If you have ever read a movie book, you probably have encountered these words on the acknowledgements page or crawling up the edge of an illustration: ”Photos courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.”
MOMA`s collection of movie stills-photographs taken on the sets of films, or composed in portrait studios by the professional photographers all the major producers once kept on staff-is among the largest in the world, and is certainly the best catalogued and most accessible. At last count, there were some 4.5 million stills neatly filed away-by title, studio or year-in 150 five-drawer beige cabinets housed in an upper corner of the museum`s 53rd Street facilities in New York City.
For the last 20 years, the keeper of those files has been assistant curator Mary Corliss (she celebrated her anniversary on Aug. 14). Small, charming and possessed of a seemingly inexhaustible energy, Corliss has been responsible for transforming an obscure subset of the museum`s collection into an invaluable resource for the country`s publishers, picture editors and academic researchers. A new gallery space in the museum, created when MOMA`s film auditorium was refurbished, has also given Corliss a chance to share her department`s collection of stills, posters and set designs with the public. Recent exhibitions have included a tribute to Paramount Pictures and a celebration of the James Bond films on their 25th anniversary.
On a typical day, Corliss and her assistant, Terry Geeskin, respond to 20 requests for photographs, made in person or over the phone. A film programmer in Cleveland may be looking for a picture to adorn his monthly brochure; a newspaper may be looking for a portrait to go with an obituary of a deceased star; or a set designer may be searching for the right atmospheric touches to give a period film. One recent user of the archive was designer Giorgio Armani, who pored over photographs from the Warner Brothers gangster films of the `30s while creating the costumes for ”The Untouchables.” (The volume of requests prevents the archive from dealing with private collectors.)
Customers based in New York can make an appointment and select their own stills from the museum`s holdings; out-of-towners, though, have learned to rely on Corliss`s taste when requesting a star or a representative scene, and there are few disappointments. (The pictures reproduced on these pages are some of her personal favorites.) ”Once in a while we get requests for stills that just don`t exist,” says Corliss, ”such as the tornado in `The Wizard of Oz` or a werewolf in the middle of a transformation. These were special effects created in the camera, and there aren`t, of course, any photographs of them. But otherwise, we`ve got everything you could possibly want.”
Once a still has been selected, it`s sent to a lab for duplication. The original remains in the museum`s collection, and the duplicate negative is also put on file. It seldom takes more than a week for a customer to have a photo in hand, and the costs remain well below those of any competing picture service: $10 a print for publishers, $8 for non-profit institutions.
The Film Stills Archive began, almost inadvertently, in 1935, when the museum acquired the personal papers of pioneer filmmaker D. W. Griffith by paying the long-overdue storage bill from the warehouse where they were kept. Among the scripts and financial records was Griffith`s personal horde of photographs from his productions, including ”The Birth of a Nation” and
”Intolerance.” Acquisitions from the estates of Griffith stars Carol Dempster and Richard Barthelmess, as well as the personal collection of Griffith`s longtime cameraman Billy Bitzer, have since enlarged the Griffith holdings; Lillian Gish also has promised the museum her files.
In the 1930s, when film stills were considered beneath contempt by most public institutions-on an order with comic books and baseball cards-the first director of the museum`s department of film, Iris Barry, had the foresight to begin amassing photographs along with the movies she acquired for the museum`s collection. As Barry rounded up unwanted silent films from Russia, Germany, Japan and France, she took the stills with them, though they had little evident value at that time.
But the film stills collection really took off in 1948, when the publishers of Photoplay magazine donated the more than 1 million photographs that had accumulated in their offices since the publication`s founding in 1915. Since then, the collection has grown through donations from actors, directors, and distributors, occasionally supplemented by purchases made from the archive`s modest budget.
”We have to balance acquisition and preservation,” says Corliss, ”and right now the most important thing is to find proper housing for what we do have.” Stills from new films are forwarded by most of the major distributors; in addition, both Time magazine (where Corliss`s husband, Richard, is a film critic) and Newsweek ship over their surplus supplies. The job of cataloguing is continuous: ”Within a month of a film`s release, we`ll have a request for pictures. We spend our overtime hours working on the collection, adding new material and making new files.”
These photographs are more than pin-ups. The studio portrait photographers-men and women such as Eugene Robert Richee, who took the photograph of Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo, may have considered themselves only part of a publicity machine, but they often produced images of genuine quality that have only recently been properly appreciated. Film stills are superbly evocative of their time, but they can also capture an abstract, idealized beauty that is, perhaps, our century`s sequel to Sargent and Ingres. Scene stills may supply our only clues to the look and content of the hundreds of thousands of movies that have simply disappeared, and even for many of those that have survived, only stills can suggest the original textures and qualities of light that have been obscured in the muddy, duplicate prints that have come down to us.
Corliss produces a recent acquisition: a hard-bound volume of stills from the 1936 ”Theodora Goes Wild,” part of a collection of similar volumes newly donated by Columbia Pictures. The volumes contain between 300 and 400 photos, representing several views of all the major scenes, several different portraits of all the cast members, and a selection of posed shots, taken on specially constructed sets in the studio`s still department; all of the photos are printed on a high-quality, linen-backed stock, and each is accompanied by an identifying caption, pasted on the back. Studio publicists would take these books around to the newspapers and magazines, and as each editor made his choice, the place and date of publication was entered in the margin of the picture. The same photo never appeared twice.
But that was the `30s. Today, says Corliss, ”stills are practically worthless. The studios will send out a package of 10 or 12 at the most, and most of those will be bland head shots of the stars. You`re lucky if you get one or two scene stills, and even those seem to have been chosen by someone who has no idea of what the movie is about. Future generations will never know what these films are.
”In the studio days, photographers would use 8-by-10 negatives and spend hours setting up their shots. Now, most of the stills come from blown up 35-mm., and they`re blurry or grainy or washed out. On top of that, they`re printed on this cheap, horrible `RC` (`resin-coated`) paper, which won`t be nearly as durable as the fiber paper the studios used to use and which we use for our reproductions. We have stills processed 60 years ago that look like they just came out of a lab, but the new ones won`t last.
”Looking through one of our star files is like seeing a flipbook of a person`s life. Here they are with the husband they`re going to love forever, and here they are a few pictures later with someone new. It`s fascinating, and very moving, to see the passage of time, to see how people change and how they slowly fade.”
People may fade, but Mary Corliss is doing all she can to ensure that their images won`t.
