You can tell right off that the sharp curators of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society’s move-fast-or-you’ll-miss-it tribute to the Bay Area’s singular place in motion-picture history know these essential truths: Movies are entertainment, movies are history and movies are personal. Our responses and affections are individual, even if they are shared by many other people. They recognize that movies can also be art, but what’s really being honored here is the act of collaboration. And the most important collaborator isn’t the star or the director but the audience.
There isn’t a profound or novel message to be gleaned from the selective and highly enjoyable array of artifacts, memorabilia and one-sheets (aka posters) on display, other than to remind visitors of the remarkable range of subjects and styles the Bay Area has inspired in a century of moviemaking. From the silent comedies and Westerns produced long ago by the Essanay Studios in the East Bay to Pixar’s rambunctious and lucrative feature-length cartoons, from Hollywood’s ambivalence toward San Francisco’s noirish underbelly to Clint Eastwood’s internationally recognized bullets-and-bravado persona, every period is represented.
The bright, airy, high-ceiling Mint is a fine venue for showing off the alluring pleasures promised by a slew of one-sheets of San Francisco-set movies, beginning with the hallway mountings of Petulia, Milk and Vertigo. When you venture into each room you encounter a different theme, whether it’s foreign-language posters of S.F. movies, a taste of the San Francisco International Film Festival (featuring a poster for the 1958 fest by the great graphic designer Saul Bass) or a tip of the fedora to San Francisco’s avant-garde and independent filmmaking traditions (including a 1953 flyer from the Museum of Modern Art’s pioneering Art in Cinema program and a Crumb one-sheet, among other treats).