The EYE Museum of Film: Magic and the Movies

9/5/2014

The EYE Museum of Film: Magic and the Movies

Magic: A power that allows one to do impossible things.

The thumbnail-sized pictures depicting the film museum’s angular white structure on Google Images do no justice to the building— the EYE Museum is magic, both outside and in. The architecture of the museum, much like film itself, is a study of the border between illusion and reality. Proud masthead of Amsterdam’s industrial locus across the IJ, the jutting triangupentragonal roof (or, some impossibly complicated and hypnotic geometric shape that’s yet to be named) points directly towards modernity and away from the historic bricks of Centraal Station. If you squint just hard enough in just the right spot, you may catch a fleeting glimpse of old Amsterdam as a hazy recollection in the nearly floor-to-ceiling reflective windows encircling the building’s façade. Stand anywhere else and your view immediately shifts: at one moment a glittering sky, and the next, the thin shadow of a fat barge scuttling across the slow-moving river. Likewise, every vantage point transforms the viewer’s perception of the building’s shape, as new angles and intersecting forms reveal themselves. Each step up the sprawling wooden staircase leading to the museum’s monstrous metallic entrance provides an alternative view that challenges the visitor’s understanding of where the physical building ends and where the landscape begins (and if, for that matter, the distinction really exists or matters in this construction). Furthermore, the meticulous sculpting of the imaginatively architectural but non-functional extra bits and pieces provides another confounding of reality: is this a museum building or a work of art itself?

Though there was a paid exhibition upstairs about David Kronenberg, being budget-conscious college students, my group opted for the free exhibition in the basement of the EYE. The space is primarily used to display information about, snippets of, and even full features of films in the museum’s collection, but additionally includes a variety of installations generally related to film and video. By far the most popular installations were a series of interactive video displays that, through the use of time-lag cameras, inserted the visitor into a short film. In one of these installations, people stood in front of a green screen while their likeness was projected atop Georges Melies’s turn-of-the-century short “Le Voyage Dans La Lune”, in which a rocket crashes into the man on the moon. For those familiar with Melies’s pioneering work in early cinematic special effects such as the ‘stop trick’ (object filmed -> camera shut off -> object moved out of frame -> camera turned on), which produced the illusion that an object had disappeared, it may come as no surprise that the filmmaker got his start as a professional illusionist. To audiences in 1902, the innovations Melies brought to life on-screen must have seemed nothing short of magic; photography could be manipulated, painting could be abstracted, but this, this was fiction (seemingly) unfurling in real time.

What caught me by surprise at the EYE Museum was that even in 2014—in an age of Michael Bay CGI, and every sort of interactive media you can imagine—visitors of all ages still wriggled their bodies in front of the green screen while watching the projected video, mesmerized by their own presence within the rudimentary clip. No matter how far film technology has advanced, nor how common special effects have become, these simple installations demonstrate human fascination with some intrinsic magic quality that exists in film. In many respects, film more closely resembles our temporal experience of real life than any other artistic medium.  Yet at the same time, because of this apparent similarity it becomes all the more fantastic when film challenges our perception of reality, even when it’s as simple as projecting a person’s likeness onto a model rocket on collision course with a cardboard moon.

Walking half-backwards to catch a final glimpse of the stunning building as I exited, I promised myself that sometime, if not on this trip, I would visit this place again. My interest as a filmmaker was piqued not only by the exhibitions about film— which only illuminated the medium’s ability to do the simple, and the simply impossible— but also by the building’s architectural style, itself inspired by the hazy line between fiction and reality. The sun had dipped deeply in the sky by the time we left, and a new set of mirages glowed across the EYE’s darkening windows; for a millisecond I thought I saw myself, but a step more and the image had disappeared.