The Moving Camera and Films on Shelves - Text 6
The AMNH’s shelves of preserved films contain the Motion Picture Library (MPL) project,[14] a film archive like few others, or any other, in the world of museums when it was founded in 1915. This archive’s mandate, at least for the first decade of its existence, shared the educational vocation of Akeley’s project:[15] the dissemination and scientific study of exploration films in order to make the general public aware of these distant places and their biocenoses before they disappear.[16] The films collected and preserved in the MPL, which were shown at the AMNH before being lent to schools in New York and then in the rest of the country, gave rise to great public infatuation in the first half of the twentieth century. But what we see in documents pertaining to contemporaneous institutional archives concerning the visibility of the MPL shows that the same few films enjoyed this visibility. The pride of the AMNH were Robert L. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), films by the Johnsons, a husband and wife team, and even the images shot in India during the Vernay-Faunthorpe Expedition.[17] Their point in common: they were all shot with an Akeley camera.
