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For nearly 40 years, from the 1970s until well into the 2000s, Bob was a towering figure in the world of film preservation, and the most dynamic, eloquent and effective champion for the cause of film preservation in the U.S. archival community during those decades. After his return to UCLA in 1986, Bob's ongoing achievements included the creation of UCLA's inaugural Festival of Film Preservation in 1988, which continued as an annual event through the 1990s and beyond. The archive also opened its new Archive Research and Study Center in the UCLA Powell Library, which greatly improved the archive's ability to serve scholars and researchers from across the campus and around the world. Gregory Lukow is the retired Chief of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division). fr Gregory Lukow rend hommage au regretté Robert 'Bob' Rosen, décédé le 2 octobre dernier a Гаде de 84 ans.
Robert "Bob" Rosen passed away on 2 October 2024 after a lingering illness at the age of 84. For nearly 40 years, from the 1970s until well into the 2000s, Bob was a towering figure in the world of film preservation, and the most dynamic, eloquent and effective champion for the cause of film preservation in the U.S. archival community during those decades. But more than a visionary preservationist, Bob was a brilliant teacher who deeply impacted the lives of a generation of film scholars, teachers, archive directors, curators, and programmers who passed through his tutelage. For many of those he taught - including this writer - he was more than just an educator, a teacher. He maintained longterm relationships with many of his students and helped transform us into mentees, acolytes, friends, and, eventually, successful professional colleagues in the field. We were, to use one of his favourite words, "comrades".
After co-teaching a popular course on film history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971 - the first course of its kind ever taught in an Ivy League history department - Bob was invited in late 1974 to teach a single course in the UCLA Department of Film and Television. Just months later, in June 1975, he was appointed the second Director of the UCLA Film Archive, a role he held until 1999. During those years, he took what was initially a relatively small study collection, expandedits film holdings exponentially along with an intensified focus on television, and transformed it into the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the world's largest university-based moving image archive. He established key partnerships with major film studios, directors and producers, and was a passionate advocate and ubiquitous presence within the media who raised UCLA's public profile globally and promoted the archives numerous high-profile film and television restoration projects throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1984-1985, Bob took a two-year leave of absence from UCLA to serve as the founding director of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute. While at the AFI, he broadened his impact on the entire U.S. archival field by developing national-level initiatives and establishing new partnerships involving virtually all of the U.S. moving image archives, as well as the major film studios and television broadcasters. After his return to UCLA in 1986, Bob's ongoing achievements included the creation of UCLA's inaugural Festival of Film Preservation in 1988, which continued as an annual event through the 1990s and beyond. The archive also opened its new Archive Research and Study Center in the UCLA Powell Library, which greatly improved the archive's ability to serve scholars and researchers from across the campus and around the world.
In 1988, Bob was appointed to represent UCLA as a founding member of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, and he served continuously on the Board until 2021. In 1990, he worked closely with Martin Scorsese to create The Film Foundation, the non-profit consortium of major American filmmakers dedicated to film preservation. Bob served as the founding Chair of the Foundation's Archivist Advisory Council, comprised of representatives from all the major U.S. FIAF member archives. The Film Foundation later became affiliated with the Directors Guild of America, so it was entirely fitting that Bob received the ОСА' 2008 John Huston Award for Artists Rights.
Bob was a long-time participate in FIAF, attending his first annual congress in 1976 in Mexico City and his last in Los Angeles in 2017. In 1987, Bob elevated UCLA's affiliation within FIAF from Observer status to that of a full FIAF Member. That same year, during the 1987 Congress in West Berlin, he was elected to FIAF's Executive Committee, serving three terms until 1993. Bob's agenda within FIAF, as it had been with his work in the United States, was to foster the incredible diversity and growth of moving image collections both nationally and regionally, collections that were inevitably - to use one of his favourite sayings - "geographically dispersed and philosophically diverse". He also advocated vigorously for democratizing access, sharing information on archival holdings, and building archival bridges to both film schools and film studios. In 1995, UCLA, the Academy Film Archive, and the AFI's Preservation Center co-hosted the FIAF 1995 Congress in Los Angeles, which celebrated "The First 100 Years ... The Next 100 Years" of cinema's history. Although Steven Ricci representing UCLA, Michael Friend representing the Academy, and | representing the AFI at the time were the three primary Congress organizers, we all knew and respected that at the Congress' highlight event it would be Bob Rosen who was on stage representing all of us as he interviewed panels of such acclaimed directors as Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg.
Bob stepped down as Director of the UCLA archive in 1999 when he took on the role of Dean of School of Theater, Film and Television. During his 11 years as Dean, he established the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Online Program, and continued to push for the creation of the school's Moving Image Archive Studies programme, the first graduate-level degree curriculum in the United States that launched in 2001. In 2009, Bob stepped down from his position as Dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television, and was honoured as the School's Dean Emeritus until his passing in 2024.
Bob Rosen had a major impact on my life, which was typical of the impact he had on so many lives in a long-lasting manner across decades. | entered Bob's orbit in the autumn of 1976, when | began my graduate coursework in Film and Television Studies at UCLA. | learned, worked with and continuously interacted with him during the 25 years when | lived in Los Angeles until | moved to the east coast in 2001 to begin my tenure at the Library of Congress. From the first course | took taught by Bob, it did not take long for me and others in my class to gravitate to Bob for the duration of our time at UCLA. These other classmates included Michael Friend (later director of the Academy Film Archive), the late Steven Ricci (a 10-year member of FIAF's Executive Committee), Geoffrey Gilmore (who had followed Bob to UCLA from the University of Pennsylvania and was for many years director of the Sundance Film Festival), Luli Barzman (filmmaker and editor of the UCLA's student journal On Film), and Eddie Richmond (later curator of the UCLA archive for three decades).
We and countless others over the years entered Bob's orbit, which had a lasting impact on our subsequent careers in both the scholarly and archival fields. It also shaped how we came to understand the world by having experienced Bob's brilliance as a teacher. | am only one of many of his students who have commented that we not only learned from the content of what Bob taught us, but also that Bob literally taught us how to think, to think critically. And Bob was a charismatic teacher, not only in what he said but in the demonstrative manner in which he delivered his lectures, so much so that it was almost impossible for us to resist imitating both the cadence of his voice and the dynamism of his physical gestures.
Bob had an oft-repeated saying when he was teaching. He would vigorously assert that films are not merely a "reflection" of society or history, that is, they did not merely hold up a mirror to the world passing around us. Rather, they were part of our direct interaction and engagement with the world. As he wrote in a 1992 article published in the Los Angeles Times:
For our century, film has been at once an art form, a cultural artifact, a historical document, an ideological force and a source of popular entertainment. It is the repository of our collective memory, and to lose it is to lose part of ourselves.
For those many of us in the field of film education and preservation, for those of us who were taught by Bob Rosen or worked alongside him, he is an indelible figure in our collective memory. We have lost him to time, but the lasting impact of his generosity remains.
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