Keeping film history alive, a major priority: MoMA
According to Ronald Magliozzi, the New York Museum of Modern Art curator of Tim Burton: The Exhibition currently showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, the preservation of audiovisual history should be a priority that requires international cooperation.
“Sharing the information about moving image work across archives all around the world is very important; that way we can sort the best materials that exist and we don’t duplicate work,” Magliozzi told Encore.
Curators must accept that it’s impossible to preserve everything until the resources are available to do so. The job then becomes a matter of prioritisation.
“The endless problem is money, so you must prioritise your preservation efforts based on the importance of the work, its rarity and the danger that it won’t survive if it isn’t preserved in a timely fashion. The importance is measured in an artistic sense, its relevance to the history of its national cinema, to the work of an individual artist or to a race or an ethnic group. There are all kinds of considerations,” he added.
While money and manpower have always been crucial to securing the preservation of film and television in museums and archives around the world, new technologies and the amount of user-generated content inthe digital age means the work of curators will get even harder, in deciding what will be relevant and important to retain for future generations.
“The proliferation of user-generated work, and work that’s created and available in ever-evolving formats presents new problems, because you need to migrate them into the new systems. User-generated work requires specific technologies, equipment and programs; it’s a major responsibility. It’s going to require new moving image archives. There aren’t enough moving image archives to preserve all this work.”
Exhibitions like the one around Tim Burton have brought the moving image into traditional gallery spaces and, with them, a new audience for art museums. Magliazzi’s work in this arena also includes a celebration of Pixar’s animation efforts – an exhibition which also visited ACMI in 2008 – and forays into bringing telemovies and television into MOMA’s galleries.
“The idea of bringing moving image into the gallery is a major, important activity in all kinds of museums, and it’s happening all over the world,” he said.
Magliozzi is adamant that preserving and exhibiting film has an important place in art galleries around the world. The Burton exhibition is a small way he’s contributing to changing the culture around moving image being exhibited in artistic spaces. The popularity of the Burton exhibition has helped. “It’s been the third most popular exhibition that the museum has ever staged following Picasso and Matisse. That’s a big deal for us.”
The Burton exhibition mixes work from Burton’s films, including classics like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands with new releases such as Alice in Wonderland. It combines these with traditional drawings, paintings and installations that explore his creative vision and the many motifs in his work, from childhood to adulthood.
Despite the popularity of the exhibition, Magliozzli concedes such varied work poses its own challenges. As well as the technical problems posed by screening video, especially in small galleries, where sound is likely to bleed into different parts of the gallery, the breadth of work to be curated is massive.
Tim Burton: The Exhibition is at ACMI until October 10, 2010. The list of Burton-related events can be found here.
By Hansika Bhagani
