Virtual art tour (inspired by The Art Issue of The New York Review of Books): MoMA: How To See: Home Movies, How To See: The First Movies

Stills from Jarret family home videos, Pittsburgh, 1958–1967. The New York Review of Books. Photo: Museum of Modern Art. Please click to enlarge.

MoMA: How To See the First Movies: Maxim Firing a Field Gun (1897). My screenshot.

The New York Review of Books: The Art Issue, 14 May 2020.
Corona lockdown art museum visits.

For the first time in the 125-year old history of the cinema, movie theatres are closed worldwide. The same with museums and galleries. In an innovative way, The New York Review of Books has dedicated an issue for art exhibitions that can be visited online. It's not the same thing but better than nothing! I started two weeks ago with my first one, Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (Met Breuer, New York). The visual quality of the museums' digital tours is high. They are worth visiting on a good television screen.

Following the NYRB Art Issue page by page, my next exhibition is MoMA's "Private Lives Public Spaces", introduced by an essay by Leslie Jamison: "Other Voices, Other Rooms".

Virtual visit:
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Private Lives Public Spaces.
Organized by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, Brittany Shaw, Curatorial Assistant, Katie Trainor, Collections Manager, Peter Williamson, Preservation Officer, and Ashley Swinnerton, Collection Specialist, Department of Film.
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. How To See: The First Movies.
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. How To See: Home Movies.

MoMA introduction: "Long before camera phones, the 1923 introduction of small-gauge film stock heralded the unofficial birth of affordable home moviemaking. Over the subsequent decades, many thousands of reels of amateur film shot around the world amounted to one of the largest and most significant bodies of moving-image work produced in the 20th century."

"Artists, celebrities, world travelers, and the public at large, using 16- and 8-millimeter equipment, employed this unregulated, democratic form of personal filmmaking to produce work that is by turns vigorous, sentimental, frank, and sometimes transgressive. Sadly, these films were also rarely preserved and commonly abandoned, often ending up as flea market curios or stock footage as more consumer-friendly video formats arrived in the 1980s. Private Lives Public Spaces, the Museum’s first gallery installation of home movies and amateur films drawn exclusively from its collection, shines a light on a seldom-recognized cinematic revolution."

"This 100-screen presentation of virtually unseen, homemade works dating from 1907 to 1991 explores the connections between artist’s cinema, amateur movies, and family filmmaking as alternatives to commercial film production. Staged as an immersive video experience, the exhibition reveals an overlooked history of film from the Museum’s archives, providing fresh perspectives on a remarkably rich precursor to the social media of today." (MoMA introduction)

AA: I finish my virtual art tour in the (virtual) company of familiar faces from the Museum of Modern Art: Ron Magliozzi, Brittany Shaw, Katie Trainor, Peter Williamson and Ashley Swinnerton presenting home movies, and Dave Kehr introducing some of the first movies ever made.

Home movies are a fascinating phenomenon, sometimes made with a wonderfully assured touch, revealing aspects of life otherwise unrecorded, and also technically of much higher quality than is conventionally assumed. As the curators state, we are now in a privileged position to value home movies when the corona pandemic lockdown forces us to stay at home.

In early cinema, the 68 mm films of the Mutoscope and Biograph companies, led by W. K. L. Dickson, were the absolute elite form, and the format remained unsurpassed until the breakthrough of the IMAX (the Biograph frame was not only wider but also taller: four times as large as the standard frame, like IMAX). The 68 mm Biograph collections of EYE Film Institute (ex-Nederlands Filmmuseum) and the BFI National Archive have been made available during the last 20 years. Now in New York MoMA has made accessible their Biograph 68 mm collection, including several titles that are not included in the Amsterdam and London sets. In How To See: The First Movies Dave Kehr introduces the MoMA restorations with several appetizing and tantalizing glimpses.

For instance I don't think I have previously seen moving images of Hiram Maxim demonstrating his killing machine, the Maxim gun, the first recoil-operated machine gun in production. His machine gun was one of the cornerstones of the expansion of the British Empire in its most brutal and bloody period. Millions were killed in genocidal imperial wars, the first instances of an industrial scale slaughter, later introduced to European soil in WWI.

From the MoMA homepage:

The root of the word “amateur” is love.

During the spring and summer of 2019, curators in MoMA’s Department of Film screened hundreds of hours of amateur footage that had been acquired by the Museum over the last 85 years—films ranging from Salvador Dalí’s vacations in Spain to countless hours of families whose names have often been lost, capturing the intimate moments that mattered to them.

All of this was in preparation for Private Lives Public Spaces, the Museum’s first exhibition devoted to home movies as a cinematic art form. “For me, home movies really were a revelation,” recounts film curator Ron Magliozzi. “The largest body of moving-image work created in the 20th century is home movies.” Home movies offer an unfiltered window onto history, telling important stories of the century that didn’t pass through film studios, news companies, or advertising.

“Home movies function as time machines into the past,” muses curatorial assistant Brittany Shaw. “It’s what the past looks like to us…or the idea of the past. When I think of this time, it’s how I think of the colors, those bright reds and blues….” “And that’s the aesthetic we were talking about,” continues Magliozzi. “That’s the connection to modernism…the fact that the color is of a certain period, the way it might be in a painting.”

Now, in this difficult moment when we’re all stuck inside, often separated from our loved ones, it’s an opportune time to revisit our own home movies, and the moments that we and our parents and grandparents shared together and chose to capture.