Creating 'Reel' Value: The Establishment of The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1935-1939

28 Catapano / Creating 'Reel' Value MOMA Film Stills Archive Ms. Iris Barry, Preservation's Founding Mother at MOMA, examines a 16mm print with John E. Abbott. Film & History Vol. 24, No's. 3-4, 199429 PETER CATAPANO©IIPAITIMII (MT ®(P (KIΧTr©fôY y.©. Q(FlWQMI Creating 'Reel' Value: The Establishment of The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1935-1939 .n November 1935, five years after its founding, The Museum of Modern Art in New York announced the opening of its Film Library "to render possible for the first time a considered study of the film as art."1 The status of film among the arts had been a subject of speculation from the medium's beginning. Vachel Lindsay's The Art ofthe Moving Picture, published in 1916 and considered the first work of film theory produced in America, compared the formal qualities of the cinema to sculpture, painting, and architecture. In the years immediately preceding and following the First World War, articles written in Western Europe and the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, filled with enthusiastic praise for the cinema's current artistic achievements and its future potential, began to circulate in the United States. An international, 30 Catapano / Creating 'Reel' Value Euro-American film community of cinéphiles and cinéastes holding a variety of institutional posts had emerged after World War I. Despite significant differences of opinion, there seemed to be a growing consensus regarding film as art Indeed, as Dudley Andrew has noted, "By 1935 it was taken for granted in nearly all educated circles that cinema was an art, independent of all other arts."2 In order to understand how a lowlyregarded cultural object like the motion picture came to be increasingly regarded as "Art," it is important to look beyond the elite, "educated" circles described by Andrew and toward the way "true" artistic or aesthetic values were created. A network of intellectual debates, museum politics, and culture industry practices in the United States during the 1930s worked to construct what Michel Foucault has called "the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth," producing in the case of film a "true" discourse couched increasingly in aesthetic, rather than sociological, terms.3 In traditional Kantian based aesthetics, to be of value, a work of art must formally possess transcendental qualities discernible to a trained and refined sensibility. The emphasis on the isolated experience of aesthetic pleasure has also tended to privilege an ideal, ahistorical subject who perceives all meaning in individual reason, not in social relations or in cultural politics. Aesthetics has characteristically made a distinction between the individual subject and the social subject serving, according to Raymond Williams, as "an element in the divided modern consciousness of art and society: a reference beyond social use and social valuation."4 However, ifone agrees with Barbara Herrnstein Smith, as I do, that "all value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of things," the strict demarcation between "Art" and "Society," long characteristic of aesthetic formalism, becomes irrelevant since all truth and all artistic value is socially constructed.5 Creating "reel" value aesthetically provided for The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) a means of constructing a plausible foundation for its own authority as a high art institution by regulating a relatively new cultural domain, the motion picture. If a recognized high art institution like MOMA had as its project the elevation of the motion picture to the realm of culture, then other discourses on film, especially those endorsing a more social or political viewpoint, become marginalized. All appeals to the artistic or true in film should be understood as the political effects of power serving to shift the terms of contemporary cultural debate by legitimating certain practices and by placing cinematic representation within the confines of high art/low art, categories of distinction which have persisted in the United States since the nineteenth century. The aesthetic criteria Film & History Vol. 24, No's. 3-4, 1 994 31 that supports the high/low register has functioned historically, according to Lawrence Levine, as "frozen categories ripped out of the contexts in which they were created."6 The high...