Big changes afoot at the UCLA Film & Television Archive

The second biggest moving image archive in the U.S., after the Library of Congress, UCLA Film & Television Archive, will be going through some profound changes over the next few years.

The pressing tasks of modernizing the venerated Archive’s infrastructure, increasing its audience and support base and bringing it once and for all into the looming digital age, will be led by its new director, Professor Jan-Christopher Horak, a veteran film archivist and preservationist who has been working as a hands-on rescuer of lost cinema—in the U.S. and in Europe, for non-profits and Hollywood studios alike—for over three decades. Along the way he found time to teach on several continents, including an ongoing stint as Acting Director of UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies program, and to publish numerous books and articles in 11 languages.

“Film preservation has from its very beginnings been an international undertaking,” Horak wrote, in a recent essay, “with the UCLA Film & Television Archive now in the forefront.” In this sense he is close to the perfect candidate for the UCLA post. His career has sent him hop-scotching around the globe from Munich’s Filmmusuem to the labyrinthine film vaults of Moscow. He has had hands on management experience in the field: he has been the Senior Curator of the Film Department at George Eastman House and the director of the Munich Filmmuseum, and in 1998 he became Founding Director of Archives & Collections at Universal Studios. He is the first director in the Archive’s history to maintain a second office in the vault complex in Hollywood, dividing his time between ground zero of the collection and preservation effort and the academic, research and public exhibition headquarters in Westwood.

The most dramatic sections of Horak’s biography, however, involve his many proactive expeditions to rescue missing films, or missing pieces of films, in order to reconstruct classic works believed to be lost. Ensconced in his pied a terre deep inside the dim, maze-like and pin-drop quiet Archive film vault complex in Hollywood, Horak explains: “When I started out in the field in the mid-70s the first generation of archivists was still in place, and for the most part they were collectors. They saw their first goal as going out and finding films and just getting them into an archive where they could be protected. So I came up at a time when one of the big efforts was still the hunt, looking for things that critics had written about and that could no longer be seen. And the losses were in fact staggering: 95% of all American silent films were gone; 50% of all nitrate films made before 1950 were gone. There were actors and directors who were once important whose work was almost entirely unknown. That was my initial spur as an archivist.

“Another kind of hunt is, you have the film, but it’s incomplete, and you’re trying to find all surviving prints, negatives, scripts, censorship records—anything at all that will help you piece together something that is more complete. That can be very exciting, too, both in terms of finding the material and then trying to get it back into an intelligible form.

“Take as an example the 1925 G.W. Pabst film “The Joyless Street,” with a very young Greta Garbo, which was a reconstruction and restoration I did in 1997 when I was in Munich. One of the most exciting things was finding two reels of outtakes that contained five shots from a key scene, which allowed us to re-think the way the whole film had been edited. It was an incredible epiphany when we realized what we had.”

The kinds of reconstructions Horak finds so exciting are the first steps in a process of redeeming a lost film. The next stage is preservation, the deceptively simple act of keeping the footage, once found, squirreled away somewhere safe.

“The clarion call in the early days was ‘Nitrate Can’t Wait,’” Horak recalls. “It was thought that if we don’t migrate the images from nitrate to acetate or polyester stocks, which were thought to be more stable, it would all be gone in just a few years.”

Routinely used for commercial production until 1951, cellulose nitrate films were decomposing and became the focus of the most urgent preservation efforts of the 1970s and ’80s. But nitrate, it emerged, was not the culprit: “When we finally did aging tests on nitrate we discovered that the problem wasn’t the stock itself but the conditions under which it was being stored. If it is kept cold and dry, nitrate will last upwards of 1,000 years.”

The Race to Keep Pace with the Digital Revolution—and to Raise the Cash the Chase Requires

Jan-Christopher Horak: “At this point we don’t do any digital preservation,” Horak admits. “We don’t even use digital as an intermediate step for film preservation. The digital revolution has moved so fast that we are already behind the eight ball. And increasingly material will come to us that is born digital. A lot of what the studios are shooting now is digital. Video games are now an industry that is larger than the Hollywood movie industry. All government records are now being stored digitally. We in the field don’t have any experience with or even any models for how to deal with that material.

“And the problem is bigger than any one archive. The profession at present does not have a stable, archival digital preservation medium. The only solution right now is what is called migration, moving digital information from one carrier or format to another. Theoretically the copies are exact and there is no loss of information, but in practice digital artifacts get introduced. And a lot of the migration processes themselves are extremely expensive. The most recent reports suggest that it is ten times more expensive to archive digital material than analog material, not least because migration involves human labor, which as we know is the most expensive part of any process. This is a problem of monumental proportions.

The Support Base With a Larger Audience and a Branded Line of DVDs to Extend the Franchise

Jan-Christopher Horak: “My largest challenge at the moment is to broaden our base of support, to greatly increase our numbers of constituents. I’m giving myself basically five years to accomplish this. I want us to have our own DVD label, and eventually distribute through the Internet, so we are directly addressing not just the local community or the U.S. but the whole world. Given the situation we are in now with digital media and the Internet this is a very realistic prospect, and more than realistic, it is absolutely necessary.

“We especially need to bring in a great deal more of the money that’s hardest to raise; money for infrastructure and staff salaries. There is always money available for the dramatic, big preservation efforts. But without vast improvements in terms of staff and infrastructure, we won’t be able to carry out those heroic, big ticket restorations.

“One of my strategies for building a new audience is that we have to remember our core constituencies. For example, the University community, students and faculty. We must do a much better job of programming for that audience and of getting the word out to them.

“As far as the surrounding theatrical audience is concerned, what we have to recognize is that the mass audience that Hollywood, in its classic period, could count on, no longer exists. But we can appeal to lots of small audiences. We can program in cycles, again and again, targeting those specific audiences. The Iranian community is a perfect example, especially in the Westwood area. The Archive’s programming of Iranian cinema over the past two decades has been groundbreaking. But there many other ethnic audiences that we have done very little to reach: Japanese, Korean, East Indian and African American.

“One audience that some exhibition outfits have had some success with in recent years has been an edgier, hipper crowd, kind of the post-Tarantino audience. I consider myself to be part of that audience to some extent, so I have no problem trying to reach out to it. Right now I’m negotiating to get the collection of an exploitation studio, Troma, for the Archive. I’ve been a big fan of Troma for decades. On one level their stuff is gross and trashy and on another level it is incredibly sophisticated and politically astute. My first program when I became director of the Munich Filmmuseum in 1994 was a Troma retrospective—and to an audience that had never been shown anything even remotely like that. And what did I get for it? I got the front page of the Arts section of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which is the second largest newspaper in Germany. So it works!”

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