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Robert “Bob” Rosen, a pioneering film historian, archivist and former dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, has died. He was 84.

Rosen died Wednesday, UCLA said without specifying a cause of death. Born in 1940, Rosen was named Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1999, a position he held for slightly more than a decade.

Before that, he served as director of archives at UCLA starting in 1975, growing the school’s original film and TV vault into a world-leading collection. That appointment grew out of an invitation to teach one 10-week course at the UCLA Department of Film and Television in 1974.

“I never left. Understanding motion pictures and teaching filmmakers was to become my life’s goal, and over the course of the next four decades, I served as professor, then department chair, and finally for 11 years as dean of the school,” Rosen said...

Queer film fans in Los Angeles are feeling the summer void left by the beloved Outfest, which paused its programming last year amid financial issues and staff layoffs and has yet to resume. But a new film series, called Queer Rhapsody, looks to fill that crater across five venues July 19-28 — and with curation from the UCLA Film and Television Archive and one of Outfest’s former own. Even if they aren’t looking just to replace the 40-year-long legacy of L.A.’s oldest film festival. Plus, Queer Rhapsody is decidedly a series, not a festival.

With a focus on liberating narratives and a program of more than 50 narrative and documentary features and shorts, Queer Rhapsody opens at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater with Drew Denny’s “Second Nature.” Narrated by Elliot Page, the documentary follows trans trailblazer and evolutionary biologist Dr. Joan Roughgarden, who meets with...

A highlight of 2024’s TCM Classic Film Festival was the world premiere of a pristine restoration of John Ford‘s “The Searchers,” one of the greatest Westerns ever made and certainly — given its impact on directors like Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and Paul Schrader — one of the most influential. “The Searchers” was photographed in VistaVision, arguably the best of the widescreen formats that emerged in the 1950s to combat television’s encroachment on the film business, and to see it projected on the big screen is a transcendent experience — especially if one is lucky enough to view the 70mm print that premiered at TCM’s fest and is currently making its way around the revival circuit (it screens in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque on May 3 and 4).

The 70mm print is the end result of a meticulous restoration project overseen by Warner Brothers Discovery and Scorsese’s Film Foundation,...

While David Zaslav and Bob Iger’s tax-optimization strategy of deleting films and TV shows from their streamers has triggered plenty of agita among creators, the custodians of Hollywood’s digital era have an even greater fear: wholesale decay of feature and episodic files. Behind closed doors and NDAs, the fragility of archives is a perpetual Topic A, with pros sweating the possibility that contemporary pop culture’s master files might be true goners, destined to the same fate as so many vanished silent movies, among them Alfred Hitchcock’s second feature, The Mountain Eagle, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Oscar-winning The Patriot.

It’s underscored by initiatives such as Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. “The preservation of every art form is fundamental,” the industry icon says on a video on the organization’s web site. For the business, these are valuable studio assets — to use one example, the MGM Library...