Caught in the moment

WE ARE used to seeing stills from old movies, classic celluloid moments captured forever — Marilyn Monroe in a white halter-neck dress standing on a vent, James Dean frowning, Elizabeth Taylor kneeling in a bikini, Charlton Heston in a chariot.

These images are so much part of our 20th century memory that we don’t even register them any longer, so ingrained are they in our cultural subconscious.

What we tend not to see are these old school movie stars away from the camera but still on set. A new exhibition in London is full of such previously unseen pictures, perhaps the most dramatic a shot of Marilyn Monroe, photographed by Eve Arnold, one of the most important photographers of the last century who died in January this year, three months short of her 100th birthday. Arnold was a photojournalist, best known for her candid, beautiful black and whites of Marilyn.

Taken in the Nevada desert in 1960, the light and feeling of space is huge. Its centrepiece is a distracted Marilyn, looking down and concentrating on what she is reading, oblivious to Arnold’s presence. The only suggestion that this is a film set is the stark angularity of a boom microphone in the background, against the desert expanse. Marilyn, going over some difficult lines she has to play with Clark Gable — the photograph was taken on the set of John Huston’s 1961 classic The Misfits — seems unaware of anything, lost in her work.

The exhibition — Magnum On Set — is at the London Film Museum in Covent Garden. It is in itself an extraordinary space, in the cellars where once Covent Garden flower sellers used to store their wares deep underground. Under vaulted stone ceilings far below the market’s piazza, the Film Museum was founded by Jonathan Sands, a former photographer with a great collection of movie props, and devised by Leslie Hardcastle, a film veteran who is responsible for the Museum of Moving Image (MOMI) across the Thames on the South Bank.

The Covent Garden museum is a ‘branch’ of the London Film Museum (the main museum is located at County Hall on the South Bank), its vast, atmospheric underground location ideal for travelling exhibitions like Magnum On Set.

Descending into the London Film Museum, you walk through the history of film, right from its very beginning — the first thing you see is a mannequin of a travelling projectionist carrying a camera on his back.

There are pre-film moving image devices from the late 1800s — from the magic lantern to Théâtre Optique and Victorian spinning devices that tricked the eye into seeing movement. And there are early movie cameras — huge antique contraptions in wood and bronze.

The first-ever moving film — a short series of real-life scenes made by the Lumière brothers in 1895 — is on a loop on one of the many screens dotted around the dimly-lit museum, so that you feel you are wandering through a series of small cinema spaces.

Magnum On Set is a series of stills and films clips from 12 movies chosen from a three decade period of the mid 20th century.

They are Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight (1936), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Rebel Without A Cause (1955), Moby Dick (1956), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), The Alamo (1960), The Misfits (1961), The Trial (1962), Planet of the Apes (1968), Zabriskie Point (1970), L’important C’est d’Aimer (1975) and Death of Salesman (1985).

Scenes from each film are shown on a dozen screens, and the walls are covered in fascinating behind-the-scenes stills from the sets.

Like the one of Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowell in between takes on the set of the sci-fi classic Planet of the Apes. As Heston goes over his script in his toga-like costume, McDowell sits a few steps higher on a stone stairway, head in hand, looking bored — in full ape costume.

The stills from Planet of the Apes are great, because they show actors relaxing and larking around between takes, but still fully aped-up.

Best of all are the props, scattered around the museum in glass cases. The first thing you see is a Planet of the Apes costume — surprisingly petite, and very detailed — but it is the smaller items which are the most interesting. Like Marilyn Monroe’s pill boxes, shown to me with tremendous glee by Jonathan Sands. There are two — one from Hill’s Drug Store in Reno, Nevada, another with a label from her doctor which reads, “Mrs A Miller. Take one tablet with breakfast”.

There is also Marilyn’s lipstick, on loan from Misfits script supervisor Angela Allen, a diamanté bracelet given to the star on completion of the film by its director John Huston, and the key to her dressing room, a heavy brass thing that itself looks like a prop.

The original script of The Misfits is in another glass case, a script which contains just the lines for the three main characters — the others are in pencil so they can be reworked or rubbed out as required. Next to it lies John Wayne’s stetson from The Alamo. On the wall nearby are pictures of a mad-eyed Klaus Kinski surrounded by naked chicks from the Seventies arthouse movie L’important C’est d’Aimer. And perhaps most significantly of all, there’s Eve Arnold’s Nikon, a cumbersome, primitive looking item that nevertheless embodies those iconic snapshots of 20th century film culture.

Before visiting the Film Museum, the only Magnum I’d heard of was the ice cream marketed at ladies. Magnum Photos has been around far longer, founded in 1947 by four photographers — Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David ‘Chim’ Seymour, each with his own experiences, traumas and photographic records from the Second World War. Today, Magnum remains a photographic collective owned by its photographers, with offices in London, Paris, New York and Tokyo.

It was formed in response to the end of the war, as an expression of relief at having survived it. Or, as the late legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson told Le Monde, “Back in France, I was completely lost. At the time of liberation, the world having been disconnected, people had a new curiosity. I had a little bit of money from my family which allowed me to avoid working in a bank. I had been engaged in looking for the photo for itself, a little like one does with a poem. With Magnum was born the necessity for telling a story.” He described the photographic co-operative as “a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on, and a desire to transcribe it visually”.

After the war came the great boom of mid 20th century filmmaking, where conflict and deprivation were replaced by images of beauty and bravery. The Misfits was a classic post-war drama, utilising several big guns — Arthur Miller wrote it, John Huston directed it, and Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift starred in it. Placing this much talent in 100-plus degree desert heat resulted in an explosive set. Huston was frequently drinking and ran up gambling debts which the production crew had to pay off, Miller and Monroe’s marriage was imploding, and Huston believed that Marilyn was on her final descent into chemical oblivion — filming had to be halted for a few weeks in August 1960 so that she could attend a detox clinic. She died two years later — physically, at least.

Like all major 20th century film icons, her image remains very much alive. You can’t quite imagine wanting to visit museums full of Jack Black or Jennifer Aniston in 50 years, can you?

* Magnum On Set at the London Film Museum, Wellington Street, Covent Garden, London until September.