By Caroline Roberts, Conservator
This month I thought I’d offer up some entertainment—and a bit of trivia for those conservation and film enthusiasts out there. Curiously enough, even though we’re a small field, cultural heritage conservation pops up fairly frequently in film. This seems to happen when a screenwriter is looking for something visually compelling for their protagonist to do in their off time, i.e., while they’re not capturing ghosts or saving the planet from evil superhumans. Less often, conservation may feature within a cultural preservation adventure plot (“It belongs in a MUSEUM!” … oh wait, wrong profession …).
I’ve seen only one film that stars a real-life conservator—George Stout in 2014’s Monuments Men—but the fictional characters are just as fun (if not more so) to watch. I’m still holding my breath for a conservator to appear in a futuristic space saga …
There are far more comprehensive lists out there, but here are some of my favorite films in which conservation plays a central role (be warned, some of these tomatoes are pretty rotten):
- Ghostbusters II (1989), starring Sigourney Weaver as Dana Barrett, a professional cellist and paintings conservator (!) who must save her son from the evil magician Vigo.
- The Relic (1997), in which a statuette of a mythical forest monster is uncrated and wreaks havoc on an unsuspecting museum staff—including the conservation department (filmed at Chicago’s Field Museum).
- Head Over Heels (2001), starring Monica Potter as Amanda Pierce, who paints the face of FBI agent Bob (played by Freddie Prinze Jr.) into a missing area of a painting she’s restoring for a Russian smuggler.
- Monuments Men (2014), starring George Clooney as one of conservation’s founding fathers, George Stout, who led a team of Allied officers charged with saving cultural heritage from destruction by the Nazis.
- Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), in which Diana (Gal Gadot) works at the Smithsonian as a conservator (or curator? or both?) but must take some PTO (or however she negotiated this with her boss) to stop an evil guy named Max from destroying the planet while also letting go of her lost love, Trevor (Chris Pine), and dealing with a disgruntled coworker-turned-cheetah, Barbara (Kristen Wiig).
