Burton at MoMA - a Multimedia Masterpiece

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 10 December 2009 22:52

Written by Kevin Filipski

It’s not often that the Museum of Modern Art presents an exhibition of a film director that comprises more than mere screenings, but rarely has there been one as thorough (and thoroughly multi-media) as Tim Burton.

A director just outside the mainstream with his visually thrilling and fantastical tales of outsiders and misunderstood monsters, Burton has become a genre unto himself, from the willful silliness of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice to the fairy tale-like Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, with such splendid one-offs as his biopic Ed Wood and the surprisingly moving tragicomedy Big Fish thrown in for good measure. (Let’s ignore such lavish duds as Sleepy Hollow and the unnecessary Planet of the Apes remake.) His recent adaptations of the musical Sweeney Todd and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory have divided fans; surely his next film, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, will do the same.

The MOMA exhibit displays artifacts of all kinds from Burton’s long career. (He likens it to rummaging through his closet and discovering things he’d forgotten existed.) From his teenage days making 8mm shorts in his Southern California backyard—which we can watch—we are privy to the unending frenzy of Burton’s imagination.

There are innumerable photographs, paintings and drawings, including amusingly deadpan sketches that visualize his punning wordplay, with a whimsicality reminiscent of both Frederico Fellini and John Lennon. There are also many objects taken from film projects both made and unmade, like miniaturized Martians from the loony parody Mars Attacks! and wondrous stop-motion puppets from Nightmare and the more sinister Corpse Bride.

Of course, there’s also a full slate of film screenings of all the features and shorts that Burton has made (including the classic six-minute Vincent, narrated by Price himself).

For me, the must-see day is April 5, 2010, when both of Burton’s underrated but gruesomely entertaining Batman movies will be shown, along with the wondrously warped Frankenweenie.

There’s also a series of films chosen by Burton himself as an example of his influences, Tim Burton and the Lurid Beauty of Monsters, which run the gamut from James Whale’s original Frankenstein (with Boris Karloff) and F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu to the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster, all made by none other than—you guessed it—Ed Wood himself.

In its wide-ranging approach to a director who started out in Disney’s animation department and then went on to cult status thanks to fourteen feature films that could be considered anti-Disney as a whole, MOMA’s Tim Burton will please his fans and maybe even make skeptics reconsider their opinion of one of Hollywood’s true iconoclasts.

For more info go to: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/313

Tim Burton Exhibit at the MoMA
Sunday, Nov. 22 - Monday, April 26
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY 10019
212-397-6980

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