What would happen if a movie director were given free reign inside a film vault, with thousands upon thousands of titles? What would he choose? What would he say?
These may not be questions that would trouble most people. But they did trouble the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
The result is the archive’s “Curated By…” film series, which began its first run this past weekend and will continue over the next several weeks at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater.
Throughout the year, filmmakers will be invited to browse through the archive using a handy Internet catalogue and pick the movies they’d like to screen for an audience.
To start things off, Canadian auteur Guy Maddin has chosen seven films, a number of which are so obscure they have not even had a DVD release.
“Guy is such an obsessive cineaste,” said Mimi Brody, associate programmer for the archive. “His work is very much informed by classic films and the cinema prior to the establishment of the Production Code.”
Born in Winnipeg, Canada, the 51-year-old director said he lived a childhood he considers almost dreamlike.
“Everything in the outside world seemed unreal to me,” he said.
“My sense of the world was very storybook. Movies, news reels, bedtime stories ““ they all blurred together.”
Maddin has since gone on to make such eclectic and bizarre films such as the surreal “Tales from the Gimli Hospital,” his first long feature, and the Great Depression sort-of musical “The Saddest Music in the World,” starring Isabella Rossellini.
His newest film, “The Brand Upon the Brain,” released in 2006, is a full-fledged silent movie, showing his love for the pre-sound era, a love which, coincidentally, formed his interest in the archive.
“I had seen the (UCLA Film and Television Archive) credited in various silent movies,” said Maddin, noting that UCLA has been involved with the restoration and preservation of many films of the silent era.
“I pictured it as this amazing fortress full of treasures. The idea of an archive with about 150,000 titles spanning 100 years of film is absolutely mouth-watering.”
In many ways, selecting the seven films proved a process of personal discovery for Maddin, who unearthed such movies as Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Godless Girl,” a sound-silent hybrid detailing the travails of a religious-atheist couple inside an oddly monstrous reform school.
DeMille’s extravaganza, which opened the series last Friday, was new for the filmmaker, who had heard about it but never seen it.
“This is a tremendous opportunity to show these films to the world, and myself,” he said.
In addition to the array of rare films, the series will bring viewers to UCLA’s new Billy Wilder Theater.
“This is an opportunity for students to discover not just new films, but also our new theater,” said Brody.
Tonight, Maddin will present a talk at the Otis College of Art and Design and will return to UCLA on March 9 and March 17 to screen his remaining films.
This Friday, in particular, will showcase one of Maddin’s other great cinematic obsessions: film noir.
Director Max Ophüls is up first for the double-bill with his film “Caught,” starring James Mason and Robert Ryan.
Following that is Nicholas Ray’s “On Dangerous Ground,” a film which Maddin, who wrote introductory notes for each screening, describes as “a story about an out-of-control cop who is sent to cool off in a snowy outpost … and there meets up with a pair of out-of-control adversaries: a child killer and the child’s father.”
Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan star in the film.
“I’m a big film noir fan ““ the atmosphere, the style,” said Maddin. “It makes no attempt at being realistic. It’s an art form.”
On March 17, Frank Borzage’s melodrama “Secrets,” with Mary Pickford and Leslie Howard, and Leo McCarey’s “Make Way for Tomorrow,” with Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi, will be screened, finishing off the first installment of the “Curated By…” series.