MUMBAI: For four decades, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has fed film aficionados a steady diet of movie classics — retrospectives that included works from Roman Polanski, Cary Grant, Ernst Lubitsch and, in a current series, James Mason. But the museum‘s weekend film programme was losing both money and its audience, seeing which LACMA has decided to pull the plug on its cinematic centerpiece.
Before there were local film festivals nearly every week and mass merchants such as Target stocking art-house hits like A Room With a View and Gosford Park on their DVD shelves, LACMA‘s series was one of the few places area movie lovers could find Hollywood classics and foreign-language standouts. Screenings often included appearances by and conversations with distinguished filmmakers and legendary actors and actresses.
The museum said that it was not abandoning its commitment to films and filmmakers but instead wanted to rethink its approach to the art form, and would look for potential donors to underwrite an unspecified future film program that is curated like any other part of the museum‘s exhibits.
“It‘s not that people don‘t love film here, but it‘s hard,” said the museum‘s director Michael Govan adding, “We are getting diminishing audiences. This is a good time since we are shrinking to spend time thinking and rethinking. We do have to stem our losses.”
Govan did not say when the museum‘s revamped film programming would debut but suggested that there could be some new film programming next spring. The last weekend screening, The Classic Films of Alain Resnais will be held from 2 to 17 October.
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