Imagine a James Joyce in his fifties, decades later with a mask on, meandering downstairs from the lavishly expanded lobby of MoMA. He sees himself strolling around on a 1935 day, together with dozens of other home and amateur films spanning the entire 20th century, all never before shown. Will he recall his early ambition to iterate the “reality of experience” first in Dubliners? Will he find resonances of epiphanies—extracted from moments of the mundane—among the intimately spectacular 102 silent screens on view? Adjacent to Joyce stand the jolly Salvador Dalí in his vacation residence and the silent film star Carmel Myers singing in a garden, across the aisle a lineup of celebrated photographers, filmmakers, and painters intrigued by family events and quotidian subjects.
Exhibition view, Private Lives Public Spaces, MoMA, Oct 2019-Feb 2021
Certain hesitation arises about the navigation and categorization of the works. Celebrity, the Experience of Place, and Family. Acclaimed artists and writers take up the mezzanine, open to the massive body of amateur creations further down the elevator. The route brews an exciting energy of those that await to return, in an almost vengeful zest. Or is it a mere projection of me, a glum visitor at the yearend of 2020?
Amid the heartfelt touches of laughter, frivolous games, or utterly trivial family conversations, a visceral yearning yet emerges from a packed festive scene, with young people dancing. It was so jovial and crowded that no one could realistically avoid any physical contact with another for more than a few seconds. How lovely! The sheer necessity of bumping into others, however uncomfortably or reluctantly.
On the other side of the gallery are Charles Turner’s two films from the first half of the 1940s. Sixth Avenue—Subway—Post earnestly records Turner’s daily ride from home to the US Army Pictorial Service in Queens. Right above is his 9-minute Manhattan Moods, documenting the solemn skyscrapers, besuited pedestrians, and contrails from jets in 1942. Before I connected the images with the same avenue and similar environment that arm the current MoMA, or the wartime tensions globally, I had immediately thought of my grandma. She was born in 1940 into a big family in the Sichuan province of China, when the country was torn by arms and tensions. In a sleek museum structure in New York, watching documentations of the familiar urban landscape about 70 years ago, I thought of her. I was not in a nostalgic mood for home; I would rather think that I was transported there involuntarily. And I envision Joyce pacing right next to me, reflecting on his Dublin.
The exhibition also floats a revisit of historic moments in collective memory by moving-image professionals and amateurs alike, such as the Disney Animators’ strike in 1941, Ted Kennedy’s 1980 Presidential Campaign, and the Anti-Gulf War March raging across 1991. At the back, a full display case gathers nine models of generational film cameras—Revere, Rollei, Eastman Kodak, Bell & Howell, among others. B&W and color advertisement pages are in their company. Seated as if backstage, the cameras are both objects for retrospective observation and honorable co-authors of the exhibiting films. A shoutout to their contribution seems long due in art museums.
Consider yet again the curatorial thesis: what is implied by the cameras’ group presentation in this show? An archaeological research on media history? How does media archaeology now cross paths with the contention of common culture versus high art? Is this in resonance with the automata, clocks, scientific instruments included in Making Marvels from the same season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Is the historiography of art and technology merging at an atemporal contact point of European courts and American homes?
It is important to note that unlike this selection of collected and preserved films, a majority of home movies might only exist in forms of family memory or dusted collection in forgotten drawers or at flea markets. These films managed to survive the constant evolution and obsolescence of technology due to the museum’s early precaution against their doomed obsoletability. The comeback of such alternative productions evokes the notion of “dark matter” that the American artist Gregory Sholette adumbrates. Sholette proposes attention to the marginalized artists, whose work is both essential to the configuration of the mainstream and possesses the potential to subvert such hierarchy, aided by the rise of affordable communication and audiovisual technology. Thus, rather than a precursor of social media as the exhibition states, home movies fundamentally enable the history of films, free from a desire to make social statements. In other words, they exist as assertive companions of the widely circulated and celebrated cinemas. These alternative formats have survived their numerous contemporaries thanks to their very amateurism and anonymity. Instead of a contrivance that institutional machines necessitated their presence to reinforce the order—of the center and the margin, or the high and the low—their preservation history is perhaps more readily located within the gesture of pioneer film curators who laid the foundation. The films’ distance from the commercial sector further pardons them from decisions of deaccessioning across the decades. They remain dusted and un-dusted in an aloof manner.
Private Lives Public Spaces is not remiss in developing a virtual viewing program, which nonetheless adds ambivalence to the museum’s position in showing homemade moving images. What composes the difference between a casually uploaded Youtube video and a digitally preserved 16mm family film resurfaced from MoMA’s archive, again presented via Youtube for public viewing? The museum identifies this endeavor as its “first exhibition devoted to home movies as a cinematic art form.” Other than an acknowledgment of their mass presence, the rationale behind—why these specific films are in focus at this particular moment—remains ambiguous.
One consideration is that the experience speaks less about the viewing materials than the viewers. It reminds me of the youtube channels that stream live views from international space stations, juxtaposed with trackers and chat boards for audiences who constantly join and exit the viewing spectacle. Ariella Azoulay, in Civil Contract of Photography, outlines a contractual relationship in which the photographed subjects, especially those deprived of their citizenship in states of emergency, consent to their photographic presence by anticipating the viewer to act on it. The fact that the films were all digitized and shown on silent screens in the downstairs gallery points to the arduous journey they had to make. In what ways will they survive another century? How is a contemporary viewer expected to act on such homemade movies that, unlike the modern phenomenon of social media, were likely not intended to be viewed outside their immediate circle of families and friends?
Together with a keenly observant Joyce, I dreamed through the century from its own lens, the many moments and movements still contingent on their situations, though unable to tell one from another. Upon arriving home, I put up my antique print from 1948 onto a windowsill, a surrealist commercial by the Harvel watches for Christmas time; the brand, as a large part of the exhibition, now belongs to history. Then I had a hard time comprehending what a $5,500 watch meant in 1948. It was a period of frenzied currency reforms and inflations in China. The amount could screen films in public nonstop for years. What did public space entail back then in this part of the world, when lives were certainly not so private?