ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 investigates the work of the George Eastman Museum (GEM) from the 1950s, when it was known as the George Eastman House (GEH), to the present. Under competition from the longer established Film Library at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, GEH theorized film as popular art, acquiring silent films that MoMA at the time considered “trivia.” By contrast, with recent initiatives such as the Nitrate Picture Show, GEM identifies films as fine art objects with unique aesthetic and material characteristics, emphasizing their aura in the age of analog film’s near obsolescence. Through Gadamer’s critique of the “aesthetics of separation,” I argue that GEM’s “fine art” curatorial discourse reinforces established historiographies and hierarchies of taste.
