For the first interview on this website, I am honored to have
Jan-Christopher Horak. Dr. Horak is an adjunct professor at UCLA and Chapman University. He is also the former director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. In that capacity, he served for eleven years on the National Film Preservation Board. He is also the author and/or editor of numerous books, including Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919 – 1945 (1995), Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (1997), Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (2014), The L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (2015), Hollywood Goes Latin: Spanish-Language Cinema in Los Angeles (2019), and Cinema Between Latin America and Los Angeles: Origins to 1960 (2019).
My deepest thanks to Dr. Horak—Chris—who was very generous with his time and insight. To learn more about him and his work, check out his website.
This interview was conducted on April 12, 2025.
Eric: Which years were you on the National Film Preservation Board?
Chris: I joined in 2010, and I think it was 2021 that they thanked me for my service.
Were you invited to join?
I became a member as a matter of course as director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. NYU had a representative, UCLA, and then of course other organizations: AMIA [the Association of Moving Image Archivists] had a representative, the Screen Actors Guild, the Cinematographers Guild, the Society of Cinema and Media Studies…
As well as a couple directors, historians, and film critics too, right?
Only if they were a member of those organizations, unless they were at-large members. There were guests occasionally.
I know Dave Kehr was on the board from the beginning and still is.
I think he was initially a member because he was part of the National Society of Film Critics.
Did Martin Scorsese ever come to the meetings? He’s listed as a board member.
Not once while I was there. Another member of the Directors Guild of America, Christopher Nolan, came as Scorsese’s alternate.
So the board makes recommendations for the Film Registry choices each year? It kind of feels like the whole thing is shrouded in secrecy.
This is the way it happens: First of all, the board makes recommendations through a vote. That is a multi-step process. It begins with the films that the public has nominated, so they’re always available as one list. And then the board would make its own list. There were various subcommittees—a documentary subcommittee, an avant-garde subcommittee—that made recommendations too. Initially that wasn’t the case. And if you notice, in the early years of the board, it’s almost exclusively Hollywood feature films, virtually nothing else. And due to complaints by various people, the body decided that they needed to put in other kinds of American films, so that’s when that started happening.
Didn’t it start even earlier? The first year was all Hollywood features, but the second year, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943/1990) got added…
There were individual titles, but, for example, silent film was always terribly neglected because most people didn’t know anything about it, so it took a while to get some titles. And even now it’s underrepresented.
Yeah, you and I talked about that when the 2024 announcement was made. There were just two silent film additions, and they were both shorts. But getting back to the process…
Then you’d get a master list—the nominations would be put together. Also, the committee members from the various groups would make big recommendations and often politick for individual films. Because they couldn’t assume that the board members had seen everything, they would send out, at first DVDs, and then later screeners online, so people could watch individual titles. So at first there was a huge list, and then usually in the late summer or early fall, each individual board member had to put together a list of twenty titles in descending order of preference. And those titles were then evaluated and calculated, and then a smaller list was put together of—I don’t remember how many titles—but it was significantly less than the five hundred to one thousand titles on the original big list.
Evaluated by whom?
It was done mathematically. Each title had a numerical value from each board member, and those were added together. So if I had a film that was number one on my list, and somebody else had the same film as number eleven on their list, the film would have the corresponding points, and they would be added together.
Did the entire board meet at some point?
Yes. Usually in the fall—late September or early October—the board would meet, and then there would be discussions.
In person?
Yes, in-person discussions. Now, the caveat is, when I was on the board, Bob Rosen was still on the board, even though he was no longer director of the UCLA Archive. In fact, he was on the board until 2021. There were two members from each institution, but the Library of Congress would only pay for one to attend the meeting, so for the first couple of years I didn’t go because Bob Rosen was still going. I think I started going regularly to the board meetings around 2012 or 2013.
But you were still submitting your lists?
Oh yeah, I was still involved in the process. Anyway, after that first list, we had to make a second list of what the board’s final nominees would be. And then that was the list that went to the librarian of Congress, who could either take those titles into account or ignore them completely. And during the years when James Billington was the librarian, he often ignored everything! Well, not everything, but a lot.
He just picked things himself?
Yes. For example, there was a whole group of us that tried for years—maybe seven or eight years—to get Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971/2020) added. But for Billington, the archconservative, that film was pornography. And in fact, the new librarian of Congress [Carla Hayden] ignored it the first year or two also.
You finally got it added though!
We did, but the long and short of it was that the librarian had final authority, and the list was usually published in mid-December.
Were the in-person meetings ever particularly contentious?
I wouldn’t say “contentious” because we were sitting in the basement of the Library of Congress, so we were on our best behavior. But there were serious discussions. Again, people would politick for certain films. Decisions were often made not necessarily based on the films themselves but on their importance in terms of the politics of film preservation.
Can you give an example?
I prefer not to, but it was clear to me that there were sometimes films that made it that had just been preserved and released on Blu-ray or something like that, and therefore there were people advocating for those titles.
That’s happened quite a bit over the years.
Some titles that went on—not that they didn’t deserve it—but after a certain point and after the initial controversy over the fact that this was all a bunch of white Hollywood guys getting nominated, there were advocates for films made by women and made by minority groups. So there was always an attempt to try to work those films in too.
Yeah. Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree (1969/1989) got added the first year, and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978/1990), Barbara Koppel’s Harlan County USA (1976/1990), and Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943/1990) the second. But it wasn’t until the last five years that more than five out of the twenty-five films added each year were not directed by “white Hollywood guys.”
I think that also has to do with the librarian of Congress and the makeup of the board. There are more women and people of color on the board than previously. But now that Mr. Trump has declared DEI dead, who knows what’s going to happen? And I’m not sure if the librarian of Congress is going to finish her term. He’s fired everyone else. And, especially in the military, the people he’s fired are women and people of color. [Chris was prescient about this. Carla Hayden was fired less than a month after this interview.]
My hope is that the Film Registry is below Trump’s radar and won’t be affected, but who knows?
There is nothing below Trump’s radar.
Were there particular films you advocated for during your tenure, and did you have any success?
I did advocate for a couple of titles, and I won a few times, and I lost a few times. But another thing that has to be said is, it is rare that a title gets on the first time it’s nominated. After the first time it’s nominated or the first time it’s discussed by the board, it usually takes two or three years to sit there for a while. There are so many titles, so it was a matter of advocating and continuing to advocate for that title.
Care to share any of your wins?
Yeah, I advocated for Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1990/2015) and for Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite (1978). But that one hasn’t been added yet.
I haven’t heard of Citron. Is she an experimental director?
Yeah, she’s a lesbian documentary filmmaker but in more experimental forms. I was always advocating for her. I also advocated for my good friend Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984/2013), which is such a wonderful companion film to Killer of Sheep (1978/1990). And of course, Charles Burnett wrote the script for Bless Their Little Hearts.
And both films are coming out in new Blu-ray Disc editions, which I’m very happy about. So Billy Woodberry is a friend of yours?
I met him in 1984 at the Berlin Film Festival when he showed Bless Their Little Hearts, and from that point on we became friends. We corresponded for a while, and then when I moved to UCLA, we saw a lot of each other. He worked at UCLA in the film department, handling equipment and stuff like that. He was always working on projects, but he never managed to get another film finished at the time. He retired from UCLA about five or six years ago, and ever since then he’s kind of exploded. He made a wonderful documentary about a black poet who was part of the beat generation but was kind of flushed down the toilet because he was black [And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead (2015)]. He’s had at least two films finished and playing at all sorts of festivals. About three or four years ago, he moved to Lisbon, which is where I last saw him.
Working on the L.A. Rebellion book, that’s when I was at UCLA, and we knew we were going to get funding for this massive project about L.A. arts. Because I knew Billy Woodberry, we thought, well, there are all these UCLA film students, and nobody’s ever done a book about them, so we started doing the research. And then I brought in Jackie Stewart and Allyson Field to work with me on it, and we thought we had like five or six filmmakers: Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Larry Clark, Julie Dash—we ended up identifying fifty filmmakers who had all gone through this school in succeeding generations. That project, like my other projects, is really connected to my work. I’ve always done work out of the archives.
In addition to the L.A. Rebellion book, you have written, edited, or contributed to books on experimental cinema [Lovers of Cinema and Making Images Move], Saul Bass, Native Americans in Hollywood, and Spanish-language Hollywood films.
That’s only a partial list. I’ve published several books in German too, including my dissertation on anti-Nazi films made in Hollywood by German-Jewish refugees, which was published in 1984 by an academic press in Germany and became a bestseller in the academic press market.
Wow! And there’s no English translation?
No. There are a couple of essays from it that I’ve published in English since then. When I went to Germany in 1978 to start my PhD, it was a time when most of the professors—they weren’t Nazis, but they had been trained by Nazis. So the interest in German-Jewish immigration, whether in film or in literature or in politics, was just beginning around the mid-1970s. My book was one of the first serious studies to come out on all these German-Jewish filmmakers who had ended up in Hollywood.
Obviously Fritz Lang is the first one everyone thinks of. He was not Jewish, but he certainly made a lot of great anti-Nazi films. Which other directors do you talk about in your book?
Actually, Lang was half Jewish. His mother was Jewish. I also discuss Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Curt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Billy Wilder obviously, Anatole Litvak, who was Russian but had been working in Berlin until he got kicked out. The book really established my reputation as the person to create this field of film-in-exile studies. And I did that dissertation topic because I had done my Master’s thesis on Ernst Lubitsch at Boston University. I had been an intern at George Eastman House in 1975 – 76, and that was where I really discovered silent film because it was like the mother lode. So that’s why I started the project on Lubitsch. Since that time, the topics I’ve chosen have always been connected to the work I was doing in the archive in which I was employed.
After I finished my dissertation and defended it in 1984, I returned to George Eastman House—as a curator. And I found they had these avant-garde films, like the James Sibley-Watson titles. At the same time, an independent press asked me to do a little pamphlet on Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921/1995)—they were going to publish all the stills—so I worked on that project. The press went under, so the pamphlet never got published, but it did become an essay.
When I published Lovers of Cinema, I used the same methodology I had used for my first German publication, an exhibition catalogue called Film and Photo 1929 [Film und Foto der zwanziger Jarhe, 1979]. A fellow intern at Eastman—Ute Eskildsen, who was a photography specialist—and I got a contract to recreate the 1929 exhibit for its 50th anniversary. The original exhibit’s film portion had been curated by Hans Richter, so my essay not only discussed the German, French, and Russian avant-garde films that had been exhibited in the 1929 exhibit but also talked about the film societies that had shown the films and the distribution networks that had been set up to distribute them. Unlike previous authors, who were purely focused on the films themselves and doing close readings of them, I was more interested in seeing avant-garde film as a system, just like Hollywood was, only in a much different way. And that was what I also did with Lovers of Cinema. I was one of the first to really look at avant-garde films as more than just isolated filmmakers. I saw how the filmmakers were interconnected, how they got distribution, and where their films were shown at film societies.
There’s a popular narrative that experimental cinema—in the U.S. anyway—began with Maya Deren. It was partly through the Film Registry that I learned that that wasn’t the case. Your book, Lovers of Cinema, and especially your chapter, “The First American Film Avant-Garde,” counters that narrative. We learn that Deren didn’t spring up from nowhere but was part of a continuum of American experimental filmmakers who precede her by decades. Was correcting that narrative part of your intention in writing your chapter and doing the book?
It’s funny because I knew Jonas Mekas, and that was his line: that there was no such thing as avant-garde film before Maya Deren in the 1940s, which simply wasn’t true. He was at George Eastman House when I was there as a curator, and we had discussions about this. He still adamantly refused to acknowledge this earlier work. I think part of it has to do with a different kind of understanding of avant-garde cinema. I saw avant-garde cinema as filmmakers who oftentimes, especially in the time before Maya Deren, had to do other things because the infrastructure for production and distribution in the making of avant-garde films wasn’t sufficient to allow them to just do that. Jay Leyda did other things. Herman Weinberg became a critic and was doing subtitles on foreign films. They all had other things to do. After Maya Deren, people had the opportunity to make films because they could get grants for them. Their self-image was that they were pure artists. But, for Jonas Mekas, those earlier filmmakers, because they sometimes worked on commercial stuff, they were tainted. They were not really pure, avant-garde filmmakers. Therefore, their work couldn’t be considered avant-garde films.
That’s one part of it. Another part, as I argue in the book, is that every generation wants to pretend they’re sui generis. And so, parallel to Mekas and the New American Cinema in the 1950s, you have American abstract expressionism pretending that they’re the first ones to invent abstract art.
Lovers of Cinema came out in 1995, and several of the films in your chapter and in the essays throughout the book were later added to the Film Registry: Manhatta (1921/1995), The Life and Death of 9413 (1927/1997), The Fall of the House of Usher (1928/2000), H2O (1929/2005), A Bronx Morning (1931/2004), Rose Hobart (1936/2001), and The City (1939/1998). Do you think that the publication of the book influenced the decisions to get these titles added to the Film Registry? And did you personally advocate for any of them?
I did advocate for some. I think I advocated for H2O. You’d have to give me the dates when they were added.
H2O was added in 2005, so before you started on the board. But I wonder if the inclusion of those films may also have had something to do with what you were talking about earlier. Kino Lorber released three DVD collections of avant-garde cinema, the first of which was released in August of 2005 and included H2O, which was then added to the Film Registry that year. Do you think the publication of your book also had something to do with these films being added to the Film Registry?
I don’t know for sure, but it is true that before my book got published, very few of these titles were in any kind of discussion. Manhatta was always well-known. There were a couple of other titles that were out there, but there were very few people who knew about Jay Leyda’s piece on avant-garde film that he published in 1947 in Hollywood Quarterly. A smattering of those titles had been mentioned in other avant-garde histories, but they were always talked about in those other publications as basically copies of European avant-garde films and therefore not really avant-garde and not really original.
On page 31, you say, “Manhatta was the first American avant-garde film.” Limiting our discussion to Film Registry titles, where do you place earlier films like Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906/2015) and Interior New York Subway (1905/2017)?
I think I mention early cinema, and I’ve since written about that, although it’s only been published in Polish and German. And I’m not the first to talk about early cinema as avant-garde cinema. Tom Gunning has written about it. I think the point I make is that avant-garde cinema in the United States can only become avant-garde once you have an established, monopolized film industry. So yes, early cinema is by definition avant-garde because it is all experimental. I think I make that point in the book. So Dream of a Rarebit Fiend and numerous other titles, including Interior New York Subway, which I talk about in another essay, are absolutely avant-garde films. So, clearly, you are right, those early films have to be considered avant-garde, but, again, they’re made in a context where there is no established industry, so everything back then was in some way avant-garde.
It sounds like the distinction you’re making is that, starting with Manhatta and the other titles you focus on in your chapter, there was a reaction against what by then had become established cinema.
By then it had become a commercialized engine—a cinema of convention. Avant-garde at that point means “reacting against.” It’s the same in Europe. Whether it’s the first French avant-garde or the second French avant-garde, some of whom, like René Clair, ended up in the film industry. But initially they are reacting against the conventionalized cinema that’s being produced by the film industry at the time.
Buñuel too.
Absolutely! Buñuel in a certain way always stays avant-garde. I love Buñuel from beginning to end. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) is one of my all-time favorites.
Oh yes, me too. But there’s still a difference between that and Un chien andalou (1929).
Of course. Avant-garde films can be non-narrative, but they also can be narrative. There are certainly narrative films that are avant-garde.
Are there any particular films—avant-garde or otherwise—that you wish were on the Film Registry? Besides Daughter Rite, I mean.
Um… I’m sure there are.
Now that you’re no longer on the board, do you ever nominate films just as a member of the public?
No. They thanked me for my service.