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WINSTON-SALEM -- Wearing a pair of white gloves, Robert Sterling runs his fingers along a print of "JFK," feeling for tears in the sprockets and keeping an eye out for dirt or scratches.

"This is the history of film," the UNC School of the Arts junior says. "When you see a film print, when you see a screen flicker, that's what you associate with the movies. That's what makes film almost magical."

And there is plenty of magic in the vaults at the school's Moving Image Archives -- more than 15,000 35 mm, 70 mm and 16 mm film prints, as well as a large collection of VHS tapes, DVDs, laserdiscs and pretty much anything else that has served as a cinematic medium.

The fifth largest noncommercial film archive in the United States, it's one of only a handful that regularly screens actual film prints (not just DVDs or tapes) for film students. On a typical weekend, students might be able to catch "A Clockwork Orange," "Double Indemnity" or "Terminator 2: Judgement Day."

"For some grand Technicolor spectacle, the best way to see it is on the big screen, with a big audience in a darkened theater, the way it was meant to be seen," archive curator David Spencer says. "You have a generation of students who are watching stuff online or watching it on their iPhones even. But it's a whole different experience watching a movie on celluloid projected into a theater."

Cultural artifacts

The bulk of the archive's collection is housed in a 25,000-square foot climate-controlled facility in the school's Studio Village.

Spencer keeps the temperature at about 60 degrees and 40 percent humidity to prevent fading in the color prints. Ideally, he said, he would like to keep it 10 degrees cooler, but the archive has had to tighten its belt in the current economy.

The place has the chemical aroma of a photo lab. Inside, thousands of octagonal film canisters line the shelves and sit sorted in piles on the floor -- everything from Oscar-winning CinemaScope pictures to instructional films with titles such as "How to Buy Wallcoverings" or "How to Make a Mint."

The archive got its start in 1993 when film collector and scholar Ray Regis came to the school. He had been in talks with Harvard University to take his films, but couldn't reach a deal. Sam Grogg, then the film dean at the School of the Arts, found out about the collection and invited him to come to Winston-Salem. He spent the next 12 years there as an instructor and curator.

Over the years, the school made several other major acquisitions, including more than 160 tractor-trailers worth of film from defunct distributor National Film Service.

"They said we either had to take all of it or none of it," Spencer says. "So we took it all. And it's a real mixed bag of Japanese monster movies, horror films, classics by Luis Buñuel and Jean Luc-Godard."

As a result, the archive also has dozens of prints of movies like "The Trial of Billy Jack" -- "a classic of its age," Spencer says.

But even the most mundane cinema, he says, has some value.

"We consider them cultural artifacts," he says. "They may not be the best movies ever made, but they do reflect the time and place where they were made, and for that reason, those prints need to be preserved."

And in an age when certain media may go obsolete after a few years, it's especially important to preserve the original product, archivists say.

"We know that film, when stored properly, will last more than 100 years," says Jeff Lambert, assistant director at the National Film Preservation Foundation. "VHS, on the other hand, hasn't withstood the test of time as well, and the image quality itself was not very good. If we have a film record, we can always go back to that."

24 frames per second

The School of the Arts has three theaters, the largest of which seats 300, in its ACE Exhibition Complex. Though the school owns the prints, it doesn't own the rights to the films, so can only screen them for "educational purposes" and not for the general public.

"If we loan out a title to anyone, they have to pay a fee to get the print and then pay a license fee to whoever owns the copyright," Spencer says.

When the school does lend them out, it also has strict guidelines on how they can be handled.

Feature films usually consist of four to six 20-minute reels, which most theaters nowadays splice together and load onto a huge platter, from which they're projected.

However, most of the films in the archive need to be shown on what's known as a dual projection system, which uses two projectors timed to start one reel when another ends.

"In a platter system, you have to deconstruct and reconstruct the prints," Spencer says. "And then the film is going to be threading out in the open. No matter how clean you keep your projection booth, you're going to have dust and dirt floating around."

Students who work the projectors have to undergo several months of training. Along with loading the projectors, they also inspect and clean the prints.

At the School of the Arts, juniors and seniors still shoot on actual film, as opposed to digital video, a common medium for many film students nowadays. Those who work with the archive say handling film gives them a greater appreciation for the craft.

"In this digital age, where everything is done by computer, it's cool to see the physical print, the final product of movies and to actually understand how it works," says junior Daniel Hansen, who was looking at a print of Charlie Chaplin's 1947 film "Monsieur Verdoux."

"Film is 24 frames per second, and you actually see that and you're able to calculate certain times and to see there are four sprockets for every frame. And to get your hands on a Charlie Chaplin film, that's pretty cool, too."

Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez @news-record.com