In Summary: A Final Contemplation on My Experience With the Wharton Studio Museum

Written by Tiesa Green, Cornell University

On a lazy afternoon over a decade ago, I wandered into the living room as my mother stared attentively at the television.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

“Field of Dreams. Do you want to join me?”

As I appraised the screen, the uncannily soft edges of delineation between the film’s subjects and turns of phrase aligned just-askew with those with which I was familiar did two things: firstly, and less importantly, it somewhat unsettled me. Secondly, though, these qualities signaled to me that the film was well before my time. Curious, I sat and joined her. As the credits rolled, my mother asked if I enjoyed the movie. I suppose I had, but in the way that you enjoy the activity at hand as a backdrop for a serendipitous opportunity to bond with a loved one. Because of my emotional detachment from the film itself, I had not thought of Field of Dreams in a dozen years; that is, until I began working with Wharton Studio Museum.

For those of you who missed my first blog post and do not know who I am or the nature of my association with the Wharton, I am a senior at Cornell University (my graduation is in four days!) who was put in contact with the museum for one of my classes from the Spring 2024 semester under the instruction to publish blog posts that I believed could bring in a younger demographic. While this task was quite simple, and I was assured by Diana herself that not succeeding in this effort would not be a problem at all, I still found it incredibly daunting. I was left with a nagging, overarching question: “How can I possibly bring in my age demographic to the world of silent film preservation if I am not a part of the silent film preservation world myself?”

I previously took silent films at face value, seeing them only as they are presented in today’s mainstream narrative, as merely the low-quality, overly campy, racially homogenous predecessors of today’s digital films, and nothing more: similar in the first iteration of the bicycle whose wheels were different sizes in its relative impressiveness of being of centuries’ past, but now made clumsy and rudimentary through technological progress.

I was very, very wrong. I am willing to (perhaps after some begrudging) openly admit this here, in my final blog post for this project.

My newfound understanding of the genre, by way of my association with the Wharton Studio Museum, has led me on a journey of perspective reinvention. Rather than as a cumbersome wheel-mismatched bicycle, I have come to observe silent films much as I do the Roman Coliseum. Though objectively degraded by time through the physical structural decay of their mediums, a natural process helped along further by dismissive neglect from the people who lived through its peak in usage, these objects’ remains give insight into past greatness.

If you ask anyone who has seen or heard of Field of Dreams (1989) to mention one thing about it, a significant number of them will undoubtedly–albeit incorrectly–reference its most famous line. While the quote is technically, “If you build it, he will come,” rather than “they will come,” the quote nevertheless captures the leap of faith it often requires to set off the events that will pay off in the future. Though coming about nearly a century after the media at the center of the Wharton Studio Museum’s preservation efforts, this famous film quote perfectly encapsulates the quiet appeal of the establishment’s existence. It does not scream for attention in the way customary of an IMAX theater, nor does it boast the often bandwagon affectation of the world’s most famous museums. Rather, its presence, without explanation, evokes an inexplicable sense of nostalgia and curiosity that will surely draw one in, upon their discovery of it.

It is commonly said that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, as the singular human experience is too brief to give rise to the patterns that the study of human action over time reveals. But the repetition of history isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Since their obsolescence through sleeker technology, we have seen the reemergence of the record player, Tamagotchi, digital cameras, and more. These technologies were built, and the people came, even if it took them a little while.

Would it be so naïve to hope the same for silent film?