A History of Cinema as Art, the Place of Animation: A Comparative Approach, France/United States 1946–1976 - Cécile Noesser

PANEL 3: CURATING ANIMATION Srijeda, 10. lipnja, 10:00-10:30

A History of Cinema as Art, the Place of Animation: A Comparative Approach, France/United States 1946–1976
Cécile Noesser (ESAD Amiens)

Shortly after the Second World War, several initiatives were launched in France and Europe to build film collections within modern art museums. Designed mostly by artists, their aim was to establish cinema as an art form and give it a place in museum collections. These were twenty decisive years in the creation of a legitimate heritage and corpus of film works, and the canonisation of a certain artistic animation. The pioneering programme “Art in Cinema”, conceived by experimental filmmaker Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1954, included some sixty film events. Twenty years later, the “Essential Cinema” collection launched by the Anthology Film Archives in New York was another ambitious attempt to define cinematic art. It comprised 330 titles, compiled between 1970 and 1975 by filmmakers James Broughton, Peter Kubelka and Jonas Mekas, and theorists Ken Kelman and P. Adams Sitney. In Paris, the director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne entrusted Peter Kubelka with the design of “A History of Cinema” at the Centre Pompidou (1976-77). These three curatorial initiatives were accompanied by publications that contextualised and complemented the aesthetic, critical and historical narratives forged during these events. They were made possible thanks to close ties between French and American curators and institutions. Animation occupies an important place here, both in terms of numbers and authors, from the graphic avant-garde of the 1920s to the pioneering experiments with video and digital images in the 1970s. In order to integrate cinema into the museum, these curators considered film as belonging to the field of visual arts, thereby legitimising the presence of animation in the collections. But animation is also invisible as an art form with its own history, to the benefit of the experimental or avant-garde cinema category. Based on this observation, we will examine how animation is sometimes integrated and sometimes distanced from these collections, by analysing acquisition and promotion choices (editorial or exhibition).

Cécile Noesser, PhD in sociology of arts and culture, is the author of The Resistible Rise of Animated Cinema. Socio-genesis of a cinema-bis in France (L'Harmattan, 2016). Specialist in the broad fields of animated film and its connections with art, she teaches at the École supérieure d'art et de design (ESAD) in Amiens. Since 2023 she is co-director of the Cinémas d'animation collection at L'Harmattan. She is also a programmer, critic, curator and co-founder of a gallery dedicated to animation.