With more than 400,000 holdings in its collection, the UCLA Film and Television Archive stands as the second-largest motion picture archive in the country, behind only the Library of Congress.

The enchanting thing about this year’s – as any year’s – nominations for the Academy Award for best documentary short is how intrinsically humanistic they are.

Thomas Pynchon, the notoriously reclusive writer of such postmodern classics as “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” has built a career off novels deemed too dense, idiosyncratic and cerebral to ever be translated to the screen effectively.

Bohemian artists and beatniks flocked to San Francisco in droves during the 1950s and 1960s. At the height of this wave of migration, legendary avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner made the city his home and began creating filmic assemblages that juxtaposed snippets of archived footage set to music.

At the height of Andy Warhol’s fame in the late 1960s, artists, poets and musicians crowded his New York City studio space, called “The Factory.” In a haze of smoke, rock groups like the Velvet Underground played as 16 mm films made by Warhol and his peers were projected onto screens.

Figures covered in dust and ash, writhing: arms, legs, backs, torsos exposed, transfixed and transposed in time and space. A back-and-forth banter between a man and a woman begins on the audio track as brief newsreel footage of Hiroshima’s wreckage flashes across the screen.

This post was updated on Oct. 2 at 3:25 p.m.
In a darkened gallery, beads of light fall on various pieces of clothing, both old and new.

Sultry, sexy, her voice famously husky and effortlessly cool, Lauren Bacall epitomized the very definition of “movie starlet” for more than half a century. With her passing on Tuesday at the age of 89, Hollywood has lost one of its greatest actresses.

The golden hour in filmmaking is a brief and fleeting time of day directly before sunrise and after sunset when the sky is painted in lush yellows and warm reds.

From the smoke-filled cafes of 1920s Paris, where his landmark film “Un Chien Andalou” was concocted with Salvador Dalí, to the poverty-stricken slums of 1950s Mexico, Luis Buñuel crafted a variety of masterpieces that would cement his status as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers.