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http://entertainment.time.com/2012/01/11/mary-and-moma-the-case-of-the-still-missing-film-stills/?iid=ent-main-lede

Mary and MoMa: The Case of the (Still) Missing Film Stills
Ten years ago, the Museum of Modern Art's Film Stills Archive was closed, and a priceless heritage denied to the public
By Richard Corliss | January 11, 2012

Ten years ago today, a vast, invaluable trove of movie history was capriciously shut down. Executives at the Museum of Modern Art ordered the closing of its Film Stills Archive, a collection of some 4 million photographs documenting more than a century of movies, performers and directors. On the morning of Jan. 11, 2002, Mary Lea Bandy, chief curator of the MoMA Department of Film and Video, told the two Stills Archive staff members that at the end of the business day two things would happen: the facility would be shuttered and the staffers would be laid off—until, and unless, the Museum found space for the Stills Archive when MoMA returned from its temporary home in Queens to an enlarged Manhattan premises in 2005. The collection was mothballed in the Film Department’s vault in Hamlin, Pa., where it remains today, inaccessible to scholars and journalists, and to the head of the Archive, Mary Corliss.

That name may be familiar to TIME.com readers. Since 2004 she has reviewed movies from the Cannes, Venice and Toronto film festivals for this website. That she and I share a last name is no coincidence: we married in 1969, after meeting at MoMA, where for a time I was her intern in the Film Stills Archive. So I can vouch for Mary’s dedication to the Archive, which she had run for nearly 34 years. She spent more late nights there—nourishing the collection, or curating 41 gallery exhibitions on subjects ranging from Warner Bros. cartoons to Yiddish films—than I did at TIME. Indefatigably and lovingly, she made this great collection available to the scholars, journalists, filmmakers and programmers who mined its resources. Literally hundreds of film books and documentaries carried the credit “Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive.”

(MORE: Mary Corliss reviews The Artist)

The Archive was, without much exaggeration, Mary’s child; she cared for it and nourished it. Her love can be detected in an essay for Roger Ebert’s book The Great Movies, for which she chose the stills: “I open those venerable filing cabinets in the Archive and find a century’s worth of art and folly, commerce and kitsch, invaluable documentation and, most of all, indelible memories… Film stills freeze the emotion and excitement of an actor, a scene, a film, an era; they are the pin through the movie butterfly that somehow gives this lovely, ephemeral creature lasting life. Stills distill; stills preserve.”

“When I rummage through bulging ‘personality files’ of movie-star stills,” Mary wrote, “I can see a compressed life story: the freshness and gawky promise of a young actor; the radiant maturity as the star’s appeal is complemented by the filmmakers’ artistry; then, as age writes its cruel lines on a face, the poignant battle against decay, waged with heavy makeup and lighting that is ever more carefully soft-focus. Any of these personality files is a flip-book that grants me a God’s-eye view into both the intoxicating nature of human beauty and the inevitability of mortality. In a film still, though, an actor can remain forever at the apogee of his appeal.” That devotion to the Archive may explain why Mary was bereft less for herself than for the collection when she and her longtime assistant Terry Geesken were laid off and the stills and negatives were hauled away to Hamlin, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from New York City.

(MORE: A 2002 TIME.com story on the closing of the MoMA Stills Archive)

Because I adore Mary, I may be considered biased. But don’t take my word in the MoMA dispute. Listen to the chorus of press comments from a decade ago: reaction was swift and strong. The day after the Stills Archive’s abrupt closing, The New York Times ran an article, sympathetic to the staffers, followed by a stinging letter from Ebert and a Sunday Arts & Leisure piece by David Thomson. The Village Voice and the New York Observer covered the closing and joined the outcry, as did John Anderson in Newsday and Robert Osborne in The Hollywood Reporter. The Society for Cinema Studies and the New York Film Critics Circle fired off protests to Bandy and MoMA Director Glenn Lowry. Martin Scorsese, who had used Stills Archive photos in his documentary My Voyage to Italy, said of the collection’s exile to Hamlin, “I can only hope, for the cineastes here in New York who need access to the files, that this is not permanent.”

In that first Times report, Lowry said, “My own feeling is that it makes a great deal of sense to have all our film material together, but we have several years to figure that out.” Film Department curator Steven Higgins assured David Callahan of Film History magazine that the Museum’s intention was “to get access open again and to get people using it. Otherwise, it’s of no use to anyone. We recognize that.” Yet in 2005, when MoMA reopened on a property more than seven times as large as the earlier site, Lowry, Bandy and Higgins could find no room there for the Stills Archive. In Dec. 2006, Jim Emerson, the film critic and historian who runs the Scanners blog on Ebert’s website, wrote: “For five years now, one of the great film resources in America has been unjustly imprisoned, boxed up and sitting in the corridors of a film storage facility in Hamlin, Pennsylvania. It’s a scandal, a tragedy, and an enormous disservice to film scholarship.”

Why, then, would MoMA keep the Archive closed and unmaintained? Could there be a motive aside from the Museum hierarchy’s indifference to one of its most valuable collections? The Village Voice story, by Anthony Kaufman, provided a reason. “Geesken and Corliss were both active participants in the [four-and-a-half-month] strike [in 2000] by United Auto Workers union Local 2110…, and they suggest the layoffs are related. The coincidence is not lost on many film scholars. ‘Mary was a vocal supporter of the strike,’ says film historian Eric Myers, ‘and this is one way they have of getting rid of her.’”

The union filed a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board, and the case consumed more than four years. In late 2006, Mary sent this message to friends: “This September, I received a document signed by the three Republicans appointed to the Washington office of the NLRB…. In their ruling, they not only fully agreed with MoMA’s arguments; they reversed those points that the judge in the NLRB trial had decided in our favor. … That verdict represents the end of the legal battle. But the struggle to keep the Stills Archive alive does not, cannot end there. Since MoMA argued that the Archive was closed for temporary lack of space, it follows that, when even more space was made available, the Archive would reopen. That was Terry’s and my understanding when we took a low severance in order to have recall rights to our jobs of 34 and 18 years, respectively, returning when the Archive reopened.”

Tributes to Mary and the Archive continue to appear. Last year, on the TCM Classic Film Union website, the blogger “klaatukat” wrote: “Apropos of this evening’s feature on the MoMA film archives, I would like to salute Mary Corliss, who worked for almost 35 years as the Curator of the Film Stills Archive at MoMA. I met her several times and not only is she knowledgeable and astute, she is a gracious person. MoMA lost a valuable curator when she was summarily dismissed. Thank you Mary.” No thanks from MoMA, though. If bloggers were to visit the Museum’s own website and search for the Archive, they would read: “As part of the long-term plan to expand and renovate the Museum, the Film Stills Archive has been closed temporarily and moved to The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in Hamlin, Pennsylvania….” Temporarily, as in 10 years and counting.

In the intervening decade, Mary and her partner Michael Smith have opened a design store, Adelaide, in Greenwich Village. Mary tried to put aside the painful memories of the MoMA struggle. But as the 10th anniversary of what she wryly calls “the Archive’s own 1/11” approached, she was contacted by scholars preparing studies of the Archive and its demise. One, Jason Simon, interviewed her for a gallery monograph to be published in conjunction with a gallery exhibition in April. Mary’s answer to one of Simon’s questions reveals her abiding care and concern for the Film Stills Archive:

“What bothers me is that there’s no conscience, no morality to what they’ve done. There’s no making a wrong right here. And again, it’s not about me, because I’m out of it. I’m gone there. But they still have this majestic collection that is inaccessible and I wonder how, or even if, it’s being preserved and maintained. That’s what angers me more than anything. … Somebody at MoMA has to realize that there is this historic collection, a record of cinema’s glorious past, and it’s just collecting dust and deteriorating. Does anybody at MoMA care what condition the Film Stills Archive is in? This is a museum, and it’s a museum’s collection and it’s a museum that made promises. I made promises to filmmakers on MoMA’s behalf that their collections and their work would be preserved and honored and be there for generations to behold and to study and learn from. Keeping that Archive closed is a violation of all that. They broke their trust as a museum: to care for these visual artifacts and make them available to the public. That’s the real tragedy.”

Her final paragraph says it all. You do not leave a collection unattended for 10 years, because all manner of deterioration can happen. The photos start bending, images start sticking to other images, if the humidity and temperature aren't right, mold grows and the silver can even begin fading. Paper turns yellow. If there is a leak, water damage will mar or destroy the materials. Insects can damage the materials. They seem to want to ruin this collection to spite Corliss and her assistant. All of the stories I've read all follow the same conclusion: it was punishment for her supporting the striking workers. Then the Republicans under Bush who have no regard for unions or that they created the American middle class, reverse everything. If this had happened back in the days of the animation strike in the 1940s, the NLRB would have told MOMA to put her back in no uncertain terms and punished them also, as they did Disney when he had strikers beaten and trampled all over their rights.

The mystery is why MoMA even wants to hang on to the collection since they are in no hurry to make it available to the public. Presumably there are vault costs associated with warehousing a huge collection that is, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible. So why not donate it to the Library of Congress and be done with it?

The stills collection does not interest me particularly. My dog in this fight is the exhibition of silent films and my conversations and friendships with several of the museum employees constrain what I can say. Yet I see several parallels between the Museum's attitude towards the still collection and the silent film collection. A dozen years ago, the museum had two screening rooms. Today it has three. Yet, except for the semi-regular auteur series, the exhibition of silent films at the Museum has dropped precipitously, limited to the occasional special show in which material is borrowed from other archives. Some of that, no doubt, is due to the fact that I have seen much of their regular fare and don't feel a need to see much of these films again. A great deal of it is due, however, to the fact that the upper levels of Museum management have no interest in these subjects. It's the sort of malign neglect that has resulted in the disastrous disappearance of most of the Paramount silent library,

We all understand that there is a certain amount of political activity that drives the Museum of Modern Art, both public politics -- the sort that causes people to march whenever anyone shows BIRTH OF A NATION -- and internal politics. Someone who has ridden his way to power on a particular hobby horse has no inclination to switch horses. Someone who has spent his life getting donations in support of the latest waves of Kazakhi film cannot be expected to favor Norma Talmadge films. Just as success engenders success, obscurity engenders obscurity So the silent films and the stills sit, and there is no one in a position of authority to insist they be made available. Eventually, they are forgotten.

Yet, equally politically, these items cannot simply be handed over to someone else. That would indicate that someone has made a mistake. It would open to discussion the possibility that, just as someone in the past has made a mistake, someone may be making a mistake even now.

Those of us who live in what what we laughingly call the real world make decisions knowing that some of them are certain to be mistakes, but hoping that, on the whole, our judgments are good enough that we can point with some pride to our average results. When we are doing this with our own resources, we can shrug our shoulders at our mistakes, learn what we can from our failures and try to do better next time. However, those who manage others resources can 'improve' those batting averages by rewriting the rules. By keeping the stills collection hidden away, the management of MOMA can claim they are spending money wisely. If stills were made available, there would be a clamor for more stills. By showing more obscure silent films, there would be a clamor for yet more. Those Kazakhi films would suffer as a result as more resources would be spent on other matters. Those whose reputations rest on their ability to collect and exhibit those Kazakhi films would find their positions weakened -- and therefore, it is in their interest to make sure that their products are the only ones made available.

I should note that I don't hold any particular brief against Kazakhi films. I use them as an example of another MOMA resource that my own hobby horse must share resources with. I have no interest in them at all, but recognize that some people do. I don't see why we can't have some Kazakhi films every month and some silent films. I do not doubt that even the fiercest partisan of Kazakhi films will pay at least lip service to the idea of sharing. It's simply that when it comes time to budget auditoriums and money for a month's showings, the Kazakhi film people will fight fiercely for as much Kazakhi film as can be managed. Right now, they have the control and so Kazakhi films will be exhibited and we will see reports about the great advances in the Kazakhi film program, the new titles acquired, the number of exhibitions and so forth. The stills will remain in Pennsylvania, rotting, until matters can be handled rationally and satisfactorily.... by the standard of people who have no interest in doing so.

Bob

If the stills are damaged or destroyed, the museum will have thrown away a collection worth millions of dollars, and will look even more pitiful than they do now. If they don't want it, don't want to use it, and don't want to give it to someone else, they might as well burn it like the end of CITIZEN KANE, for all the good it does sitting in an empty warehouse.

If the stills are damaged or destroyed, the museum will have thrown away a collection worth millions of dollars, and will look even more pitiful than they do now. If they don't want it, don't want to use it, and don't want to give it to someone else, they might as well burn it like the end of CITIZEN KANE, for all the good it does sitting in an empty warehouse.

If the stills are damaged, destroyed or looted (not an unheard of possibility), MoMA may be keeping them under wraps to safeguard against bad PR. Or not. We'll never know until they are released from indefinite detention.

[silentfilm]

I have a friend who recently bought a vintage still off of eBay with an MOMA stamp on the back. Do they sell these in the gift shop? It's conceivable that they are selling duplicates or copies of their collection.

Good points all. But as a matter of politics, it cannot be particularly desireable to have Time magazine editorializing against your policies. Not that Time is so influencial these days, but it might inspire similar rants by the NYT and (gasp) The Huffington Post. And as long as Richard Corliss is alive and has a voice, these rants will continue. Wearing my political hat, I'd rather get rid of the collection now and be second-guessed in the short term than have media outlets lambasting me for decades to come.

The stills collection does not interest me particularly. My dog in this fight is the exhibition of silent films and my conversations and friendships with several of the museum employees constrain what I can say. Yet I see several parallels between the Museum's attitude towards the still collection and the silent film collection. A dozen years ago, the museum had two screening rooms. Today it has three. Yet, except for the semi-regular auteur series, the exhibition of silent films at the Museum has dropped precipitously, limited to the occasional special show in which material is borrowed from other archives. Some of that, no doubt, is due to the fact that I have seen much of their regular fare and don't feel a need to see much of these films again. A great deal of it is due, however, to the fact that the upper levels of Museum management have no interest in these subjects. It's the sort of malign neglect that has resulted in the disastrous disappearance of most of the Paramount silent library,

We all understand that there is a certain amount of political activity that drives the Museum of Modern Art, both public politics -- the sort that causes people to march whenever anyone shows BIRTH OF A NATION -- and internal politics. Someone who has ridden his way to power on a particular hobby horse has no inclination to switch horses. Someone who has spent his life getting donations in support of the latest waves of Kazakhi film cannot be expected to favor Norma Talmadge films. Just as success engenders success, obscurity engenders obscurity So the silent films and the stills sit, and there is no one in a position of authority to insist they be made available. Eventually, they are forgotten.

Yet, equally politically, these items cannot simply be handed over to someone else. That would indicate that someone has made a mistake. It would open to discussion the possibility that, just as someone in the past has made a mistake, someone may be making a mistake even now.

Those of us who live in what what we laughingly call the real world make decisions knowing that some of them are certain to be mistakes, but hoping that, on the whole, our judgments are good enough that we can point with some pride to our average results. When we are doing this with our own resources, we can shrug our shoulders at our mistakes, learn what we can from our failures and try to do better next time. However, those who manage others resources can 'improve' those batting averages by rewriting the rules. By keeping the stills collection hidden away, the management of MOMA can claim they are spending money wisely. If stills were made available, there would be a clamor for more stills. By showing more obscure silent films, there would be a clamor for yet more. Those Kazakhi films would suffer as a result as more resources would be spent on other matters. Those whose reputations rest on their ability to collect and exhibit those Kazakhi films would find their positions weakened -- and therefore, it is in their interest to make sure that their products are the only ones made available.

I should note that I don't hold any particular brief against Kazakhi films. I use them as an example of another MOMA resource that my own hobby horse must share resources with. I have no interest in them at all, but recognize that some people do. I don't see why we can't have some Kazakhi films every month and some silent films. I do not doubt that even the fiercest partisan of Kazakhi films will pay at least lip service to the idea of sharing. It's simply that when it comes time to budget auditoriums and money for a month's showings, the Kazakhi film people will fight fiercely for as much Kazakhi film as can be managed. Right now, they have the control and so Kazakhi films will be exhibited and we will see reports about the great advances in the Kazakhi film program, the new titles acquired, the number of exhibitions and so forth. The stills will remain in Pennsylvania, rotting, until matters can be handled rationally and satisfactorily.... by the standard of people who have no interest in doing so.

Bob

I have a friend who recently bought a vintage still off of eBay with an MOMA stamp on the back. Do they sell these in the gift shop? It's conceivable that they are selling duplicates or copies of their collection.

The Photo Archive on eBay is currently selling MOMA-stamped stills like this one:

[/url]http://www.ebay.com/itm/BUSTER-KEATON-GENERAL-1927-MOVIE-PHOTO-W265-/400269097992?pt=Art_Photo_Images&hash=item5d31e5bc08[/url]

You used to be able to buy newly-printed copies of MOMA stills but this one appears to be of an earlier vintage. The MOMA address appears to be "pre-zip code" and the still from THE GENERAL is not one you generally find in circulation.

Herman Weinberg donated Pat Powers' stills collection from THE WEDDING MARCH and THE HONEYMOON to MOMA in the 1950's. He later had a change of heart and demanded the Museum return them. When Herman got his originals back the reverse side on each had been stamped (or rather, branded) with MOMA's Film Stills Archive legend. So it is entirely possible that MOMA is doling their collection out the back door, so to speak, at $9.99 a pop.

I have a friend who recently bought a vintage still off of eBay with an MOMA stamp on the back. Do they sell these in the gift shop? It's conceivable that they are selling duplicates or copies of their collection.

I STRONGLY recommend that anyone who collects stills should take a proactive stance and monitor to the extent possible the materials being sold/auctioned on EBay, Heritage and any of the other auction sites and houses that deal in this material. I mention EBay and Heritage because I do business with them and will sure as hell question anything that turns up with MOMA identification on it. I have yet to encounter MOMA items for sale or auction -- the sellers I've dealt with have been thus far above any suspicion of that sort, but I haven't been as active a buyer lately.

I don't collect baseball or other sports memorabilia, but I follow those markets and a significant and monetarily huge scandal has erupted in the world of baseball collectibles as a result of items STOLEN from the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, the Boston Public Library and The New York Public Library. These items are primarily PHOTOGRAPHS and DOCUMENTS, items that are easily removed unobtrusively from museum/library collections and subsequently appear in lots for auction with apparently little questioning (at least up until now) from the auction houses. The museums and libraries are often slow to inform law enforcement officials and obviously are reluctant to admit publicly that valuable items, many of which were donated by families expecting them to be cared for in perpetuity, have been stolen by their own employees or those with connections to the institutions.

Here, we may not be talking about individual items fetching in the neighborhood of five or six figures at auction, but as others have mentioned, we have a film heritage that is at this point (and for 10 years) been left to what may very well be CRIMINAL NEGLECT. Keep yours eyes open and if anything seems suspicious, question it, seek answers, and if you don't get them, at least post it here on this forum.

Disgraceful

[silentfilm]

Here's another photo from the MOMA collection being auctioned on eBay...

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160918566700&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:US:1123

Here's another photo from the MOMA collection being auctioned on eBay...

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160918566700&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:US:1123

Holy cow ... has someone written '4 Auction' or '+ Auction' over the front of that photo in whiteboard marker?

That is just unbelievable.

Here's another photo from the MOMA collection being auctioned on eBay...

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160918566700&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:US:1123

Holy cow ... has someone written '4 Auction' or '+ Auction' over the front of that photo in whiteboard marker?

That is just unbelievable.

Probably not, it's likely in a plastic sleeve and scanned that way. A lot of sellers do this, it's faster than watermarking as JP Themint does