It may be ironic, but one of the best-kept motion picture
secrets at UCLA is also the biggest film collection not only on
campus but also at any university in the United States.
The UCLA Film and Television Archive, through its outreach arm
““ the Archive Research and Study Center ““ offers
students unique access to its vast collection of movies, television
shows, newsreels, trailers and pretty much everything else you can
think of that would fit under the heading “moving
picture.” At ARSC, students can have titles from the archive
pulled for free individual viewing.
“We’re the access point for material held by the
archive,” said Mark Quigley, the archive’s reference
and outreach coordinator. “We only ask that all requests be
framed with a research purpose.”
The commitment to research keeps the archive alive, but it
doesn’t mean that you have to be a film student to watch one
of the 220,000 titles available through ARSC that span from
Hollywood classics such as “The Godfather” or
“Casablanca” all the way down to the most obscure
television series you can think of. While Quigley said ARSC
wouldn’t be willing to pull episodes of “The Brady
Bunch” just for entertainment, it would pull them for a
personal study of family dynamics during the 1970s.
Additionally, ARSC provides students with access to the News and
Public Affairs Collection, which includes about 100,000 news
broadcasts from 1985 to the present, as well as the Vanderbilt
Television News Archive, which offers a database of news abstracts
dating back to 1968.
“Preservation without access is pointless. (The archive
is) making sure our moving image history is preserved, but also
that people are seeing it,” Quigley said.
According to the archive’s Web site, ARSC arranges for
about 14,000 individualized viewings of archive titles per year.
That may seem like a lot, but considering the sheer number of
titles available as well as the number of people who are at UCLA on
a daily basis, the number could easily be higher. Still, the
cultural benefits for those who take advantage of it can be
immeasurable.
“It’s how I learned film history,” said David
Pendleton, a programmer at the archive and a UCLA alumnus.
Pendleton remembers watching films individually in the library
as well as attending the archive’s frequent film screenings
in the James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall and credits the
collection to expanding his knowledge of and interest in film.
Now he helps organize many of the Bridges screenings, which are
presented in a series of programs that include various films all
with a common association or theme. For example, the
archive’s fall schedule includes a series of Mexican films
from the 1930s through the 1990s as well as three retrospectives of
foreign filmmakers, including Luchino Visconti, whom Pendleton
called the “Italian David Lean.”
According to Pendleton, part of the archive’s importance
stems from its devotion to screening films with which the public
may not already be familiar.
“You may need to stretch yourself a little bit in terms of
watching a film in black-and-white or a film that was made before
your parents were born,” Pendleton said. “But
that’s film-going.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that any sort of popular
cinema can only be found in ARSC. The opportunity for
individualized viewings coupled with the presence of public
screenings give the archive a public image that any students
interested in film can access easily. And the screenings in Melnitz
aren’t all foreign, either.
“We try and do a little bit of everything,”
Pendleton said. “We just did a program of rock
‘n’ roll films. We certainly value popular cinema.
Different programs have different audiences attached to them. Once
people get into the habit (of coming), maybe they’ll try
something they’re not already aware of.”