UCLA, Sundance to Create Independent Film Archive

A first-ever archive to collect and preserve independent films will be created at UCLA under a partnership announced Monday by the university and the Sundance Institute.

Funded initially by the Ahmanson Foundation, the collection--part of the UCLA Film and Television Archive--will include a wide range of works by non-mainstream filmmakers, as well as documentaries and selected newsreel material from UCLA’s Hearst Metrotone News Collection.

“Independent films have emerged as not only a unique art form, but as a significant means of chronicling our times,” said Robert Redford, creator of the Sundance Institute and its annual film festival. He said the Sundance Collection at UCLA “will ensure that this art form both endures and becomes an ongoing resource.”

UCLA’s archive director Bob Rosen said that once the archive is assembled--there are plans to purchase 40 films and seek donations of 150 more--it will be a “living” resource for filmmakers and the general public alike.

“Since an understanding of our cinematic heritage is integral to the work of contemporary filmmakers, we will make this vital collection of independent films available for their study,” he said. Screenings will be held for the public, he said, “because independent film can better help us understand ourselves as Americans.”

Though preservation is an issue for all movies, independent films--those not made by major movie studios--are especially vulnerable to being lost. Ken Brecher, executive director of the Sundance Institute, called them “orphan films. They had no parents. Nobody owned them. No one cared enough to preserve them.”

Last summer, Brecher said, director Allison Anders was at the Sundance Institute for a workshop. He was horrified to learn that she doesn’t have prints of her own work.

“She couldn’t put her hands on all her films,” he said of the director of “Gas Food Lodging” and “Mi Vida Loca.” “Extraordinary moments in the history of independent film don’t exist. These films are not 100 years old. They’re 10 years old.”

The UCLA Film and Television Archive is one of the nation’s most comprehensive archives for the preservation, restoration, exhibition and study of film and television programming. It contains more than 220,000 motion picture and television programs and newsreels, making its collection second only to that of the Library of Congress.