Can’t live without it: demystifying the private collector by unpacking the “Rob Brooks Mary Pickford Collection”

Private collectors have a long history of generous donations to cultural heritage institutions, but donors and said institutions have had a contentious relationship. Both private collector and institution have a different relationship to the objects in the collection and this is reflected in the narratives attached to them, which can create tensions between the private collector and the public institution that accepts the donation. Film memorabilia collections and donations are subject to these very same tensions, but they have not been discussed at length in academic literature. This thesis examines the “Rob Brooks Mary Pickford Collection” at the TIFF Film Reference Library (FRL). It assesses the emotional narrative of the collector, Rob Brooks, who as a private collector gifted his collection, as well as the aims of the cultural institution, the narratives that are attached to the collection once it received, and how touring the collection may change that narrative.

Can’t live without it: demystifying the private collector by unpacking the “Rob Brooks Mary Pickford Collection”

Private collectors have a long history of generous donations to cultural heritage institutions, but donors and said institutions have had a contentious relationship. Both private collector and institution have a different relationship to the objects in the collection and this is reflected in the narratives attached to them, which can create tensions between the private collector and the public institution that accepts the donation. Film memorabilia collections and donations are subject to these very same tensions, but they have not been discussed at length in academic literature. This thesis examines the “Rob Brooks Mary Pickford Collection” at the TIFF Film Reference Library (FRL). It assesses the emotional narrative of the collector, Rob Brooks, who as a private collector gifted his collection, as well as the aims of the cultural institution, the narratives that are attached to the collection once it received, and how touring the collection may change that narrative.

Affective Cin-aereality

This article explores a kinship between aviation and cinema through the intersection of affective gender, dreams, and flying as expressed across newspaper accounts of women and flight, star discourse related to Mabel Normand and Mary Pickford, and the sexualized scenes of aerial joyriding in Abram Room’s Bed and Sofa (1927) and Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’s Plane Crazy (1928). It argues that in order to fully understand the aviation-cinema nexus, we must dislodge it from its masculinist heritage within high modernist myths. Key to this dislodging is the reinsertion of gendered associations of the body, affect, and the senses into the modernist myth of aerial vision as a weightless, abstracted regime of the eye. The article theoretically frames this historical exploration of aviation and cinema as an exemplary case study for an expanded rethinking of affect, reception, and the senses in Miriam Hansen’s notion of cinema as vernacular modernism.

Lillian Mary Pickford. 14 August 1902—14 August 2002

Mary Pickford was an experimental physiologist who carried out pioneering work on the actions of the hormones (oxytocin and vasopressin [ syn. antidiuretic hormone, ADH]) secreted by the posterior pituitary gland, which is part of the brain. She provided understanding of how the secretion of these hormones is controlled to regulate body fluid composition, specifically the maintenance, through actions on the kidneys, of normal osmolarity and Na + concentration, and hence blood volume and pressure. Using the water-loaded dog model she showed that vasopressin is the only hormone that regulates the excretion of water, by stimulating the kidneys to concentrate urine; she found that oxytocin could stimulate excretion of Na + . She showed that acetylcholine is an excitatory neurotransmitter in the hypothalamus, stimulating the neurons that produce vasopressin to secrete—the first evidence for acetylcholine action in the brain. The principles that Mary established have been extensively confirmed; hence, she was important in the establishment of the concepts and discipline of neuroendocrinology, which is about the bidirectional interactions between hormones and the brain. Using human and animal models, in her later work Mary focused on possible roles of interactions between female sex hormones and vasodilating actions of oxytocin in the perimenopausal problem of ‘hot flashes’ (or ‘hot flushes’) experienced by many women. She faced, but overcame, entrenched gender prejudice during her career; she was the first woman to be elected to the Pharmacological Society, and the first woman appointed to a chair in the Edinburgh Medical School.