“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
—William Faulkner
Like the city of Los Angeles, UCLA has always been focused on the future. Discovery, innovation, risk-taking: All of these are driven by a quest to lead the world toward what’s next. In medicine, business, technology and the arts, our scholars, researchers and budding entrepreneurs reside on the cutting edge. New things start here.
Yet across campus, major programs are also devoted to preserving the past, to caring for and documenting what has come before so that we can better understand ourselves and what may lie ahead, while leaving a record for those who come after us. Cultural heritage is a timeless treasure, a window into our shared history; keeping it alive promotes diversity and fosters a sense of belonging. “It’s also cultural understanding, a way we can be kinder to each other by learning about each other and ourselves,” says May Hong HaDuong M.A. ’06, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. “It’s an incredible bridge to cultures and people.”
Every day, the challenges of age, neglect, decay, urbanization, climate change and modernization add urgency to the need for conservation — a mission to prolong the life of these repositories of stories and secrets. The staff who work in these programs are in a race against time. Their first charge, says UCLA Library head of preservation and conservation Consuela “Chela” Metzger? “Do no harm.”
Hooray for (Saving) Hollywood
The UCLA Film & Television Archive — the nation’s second-largest moving-image collection after the Library of Congress — celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. In 1965, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS) partnered with the UCLA Theater Arts Department to create the ATAS/UCLA Television Library. Three years later, a few theater arts graduate students and staff members began rescuing copies of movies the studios were about to discard, including flammable nitrate prints made before 1951. The plan was to add these to the television recordings already in storage. That effort is what professor emeritus Howard Suber M.A. ’66, Ph.D. ’68 calls “the buccaneer era”: The ragtag group simply loaded films into rented trucks and hauled them to a vault in downtown L.A., hoping to scout out funds to preserve them.
The collection grew quickly, with movie studios happy to unload their dusty holdings. The films were eventually moved to the Technicolor Vault in Hollywood. Though this vault was built to be nitrate-safe, there was no air conditioning for temperature and humidity control.
Letting films fade is a “cultural crime,” said the archive’s first director, faculty emeritus and historian, the late Robert Rosen. Moving images, an art form that began over a century ago, are not simply for entertainment, he said, but rather “historical documents that embody collective narratives.” Yet approximately half of the films produced before 1951 — including 80% of features made between 1912 and 1930 — no longer exist.
By 2002, UCLA was not only sounding the alarm bells but rallying to answer them. The staff added experts in both conservation and restoration. The projection booth in Melnitz Hall’s Bridges Theater was renovated to be nitrate-safe, enabling students, scholars and the public to view pre-1951 films without danger of fire; the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television began offering an academic program in moving image archive studies.
Move the slider back and forth to see before-and-after digital color correction images from the Digital Lab. (Viewing in Safari? Clear your history/cache.)
Comparisons of two-color Technicolor images, nitrate film vs non-nitrate film, from the 1932 film Doctor X
Bruce Lee appears in an ABC-TV promo for The Green Hornet (1966), before and after color correction.
Claude (1963, UCLA Animation Workshop) before and after color correction
Today, there has been a revolutionary transition to digital technology. But the archive, now part of the UCLA Library, remains committed to preserving analog images on film. The university now boasts the largest nitrate-safe storage facility on the West Coast: The state-of-the art, environmentally controlled building in Santa Clarita was made possible by the generosity of the Packard Humanities Institute and film lover David Packard. The newsreel collection held there is a collaboration with the Packard Humanities Institute. With the move from the Technicolor Vault, DaHuong says, much of the deterioration of prints has been slowed down or completely stopped.
“Film preservation and restoration is incredibly detail oriented. We often go back to the original elements if we can find them,” she says. “Then we need a really detailed workflow and budget to bring the art form back to life in the way it was intended. If we do it right, we’re part of the lifespan of a film that not only reflects the filmmaker’s vision but makes the material accessible for audiences beyond our lifetimes.”
Click on the “Read More” button to take an eye-popping photographic journey through these incredible preservation efforts.
Speaking Up to Save the World’s Disappearing Languages
Language communicates culture. Wisdom. Traditional knowledge and artistic expression of a people, place and time. When a language disappears, much disappears with it. Yet according to the United Nations, one of the world’s roughly 6,000 indigenous languages vanishes every two weeks. Databases of the languages of the world show the status of each.
“A language is endangered,” says UCLA linguistics professor Pamela Munro, “if it is losing speakers faster than it is gaining them — more speakers are dying than new speakers are being born and learning the language.” Some of the languages still being spoken are “critically endangered,” she says.
The fear is that eventually a language will not be spoken at all and, over time, not even remembered. Some may ask: So what? Here’s what: It’s a devastating loss for people whose heritage and ancestral knowledge are wrapped up in their native tongue.
In linguistic fieldwork, scholars document endangered languages with the assistance of native speakers if they can be located; if not, they lean into archival materials to develop educational tools and collect stories told in that language.
Munro, who studies Native American languages, has been most involved with the Chickasaw language, which is primarily spoken in Oklahoma. She works in collaboration with the Chickasaw Nation, one of the country’s largest tribes; with a co-author from the nation, she has published a grammar book and dictionary for educational use. She also studies several languages spoken in the Los Angeles area, including Garifuna, the tongue of the Garifuna people from Central America. She teaches a community class on Garifuna, using a book that grew out of one she wrote for a UCLA linguistics course.
Listen to audio clips of Garifuna being spoken by Ben Flores and Martha Martinez-Ciego. Both are originally from Belize, and now assist UCLA linguistics professor Pamela Munro in preserving this ancient Central American language.
Pántatina sarágua láu nerérun Garífuna.
Translation: I’m really proud of my Garifuna language.
Mégei wamuti sún ídemuei lé guwára bei lún abíhani lún larédahouniwa dimúrei Garífuna.
Translation: We need all the help we can get to preserve the Garifuna language.
Other UCLA faculty study languages in other parts of the world, such as Ghana and South Asia. Even lesser-studied languages have critical contributions to make to linguistic theory, says linguistics professor Ben Eischens, who studies San Martín Peras Mixtec, spoken in Western Oaxaca, Mexico, where Eischens frequently travels to work with native speakers. While the language is still spoken and taught, it’s threatened by a pattern of increasing bilingualism with Spanish and by its speakers’ migration to the U.S. and other parts of Mexico, since migrants tend to adopt the language of their new home.
Losing a language is not inevitable, Eischens says, but rather a case of “a non-immediate risk.” Which makes it critical to maintain and revitalize these endangered languages while we can if we are to hold onto the history and culture they carry.
Melodies, Echoing Through Time
Music says so much. It can reach beyond language barriers and bring together people of wildly different backgrounds. It celebrates diversity. It keeps traditions alive. It’s a critical form of ephemeral cultural heritage, passed down aurally.
UCLA’s world-renowned Ethnomusicology Archive, established in 1961, is dedicated to the study of living musical traditions around the world; its collection includes more than 150,000 audio, video, print and photographic items that document every form of musical expression. Six to eight collections are added every year, says archive director and ethnomusicology professor Helen Rees, with these consisting mostly of recordings made in the field by UCLA scholars working around the world.
Representing every continent except Antarctica, UCLA’s ethnographic sound archive is the second largest in the nation, outside of the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress. Part of the Department of Ethnomusicology in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, the archive preserves and makes accessible over 60 years’ worth of audio and video recordings, as well as lectures by UCLA faculty and visiting scholars and performers.
Obviously, not everything can be kept. Archivists rely on scholars to prioritize. They also partner with local communities, such as the Los Angeles Filipino American community, whose members recommend what should be saved and documented from their own traditions. The archive also includes a formidable collection of Jewish recordings, mostly from Southern California, and a growing African American collection.
The digitization and preservation lab in Schoenberg Hall accommodates many legacy formats, such as reel-to-reel recorders, which means a treasure hunt of finding and buying secondhand equipment that’s no longer manufactured, then diligently keeping it in working order. (The lab even includes an oven where old, sticky cassette tapes are dried out before being digitized.)
The Ethnomusicology Department also houses the World Musical Instrument Collection, with instruments from all corners of the world preserved and displayed. Students and guests enjoy a close encounter with the instruments, enhanced by state-of-the art audio and video, bringing to life the sights and sounds of world cultures.
The collection also enables time travel, says archivist Maureen Russell M.A. ’80, M.L.I.S. ’88: “Our earliest recordings are from the 1920s, so you are listening to voices from a hundred years ago. If not recorded, [they] would be lost. It’s like capturing lightning in a bottle.”
Circulating the Past
Powell Library is a stately edifice, certainly one of the best known and iconic buildings on campus. Yet most people are completely unaware of the large lab in its basement where conservators diligently preserve paper and audio-visual materials from the past. “We don’t go looking for trouble,” says Metzger. “If it’s not being actively researched, used in the classroom, being digitized, being exhibited, we don’t get involved with it.” So preservation efforts are focused squarely on circulating material, which must withstand repeated use.
Trained in library science, bookbinding, conservation and repair, Metzger is clearly the right general for such a field operation. “We know what particular papers and various inks are made of, how they respond to light and oxygen, what light conditions will help them survive,” she says. “What are the color shifts that will happen to a photograph over time? What temperature range is best for storing film?”
To that end, she and her colleagues fastidiously monitor the temperature and humidity in all the library’s spaces to prevent mold. It’s challenging to maintain environmental conditions in older buildings.
Conservators observe a simple code of ethics. “First, don’t make anything worse,” Metzger says. “I want to be sure my mends don’t cause new breaks and the glue doesn’t cause damage through time. I want to be sure I’ve talked to a curator or the custodian of an object to inform them what is possible and not possible.” She documents everything done, in case questions arise later.
As I walk through the lab with Metzger one day, she picks up a particularly poignant work in progress — an old hardbound book. It’s a romance novel. Its pages are yellowed, and some are loose; many are marred by tape that was applied long ago and has since fallen off. The book is being preserved not for its contents, but rather for its history. Its provenance includes time spent at a Japanese internment camp during World War II, where books were scarce. Metzger handles it gingerly, showing reverence for where it has been. What it represents.
“Collecting itself is a preservation act,” she says. “So is access. If you don’t provide access, you might as well lock the object in a box and throw away the key.”
Every Object Tells a Story
Material culture encompasses the physical objects and artifacts of a society or group of people — what they produced and used in their daily lives. It is one of few sources for learning about a people, their habits and the time and place in which they lived. The objects include archaeological and indigenous material that may be sacred, utilitarian or fine art: a corroded bronze sculpture, a primitive tool, a broken piece of pottery, a frayed basket. Each carries an echo of the past, of a duty, service, ritual or task performed, over and over, through the decades and centuries. Each tells us a little bit about who the users were and how they lived.
But while material culture is a staple of various museums big and small, the study of the art of preserving such objects is scarce in the U.S. The UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, established in 2004 in partnership with the Getty Conservation Institute, is the only academic program in the western U.S. devoted to education and training in conservation, and the only one in the nation dedicated to archaeological and indigenous materials.
“Because our focus is small,” says the program’s director, art historian and cultural materials conservator Glenn Wharton, “we can go deeper than institutions that have a broader scope.”
The three-year master’s program attracts students from around the world and trains them in the theory and practice of conservation, the challenges presented by climate change, and the signs that objects may have been acquired illegally. Their work is hands-on, with materials borrowed from museums and other collections in Southern California.
Laboratory courses are taught at the Getty Villa in Malibu, in facilities created especially for UCLA. Since 2019, the UCLA/Getty Program is one of only two conservation programs in the U.S. offering a Ph.D.
The program’s faculty have interdepartmental affiliations in art history, anthropology, information studies, and materials science and engineering. Because the program is embedded in the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, students also collaborate with scholars of the ancient world across the campus, researching collections from the Fowler Museum at UCLA — another major UCLA player in preservation — as well as from other collecting institutions, including those run by tribal nations. Working with community members, especially those from Indigenous groups, students learn cultural aspects of objects, which Wharton says may include continued use in ceremonies and ritual activities.
“That shifts how we think about preservation,” he says. “Collaborating with people whose cultures produced these objects expands what we can do. We engage stakeholders in constructing narratives about the past.”
The program is currently developing partnerships with African American community members, preserving their heirlooms and collecting the stories of their families and histories. “Then the goal of conservation,” he says, “becomes enabling people to connect with their pasts.”
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Winter 2025 issue.
