NEW YORK OBSERVER/MOMA
CineStudy
by Elisabeth Franck
Since mid-January, phone calls to the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Stills
Archive, one of the world’s foremost pictorial records of filmmaking dating
back to the 1890’s, have been silently transferred to a voice-mail box with
this recorded greeting: “Due to the Museum of Modern Art’s ongoing
expansion project, the Film Stills Archive has been closed and is no longer
accepting orders.”
Considering the public outcry that followed a Jan. 12 New York Times article
first reporting MoMA’s decision to shut down public access to the rare
archive for the foreseeable future and ship it to the museum’s Celeste Bartos
Film Preservation Center in Hamlin, Pa., the brief recorded message is hardly
explanation enough for the thousands of directors, authors, scholars and
publishers that use the archive. Director Martin Scorsese, who edited MoMA
stills into his last film, My Voyage to Italy, said, “I can only hope, for
the cineastes here in New York who need access to the files, that this is not
permanent.”
But the recording is far more information than is being disseminated inside
MoMA’s film department, where current and former employees say a paranoid
atmosphere of secrecy has taken over as museum director Glenn Lowry plans to
shut down the 53rd Street site from late May of this year until some time in
2005 to complete a $650 million renovation amid a worsening economy. Employees
at MoMA say that the museum’s film department—created by its founder,
Alfred Barr, in 1935, and unparalleled in its role elevating film to an art
form and the director to the status of an auteur—is being dealt a terrible
blow in the name of museum progress. The Stills Archive, they believe, will not
be a priority even when MoMA unveils its big, shiny new home.
In addition to cutting off access to the Film Stills Archive, The Observer has
learned, MoMA has yet to find an off-site location in which to continue its
crowd-pleasing film screenings—generally two or three shows a day—once the
museum closes on May 21.
MoMA shut down the Film Stills Archives on Jan. 9 when it laid off Mary
Corliss, curator of the archive for 34 years, and her co-worker, Terry Geesken,
a 17-year MoMA employee. Mary Lea Bandy, chief curator of the film department
and the museum’s deputy director for curatorial affairs, gave the women two
days to clear out. Neither Ms. Bandy nor Mr. Lowry would be interviewed for
this article.
Ms. Corliss believes her firing and the relegation of the Film Stills Archive
to Pennsylvania are partly retaliation for her active role in the museum-wide
strike of 2000. She and Ms. Geesken played very vocal roles during the strike,
and Ms. Corliss called on her influential friends to conduct a letter-writing
campaign and get publicity for the plight of the poorly paid MoMA assistants.
Returning to the job after the four-month strike, she said the Film Stills
Archive had suffered in terms of MoMA’s film department’s priorities.
On the day Ms. Corliss was laid off, union members met with Oz Zager, MoMA’s
director of human resources, who told them that Ms. Corliss and Ms. Geesken’s
firing had been totally up to Ms. Bandy. The reason for her decision, they said
Mr. Zager told them, was that “the Film Stills Archive is not central to the
core mission” of MoMA’s film department.
Some characterize MoMA’s film department as a vipers’ nest. “The film
department has a history of being fragmented,” said a MoMA staffer who has
worked with the department for about five years. “There have been turf wars
there that have polarized the department in a pretty dramatic way. There’s a
tremendous amount of infighting and many people have been there for a fair
amount of time, since it’s a pretty coveted position in the community of film
scholars and curators.”
Employees say many of the current problems can be traced back to the beginning
of Ms. Bandy’s reign in 1980. Her climb to director of the film department,
after being hired by MoMA’s publishing department and a two-year stint as an
exhibition coordinator, was somewhat controversial. She came to the museum with
no film studies under her belt, after graduating from Stanford University and
working as an assistant editor at Harry N. Abrams Inc.
A few in the department criticized the appointment, Ms. Corliss among them.
“On a scholarship level, I didn’t feel she was qualified for the job,”
said Ms. Corliss. When Ms. Bandy came on board, the film department boasted two
heavyweight cinema scholars: Adrienne Mancia, who headed programming and was
known in festivals the world over for her daring choices and intimate knowledge
of film, and Eileen Bowser, the longtime head of the department’s film
collection.
Started as no more than an assortment of industry-related photographs stored in
several bound volumes, the Film Stills Archive achieved a special status in
American scholarship. After a 1948 bequest from Photoplay magazine, an industry
publication, of stills from the 1890’s through Hollywood’s golden age, the
archive’s holdings were over a million photos.
When Ms. Corliss first started there in 1967, there had also been bequeaths of
stills of D.W. Griffith and Georges Méliès. She brought in donations from the
Dell Publishing Company, Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures, among
others. Anonymous benefactors would send in donations with notes like, ‘We
wanted you to have these.’
“The film community is small,” Ms. Corliss said. “So I would hear people
were looking for space for their collection and we’d contact them and let
them know we’d have a happy home for the things they cherished.”
Most of the images are the work of set photographers capturing key moments in a
plot line: Virginia Cherrill offering a flower to Charlie Chaplin in City
Lights, Anthony Perkins with his hands clasped over his mouth in horror in
Psycho. Alphabetized by actor’s name are studio portraits of Garbo and
Dietrich by the great Hollywood photographers George Hurrell and Ruth Harriet
Louise. Until it closed, the archive, including 4 million stills and a
half-million portraits, was accessioning donations on a daily basis.
“The MoMA Stills Archive has more early material than any other archive,”
said Howard Mandelbaum, president of Photofest, New York’s biggest commercial
archive of film stills. In 1999, MoMA stills from Erich von Stroheim’s Greed,
a film that had disintegrated out of existence, were used in a Turner Classic
Movies reconstruction of the film, interlaced with bits of salvaged footage.
More recently, Knopf author Jim Harvey stopped the presses on his book, Move
Love in the Fifties, after he found a picture of Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan
at Kazan’s birthday party on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire in MoMA’s
archive.
Clients would write or e-mail a request and within a week, wearing cotton
archival gloves, could sort through images culled together by Ms. Corliss or
Ms. Geesken. More often than not, they’d hit pay dirt. Copies cost $15 to $20
apiece and were usually ready in 48 hours. When The New York Times needed a
photograph of Robert Bresson in 1999 for his obituary, however, the department
made copies available in 20 minutes.
“There were always things there you didn’t expect and you didn’t even
know existed,” said Robert Sklar, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of
the Arts Cinema Studies Department and author of City Boys, a book about Jimmy
Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield.
By 1980, when Ms. Bandy took over, Ms. Corliss was overseeing the Film Stills
Archive in a townhouse on West 53rd Street where the museum’s library was
also located. Around 1984, both were moved to the east wing of the central
building; the library first and then the archives, onto a mezzanine above the
library. She and Ms. Geesken sat at desks near a viewing area in the east wing.
The rest of the film department was on the fifth floor of the west wing.
When programming was still the turf of Ms. Mancia, Ms. Bandy wasn’t allowed
into programming meetings. But, within a few years of Ms. Bandy’s arrival,
Ms. Bowser retired and Ms. Mancia left in what several employees described as a
tense contest with Ms. Bandy, and the tables were turned. With Ms. Bandy
gaining power, there were no more invitations to employees to special
screenings. Department-wide memos reached only some employees, some said. And
many employees complained that they were always kept away from meetings with
the museum’s film committee trustees. “When I first started there, we were
always invited to things, openings and screenings,” said Ms. Geesken. “That
no longer happens.”
Ms. Corliss was promoted only once, from curatorial assistant to assistant
curator, during her 20 years under Ms. Bandy, despite her widely praised work,
the 41 exhibits she had curated, credits in countless films and books and the
acquisition of more than a million stills for the Archive.
Employees say Ms. Bandy was directing the mission of MoMA’s film department
away from scholarship and the department’s standing was suffering. The 1996
opening of the $11.2 million Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in Hamlin,
Pa., where the museum’s film collection was moved, was due to Ms. Bandy’s
efforts. Some museum employees complained that she was essentially focused on
fund-raising. “The way people watch movies has changed,” a department
member commented. “The world has changed, and change is a healthy thing. But
I can’t say that the department changed in a healthy way.”
Ms. Bandy’s appointment to assistant director of curatorial affairs in 1993
seemed to indicate that Mr. Lowry—a director fond of crowd pleasing
exhibitions—and MoMA’s board had signed off on her leadership of the
department, and its new emphasis away from the archives and scholarship.
“Archives used to come above programming in the annual report,” said one
employee. “It seems small but it says a lot. Programming is on top now.”
The culminating scene of this drama was the museum-wide strike of 2000. On one
side were Ms. Corliss and Ms. Geesken, both active participants in the strike.
Ms. Corliss obtained the support of prominent Hollywood big shots in an open
letter to the museum and her husband, Richard Corliss, wrote about the strike
in Time. On the other side was Ms. Bandy, ironically head of the museum’s
union before she came to the film department.
To say Ms. Bandy opposed the strike is putting it mildly. A replacement worker,
Helena Robinson, was hired to fill in for Ms. Corliss. (Ms. Robinson is
currently a research assistant.) Many department members crossed the picket
lines, including Charles Silver, former union member and head of the Film Study
Center. “I believe this strike is based on manipulation,” Mr. Silver told
The New York Times in 2000. “These people have engineered a strike for their
own purposes.”
Until the strike, the archive was set to move to MoMA QNS, the
160,000-square-foot facility in Long Island City, Queens that the museum had
bought in March of 2000 partially as a place to go during the renovation. A
former Swingline staple factory, it was planned to house temporary exhibits and
collection highlights until MoMA reopened in Manhattan.
Ms. Corliss met with an architect on the project to plan the move in early
2000. They agreed on a 1,800-square-foot space on the mezzanine level. The last
meeting with the architect was scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on April 28, 2000, the
first day of the strike. When she returned to work, Karen Davidson, MoMA’s
deputy director of policy, planning and administration, told her that Glenn
Lowry was reevaluating the plans.
In November 2000, MoMA received a $5 million grant from Gov. George Pataki for
the renovation of the Swingline building and announced that the site would
house “the Museum’s archives, a portion of its library collections and its
renowned film stills collection.”
But, at a museum all-staff meeting on Jan. 31, 2001, Mr. Lowry, responding to a
question, said there would be no space for the Stills Archive at MoMA QNS. A
month later, Mr. Zager, the museum’s director of human resources, told Ms.
Geesken at a union meeting that “we’d been jockeyed out of a position
there.” MoMA’s Film Study Center, repository of scripts and other printed
matter, had not.
In July of 2001, Ms. Corliss was told that the archive would move to the
Celeste Bartos center in Hamlin, Pa. The 135 file cabinets were to be crammed
into 300 square feet in hallways. A desk for Ms. Corliss would be worked into
the conference room. “It’s a beautiful facility, state of the arts, you
can’t fault it,” said Ms. Corliss of the Film Preservation Center.
“It’s a temperature and humidity controlled vault, but still, that’s it.
It’s in the hallways.”
When the decision seemed irreversible, Ms. Corliss contacted many frequent
users of the archive—the New York Film Critics’ Circle, the faculty of
Tisch’s Cinema Studies Department and the Society for Cinema Studies. Each
wrote the museum. “It would be a major loss for film scholarship were the
MoMA Film Stills Archive to become unavailable,” wrote the faculty at Tisch.
“The incomparable variety of the Archive makes it … a crucial component,
along with the MoMA Film Study Center, in maintaining MoMA’s supremacy and
leadership in the field of cinema studies.”
MoMA’s defenders argue that it could not help but suffer from a space crunch.
Plus, times were not flush: the museum tightened its budget, impacting
available space. MoMA is currently trying to sub-lease about 30,000 square feet
of space on 52nd Street, which now houses its membership, development and
information services departments.
Even MoMA’s board of directors was apparently caught by surprise by the
decision to close public access to the Film Stills Archive once it was shipped
off to Pennsylvania.
In a letter dated January 10, 2002 and signed by Agnes Gund, MoMA’s president
and a film committee member, and obtained by The Observer, Ms. Gund said the
Hamlin center was to be the new location since the museum had “undertaken a
thorough review of … the best ways to ensure that our collections are …
able to be accessed and appreciated by the widest audience possible.” The
letter shows no knowledge of the museum’s plans to cut off access to the
archives, made clear the previous day when Ms. Bandy laid off Ms. Corliss and
Ms. Geesken and announced she was putting the archive into cold storage.
Within 48 hours, both employees were taken off the computer systems and sent
packing. “What a way to go,” commented one employee. “No happy trails, no
goodbyes, and your life’s work in cold storage.”
Since then, MoMA has remained as silent as the stills themselves. After
speaking to the New York Times for their piece, Ms. Corliss was swamped with
e-mails, and was interviewed by Leonard Lopate on WNYC. Film critic Roger
Ebert, who used the MoMA stills in his upcoming book The Great Movies, wrote
the Times from the Sundance Film festival: “If the archive is not available
to most of its users, of what use is it?”
MoMA’s only statement said “the building project will require a temporary
contraction of services and a retrenchment in staff in order to realize the
permanent expansion of resources when the museum reopens in 2005.”
But the statement does not address the fact that several MoMA film department
employees told The Observer that no alternative space has been found for the
department’s popular film programming series. They said that everything past
May seems to be on hold. “How the department will serve the public during
this time … it’s anybody’s guess,” said one museum employee.
But finding a home for the film series has its own incentives: the film
screenings—including the annual “New Directors/New Films” series—are an
important factor to MoMA’s membership base, a bonus with memberships or the
admissions fee. Currently, only one of the Roy and Nina Titus theaters is in
use. Both theaters will be closed by summer.
John Anderson, a Newsday film critic said, “It seems like the people who are
really devoted to film are of the lowest priority there. The people devoted to
the bureaucracy seem to control what’s going on.”
“Many of us have come to associate MoMA with access to film-related as
opposed to merely static art material,” said Annette Insdorf, a Columbia
University film professor who said she started her cinematic education on 53rd
Street, “but perhaps we’ve been spoiled.”