7 October - 27 January
Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck
43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
The French New Wave adored film to the point of obsession. The post-war accessibility of motion pictures, hitherto restricted, spawned a generation that devoured the medium in all its forms — a new generation cultivated cinephilia to cult status. A Museum of Everyday Life: Cinephilia and Collecting, currently showing at the Peltz Gallery, wonderfully captures the obsessive nature cinema inspires.
On display within this unremarkable space are works on loan from the Cinema Museum. Situated in Lambeth, the ex-workhouse has links to Charles Chaplin, the doyen of silent era Hollywood. During Chaplin’s impoverished early childhood, he would have stayed in the building with his mother. The converted site is home to collections that cover the whole breadth of cinema, yet the museum is seeking public funding to keep the collection together.
The joy of this exhibition is envisioned by the collectors, their labour of love underlines an obsessive nature compelled to collect and catalogue. The number of items present here is staggering, and must be in excess of 100,000, realised as index cards, scrapbooks cuttings and celluloid samples. The timespan begins around the Second World War and continues to the preset, but some of the collected items edge close to the first talkies. The effort taken by the curator to assemble this exhibition is testament to the spirit of the collectors themselves.
Envelopes contained within large metal index cabinets hold fragile celluloid movie cuts, are scattershot and lack the fastidiousness of other files, which are meticulously compiled and alphabetised. Some collections a mere 183 cards kept within a tiny box, others in tightly filled rows. A tall chest of drawers built from reclaimed wood stands proudly next to a wall adorned with index cards.
Collecting inspires a love for the subject matter and opens up the possibility to consider each aspect equally. From famous names that pop out instantly and excites the heart, to the less glamorous characters scattered across time. One cannot omit as a true collector. To omit is to deny their presence within the medium, and thereby undermine the collection itself. It is perhaps this spirit that the unstoppable nature of the hobby explodes. Vic Kinson is one such collector, who amassed over 36,000 index cards, and provides the set piece of the exhibition.
The level of detail etched on these index cards appear limitless. Morsels of interesting facts sprinkled within the perfunctory information of an actor’s career: Al Pacino’s card states he was once a dancer and a stand up comedian; that Fatty Arbuckle was accused of manslaughter; Groucho Marx filed for bankruptcy after the 1929 Wall Street crash; Buster Keaton an alcoholic; Anthony Quinn’s family escaped the Mexican revolution; or that Lana Turner married eight times. Actors are described with reflection: Susan Sarandon as a, “Sexy and sassy American leading lady”; Burt Lancaster as the “Muscular actor with a flashing smile tinged with menace”.
Present throughout this exhibition is the urge to collect and collate for oneself, a record to replace a fragile and fading memory. A yellowing scrapbook of Peter Ewing lists the Academy Awards honour-role of 1939, written with elegant penmanship, and sites The Citadel as the best acted and best directed picture of the year. Yet the errors present remind the observer that this was a human endeavour, and so errors are unavoidable. The Citadel in fact had won its award the previous year. That should not take away from the enjoyment of looking at these artefacts, in fact, they highlight the personal touch present throughout this collection.
One finds oneself wanting to read each card, to browse each scrapbook, and to hold each strip of celluloid up to the light. Yet the sheer numbers are overwhelming. To do justice to the collection would require a lifetime within these walls, as surely as these collections took a life time to assemble.