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In 1939, the Academy of Motion Pictures published its first ‘Actor Directory’, which grouped actors into categories such as ‘prominent women’ and ‘actresses’, but reserved separate sections for ‘colored’ performers and “Oriental”. The Academy removed the separate categories a few years later, but many actors of color weren’t included in other sections. They were eliminated.
These racist repertoires are on display at Los Angeles’ new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which celebrates some of history’s most important filmmakers while trying to confront the dark legacy of exclusion and discrimination head-on in the industry. . The hope is to tell a much more complicated and precise Hollywood story over the years.
“As an Academy, we want to recognize our own bond,” said Dara Jaffe, assistant curator, on a recent tour ahead of the official opening on September 30. She pointed to an exposure on Anna May Wong, the only Chinese-American movie star in the 1920s, who was denied the lead roles. Nearby, the gallery features original casting notes on Al Pacino and young Polaroids by Christian Bale and Joaquin Phoenix from early auditions.
The messy and expensive journey to the opening of the Academy Museum came alongside the rapid changes in Hollywood sparked by #OscarsSoWhite, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and other movements pushing for inclusion in entertainment . The result, after many delayed launches and leadership upheavals and pandemic upheaval, is a museum that refreshingly criticizes Hollywood’s failures – though there are limits as far as an institution affiliated with the The Academy can deal with the reality of ongoing exclusion and the role The Oscars play in perpetuating the problems.
“We celebrate cinema, but we also have difficult conversations about parts of our history that are less proud,” says Bill Kramer, director of the museum. “We need to be honest about who we are as an industry.”
Designed by Renzo Piano in a modern, sleek restored 1930s structure, the 28,000-square-foot museum is a high-stakes venture for the Academy and for Hollywood. Since the 1920s, when the Academy was founded, a film museum has been an industry dream, says Kramer. But none of the past efforts have succeeded. In the 1960s, a group of industry leaders attempted to build one across from the Hollywood Bowl – with LA sheriffs forcibly dismissing a landlord who stood in the way and refused to give up his property. But financial problems and infighting derailed the project and the land was eventually turned into a parking lot. The artifacts the group had acquired, including Fred Astaire’s tap dance and Marlene Dietrich’s costumes, ended up being stored in a closed prison.
In 2012, the Academy announced plans for a cinema museum in the cinema capital of the world in the iconic May Company building, which was built as a department store in 1939 (a notable year in cinema history. with the release of The Wizard of Oz). . It was a gargantuan undertaking, involving a building with deteriorated characteristics, and the Academy raised $ 100 million with Piano on board. In the end, that wasn’t enough, and financial setbacks hit the project, which incurred more than $ 300 million in debt in 2015, when construction began. The Academy promised an opening date in 2017 – and every year since, Tom Hanks announcing at the Oscars in February 2020 that it would finally open later that year. A month later, the pandemic struck.
Piano, known for designing the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Shard in London, said he would have been a filmmaker if not an architect. He designed the museum for visitors to cross a bridge between the renovated historic structure, which houses the museum’s collection, and a new glass and concrete sphere dubbed the Death Star Dome, with the new Geffen Theater of 1,000 places.
The benefit of the many delays was that the museum had time to rethink the concept, as marginalized artists exposed industry discrimination and forced the Academy to diversify. When the museum was about to open in 2019, it promised to celebrate the “most important” aspect of cinema: “how magic is created”. Almost three years later, his approach and his marketing seem more relevant.
“We live in a time when more and more people and stronger voices are calling on institutions to recognize the wrongs of the past,” said Jacqueline Stewart, museum artistic and programming director, film specialist and archivist. who was hired in January. “We have to retrace our cultural histories with our eyes open. One of the risks we take when we don’t pay attention to our past is accepting these exclusionary practices as the norm.
The Chicago professor, who in 2019 became Turner Classic Movies’ first black host, said museum galleries reject the idea of a “movie canon” and instead showcase “movies. stories, in the multiple, so we do not go through the periods in a linear way ”.
The main exhibition, Stories of Cinema, spans three floors and challenges notions of who counts as an author and what works should be placed on a pedestal. A gallery called “Significant Movies and Moviemakers” features six works and artists, starting with an exhibition by Citizen Kane that includes the Rosebud sleigh. Next to it is a moving tribute to Real Women Have Curves, a 2002 film about a Mexican American family in East LA by director Patricia Cardoso, which has been critically acclaimed but long denied recognition and resources. . The Oscars came under fire in 2013 after excluding one of the film’s stars, Lupe Ontiveros, from her In Memoriam edit.
“We did something that is worthy of a museum, and that’s a huge compliment, ”says Effie Brown, who was the producer of the Cardoso film and now chairs the Academy’s Inclusion Advisory Committee, which includes Ruth E Carter, the Black Panther costume designer; Arthur Dong, specialist in Chinese representation in Hollywood; and Bird Runningwater, who runs an Indigenous program at Sundance. The group helped curators make sure the exhibits were contextual and not whitewashed. “We are in Los Angeles, which is very diverse, and I want people to see themselves reflected, to see the contributions of their ancestors, to see that they are not forgotten,” said Brown, adding, “I also want that ‘they panic and see the things that moved them when they watched it on the big screen.
Darnell Hunt, dean of social science at UCLA, which publishes annual reports on Hollywood’s diversity, notes that the Academy until recently tended to blame exclusion, saying, “We don’t. don’t make the films, we just honor what’s done. ‘”He says he hopes the museum doesn’t” ghettoize “diversity and inclusion” in a small corner of the museum, but rather treat the issue as something thing that frames all of Hollywood history and what Hollywood is now ”.
The museum appears to do an effective job of not symbolizing discussions of exclusion, although there is a small gallery called Impact / Reflection which instead crams into discussions of films related to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, labor relations and climate change.
An Oscars hall features large screens with a rotation of notable speeches for Academy “premieres” throughout history, illustrating the shamefully slow pace of progress, with Rita Moreno (the first Latina actor to win in 1962) alongside Chloé Zhao (the first woman of color to win for directing, in 2021). The gallery also includes 20 notable Oscar statuettes, but leaves an empty display for Hattie McDaniel, whose 1939 Oscar for Gone with the Wind and who was forced to sit at a separate table during the ceremony.
A makeup and hairstyle exhibit includes prosthetics worn by Charlize Theron and Danny DeVito, as well as an exhibit of old makeup from the 1930s and 1940s that were used for blackface and yellowface. An animated exhibit presents a fascinating look at the long and ubiquitous history of racist imagery and sexual violence in cartoons. The room displaying the backdrop of North by Northwest’s Mount Rushmore includes a sign recognizing the desecration of the sacred Lakota land. The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 racist film that led to a resurgence of the KKK, is only addressed twice in the museum – and from the perspective of black filmmakers.
The collection, which also includes the Wizard of Oz ruby slippers, Jaws’ only surviving shark model, and Okoye’s Black Panther costume, offers a dense and dizzying array of artifacts that may require multiple visits to be completed. digested. The Spike Lee Gallery is remarkable, with dozens of items from his personal collection, which is like “stepping into Spike’s mind and also into his literal spaces.” It’s what covers the walls of its homes and offices, ”according to Jaffe, the curator. And the museum also opens with the first-ever Hayao Miyazaki retrospective in North America, with a transformed space resembling the worlds from the co-founder of Studio Ghibli’s films.
In its programming, the museum does not hesitate to collaborate with creators who have criticized the industry, including Haile Gerima, an independent Ethiopian filmmaker who was part of the LA Rebellion film movement and who self-distributed his 1993 film, Sankofa, after American distributors rejected it. “I have lived without Hollywood and I would love to live without Hollywood all my life,” said Gerima, 75, in a recent interview, adding that he did not know anything about the museum until recently and had accepted. to participate after Ava. DuVernay introduced it to him and made it clear that the Academy was sincere in its efforts to honor “foreign filmmakers” and “sections excluded from film practice.” The museum is now restoring Gerima’s 1979 documentary, Wilmington 10 – USA 10,000, about a group of wrongly convicted North Carolina students.
“I basically enter [the museum] with suspicion, ”he said, noting that he has repeatedly seen attempts at meaningful inclusion collapse. “Every 20, 30 years in Hollywood, when the current community of excluded and discriminated against rises, there is turbulence, but is this a permanent recognition? … The fact that the museum is attached to this industry itself is a challenge for them. I hope he succeeds.
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