Show Business: Twin Shrines to the Silver Screen

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For old-fashioned art lovers, a museum is a building that elevates the spirit and lowers the pulse rate. In this cathedral, the faithful speak in reverent whispers or stand silently before paintings, which demand leisure and concentration for the appreciation of their subtleties. Other visitors, less awestruck, may squirm through the solemnity, like a child dragooned to High Mass. Or find a seat in the vestibule and fall asleep.

No one is likely to nod off in two new museums, independent of each other, that have just opened with similar names and within five days of each other but 3,500 miles apart. The American Museum of the Moving Image, in New York City, and London's Museum of the Moving Image, on which Prince Charles raised the curtain last week, are as informal and user friendly as their acronymic nicknames, AMMI and MOMI. Splendidly begauded in perky colors, stocked with playful film fetishes and interactive exhibits that look like video games, the new museums are not mausoleums of modern art. They are more like theme parks, urban Disney Worlds.

This is as it should be. Movies, even in a museum, want the proud hug of philistinism. The film archivist Henri Langlois knew this when he opened a Paris movie museum 16 years ago in his Cinematheque Francaise. Inside the front door, Psycho's mummified Mother Bates lurked behind a window. Against the back wall, German expressionism ran riot in a full-scale set from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The museum was like an EKG of a national intelligence that can find value in both Jean-Luc Godard and Jerry Lewis.

Why, then, could the blend of films and artifacts not find a home in the country that made them famous? After nearly three decades of community agitation, the Hollywood Museum is still only the promise of an empty lot next to Mann's Chinese Theater. The stars' footprints would have to lead east. Few guessed that they would lead to a working-class neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., just a short subway ride from Manhattan.

Aiming to embrace the media's aspirations to high art as well as their roots in vaudeville, AMMI serves up film and television history in two strengths: straight up and with a shot of circus-clown seltzer. But even the serious exhibitions provide the tang of astonishment. A display of 58 machines -- from the 1835 thaumatrope to tomorrow's Sony GV-8 Video Walkman -- pulses with the gimcrack genius of those anonymous technicians who gave artists the tools to dream with. The spirit of Philo T. Farnsworth, boy pioneer of TV, rides again!

That bracing ingenuity marks many of AMMI's exhibits. Nam June Paik's video installation is an automobile frame on which are mounted 65 screens, each strobing scenes of Bonnie and Clyde or Abbott and Costello or any of a hundred other images. AMMI's apex is Tut's Fever, an Egyptian-style movie palace conceived by Artists Red Grooms and Lysiane Luong. Grooms' impish sculptures staff the theater: Theda Bara sits in the box office; Mae West sells you candy; Mickey Rooney is the usher; a sarcophagus creaks open to reveal the late James Dean. In the theater auditorium, its walls a splurge of film-trivia graffiti, you can watch a silent-movie serial or just gawk at the delirious decor.