Modern ethnographic exhibitions use multi-media and multi-modal communication – they address their visitors through objects, texts, photographs, films and new media – while film is also multimodal
since it combines motion pictures, sound and graphical elements. This article focuses on the contact between film and exhibition: the relationship between a temporally structured medium and the spatial organisation of knowledge. Moreover, it considers the starting points, methods and concepts of the post-modern epistemological break in visual anthropology and museology in order to discuss the construction of knowledge relating to selected examples of film and exhibition communication.