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Tim Burton’s Treasure Trove
FILMINK speaks to MoMA’s Jenny He, about working with Tim Burton and what we can expect from the exhibition at Melbourne’s ACMI.
A new exhibition at Melbourne's Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) offers an intriguing peek into the mind of Tim Burton, the man behind such delightful cinematic oddities as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetlejuice.
Tim Burton: The Exhibition comes straight from New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), featuring more than 700 works. About 150 new items have been added to the Melbourne exhibition, including the Batmobile from Batman (1989) and 1992's Batman Returns (on loan from Warner Bros. Movie World), and costumes and artwork from Alice in Wonderland (2010).
The largest temporary exhibition ACMI has ever hosted, it features hands-on workshops, lectures, screenings and competitions. Burton himself participated in a number of sold-out events in the exhibition's opening week: a screening of his first feature film Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985), a ‘masterclass' session hosted by Margaret Pomeranz and a book signing.
When putting together the exhibition, MoMA curators Jenny He and Ron Magliozzi performed what Burton has likened to "an archeological dig" through his extensive archives of roughly ten thousand items. Other pieces in the exhibition are on loan from film studios and private collectors.
Receiving Burton's blessing for the show "took some convincing", Jenny He tells FILMINK on the line from Melbourne where she is visiting from New York. "But we proposed our idea to Tim, and he basically said, ‘here is my archive, whatever you guys want to do, go ahead!'"
Included in the exhibition is the then-eighteen-year-old Burton's first pitch to Disney. "We have Tim's hand-written submission letter on display, and the very kind rejection letter from Disney right next to it," says He with a laugh.
"There was this trove of unrealised and personal artworks," He explains. "The themes that are inherently Tim Burton are also evident in his artworks." The exhibition "is an exploration of motifs and themes that are so well-known to the public through Tim's films, but in other mediums," says He.
The exhibition features work from Burton's childhood, his training at the California Institute of Arts - where his contemporaries included Pixar heavyweights John Lasseter (Toy Story) and Brad Bird (The Incredibles), and Disney's John Musker (The Little Mermaid; The Princess and the Frog) - and his Hollywood career, spanning from when he worked as a Disney animator in the 1980s to the present.
"It was such an honour and privilege to be allowed into Tim's personal archive," He enthuses. "Making that connection between the personal and the professional is really the crux of this exhibition, because his films are so personal. They come from an emotional core that connects to audiences, and that's what the exhibition tries to convey."
While Burton left curating of the exhibition to MoMA (and later, ACMI), he was involved. "We asked him to create something for the lobby, and he came back with several new works," reveals He. "Tim created a three-dimensional creature family based on a sketch from 1998. He was re-engaging himself with works he hadn't seen in years, and he gave them new life, transforming them into other mediums.
"I think that was the best part of collaborating with Tim on this exhibition," He reflects. "To be able to see his vision renewed and to be able to see works that had been in storage for so long."
Tim Burton: The Exhibition is currently on at ACMI and will run through to October 10. For more information, visit the ACMI website.
Picture caption: Jenny He and Tim Burton at the media preview of Tim Burton: The Exhibition at the MoMA in November 2009. Taken by Jemal Countess.