Think you know rock ‘n’ roll? Think again.
The Crank film club, a graduate student society through the UCLA
Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, will be educating
rock fans (and even the musically curious) through a series of rock
films hosted at the James Bridges Theater at 8 p.m. on Wednesday
nights through the end of fall quarter.
The “Rock You Sinners!” series will present one
dozen films free of charge and will include custom-made program
notes. Many screenings will also feature guest speakers or
giveaways.
“Rock Baby ““ Rock It” and “Rock You
Sinners,” both made in 1957, will kick off the series
tonight, each exploring the early beginnings of rock
‘n’ roll.
“One is British and one is American, so they’re a
little bit different,” said Brian Hu, a graduate student in
the film, television and digital media department.
“It’ll be interesting to see how in the early days of
rock ‘n’ roll, film was already commenting on rock
‘n’ roll as a phenomenon, and the British did it a
little bit differently than the Americans.”
Both of these extremely rare films were found by Crank members
in the vast annals of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
“We are indebted to the UCLA film archive and their huge
help to us,” said The Crank President Savitri Young, also a
film graduate student. “At this point we feel like
we’re learning a lot from them, and they feel like
they’re really excited to provide whatever they can for
us.”
While achieving great renown for its assets and resources, the
UCLA film archive is unfortunately inaccessible to most UCLA
students.
“You can’t watch the original 35-mm or 16-mm prints
because there are no facilities to watch them with,” said Hu.
“And graduate students, or people in our club, think
it’s a little unfair that we don’t get to see them, so
this (club) is our way of accessing the archive.”
The Crank, which was founded in fall quarter of last year,
primarily aims to showcase the hidden treasures within the film
archive to the UCLA community by hosting screenings.
“Our goal is twofold,” Young said.
“We’re trying to show films that don’t get seen
or that don’t have a release on DVD or VHS ““ basically
films that you can’t see that our archive has. The other part
is that we as film students are getting a lot of experience in
actual programming. If you’re going to be teaching a film and
television class, you’re going to need to set up a syllabus
and set up screenings. They’re going to have to make sense
and tell a story in the series, which is what we’re trying to
learn to do.”
Past film series have included Westerns and the hodgepodge
collection “Sex, Terror and Tears.” This
quarter’s inspiration, however, stems from the three program
coordinators’ mutual interest in rock ‘n’
roll.
Hu, one of the coordinators, is also the editor of The
Crank’s distinctive program notes. All club members are
required to pen one set of notes for each film that is shown. The
two-sided handout usually includes a movie synopsis and stills, but
what sets them apart from any report is the depth of research and
additional material that may be presented.
Program notes researchers are especially interested in
censorship files. “If we’re talking about films made
from the ’30s to the ’50s, there was a censorship
committee ““ sort of like the MPAA,” Hu said.
“They gave producers notes on what they think should be taken
out, and we can see the original notes.”
“Every possible sort of paper trail record that exists for
that film in Los Angeles will be found by whoever is doing the
program notes,” Young said.
“The program notes really exemplify graduate-level
research and graduate-level writing which, should undergraduates
want to take advantage of, is a really great blueprint on how to do
film criticism.”
Thus, aside from the usual screening format, viewers discover
little-known history about each of the films.
“Opportunities like this add on to my list of reasons of
why I feel so privileged to be a UCLA student ““ being exposed
to avant-garde entertainment,” said Amy Yeh, a second-year
communication studies student. “It’ll be exciting to
learn something nearly the rest of the world doesn’t know
about rock ‘n’ roll legends and culture.”
While some of the films in the series are rare or obscure, many
of them are about well-known subjects and feature unusual
footage.
“We intentionally tried to program films with some that
people have heard of, like (Elvis Presley’s) “˜Blue
Hawaii’ with something like “˜Lord Love a Duck,’
which I’ve never heard of,” Hu said. “We also
have a variety of genres ““ we have concert films; we have
documentaries; we have narrative films.”
The programmers guarantee they’ll crank out a new and
exciting experience each and every Wednesday night.
“Ultimately, what we want is to not only have people who
are interested in this topic join us to watch these movies, but we
want people who are curious to become interested as well,”
Young said.