FRED HATT: I'm Fred Hatt.
I'm a projectionist at MoMA, which
means I show movies, all kinds of movies, to the public,
to the curators and scholars.
And the thing I really love about working
with old films and old media, is the time machine effect.
A film can sit on a shelf for years,
but when you run it through a projector, the actors,
the performers live again, and the whole era comes to life.
Last year, I spent a lot of time projecting Super 8 home movies
for some of the curators who were putting together
this show that I'm standing in.
This is called Private Lives Public Spaces.
And there are over 100 screens of moving images
that are like 100 windows into private life
throughout the 20th century.
Why are home movies in an art museum?
I mean, they're not really intended to be works of art.
But when the tools of art are in the hands of ordinary people,
you really get a look into life that the artifice
of the entertainment studio just can't match.
Within this show, I was particularly
drawn to this screen of films that's back here in the corner.
These are home movies of Edit DeAk.
Edit was a Hungarian immigrant to Manhattan,
an independent art critic and writer,
who championed street art and performance art and outsider
art, really tried to broaden the brush of what
art could be in New York City.
These films are done from the mid to late 70s
through the early 80s.
And you see a few famous faces, but mostly it's
Edit and her friends in the art world and the music scene.
You kind of get a feeling that people are just being playful.
They're trying things out.
You see people experimenting with gender fluidity
and with fashion, trying to mix and match images
from different eras and really evokes the era
of when these were made.
I moved to New York City from Oklahoma in 1987,
and I was-- mainly, I was attracted by the scene
that Edit DeAk is documenting here.
I wanted to live that bohemian lifestyle.
And I wanted to create my own art.
I came along just a little after the time that she was showing.
It was a rough time to be in New York.
It was dirty.
It was chaotic.
There was a terrible pandemic going on.
But it really did feel like there was ferment,
there was a scene, there was a--
just regular people were creating an art scene,
and that was very exciting.
It did not feel at that time, as it does now,
that the whole city was owned by real estate developers
and the ultra-wealthy.
I love art and I love museums, but sometimes I
think that the big stars of the art world
get a little too much of the attention.
I mean, they're important.
Those artists are important for a reason.
And, of course, they have box office draw.
But every artist exists in an ecosystem.
The big artists are like the charismatic megafauna
of nature.
They exist in an ecosystem.
And you need to understand that whole ecosystem.
In the arts, that means not just the famous artists,
but the not famous artists, and the art schools, the art supply
stores, the life drawing groups, the jam sessions, the parties--
just the lives of all the people that love art and make art
are the soil out of which the great art grows.
And these films by Edit DeAk really
show something about what it was like to be in New York
City in a particular time and place that was a very
fertile scene for creativity.
And I feel privileged that I was able to be young and live
in New York in that time when you didn't need to be rich,
you didn't need to be connected.
You just needed to be brave and street smart.