The Yale Film Archive receives its 14th national grant for film preservation

The Yale Film Archive has received its 14th grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), this time to support the preservation of two short films by Sheldon Renan ’63: “Basic Film Terms: A Visual Dictionary” and “Basic Television Terms: A Video Dictionary.” This year is the 11th consecutive year that the Yale Film Archive has been awarded a NFPF grant for its preservation work.

Renan developed an obsession with the medium of film as an undergraduate, while working as a projectionist for the Yale Film Society. In 1970, seven years after he graduated, Renan made “Basic Film Terms.” His second film, “Basic Television Terms,” followed seven years later. Both films, distributed by Pyramid Films (later Pyramid Media), were viewed in high schools, colleges, and other organizations—influential texts for a generation of filmmakers and television professionals learning their craft.

Educating future filmmakers

The seeds for “Basic Film Terms” were sown when Renan met Allan Kaprow—a performance artist and pioneer of the “Happening”—and education visionary Herb Kohl. At the time, Kaprow and Kohl were collaborating on a project called “Other Ways,” aimed at rethinking schools and schooling. As part of that project, Renan taught filmmaking to a class of fourth-graders. He soon realized that he needed a way of explaining the technical terms he was discussing. He promised the class he would “put together a dictionary on film.”

Renan enlisted the help of cinematographer Robert Primes, an Emmy Award–winner in 1995 and 1999. Renan and Primes assembled a series of shots illustrating zooms, pans, dollies, dissolves, and other foundational concepts in filmmaking. Editor Sargon Tamimi cut the film and introduced Renan to fellow Yale alumnus Willie Ruff, M.M. ’54. As Renan describes it, Ruff’s sensitive jazz score “provides an emotional narrative structure that you rarely see in an educational film.”

The success of “Basic Film Terms” meant that Renan was later able to enlist the popular “Star Trek” actor Leonard Nimoy to narrate and appear on screen as the host of Renan’s “Basic Television Terms.”

Author and founding director

In 1967, with the support of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Renan published “An Introduction to the American Underground Film,” the first comprehensive book about American experimental film.

That same year, he founded the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley. Inspired by the film programs of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Renan set out to establish a similar project in the Bay Area. Peter Selz, founding director of the university’s art museum, agreed to host the new institution for the benefit of the campus and the community. Renan was named as the Pacific Film Archive’s first director and served in that role until 1975.

The Yale Film Archive‘s preservation work on the two films has just begun, but both will eventually screen on campus as part of the ongoing Treasures from the Yale Film Archive series, hopefully with Renan in attendance.

The NFPF’s federally funded grants are awarded to nonprofit and public institutions to help preserve culturally and historically significant film materials. This year, grants were awarded to 32 institutions for work on 66 films.

Read more about the NFPF and the 2024 NFPF grants.

Read about the Yale Film Archive’s 2023 NFPF grant for the preservation of Roger Tilton’s short film “Shades.”

Image: Actors positioned to demonstrate a framing technique, from the short film “Basic Film Terms: A Visual Dictionary” by Sheldon Renan ’63