Abstract
NaFilM, a National Film Museum project initiated by students of the Film Studies Department at Charles University, Prague, aims to create original curatorial approaches to exhibiting the history of the film medium, combining exhibition design with informal film and media education. Organized exhibitions function as labs in which to test possibilities of interaction, activity, association and multi-layered communication with concrete interactive installations through the feedback of various groups of visitors.
Currently, systematic methods of constructive communication in historical film expositions are developing within the project. The goal is to more strategically use the communicative and constructive aspects of the film medium to curate the overall visitor experience.
Basing the museum's narrative of Czechoslovak modern history not on the authority of historical canon, but rather on the logic and structure of acquiring media literacy, enables the instigation of historically contextualized critical thinking making the visitor a participant of historical reflection. Working from the perspective of reality filtered through the construct of film (applying the codes, conventions and intentions of the medium) we find is a suitable way to understand how particular eras represented themselves.
Thus the visitor is encouraged to learn how to read and perceive history through its images and reflections thanks to the communication allowed through the multi-layer role of film as a source which exceeds the conventional use of historical illustration and is a more encrypted (but paradoxically more immediate) testimony of the era itself.