One of the Museum of the Moving Image’s staple installations is “Tut’s Fever Movie Palace.” When I first came across this installation, it made me think of a Disney World gimmick, a strange combination of colonial reframing and poorly casted props combined to give a sense of strangeness, of enjoyable fabrication, play. Commissioned by the Museum in 1988, “Tut’s Fever” was intended as a true film viewing location. This theatre acts as the epicenter of the museum. After floating through other exhibitions, the museum’s centerpiece is a bizarre miniature theatre created by the Paris-born artist Red Grooms.
My impression, and the idea of Grooms’s vision seem to match up. Sitting in the theatre, an audience member is literally encapsulated by the installation, giving the viewer the sense that time has stood still, and has been standing still, waiting for you to arrive in this un-aging theatre. The old-timey and mostly tawdry decor revamp the exotification of cinema, not so much brought back from the dead, but frozen in time.
Since the museum itself doesn’t intend on being any sort of film library, it instead acts as a strange screening facility. The space of “Tut’s Fever” is a colonial reimagining, a genuine “Disneylandification” of not only Egyption art, but cinematic culture. The artist’s intent, and the museum’s intent, was to work with the camp of cinema from the 1920’s, to bring the Hugo-esque sorcery of the image back into modern times, and to gather audiences back into theaters. As a first time viewer, Grooms’s vision worked-fascinated by my surroundings I simultaneously thought where am I? and when’s the next screening?
