UC Berkeley Has Vast, Rare Film Collection

Press release from UC Berkeley News:

BERKELEY, CA — Vaults often store valuables, and that’s especially true of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s massive vault in Richmond. Hidden within an industrial complex, the climate-controlled facility, which looks the size of a football field, contains more than 18,000 films and videos from around the world, many of them rare and most of them donated, as well as recorded interviews with filmmakers, screenplays, posters and other ephemera related to the history of film. The vast archival collection is one of the largest of its kind in the Bay Area.

Some of the vault’s rarely-viewed reels, stored among thousands of stacked metal cans on endless rows of shelving, are being shown this winter at BAMPFA as part of its ongoing Out of the Vault: Everything’s Ephemeral film series. The series, curated by Jon Shibata, Adrianne Finelli and Pamela Vadakan, and partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, features non-commercial 16 mm films that are mostly 12 minutes long and are ephemeral — such as home movies, amateur and educational films, orphan films, unidentified film fragments and other oddities. The trio researched BAMPFA’s film catalog, scoured the stacks, previewed films and slotted their favorites into the series’ three themes: inner and outer landscapes, poetry/rhythm/movement, and play. The series serendipitously coincides with the 100th anniversary of 16 mm film.

A 10-film collection, Play is the work of life, will be shown at BAMPFA on Thursday, Feb. 16. That program, says Shibata, BAMPFA’s film archivist, “is an attempt to attune, to reconnect to that essential call to play within us all.”

This press release was produced by UC Berkeley News. The views expressed here are the author’s own.