SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Television first started broadcasting in 1928 so there’s a lot of history when it comes to moving images.
May Hong HaDuong is the new director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and remembers growing up watching classic films, romantic comedies, and lots of local news.
“The archive is not just cinema and television. We also collect news films,” said HaDuong. “News films that document Los Angeles landscapes, histories, culture, protests. It’s an amazing collection where you cannot just be inspired, but learn from these stories.”
The first woman and person of color to lead the largest university-held collection of moving images, May is not just in charge of preserving over a half-million elements stored inside the archive, but also developing programs for people to research these vast histories.
“You just can’t build it and expect people to come to an archive,” said HaDuong. “You need to develop deeper connections with communities and people to have them visit and have them research and visit your website and watch things online and understand the context of these stories.”
Growing up in Huntington Beach, May never saw herself reflected in pop culture and the media, but gravitated towards moving images after seeing films like Illusions and Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash, generational stories about personal hardship and migration.
“As a queer woman of color and the archives director, I’m really excited to find ways for us to work with communities and people with lived experiences to better connect our collections with all kinds of folks,” said HaDuong.
May streams a clip on her laptop available on the Archive. “As far as marriage goes, I want a man that wants to go places, do things” said the narrator of Behind Every Good Man, a short film preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive as part of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project.
After co-organizing the first Boston Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Film Festival, May got her Masters in Moving Images Archive Studies at UCLA. Celluloid, videotape, and even digital files all have an expiration date, so May’s goal now is to continually preserve and protect the materials for future generations.
“As an archive, what we’re going to do is focus on providing access to these materials as best we can, not just to our local communities, but also our global constituents,” said HaDuong.
May never expected we’d be able to stream movies on our phones, but she believes the technology has the power to democratize and make accessible moving histories.
“So right now feels like such an important time for us to really look at how content and moving images shape the way we see the world,” said HaDuong. “And my goal as director of the archive is to connect folks with our materials so they understand fact, information, and culture through moving images.”