Iris Barry

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Iris Barry , married Iris Porter and Iris Abbott (baptized June 2, 1895 as Iris Sylvia Crump in Washwood Heath , Birmingham , United Kingdom ; died December 22, 1969 in Marseille , France ) was a British- American writer , film critic and film historian . She co-founded the Film Society , one of the world's first film clubs, in London in 1925 , and in 1935 in New York City she was the first female curator of the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Career

Barry was probably born Iris Sylvia Crump in March 1895 in the Washwood Heath district near downtown Birmingham . Her father, a coppersmith , left the family when Iris was an infant, and her mother was engaged in fortune telling . Iris was raised by her mother and her parents, English dairy farmers. Their school years she spent in a convent school in England and on a Ursuline convent in the Belgian Verviers . In 1911 she passed the college entrance exam at the University of Oxford , but as her admission dragged on she went to France . The start of the First World War forced her to return to Birmingham, where she did odd jobs, going to the cinema and writing poetry as often as possible.

Some of Barry's poems were published in the US poetry magazine Poetry. A Magazine of Verse published. As a result, the magazine's Europe correspondent, Ezra Pound , became aware of Barry and began correspondence with her. Eventually, Barry moved to London in 1916 or 1917. Pound introduced her to the ranks of the leading writers and artists of the time, including the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis , who was 13 years his senior . With him, Barry had a son, born in 1919, and a daughter who was one year younger. Both children were raised by Barry's mother and only met their birth mother late. Barry did a variety of jobs in London during these years, including working as a temporary librarian at the School of Oriental and African Studies , attending cinema screenings almost every day, and eventually writing about the films she saw.

The acquaintance with the cinema operator Sidney Bernstein meant that he could write film reviews for him. In 1923 her book Splashing into Society was published , a humorous story about art and success as an artist, told from the perspective of a child. In the same year she began writing film reviews for the conservative British weekly magazine The Spectator . She was the first female film critic in the country to do this for four years. At the Spectator she met her first husband, Alan Porter , an Oxford poet and columnist for the magazine.

Barry soon acquired the reputation of a cineast with outstanding expertise and founded in October 1925 with like-minded people like Sidney Bernstein, the film producer Ivor Montagu , the film director and screenwriter Adrian Brunel , the actor Hugh Miller , her fellow critic Walter C. Mycroft and the sculptor Frank Dobson the London Film Society. The Film Society was one of the first film clubs in the world and its primary aim was to screen films that had been ignored by the mainstream film industry or whose public screening had been banned by film censors . The Film Society organized more than 100 screenings of otherwise unattainable films by 1939.

In 1925, Barry became a film correspondent for the Daily Mail tabloid . The following year her book Let's go to the pictures was published , a consideration of cinema and cinema as an entertainment medium and a new form of art. Barry's work for the Daily Mail lasted until 1930, she was fired because of a negative film review. Lord Rothermere , the editor of the Daily Mail, met on the night of the premiere of the romantic comedy film Knowing Men with the writer and screenwriter Elinor Glyn , who had written the novel and worked as a film director for the first time when the film was made. Without Barry's knowledge, Rothermere Glyn promised a benevolent review. Barry certified the film, however, in their slating an incredibly low level ( at abysmally low level ). The next morning she received her last paycheck with the note No questions. No excuses. No job . She emigrated to the United States with her husband . While Porter as an English teacher at the elite university Vassar College in Poughkeepsie in New York State went wrote Barry as a ghostwriter a book about Afghanistan and with the help of Porter's a book about dream interpretation. The Porters divorced in July 1934.

In New York City, Iris Barry did not find a connection to the art scene until 1932, when she was accepted into a circle around the gallery owner Kirk Askew and his wife Constance. Other members of the group were Lincoln Kirstein , the composers Paul Bowles and Virgil Thomson , the actor, screenwriter and film director John Houseman , the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock , the architect Philip Johnson , who was the department of architecture and design of the Museum of Modern Art , and the art historian couple Margaret Scolari and Alfred Barr . Barr was director of the Museum of Modern Art. These contacts initially gave her a job at MoMA in 1932 to build up the film library. While at the Askews, Barry also met John E. "Dick" Abbott, a former Wall Street businessman and film enthusiast. She married Abbott within a month of Barry's divorce. When the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film was established in 1935 , Abbott was made director and Iris Barry the first woman curator.

Barry's duties as a curator included not only the procurement of films and their scientific processing, but also contact with all structures of the film industry in order to promote their collection and the acceptance of the medium of film as an art form and a cultural asset worth preserving. Therefore, she made her first trips to Hollywood , where she managed to win over the representatives of American film for her cause. From 1936 onwards she traveled to Europe, where she found films and bought them for her museum and made contact with the few existing film archives . In 1938 her translation of the French Histoire du Cinéma by Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach was published . At the 1938 Academy Awards , the Museum of Modern Art's film department was awarded an "Oscar" by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the institution's efforts to archive films and for its work to recognize film as an art form. The award of the award is considered to be thanks to Iris Barry. In 1940 she curated the exhibition DW Griffith: American Film Master at the Museum of Modern Art . The booklet she wrote for this exhibition is still considered a standard work today. Barry's work for MoMA was also viewed critically. Among the current films she preferred the neglected and in her eyes artistically and film-historically valuable works and avoided the mainstream . In doing so, she exposed herself to the accusation of ignorance, arrogance and dogmatism, which led to MoMA only having an incomplete collection of films.

Since Barry's trip to Europe in 1936, there has been an exchange of films and other materials between the Museum of Modern Art, the Berlin Reichsfilmarchiv , the French Cinémathèque française with Henri Langlois and the British Film Institute . In 1938, Barry was the second representative of MoMA and a founding member of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film . The organization's first president was Barry's husband and superior, John E. Abbott. From 1946 to 1966, Barry was a member of the Executive Committee of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film as Founding President .

The efforts of Barry and her only few colleagues in the film archives around the world marked the beginning of organized film restoration. In the four decades since 1895, innumerable films had been lost because the film industry only evaluated them from an economic point of view and not from a cultural, historical or artistic point of view. Film storage cost money and was extremely dangerous in the celluloid film era . The costs were avoided when a film did not appear suitable for later revival. Added to this was the value of the film material as a raw material because of the silver it contained. In addition to deliberate destruction, negligence in storage, fire, and decomposition of the film were reasons for film loss. The Library of Congress and its United States Copyright Office did not help either: from 1894 to 1912, paper prints were required as proof of registration, and from 1912 to 1942 it was possible to assert copyright by submitting documents such as movie posters and scripts . From 1912 to 1942, the Library of Congress received only 30 films for archiving. It is estimated that before 1950, 75 percent of silent films and 50 percent of talkies of US film production must be considered lost films .

Iris Barry became an American citizen in 1941. Abbott soon moved to other positions within the Museum of Modern Art and Barry also became director of the film department in 1946. Abbott's marriage was divorced before 1950. In 1949 Barry fell ill with cancer for the first time, but was successfully treated. At the same time, she was named Chévalier of the Légion d'honneur in recognition of her services to French film - namely the accommodation of the holdings of the Cinémathèque française during the German occupation of France in World War II . In the same year she left the United States and moved to France. There she continued to work as a representative of the Museum of Modern Art, bought material for the collection or attended film festivals for the MoMA . For a while she lived in Fayence in the Var department in the south of France with a young French man in a derelict farmhouse and ran in the former home of Arthur Everett Austin Jr., who died in 1957 . until 1944 director of the Wadsworth Atheneum , an antique shop. In 1955, under McCarthyism , she was threatened with deprivation of US citizenship for alleged communist activities, but her membership of the museum, confirmed by MoMA staff, saved her from doing so. Iris Barry fell ill with cancer again in 1969. Since she was penniless, friends and former colleagues had to step in and pay for their treatment costs. Iris Barry died on December 22, 1969 in Marseille .

Publications (selection)

Poetry and fiction

Art and film history

literature

  • Missy Daniel: Barry, Iris . In: Barbara Sicherman and Carol Green Hurd: Notable American Women. The Modern Period. A Biographical Dictionary . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1980, ISBN 0-674-62733-4 , pp. 56-58, with further bibliographical information and information on the whereabouts of the correspondence;
  • Bruce Henson: Iris Barry: American Film Archive Pioneer . In: The Katharine Sharp Review No. 4, Winter 1997, ISSN  1083-5261 , PDF, 81 kB ;
  • Robert Sitton: Lady in the Dark. Iris Barry and the Art of Film . Columbia University Press, New York 2014, ISBN 978-0-231-53714-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Missy Daniel: Barry, Iris , pp. 56-57.
  2. ↑ a b c Missy Daniel: Barry, Iris , p. 57.
  3. ↑ Bruce Henson: Iris Barry: American Film Archive Pioneer , p. 3.
  4. ↑ Henry K. Miller: Film Society, The (1925-39) , Website Screen online of the British Film Institute , accessed on January 6 of 2019.
  5. ↑ a b c Robert Sitton: Iris Barry . In: Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal and Monica Dall'Asta (eds.): Women Film Pioneers Project . Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. Columbia University Libraries, New York, NY 2013, October 9, 2015, accessed January 6, 2019.
  6. ↑ Bruce Henson: Iris Barry: American Film Archive Pioneer , pp. 4-5.
  7. ↑ FIAF Timeline , website of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film , accessed on January 6, 2019.
  8. ↑ Christophe Dupin: [1] . In: Journal of Film Preservation , No. 88, April 2013, pp. 43–58, accessed January 6, 2019.
  9. ↑ Past Executive Committees , website of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film , accessed on January 6, 2019.
  10. ↑ Bruce Henson: Iris Barry: American Film Archive Pioneer , pp. 1-2.
  11. ↑ Missy Daniel: Barry, Iris , pp. 57-58.
personal data
SURNAME Barry, Iris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Crump, Iris Sylvia (maiden name); Porter, Iris (first married name); Abbott, Iris (second married name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-American writer, film critic and film historian
DATE OF BIRTH baptized June 2, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Washwood Heath , Birmingham , United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH 22nd December 1969
Place of death Marseille , France