Movie Icons at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema
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Tucked into the upwards spiraling walkway of Turin’s Mole Antonelliana tower, the "Movie Icons" exhibition at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, running through January of next year, brings together a grab bag of Hollywood props and costumes, from one of the original alien costumes from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind to several of the wands from the Harry Potter series. Visitors can examine the folds and creases in the original Ninja Turtles and Spider-Man costumes—and perhaps shed a tear at the inevitable signs of age that reveal just how much time has passed since their childhoods.
The items in the exhibition were drawn from the stores of movie-prop collectors, primarily Luca Cableri. There might seem to be a mismatch between the cultural cache of a museum exhibition and the esotericism of movie-prop collecting, but it’s worth remembering that private collections, often of objects offhandedly dismissed by tastemakers, have often formed the basis of archives and museums, and thus invaluable academic and public knowledge.
This is particularly salient in the history of cinema museums like the Museo Nazionale del Cinema or, indeed, the Cinematheque Francais in Paris. These institutions were formed largely by midcentury movie nerds like Henri Langlois who as young people started obsessively collecting objects that most people of their era considered to be mere technical curios or outmoded toys: projector components, phenakistoscopes, zoetropes, thaumatropes, and so on.
As it turns out, the development of the field of media studies and the compiling of a history of modern visual culture has depended largely on these once-meaningless collections. "What we know about pre-cinema, and also silent movies, came from these kinds of people," says museum director Domenico de Gaetano. "Thanks to them, we can say that a kind of history of cinema exists. So this is why I think it’s important—the role of collectionism."
One of these collectors was the Museo Nazionale del Cinema’s founder, Maria Adriana Prolo, whose artifacts spanning the 1870s through the mid-20th century form the foundation of the museum’s permanent collection. Prolo isn’t as well known as giants of film preservation like Langlois, but she was in many ways his equivalent in Italy, pushing for decades for the history of cinema to be recognized as a legitimate sphere of art and culture.
Costume from Terminator Salvation. © Museo Nazionale del Cinema
The "Movie Icons" exhibition, particularly given the toy-like quality of things like the puppets from Gremlin, carries some of this spirit. "In a certain way," Gaetano points out, "movie props are an old-fashioned exhibition." At the same time, though, the concept behind it is embedded fully in the current context of movie production. The props are something material, something tangible, in an era when the production methods of cinema are becoming incredibly ethereal.
Digitization means that today’s elaborate superhero costumes, unlike the one from Tim Burton’s Batman on display at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, are now at least in part rendered by a computer. Broadly speaking, digitization means that a museum of cinema has less material to display from any given film. Whereas film productions used to offer a wealth of physical material, including photographic documentation, that could be exhibited, today "there are no more photos or prints to be collected," Gaetano observes, "just [digital] files."
Seeing iconic movie props helps us recapture our imagined physical ties to the fantasy worlds of the screen. If it can be difficult to imagine interacting with the digitally animated worlds of so much spectacular cinema today, maybe seeing Harry Potter’s wand helps us bridge this gap.
Strolling up the ramp that winds up the first few stories of the largely hollow Mole Antonelliana, another facet to such a display occurred to me, and one that distinguishes a museal display of movie props from most other artifacts. While the business of a museum is usually to cultivate an aura around a thing, to enhance the genius or the importance of the object, taking a close look at a collection of movie props suggests an additional dimension.
It’s the camera that adds aura to these things, the lighting and the cinematography that convinces us that the xenomorph is a slick and slimy threat, that the Batarang is hovering in midair, that it doesn’t matter that Freddy Krueger’s burn wounds look like rubber. Taken out from under the lights, no longer under the oversight of a cinematographer or an editor, movie props become something different than they seemed on screen. In a museum, we can admire the craft of these objects while also reflecting on what the camera adds, how these things are just a piece of a dream-making apparatus that’s larger than the sum of its parts.
Take the RoboCop costume from RoboCop 2, one of the first things one sees in the "Movie Icons" exhibition. Standing in front of it, one is struck by the ingeniousness of its design, the alienating blockiness of the metal exterior that makes the hero look like the hideous American cars of the 1980s produced in his native Detroit. But that’s not a steel breastplate at all. In fact, it’s a plastic sheet that’s been strategically painted to simulate the multifarious sheen of metal.
Costume from RoboCop 2. © Museo Nazionale del Cinema
To a certain extent, then, the "Movie Icons" exhibition encourages a critical perspective on these objects and the world they come from. It compels the visitor to think about how fantasies are constructed—that is, the kinds of coordination that have to take place between costume designers, prop masters, cinematographers, and directors. The classic paradox of Hollywood as a "dream factory"—a rationalized assembly line for producing irrational spectacle—becomes manifest in the way these meticulously crafted things, in person, neither constitute convincing simulations nor fully correspond to what we’ve seen on screen.
Unexpectedly, these things acquire even more interest when one assumes such a perspective toward them. They lend agency to the viewer: Now that we can see through the illusion, it’s our choice to wonder at it or deconstruct it, to bask in the memory of a well-orchestrated trick or to whet our critical view on the spectacle we’re sold. In person, movie props don’t merely connect us to a tangible history, as they also prepare the grounds for critique. And that was precisely the purpose of the institutions that the cinephile-collectors of the mid-20th century founded.
"Movie Icons" runs through January 13 at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.
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