"The Archive is a vital part of the Los Angeles film scene and world-class contributor to the cause of film preservation." —Leonard Maltin
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is the second largest moving image archive in the United States after the Library of Congress, and the world’s largest university-based media archive. Screenwriter-director Curtis Hanson (Eight Mile, L.A. Confidential) is the Archive's Honorary Chairman.
The Archive's Beginnings
In late-1965, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS) joined forces with the UCLA Theater Arts Department to create the ATAS/UCLA Television Library. Three years later, Film Department faculty founded the Film Archive. In 1976, when Robert Rosen was named director of both organizations, the UCLA Film & Television Archive was established as a joint venture.
During its early years, the Archive amassed a serious film collection with the donation of the Paramount Pictures print library. This was soon followed by important acquisitions from all the major U.S. studios: Warner Brothers, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Republic Pictures.
In 1977, the Archive made two bold strokes—launching its preservation and restoration program, soon to produce titles such as Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932) and Frank Borzage's Moonrise (1948); and an expansion of its campus film programming to screen a variety of films for the general public. The Archive achieved a national reputation for its exhibition of Hollywood classics, documentaries, contemporary independent productions and cutting edge works of international cinema.
The Eighties: Expansion and Acclaim
During the Eighties, the Archive expanded its preservation efforts to include animated films and John Ford westerns, and received worldwide acclaim for its restoration of Becky Sharp (1935), the first three-strip Technicolor feature. In 1981, the Archive became the permanent home to one of the most compelling and significant historical resources of the 20th century—the massive Hearst Metrotone News Collection, documenting the fabric of life from 1915-1975. The Archive provides footage from this collection to hundreds of films and television programs every year.
In 1988, the Archive screened its first biennial UCLA Festival of Preservation, inviting the general public to see the Archive’s recent restoration work. The Festival spans a century of moving image media, showcasing classic Hollywood features, television programs, newsreels, silent comedies, documentaries and contemporary independents.
“No other event in the country so consistently illuminates the irresistible hidden treasures of America’s movie heritage, putting a spotlight on drop-dead fascinating items unseen in decades, and difficult to see after the festival.” —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
The following year, the Archive opened its Archive Research and Study Center (ARSC) in UCLA's Powell Library. ARSC provides free access to more than 10,000 collection items each year. Hundreds of books, films, plays, articles and scholarly monographs have been produced drawing on its resources.
In 1989, the Archive was awarded an Emmy Plaque for the restorations of An Evening with Fred Astaire (10/17/58), Another Evening with Fred Astaire (11/4/59) and Astaire Time (9/28/60), which “…exhibit a high level of engineering and are important to the progress of the industry.”
The Nineties and the Aughts: Indie and Studio Classics
At the start of the Nineties, the Archive launched its annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema, the first showcase for new Iranian films in the United States. In a public relations milestone, the Archive made its catalog records searchable on the web. And it established the Sundance Collection at UCLA to provide long term access to independent production. Restoration projects included Efraín Gutiérrez's Chicano Love is Forever (1977), Robert Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) and films by Kenneth Anger. Closing the decade, the Archive acquired the Stanford Theatre Film Laboratory, providing the Archive with its first in-house lab capabilities.
In the Aughts, the Archive won further accolades for its restorations of independent works by John Cassavetes, Charles Burnett (1977's Killer of Sheep) and Kent Mackenzie (1961's The Exiles); the latter two films won Film Heritage Awards from the National Society of Film Critics. In 2005, the Archive partnered with Outfest to create the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation, the largest publicly accessible collection of LGBT films in the world. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association presented the Archive a Legacy of Cinema award for the Project and its restoration of Bill Sherwood's Parting Glances (1986).
In 2003, the National Society of Film Critics presented a Special Citation to the 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).” The Archive later received another Film Heritage Award for its restoration of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948).
New Millennium / New Initiatives
The Telluride Film Festival Special Medallion is awarded to "a hero of cinema—an organization or individual—that preserves, honors and presents great movies."
2002 marked the birth of the UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies (MIAS) graduate degree program. The program—jointly administered by Cinema and Media Studies, Information Studies and the UCLA Film & Television Archive—was the first in North America designed to train archivists. The Archive plays an important role as a site for students to gain firsthand experience as they work with staff members regarding preservation and restoration, programming, cataloging, collections processing and other activities.
Thanks to a $5 million donation by Audrey L. Wilder, the Archive moved its public screenings to a new venue, the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village. “Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Film” delighted sold-out crowds in Los Angeles and then toured more than 20 prestigious venues and film festivals in the U.S., Canada and Europe. And the renowned UCLA Festival of Preservation inaugurated its first North American tour.
In 2008, thanks to an extraordinary and ongoing partnership with the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) and David Woodley Packard, the Archive's nitrate film holdings were moved to a new state-of the-art $39 million vault facility in Santa Clarita, California. The new vault is the first phase in the Archive’s multi-year plan to build a fully developed preservation center with additional vaults for UCLA’s entire collection, as well as laboratories, workrooms and theaters with fiber-optic connections to UCLA.
The Archive launched the new decade in 2010 with two major honors—the Special Medallion from the Telluride Film Festival, and a 24-hour showcase on Turner Classic Movies featuring "the extraordinary restoration and remastering work conducted by the Archive."
Email this
