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Film Comment (1974) - People we like

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The ambience on April 30 consisted of pitchers of beer,soggy strawberry shortcake, a pool table, and the televised roar of the Stanley Cup Playoff. When an overeager and unkempt young student shows up at the Museum's Film Study Center and "rediscovers" D.W. Griffith (which happens about once a month), Artie will smirk and privately kvetch, remembering the night in 1925 a drunken Griffith climbed atop a banquet table and ceremoniously peed in the punchbowl.

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The Three Gables lies somewhere east of Queens, enemy territory for New York intellectuals. It's a neighborhood bar, a place where tired Long Island Railroad employees come to relax with a drink and a friend. It is a place where most of the patrons have never heard of the Museum of Modern Art, much less care about its activities in film preservation and exhibition. In short, the local pantheon is far more likely to include Casey Stengel than Jo Sternberg.

On the night of April 30,1974, the Three Gables was invaded by some fifteen members of the Museum's Department of Film. Exactly thirty‑five years ago, a projectionist had started working at the Museum. Now, Artie Steiger's friends,almost all of whom had not even been born in 1939, had come to pay him homage on his home ground. The night before, many of the same people had been at Lincoln Center giving Alfred Hitchcock his due amidst champagne, millionaires, and a bona fide princess. The ambience on April 30 consisted of pitchers of beer,soggy strawberry shortcake, a pool table, and the televised roar of the Stanley Cup Playoff. Artie Steiger's dignity gave the second evening just a bit more class than the first.

Artie Steiger is as mysterious about his actual age as Marlene Dietrich. Sometime in the Twenties he served D.W. Griffith as projectionist before moving to Fox's 56th Street studio for a long stint. These were the days at Fox when John Ford and Raoul Walsh were developing their craft. Artie is proud to show some frames clipped by him from the negative of THREE BAD MEN which got by Ford and his editors‑a shot revealing the camera crew in an automobile.

Artie is prone to play down the concept of the cinema as an art, having been too close perhaps to the "artists" and too aware of their failings. When an overeager and unkempt young student shows up at the Museum's Film Study Center and "rediscovers" D.W. Griffith (which happens about once a month), Artie will smirk and privately kvetch, remembering the night in 1925 a drunken Griffith climbed atop a banquet table and ceremoniously peed in the punchbowl.

At the same time he is delighted when Blanche Sweet or Lillian Gish will stop in the Museum's hallway and exchange pleasantries with him, sharing their kindred status as "oldtimers." He happily recounts his experience of interrupting a screening for Gloria Swanson at lunchtime and being offered half her supply of roots and berries. He remembers how, in the days before he became staff projectionist on the fourth floor, when he was working in the Museum auditorium, Greta Garbo would watch her films with him from his booth, preferring Artie's company to that of the multitude.

There are stories of conflicts with Marlene Dietrich, shared pranks with Luis Bunuel, and a warm relationship with Billy Bitzer, to whose widow of thirty years Artie has remained a loyal friend. When a southern governor had an allday private screening on a hot Saturday when no one was around and the Museum had not yet installed airconditioning, Artie and the governor did the logical thing and stripped to their underwear in the interest of comfort. When an overenthusiastic staff member runs from the screening room proclaiming the arrival of a new masterpiece, Artie is quick to suggest that he left out a few of the reels, or that the film was shown upside down. All of his commentary is tempered with great charm and wit, and a considerable need to deny his own very genuine importance.

Recently Artie had a small stroke, and he had to undergo a serious operation to correct a circulatory disorder. All of this was borne with courage and good cheer. He would do a little belly dance in his hospital gown for members of the department on lunch hour visits. He has been told to cut down on two of his greatest pleasures: the brew which has provided him with a splendid girth to rival Hitchcock (see photograph), and cigarettes (ironically, he smokes Virginia Slims). This latter has relieved some of our fears of Artie going up in a puff of nitrate smoke with an original print of ONE EXCITING NIGHT one quiet afternoon. Some of us suspect D.W. Griffith is out for revenge.

When the professional staff of the Museum went on strike last October, the two auditorium projectionists honored our picket line. Two years before, in a similar situation, Artie had gone to work and enabled the Museum's administration to maintain a semblance of normality in the showing of films. This time, in spite of not really sympathizing with the more abstract issues of the strike, and regardless of enormous pressure, Artie stayed out in support of his colleagues. The film program was suspended for the duration of the strike. In a sense what Artie had done was heroic, but more precisely it was an act of love.

How much longer we will be privileged to see this ambulatory treasure waddle down the Museum corridors or wedge himself between his projectors, one cannot foretell. For the present, however, he goes on both enriching and offhandedly deprecating the art to which he has devoted his life. On behalf of his friends and respectful associates, it is an honor to use "People We Like" to salute someone we love‑Artie Steiger‑a true gentleman and a very gentle man.

Charles Silver, whose monograph on Marlene Dietrich will be published in the Pyramid Movie series this fall, is in charge of the Film Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art.

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