Movie Magic

I was a big fan of the Movie Exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center. You could easily get lost in the archives of cinema from decades past, there was just so much to look at, and everything was a piece of movie history. To start off, I felt the sectioning off of each "position" or job that we typically think comes with a movie was a smart move. It allowed you to get lost in one person's work and be fully involved with their aspect of the movie without any interference from another person's part of the movie. You really got to understand what it entailed to be a producer, or an art director, or a costume designer. I feel that in dividing up the exhibit by role, just made their role that much more important because then you could understand what would be missing had this part of the exhibit not been there.
The vast collection of artifacts they had at the HRC really blew my mind. Just reading letters from directors and producers, and looking at storyboards from 70 years ago really made me understand how timeless the genre of film is but at the same time how much it has changed in such a short amount of time. I was very impressed at how everything was neatly organized into its niche and how everything in that part of the exhibit, adhered to what it was describing, whether it was music scores in the composer section, or costumes in the costume designer section, it all fit and was just enough to portray the importance of that role in movie making.
The different movies that were focused on in the indivudal section of the "movie timeline" gave a good representation of how much film has changed in a short amount of time. To be honest the only movie that I really knew from that timeline of movies was Top Gun, which I didn't even watch but, the descriptions were detailed enough that I could understand everything they presented and was interested in what was shown even though I hadn't watched the movies.
Overall, I was very happy with the experience I had at the HRC; I will definitely try to go there again before the exhibit closes down since you can't see that stuff anywhere else. On a random tangent, I liked the costumes and propaganda (movie posters) sections very much because with the costumes, it was crazy to know someone wore this in a feature film almost a century ago and that its still in perfect condition; and with the movie posters it was just cool to trace the changes in movie posters that have led to our fancy flashy posters of today. I think if anything, the HRC taught me that every role is important, there is no small role in making a movie; each person's role is only an additive piece to the whole picture, without a certain role, you lose all aspects that come with that role from your movie. Also, another random tangent, I'm glad Robert De Niro was so supportive of the exhibit because he contributed a lot of really amazing pieces to the display that definitely made some parts of the exhibits what they were.