Educational Media Reviews Online

Teri F. Brewer’s film A Donation to the Museum is a brief documentary that aims to examine one specific donation to the City of Bristol Museum in an effort to better understand the pieces. This examination uses the artifacts, donor history, and the reaction and interest of other anthropologists and archaeologists. It was an ambitious undertaking, and unfortunately, does not work.

Brewer’s film would benefit from a clearly established thesis and continuity. As it is now, the film moves back and forth from England to California; from an analysis of the artifact to current day explorations of the artifact’s site in California; from the genealogy and personal family history of the donor to the desires of the Pimu Catalina Island Archaeological Project. The story of the artifacts is not truly pieced together in any logical way, and a theme or point is missing.

In addition to improved storyboarding, the film would have benefited from a narrator to create a visual paragraph. An off-screen narrator would be able to articulate the thesis, provide context and background information, assist in moving the plot along, and summarize and conclude the film.

Additionally, the film is poorly shot in terms of film quality and sound. For example, Brewer provides significant film time to examining the artifact and how experts learned about the piece without situational context. A paleopathologist explains how to identify the human skull in terms of age and gender. She refers with hand gestures to an image of the skull on a laptop, but the laptop image is not clearly presented due to the angle of the filming. A clear image of the skull highlighting the various parts along with off-screen narration from the paleopathologist would have worked significantly better. The scene is also marred due to some background noise at the film location which would have also been corrected with off screen narration. This film is not recommended.