Mae West & Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. expressed dismay when Iris Barry programmed the 1933 Mae West vehicle "She Done Him Wrong" for a film audience at the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street. . . .

All eyes will be fixed on Yoshio Taniguchi's design when the Museum of Modern Art reopens today [in Manhattan], but film lovers should be forgiven if their sights narrow on the escalators leading down to the movie theaters. After two years . . . , the film department returns home this week with three series. . . .

This program is merely an appetizer, however. Starting tomorrow, the film department gets down to serious cinematic business with the first of two massive series, "Premieres" and "112 Years of Cinema." The second, which opens Wednesday, provides an overview of the seventh art from its late 19th-century beginnings to the present. In sheer scope - the museum will screen a film from every year in movie history - the "112 Years of Cinema" program will afford an overview of the medium, however implicit. . . .

. . . . Founded in 1935, the [film] department, the first in the country, aimed to "trace, catalog, assemble, preserve, exhibit and circulate to museums and colleagues single films or programs of all types of films." The initial film curator, Iris Barry, sought out quality movies along with disintegrating prints; she was, for instance, a champion of D. W. Griffith when the great director was in the lonely twilight of his career. . . .

. . . More than anything it was the democratization of taste intrinsic to the movies that made even the idea of a museum film department so heretical. In her history of the department, the chief curator Mary Lea Bandy recounts how Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. expressed dismay when Iris Barry programmed the 1933 Mae West vehicle "She Done Him Wrong." What Mrs. Rockefeller didn't know was that movies were changing her world and her museum.

In a talk he gave at the Modern around the same time and which was published in 1934, the art critic Erwin Panofsky argued: "Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 percent of the population of the earth."

The movies, Panofsky wrote, had "re-established that dynamic contact between art production and art consumption" absent in the other arts. If all the poets put down their pens and all the artists laid down their easels, he coolly added, only a small fraction of the general public would notice and even fewer would care. Decades later, the bitter truth of these words seems to have been borne out. The movies did more than revitalize the relationship between art producers and art consumers; they radically changed the other arts, which have increasingly bent to the logic of entertainment. It's a logic to which museums ceded long ago, evident in blockbuster shows and all those bells and whistles designed to keep the paying public from getting too bored by the art. . . .

Against the backdrop of the really big show that has become the Modern's reopening there is something almost a touch subversive about the film department . . .

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CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Putting the Movies Back Into the Modern
By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times - - Published: November 20, 2004