The Museum of the Moving Image
by Grant Loucks

From the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of the Operating Cameraman

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On a recent trip to London, I discovered that the history of Hollywood has been preserved in a building on the South Bank Arts Complex under famed Waterloo Bridge. It is called the "Museum of the Moving Image." This is the world's largest museum devoted to the history and the future of movies and television.

The Museum is the work of two men: National Film Theater Controller Leslie Hardcastle and National Film Archive Curator David Francis, along with British Film Institute Director Anthony Smith and Designer Neil Potter. These gentlemen worked diligently for 20 years to trace the development of moving images starting thousands of years ago in the Far East and on to the development of the cinema and television. The museum opened in September 1988 after an expenditure of 12 million pounds - over 20 million dollars at today's exchange rate.

When you visit the museum allow a minimum of 2 hours to get the full impact of this spectacular exhibit.

TIME TRAVEL

One of the first exhibits you come to is a time machine that takes you back five thousand years to the earliest moving image. Shadow puppets that originated in Java and that were also known in ancient China are laid out in the best of traditional museum styles, along with many hands-on devices. You get to handle artifacts, watch films and push buttons. When I was there, actors directed guests about and explained the various instruments in the development of the moving image.

There are many mechanical and optical devices that will thrill even those with just a passing interest in filmmaking equipment: an 18th-Century magnifying glass for view-ing engravings called a Zogroscope; a Thaumotrope Disc (circular cards with pictures on each side - a bird on one and a cage on the other; when you spin the threads attached to the cards, persistence of vision takes effect placing the bird in the cage); a photographic gun that shoots 12 pictures a second on a circular photographic glass plate and the Mutoscope, whose principle is animating sketches or photos by turning over pages bearing successive images. This was the beginning of the flip book that almost everyone has had a chance to try at one time or another.

MAJOR CHANGES TOOK PLACE

The transition from the optical toy and persistence of vision devices to projected motion pictures was made possible by George Eastman's development of the thin-based roll film and by Edison's knowledge of Edward Muybridge's Trotting Horse and other sequence photography as well as by a meeting in Paris with Jules Marey (a developer of a glass plate sequence camera), which sent Thomas Edison and his lab chief, W.K.L. Dickson off and running in their quest to produce a motion picture camera.

During your trip through cinema history, you will find the Lumiere Brothers of Lyons, France, who showed their first film to a paying audience in December 1895. Besides the vintage instruments, which are the real stars of the museum, some of the star camera developers - including Englishmen: Williamson, Hepworth and Paul; Frenchmen: the Lumi¸re Brothers, Marey; Americans: Edison, Bell & Howell, and Mitchell-have their handcranked cameras on display. There are also mockups and stage sets that recreate the cinema of yesteryear-Paramount Pictures has an exhibit complete with art, makeup, scripts, costumes, sound and camera departments plus a sound stage with booms, cameras, camera trucks and stage lights.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Be sure to see "Cinema and the Russian Revolution" which was propaganda disguised as entertainment displayed in a full size replica of a 1919 Russian railway car along with footage and extracts from Soviet silent films. There is even a complete Odeon movie house that you enter through a 1930's style theater lobby.

There is hands-on animation for children, where they sit around a large table and are taught how to make their own sketches. After drawing a strip of pictures, they put these strips into a slotted cylinder (Zoetrope) to create the action. (See photos on pages 5 and 6.) When they leave, they keep their picture strips. This is take-home value that these children will always remember. All of this is done in the shadow of a spectacular mural of Bugs Bunny drawn by none other than Chuck Jones.

Just as the museum devotes its space to the evolution of the moving picture industry, it gives similar treatment to the chronology of TV. "Seeing by wireless" is what the London Times called John Logie Baird's first television broadcast in 1929. Like the first 35mm hand-crank film cameras, Baird's tv apparatus was crude but it worked. He transmitted a 30-line picture from his lab in the Soho district of London and it was received a few miles away. You'll see the original Baird television equipment handsomely displayed. By the way, the building that housed his lab is still standing albeit an Italian restaurant complete with a plaque on the wall dedicated to Baird's work.

Lots of fun, this Museum of Moving Images. The Hollywood film factory is well represented with wonderful exhibits of special effects - a full scale Western town and many examples of well-known directors, cinematographers, writers and of course, the film stars: Chaplin, Garbo, Bogart, Gable, Monroe.

You'll probably wonder, as I did, why our cousins from across the sea have the good sense to document and preserve an art form that may very well be entering the biggest change since Thomas Edison - and we in Hollywood have not. The British cinema has always lived economically in the shadows of Hollywood but their contribution to the preservation of the art of filmmaking is world- class and without equal. Be sure to visit the Museum of the Moving Image on your next trip to England.