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Robert Gitt
Legendary film preservationist Robert Gitt, who officially retired from UCLA Film & Television Archive in 2006, but continued to work on Archive projects until recently, will be honored with FOCAL International’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The U.K.-based organization, which functions as an international Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries, announced recently they will present Gitt with the Award at the 13th annual FOCAL International Awards ceremony in London on May 26, 2016.
My former colleague at the British Film Institute, Clyde Jeavons, made the nomination, noting that “Bob has led the preservation and restoration team at UCLA for many years and is one of the world's most admired and respected conservation and restoration experts. He has restored probably more important American movies - silent and sound, classic and obscure - than all the other U.S. archivists put together, and has been a pioneer of techniques to recover early and late Technicolor and to restore the first Hollywood sound-on-disc systems, even working from cracked and broken shellac recordings. In short, he has helped to make available to the highest possible standards countless films threatened by loss and decay.”
FOCAL International’s press release also quoted Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures EVP asset management, film restoration and digital mastering: “Bob Gitt set the standard for what we call film restoration. Film preservation existed prior to Bob Gitt, but the kind of restoration we know of today is the result of Bob's standard setting work for almost forty years.”
In my own letter in support for the nomination, I wrote: “Robert Gitt is a national treasure. Through his work as senior film preservationist at UCLA Film & Television Archive, Bob Gitt helped establish modern methods of film preservation and restoration. Joining UCLA in 1977, Gitt moved beyond simple copying of film elements to a working methodology that encompassed careful inspection and comparison of all surviving elements from a particular title, then reconstructing the film image by image to create a new complete text. His restorations of such films as Becky Sharp (1935), Stagecoach (1939), and My Darling Clementine (1946) are legendary. Over his long career until his retirement in 2006, Bob Gitt also trained a whole generation of film preservationists.”
Robert Gitt was born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, and attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Gitt remained at Dartmouth for several years after he graduated in 1963, curating programs for Dartmouth College Films, including early tributes to directors Jean Renoir and Joseph Losey. In 1970, Gitt joined the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C, where he established presentation standards for the AFI Theater, then became the AFI’s Preservation Officer in 1973. Among the projects he worked on at AFI was the landmark restoration of Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937), which he continued in cooperation with the Library of Congress and Sony Pictures after he came to UCLA. In 1977, Robert Gitt began work at UCLA Film & Television Archive as its first film preservationist.
Before his retirement, Gitt personally preserved or supervised the restoration of more than 360 feature films, as well as hundreds of shorts and newsreels. Notable films he worked on include the shortened and full-length versions of Orson Welles' Macbeth (1948); the silent comedy classics Grandma's Boy (1922) and The Freshman (1925), starring Harold Lloyd; Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957); Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955); Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957); and many others. In 1991, Gitt and UCLA received the British Film Institute Archival Achievement Award, and in 1995 he was awarded the Prix Jean Mitry at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy.
UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Rick Chace Foundation have also recently released Gitt’s latest project, A Century of Sound – The Sound of Movies: 1933-1975, a four-disc Blu-ray set that runs 12 hours, constituting a virtual visual encyclopedia on sound in motion pictures. This set will be available to archives, libraries, educational institutions and other non-profit organizations — and to qualified educators, researchers and scholars — through the Archive website beginning March 1.
Congratulations, Bob!
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