Film curator Scott Simmon has delivered a first to historic-cinema lovers: a set of four DVD's containing 50 movie gems. "Treasures from American Film Archives" makes available the "other" side of American film history, beyond Hollywood. The 11-hour set ranges from silent features and avant-garde shorts to documentaries and political advertisements produced between 1893 and 1985. "This is the first time that nonprofit archives have collaborated to make their holdings public," says Simmon, a visiting professor in the English department at UC Davis. He searched out the films and wrote the 150-page book that accompanies the set. Among the 18 participating archives are the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley. "What these diverse films share is they have not been commercially preserved," Simmon says. "They survive thanks to nonprofit archives. For teachers of cinema, their availability expands greatly the canon of film studies." Simmon curated the National Film Preservation Foundation project, which was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Charitable Trusts. He also has written "The Films of D.W. Griffith" (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and co-authored other books on film history and preservation. The DVD set, which can be found at major video stores and is distributed by Image Entertainment, will be of interest not only to film buffs but to students of American culture, Simmons says. A list of titles on the set is available at the Web site of the National Film Preservation Foundation: .