Reel History - Professor Robert Rosen

Robert Rosen RC ’63 built the world’s largest film and television archive outside of the Library of Congress. While American auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola were creating groundbreaking films, Rosen and his colleagues were working to preserve the cinematic influences that inspired filmmakers.

“I was giving a talk at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” Rosen recalls. “Onstage, I had Coppola, Eastwood, Lucas, Scorsese, and Spielberg. I put up some images from Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955). The movie was not a success; most people had never heard of it. I looked over at Steven Spielberg, and he said, ‘You know, that was the single most important influence on the making of E.T., and there were audible gasps in the audience. He talked about how all these movies of the past had influenced him. I turned to Scorsese, and said, ‘I saw more Night of the Hunter in your Cape Fear than in the original Cape Fear.’ And he acknowledged the debt.”

In the mid-1960s, equipped with degrees in political science and history from Rutgers and Stanford, Rosen was teaching history at the University of Pennsylvania. His academic interest had always been examining the junction where intellect and history merged, so when his colleague Stuart Samuels RC’61 approached him with the idea that they collaborate on a class that taught film as social and cultural history, he agreed. That decision led Rosen to become a leading film historian and preservationist, as dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, and director of the school’s Film and Television Archive.

“Film is a social and political force that helps shape our views on gender, race, and class. It is a cultural artifact to be passed onto the future,” Rosen says. “Five hundred years from now, when people look back to the 20th century and try to understand who we were, the documents that will have a special place for them would be the stories that we told through film.”

While Rosen appreciated the cultural value of film, he had no academic background in it, let alone film preservation, when he arrived in UCLA in 1974. “My approach was a sociology of knowledge approach, or relating cultural products to sociological circumstances in which they develop,” he says. As director of the school’s film archives, Rosen learned that nitrate film stock was chemically unstable and highly inflammable, and would eventually turn to dust. To complicate matters, all film made until the 1950s contained nitrate; the act of preserving these films was daunting.

In order to fund the preservation project, Rosen traveled to Rochester, New York, where representatives from Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, and the American Film Institute met to distribute funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. After pleading the importance of preserving UCLA’s film collection, the group awarded him with a $25,000 grant. Today, UCLA’s Film and Television Archives constitutes one of the world’s largest, with more than 220,000 film and television titles and 27 million feet of newsreel footage. Its contents are second in size only to the Library of Congress’s collection.

In addition to his duties at UCLA’s archive, Rosen also serves as chairman of the archivist advisory committee for the Film Foundation, which Martin Scorsese founded in 1990 to support “hands-on” film preservation and restoration work. The foundation recently developed an educational initiative, “The Story of Movies,” which is the first ever partnership of filmmakers and educators to create a curriculum that aims to help students better understand and interpret the language of film and visual images. Educators can contact the Film Foundation for curricula that instruct how to teach media literacy skills through films like To Kill a Mockingbird or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. (For information on the Film Foundation and its educational resources, visit http://www.film-foundation.org/default.cfm.)

Rosen continues to teach. His former students include Alex Cox (director of Repo Man and Sid & Nancy) and Alexander Payne (Academy Award-winning writer and director of Sideways). When Payne accepted a best director award from the L.A. Film Critics Association for Sideways, he said he learned everything about making new movies from watching old movies at UCLA. The man who introduced those old movies to Payne?Bob Rosen.

His course on film history and theory for graduate directors provides “a method of how to look at old movies to learn how to make newer movies. You see how directors found their ways of storytelling, and how they solved problems of storytelling, to find your own voice. It’s the notion of discovering the future by engaging in a creative dialogue with the past.”

His teaching duties extend across the Pacific Ocean. At the invitation of the Chinese government, Rosen was part of a group that traveled to teach the first course on film theory to Chinese university students in 1984. He has been returning to teach in China for more than 20 years. “One of my goals is to create a neutral terrain where the Chinese and U.S. film industries can come together and discuss difficult and complex issues.”

Between his work at UCLA, the Film Foundation, and teaching overseas, Rosen is a busy man, a fact that has not changed since his days at Rutgers. “I was president of the Targum council, and was very involved in an array of activities with the civil rights movement and some of the political movement in the early ’60s. I was the valedictorian of the Class of ’63. I have very positive memories of Rutgers?a very exciting place.” He credits Rutgers professors Eugene Meehan (political science) and Henry Winkler (history) for encouraging him to take risks in the creative and intellectual realms.

“If I had to make a list of a hundred directions that my career would take once I left Rutgers, anything having to do with movies wasn’t even on the list,” Rosen says. “Looking back now, from being involved in film when people looked down their nose at it, we’ve really come a long way. It’s an amazing evolution, and I feel very lucky.”

Keywords

"robert rosen" "alexander payne" "martin scorsese" 

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