Museum in the Making

Life cast of John Malkovich from Being John Malkovich

Last week, the forthcoming International Life Cast Museum was showing off part of its collection at a preview show in Allston. It was in an unlikely five-story building near the Super Stop and Shop, filling one large partitioned room and several corridors snaking off past the offices of small presses and the Boston Babydolls (burlesque dancers were continually wandering through while adfamiliares and I were there). The exhibit was divided into Hollywood life casts, casts of the natural world, historical faces, fine art, and Holocaust survivors (one of whom filled the room with her stories of atrocities, playing over and over on a ninety-second loop). Everything in the museum, just about, was cast from something living or formerly living — faces, skulls, hands, heads, boobs, bodies. The curator, who privately owns most of the collection, was on hand to eagerly answer questions and offer fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies.

It's a curiously intimate experience, interacting with famous faces. They're life-sized, obviously, and three-dimensional, and evoke therefore more of a sense of real presence than movies or photographs. Natalie Portman's life mask is so small, so human, it's much easier to imagine conversing with it than with the thirty-foot princess in Star Wars. It's a bit like wandering through a room of famous people who are very carefully holding perfectly still and ignoring your presence. It was so easy to see them as people, they almost seemed rude or aloof or catatonic, and I felt strangely invasive.

Speaking of Star Wars, there were some nice tidbits for a fan like myself, including an artist's proof of the Han Solo in carbonite cast, and the dummy head cast for Obi-Wan's body-vanishing death scene in A New Hope (see below). We learned that the face of Resusci-Anne, the CPR practice dummy, was copied from a death mask made from the corpse of a young drowning victim who died in the Seine in 1805 — the mask and the dummy hung side-by-side. We rolled our eyes at the cheesy animal-print butt-and-back furry-bait casts, and I got a little misty when I saw Hollywood greats like Karloff and Hitch and Jimmy Durante.

I went back on Sunday to take some photos, with the blessing of the curator. It's a creepy-cool experience, and he has ambitious plans for the real museum; I wish him the best in getting it off the ground.

( More photos below! )

The full set is here.