Making Time Travel Possible Through Film Preservation: A Conversation With UCLA Archives

By Bailey Pennick

Every time you watch a film, you're taking a leap. A leap into someone else's point of view, a leap into a new world, and a leap into another time and place. That's what I love about old movies, says Jillian Borders over Zoom. Getting this glimpse of what life was like Seeing what people were wearing and what they were doing. Borders, the head of Preservation at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and her team have been working closely for years with Sundance Institute to preserve films from our history and expand the Sundance Collection at UCLA.

While film restoration might conjure images of dusty boxes and pre-code stories, Borders' work on the Sundance Collection runs the gamut of our 40-plus year history, including films and times that might not feel so distant. Historically, I find it interesting, especially working on a lot of '90s films like Go Fish, it does really seem like a glimpse of life that's familiar to me. But, also, I can almost barely remember now.

This temporal looping is fitting for the UCLA Archives team, who is in the middle of a screening series Science Fiction Against the Margins, part of the Getty's PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative. The Getty Pacific Standard Time Grant is four years: two years, which is research, and then, two years, which is actually mounting the exhibition, explains Maya Monta ez Smukler, UCLA's Archive Research and Study Center Officer. A smile comes across her lips as she ponders the passage of time, Finally it's here. The grin is warranted considering this behemoth of a project started as a collaborative idea from Cinema and Media Studies Professor Chon Noriega in December 2019. We were supposed to turn in the applications in March 2020, says Smukler. It was, like, literally a week or two before the application was due we were told to leave our offices.

As we were all put on pause during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Smukler recalls how the UCLA team stayed the course. To be watching a billion science fiction films and thinking through what science fiction outside of dominant cinema might be during a moment that, in a lot of ways, was super sci-fi. [It was] interesting and intense and hilarious [laughs]. The final result of all that pandemic viewing culminated in a rich program that highlights films from across the globe, including one of Borders' more recent projects - the Sundance Collection restoration of writer-director Hilary Brougher's 1997 feature The Sticky Fingers of Time.

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