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Moving Image Archive

Katie Trainor of the Museum of Modern Art

Katie Trainor, film collections manager at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
Katie Trainor, film collections manager at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)

Katie Trainor is the Film Collections Manager at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Since the founding of the museum in 1928, MoMA has placed great importance on representing and introducing “the only great art form peculiar to the twentieth century.” The first chairman of the Museum’s Film Library, David O. Selznick sent then curator of film, Iris Barry, to Hollywood to try and persuade industry leaders to donate prints. An innovative idea for the time, Hollywood soon responded- studios, actors and producers such as  Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century-Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, Harold Lloyd, Walt Disney,  William S. Hart, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks donated prints to the infant archive. Barry would later travel through Europe and the Soviet Union collecting international films and making connections with many European filmmakers. In 1937, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Museum with an award for “its significant work in collecting films . . . and for the first time making available to the public the means of studying the historical and aesthetic development of the motion picture as one of the major arts.”

Now, eighty-odd years later, the collection consists of 25,000 titles and “ranks as one of the world’s finest museum archives of international film art.” The archive represents every major artist of the silent era- as well as many of the innovators of sound technology.  Films by artist such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Paul Strand, along with animators and experimental filmmakers, expand the collection past feature films and enhance its already astounding cultural significance  The donation of films continue today with many of the industry’s best directors and producers, such as Clint Eastwood, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Kathryn Bigelow, and many others, donating their films. Due to the size and preservation needs of the Film Collection, the Museum opened The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in 1996. Located in Hamlin, Pennsylvania, the center offers a “flexible system or temperature- and humidity- controlled vaults, which can adapt as the collection increases and preservation techniques advance.”

The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center, located in Hamlin, Pennsylvania, opened in 1996.
The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center, located in Hamlin, PA, opened in 1996.

Katie’s position as Film Collections Manager has her managing “the preservation pipeline, supervising the preservation Center in Hamlin PA, collaborating with other FIAF archives [International Federation of Film Archives, of which MoMA is a founding member] on preservation…” as well as managing non film related materials. After handling film at the Harvard Film Archive where she worked for eight years, Katie attended the Selznick School at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. She has since worked at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a projectionist, at the Harvard Film Archive managing the Cinema and archives, at the Jacob Burns Center as Director of Operations, the IFC Center managing the theater of operations, and, presently, MoMA. Katie made it clear that she “was and still [is] an archival projectionist.” She credits the handling and the projecting of film at the Harvard Film Archive for her love of the artifact that is film and it is where her desire to “take care of it” was formed.

As a member of the museum culture, she is but one person in the Curatorial Department. In a large institution such as MoMA, inter-departmental collaboration is essential. The acquisition process in a museum archive is also different from other archives. Films are often sought out by a curator or member of the curatorial department, researched, and then pitched to the Curatorial Board where they discuss whether or not the film fits in to the current collection and/or the future direction the collection would like to go. If it is, the museum makes plans to acquire it. In an institution like MoMA, there is a mission statement to follow and an image to consistently project and, because of this, they may be more selective about the films they take and also about the films they prioritize for preservation.

When it comes to preservation, MoMA’s Film Archive currently does not digitize widely  They still preserve film to film and this is because of the museums interest in not only preserving the content of the film but also the art form of movie making itself. However this method of preservation can and will eventually need to be addressed by MoMA. As Katie acknowledged the “eminent demise of motion picture stock” is a major problem. MoMA will eventually have to address the idea of digital preservation, but as of right now they are “still very committed to photochemical preservation.”

My interview with Katie was very informative regarding how museums, specifically art museums, view film and the archive/preservation of that film. For them it is not only the content of the film which is significant to cultural artistic heritage and movie history, but also the film itself, as an artistic and creative artifact that belongs to a unique form of artistic expression. Certainly this is the case for other film archives, but perhaps a film archive located in an art museum, especially one with the reputation and legacy of MoMA, has the ability to see beyond the “film” as something that is only important because of the moving image it contains and more as an artistic medium that in itself  is culturally important and worth saving.

~Rebecca Stanwick

References

“Film Preservation Center.” MoMA. Museum of Modern Art, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2013.


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