Twin Shrines to the Silver Screen
By RICHARD CORLISS
For old-fashioned art lovers, a museum is a building that elevates the spirit and lowers the pulse rate. In this cathedral, the faithful speak in reverent whispers or stand silently before paintings, which demand leisure and concentration for the appreciation of their subtleties. Other visitors, less awestruck, may squirm through the solemnity, like a child dragooned to High Mass. Or find a seat in the vestibule and fall asleep.
No one is likely to nod off in two new museums, independent of each other, that have just opened with similar names and within five days of each other but 3,500 miles apart. The American Museum of the Moving Image, in New York City, and London's Museum of the Moving Image, on which Prince Charles raised the curtain last week, are as informal and user friendly as their acronymic nicknames, AMMI and MOMI. Splendidly begauded in perky colors, stocked with playful film fetishes and interactive exhibits that look like video games, the new museums are not mausoleums of modern art. They are more like theme parks, urban Disney Worlds.
This is as it should be. Movies, even in a museum, want the proud hug of philistinism. The film archivist Henri Langlois knew this when he opened a Paris movie museum 16 years ago in his Cinematheque Francaise. Inside the front door, Psycho's mummified Mother Bates lurked behind a window. Against the back wall, German expressionism ran riot in a full-scale set from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The museum was like an EKG of a national intelligence that can find value in both Jean-Luc Godard and Jerry Lewis.
Why, then, could the blend of films and artifacts not find a home in the country that made them famous? After nearly three decades of community agitation, the Hollywood Museum is still only the promise of an empty lot next to Mann's Chinese Theater. The stars' footprints would have to lead east. Few guessed that they would lead to a working-class neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., just a short subway ride from Manhattan.
Aiming to embrace the media's aspirations to high art as well as their roots in vaudeville, AMMI serves up film and television history in two strengths: straight up and with a shot of circus-clown seltzer. But even the serious exhibitions provide the tang of astonishment. A display of 58 machines -- from the 1835 thaumatrope to tomorrow's Sony GV-8 Video Walkman -- pulses with the gimcrack genius of those anonymous technicians who gave artists the tools to dream with. The spirit of Philo T. Farnsworth, boy pioneer of TV, rides again!
That bracing ingenuity marks many of AMMI's exhibits. Nam June Paik's video installation is an automobile frame on which are mounted 65 screens, each strobing scenes of Bonnie and Clyde or Abbott and Costello or any of a hundred other images. AMMI's apex is Tut's Fever, an Egyptian-style movie palace conceived by Artists Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong. Grooms' impish sculptures staff the theater: Theda Bara sits in the box office; Mae West sells you candy; Mickey Rooney is the usher; a sarcophagus creaks open to reveal the late James Dean. In the theater auditorium, its walls a splurge of film-trivia graffiti, you can watch a silent-movie serial or just gawk at the delirious decor.
The museum's curators are eager to convince you of the seriousness of their enterprise, and some of the text panels read like term papers. Ignore them; play hooky in your trash-collector's soul. Enter phone booth-shaped screening rooms to watch clips from All About Eve or Mary Tyler Moore's last episode with commentary from Directors Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Jay Sandrich. Model costumes of the stars, like Marilyn Monroe's dress from The Seven Year Itch, before a fun-house mirror. Lay your own sound effects over the dialogue of a TV commercial or movie clip. Browse through the media memorabilia of a zillion middle-class childhoods: the Cisco Kid coloring book, the Partridge Family lunch box, a Donald Duck board game, the Welcome Back, Kotter paper-doll set. And when you need a rest, stop by AMMI's two state-of-the-art theaters and catch a full-length movie. Later this fall, AMMI will mount a Jerry Lewis retrospective. Henri Langlois must be pleased.
If AMMI exudes the comfortable musk of a neighborhood Bijou miraculously restored, London's MOMI has eyes to play the Palladium. Not that the two institutions have radically different means or ends. Both occupy about 9,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space. Both display a Nam June Paik piece, clips from the compilation film Precious Images, and a model of a drive-in theater. Both have been ages in the planning, though MOMI's 1978 prospectus preceded AMMI's by three years, and a trace of bantering rancor shows through the Brits' geniality toward their upstart colonial rival. Perhaps because MOMI was spawned by the venerable British Film Institute, it seems a more comprehensive and congenial trip down the Yellow Brick Road of movie and TV history. It is certainly the more lavish in ambition and design: a superproduction on location under Waterloo Bridge.
MOMI also has a simple, compelling narrative thrust. It traces moving images from the shadow plays of ancient Java and the magic-lantern shows of the early 19th century to the big parade of movie stars, social trends and industrial eruptions. Some periods are re-created with elaborate props: a looming female robot from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a railway car stocked with projector and films to recall the propaganda push of early Soviet cinema, a Salvador Dali collage with the probing eyes he designed for Hitchcock's Spellbound, and a couch inspired by Mae West's lips. Elsewhere, actors stroll about in character to fill in the historical blanks. In a room labeled "Cinema Goes to War," for example, "soldiers" roll about in trenches. Nearby is a majestic staircase canopied by MOMI's own high-camp Erecthyon: six sculpted muses of the silent cinema (Theda Bara, Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Gish and Rudolph Valentino) serving as columns in a temple of the gods.
Elsewhere you can peek over a silhouette of Parisian rooftops to glimpse excerpts from French films of the '30s. You can see March of Time newsreels in their U.S. and British editions. You can sit in a makeup chair, look into the mirror, and watch Spencer Tracy metamorphose from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. Approaching one machine, you can press any of two dozen buttons and hear a line or two of famous dialogue -- can you identify the film? Wander into the animation chamber, and swap sketches with some master cartoonist. In the TV section, compare the video performances of the last five Prime Ministers. And then look through an adjacent window to find a Spitting Image puppet of Margaret Thatcher. Scarier than Mother Bates.
Do MOMI's strolling players help create the suspension of disbelief necessary to any moviegoing experience, or do they shatter it? Are some of the smaller exhibits at AMMI miracles of condensation, or just perfunctory? And is there, somewhere, a place for a movie museum untainted by the glam-bam Disney World touch? These are questions to ponder on a second or 17th visit to two dazzling show palaces. The lights are on. The cameras are in place. MOMI and AMMI deserve the action.