Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (review)

When the Museum of Modern Art thought to include the motion picture in its catalog of twentieth-century modernism, it made a series of crucial decisions involving the very nature of this medium, decisions which dramatically altered the role of cinema in the arts (as well as the understanding of art in the cinema).

As Haidee Wasson makes clear in her highly engaging inside account of the formation of the Museum's 'film library', Iris Barry and her staff were not the first on the block to think of film as an art form, to understand that film had a peculiar history of its own, or to realize the unique role that exhibition had to play in the very existence of cinema.

The Better Films Movement, the art house cinema circuit, and the non-theatrical market had all been around for years, along with a raft of serious film publications and Columbia University's classes in photoplay writing and analysis. The demand was already there, but the more this demand increased, the more it became apparent that film art, if it existed, lacked the critical, commercial and institutional structure that supported its predecessors. The usual sources were increasingly unable to meet demand for classics of the genre and, as Henri Langlois was already learning in Europe, the recent shift from silent films to talkies threatened the wholesale disposal of these commercially worthless 'old movies.' Art museums like the Metropolitan already displayed yesterday's fashions and furniture, Roman coins and Etruscan chamber pots. So why shouldn't great films play a similar role in any museum of twentieth-century art?

Movies as museum artifacts? A few problems were immediately obvious (and remain so, seventy years later). In the first place, there was no original object to valorize, and unlike prints or photographs, which also exist as multiples, 'owning' a copy of a film (when possible) did not necessarily bestow on the possessor the right to show it to anyone. And even if one did own such a print, was the 'film' (the original object of interest) really just that roll of celluloid in a can? Or was it more akin to software, only coming alive when processed mechanically for performance? The Museum of Modern Art clearly had no similar artifacts in its collections, but neither did any other conventional museum.

Existing film collections were typically referred to as libraries. Iris Barry and her husband, John Abbott, had convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to bankroll the presence of cinema at MOMA, but the money came with strings attached. Film would take a leading part in the Museum's educational mission, which heavily emphasized outreach. Exhibits of all sorts were to be packaged and circulated, spreading the gospel of modernism far beyond the confines of Fifth Avenue. This film library function was state of the art museum practice, and the Rockefeller money was specifically tied to it. But referring to internal documents in both the MOMA and Rockefeller family collections, Wasson makes it clear that if Iris Barry was interested in assembling a museum collection of films as artifacts, the money for this would have to come from some other source. Surprisingly, there was none. The Museum failed to find any other major supporters for its film program, either commercial or philanthropic. As for Hollywood, the producers were not only loath to make prints available, they were not especially interested in writing checks, either. 'Without the funding supplied by the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation', she writes, 'the Film Library would not have been possible'.

Other collections developed by Henri Langlois, James Card, or the Library of Congress were sprawling and unfocussed, gathering in masterworks and mediocrities with the same shovel. Barry's collection, on the other hand, was organized from the beginning as a teaching tool, a curated vision of world cinema as seen by this ex-pat critic...