An International Study of Film Museums 2020034479, 2020034480, 9780415432245, 9780415432252, 9781003134206

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 1: The birth of the museum of cinema
Museums of cinema’s early history
Cinema as technology in museums: the pioneers
Museum of cinema: its pre-history and its archaeology exhibits
The museum of cinema as ‘organic’ formation: Paul Rotha
Museums, film libraries and archives: different paradigms?
Early archives and museums of cinema
MoMA’s Film Library: film as art
The British National Film Library
The Cinémathèque Française
Reichsfilmarchiv: a state-backed archive
FIAF and the safeguarding of cinema’s heritage
Archaeology of cinema in today’s museums
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2: The National Science and Media Museum
The ‘ancestry’ of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford
The British Film Institute and the Museum of the Moving Image
A media museum in the North of England: the first 25 years
Cinematography and photography in the museum
The development of television galleries
Watching films in the museum
Film Festivals in the museum
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Who is guarding the treasures now?: The Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma
The Birth of the Cinémathèque Française: modest beginnings
The Cinémathèque Française and the passage from silent movies to sound
Avenue de Messine: the first ‘home’ of the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma
Rue de Courcelle: the second ‘home’ of the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma
The Cinémathèque in the sixties and the ‘Affaire Langlois’
A dream realised? The ‘Palais de Chaillot’
The Bercy Project: ‘Passion Cinema’ betrayed?
Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma archaeology collection
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4: ‘Thought of a museum of cinema’: the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin
First steps in the direction of a National Museum of Cinema
The first museum of cinema at Palazzo Chiablese in Turin
The reopening of the ‘Museo Nazionale del Cinema’ in the Mole Antonelliana
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5: The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia
The Museu del Cinema in Girona: an experiment in a locally run museum
The collection of Tomàs Mallol
The museum’s philosophy about exhibiting pre-cinema and cinema
The permanent exhibitions
Amateur cameras and ‘Cine NIC’
American cinema in the museum: ‘The Dream Factory’
The temporary exhibitions
The museum and Catalan film culture
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Eastman House: an international museum of photography and cinema
The first museum in the George Eastman House
From ‘shrine’ to public museum
Cinematography and the moving image in the museum
The museum’s development and transition
The consolidation of cinema and cinematography in the museum
The museum in crisis
The new museum and archive
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

AN INTERNATIONAL STUDY OF FILM MUSEUMS

An International Study of Film Museums examines how cinema has been transformed and strengthened through museological and archival activities since its origins and asks what paradoxes may be involved, if any, in putting cinema into a museum. Cere explores the ideas that were first proposed during the first half of the twentieth century around the need to establish national museums of cinema and how these have been adapted in the subsequent development of the five case studies presented here: four in Europe and one in the USA. The book traces the history of the five museums’ foundation, exhibitions, collections, and festivals organised under their aegis and it asks how they resolve the tensions between cinema as an aesthetic artefact – now officially recognised as part of humanity’s cultural heritage – and cinema as an entertainment and leisure activity. It also gives an account of recent developments around unifying collections, exhibition activities and archives in one national film centre that offers the general public a space totally devoted to film and cinematographic culture. An International Study of Film Museums provides a unique comparative study of museums of cinema in varying national contexts. The book will be of interest to academics and students around the world who are engaged in the study of museums, archives, heritage, film, history and visual culture. Rinella Cere is a Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. She teaches the courses Globalisation and the Media and Postcolonial Media Culture and her publications include books, chapters and journal articles on media and popular culture in Britain, France and Italy. She is continuing to research museums of cinema around the world.

AN INTERNATIONAL STUDY OF FILM MUSEUMS

Rinella Cere

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Rinella Cere The right of Rinella Cere to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cere, Rinella, author. Title: An international study of film museums / Rinella Cere. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034479 (print) | LCCN 2020034480 (ebook) | ISBN 9780415432245 (hardback) | ISBN 9780415432252 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003134206 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures--History--Museums--Europe. | Motion pictures--History--Museums--United States. Classification: LCC PN1993.4 .C2725 2021 (print) | LCC PN1993.4 (ebook) | DDC 791.43075--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034479 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034480 ISBN: 978-0-415-43224-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-43225-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13420-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by SPi Global, India

For Julia Findlater

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction

1

1 The birth of the museum of cinema

9

2 The National Science and Media Museum

29

3 Who is guarding the treasures now? The Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma

45

4 ‘Thought of a museum of cinema’: The Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin

60

5 The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia

75

6 Eastman House: An international museum of photography and cinema

87

Conclusion Index

104 107

FIGURES

4.1

Maria Adriana Prolo and Henri Langlois in 1954

62

4.2

Triple magic lantern

68

4.3

Single magic lantern

69

5.1

The front façade of the Museu del Cinema in Girona

78

5.2

Poster for the temporary exhibition on Greta Garbo, Museu del Cinema in Girona

82

6.1

Entrance to Eastman House

98

6.2

Signage to Eastman House entrance

100

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has taken the best part of 10 years and a life calamity mid-point which changed its shape. It has meant crossing Europe and continents and has involved meeting and talking to many people, my only hope is that I have faithfully written down all your names in order to thank you all. Special thanks goes to museums’ curators, librarian, archivists and film programmers who agreed to interviews or informal talks, thus providing me with their valuable insights and time, in no particular order, Michael Harvey and Bill Lawrence of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford; Laurent Mannoni of the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma; Donata Pesenti Campagnoni (I have spelt your name correctly this time around), Carla Ceresa and Luciana Spina of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin (I am also extremely grateful to the Turin museum for the permission to use the images in Chapter 4). Jordi Pons i Busquet, Montse Puigdevall Noguer and Gemma Carbó i Ribugent of the Museu del Cinema in Girona. Patrick Loughney, James Reilly, Rachel Stuhlman, Kathy Wolkowicz Connor, James Cameron and Eliza Benington Kozlowski of George Eastman House. At George Eastman House I have benefited greatly of the generous and welcoming introduction from Sheila Foster, who is behind much of the research of the anniversary book used in Chapter 6. Irene Saltrelli is also to thank for keeping me warm and fed in wintery Rochester. Many other museums staff has helped again in no particular order Claudia Bozzone, Maria Grazia Girotto, Peg Tyler, Susan Drexler, Dean Loughran and Sarah Jarvis. In Turin I benefited greatly from the company of Giovanni Curtis and his many insights about cinema which have made us lifelong friends. Closer to home, I have many people to thank,Vanessa Toulmin and her assistant Lesley Allen of the National Fairground Archive at Sheffield University, an invaluable resource for researchers of popular visual culture. I have benefited greatly from the help of Hugh O’Donnell with Catalan and Remo Bertini with French. Family, friends and colleagues are always subjected to the dubious benefits of overambitious research projects. I am really grateful to many colleagues in the film, communication and media section of Sheffield Hallam University, but in particular to Tom Ryall and Steve Neale for their helpful and supporting comments at the beginning of my research project. Support has also come in other forms from many other colleagues at Hallam, from Rosalind Brunt, the late Tessa Perkins, Chris Goldie, Chris Pawling, the late Gerry Coubro, Angela Martin, Paul Marris, ChiYun Shin, Sheldon Hall, Luigina Ciolfi and Daniela Petrelli. More Academic colleagues and

xii  Acknowledgments

friends further afield are also due thanks, especially Bella Dicks, Richard Maltby, Dina Iordanova, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Neil Blain, Sylvia Harvey, Richard Johnson and Robert (aka Bobba) Bennett. I would like to thank Matthew Gibbons and Lalle Pursgrove of Routledge, who supported the project in an earlier incarnation and before the current editor Heidi Lowther and assistant Katie Wakelin took over and who showed me considerable patience in the light of my many delays, the most ‘spectacular’ of which was certainly my fall on my way to work. Without the support of the British Arts and Humanities Research Council and Sheffield Hallam University, this research would have never taken off the ground. What is left of my family comes last but not in my affections.

INTRODUCTION

This book first began as a way of answering a recurring question about the paradox of putting cinema in a museum, after all one could watch films in many different contexts and need not enter a museum institution to do so. The question was also not tied to cinema not having the same cultural merit as other arts; this debate is well burnt out along with the many fires that consumed many deposits of nitrate films stock.What I did not know at the beginning of this research journey is that there are as many ways of putting cinema in a museum as there are museums of cinema. Cinema is many things besides films, old and new; it is archaeology, technologies, cinephilia, auditoriums, festivals, archives and libraries, art and cultural heritage. This list is not exhaustive and it is not in any particular order, but is one that applies in an assortment of combinations to all the museum institutions I visited and researched, a list further complicated by their individual histories, de facto existing collections, organisational preferences and national contexts. The last coupling, art and cultural heritage determined another question: how are museums of cinema combining the popular culture of film with cinematographic heritage?1 It is hoped that this book, through the five case studies proposed here, will make a contribution to answering these two questions. In the last two decades, much writing has been done about the need for a change of viewpoint about the museums and media relationship, which has introduced conceptual and terminological convergence: ‘museum media’; an idea first proposed by Henning (2006, 2015) and expanded by many others to account for more recent media developments, from gaming to social media. Russo has gone as far as to assert ‘The media museum is here’ (Russo 2012: 155). In many of these accounts and studies, there is no mention of the museums which actually deal in media ‘material,’ whether cinema, radio, television or videogames.This omission seems surprising as one of the claims made is to look at museums from a media theory perspective, what better place to start than the ‘literal’ media museums. The discussion ‘museums are media’ and ‘museums are not media’ is one that is ongoing especially as writings and theorising about museums increasingly look at them as ‘transmedia texts’ (Kidd 2014), as ‘media producers’ (Pavement 2019) or as generally mediatised practices in line with the social context in which they are embedded (Drotner et al. 2019). In some sense,

2  Introduction

museums of cinema are an ideal example of the mediatisation of exhibitions, at the same time they are also about the musealisation of cinema; they have been at the centre of the expansion of cinema’s heritage and their very definition includes many different types of institutions and activities, from museums to film libraries to archives. Some institutions encompass all three roles, others only one or two of the three. Some have very little museal activities in the way of exhibitions of cinema’s artefacts, while others have extensive ones covering many centuries of the archaeology of cinema. Specific national contexts and histories are also determinants for some of these differences. The case studies in this book, and perhaps not different from other types of museums, share a fair amount of power struggles and controversies. These, at times, have caused their fundamental nature and existence to be put into doubt in the same way as cinema was, at least in the beginning, which they strive to musealise. When Truffaut declared that ‘putting a Garbo costume next to the skull from Psycho is a gimmick for tourists’2 he was airing a view, which had been at the centre of the establishment of museums of cinema right from their inception. Would not funds and generally scarce resources be better spent solely for the conservation of films, future filmmaking and distribution of films rather than exhibiting cinematographic artefacts? The understanding of the weak economic base which brought about such doubts is crucial; on the whole, museums of cinema have commanded very little state support and public funding and in some cases none at all, and when funds were made available they were often limited and precarious. The weak economic foundation, coupled with ‘philosophical’ doubts as to the importance of the material objects surrounding cinema, produced different ideas about the preservation and exhibition of cinema’s heritage in the early history of their formation. This book will attempt to address the different ways in which cinema, a popular cultural form, has been transformed and strengthened through museological and archival activities since its origins, and how it has addressed what has also been described as the difficulty of ‘exhibiting what has already been exhibited’ which is ultimately the challenge of how to musealise pre-cinema and cinema without foregoing its ‘moving essence.’ This challenge was taken up by many of the early pioneers at the centre of the historical origins of museums of cinema, cinémathèques and archives. This book will discuss in some details some of the key figures involved but also address some of the problems which arose in relation to these ‘larger than life’ characters. It will also look at how some of these institutions eventually followed a different path and took on a life of their own, independently of their creators, who were also usually collectors themselves. This book is also an attempt, albeit of necessity limited, given the international scale of developments in museums of cinema, to account for the continued and determined effort over many decades to safeguard cinematographic patrimony in all its forms, for the nation and its people, for humanity, or simply for the love of cinema. The first chapter will set out the context and trace the history of the idea to musealise cinema, the ‘configuration’ of this potential museum and the different trajectories which were followed based on whether cinema was seen as art or science and technology. In particular it will look at the writings of Boleslaw Matuszewski, who first discussed the need for a ‘cinematographic archive/deposit’; his was the first writings advocating the need to safeguard cinema’s heritage. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of the first exhibitions of private collections of pre-cinematographic and cinematographic artefacts in Europe, the technological bias inherent in these collections then housed in science and technology museums. First important examples at the turn of the twentieth century were the exhibition in the Science Museum in London with artefacts lent by Robert W. Paul and Will Day from their collections and in the Národní Technické Muzeum in Prague, with artefacts from French pioneers: Purkyne, Demeny, Marey and Lumière.

Introduction  3

The most complete conceptualisation of an ‘ideal’ museum of cinema was first introduced by Paul Rotha’s in an essay entitled ‘A museum for the Cinema’; this is especially important because he was the first to theorise how the division at the heart of cinema, the mechanical and scientific (the technologies/equipment) vs. the cultural and aesthetic (the films) could be reconciled in a dedicated space which attended to both: the exhibition of the instruments and the conservation and screening of the films. In addition, Rotha argued that this institution should incorporate ‘supplementary objects in connection with the cinema worthy of preservation’; these ranged from film posters, books, designs and costumes and still photographs. This ‘ideal’ museum was one very familiar to the forerunners who contributed to the establishment of the museums of cinema in the fifties, which are part of the case studies for this book, among them: James Card, Henri Langlois and Maria Adriana Prolo, who had a shared vision of a museum of cinema as an institution which would safeguard the cinematographic heritage. Alongside the idea of creating a museum of cinema a different, albeit related, development took place. In many countries, including Britain an artificial division was set in motion through the creation of institutes for the dissemination of cinema with archival responsibilities for the conservation of film but not in a museum context.This section of the early history of institutions tasked with looking after cinema will discuss the different pathways and ‘models’ which generated from individuals who had a more ‘preservationist’ vision of cinema – preservation at the expense of dissemination – and individuals who firmly believed that a museum context would help both preservation, conservation and dissemination. This dual trajectory will also be traced through the process whereby ‘technologies of film’ were separated from ‘educational and artistic purposes’ and these were in turn part of the wider debates of the relationship between art and science of the time. Therefore, in the first chapter, an account will also be offered of the first institutions established in the early part of the twentieth century entrusted to safeguard and preserve cinema’s heritage: film libraries and archives and what I have termed different paradigms for the preservation of cinema. These different paradigms can, however, be seen to come together with museums in the organisation which since the forties was central to galvanise the activities of conservation and dissemination of cinema, The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). The intense European and international activities tied to the creation of Cinémathèques, film libraries and archives eventually united together under its aegis. Many museums of cinema became part of FIAF as Associates, especially those with major collections, although they may not had at the time a sustained and systematic programme of film preservation as such. It also facilitated all kinds of cinema-related activities and fostered the intense collaborations between different institutions throughout the last century; although undoubtedly, given the few people involved at least until the 1960s, these were often based on personal acquaintances and friendships. FIAF is still today the most single important organisation for the preservation of cinema’s heritage. The first chapter concludes with a final reflection on the archaeology of cinema in todays’ museums and their ‘museological’ context. The historical continuity of the medium of cinema is particularly evident in its ‘archaeology’ and over the years this has undoubtedly become a significant interpretative link in definitions of cinema and cinematographic heritage. Recent studies have concentrated on this ‘excavation’ exercise and have unearthed a range of ‘archaeological finds,’ from ‘mondi niovi’ to panoramas to magic lanterns’ phantasmagoria (Griffiths 2008; Huhtamo 2013; Gabrieli 2016). These ‘finds’ are part of the archaeology of cinema’s collections in all the case studies looked at here; they are however uneven in terms of exhibition, as for only three of the museums, they are central to their ethos and practice (in Paris, Turin and Girona).

4  Introduction

This is also evident in the curators’ efforts to explain to their visitors its importance within the history of cinema as the original ‘art of the people’: ‘ubiquitous’ objects, such as the Magic Lanterns and many other early optical artefacts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are framed as the equivalent of cinema as ‘art of the people’ of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The other two museums discussed, in Bradford and Rochester, have also in their collections many artefacts connected to the archaeology of cinema, but have not to date created a dedicated exhibition for these artefacts but rather have chosen to concentrate on different aspects of cinematographic culture, partly because their resources are also directed towards photography as well as cinema. The following five chapters trace the history, developments and practices of five museums, four based in Europe and one in the United States. The choice of museums is not random, and indeed there are many examples around the world to choose from (Bottomore 2006) but the visits, exchanges, interviews and especially the consultation of archives require language skills and one of the reasons for the choice of these museums is based on the author’s competence with the languages involved besides English: French, Italian and Catalan. Of course there are other crucial factors determining the choice of these five museums: for example, in the fact that in their differences and similarities they offer a wide ranging models of national museums of cinema’s developments, even if they all share a considerable international brief. Chapter 2 is the first case study in the book and it considers the history and development of the newly termed National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, UK (NSMM henceforth), formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, first established in 1983. The museum itself was one of a cluster of new museums in the UK founded in the eighties and it was especially important, as unusually, it was planned to be located outside the metropolis in a northern British town, a region known for its former industrial landscape: Bradford was the town finally settled on for its location. The chapter first looks at the cinematographic and photographic collection which constituted the precursor of the museum in Bradford, now housed there, which was first exhibited as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century in the then Kensington Science Museum in London. It follows with an account of the BFI, already mentioned in a different context in Chapter 1 and long-term collaborator, especially with lending activities of its extensive film collection. Alongside, and in a way of context, there will also be a mention of a parallel institution, established not long after the Bradford museum, the former Museum of the Moving Image in London (MoMI), whose fortunes turned out to be very different as it closed within 10 years of its opening. The chapter goes on to discuss the first 25 years of the museums’ activities; in the first decade of its existence, the museum acquired two large collections, in fact not just collections but the entire content of two museums, the content of the Kodak limited Museum at Harrow followed by the John Burgoyne-Johnson Movie Museum based in Buckingham. In 1989, the former Science Museum collections also came under the responsibility of the NSMM, thus becoming ‘a collection of collections.’ Since then the NSMM has undergone a much-needed rationalisation of the entire body of artefacts.Two of the chapter’s section will be dedicated to the cinematography and photography’s collection, respectively. The chapter will conclude on the role played by the museum today, with its wider remit about television, the creation of a television gallery, the introduction of new interactive media technologies, its contribution to the creation of film festivals and the promotion of film and media culture more widely through its three auditoriums, including an Imax screen. Chapter 3 traces the unique history of the Cinémathèque Française - Musée du Cinéma in Paris, one of the most renowned film library and museum of cinema. It looks at its origins

Introduction  5

and the activities of his formidable founder and Director Henri Langlois and the context of its ‘modest beginnings’ belying the enormous efforts to safeguard early silent cinema in the transition to sound. Langlois’s passion for cinema was total, he collected every film he could lay his hands on and was one of the first to put into practice a museological view of cinema; for every review and season he organised, he created parallel exhibitions of artefacts surrounding the screenings. The chapter will discuss the itinerant movement of the institution, from Avenue de Messine, its first site to Rue de Courcelle and finally to the Palais de Chaillot, with its first permanent cinema museum. It will also consider some of the contradictions which were at the heart of the Cinémathèque, as an organisation run by dedicated individuals, of whom Henri Langlois was but one, and the increasing interest in its activities taken by the state, once public funding for the Cinémathèque had been approved. The French state, unlike the British one, has always taken a more direct interest in all matters of culture, sometimes for better or worse. The crisis at the Cinémathèque in 1968 was a good example of its more negative ramifications when it tried to restructure its organisation and dismissed Henri Langlois, what came to be known as ‘L’affair Langlois,’ totally ignoring the fundamental role this institution played for some of its most celebrated film directors and movements and for national film culture as a whole. The chapter will conclude on the latter years of the Langlois’ ‘reign,’ his dream of creating an equivalent ‘Palais de Louvre’ for the cinema, the fire which burned the museum down at Palais the Chaillot, and the many years of stagnation punctuated by intermittent failings and successes. This long process finally culminated in the opening on 26 September 2005 of the ‘grand projet,’ which has united the cinémathèque, library and museum collection in one national film centre at 51 Rue De Bercy in the Frank Gehry-designed building which formerly housed the American Cultural Institute. Chapter 4 is on the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin which has also reopened as a new permanent museum in the new millenium in that city most symbolic building, The Mole Antonelliana. This chapter will discuss the foundational history of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema from its first conception in the forties to the present day. In Italy, like in some of the other case studies discussed in this book, the museum was established by a dedicated individual, Anna Maria Prolo. The chapter will consider her enduring passion which began during her historical studies in the early Turin film industry, often designated in film’s history as the ‘Hollywood’ of silent cinema. This brought her into contact with directors, actors, screenwriters and producers, who handed over documents, photos, cameras, etc. Prolo traced the beginning of the museum at this point: ‘Almost all of them had documents, photos, cameras, and it is for this reason that on that famous 8 June 1941 I wrote on my diary “thought of a museum of cinema.”’ This lifelong work, similar to the one described in Chapter 3 about Henri Langlois, first yielded results in 1959, with the establishment of a national museum of cinema with regional and state-funded backing at Palazzo Chiablese. Prolo’s collecting activities for a future museum of cinema, privileged the ‘archaeology’ of cinema and as a result the pre-cinema collection of the museum is considered one of the most important in the world, if not for the quantity, certainly for the quality of the artefacts. The museum, however, has also acquired the collection of the British brothers, John and William Barnes following the closure of their small museum of cinema in St. Ives (a portion of their collection relating to South-Eastern England was purchased by the Hove Museum). This is a substantive collection of artefacts with much that classify as ‘archaeology’ of cinema, mainly magic lanterns and slides.

6  Introduction

The discussion will also consider the way the museum through its activities has played a singularly important role in Italian film culture of the second part of the twentieth century to capture the spirit of the intense ferment around cinema and especially the immense efforts of its remarkable founder Maria Adriana Prolo. The existence of a museum of cinema in Turin is solely due to her pre-war and post-war efforts, but also to the intense collective activities which ensured that cinema culture, national and international was made available to all. This chapter will conclude by looking at the ways in which, an institution which had begun in an amateur fashion, a concept that film scholarship has reprised to in recent years, has over time become one of the most successful museums of cinema in Europe especially in its present new configuration. Chapter 5 covers the last of the four European museum case studies and it is also the ‘youngest’ formation, the Museu del Cinema in Girona in Catalonia. It was opened in 1994 by Girona Town Council. It is originally connected, like most other museums discussed in this book, with a large private collection owned by Tomàs Mallol, a filmmaker, who had begun collecting cinema’s artefacts back in the sixties: it contains about 20,000 objects, 8000 of which are pre-cinema artefacts. Mallol was also keen to see his collection as part of a public institution that stayed in its original regional location, Catalonia, and to be made accessible to the general public. Tomàs Mallol, like Maria Adriana Prolo in Italy many years earlier, favoured the ‘archaeology’ of cinema as a collector (as well as amateur equipment and children’s cinema), and this has made the Girona museum an important example of exhibitory practices of the archaeology and pre-cinema up to 1895. The unique local financial arrangements for the buying of the collection and the museums’ philosophy behind the organisation of the permanent exhibitions stands as an important ‘model’ for the future of museums of cinema and cinema culture more generally. Equally like some the other museums researched for this book, it successfully integrates its permanent exhibition of the ‘archaeology of cinema’ with its other activities of promoting cinema culture more widely. The museum’s particular section on amateur cameras and children cinema-related toys will also receive some attention in the chapter as it plays an important role in the history of the local Catalan film industry and popular culture. Overall the chapter looks at the ways collections are exhibited, the educational activities undertaken alongside, for example film festivals and retrospectives, and looks especially at their important and extensive cycle on cinema and youth. This chapter will conclude on the specific ways this museum concentrate in Catalan film culture as part of its exhibitions, screenings and educational programmes. The final chapter looks across the Atlantic to a much larger institution for the last case study. Eastman Museum (formerly George Eastman House: the International Museum of Photography and Film) was first established in 1949 and houses one of the largest collections of films and photographs (as well as photographic and cinematographic equipment and objects) internationally. This chapter will trace the museum’s history, its origins and its passage from ‘shrine’ dedicated to George Eastman, the founder of the Kodak Company, to public museum. Many key figures will be discussed who have been involved in its foundation, development, transition and consolidation as an international museums of photography in the first instance and cinema soon after. Like all the other institutions discussed in this book, it has also suffered its share of controversy and strife, some of which is described in this chapter up to the late nineties. Eastman museum shares with the Bradford one the predominance around the photographic collection, nonetheless cinema although not always at the centre of the museum’s activities in its origins, it has in recent years grown to be a substantial part of the museum. This will be traced, for example, back to the intense collecting activities of his first film curator, James Card, and the way he amassed for the museum a huge and important collection of

Introduction  7

movies from the silent era, the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood and silent German cinema. The rich film collection of over 25 thousand titles is matched by the richness of the photographic collection, which includes the Gabriel Cromer Collection bought from France. The museum has an overall collection of over three million artefacts, including films, stills, posters and documents. The museum international brief is explicit in its collection which is made up of material from Europe as well as North America.The museum, given its origins as the private house and gardens of the founder of the Eastman Kodak company, is also classified as a ‘National Historic Landmark.’ This chapter will discuss the uniqueness of a museum housed in an ‘urban estate’ surrounded by acres of land; it will discuss the developments, expansion and restoration throughout the eighties which attempted to combine its original brief ‘to collect, preserve, and present the history of photography and film’ with the existence of the house and the formal gardens surrounding it. The historical house has been at the centre of much division and contradictions in the museum activities, partly accounted for in this chapter, which were eventually resolved by separating their respective responsibility. The chapter will conclude by considering its undoubtedly wider remit as an international museum in its past and current programming choice of exhibitions as well as its role in the conservation and preservation of its extensive photography and cinema collection. The individual histories of these five museums are quite extensive and this book can only be a partial account for parts of their history and legacy as museums, their role in safeguarding and curating the cinematographic patrimony, current activities in relation to exhibitions and screenings and their overall role in promoting national and international cinema’s heritage and as well as contemporary cinematic culture. It is really intended as a start of a dialogue about museums of cinema especially as in the last 20 years their fortunes have turned and as we have seen for most of them, large sums of public and private finance have been spent on restoring and redesigning them.This is true of all five case studies researched here, albeit in different ways, again depending on national contexts and types of collections and interests. One particular ongoing feature, as is evident in the French and American example, is the way in which the unifying of collections, exhibition activities and archives in one national film centre is considered the preferred option, in order to ‘offer the general public a place entirely consecrated to film and cinematographic culture.’ This is line with what Dicks called ‘the principle of visitability’ which has also invested ‘self-contained, single-use museum.’ With museums of cinema, there is a double advantage, as my case studies hope to show, they are not part of the dichotomy mentioned by Dicks where we have the ‘public museum’ with its didacticism on the one hand and the heritage site with its ‘more accessible techniques of display’ on the other (Dicks 2003: 120) rather they are what Christie has referred to as an ‘archipelago’: So film developed, not so much as an empire, but as what we might call instead an “archipelago” of its own – a worldwide network of institutions that conserved, curated, and canonized film, but separately from the institutions that performed the same functions for visual and plastic art, other than at MoMA. (Christie 2012: 224) The following chapters are a few small islands of the cinema museums archipelago.

Notes 1 See Cere (2005). 2 This was said against Henri Langlois, the Director of the Cinémathèque Française whose efforts to create a museum of cinema, had brought a serious financial crisis for the institution, quoted in Roud, A Passion for Films, 1983, p. 178.

8  Introduction

Bibliography Bottomore, S. (2006) ‘Film museums: A bibliography‘. Film History, 18, 3: 327–349. Cere, R. (2005) Moving images. How museums are combining the popular culture of film with cinematographic heritage. Museums Journal, October , 30–33. Christie, I. (2012) A disturbing presence? Scenes from the history of film in the museum, in A. Dalle Vacche (ed.) Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dicks, B. (2003) Culture on Display. The Production of Visitability. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press. Drotner, K., Dziekan,V., Parry, R. and Schroder, K. C. (2019) The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication. Oxon: Routledge. Gabrieli, A. (2016) The Emergence of Pre-cinema. Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination. New York: Palgrave, Macmillan. Griffiths, A. (2008) Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press. Henning, M. (2006) Museums, Media and Cultural Theory. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Henning, M. ed. (2015) Museum Media: The International Handbook of Museum Studies,Vol. 3. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Huhtamo, E. (2013) Illusions in Motion. Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kidd, J. (2014) Museums in the New Mediascape.Transmedia, Participation, Ethics. Oxon: Routledge. Pavement, P. (2019) The museum as media producer: Innovation before the digital age, in K. Drotner et al., The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication. Oxon: Routledge. Russo, A. (2012) The rise of the “Media Museum”, in E. Giaccardi (ed.) Heritage and Social Media: Understanding Heritage as a Participatory Culture. London: Routledge.

1 THE BIRTH OF THE MUSEUM OF CINEMA

Museums of cinema’s early history The idea of putting cinema in a museum goes back nearly as far as the birth of cinema itself. It was perceived as a necessary historical responsibility to safeguard this new and ‘fragile’ art, and it was clearly part of a much wider climate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which had begun to sense the impermanence of these new cultural objects but still hang on to ideas of permanence and historical continuity. This ambivalent state was not helped by cinema that was by its very nature abstract and concrete, permanent and impermanent, tangible and intangible, subject and object. Unsurprisingly it was cinema rather than other cultural forms, which was singled out as futureless, but not by all, as the feverish activities by film pioneers for the creation of museum exhibitions, archives, film libraries and clubs, attest throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The idea of conserving and exhibiting the photographic and cinematographic heritage was first introduced by a photographer and camera operator for the Lumière brothers, Boleslaw Matuszewski. This relatively little known Polish photographer and cinematographer has gained an important place in cinema history with his pamphlet ‘Une nouvelle source de l’histoire’ where, he was not only advocate for the importance of the ‘documentary possibilities of cinema’ (Cousin and Macdonald 2006: 13) and of documentary as authentic historical evidence, but also argued for the need to safeguard it for posterity through a systematic ‘Depository’: ‘The issue now is to give this perhaps privileged source of historical evidence the same authority, official existence and accessibility as other already well established archives.’1 Intrinsic in the above pronouncement is two key strands in film history and theory: film as realist social document and film as an equivalent cultural and historical ‘entity’ to literature and the plastic arts. The first of these strands has been central to the development of the study of cinema in the academy as well as awarding it an ever-growing prominence in visual culture. In ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’2 Bazin, writing in France during the forties and fifties, tackles this question head on and in it pronounces that ‘Photography and the Cinema [on the other hand] are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism’ (Bazin 2005: 12).

10  The birth of the museum of cinema

According to Bazin, this obsession ‘forces us to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say in time and space’ (Bazin 2005: 13–14). Realism and in particular the ‘aesthetic of reality’ is at the heart of many of the essays Bazin wrote on cinema, still considered to date foundational to cinema’s definitions and debates, in spite of its many detractors as well as supporters over the years; definitions and debate which are partly accounted for by Dudley in his Foreword to the 2005 edition of Volume 2 of What is Cinema? (Dudley in Bazin 2005). Visual depiction and representation of the ‘real’ was not, however, the only form which characterised the origins of cinema; the making of fantastic films was also concurrent, for example, in the work of early filmmaker, Georges Méliès, who was producing films at the same time as the Lumière brothers. The two genres,3 realist and fantastic, are two examples of some of filmmaking’s future developments. Bazin was well aware of the two genres in the description he gives in one of the essays in volume 1, entitled ‘The Myth of Total Cinema,’ of the colour processes in both Reynaud and Méliès (Bazin 2005: 20). Bazin was also aware that Méliès’ fantastic cinema still relied on theatrical spectacle: ‘[That was the heyday of] Méliès who saw the cinema as basically nothing more than a refinement of the marvels of the theater. Special effects were for him simply a further evolution of conjuring’ (Bazin 2005: 78). More recently Engell also highlighted both the staging and conjuring features of Méliès’ films, ‘the motif of the enigmatic, inexplicable origination or agency of a magician facing the magically-produced “appearances” of the notorious magic stage and the performance of a magician’ (Engell 2014: 362). Moving away from the debate between realism and fantastic cinema and its theatrical ‘corseting’ (Penz 2012: 281), a second strand formulated by Matuszewski was in connection with cinema’s ‘legitimacy and status,’ which argued for ways in which it could achieve a greater standing alongside literature and the plastic arts and how it could be realised through three processes: ‘authority, official existence and accessibility’; the need for these indicated that the cinema’s status was still seen as marginal to other more established cultural (bourgeois) forms.4 Through the idea of introducing its collection and preservation, a process which had been already intrinsic to the birth of public museums institutions of the nineteenth century as creations of ‘a social space’ and ‘a space of representation’ (Bennett 1995: 24), the cinema was perceived as acquiring a parallel cultural status. If cinema was worth collecting and preserving for posterity, it would require an institution, be it an archive, a library or a museum or all three combined as it is now evident in many examples around the world. Bazin’s own writings did not particularly indicate a need for ‘institutionalisation’ of this sort; rather ‘[But] his life’s goal was never to elevate cinema to parity with these traditional arts; rather, he believed, cinema’s “documentary” attributes set it adjacent to the arts. Cinema could imitate traditional arts (for instance, by telling stories), ignore them (as in science films), or intersect with them by adapting their greatest achievements’ (Dudley in Bazin 2005: xiv). Matuszewski, like many other people working in early photography and cinema, offered his own documents as a launch for this future film archive/museum: ‘I offer this not uninteresting series of cinematographic exposures as the basis for the establishment of the new Museum’ (Matuszewski, 1898: no pagination). As the official photographer of the Emperor of Russia, he had many such documents to offer a future archive;5 he also had great hope that people, professionals and amateurs,6 would follow in his footstep: My example will be imitated … if you are only so good as to encourage this simple but new idea, making suggestions of your own to improve it, and above all giving it the wide publicity it needs to thrive and be fruitful. (Matuszewski, 1898: no pagination)

The birth of the museum of cinema  11

Matuszewski’s views on the ‘uncontestable and absolute truth’ revealed by the cinematographer or his views that the latter is the ‘the epitome of the truthful and infallible eye-witness’ has not much currency in an era where the epistemological and semiological foundations of history have been put into doubt. Nonetheless his other idea, about a ‘depository’ has become central to the developments of film archives and museums of cinema alike. In particular, his concept of conservation and ensuring public access to film sources singles him out as a pioneer of both film history and the musealisation of the seventh art (Pesenti Campagnoni 1997). In Film Curatorship, Paolo Cherchi Usai et al. (2008) goes further in arguing that ‘the first imperative [of curatorship] is to ensure that the traces of history embodied by the works in a collection will not be altered, manipulated, or modified under any circumstance for any reason whatsoever, be it of a political, racial, religious, or economic nature’ (Cherchi Usai et al. 2008: 148). A few years after Matuszewski’s proposition, D. W. Griffiths and Vachel Lindsay in the United States also introduced the idea of a film library/museum; Lindsay expanded on this in his book The Art of the Moving Picture first published in 1915; similarly to Matuszewski, he envisaged a civic institution which would be dedicated to film and its future public; details were largely lacking not least because as Decherney has argued ‘Lindsay’s discussion of exhibiting and collecting were directly intertwined with his general theories of cinematic representation and American politics’ (Decherney 2005: 33). Lindsey’s Universal Film Museum was not realised in the United States as elsewhere.

Cinema as technology in museums: the pioneers The early history of cinema is also characterised by the emphasis placed on its technology; a handful of pioneers are particularly important in this context. Etiennes-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge were the earliest figures associated with the moving image; their inventions, respectively, chronophotography7 and zoopraxiscope8 and their many experiments on motion lay the basis for the development of the moving image technology. Both were concerned with the scientific and technological view of motion, however, Marta Braun in her study of Muybridge highlighted how his work also ‘straddled the worlds of art and science in the late nineteenth century’ (Braun 2010: 7). Similarly, François Dagognet’s book on Marey (1993) argues that there was a dual purpose to his search for the fixing of motion: scientific and aesthetic. Muybridge’s showmanship was perhaps in contrast with Etiennes-Jules Marey, a physiologist by profession; nonetheless, they both shared a preoccupation with the visualisation of movement which also engendered a meeting between them in 1881; Marey’s chronophotographic gun was invented the following year (Braun 1992). Deac Rossell in his article on chronophotography and moving pictures singles out two more ‘chronophotographers’ besides Marey and Muybridge, Georges Demenÿ and Ottomar Anschütz, but he also discusses many other figures that he calls ‘the lesser known workers’ (Rossell 2013: 10) involved in the history of chronophotography and its relation to the future medium of cinema. Like the chronophotographers, many pioneers of early cinema were also scientists, engineers, inventors and showmen. Louis Le Prince is now known for having invented the first singlelens early motion picture camera, who submitted a patent to the United States as early as 1886 (Rawlence 1990; Howells 2006); William Friese-Greene, equally, is known for having invented camera models as well as experimenting with colour in moving images, the ‘biocolour’9; Robert Paul, whose inventions became part of the first collection exhibited in Britain, and which I will discuss further in Chapter 2.10

12  The birth of the museum of cinema

Yet other inventors experimented with colour, for example, George Albert Smith and Charles Urban with Kinemacolor, both really successful in selling their films in Europe and America.11 These were also the days of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits about photographic and cinematographic patents and inventions, according to Khan: ‘Copyright laws illustrated the difficulties and dilemmas that the legal system experienced in dealing with such new technologies as mimeographs, flash photography, cinematography…’ (Khan 2005: 16). Not surprisingly the first deposits to the Library of Congress were textual descriptions rather than the film themselves, principally in an effort to stake copyright claims (Christie 2012). Alongside, the Universal Expositions of the day were early conduits for the intensive experiments of all these inventors and the technologies surrounding photography and cinematography; precursors of a certain type of museum exhibitions and collections which favoured the technological apparatuses over collections of the film themselves and/or their distribution and screening. Little consideration was given in the early developments of the nineteenth century’s museums to the aesthetic and cultural value of films or the information and communicative action performed by them. This is not surprising as the production and distribution of films was still in its infancy and largely confined to urban audiences and to random screenings and events, not yet embedded in the cultural activities and imaginary of everyday life and still capable of provoking wonderment rather than familiarity, or to use Griffiths’ expression still capable of ‘sending shivers down your spine’ (Griffiths 2008: 1). The division in place between cinematography as mere technology and cinematography as artistic and cultural form is also part of the history of cinema and it is apparent that right from the beginning there is a ‘dichotomy between art and science, humanistic and technological culture which has also partly determined the historical development of the institutions created to conserve and safeguard the cinematographic patrimony’ (Pesenti Campagnoni 1997: 2). This was also very much intrinsic to the culture of the day where the discourse of progress, through scientific and technological inventions, was at its height and the stirring of mass culture was also on its way (Crary 1990, 2001). Laura Marcus argued that ‘claims made for film as an art form were often dependent on the suppression of cinema’s mechanical and technological dimensions and on attempts (discursive and conceptual) to construct for the medium an ‘organic’ birth and identity’ (Marcus 2014: 93), and indeed this ‘suppression’ was evident in the way that before the establishment of dedicated museums of cinema, cinematographic apparatuses found their way into museums of science and technology; these institutions, as to be expected, privileged technical interpretations and separated the objects from their cultural and social use. The cinematographic apparatus was often exhibited alongside the photographic one, in a ‘presumed’ technological affinity and continuity, and always as part of wider climate of technologically driven discourses of the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. Their fate in the museum, however, was not necessarily one of legitimation or acquired status: ‘Photography and its off-shoot, film, would face a long battle for recognition throughout the twentieth century, plagued by their associations with mechanism and vulgar popularity’ (Christie 2012: 249).

Museum of cinema: its pre-history and its archaeology exhibits Two of the first museums to collect cinematographic objects were the then Science Museum in London (today the National Museum of Science and Industry)12 from 1913 and the Národní Technické Muzeum in Prague from 1908.13 Both museums relied on donations and loans of private collections for their exhibitions. These first collections were modest undertakings; the

The birth of the museum of cinema  13

Science Museum in London received in the first instance, in 1913, six cinematographic apparatuses from Robert W. Paul.14 A second collection in 1922 was received in the form of a loan, a deposit of 500 objects, part of the Will Day’s collection of almost two thousands artefacts. The history and whereabouts of the Will Day’s collection will be discussed further in Chapter 2 and three; it is still today considered one of the most important collections of pre-cinema and cinema materials, precisely in the way it combines both the technological apparatuses and equipment used first in shows in Paris and London as well as documents, photographs and rare early films. It also comprises original and unique objects such as the Rudge Phantascope Lantern, Paul’s first projector, the Theatrograph and Edison’s Kinetoscope (Mannoni 1996). These two collections enabled the Science Museum to have one of the first dedicated cinematographic exhibitions as early as 1924 which was on show until World War II, during which time it closed (Harvey 1998: 5). According to Pesenti Campagnoni (1997), this whole collection, in spite of its partial exhibition in a technological frame, was to become a European-wide focus for the idea of creating museums of cinema, even though this optimistic interpretation was not quite matched by an equivalent appreciation from the rest of the museum world of the time. Technological framing was also at the centre of the Národní Technické Muzeum’s first collection in Prague, mainly based around photographic and cinematographic apparatuses donated by Jakub Husnik and Karel Zenger.15 Many of the objects donated were connected with French pioneers of photography and cinematography: Purkyne, Demeny, Marey and Lumière (Pesenti Campagnoni 1997: 4). France, along with the UK and the USA, was at the forefront of photographic and cinematographic inventions and developments; equally it was also in France that discussions and debate begun circulating about creating a museum of photography and cinematography. A dedicated exhibition of photographic and cinematographic objects was also created in France in 1923; it had been previously part of the polygraphic exhibition (Pesenti Campagnoni 1997: 4). A few years later, in 1927, France further boosted the exhibition of its existing collections by creating a museum of photography as part of the ‘Conservatoire national des arts and métiers,’ which also incorporated cinematographic apparatuses. Similar to the other two institutions above mentioned in London and Prague, this was a ‘technologically oriented exhibition,’ with photography and cinematography ‘sharing’ their history of technological developments (Pesenti Campagnoni 1997: 5). This is unsurprising as many of the protagonists involved in photography were also part of the development of cinematography. The French museum was strongly supported by donations and promoted by Gabriel Cromer,16 a prominent photographer and collector, who could be described as the French equivalent of Will Day for cinematography in Britain. The meaning and value to visitors of these technologically led exhibitions which ignored the content these objects produced, the people behind them (photographers, filmmakers, cinematographers, etc.), the industrial environment and the national context from which they alighted, will not really be disputed until much later, as part of a continuum in museological practice, which sought to explain artefacts in their social and historical context rather than as isolated objects. Nonetheless, it is worth reiterating that in the early history of museums’ exhibition of cinema, the technologically driven interpretative framework was, on the whole, exclusive of the films produced as well as of the context of their reception. A broader cultural explanation for this early ‘forced’ division can also be envisioned in the way art, culture, science and technology were organised in industrial society, rooted in systems of production, division of labour and the formation of an industrial labouring class (Popple 1998; Hidalgo 2018).

14  The birth of the museum of cinema

The outcome of this dual trajectory resulted in films being seen as separate ‘objects’ and requiring a different type of institution to safeguard them. In some cases, it is still the basis of some present-day divisions between national museums, archives and libraries as well as determinants of the nature and composition of some of the collections. All the above-mentioned exhibitions and collections are significant because they were part of the apparatuses vs. films early interpretation of the musealisation of cinema.This dichotomy appears to be superseded to a large extent today as the five case studies of media/cinema museums will illustrate in the following chapters of this book.

The museum of cinema as ‘organic’ formation: Paul Rotha In Britain, the film critic and cinematographer Paul Rotha was the first to discuss and write about museums of cinema and to sketch a potential design. His text, ‘A Museum for the Cinema’ written in 1930 presented a comprehensive visualisation of what a museum of cinema may look like, encompassing the preservation and exhibition of technological objects (cameras, projectors, lighting apparatuses, etc.) along with the films, from the earliest examples of the ‘primitives’ down to the latest productions. Rotha’s ‘ideal’ museum of cinema did not stop at the technological apparatuses and the films themselves, it also argued for incorporating ‘supplementary objects in connection with the cinema worthy of preservation’ (Rotha 1958: 192); these ranged from film posters, books, set designs, costumes and still photographs. His vision for an ‘organic’ museum of cinema is worth citing in full: Firstly, there are articles of purely scientific interest relating to the evolution of the instrument itself, including early examples of cinematograph cameras and projectors, as well as various types of lighting apparatus, used by the pioneers, Edison, the Lumière brothers, Friese-Greene, Robert Paul and Thomas Armat. Secondly, and of more general interest than the mechanical side, there is at present the opportunity for the collection of actual films themselves, beginning with the ‘primitives’… In this way, with the main body of the collection composed of outstanding examples of cinematic art, could an interesting and informative museum, of great value in the future, be inaugurated. (Rotha 1958: 191–192) Rotha also spelled out in concrete terms what ‘the basis of such an institution’ would be in Britain: the collection then housed at the Science Museum in London on loan from Will Day17 and what he called ‘an admirable nucleus around which a museum of wider conception could be built’ (Rotha 1958: 193). Rotha incorporated in his vision the need for a ‘library of films, representative of all countries,’ although he really had in mind a library of highly artistic films, examples of ‘schools of intellectual cinematography’ and not what he called ‘the usual forms of commercial cinema to which we are generally accustomed’ (Rotha 1958: 192). It is significant that as early as 1930, with sound not yet fully established, there was already in circulation a notion that some films and schools of film and cinematographers had intellectual, cultural and/or artistic value (and hence were worthy of preservation) which distinguished them from others which were not, which usually meant commercially oriented films, with particular reference at the time to the rise of the Hollywood cinema industry and its all-encompassing industrial and commercial development: For every actor, writer, electrician or painter employed in Hollywood’s production industry in 1939, there were five distribution company salespeople, projectionists, ushers and

The birth of the museum of cinema  15

box-office clerks employed in the business of despatching and exploiting motion pictures, and around 2000 people whose regular habit of ticket-buying greased the wheels of the entire operation. (Maltby et al. 2011: 8) Commercial development in cinema was part, very early on, of the debate that ensued about what was worth preserving, a debate which is still with us today, notwithstanding advances in preservation techniques and digital technology. Two camps have formed around this, one that everything is worth preserving and two, that given the often scarce resources, a selection should be introduced along the lines of artistic and aesthetic quality and/or contribution to human heritage. In his ‘Charter of Curatorial Values’ Cherchi Usai introduces a more nuanced system about preservation and selection which he describes, adopting a political metaphor, thus: ‘[T]here are no layers or degrees of citizenship in an archive or museum…a copy of a 2005 “easy listening” music CD is no less important than the earliest recording of a famous Australian Soprano’ (Cherchi Usai et al. 2008: 153). An altogether different approach to preservation has been put forward by Frick in her suggestion that it ‘should be viewed as discourse or as socially structured practice, instead of as the natural, logical way of incorporating historical moving images into contemporary life’ (Frick 2011: 6). Rotha explicitly talked about early Russian cinematography in his article and gave voice to ideas which he felt were not widely circulated at the time about film as art and intellectual endeavour, although the Russian cinematographers did not themselves see it as art but as political propaganda: ‘It is not as yet widely recognised that the Russian cinematographers aim at the development of the film into a new intellectual form, a vast synthesis of art and science which is “the purpose of all intellectual activity”‘ (Rotha 1958: 192). Rotha’s writings on museums of cinema were pivotal in that he did not distinguish between cinema as technology and cinema as aesthetic and cultural practice and thus began undoing, at least theoretically if not in practice, the division between art, science and technology.18 Above all, his ideal museum of cinema, although conceived as far back as 1930, has a very contemporary character; for example, in the preliminary scientific plans for the new museum of cinema in Turin which reopened in 2000 is outlined a very similar conception of what a museum of cinema should incorporate in its exhibition plans: Only a museum as a dynamic structure can assure a knowledge of the cinema language, of the precinema and cinema techniques evolution, and of its productive machine. A museum of cinema as a complex system of knowledge and experimentation will then carry out the necessary synthesis of information and emotions…to programme for the visitor a suitable knowledge. (Bertetto et al. 1997: 6)19 The Italian museum will be discussed at length in Chapter 4 but it is remarkable that more than 60 years later it reinterpreted Paul Rotha’s original idea of a museum of cinema.

Museums, film libraries and archives: different paradigms? In spite of Rotha’s prescient views on museums of cinema, in many countries including Britain, an additional artificial division was set in motion through the creation of institutions for the dissemination of cinema on the one hand (with or without archival responsibilities for the conservation of film), and on the other hand, museum-based exhibition of cinematographic apparatuses.

16  The birth of the museum of cinema

This process was partly the result of the binary systems of knowledge already mentioned, but also partly due to the different pathways chosen by the individuals involved, who either had an entirely ‘conservationist’ vision of cinema – conservation at the expense of dissemination – or had a ‘museological’ view of cinema20 and who firmly believed that a museum context would provide cinema with the cultural status which it still lacked, as well as a robust environment for its conservation, exhibition, interpretation and dissemination. Although the ideas about creating a film archive, like that of creating a museum of cinema, circulated right from the beginning, the first physical manifestation of this was not realised until the thirties, when cinema was itself hardly middle aged and was at an important historical juncture. Sound had replaced silent film and with it an entire ‘way of seeing’; 30 years of silent movies had suddenly become the past, a discrete stock of history (Cherchi Usai 2001). Langlois’ ‘lament for lost films’ (Robinson 2006: 243) revolved precisely around the notion that archives and cinémathèques were too late on the scene by 10 years at least. Not only that, also governments and industries did not take the conservation of moving images all that seriously even though, as Kula argued, they were: …[H]arnessed in the service of national and international ideologies, and as the impact of moving images as shapers of public opinion and moulders of public taste began to be recognized by politicians and advertisers alike, there was no concerted effort to systematically acquire and conserve the moving images of one generation of the enjoyment and edification of those to follow. As a result it is estimated that fully one half of the moving images produced before 1930 have been lost. (Kula 1994: online) There were also problems about film conservation connected with the nature of the material used for film up to the 1950s, which employed nitrocellulose, a highly inflammable and unstable substance, as evidenced in some of the museum case-studies discussed later in this book, many nitrate film deposits were lost either to fires, neglect or the natural ageing process21 (Heckman 2010; Smither and Surowiec 2002). The wholesale dumping of silent movies has been one of the explanations behind the effort to establish film archives in the thirties. However, the coincidence with the disappearance of silent cinema has been disputed by others who have argued that it was a far more diverse development and not entirely traceable to one factor. For example, Houston has argued that the first film archives ‘took their character from national attitudes to cinema, methods of funding, views about public service; even more, they reflected the tastes and passions and working methods of the people who created them’ (Houston 1994: 18).The last remark by Houston about ‘the people who created them’ is especially important as archives, like cinema museums and cinémathèques, were not on the whole and with few exceptions, state-sanctioned affairs, but individual endeavours which were gathering momentum and which would eventually harness some limited state support. More recently however, Caroline Frick, although acknowledging the importance of Houston’s work, it criticises its dual emphasis on the national and its preservation: ‘Houston’s book operates within a paradigm that views moving images as accepted, vital components of national cultural heritage’ (Frick 2011: 9). A paradigm which she goes on to argue is ‘imbued with notions of sanctioned cultural value, protection, ownership, and power’ against, for example, the ‘“library” (which) denote access and education, as well as the prioritization of the sharing and circulation of cultural material’ (Ibid, pp. 9–10). A judgement that could be equally applied to the role played by museums of cinema as it will become evident in the following case studies.

The birth of the museum of cinema  17

Early archives and museums of cinema Historically there is little doubt that specific national context and individuals’ approach produced visible differences in the first European film archives and those across the Atlantic, in spite of the fact that many were established around the same time in the thirties. In the United States the very first archive of the moving image was established by The Library of Congress, it was one of the first institutions to store stills from the moving image between 1896 and 1912. The actual films were not stored until later, in the 1940s, when their acquisition policies changed as a result of the introduction of copyright legislation which permitted nitrate films to be deposited.22 According to Decherney, The Library of Congress holds today ‘the largest collection of films in the United States, largely as a result of copyright deposits and the acquisition of large collections. But its curators no longer collect films with a distinct theoretical or national mission’ (Decherney 2005: 157). The first to be established in Europe was the Swedish Film Archive in 1933, later to be incorporated into the Swedish Film Institute. As Houston argued about the early history of the archives generally, this was a private initiative by a group of individuals based in the Swedish capital Stockholm, who had also previously established the Swedish Film Society (Houston 1994). Of particular interest, in connection with the museal theme of this book, is the way in which a commission was also immediately instituted to create a museum and equally how the ‘collecting of non-film material begins immediately.’23 By 1938 ‘the Tekniska museet (National Museum of Science and Technology) offered the Society new, bigger, and more appropriate facilities for the collections’ (Wengström 2008: 101). The Swedish Film Archive was soon followed by other archives and film library developments, but paradoxically this first film archive did not become part of the group of ‘the big four’ that went on to establish the International Federation of Film Archives, FIAF henceforth,24 and only joined it in 1946. The ‘big four’ were, respectively, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA henceforth) Film Library in New York (1935), the National Film Library (London 1935), Reichsfilmarchiv in Berlin (1935) and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris (1936). These early archives and their different national contexts are crucial to explain the different paradigms that developed about film conservation and exhibition, a paradigm which either incorporated the museological idea of cinema or excluded it, at least in their early formation. These were all principally film archives and their different national and political contexts also determined their other qualities or drawbacks in their activities. In the following section, I briefly will discuss these four archives, especially since three of these had direct and indirect connections with the formations of the museums’ case studies in this book.

MoMA’s Film Library: film as art The Film Library at MoMA which is today the Film and Video Department was the brainchild of Iris Barry, a British film critic, who became the first curator of the new institution which would ‘first and foremost create a consciousness of tradition and of history within the new art of film’ (Bandy 1994: 2).This was done with the support of MoMA’s first director Alfred Barr, who shared with Iris Barry the idea that film was comparable with the other arts and that its, by then, popular and commercial character was not necessarily in opposition to more traditional cultural forms. The museum context was seen as indispensable, not only to safeguard the film stock through conservation, but also to provide an educational brief about the most popular entertainment of the time. In the words of Wasson:‘Barry worked to transform the institutional and material conditions in which films were seen, studied, written about, and discussed’ (Wasson 2006: 154).

18  The birth of the museum of cinema

Barry’s vision for the Film library was complementary to Barr’s about the modern museum; an institution which would ‘bridge the gap between avant-garde artists and the public, and to promote the appreciation and understanding of the visual arts of the modern era’ (Bandy 1994: 26). This was not without its contradictions as Decherney has pointed out in his chapter on ‘Iris Barry, Hollywood Imperialism and the Gender of the Nation,’ where he argues that she ‘turned against the avant-garde, which she saw as a dangerous rather than a welcome threat to Hollywood (Decherney 2005: 121). This is reinforced by Christie’s view that ‘they [Barry and the museum] cultivated links with Hollywood and worked to promote the canonization of D. W. Griffith as the father of film narrative’ (Christie 2012: 244). Frick, by contrast has argued that Barry had a ‘complicated’ view of Hollywood movies and what she was ultimately after was ‘prints of older Hollywood material’ (Frick 2011: 36). Bandy’s account of the history of film at MoMA argues that the film library was consistent with the American view of conserving and exhibiting film as part of a larger cultural project, inclusive of all the arts. This idea of the modern museum institution to cater for and incorporate all the visual arts, including cinema, reinforced the way in which MoMA’s Film Library served as a singular example of films collections in a museum. But in conservation and exhibition terms, Christie has also argued, along with Wasson, that: MoMA’s “art” and film have been kept fairly rigorously apart, until recently when a growing body of contemporary art that exists in film and video form has entered the upper storeys of the museum (whereas film has always been in the basement) – finally legitimized as art by bona fide artists. (Christie 2012: 244) Bandy also claimed that these activities as part of ‘divisions or departments of larger cultural and educational institutions’ is ‘what distinguishes the American approach to archiving cinema history’ (Bandy 1994: 26).An additional claim could be made that what distinguished the American approach was not only the fact that film was part of larger arts and educational institutions, but that it was part of these, precisely because principally films were being preserved rather than the instruments that were used to produce them (although MoMA does have a small collection of instruments as well); in short, films were considered and interpreted as cultural artefacts if not exactly art, rather than the end product of scientific and technological processes. Film was also part of larger institutions in some European countries but museologically it was ignored and the instruments were, as a result, housed in science and technology museums and exclusively exhibited as technology.25 At the same time, Bandy suggested that ‘strictly speaking there is no such thing as a museum of cinema in the United States, that is, a museum devoted to collecting original motion pictures and artefacts relating to their production and exhibition’ (Bandy 1994: 26); they are all part of art museums or photography.26 This is still partly true as the only new museum that opened back in 1981, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, does not in fact have an archive of original film and video although it has a large collection of artefacts (circa 130,000 items to date) connected with film and television. However, the film collection and related artefacts of George Eastman House, one of the case studies of this book, has definitely received increased attention over the years and has become a central part of the museum activities.27

The British National Film Library The first archive development in Britain was the founding of the British National Film Library, which has undergone two name changes since its establishment, respectively, the National Film Archive and today the National Film and Television Archive.This archive was founded to support

The birth of the museum of cinema  19

the British Film Institute in 1933, BFI henceforth, to attend to the nascent film culture. The latter, with its educational remit for the support and dissemination of film needed an archive, to fulfil its function. The only available systematic study, which extend from 1933 to 2000 by Nowell-Smith and Dupin (2012), has shed much light on the history of the BFI, its role in the film culture of twentieth-century Britain and especially its fraught relationship with successive governments; however, this will be discussed further in Chapter 2. The archive itself was created in 1935 and became an integral part of the activities of the BFI. Ernest Lindgren, the first curator responsible for the archive, had a reputation of having a very selective approach to acquisition and conservation, unlike his French counterpart, Henri Langlois, who will also be discussed in Chapter 3 on the Cinémathèque Française. The British archive was a ‘model of restraint’ and it is described in Houston’s book perhaps somewhat ironically as ‘Fortress Archive’: ‘Too readily he [Lindgren] came to see the Archive as a fortress under siege, threatened not only by evident enemies but by other departments of the BFI’ (Houston 1994: 44). In reality, creating and looking after an archive from scratch, about a relatively new cultural medium must have been very challenging: Lindgren, in the same way as Langlois in France and in this they were certainly similar, was always contending with lack of adequate funding and lack of appropriate legislation about statutory deposits coupled with the other departments of the BFI often taking the lion’s share of the meagre funding. Lindgren attempted as last resort to break away from the BFI, in the hope that independent status would provide the archive with more secure and adequate funding (ostensibly from government). In the end the BFI governors opposed this move and indeed it would have made little sense to have a library without an archive and vice-versa, although there were some examples around the world even then, that certainly Lindgren would have known about. Paradoxically, in Lindgren’s ideal archive, which he termed in capital letters an Utopian National Film Library and which he wrote about in 1948, and whose vision resembled Rotha’s for the museum of cinema discussed above, he stated that ‘One of the most active departments of my Utopian National Film Library, therefore is its Lending Section’ (Lindgren in MacKenzie 2014: 530).28 The British Film Institute by the late 1930s had a well-established archive and library, although the institute and the archive were not always in unison about lending and cultural activities. At this point in their history, there was no mention of a possible museum of cinema.

The Cinémathèque Française The Cinémathèque Française was never an archive as such in its early days, at least not in the more literal understanding of that word. It certainly had a huge stock of films but for many years they were neither properly conserved nor catalogued.The conservation and cataloguing processing which were very much at the centre of the other archives’ activities were not so central to the founders of the Cinémathèque.The Cinémathèque Française is one of the five case studies of this book and will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 3 as it also went on to become a museum of cinema.The ‘aura’ created around the Cinémathèque over the decades was not so much tied to its archival skills or to the exact content of the archive but to a climate of ‘love of cinema,’ which it nurtured and fostered, very successfully presided over by the charismatic figure of Henri Langlois. The Cinémathèque Française, unlike the parallel British institution, adopted a kind of informal collection policy, with Langlois and his collaborators saving everything they could lay their hands on; they assembled vast amounts of film prints (as well as other materials); to save these from destruction was their first concern.29 Without this ‘omnivorous’ approach, even if not always

20  The birth of the museum of cinema

rigorous, much of it would have been lost; ultimately this ‘ad-hoc’ archive was paradoxically more wide-ranging than others, that were either better funded or better organised. In Europe, the Cinémathèque Française did more to save films, and especially early silent films, than all the others discussed in this chapter. Many have argued that in its beginnings it was neither an archive, nor a film library or museum; yet unlike the others considered here it was to become all three over time, and at various points in its history it managed to draw on some financial support from the French State.

Reichsfilmarchiv: a state-backed archive The fourth archive, the Reichsfilmarchiv, part of the group which went on to establish FIAF, was a fundamentally different institution to the three aforementioned but nonetheless critical to the understanding and developments of the different institutions which ‘looked after’ cinema’s heritage. The Reichsfilmarchiv foundation and organisation was not tied to individuals who had ‘fallen in love’ with cinema, or who saw film as either art, educational medium or technology. This was an altogether different paradigm, a state-sanctioned institution inaugurated in 1935 by Hitler himself. Frank Hensel is the name most associated with it from its origins and right up to World War II when the archive collection was broken up. In spite of this, as Aurich has argued, ‘…in German film histories, Frank Hensel and the Archive, which he influenced so greatly, are rarely even mentioned’ (Aurich 2002: 16). The Reichsfilmarchiv was the better supported and subsidised archive of the time, as the political climate determined that this was to be an ‘approved’ state archive. Goebbel, Minister for Propaganda of the Third Reich and chief architect of the propaganda machine of National Socialism had a law passed which made it unlawful to destroy or export any audio-visual material. The Third Reich had a keen sense of the importance of film for the consolidation of the national socialist project, and the Reichsfilmarchiv was consequently moved under the jurisdiction of the Propaganda Ministry and away from the Reichsfilmkammer (Reich Chamber for Film) with which Hensel, was increasingly disillusioned with, for its lack of support. Hensel was very much the promoter of this strategy and his ‘career as a film functionary was inseparably connected with the history of National Socialism’ (Aurich 2002: 21). Nonetheless aside the Reichsfilmarchiv,30 many early archives and libraries were on the whole spontaneous affairs, with many different national set-ups, but what they all had in common was an awareness that looking after films (and cinema heritage in general) was a very costly and timeconsuming activity. As Houston rightly claimed there was ‘no such thing as a typical film archive’ (Houston 1994: 5). The early archives’ efforts, their very existence in fact, are today seen by some as fundamental to contemporary digital developments and ‘an important driving force in the global media economy’ (Hediger 2005: 95) and are increasingly part of the move to content on demand which is in turn part of the wider process referred to as ‘mining the archive.’31 In our digital age, the setting often envisaged is of unlimited availability and access for the user, even bypassing film specialists and archivists. The perceived easiness associated with the transformation of previous audio-visual formats into digital codification and hence potential unlimited online access has created new tensions between public/state archives and markets: the archives (and museums) are not the only ones to have large film stocks; the major media corporations also possess large libraries but this is precisely where their similarities end. Horwath is especially critical of this process which he refers to as being part of the neoliberal rhetoric, the digital image bank versus the ‘dusty and musty’ archives and museums: ‘But we might now find ourselves at a moment in time when the newly professionalised archive

The birth of the museum of cinema  21

leaves behind the idea of the museum as a critical tool and turns into a digital image-bank, riding on top of perfectly managed cold-storage facilities for untouchable nitrate and acetate films’ (Horwath 2008: 82). Arguably this tension had always been part of the history of loans/deposits/donations for educational purposes to public archives and museums from film production companies. Therefore even in an ‘archive driven media economy’ (Hediger 2005: 119) and in ‘digital utopia’ (Rosen 2001) preserving film heritage ‘for learning about the past and for civic reflection upon our civilisation’32 is an essential part of the ‘critical museum’ (Horwath 2008: 82). The European Union recommendation of 2005, albeit non-binding legally, advocated a legal deposit obligation (IRIS 2004), but to date there is a mixture of mandatory and voluntary systems in place. Prior to the European Union’s recommendations, cinema’s heritage, preservation, exhibition and screening prompted a debate about cinematographic heritage within UNESCO. In 1980, during the general conference a first set of recommendations were drawn up about ‘the Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Images’ in a general recognition of their importance for humanity; FIAF which will be discussed below was also behind this process. The UNESCO declarations captured the essence that this heritage was very much a testimony of the century just gone and a unique visual cultural and artistic document of that part of our human history.33 In the same vein more than a decade later, in 1994, Federico Mayor, the then Director-General of UNESCO launched the ‘Appeal for the Safeguarding of the International Cinematic Heritage, Memory of the Twentieth Century’ (Mayor 1994). In his address he made clear that it was no longer possible to safeguard ‘cinematic heritage’ through the goodwill of individuals and private initiative, or worse leave it to the market.The appeal called on partnership arrangements between many different people, institutions and cultural industries; between existing film archives and libraries, cinema museums, restoration laboratories and especially FIAF, which has to date more than a hundred members worldwide: ‘The conservation and restoration of the international cinematic heritage entail special problems that private support and spontaneous gestures cannot by themselves resolve’ (Mayor 1994: 4). The history of the archives, cinémathèques and museums of cinema is not complete without an account of the organisation, which accompanied the development of all three types of institutions, FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives.34

FIAF and the safeguarding of cinema’s heritage FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives has been fundamental to the promotion of film preservation and exhibition and today, most museums of cinema, libraries and archives are affiliate members. It was established in 1938 by the group of people behind their respective national ventures, four of the cinémathèques and archives discussed above; they were John Abbott and Iris Barry of the Film Department at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art in New York), Frank Hensel of the Reichsfilms Archive in Berlin, Olwen Vaughan and Ernest Lindgren of the British Film Institute and the National Film Library in London, Henri Langlois, George Franju and Lotte Eisner of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. These ‘cinephile’ forerunners not only had begun independently the process of saving, preserving and showing old stock of films but had also quickly realised that cinema was indeed an international art form and cultural medium and that without proper archives and exhibition and screening space humanity would lose the historical and political significance of the life worlds, societies and cultures it depicted. Cinema itself had undergone a momentous change when sound was introduced a few years earlier and the determination to preserve and conserve had come about precisely because, as already mentioned, silent movies were thrown out at a spectacular rate:

22  The birth of the museum of cinema

The silent films (from 1896 to 1930) were thrown away by the tons: they had no commercial value any longer. The talkie had arrived and people were queuing to see the all singing, talking and dancing films. No one was interested in keeping those older films, collecting them, cataloguing or restoring them… FIAF was not born of the desire to save films, but from a desire to show films that were removed from the commercial market. (Wibom 1998: 20) The people involved in the establishment of FIAF had a mixture of interests, combining both the preservation and the screening of films and the exhibition of its related artefacts. The first thing this group of archivists, curators and cinephiles did was to draw up a statute for the organisation: it begins with a general definition of the ‘object of protection.’ Article 1 states that ‘By film is meant a recording of moving images, with or without accompanying sounds, registered on motion picture, film video-tape, video-disc, or any other medium now known or to be invented’ (FIAF Statute and Internal Rules).35 This is followed by specific ways in which this is to be done; these are broken down in turn into various activities which are not just concerned with promoting ‘the collection and preservation of films’ but are also concerned with the promotion of ‘film art and culture’ in general. Most importantly given its international remit, it aims to support all countries in their endeavour to ‘create and develop film archives dedicated to the safeguarding of the national and international moving image heritage’ and develop relations among them for the exchange of films and documents (FIAF Statute and Internal Rules).36 There is still much to be done, however, in relation to the south of the world, and especially Africa (Forbes 2009). The aim of the Federation was to be strictly non-commercial and to this day Article Three of its Statute declares categorically that ‘No institution or organisation whatsoever which, under a cover of archive activity, makes use of its collections primarily for commercial purposes shall be admitted to the Federation’ (FIAF Statute and Internal Rules).37 The statute comprises 29 articles in all which range from finance to types of affiliations; in addition it also included a lengthy document of Internal Rules (111 in total). Of particular importance was the stipulation in Rule 1, right at the beginning of the Statute, that ‘There must be no possibility of physical or legal control of the assets or activities of the Federation by any Member or Associate.’38 Over the course of its existence, however, questions of control and direction were sometimes at odds with the principles inscribed in its Statute and Internal Rules. The most public disagreement, about control and direction of FIAF, was the one with Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française, which will be discussed at some length in Chapter 3. Finally it is worth mentioning that the Federation’s aims have not changed dramatically over the decades since its foundation and the drawing up of the Statute and Internal Rules. In the words of a former FIAF President, this voluntary organization has continued to: [First to] promote the preservation of films as work of art and historical documents; second, to promote the creation and development of film archives in all countries; third, to facilitate the collection and international exchange of films and documents relating to cinematographic history and art for the purpose of making them as widely accessible as possible; and finally, to develop co-operation among members. (Daudelin 1994: 37) This statement is very much in unison with the recommendations put forward by UNESCO in 1980 and again in 1994, about the moving image heritage mentioned above, which declared

The birth of the museum of cinema  23

very similar aims. Museums of cinema’s remit about cinematographic artefacts and archaeology of cinema were not initially a direct concern of FIAF, which was clearly much more preoccupied with safeguarding film stock, however, many museums of cinema with conservation responsibilities had affiliated right from the start (for example, the museum of cinema in Turin discussed in Chapter 4). The introduction of the concept of ‘cinema heritage’ also widened the remit about the content to be safeguarded and conserved.

Archaeology of cinema in today’s museums Finally, I want to mention one last aspect of what we also understand to be part of cinema heritage, its archaeology, as many museums of cinema and photography around the world include important collections of these artefacts.The classification, collection and interpretation of cinema past inventions is what has come to be known as the ‘archaeology of cinema,’ a terminology first introduced by C.W. Ceram in his classic study in 1965. His account stops at the birth of cinematography and it is described modestly as a ‘technical history of the subject’ (Ceram 1965: 10). This is not to be confused with recent ‘media archaeology’ theory, although the latter has drawn parallel conclusions in their interpretation of ‘techne’: ‘The archaeology of media is not simply an alternative form of reconstructing beginnings of media on the macrohistorical scale; instead it describes technological “beginnings” (archai) of operativity on the microtechnological level’ (Ernst 2013: 57). Museologically by ‘archaeology of cinema’ we understand everything that has developed to project images from the sixteenth century onwards. It is 300 years of inventions, scientific research and spectacle which culminated in the ‘seventh art.’ Other terminologies that characterise ideas, objects and images which had begun to circulate as early as the sixteenth century are sometimes referred to as ‘pre-cinema,’ ‘proto-cinema’ and ‘archaeo-cinema.’ Indeed as we have seen above the idea behind the creation of museums of cinema incorporated right from the beginning the notion that cinematographic heritage and history should include all that preceded it, whether ideas or actual inventions and technologies. All the museums case studies researched for this book hold items in their collections related to the archaeology of cinema (and/or of photography); many of them complementary as they reflect the individual character and preferences of the early collectors and founders of the museums. Some of the key people in the following case studies have been at the centre of this recovered archaeology and of the establishment of a museological view of cinema, ensuring that artefacts that preceded the arrival of cinema are exhibited and curated.39 At least three of them (in Girona, Paris and Turin) have a dedicated permanent exhibition centred on the archaeology of cinema.The exception in these five case studies is George Eastman House in Rochester (USA) and to a lesser extent, the National Media Museum in Bradford (UK). These two museums, on the other hand, have extensive permanent exhibitions of their archaeology of photography’s collections with additional items exhibited which belong to the archaeology of cinema.The exhibition and interpretation of both the archaeology of cinema and photography form a substantive curatorial work of all the museums studied and will be partly discussed in the following chapters. The five different case studies researched for this book, four in Europe and one in the USA, have given different priorities to the archaeology of cinema, ranging from ‘full blown’ exhibitionary space (as in Paris,Turin and Girona) to smaller exhibitions alongside other media, usually photography, but also radio, television (as in Bradford and Rochester) and lately digital media (especially interactive games).

24  The birth of the museum of cinema

Notes 1 Boleslaw Matuszewski, ‘Une nouvelle source de l’histoire’, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/clasjul/mat.html (Accessed 18 November 2016). 2 ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ is the first essay in Volume 1 of What is Cinema? (Bazin 1967, 2005). 3 Bazin was the first film scholar and critic to introduce the term genre in connection with the study of cinema. Since then much work has been published on genre but the first comprehensive definition of the theory of genre in relation to film was by Steve Neale (1980). 4 An extensive sociological study has been done by Bourdieu and Darbel on art, class and ‘disposition’. The title of this book reprise part of the original title The love of Art. European Art Museums and their Public’ and substitute art with cinema, Bourdieu and Darbel (1991). 5 The photographic and cinematographic archive of the Romanov was used extensively by Esfir Shub in her first documentary The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). 6 After a century of ‘professionalisation’ around cinema, there is increasingly a case been made for a return of the ‘amateur’ filmmaking, partly spurred on by the digital-led transformations of media use, see Rascaroli et al. (2014); at the same time, there has been an increased emphasis on the preservation of amateur audio-visual material, see Frick (2011). 7 Chronophotography is a series of photographs taken in successive motions with the aim of studying movement. 8 The zoopraxiscope is an apparatus to show moving images and it is the precursor of the film projector. Muybridge invented it to show his chronophotographic plates. 9 In 2006 the documentary films ‘The Open Road,’ filmed by his son Claude Friese-Green, and using his father original colour patent were broadcast as a BBC series entitled ‘The Lost World of Friese-Green.’ These colour documentaries depicted the breadth and length of early twentieth century Britain. They are now digitally restored by the BFI and available on DVD. 10 Robert Paul has received a great deal of attention by the film historian Ian Christie, whose new book (2019) is entirely dedicated to this previously ignored figure in the history of the inventors of cinematography. 11 The Hove Museum and Art Gallery in the UK holds an important collection on these two film pioneers as they operated from Brighton and Hove, see https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/discover/2015/02/26/ george-albert-smith/ 12 The National Museum of Science and Industry is described as ‘a family of museums’. One of the offspring of this family is the National Media Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, renamed National Media Museum in 2008 and more recently as National Science and Media Museum, one of the case studies of this book, discussed in Chapter 2. 13 According to Bottomore, the very first attempt to submit artefacts was by Robert Paul to the British Museum in 1896; the latter not only responded in the negative but suggested they considered the ‘animated photographs…the collection of rubbish,’ Bottomore (1995, p. 291). 14 The Science Museum was not yet completed in 1913 and it was not officially opened until 1928. It was the progeny of the South Kensington Museum which subsequently was divided between the art and science museum. The art section was channelled into the Victorian and Albert Museum, which opened much earlier in 1899. 15 Jacob Husnik was an artist and the inventor of the photolithography method and Karel Zenger was a professor at the Technical Institute of Prague. 16 Gabriel Cromer was a French photographer (1873–1934) who left a very rich collection of photographs, daguerreotypes, as well as equipment and documents on the origins of photography. Like Will Day in Britain for cinematography, it was his hope that his collection would become part of a future French national museum of photography. Instead the collection was bought in 1939 by GEH, one of the case studies in this book, see Chapter 6. 17 The Will Day collection was eventually sold in 1959 to Henri Langlois and formed the basis for his Musée du Cinéma, also discussed in chapter three.

The birth of the museum of cinema  25

18 A dedicated museum of cinema will not actually be established in Britain in the form envisaged by Rotha in the 30s until the eighties, see chapter two on the museum in Bradford. 19 This quote is from the internal report commissioned for the new museum of cinema in Turin. It is written in English, but it is clearly a poor translation from Italian. This report was based on an international collaboration, hence the translation into English. Prominent international figures such as the film historian and critic David Robinson and the filmmaker Peter Greenway were part of the scientific committee. 20 I use museology here as introduced by Vergo whereby ‘the plethora of present-day museums embraces every field of human endeavour’ (Vergo 1989, p. 1). 21 According to Kula nitrate stock could only be conserved by transferring the film images on a regular basis, or at least every few years, onto fresh material. A commitment that not even one of the largest deposits in the world (the Library of Congress in the United States) was willing to provide until the sixties. Kula, op. cit., online. 22 Kula has argued that the presentation of a copy for registration rather than the actual deposit was seen as sufficient at the time in archival terms (Kula 1994). For the ‘ups and down’ history of the Library of Congress see Frick, op.cit., Chapter 3 ‘The American Film Heritage Movement: Justifying the National.’ 23 For a brief history of the Swedish archive see http://www.filminstitutet.se/en/learn-more-about-film/ archival-film-collections/history-of-the-archive/ 24 The acronym in use FIAF stands for the French denomination: La Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film. 25 I will return to this argument when discussing the British approach to cinema museums in Chapter 2. 26 Beside MoMA’s Film and Video Department, the other two museums in the United States which have a substantial archival film remit and collections is George Eastman House, one of the case study of this book and the Museum of the Moving Image which opened in New York in 1981. Other substantial collections are housed in the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California. There are also major film archives at the Library of Congress and the National Archive in Washington, DC and the University of California in Los Angeles and countless other smaller examples around the United States. A smaller but more contemporary collection of films is also stored with the American Film Institute. 27 For George Eastman House’s history see Chapter 6. 28 Ernest Lindgren also wrote a number of books about cinema during his tenure as archivist, in particular his book The Art of the Film was republished as recently as 2011. 29 The debate about Lindgren and Langlois’ different approaches to archival collection and preservation is also taken up by Scott MacKenzie in his introduction to the section on ‘Archives, Museums, Festivals and Cinematheques, pp. 517–518. 30 For more information about archives film holdings, see https://www.fiafnet.org/pages/E-Resources/ Collection-Catalogues-and-Databases.html 31 For a discussion of this expression and its origins, see V. Hediger, Politique des archives: European Cinema and the Invention of Tradition in the Digital Age (2005, p. 111). 32 Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Film Heritage and the competitiveness of related industrial activities, 16 November 2005. Official Journal of the European Union, 12 December 2005, L323/57. 33 The full text of the 1980 UNESCO recommendations can also be found in PDF on the FIAF’s website, https://www.fiafnet.org/pages/E-Resources/1980-Unesco-Recommendation.html 34 See endnote 20 about the explanation for the acronym. 35 The FIAF Statute and Internal Rules are available at https://www.fiafnet.org/pages/E-Resources/ FIAF-Statutes-and-Rules.html 36 Ibid, endnote 32. 37 Ibid, endnote 32. 38 Ibid, endnote 32. 39 Key figures in this ‘recovery’ who the author has interviewed are Laurent Mannoni, Donata Pesenti Campagnoni and Jordi Pons i Busquet.

26  The birth of the museum of cinema

Bibliography Aurich, R. (2002) Cinéaste, Collector, National Socialist. Frank Hensel and theReichsfilmarchiv. Journal of Film Preservation, 64 (April): 16–21. Bandy, M. L. (1994) The movies at MOMA: The first cinema museum in the United States. Museum International, 184: 46. Bazin, A. (1967, 2005) What is Cinema? Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bazin, A. (1971, 2005) What is Cinema? Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History,Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. Bertetto, P., Francis, D., Micciché L., Pesenti Campagnoni, D. and Robinson, D. (1997) Preliminary Scientific Project: Towards a Cinema Museography. Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema at the Mole Antonelliana. Internal Report. Biltereyst, D., Maltby, R. and Meers, P. eds (2012) Cinema, Audiences and Modernity. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Bottomore, S. (2006) ‘Film museums: A bibliography’. Film History, 18, 3: 327–349. Bottomore, S. (1995) ‘The collection of rubbish’. Animatographs, arguments and archives: London 1896– 1897. Film History, 7: 290–297. Bourdieu, P. and Darbel, A. with Schnapper, D. (1991) The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public. Cambridge: Polity. Braun, M. (1992) Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Braun, M. (2010) Eadweard Muybridge. London: Reaktion Books. Brookman, P. eds (2010) Eadweard Muybridge. London: Tate Publishing. Ceram, C. W. (1965) Archaeology of Cinema. London: Thames and Hudson. Cherchi Usai, P. (2001) The Death of Cinema. History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age. London: British Film Institute. Cherchi Usai, P., Francis, D., Horwath, A. and Loebenstein, M. eds (2008) Film Curatorship. Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace.Vienna: Filmmuseum Synema Publikationen. Cherchi Usai, P. (2010) ‘The Conservation of Moving Images’, Conservation Studies, 55, 4: 250–257. Cherchi Usai, P. (2019) Silent Cinema:A Guide to Study, Research and Exhibition, 3rd edn. London: Bloomsbury. Cherchi Usai, P. (2014) The Lindgren Manifesto: The Film Curator of the Future (Italy 2010), in S. MacKenzie, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures. A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Christie, I. (2012) A Disturbing Presence? Scenes from the History of Film in the Museum, in A. Dalle Vacche (ed.) Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cousin, M. and Macdonald, K. eds (2006) Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. London: Faber and Faber. Crary, J. (2001) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacles and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crary, J. (1990) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dagognet, F. (1993) Etienne-Jules Marey. A Passion for the Trace. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Dalle Vacche, A. ed. (2012) Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Daudelin, R. (1994) The International Federation of Film Archives: A ‘United Nations of moving images’. Museum International, 184, 46: 37–38. De Lauretis T. and Heath, S. eds (1980) The Cinematic Apparatus. New York: St Martin’s Press. De Valck, M. and Hagener, M. eds (2005) Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Decherney, P. (2005) Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1998) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dudley, A. (2005) Foreword, in A. Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dudley, A. (2010) What Cinema is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.

The birth of the museum of cinema  27

Elsaesser, T. (2016) Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Elsaesser, T. and Hagener, M. (2015, 2nd ed) Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. London: Routledge. Engell, L. (2014) The Magical Image in Georges Méliès’s Cinema, in R. Gaafar and M. Schulz eds, Technology and Desire:The Transgressive Art of Moving Images. Bristol: Intellect. Ernst, W. (2013) Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. FIAF (1998) 1938–1998: 50 Years of Film Archive. Bruxelles: FIAF. Forbes, D. (2009) Film archives: A decaying visual history. Conference Paper, First International Conference on African Digital Libraries, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Frick, C. (2011) Saving Cinema.The Politics of Preservation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaafar, R. and Schulz, M. eds. (2014) Technology and Desire: The Transgressive Art of Moving Images. Bristol: Intellect. Gracy, K. F. (2013) The Evolution and Integration of Moving Image Preservation Work into Cultural Heritage Institutions. Information & Culture, 48, 3: 368–389. Grazzini, G. (1999) La memoria negli occhi: Boleslaw Matuszewski: un pioniere del cinema. Rome: Carocci. Griffiths, A. (2008) Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press. Gunning, T. (2000) Introduction, in L. Mannoni (ed.) The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Harvey, M. (1998) The Cinematography Collection of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, in J. Fullerton (ed.) Celebrating 1895:The Centenary of Cinema. London: J. Libbey. Heckman, H. (2010) Burn after Viewing, or, Fire in the Vaults: Nitrate Decomposition and Combustibility. The American Archivist, 73, 2, 483–506. Hediger,V. (2005) Politique des archives: European Cinema and the Invention of Tradition in the Digital Age. ASCA Annual Report. Henning, M. (2006) Museums, Media and Cultural Theory. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Henning, M. ed. (2015) Museum Media: The International Handbook of Museum Studies,Vol. 3. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Hidalgo, S. ed. (2018) Technology and Film Scholarship: Experience, Study, Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Horwath, A. (2008) The Market vs. the Museum, in P. Cherchi Usai, D. Francis, A. Horwath and M. Loebenstein (eds.) Film Curatorship:Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace.Vienna: Filmmuseum Synema Publikationen. Houston, P. (1994) Keepers of the Frame:The Film Archives. London: British Film Institute. Howells, R. (2006) Louis Le Prince: The body of evidence. Screen, 47, 2, 179–200. Huhtamo, E. (2013) Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Huhtamo, E. and Parikka, J. eds (2011) Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press. IRIS (2004) The Protection of Cinematographic Heritage in Europe. Legal Observations of the European Audiovisual Observatory, Strasbourg. Jay, M. (1994) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Khan, B. Z. (2005) The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kidd, J. (2014) Museums in the New Mediascape: Transmedia, Participation, Ethics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Kreimeier, K. and Ligensa, A. eds (2015) Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey. Kula, S. (1994) History and organization of moving images archives in United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO Audiovisual Archives: A Practical Reader. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000099022 (Accessed January 25 2019).

28  The birth of the museum of cinema

Lindgren, E. (2014) The importance of Film Archives (UK, 1948), in S. MacKenzie (eds.) Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacKenzie, S. (2014) Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maltby, R., Biltereyst, D. and Meers, P. eds (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Maltby, R. (1995, 2003) Hollywood Cinema, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Mannoni, L. (1995) Le grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre. Archéologie du cinéma; transl. Richard Crangle (2000) The Great Art of Light and Shadow. Archaeology of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Mannoni, L. (1996) Le mouvement continué. Catalogue illustré de la collection des appareils de la Cinémathèque Française. Milan and Paris: Mazzotta, Cinémathèque Française, Musée du Cinéma. Marcus, L. (2014) Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema. New York: Cambridge University Press. Matuszewski, B. (1898) Une nouvelle source pour l’histoire: la creation d’un dépôt cinématographique historique. Paris: Noizette. Mayor, F. (1994) Appeal for the Safeguarding of the International Cinematic Heritage, Memory of the Twentieth Century. Museum International, 46, 4: 4. Neale, S. (1980) Genre. London: BFI Publishing. Nowell-Smith, G. and Dupin, C. eds (2012) The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Parikka, J. (2012) What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity. Pesenti Campagnoni, D. (1997) Tra patrimonio filmico e patrimonio cinematografico. Alcune tracce storiche sui Musei del Cinema e dintorni. Notiziario dell’Associazione Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 49–50: 21–32. Penz, F. (2012) Museums as Laboratories of Change: The Case for the Moving Image, in A. Dalle Vacche (ed.) Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls? Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Popple, S. (1998) “Cinema Wasn’t Invented, It Growed”:Technological Film Historiography Before 1913, in J. Fullerton ed. Celebrating 1895:The Centenary of Cinema. Sydney: John Libbey. Rascaroli, L., Young, G. and Monahan, B. eds (2014) Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web. London: Bloomsbury. Rawlence, C. (1990) The Missing Reel:The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures. London: Collins. Robinson, D. (2006) Film Museums I Have Known and (Sometimes) Loved. Film History, 18, 3: 237–260. Rosen, P. (2001) Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity,Theory. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Rossell, D. (2013) Chronophotography in the Context of Moving Pictures. Early Popular Visual Culture, 11, 1: 10–27. Rotha, P. (1930, 1958) A Museum for the Cinema, The Connoisseur; reprinted in Rotha on the Film: A Selection of Writings about the Cinema. London: Faber. Smither, R. and Surowiec, C. A. eds (2002) This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film. Bruxelles: FIAF. Toulmin,V., Russell, P. and Popple, S. (eds) 2004 The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film. London: BFI. Vergo, P. ed. (1989) The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books. Wasson, H. (2006) The woman film critic: Newspapers, cinema and Iris Barry. Film History, 18, 2: 154–162. Wasson, H. (2005) Museum Movies:The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wengström, J. (2008) The Swedish Film Institute Archive Celebrates its 75th Anniversary. Journal of Film Preservation, 77/78 (October): 101–108. Wibom, A.-L. (1998) Interview in FIAF, 1938–1998: 50 Years of Film Archive. Bruxelles: FIAF.

2 THE NATIONAL SCIENCE AND MEDIA MUSEUM

The ‘ancestry’ of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford The first cinematographic collection in Britain consisted of six items loaned by Robert W Paul, inventor and early British filmmaker, to the Science Museum in Kensington in London in 1913. The objects were classified under the Department of Chemistry alongside the photographic collection which had been part of the museum collection since 1870; among them was the Theatrograph projector, which Paul himself had invented, an Animatograph and Cinematograph cameras,1 all developed and produced by Paul’s company (Christie 2019). These apparatuses are now part of the permanent collection housed with the Science and National Media Museum in Bradford, the main case study at the centre of this chapter. This small collection is also significant because it is part of the early history of the musealisation of cinematography and the basis for subsequent developments in Britain: the division between the purely technological character of cinema and its social role, a division already discussed in Chapter 1. In the British context, these earliest set of artefacts determined the way in which cinematography was archived and exhibited in national museums, that is predominantly within a technologically oriented framing. According to Michael Harvey, a former Senior Curator of Cinematography at the Science and National Media Museum,2 this division was partly inevitable as the collection began its existence solely as a ‘scientific’ collection: ‘a collection of physical and mechanical instruments’ (Harvey 1998: 3).This in in spite of the fact that Robert W. Paul was not exclusively interested in the scientific and mechanical aspects of the burgeoning motion pictures but also made and exhibited many short films himself.3 The Science Museum in London where the apparatuses were first housed was in turn a development of South Kensington Museum, itself a permanent space created after the ‘Great Exhibition’ at Crystal Palace of 1851, described by historians as the occasion to celebrate and exhibit British imperial aspirations: ‘Like everything else at the Great Exhibition, Empire was a commodity, a thing more important than but not dissimilar to shawls, ironwork, flax or indeed, sculpture’ (Greenhalgh 1988: 54). Empires and Great Exhibitions had also, according to Bennett, another purpose, that of the ordering of objects and people as disciplinary measures; it ‘brought

30  The National Science and Media Museum

together an ensemble of disciplines and techniques of display that had been developed within the previous histories of museums, panoramas, Mechanics’ Institute exhibitions, art galleries, and arcades’ (Bennett 1995: 61). The division aforementioned between art/culture and technology/science was intrinsic to the way the museums’ collections were separated physically and named accordingly: ‘By 1885 the division between art and science was formally recognised when part of the South Kensington Museum was designated the “Science Museum”’ (Harvey 1998: 4). This division also originated and encouraged by its first curator Colonel Henry Lyons, a military man, who imprinted on the museum an ‘utilitarian’ approach to collecting and exhibiting (Harvey 1998: 6), and which ultimately determined much of what happened in the history of the Science Museum well into the twentieth century. It has also been argued that although the South Kensington Museum was first conceived as an institution to ‘promote industry’, it was the art collection which gained the upper hand and which resulted in the opening of a new institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, much earlier than the Science one4; an instance of the entrenched division between science and art at that time. Leaving aside the general and separate development histories of these two museums, what is relevant here, is that the cinematography section of the museum was enriched in 1922 by the addition of the Will Day’s collection, which went on display 2 years later, in 1924. This was also in the form of a loan, but this time around the loan was a much larger and comprehensive collection, at least measured in those days’ standard, comprising more than five hundred items. The Will Day’s collection has come to be known as the first material embodiment of ‘archaeology of cinema’, in the way it included much pre-cinema as well as cinema artefacts (Bottomore 1997).5 It could even be argued that, except for its technological bias, it was one of the first physical demonstrations of a future museum of cinema: ‘Attempting to define what “film heritage” might look like, [they] set precedents for many facets of subsequent curatorial and archival practice’ (Latsis 2016: 28). Harvey has argued that the Day collection in particular was instrumental in sustaining a ‘passive acquisition process’ in the technologies of cinema (Harvey1998: 4–5); acquisition when it came to cinema’s artefacts was erratic, and hardly non-existent, especially during the inter-war period, relying mainly on donations. It was this same principle which countenanced the museum’s assumption that the Will Day collection would one day simply be passed on automatically or donated; but Day had invested a great deal in the collection and wanted to sell it as a whole for 10,000 pounds,6 first to the Science Museum itself and subsequently, after being turned down, to the BFI. Nothing came of it and as we will see in the following chapter it was sold to Henri Langlois, one of the founders of the Cinémathèque Française, many years later and well after Will Days’ death, by his sons in 1959; the collection served as the basis for the French Musée du Cinéma. The discrepancy between purchase grants, part and parcel of individual museums’ acquisition policies, was by no means singularly reserved to photography or cinematography; it was indicative of the general difference between the cultural value ascribed to art, particularly paintings, and that ascribed to technological artefacts, a distinction which determines problematic acquisition policies to date.7 The Will Day collection in particular has been described as a ‘Trojan horse’ as a result of the underlying assumption that it would eventually become a permanent collection of the Science Museum and therefore ‘inhibited the development of the Science Museum’s own holdings’ (Harvey 1998: 5). That is not to say that no purchase or donation activities took place during the inter-war period, but these were clearly not substantial purchases and in reality mostly donations; up to 60% of artefacts in the cinematographic collection are de facto donations. Among these

The National Science and Media Museum  31

the most important donations were two cameras by Louis Le Prince donated by his daughter, Marie Le Prince.8 The sale of the Will Day Collection had actually been arranged as early as 1930 with a catalogue detailing all the items of the collection. What remains remarkable is that it never found a buyer in Britain in spite of the fact that Day himself had according to Harvey ‘amassed (it) mainly with the purpose of demonstrating that cinema was a British invention and William FrieseGreen was its inventor’ (Harvey1998: 4). William Friese-Green, already mentioned in Chapter 1, was a pioneer filmmaker who patented the Stereo Cine Camera, also now part of the National Science and Media Museum collections.Today he shares that mantle, however, with Robert Paul who Ian Christie has brought back to life as the man behind the early British Film Industry (Christie 2019).9 In the early twenties, it appeared there was little need to view the technological artefacts alongside the moving images produced, or to interpret their intrinsic connection; neither was there an established research field to understand and study the social and cultural context of cinema’s technologies, the films and their reception. We were still a very long way from the establishing of a museum of cinema; the museological approach to cinema with its incorporation of exhibition of artefacts and screening of films was only put into practice much later on in the twentieth century: Throughout those years, the cinematography collection remained almost entirely a collection of technological artefacts with little associated material, except for technical manuals. There were few examples of film or magic lantern slides or posters. Nor was there any documentation or paraphernalia associated with the film production process. (Harvey 1998: 8) This technological-determinist approach to exhibiting the ‘tools’ of the ‘seventh art’ without their final artefact, the films themselves, was also partly dictated by the founding of the British Film Institute in 1933, which was responsible for the acquisition, curating and archiving of films, their dissemination and promotion as well as for the research of film history but which in turn ignored the technology that produced them.The BFI was principally an educational film institution at least until the opening of the two museums in the 1980s: the first, which is the main subject of this chapter, the former National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (NMPFT henceforth), now renamed The National Science and Media Museum, in Bradford in 1983; and the second, the short-lived Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI henceforth) in London shortly after in 1988, now closed. Certainly, the absence of a museum of cinema until the 1980s proved to be what Harvey called a ‘failure’ for many decades and which reinforced ‘the inability of either institution to present a comprehensive overview of the film medium’ (Harvey 1998: 8).

The British Film Institute and the Museum of the Moving Image Before launching into the discussion of the British case study, the newly named National Science and Media Museum, I am going to consider the sister organisation, the British Film Institute (BFI henceforth); not least because the BFI has an ongoing collaborative working relationship with the museum, for example, in providing original film material from the national archive. Earlier insights into the workings of the BFI as well as its ideals can be gauged from a chapter in Houston’s book ‘Keepers of the Frame’ (1994). Although much of her discussion centre around the National Film Archive, a central arm of the BFI, some important details about the

32  The National Science and Media Museum

BFI’s original character come to light. There are also insights into the central role played by the National Film Archive in the preservation of film heritage, even if not always in its promotion, distribution or musealisation, aspects which Ernest Lindgren, its first archivist, apparently cared less for, a view that has been subsequently disputed.10 A relatively more recent fuller history of the BFI, its complicated developments and at times its problematic relationship with successive governments and film culture, takes up the story to 2010 (Nowell-Smith and Dupin 2012). The BFI was established in 1933, followed by the National Film Library a couple of years later; among its early objectives was the preservation of ‘films of permanent value’ (Houston 1994: 22) and by 1935 this process was well under way: ‘The NFL’s first catalogue, published in September, records 268 films in the preservation section, against 55 in the loan section’ (Nowell-Smith and Dupin 2012: 23). Houston wrote about the BFI’s early days as a peculiar mix of British attitudes about cinema which were very different from the other nations which had set up similar institutions: ‘If the other three archives (the French, German and American) could be defined in terms of their relationship with the state, with the film industry, and simply with film enthusiasts, the key relationship for the National Film Library was with the education profession’ (Houston 1994: 22). Nowell-Smith has reinforced this point in suggesting that after various tensions between the education and entertainment sub-committees, the pendulum swung in the education direction: ‘A storm in a teacup, no doubt, and a small victory for Cameron [Chair of the education subcommittee] and the educationist against the trade, but symptomatic of the petty squabbles that dogged the Institute in its formative years’ (Nowell-Smith and Dupin 2012: 20). The educational remit was considered one of the two most important tasks of the Institute alongside creating and preserving a film collection; this remit, however, also meant that there was no interference from the commercial film industry and vice versa; in the words of the historian of British Film Rachael Low: ‘The trade managed to confine the institute to a sort of educational half-world where it was tolerated with everything from vague goodwill through indifference to contempt as long as it did not interfere with commercial film’ (Low in Houston 1994: 27). Relations with the film industry were not very amicable, especially with some of the American companies,11 but on the whole the time was ripe and major film companies began to co-operate and send the prints asked, albeit used, to the National Film Library. The humble terms helped; used prints and a tacit agreement that no use would be made outside the ‘educational circle’: ‘By 1939 the preservation collection had grown to two million feet of film, as distribution companies started responding more favourably to the Library request for prints’ (Nowell-Smith and Dupin 2012: 21). Indeed, this donation process played a small part in the government awarding a small grant to acquisition and preservation, but the public sums involved in the early days of the Institute, and later, remained comparatively very small; on the whole the BFI was not yet considered as a ‘bona fide’ public institution. Of relevance here, in terms of future developments of a museum of cinema, is the direction the BFI was embarked on, one that compounded the division library/film archive and artefacts/ exhibitions and brought about an altogether different institution from some of the other case studies researched for this book, at least until the late seventies and eighties. In its early years, the BFI might have been a founding member of FIAF and Britain one of the first country to have a film library and archive but it was not so forthcoming in the creation of a dedicated museum of cinema, in spite of the fact that some of the best cinematographic collections had been assembled in Britain by many of its early pioneers of cinema; the already mentioned Robert Paul and Will Day, but also by many others like Louis Le Prince, Charles Urban, James Williamson, etc. It had also been fully theorised and visualised by the British critic, Paul Rotha, mentioned in Chapter 1. This absence was only tackled by the BFI in 1988 with the founding of the MOMI in London.

The National Science and Media Museum  33

A museum of cinema and other media was a much later development compared to other advanced industrial countries in Europe and internationally. Paradoxically in the UK, two were established within a few years of each other although albeit not within geographical proximity, one in London and one in the north of England, in Bradford. At the centre of both opening were a number of key figures, for example, Colin Ford, who was the first Director of the then National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (henceforth NMPFT), but who also helped prepare the plans for the MOMI years before it was established (Harvey 1998: 9). The other figures more directly connected with the opening of MOMI were David Francis, then curator of the National Film Archive, Leslie Hardcastle, then Controller of the National Film Theatre and David Robinson,12 described as the ‘key player in the interpretative process’13 (Blakemore 2012). Although this chapter is mostly concerned with the Bradford museum case study, the London MOMI like the BFI above, is worth a mention in this chapter as it was the only other attempt in Britain to combine a museological view of cinema with its other activities around film screening, educational and archival work. In the plans for the museum creation, it was stressed that this would be a new type of museum that would concentrate on everything to do with cinema and would introduce a more hands-on approach to material objects (Blakemore 2012). Long before MOMI’s official opening it had already become part of a discussion about new museums in London14 and their potential role in bringing about a much needed criticism of established museums practices and systems of classification. The debate was extended to museums and the media, for example, in Silverstone where he argued that ‘Museums compete with, contradict, and reinforce the images, ideas, words and classifications which the mass media generate daily’ (Silverstone 1988: 232). Today the debate has extended even further, for example, in Henning and Russo’s formulations of the ‘media museum’ already mentioned (Henning 2006, 2015; Russo 2012). MOMI’s new museum practice and wider cultural role was described in an influential edited collection of the time about museums of the eighties, The Museum Time Machine, although it had yet to open at the time of its publication: Designed to mark a break with existing museum practice…at the point of intersection where images are endowed with ‘aura’ (the magic of the ‘modern’ represented by the laser ‘tower’ in the sky above Waterloo Bridge, and the ‘halo’ of the old in the recreation of the peep-show) and where they are analysed and contextualized (‘demystified in the interest of education’). (Lumley 1988: 17) The auratic nature of art first theorised by Benjamin in relation to photographic work which in its reproduction unsettles the original is one that keeps returning in the discussion of the social function of museums generally. Museums of cinema are not exempt but a reformulation of the aura-original dialectic is necessary as the original (certainly images, films and cinematic culture generally) may well be already familiar to the visitor, with the exception perhaps of some of the objects connected with the archaeology of cinema and pre-cinema.15 In this sense, museums of cinema can claim both functions: auratic and non-auratic. Given the time of its writing, Lumley’s book was perhaps envisioned as the synthesis between the modern and postmodern, and MOMI, when it opened in 1988, attempted to capture the idea of the ‘postmodern museum’ which defined the 1980s (Hooper-Greenhill 2000), in some kind of synthesis between the old and the new. But according to Cary Bazalgette of the BFI educational department, the museum concentrated on cinema technological developments at the expense of cinema’s social context, and more

34  The National Science and Media Museum

pointedly perhaps, went on to describe the museum plans as a ‘white, male, Eurocentric view of the moving image’ (cited in Blakemore 2012: 263). Nonetheless MOMI, unlike the museum in Bradford, was totally devoted to cinema and its history (and to a much lesser extent to television). Its exhibitions revealed no particular trace of the ‘intersection’ of the auratic with the educational demystifying context described by Lumley above; rather its many displays presenting the visual and technological history of film was much more traditional and aligned with Paul Rotha’s ideas of a museum of cinema discussed in Chapter 1 and which was explained in the Museum Guide thus: The museum tell the story of the moving image from earliest times to the present day concentrating on themes relating to the history and contemporary developments of cinema and television.The themes are presented through sound and image technology, memorabilia, models, and displays. (MOMI 1996: no pagination) The fate of MOMI has been at the centre of much media and public debate as it was abruptly closed in 1999, ostensibly under the pretence that it would reopen as a new national film centre in 2007. Those plans were never realised and only 5 years later a project was approved to create a new national film centre which would also incorporate a museum of cinema or at least some exhibition space dedicated to cinema and pre-cinema artefacts. A statement was published in December 2004 by the then Chairman, the late Anthony Minghella, and the Director of the BFI Amanda Nevill, which announced the commitment of the institution towards the creation of a new national film centre within 10 years, which would be the ‘focus for a national and international home for moving image culture.’16 This ‘iconic National Film Centre’ is still to see the light of day; instead a redevelopment of the National Film Theatre, now BFI Southbank, was completed in 2007 and it does include a gallery space, the BFI mediatheque and the BFI Reuben Library, all open to the public and with free entry, in what was previously part of MOMI’s space dedicated to the museum. Substantive development also took place following the BFI plans for 2012–2017 (Film Forever), from widening educational activities at regional level to digitising the collections; the plans stated that at least ‘10.000 significant works from the BFI National Archive would be digitized.’17 The latest BFI plans for 2017–2022 (BFI 2022 Supporting UK Film) build further on the same kind of developments: promoting the UK film industry, digitising and conserving film material from archives and continuing the widening participation of film and media educational activities.18 But no museum of cinema as such for London is envisaged in these latest plans.

A media museum in the North of England: the first 25 years Unlike MOMI, with its metropolitan appeal and short-lived existence, the museum in Bradford has been a much more solid and successful experiment; it has proved to the sceptics that you can have a museum of national (and international) interest in the north of England, tucked away in a provincial town and away from the metropolis.19 The Bradford museum was in the first instance principally a museum of photography and to a lesser extent of cinema and television, but in the last three decades it has undoubtedly played a major role in promoting cinema and media culture generally including new digital media forms. Its former title, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television was changed in 2008, ostensibly in order to encompass the widened remit about media generally and digital media in particular; it was renamed twice, firstly

The National Science and Media Museum  35

as the National Media Museum in 2008, and more recently in 2018, with its current title, the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM henceforth). Over the years, film acquired an increasingly prominent role, although not principally in relation to exhibitions of the archaeology of cinema or cinematographic artefacts generally. The museum’s activities in relation to cinema concentrated on the development of film festivals as well as weekly programme screenings, especially since the incorporation of an IMAX Cinema into the museum. In the first of one of the changes, back in 2007, the publicity brochure entitled ‘The Museum is changing’ stated that, funds permitting, there were plans to create a Film Heritage Gallery.20 David Robinson commented at the time that if this particular development was going ahead it may ‘at least finally justify the “Film” in that museum’s title’ (Robinson 2006: 258).The museum did change its title, but only to take the word Film out and the Film Heritage Gallery dedicated to the archaeology of cinema and cinematography artefacts was never fully realised, although examples are exhibited in some of the galleries. The museum originally opened as one of the arms of the London-based National Museum of Science and Industry, NMSI henceforth21 (the word science now reintroduced in the latest renaming mentioned above) and therefore as a museum with an already established photographic and cinematographic collection, with its origins in the Science Museum discussed at the beginning of this chapter. It was described by Lumley, somewhat disparagingly as the opposite of MOMI, as ‘an extension of the repertoire of existing museum collecting and exhibiting’ (Lumley 1988: 16). This may have been true at the beginning of the museum’s existence, when it was housed in an old theatre and concentrated on media technology and ‘British achievements’, but it very quickly became not just an ‘outpost’ of the Science Museum but the very museum conceived as breaking with ‘the glass case’ and ‘existing museum practice’ (Lumley 1988: 16). The following account is a short history of the trajectory of the NMPFT over the first 25 years of its existence, since its opening on 16 June 1983. In 2008 the museum celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with a ‘MediaFest’, a conference to ‘debate and explore how society has consumed, created and participated in the media’ followed by a dedicated exhibition about the museum itself. In the first few years of its existence the NMPFT, via the Science Museum, acquired two large collections, in fact not just collections but the entire content of two museums. The first, the Kodak Museum at Harrow, donated its collection right at the beginning in 1983 and this was then displayed in the new galleries of the NMPFT in 1989. The collection was mainly photographic but according to Michael Harvey (1998: 10) part of this collection also contained cinematographic apparatuses22 which only minimally compensated for the loss of the Will Day collection aforementioned. The second came from the John Burgoyne-Johnson Buckingham Movie Museum in 1989 and it consisted of 500 amateur objects which ‘filled most of the gaps in that area not represented in the Science Museum and Kodak collections and took the story of amateur film equipment up to the early 1980s and the beginning of home video’ (Harvey 1998: 10). Alongside the then NMPFT’s activities, the Science Museum continued a parallel activity of collecting photographic and cinematographic objects until 1989, when it all came under the responsibility of the NMPFT, thus becoming ‘a collection of collections – a combination of Science Museum, Kodak Museum, Buckingham Movie Museum and National Museum of Photography, film and Television’ (Harvey 1998: 10). This clearly required a rationalisation of the entire body of artefacts, not only in terms of eliminating duplication but also in terms of accuracy and fairness in relation to the three different media represented, photography, film and television

36  The National Science and Media Museum

(Harvey 1998). It also required an increased attention to international acquisitions.The first published acquisition policy of the NMPFT stated this openly: The NMPFT acquires artefacts to represent the past, present and future evolution of photography, film and television as both technological and aesthetic components of human culture. The history and contemporary nature of the media involved require that acquisition is undertaken internationally. (Harvey 1998: 11) Always according to Harvey this was also in line with the broadened scope of the then NMSI’s acquisition policy which had moved away from the purely technical orientation of earlier times to a comprehensive list of criteria, many of which applied to the NMPFT’s collections. This increased coherence about acquisitions was important for two reasons: one, because it provided the much needed bridging for this kind of museum of the previous division already discussed between art and technology and two, because it moved the focus of the museum away from the national to the international, which arguably, was equally central to the exhibition of photography and film, given their long-standing international dimension. In concrete terms as already argued earlier this meant not only collecting the artefacts but also exhibiting and disseminating the visual cultural in which they were embedded: Since it opened, one of the Museum’s main tenets has been that visual artefacts should be exhibited alongside the equipment that made them: in this way we attempt to bridge the divide between science and art… So now on we do not just collect objects but also, wherever possible, the associated material that will help interpret, understand and communicate the subjects which the National Museum of Photography, film and Television represents. (Harvey 1998: 12) But as already mentioned, in the Bradford Museum, cinema is yet to have an extensive dedicated exhibition of its archaeology, pre-cinema and cinema artefacts and the related interpretation of their social context. The museum underwent two substantial expansions since its foundation. The first connected with the programme ‘Imaging Frontiers’ completed in 1999. This was a 16 million pounds expansion and development, which began in 1996, jointly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Arts Council of England, the Foundation for Sports and the Arts, the European Union and the private sector. At the centre of this expansion were developments in digital technology alongside increased emphasis on interactive museums’ displays and the fostering of culturally relevant experiences, generally part of a wider endeavour in new museological approaches (Vergo 1989; Keen 1998). In the souvenir publication for the general public which accompanied this expansion and development, ambitiously titled ‘Photography, Film and Television: Think Again’, the then Director Amanda Nevill (who subsequently moved to head the BFI) strongly emphasised in the introduction the creative museological approach of the ‘innovative galleries where visitors can explore and interact with digital technology’ (Nevill 1999: 6). At the centre of this development was the permanent exhibition ‘Wired worlds: exploring the digital frontier’. This was a costly exercise in the overall budget (2.2 million pounds) as digital developments often are, and undoubtedly, one of the most difficult areas to represent as part of a permanent gallery in a museum; it purported to ‘address the challenges of an evolving field’, but part of the difficulty

The National Science and Media Museum  37

with this exhibition was precisely about the way digital artefacts and interactive exhibitions can appear quickly out of date. Museum staff believed the project delivered ‘mixed results’ and it clearly appeared dated within 5 years of its development.23 Unsurprisingly this section of the 1999 Digital frontiers development has since long gone and replaced by other digital developments in the museum exhibitions. The sustainability and life expectancy of digital developments in museums is increasingly a question asked about their future directions (Parry 2010). Perhaps of more lasting value in the Bradford museum, also part of the Digital Frontiers development, was a second objective tied to the educational work of the museum with primary schools which explored ‘digital imaging’.This was a 9-month-long initiative which assisted teachers and pupils in the use of digital imaging technologies in the delivery of the curriculum and used across many different subjects. It claimed to lay some important basis for the coming digital future. Educational work is an ongoing remit of the museum, but today it links much more explicitly to the British National Curriculum for education.24 Equally of more lasting value and more in line with the idea of a museum of media is the introduction of the digitisation policy of collections, the creation of multi-media and interactive environments online and digital access to collections. Collections are now partially available on the museum website which since its introduction has proved very popular.25

Cinematography and photography in the museum The museum’s collection of cinematography, as already mentioned, does not have a dedicated exhibition space and only appears as few items scattered in different parts of the museum. Artefacts in the collection, now comprising 3492 objects (as of January 2019), are visible online in the museum’s website section on cinematography, 500 of the items are listed in detail and almost all of them are accompanied by an image of the object (416), but only a handful of that number are on actual display, about 50 at the last count (January 2020). The collection, although lacking a dedicated exhibition space, can however be viewed as part of ‘Insight: Collection and Research Centre’; it is open by appointment and once a week it can be viewed through a prebooked guided tour with members of the curatorial team. The tours are available every week on Wednesday, but undoubtedly a collection so organised is not likely to be visited or appreciated, except by researchers, a few ‘cinephilic’ individuals and educational-related visits rather than by the general public. Lack of funds and the vastness of the collection have often been put forward as reasons for the lack of development of a dedicated archaeology of cinema/cinematographic gallery, but equally, looking at the developments over nearly four decades of its existence, funding and priorities have been funnelled elsewhere through deliberate policies, principally into television (I will discuss the television gallery below), new media and digital technologies. All these have taken precedence over the exhibition of the ‘archaeology of cinema’, in spite of the museum’s good intentions that ‘Pride of place goes to our Cinematography collection – ranging across cameras, projectors, magic lantern slides, drawings, posters and documents – that traces the history and prehistory of cinema.’26 The absence of a cinema-dedicated gallery has been an especially significant omission in a museum which dedicates so much of its resources to the screening of films and well into the twenty-first century, to the organisation of film festivals as well, although this has now come to an end. I will discuss the work of the museum in organising film festivals below in this chapter. Most of the artefacts came from the original collection of the Science Museum already mentioned and like all the other cinema and cinematographic collections which are part of the museums case studies in this book, it includes items of pre-cinema and archaeology of cinema,

38  The National Science and Media Museum

such as magic lanterns and various optical toys. It is only different from the other four collections studied in that it also emphasises its national origins: British film-making and its equipment makes up a substantial part of the collection. For example, it contains many cameras and editing and sound desks (Technicolor, Mitchell, VistaVision, Dolbysound cameras, etc.) from the early days of British film-making and from all the major studios active at the time to produce British cinema: Pinewood, Ealing, Shepperton, Elstree, etc. (Warren 2001; Barr 1999). The collection also includes stills and posters, although this is the least developed section, partly reflecting the nature of its origins in the Science Museum. However, in recent years and connected to its specific location in Bradford, the process of collecting has begun to change, with an increasing concentration on collecting film posters and stills, for example, Bollywood, British and American film posters, especially those which were printed in Bradford by W E Berry.27 The photography collection is worth a mention for its importance and size and the fact that part of it originated along with the cinematographic collection in the Science Museum. It is undoubtedly the most sizeable in the museum in both scale and resources dedicated to it. As already mentioned, it encompasses many different collections: the original Science Museum one, the Daily Herald Archive and the Kodak Museum and until recently the collection of the Royal Photographic Society, which was moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2017, amidst much opposition from regional voices, as well as doubts about the move from the Photographic Society itself.28 Photographic objects have ‘pride of place’ in The Kodak Gallery, which includes a selection of photographs about the history of popular photography, from its origins to contemporary digital photography. The instruments are still displayed in glass cabinets as there are too many examples of cameras and related artefacts to be left ‘free-floating’, principally from the former Kodak museum in Harrow, already mentioned. This was a large collection of 35,000 objects and images combined, which was donated to the museum in the 1980s, following the Kodak museum’s closure.

The development of television galleries Museologically television has received much more attention than cinema and a whole floor of the museum is dedicated to television. ‘TV Heaven’ was first developed in 1993 and it was part of new directions in museum exhibition practices involving audio-visual media. It consisted of a collection of television programmes which the audience could select from for viewing in the museum. The museum’s television collection made available over 900 programmes spanning 60 years of television in Britain, the programmes could be booked in advance and they could be viewed in cubicles which accommodated up to five people.There was also a larger viewing space which accommodated 39 people for groups viewing and educational sessions. Many different British television programmes were made available, and as the publicity declared at the time, they ranged from ‘classic comedies, childhood favourites, soaps, hard-hitting documentaries, memorable plays and dramas, and much more’. More recently the museum has included film along with television for the public’s viewing experience, it is now called BFI Mediatheque; it lists all the different audio-visual activities on its website and besides the long-standing TV Heaven collection, visitors can view seven others sections from the archives from ‘Feature Films’ to early cinema ‘Victorian and Edwardian Life’: ‘Grab a booth in the BFI Mediatheque and discover the best, rarest and most extraordinary films and TV programmes from the BFI National Archive. More than 2,500 titles are available to view – all for free.29 Alongside these viewing facilities, the museum organised activities and public

The National Science and Media Museum  39

talks, about topics relating to television culture and/or about the programmes included in the collection. TV Heaven like the museum was accessible for free and the public could search the collection database online for the programme required before visiting the museum. TV Heaven closed on 18 July 2013 and is now available online via the BFI Mediatheque. The Experience TV Gallery which opened in 2006 has been continually expanding and developing; it is a mixture of interactive displays and television-related artefacts, from recording devices and television cameras to TV sets. It is entirely dedicated to television’s history, production, industries and objects. The Experience TV Gallery covers a lot of ground; there are seven sections to the gallery: The Race for Television, Gallery of Televisions, The Production Zone, BBC Collection, The Business of Television, BBC Studio and The Power of Television. The Gallery of Televisions is an extensive display of domestic television sets from the early cabinet style televisions to futuristic sets of the sixties and seventies down to the slimline TV sets of today. These are shown alongside professional recording equipment, in an effort to demonstrate the processes behind the making of television programmes, but the domestic items undoubtedly play a larger meaningful role for the public. The enjoyment of viewing domestic television sets ‘through the ages’ was mentioned frequently in visitors’ studies alongside the possibility of viewing TV programmes from the archives. Significantly the object itself was as important and memorable as the programmes, the latter described as ‘one of the family’. The gallery includes John Logie Baird’s original apparatus as well as many corollary items connected to familiar British television programmes.

Watching films in the museum Cinema-related activities of the museum are perhaps most concentrated on the screening of films rather than on a permanent exhibition of cinematography and the archaeology of cinema. Film programmes and screening, which encompass both past and present films, commercial and arthouse, play an important part in the life of the museum. The three cinema auditoriums in the museum – Pictureville, IMAX and Cubby Broccoli – are important in two distinctive ways; firstly, because they provide a rich cinematic experience for local people, as well as for people from the surrounding region. Secondly, because they provide viewing facilities for different film formats and hence the possibility to put on a wide range of films for the monthly screening programme. Also the presence of an IMAX cinema, one of the most successful large-format screen systems, is very important to contemporary audiences as a cinematic experience (Recuber 2007; McDonald 2010). The IMAX was opened alongside the museum back in 1983 and as its publicity states, it was ‘the first to be opened in Europe.’30 The other special screening provision is available in the Pictureville auditorium with its ‘deeply curved screen’ opened in 1992 and described by David Puttnam as ‘the best cinema in the world’; it is a 306 seat cinema and it has Cinerama screen and projection facilities,31 which makes Pictureville ‘the only public cinema where this format can be screened in the UK.’32 It is also one of only three public venues in the world that can still show Three-panel Cinerama; the other two are, respectively, the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles and Seattle Cinerama.33 The NSMM’s Pictureville Cinerama is undoubtedly quite a unique cinema provision for the national audience, and an important innovation for a museum of cinema. Cubby Broccoli is the latest addition to film viewing in the museum; it opened in 1999 and it is named after the British producer of James Bond films. It is a smaller cinema house than Pictureville, it has 120 seats capacity and it was clearly created to complement Pictureville.These three auditoriums have also been central to the film festivals organised by the museum right up to 2016 which I will briefly discuss below.

40  The National Science and Media Museum

Film Festivals in the museum Turan (2002) has divided film festivals into three different categories, those with ‘business agendas’, those with ‘geopolitical agendas’ and those with ‘aesthetic agendas’. Film Festivals organised by museums of cinema often incorporate more than one of these agendas in one film festival and have sometimes all three in them and more, in the sense that they may have additional aims which are also about the local and national cultural concerns. In comparison to historical and well-established film festivals they are small and often dedicated affairs but they are integral to the workings of the museum for the way in which they bring together film genres, filmmakers, specialised and general audiences and movies from around the world. Film festivals have proliferated in recent decades as well as their study, pioneered in the UK by the University of St Andrews’ Film Study Centre headed by Dina Iordanova34; they have also often been part of cinema’s museums activities. For example, Wong (2011) describes film festivals as the ‘ultimate celebration of cinema’ on a par with film archives, cinematheques and museums of cinema. There are a number of general reasons for this proliferation ‘starting with the municipalities that host them to get their names before a wide public and attract visitors both during and after the celebration in question’ (Turan 2002: 7). Similar motives, but more concerned with maintaining a multi-cultural cinematic culture, were likely behind the Bradford museum promotion and organisation of film festivals as well as an essential element of the wider museum remit. Turan’s discussion about the growth of film festivals and its surrounding culture contributes strong insights as to the reasons of their growth, although it is clearly written with an American perspective in mind: The key cause of festival proliferation, however, is a symbiotically linked trio of factors. Newly active independent and foreign language filmmakers hunger for appreciative audiences, a need that dovetails nicely with audience members’ yearning for alternatives to the standard Hollywood fare that dominates film screens not only in this country but also worldwide. And small distributors as well as national film industries locked into an unequal battle with the American Juggernaut see these hungers as a not-to-be-missed opportunity to both earn money and promote their goods to the fullest extent. (Turan 2002: 7) The museum ran three successful annual festivals for at least two decades: the Bradford Animation Festival, the Bradford International Film Festival and the Mango Film Festival, regrettably all now discontinued. The oldest of the three, the Animation Festival, first organised in 1993, is steeped in parts of the culture of the museum which has always given large consideration to film animation and which was also visible in the development of a small dedicated gallery to animation. The International Film Festival, first organised in 1995, was a generalist film festival with a wide programme of new releases and retrospectives and at times centred on new British film releases. The programmes looked at over the years (as well as information collected through direct participation) show a rich variety of programmes, guests and themes, national and international. Bite the Mango Film Festival was dedicated to Asian and Black Cinema, and one which had resonance both locally (Bradford has a large Asian population) and internationally in its attempt to bring world cinema to Britain. Bite the Mango Film Festival was first organised in 1994 and it is perhaps the best example of a festival which served as the only public screening space a film received in the UK. The museum and its festivals have served for many years as an important space and conduit for new films which would not otherwise received any other public airing:

The National Science and Media Museum  41

‘A lot of work only gets shown now at festivals. A lot of foreign language film that would get distribution 10 years ago doesn’t get seen anymore’ (Piers Handling cited in Turan 2002: 8). The closure of all these film festivals has partly been blamed on the decreasing resources in funding from the British government, as well as on the fact that the museum run and was host to perhaps too many festivals and that energies and resources could well have been better spent on collections, exhibitions and the everyday life of the museum. There is no doubt that film festivals as part of the overall museum’s projects absorbed many of its resources and it was not always obvious how these activities related to the rest of the museum but undoubtedly they promoted a film culture which would otherwise have been paradoxically absent from a museum which was also about film. In general, it has been argued that museums of cinema’s history and trajectory are inclusive of all these different facets, whether they deal with the archaeology of cinema, cinematographic artefacts, the screening of films or film festivals: ‘festivals intersect with other discourses and institutions in the wider construction of film as a field of knowledge (Wong 2011: 15). Equally, film festivals in museums are at times the only available spaces to see films which are not always shown even by independent cinema institutions and therefore act as ‘an alternative distribution network’: ‘People are going to them because theaters aren’t doing their jobs to show films from the rest of the world’ (Turan 2002: 8).

Conclusion In 3 years’ time, in 2023, the museum in Bradford will have been open for 40 years and to date it remains a very popular museum, although in purely cinematic terms, unlike some of the others discussed in this book, it is not an exclusively cinema-dedicated museum; in one respect, it shares similar features with its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, George Eastman House Museum, discussed in Chapter 6, especially in relation to the curatorial responsibility for photography. However, unlike Eastman House is a much more ‘hands on’, museum and visitors and audience are invited to interact with the exhibits, especially in relation to national television programming and film animation. Its popularity has been partly ascribed to its wider media remit extending to photography, television and digital media. It has a very strong national orientation, visible in many of its collection and activities, and it is clearly considered a national resource even in its latest reincarnation. The name change and new developments to include more scientific, technological and digital media developments have not detracted from that purpose: ‘Britain needs a national museum to reflect these important and influential aspects of our national life and identity, to make sure these dramatic changes are chronicled, recorded and interpreted’ (National Media Museum, n.d.: 2).

Notes 1 To view these artefacts, see: https://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/search/categories/cinematography 2 I first interviewed Michael Harvey back in 2004 when he was Head of Cinematography for the collection of the then National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, UK. 3 In 2019 the BFI celebrated the 150th anniversary of his birth by screening many of his films, some very recently rediscovered from national and international archives, see: https://paulsanimatographworks. wordpress.com/2019/11/16/new-paul-discoveries-online/ 4 See https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/sites/default/files/2017-10/science-museum-history.pdf (Accessed 18 December 2018). 5 More details about the Collection will be described in Chapter 4, on the Cinémathèque Française, which bought the collection in 1959. 6 £10.000 in the 1920s would be roughly just over half a million pounds in today’s money.

42  The National Science and Media Museum

7 Notable contemporary examples in the UK range from The National Gallery purchase in 2004 of the painting by Raphael ‘The Madonna of the Pinks’ for 22 million pounds from the Duke of Northumberland to the acquisition of Titian’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’ in 2009 and ‘Diana and Callisto’ in 2012 from the Duke of Sutherland for the combined price of 95 million; again partly with funds of The National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland. The very size of these sums denotes the arbitrary value and cultural priority given to paintings and the arts. In addition doubts are very rarely introduced about large sums handed over to the aristocratic owners of these paintings, who are instead portrayed as loyal ‘national’ servants by possibly accepting a lower sum for their paintings that they would otherwise fetch on the private market. 8 The Research Centre for Cinema, Photography & Television based at the Institute of Communication Studies in Leeds is named after Louis le Prince, who settled in the city and whose pioneering cinematographic work is considered fundamental to the development of cinema. To view his single lens cinematograph camera, see: https://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co18634/ le-prince-single-lens-cine-camera-cine-camera-cinematograph 9 The NMSS’ exhibition The Forgotten Showman which has been close to the public due to the pandemic of Covid-19 will be extended into 2021. There is also a comic booklet by ILYA and Ian Christie entitled ‘Time Traveller. Robert Paul and The Invention of Cinema available to view at https://simplebooklet.com/YqicBlR7tUKyUpguZBJS9S#page=0 10 In Houston book an entire chapter is dedicated to ‘Fortress Archive’, the nickname given by Houston for the National Film Archive, and the figure of its first archivist Ernest Lindgren as well as his antagonistic relationship with the director of the Cinémathèque Française Henri Langlois, and their very different methods of running an archive and film library, see also MacKenzie, op. cit. pp. 517–518. 11 Details of the dealings between the NFA and potential industry donors are partly accounted for in her Chapter 2: Trading with Trade, Houston, pp. 23–36. 12 We will see that both figures, David Francis and David Robinson, will also be consulted in the creation of the Italian museum of cinema in Turin, which is the subject of discussion in Chapter 4. 13 Many other figures were involved in the process and details of this can be read in Blakemore’s chapter: ‘A public showcase for the BFI.The Museum of the Moving Image’ in Nowell-Smith and Dupin, op.cit. 14 The other was the rather more successful Design Museum. 15 For a discussion of aura in cinema, see Hansen (2012). 16 http://www.bfi.org.uk/about/news/ (Accessed 10 March 2005). 17 http://www.bfi.org.uk/about-bfi/policy-strategy/film-forever (Accessed 22 February 2013). 18 https://www.bfi.org.uk/2022/ (Accessed 26 June 2018). 19 Many other developments (Liverpool Tate, Imperial War Museum in Manchester, Millenium Gallery in Sheffield, etc.) were introduced in the following years in a regeneration drive of parts of the north of England, which main association was with its industrial past. 20 Many other developments were also planned: a gallery about radio, a gallery about news-gathering, about advertising and a plan to restructure the existing photographic gallery to incorporate changes in photography. 21 Currently the Science Museum group incorporates five different museums: the Science Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Railway Museum, the Museum of Science and Media and Locomotion. 22 This was collected by another pioneer of cinema, Arthur Kingston. A short biography is available on the website of the British Society of Cinematographers, https://bscine.com/bsc-members/?id=344 23 From the interview with Michael Harvey and Bill Lawrence, respectively Head of Cinematography and Cinema, 10 June 2004. 24 In 2006 a second study about museums and education was carried out by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (University of Leicester) for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council entitled ‘What did you learn at the museum today? Findings ranged from an increase in use of museums by schools to museums carrying out a role for children at risk of social exclusion. 25 This is the case with all the museums discussed in this book and the museums’ website is increasingly the first point of contact between public and museums. 26 http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/FilmAndImax/home.asp (Accessed 12 January 2009).

The National Science and Media Museum  43

27 https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/ap27832/w-e-berry-ltd 28 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/02/bradford-photography-collection-movevanda-reviled-vandalism (Accessed 28 February 2017). 29 https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/whats-on/bfi-mediatheque (Accessed 12 January 2019). 30 https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/cinema/ (Accessed 28 February 2019). 31 Cinerama simultaneously projects three films against a deeply curved screen, and in 1952 became the world’s first wide-screen film presentation system. 32 http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/AboutUs/MuseumHistory.aspx (Accessed 1 March 2013). 33 http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/09/26/the-wayward-charms-of-cinerama/ (Accessed 14 February 2019). 34 This was in the form of a book series which begun in 2009 and to date St Andrews Film Studies Publishing House has brought out 6 Yearbooks on Film Festivals.

Bibliography Barr, C. (1999) Ealing Studios: A Movie Book. Berkeley: University of California Press. Belton, J., Hall, S. and Neale, S. eds (2010) Widescreen Worldwide. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Benjamin, W. (1992) Illuminations. London: Fontana. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History,Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. Blakemore, L. (2012) A Public Showcase for the BFI: The Museum of the Moving Image, in G. NowellSmith and C. Dupin (eds) The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bottomore, S. (1997) De la bicyclette au cinéma. Une biographie de Will Day. 1895, Revue d’histoire du cinéma, numéro hors-série. Bottomore, S. (2006) Film Museums: A Bibliography. Film History, 18, 3: 327–349. Christie, I. (2019) Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. De Valck, M. (2007) Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Greenhalgh, P. (1988) Ephemeral Vistas: the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hansen, B. M. (2012) Cinema and Experience: Sigfried Kracauer,Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Harvey, M. (1998) The Cinematography Collection of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, in J. Fullerton (ed.) Celebrating 1895:The Centenary of Cinema. London: J. Libbey. Henning, M. (2006) Museums, Media and Cultural Theory. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Henning, M. ed. (2015) Museum Media: The International Handbook of Museum Studies,Vol. 3. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000) Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Houston, P. (1994) Keepers of the Frame:The Film Archives. London: British Film Institute. Iordanova, D. ed. (2013) The Festival Reader. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies Publishing House. Jesinghausen, M. (2000) The Sky over Berlin as Transcendental Space: Wenders, Döblin and the ‘Angel of History’, in M. Konstantarakos (ed.) Spaces in European Cinema. Exeter, England: Intellect. Keen, S. (1998) Digital Collections: Museums and the Information Age. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Latsis, D. (2016) The Beginnings of Cinema as a Museum Exhibit.The Cases of the Smithsonian Institution and the Science Museum in London. Moving Image:The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 16, 1: 17–34. Lumley, R. ed. (1988) The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display. London: Comedia, Routledge. MacKenzie, S. (2014) Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press. McDonald, P. (2010) IMAX: the Hollywood Experience, in J. Belton, S. Hall, and S. Neale (eds) Widescreen Worldwide. New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing. MoMI, Museum of the Moving Image (1996) Picture Goer: 100 Years of Cinema-Going at the Museum of the Moving Image. London: BFI and MOMI.

44  The National Science and Media Museum

National Media Museum (n.d.) The Museum is Changing. Publicity booklet, Bradford: Thompson. Nevill, A. (1999) Think Again! in National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, in Photography, Film and Television. Think Again. London: Science Museum and National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. Nowell-Smith, G. and Dupin, C. eds (2012) The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Parry, R. ed. (2010) Museums in a Digital Age. London: Routledge. Recuber, T. (2007) Immersion Cinema: The Rationalization and Reenchantment of Cinematic Space. Space and Culture, 10, 3: 315–330. Robinson, D. (2006) Film Museums I Have Known and (Sometimes) Loved. Film History, 18, 3: 237–260. Russo, A. (2012) The Rise of the “Media Museum”, in E. Giaccardi (ed), Heritage and Social Media: Understanding Heritage in a Participatory Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Ryall, T. (2000) Britain and the American Cinema. London: Sage. Silverstone, R. (1988) Museums and the Media: Theoretical and Methodological Exploration. International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 7, 3: 231–241. Turan, K. (2002) Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vergo, P. ed. (1989) The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books. Warren, P. (2001) British Film Studios: An Illustrated History. London: Batsford Ltd., Pavillion Books. Wong, C. H. (2011) Film Festivals: Culture, People and Power on the Global Screen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

3 WHO IS GUARDING THE TREASURES NOW? The Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma

The Birth of the Cinémathèque Française: modest beginnings The establishment of the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma like similar institutions around the world1 is the outcome of a growing rich cinematic culture which developed in the twenties and thirties and began with the establishment of ‘ciné-clubs.’ In France as elsewhere the ‘cinephiles,’ which normally gathered in informal groups, proliferated and in November 1929 the Federation of Ciné-clubs was formed whose first president, Jean Mitry, also became a key figure of the future cinémathèque. It was within some of these circles that the idea of cinema changed from mere technological prowess and transient spectacle to a more established cultural and artistic practice to be appreciated and preserved.2 One such club was The Cercle du Cinéma, run by George Franju and Henri Langlois, the first two key figures behind the creation of the Cinémathèque. However, although the Cinémathèque Française begun as a very modest endeavour, numerous individuals captivated by cinema were involved right from the start until the actual practical and spiritual ‘mantle’ eventually fell on Henri Langlois, while George Franju went on to become a well-known documentary filmmaker, whose documentaries have stood the test of time (Ince 2005). The story of the origins of the Cinémathèque reads like a legendary tale: from the help of Paul-Auguste Harlé, the editor of the trade magazine La Cinématographie Française and his ten thousands francs loan, a considerable sum at the time, to one of its first substantive donations, the Kamenka Collection3; to the first location for storage and the first ‘curator,’ who was none other than Méliès, the pioneer of fantastical cinema, by then an old man living in a care home. This icon of early silent French cinema and his work is today a permanent feature of the history of cinema as well as of cinema museum’s exhibitions. Equally legendary is the character of Henri Langlois, who was undoubtedly the heart and soul of the Cinémathèque Française until his death in 1977; he tirelessly dedicated his entire life to the institution and to the creation of a museum of cinema. Langlois was not the only key figure to establish and develop the Cinémathèque but he was certainly singularly minded about his vision of the Cinémathèque as a museum. According to Lotte Eisner, a lifelong collaborator of Langlois and the Cinémathèque, he had in mind a future museum of cinema all along (Roud 1983: 22).

46  Who is guarding the treasures now?

Langlois’ ideal project, like Rotha’s aforementioned, was a comprehensive one, he saw cinema in its entirety and this could not but include a future museum of cinema. Like Rotha, he also had right from the beginning a very modern-day idea of museum of cinema in mind: The Cinémathèque had to be a museum, with a unified collection including films, documents, designs, sketches, costumes, drawings…Langlois had a unitary and global conception which began from the telegram that expressed the desire to make a film to the poster which finally advertised it. (Olmeta 2000: 157, my translation) He was not alone in this, according to Roud in his book on Langlois, this was an idea which circulated widely in the 1930s: ‘By the early thirties, however, the idea of a film library as the equivalent of an art museum was firmly established. Langlois and Franju wanted not just to collect and preserve films, but also to show their collection’ (Roud 1983: 18).4 Developments in early museums of cinema mainly involved donations from private collectors as already mentioned in Chapter 1, and all of the museums discussed in this book have been bestowed with some of their cinema artefacts and associated materials from the efforts of private individuals. The genealogy of museums of cinema’s most important collections to date can be traced to these pioneers of cinema. One is tempted to compare this with the cabinets of curiosities of earlier times but without the power and status which these engendered in the individuals who created them and who mostly belonged to the aristocracy. Langlois was himself a passionate collector not only of films, about which he had a colossal knowledge, but also of all its surrounding culture; in Cocteau’s famous lines he became ‘Le dragon qui garde notre tresors’ (cited in Mannoni 2006a: 368). These ‘tresors’ were from a wide array of international film heritage but there was also a great deal of emphasis on French film heritage. It is impossible to think of French Cinema without considering its association with the Cinémathèque’s activities. In fact, many have argued that the history of the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma cannot probably be told without considering Langlois’ approach to cinema, although the ‘mythologising’ of Langlois also brought with it problems in creating a museum of cinema after his death: ‘from the early 1990s, the Musée Henri Langlois could have been transferred and recreated in the ample spaces of the Palais de Tokyo, but instead quarrels arising from the mythification of an individual prevented this move from happening’ (Mannoni 2006b: 286). Langlois ‘colourful history’ is in itself part of the history of the Cinémathèque Française,5 but this chapter seeks to trace the trajectory of The Cinémathèque as a whole, especially in its important work done over the years in saving large quantities of cinematographic patrimony, both national and international. This work was certainly done out of sheer ‘passion’ by Langlois but also by a large number of people that collaborated with him. Undoubtedly, however, in the words of Mannoni, who has to date written the most comprehensive history of the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma, ‘Neither is it to descend, in turn, into vain apology or hagiography to note that Langlois was the central pivot of cinematographic museography over a period of almost fifty years: it is the plain historical truth’ (Mannoni 2006b: 286).

The Cinémathèque Française and the passage from silent movies to sound A convincing argument behind the reasons for the birth of cinémathèques generally, and the French one in particular, was the sudden realisation of a cinematographic patrimony being lost: ‘la prise de conscience de la disparition du Cinéma muet’ (Olmeta 2000: 31). The introduction

Who is guarding the treasures now?  47

of sound, although slow at first and technically imprecise, brought about a veritable revolution; once the audience got used to sound in cinema, the silent movie became quickly extinct and entire stocks of film were either destroyed or sold off, in many cases by the kilograms. It was a genuine ‘eviction of a product by another, an eviction radical, rapid and nearly universal which is undoubtedly unique in the history of spectacle’ (Borde in Olmeta 2000: 30, my translation). The larger companies, such as Gaumont, Pathé and Lumière created some deposits in France, but these efforts were hardly sufficient for the preservation and conservation needs of this vast and valuable historical and cultural heritage. It was this ‘destructive’ moment which helped the ciné-clubs and the future cinémathèque. Renting silent movies was no longer of importance to many companies because of the poor economic return and hence why many used copies of silent movies, often in good condition, once cinema was near totally superseded by sound, begun to find their way to Franju and Langlois’ Circle du Cinéma.This contributed to Langlois early private collection and at the same time it reinforced his approach to cinema, the essence of which was to show as many films as possible. The very first projection by Franju and Langlois’ Circle du Cinéma evidenced their passion for silent cinema: the double bill of The Fall of the House of Usher by Epstein and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari by Wiene (Olmeta 2000). Two films now considered silent classics and much written about. The historical context of the cinema industry changes was clearly favourable to the creation of a cinémathèque. The Cinémathèque Française was signed into official existence on 2 September 1936 by Harlé and Langlois, although support for it came from many different sources. With their first fund of 10,000 francs donated by Harlé, they attempted to acquire film prints and in this enterprise they found much help in Harlé himself, who persuaded Alexandre Kamenca, an important film producer of the twenties to deposit his film stock with the Cinémathèque, in spite of the fact that at the time it neither had a building where to store it or adequate facilities to show the films. Myrent in the book written with Langlois’ brother, describes how the Langlois’ family home, the bathtub in fact, was the first deposit of the Cinémathèque Française: ‘Every Rue Laferrière regular remembers that old tub with its ornate legs and its antique showerhead’ (Myrent and Langlois 1995: 32). Other figures also helped, for example, Germaine Dulac, a well-known woman filmmaker of the twenties and thirties, introduced Langlois to other important filmmakers, Epstein, Feyder, Renoir, as well as to the two main French production companies of the time: Gaumont and Pathé. Around the same time, Langlois also met Iris Barry, the curator of the film department at MoMA who was embarking on a similar mission to Langlois, but who had at her disposal many more resources. Barry was in Europe in 1936 ‘conscientiously globe-trotting in search of lost films’ (Myrent and Langlois 1995: 34).

Avenue de Messine: the first ‘home’ of the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma World War II brought many of the activities of the Cinémathèque to a standstill, as part of the film collection was seized by the occupying German forces. Langlois and Lotte Eisner managed to hide some of the collection but perhaps surprisingly the Cinémathèque continued to do business with the Reichsfilmarchiv and its German head, Frank Hensel, then President of FIAF, in spite of some its underground activities of hiding film cans. Even more surprisingly, the Cinémathèque moved its premises into Avenue de Messine, where the Reichsfilmarchiv was also in residence; this address will be one of the first of three physical incarnations of the museum which was to become an integral part of the Cinémathèque’s endeavours.

48  Who is guarding the treasures now?

It was precisely at this address that in 1948 the ‘Musée Permanent du Cinéma’ was established, although exhibitions had taken place there as early as 1945, notably the exhibition ‘Images du Cinéma Français’ and in 1946 the exhibition of the works of the French ‘Primitif ’ Emile Reynaud which had been preceded by the Cinémathèque’s first publication by George Sadoul, Emile Reynaud: Peintre de film (Mannoni 2006b: 275).6 Mannoni puts this date as the start of a ‘willingness to “museumize” the cinema…and its desire to participate in the historiography of the seventh art’ (Mannoni 2006b: 275). Undoubtedly the museum space he carved out, and the artefacts first exhibited there, was the first of Langlois idiosyncratic adventure into the musealisation of cinema: ‘This was like a cinematographic cabinet of curiosities, a private apartment where the most bizarre objects hung from the walls’ (Mannoni 2006b: 275). Avenue de Messine, however, is mostly remembered not as much for its museum activities as for being the ‘cradle of the new wave’ (Myrent and Langlois 1995: 125), the most important film movement to come out of France in the second half of the twentieth century. It was here that many of the filmmakers of the ‘new wave’ met and formed their ideas about cinema: the likes of Chabrol, Demy, Godard, Resnais, Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut and Varda. The Cinémathèque run cycle after cycle of films from Avant-Garde to World Cinema and many retrospectives on filmmakers and movements. In the 10 years between 1948 and 1958, the year the Cinémathèque transferred to 82 Rue de Courcelle, it also organised many exhibitions outside Paris and internationally, for example, in Brazil. The influence of the Cinémathèque on filmmaking in France has been thoroughly acknowledged and much has been written about the filmmakers’ views of their cinematic ‘upbringing’ by the Cinémathèque and Langlois.7 Avenue de Messine was the home of the first of such ‘families’ in spite of the conflicts which rose later between some of the members, especially between Truffaut and Langlois about the latter’s idea of cinema ‘museological style’ (Mannoni 2006b: 274; Roud 1983: 178–179).

Rue de Courcelle: the second ‘home’ of the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma The reputation of the Cinémathèque grew alongside Langlois’ ‘mammoth’ projects; this was helped by many factors, including the increased financial support from the state, which up to then had always been somewhat uncertain and at times downright ‘invisible.’ First there was the transfer of the Cinémathèque to a much larger four storey building in Rue de Courcelle, secondly the opening of a 250 seat auditorium on Rue D’Ulm for the use of the Cinémathèque’s programming. Thirdly, and most importantly, with the help of the then Minister of Culture André Malraux and French State support, the Cinémathèque was able to buy in 1959, principally through the efforts of Langlois, the Will Day cinematographic collection,8 still considered today one of the most important in terms of the diversity and uniqueness of the artefacts.9 Malraux, while Minister of Culture also supported the Cinémathèque through a wider acquisition policy and as a result, many items connected to cinema, made their way to the Cinémathèque’s collection. For example, the collection of costumes bought from Hollywood (these cinematic artefacts were a favourite with Langlois). Many of these costumes have now been restored and were part of the 2001–2002s exhibition, ‘Les plus belle robes du cinéma: la collection de la Cinémathèque Française’ organised by one of its directors of collections, Marianne de Fleury.10 Unfortunately 1959 was also the year that a fire broke out in the courtyard of Rue de Courcelle (it was the height of summer and a very hot day), where cans of films were temporarily stationed,

Who is guarding the treasures now?  49

either to be returned to the original lenders or to be stored at the warehouse in Bois d’Arcy.The consequences were very serious, not so much for the amount of films destroyed, which although sizeable and regrettable (various estimates have been made about the actual loss but to this day the exact figure is not known; a rough estimate has been put at 5000 films lost) was not massive but for the fact that some of the films lost were unique copies and some were on loan from film museums and libraries around the world. Langlois, as the Cinémathèque’s director, was inevitably held responsible for the loss. The 1959 fire revealed some of the ‘relaxed’ practices of conservation at the Cinémathèque and many have suggested that this was partly behind the rift around the same time between Langlois and FIAF, the organisation that he had helped set up, a rift which was never bridged.The history of Langlois’ resignation from FIAF is full of intrigues and counter-intrigues, and it has been recounted in some details in the publications about Langlois and the Cinémathèque. The then Polish President of FIAF, Jerzy Toeplitz, had clear cause for concern as the Polish archive was one that had lost most films in the fire. Toeplitz and the Vice-President Lindgren (of the British National Film Library), whose conflictual relationship with Langlois’ methods had been an open secret for years, were believed to be behind some of the intrigues which called to vote Langlois out of office (he was then SecretaryGeneral of FIAF). Langlois, however, had many lifelong supporters and friends within FIAF and in the end the reason Langlois resigned from FIAF was, at least officially, connected to an entirely different quarrel which he had with Ledoux, the curator of the Royal Belgian Film Archive.11 Mazzanti has noted that for the Belgian Cinémathèque, the ‘dichotomy – “conservation vs. exhibition”, “film archive vs. cinémathèque”, “Lindgren vs. Langlois”‘ (Mazzanti 2013: 85) was never part of its history and this was undoubtedly due to the character of its first curator Jacques Ledoux, whose ‘comprehensive and scientific approach helped strike a balance between the “collect and show” and the “collect and conserve” approaches’ (Ibid, p. 85). Langlois’ approach to classification was undoubtedly unsystematic, but right from the start, it was clear that his priority was not on conserving films for its sake that he had already acquired for the Cinémathèque, but on increasing film acquisition, before films were lost, and more importantly to show them as much as possible. Preservation was only a poor third in his priorities. The much cited Persian carpet metaphor is often brought as an example of his ideas about films: ‘Langlois believed firmly that the best way to preserve films was to show them. Films, he would say, are like Persian carpets: they have to be walked on’ (Roud 1983: 20). Leaving FIAF did not have particularly harsh consequences for Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française, but it did for those smaller ones which had followed him out. For example, Buache of the Swiss Cinémathèque, who commented that: The break with FIAF didn’t really cause him any trouble. He and the prestige of the Cinémathèque were so great that all the other archives concluded bilateral agreements with him for exchanging films. It was much more dangerous for people like me: the Swiss Cinémathèque was cut off from all FIAF members, and I had only Langlois to depend on – and he could be difficult, you know. I was isolated, he wasn’t. (cited in Roud 1983: 112–113)12 Disagreements and curatorial policies notwithstanding, the Cinémathèque expansion and development continued apace in the post-war period and certainly until the sixties. In 1968, a crisis exploded around what came to be known as the ‘Affaire Langlois’; the events that followed changed fundamentally the relationship between the Cinémathèque and the French State.

50  Who is guarding the treasures now?

The Cinémathèque in the sixties and the ‘Affaire Langlois’ In the period running up to 1968, the Cinémathèque had grown richer, both in financial contributions and collections. Langlois’ motto ‘exposer, diffuser, conserver’ was put to the test with a rich offer of film programmes and exhibitions. This had already begun at Rue De Messine, but at Rue de Courcelle it intensified further, with exhibitions of cinema artefacts arranged to accompany the film screening seasons. The Cinémathèque was the centre of an unprecedented flourishing of new cinema, which went on to acquire the name of Nouvelle Vague, France’s symbol of new ways of filmmaking and which also brought the arrival of auteur theory. In this period, archive, cinémathèque and museum came together and ‘act as monuments to cinema… and perform a vital function in keeping the cultural heritage “alive”‘ (Hayward 1993: 7), although at the same time she voiced in an unforgiving view that this also served as ‘agents of petrification of that heritage’ (Ibid, p. 7). It is not clear why Langlois’ approach and attempt to save everything, at least to begin with and certainly whenever possible, was interpreted as a stifling approach to cinema heritage, as the contrary may appear to be true. Not least because the Cinémathèque and Langlois were also active in the promotion and contribution to film festivals, which in turn, were supported by exciting new journals about cinema, for example, Cahiers du Cinéma, which was first published in 1951 (Bickerton, 2011). Hayward may have been pointing to some of the contradictions inherent in the functioning of the Cinémathèque which were brought to the fore in 1968; on the one hand it was run as a private institution by a forceful individual and on the other hand it had slowly become a publicfunded institution, charged with safeguarding the cinematographic patrimony (Olmeta 2000: 119). In order to address this apparent contradiction, drastic measures were taken by the state against the Cinémathèque in February 1968. It withdrew all funding and requested a restructuring of the Cinémathèque with a new elected board, including new directorship. The token compromise gesture from the department of culture was to leave Langlois as ‘artistic director.’ This sudden direct interference from the French State and the then Minister of Culture Andre Malraux brought a confrontation which lasted more than 2 months and was part of the eventful ‘Affaire Langlois’ which has retained the aura of a ‘legendary battle’ in the annals of the Cinémathèque Française, a battle which Langlois and the Cinémathèque ultimately won. The particular meeting which ousted all the previous people responsible for the Cinémathèque and replaced them by state-chosen employees has been described by Jean-Louis Comolli in Cahiers du Cinéma as a: Manoeuvre prepared well in advance and very similar to a veritable putsch… the eviction of Langlois was not a sudden outcome of the meeting, or the attempt to put into place some kind of democratic and accountable system...but a premeditated conspiracy. (Cited in Olmeta 2000: 121, my translation) Following the take-over by the Ministry of Culture, a veritable confrontation started between the defenders of the Cinémathèque and its detractors. A spontaneous protest at first, it quickly gained momentum thorough the organisation of press campaigns, press conferences, various demonstrations and finally the establishment of a ‘Cinémathèque Defence Committee.’ From then on, wellestablished French filmmakers13 refused the rights to project their films in the Cinémathèque until a reversal of policies was announced (Olmeta 2000: 121). The main criticism addressed by the ministerial culture department to Langlois and his administration was mainly connected with the perceived inability to look after the film stock at

Who is guarding the treasures now?  51

Bois d’Arcy, which lay in a very poor state of conservation, as well as in the near total absence of proper cataloguing. This question about the state of conservation of the film stock was raised in parliament following a visit to the deposit. Malraux, the Culture Minister, who up to that point had avoided direct involvement with the ‘Affaire’ intervened for the first time to defend his department decision, although acknowledging that the Cinémathèque was the creation of the personal efforts of Henri Langlois and his collaborators. This was the only public intervention made by Malraux on the whole affair, his silence often attributed to a form of residual loyalty to Langlois and the Cinémathèque; a silence matched by Langlois that lasted from February, when he tendered his resignation following the state reorganisation, to the 22nd of April when he was reinstated as General Secretary. However, like all public disputes, its resolution did not come without a ‘price tag,’ and although the state gave in to the demands of the ‘Cinémathèque Defence Committee,’ it nonetheless decided not to reinstate the previous level of funding to the Cinémathèque. It directed much of its funds instead to the Centre National de la Cinématographie (today the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée), a publically funded institution based at Bois d’Arcy tasked at the time with cataloguing and conserving nitrate and acetate films. The ‘hand to mouth existence’ of the Cinémathèque was back, after its relatively more ‘comfortable’ times, of the previous two decades.

A dream realised? The ‘Palais de Chaillot’ Langlois’ last efforts and the closing phase of his ‘reign’ at the Cinémathèque were all propelled towards the creation of a museum of cinema. In 1963 the new Cinémathèque’s auditorium opened at ‘Palais de Chaillot’ (a much bigger cinema house than the cinema auditorium in Rue d’Ulm,14 the latter had been used previously by the Cinémathèque for its screening programmes) with its 430 seats capacity and state-of-the arts projection facilities (16, 35 and 70 mm films); a cinema auditorium ‘at last worthy of the films the Cinémathèque showed’ (Roud 1983: 126).The auditorium was inaugurated with three important exhibitions and screening; one dedicated to Étienne-Jules Marey, the French scientist at the centre of pre-cinema history, and the other two, respectively, entitled ‘Initiation into American Cinema’ and ‘Initiation into Japanese Cinema’ and result of a rich collaboration with George Eastman House and the Japanese Film Library. The space offered by the state to Langlois for the future museum of cinema at Palais de Chaillot (which formerly housed the museum of ‘Arts and Traditions Populaire’) was ideal, as it was also in the same building of the new auditorium. It was ostensibly given for a temporary exhibition of the history of cinema but it became the first step towards Langlois much longed for desire for a permanent museum of cinema. The first exhibition was a ‘tour de force’15 in the history of cinema, from its origins to the present day and in Langlois’ own words: ‘I want it to be at the same time beautiful, complete and serious’ (cited in Mannoni 2006a: 419, my translation). But this ambitious project brought with it many problems; notwithstanding the fervid activities to finish the exhibition on time, the opening date was postponed at least three times.The most serious concern was the mounting debt in spite of the state financial support and some private contributions. Pressure mounted along with the debts and it became even more necessary to fix a date for the opening. In the end it was the state that endorsed the finalisation of the project and thus consented the opening of the museum of cinema; the then Minister of Culture, Jacques Duhamel, offered three millions francs to conclude the project.This paradoxical situation of a private association opening an international museum with collections bought with state funds remained a contradiction at the heart of the survival of the Musée du Cinéma (Mannoni 2006a: 426).

52  Who is guarding the treasures now?

On 14 June 1972 the museum exhibition finally opened with the title ‘Three Quarters of Century of International Cinema’ but as Mannoni pointed out ‘There is no doubt that this was seen as a prelude for the permanent fixture’ (Mannoni 2006a: 427, my translation). This exhibition effectively became the permanent Musée du Cinéma. The opening was a grand affair, with the Culture Minister Jacques Duhamel in attendance and homage paid to Langlois and his creation, unfortunately the honours (from the press as well) did not extend to all the people behind the scene; worth a particular mention is Lotte Eisner,16 who had worked with Langlois right from the beginning, although her efforts will be acknowledged subsequently by Langlois himself in a press interview (cited in Mannoni 2006a: 427).The collective effort was not ignored by Mannoni either as indicated in the opening speech he unearthed for his history of the Cinémathèque Française. Roud wrote about how ‘the importance of the Chaillot auditorium cannot be underestimated’ for the Cinémathèque, which he described as ‘now functioning in, and as, a national monument’(Roud 1983: 126); he also added that equally, and even more so, this applied to the opening of the Musée du Cinéma, with predictable consequences: the price for the institutionalisation of the Cinémathèque was undoubtedly a reduced freedom of action. Some of the latent problems would unravel over a number of years, up to Langlois’ death in 1977 and beyond. From a museological point of view, the most serious problem was that the museum saw no new improvements and expansions from the time of opening in 1972 to the time of its closure in 1997, the year a fire broke out and forced it to close. Official state recognition did not bring sufficient funding for ongoing developments, and the result was ensuing disarray and mounting debts, as never before in the Cinémathèque: ‘In his palace of Chaillot, Langlois, like Ludwig in Visconti, was slowly agonising’ (Mannoni 2006a: 441, my translation). Criticism also came from former allies, especially filmmakers who although sympathetic to the Cinémathèque activities were less enthralled by the Musée du Cinéma, which they saw as a ‘sieve,’ draining valuable state resources which could otherwise be channelled into new filmmaking. What was becoming obvious to many was that the film collection, rather than the artefacts, which Langlois had done so much to save in the first place and which now needed a ‘new saviour’ if it was to survive, even if it was in the form of the state. As chaos and disorganisation increased, historians and film critics from the pages of established film journals (Cahiers du Cinéma, Cinéma 75, Image et Son, Positif) put out in 1975 an appeal for a national cinémathèque to unify all the activities and collections under one ‘powerful and efficient organization’ (Mannoni 2006a: 442–443, my translation). Paradoxically, amidst escalating problems in France, Langlois and the Cinémathèque was celebrated over the other side of the Atlantic with an Oscar award for having saved so many films and so much of film cultural heritage. At the same time, the Cinémathèque’s priceless film collection was ‘languishing’ in six different places, one of this containing highly inflammable nitrate film stock. Langlois tried to find solutions to the deposit requirements of all the Cinémathèque’s collection, from films to artefacts; one in particular, an arrangement he had made with two companies (Auvidulis and JFC) to hire services and deposit to store and catalogue the collection would reveal the extent of the indebtedness of the Cinémathèque. The sum involved in this arrangement was astronomical for the times (2.4 million francs) and there were certainly no funds available to the Cinémathèque to keep up with annual repayments.This was possibly the most serious mishandling of the Cinémathèque’s economic affairs and one which reverberated far and wide. Langlois and his collaborators’ determination had always brought about, sooner or later, solutions to the Cinémathèque’s problems, but those times had finally come to an end.

Who is guarding the treasures now?  53

Langlois died of heart failure in January 1977 and was not to witness either these companies seizing the accounts of the Cinémathèque or the second fire of the cinémathèque. One of the six film deposits was stored in the middle of a village (Pontel), and when in 1980 the fire broke out followed by the cans explosion, again during a particular hot summer, it was not only the films which were endangered but people and houses nearby.17 For a second time the absence of a complete inventory of the film stock deposited has not permitted an accurate audit of the exact loss although this was a much more serious fire and loss than the one suffered in 1959 at Rue de Courcelles.18 Mannoni has argued that the fire at Pontel opened a new era of relations between the Cinémathèque and the state; an era where more rigour was required to safeguard collections as well as to re-establish the Cinémathèque’s reputation. It was also a new political era, with the Socialist François Mitterand becoming President (Mannoni 2006a: 459). The times of the Cinémathèque as a ‘one man show,’ if it ever was so, as well as the times of ‘mythologising’ had passed and only Mary Meerson, Langlois’ lifelong companion, and a few others on the board of the Cinémathèque kept fighting for the legacy of Langlois, although in the mounting tense climate it was no longer clear to many onlookers what that legacy was. The collection amassed and the museum was clearly the most important part of the legacy but without proper curatorial care it clearly appeared rather sad and forlorn. This is what Mannoni’s impression were from his childhood and adolescent visits: Langlois had succeeded in creating little bridges between apparently different objects and documents, as sort of cinematic version of the Musée Imaginaire described by Malraux. But the terrible condition of the objects on display, the dust, the obvious neglect of the premises, made it also quite a sinister experience. (Mannoni 2006b: 286) Towards the end of the 1980s, Langlois’ Musée du Cinéma was in serious need of restoration; efforts were made by the then culture minister, Jack Lang, towards the idea of restoring, updating and promoting the museum of cinema, not necessarily in the existing location but in a new location.The proposed new museum of cinema would be installed in the nearby Palais the Tokyo, but nothing came of it. Equally, nothing came of other attempts to restore the museum, including the restoration of the collection in its present location at Palais de Chaillot itself. A combination of ‘die-hard’ Langlois’ supporters, who were not prepared to accept compromises about the museum, and the political change of guard, which had little political will towards this project finally put paid to a newly restored museum of cinema. Political neglect and lawsuits were not the only factors that contributed to the demise of the museum; in 1997 a third fire in the history of the Cinémathèque closed the museum at Chaillot for good.The collection was saved but for nearly a decade the Langlois museum and his original design could only be viewed through the pages of the detailed catalogues of the Musée du Cinéma Henri Langlois and of the collection’s catalogues of the Cinémathèque Française (Lefebvre 1995; Marquand-Ferreux et al. 1991a, 1991b; Mannoni 1996; Myrent 1984). Limited progress was achieved under Mitterand’s Minister of Culture Jack Lang in connection with the film stock: ‘Plan Nitrate’ was launched in 1999 and completed in 2005. This large restoration project of French film heritage was also linked to an annual festival: ‘Cinémémoire,’ so that ‘the public may experience the richness of these unearthed treasures’ (Mannoni 2006a: 465, my translation). Many years followed with Paris left without a Musée du Cinéma. For over 20 years following the death of Langlois the Cinémathèque’s stability and future trajectory was often in doubt because of internal strife between different parties, and what Mannoni has called ‘les Anciens et

54  Who is guarding the treasures now?

les Modernes’ (Mannoni 2006a: 464). Not even Païni’s energies and geniality19 who, was then overseeing the project, managed to bring about the realisation of the Palais de Tokyo project and he was eventually side lined when a new museographic project was envisioned. In that time, however, the Cinémathèque itself, if not the Musée du Cinéma, regained a moment of brilliance in the ‘revolution Païni’ with its rich programming activities and exhibitions. In 1995 he also went about organising an exhibition dedicated to the founder of the Cinémathèque entitled ‘Citizen Langlois.’ Païni, during his time at the Cinémathèque, also promoted the idea of restoring the museum itself as Langlois had designed it and which he called ‘une institution vivante,’ a project which could bring a resolution to the divided approach to the Langlois museum and reconciliation between the old and the new; the museum had acquired legal status and therefore protection, following the lawsuit brought by the ‘Association Henri Langlois.’20 Ultimately, however, the idea of keeping the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma intact was no longer perceived as a viable proposition; in 1992 all the non-film archive was handed to the care of the Bibliothèque du Film (BIFI), again with disastrous consequences. A fire in 2002 destroyed 20,000 documents assembled since 1936. This new crisis was, as in previous ones, the catalyst for positive developments, such as reorganisation and systematic cataloguing as well as improved access to previously inaccessible material. Païni persevered in strengthening the artefacts collection and creating a department responsible for it, although that was in the same year that the Langlois museum closed (Mannoni 2006a: 468). As already stated, the new museum project at the Palais de Tokyo was never realised although the expenditure for the scoping project reached substantial sums for the times. Many criticised the squandering of funds and criticism came particularly from the parallel state institution to the Cinémathèque, the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC). The Palais de Tokyo’s design for a museum of cinema will eventually be substituted by a new one to be based at the former American Centre at 51 Rue de Bercy. The Bercy project will be conceived as a unifying cinematic resource: a ‘Maison du Cinéma’21 which would bring under one roof, all the different sections of the Cinémathèque’s collection, artefacts included, as well as BIFI and the film services of the CNC.

The Bercy Project: ‘Passion Cinema’ betrayed? The idea of creating a museum of cinema in The Palais de Tokyo was ultimately rejected by the Ministry of Culture but significantly it was at the same time keen to see a museum of cinema realised in Paris and charged Serge Toubiana, the former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, to undertake a review of the cinematographic patrimony in France to that end. The findings were extremely enlightening and the final formulation arrived at, very different, for example, from the ‘Anglo-American’ relationship between state and cinema. Essentially, Toubiana argued that ‘the State needs the Cinémathèque, essential element for French-style cinephilia, museum of cinema and school of taste and knowledge (about cinema), because it contributes with “ardeur et constance” to our “French exception”’ (Mannoni 2006a: 471, my translation). Likewise, the Cinémathèque needed the state to fund its activities and its continued development. The public interest group ‘Pour le cinéma’ which had formed to promote a new museum of cinema was disbanded following the acquisition in 1998 of 51, rue de Bercy, a Frank Gehry building which housed the former American Cultural Institute, and the proposed new location for the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma. As the new project developed, not all was well at least in the first few years, with the ‘grand projet’ at Bercy either.The idea behind it, to unify all the cinema resources: cinémathèque, library,

Who is guarding the treasures now?  55

museum and archive collections in one geographical location and in one national film centre, was very appealing, and not so dissimilar to the project envisaged for London discussed in the previous chapter which never came to fruition. The problems which arose in relation to the Bercy’s development were connected with the ‘preferences’ of the then President of the Cinémathèque Claude Berri (he died in January 2009), who although a filmmaker, was also an art collector and his love for contemporary art appeared to outstrip his love of cinema and of cinema’s artefacts. In a move that betrayed the Cinémathèque’s plan for a museum of cinema, he voted against the previously approved project (approval which he had agreed to) to dedicate the entire Floor Five of the building to the former Henri Langlois Museum. Instead Floor Five was singled out to be used in the future to house ‘important exhibitions’ of painting and cinema. Contemporary painters: Ryman, Opalka, Flavin, Picasso’s collages, Sugimoto, Hantai (it was no coincidence that he was a collector of these painters himself) were to find space in what had previously been planned as a permanent museum of cinema, which in the original plan was to be ‘a place entirely consecrated to cinema.’ Berri’s plan was to displace the Musée du Cinéma Henri Langlois to the second floor, previously a space for temporary exhibitions and clearly too small for a permanent collection of the size assembled by Langlois. A small exhibitionary space on Floor 7 would be granted for the display of the artefacts about the origins of cinema, but given the size of the collection, it additionally shattered the exhibition’s coherence envisaged in the original plan. This plan will be blocked after much protest and collection of signatures by the French research association on history of cinema.22 At the time, Laurent Mannoni, the director and curator of ‘appareils,’ argued that Berri’s idea ‘transforms, both practically and symbolically, the permanent museum into a temporary exhibition.’23 Claude Berri backed down, although the opening of the museum was inevitably delayed.24 After the unfolding of many crisis and obstacles, the project Bercy succeeded and on 26 September 2005, it opened its door uniting the cinémathèque, library and museum collection in one national film centre; in particular the new centre also brought together the former Cinémathèque and museum, Day and Langlois’ collections with the CNC’s ones. The disputed term Maison du Cinéma, which had initially been proposed was dropped and the Cinémathèque has retained its name. The opening exhibition for the launch entitled Renoir/Renoir comprised a complete retrospective of the Renoir family, from the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir to his three sons, especially the film director Jean Renoir. The structure and choice of exhibition for the launch of a new museum of cinema received much criticism at the time, again because of its new focus away from cinema and into themes incorporating painting. The central theme of the ‘French creative family’ was undoubtedly predicated on a perceived national common experience of culture and society. In the pre-publicity brochure and on the Cinémathèque’s website for the exhibition, it was stated that this would be ‘the first large temporary exhibition dedicated to the Renoir family.’ The exhibition comprised a complete retrospective of Jean Renoir’s films, but inevitably given the conceptualisation behind the exhibition, a great deal of prominence also fell on the father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.The publicity brochure with the image split into two, where one half is a shot from Renoir’s film Partie de Campagne (1936) and the other half is a painting by his father, Le Moulin de la Galette (1876), confirms this reading of the front image of the brochure. Since then however, there has been no other painting-led exhibitions, although in 2013 paintings and drawings on show connected to two exhibitions, respectively, on Cocteau and Pasolini.

56  Who is guarding the treasures now?

Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma archaeology collection Today the two main collections, the Will Day and Henri Langlois’ are very much interpreted as complementary, the latter having being assembled over many decades from the thirties onwards with various collaborators, Georges Franju, Lotte Eisner, Mary Meerson and Marie Epstein among others (Mannoni 2006a; Olmeta 2000). In terms of cinema archaeology, the Cinémathèque’s collection is one of the richest in the world with 6,000 apparatuses (with very unique artefacts: Marey’s Zoetrope, Lumière’s Cinematographe, Biograph’s Mutoscope, Edison’s KinetoscopeKinetophone, etc.) and a mammoth collection of magic lantern glass slides, to date standing at 25,000; all these are now curated alongside the CNC collection25 (Mannoni 1996; Garson 2005). Over many years the director of the apparatuses’ collection, Laurent Mannoni, has painstakingly rescued and catalogued most of the material which had lain for years packed in the basement of the Palais de Chaillot, following the fire that broke out in 1997, aforementioned, which closed the museum section for many years, although the Cinémathèque continued to function separately. Sadly only a small part of the collection is now on show as permanent exhibition at the new Cinémathèque Française at Bercy. The permanent exhibition is a reduced version of the original plan. A reduction from 3000 to 1100 square metres, of two floor spaces to one, much to the chagrin of both directors of collections, the already mentioned Laurent Mannoni, responsible for the apparatuses and Marianne de Fleury for the museography.26 The original plan would have historicised and exhibited four ‘époques’ of cinema beginning with the Will Day collection via Langlois’ activities. It would have also incorporated the activities of Jean Vivié former director of the ‘Services des archives du film of Bois d’Arcy,’ renamed ‘Archives Françaises du Film’ in 2003 (part of the CNC) and finally an exhibition dedicated to ongoing and recent acquisitions: ‘Une collectione jamais terminée.’27 Currently the museum section of the Cinémathèque exhibits 600 artefacts and apparatuses connected with the archaeology of cinema in rotation, with different artefacts introduced regularly.

Conclusion Whether Henri Langlois, in whose spirit the Bercy project was first conceived, would consider 51, rue de Bercy his ‘Palais du Louvre’ for the cinema finally realised, it is impossible to say. The opening exhibition with its insistence on French artistic achievements, as well as cinematic one, could have a national parallel with his first programming in 1945 ‘Images du cinéma français,’ except perhaps for the fact that his ‘unitary vision’ about cinema was often accompanied by the exhibitions of the artefacts surrounding the films, whether these were costumes, sets, posters or praxinoscopes. Langlois was one of the first to put into practice a museological view of cinema and certainly for every film review and season he organised, he created parallel exhibitions of artefacts surrounding the screenings. This is not exactly the case at the Bercy complex, but with its four auditoriums alongside the museum (albeit reduced) and smaller galleries and exhibition spaces, permanent and temporary, it has since the opening created a vast and rich programme of all things cinema. The new Cinémathèque Française and even the reduced museum section are to some extent living up to Langlois’ ideals. Mannoni concluded his detailed book on the history of the Cinémathèque Française by saying that ‘the public, cinephiles and non, have a happy look on their face.The building is welcoming and the surrounding gardens and environment are pleasant. Even the wind seems friendly’ (Mannoni 2006a: 474, my translation). I would just beg to differ on the last ‘praise’ about the wind, for ‘everything cinema’ in Bercy, he is definitely ‘spot-on.’

Who is guarding the treasures now?  57

Notes 1 Around approximately the same time as the establishment of the Cinémathèque Française (as we have seen in chapter one), they also saw the light many other similar institutions: for example, the National Film Library in London, the Svenka Filmsamfundet in Stockholm, the Berlin’s Reichsfilmarchiv and in New York, The Museum of Modern Art established a department dedicated to cinema. 2 This had originated with the writing of Ricciotto Canudo on the seventh art and his establishment of ‘Le club des amis du septiem art’ (Canudo 1923). 3 Alexandre Kamenka was the owner of the film production company Société Films d’Albatros; of particular note are his productions in the 20s, such as Les Lion des Mogols directed by Jean Epstein in 1924 and Feu Mathias Pascal, directed by Marcel L’Herbier in 1925, Fairservice (2001: 205). 4 Roud goes on to argue that there was a fundamental difference between a cinémathèque and a club, in so far as the former ‘would not have to depend so much on “popular programming” for an audience’; also the clubs were principally about showing films rather than preserve them, Roud (1983: 18). 5 The activities of Langlois have received much attention over the years, in particular see Mannoni (2006a) and (2006b), Myrent and Langlois (1995), Roud (1983). A documentary ‘Henri Langlois. The Phantom of the Cinémathèque’ was also made in 2004 about his life and work. 6 George Sadoul was a French film writer and historian. His bibliography is extensive, he wrote a six volume general history of cinema as well as books on French cinema and the Cinémathèque Française. 7 See for example published in the English language Roud, Chapter 5, Children of the Cinémathèque; Myrent and Langlois, Chapter 7, 7 Avenue de Messine: Cradle of the New Wave. 8 Will Day is widely reputed to be the first in a long line of people who began to conceive of cinema not as a medium which had suddenly appeared in 1895 but as part of a series of discoveries about light, movement and its projection. His collection, also the first of its kind, reflected this historical approach to cinema and it is also visible in his writings. His manuscript, which remains unpublished, ‘Twenty Five Thousands Years to Trap a Shadow, the Birth and Biographical History of Moving Picture,’ is also part of the collection in Paris. It is described by Mannoni as ‘surpassed and full of errors’ but nonetheless a precious testimony of the historiography of cinema, L. Mannoni (1996), Le mouvement continué. Catalogue illustré de la collection des appareils de la Cinémathèque Française, pp. 15–16. 9 As pointed out to me by Laurent Mannoni, when during my visit in 2005, he kindly showed me some of these precious objects, then stored in the cold top floor of the tower adjacent to the Bibliothèque Nationale and where he also had his working desk in the entrance. Parts of the Langlois ‘efforts’ awaiting a return to a museum. Bercy opened in the same year. 10 Pavillon des arts, Paris, 24 October 2001 to 24 February 2002. The exhibition also subsequently travelled to New York in June 2004. 11 The quarrel was based on Langlois’ suspicion, never proved, that the Belgian Archive and Cinémathèque had exchanged illegal prints. On the other hand some have suggested that Langlois used the whole affair as an excuse to get out of FIAF which was no longer run according to his wishes. 12 Freddy Buache was Director of the Swiss Cinémathèque from 1951 to 1996. He passed away at the age of 94 on 28 May 2019. See Nadia Roch (2019) Freddy Buache et la FIAF. Journal of Film Preservation, 101, pp.103–110. 13 The filmmakers involved in the protest are numerous and span many generations: they went from Abel Gance to Jean-Luc Godard. A full list is cited in Olmeta (2000: 121). 14 Rue d’Ulm was also at the centre of the ‘Affaire Langlois,’ when French filmmakers forbade the screening of their film in both Rue d’Ulm and the Palais de Chaillot’s auditoriums, Brody (2009). 15 Loans and donations of artefacts were sought internationally, in Hollywood and Europe. Costumes, sets and scripts, with costumes in particular close to his heart: ‘This love of costumes, as commented on by a journalist at the Figaro is “paradoxical for a man that always looks like he has slept in his clothes”,’ cited by Mannoni (2006a: 420). 16 Werner Herzog dedicated a literal journey to Lotte Eisner. When informed of her impending death, he set off to walk from Munich to Paris and recorded the days and nights along the way; a secular pilgrimage that he undertook ‘in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot,’ Herzog (2014: Foreword).

58  Who is guarding the treasures now?

17 The people of the village had no knowledge of these inflammable films deposits near them and the potential danger involved. 18 It was estimated that the deposit contained approximately 80,000 film cans, with anything between 7,000 to 12,000 titles. 19 Mannoni compares Païni to Langlois of the first hour, that is to the Langlois of the ‘avenue de Messine,’ Mannoni (2006a: 466). 20 In France this is called ‘oeuvre de l’esprit,’ which means that it is an original work of art and hence subject to state protection, cited in Mannoni (2006b: 286). 21 The title ‘Maison du Cinéma’ will not be adopted by the Cinémathèque. Today that title is used for a new media centre which opened at Les Halles. 22 Anonymous, A protest document was circulated entitled ‘Vers un musée de la peinture contemporaine au 51, rue de Bercy? February 2005. 23 From my interview with Laurent Mannoni, 27 January 2005. 24 Claude Berri opened his own gallery in 2008 called Espace Claude Berri to exhibit his collection of contemporary art works. 25 See http://www.cinematheque.fr/fr/catalogues/appareils/ 26 For a short version of the political manoeuvres around the new museum of cinema at Bercy, see Mannoni (2006a: 470–471); Cere in Sight and Sound, May 2005; also Garson, 2005. 27 Passion Cinema: Une histoire des collections patrimoniales, document given to author by Laurent Mannoni in 2005.

Bibliography Bickerton, E. (2011) A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma. London:Verso. Borde, R. and Buache, F. (1997) La crise des cinémathèque…et du monde. Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’homme. Brody, R. (2009) Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Cere, R. (2005) Aristocracies of Taste.Will Cinema once again lose out to figurative art in Paris’ new Maison du Cinéma? Sight and Sound, 15, 5: 10. Fairservice, D. (2001) Film Editing: History,Theory and Practice: Looking at the Invisible. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Garson, C. (2005) A New Installation for the Cinémathèque’s Collection. Cahiers du cinéma, 601: 61–63. Hayward, S. (1993) French National Cinema. London: Routledge. Herzog, W. (2014) Of Walking in Ice. London:Vintage Books. Ince, K. (2005) Georges Franju. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Koszarski, R. (2006) The Lost Museum of Henri Langlois. Film History, 18, 3: 288–294. Lefebvre, T. (1995) Cinémathèque Française, Musée du Cinéma Henri Langlois. Paris: Maeght. Mannoni, L. (1996) Le mouvement continué. Catalogue illustré de la collection des appareils de la Cinémathèque Française. Milan and Paris: Mazzotta, Cinémathèque Française, Musée du Cinéma. Mannoni, L. (2006a) Histoire de la Cinémathèque Française. Paris: Gallimard. Mannoni, L. (2006b) Henri Langlois and the Musée du Cinéma. Film History, 18, 3: 274–287. Mannoni, L., Werner, N. and Marina, W. (2004) Eyes, Lies and Illusions: The Art of Deception. London and Aldershot: Hayward Gallery Publishing with Lund Humphries. Marquand-Ferreux, H., de Fleury, M., Lebrun, D. and Meston, O. (1991a) Musée du cinéma Henri Langlois. Des origines aux années vingt (salles I à XIV), vol. 1. Paris: Maeght et La Cinémathèque Française. Marquand-Ferreux, H., de Fleury, M., Lebrun, D. and Meston, O. (1991b) Musée du cinéma Henri Langlois. De l’expressionnisme allemand aux années cinquante (salles XVI à XIX), vol. 2. Paris: Maeght et La Cinémathèque Française. Marquand-Ferreux, H., de Fleury, M., Lebrun, D. and Meston, O. (1991c) Musée du cinéma Henri Langlois. Index, Bibliographie, vol. 3. Paris: Maeght et La Cinémathèque Française. Mazzanti, N. (2013) The Cinémathèque royale de Belgique: The First 75 Years…and the Next. Journal of Film Preservation, 89: 82–91.

Who is guarding the treasures now?  59

Myrent, G. (1984) Musée du Cinéma Henri Langlois. Palais de Chaillot. Museum Catalogue. Paris: Cinémathèque Française. Myrent, G. and Langlois, G. P. (1995) Henri Langlois: First Citizen of Cinema. New York: Twayne Publishers. Olmeta, P. (2000) La Cinémathèque française de 1936 à nos jours. Paris: CNRS Editions. Païni, D. (1992) Conserver, montrer: où l’on craint pas d’édifier un musée pour le cinéma.Ypres:Yellow Now. Roch, N. (2019) Freddy Buache et la FIAF. Journal of Film Preservation, 101: 103–110. Roud, R. (1983) A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française. London: Secker & Warburg.

4 ‘THOUGHT OF A MUSEUM OF CINEMA’ The Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin

First steps in the direction of a National Museum of Cinema In July 2000, the new national museum of cinema reopened its doors in Turin, in that city’s most symbolic building: the ‘Mole Antonelliana.’ The museum had, however, existed for many years in previous locations (one of which had been a section of the Mole itself) and had been at the forefront of exhibiting, screening and promoting cinema and all its surrounding culture in Italy and beyond. This third museum case study traces the foundational history of the Italian museum and the role it played over the years in promoting national and international cinema and in exhibiting cinema-related artefacts in Italy and internationally. The Italian museum’s history, like its French counterpart, has a key figure in a dedicated individual, Maria Adriana Prolo, the founder of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (MNC henceforth), who first developed her interest in cinema through her research into the Turin early film industry; this in turn was indirectly inspired by her work as an archivist and historian of literature. Pesenti Campagnoni identifies this crucial moment, when Prolo was undertaking ‘research in 1938 on documents with Francesco Pastonchi about Piedmontese literature at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century [which] sent her towards the “seventh art”.’ (Pesenti Campagnoni 2002: 16).1 Soon afterwards she wrote and published an article for the journal Bianco e Nero entitled ‘Torino cinematografica prima e durante la Guerra, Appunti’ (Turin cinematography, before and after the war, notes).2 Alongside her research on early silent cinema in Turin, Prolo commenced collecting cinemarelated artefacts for a future museum of cinema, privileging what has been described as her ‘other great passion,’ the archaeology of cinema (Pesenti Campagnoni 2002: 25).The pre-cinema collection of the MNC is today considered, like the French one, one of the most important in the world, if not for the quantity, certainly for the quality of the artefacts, complemented by the acquisition in 1994 of the cinema collection of the English brothers John and William Barnes.3 Prolo’s historical research on Italian cinematography intensified during the thirties when she started her collaboration with the ‘Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia’ in Rome,4 helped directly by the then founder and director Luigi Chiarini. This collaboration brought her into contact with many filmmakers, actors, screenwriters, choreographers and designers; individuals who at one time or another had been involved in the ‘golden age’ of the Turin film industry

‘Thought of a museum of cinema’  61

(Rondolino 2000).These individuals were quite happy to be interviewed, as well as to hand over documents, photos, cameras and many artefacts in their possession. It is at this particular juncture that the collection proper started and the idea of the museum to house it began to take shape not just ideally but also materially. There is also another more anecdotal and nostalgic version of how Prolo became interested in cinema. This is based on a childhood memory of having seen a silent movie ‘Occhi che videro’ (Eyes that saw),5 where the ‘seeing’ becomes ‘a premonition of what I wanted to see established, a museum of cinema in Turin’ (cited in Pesenti Campagnoni 2002: 16). It is very likely that the two versions were not necessarily exclusive and both facets of that same ‘passion’ and drive to establish a national museum of cinema. Prolo’s exploration developed in a threefold direction: archival historical research, oral history research and collection of objects. Prolo could be described as the precursor of the ‘museological practice of official and unofficial remix’ (Kidd 2017: 122) in her scouring of flea-markets for objects connected with visual history, talking to people involved in the early cinematographic industry and looking into ‘dusty’ archives and libraries for all kinds of cinematic documents for, to adopt a contemporary formulation, her ‘transmedia’ museum of the twentieth century, decidedly not digital but as Kidd as argued: ‘I wish not to suggest that this is a purely digital phenomenon; indeed, there have been museum exhibitions that we might conceive of as transmedial in previous manifestations of the museum’(Kidd 2017: 27). Specifically on the archival front Prolo began by combing and assembling material and information from libraries all over Italy; the aim behind the archival research was to publish a history of early Italian cinema. She was also especially keen to publish an anthology with writings by Ricciotto Canudo,6 Lucio d’Ambra and Giovanni Papini.7 This was initially to be written in collaboration with the editor of ‘Cinema’ magazine Francesco Callari, but nothing came of this collaboration (Pesenti Campagnoni 2002: 19). Prolo’s historical research did not stop at libraries and archives, proving to be a pioneer in both her research activities as well as her collecting; very early on she adopted oral history methods, based on real-life experiences, which are now well established within historical research methods.8 She did this by gathering many testimonies from people and professionals involved in the early cinematographic industry in Italy and in Turin. In particular, the most notable examples among these were filmmakers and screenwriters Giovanni Pastrone, Arrigo Frusta, Baldassarre Negroni and even Charles Lépine, a central figure in early French cinema, who by the time Prolo interviewed him, was already confined to his bed (he died in Turin in January 1941). Prolo herself confirmed in her writings that her encounter with all the protagonists of early Italian cinema was at the centre of the idea of creating a national museum of cinema: ‘Almost all of them had documents, photos, cameras, and it is for this reason that on that famous 8 June 1941 I wrote in my diary “thought of a museum of cinema”.’9 The museum will become Prolo’s lifelong project, which she will incessantly work at for many decades. We also know this from the rich correspondence with ‘cinematic soulmate’ Henri Langlois (Figure 4.1) (Toffetti 2002). Regrettably only the first volume of her history of Italian silent cinema has ever been published10 and even then, much later than expected; even more regrettably her work was never given its due credit, explained by Pesenti Campagnoni as a ‘veiled snobbish attitude towards the researcher and her work, which although not publicly reviewed was nonetheless used by specialists in the field, often without acknowledging her.’ (Pesenti Campagnoni 2002: 22, my translation). If it is true that in retrospect her work reveals certain gaps (for example, she never discussed or analysed the films themselves), she nonetheless set the research in motion; there was

62  ‘Thought of a museum of cinema’

FIGURE 4.1 

Maria Adriana Prolo and Henri Langlois in 1954. (Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del

Cinema)

only one other work published on Italian silent movies before Prolo’s.11 This ‘veiled snobbery’ on the part of the cinematographic critics and specialists in the field was steeped in their inability to understand the value of her novel methodology as well as thinly disguised rivalry, which today we would also identify as a typical patriarchal position. On the other hand her reception abroad, especially in France, was somewhat in contrast to the Italian ‘snobbery.’ Influential French film historian and critic George Sadoul was especially full of praise in his comments towards her work, in both his writings about early cinema in Italy as well as in his historical work about the general history of cinema (Pesenti Campagnoni 2002: 22). One last aspect of her pioneering lifework worth mentioning is her interest in photography, which she saw as ‘a link between the magic lantern and cinematographic technologies.’12 In the latter part of her life, this became one of the dominant themes in her activities: from promoting photography in relation to Turin, publicising the need for a history of photography and setting in motion research and collection of photographic artefacts in the same way as she had done for pre-cinema and cinema. The ultimate aim was to create another museum, this time of photography; her model was the then Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, established in 1949 in Rochester (USA), and also one of the case studies of this book, which she knew well. The museum of photography, unlike the cinema one, did not come to fruition, but she did eventually establish another museum in her place of birth: the ‘Museo Storico Etnografico of Romagnano Sesia,’ in which photography plays a large part. In many countries, at least in the first part of the twentieth century, museums of photography were often established before museums of cinema, as in the case of George Eastman House: a museum of photography in the first instance and only of cinema subsequently. On the other hand, museums of cinema founded in the latter part of the twentieth century more often

‘Thought of a museum of cinema’  63

encompassed all three of the visual media: photography, film and television as in the case of the former British National Museums of Photography, Film and Television, now National Science and Media Museum discussed in Chapter 2. The museum ‘adventure’ proper, in the sense of searching for support, funds, location begun almost at the same time as the collecting itself. At the beginning, and throughout the thirties, it appeared the project was very welcome; in addition Prolo could count on personal and familial connections for publicity, promotion and initial funding of the museum. One of the reasons that made the founding of the museum welcome and attractive, was that it coincided with the reopening of the FERT studios13 and a genuine urgency to regenerate the Turin’s cinematographic industry. This new optimistic climate brought Prolo’s project to the fore, mainly in the Turin press, which clearly praised the revival of the ‘officina’ cinema and its museum. An article by Mario Gromo in the Turin-based paper ‘La Stampa’14 brought up how it could be seen as a parallel with the Berlin’s studio UFA and its museum.15 The first location of the museum of cinema was in the same building where it will become a very successful museum 59 years later, finally occupying the whole building of the Mole Antonelliana. But during its modest beginnings in June 1941, the museum occupied only the first floor of the ‘Mole,’ loaned from the Turin City Council; here all sort of objects began to find their way: many different models of early cameras, magic lanterns, slides, photographs, sets, scripts, posters, films, etc.16 Financial support was also channelled the museum way, alongside increased publicity in varied news articles which begun to appear more frequently in the press about the establishment of a museum of cinema.17 These positive beginnings were, however, marred by the historical events of the time, World War II was in its final throes and Turin was under heavy bombardments as the German occupying Army was pushing northward pursued by Partisans and Allied Forces. All the artefacts of the museum were stored in the cellars of the Mole Antonelliana and they did not re-emerge until 1946, having suffered no damage. After the end of the war, the museum attempted to organise a few activities, but these were on the whole minimal and rather unsuccessful. Funding of cultural activities, generally, was taking a backseat, as funds were clearly needed elsewhere and for much more vital projects of reconstruction. Nonetheless, from 1947 to the official opening of the museum in 1957 at the Palazzo Chiablese, Prolo and her collaborators, especially Mario Gromo and Giovanni Pastrone, organised many exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. The first retrospective organised by the museum in 1949 was about cinematography in Turin (in the Galleria Metropolitana).This retrospective achieved a notable success, not least because it brought together all the people that had been involved in the Turin ‘golden era’ of silent cinema and who were still very much interested in establishing its importance in Italian cinema’s history (Bertellini 2017). At the same time, Maria Adriana Prolo continued her indefatigable work of publicising the museum. In 1949, during the Congress of the International Federation of Film Societies, which took place alongside the Venice Film Festival, she asked all present to help with the collection of documents and objects pertaining to Italian cinema history. A year later, a retrospective on cinema was organised as part of the Second International Exposition of Cinematographic Technology, and the following year, in 1951, a photographic exhibition was organised dedicated to the George Eastman House Museum of Photography in Rochester, which had previously helped and supported the MNC through both donations and advice. In 1952 the Museum took part in one of the first experimental television programmes by presenting and showing some of the most important pieces of the museum’s collection (the

64  ‘Thought of a museum of cinema’

RAI, Radiotelevisione Italiana, the Italian Public Service broadcasting company, only started broadcasting on a regular basis 2 years later in 1954). In the same year the museum contributed to the Venice Film Festival with two films from its collection of silent movies produced from the ‘golden age’ of the Turin cinematographic industry. One produced by Itala Film in 1907, La cameriera é troppo bella (The housemaid is too beautiful) and one produced by Ambrosio Film in 1911, Le farfalle (The butterflies). All these cinema-related activities took place in a variety of places, as the museum did not have at this stage a permanent location where it could exhibit its cinema artefacts or screen films either from its collection or more generally from those produced at the time. Support for the establishment of a museum came from an unlikely quarter, from the director of the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma, Henri Langlois, who, as we have seen in Chapter 3, was also feverishly trying to establish his own museum of cinema at the same time in Paris. Langlois, a lifelong supporter and friend of Prolo, during his visit to Turin for the Marc Chagall exhibition in Palazzo Madama,18 was busy persuading journalists and authorities not only to find an adequate location for the museum but also to give it proper legal status. As  a  result, on 7 July 1953 the ‘Association of the Museum of Cinema’ was formalised and legally established, although another 5 years would pass before the actual museum and auditorium were opened. In the interim period between the establishment of the ‘Association’ and the opening of the actual museum, exhibitions and screening activities continued undiminished. The collaboration between Prolo and Langlois brought about the exhibition organised at the Cinémathèque in Paris at Avenue de Messine, 7, the first site of the Cinémathèque Française, mentioned in Chapter 3. The exhibition opened in January 1954 and lasted until June, and has always been considered a successful ‘prototype’ of the future museum. In October of the same year, the Turin museum was recognised as a member of FIAF (The International Federation of Film Archives). The following year the MNC contributed to ‘60 ans de cinéma,’ the impressive exhibition organised by the Cinémathèque Française in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris for the 60th anniversary of the birth of cinema. In 1955 there was also collaboration with London’s National Film Archive on the ‘First International Exposition of Sport’ in Turin. Elsewhere in Italy, activities were also prolific. In 1956 the museum organised an exhibition in Milan of some of the best pieces of its collection at the invitation of the ‘Cineteca Italiana-Archivio Storico del film’19 and in the same year contributed to the ‘First Exhibition of Cinematographic Books and Periodicals’ at the Venice Film Festival. It is remarkable how all these exhibitions were organised without an established permanent structure behind it. Finally, in 1957, the museum was granted a space at Palazzo Chiablese, and the work began in earnest to prepare the sixteen rooms which housed the first national museum of cinema in Italy, underwritten by funding from both the state and private donors. Today the MNC is a rich collection which comprises many ‘fondi’ (deposits) of films and related materials; the most substantive ones are Fondo Itala Film and Fondo Pittaluga; alongside there are a few minor ones: Fondo Film Artistica Gloria and Fondo Cabiria. There are also many other smaller collections in the archives, too numerous to mention here, however, these for archival purposes are grouped under filmic categories, such as ‘sceneggiature’ (scripts), or in the case of very diverse types of film documentation these have been grouped under ‘Fondi Diversi’ spanning two centuries.20 The extended chronology here is because this latter ‘fondo’ includes documentation on items which are part of the ‘archaeology of cinema’ which I will return to below.

‘Thought of a museum of cinema’  65

The first museum of cinema at Palazzo Chiablese in Turin The Museum officially opened its doors on 27 September 1958 at Palazzo Chiablese. The opening also coincided with the International Congress of Cinematographic Technologies, by then already in its tenth year. The museum had sixteen rooms for exhibitions, a 120-seat screening auditorium, a library, a photographic collection, a film library and an archive. In November of the same year, the first films season began (seasons would usually last until May). Visitors to the museum were able to see two films a day in the auditorium, which could project both 35 mm and 16 mm films. The screenings were often part of major retrospectives and these also included exhibitions of artefacts that frequently, but not exclusively, related to the films screened. Cinematic activities expanded greatly following the opening of the museum in 1958. The first available information, while not very detailed, is recorded in the first ‘Notiziario dell’ Associazione Museo del Cinema’ (Bulletin of the Association of the Museum of Cinema), which came out in print quite a few years later.21 Some information about the activities of the museum is also available in the catalogue of the Fondo Museo Nazionale del Cinema, ‘Proiezioni, mostre e collaborazioni fino al 1988’ (Screenings, exhibitions and collaborations to 1988).22 In this same archive, there is also some information about activities prior to 1958 described as ‘Attività anteriori al 1958’ (Activities prior to 1958).23 The publication of a regular bulletin by the ‘Associazione Museo del Cinema,’ beginning in 1966, contains detailed screening programmes and accounts of exhibition-related activities of the museum; these bulletins reveal the vital role played by the museum of cinema in promoting cinema culture at large.24 As is often the case with museums of cinema, the institution had the dual role of museum and cinémathèque, that is, the films screening programmes were often accompanied by an exhibition of artefacts from the collections related to the films shown, genre, themes and filmmakers. While most were devoted to Italian, European or US films, programming activities also extended to wider international cinema, albeit to a much lesser extent, including Japanese, African and Latin American. However, many films from what we now more generally call ‘world cinema’ were included in thematic screening programmes, such as avant-garde filmmaking, documentaries, art-house, etc. The museum also undertook a great deal of educational activities with secondary schools, which were and still are a large part of the museum’s brief; these normally took the form of museum’s visits, accompanied by screenings which were quite diverse, but often culminated with the screening of Pastrone’s Cabiria. The museum was given the title of ‘National’ at the General Assembly of 1966 (Law of 4 November 1965), thus finally granting the museum its status as a national resource. At this same meeting, there was also a discussion about more appropriate future locations for the museum, a discussion which will accompany its history right up to 2000 and its reopening in the Mole Antonelliana. But the ‘national’ in the museum was not just a policy decision; the museum of cinema in Italy, like the others discussed in this book, also concentrated on the importance of national cinema in Italian culture, from the early Turin-based cinematographic productions to the very successful filmmaking of the forties and fifties which came to be known as ‘neorealist’ cinema. The MNC’s activities about early Italian cinema were supported by its collections which ranged from Turin’s early cinematographic industry (a collection particularly rich given the museum’s location and foundational history) to materials about early cinema production in other Italian contexts, notably that of Rome and Naples. For example, in October 1960, the museum collaborated in the exhibition ‘Quando il cinema si chiamava Napoli’ (When cinema was called Naples).25

66  ‘Thought of a museum of cinema’

Ginsborg (1994) suggested in one of his many studies of Italy that the Italian state may well be a case of ‘nazionalizzazione debole’ (weak national identity), in turn a result of a ‘double geographic identity,’ Mediterranean and North European; but these identities are nonetheless ‘traversed’ by a third more recent formation, the Italian nation-state, following the unification of 1861, sharing numerous common cultural features: Italian language and identity. This ‘third formation,’ the Italian nation-state, was very visible in the activities of the MNC in Turin.26 For example, in 1961, the museum’s programming activities commemorated the centenary of Italian unification with a season of films on the Risorgimento, the irredentist movement of the nineteenth century; 25 films in total were screened between May and November.27 Turin is the city which most symbolises the irredentist movement of the nineteenth century and its cause for Italian unification and liberation from foreign rule. It is also the city which houses the Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano.28 The most iconic silent film in the MNC’s collection is undoubtedly Cabiria, made by Giovanni Pastrone, a central figure in early Italian filmmaking in Turin. Pastrone had also supported the establishment of the museum, and shortly before his death in 1959 had donated his substantial collection of films and documents to the museum. This film has been screened on many occasions and in many different contexts; it has even received a recent airing on one of the private Italian television channels, LA7. In 1964, the fiftieth anniversary of its first screening was commemorated by the MNC in a special programme, and in 1965 the screening season began with a showing of Cabiria. Over the years the museum’s film programme frequently featured screenings of this film, either on its own or as part of a season on early cinema and cinematographers. Nevertheless, early cinema, and Cabiria in particular, was not the only ‘polar star’29 of the programming of the MNC; the museum was also very mindful of contemporary developments in the cinematographic industry in Italy. Neorealism30 was not entirely on the wane in the course of the 1965–1966 seasons: homage was paid to Alberto Lattuada,31 one of the earliest filmmakers in the neorealist mode, with screenings of 13 of his most important films. This was the most complete programme dedicated to the filmmaker up to that point in Italy.32 At the same time, many other films of contemporary filmmakers were screened regularly in collaboration with the ‘Cineclub’ of the Museum Association. Throughout the 1966–1967 season, programmes included films by Roberto Rosselini, Pietro Germi, Emanuele Luzzati, Mario Soldati and Giuseppe De Sanctis. From 31 January to 12 March of that season, the programme featured a ‘Personale di Francesco Rosi’ (Francesco Rosi’s Retrospective), perhaps the most overtly political filmmaker of the neorealist group (Testa, 1996, Pasqualicchio and Scandola, 2019). The activities of the museum and the Associazione did not concentrate solely on features films and filmmakers. Many series were programmed around documentaries: on nature, art, society and ethnography.33 Other popular exhibitions and screenings centred on actors, producers, filmmakers from silent and early cinema in Turin. The museum also organised others, more strictly artefacts-based exhibitions, such as the first International Exhibition of Stereoscopy in Photography and in Cinema, and various exhibitions of ‘Lanterna Magica,’ such as Fantasmagorie, ‘Tableaux mécanisés,’ ‘Tableaux Fixes,’ etc.34 Many activities of the museum continued ongoing collaboration with similar institutions at international level, especially to promote and disseminate Italian cinema and related artefacts, and in turn promote European, American and World cinema in Italy.35 Films and many original documents, manuscripts and posters of the silent and early sound era in Italian cinema were sent worldwide. The museum international collaborations were generally successful and the MNC

‘Thought of a museum of cinema’  67

was very keen in lending its collection (film, documents and artefacts) to exhibitions and screenings around the world. The MNC holds also a very rich collection of posters which had a dedicated exhibition space at Palazzo Chiablese, and many are today exhibited on the spiral lateral walls of the Mole Antonelliana.The collection ranges from pre-cinema, origins of cinema, silent cinema and sound cinema posters. The advertising posters for films have greater resonance, well beyond their initial purpose of promoting movies, they have become ‘part of the urban panorama, decorated the streets, became a happy invitation for evasion, fun, and why not, a point of reference for pleasant encounters’ (Pacini 2001: 48). Collaborations have always been particularly frequent and intense with France and the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma, as we have also seen in Chapter 3. Much has been made of the relationship between Henri Langlois and Maria Adriana Prolo and the fact that the exchanges between the MNC and the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma were predicated on their relationship and shared cultural affinities (Toffetti 2002). The MNC contributed to the exhibitions and screenings held at the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma right from its beginning, for example, in the first exhibition in Paris in 1954 about French cinema. Conversely the MNC planned an exhibition and screening programme for the centenary of Georges Méliès, the most symbolic French figure of fantastic cinema.36 Another example from the sixties was a major cycle entitled ‘Fifty Years of Avant-garde Cinematography’; this was based on an idea put forward by Henri Langlois regarding the continuity of experience between avant-garde filmmakers and the silent and sound era. Much of the material was loaned from the Cinémathèque Française.37 French cinema culture was not the only one to receive attention from the MNC; exhibition and film programmes included many other European nations. Highlights included the homage paid in the fifties to British Cinema in conjunction with the National Film Archive.38 In the 1967 season, there was a week dedicated to contemporary Soviet Cinema, with a special concentration on the filmmaker Mark Donskoi.39 There were numerous collaborations with the Goethe Institute in Turin; a season on new German cinema was screened in February and March 1969,40 and a second season took place in November and December of the same year and again the following year. American cinema and World Cinema also received a great deal of consideration in the MNC programming of screenings and exhibitions over the years,41 and was evidence of how the MNC operated on a number of different levels: as ‘cineteca,’ museum, library and archive.

The reopening of the ‘Museo Nazionale del Cinema’ in the Mole Antonelliana Much of the publicity of the museum since its opening in 2000 has concentrated on its unusual location, the Mole Antonelliana, the tallest brick building in Europe and symbol of Turin. Undoubtedly this location has done much to put the ‘Museo Nazionale del Cinema’ on the international map, however, there are many more attractive features to the new museum, from the design of the museum space itself to the layout of the exhibition of its permanent collections, its temporary exhibitions, its films screening programmes and its festivals. In that sense, besides being the tallest museum in the world, a visit to the MNC provides the visitor/audience a very enjoyable cinematic museum experience. Like some of the other museums discussed in this book, it has the advantage of having reopened at a time when museological and museographic problems are resolved by careful preparation and nothing is left to chance. The preliminary document for the project of the new museum ‘Towards a cinema museography’ went

68  ‘Thought of a museum of cinema’

a step further in that it invited not only museum professionals to work on it but also filmmakers, specialists in different areas from design to cinema.42 The MNC is the second most important museum for its archaeology of cinema collection in Europe and the Turin museum like its French counterpart holds three important collections of archaeology of cinema, one bought from the twin brothers John and William Barnes; one bought from the Belgian couple Pierre and Zette Levie and one more long standing which was assembled by the founder of the museum already mentioned, Maria Adriana Prolo, who also privileged the archaeology of cinema in her collecting activities.43 The Prolo’s collection contains 3,500 items, many connected with the history of entertainment in the seventeenth century and earlier part of eighteenth century: optical boxes, precious and rare examples of ‘mondi novi,’ ‘vues d’optiques,’ materials connected with the shadow theatres and many documents about optical spectacles of this period. The Barnes’ collection is also rich in artefacts which are considered part of the archaeology of cinema and it is especially rich in magic lanterns and glass slides of English origins (Figure 4.2 and 4.3).

Triple magic lantern. (Photograph by Giovanni Fontana, Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema)

FIGURE 4.2 

‘Thought of a museum of cinema’  69

Single magic lantern. (Photograph by Giovanni Fontana, Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema)

FIGURE 4.3 

The collections contain about 100 slides from the seventeenth century, and 2000 from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as rare materials connected with experiments about movement and prints of the same period. Similarly the Pierre and Zette Levie collection prioritise artefacts which are part of the archaeology of cinema. The first level of the museum is entirely dedicated to the archaeology of cinema.44 Many of the artefacts have been set up for the visitor to ‘experience the vision offered by the shadow theatre, the mondo niovi, optical boxes, and magic lanterns’ (Guide to the National Museum of Cinema 2000: 3). This ‘lived’ and interactive experience is interspersed with numerous objects and documents organised into eight thematic zones from the ‘birth of movement’ to ‘the origins of cinema and the birth of moving pictures’: the shadow theatre, the camera obscura, the optical boxes, the stereoscopies, the magic lanterns, the chronophotography, the kinetoscope and finally the cinematograph (Guide to the National Museum of Cinema 2000: 3). This exhibition of the archaeology of cinema in the Turin museum is a ‘spellbinding’ experience in the way it captures the visual journey right up to the birth of cinema through the richness of its artefacts.45 The Temple Hall on the second level is described in the museum literature as its ‘spectacular heart.’ In the centre of the hall, red ‘luxurious’ chaises-longue and two large screens await the visitors. On these two screens, at the time of my visits, you could view either a black and white film made by the museum itself entitled ‘Silent cinema in Turin’ or the film collage ‘A look at the history of Italy,’ made by Italian filmmaker, Carlo Lizzani, which reconstructs the history of Italy from the eyes of its filmmakers, from Visconti’s film on the Risorgimento to Moretti’s Palombella Rossa. This section of the museum with its concentration on Italian cinema still indicated the importance given to national cinema as expression of national identity and culture in the Turin museum. At the same time the two parallel film collages are stopped at regular intervals and the spectacular element continues with the opening up of the cupola above appearing as a sky, revealing floating images from the days of magic lanterns: a powerful fantastic show that recalls the best of Méliès. The surrounding displays recreate the sets of the many film genres which have evolved in the history of cinema from animation to westerns (with, for example, a typical saloon film set on

70  ‘Thought of a museum of cinema’

display) to musicals, etc.46 François Confino, the designer and architect in charge of the design of the museum created this section with a space for secular ‘worship’ in mind, which he called ‘chapels’: the ten genres/themes are inside ten ‘chapels’ surrounding the centre of the hall. He described his design of the Temple Hall: ‘[A] temple for cinema, a complicit and self-conscious tribute to the Mole Antonelliana; the building once designed to be a synagogue, today embraces the Seventh Art’ (Guide to the National Museum of Cinema 2000: 51). This ‘complicit and self-conscious tribute’ to the religious origins of the Mole Antonelliana turns the colossal statue of the God Moloch in Cabiria – a copy of the prop from the homonymous film is placed in a prominent section of the Temple Hall – into a deity of cinema. The Temple Hall’s architecture and design appears to want to recreate the cinematic experience as a transcendent journey: a fusion of mind, body and technology. The third level is given the title of ‘macchina del cinema’ (machine cinema); the exhibition of artefacts is distributed around the walkways and arches (it is near the top of the Mole and hence space is somewhat restricted) and it traces the journey in the history of filmmaking and its final creations, the film themselves. It is a detailed journey described in the museum’s printed guide as ‘a real educational course, dedicated to the various stages of film-making, revealing what is behind the screen, namely everything involved in the production of film so that it becomes show’ (Guide to the National Museum of Cinema 2000: 3). From this walkways and archways one can also look down to the central area of the Mole on the second level, the Temple Hall.

Conclusion Antonio Gramsci maintained that Italian ‘high’ literary culture had a tendency to look beyond its national borders, in the belief that transnational culture was superior to anything been done in Italy, in a total disregard of popular culture. Italian cinematic culture has at least broken ‘the inferiority complex’ and the opposite is now true: that looking at cultures beyond one’s national borders is a mark of both true cosmopolitanism as well as recognition of one’s culture. What is remarkable about the history of the cultural activities brought about by the Turin museum of cinema is the diversity of its exhibitions, as well as its strong record of screening and film programmes which accompanied all the important transformations in Italian cinema culture, from the internationally renowned neo-realist phase to the many crisis in Italian cinema (Brunetta 2003). The regular screenings, exhibitions, collaborations and publications stimulated and reinforced a shared common public film culture; the venture in establishing a museum and archive could just have resulted either in a museum of artefacts or a moving image archive open to a few specialists; Cherchi Usai has warned us in his book on The Death of Cinema (2001) about the moving image archive ending up either ‘as a kind of museum…asylum for cultural artefacts’ or, as in the case of the museums of cinema, becoming simply ‘a high-class amusement park.’47 On the contrary, the MNC has managed to date to retain a ‘live’ and working archive and popular exhibitions of cinema’s history and its archaeology, in a genuine attempt to reach out to all the people of Turin, of Italy and beyond. Without the Turin museum, cinematic culture would have undoubtedly continued its uninterrupted path, but very little would be known about its archaeology, its origins, the rich ‘golden age’ of the Turin film industry before World War I and between the wars, the different international trajectories in terms of conservation, exhibitions and cinema cultures, not to mention the engaging experience of visiting the new museum in the Mole Antonelliana.

‘Thought of a museum of cinema’  71

Notes 1 ‘It was then that I met the poets Carlo Chiaves and Guido Volante, who had both written screenplays, and Ernesto Maria Pasquali, who had left journalism for film directing. Being unable to find material on them, I began to read, copy after copy of magazines on silent cinema which I had found at the National Library’, Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, Maria Adriana Prolo, 2002, p. 16, my translation. 2 Bianco e Nero is a film journal first published in January 1937 by the ‘Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia’ based in Rome, to promote cinematographic culture in Italy. The journal is still published today. See http://www.fondazionecsc.it/context.jsp?ID_LINK=138&area=148 Also on the

cinematographic industry in Turin at the start of the twentieth century, see Rondolino (2000). 3 In 1994, the Museo Nazionale del Cinema acquired the Barnes brothers’ collection which amongst its artefacts contains many precious 18th hundred magic lanterns and glass slides. The Hove Museum and Art Gallery also bought part of the collection in 1997 which relates to the early years of British cinema.

See https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/discover/2015/02/26/the-barnes-brothers-collection/ 4 The ‘Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia’ was established in 1935 and it comprises the ‘Scuola Nazionale di Cinema’ (National Film School) and the ‘Cineteca Nazionale’ (the national film archive) with a deposit of over 120,000 films. For the concerted effort made under Fascist Italy to promote the cinematographic industry see also S. Gundle, Mussolini’s Dream Factory. Film Stardom in Fascist Italy, 2016. 5 Occhi che videro (Ubaldo Pittei; Turin, 1914). 6 Ricciotto Canudo is known for having coined the term the Seventh Art in his essay ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’ written in 1923. 7 Lucio D’Ambra was the pen name of Renato Manganella, an Italian film director and screen writer at the beginning of the twentieth century. Giovanni Papini was a writer and literary critic, whose adherence to the Fascist regime brought him into disrepute at the end of World War 2 when he joined a Franciscan Convent. 8 In the Italian context of particular note is the oral history research done by the historian Luisa Passerini. 9 Prolo’s own account in Cahiers du Cinéma, Naissance d’un Musée. Le Musée de Cinéma du Turin, no. 33, March 1954, pp. 18–19. 10 Maria Adriana Prolo, Storia del cinema muto italiano, 1951. 11 The book in question is by E. F. Palmieri, Vecchio Cinema Italiano,Venezia, 1941 quoted in G. P. Brunetta, Guida alla storia del cinema italiano, 1905–2003, 2003, p. 413. 12 My translation of ‘anello di congiunzione fra la lanterna magica e gli apparecchi cinematografici da presa e da proiezione’ cited in Pesenti Campagnoni, op. cit., p. 25. 13 The Turin FERT Studios have been at the centre of the Maciste series production; see also J. Reich, The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema, 2015). 14 La Stampa is an Italian daily printed in Turin but with a nation-wide distribution. It is still one of the main national papers in Italy. 15 D. Pesenti Campagnoni, Alla luce delle fonti d’archivio: il volto storico del Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, in Nero su Bianco. I fondi archivistici del Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1997, p. 32–33. 16 This history is traced in a general pre-bulletin, June 1941 to September 1958 no. 0 (1962). 17 The first funding for the museum were divided as follows: Fiat 3000 lire; Cartiere (paper mills) Burgo 300; Banca Anonima di Credito, 1000; Cassa di Risparmio, 500; Amministrazione Provinciale (provincial administrative body), 500; Istituto di San Paolo (bank), 300; Pastificio Agnesi (pasta firm); FERT 1000; Ente Provinciale per il Turismo (provincial tourist board), 1000. 18 Palazzo Madama was the residence of the first Italian Parliament, before it moved to Florence and subsequently to Rome. It now houses the Turin Museum of Ancient Art. 19 The Cineteca Italiana in Milan was first established in 1947. It has a deposit of 35,000 films from the origins to today. FIAF considers the Cineteca one of the best archives of European silent movies. In 1985 it also opened a small museum of cinema, see https://www.cinetecamilano.it/museo 20 All the material has now been catalogued with the support of the Piedmont Regional Fund and the fine archival work of Carla Ceresa and her team and is available in a publication alongside a series of essays on the history and activities of the MNC. Carla Ceresa and Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, Nero su Bianco, I fondi archivistici del Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin 1997).

72  ‘Thought of a museum of cinema’

21 Notiziario dell’Associazione Museo Nazionale del Cinema, anno 1, no. 1, January 1966, p. 4. 22 Fondo Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1958–1989, A126-A138; A 140. 23 Ibid. 1947–1957, A113. 24 Notiziario, Anno I, No. 1, January 1966. This first issue incorporates a description of cultural activities undertaken prior to 1966, beginning with January 1962. 25 Fondo Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1960, A126/11. An absorbing account of early cinema in Naples can be found in Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map. Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, 1993. 26 Paul Ginsborg ed., Stato dell’Italia. Il bilancio politico, economico, sociale e culturale di un paese che cambia, 1994, pp. 643–644. 27 Fondo Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1961, A127/3. 28 The Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento is housed in the Palazzo Carignano, which from 1848 to 1861 was in use as House of Deputies of the Subalpine Parliament (the predecessor of the Italian Parliament). 29 Cabiria has been described by the Italian film historian Gian Piero Brunetta as the ‘polar star of early cinema’. G. P. Brunetta, Guida alla storia del cinema italiano, p. 33. It is also mentioned in Gianni Rondolino, Il fondo Cabiria, in Nero su Bianco, I fondi Archivistici del Museo Nazionale del Cinema, pp. 69–72.The original version of Cabiria, made in 1914 has been lost.What reached posterity is a version re-montaged by Pastrone himself in 1931, this version of Cabiria was restored by the MNC in 2006. Cherchi Usai has found that some of the shots missing from the 1931 version have been found in 16mm prints in the New York MoMA’s archive from a shorter version of the film released in the US in 1921, and that may be other archives around the world could hold other copies as well, see P. Cherchi Usai, ‘CABIRIA, an Incomplete Masterpiece: The Quest for the Original 1914 Version.’ 30 Neorealism is the name of the movement which has come to define Italian national cinema. Much has been written on Italian Neorealist Cinema. A detailed account of the movement can be found in Millicent Marcus (1986), Mark Shiel (2006), Christopher Wagstaff (2007), Torunn Haaland (2012). 31 Fondo Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1965–1966, A128/7. 32 The films screened were: Il Bandito, Senza Pietà, Il Mulino del Po, Luci del Varietà, Anna, La Lupa, La Spiaggia, La Tempesta, I Dolci Inganni, Lettere di una Novizia, L’Imprevisto, La Steppa, Il Mafioso in Notiziario, Anno I, No. 1, January 1966, p. 14. 33 For more details of these programming in the first era of the museum of cinema see Cere (2006: 300–301). 34 Notiziario, Anno V, No. 14–15, May-December, p. 4; Fondo Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1970, A129/8. 35 An account of some of these activities up to 1971 can be found in Cere, op. cit., pp. 301–303. 36 For a detailed description of the MNC collaborations and dedicated exhibitions, screenings and retrospectives of French cinema and film actors see Cere, 2006, op. cit., pp. 301–302. 37 Notiziario, Anno IV, No. 10, May 1969, p. 6. 38 Notiziario, Anno I, No. 1, January 1966, p. 4. This collaboration is quite unique, as the British National Film Archive was not particularly forthcoming in lending its film material to other museums/cinémathèques. For an explanation of the archive’s restrictive approach to exchanging, lending and screening its material see Penelope Houston, Keepers of the Frame. The film Archives, op. cit., pp. 37–48; see also chapter two of this book for related references. 39 Notiziario, Notiziario, Anno III, No. 6, January 1968, p. 3. 40 Notiziario, Anno IV, No. 10, May 1969, p. 6; Films screened included Es and Schönzeit für füchse by Ulrich Schamoni (1966 and 1965, respectively), Der findling by George Moorse (1967), Mahlzeiten by Edgar Reitz (1967) and Wilder reiter Gmbh by Franz Joseph Spiecker (1967). 41 For a detailed description of the MNC dedicated exhibitions, screenings and retrospectives of American Cinema and stars/actors, both Hollywood and ‘underground,’ see Cere 2006, op. cit., p. 302. 42 The board of the ‘Preliminary Scientific Project’ was composed of Paolo Bertetto, David Francis (who had also been involved in the creation of MoMI in London), Lino Micciché, Donata Pesenti Campagnoni and David Robinson. This assortment of European museums and cinema specialists was also joined by François Confino for the ‘Artistic Design and Deco’ and reading through the document I discovered that advice was also sought from the British filmmaker Peter Greenaway. In the long list of acknowledgements in the Guide to the National Museum of Cinema (2000) was also in evidence how many other colleagues around Europe and beyond were consulted.

‘Thought of a museum of cinema’  73

43 Prolo’s collection of archaeology of cinema is described by Pesenti Campagnoni, the current director of collections as one of two of Prolo’s passions, the other being silent cinema, Pesenti Campagnoni (2002: 25). 44 The ground floor is the ‘piano di accoglienza’ (entrance and welcoming floor) with ticket office, café, restaurant, bookshop, etc. 45 The Girona and Paris’s museums also have excellently organized exhibitions of the archaeology of cinema, but as mentioned in the previous chapter on the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma, the latter has now a much reduced exhibition space for their collection of the archaeology of cinema. 46 The genre and themes described in the literature are not however always immediately recognisable at first sight, these are: ‘animation, cinema of the absurd, horror and fantasy, cinema of mirrors, western, musical, science fiction, experimental and family cinema, melodramas of love and death, catastrophic cinema’. Small Guide to the Museum’s brochure, not dated. 47 From the Readers’s comments in Paolo Cherchi Usai,The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age, 2001, pp. 115–116.

Bibliography Bertellini, G. ed. (2013) Italian Silent Cinema. A Reader. Blooomington, IN: John Libbey and Indiana University Press. Bertellini, G. (2017) Silent Italian Cinema. A New Medium for Old Geographies, in F. Burke (ed) A Companion to Italian Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Bertetto, P. and Pesenti Campagnoni, D. (1996) La magia dell’immagine. Macchine e spettacoli nelle collezioni del Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Milan: Electa. Bondanella, P. (2001) Italian cinema. From Neorealism to the Present. New York: Continuum. Brunetta, G. P. (2003) Guida alla storia del cinema italiano: 1905–2003. Turin: Einaudi. Brunetta, G. P. (2008) Il cinema muto italiano. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Bruno, G. (1993) Streetwalking on a Ruined Map. Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Burke, F. ed. (2017) A Companion to Italian Cinema. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Canudo, R. (1993, new ed.) Reflections on the Seventh Art, in R. Abel (ed.) French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907–1929, vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cere, R. (2006) ‘Exhibiting Cinema’: the Cultural Activities of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1958–1971. Film History, 18, 3: 295–305. Ceresa, C. and Pesenti Campagnoni, D. eds (1997) Nero su Bianco, I fondi archivistici del Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema and Lindau s.r.l. Cherchi Usai, P. (1988) ‘CABIRIA, an Incomplete Masterpiece: The Quest for the Original 1914 Version‘. Film History, 2, 2: 155–165. Cherchi Usai, P. (2001) The Death of Cinema. History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age. London: British Film Institute. Confino, F. (2000) Mettre en scène une mise en scène ou le paradoxe de l’exposeur, in D. Pesenti Compagnoni (ed.) Vedute del ‘mondo novo’. Vues d’optiques settecentesche nella collezione del Museo nazionale del cinema. Torino: Umberto Allemandi. Cortini, L. and Pimpinelli, M. A. (2005) Audiovisual Archives in Italy:The efforts of the ANAI group on the description of film and non-film material. Il mondo degli archivi online. Quadrimestrale di informazione e dibattito. De Berti, R. ed. (1996) Un secolo di cinema a Milano. Milan: Il Castoro. Della Casa, S. and Pinto, F. eds (2001) Torino città del cinema. Milan and Turin: Castoro and Associazione Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Forgacs, D. (1990) Italian Culture in the Industrial Era: 1880–1980. Cultural industries, politics and the public. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ginsborg, P. ed. (1994) Stato dell’Italia. Il bilancio politico, economico, sociale e culturale di un paese che cambia. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Guide to the National Museum of Cinema (2000) Turin: The National Museum of Cinema, Maria Adriana Prolo Foundation.

74  ‘Thought of a museum of cinema’

Gundle, S. (2016) Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy. Oxford: Berghahn. Haaland, T. (2012) Italian Neorealist Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kidd, J. (2017) Museums in the New Mediascape.Transmedia, Participation, Ethics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Marcus, M. (1986) Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pacini, N. (2001) The collection of movie posters preserved by the National Museum of Cinema, in Guide to the National Museum of Cinema. Turin: The National Museum of Cinema, Maria Adriana Prolo Foundation. Pasqualicchio, N. and Scandola, A. eds (2019) Francesco Rosi. Il cinema e oltre. Milan: Mimesis Editore. Pesenti Campagnoni, D. (1997a) Alla luce delle fonti d’archivio: il volto storico del Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, in C. Ceresa, and D. Pesenti Campagnoni eds, Nero su Bianco. I fondi archivistici del Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema and Lindau s.r.l. Pesenti Campagnoni, D. (1997b) Tra patrimonio filmico e patrimonio cinematografico.Alcune tracce storiche sui Musei del Cinema e dintorni. Notiziario dell’Associazione Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 49–50: 21–32. Pesenti Campagnoni, D. (2000) Vedute del‘mondo novo’. Vues d’optiques settecentesche nella collezione del Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Turin: Umberto Allemandi. Pesenti Campagnoni, D. (2002) Maria Adriana Prolo. Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema and Fondazione Maria Adriana Prolo. Pesenti Campagnoni, D. (2006) The preservation, care and exploitation of documentation related to the cinema: an unresolved issue. Film History, 18, 3: 306–318. Prolo, M. A. and Carluccio, L. (1978) Cinema: storia e museo in Il Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Turin: Cassa di Risparmio. Reich, J. (2015) The Maciste Films of Italian Silent Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rondolino, G. (2000) ‘La naissance du cinéma à Turin’ in Catalogue Collectif, Turin, Berceau du Cinema Italien. Milan: Editrice Il Castoro. Shiel, M. (2006) Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City. New York: Columbia University Press. Sorlin, P. (1996) Italian National Cinema: 1896–1996. London: Routledge. Testa, C. (1996) Poet of Civic Courage.The Films of Francesco Rosi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Toffetti, S. ed. (2002) Le Dragon et l’Alouette. Maria Adriana Prolo Henri Langlois Correspondance 1948–1979. Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema and Fondazione Maria Adriana Prolo. Wagstaff, C. ( 2007) Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

5 THE MUSEU DEL CINEMA IN GIRONA, CATALONIA

The Museu del Cinema in Girona: an experiment in a locally run museum The ‘Museu del Cinema’ in Girona, Catalonia, is the most recently established of the five museums researched for this book, and in spite of the climate of decline of European cinema museums described by Robinson (2006), it is a highly successful and well-run museum. It is also the only ‘regional’ museum among the five case studies of this book and although it is often referred to in the literature as a Spanish museum, its institutional and organisational arrangements are to all intent and purposes Catalan. Catalonia has not achieved full national independent status from the Spanish State to date although it has strived to do so for many decades and in 2017 the referendum for independence was held but subsequently ruled illegal by Spain.1 In January 1994 the ‘Ajuntament’ (Municipal Council) of Girona bought the pre-cinematographic and cinematographic collection of Tomàs Mallol, a Catalan collector and filmmaker on the condition and promise to house it in a future museum of cinema in the town. The museum in Girona was the result of much negotiation between the council of Girona and the owner of the collection Tomàs Mallol. It is an unprecedented model of co-operation and innovation in museums’ developments; most municipal councils do not dispose of large budgets to enable them to buy private collections to exhibit in public institutions,2 and even in cases where finances are less of a problem, it is nonetheless the case that in today’s neoliberal climate, museum policies and priorities about funding are often dictated by plans involving private-public partnerships. The financial arrangements between Girona’s town council and Tomàs Mallol are a possible model for the future of acquisition policies of public museums: the council bought the collection and it is paying it in yearly instalments over the period of 100 years, rather than with an outright payment,3 a sum which the Girona council did not dispose of in its entirety for an immediate purchase. A more public-spirit ethos may dictate that collections should be donated rather than sold, but as we have seen in relation to the two British collections discussed in previous chapters, the Will Day and the Barnes brothers’ collections, which, respectively, went to France and Italy, a similar fate may have befallen the Mallol collection unless a solution was found to buy it by the Girona municipality. Many private cinematographic collections around the world, with notable exceptions, have struggled to find a museum home or any home except for the occasional temporary exhibition

76  The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia

space. Girona’s local political and cultural administrators have proved more attentive to the value of cinema archaeology, history and heritage and to more wide-ranging notions of what constitutes culture than their counterpart in more established and richer national contexts. The Girona collection encompasses a wide chronology, because Mallol like Prolo in Italy many years earlier discussed in the previous chapter, concentrated his collecting priorities on the archaeology of cinema (as well as amateur equipment and the unique collection of children’s cinematographic items, also exhibited in the museum). This has made the Girona museum an important example for the history of pre-cinema up to 1895. The overall collection spans from the seventeenth century up to the 1970s, with the majority of items from the mid-eighteenth to the earlier part of the twentieth century. The collection, although amassed more recently in comparison to the previous ones discussed in the earlier chapters, is very extensive and it comprises 20,000 items overall, 8000 of which are artefacts and instruments from pre-cinema and early cinema. Another 10,000 items are made up of fixed image documents (drawings, paintings, photographs, posters and prints), 800 different kinds of films as well as a library of 700 magazines, journals and books.The museum has also a dedicated research room and library with open access for students and cinephiles alike, as well as lending facilities. According to its first and current director Pons i Busquet, the project for the museum of cinema consisted of four initial fundamental phases. The first was the development of the architectural, museological and museographic project and design for the permanent collection. The second consisted of the establishment of a foundation: the ‘Fundació Museu del Cinema-Col. lecció Tomàs Mallol’ with a board membership drawn from the general public, Girona councillors and the Mallol family to oversee the museum activities and management. The third entailed the drawing up of plans for an inventory and catalogue of the collection; and the fourth, plans for information and dissemination to the general public, especially using new digital technologies. The foundation ‘Museu del Cinema-Col.lecció Tomàs Mallol’ began its work in earnest in 1995 by supporting the plans of the director for a future operational function of the museum throughout the 4 years running up to its opening. From 1994 to 1998, the year of the official opening of the museum, the trajectory to its final realisation was a ‘long one and not without its difficulties’ but it finally materialised into a museum of cinema (Pons i Busquet 1999: 203).

The collection of Tomàs Mallol Tomàs Mallol like many others before him was a passionate collector as well as an accomplished amateur filmmaker, with the occasional venture into professional filmmaking. His interest in everything to do with cinema, but especially the ‘technical side’, is shrouded in the childhood myth (myths originating from childhood are common with other figures discussed in this book) about having seen itinerant cinema projections in his native village, Sant Pere Pescador. Mallol claimed that this made a big impression on him because as a mere 8 years old he built a rudimentary projector which is actually exhibited in the amateur section of the museum. Mallol made many amateur shorts throughout his lifetime and it was partly as a result of these activities that he began collecting cinematographic equipment. The collecting ‘bug’, however, he maintained started after reading Ceram’s Archaeology of the Cinema, which by his own admission influenced the direction of the collection, although alongside he continued to collect amateur cinema artefacts and objects relating to children’s cinema.4 This last section of the collection, which will be described in more details below, is very distinctive for two reasons. Firstly, it was in Barcelona that Cine NIC was invented, one of the early developments of moving image toys and secondly, it is one of very few collections which is specifically related to childhood, toys and

The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia  77

cinema.This collection comprises the total of 2500 artefacts (projectors and viewers, optical toys, films, etc.) with 1413 objects solely connected to Cine NIC.These are exhibited in a shared space with the collection on amateur cinema.

The museum’s philosophy about exhibiting pre-cinema and cinema Right from the start, the museum was conceived within the overall planning of the cultural activities of the city of Girona and alongside other established museums’ exhibitions.The permanent exhibition of the Mallol collection has been described by the museum director Jordi Pons i Busquet – in an article much more concerned with the museum’s philosophy rather than the day-to-day developments – as an attempt at explaining humanity’s need to ‘trap reality in images’; a constant preoccupation in human undertakings. Four main areas are identified in his article as the vehicle to explain the philosophy behind the exhibition of cinema’s artefacts: The different ways and apparatuses invented and adopted to represent images prior to cinema’s invention. The technological evolution of these right up to cinema’s invention. The origins of cinema: first apparatuses, industries, films and stars. Two examples of cinema as an undoubtedly popular phenomenon: amateur cinema and children’s cinema. (Pons i Busquet in Romaguera 1995: 289) All these themes are prominent in many cinema museum’s installations; the projection of images on a screen, the fixing of images on a surface (photography), the investigation into movement and its representation, the pioneers of cinema, the popular developments of cinema. But if the first three categories are recognisably part of previous and well-established accounts of museums of cinema, as we have seen in the previous chapters, the fourth, amateur and children’s cinema is undoubtedly an original contribution of this museum towards exhibiting cinema-related popular objects.

The permanent exhibitions The museum is housed in a turn of the nineteenth-century building (Figure 5.1), which although not an ideal space for a museum of this kind – it is distributed on three floors – is nonetheless made coherent by the exhibition’s historical and thematic layout and organisation. Its success in exhibition terms lies in its chronological linearity but also in the idea behind the collection, which as stated earlier it has a preference towards the archaeology of cinema; it also takes a distinct longitudinal historical view about the creation of images. It comes across as a thoroughly well-conceived and quite ‘enthralling’ museum of cinema. On the ground floor, the visitor is greeted not only by the ticket office and the customary shop but also by an introduction of the permanent exhibition, appropriately on screen, about the history of projected images in a similar way to the Turin museum’s entrance floor. The permanent exhibition of the archaeology of cinema is clearly predicated on Ceram’s Archaeology of the Cinema (1965), starting as it does with shadow plays and finishing before the advent of television. In Ceram’s words: Shadow entertainments have no direct technical connection with cinema but the affinity is obvious. In their consistent use of the animated two-dimensional image flung upon a screen and their wide range of subject matter they are more akin to the motion picture than any of its cultural forerunners. (Ceram 1965: 26)

78  The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia

FIGURE 5.1 

The front façade of the Museu del Cinema in Girona. (Author’s photograph)

The exhibition starts at the top of the building on the third floor and the inversion of the structure within the building with its ‘descendent feel’ bestow an artifice of its own to the journey of light and shadows. The top third floor is solely concentrated on the early archaeology of cinema and the many attempts at projecting images right up to the developments of photography and of the ‘fixing of the image.’ Chinese shadow plays, with puppets, begin the exhibition, with a ‘live’ example of their silhouette on screen. There are also silhouettes and puppets examples in the exhibition from many different cultures: Javanese, Indian, Turkish and Greek among others.5 The intrinsic ‘frailty’ of these objects is a spontaneous marker of the ‘tentative’ nature of the journey of ‘light and shadows’ began many thousand years ago. This section of the museum entitled ‘Emerging from the shadows’ also provides different examples of types of shadows right up to the nineteenth century, from Japanese magic mirrors to ombrascopes to ‘litofania’: ‘For the first time, the light, the darkness and the screen create a spectacle.’6 The space with shadows amusements and artefacts is followed by a room turned into a camera obscura, which although not strictly a forerunner of the cinema is always a ‘magical’ and ‘mysterious’ way to experience its ancient connection especially with photography. In fact ‘(T)he “dark chamber” is nowadays regarded as the direct forerunner of the photographic camera’ (Nekes 2004: 201). Although images are unstable and fleeting in the camera obscura, the optical principle

The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia  79

of capturing exterior images in reverse through a small hole in a dark room always prompts wonderment even in visitors who are well aware of the way it is a natural physical phenomenon. There are also many objects exhibited (196 in all) such as portable camera obscura and many different optical boxes used to ‘trap images’. Much effort was put into this process during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the ‘capturing of real-life images’ through optical devices and this exhibition in turn captures the essence and intensity of these ancestors of photography and even documentary film; part of this section of the exhibition also includes some items relating to photography and its technical development.There are many artefacts based on mirror and optical principles; the ‘magic mirror’ attraction always popular, which Mannoni described as the camera obscura’s ‘poor cousin of more complex character’ (Mannoni1995: 17). Other artefacts exhibited are connected with anamorphosis and on view are also antique texts about optics, including a classic text by Father Athanassius Kircher: ‘Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae,’ first published in 1646 and mistakenly reputed to be behind the invention of the magic lantern.7 On the same floor alongside shadow plays and camera obscura is the very popular and ubiquitous magic lantern, in its multiple guises and transformations. The ‘centre piece’ of the archaeology of cinema, the ‘magic lantern’ remains ‘the longest-lasting, most inventive, and most artistic of the “ancestors” which were eventually snuffed out by the birth of cinema’ (Mannoni 2000: 33). This instrument evolved over three centuries and, contrary to received opinion, lantern shows did not stop suddenly with the advent of cinema; they continued well into the twentieth century although they did phase out by the thirties and are now to be found only in dedicated settings and in museums of cinema.8 There are many examples of magic lanterns exhibited as well as glass plates and advertising prints of shows. This is the section best represented in terms of number and quality of artefacts (2883 items in total). As mentioned above, it is not entirely surprising, given its widespread diffusion and longevity as a medium of popular entertainment, public information and education. The lantern section exhibited comprises both domestic and professional lanterns, as well as a piece on the sources of illumination for magic lanterns. ‘Live’ examples include a phantasmagoria and a glass slide show. The glass plates collection visualise a very rich source of themes and images, which were part of life and the culture of the day: devils, skeletons, ‘la mort’, panoramic views, kaleidoscopic images, various characters from the ‘commedia dell’arte’ (a popular subject in lantern slides of the eighteenth century), scientific images about the cosmos, magical creatures, battles, people in local costumes from different parts of the world; the collection even comprise a set about a hot air balloon.

Amateur cameras and ‘Cine NIC’ Since the establishment of the museum, the director and curators have endeavoured to develop and interpret the section on children’s and amateur cameras in a meaningful way for the public in spite of the scarcity of assembled documentation and historical research on these objects and their use. According to Gemma Carbó i Ribugent,9 nothing much has been written about children’s cinematographic toys, and on Cine NIC in particular (the richest cine-toy example in the museum because of its Catalan origins mentioned above), whether about its history or the social and cultural impact it had since it was patented back in April 1931. However, the museum has produced an educational booklet for schools named the ‘Dossier del Professor’ about the museum which also contains a short account of the history of Cine NIC (Dossier del Professor, not dated: 13). Cine NIC was a Barcelona-based company which first pioneered children’s animated image projectors. The projector was invented in Barcelona in 1931 by two brothers Ramón and Tomás

80  The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia

Nicolau Griñó,10 who were, respectively, in charge of the artistic and technological developments.This ‘children’s toy cinema’ had an enormous success worldwide; the patent for Cine NIC was sold in many different countries internationally and as far afoot as Argentina, Canada and Japan, and all the different countries in turn produced their own version of the projector and strip of films (Artigas i Candela 1998: 19–20).11 Like the magic lantern a century before, the apparatuses for cinema projection also saw developments geared toward the domestic environment and in that context especially towards children. Cine NIC logo was that of an elephant ridden by a black child with the exaggerated features which were part of the colonial and racist views of black people of the time.This original racist logo has been discarded in today’s reintroduction of this toy, which is a kind of vintage replica of the original. Nonetheless, the problematic aspect of this toy’s logo is not mentioned in the museum literature or the little historiographic material in existence, an aspect of the exhibit which should be critically addressed for the visitors.12 Along with the purchase of the projector a catalogue of more than 200 film strips of animated drawings was made available for children’s viewing. These were hand coloured with aniline as typographic paints were too greasy and did not allow for a transparent view. Many of the film strips were based on traditional story and fairy tales. Cine NIC also bought rights from Disney for Pinocchio, Snow White, Peter Pan, etc. Some new characters were also created such as ‘Tom el cowboy and ‘Miau el gato’ (Frutos Esteban 1999: 125). The development of this toy was significant for two reasons: one, because it was the first ‘children animated image projector’ and two, because it enabled children to experiment with film animation strips, a hands on creative cinematic toy.13 The ‘NIC sonoro,’ examples of which are visible in the permanent exhibition, came out over a decade later in April 1943 but sound examples were already in existence in other parts of Spain. These new models were still based on the ‘silent’ projector but in addition it had a recorder attached which told the story. By moving the handle, the film and the sound came on synchronically (Frutos Esteban 1999: 125).14 All these toys were very successful well into the 1970s and there are examples from all decades in the museum exhibition space dedicated to them.15

American cinema in the museum: ‘The Dream Factory’ The successful relationship between collectors and Girona’s Museu del Cinema has not stopped, however, at exhibiting the archaeology of cinema and Mallol’s collection. Other collaborations have taken place over the years with another cinema collector, Maite Minguez Ricart, cofounder of the distribution company Manga Films.The agreement signed in 2002 stipulated that the museum would be able to exhibit pieces from 1800 items, part of the Maite Minguez Ricart collection, particularly rich in costumes from Hollywood cinema. This only takes up a small section of the museum, compared to the Mallol’s collection, but it is the only part of the museum dedicated entirely to artefacts from cinema production sets, much of it contemporary. Items exhibited centre predominantly around the star system and its Hollywood origins, not surprisingly this exhibition goes under the name ‘The Dream Factory’, a well-known pseudonym for Hollywood cinema, and true to its title the objects are all about American stars, pictures, costumes, weapons, etc. As it is a relatively small space within the overall museum, objects from the collection are exhibited in turn and changed regularly. Examples on show range from Marilyn Monroe’s dresses, James Dean’s boots, Charlie Chaplin’s uniform in The Great Dictator, etc. The collaboration between the museum and Maite Minguez Ricart was renewed in 2013

The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia  81

with additional artefacts added to the museum, for example, the Kriptonite from Superman, Batman’s mask and a dress from Gilda amongst others. This kind of exhibition always prompts a reflection on the meaning of this individual objects on show for the visitor. If looking at costumes in museums worn in previous ages may reveal the class-based, hence economic and cultural distinctions argued by Bourdieu, what is a fictional cinematic costume revealing? As we have seen when discussing the Cinémathèque Française, the likes of Truffaut thought that this kind of exhibition detracted from the more important task of making and viewing films. Nonetheless, many visitors of the museum when asked about viewing the actual objects used in movies they were familiar with, they generally felt this roused their memories and allowed them to relive imaginatively the whole cultural experience of the films. As a museum exhibition, ‘The Dream Factory’ inspires the visitors differently, in as much as it evokes a ‘lived’ experience of entertainment-oriented films. In the exhibition space, alongside the artefacts, there is also a video installation with running clips of films, documentaries and news footage, a random collection of audio-visual material from Hollywood.

The temporary exhibitions Alongside the permanent exhibitions of pre-cinema and cinema’s artefacts which are by far the most rich and extensive throughout the museum, the curators have also dedicated some attention and resources to temporary exhibitions, ever since the opening of the museum in 1998, on a wide range of topics and drawing on all their collections, old and new.The temporary exhibitions have sought to balance the bias inherent in the collections by organising exhibitions about more contemporary oriented cinema-related themes, from the stars system to sound to filmmakers, etc. These temporary exhibitions, which are a much larger part of some of the activities of the other museums considered in this book (especially those which privilege contemporary exhibitions and film seasons, rather than exhibition of artefacts about archaeology and cinematography) are also very important to the Girona museum. The museum is also very successful in integrating its activities into the ‘life-cinema’ culture of Girona. Over the years they have produced at least two-yearly exhibitions, often combined when appropriate by week-long presentations and screening programmes, both at the Museu del Cinema itself as well as at the independent cinema house of Girona, the Cinema Truffaut. One such exhibition was dedicated to the actor Greta Garbo, entitled ‘L’ Enigma Garbo 1905– 1990’ (Figure 5.2), which comprised a range of stills from her films and famous photographs on show in the small gallery adjacent to the entrance, accompanied by presentations and screening programme across the two institutions. The museum and Cinema Truffaut often collaborate, not only in relation to temporary exhibitions, but also in relation to all the other cinematic activities and film seasons.16 Of particular significance for the local visitors/audiences are the exhibitions and film seasons organised on Spanish and Catalan filmmakers, normally around specific themes which are linked to the two respective ‘national’ cultures, for example:‘Buñuel: l’últim viatge’ (Buñuel, the last journey), a photographic exhibition of Buñuel filmography based on his journey to Madrid (2000–2001) and the exhibition dedicate to Catalan filmmakers:‘Open Screen 2010.A Forum for New Creators: Òscar Pérez, Joan Enric Barceló,Victor Correas, Paco Cavero and David Ruiz’ (2010). Also many examples from the temporary exhibition programme over the period between 1998 and 2019 reveal a productive combination of film critical practices applied to museum exhibitions. For example, one of the first exhibitions ‘Una Mitologia,’ The Century of Cinema

82  The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia

FIGURE 5.2  Poster for the temporary exhibition on Greta Garbo, Museu del Cinema in Girona. (Author’s photograph)

II (1998–1999), reveals the ‘myth-making machine’ in the construction of film stars through the exhibition of 91 photos from classic Hollywood cinema: ‘Neither sheer artifice nor sheer reality.’17 Another exhibition along the same theme of stardom was on in 2014–2015: ‘Silence Stars. The Star System in Hollywood Silent Films,’ albeit with a very novel curatorial interpretation and a subtle treatment of their artistic achievements, somewhat different from the treatment of more contemporary Hollywood stars: ‘This exhibition aims to discover the modernity of silent films, the hand of boundless creativity of its stars, who built a universe of extraordinary power and visual poetry.’18 Other significant examples in the museum’s temporary exhibitions over the years have been dedicated to sound and scores for the cinema, ‘La partitura sonora,’ Cinema I, an audio-visual montage of 200 fragments of the most popular film scores (1998). The last example I want to mention here is the temporary exhibition ‘Cineastes contra magnats,’ about the ‘manipulation’ of film by television, again an example of the museum curatorial critical skills in their preparation of exhibitions linked to contemporary media and film culture. Temporary exhibitions of this nature are clearly dedicated to themes which are increasingly part of the ways people think and understand cinema: contemporary leisure but also consumerled industry, which the museum attempts to frame in a not entirely uncritical discourse of its

The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia  83

role in the cultural life of its visitors. Intrinsic to this is the specific role of the museum and the independent cinema house in the circulation and promotion of Catalan film culture, which will conclude this case-study.

The museum and Catalan film culture As we have seen in some of the other museums discussed in this book, the role of museums of cinema is also important in preserving and exhibiting national cinema culture, especially when, as in Catalonia, this has often had to contend with the dominant hegemonic culture of the Spanish nation-state. In this respect at least, some museums of cinema are key, in spite of their international outlook, to ‘authenticate and preserve identities through the presentation of heritage… national museums are implicit in the construction of national identities’ (McLean 2005: 1). In museums of cinema the exhibiting and uncovering of national film heritage is not embraced, however, as a mere ‘nationalist’ project. In many ways, given the nature of cinema itself (and its artefacts), cultural homogenous interpretation is not always either appropriate or relevant; narratives of cinema have always offered more ‘viewpoints’ even when national-centred. Nonetheless, it is evident that the work of the museum of cinema in Girona is also about uncovering, exhibiting and screening a shared Catalan cultural identity through the cinema and other media, which was previously suppressed.19 Therefore, alongside a strong European and international identity, especially evident in some of the permanent exhibitions of the archaeology of cinema, it is also a museum of cinema in a future nation of the twenty-first century. The Girona museum’s activities validate Kaplan’s point about how ‘each country uses its museums to represent and reconstitute itself anew in each generation’ (Kaplan 1994: 4). That is not to say that the ‘absence’ or ‘presence’ of Spain is a major conscious concern in the museum’s exhibitions and cultural activities.20 Nonetheless, one of the first cultural activities organised by the ‘Museu del Cinema’ after its opening was the ‘Homage to the pioneers of Catalan cinema.’ This entailed a series of screening of classic silent Catalan films accompanied by live music as it would have been during their original screening; all the films shown were lent by the ‘Filmoteca de Catalunya,’ based in Barcelona.The museum itself holds a large collection of Catalan film posters (near 20,000) from the forties to the sixties mainly from a distribution house in Barcelona, although there is clearly no space to exhibit even a small portion of them in the existing museum. A few older rare pieces are exhibited in the museum’s archaeology of cinema section, such as the poster on the first projection of the Lumière brothers and one for the Optical Theatre of Èmile Reynaud (Pantomimes Lumineuse). A final mention goes to the museum website as it has, like that of the Italian museum, a particularly well-designed interactive face which allows the virtual visitor to explore the museum’s levels and the different exhibits within them.The website went online on 28 December 2001 and it is described as the ‘virtual door of the museum,’ the aim of which was clearly to publicise the museum but also to inform the public of its activities and to encourage a non-virtual visit. It can be accessed in four different languages: Catalan, Spanish, English and French; however, not all the local information and links are available in the latter two languages. The website ‘hits-visits’ have grown exponentially since its introduction but the museum communication policy has developed further following the introduction of a variety of social media from Twitter to Instagram. In a case study about ‘the presence of Catalan museums on social media platforms’ the Girona Museu del Cinema scored somewhere in mid-point in the category of ‘small or medium-sized’ institutions: ‘Some small or medium-sized centres are very active on Twitter and receive many

84  The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia

replies. For instance, the Museu del Cinema de Girona has tweeted more than 2800 times since the account was created and has more than 4200 followers (Badell 2015: 255). Museum literature about the presence of museums on digital platforms has confirmed the link between these and an increase in the material visits. Similarly, the Museu del Cinema’s own audience surveys have found that both the official website and the social media traffic have helped to increase the actual visits to the museum, many of the respondents stated that they had also visited the museum website prior to the actual visit.

Conclusion The museum of cinema in Girona is an excellent example of a contemporary museum institution; it is well run, very user-friendly with an open-access archive and loan system. Since its establishment, it has undertaken a quantitative yearly audience/visitor study and in some years, also a small but significant qualitative study, something that even in larger museums is not approached in such a systematic way. All the data and information collated are inserted in the yearly reports which are accessible for all to see. This openness distinguishes this museum from some of the other studied, which keep the collation of data about visitors only accessible to museum staff and to researchers when approached. The museum director wrote confidently that given ‘the quality, the quantity and the coherence of the collection, it was comparable to the best museum and private collections in Europe dedicated to pre-cinema and early cinema (Pons i Busquet 1995: 313). I would add that the museum policies and the quality of the temporary exhibitions, the user-friendly approach to the general public and to cinema and museum researchers, makes it even more than a comparable institution. This museum’s journey is both visually and intellectually stimulating and although strictly chronological in its interpretation of the history of the archaeology of cinema, it is as close to a ‘cinema museum’ as it can get.

Notes 1 Catalonia is a territory within the Spanish State with autonomous political status. Although the Spanish State has 17 different regions with autonomous status, different levels of autonomy apply to them. Catalonia along with a few other ‘historical regions’ was granted a higher level of autonomy as it is one of four regions which claim to be a nation with its own language, culture and traditions. Within this greater legislative and executive autonomy Catalan culture has always played a pivotal role, the museum in Girona is part of the cultural and symbolic value attached to this aspiring nation. 2 In fact opposite developments seem to be taking place. One notable UK example was the sale by Bury Council in Greater Manchester of a painting by L.S. Lowry in order to help with council debts of ten million pounds. The painting was sold for one and half million pounds at a Christie’s auction. This sale sparked a heated debate in the press about the rights and wrongs of selling public art. See ‘The disgrace is not that this Lowry is being sold but the reason why,’ The Guardian, 27 October 2006; ‘Selling off this Lowry would be an act of cultural vandalism,’ The Guardian, 8 November 2006. 3 Interview with the Director Jordi Pons i Busquet, Montse Puigdevall Noguer and Gemma Carbó i Ribugent. The total sum mentioned for the collection at the interview was of 7 million Euro to be given to Mallol and his descendants at 70 thousands Euro on a yearly basis. Interview, Museu del Cinema, 30 November 2005. 4 T. Mallol Si la Memòria no em falla, 2005, pp. 344–345. 5 At the time of my visit there were 134 items exhibited in the section on ‘shadow spectacle.’ 6 You can visit the museum online to view many of these artefacts, http://www.museudelcinema.cat/ eng/colleccio_objectes.php?idcat=641&idreg=1271

The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia  85

For an interesting visual tour of different instruments which are part of the archaeology of cinema, see also the webpages of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, part of the University of Exeter, http://www. bdcmuseum.org.uk/visit/about-the-bill-douglas-cinema-museum/ For a detailed description of archaeology of cinema’s artefacts see Mannoni (2000), and for a detailed glossary, see Nekes (2004). 7 Many museums hold original copies of the first edition of Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, including museums of cinema. The Science Museum in London has a copy and the first two editions are also to be found in the Archive Library of George Eastman House, one of the case studies of this book, which I managed to view during my visit. 8 For information about Magic Lantern’s shows, see the website of the Magic Lantern Society, www. magiclantern.org.uk/ 9 Interview with the author, 1 December 2005. 10 In the museum description the brothers appear with a different name from the one I have seen in Frutos Esteban. They appear as Josep M. and Tomàs Nicolau Griñó. 11 The patent was first sold to France in September 1931 and it went under the name of Cine Tom. This was followed by Germany, which however did not adopt its own name or logo and used the original Cine NIC one. Portugal bought the patent in 1932 and Britain the following year by a company called Eagle Toys Ltd. Eagle named its projector Star Cinema. In Italy it went under the name of Topolino NIC and in many other countries it went under the name of Cine Tom, as in France. In spite of all these name differences Artigas i Candela argued that the success of this first cinema projector for children was its ‘universal idiom,’ although he also argued that it never lost its Catalan roots (Artigas i Candela, p. 20). 12 I am sure that a detailed critical research would unearth a great deal about the assumptions behind the origins and meaning of the logo as well as the racist content of some of the film animation strips, although during my visits I did not see any racist film strips on exhibition in the museum glass cases. Efforts have clearly being made to omit them. 13 Alongside the racist logo mentioned above, there is very little sociological research in relation to the likely groups that would have been able to afford this toy, although we can assume that wealth and class would have played an important factor in this. 14 These early developments of children’s animation toys were not just occupied by Cine NIC, many other cinema toys were produced at the same time and they were part of the expanding mechanical toys industry, which included electric trains, cars, etc.There were a number of smaller companies and artisans which specialised in producing cinema toys for children. The Payá brothers from Alicante were also known for their production of children’s cinema toys. For most of these small industries the 30s Spanish civil war interrupted the production which resumed post-war with added sound as in ‘Cine NIC’ (Frutos Esteban, pp. 125–126). Explanations as to the reasons for the extensive development of these particular small manufacturing industries, in many cases just artisanal, is as yet to be fully researched. 15 In 2005–2006 I conducted a small questionnaire-based visitors’ research and Cine NIC was the one single item mentioned by many of the older generations’ respondents when asked about past cinematic memories. 16 For a full list of the exhibitions of the museum which have taken place since the museum opening, see https://museudelcinema.girona.cat/eng/exposicions_historic.php 17 For the complex nature of the stardom phenomenon nothing has yet surpassed the original work of Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film stars and Society, 1986. 18 See https://museudelcinema.girona.cat/cat/exposicions.php?idReg=4367&tipus=hist (Accessed 12 January 2017). 19 Catalonia’s opposition to the Franco regime and consequent repression is well accounted for in Andrew Dowling, Catalonia Since the Spanish Civil War: Reconstructing the Nation, 2012. More recent work by the same author delves into the Catalan national independence claim from the Spanish State: The Rise of Catalan Independence: Spain’s Territorial Crisis, 2017. 20 I have taken this concept from the argument advanced in a chapter by David Clarke in Heritage and Museums: Shaping National Identities, albeit in a different context, that of the establishment of a Museum of Scotland where he states: ‘the absence of England is striking. Although perhaps not a balanced presentation of past realities it reflects a welcome attempt to define Scottish identity in terms of other than those of comparison with the bigger country next door,’ in M. Fladmark ed., Heritage and Museums: Shaping National Identity, 2014, p. 87.

86  The Museu del Cinema in Girona, Catalonia

Bibliography AAVV (1999) Arqueologia de la comunicació. Actes de les IV jornades d’ Arqueologia Industrial de Catalunya. Barcelona: Associació d’ Enginyers Industrials de Catalunya. Artigas i Candela, J. (1998) El Cine Nic. Una joguina històrica del poble-sec. Districte de Sants-Montjuïa, Ajuntament de Barcelona. Artigas, J. (1997) CINE NIC – Le ROI des projecteurs pour enfants! HEEZA actualités. Barcelona, September, no. 14. Artigas, J. (1998) LUX, RAÏ, SKOB … Les autres projecteurs jouets de cinéma pour enfants, HEEZA actualités. Barcelona, September, 17. Badell, J.-I. (2015) Museums and Social Media: Catalonia as a Case Study. Museum Management and Curatorship, 30, 3: 244–263. Ceram, C. W. (1965) Archaeology of Cinema. London: Thames and Hudson. Clarke, D. (1999) Building Collections. Constraints of Changing Contexts, in M. Fladmark ed. Heritage and Museums: Shaping National Identity. London: Routledge. Crangle R, van Dooren I and Heard M (2005) Realms of light: Uses and Perceptions of the Magic Lantern from the 17th to the 21st century. Exeter: The Magic Lantern Society. De la Mancha, G. (1987) Literatura y cine infantil en la España de la postguerra. Historia de la educación, no. 6. Dossier del Professor (n.d.) La màgia del l’animació. Una maleta per treballar la magia de les imatges en moviment. Girona: Museu del Cinema, Col.lecció Tomàs Mallol. Dowling, A. (2012) Catalonia Since the Spanish Civil War: Reconstructing the Nation. Brighton: Sussex Academic Publishing. Dowling, A. (2017) The Rise of Catalan Independence: Spain’s Territorial Crisis. London: Routledge. Dyer, R. (1986, 2004) Heavenly Bodies: Film stars and Society, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Frutos Esteban, F. J. (1999) Artilugios para fascinar: Collection Basilio Martín Patino. Salamanca: Juntade Castilla Y Leon & Excmo Ayuntamiento de Salamanca. Hansen, E. C. (1977) Rural Catalonia under the Franco Regime: The Fate of Regional Culture Since the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaplan, F. E. S. ed. (1994) Museums and the Making of “ourselves”: The Role of Objects in National Identity. London: Leicester University Press. Mallol, Tomàs (2005) Si la Memòria no em falla. Girona: CCG Editions and Institut d’Estudis del Museu del Cinema. Mannoni, L. (1995) Le grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre. Archéologie du cinéma; transl. Richard Crangle (2000) The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. McLean, F. (2005) Museums and National Identity, Museum and Society, 3: 1. Nekes, W. (2004) Glossary, in L. Mannoni, W. Nekes and M. Warner eds. Eyes, Lies and Illusions: The Art of Deception. London and Aldershot: Hayward Gallery Publishing with Lund Humphries. Pons i Busquet, J. (1995) El Museu del Cinema – Col-lecció Tomàs Mallol. Formació, Descripció i Valoració, in J. Romaguera (ed.) El patrimony cinematogràfic a Catalunya. Barcelona: Fundació Institut del Cinema Català. Pons i Busquet, J. (1999) Presentació del projecte del Museu del Cinema-Col-lecció Tomàs Mallol in AAVV Arqueologia de la comunicació. Actes de les IV jornades d’ Arqueologia Industrial de Catalunya. Barcelona: Associació d’ Enginyers Industrials de Catalunya. Robinson, D. ed. (1993) Lantern Image: Iconography of the Magic Lantern, 1420–1880. Exeter: The Magic Lantern Society. Robinson, D. (2006) Film museums I have known and (sometimes) loved. Film History, 18, 3: 237–260. Romaguera, J. ed. (1995) El patrimony cinematogràfic a Catalunya. Barcelona: Fundació Institut del Cinema Català.

6 EASTMAN HOUSE An international museum of photography and cinema

The first museum in the George Eastman House The development of many museums of photography and cinema were put on hold during World War II and George Eastman House (GEH henceforth) was no exception. The idea of creating a memorial and museum out of the imposing house, the largest in Rochester, George Eastman had built for himself and his family had begun to circulate much earlier since his suicide in 1932, but it was not until 1946 that the planning of the museum took some concrete shape through a body created for this purpose, the Kodak Committee for George Eastman House Inc. Two years later, in June 1948, the Board of Trustees of this non-profit organisation had their first annual meeting; one of the outcomes was that it authorised the appointment of a director and curator for the proposed museum/memorial project for 1 year in the first instance.The book published in 1999 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the museum describes the trustees as all former friends of George Eastman and as all having a shared goal in mind, that of creating ‘first and foremost (to be) a memorial to their old friend’ (George Eastman House 1999: 1). The debates about the museum/memorial dichotomy have accompanied the direction of George Eastman House throughout its history; hence, why the original aims and nature of its direction as a museum have impacted on many of its decisions, from appointments of staff to curatorial choices in the years that followed.1 Nonetheless GEH, whether museum or memorial or both, had a strong advantage compared to similar developments around the world; it disposed of a collection even before its existed as a public institution; it disposed of funds and of a prestigious building. The Kodak Company, through key figures such as Kenneth Mees first and Walter Clark later, respectively, the founder/director and assistant director of the Kodak Research Laboratories,2 had begun to acquire important photographic collections from around the world. One of the first acquisitions was the collection of Josef Maria Eder in 1920, followed by the acquisition of the Gabriel Cromer collection from France in 1939, one of the most important of the time. This particular collection was especially dear to Langlois discussed in Chapter 3, which he had tried his hardest to keep in France but without success. These and other work collected between the two world wars (work by Julia Margaret Cameron, David Ocatvius Hill, Eadweard Muybridge and William Henry Fox Talbot) formed the basis for the first Eastman Historical Photographic

88  Eastman House

Collection (EHPC). Clark and others, with these acquisitions, clearly had in mind the creation of a museum of historical photography open to the public, although what form it would take only became clear after World War II. Cinematography and cinema was to come about much later. The form and direction of the future museum was outlined more clearly by Oscar Solbert, who also went on to become its first director. Solbert, a former military man,3 was a trustee of the board and the Kodak public relations executive; he also had more than a passing interest in photography and cinematography. He was keen to establish courses on photography and cinematography at the University of Rochester, until he came up with the idea that the Eastman House itself could be used for such purpose, thus combining the memorial legacy with the idea of an educational public museum: If the Eastman House could be used as headquarters, studios, and for lectures for a Department of Photography at the University of Rochester, it would be a fitting memorial to George Eastman. It could be set up as the most complete historical photographic museum in the world, from Daguerre to the latest modern equipment. The company now possesses these collections. (Cited in George Eastman House 1999: 9) In this way the museum that was initially conceived as a legacy to George Eastman, retained the memorial element but also became one of the first centre in the Unites States to teach, research and exhibit the instruments involved in photography and later cinematography. Solbert, following the first meeting of June 1948, was also given a free hand to appoint its first curator, and in spite of initial suggestions by the planning committee that Edward Steichen4 be chosen for the post, Beaumont Newhall was approached instead. Newhall had been handpicked by Solbert and Clark for his expertise in museums (he had trained as a museum professional) combined with his interest in the history of photography. Newhall had worked at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York and had organised a photographic exhibition while there, one of the first of its kind: ‘The seminal 1937 historical overview of the history of photography titled Photography 1839–1937’ (George Eastman House 1999: 11). He was also the professional at the centre of the creation of the Department of Photography at MoMA in 1940. These activities were still centred principally on photography rather than cinema, and the need to see it recognised alongside other art forms such as literature, paintings and sculpture. However, as we have seen in one of the other museums researched for this book, the British case study, cinematography and cinema often came after the establishment of photography collections. On his return from World War II, Newhall had found himself out of a job, after tendering his resignation following the appointment of Steichen at the head of the Department of Photography at MoMA, where he would have been his deputy. Newhall had a very different idea about the character of photography from Steichen; he saw it more as an artistic and creative form while the latter saw it more as a communication and news medium: ‘The initial battle between Steichen and Newhall enables us to understand the roots of contemporary debates regarding “creative” photography vs. photojournalism’ (Gresh 2015: 264). Newhall, however, found at George Eastman House similar problems and controversies to the ones he had left behind at MoMA, for example, the absence of appropriate space in the housemuseum to mount exhibitions of artistic photographs as well as insufficient funds to invest in new acquisitions which were art oriented.This situation mirrored the one in Britain discussed in Chapter 2: photography rather than cinema, albeit with a technological and scientific perspective, was initially at the centre of the establishment of George Eastman House.

Eastman House  89

Solbert, as a director, was nonetheless equally active in promoting the collection and exhibition of the moving image alongside that of photography. For this purpose, he appointed as assistant curator James Card, who was effectively hired to make three short documentaries about photography5 but whose ambitions for the collection, conservation and exhibition of the moving image were as great as those of Newhall for photography. These two professionals, Card and Newhall, also shared a view about the aesthetic and artistic value of the moving image and of photography, respectively. This dual and complementary appointment and the shared intellectual interests were behind the later retitling of GEH as The International Museum of Photography and Film. The museum, in spite of its initial development and connection with photography, endorsed very early on a central role to the moving image and gave it space in which it could be researched and exhibited; in the words of James Card in a letter to Solbert: ‘a program of collection and maintaining both information and films important to the history of the motion pictures would extend considerably the worldwide significance of the Eastman House Museum’ (quoted in George Eastman House 1999: 9). The unofficial narrative about what Newhall found when he set foot in George Eastman House, makes a really interesting story in itself, but the paradoxical situation he found himself in is a far more enlightening account of the early days of George Eastman House Museum. On the one hand, he was expected to turn GEH into a science museum,’6 but on the other hand, he was left at liberty to buy collections which were important not just for their scientific and technological value but for their historical and artistic one, whether funds had been earmarked for that purpose or not. This period in the history of GEH is described as ‘One fortuitous circumstance… (and) radical change in the philosophy of collecting’ (George Eastman House 1999: 18). What is in fact apparent is that it was not a fortuitous occurrence at all; the change in philosophy of collecting and exhibiting – which essentially meant giving status to photographs alongside the technologies that produced them – was a direct result of Newhall’s own philosophy and approach to the exhibition and study of photography. This was partially acknowledged in the book printed to honour his contribution to George Eastman House: ‘It has brought to many an awareness of the work in scientific fields and the highly developed technology which has been of importance in increasing the value of photography not only as a pictorial medium but also of increasing importance in many other fields’ (President of GEH, C. J. Staud in George Eastman House, 1971: no pagination). In the often contradictory and conflictual context, Newhall was often on the brink of resignation, but in spite of the tensions, which as we have seen have been part of the histories of many of the museums discussed in this book, collections were donated in unprecedented numbers under his curatorship; equally unprecedented were the amount of purchases made. Some of these, like for example the Medicus collection, which Newhall negotiated to buy, and which is particularly significant in terms of the United States’ national historical visual record, with its inclusion of Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, to this day considered one of the most important artefacts in GEH’s collection. Equally valuable and long-sighted were Solbert and Card’s efforts in assembling collections of the moving image. Card himself donated his collection of films to the museum and Solbert sought to enlist the moral and financial support of the Drydens (George Eastman’s niece and husband) to build an auditorium for the museum to screen films, which they believed would boost the exhibition of artefacts and the study of film, especially ‘lost film,’ alongside the historical photographic collection. Cherchi Usai described Card as ‘the last warrior of film preservation,’

90  Eastman House

not so much for his technical know-how of ‘nitrate reels’ but for his gathering of the collection of silent cinema at George Eastman House (Cherchi Usai 2000: 68).7 The museum officially opened to the public on 9 November 1949. It is described in Look, a large-size illustrated weekly magazine, as ‘the most complete collection of photographic paraphernalia in the world’ (cited in George Eastman House 1999: 19). The layout of the first museum was inevitably dictated by the building’s design and as suggested in Collective Endeavor: ‘Laying a museum out in such a grand mansion required some creativity’ (George Eastman House 1999: 19). But independently of the spatial and design-related problems, inherent in installing a collection in a non-purpose built space, what became apparent in this first version of the museum (and something that was to change in subsequent modifications), was the concentration on photographic apparatuses and technologies on both floors of the mansion, including a smaller space dedicated to motion pictures apparatuses, thus adhering to the original aim of ‘scientific museum.’ The museum also had a space reserved for the exposition of George Eastman’s life and achievements; a wide range of objects were exhibited in the dining room of the mansion: documents, films, photographs and personal items. Early on in the life of the museum, at least in exhibitionary terms, collections of photographs did not appear as central in the museum design and layout. An assortment of photographs were exhibited in two small rooms in the back of the dining room and in a small space on the second floor, besides the exhibition of cinematographic apparatuses; the photographs displayed were an unusual mix, with representations of war, military and aerial views as well as a group of photographs on the graphic arts. The ‘lion’s share’ of the museum went to photographic apparatuses and their history.The ‘Hall of Contemporary Photography,’ the largest space dedicated to photographic objects was again ‘a bewildering array of nearly twenty separate exhibits’ (George Eastman House 1999: 21). It was a representative collection of photographic instruments and their different applications: ‘spectrography, photomicrography, optics, medical photography, radiography, among others’ (George Eastman House 1999: 21).This exhibition was completed by the ‘Cavalcade of Color, the projected slide show illustrating the uses and “glory” of color photography’ (Ibid: p. 21).

From ‘shrine’ to public museum Beaumont Newhall, with his love for detailed research and extensive promotion of the photographic work by his contemporaries has been described as a ‘gift’ to George Eastman House. At the time of his appointment, he had only just finished writing the History of Photography.8 When he joined the museum in 1948, one of his main concerns was to see photography recognised as more than a passing ‘document, an anecdote, an illustration, a record’ (cited in George Eastman House 1999: 25). His ambition for photography was influenced by the then well-established modernist approach, what he called the ‘recognition of the universal, in whatever field it may be sought’ which would render the photograph ‘truly and unequivocally a work of art’ (Ibid: p. 25). Much speculation has circulated as to why a scholar and professional of his calibre stayed in Rochester as opposed to joining larger museum institutions in a metropolitan context.9 Friends of Newhall answered this question by suggesting that as a scholar of photography the collections at George Eastman House were the most important he could lay his hands on. Newhall himself was of the same opinion and wrote as much to his friend and publisher John Tennant: ‘But the biggest kick I have personally received from this job is going over the incredible wealth of material which M. Cromer put together’ (George Eastman House 1999: 24).10 Newhall, although

Eastman House  91

appointed as a curator, he continued his scholarly research about photography while at Eastman House. In the words of Ansel Adams, a friend and renowned photographer, we get a glimpse of the complexity at the heart of his research: ‘(Newhall had) the great patience of the art historian…It is a form of creative architecture, designing and structuring edifices of information and interpretation…I began to see how the reconstruction of a work of art became, in a very positive way, a creative expression in itself ’ (cited in George Eastman House 1999: 24). In the first 10 years of its life, the museum continued to accumulate a vast amount of invaluable photographic prints from around the world, as well as acquiring major collections of both prints and photographic artefacts in the United States, principally due to Newhall’s previous links and activities. Besides the Medicus Collection already mentioned, another important deposit came from Alden Scott Boyer, not only rich in photographic apparatuses and photographic prints, it also contained a small library of 3000 books and periodicals, a nucleus which began the Eastman House Library and consolidated the educational aspect of the museum, which had also been one of the ideals of its first director Oscar Solbert. Collaboration ensued between GEH and the University of Rochester, unfortunately rejected later as much prejudice still circulated about the teaching of photography as a serious area of academic study. This was followed by more successful collaborations with the Rochester Institute of Technology. Other significant activities proceeded apace; a museum journal was introduced in January 1952 entitled Image, and to begin with, it was both a museum bulletin as well as a journal dedicated to the history of photography.11 Also, through an invitation from Newhall, the museum was joined by another important figure in photographic circles, Minor White, to help especially with the publication of Image. This new appointment began a productive period of collaboration, as White’s views on photography complemented and enriched Newhall. If Newhall was known for his aesthetic and artistic understanding of photography, the former ‘had been developing a more thematic approach in which large spiritual and philosophical ideas would be communicated by the aesthetic sequencing and placement of pictures’ (George Eastman House 1999: 30). This successful partnership gave rise to a series of photographic exhibitions where their combined thinking and efforts would make an important contribution to the definition and understanding of photography as an art form. White also introduced the concept of internationalising GEH’s exhibition activities in order to continue the development of its reputation beyond the national borders. This was partly to counteract the recurrent perceived notion that GEH was to some extent a provincial museum, of central importance to the people of Rochester, but not necessarily accessible to people outside, especially in the fifties when travel was not so frequent, whether in the United States or beyond. White replaced the idea of the museum being beyond the reach of many people with the idea that the museum could go outside its walls, a process which is integral to contemporary museum practices but not so developed in the fifties: ‘It seems to me that so few people will make the pilgrimage to Rochester that the future brilliance and importance of the House is to become a kind of factory sending its products of ideas all over the world’ (quoted in George Eastman House 1999: 30–31). This approach certainly paid off in the increasingly high profile, importance and knowledge of this museum and its activities worldwide. Travelling exhibition, especially photographic ones, is to this day a central feature of GEH’s museum activities, although they travel mostly within the North American continent. In spite of the perceived provincial location, Rochester and George Eastman House’s activities were seen in the mid-fifties as a ‘golden age’ for photography and many young photographers which would rise to prominence in later years ‘cut their teeth’ in Rochester, either at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where both Newhall and White were

92  Eastman House

also teaching, or taking classes separately with White and with the support of GEH.12 A museum which had begun as a somewhat ‘conservative’ institution, part memorial, part museum, was transformed into a museum with a radical and novel agenda for photography, and Rochester as ‘the epicentre of the study of serious photography’ (George Eastman House 1999: 31).

Cinematography and the moving image in the museum Photography was undoubtedly the principal subject matter for conservation and exhibition projects at GEH, however, it was not the sole pursuit and this section intends to look at not only the relationship between photography and cinema but also to highlight the importance of the latter in the context of this chapter’s aim: to look at cinematography and film’s place in GEH and at the way the film collection developed alongside the predominant photographic-related developments. The appointment of James Card above mentioned, ostensibly as assistant curator to Newhall, was central to Solbert’s strategy of also promoting the study and historical collection of the moving image. The project was ambitious as it aimed to create a substantial film archive in the first 10 years of the museum’s life. There were two principal objectives to Solbert’s strategy about the development of the moving image section of the museum; the first entailed the construction of an auditorium13 as part of the museum and the introduction of regular screenings and film programmes which would ‘integrate and make available information pertinent to the history of motion pictures.’ The second objective was ‘to build and maintain a basic, historical collection of films’ (George Eastman House 1999: 34–35). Unlike the museums discussed in the previous chapters, where in most cases films and artefacts collection were assembled well before the museum structures even existed, the opposite was true of GEH’s collection. Solbert hoped to achieve his second objective through a tight programme of representative selection and acquisition by buying 20 prominent films from international producers from 1900 onwards. As already mentioned, Card himself came with his own personal collection, which he loaned directly to GEH and was effectively its first collection (Card 1999). The only problem with Solbert’s tight prescriptive purchase program was the fact that it did not quite fit in with Card ‘insatiable’ collecting ambition. Card, like Langlois in Paris, two of the ‘seven raiders of lost cinema’ (Cherchi Usai 2000: 68), with whom he had established a strong relationship, was ‘obsessed’ with saving everything, even if only partly due to realistic considerations about the vulnerability of early nitrate-based film stock. The only difference between him and Langlois was that Card had substantial financial support from the museum’s director for his curatorial direction and purchases, while Langlois, as we have seen in Chapter 3, was often struggling with lack of sustained funding. Card also had substantial support from other members of the Kodak Company, collecting films for GEH was a relatively straightforward process, as connections with the great film studios of the day were apparently handled quickly and efficiently by Ted Curtis, the then Kodak Vice-President in charge of motion pictures. George Eastman House was also the first museum to have constructed a fire-proof film vault. The building, named after Henry Alvah Strong, first president of Kodak and Eastman original partner, served as storage and archive to both the Eastman House’s film collections as well as to a large film deposit of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in spite of the fact that MoMA and GEH did not always see eye to eye about collections’ preservation policies.14 GEH would also join FIAF quite early on in its history. Card was decidedly influential in putting GEH on the international map of film archives, libraries and museums; he had prolonged

Eastman House  93

established connections with similar European developments, discussed in three of the other four national cases studies considered in this book, Britain, France and Italy. Newhall, on the other hand, had also visited some of them while in Europe and it was him, rather than Card (and in spite of his reservation about the direction of the museum to include the moving image), who attended FIAF’s meeting in 1952, the year the museum joined as a full member. Finally, as part of its early history, another important development was introduced to promote cinema at the museum, again the ‘brainchild’ of Oscar Solbert: the creation of a film festival, complete with its awards, under the name of the ‘Georges’ or George Eastman Award.The first of these took place in November 1955; it was an ambitious programme, which Solbert would have liked to rival the Oscars (George Eastman House 1999). Although this ambition was never fully realised, many important directors and movie stars have been awarded the ‘George’ over the years. On the official website, it is claimed that ‘The award is held in high regard among those who have been honored, including early recipient Buster Keaton, who considered the Eastman Award to be more prestigious than an Oscar.’15 This bi-annual award is still one of the many film-related activities of the museum today.

The museum’s development and transition GEH was on much firmer financial ground as a museum and archive then its European counterparts. Although Kodak kept the purse strings well under control, it had nonetheless set an annual operating budget as well as allowing the museum to go over the annual budget when required. By the end of the fifties GEH had grown exponentially, with the photographic collection already three times the size since its first phase and the film collection, which had not even been part of the original plan of the museum, already composed of 3000 films. In the sixties, the museum grew further, both in terms of staff, which in 1966 numbered at 30 full-time employees and in terms of developments of collections and exhibitions. Photography remained the centrepiece of the museum but ‘behind the scene’ a large film archive was amassed relatively effortlessly, by then a permanent feature of the ongoing support to establish a moving image collection: ‘Movies arrived, bidden and unbidden, in large numbers, not only from Hollywood, but from a variety of sources. It was a collector’s dream, a film-lover’s paradise’ (George Eastman House 1999: 51). James Card was joined by an assistant in 1953, George Pratt, described as the ‘true scholar on the film staff ’ (George Eastman House 1999: 51). George Pratt concentrated on cataloguing and analysing the visual and written material assembled over the years; at the same time, Card was busy travelling, acquiring and exchanging film material, the latter not always with a happy outcome, especially if the exchange was with Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française.16 Pratt also taught film history at the University of Rochester and wrote a book on the history of silent cinema, ‘Spellbound in Darkness’ (1973), at a time when there was still dearth of publications on the subject. Pratt’s scholarly work on cinema resembled that of Newhall’s on photography.17 Newhall on the other hand went on to become director of GEH following Oscar Solbert sudden death in 1958 and to shape the museum very differently from its original plan and layout; for example, he initiated what was then a pioneering process: the gradual removal of the glass boxes in appropriate contexts. One such context was the history of George Eastman himself and the room dedicated to his achievements, which was emptied of the glass boxes, and returned wherever possible to its original state.18 Intentionally or not, Newhall had begun a process which produced the crucial and necessary separation, still in place today, between the house and the museum.

94  Eastman House

The consolidation of cinema and cinematography in the museum As we have seen above, GEH incorporated the idea of a museum of cinema from its early stages, but the change in name to reflect both photography and film was not introduced until the 1970s; this was around the same time that people with personal connection with the George Eastman himself were no longer around: ‘The era had ended when to be a trustee was to have been a friend of Mr. Eastman’ (George Eastman House 1999: 61). The implications of this were that the museum had finally reached its maturity:‘It was no longer just a good idea with a world of potential; it was a full-fledged, working museum, one with all the problems associated with museum practice. In the near future, the most pressing problems of Eastman House could not be resolved by aesthetic wrangling, rather they concerned money, mission, and the survival of the museum as a fully functional, independent, non-profit arts institution’ (George Eastman House 1999: 62). The transformations also coincided with a change of directors, and with Newhall’s departure, after 23 years in Rochester. Newhall was replaced by Van Deren Coke, a friend of Newhall and who was then head of the Department of Arts at the University of New Mexico, a link he retained and to which he returned to, in just over a year. Coke’s short directorship was described as the last throes of the legacy of the museum’s governance, where decisions about funding and finances were still taken by the management of the Kodak Company and their board of trustees. The latter had often very little interest in either photography or cinema and generally had no say in the setting of the budget: ‘With Kodak holding the reins and the board rendered unavailable to him for advice and support, the director’s options were limited mostly to fruitless protests’ (George Eastman House 1999: 64). Although Coke was not able to assert an independent policy in the museum, he nonetheless, even in the short period he was director, oversaw some important photographic exhibitions. These brought further to the surface the gap between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ in George Eastman House. Criticism from the ‘old guard’ was especially addressed to the photographic exhibition Continuum 60 (1972), an exhibition of contemporary photography which clearly subverted traditional rules of photography. Some of these images were published in the museum journal Image alongside an essay by Coke and Jenkins (whose formative studies had been under Lyons’ Visual Studies Workshop)19 and were much criticised by members of the board of trustees. Resurfacing was the ongoing tension between Kodak, the board of trustees and the museum, who even as late as 1972, and with most of the original members no longer around, still dictated the policies of the museum. The tension was not solely about the memorial vs. museum dichotomy already mentioned, but at this point and more critically about whether GEH was to remain a private institution or become an independent public institution, with consequent change in funding and ownership of collections.20 On the horizon was finally the idea that the Historic House should be separated from the collections and museum. Clark himself, still at the head of Kodak, suggested as much: Perhaps the house should be maintained as a memorial to George Eastman, used for social gatherings, etc., be a Landmark of which Rochester should be proud, and have the historical collections and exhibitions transferred to another building under proper keeping. (George Eastman House 1999: 68) Coke, on his part, equally made clear on his last memo to the board of trustees that arrangements had to be clarified and that if GEH was to continue to be a ‘proprietary museum’ it needed to be managed and administered accordingly (George Eastman House 1999: 69). In the same memo,

Eastman House  95

he also pointed out that support needed to be channelled in the direction of some of the underdeveloped activities of what he called a ‘tri-part institution’ (house, photography and film); the underdeveloped activities were inevitably about cinema and the exhibition of related artefacts (George Eastman House 1999: 69). While debates continued about the nature of photography and GEH’s curatorial staff members were introducing innovative and radical visions in their exhibitionary practice, the museum was subjected to a new scrutiny about its role, undertakings, finance and collections. The change which came was both necessary and inevitable: the conservation side of the museum needed development for both photography and film; funding was no longer sufficient given the scale of the museum’s operations and collections; additional space was required as well as more dedicated space; rising prices in the photographic market put new acquisitions out of GEH’s reach; the value of the collection was growing but problems of cataloguing, space, safety and conservation were becoming paramount. Paradoxically, in relation to the film collection, the more at risk stock of nitrate films were safely stored, but acetate films were not, movie stills were also equally at risk and not properly stored. Many of these problems were identified by Robert Doherty, the new director who followed on from Coke’s short tenure in his assessment of the state of the institution and of the film and photographic collections. The lack of space could only be resolved through the construction of a new dedicated building for both tasks entrusted to the museum: the exhibition of collections and their safe conservation and storage. This was a massive undertaking and one that would require much support from the trustees as well as outside private sources as very little financial support was forthcoming from the New York State Council on the Arts.This was a source of much frustration for Doherty: ‘It seems impossible… to register upon the New York State Council on the Arts that we are not a company museum like the Corning Museum, and we seem to be penalized for running a balanced budget.’ 21 (cited in George Eastman House 1999: 78–79). The ‘balanced budget’ era had, however, also come to an end. The idea that Kodak was still behind the museum’s operations and finance was not one that could be so easily dispelled, and it was demonstrated when the decision was taken to ask for Doherty’s resignation, in spite of what was described in the museum newsletter as ‘Doherty’s strength and vision as director’ and the ‘increased recognition he brought to the museum.’22 What resurfaced again, following Doherty’s ‘voluntary’ resignation, were the conflicting needs of the historic house versus the museum. The former, at this point in its history, requiring substantial repairs and taking priority in the minds of the trustees over the museum funding: ‘In discussion with Kodak management, it has been confirmed that Kodak’s major interest is in the preservation of the Eastman house as a historic residence and that is their desire, in fact their intent, to scale down their financial support to the IMP-GEH’ (George Eastman House 1999: 83). In spite of this unfavourable backdrop to the museum’s finances and support, some excellent exhibitions continued to be organised during these difficult times. In 1976, ‘The Spirit of Fact: the Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes, 1843–1862’; in 1977 ‘French Daguerreotype’; important publications also came out such as Camera Work: a Pictorial Guide in 1978, and of particular importance to some of the concerns of this book about cinema’s exhibition, the bicentennial survey of American cinema arranged by James Card in 1976. The fate suffered by the museum’s director was preceded by that of James Card, partly at the hands of the director himself, who brought to the attention of the board, Card’s unorthodox ways of working which did not include ‘accountability for his time, curatorial duties, and the preservation of the film collection’ (George Eastman House 1999: 81).23 Card submitted a resignation and then retracted it, but in the new museum’s regime it was accepted, unlike under

96  Eastman House

Solbert’s governance. He was swiftly replaced.24 The financial problems of the late seventies were also compounded by a fire and although the travelling exhibitions material stored in the shed where the fire broke out was saved, the vault which stood next to it and which housed 3195 reel of nitrate film exploded (George Eastman House 1999: 82). Fires have often been the measure of cinema museums’ history, especially those established early on.

The museum in crisis The financial crisis which was building up in the seventies came to a head in the eighties; this has been described in Collective Endeavor as the ‘Smithsonian Crisis,’ when considerations were put forward to transfer the museum archive to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. A new director was appointed in 1980, Robert Mayer, chosen for his administrative expertise in the arts rather than for his curatorial or photographic knowledge. But even this carefully chosen appointment by the board did not prevent the looming financial crisis: the first drastic measure taken was to lay off staff. This decision received much criticism in the local press and questions were asked as to why it had come to this: ‘Why is the board of directors allowing the museum to wither rather than going public with its needs and hopes?’ (George Eastman House 1999: 89). Staff at the museum rapidly started organising a ‘Save George Eastman House’ campaign as it began to transpire that the collection could be transferred to another museum institution. Paradoxically, even among this turmoil staff diligently continued their curatorial and scholarly work as important collections were still being donated to the museum which needed cataloguing and interpreting. One such donation was the Sipley/3M collection (donated to the museum in 1977), a massive deposit of 55,000 images, 5,000 books and periodicals, 300 items of photographic apparatuses and 200 films. Another important donation was the Steichen collection. The man who had been earmarked to be one of GEH’s directors had arrived at the museum many years later ‘as a collection.’ In 1981, always amidst the impending crisis of possible closure and move of collections to the Smithsonian, the staff at the museum managed to mount an impressive exhibition, which was pointedly called ‘Acquisitions 1973–1980’ about the museum’s new acquisitions and their relevance to the interpretation of historical and contemporary photography. The museum got a financial respite in 1980 from the settlement of the insurance pay out following the fire aforementioned; at the same time the Wallis committee, which had been set up to report about potential future developments for both the house and the museum, delivered its findings; these were in the form of 15 recommendations, which not surprisingly identified many of the long-standing issues, the report also proposed possible solutions.The most important of these are worth quoting in full as they were central to the future consolidation of the museum of photography and cinema in Rochester: The residence and gardens be preserved and maintained as an important unit of a memorial to George Eastman; the photographic museum be shifted to a new, more suitable building; a broader base of support be sought; exhibitions be created to appeal to both specialized and general audiences; preservation, conservation andcataloguing be accelerated; the board be enlarged and diversified; a capital campaign to fund the new building be initiated as soon as possible. (George Eastman House, 1999: 90) All these recommendations did not in themselves ‘stay off ’ the possible transfer of the collections, although if all of them materialised, it was very likely that the museum side of GEH would fundamentally change as well as continue to operate in Rochester. However, what really brought

Eastman House  97

the project of transferring the collection to the Smithsonian to a halt (and what years of intense opposition from local people and press, the formation of various local committees and campaigns to keep the collection in Rochester had not been able to do) 25 was the response from the Smithsonian Institution itself. This move was considered to be a too complicated and expensive project to take on, and the Smithsonian policy was clear about the boundaries of its remit: ‘The role your proposal invites the Smithsonian to play seems to fall outside the bounds of policy established by our Board of Regents concerning the operations of museum activities outside Washington, D.C.’ (cited in George Eastman House, 1999: 101). This rejection paradoxically returned GEH to its own problems but also to its own solutions. In the first instance, there was a Kodak gift, which although not a blank cheque,26 it undoubtedly restored some confidence in the museum. This was followed by the success of the ‘capital campaign’ for a much needed new building for the photography and film museum and archive, alongside the restoration of George Eastman House; additional funds were also needed to cover the running deficit.The capital expenditure came to a huge sum at the time, just over ten million dollars27 but the success of this capital funding campaign finally changed the relationship between GEH as memorial consisting of the house and gardens and GEH as museum, although it did not change just then the relationship between GEH board of trustees and the museum director. In a familiar repetition of the museum’s history, the board of trustees asked for the resignation of the director Robert Mayer, in spite of the fact that he had seen the museum through some of its most difficult times. GEH’s board of trustees often seemed to move in ‘mysterious ways,’ and often counter to decisions taken previously. One of the reasons given for demanding his resignation was that he was not a specialist on the history of photography, this in direct contradiction to the reason why they chose him in the first place: that he was an experienced museum administrator. In the Museum Newsletter’s introduction, following the departure of Mayer, his replacement, James Enyeart, is described as the ideal candidate for his expertise in photography, his extensive research and publications in the field as well as curatorial experience.28 The new director’s scholarly interests and museum curatorship in photography coupled with a dedicated new building and the house restoration brought a renewed sense of purpose and direction to the museum as a whole. 29

The new museum and archive The new museum building opened on 28 January 1989, the building itself had been designed to be as architecturally ‘harmonious’ as possible in relation to the old building and it was conceived in such a way as to fit with the ‘architectural integrity of Eastman House (GEH 1999: 108).30 In reality, and unlike the architecture of Eastman House, the geometry of the main façade evoked a chapel like entrance (Figure 6.1). The overall building, however, internally and externally, was constructed on the needs of a secular space to house a museum. Its multi-purpose function was structured around the long and wide-columned corridor named the ‘Potter Peristyle,’ and it comprised large galleries, exhibition halls, photographic and film archive, research facilities, conservation laboratories, Richard and Ronay Menschel library, museum shop and café. The building’s efficiency was matched by the conservation and exhibiting activities of the museum staff for the opening of the new museum; these were still principally centred on photography but cinema was also occupying a greater place in the conservation and exhibition activities of the museum. Three photographic exhibitions were prepared for 1989, the opening year of the new museum, which ‘recapitulated the photographic themes that had over the years come to define the mission

98  Eastman House

FIGURE 6.1 

Entrance to Eastman House. (Author’s photograph)

of the museum’ (George Eastman House 1999: 109). The themes spanned from the artistic and cultural aspects of photography to the technological and commercial ones. Two of these exhibitions were organised by Robert Sobieszek, a longstanding senior photography curator at the museum, respectively, entitled ‘The Art of Persuasion: A history of Advertising Photography’ and ‘The Art of Photography.’ The third exhibition, ‘Gems of Technology,’ was curated by Philip Condax and it concerned itself with the history of the technology behind the photographic medium, a theme which had been central to the founding of the Eastman House collection. There were many other important photographic exhibitions the same year31 but for the purpose of this book I am going to concentrate on the cinema-related developments. The same year, also finally saw cinema celebrated in the museum, with a large exhibition organised by the senior curator of film Jan-Christopher Horak who had been mentored by George Pratt. The exhibition ‘Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood’s Golden Age’ was the first of its kind in the museum, it was made possible by the rich documentsbased collection which had been assembled since the fifties alongside the films. Using production stills, posters, and various promotional materials, this exhibition uncovered the history of film making and marketing at the height of Hollywood’s success in the thirties and forties.32 In the write up for the exhibition catalogue, Horak outlined some of the ideas behind such an

Eastman House  99

exhibition, in particular the way in which these documents in the collection, both written and visual, revealed the material process behind Hollywood successful productions: ‘a new generation of film historians [had begun to] deconstruct Hollywood’s mythology, in order to formulate a history which relates the symbiotic relationships between film technologies and industrial relations, marketing and advertising, filmmakers’ intentions and audience reception’ (quoted in George Eastman House 1999: 111–112).33 The tension between photography and film departments was no longer as critical as it had been during the pioneering times of James Card when the ‘motion picture department had been viewed as a virtual fiefdom’ (George Eastman House 1999: 125). If George Pratt had helped consolidate and professionalise the film department, the curators that followed, especially Horak, and his assistant Morgan Wessons took the museum in a new direction by instituting activities which are now seen as integral in museums of cinema world over. Together, they established the Eastman House Film Festival with films drawn from the collections, organised visits from filmmakers and film artists and devised many different film seasons screened in the two museums auditoriums, the Dryden and the Curtis.34 These seasons ranged from selections of experimental to popular films, some were theme-based and others were centred on individual filmmakers. These developments also brought advantages in terms of expanding the collections; the exhibition dedicated to Scorsese’s work also ensured a donation of his personal collection, financial support, copies of his work and an ongoing support of film conservation for the museum. 35 The film conservation department was further consolidated when Paolo Cherchi Usai substituted Horak.36 Horak, during his tenure as Director of Film, founded in 1997 the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, where dedicated courses on film preservation were first offered internationally.37 The film section of the museum was decisively receiving much more attention than in the previous decades and by 1994 the film collection was extensive and comprised nearly 20,000 films.38 With the establishment of the Film Preservation Board, and the building of a much-needed film conservation centre,39 cinema had ultimately achieved legitimate status in a museum dominated by photography (George Eastman House 1999: 131). Enhancing this new status was also behind the choice of the new director, Anthony Bannon, appointed in 1996, who was not ‘picked’ from the field of photography but from that of cinema.

Conclusion The fiftieth anniversary of George Eastman House in 1999 emphasised the way in which the museum had now become much more integrated in all its activities. The exhibition ‘Inside Out: 50 Years of Collecting’ highlighted this new conceptualisation which was also reflected in the name change of the title to include film: from International Museum of Photography to International Museum of Photography and Film.40 In the last 20 years, it has operated successfully as museum of photography and cinema as well as heritage centre for George Eastman House and Gardens; however, a permanent exhibition of cinema’s archaeology is still absent. As I am concluding this chapter, GEH is undergoing renovation of both the mansion and gardens as well as building a new entrance and visitor’s centre. The new construction project which GEH is embarking on in 2020 which will go under the name of a large benefactor Thomas Tischer Visitor Center states in the publicity that: ‘The new entrance and visitor center will be more convenient, visible, welcoming, and accessible for guests.’41 Indeed the entrance built in 1989 visible in my photograph above felt as if it was ‘at the back of the house’ but with a beautiful signage from the walkway to guide you in (Figure 6.2).

100  Eastman House

FIGURE 6.2 

Signage to Eastman House entrance. (Author’s photograph)

Notes 1 This debate had not entirely abated when I interviewed Kathy Wolkowicz Connor, curator of George Eastman House and collection back in 2006. Connor was active in establishing the George Eastman Archive and Study Centre in 1999. 2 Mees and Clark were both British ‘photographic scientists’ with a shared interest in the history of photography. Clark had previously worked for a short spell at the British Science Museum. George Eastman House, A collective Endeavor, 1999, p. 5. 3 We have seen a similar figure in Chapter 2, in the first director of the South Kensington Museum, also a former military man, Colonel Henry Lyons. 4 Edward Steichen was an established and influential photographer and curator of the time, among his many achievements, while Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is the exhibition of the ‘Family of Man’ in 1955, which brought together hundreds of images from international photographic work. The photographs in the exhibition are all reproduced in a publication by MoMA in a thirtieth anniversary edition. 5 These were to be ‘short, illustrative, loop films about the daguerreotype process, the wet-collodion process, and William Henry Fox Talbot,’ George Eastman House, A collective Endeavor, 1999, p. 17. 6 Clark admitted to Newhall that their intention was precisely that he would turn GEH into a science museum, quoted in George Eastman House, A collective Endeavor, 1999, p. 18.

Eastman House  101

7 Part of his life account by Cherchi Usai, also mentions Card’s silent cinema ‘diva’ spotting and all the mythic story of his re-discovery of Louise Brooks and their subsequent relationship. See also Donald McNamara, Lulu in Rochester: Self Portrait of an Anti-Star. Missouri Review, Summer 1983, 6, 3: 63–82. 8 Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography was published many times over the decades, the last imprint was as recently as 1984. 9 ‘Instead of holding a position of prominence in a major museum in a large cultural center, he had chosen to be the curator of what might have been mistaken for a company museum in the upstate city of Rochester, New York.’ George Eastman House, A collective Endeavor, 1999, p. 23. 10 See note 13 in Chapter 1 about Gabriel Cromer. 11 This is still published today, https://www.eastman.org/image-magazine 12 A few names worth mentioning which were part of this ‘heady days’: Peter Bunnel, Paul Caponigro, Carl Chiarenza, Bruce Davidson, Nathan Lyons, David Plowden, Pete Turner, Jerry Uelsman. Unsurprisingly still all men at the time. 13 The Dryden Theatre, named after George Eastman’s niece and husband, still carries the same name to this day, https://www.eastman.org/dryden-theatre 14 The moving and storage of part of MoMA’s film collection to GEH’s fire-proof vault was not particularly welcomed by staff at MoMA. This opposition has been ascribed to the ‘wide gap between the collecting policies of the two museums’ (George Eastman House, A Collective Endeavor, 1999, p. 37). But I have not seen any documentation from the MoMA’s side of the argument which may reveal a different interpretation. 15 A short history of the award and the recipients of the prizes since 1955 is available on GEH’s website at https://www.eastman.org/george-eastman-award 16 Apparently in the fire which engulfed the yard and the wooden sheds at the back of the Cinémathèque Française on Rue de Courcelle, there was also film cans on loan from GEH. 17 George Pratt died in May 1988 and was awarded the Jean Mitry Prize for his ‘contribution to the reclamation and appreciation of silent cinema’ in the autumn of the same year at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone. His successor and friend at Eastman House, Jan-Christopher Horak, collected the award on his behalf. See https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/archival-spaces/george-pratt-100 (Accessed 17 February 2019). 18 This was not an easy task as much of the original furnishing had been scattered, cited in The George Eastman House and Gardens, 2004. I hope is not perceived as an act of desecration but during my visit I found some of the ‘decorative’ aspect of Eastman House with its ‘heads, skins and even hoofs of animals from the wild’ (which must have been shot during his African trips) hugely problematic; I imagine they were still exhibited in an attempt to recreate the house in its original version. 19 Lyons had been Associate director of George Eastman House, but had left to pursue a more radical vision of photography than it was possible within the confines of the museum. 20 A law was passed in 1969, the Tax Reform Act, which determined what constituted a public and a private institution (mentioned in George Eastman House, A collective Endeavor, 1999, p. 66). 21 The Corning Museum of Glass was founded by Corning Glass works in 1951.The allusion here is likely to relate to the wealth behind the museum and this in spite of the flood which engulfed the museum in 1972, caused by Storm Agnes. 22 George Eastman House Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 1, Winter 1980. 23 One feels sympathy for the kind of freedom this early cinephiles, turned museum professionals, could exercise in the early days of the musealisation of cinema. 24 John Kuiper, who worked at the Smithsonian Institution was Card’s replacement. 25 An organisation was formed called PABIR, Photo Archives Belong in Rochester, composed of local photographers, including Nathan Lyons, mentioned earlier who was at the time director of the Visual Studies Workshop. 26 The funds which had come from sale proceeds of a building owned by Kodak in San Francisco were put in a separate account and were to be used solely for the new archive building. 27 The capital campaign was led by Rochester businessman Bud Rusitzky, who was very effective in raising money fast; by 1987, 9.2 of the 10.2 million required had been raised (George Eastman House, A collective Endeavor, 1999, p. 104).

102  Eastman House

28 International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Newsletter, vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 1989, p. 1. 29 The restoration of the historic house was completed 6 months after the opening of the new museum building. The gardens also received some attention in the same year with the first appointment of a landscape curator and the beginning of restoration of the gardens. The house curator, Kathy Wolkowicz Connor, also instituted in 1999 a George Eastman Archive and Study Centre (Interview with author, 7 March 2006). 30 George Eastman’s house and gardens are subject to Landmark status, the American equivalent of the British Listed Building legislation. 31 The most important were: Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America; New Acquisitions/New Work/ New Directions: 1981–1989; A Salute to Daguerre: The Contemporary Daguerreotype; American Photography: 1839–1900. 32 The poster for the exhibition reproduced a still from the film South of Suez (1940) directed by Lewis Seiler. 33 Critical film scholarship about Hollywood Cinema has extensively developed since then. A major work is Maltby’s Hollywood Cinema’s history where all the industrial and production processes are well accounted for, which is now in its second edition. 34 The Curtis is a smaller auditorium, part of GEH, built in 1928. 35 Scorsese’s collection comprised 1600 American feature films from 1930 to 1960. 36 Horak took up a new appointment as Director of the Filmmuseum in Munich and Cherchi Usai had alighted from Europe where he was previously working at the Belgian Royal Film Archive. 37 Not long after, in 1998, an equivalent centre was established in the conservation of photography (Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation) funded by the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation with a grant of 2.2 million dollars. 38 The museum also had 400,000 photographs, 40,000 volumes in the library and 25,000 technological artefacts ranging from camera obscura to lantern slides projectors to all kinds of stereographic and photographic apparatuses, the cinema-related artefacts collection sadly received very little attention in exhibitionary terms. 39 The Louis B Mayer Conservation Centre is also in Rochester although in a different part of town of the museum. It can store up to ‘30 million feet of film’ in climate-controlled conditions. 40 Interview with Patrick Loughney, curator of motion pictures, 8 March 2006. Loughney also invited me to view some of the important research work undertaken on film by his department about different types of film materials and their ‘aesthetic’ results in terms of coloration. 41 https://www.eastman.org/restoration-construction (Accessed 12 December 2019).

Bibliography Brayer, E. (2006) George Eastman: A Biography. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Card, J. (1959) The Historical Motion-Picture Collections at George Eastman House. Journal of the SMPTE, 68, 3: 143–146. Card, J. (1999) Seductive Cinema:The Art of Silent Film. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Cherchi Usai, P. (2000) James Card, Founding Film Curator of George Eastman House (1915–2000). Journal of Film Preservation, 60/61: 68–70. George Eastman House (1999) A Collective Endeavor.The First Fifty Years of George Eastman House. Rochester, NY: George Eastman House. George Eastman House (2004) The George Eastman House and Gardens. Rochester, NY: George Eastman House. Gresh, K. (2015) An Era of Photographic Controversy: Edward Steichen at the MoMA, in J. E. Hill and V. R. Schwartz eds, Getting the Picture.The Visual Culture of the News. London: Bloomsbury. Horak, J.-C. (2001) The Dreamer: Remembering James Card. The Moving Image:The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 1, 1: 203–210. Maltby, R. (1995, 2003) Hollywood Cinema, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eastman House  103

Newhall, B. ed. (1980) Photography: Essays and Images. Illustrated Readings in the History of Photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Paris, B. (2000) Louise Brook: A Biography. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Pratt, G. C. (1973) Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film. New York: New York Graphic Society. Ryall, T. (2000) Britain and the American Cinema. London: Sage. Steichen, E. and Sandburg K. (1996, new ed.) The Family of Man. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.

CONCLUSION

In 2006 Stephen Bottomore compiled two lists for the special issue of Film History, the first ‘Film museums: a bibliography’ and the second ‘Cinema museums – a worldwide list,’ at the time I had just completed the research connected with two of the museums on that list, the Italian and French, but what struck me about the entries in either list was the near-total absence of either bibliographic references or these type of institutions in Africa, in fact the only institution mentioned is a Museum of Photography in Mauritius. Other continents of what we now refer to as the global south, Asia and Latin America (not in a geographical sense of that word) did not fare much better, but they had a few more examples, not least because of their rising economic power as well as some of those continent’s nations established cinema histories. Europe and the USA had the lion’s share on both those lists and unfortunately this book contributes to that, but in the hope that when the lists are rewritten, many more countries from the postcolonial world will be on them. Aside from the Film History special issue, museums of cinema institutions have not received much attention from film and museum scholars, not least, because as I found out during my research, this interdisciplinary area is still in the making. Nonetheless a few studies are slowly appearing about some of the many different institutions which have developed worldwide. The case studies selected for this book, albeit entirely western-centred, have been a small attempt in that direction, an overview rather than a detailed study of each museum which would otherwise require at least a book for each institution. In the case studies I have also found impossible to follow a shared general template as the material available about their histories and context differed greatly, with some museums having already lengthy studies behind them, such as the Cinémathèque Française-Musée du Cinéma, and others none at all. What I found out, however, is that they all had in common a strong culture of collaboration, whether it is in connection with loans, museum practice or shared ‘love of cinema.’ In these examples, it is also evident that it has taken the ‘dogged’ effort of many individuals to arrive at today’s well established and popular institutions which conserve, restore, exhibit and screen all things cinema (and in some of the examples here also photography and television). All the museums discussed in this book have incorporated auditoriums, often more than one, run daily and

Conclusion  105

season film programmes and yearly film festivals, retrospectives about genres, stars and costumes, set designs and drawings, technologies, photographic exhibitions and, as in three of the specific case studies of this book, curate and exhibit the permanent collection of the ‘archaeology of cinema.’ One of the museums researched, Eastman Museum, also runs postgraduate courses in photographic and film conservation and restoration. The curators of the museums in Bradford, Paris, Turin, Girona and Rochester have all stated during my assorted visits that the collections, and for some of them, especially the section categorised as ‘archaeology of cinema,’ can best be served by being part of a wider museological context, where links are forged with contemporary cinematic practices. Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, the director and curator of collections at the Turin museum, has gone a step further by suggesting that we move beyond the historical split between film and cinematographic heritage.1 Three of the museums of cinema presented in this book openly underline the connection between film culture and their collections of the archaeology of cinema, pre-cinema and cinematographic instruments in their permanent exhibitions. A process which has been key to museums of cinema’s undertakings is the interpretation and practice of moving beyond the divide between cinema as ‘leisure/technology’ and cinema as ‘aesthetics/art’; this has opened up a new demographic in museums visits and in addition partly bridged the divide between the traditional function of the museum as repository of collections and contemporary film and popular culture. These developments, past and present, have contributed to strengthening museums of cinema as well as provided a link with contemporary social and cultural experience for people who visit them.2 Their experience about visiting museums of cinema may be different, but unlike for other museums, there is already for most of the visitors a pre-existing association: museums’ displays and screenings have a connection with people’s personal filmic memory. Not surprisingly the audience profile is also different from other museums in terms of class, gender and ethnic identity. These multifaceted organisations have in recent years started the digital conversion of many of their physical collections; what the outcome and implication of this may be in the long run is still to be ascertained; the likely outcome could be that exhibitions may become more ‘personalised,’ more ‘intimate’ even or conversely that it becomes a deeper source of shared heritage experience (Ciolfi 2012). It is possible that new museological practices which have looked at providing an experience of ‘tangible interaction’ (Not and Petrelli 2018) may also be explored in an attempt to bridge the ‘materiality and immateriality of cinema.’ Bonomi’s suggested six ways3 in which the museum can be imagined for the future and for ‘our growth as contemporary citizens: rapid, self-reflecting, agile, transmitting, receiving, and welcoming’ (Bonomi 2002: 390), qualities which are not so dissimilar to the ones discussed by Hooper-Greenhill about the post-museum (2000). Whether this approach will specifically help museums of cinema in their increasingly difficult task of competing for visitors and audiences with a powerful and prolific digital cultural industry only time will tell. Museums of cinema are complex institutions not solely because of the nature of their collections but because the ‘ephemeral paradox’ of their existence remains unresolved; Joseph Losey suggested that Langlois’ museum was ‘a fine testimony to the futility of trying to preserve a transient art’ (cited in Roud 1983: 185). Increased studies and understanding of these institutions I am sure will go some way towards resolving that paradox. If these case-studies can serve as a springboard for future research about museums as well as inspire people to visit them it will have served some purpose towards the idea and necessity of safeguarding of cinema’s heritage in all its complexity.4

106  Conclusion

In a way of final conclusion, I would like to end with a quote from the ‘Preliminary scientific project’ for the Turin museum, which I believe encapsulate fully what is to be done: The challenge of a Museum as particular as the Cinema Museum should be rigorously defined…it should not simply be an accumulation of material as though it were a bazaar… Only a museum as a dynamic structure can assure a knowledge of [the] cinema language, of [the] precinema and cinema techniques evolution, and of its productive machine. A museum of cinema as a complex system of knowledge and experimentation…’ (Bertetto et al., 1997: 4–6)

Notes 1 Interview with author, Turin 18 November 2004. 2 I have undertaken visitors’ studies in two of the museums discussed in this book (in Bradford and Girona) and the finding confirmed that visitors appreciated the connection made between cinema’s heritage and contemporary cinema culture. I have also looked at a number of visitors’ studies undertaken internally by the same museums which produced similar findings. 3 After Calvino’s Six Memos for a Next Millenium, 1996. 4 Since I started this research I have been contacted by many students and young scholars from around the world who are researching the histories and practices of their own national museums/cinematheques.

Bibliography Bertetto, P., Francis, D., Micciché L., Pesenti Campagnoni, D. and Robinson, D. (1997) Preliminary Scientific Project: Towards a Cinema Museography. Museo Nazionale del Cinema at the Mole Antonelliana. Internal Report. Bonomi, F. (2002) A World of Fleas and Elephants: Collective Space and the Crisis of the Museum as Industry, in A. Detheridge, M. L. Frisa, M. Lupano and S.Tonchi eds, Total Living. Milan: Edizioni Charta. Calvino, I. (1996) Six Memos for the Next Millenium. London:Vintage. Ciolfi, L. (2012) Social Traces: Participation and the Creation of Shared Heritage, in E. Giaccardi (ed.) Heritage and Social Media: Understanding Heritage in a Participatory Culture. London: Routledge. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (2000) Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. London: Routledge. Not, E. and Petrelli, D. (2018) Blending Customisation, Context-Awareness and Adaptivity for Personalised Tangible Interaction in Cultural Heritage. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 114: 3–19. Roud, R. (1983) A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française. London: Secker & Warburg.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to content in figures. Abbott, John 21 Adams, Ansel 91 Ambrosio Film 64 American Cultural Institute, Paris 5, 54 American Film Institute 25n26 Anschütz, Ottomar 11 archaeology of cinema 3, 4, 5, 6, 12–14, 23, 56, 68, 85n6 Archives Françaises du Film 56 Armat, Thomas 14 Artigas i Candela, Jordi 85n11 Arts Council of England 36 Aurich, Rolf 20 Auvidulis 52 Baird, John Logie 39 Bandy, Mary Lea 18 Bannon, Anthony 99 Barceló, Joan Enric 81 Barnes, John and William 5, 68 Barnes brothers’ collection 5, 60, 68, 71n3, 75 Barr, Alfred 17–18 Barry, Iris 17–18, 21, 47 Bazalgette, Cary 33–34 Bazin, André 9–10, 24n3 Benjamin Walter 33 Bennett, Tony 29–30 Berri, Claude 55, 58n24 Bertetto, Paolo 15, 72n42, 106 BFI 4, 19, 21, 30, 31–34, 38–39 Bianco e Nero 60, 71n2 Bibliothèque du Film (BIFI) 54 Bibliothèque Nationale 57n9 Bill Douglas Cinema Museum 85n6 Biographe: Mutoscope 56

Bottomore, Stephen 24n13, 104 Bourdieu, Pierre 24n4, 81 Boyer, Alden Scott 91 Bradford Animation Festival 40 Bradford International Film Festival 40 Braun, Marta 11 British Film Institute see BFI British National Film Library see National Film and Television Archive Broccoli, ‘Cubby’ 39 Brunetta, Gian Piero 72n29 Buache, Freddy 49, 57n12 Buckingham Movie Museum see John BurgoyneJohnson Buckingham Movie Museum Bunnel, Peter 101n12 Buñuel, Luis 81 Cahiers du Cinéma 50, 52, 54 Callari, Francesco 61 Cameron, Julia Margaret 87 Canudo, Ricciotto 57n2, 61, 71n6 Caponigro, Paul 101n12 Carbó i Ribugent, Gemma 79, 84n3 Card, James 3, 6–7, 89–90, 92, 93, 95–96, 99, 101n7 Catalonia 84n1 Cavero, Paco 81 Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée see CNC Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia 60, 71n4 Ceram, C.W. 23, 76, 77 Cercle du Cinéma 45, 47 Ceresa, Carla 71n20 Chabrol, Claude 48 Chaplin, Charlie 80

108  Index

Cherchi Usai, Paolo 11, 15, 70, 89–90, 99, 101n7, 102n36 Chiarenza, Carl 101n12 Chiarini, Luigi 60 Chiaves, Carlo 70n1 Christie, Ian 7, 18, 24n10, 31 chronophotography 11, 24n7 Cine NIC 76–77, 79–80 Cinéma 75 52 Cinema Truffaut, Girona 81 CINEMATEK–Royal Belgian Film Archive 49, 102n36 Cinémathèque Française–Musée du Cinéma, Paris 3, 4–5, 17, 19–20, 21, 23, 30, 45–59, 67, 93, 104, 105; avenue de Messine 5, 47–48, 64; Palais de Chaillot 5, 51–54, 56; rue de Bercy 5, 54–55; rue de Courcelle 5, 48–49, 53 Cinerama 39, 43n31 Cineteca Italiana, Milan 71n19 Cineteca Nazionale 71n4 Clark, Walter 87, 94, 100n2, 100n6 CNC 54, 55, 56 Cocteau, Jean 46, 55 Coke, Frank Van Deren 94–95 Comolli, Jean-Louis 50 Condax, Philip 98 Confino, François 70, 72n42 Connor, Kathy 100n1 Correas,Victor 81 Cromer, Gabriel 13, 24n16, 90; see also Gabriel Cromer Collection Curtis, Ted 92 D’Ambra, Lucio 61, 71n7 Dagognet, François 11 Daily Herald Archive 38 Darbel, Alain 24n4 Daudelin, Robert 22 Davidson, Bruce 101n12 Day, Will 2, 24n16, 30, 31, 32, 57n8; see also Will Day Collection De Santis, Giuseppe 66 Dean, James 80 Decherney, Peter 11, 18 Demenÿ, Georges 2, 11, 13 Demy, Jacques 48 Design Museum, London 42n14 Dicks, Bella 7 digital frontiers 37 Doherty, Robert 95 Donskoi, Mark 67 Dryden Theatre, Rochester 101n13 Dudley Andrew, James 10 Duhamel, Jacques 51, 52 Dulac, Germaine 47 Dupin, Christophe 19, 32 Ealing studios 38 Eastman, George 6, 87, 88, 90, 93, 94

Eastman Historical Photographic Collection (EHPC) 87–88 Eastman House Film Festival see George Eastman House Film Festival Eastman Kodak company see Kodak Company Eastman Museum, Rochester 4, 6–7, 87–103, 98, 105; see also GEH Eder, Josef Maria 87 Edison, Thomas 14; Kinetoscope-Kinetophone 56 Eisner, Lotte 21, 45, 47, 52, 56, 57n16 Elstree studios 38 Engell, L. 10 Enyeart, James 97 Epstein, Jean 47, 57n3 Epstein, Marie 56 European Union 21, 36 Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film see FIAF FERT studios, Turin 63, 71n13 Feyder, Jacques 47 FIAF 3, 17, 20, 21–23, 25n24, 25n35, 32, 47, 49, 57n11, 64, 92–93 film festivals 40–41 Film History 104 Filmmuseum, Munich 102n36 Filmoteca de Catalunya, Barcelona 83 Flavin, Dan 55 Fleury, Marianne de 48 Ford, Colin 33 Foundation for Sports and the Arts 36 Francis, David 33, 42n12, 72n42 Franju, George 21, 45, 46, 56 Frick, Caroline 15, 16, 18 Friese-Greene, Claude 24n9 Friese-Greene, William 11, 14, 24n9, 31 Frusta, Arrigo 61 Gabriel Cromer Collection 7, 24n16, 87 Gance, Abel 57n13 Garbo, Greta 81, 82 Gardner, Alexander: Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War 89 Gaumont 47 GEH 6, 23, 25n26, 41, 51, 62, 63, 87–97, 99, 100, 100n1; see also Eastman Museum, Rochester Gehry, Frank 5, 54 George Eastman Archive and Study Center 100n1 George Eastman Award (‘Georges’) 93 George Eastman House: the International Museum of Photography and Film see GEH George Eastman House Film Festival 99 Germi, Pietro 66 Godard, Jean-Luc 48, 57n13 Goebbels, Joseph 20 Gramsci, Antonio 70 Great Exhibition of 1851 29 Greenaway, Peter 25n19, 72n42

Index  109

Greenhalgh, Paul 29 Griffith, D.W. 11, 12, 18 Gromo, Mario 63 Handling, Piers 41 Hantaï, Simon 55 Hardcastle, Leslie 33 Harlé, Paul-Auguste 45, 47 Harvey, Michael 29, 30, 31, 35–36, 42n23 Hayward, Susan 50 Hediger,Vinzenz 20, 21 Henning, Michelle 1, 33 Henri Langlois Collection 46, 47, 53, 54, 55, 56 Hensel, Frank 20, 21, 47 Heritage Lottery Fund 36 Herzog, Werner 57n16 Hill, David Octavius 87 Hitler, Adolf 20 Hollywood 7, 14, 18, 57n15, 80, 82, 93, 98–99, 102n33 Horak, Jan-Christopher 98–99, 101n17, 102n36 Horwath, Alexander 20–21 Houston, Penelope 16, 17, 19, 20, 31–32, 42n10 Hove Museum and Art Gallery 5, 24n11, 71n3 Husnik, Jakub 13, 24n15 Image et Son 52 IMAX 39 Imperial War Museum, Manchester 42n19 International Federation of Film Archives see FIAF Iordanova, Dina 40 Itala Film 64 Japanese Film Library 51 John Burgoyne-Johnson Buckingham Movie Museum 4, 35 Kamenka, Alexandre 47, 57n3 Kamenka Collection 45 Kaplan, Flora E.S. 83 Keaton, Buster 93 Kensington Science Museum see South Kensington Museum see National Museum of Science and Industry Khan, B. Zorina 12 Kingston, Arthur 42n22 Kircher, Athanasius 79; Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae 85n7 Kodak Company 6, 7, 87, 92, 93, 94 Kodak Museum, Harrow 4, 35, 38 Kuiper, John 101n24 Kula, Sam 16, 25n22 L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation 99 L’Herbier, Marcel 57n3 La Cinématographie Française 45 Lang, Jack 53 Langlois, Georges P. 47

Langlois, Henri 3, 5, 7n2, 16, 19, 21, 22, 24n17, 30, 42n10, 45–54, 55, 56, 57n5, 57n11, 61, 62, 64, 67, 92, 93; see also Henri Langlois Collection Latsis, Dimitrios 30 Lattuada, Alberto 66 Lawrence, Bill 42n23 Le Prince, Louis 11, 31, 32, 42n8 Le Prince, Marie 31 Ledoux, Jacques 49 Lépine, Charles 61 Levie, Pierre and Zette 68; see also Pierre and Zette Levie Collection Library of Congress 12, 17, 25n21, 25n26 Lindgren, Ernest 19, 21, 25n28, 32, 42n10, 49 Lindsay,Vachel 11 Lizzani, Carlo 69 Losey, Joseph 105 Loughney, Patrick 102n40 Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, Rochester 102n39 Low, Rachael 32 Lumière (brothers) 2, 9, 10, 13, 14, 47, 83; Cinématographe 56 Lumley, Robert 33, 34, 35 Luzzati, Emanuele 66 Lyons, Henry 30, 100n3 Lyons, Nathan 101n12, 101n19, 101n25 MacKenzie, Scott 25n29 magic lanterns 3, 4, 5, 66, 68, 69, 71n3, 79, 80 Mallol, Tomàs 6, 75, 76, 84n3; see also Tomàs Mallol Collection Malraux, André 48, 50, 51, 53 Maltby, Richard 14–15 Manga Films 80 Manganella, Renato see D’Ambra, Lucio Mango Film Festival 40 Mannoni, Laurent 25n39, 48, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57n9, 79 Marcus, Laura 12 Marey, Etienne-Jules 2, 11, 13, 51; Zoetrope 56 Matuszewski, Boleslaw 2, 9, 10–11 Mayer, Robert 96, 97 Mayor, Federico 21 Mazzanti, Nicola 49 Meerson, Mary 53, 56 Mees, Kenneth 87, 100n2 Méliès, Georges 10, 45, 67, 69 Micciché, Lino 72n42 Millennium Gallery, Sheffield 42n19 Minghella, Anthony 34 Minguez Ricart, Maite 80 Mitry, Jean 45 Mitterand, François 53 MNC 3, 5, 23, 60–74, 105, 106; Mole Antonelliana 60, 63, 67–70; Palazzo Chiablese 5, 63, 64, 65–67 MoMA Film Department/Library 17–18, 21, 25n26, 47, 57n1, 101n14

110  Index

MOMI 4, 31–34, 35, 42n13 Monroe, Marilyn 80 Moretti, Nanni 69 Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin see MNC Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano 66, 72n28 Museu del Cinema, Girona 3, 6, 23, 75–86, 78, 106n2 Museum of Modern Art, New York see MoMA Museum of the Moving Image, London see MOMI Museum of the Moving Image, New York 18, 25n26 museums of cinema’s early history 9–12 Muybridge, Eadweard 11, 24n8, 87 Myrent, Glenn 47 Národní Technické Muzeum, Prague 2, 12, 13 National Archive, Washington, D.C. 25n26 National Film and Television Archive, London 17, 18–19, 21 National Film Archive, London 31–32, 33, 42n10, 64, 67; see also National Film and Television Archive, London National Film Library, London 32, 49, 57n1; see also National Film and Television Archive, London National Film Theatre, London 33, 34; see also BFI National Museum of Photography, Film and Television see NMPFT National Museum of Science and Industry, London 2, 4, 12–13, 14, 24n12, 24n14, 35 National Science and Media Museum, Bradford see NSMM Neale, Steve 24n3 Negroni, Baldassarre 61 neorealism 66, 72n30 Nevill, Amanda 34, 36 New York State Council on the Arts 95 Newhall, Beaumont 88, 89, 90–92, 93, 94, 100n6; History of Photography 101n8 Nicolau Griñó, Ramón and Tomás 79–80 NMPFT 31, 33, 34, 36; see also NSMM Nouvelle Vague 50 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 19, 32 NSMM 4, 6, 23, 24n12, 29–44, 63, 106n2 Opalka, Roman 55 Païni, Dominique 54, 58n19 Palazzo Madama, Turin 64, 71n18 Papini, Giovanni 61, 71n7 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 55 Pasquali, Ernesto Maria 71n1 Passerini, Luisa 71n8 Pastrone, Giovanni 61, 63; Cabiria 65, 66, 72n29 Pathé 47 Paul, Robert W. 2, 11, 13, 14, 24n10, 24n13, 29, 31, 32, 42n9

Pérez, Òscar 81 Pesenti Campagnoni, Donata 13, 25n39, 60, 61, 71n1, 72n42, 105 Picasso, Pablo 55 Pierre and Zette Levie Collection 69 Pinewood Studios 38 Plowden, David 101n12 Pons i Busquet, Jordi 25n39, 76, 77, 84n3 Positif 52 Pratt, George 93, 98, 99, 101n17 Prolo Collection 68 Prolo, Maria Adriana 3, 5, 6, 60–63, 62, 67, 68, 71n1 Puigdevall Noguer, Montse 84n3 Purkyně, Jan Evangelista 2, 13 Puttnam, David 39 Reichsfilmarchiv, Berlin 17, 20–21, 47, 57n1 Renoir, Jean 47, 55 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 55 Resnais, Alain 48 Reynaud, Emile 10, 48, 83 Rivette, Jacques 48 Robinson, David 25n19, 33, 35, 42n12, 72n42 Rochester Institute of Technology 91–92 Rohmer, Eric 48 Rosen, Philip 21 Rosi, Francesco 66 Rosselini, Roberto 66 Rossell, Deac 11 Rotha, Paul 3, 14–15, 32, 34, 46 Roud, Richard 46, 52, 57n4 Royal Belgian Film Archive see CINEMATEK– Royal Belgian Film Archive Royal Photographic Society 38 Ruiz, David 81 Rusitzky, Bud 101n27 Russo, Angelina 1, 33 Ryman, Robert 55 Sadoul, Georges 48, 57n6, 62 Science Museum Group 42n21 Science Museum, London 29–30, 37–38; see also National Museum of Science and Industry, London Scuola Nazionale di Cinema 71n4 Scorsese, Martin 99, 102n35 Shepperton Studios 38 Shub, Esfir 24n5 silent cinema 7, 16, 45, 47 Silverstone, Roger 33 Sipley/3M Collection 96 Smith, George Albert 12 Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. 96–97 Sobieszek, Robert 98 Solbert, Oscar 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 96 Soldati, Mario 66

Index  111

South Kensington Museum 4, 24n14, 29–30, 100n3 Staud, C.J. 89 Steichen, Edward 88, 100n4; see also Steichen Collection Steichen Collection 96 Strong, Henry Alvah 92 Sugimoto, Hiroshi 55 Svenska Filmsamfundet (Swedish Film Society) 17, 57n1 Swedish Film Archive 17 Swedish Film Institute 17 Swiss Cinémathèque 49, 57n12 Talbot, William Henry Fox 87 Tate Liverpool 42n19 Technical Institute of Prague 24n15 television galleries 38–39 Tennant, John 90 Thomas Tischer Visitor Center 99 Toeplitz, Jerzy 49 Tomàs Mallol Collection 75, 76–77 Toubiana, Serge 54 Truffaut, François 2, 48, 81 Turan, Kenneth 40, 41 Turner, Pete 101n12 Uelsman, Jerry 101n12 UNESCO 21, 22–23, 25n33

University Art Museum, Berkeley, California 25n26 University of California, Los Angeles 25n26 University of Rochester 88, 91, 93 University of St Andrews Film Study Centre 40 Urban, Charles 12, 32 Varda, Agnès 48 Vaughan, Olwen 21 Venice Film Festival 64 Vergo, Peter 25n20 Victoria and Albert Museum 24n14, 30, 38 Visconti, Luchino 69 Vivié, Jean 56 Volante, Guido 71n1 Wasson, Haidee 17, 18 Wessons, Morgan 99 White, Minor 91–92 Wibom, Anna Lena 22 Will Day Collection 13, 14, 24n17, 30–31, 35, 48, 55, 56, 75 Williamson, James 32 Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk 41 World War II 47, 63 Zenger, Karel 13, 24n15 zoopraxiscope 11, 24n8