MoMA Response

The trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York last Friday was an interesting one as I didn't expect the exhibition to be walls covered with screens. The people within the videos were seemingly normal, simply recording parts of their lives to keep as memories. In a way, it reminds me of today’s current lifestyle where everyone has a camera ready to record whatever is going on in their lives. It has become part of our identity. Just as them being able to record special memories and keeping it to themselves has become a part of their identity as well, capturing moments from that time period to remember. However, these movies were clearly not meant to be shown to the public seeing as they are intimate family moments that were meant to simply reminisce. The title of the exhibition was a fitting one, “Private Lives Public Spaces” being an exact idea of what was happening. However, it's important to realize these movies are important in seeing the evolution of the camera and how things were recorded in the past century. It even makes these moves become art since they show a time before the current generation of recording everything and posting it online. These movies were private moments that let viewers peek into the past and the identity of those recording and being recorded. I watched two particular movies that I thought were interesting enough to relate back to Judith Howard’s ideas on identity and how they are influenced.


The first movie, recorded by an unidentified film maker, was called “Vacation” and recorded in 1934-35. It depicts a group of girls/women in dresses, with one or two men around them, enjoying their time in the park. Most of the movie was focused on the girls riding on bikes or playing on the swings or slides or any other activities around the park. They were always smiling and had a child-like quality to their actions. In her article, Howard mentioned the idea of group schemas in context with social cognition and how it often times generalizes certain qualities of a person’s identity. She also mentions that in doing so, “they also entail losing potentially valuable information” and “almost always accompanied by systems of evaluation of some categories as better or worse” (Howard 368). At first the video seemed simple and lighthearted, but looking back to Howard’s article, it seemed that these women were taught or made to act a certain way. They were always smiling, wearing similar clothing, acting both childish yet still elegant. In making the women seem this way, the viewer of this exhibition doesn’t get a full sense of their individual identities. However, this type of movie wasn't meant to be watched by anyone other than older family members, children or friends of those recorded within the movie. The women of that period were expected to act in a certain way for those who would eventually watch them when playing it back, limiting them from showing their full identity.





The next movie, also by an unidentified filmmaker, was titled “Margaret’s Communion Party” and was recorded around the same time as the last one, 1933. The depiction was more or less the same, where women were dressed nicely and looked pure. Meanwhile, men were dressed handsomely but weren’t expected to act any particular way. The home movie shows parts of a Christian/Catholic communion focused around a girl. Though, the main focus for this movie was Judith Howard’s ideas on interactionism, where “people attach symbolic meaning to objects, behaviors, themselves, and other people, and they develop and transmit these meanings through interaction” (Howard 371). The act of a communion is symbolic to those of the Catholic or Christian belief, the child, or sometimes the adult, giving themselves to God. Having been through a communion myself, the ceremony is fairly simple, ending with the person taking in “the body of Christ”. By accepting him into their body, they accept him into their lives, symbolizing their faith in a higher being of power. Something so simple can be very impactful to one’s identity since it is idolized by those of the faith and celebrated with parties such as the one in the video. This video was most likely meant to remember the day of Margaret accepting God and to keep a memory of the precious event to show to family members and children. It would become something that shapes Margaret and possibly the identity of her children if/when they see it or when they get to the age she was in the video and go though the same symbolic ceremony.