Haidee Wasson,
Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 520 24131 2 (pb) US$24.95
ISBN: 0 520 22777 8 (hb) US$60.00
314 pp
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

In 1988 London’s Museum of the Moving Image was unveiled amid fanfares celebrating its interactive ‘hands-on’ ethos. In a dynamic, market-driven Thatcherite economy, museums would have to be more than simply exhibitors of old objects. Here was a repository of culture which truly communicated with the person in the street. Reading Haidee Wasson’s assiduous account of the rise of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library in the 1930s, you are reminded of the tensions at play between edification and enterprise, consumption and contemplation, whenever democratic public institutions attempt to assert other values in a capitalist economy.

Wasson recognizes that the label ‘art cinema’ does not come ready-made, but is the outcome of complex negotiations between discourses, institutions and other forces. Established in 1935, the MoMA Film Library found itself torn between competing American attitudes towards what the cinema could be. Born out of Rockefeller philanthropy, endorsed by a powerful middle class, supported (nominally) by the film industry, courted by social reformers, schools, universities and museums, the Film Library was founded on the assumption that public leisure time was the proper place for “rituals of serious attention, polite discussion, and tasteful, cosmopolitan encounters” (16). Assuming that movies were precious to the American cultural patrimony, “MoMA articulated a cinema not of distraction, attraction, urban wandering, pleasure, or displeasure but, rather, one of studious attention – a notably distinct idea about what cinema was and why one should watch it” (23). At the cinephilic heart of the MoMA Film Library was Iris Barry, formerly an eminent British film critic, then curator and eventually Film Library director from 1947. Tasked with justifying cinema as a modern art consonant with the mother institution, Barry argued that movies were significant because they embodied the manners and mores of the society that surrounded and watched them. Movies were the expression of a dynamic modern experience. Whilst postulating that films are valuable because of their historical significance seems to contemporary readers to ignore specifically filmic aesthetics, in the 1930s Barry’s appeal to a contemporary penchant for the modern bolstered film’s claim to museological status. As a cinephile, Barry was of course aware of film’s singular powers.

But it is a tribute to her persuasive zeal that she managed to mobilize disparate interest groups on its behalf. Like the Film Library, she found herself caught between competing attitudes and impulses within interwar America. On the one hand, to appeal to the high-minded crowd for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, America’s elite gallery space, was seen to deprive the bustling urban spaces from which movies drew life. On the other, touting movies as the ‘American art’ ignored the achievements of the French Impressionists, Soviet Formalists, German Expressionists and the British documentarists. If the burgeoning constituency for the art movie was resolutely pro-Europe, Hollywood people saw supporting the Film Library simply as furthering their own commercial ends. Then there was the progressive movement, for whom film was an educational tool for encouraging girl scouts to be good mothers, and discouraging boys from self abuse.

Wasson navigates this history dexterously and astutely. Charged with the need to raise revenue, the Film Library had to find ways of disseminating its growing archive among schools, universities and other institutions. After the hackneyed history of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’, what emerges is a refreshing account of non-theatrical exhibition in the pre-war years. In 1933 the US Department of Commerce reported that there were 190,000 non-theatrical projectors in circulation compared with only 17-18,000 commercial cinemas. Canvassing interest in Film Library holdings among educators, Barry was overwhelmed by the demand for prints and literature. Wasson’s appendix details film shows between 1934 and 1949. As a roster, it not only celebrates the flowering of American cinema since Edison, but faithfully charts developments in France, Russia, Germany and Britain. Wasson’s account of the rise of 16 mm production and exhibition across America reminded me of the talk that surrounded the rise of the Web in our own time, with its vaunted challenge to the globalizing aspirations of Hollywood. During the Second World War, the Film Library did its bit, building on acquisitions of official and enemy propaganda.

The MoMA Film Library encouraged the emergence of archives across the West. As an endnote relates, Henri Langlois, father of the Cinémathèque Française, even characterized himself as “the child of Iris Barry.” With its substantial collection of books and documents, the Film Library gave rise to important early works of film history. Wasson includes them in her extensive and useful bibliography, while the appendix reflects a commitment to cinema’s technological refinement that marks such classic texts as Film Library alumnus Arthur Knight’s The liveliest art (1957).

By advocating that cinema is worthy of serious contemplation when she did, Iris Barry set in train a heroic postwar era of art house programming and study. Taking a nuanced account of film art and the infrastructures that flow from this for granted as we do, it is difficult to imagine a time when such status had to be argued for as tirelessly as Barry did. Shifting the discussion away from the object ‘art movie’, Museum Movies is a very well researched and closely written study of the forces that feed the notion of cinema-as-art in a laissez faire setting, generating an account that is increasingly relevant to the commodified contemporary arthouse. Haidee Wasson has done Film Studies such a valuable service that it seems churlish to spot errors. It is very very difficult to get absolutely everything right in a book, particularly one so densely referenced and argued. But it is a pity when slips occur: calling MGM’s Latin legend ‘Ars Gratia Ars’ – should be ‘Ars Gratia Artis’ – ‘Art for Art’s Sake’; characterizing Stella Dallas (USA, 1937) as directed by Henry King – should be King Vidor; and calling Victor Sjöström ‘Seastrom’ when he is still in Sweden – he become ‘Seastrom’ in Hollywood in 1924. Hopefully, Haidee Wasson will have the opportunity to revise such random glitches when this fine study goes into another reprint.

Richard Armstrong
UK.

Created on: Thursday, 2 March 2006 | Last Updated: 2-Mar-06