One less artistic treasure in Oakland

On Jan. 9, the Carnegie Museum of Art announced the closing of its film and video department… On Jan. 9, the Carnegie Museum of Art announced the closing of its film and video department after 27 years as one of the nation’s premier outlets for independent and foreign cinema.

The department has been nationally renowned as a venue for films that would otherwise never find a venue, not being great moneymakers or Hollywood blockbusters, but artistic endeavors.

In Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s, major studios owned every aspect of filmmaking, from the production facilities to the studios to the theaters themselves, thus maintaining a stranglehold on which pictures made it to the masses. There was no such thing as independent film and small, experimental and avant garde films were only shown in museums and galleries.

Beginning in the late ’60s, the Carnegie carried on that legacy of artistic exhibition.

It’s been a place to see films as their filmmakers intended, without being butchered to fit a television screen. It was a place to see rare and refurbished films in a “theater experience” setting. Often, directors would attend screenings and hold discussions afterward. It was one of the institutions that gave Pittsburgh its distinctive cultural flavor.

Like everything and everyone these days, the Carnegie has been facing budget woes. Spokesmen say cutting the department entirely is purely a cost-saving effort.

Dinosaur Hall is expanding with money given by the city. Couldn’t the Carnegie appeal to the city to use some of the funds that have been earmarked for Dinosaur Hall to save the film department?

It seems the department wasn’t really raking in money or spectators. In television, even great shows get canceled if they aren’t drawing viewers and advertising revenues. However, television is purely a moneymaking venture. Museums are meant to be bright spots, oases of culture and art for the masses, regardless of profit. The city should ensure the museum is able to continue doing so.

There is some overlap among other indie and foreign film venues in the city, of course. But to assume the Oaks Theater and Pittsburgh Filmmakers can simply pick up the slack is akin to assuming that if the Post-Gazette were suddenly to fold, The Pitt News, Pulp and City Paper could just take over: flattering, but unrealistic.

It’s a terrible loss for Pittsburgh.