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Mary Pickford and the Archival Film Movement
- The University Press of Kentucky
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MARY PICKFORD AND THE ARCHIVAL FILM MOVEMENT Christel Schmidt What a wonderful thing it is to think that when we actors and actresses who appear in moving picture productions are dead and gone, our likeness will still be preserved and our actions and characteristics shown on to generation after generation. Mary Pickford, 1914 218 Pickford cuts a ribbon of film at the opening of the George Eastman House Museum of Photography on November 9, 1949. She is joined by the museum’s director, Oscar Solbert (left), and the president of Eastman Kodak, Thomas J. Hargrave (right). [3.81.222.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:05 GMT) Nineteenth-century stage star Lawrence Barrett once said that acting a role was like “carving a statue out of snow.”⁄ Indeed, before the invention of cinema, all that remained of an actor’s performance was a memory in the viewer’s mind. The silent film camera, designed to record only images, could fully capture the work of movie actors whose voices were not a part of their art. Mary Pickford, like many of her colleagues, marveled at the thought of screen immortality . However, as early as 1921, she felt a growing concern that the technical simplicity of her early films would earn audience ridicule.¤ This was one of the reasons she purchased her Biograph films (made between 1909 and 1912) from producer Nathan Hirsh in 1921 and remade her great 1914 success Tess of the Storm Country in 1922.‹ Seven years later, the arrival of talking pictures dealt silent film a fatal blow; the world’s leading form of entertainment for nearly three decades had become obsolete, seemingly overnight. The immediate acceptance of the new medium and the ease with which the old art form was discarded only exacerbated the actress’s insecurities. Pickford, the silents’ most enduring star, fell out of fashion; the press, which had once cheered her, now seemed to relish her failure. Her response was alarming. She announced that she planned to add a codicil to her will, requiring that all her films be destroyed, “except in the imagination of future generations .”› Apparently, Pickford shared the views of a 1906 article in Munsey’s Magazine that stated, without a lasting record of an actor’s work, her reputation enters into legend, “whatever the changes of critical theory and whatever the vagaries of public opinion.” The verdict of her contemporaries “is final and posterity has no court of appeal.”fi But privately, Pickford was conflicted. She later credited her change of mind to the public’s negative reaction and to Lillian Gish’s firm opinion that silent pictures would be valued in the future. By the mid-1930s, Pickford not only sought a permanent archival home for her vast private movie collection but also became a strong advocate for the archival film movement. Christel Schmidt 220 In 1935, when the Film Library at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened in New York, Pickford was an early and avid supporter.fl The first major cinema archive in the United States, the Film Library began with a mission to collect, preserve , and exhibit selected films that form a “record of the motion-picture as an industry” by choosing “examples of the motion picture as an artistic creation.” Pickford championed the cause in the press, saying, “As one of the pioneers of the industry, I . . . believe in the preservation of significant and outstanding films to be of great historic and educational value.”‡ The actress also became a donor, o∑ering the new archive ten Biograph titles from her personal collection. The relationship between Pickford and MoMA’s Film Library deteriorated following a July 9, 1937, fire at a storage facility in Little Ferry, New Jersey, which burned a portion of the museum’s nitrate film collection. Pickford had provided three of the ten promised Biograph one-reelers to the museum prior to the blaze. These camera negatives—TheViolin Maker of Cremona (1909), Lena and the Geese (1912), and The NewYork Hat (1912)—were apparently lost. Sadly, the star had experienced the loss of her work before. In 1915 a fire at the Famous Players studio in New York had destroyed several film negatives , including an unreleased Pickford feature called The Foundling (it was promptly refilmed). Although she may have sympathized with MoMA (she later claimed that she and the archive had a falling out over the exhibition of her films), her involvement with the museum ended.° Pickford might have been...