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Mary Malloy’s - Museums in the Movies
Blogroll, Featured, Museums in the Movies

Museums are still open — in the movies

Alas, our favorite museums are closed for the near future, but we can still visit them in the movies. Even though museums are mostly places for the contemplation of motionless objects and works of art, they are visually compelling and filled with things to spark our imaginations. Until we can go back into the galleries I am going to suggest some movies to take their place.

I taught a course on the History of Museums for ten years at the Harvard Extension School and during that time developed a “Film-clip Festival” to amuse students at the end of each term, and to explore pop-culture images of museums. Are museums in movies all that different from the institutions we love in the real world, I wondered? Indeed they are! About half of the museums depicted on film have a monster on the loose, and a significant number of others are being robbed!

In 125 movies made between 1911 and 2019 that includes a scene set in a real or fictional museum, eight themes can be identified that are most commonly explored.

I am working on a project on how museums are portrayed in movies. Look for more information on the Facebook group: museumsinthemovies. - Mary Malloy

In order of popularity they are:

  1.     Monsters are on the loose.
  2.     Criminal activity is taking place, usually a robbery of gemstones or paintings.
  3.     Museums are a good place to bring a date or to meet potential dates or sex partners.
  4.     Art and/or cultural objects are inspiring, educational, or objectionable in some way.
  5.     Museums are where snobbish society hangs out, usually at gala events (consequently it is a good place for them to be embarrassed, robbed or eaten by 
monsters from number one above).
  6.     A famous museum can help to establish the identity of a specific local setting.
  7.     Information is hidden in the collection (or old technology is only available there).
  8.     The actual subject content of a museum is used to move the plot forward.

There are some perennial sub-themes as well:

  1. Association with a museum can quickly define a character (as rich and connected if they are a trustee or donor), and as smart (but frequently goofy) if they work there.
  2. School children in groups are either totally bored, or out of control and being yelled at.
  3. Museum directors are snobbish idiots and usually British, even in U.S. museums.

Here are some recommendations for films in the first four categories:

1. Monster on the Loose

The Relic, released in 1997, covers two bases here, as there is both a monster on the loose—an Amazonian Kathoga that eats human brains—and a society gala to launch the new “Superstition” exhibit. Watch out fancy people!

Directed by Peter Hyams and starring Penelope Ann Miller, there are a lot of brains to grapple with in this endeavor. Linda Hunt plays the museum director, who cannot stop the gala because the mayor is coming!

Available on Amazon and included with a Prime membership.

2. Gemstone Robbery

The Hot Rock (1972) features Robert Redford as one of a hapless gang of thieves who rob the Brooklyn Museum of a famous African diamond. There are too-brief references to the colonialism that has long underpinned the diamond business, but this is a comedy with Redford’s character, recently released from prison, convinced to participate in a caper he would rather avoid. Directed by Peter Yates; George Segal, Ron Leibman, and Paul Sand make up the rest of the criminal crew.

Available on HDFY at https://hdfy.to/movies/action/the-hot-rock-1972-watch-online

3. The Museum Date

Angie (1994). Geena Davis plays the title character: a pregnant, partnerless woman with a world of woes, in this film set in New York City. Twenty minutes into the film she aimlessly follows a group of school children into the Metropolitan Museum and meets the love of her life played by Stephen Rea. It isn’t exactly love at first site (not for her anyway), but they have an interesting discussion about the painting “In a Café (Absinthe)” by Edgar Degas. This painting (which is actually at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and not at the Met) depicts a boozy old couple and looks to Angie “like a lot of marriages I’ve seen.” They proceed to get kicked out of the museum because she is eating crackers for nausea.  (As a note here, I’m going to talk at some point in the future about the Thomas Crown Affair, in which Pierce Brosnan’s rich guy eats a flaky pastry in the French Impressionist gallery at the Met, while casually chatting with the guard. Yikes!)

Rent for $2.99 on Amazon Prime.

4. Art as Inspiration

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). No film captures an individual’s moving encounter with a work of art better than this charmer, directed by John Hughes and starring Matthew Broderick. Taking two friends with him around Chicago while playing hooky from school, Ferris goes into the Art Institute. His friend Cameron, played by Alan Ruck, is immobilized in front of the pointillist painter Georges Seurat’s large painting “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” from 1884. The camera goes back and forth between Cameron’s face and the child at the center of the painting, until his big blue eyes shimmer with tears and the little girl dissolves into dots of paint. Lovely!

Available on Netflix, or rent for $2.99 on Amazon Prime.

March 13, 2015by Mary Malloy
Blogroll, Mary Malloy, Museums in the Movies

What to watch until museums reopen (and maybe even after).

I have been working for several years on compiling a list of movies that have scenes set in museums, and it occurs to me that some of you might be looking for film suggestions while museums are closed and you are isolating at home. My current list has 125 films on it, from which I have selected fourteen, plus a cartoon extra, a documentary, two music videos, and some TV shows. This list does not include some of the most familiar titles like The DaVinci Code (2006) or the Night at the Museum series (2006, 2009 and 2014), and you will be relieved to know that it also doesn’t include a new sub-genre I have discovered: “teen-gore-slasher movies set in museums.”
Jen Kramer, my friend and colleague from Harvard, is working with me to put the background info, plus some clips, stills, and the full list into a website. Suggestions are welcome. Thanks to all of you who have already alerted me to films. Wash your hands before digging into the popcorn!
Movies in Chronological Order
1932:   The Mummy
            The first of several dozen movies in which monsters are on the loose in museum galleries. It begins at an Egyptian archaeological site run by the British Museum and stars Boris Karloff in one of his most iconic roles.
1938:   Bringing Up Baby
            A hilarious turn by Cary Grant as a paleontologist working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (which is disguised here as the “Stuyvesant Museum of Natural History,” but uses the AMNH façade).
1949:   On the Town
            Great tunes and great dancing, but very dated ideas of museums. Ann Miller’s big tap number is aces, but Yikes!
1964:   Topkapi
            Melina Mercouri (later the Greek Minister of Culture and leading proponent of returning the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum to Greece) leads a bumbling effort to rob the national museum in Istanbul.
1964:   The Train
            The opening before the credits is spine tingling! Paul Scofield plays a Nazi officer who loves art, and is taking a train filled with stolen French impressionist paintings from Paris to Germany before WWII ends. Interesting philosophical questions are raised about the role of art in defining a national identity, and the value of paintings vs. human lives
1967:   To Sir with Love
            Sidney Poitier plays the best of all possible high school teachers, working in a tough London neighborhood (or I should say neighbourhood for my family currently quarantined in England). He takes his students on a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Natural History Museum, while Lulu sings the theme song.
1975:   Murph the Surf (aka Live a Little, Steal a Lot)
            This is a surprisingly good little heist film with the recently departed Robert Conrad in the title role. It is based on an actual robbery at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (No wonder they haven’t let a film crew in their galleries in decades—not even Night at the Museum, in which the filmmakers painstakingly replicated the AMNH galleries in a studio in Vancouver.)
1980:   The Awakening
            While not exactly a good film, this Charleton-Heston-as-archaeologist epic is notable for being the first film with footage actually filmed in the Cairo Museum. (Other films like Karloff’s The Mummy, and Brendan Fraser’s 1999 film of the same name, have scenes that show almost identical exteriors of the museum, but the interiors were filmed on sets.)
1993:   Demolition Man
            Wesley Snipes plays Simon Phoenix, a twentieth-century criminal so violent that he has to be put into a permanent cryogenic stasis. Sylvester Stallone plays a similarly violent cop, John Spartan, who gets the same treatment. When Phoenix is accidentally thawed in a benign and peaceful future, no one can deal with him except a defrosted Spartan. Phoenix wants weapons and the only place he can find them is in a wonderfully conceived futuristic museum.
1997:   The Relic
            Two important museum themes come together here: 1) museums are places where snobs congregate at soirées, and 2) monsters are on the loose! The book on which this is based is set at the American Museum of Natural History but they declined to participate, so the Field Museum in Chicago is the star. Even though the museum director knows there is a monster killing people in the basement, the important gala with the mayor must go on!
1997:   Bean (aka Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie)
            There are so many really clever bits in this, but the scene where the marketing folks pitch ideas about Whistler’s Mother-related items for the gift shop is especially hilarious.
2001:   Rat Race
            Spoiler Alert: “The Barbie Museum” is not what the family expects.
2018:   Black Panther
            Vibranium artifacts from Wakanda are violently repatriated from “The Museum of Great Britain.” This obvious stand in for the British Museum is actually a computer-generated sign in front of the exterior of the High Museum in Atlanta. I was immediately suspicious when the curator entered the gallery with a cup of coffee!
2018:   Museo
            This Spanish-language film is currently only available on YouTube’s premium channel, but it is worth trying a free introductory membership just to see it. Based on an actual event, the wonderful Gael García Bernal (from Mozart in the Jungle) stars as a bored young man who robs the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The aftermath of guilt and confusion when the artifacts can’t be fenced is beautifully developed, and the moment he realizes the treasures might actually go to Britain because of his actions is especially poignant.
Cartoon:  In movie theaters in “the old days,” a cartoon short often preceded the feature. For your amusement I recommend Betty Boop’s Museum from 1932, readily available in a Google search. Our heroine visits a museum in a classical building with a surprise inside.
Documentary: I highly recommend The Rape of Europa (2006), a terrific documentary on the Nazi looting of works of art during WWII. You will find here the basis of the later fictionalized movies The Monuments Men (2014) and Woman in Gold (2015).
P.S. Don’t bother with The Monuments Men, it is a rotten movie and the documentary features interviews with the actual guys, who went on to become prominent art historians and museum directors after the war.
Music Videos:
1966:   Color Me Barbara
            This may be the first music video ever made. Barbara Streisand struts through the Philadelphia Museum of Art singing.
2019:   Apeshit
            Beyonce and JayZ had incredible access to the Louvre in making this video, which is filmed in several galleries.
Television:
The British series “Inspector Lewis” made great of use of actual museums in Oxford, where the stories are set. In various episodes our heroes DCI Robbie Lewis and DS James Hathaway go to the Natural History Museum to get expert advice, look at crime-related clues in the Ashmolean, and solve murders that take place in the museum-adjacent Bodleian Library and Botanic Garden. Museums are also used as the settings for various social events. Here is a brief rundown:
Season 1, Episode 1: “Whom the Gods Would Destroy” has a visit to the Ashmolean.
Season 1, Episode 3: “Expiation.” Crazy Hugh Mallory has murdered his wife and now intends to kill his two daughters and himself by hurling them from a high window at the Natural History Museum.
Season 2, Episode 1: “And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea” has another excellent Ashmolean scene, where our detectives find an art student looking at the way John Constable painted clouds.
Season 2, Episode 7: In “The Point of Vanishing” a postcard of a fifteenth- century painting at the Ashmolean (“The Hunt in the Forest” by Paolo Uccello) provides a clue that must be followed up at the museum. A helpful docent explains vanishing points to our heroes.
Season 4, Episode 7: “The Gift of Promise” sets an awards presentation for an educational organization in the Natural History Museum. And Season 5, Episode 2: “Wild Justice” features a wedding reception at the Ashmolean (where, unfortunately the groom is murdered).
Season 5, Episode 3: “Fearful Symmetry” includes one of my favorite exchanges between the two detectives. One of the suspects is a photographer whose work is being mounted at the Ashmolean in an exhibit called: “Fallen?: A Meditation on Post-Lapsarian Female Gender Identity.” Sergeant Hathaway has to explain this to Inspector Lewis: “Professional iconoclast, social photo anthropologist-cum-cultural pundit,” he says.
Lewis: “Oxford-type then?”
Hathaway: “Oh yeah.”
Season 7, Episode 1: “Down Among the Fearful” features a return to the Natural History Museum to consult an expert about lethal drugs and euthanasia.
Extra!
Endeavour, the prequel to Inspector Morse (of which Inspector Lewis is a sequel), filmed a scene in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. Morse and his superior, Detective Inspector Thursday, interview Dr. Moharram Shoukry, who tells them he is “on loan from the Cairo Museum, together with some of the visiting exhibits.”
Thursday: “So you mind all the bits and pieces?”
Shoukry: “If by that you mean do I make sure no harm befalls the priceless artifacts of my people’s ancient history, then yes, I mind the bits and pieces.”
Thursday: “No slight was intended Doctor.”
Shoukry: “With the British, it never is.”
(Season 5, episode 2: “Cartouche”)
Finally, while Ross is an archaeologist who works at the American Museum of Natural History in Friends, the series never really took advantage of developing his interesting job and he sometimes makes seriously cringe-worthy comments about the field. The only episode that actually takes place in the museum is awful! I don’t recommend it, but it does have a clever response shot from a group of school children and a nun. If you are now too curious to resist, it is from 1996, Season 2, Episode 15: “The One Where Ross and Rachel… You Know.”
January 23, 2015by Mary Malloy
Blogroll, Poetry

The Quiet Land

The Quiet Land

The title of this book was inspired by a poem that I quote at the end of the novel.

In a quiet water’d land, a land of roses,

Stands Saint Ciarán’s city fair;

And the warriors of Erin in their famous generations

Slumber there.

Written in the fourteenth century, about a hundred years after the novel is set, it captures a sense of the peace that you feel today at Clonmacnoise: “A quiet water’d land, a land of roses.” But beneath that quiet, literally beneath your feet, lie the bones of the great and ferocious warriors of Irish history and legend: “Battle-banners of the Gael that in Kieran’s plain of crosses / Now their final hosting keep.” It struck me that this had actually been a most UNquiet Land.

The original poem was written in Irish by Angus O’Gillan (also called Aongus Ó Giolláin, Enoch O’Gillain, and Enoch o’Gillan), but it is best known from a brilliant late-19th century translation by T.W. (Thomas William Hazen) Rolleston (1857-1920).

Rolleston’s translation first appeared in William Butler Yeats compilation A Book of Irish Verse, published in London in 1895, where Yeats said the poem was “so purely emotional that it must stand an example of the Gaelic lyric come close to perfection.” (Rolleston and Yeats had a complicated relationship; in his memoirs, Yeats called Rolleston his “intimate enemy.” The two would meet at gatherings of Yeats’s London-based “Rhymer’s Club,” at “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese” pub in the 1890s.)

The poem, in the translation by Rolleston, first became widely known when it was included in the 1919 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch. This important anthology sold almost a half-million copies in its first edition and was extremely influential in introducing poetry to a new audience at the turn of the twentieth century.

Rolleston’s source was almost certainly a 19-stanza version of the poem, in Irish and English, which was included in the 1897 Christian Inscriptions in the Irish Language, “Chiefly Collected and Drawn by George Petrie, and Edited by M. Stokes.” (There is a link below where you can read the complete poem in this version.)

The antiquarian Petrie found the poem in “the Rev. Dr. Todd’s list of Irish manuscripts preserved in the Bodleian Library (Rawlinson, B. 486. fol. 29),” which describes the “tribes and persons interred at Clonmacnoise, written by Enoch O’Gillan, who lived on the borders of the River Suck, in the county of Galway.” (The author identifies himself in the last stanza.)*

Petrie thanked “Mr. Wm. M. Hennessy for the translation and notes with which he has enriched it.” I am including an illustration of the first six stanzas with Hennessy’s notes.

My favorite stanza here, which Rolleston didn’t incorporate into his version is the last one shown on this page:

Numerous in the secret stronghold

Are men of the race of Niall of the Nine Hostages;

Men whose fame deserved a bed like the Brugh,

Sleeping under the flags of Cluain.

In his note “g” Hennessy tells us that “men of the race of Niall of the Nine Hostages” (the famous ancestor of the O’Neil clan), were important enough to have been buried in the great Paleolithic tombs like New Grange, but still chose Clonmacnoise, for the nearness to the relics of St. Ciarán. (The word “Cluain” is used here as an abbreviation for Clonmacnoise, which is spelled Cluain Mhic Nóis in Irish.)

I’ll let Prof. Gregory A. Schirmer have the last word before I conclude this blog with the complete text of Rolleston’s translation. In his excellent book Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English, Schirmer gives us a perfect context for the Celtic/Romantic poetry which appeared in the world of Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Douglas Hyde.

“What is most striking about this poem, especially in the context of the literary revival’s construction of an Irish past, is the way in which it reads this landscape generally associated with Ireland’s Christian past—Clonmacnoise was once one of the centers of European Christianity—in almost exclusively pagan terms, nearly displacing the monastic community founded by St. Kiernan in the sixth century with the pagan culture that lies buried beneath it. The Dead of Clonmacnoise exemplifies the general tendency of the revival to celebrate Ireland’s pagan past at the expense of its Christian one, a strategy of obvious political advantage to a movement directed for the most part by a class alienated from contemporary Irish Catholicism.”

This is the O’Gillan/Rolleston poem as it appears in the Oxford Book of English Verse:

T. W. Rolleston. b. 1857

849. The Dead at Clonmacnoise

FROM THE IRISH OF ANGUS O’GILLAN

IN a quiet water’d land, a land of roses,
Stands Saint Kieran’s city fair;
And the warriors of Erin in their famous generations
Slumber there.

There beneath the dewy hillside sleep the noblest
Of the clan of Conn,
Each below his stone with name in branching Ogham
And the sacred knot thereon.

There they laid to rest the seven Kings of Tara,
There the sons of Cairbrè sleep—
Battle-banners of the Gael that in Kieran’s plain of crosses
Now their final hosting keep.

And in Clonmacnois they laid the men of Teffia,
And right many a lord of Breagh;
Deep the sod above Clan Creidè and Clan Conaill,
Kind in hall and fierce in fray.

Many and many a son of Conn the Hundred-Fighter
In the red earth lies at rest;
Many a blue eye of Clan Colman the turf covers,
Many a swan-white breast.

Note: O’Gillan and Rolleston each lived for a time within a relatively short distance of Clonmacnoise. O’Gillan identifies himself as originating “by the stream of the Suck,” the river that forms the border between Rosscommon and Galway counties today, and runs into the Shannon just below Clonmacnoise. Rolleston was born in Shinrone, County Offaly, about 25 miles southeast of the monastic ruins.

Sources:

Christian Inscriptions in the Irish Language, “Chiefly Collected and Drawn by George Petrie, and Edited by M. Stokes” (Dublin: The University Press for the Royal Historical and Archaeological Association, 1872). This book is now available online at: https://archive.org/details/ChristianInscriptionsInIrishV1/page/n9/mode/2up

Information on Clonmacnoise and this poem are discussed in the very first pages.

February 6, 2014by Mary Malloy
Blogroll, Museums in the Movies

Museums in Alfred Hitchcock Movies

Alfred Hitchcock made four movies with museum scenes between 1929 and 1966. For the famous director, there was clearly a value not only in the compelling visuals of a museum, but in the curious juxtaposition of high culture and criminal activity that a museum could provide

In Blackmail (1929), Hitchcock actually made the transition from silent to sound films right in the middle of making the picture, and he left the first several minutes quiet. The plot: Alice White (Anny Ondra) is dating a detective from Scotland Yard but gets frustrated with him on a date and leaves with another man, who attempts to rape her. She kills him and runs away, not knowing that a local thief, Tracy (Donald Calthrop) has seen her. When Tracy tries to blackmail her, Alice finally (!) tells her boyfriend what’s happening. The police chase Tracy to the British Museum. He races up the stairs and through the Egyptian galleries, at one point lowering himself on a chain in front of the giant carved head of Ramses II. He is chased into the famous reading room and up to the top of the dome, where he falls to his death through the skylight.

Hitchcock described the making of Blackmail to Peter Bogdonavich in 1963.[1] The actors, he said, weren’t actually filmed in the British Museum. “There was never enough light,” Hitchcock explained, “so we used what is known as the Schufftan process.”

You have a mirror at an angle of 45 degrees and in it you reflect a full picture of the British Museum. I had some pictures taken with half-hour exposures. I had nine photographs taken in various rooms in the museum and we made then into transparencies so that we could back-light them. That is more luminous than a flat photograph. It was like a big lantern slide, about 12 by 14. And then I scraped the silvering away in the mirror only in the portions where I wanted the man to be seen running, and those portions we built on the stage. For example, one room was the Egyptian room, there were glass cases in there. All we built were the door frames from one room to another. We even had a man looking into a case, and he wasn’t looking into anything on the stage. I did nine shots like this, but there was barely any set that could be seen on the stage. … The chase on the roof was a miniature. We just built a skeleton ramp for him to run on.

For Strangers on a Train (1951), actors Farley Granger, Ruth Roman and Robert Walker were filmed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  Granger’s and Roman’s characters are discussing how blissful the museum makes them feel when they are approached by Walker’s disturbed character Bruno, and the mood changes instantly. The art museum, with its sense of serenity and culture, was the perfect place to set the scene, which Hitchcock brilliantly exploits. That public confrontations should not take place in this setting is perfectly understood by the sane characters (and the audience).

When Hitchcock made Vertigo (1958), he used an actual gallery in the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a San Francisco art museum that was just one of the local landmarks used for the film. The museum added a painting to an existing exhibit—made for the movie and pertinent to the plot. James “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) is a detective following the wife of an acquaintance. Kim Novak plays the twin roles of the wife, Madeleine, and Judy, who has been hired to impersonate Madeleine to convince Scottie that she is mentally unstable. At the museum, Judy/Madeleine stares at a painting of a supposed ancestor, Carlotta, who died by suicide many years earlier. Judy has a bouquet of flowers identical to the one held by the woman in the painting, and wears a similar hairstyle. Scottie has been told that Madeleine identifies with Carlotta in a dangerously compulsive way and this is the proof.

Jimmy Stuart observes Kim Novak observing a painting.

In Torn Curtain (1966), Hitchcock again set an important sequence in several museum galleries, but this time there was no actual museum used. In the scenes where the American physicist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) is being chased through a museum in East Berlin, all of the complex backgrounds, with paintings, sculptures and architectural details, were matte paintings on glass by the artist Albert Whitlock. Newman was filmed in a mostly empty studio. The scene begins thirty-nine minutes into the movie: Newman’s character looks up from a guidebook picture of the “Muzeen Zu Berlin,” to see the actual building (well, actually the painting of the building by Whitlock!). It’s too bad the movie is boring, because this scene is remarkable for Whitlock’s artistic achievement.

Torn Curtain (1966) Museum exterior, painted by Albert Whitlock.

Note: As of 2 April 2020, all four of these movies are available to be rented on Amazon Prime Video for $2.98 each. Full versions for free can be found through a YouTube search.

[1] Peter Bogdanovich. The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, excerpted at:

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock_and_Peter_Bogdanovich_(1963)

April 20, 2013by Mary Malloy

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About me

Mary Malloy is the author of both historical novels and non-fiction history. She has a Ph.D. from Brown University and infuses her books with well-researched details and richly textured writing. As a teacher and writer, she works to bring the past alive by exploring the lives of both ordinary and extraordinary people.

Recent Posts

Museums are still open — in the movies

Museums are still open — in the movies

What to watch until museums reopen (and maybe even after).

What to watch until museums reopen (and maybe even after).

The Quiet Land

The Quiet Land

Museums in Alfred Hitchcock Movies

Museums in Alfred Hitchcock Movies

“I taught a course on the History of Museums for ten years at the Harvard Extension School and during that time developed a “Film-clip Festival” to amuse students at the end of each term, and to explore pop-culture images of museums. Are museums in movies all that different from the institutions we love in the real world, I wondered? Indeed they are! About half of the museums depicted on film have a monster on the loose, and a significant number of others are being robbed!”

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