American Cinematographer - November 2001 - 112

elements from several studios. MIAS

and academic coursework in the

to gain addi¬
practical experience through
internships at the labs, film vaults,
regional archives and production
facilities in the Los Angeles area. For

is an
option within the university's M.A.
in Film Studies; it combines practical
training at the archive, which special¬
izes in small-gauge film preservation,

GETTING INTO
THE ACT

Most people working in film
restoration

today learned the
craft by apprenticing with the
handful of experts in the field, taking
a low-level job at a film lab or archive
and working their way up. Indeed,
when the Librarian of Congress
conducted a comprehensive study of
of American film preserva¬
tion in 1993, opportunities for
formal instruction in film restora¬
the

U.K. The one-year program

School of

English and American

Studies. Courses include field

trips to
major archives in the region, such as
the Imperial War Museum, the
and the Scottish Film Archive. For

NYU has formalized

more

information, visit the Web site:

www.uea.ac.uk.

Students

at

the

Eastman

House's L. Jeffrey Selznick School of
Film Preservation receive intensive,

practice-based instruction from staff

International Federation of Film

dates back

offering training sessions about

once a

year.

The field

began to broaden in
1996, when the George Eastman
House in Rochester, New York
opened the L. Jeffrey Selznick School
of Film Preservation. It is about

to

broaden

In concert with the Eastman

Selznick
School, the
Department of Cinema Studies at

tion/preservation were scarce; the
University of East Anglia in Norwich,
England, was offering the only
degree program in film archiving
anywhere in the world, and the

were

more information, visit the Web site:
www.cinema.ucla.edu/MIAS.html.

National Film and Television Archive

state

Archives (FIAF) and the Association
of Moving Image Archivists (AMLA)

students will be able

tional

at

the museum's Motion Picture

House's

in film archiving
that will begin
enrolling students in fall 2002. The
department has offered instruction
in archive theory and practice on an
intermittent basis for several years

through

of Modern Art, which
of the largest public film

Museum

newsreels and

archives in the country.
master's program will be

program

to

productions

1894. The one-year

includes guest lectures by a

variety of experts representing differ¬
ent aspects of the restoration busi¬
ness, and field trips to other archival
facilities in the region.
Eastman
House
holdings
include German and French films of
the nitrate

(pre-1950) era, classic
American films of the silent and
sound

holds

with the

an arrangement

Department, whose collection of
features, shorts, documentaries,
amateur

two-year

a

master's program
and preservation

one

The new
structured

that students spend one year
studying film history and theory at
NYU, and one year learning archival
practice at the Selznick School.
so

Two
years
ago,
NYU
purchased the collection of William
K. Everson, a longtime Cinema
Studies professor at the university
and an indefatigable film collector.
Everson amassed one of the largest
private collections of British dramas

further: following East
Anglia's example, New York
University and the University of
California-Los Angeles are launching
degree programs that provide an

more

and comedies outside of the U.K.

information, visit the Web site:

before he died in 1996. Most of the

www.eastman.org.

Everson Collection is housed at the

intellectual framework for archival

UCLA

Eastman House. For

in

tion,

nars

lished.

University of East Anglia
in England launched its graduate
program in film archiving in 1990.
The university is home to the East
Anglian Film Archive, one of the
largest regional film collections in the
108 November 2001

(which

Technicolor

practice in addition to teaching the
technical skills required.
Plenty of opportunities still
exist for apprenticing at film labs, of
course, but following are brief
descriptions of other avenues now
open to aspiring film preservation¬
ists. They are listed chronologically
according to when they were estab¬
The

periods and the MGM Studio

Collection

Studies

includes

negatives). For

began offering semi¬
Moving Image Archive

(MIAS) in 1998, and the

university is formalizing a two-year
master's program that will begin
enrolling students in fall 2003. MIAS
seminars, which are currently offered
at a rate

of three per year, are open to

call

the

more

informa¬

Cinema

Studies

Department at (212) 998-1600.
Also worth noting is AMIA's
scholarship program, which was
inaugurated in 1997. Under the
merit-based program, the Mary
Pickford Foundation, Sony Pictures

graduate students in the Department

Entertainment

and

Consolidated

of Film and Television and the

Film Industries (CFI)

lab each fund a

Department of Information Studies.

$4,000 scholarship; and Kodak
provides a $10,000 Kodak/AMIA
Fellowship. For more information,

Students work with staff in the
UCLA Film and Television

whose

Archive,

holdings include Hearst

Metrotone

Newsreels, Paramount

films released from the late 1920s

through 1948 and nitrate film

visit

the

Web

site:

Rachael K.

Bosley

AMIA

www.amianet.org.
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American Cinematographer - November 2001

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