Art in Motion
By Daily Bruin Staff
April 29, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 Illustration by Kristen Gillette
By Carolina Reyes
Daily Bruin Contributor For many filmmakers around the world, the
UCLA Film and Television Archive is a gateway to artistic freedom.
Sometimes controversial in nature, often Hollywood classics, films
from around the globe have made their way to the UCLA Film and
Television Archive, where they are released to U.S. audiences.
“We are an archive that preserves American film and we value
American films,” said Andrea Alsberg, director of programming
at the archive.
Freedom of expression Each year, the
Archive’s Public Exhibition Program presents film series that
highlight a particular filmmaker, film genre or works from a
particular country. Works banned in other countries, often
including political hot topics and pornography, have made their way
to the archive and have been included as part of the exhibition
series. “In terms of film history, it’s worth looking
at pornography, it’s worth looking at films that have been
banned in other countries and censored throughout times,”
Alsberg said. “New Chinese Cinema: Tales of Urban Delight,
Alienation and the Margins,” shown in November 2000 featured
films that were banned in China because of its subject matter.
These films are products of the so-called “Sixth
Generation” directors, who often work outside the government
controlled studio system on banned projects, according to Alsberg.
The film series also include works by filmmakers often overlooked
by U.S. audiences, but that are well known in other countries.
“The archive screens not only films from its own diverse
collections,” said Kelly Graml, public affairs and marketing
coordinator of the archive. “But (it) searches the globe to
show the absolute best of cinema, including many films difficult to
see elsewhere on the big screens.”
 DANIEL WONG The James Bridges Theater hosts film
screenings ranging from international films to old Hollywood
favorites. This year’s film series featured Indian director
Ritwik Ghatak, whose work was screened for the first time in North
America in 1985 at UCLA, according to the April 2001 Archive
calendar. Despite his introduction to the West more than a decade
ago, Ghatak still lacks the fame and exposure he enjoys in
India.
“We’re not just programming films for various
aspects of Los Angeles communities,” Alsberg said. “But
we hope that the community will take advantage of the screenings as
well as initiate the rest of Los Angeles into a particular
country’s culture.” Musicals from the Soviet Bloc have
also been featured in the past by Archives as part of their
“Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance: Musical From Around the
World,” series. UCLA’s international musical series
gave audiences a rare taste of musicals from former communist
countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia, according to the
November 2000 Southern California Live Telegram newspaper. “I
am of the belief that most good films ““ whether they are
musicals or documentaries or drama ““ say something about the
social and national ideology of their world,” Alsberg
said.
Classic Hollywood collection UCLA Film and
Television Archive is the world’s largest university-held
collection of motion pictures and broadcast programming with more
than 22,000 films and television programs dating back to the 1890s.
“We show classic Hollywood, silent and international film by
either looking at a particular director or by looking at a roundup
of what a country has to offer,” said Alsberg. The UCLA Film
and Television Archives were initially founded to fill the need for
a film study and preservation center on the West Coast. In 1971,
Paramount Pictures Corporation donated 800 35mm studio prints of
features made between 1928-1948. This was the Archives’ first
significant acquisition, according to a UCLA Film and Television
manual. Warner Brothers, the Consolidated Film Industries and The
Harold Lloyd Memorial Collection later made deposits to the
Archive. This latter collection represents a wide spectrum of
American and European film history, according to the manual.
Preservation In addition to exposing the public
to films from around the world, the archive also is devoted to
preserving films. Until 1950, film was made on nitrate cellulose
film, which would easily deteriorate. Later, film started being
restored on acetate, but this compound also deteriorates. Today,
staff members at the Archive repair and restore films made after
1950, according to its Web site. The “Festival of
Preservation,” put on by the Public Exhibition Program, also
aids this safe-keeping effort. This event highlights films reserved
at the archive and one of the main reasons people attend the
festival, according to Alsberg, is to watch many old-time favorites
on newly restored film.
Public education Adults are not the only ones
who benefit from the various film events organized by the Public
Exhibition Program. Once a month a “Kids’ Flicks”
program is put together to expose young people to see films other
than those they normally see at the movie theater, Alsberg said.
Films shown in the past include classics such as “The Wind in
the Willows” and “Charlotte’s Web,” as well
as international films like “Kirikou and the
Sorceress,” a French film based on an African folk tale.
“Films that are made in other countries speak to kids in
different ways than Disney, and they have a certain charm that we
would almost consider old-fashioned now,” Alsberg said. In
the future, the Public Exhibition Program hopes to organize and
show a series of films that have been controversial in their own
time. D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “Birth of a
Nation” spurred the idea for the exhibition series. Formerly
studied by film researchers, it is no longer critiqued because of
its subject matter, according to Alsberg. “Birth of a
Nation,” is a film about the Ku Klux Klan that shows African
Americans in a demeaning way and is racist, Alsberg said.
“Our feeling and why we never shy away from films like this
is because films have to be studied and contextualized,” she
said, “and we learn from that experience.” Often, the
archive will receive a hold of films from another archive around
the world and hold a single screening of the film, possibly the
only time it will ever be seen by the public. “If you stay
home and watch the news you don’t necessarily get the other
person’s point of view,” Alsberg said.
“We’re allowing the creative forces of the world to air
their views in our theater.”
