Dork Zabunyan on the Migration of Cinema Concepts to the Museum Space

Philosopher and film studies lecturer Dork Zabunyan critiques the migration of moving images from cinema to museums, a phenomenon accelerated over the past decade. He revisits Serge Daney's 1989 article "Du défilement au défilé," which observed that spectators become mobile in exhibition spaces, contrasting with cinema's fixed viewing. Zabunyan identifies a flaw in Daney's argument: Daney illustrates this shift with Federico Fellini's "Ginger and Fred," a film still experienced in a dark theater, thus avoiding the question of what happens to montage when viewers move. Zabunyan argues that the transition of images lacks reflection on the migration of cinematic concepts like montage, framing, and mixing into spatial contexts, which he terms "image-espace." He warns that neglecting this leads to overemphasizing the spectator's role, as in relational art, where the viewer supposedly assembles the work—a notion critiqued by Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. Another consequence is the dominance of present-time experience in exhibitions, hindering the coexistence of heterogeneous temporalities achieved in cinema. Zabunyan cites Jean-Luc Godard's "Voyage(s) en utopie" at Centre Pompidou as an example where montage mutated into spatial assemblage, creating an image-space that transcends the present. The article appears in artpress, July 2008.