| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema. By Haidee Wasson. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xiv, 314 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-520-22777-8. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-520-24131-2.)

It is widely recognized that the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City has exercised a profound, even hegemonic, influence on how modernism is collected, exhibited, and interpreted throughout the West. Haidee Wasson's new book explores a hitherto neglected aspect of the MOMA's history, its establishment in 1935 of the Film Library. Taking as her subject the formation, both physically and ideologically speaking, of the collection during the years between the world wars, Wasson investigates how film was framed at the MOMA, starting with the question of how a popular medium could be made to fit into the cultural space of a fledgling fine-arts museum. Simply by its existence, the Film Library established the idea that cinema could be taken seriously as an art form in progressive circles.

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