Archivist shares his passion for film

Jan-Christopher Horak, AS ’73, has been named the director of the Film & Television Archive at the University of California Los Angeles, where he has been an adjunct professor and acting director of the Moving Image Archive Studies program.

Horak, who earned his bachelor’s degree in history while developing a passion for film at UD, formerly served as curator of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum, a position he left in 2006.

The UCLA archive holds the second-largest collection of moving image media in the United States, after the Library of Congress, and the largest such collection of any university in the world. It is known internationally for its pioneering efforts to preserve and restore film and video and to make its collection available to researchers and students.

In announcing Horak’s appointment in December, UCLA cited his “long and distinguished career as a film archivist and curator.”

Horak went on from UD to earn a master’s degree in film from Boston University and a doctorate from the Department of Communications at the University of Muenster in Germany. He has been senior curator of the Film Department of the George Eastman House and director of the Munich Filmmuseum. In 1998, he became founding director of Archives & Collections at Universal Studios before moving to the Hollywood Entertainment Museum.

He is the author of numerous books in German and English and more than 200 articles and reviews published worldwide.

“I am extremely happy to be entrusted with one of the most important moving image archives in the world,” Horak says of his new position. “I look forward to leading the UCLA Film & Television Archive as it meets the many challenges ahead, especially the conversion of all media in the digital realm.”

In a 2003 interview with the UD Messenger, Horak recalled the beginning of his enthusiasm for film, inspired by a Winter Session (then called Winterim) course he took his sophomore year. The class, focusing on the

Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, led him to take additional film courses and to start writing film criticism for The Review student newspaper.

“I think that was really important for me,” he said in that interview. “I was not a film buff or anything like that when I went to Delaware, but I found something that became my passion, and my passion is my work.”