MoMa offers sneak peek at Tim Burton retrospective

By Sarah Sluis

Tim Burton's films, with their dark imagery and spindly characters, have enchanted audiences over the past twenty years. This November, New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) will present a retrospective of his work that includes drawing, paintings, costumes, puppets and all of his films, which will be screened in MoMa's theatre.

While film is an infant medium compared to painting or sculpture, MoMa first highlighted a filmmaker seventy years ago, in 1939, when the museum curated an exhibit of Georges Mlis, the filmmaker famous for his experimentation with the film form and development of special effects (the picture of the moon with a spaceship sticking out of its eye, filmed in 1902, comes from him). The director of the museum, Glenn Lowry, who introduced the exhibit, highlighted MoMa's commitment to "modern art in all of its manifestations," and called Burton "one of our foremost auteur voices."

Burton himself was much more modest. He spoke of growing up in Burbank, California, where there wasn't much of a "museum culture." When asked by a reporter what his Mom would think about a curator's comparison of his work to Warhol's, he quipped that her response would be "Who's Warhol?" While Burton has kept most of his work (550 of the over 700 works in the exhibit come from Burton himself), he hadn't really looked at much of it. He said the process had been a "re-energizing thing for me," describing himself as someone who doesn't usually mull over past works. Revisiting his Hansel & Gretel television movie (which reportedly aired on the Disney Channel once, on Halloween), for example, he was surprised to realize that elements of the movie had shown up in his later works. Sweeney Todd also centers on cannibalism, and Batman also uses paint-filled water balloons for dramatic effect. The spooky film (which would probably scare young children half to death) also featured the overly extended limbs that Burton so frequently uses to make his characters creepy (e.g. Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas) The witch has a candy-cane inspired nose, and long dismembered limbs reach out to capture Hansel. With only a video copy of the movie remaining, MoMa plans to install a special gallery projector that will improve the movie's quality.

Because Burton uses drawing to work out his ideas, this exhibition will give incredible access to his creative process. Even when we think of a director's collection of films as the work of an auteur, most discussions are limited to the films themselves, and not the thought processes behind them or the material that informed the films. While Burton's work seems dark, creepy, and far from the mainstream, his movies have also been commercial. Rated from PG to R, he has made eerie films that appeal to all ages. From the trailer and early images of Burton's next project, Alice in Wonderland, it appears that Burton's retrospective at the MoMa may need a followup in years to come.