Opened in 1988 in a former building of the historic Astoria Studios complex, it was the first museum in the United States devoted solely to the art, history and technology of film, television and video.
The core Behind the Screen exhibition is built around interactive experiences and working demonstrations rather than passive galleries, so plan for more hands-on time than a typical museum visit.
The site is the argument. Famous Players-Lasky built the studio in Astoria in 1920 so that films could be made within reach of Broadway's actors, and the Marx Brothers shot The Cocoanuts there in 1929 and Animal Crackers in 1930. Paramount moved production to California in 1932; from 1942 to 1971 the United States Army Signal Corps used the lot to make training films; the property was taken over by the developer George S. Kaufman in 1982 and revived as a working studio. The museum opened on September 10, 1988 in one of the original buildings, under the name the American Museum of the Moving Image.
Behind the Screen, the core exhibition, opened in 1996 to a design by Ali Hocek and runs across two floors — production technology on one, and performance, costume, sets and exhibition on the other. It draws on roughly 1,400 objects from the permanent collection: film and television cameras, projectors, television sets, sound recording gear, costumes, set sketches and models, makeup, fan magazines, posters and licensed merchandise. The merchandise is not filler. Tracking how a character becomes a lunchbox is one of the few honest accounts of the industry any museum offers.
This is a museum about process, and it expects work from you. Stations let visitors record their own movements as a sequence of stills and print the result as a flipbook, or build and save a short stop-motion animation. The point being made is mechanical rather than reverential: film is a machine for assembling illusions, and here you operate part of it.
The Jim Henson Exhibition opened in July 2017 with close to 300 objects, among them 47 original puppets including Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and Rowlf. An expansion designed by Leeser Architecture reopened the museum on January 15, 2011, adding theaters that run a genuine repertory screening program rather than a token loop.
36-01 35th Ave, Astoria, NY 11106 · Official site ↗
The Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) is a time-based media museum located in a former building of the historic Astoria Studios, in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens in New York City. The museum originally opened in 1988 as the American Museum of the Moving Image, and in 1996, opened its permanent exhibition, "Behind the Screen", designed by Ali Höcek of AC Höcek Architecture LLC. The museum began a $67 million expansion in March 2008 and reopened in January 2011. The expansion was designed by architect Thomas Leeser.
This background summary is from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The editorial on this page is ours.