My trip to the History of Cinema Museum!
Today we visit a place that sends the visitor back to the nineteen hundreds, when cameras and all other forms of cinema were being born, and that place is the History of Cinema Museum (HOC). The HOC is located at MCN Hive on the first floor in the TECOM area of Dubai, and it is a simple, moderately-sized showroom filled with tons of artifacts and memorabilia related to cinematography. The museum was founded by a Bahraini born entrepreneur named Akram Miknas, who has a passion for all things cinema, and all the items on show in the museum are from his personal collection, which in my mind just makes the whole thing even more impressive.
When we went to the museum it was the middle of a week day so it was completely empty, which is always nice when going to a place like this because you get what some might say is a drastically different experience to if it was super-packed. So when you drive past the tall building that it is located in you really have to be looking because there is only one indication of any museum being there -- it is a small sign sticking out of an alleyway connected to the building that you may notice if you're driving slowly. After figuring out which building it was in we entered through a cafe, and over in the corner of the ground floor there was a flight of stairs and a sign hanging from the ceiling informing us that the museum was close at hand. After climbing up the stairs we were met with a small door that lead into an also fairly small room with a reception desk and a few old timey cameras on a glass shelf. We bought our tickets, which are thirty dirhams per person, and we entered the museum of modest size.
The museum has a plethora of items from small phenakistoscopes which are two circular papers on either end of a stick (one with slits and one with images) that when spun tricks your eyes into thinking that there is only one image which is moving, to a megalethoscope which is basically a massive lens that when looked through gives pictures extra depth and a feeling of realism. At least when we went there there didn't seem to be any specific order to how the stuff was being displayed, so we just started on the right side of the entrance and looped around.
The first things we saw were four flip book animation machines with little cranks on the side that you could spin to watch a black and white picture animation. Only two of the machines were working, one was showing a set of pictures titled "The Cat Burglar" and the other was showing Charlie Chaplin making a cocktail (which I got a recording of that I put in the vlog). My personal favorite was the Charlie Chaplin one, just because it ran a bit smoother and I also just like Charlie Chaplin, and I find his silent movies interesting. The rest of the wall to the right of the entrance was mostly showcasing some early photo taking technology and a bunch of small statues.
Then the wall to the front of the entrance showcased a lot of shadow manipulating cut outs and basic machines, as well as a lot of lenses and flip book animation style items often in the form of old kids' toys. A couple of my favorite things from this side of the showroom were a small table with a bunch of simple toys and other stuff that you could pick up and interact with to see how the illusions were made to entertain kids, and one of Walt Disney's praxtinoscopes.
The wall to the left of the entrance had a few more cameras from the nineteen hundreds and then one of my favorite things in the whole museum, which was a chart showing you how to make different shadow puppets. There were also three different distorted mirrors which gave me a great chance to get a few selfies.
Lastly I cannot rightfully end this post without giving a special mention to the largest exhibit in the museum which is positioned in the middle of the showroom and goes by the name of Kaiser Panorama. The Kaiser Panorama is a German made machine that basically flips through a bunch of pictures and has several looking spots that you can peer into and see the images in a zoomed-in state.
So after looking at the pictures in the Kaiser we left the museum and with that this post is over, hope you all enjoyed. I definitely would suggest the HOC museum to anyone visiting Dubai, it's a nice little place to have a quiet look around and maybe enjoy yourself a bit. Anyway hope you guys enjoyed and be sure to tune in for the next post.