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West Coast Xanadu: UCLA's Extraordinary Film Archives
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14845 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1988 |
2,118 Words |
| Author
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Lawrence O' Toole
Lawrence O'Toole writes for Entertainment Weekly and a number
of other national publications. |
Not even Citizen Kane's Charles Foster Kane could boast such a stash of treasures in his Xanadu as UCLA'S film archives. Begun in 1968, the archives now hold approximately two hundred thousand films and TV and radio programs, and twenty-seven million feet of newsreel film. Those vaults hold, you could say, an entire cultural legacy.
In the case of feature films, some are classics that otherwise would have decomposed, left to deteriorate into handfuls of dust in various storage vaults around the world. Until 1951, unstable and highly flammable nitrate, which eventually decomposes, was the stock used for film; preservation Involves transferring the nitrate to safety film, which can last two hundred years so. Considering that over 80 percent of silent films are now lost to us (and 50 percent of films made before 1950), the importance of UCLA's preservation program cannot be stressed nearly enough.
Group Theater Screen Tests
From July into September this past year at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) a fair representation of UCLA's work over the last decade has been on view. Saved!, as the series was titled, not only highlighted the work of known directors, it also exposed directors who should be better known. There were shorts, too, and cartoons, and newsreels, propaganda films, Laurel and Hardy speaking Spanish (the Hal Roach studios made separate language versions of its films), and even Group Theater (Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, et al.) screen tests.
For the film lover, Saved! Was an orgy; for others, living in an age that rapes its filmic tradition by colorizing old movies, it might have been an education.
This current year, in fact, has been somewhat heartening in terms of film preservation. Columbia Pictures, for example, will release the full never-released four-hour-plus version of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia this fall. (An original 222-minute version was Lean's own cut and was released in 1962, but during the international release in 1971 the film was pared down to 187 minutes and much of this original negative lost.) This fall will also see the fully restored version of Kon Ichikawa's 1964 film Olympiad, originally released in a dramatically shortened and dubbed version.
And opening in New York in November (the rest of the country in January) is the recently rediscovered We the Living, from Ayn Rand's novel,
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