Pacific Film Archive gets front-door access

From the start, the Pacific Film Archive has gotten the back end of the title Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and a back-door entrance. All of the architectural grandeur for the new $112 million home of BAMPFA is for the film department, which is an equal partner with the art department, though the long name and unpronounceable acronym BAMPFA suggest that film was an add-on or afterthought. The job of melding art and film while turning a 1939 factory into a 21st century museum was assigned to the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which designed the Broad in Los Angeles and the McMurtry art building at Stanford University, both opened in late 2015. A third film option is an outdoor theater, which will offer occasional free screenings along Addison Street on the back wall of the Barbro Osher Theater, as the main screening room is named. Built from scratch, on the site of a former parking garage, Osher Theater is angular, with a shiny stainless steel skin. To get to the front door you visually follow the line of that silver skin over the roof of the printing plant to a shiny cantilever structure that announces the entrance. Movie and gallery tickets will be sold at the same counter, and to get to the theater, you walk back to where you started, passing by open galleries. The theater has its own lobby with a glass wall that allows you to look down on the workings in the Film Library and Study Center, which sits underneath the theater. Open to the public during drop-in hours, the library offers access to 17,500 films in celluloid, video and digital formats, plus about 250,000 books, press kits and ephemera going back to the beginning of film. The films are stored off site but can be summoned here for individual screening in boxlike cubicles outfitted with 35mm and 16mm projectors. The Charter of the United Nations was printed here before being shipped across the bay to the War Memorial Veterans Building, where it was ratified in the Herbst Theatre in 1945. “All of our collective wisdom about what makes for an ideal cinematic experience went into designing this theater, from the size to the angle of the seats to the quality of the acoustics to the sound system,” Rinder says. Since the UC printing plant opened in 1939, Rinder would like to see some films from that year, and there is plenty to choose from.