In a Hollywood age in which some of the biggest headlines revolve around post-3D conversion and advancements in motion-capture technology, it’s sometimes hard to imagine a time where sprocket holes and the millimeter width of film were the technical cornerstones of the cinematic landscape.
Today marks the beginning of a monthlong programming window into that history of moving images with the start of the UCLA Festival of Preservation, presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Among those on the bill for the March screenings at the UCLA Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater is a John Steinbeck documentary called “The Forgotten Village,” a 1970 film “Wanda” from director Barbara Loden and a slew of decades-old television programs, many of which are being publicly shown by the archive for the first time.
Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, said the festival that happens every other year allows the team of preservationists to prepare enough material for four weeks of screenings.
“Sometimes it takes half a year just to do the research to find out where all the elements of a film are, whether we have the best elements or whether there are fragments in other places,” Horak said.
Shannon Kelley, head of public programs for the UCLA Film & Television Archive, explained that through the programming process and beyond, the target audience is not just film buffs, but the general American public.
“The selection process has a lot to do with posterity and future audiences. We’re hoping that we’ve saved a piece of Americana or world cinema culture forever. In many cases, these are the films’ last chance to be rescued,” Kelley said.
In addition to the revelatory value of the screenings, notable actors and actresses involved with the various presentations will be there to answer questions.
The list of other presenters will be the men and women who did the work on display. For Kara Molitor, a second-year graduate student in moving image archive studies, one of the biggest draws will be seeing the actual preservationists present the results of their handiwork.
“Listening to their process, seeing their film, making sure that what we saw was as close to what people saw when it first came out, it’s the best point of having the festival,” Molitor said.
Tickets to all remaining available screenings are free for UCLA students, a policy instituted by Horak during his stint as director. Both he and Kelley stressed the benefits of high attendance from the UCLA population.
“When we have more students present, we have more conversations, so we’re proud to do that,” Kelley said.
A special selection of episodes from “This is Your Life,” the 1950s series of TV tales of real-life people produced by Ralph Edwards, is on the festival schedule. Consistent with the festival’s aims to preserve history as well as film, these episodes all center around Holocaust survivors.
For the “This is Your Life” episodes, archive staff have implemented a relatively new digital method of restoring ’50s-era broadcast copies, called kinescopes, to their original picture quality.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, the introduction of digital elements into this process does not mean the end of preservation work. Despite the fact that hard-drive databases may seem more permanent and durable than its celluloid predecessors, Horak explained that the average shelf life for a digitized file is about 18 months. Even with the right tools, a 10- to 15-year maximum on supported file types means that physical copies of originals, negatives and reprints will be the archival method of choice for future generations of Festival of Preservation attendees.
“If you want to preserve something long-term, you have to put it back on film,” Horak said. “I can put it away into our state-of-the-art vault, and I can go back in a hundred years and it’ll look fine.”