UCLA FILM AND TELEVISION ARCHIVE RECEIVES AWARD FROM THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF FILM CRITICS

LOS ANGELES, CA - The UCLA Film and Television Archive received a 2002 Special Citation for its film preservation work from the National Society of Film Critics on Saturday, January 4, 2003.

The Society, comprised of 55 of the country's leading film critics and scholars, announced the award at its thirty-seventh annual meeting in New York City. The 2002 Special Citation was given to the UCLA Film and Television Archive, "For its long-lived and heroic work in film preservation, restoration and resurrection, including its recent rehabilitation of rehearsal and test footage from director Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955)."

Founded in 1966, the National Society of Film Critics' mission is to promote the mutual interests of film criticism and filmmaking. The Society is currently chaired by Peter Rainer of New York magazine and its members include critics from the major daily newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, as well as critics from Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Chicago Reader, The Boston Phoenix and Slate.

Besides responding to specific issues such as film colorization and the MPAA ratings system, the Society publishes an ongoing series of anthologies and meets each January to vote on awards for the finest film achievements of the previous year.

The UCLA Film and Television Archive is internationally renowned for its pioneering efforts to preserve and showcase not only classic, but current and innovative film and television. A unique resource for media study, the Archive constitutes one of the largest collections of media materials in the United States ­ second only to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ­ and the largest of any university in the world. Its vaults hold more than 225,000 motion picture and television titles and over 5,000 hours of historical newsreel footage spanning the entire 20th century.