Rochester’s Eastman Museum: A Must for Photo Fans and Connoisseurs of Life

A show of ’60s movie posters highlights its cinematic chops.

‘I wish I’d spent more time in Rochester” isn’t the mother of all laments, but I did find this culture hub far more appealing than I imagined, in big part because of the Eastman Museum. Called George Eastman House for years in memory of the film-roll-and-camera entrepreneur, it has to be considered one of the most unsung yet definitive museums in America.

Its specialty, in which it’s probably the ultimate authority, is photography and the art of film. Film, and Eastman (1854–1932) was among its founding fathers, is more than a medium. It is cultural puissance, a word to be used for the rarest of powers. It’s that thin, flexible, plastic strip coated with an emulsion that, when exposed to light, captures the world. From the amateur’s photographs shot with Brownies to blockbuster movies, the Eastman Museum has got it all. It’s an august proposition and, still, an inviting and comfortable place.

Rochester’s Eastman Kodak was the world’s biggest producer and innovator in film and cameras for a hundred years. The Eastman Museum started in 1947 with the company’s massive, comprehensive film archive and opened to the public in 1949 in Eastman’s impressive Georgian Revival manse in what has to be Rochester’s most elegant neighborhood. The museum is just starting its 75th-anniversary celebration, and, as readers know, I enjoy writing about institutional birthdays. A smart, confident, and together place will use an anniversary to celebrate its collection and recognize its core constituencies. It’s a time to put its best foot forward.

I’d never been to the museum. Shame on me. Rochester’s a hefty journey, but it’s not Mars. I spent most of the day at Eastman House, first visiting Crashing into the 60s: Film Posters from the Collection. What a great, though spotty, show. Its strength is in the 70-or-so buoyant, raucous, complex posters advertising movies from the 1960s. The show is mostly about the art, since it’s not scholarly, but what a revelation. Hayseed me, I didn’t realize that Eastman House was a center for the study of the movie industry. Rochester is, after all, multiple bus fares from Hollywood.

The Eastman Museum is renowned for photographs, and in a couple of weeks I’ll write about its photography collection, but, on this trip, I focused on film history and the anchor exhibition on view, which is about movies.

Crashing into the 60s is an odd title, though the 1960s were, on nearly every level, a car crash, a dumpster fire, a poo-poo extravaganza, and an all-around pretty kettle of fish. Yes, there was the Summer of Love, best called the Summer of Libido, but as movies go, it was more a mixed bag, end of an era, with stirrings of the truly revolutionary days of the early 1970s. Still, it’s the art that counts as well as the memories.

The exhibition occupies three big galleries. There are two separate entrances, so it’s not strictly linear or narrative, which is fine. Like the posters, it’s an exhibition of impressions and immediate impacts. I entered via a big courtyard serving as the introductory space and installed to suggest a wild, eclectic spirit rather than what we assume to be the conformity of the 1950s. I saw posters for two horror movies, Blood Lust of the Voodoo Queen and Doctor Blood’s Coffin, both from the early ’60s. Okay, that’s drive-in-movie creepy and outré. Very ’60s. I’m not sure why they’re included in the exhibition. A few objects have didactic labels, but most don’t.

There’s a poster for The Great Escape, the edge-of-your-seat, all-star, POW-camp-break-out movie from 1963. Above the title, cast, and central graphic of fleeing POWs are four bands, each time-stamped by the minute, each depicting stages in the nighttime escape, Nazi searchlights in play. The poster blasts immediacy, but the movie itself, a big hit, ends in one big splash of gray. Many of the POWs are recaptured and summarily shot. Triumph doesn’t always follow risk. Not every story has a happy ending. That’s not the default ending for an American movie, though it’s a prescient one.

Next to it is a poster for Exodus, another nerve-tingler and escape story set in 1948 in soon-to-be-partitioned British Mandate Palestine. The poster, designed by Saul Bass, is abstract and powerful. Then, by the introductory text, is a poster for Password Korn, a 1968 Polish spy film. It’s edgy. There’s no image of stars and no still from the movie. We see a big, stylized ear attached to a small, abstract face set against a black-and-red bull’s-eye.

Thus we enter the exhibition, an intrigued state of mind established. Freedom, oppression, blood, gore, war, and spies. There’s a Pink Panther poster, too, for jazz and the evolution of slapstick into ’60s irony.

The museum occupied Eastman’s house, retrofitted into a display space the best it could be, until 1989, when it got a proper, purpose-built addition. The galleries are spacious and logical. After the introductory gallery, Crashing into the 60s takes off like a rocket with the billboard-size, minimalist, red, white, and black knockout for One, Two, Three, an unloved but very funny political comedy about Berlin during the Cold War. The poster is not framed but installed flat on the wall, so there’s nothing between art and viewer, as the designer intended.

Near it is a trio of posters. There’s Tom Jones, Fielding’s novel turned sexcapade, with a brash Albert Finney, playing Tom Jones, surrounded by fawning women who look like Playboy Bunnies. It’s in a group of three posters and to the left of the poster for In the Heat of the Night, showing cops and a dead body, not Bunnies and a stud. My Fair Lady’s famous poster is to the right of Heat of the Night’s Minimalism was born in the ’60s, and in advertising we see simpler forms and bold colors, but My Fair Lady’s poster is positively lavish, with tons of detail and a dozen vignettes unfolding under Audrey Hepburn’s massive Ascot hat.

The ’60s were a schizophrenic time. The decade started, for instance, by worshipping Abstract Expressionism but quickly moved to Pop Art. In movies, Tom Jones was a mammoth costume period piece, which was a tried-and-true genre, as was the Broadway musical. Design-wise, posters evolved to be bolder and simpler, but there were other changes, too. A poster for Black Tuesday from 1954 puts the star — Edward G. Robinson — front and center. By 1960, a poster for The Apartment shrinks the two stars, puts them in a corner, and emphasizes the apartment’s keys. A poster for Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s breakthrough, avant-garde drama, cuts the heroines into puzzle pieces. I saw Persona years ago. An orgy, amnesia, abortion, self-immolation, and the Warsaw Ghetto figure. “I Could Have Danced All Night” it ain’t.

The next gallery is a disjointed mix of themes. Crashing into the 60s is a “something to think about” show and, for me, a spur to think about design innovation and movies I’ve seen. I wish there was a more consistent design focus. I liked the small section on Saul Bass, but he’s the only one of many talented designers to get some love. The show has other odd moments. There are three more posters for One, Two, Three, and I don’t know why. The Christine Jorgensen Story is the life of the ’60s sensation — a former G.I. who in the 1950s became the first person widely known for undergoing sex-reassignment surgery. The movie is from 1970, though, so it’s off-topic. I saw it years ago and kept giggling over the doctor’s name — Dr. Hamburger. Odds Against Tomorrow is a 1959 film. Besides starring the execrable Harry Belafonte, it’s off-topic, too.

Pop culture icons such as the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Judy Garland are represented with so-so posters, so so-so that I’m placed in a skeptical frame of mind. Where’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Bullitt, and Dr. Strangelove, and how about Hitchcock, Barbarella, the man-made monster Hal, and Mrs. Robinson? There’s a good section on Saul Bass and a big, black-and-white poster from 1962’s The Miracle Worker. It’s an image of the protagonists — the young Helen Keller and her teacher — in a violent, blurred struggle, telling us how visceral both the story and the movie were. It’s very effective but, alas, a high point in an ending that’s a fizzle.

I enjoyed the exhibition, but it’s good to remember that, in an anniversary year, only “best foot forward” is allowed. The curators must’ve mined the permanent movie-poster collection, which is fine, but if what the museum owns is so limited, I would have chosen focus over what, in some areas, are dribs and drabs. Or I would have borrowed posters and done something truly smashing. The museum’s underwhelming, hard-to-use website notes that it owns 3 million objects in its moving-image, stills, poster, and paper collection.

The museum owns 28,000 films, spanning the history of cinema from Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers to Technicolor negatives for Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and many other high points, as well as archives from Cecil B. de Mille, Norman Jewison, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese. Its Technicolor material comes from the Technicolor Company archive, which the museum owns. Its film-preservation program is superb. Film history is always changing, in part because of the discovery of old films thought to be lost. Thousands of movies from the industry’s earliest days have disappeared, either deteriorating into oblivion or sitting unknown in a library or vault. Discoveries happen all the time, and with discovery comes conservation and restoration. The best work happens in Rochester.

Nothing succeeds like success. With so many treasures, and since the museum’s seen correctly as a prestigious, conscientious custodian, it gets more and more. A few years ago, the son of the visionary movie producer David Selznick engineered the gift to the Eastman Museum of hundreds of screen tests from Hollywood’s golden age. I watched the conserved and restored tests for Gone with the Wind, which are mostly hairdo and makeup tests for actors already cast.

The treasure I’ll tout, just restored, isn’t from Gone with the Wind but it’s still unique. It’s a screen test and bit of singing from Adele Astaire. Long before “Fred and Ginger,” the brother-and-sister team of Fred and Adele were huge Broadway stars, with Adele the bigger, flashier, and more confident star of the two. They were dancing titans on the London stage, too. George Gershwin wrote many of his shows — Funny Face, Lady Be Good, and The Band Wagon — for Adele. The screen test is the only record of Adele’s work on film. The museum first showed it in May.

In 1932, Adele quit show business to marry the Duke of Devonshire’s second son. She proposed to him. When the duke and his Cavendish family assembled to meet her, Adele walked into a formal reception room at Chatsworth, smiled sweetly, and cartwheeled over to the groom’s parents. Talk about epic ice-breaking. Alas, Lady Adele’s new husband, only 27 to her 36, evolved into a hopeless alcoholic. She stuck with him until he died in 1944.

In 1937, while on vacation in Southern California, Adele did a screen test for Selznick, who was casting the starring role in Dark Victory, a hit Broadway drama. It’s a few minutes long, and the test includes a charming rendition of “S’Wonderful,” Adele’s 1927 hit from Funny Face. Here’s a link — you can skip the museum’s curatorial introduction. People talk too much these days. Adele didn’t want the part in the end and went back to Lismore Castle, the Gothic Revival castle in Ireland she shared with her husband.

The Eastman Museum isn’t big and, though one of the world’s most important troves of art, doesn’t get an avalanche of visitors. Last year, 62,000 people visited, including the audience for its impressive film programs. The locals are rightly proud of it, but I think it’s seen as a specialty museum. Down the road is the Memorial Art Gallery, the small, encyclopedic place that’s viewed as the civic art museum though it’s owned by the University of Rochester. Still, the Eastman Museum is a powerhouse and a unique experience. I loved my visit and look forward to writing about its photography collection, future, the house, and the transformative George Eastman.