Life Group Dioramas and IMAX: Content Versus Form in the Education of the Modern Museum Spectator

Life Group Dioramas and IMAX: Content Versus Form in the Education of the Modern Museum Spectator Abstract Focusing mainly on the work of Franz Boas and Charles Acland, this paper examines the modes of viewing established by life group dioramas and IMAX films with the aim of considering the relationship between each medium and its educational function, especially in the context of a museum. Boas argued that attention should be directed to the content of dioramas rather than their form, that more thought should be placed on the cultures being represented than their representation. This seems contrary to the logic at work in IMAX films, which are highly celebratory of the technology used to make the films. In addition, the scale of the two media is completely different, but this paper argues that both media can in fact be said to be operating according to the principles of the object lesson, an educational approach developed in the 19 th and 20 th centuries that depended on pictures and actual objects rather than language to convey knowledge. Thus despite the distinct time periods in which dioramas and IMAX films were developed as media, there is a rationale for placing them side-by-side as educational tools in a modern museum setting. Keywords: Dioramas; IMAX; Franz Boas; Museums; Object lesson Museums of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries relied on dioramas to authenticate idealized scenes of so-called primitive life by giving these idealized scenes a physical form in the museum setting. Although some museum professionals felt that the diorama should look as realistic as possible, Franz Boas felt that if the reality effect of dioramas, and life groups more specifically, became too strong, then the educational function of the life groups would be lost because the viewer s attention would be shifted from the content of the dioramas to their form. 1 While Boas advocated concealing the mechanics behind the creation of dioramas, IMAX films celebrate the technology used to make and display the films. This shift in the level of awareness the viewer is meant to have of the form of the medium reveals changes in an understanding of the relationship between media and their educational function. This paper will aim to describe the differences between dioramas and IMAX in terms of how each medium views the connection between form and content with the larger goal of considering what this says about the educational function of each medium. Considering the educational function of each medium is particularly pertinent 1

because the technologies are often located in close proximity to each other in modern museums, places which claim to be spaces of education and enlightenment. By examining the relationship between these two media within the modern museum, this paper will aim to explore the dynamics and tensions present in today s museum while also considering how these media work together to create a particular type of spectator. In order to construct a life group diorama, artists and anthropologists went out into the field and selected a spot that had both artistic merits and ethnographical and scientific values. 2 It is important to note that the life group diorama was a simulacrum: the life group had no original in nature but rather represented the artist and anthropologist s vision of the ideal form of the culture. Yet, by making their ideal vision into a physical form, the artist and anthropologist were able to use the diorama to authenticate the ideal form of the culture and give it a reality that it could not have without the physicality of the diorama. The life group diorama allowed the artist and the anthropologist to present their ideal vision to the rest of the world in a very tangible form. By providing the museum visitor with a realistic-looking scene, filled with wax models or plaster casts of native peoples, costumes, and real artifacts, the life group diorama generated a strong reality effect. The life group diorama seemed to transport the visitor through time and space to the scene of the diorama, making the visitor feel like he or she was actually in the presence of a past time and place, able to gain the knowledge that the artist and anthropologist had while in the field. This notion that the visitor would be able to gain knowledge merely by looking at the life group diorama is called an object lesson, an approach that depended on pictures and actual objects rather than on language to convey knowledge. According to the theory of the object lesson, a person could scrutinize pictures and objects for the lessons they contained because the 2

object lesson was thought to possess direct and visual evidence and seemed to short circuit the act of signification and to bring the things themselves before the speculating public. 3 Thus, the ideal vision of the artist and anthropologist, by being made into a life group diorama, seemed to possess an objective reality that could be directly conveyed to an audience. Because the object had direct and visual evidence, the visitor did not have to work to decode the life group. By merely being in the presence of a diorama meant to transport the viewer to a distant place and time, the visitor gained knowledge of the culture on display. Some museum professionals believed that the reality effect created by the life group diorama should be heightened by making physical characteristics as accurate as possible and by putting models in active, realistic-looking positions. They felt that by making the life group dioramas more realistic, they could more clearly convey how and what the people portrayed in the diorama looked, thought, did, and had. 4 Franz Boas, on the other hand, felt that if the diorama were too realistic, it would become a spectacle and lose its educational function. In his opinion, the reality effect of the diorama could never be completely convincing because the cases, the walls, the contents of other cases, the columns, the airways, all remind us that we are not viewing an actual village, and the contrast between an attempted realism of the group and the inappropriate surroundings spoils the whole effect. 5 Thus, for Boas, there was a fundamental breakage between the museum setting and the illusion created by the life group. A too-perfect illusion would increase this breakage and might make the life groups lose their educational function altogether. Instead of more thoroughly convincing visitors that they were actually in the presence of a distant time and place when they looked at life groups, the increased accuracy of a diorama would serve the opposite effect of reminding visitors that they were in a museum. Boas felt that the too-perfect illusionism of the life group would distract spectator attention from the 3

intended anthropological object-lesson of the exhibit in favor of a fascination with the technical means of the human facsimile. 6 Instead of making the diorama appear more realistic, an increased attention to accuracy and detail serves the paradoxical effect of making the scene seem faker by setting up a stronger contrast between the diorama and the setting of the museum. The people represented in the diorama obviously cannot be real because of the diorama s placement in the museum. The museum visitor is able to forget this to a certain extent when the diorama obtains a certain appearance of reality, but when the scene looks too real there is a major breakage. It is especially important to note Boas point that when this breakage occurs, the visitor s attention is shifted from the content of the diorama to its form. For Boas, this shift in attention is obviously a negative thing because it takes away from the educational purpose of the diorama; the object lesson no longer can be performed. The desire to keep the focus of attention on the content of the diorama stands in contrast to the guiding mentality of IMAX. IMAX is governed by an operational aesthetic, meaning that the techniques of making the film are celebrated in the film itself, the subject matter reflects the medium, and ultimately the viewer is meant to be in awe of the medium. In Time Traveling IMAX Style, Alison Griffiths articulates the operational aesthetic of IMAX with respect to the film Everest: This near-fetishizing of the IMAX process, particularly an obsession with the weight of the camera, size of the batteries, logistical challenges of filming in sub-zero temperatures, and huge support necessary to transport the equipment up the mountain, anthropomorphizes the technology, transforming the IMAX camera into a VIP that must make it up the mountain at all costs. The technology in this instance is isomorphic with the subject matter; IMAX and Everest are both behemoths that swallow up their subjects, contain them, so to speak. 7 Griffith s statement that the technology of IMAX is isomorphic with the subject matter articulates the notion of the operational aesthetic while also hinting at why the viewer s 4

awareness of the technology of IMAX is not problematic, but is in fact celebrated. While Franz Boas felt that the visitor s awareness and fascination with the technical means of the human facsimile meant that they were being distracted from the intended anthropological objectlesson of the exhibit, the viewer of an IMAX film is meant to be aware and fascinated by how the film is made. Because the subject matter of IMAX films and the technology of IMAX are isomorphic, attention to the form of the film suggests attention to the content. The form and content of an IMAX film like Everest are linked not only because the gigantism of the mountain and the massive size of the screen are felt to be basically equivalent, but also because the IMAX camera becomes a subject of the film. The technology used to make Everest is so heavily anthropomorphized that it becomes a subject of the film, it becomes the content. The film itself stresses the connection between the form of IMAX and its content, but even the very experience of sitting in an IMAX theater reminds viewers that they are watching an IMAX film. The visitor enters the theater at the bottom edge of the screen and is immediately astounded by the incredibly massive size of the theater. This feeling remains throughout the entirety of the film: the screen is so large that it is impossible for the eye to get a sense of the entire space. The viewer feels encompassed by the screen; as Griffiths says IMAX is a behemoth that swallows up and contains its subjects. IMAX not only makes the subjects in the film look miniscule and insignificant but makes the viewer feel miniscule as well. Visitors to a diorama were meant to be transported to the scene of the life group and feel like they had gained the knowledge of the anthropologists and artists, like they taken on the role of the anthropologist and artist. This sounds remarkably similar to the way in which IMAX makes both the subjects of its films and its audience members feel miniscule. People viewing IMAX films are meant to feel transported to the site of the film, like they have taken on the role 5

of the human subjects portrayed in the film. Charles Acland suggests another connection between the life group diorama and the IMAX film and one that is especially relevant to the discussion of the educational function of dioramas as opposed to that of IMAX. According to Acland, IMAX s goal is one of simulation, of hyper-realism, of producing images so real that they offer an illusion of material presence. 8 The phrase material presence is particularly interesting because it suggests that IMAX has a similar ideology as life group dioramas. IMAX films bring distant times and places to the theater. While the films may not be physical in the same sense that life group dioramas are, Acland suggests that IMAX films hope to create the illusion of material presence. This notion that IMAX films hope to create a feeling of physical presence may thus suggest that they, like life group dioramas, operate according to the principles of the object lesson. Although IMAX films do use voice-over narration, they primarily rely on the images in the film and the sensation of movement to convey their messages. Alison Griffiths describes the physiological involvement that occurs when viewing an IMAX film: IMAX, too, can now take a seat in the hall of most visceral spectatorial experiences. 9 By creating such a visceral experience, IMAX films hope to create a similar sort of physical presence as that evoked when looking at a diorama. The ways that IMAX attempts to invoke feelings of physicality suggests that these films may be operating according to the principles of the object lesson. In addition, the images in the film seem to do the things that objects in the object lesson framework are meant to. Namely, the images possess direct and visual evidence, short-circuiting the act of signification and bringing the actual sites before the speculating public. Alison Griffiths again supports the idea that IMAX films may operate according to the principles of the object lesson when she writes, Like the artifacts severed from their contextual referents in the museum, where objecthood is invested 6

with the aura of fate, in the words of Didier Maleuvre, IMAX takes the world out there and enlarges it to gigantic proportions, heightening the sensation of virtual presence and haptic immersion. 10 Just like the dioramas in 19 th and early 20 th century museums, IMAX decontextualizes its subjects in order to bring them within the grasp of the viewers and invests its films with an aura of fate. If it is indeed the case that both life group dioramas and IMAX films can be said to operate according to the principles of the object lesson, then this leads to questions of why life group dioramas and IMAX films are felt to have different educational functions. The object lesson is an educational theory, so if both life group dioramas and IMAX films operate according to the same theory, why is there the impression that life group dioramas are more educational than IMAX films? The key to understanding where this impression comes from lies in Boas division between the form and content of the life group diorama. He does not want museum visitors to be overly conscious of the fact that they are looking at a diorama because he feels like this will shift attention away from the content of the anthropological object lesson to its form. Thus, there is the impression that attention is on the culture being represented rather than on the representation itself. IMAX, on the other hand, celebrates the representation over what is actually being represented. IMAX films try to sell viewers on the experience of IMAX, making them want to see more IMAX films in the future. There is an overt celebration of technology in every IMAX film. While life group dioramas may attempt to focus more on the culture being represented than on the representation itself, both life group dioramas and IMAX films ultimately exemplify what Tom Gunning calls the modern worldview in which technology can render every distant thing somehow available to us. 11 Thus, both dioramas and IMAX films are educating the viewer about technology s ability to contain distant times and places and make them available to the viewer. Ultimately, both dioramas and IMAX films are more about the 7

representation itself, the ability to contain distant times and places, rather than what is being represented in the medium. IMAX, however, embraces this more than life groups, which attempt to keep the viewer s attention on what is being represented rather than on the representation itself. The physical form of the dioramas gives them certain objectivity by taking an idealized form and giving it a physical reality in the world. The fact that the diorama is a constructed vision and has no original in nature is hidden from the viewer and thus the deeper ideological purposes of dioramas, such as a Western dominance over primitive people, are not made explicit but are meant to be absorbed without comment. Indeed, curators today are hesitant to use life groups because of what they imply about one culture s ability to exert control over another culture. Alison Griffiths explains how the curators of the African Voices exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History were conflicted about the use of a life group diorama: The decision to exhibit the aqal in the first place had been a fraught one for the curators; the reifying tendencies and fetishizing impulses of the life group diorama with its illusionistic mannequins and allochronic representations of a petrified culture, made the curators uneasy about working with the life group trope. 12 Ultimately, the curators felt that they were able to create more dynamism in their presentation of the aqal than was traditionally possible in the diorama medium, but there is still a sense that the diorama is a graspable image that allows the spectator to assert control over the scene. This control that is made possible by viewing the contained form of a life group diorama is complicated when considering IMAX. Although IMAX proclaims to bring distant lands and times within the reach of the viewer in much the same way as life group dioramas and thus enable the viewer to enact the modern worldview, there is also the sense that the enormous size of the IMAX medium challenges the 8

viewer s ability to grasp the image and thus the world being represented in the image. This paper has already noted how IMAX envelops its subjects, containing them and swallowing them. This envelopment serves to make the viewer feel a sense of harmony with the subjects in the film that are also being enveloped, but ultimately this creates a feeling of disorder: unlike the miniature, which can be held in a privatized, individual space, the gigantic presents a physical world of disorder and disproportion. 13 Yet while it may be possible to know the gigantic only partially and the eye may be unable to grasp the entire IMAX image at once, there is still the sense that the viewer is able to exert control over the images in the film and thus what is being portrayed in the film. Acland succinctly links IMAX and dioramas and establishes the control of the spectator: Drawing upon the particularities of nineteenth-century bourgeois perception, IMAX continues to insist upon spectatorial primacy as a form of knowledge. It is to our age what the Panorama and Diarama were to their time. 14 Because IMAX and the diorama can be linked as a result of the primacy they afford to the spectator, it is interesting to consider how these forms of spectatorship enact themselves in the museum, a setting in which IMAX and the diorama come into close contact with each other. In addition, it will be important to consider the degree to which these media actually allow for the agency of the spectator or if they actually can be said to be constructing the modern museum spectator. IMAX s location in the modern museum is often attributed to the way in which its traditional subject matter resonates with the subject matter of museums. In addition, IMAX films tend to have an expository format that contain a didactic element befitting the school-group audience that makes up a significant percentage of receipts in non-commercial venues. 15 In 2006, about half of the 150 IMAX screens in the United States were located in science and natural history museums, while the other half were in multiplexes or purpose-built venues. 16 The 9

traditional argument that IMAX films are placed in museums because of their subject matter is definitely a valid one but this argument primarily leads to discussions about the relative educational value of IMAX films as compared to the traditional exhibits of the museum. These discussions center on a debate about education versus entertainment and focus on whether or not the spectacle of IMAX films can be educational. By setting up this tension between education and entertainment, arguments about the placement of IMAX in museums may shift attention away from the ways in which IMAX creates a mode of spectatorship and a mode of absorbing information that is in fact similar to the modes induced by traditional exhibits and dioramas in particular. According to Charles Acland: IMAX is more than a bit of flashy bait to get people into a dying institution; it promotes a discursive relation, and a specifically technological one, between a public and its education. And the very nature of its panoramic realism, which encourages a collapse of the referent and the reference, reasserts a modern, disciplined, visual relation and code of civic behavior. The IMAX gaze is to find oneself firmly interpellated into an epistemological purview that covers both the museum and new entertainment technologies. 17 Franz Boas feared that if life group dioramas invoked too strong a reality effect, the attention would be shifted from what was being represented to the representation itself. This desire to limit the reality effect meant that while the people viewing dioramas might see the diorama as a representation of something that existed in the real world (even though the diorama was a constructed physical embodiment of an idealized vision of a culture), they would never see the diorama and the real world as perfectly equivalent: there would always be a distance between the referent and the reference. IMAX, on the other hand, according to Acland, collapses this divide, which in turn reasserts a modern, disciplined, visual relation and code of civic behavior. IMAX takes the visual relations of the diorama and magnifies them. Although Acland had established spectatorial primacy as a form of knowledge in both dioramas and IMAX, here he 10

claims that these media control the civic behavior of the viewer. By governing the ways in which viewers are meant to receive knowledge from dioramas and IMAX, these media control the viewer rather than giving them power and agency. Thus, IMAX, in Acland s view, demonstrates the continuation of a particular kind of gaze, one that firmly grounded in the museum s way of conveying knowledge. While traditional arguments about education and IMAX center on questions of whether or not something that is entertaining can be educational, this paper has aimed to show how the way in which IMAX attempts to convey knowledge, by constructing a particular type of gaze, is actually quite in line with the diorama, a traditional educational tool of museums. Both dioramas and IMAX films may be said to operate according to the principles of the object lesson, decontextualizing their subjects and bringing them within the grasp of viewers in order for the viewers to assert control over the subjects. The theory of the object lesson claims that by gazing upon the objects of the life group diorama and the IMAX film, the viewer will be able to gain knowledge about the subjects portrayed in each medium by being immersed in the scene. Through their immersion, viewers take on the position of the artist/anthropologist in the case of the life group diorama and the position of whatever human subjects are portrayed in the film in the case of IMAX. IMAX films embrace their operational aesthetic, anthropomorphizing their technology and making them into subjects. The division between form and content is collapsed in IMAX films and thus by immersing viewers in the very experience of IMAX, IMAX films claim to educate their viewers about whatever subject is portrayed. By educating viewers about the form of IMAX, the company claims to be educating viewers about the content of IMAX. Yet, IMAX films promote the experience of IMAX much more than the subject matter of individual 11

films. IMAX embraces the fact that their films are much more about the representation than what is being represented. Dioramas, on the other hand, at least in Franz Boas view, attempt to keep the focus on what is being represented by avoiding creating too strong a reality effect. This focus, however, disguises the way in which dioramas actually say much more about the politics of representation than about the actual cultures being represented. Dioramas, like IMAX films, claim the ability of the viewer to establish control over the scene while also determining how the viewer will see the scene. While dioramas and IMAX films transport museum visitors to distant times and places, allowing the visitor to establish some sort of dominance over these times and places, ultimately the media themselves are predetermining how the times and places will be viewed. The construction and editing of reality performed by dioramas and IMAX mean that the objects that are presented to the museum visitor will not be complete. Thus, even though the visitor may be able to read the dioramas and IMAX films according to the principles of the object lesson, the information they are able to receive has been limited and filtered: the cultures and images seen have been selected and represented in a very particular way. Thus, the main difference between dioramas and IMAX films is not their educational function, because both media can be said to create a certain mode of spectatorship and to assert a modern, disciplined, visual relation and code of civic behavior. Rather, IMAX films embrace the relationship between form and content in a much more explicit way than life group dioramas and are ultimately more comfortable with the idea that they are more about representation itself than what is being represented. 12

Notes 1 Boas in Griffiths, Life Groups and the Modern Museum Spectator, 22. 2 Griffiths, Life Groups and the Modern Museum Spectator, 19-20. 3 Gunning, The World as Object Lesson, 425. 4 Holmes in Griffiths, Life Groups and the Modern Museum Spectator, 22. 5 Boas in Griffiths, Life Groups and the Modern Museum Spectator, 22. 6 Ibid. 7 Griffiths, Time Traveling IMAX Style, 253. 8 Acland, IMAX Technology and the Tourist Gaze, 431. 9 Griffiths, From Daguerreotype to IMAX Screen, 225. 10 Griffiths, Time Traveling IMAX Style, 238. 11 Gunning, The Whole World Within Reach, 27-28. 12 Griffiths, From Daguerreotype to IMAX Screen, 213. 13 Griffiths, Time Traveling IMAX Style, 253. 14 Acland, IMAX Technology and the Tourist Gaze, 434. 15 Griffiths, Time Traveling IMAX Style, 242. 16 Ibid. 17 Acland, IMAX Technology and the Tourist Gaze, 435. 13

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