Museums of cinema’s early history
The idea of putting cinema in a museum goes back nearly as far as the birth of cinema itself. It was perceived as a necessary historical responsibility to safeguard this new and ‘fragile’ art, and it was clearly part of a much wider climate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which had begun to sense the impermanence of these new cultural objects but still hang on to ideas of permanence and historical continuity. This ambivalent state was not helped by cinema that was by its very nature abstract and concrete, permanent and impermanent, tangible and intangible, subject and object. Unsurprisingly it was cinema rather than other cultural forms, which was singled out as futureless, but not by all, as the feverish activities by film pioneers for the creation of museum exhibitions, archives, film libraries and clubs, attest throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
The idea of conserving and exhibiting the photographic and cinematographic heritage was first introduced by a photographer and camera operator for the Lumière brothers, Boleslaw Matuszewski. This relatively little known Polish photographer and cinematographer has gained an important place in cinema history with his pamphlet ‘Une nouvelle source de l’histoire’ where, he was not only advocate for the importance of the ‘documentary possibilities of cinema’ (Cousin and Macdonald 2006: 13) and of documentary as authentic historical evidence, but also argued for the need to safeguard it for posterity through a systematic ‘Depository’: ‘The issue now is to give this perhaps privileged source of historical evidence the same authority, official existence and accessibility as other already well established archives.’1
Intrinsic in the above pronouncement is two key strands in film history and theory: film as realist social document and film as an equivalent cultural and historical ‘entity’ to literature and the plastic arts. The first of these strands has been central to the development of the study of cinema in the academy as well as awarding it an ever-growing prominence in visual culture. In ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’2 Bazin, writing in France during the forties and fifties, tackles this question head on and in it pronounces that ‘Photography and the Cinema [on the other hand] are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism’ (Bazin 2005: 12).
According to Bazin, this obsession ‘forces us to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say in time and space’ (Bazin 2005: 13–14). Realism and in particular the ‘aesthetic of reality’ is at the heart of many of the essays Bazin wrote on cinema, still considered to date foundational to cinema’s definitions and debates, in spite of its many detractors as well as supporters over the years; definitions and debate which are partly accounted for by Dudley in his Foreword to the 2005 edition of Volume 2 of What is Cinema? (Dudley in Bazin 2005).
Visual depiction and representation of the ‘real’ was not, however, the only form which characterised the origins of cinema; the making of fantastic films was also concurrent, for example, in the work of early filmmaker, Georges Méliès, who was producing films at the same time as the Lumière brothers. The two genres,3 realist and fantastic, are two examples of some of filmmaking’s future developments. Bazin was well aware of the two genres in the description he gives in one of the essays in volume 1, entitled ‘The Myth of Total Cinema,’ of the colour processes in both Reynaud and Méliès (Bazin 2005: 20). Bazin was also aware that Méliès’ fantastic cinema still relied on theatrical spectacle: ‘[That was the heyday of] Méliès who saw the cinema as basically nothing more than a refinement of the marvels of the theater. Special effects were for him simply a further evolution of conjuring’ (Bazin 2005: 78). More recently Engell also highlighted both the staging and conjuring features of Méliès’ films, ‘the motif of the enigmatic, inexplicable origination or agency of a magician facing the magically-produced “appearances” of the notorious magic stage and the performance of a magician’ (Engell 2014: 362).
Moving away from the debate between realism and fantastic cinema and its theatrical ‘corseting’ (Penz 2012: 281), a second strand formulated by Matuszewski was in connection with cinema’s ‘legitimacy and status,’ which argued for ways in which it could achieve a greater standing alongside literature and the plastic arts and how it could be realised through three processes: ‘authority, official existence and accessibility’; the need for these indicated that the cinema’s status was still seen as marginal to other more established cultural (bourgeois) forms.4 Through the idea of introducing its collection and preservation, a process which had been already intrinsic to the birth of public museums i...
