The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s film noir series commenced last Wednesday with a screening of Billy Wilder’ s pitch-perfect 1950 Hollywood satire, Sunset Boulevard. The crowds stayed away, but all six of us movie mavens in attendance were enthusiastically glued to the screen.
After all, we were grateful because these cinematic artworks demand to be seen on the big screen. And while, yes, the DVD market has been very good to old movies and the people who love them, the small screen diminishes their power.
Besides, film noir’s violence and moral corruption are as relevant today as they were in the 1940s and 50s. (That is, unless I’m totally mistaken and the world has been on one whopping acid trip of optimism in recent years). There’s no “happily ever after” in these cynical tales. Sunset Boulevard takes jabs at everything from the studio system to the downfall of the great silent cinema stars.
During Hollywood’s era of the morally righteous Hays Code days, stories had to be told with great subtlety—sex and violence were implied but infrequently seen. The viewer had to do the guesswork.Wild flights of imagination fill in the gaps as to what’s happening off a screen sanitized by the strict requirements. Thus, certain “mundane” actions—a furtive glance or a brief kiss—become endowed with powerful meaning so that a stagy gunshot has the impact of canon-blast. In Boulevard, aging actress Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, entices starving screenwriter William Holden’s Joe Gillis to live with her. Their onscreen token embrace and kiss are all we viewers need to establish her sugar-mamma intent of hot seduction.
This is partly why noir is so much fun to watch. Sorry, Tarrantino.
Then there’s the photography, which begs one to reconsider the aesthetic potential of Venetian blinds. Rooted in German Expressionism, the film noir environment is surreal with its low angles and ominous shadows that allude to the characters’ sinister psychologies. Yes, the protagonists are morally reprehensible, but they look fantastic—who cares about the horrible things that they do?
(The film noir series is free to the public and continues with “Double Indemnity,” which needs to be seen if only for Barbara Stanwyck’s bathrobe-clad entrance (May 7); and lastly, Bogie and Bacall in the 1946 cut of ”The Big Sleep” (May 21). Image: 42nd St.Nocturne by Xavier Ja. Barile, courtesy of SAAM.)
Last night marked a new chapter in the Stephen Colbert—Smithsonian saga. American History Museum director Brent Glass has had a change of heart. Stephen Colbert, he says, is a National Treasure.
It started back in January, when the Comedy Central satirist met with Glass and lobbied him to include a portrait of Colbert in the “Treasures of American History” exhibition, alongside Abraham Lincoln’s hat and Irving Berlin’s piano.
Glass rejected the portrait, so Colbert trudged across town to the National Portrait Gallery. That museum accepted the painting and hung it next to the bathrooms where it remained until yesterday, April Fool’s Day.
It was a hit, and crowds streamed in and lined up to snap pictures with their cell phones. Last night on the Stephen Colbert show, Brent Glass phoned in his decision, announcing that Colbert’s portrait will now be transferred to the American History Museum’s exhibit at the Air and Space museum for the next two weeks.
The American History Museum, under renovation and due to reopen this fall, now has the typewriter from “Murder She Wrote” and Catwoman’s skin-tight suit.
That’s the result of a cache of recent donations by nine actresses whose pioneering work on stage and screen peaked from the 1920s to 1970s.
These “leading ladies” from classic film, theater and television were all “foundations of 20th-century American entertainment,” says curator Dwight Blocker Bowers.
The museum got quite a haul, including an original script from “The Birds” from Tippi Hedren and Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson giving away her “TV Land Award.”
To get some insight, I called Rose Marie, who donated the black bow she always wore in her hair, playing Sally Rogers on the “Dick Van Dyke Show” in the 1960s. While she still always wears a bow (it’s her trademark), she won’t tell why it’s so important to her.
“It’s a very private personal reason,” she says. “I said I would only give up (the bow) if the Smithsonian wants it.”
But what impressed me most was Rose Marie’s appearance when she was just three-years-old in some of the first talking films in the 1920s as a singing and dancing kid wonder. The clips on YouTube show a little girl with a moptop haircut belting out jazz tunes and scatting with the best of them. Sure enough, Rose Marie also donated her childhood dancing shoes.
While she says that being in the Smithsonian was “the greatest honor an American can get,” she definitely felt that classic actresses deserved a spot there.
Performers “are very important to this country. We taught the country to be entertained, we taught them how to sing, how to dance,” she says. “When the depression was on, for a nickel you could go see a movie and forget your troubles. That is our function.”
It was a swinging good time at the Pyramids this past week and no, we’re not talking about a bluesy New Orlean’s juke joint, we’re talking the real thing, the Great Pyramids of Giza.
“It was the big experience of everyone’s life in the ensemble,” enthused John Hasse, the National Museum of American History’s curator of American music, who said that the event was broadcast on the Arab language news network, al Jazeera.
Called “Jazz on the Nile,” the tour was pegged almost to the day when Louis Armstrong, himself, raised his trumpet and performed in front of the sphinx in 1961. A famous photograph recalls the moment.
The orchestra, conducted by the renowned David N. Baker, professor of music at Indiana University and NEA jazz master, was accompanied by singer Delores King Williams and two swing and tap dancers Chester Whitmore and Shaunte Johnson. Playing a repertoire selected from the museum’s collection of Duke Ellington and Benny Carter, the ensemble hit a note of perfection when it ripped into Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” Whitmore and Johnson in full swing reinacted choreagraphy of the period.
“The audience just went wild” said the museum’s director Brent Glass, “one couple danced in the aisle.”
“It was quite an extravaganza,” said Ken Kimery, SJMO’s executive producer, “we performed at the pyramids and did two concerts in Cairo and finished it off at the Alexandria Opera House.” Band members also conducted workshops with school children. “We bridged the language barrier. We were all speaking just one language,” Kimery said. “Music.”
The tour was sponsored by the Ministries of Culture and Tourism of the Egyptian government and the U.S. State Department.
(Photographs of Director Brent Glass, and the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, courtesy of the National Museum of American History)
The padded vinyl seats on the stools look a bit grubby, and there are scuff marks on the base of the counter where customers’ feet once fidgeted while they sipped their sodas.
But an object is rarely just what it appears to be on the surface – it has a narrative context that would often remain invisible without historians and curators to sleuth it out or guard its memory.
These humble chairs and counter, once part of the Woolworth’s luncheonette in Greensboro, N.C., became a stage for an important scene in the civil rights movement when four African American college students sat down in them on February 1, 1960. The students asked to be served – a direct challenge to the store’s custom of refusing counter service to non-whites (they were allowed to order food to go, but not welcome to eat there).
They didn’t get served, but they didn’t leave, either. They stayed until closing, and came back in greater numbers the next day. And the next. The student-led “sit-in” protest ultimately lasted nearly six months, until it hurt the store’s bottom line so much that the manager finally relented and decided to begin serving African Americans. The sit-in attracted hundreds of supporters, harassers and (most importantly) journalists, and is now considered a milestone in the American civil rights movement.
Last week, at an informal “curator’s talk” in front of the lunch counter exhibit, Bill Yeingst, chair of the NMAH’s Home and Community Life Division, talked about how the lunch counter wound up in the Smithsonian’s collection.
Yeingst said he was home doing the dishes one day about 15 years ago, when he heard on the news that Woolworth’s was planning to close about 800 stores nationwide.
“That lunch counter had been in the back of my mind for a long time, and I thought, that would be a tremendous thing for the institution to have.”
Yeingst and his then-boss, Lonnie Bunch (now director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture), flew down to Greensboro and met with community leaders. Woolworth’s corporate headquarters said the museum could have part of the counter, but only if the Greensboro community approved. And it did.
Now, the lunch counter is a prominent part of American History’s permanent collection, typically displayed within view of the Star Spangled Banner to symbolize the central importance of the American civil rights movement.
“When you look back on your career, it’s one of those highlight moments. You feel like you’ve actually made a difference,” Yeingst said, smiling.
(Photograph courtesy of the National Museum of American History)
Watch video from part 2 of Stephen Colbert’s visit to the Smithsonian. Tune into “The Colbert Report” Tuesday night to see how his adventure concludes.
There was a sneak peek tour of the National Museum of American History last week. The press donned hard hats and clambered around amid the dust and noise, following behind the tour guide, aka director Brent D. Glass. “We are making great strides,” he announced.
The museum closed last fall for an $85-million renovation project that includes a drastically reorganized central atrium, which will house a grand staircase and a skylight that will bring natural light into the building’s center. The first and second floors will also have floor-to-ceiling glass showcases for better display and rotation of the museum’s three million artifacts.
The museum in its current state of demolition proved disorienting to those who knew it before. The familiar marble paneled walls were gone, along with the wall where the Star-Spangled Banner once hung. From the first floor, we could see all the way up to third floor. And everyone needed frequent orientation directions—where’s the National Mall from here?
But under Glass’s tutelage we begin imagining what was to come. The museum’s state-of-the-art new Star-Spangled Banner gallery will be the first thing visitors encounter when they enter the building from the Mall. The lighting in the gallery, dimmed for preserving the 30-by-34-foot wool and cotton flag, will evoke the “dawn’s early light” from the National Anthem, written by Francis Scott Key.
New exhibitions are planned for the reopening year, including the 8,000-square-foot “On the Water: Stories from Maritime America.”
The museum plans to announce its opening day in February. Stay tuned.
Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre invented the black and white daguerreotype, one of the earliest forms of photography, in 1839. No one questioned the French artist’s claim to fame.
But when Levi Hill, a Baptist minister from the remote town of West Kill in the New York Catskills, claimed to have added technicolor to the art form, critics did begin to ask questions.
It didn’t help Hill’s case that he refused to disclose his methods.
People suspected he had just dabbed color onto a black and white image. Hill published a book, A Treatise on Heliochromy, on his process in 1856. When still no one could mimic the method, Hill curiously blamed their failures on missteps in the complicated procedure, which required rare and dangerous chemicals. The process never became commercially viable.
The color-hungry public had to wait for that until 1907 when the Lumière brothers developed a way to shoot and develop color photographs. (Check out “In Living Color” by Robert Poole in our September issue.)
Was Hill a fraud? Were his multi-hued Hillotypes–62 of which were donated to the National Museum of American History’s collections in 1933–fakes?
Ironically, the analysis proved him to be a bit of both. Turns out Hill produced a photograph that picked up the first colors known to photography, some reds and blues, but he added enhancements in white, yellow and green, casting them off as naturally occurring.
(Hillotype of a print depicting a man fallen from a horse, color pigments applied, Courtesy of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History)
I was remembering the robin’s egg blue TI-36 scientific calculator that I had before upgrading to the TI-82 graphing calculator. I envied those who had the newer TI-83, and the much coveted TI-83 plus, both of which played games. That’s when one of the inventors of the hand-held calculator, Jerry Merryman, took to the podium at a donation ceremony at the Smithsonian Castle yesterday, and guessed at my thoughts.
“Does anyone remember their first calculator?” Merryman asked his audience of curators, teachers and press.
Merryman, along with co-inventors James Van Tassel and Jack Kilby, invented the four-function, nearly three-pound personal computing device that replaced its typewriter-sized, 55-pound predecessor.
In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the 1967 original, Texas Instruments donated a TI-58 and 59, a TI-30, a TI-Navigator Classroom System and the new TI-Nspire handhelds and computer software to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
“Invention is a big part of American history,” says the museum’s director Brent Glass. “If you think about the history of technological education, it’s amazing what one little instrument has meant.”
(Courtesy of the National Museum of American History. Above, Jerry Merryman)
