Hollywood and the Culture Elite by Decherney Peter.;

Author:Decherney, Peter.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General, HIS036000, History/United States/General
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2005-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.1 Fund-raiser for the Museum of Modern Art Film Library at Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s home, Pickfair. Left to right: Frances Goldwyn, John E. Abbott, Samuel Goldwyn, Mary Pickford, Jesse Lasky, Harold Lloyd, Iris Barry. (Author’s collection)

FIGURE 5.2 Founding the Film Library (1935). Left to right: John Abbott, Iris Barry, John Hay Whitney (seated), A. Conger Goodyear, Nelson Rockefeller. (Author’s collection)

Of course that is exactly what Barry had been complaining about for over a decade as a British film critic. Barry, however, made several surprising about-faces in the 1930s. Shortly after Philip Johnson hired her as MoMA’s librarian, Barry renounced her earlier Hollywood grievances and declared, “Hollywood Is Not America.”21 This change was presumably the result of her experiencing real Americans for the first time, even marrying one. During World War II and the cold war, Barry’s resistance to America and Hollywood weakened even further. In another dramatic turn, she entered the ranks of the staunchest defenders of liberal, American democracy, and she devoted the remainder of her career at MoMA to championing American film and to proving precisely that Hollywood is America, or at least a utopian fantasy of American ideals necessary in the struggle for global democracy.

As MoMA’s film curator her job was to defend Hollywood as an alternative to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. But there is no evidence that Barry simply and wholeheartedly assumed the Film Library’s jingoistic mission right away. In an essay she published the same year Jacobs’s book came out, for instance, Barry expressed an equivocal view of the Film Library’s party line:

The United States has contributed a veritable Mississippi of films. What is more, whether by good fortune or by accident, this country has undeniably contributed a very large portion of what is genuinely cinematic: the film is largely and typically an American Expression.22

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