Iris Barry

Iris Barry (1895 – 1969) was a film critic and curator. In the 1920s she helped establish the original London Film Society, and was the first curator of the film department of the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1935.

Life
Barry was born Iris Sylvia Crump, in the Washwood Heath district of Birmingham, England. She was the daughter of Alfred Charles Crump and Annie Crump. She studied at the Ursiline convent, Verviers, Belgium.

She moved to London in 1916 or 1917, where she met Ezra Pound. She had two children with Wyndham Lewis, a boy in 1919, and daughter in 1920.

She began publishing film criticism in The Spectator in 1923, and was film correspondent for the Daily Mail between 1925 and 1930, when she emigrated to the United States. Her marriage to Alan Porter did not long survive the move.

The Film Society, the first of its kind, was launched in October 1925; she was one of its founders along with cinema owner Sidney Bernstein, film director Adrian Brunel, well-connected enthusiast Ivor Montagu, and fellow film critic Walter Mycroft.

She is probably best remembered as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, which had opened in 1929. After coming to the United States in 1930, she founded the film study department in 1932, with an archival collection of rare films, library of film-related books, and a film circulation program. She also collected films. She became an American citizen in 1941, and married John E. Abbott.

Barry wrote a popular book on moviegoing Let's Go to the Pictures (1926) and the scholarly classic D. W. Griffith: American Film Master (1940), and became a regular book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune.

In 1949, she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government, in recognition of her services to French cinema.

She died 22 December 1969, in Marseilles.

MoMA's Film Library
The cinema studies scholar Haidee Wasson argues that under Barry's direction the MoMA's Film Library, the first American institution of film art, created the cultural and intellectual climate that allowed “. . . selected films to become visible to an emergent public under the rubrics of art and history, ” served as a “promulgator of discourses about cultural value and productive leisure,” and consequently defined “… what objects and media matter within the politics of cultural value and visual knowledge”. Wasson further details MoMA’s director’s Alfred Barr and Iris Barry's continuous struggle to affirm the cultural status and value of cinema to powerful museum benefactors and to win over Hollywood film studios’ support in order to elevate cinema’s status to that of a unique American art form. Wasson also elaborates on MoMA's Film Library’s effort to create modern audience for art cinema by employing overt disciplinary strategies. The staff of the Film Library, and sometimes Barry herself, carefully monitored the spectator’s behavior in the cinematic salon, sanctioning improper conduct (e.g. rowdiness, excessive chatter or laughter during screening etc.) by, at times, even terminating the film screening altogether. These strategies, Wasson argues, sought to mold a new form of cinematic audience by instilling the values of “educated film viewing and studious attention”.

Through her work at MoMA's Film Library, Barry has earned recognition as one of the founding figures of the film preservation movement alongside Henri Langlois and Ernest Lindgren

On October 10, 2014, MoMA presented an illustrated talk by Robert Sitton, author of Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film . 

Works

 * Splashing into society. London: Constable, 1923
 * Let's Go to the Pictures (pdf via Internet Archive)