hollywood enters the museum--1/17/25

17 Jan 2025

hollywood enters the museum--1/17/25

0 COMMENTS

Today's selection--from The Hollywood Brand by Peter Catapano. The MoMA and Iris Barry redefine traditional museum art.

“In 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.’ This announcement by Iris Barry, the curator of the Film Library, overstated the case in suggesting that MoMA was the first establishment to provide institutional support for the study of ‘film as art,’ & we saw in Chapter 4, the University of Southern California, with the help of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, had begun offering classes in both production and criticism/history prior to the creation of its Cinema Department in 1932. Other universities and museums had also begun including the motion picture in their programs more than a decade before MoMA. Stanley Kauffinan cited a course taught by Victor O. Freeburg at Columbia University's School of Journalism that used Vachel Lindsay's The Art of the Moving Picture as one of the first college film classes. However, while MoMA may not have been the first, its unique position as a museum dedicated to modern art, coupled with its high international profile, raised the status of film to its greatest prominence thus far. More importantly, MoMA not only took for granted the importance of film as art but argued for its unique status as ‘the only new art-form of modern times.’ Thus, the motion picture was perceived as a welcome and necessary addition to the young museum's remit. MoMA's roles as film archive, research center, and film ‘gallery’ expanded the horizons of film culture for scholars and cinephiles alike.

“Some of the most important early work of film scholarship was conducted at MoMA's Film Library during its first decade. Barry herself translated The History of Motion Pictures by Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, and the book was published in the United States in 1938 with a Museum of Modem Art imprint. According to David Bordwell, Bardeche and Brasillach's Histoire du cinema (1935) is an early example of what he terms the ‘Standard Version’ of film history. This has ‘certain central tendencies,’ including ‘the division into national schools, the emphasis upon known creators, and the proposition that the history of film is best understood as a search for the distinctive qualities of film as an art.’ Barry and MoMA also provided support to one of the earliest ‘standard versions’ of the history of the movies in the United States, Lewis Jacobs' The Rise of American Film. In addition to offering research support, Barry wrote the preface to the first edition, published in 1939. Film historians Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery have acknowledged The Rise of the American Film, along with Terry Ramsaye's A Million and One Nights (1926) and Benjamin Hampton's History of the American

Film Industry (1931), as one of the three most significant books written on American film history before 1960. After leaving Europe in 1941, Siegfried Kracauer completed the research on his groundbreaking study of German cinema and the rise of fascism, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), at MoMA's Film Library. As one commentator on the opening of the library noted with great prescience, ‘future Ph.D.s making a study of early twentieth-century cinema ... will be grateful for the spirit of devoted foresight which has prompted its founding.’

53rd Street MoMA entrance often used by the public for film screenings.

“The movies' cultural position was also enhanced by their exhibition at MoMA. From its inception in 1929, the museum acquired a powerful standing among major cultural institutions in the United States and around the world. Its progressive exhibition policies, produced and supported by its powerful patrons and benefactors from the worlds of art, finance, and politics, had by its first decade cemented its international reputation. By including the movies, MoMA redefined traditional notions of which objects could be considered art. In the nineteenth century, museums had played a fundamental role in establishing cultural hierarchies by endowing high culture with ‘sacredness’ as a result of removing it ‘from contact with profane or popular culture.’ Creating aesthetic value in the twentieth century at MoMA imbued film with an appearance of sacredness previously reserved only for objects of high art. By collecting and prominently displaying products of the culture industry in close proximity to works of unquestioned artistic status from traditional media like painting and sculpture, MoMA created a new kind of museum space that blurred the traditional distinction between high and low culture.”