Film Museum

The Great Train Robbery (1903), The Birth of a Nation (1914), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Jazz Singer (1927), the newsreel of the sinking Vestris (1928) are classics which help explain how & why the cinema became what it now is. Because the profitable demand for them is soon exhausted, most films, classic or otherwise, are retired after about two years, frequently forgotten, sometimes destroyed. To preserve for students and posterity important moving pictures of the past will be the function of the film library which Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art this week announced that it planned to start next autumn, with Rockefeller Foundation funds. The officers included John Hay Whitney as president, John E. Abbott, vice president & general manager, and Edward M. M. Warburg, treasurer.

Said the Museum's President A. Conger Goodyear: "The art of the motion picture is the only art peculiar to the 20th Century. As an art it is practically unknown and unstudied. Many who are well acquainted with modern painting, literature, drama and architecture are almost wholly ignorant of the work of such great directors as Pabst, Pudovkin, or Seastrom and of the creative stages in the development of men like Griffith and Chaplin. Yet the films which these and other men made have had an immeasurably great influence on the life and thought of the present generation. . . . The 'primitives' among the movies are only 40 years old. Yet the bulk of all films that are important historically or esthetically, whether foreign or domestic, old or new, are invisible under existing conditions."

Before starting its film library, the Museum made a countrywide survey to see what response it would get from colleges & museums among whom it plans to circulate films at a nominal cost. For the films which it has already assembled, 179 colleges in 43 states had already asked for showings last week. The Museum hopes to supply 500 in the next two or three years. First sample on its list of two hour programs: "Primitives, especially Melies* trick films and early Edisons, up to The Life of an American Fireman. ..."

In addition to old films, the library, first of its kind in the world, will contain books on the cinema, a collection of "stills," a library of musical scores for silent pictures. It will contain no films less than two years old. To get prints of famed old-time films, the library's scouts last spring ransacked vaults of old film companies, country theatres, disused warehouses. A print of The May Irwin-John C. Rice Kiss (1896) was found in a Bronx trash can.

*About 1909, George Melies, a magician of the Theatre Robert Houdin in Paris, gave the motion picture new life by applying the camera to feats of magic using fade-outs, dissolves and double exposures.

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