Educating Alternative Spectatorships

Abstract

Educating Alternative Spectatorships Museum Movies: The Museum of Modem Art and Birth of Art Cinema, by Haidee Wasson, University of California Press, 2005. When Iris Barry, founding curator of Museum of Modern Art Film Library, declared patronage and salvaging of old as ideal goal of her institution's work in 1930s, she presciendy for young medium's forty years of existence as reason enough to gather, collect, and scrutinize images being produced in light of projected ephemerality. In another era and at another crossroads, as we glean limits of Walter Benjamin's meditations on art's mechanical reproducibility, study of and media as an academic discipline owes considerable debt to her and fellow MoMA staff members' foundational contributions. As Haidee Wasson contends in Museum Movies, Barry, an established British film critic before it was in vogue to be one, her husband, MoMA director, John Abbott, and her museum staff, joined forces and fought good fight when it came to establishing Film Library as preeminent American arts and cultural, institutional entity, promoting the new of not as novelty but as apotheosis of all forms. Serving several masters simultaneously, from museum trustees and Rockefeller Foundation (as primary funding source) to Hollywood industry (as controller of copyrights and prints), Film Library, in very infancy, engaged in precarious balancing act justifying and sustaining public mandate under various pressures and whims of private enterprise deeply entrenched in an American rhetoric of paternalistic values and insecurities. Realistic rather than apologetic about class-based assumptions of bourgeois cultural respectability, MoMA Film Library argued for particular kinds of rather than against commercial and its sense of moral or polite cinema had as much to do with engendering manner of watching as with prescribing what should be watched. This project fell in line with recent introduction of leisure as component of everyday modern life and MoMA's view that could dynamically engage wider public at large as facilitator of proper conduct, moral development, and studied contemplation. Much of Wasson's book delineates behind-the-scenes undertakings by cultural workers and elite patrons in various interactions with MoMA to shape intelligent filmgoing for masses. The sociocultural structuring of cinematic viewing behavior congruent to an emergent visual culture remains author's interest at heart, such that Barry's earlier dictum finds partial realization. While Wasson touches briefly upon archiving and preserving of old as uncanny historical documents, her real subject invokes idea of old films and how we as filmgoers have come to perceive them. Given this emphasis, her research yields more expansive definition of art beyond common definition of European modernist experimentation at height. Art cinema specifically refers to a complex of factors including not just themselves or their mode of production but also crucial interfaces that form distribution, exhibition, and discursive contexts that mediate our encounters with and constitute me apparatus of cinema. MoMA and Film Library's internationalist agenda of collecting and exhibiting both American and European of various styles and forms to specialized and educated audiences helped pioneer vision for an American culture sowed in alternative spaces fostered by network of critics, museums and galleries, societies, festivals, universities, and state organizations. Most useful as an institutional analysis and work of cultural and social history, Wasson's study delves into rather inauspicious and prosaic beginnings of American history and criticism and fleshes out vast and multifaceted social agencies that colluded to legitimate and time-based media as modern objets d'art, and that subsequently linked American creativity and ingenuity to that which is distinctly modern. …