Film Archiving as a Profession: An Interview with Eileen Bowser

Abstract

Eileen Bowser's career as a film archivist and a leader of the international film archive movement spanned the second half of the twentieth century. As the curator of the film archive at the Museum of Modern Art, she inherited the responsibility of managing one of the world's most influential film collections, and experienced the special circumstances of running a film archive in an art museum. She served on the executive committee of the International Federation of Film Archives at the time that the organization was developing its standard-setting system of commissions and publications. Her personal interests as a historian led her to pursue collaborations between archives and academia that aided in the reformulation of early film studies that began in the 1970s. In effect, her testimony bears witness to the maturing of the moving image archive profession. Eileen Bowser was born Eileen Putt in Columbia Station, Ohio, on January 18, 1928. She earned an undergraduate degree in English and art at Marietta College and a graduate degree in art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with a master's thesis on the paintings of Tintoretto in the Scuoio de San Rocco. She joined the staff of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library in 1954 as secretary to Richard Griffith, the second curator of film after founding archivist Iris Barry. Mrs. Bowser became associate curator of the archive not long after the Film Library was renamed the Department of Film in 1966. 1 Her major publications include the revised edition of Iris Barry's D. W. Griffith, American Film Master; A Handbook for Film Archives, edited with John Kuiper; and History of the American Cinema.2