Highlights of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, due to open in 2020, cover almost the entire history of films from the 19th century to the mid-1980s.
The curator and director of the museum’s film program, Bernardo Rondeau, said the academy had three sources: the Academy Collections, the Akademiefilmarchiv and the Margaret Herrick Library.
“We can draw on our galleries from all three collections,” said Rondeau. “And especially for the museum collection, it’s a combination of items we bought at auction, items donated to us, and somewhere in between.”
Rondeau put on a pair of rubber gloves to examine one of the oldest objects in the collection, an original hand-cranked 19th century Lumière Brothers camera. It is one of the key pieces in the history of early cinema for the museum.
“You can take a movie with the camera and then project it onto a screen.” In December 1895, the Lumière brothers had the first publicly paid screening of a film in Paris, “Rondeau said.
Some items such as the exquisitely detailed headdress that Greta Garbo wore in 1931 Mata Hari extensive conservation work required.
“Something like 16 seamstresses (originally working on it) painting each little bead and every little detail individually, and I think the conservation work we did on it was pretty thorough, because it’s a very delicate, very old piece . ” said Rondeau.
This series of acquisitions is rounded off by an original “Xenomorph” head by Ridley Scott Foreigners (1979) designed by the legendary Swiss artist H. R. Giger and one of Jack Nicholson’s jackets from the classic horror film by Stanley Kubrick, The lights,
Although many of the treasures, such as one of the original Gremlins from Joe Dante’s 1984 movie of the same name, were donated by private collectors, they are frequently bought at auctions exponentially in recent years.
“The values of some of these items have really gone up,” Rondeau said. “And now there are more beings exhibiting them. I find it very exciting for Los Angeles and for the whole world to have this great movie museum in the heart of Los Angeles. “
“It will really bring the story of Los Angeles to the point, and I hope to be able to provide people with a place to experience first-hand stories and hear them out of the mouths of filmmakers.”
Source: The curator of the academy museum gives an insight into the collection – The Media HQ