One day, you’re wondering why you can’t watch a lesbian movie from the 90’s that you’ve always loved, then another day it’s available to rent. Or maybe you’re introduced to a gay movie that feels like it was made for you and yet for some reason you hadn’t heard of it until now. These are common experiences for even the casual queer cinephile and one institution pops up again and again in conjunction with these releases: the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Films like Desert Hearts and The Watermelon Woman had a reputation of importance among queer film people, but their ubiquitousness is due to the hard work of the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Outfest Legacy Project.
It was such a pleasure speaking with the director of the archive, May Hong HaDuong, about her work. With the recent layoffs at the Academy archive, as well as the recent trend of streaming services deleting their art, it’s more important than ever to assert the importance of film and television preservation.
Drew: I did just want to start by thanking you for the work that you do. Between the L.A. Rebellion and the Outfest Legacy Project, the UCLA Film and Television Archive has been responsible not just for preserving but for introducing me to so many of the films I cherish most. And I think even film people don’t realize the scope. Some work that we think of as canonical even ten years ago wasn’t as celebrated or even available and is now because of the work that you do. So I just wanted to start by thanking you.
May: Thank you. Thanks for talking about film preservation and reflecting on its impact. It’s really important as you pointed out, so I appreciate it.
Drew: Using the recent restoration of High Art as an example, can you walk through the process from selecting a movie to its eventual home video and streaming release?
May: Film preservation really takes a village. Particularly for independent cinema, after a film is made and distributed that filmmaker is often on to their next creative journey. Then years down the line, filmmakers, distributors, or curators will say, what ever happened to that film? or I have something in my garage or I’m looking for this. What we’ve found at UCLA — the largest moving image collection associated with a university in the world — is that it often takes decades for there to be a real call to say this was and is such an important film and we need to make sure it’s accessible.
As archivists, our role is to bring back to life that material for access and for audiences. The journey for High Art started with a phone call from Marcus Hu, a distributor and an incredible advocate in queer cinema, and he said we need to restore High Art. That’s how it started. The work then involved looking for where the original elements were which we were able to locate. And it also required a number of partners and collaborators. Film preservation can be quite expensive. Sometimes $1 per frame which means depending on the project it can be over a $100,000 to restore a feature length film that was shot on 35mm. So when we’re doing this we try our best to find the elements that take us back to the original release of that film. If we can find an original negative that’s great, but we may have to find something else, or work with a print. We inspect it, any issues that relate to sound or picture are identified, and we ensure repairs are made. We have specialists here in Los Angeles who we are very grateful to be able to work with. And when there’s a filmmaker who is alive or a cinematographer who is alive, they can be part of the process and ensure that it meets the original vision.
Filmmaking is collaborative. You can’t generally make a film on your own. And for High Art, Lisa was just coming out of film school and brought in all these women to work on the film and changed the lives of many. It really was a collaborative act to make that film under her vision. And our restoration modeled that spirit of collaboration as well. Jeff Kusama Hinte, who was the producer, worked with Lisa and Marcus. They really helped steward the process and part of my role was to bring partners on who could help be part of the restoration and also bring in resources to make that happen.
It takes preservation elements, archival elements, resources, people, expertise, to make all that happen and that’s generally what the archive is responsible for when we come onto a project.
Drew: How do rights factor into that?
May: From what I understand with High Art, the rights turned back over to Lisa and Jeff at that 25 year mark. The film now is 26 years old or so and they realized the film wasn’t accessible. I was shocked when Marcus mentioned this film to me. I was like, what are you talking about? But then I googled it and everything was terrible quality and it was clear that there was so much necessary work that could be done audio-wise and picture-wise.
Independent artists and creatives who have spent so much of their soul and energy making work for people to see rightfully have a desire to be able to maintain their legacy. Film archives are responsible for teaching artists or rights holders how to do that and maintain a collection. The reason for preservation is access. This is a visual medium and a film is not alive on a shelf, it’s not alive in a film can. You have to work to make it accessible. So we need to work with rights holders, we need to work with distributors, and that’s where their expertise comes into play either visually making sure that it meets their needs or legally that we can do the work to make it accessible.
We’ll restore something and then the distributor or rights holder will do the work to help get it out. It’s a marathon. We’re doing some of that work together, passing the baton on, and then the baton continues. That’s what archival work really is. I’m not here to save a film by myself — there are so many people involved. We’re only here as stewards with the work we offer and it’s someone else’s job after.
Drew: How different is the technical work between something like High Art made in the 90’s and the work that you preserve from the 30’s?
May: It can vary. Restoration can be very bespoke, not just depending on the filmmaking process, but based on what exists and how the material was stored. We’ve worked on some more recent independent films that were stored in poor conditions and have an incredible amount of deterioration. And we’ve encountered films from the 30’s that were still gorgeous. The expertise that’s brought is really about assessing the different types of damage and deterioration and shrinkage that is present. It isn’t one size fits all. You can’t just scan it and run it through a program. There’s an incredible amount of detective work required and even putting things together where one reel might have different characteristics than another. It might activate a different technical need.
The biggest issue for film preservation isn’t the 30’s vs. the 90’s. It’s pre-digital vs. digital. One of the biggest concerns around restoration I have is when filmmakers, particularly from that late 90s/early 00s era, were maybe shooting on film and then finishing digitally. A lot of that work resulted in not necessarily keeping a photochemical element. The master might only be available through an HD element that was the best scan they could get at the time, but now you could get something better. Any technology change creates opportunity for risk, so in that shift you have different technical processes that can require a lot of time and resources for restoration.
Another concern I have is digital asset management requires a lot more stewardship. A photochemical element just needs a cool and dry space. Try to play a floppy disk from the mid 80’s and you may have some issues, but put a film from the 50’s on a flatbed or in a projector and you might have better luck.
Drew: That’s really interesting to me. I think a lot of people don’t have a grasp on the dangers of digital archival work. What does it look to archive more recent work that was shot digitally?
May: Any moving image archive that is collecting contemporary films is grappling with the questions of digital preservation. At UCLA we work with filmmakers who are often giving us raw uncompressed files, unencrypted DCPs, and ProRes files — many different types of digital forms. We’re trying to get as close to the original release as possible, but the file sizes can be really massive so you still have to curate the collection. It’s almost an invisible risk when you’re working with digital because the storage needs are significant but unlike a film vault where you put something on a shelf and can visualize the remaining shelves, with digital it can quickly get to be an issue if you’re not curating well. So you still need to apply the same principles as an analog collection.
There are different tiers of storage to ensure that digital assets are preserved. And it’s important because there are horror stories of filmmakers who have shot digitally and then lost their hard drive and only have a ProRes file because they lost their production files. We’re actually working on a film right now in collaboration with the Academy and Sundance and some other partners, By Hook or By Crook.
Drew: Oo amazing.
May: That project is being restored digitally and was shot digitally so we’re recreating some of the film based on the timelines and going back even to the original files. Thankfully the filmmakers and producer have been really good about keeping those materials, but it has still required a lot of work to bring those back to life. That’s an exciting thing we’re doing and the Academy is going to premiere it soon in December.
With independent films and queer cinema, particularly anything at the margins, a lot of the filmmakers may not have become the biggest names but the work they made is still really important. They might have only made one film and moved on and those films are incredibly at risk, because they aren’t necessarily able to take care of their material. It might just be on a hard drive that’s ten years old.
Drew: Yeah, it requires resources for the UCLA archive to maintain the material, but it also requires resources for an independent filmmaker. And if you’re just starting out, you most likely don’t know if what you’re making is worth keeping all the raw files. Or you might not even have the resources to do that.
May: And this is something I think about because I view filmmakers as archivists of their creative imagination. And with digital it’s easy to shoot so much, to have all these files and materials, and not everything needs to be preserved. So when we work with filmmakers, we try to show how outtakes from a documentary might be quite important, but outtakes from a narrative film with someone walking through a door ten times maybe not. With film, there wasn’t as much of an emphasis on that because it was expensive, so there wasn’t as much of that material being amassed. The curation of those digital aspects is really important.
Drew: Thank you for getting into the details with me. The last thing I want to ask you is maybe a daunting question. From your time at UCLA, what film has been the most exciting discovery for you?
May: I’m in a moment of reflection right now because 20 years ago I stepped on campus to study film preservation. At that time this world was so different and also I didn’t understand all that went into film archiving. But I had such a curiosity and interest in this field and this work. I would go to queer film festivals and I would wonder what happened to these films afterward. It’s great that I could go to a Barbara Hammer screening, but where were these Barbara Hammer films afterward? That’s what inspired me to think about long term preservation. And as a queer woman of color, I think of archives and the work that we do as heirlooms that we’re passing onto this next generation.
The most exciting discovery for me was a film called We’re Alive that was made at UCLA in the 70’s. It was done collectively by women who designed and led a video workshop with incarcerated women at CIW, the California Institute for Women. It was distributed by a feminist distributor in the 70’s and then it basically disappeared and no one saw it after that. The filmmakers told the warden at the time that they were going to shoot for the workshop but they’d erase the tapes. And then they didn’t. So these stories of incarcerated women traveled around a bit and then it fell off the map.
About ten years ago there were some scholars who were interested in the film and asked UCLA about it. I wasn’t even there at the time but I heard about this search for this film. Finally some elements were found and UCLA began the work of thinking about restoring it but they didn’t know who the filmmakers were and the filmmakers hadn’t put their names in the credits. And they didn’t know the women featured in the film either. But by serendipity we found them and we were able to restore the film. We screened it with people who were formally incarcerated at that same prison to talk about the issues that are still present for incarcerated individuals today. And last year the film was named by the National Film Registry. It was an unseen film that scholars, archivists, and community members rallied together to make sure it could be seen and preserved and the Library of Congress said this is one of 25 films that we feel has made an impact.
I’m so proud of the team at UCLA for championing this work and the folks who really saw why this type of film was so important. And now the film is online. There are blogs written by folks who were formally incarcerated talking about the film. The Q&A is online. It’s an example of the impact films can make on communities and collective visual memory and the work of archives to extend that legacy.
This post was originally published on here
