Exhibition Review

Who knew? Who knew that Maryland had been the setting, and often the theme, of so many films? And who knew that an exhibition on just that could be presented with such a wealth of graphic, manuscript, artifact, and film materials? That, indeed, was the reaction of many visitors to the Maryland Historical Society's fascinating and immensely entertaining exhibition, "Filming Maryland."	1
Not formally a part of the exhibit, but an excellent introduction along the entryway, a gallery of period black-and-white photographs of Maryland movie theaters first greets the visitor. The photos capture not so much the large movie palaces that once loomed over major downtown thoroughfares as the compact architecture and community presence of small movie houses tightly wedged between groceries, hardware stores, and other small businesses. The sense of place, the feeling of neighborhood rather than urban expanse, is particularly evident in such images as a 1960 photograph, Kiddie Matinee at the Apex Theater, opened in 1942, as well as views of the Avalon Theater (1925) in Easton and the Waverly (1910), Echo (1914), and McHenry (1917) theaters in Baltimore.	2
The exhibit's nearby entry marquee is small, just as the one on an intimate side-street movie house would be. Once in, the visitor is greeted by more than 350 objects from 40 representative films—film stills, posters and lobby cards, scripts, directors' notes, re-created sets, and props. The initial portion of the exhibit is devoted to an overview of the role of film as popular culture and to an exploration of how motion pictures set or filmed in Maryland offered audiences glimpses of the state's people, its history, and its geography. The most arresting of the introductory materials, however, is a haunting snippet of documentary film—an all too brief view by an unknown cameraman of prisoners from the Spanish-American War arriving in Annapolis in July 1898—completed only a few years after the very first publicly screened motion pictures.	. . .