Film Screening: Museums of the New Age

The Science Museum hosts the first public performance of a new musical score accompanying a remarkable film showing the major science museums of Europe as they were in the 1920s.

‘Museums of the New Age’ is a project that has researched and found inspiration in the 1920s fashion for American enthusiasts for new science museums in their native land to come to Europe to learn how the great museums of the old world did it. One such group, led by trustee Charles T Gwynne, took along the film director Arthur Edwin Krows and cameraman Walter P. Pritchard. The trip produced a book and three films, which were shown to potential supporters in New York. Copies were also donated to the four museums shown: the Science Museum in London, the Technical Museum Vienna, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris, and the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

To bring the film to today’s audiences, we have commissioned a new score from the Science Museum’s first Composer in Residence, Jean-Philippe Calvin. The new music brings alive the film’s fascinating sequences that reveal the architecture, displays and individual facilities of the museums, from famous objects to interactive exhibits, and from workshop technicians to directors.

Supported by a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence Grant