Robert “Bob” Rosen, founding director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and former dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television, died Oct. 2 at 84 years old.

Rosen spearheaded the movement to preserve nitrate film in Los Angeles, said May HaDuong, the current director of the Film & Television Archive.

Rosen shaped UCLA’s archive into the largest university-based archive in the world and the second largest in the United States, behind the Library of Congress, said Chon Noriega, a professor in the film, television and digital media department.

When the former dean joined UCLA in 1975, films were captured on a nitrate material that was very fragile and highly flammable, said David Bret Egen, a former student of Rosen. Without adequate preservation, many of the world’s films were lost to time, he said.

Noriega added that Hollywood was not archiving its own movies before Rosen’s time because film was not seen as having a secondary life after release, Noriega said.

“A lot of the films were actually just being dumped in the ocean to clear space,” he said. “He (Rosen) was instrumental, … waving the flag and saying, ‘No, bring them here. We need to preserve these.’”

Since Rosen founded the archive, the university’s archive has grown from a few thousand items to 500,000 items, HaDuong said.

“If we were to splice every piece of film that we have in our collection head to tails, it would wrap around the world 4 1/2 times,” she said.

The Film & Television Archive has preserved films from around the world, not just the U.S. For instance, the archive restored post-Vietnam War films from Vietnam and golden age Mexican films from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, Noriega said.

HaDuong, a former graduate student during Rosen’s tenure as dean, said Rosen regarded media studies as an academic pursuit, adding that he cultivated a sense of engagement around the field with his students, bringing the importance of moving images to life.

“He was very passionate about the work we were doing,” HaDuong said. “As a champion of this work, … he would take the time to have conversations about what we were doing, to learn about ways that the School of Theater, Film and Television and UCLA could really cultivate a new generation of archivists.”

When Rosen arrived, UCLA’s film school was under the School of Arts and Architecture, said Chuck Sheetz, a professor in the film, television and digital media department. By 1990, it was its own separate department.

“Our profile had risen that much in that time, and I attribute most of that to him because he was very much the public face of the film school,” Sheetz said.

In 1999, Rosen was appointed dean of TFT, a role he served in for a decade. He was one of the last to bring a critical eye to the study of film in a humanistic framework, Noriega said.

Rosen saw new ways to preserve film and followed through on his vision, Sheetz said. UCLA lives with that legacy, he added.

Rosen’s former students, along with faculty members, said they admired Rosen as an academic and as a person. For those who took his classes, Rosen was inspiring, Egen said, adding that Rosen loved film and communicated it through everything he did.

“The thing about Bob is he could talk to you about just about anything. He had very broad knowledge,” Noriega added. “He was one of those people that could really think on their feet and put things into play intellectually.”