Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema

MUSEUM MOVIES: THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART AND THE BIRTH OF ART CINEMA Haidee Wesson Berkeley and Los Angeles: University California Press, 2005, 314 pp. Museum Movies helped explain little puzzle for me. Haidee Wasson's confidently composed book would probably help anyone in film studies with thing or two. Her history Museum Modern Art's Film Library is, in sense, story where film studies came from; as subtitle says: The Birth An Cinema. My own problem was special film show in Chicago in 1926, Old-Time Movie Week, which included selection Griffith, Sennett, and other shorts from early 1910s. Also included was clip McKinley's 1901 inauguration, which allowed entire show to be incorrectly bannered, the movies 25 years ago... films our childhood. For its time, this chance to see old movies again was unique, and advertising supposes nostalgia is only reason to go. I knew it was exceptional, but only after reading Museum Movies did I understand why. The book explains that habits, discourses, networks, and even postures watching films as art, specifically watching old movies for aesthetic purposes, were institutionalized in 1930s, most concretely as result founding MoMA's Film Library in 1935. More generally (and this is why book is really about origins film studies itself), Wasson argues that art cinema is socially constructed, but she avoids pitfalls now-routine invention of books by leaving this conclusion largely implicit. Rather than offering an overstated genealogy film studies, book shows how film appreciation owes great deal to specific people, like Iris Barry and John Abbott at MoMA, and its Film Library, which came about because few well-connected people, changes in technology film, and cultural purpose museum. Wasson's introductory chapter, Making Cinema Modern Art, lays out argument that cinema could be widely understood as an art form only when conditions to facilitate that sensibility had been developed. In other words, she offers material sociology cinephilia, social history texts, spaces, manners, technologies, and economies that came together to make Film Library a novel, hybrid, and quintessentially modern institution, one that resonated with other institutional projects to make film respectable or institutionally useful. The remaining chapters are organized loosely around those other institutional conditions and contexts: technology, museum, film industry, distribution circuits, and audiences themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, but with great rewards, Film Library itself does not become central character until halfway mark. The first half book, instead, lays out contexts that allowed very idea Film Library and film appreciation to flourish. A chapter on possibilities mobile theaters explains how technological and industrial conditions an amateur 16mm gauge film stock and portable projectors facilitated new types film viewing. Eastman Kodak, Bell & Howell, and Victor Animatograph coordinated adoption 16mm in 1923. Amateur, educational, and industrial filmmaking flourished, almost all it nonprofit. An unintended outgrowth new standard 16mm, Wasson argues, was ability to more easily view movies, even mainstream ones, for aesthetic appreciation. The educational, non-profit aspects Film Library were largely inherited from existing industrial networks set up around 16mm exhibition. The next chapter looks at MoMA and modern museum practices more generally, especially in relation to film. If many modern artists wanted to create art for masses, places like MoMA gave shape to mass museology. Design and architecture were included alongside traditional fine arts, expanding conventional boundaries objects worthy art appreciation. …

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.