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Cinema's roots in the rich popular and scientific cultures of the nineteenth century have recently attracted the attention of a number of film scholars. 2 One particularly productive site for historical and theoretical investigation is the nineteenth-century museum of natural history, since this institution negotiated the competing claims of scientific education, moral, and civic uplift, and an expansionist national identity, with the pleasure of popular visual spectacle. [End Page 53] Nineteenth-century museums of natural history represented a contested terrain of paternalistic economic and political elites, the newly-assertive academic discipline of anthropology, and the vast new urban working- and middle-class populations in search of popular amusements and spectacle. Within the natural history museum, the ascendency of the life group as a popular form of museological display in the late nineteenth century coincided with the emergence of cinema, an apparatical system that shared a number of phenomenological features with the illusionistic museum exhibit. Like the life group--the arrangement of costumed mannequins in dramatic tableaux--motion pictures constructed what Anne Friedberg has called "a virtual, mobilized gaze," by means of which the spectator would travel through an imaginary spatial and temporal "elsewhere" and "elsewhen." 3 I argue in this essay that the spatial organization of life groups within nineteenth-century museums of natural history can be read as a form of "promenade cinema," analogous to a theatrical form with roots in the middle ages, in which spectators moved between spatially-distinct dramatized scenes. 4 In this constellation, the spectator's navigation of the museum's halls and display cases was regulated as a form of "organized walking" in which "an intended message [was] communicated in the form of a (more or less) directed itinerary." 5 Moreover, in their representation of human culture in the form of simulacral models displayed before illusionistically-painted dioramas, the vistas of the life group afforded the museum-flaneur a visual pleasure similar to that offered by the gaze of early ethnographic film.
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