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Stephen Eskilson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 1, June 2006, Pages 267–268, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486181
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It is widely recognized that the Museum of Modern Art (moma) in New York City has exercised a profound, even hegemonic, influence on how modernism is collected, exhibited, and interpreted throughout the West. Haidee Wasson's new book explores a hitherto neglected aspect of the moma's history, its establishment in 1935 of the Film Library. Taking as her subject the formation, both physically and ideologically speaking, of the collection during the years between the world wars, Wasson investigates how film was framed at the moma, starting with the question of how a popular medium could be made to fit into the cultural space of a fledgling fine-arts museum. Simply by its existence, the Film Library established the idea that cinema could be taken seriously as an art form in progressive circles.
Buffetted by a variety of constituencies, the moma managed to “extract individual films— American and Foreign—from the commercial, corporate, and official regulatory restraints that limited their movement, their means of expression, and their influence” (p. 17). Wasson posits that the moma's Film Library established an alternative to the viewing modes promulgated by Hollywood and in the process had the effect of “changing cinema's expanding discursive horizon” (p. 20). The most interesting passages concern the formation of the idea of “film art,” and Wasson ably tracks this mutable concept through its institutionalization at the moma.
