Michael Connor is the guest curator of Magnificent Obsessions at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image. In partnership with Persol, the sunglasses synonymous with screen personalities such as Steve McQueen and Francis Ford Coppola, the exhibition champions craftsmanship in film, showcasing an obsessive attention to detail across significant sound design, wardrobe and props (there’s a lot of energy invested in those counterfeit cheques from Catch Me If You Can, FYI).

Over the next few days, we’ll focus on a string of highlights from the exhibition. But to begin, we talk backstory and context with Connor on a sweltering midtown NY rooftop…

Dean Mayo Davies: Tell us about your work and your role in the exhibition…
Michael Connor: I became a curator working in film festivals. One to begin with in Austin called Cinema Texas was a place I learned a lot of my approach to curating, from the festival’s creators. I would describe the way we were working as being quite collaborative and very artist-focused. After that I moved to the UK and worked at FACT in Liverpool, then came the BFI on the South Bank. On my last day I received a telephone call from a guy called Abe Rodgers who lives in London, he’s a cool guy who has a design company and proposed me a project he was putting together in Australia.

A few years back Persol got in touch and said they had a three year project lined up in regards to filmic obsession and craftsmanship – it was quite a luxury to commit so much time to a fantastic project. We knew we’d have to travel and invest a lot of energy.

DMD: How did you approach the project?
MC: By viewing cinema as an art form, though I know a lot of people regard it as if it were literature. I come from an art background which has served me well in making exhibitions. I think one of the passions that drives me on these projects is how it is easy to think of film as a sort of inhuman system, and that it’s all about box office figures and red carpet photographs – but within that system the wheels are pushed by the passion of the people that work in the industry. The world that we live in can feel very cold, rational but it is ultimately driven by people and their creative ideas, imagination and innovation.

DMD: There is emphasis on the craft behind, which can often be missed…
MC: It is quite multilayered. It boggles my mind actually when I think of some of the people in the show – how is it that they can possibly do what they do? Like [sound designer] Walter Murch we interviewed about Apocalypse Now, and there is a clip from the film edited with one layer of the soundtrack at a time. So you get the sound of exclusion, it gives you a very strange experience. If you think that Walter went out and had those sounds recorded individually, and how many layers and intricacies it takes to make just one minute of film in comparison to how long Apocalypse Now is as a movie, it really blows your mind. So many hidden achievements!

DMD: Does Persol flash through the exhibition? The brand has a history with movie stars…
MC: It does. For instance The Talented Mr Ripley  is included. But actually Persol pops up in so many films that it becomes a part of my usual radar of attention! I already knew I wanted to do something with Theodora Van Unkel, she worked with Steve McQueen and did some of the costumes for The Thomas Crown Affair which has a lot of Persol featured in the wardrobe. Then there’s [costume designer] Eiko Ishioka who is just so interesting: Francis Ford Coppola was wearing Persol during a documentary made on her work. It’s so much a part of film history in America.

DMD: Do you have any favourite pieces from the exhibition?
MC: I mean [costume designer] Julie Weiss did such an amazing job, she essentially made artworks in which to show her objects, which is great for us because as a museum you aren’t allowed to interpret too much, to get in the way of the artwork is wrong. Frida is such a layered aesthetic, that it seemed incorrect to have a singular pieces of jewellery or a skirt in a display case, so she really transformed the space, making it more complimentary to the film in a way that it was inappropriate for the organisers or curators to get that involved.

Another great piece I like is an email sent to Jennifer Connelly where she is advised to buy an iMac so that she can trade emails more easily. It is such a pivotal moment of the 90s, a time capsule-like moment which is almost comic to us as it was not so long ago, but in terms of technology and communication developments seems an age away.

Images courtesy of Persol

Click here for exhibition highlights: Creative Forgery, Poetry and Motion, Capturing the Supersonic and Costume Without Limits