Tag Archives: film

Libraries Host Filipino Documentary Screening

On October 26, the Libraries hosted an incredible screening of Filipino American film-maker, PJ Raval’s 2023 documentary, “Who We Become: A Story of Kapwa”.

In honor of Filipino History Month, over 50 attendees gathered to watch Raval’s feature documentary about three young Filipina women wrestling with the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial tensions. Raval’s work follows the women as they find themselves on a journey of self-discovery and self-reflection within their families and communities, finding new meanings of Kapwa.

Multiple organizations across campus worked together to celebrate Filipino and Filipino American culture; bringing film, food, and community into the Perry-Castañeda Library. The event also featured catering from Kapatad Kitchen & Café, the documentary short, Pagtiyagaan (2023), created by Giullian Canlas, a current senior in Asian American Studies and Radio Television Film at the University of Texas at Austin, and an insightful Q&A with Director PJ Raval.

Filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s distribution company, ARRAY, is bringing Raval’s documentary to Netflix on December 1st, and UT librarians, Uri Kolodney and Adriana Cásarez, are acquiring the film for the UT Libraries permanent collection.

This event was co-sponsored by the Center for Asian American Studies at UT Austin, UT Libraries, Radio, Television and Film (RTF), Moody College of Communication DEI, Filipino Students Association (FSA) and UT Asian American Journalists Association (UT AAJA).

Read, Hot and Digitized: The Texas Archive of the Moving Image

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

Preserving audio visual materials is one of the biggest challenges for archivists and preservationists. The Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) has approached the preservation of Texas’ film history in innovative and unprecedented ways for the last 20 years. The non-profit organization solicits any kind of film – home movies, advertisements, local television programs, corporate productions, amateur films and even professional movie productions, and offers to digitize them in exchange for a donation of the digital copy. As a result, TAMI has a digital archive of over 50,000 films by Texans or about Texas. Created by Caroline Frick, currently the Associate Chair of Media Studies in the Radio, Television and Film department at UT Austin, TAMI’s stated goals are to “discover, preserve, provide access to, and educate the community about Texas’ film heritage.” Not only are they preserved for long-term historical and research purposes, but a huge number of those films are accessible online through TAMI’s website.

The casual user can enjoy this site by simply watching videos highlighted on their homepage. They feature a rotating selection of interesting films, with a ‘watch next’ feature and a ‘random video’ selector. I will admit to having fun reminiscing about places I’ve visited and lived in Texas, as well as getting sucked into the fascinating, the weird, and the sometimes inexplicable videos on the site (take, for instance, this baffling 1978 corporate wine industry video from Dallas).

More importantly, TAMI takes their educational mission seriously, with multiple sections that place films within their geographical, historical and social contexts. An education page provides lesson plans on topics from a Texas perspective such as The Cold War, The Dust Bowl and the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Each lesson plan includes a curated selection of films accompanied by class conversation prompts, assignment ideas and how the themes fit within Texas’ TEKS and STAAR standardized testing requirements. 

The Education and Web Exhibits pages bring together digital technologies in creative ways to teach new understandings of Texas history. The Webs Exhibits section looks at different aspects of Texas. For instance, ‘La Frontera Fluida – The Fluid Border’ explores films of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. On the site you can view films depicting historical events from a historical chronology page, a subject page, and even geographically from a map of the border. These value-added aspects are great examples of a digital-humanities approach, but TAMI also makes these films available for researchers to use in their own projects. Each film has code that allows you to embed the film on your own page. This makes the content of the archive ripe for myriad digital humanities projects exploring every aspect of Texas.

The University of Texas Libraries owns or subscribes to an enormous collection of audio-visual materials originating from every corner of the globe. A simple search in the library catalog for video/film turns up over 75,000 results. While the majority of this material is not necessarily focused on Texas, the library  does have incredible collections of audio-visual materials that originate in the state.

At the Benson Latin American Collection, for instance, we have significant collections of film focused on the history and culture of Latinas/os in Texas, especially focusing on Mexican Americans and the Chicano movement. This includes large numbers of interviews with prominent activists,  documentaries and archival collections such as the Cine las Americas video collection and a collection of their festival materials, the Robert P. and Sugar C. Rodriguez collection of Tejano Music videos, and the Los del Valle project. All of these materials can be crucial primary and secondary source materials for research projects. Taken together with the materials found in TAMI, I can almost always find something useful for students doing research on Texas Latinas/os when they are looking for audio visual materials. No other state has a statewide digital film archive like TAMI, and we are privileged to have such as amazing resource at our fingertips.

All images from the Texas Archive of the Moving Image website and Instagram site.

Further resources:

Frick, Caroline. “An Interview With Caroline Frick of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image and the University of Texas at Austin Department of Radio-Television-Film” The Velvet light trap: 2013, Vol. 71 (1), p. 42-6.

National Film Preservation Foundation https://www.filmpreservation.org/.

Library of Congress Moving Image Research Center. Digital Moving Image Collections. https://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/ndlmps.html

Agrasánchez Collection of Mexican Cinema

Film poster for "Romeo y Julieta" (1943) from the Agrasánchez Collection of Mexican Cinema at the Benson Latin American Collection.
Film poster for “Romeo y Julieta” (1943) from the Agrasánchez Collection of Mexican Cinema at the Benson Latin American Collection.

Film producer and cinephile Rogelio Agrasánchez, Jr., has amassed the largest collection of Mexican movie materials in private hands which he maintains in Harlingen, Texas.

The Benson Collection acquired from him a large selection of materials including original posters, lobby cards, still photographs, flyers, and broadsides advertising Mexican films from the 1930s to the 1990s.

These resources have supported publications on the development of Mexican film production including the “golden age,” 1936-1956, and specialty subjects such as posters, fantasy, and horror. Genre films on comedy, history, folklore, mysteries and so on are well represented.

Thank You…

Thank you.We made it!

HornRaiser campaign to build the Fine Arts Library Recording Studio in numbers:

45 Days
8 matching gifts totaling $4,350
127 gifts
158% of our original goal
$15,895

We are very excited that this campaign not only exceeded our original goal of raising $10,000, but also exceeded our stretch-goal of raising $15,000.

We are very thankful for those who contributed and helped us broadcast our message throughout the campaign.

So what’s next?

A preliminary meeting has been scheduled to start brainstorming and planning for the actual construction of the Fine Arts Library Recording Studio. We hope to have everything ready for the fall 2015 semester.

As I have mentioned before, this project is a smaller piece of a larger project called the Creativity Commons. We are still fundraising for the other studios in the Creativity Commons:

  • Video Production Studio, $50,000
  • Game Developer Studio, $35,000
  • Maker Workshop, $25,000
  • 3D Design Workspace, $15,000
  • Recording Studio (funded!)

While these tools are available in other areas on campus, they are restricted to students or a certain major. The Creativity Commons will be fully accessible to all current UT students, faculty, and staff.

To give a gift to support the Creativity Commons, click here, or click here to read a previous post with more detailed funding opportunities for individuals or corporations.

Special thanks to our campus and community partners who supported us during our HornRaiser campaign to build the Fine Arts Library Recording Studio: Austin’s Pizza, Tom’s Tabooley, Waterloo Records, KUT, KMFA, Butler School of Music, and Hook ‘Em Arts.

Everything old is new again

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In a harried world where you can hardly escape the din of constant communication and the proliferation of electronic gadgets, there’s a nascent desire to slow down and take in the mad rush of life. You can find this peaceful revolt against modernity in the community of vinyl music enthusiasts or the slow food movement or in DIY communities that encourage personal creativity and self-sufficiency. And now there’s a community of like-minded folks who have found a similar passion in a device that is an almost perfect antithesis to modern concepts of technology.

The rediscovery of the typewriter by retro fetishists prompted filmmakers Christopher Lockett and Gary Nicholson to embark on making a documentary about the machine’s importance to both our past and our future.

The result of their work — “The Typewriter in the 21st Century” — will receive its Texas premiere in a screening at 6 p.m. on Friday, April 19, in the Fine Arts Library at the Doty Fine Arts building.

The documentary features 30+ interviews with authors, collectors, journalists, professors, bloggers, students, artists, inventors and repairmen (and women) who meet for “Type-In” gatherings to both celebrate and use their decidedly low-tech typewriters in a plugged-in world. Authors Robert Caro and David McCullough, combined winners of 4 Pulitzer Prizes, 3 National Book Awards and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and both avid typewriter users, provide fundamental commentary about process and the value of slowing down, writing actual drafts and revising in a world of instant, draft-less editing.

The film was inspired by a May 2010 article in Wired magazine called “Meet The Last Generation of Typewriter Repairman.” Director Lockett and producer Nicholson discussed the importance of the typewriter in 20th century literature, their conclusion being that every great novel of the 20th century was written on one, and if typewriters are in their final days, they deserved to be celebrated one last time.

Funded largely through a Kickstarter campaign, the film eventually featured not only typewriter people — the aforementioned technicians, collectors, bloggers, users and fans — but famous typewriters as well. The film features machines once owned by Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, Jack London, Sylvia Plath, George Bernard Shaw, John Lennon, Joe DiMaggio, Helen Keller, the Unabomber, John Updike, Ray Bradbury and Ernie Pyle.

The screening of “The Typewriter in the 21st Century” will be followed by a Q&A featuring producer Gary Nicholson and John Payton, owner of a typewriter “museum” in Taylor, Texas.

The event will be preceded by a small public reception at 5 p.m.

Science for Lovers

Ask Dr. Loving

Love is in the air for the spring’s entrée edition of Science Study Break.

Dr. Timothy Loving of the School of Ecology’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences observes the ups and downs of relationships in a special Valentine’s presentation of our ongoing series at the intersection of science and pop culture.

Loving will use scenes from (500) Days of Summer, Moonrise Kingdom, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Crazy, Stupid, Love, among others, to explore the dynamics of romance.

Loving’s research focuses on the relationship support process, with an emphasis on investigating the reasons for — and consequences of — romantically-involved individuals’ conversations with friends and family about the romantic relationship.

The free event takes place in the Student Activity Center Auditorium (SAC 1.402) at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, February 12, 2013. Free pizza (while it lasts) for attendees.

Science Study Break is hosted by the University of Texas Libraries and supported by the University Federal Credit Union.

You Should Be Dancing. Yeah.

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The Libraries in collaboration with UT Student Government and the Student Events Center Film Committee present the first-ever dance party on the plaza of the Perry-Castañeda Library.

Make Some Noise: Dance Party@PCL is highlighted by the long-form music video “Girl Walk // All Day” — set to Girl Talk’s mashup masterwork “All Day” — projected on the façade of the library.

For the DIYers, the event includes a maker break where revelers can create their own wearable LED throwie pin, and for the Dancearchists, music spun by the DJs from student-run KVRX 91.7.

RSVP at the PCL and the UT Libraries Facebook event page.

Adult language.

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Art on the Street

Baylor Street Wall Art by Rana Ghana

We’ve all seen Shepard Fairey’s work about town, but the burgeoning Austin street art scene features some great local artists, as well.

Photographer Rana Ghana has become a sort of informal liaison for the loose knit collective, and has extensively documented their growing body of work around the city.

Thursday (9/29) at 6pm in the Fine Arts Library (DFA 2.204), Ghana will discuss her work and that of the current group of artists she’s been tracking.

After the talk, there will be a screening of Banksy’s Oscar-nominated satirical documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop.

The event is free and popcorn for the screening is being provided by Cornucopia.

You can RSVP for the event at the Fine Arts Library’s FB page.

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Science Study Break, Now With More Na’vi

The Life Science Library’s Science Study Break program will wrap up its season on Wednesday (4/13) with an examination of James Cameron’s most recent blockbuster Avatar.

Dr. Misha Matz of the School of Biological Sciences will analyze biological fact and fiction in the fantastic world of the film.

The program will be at 6 p.m. in Garrison Hall, Room 0.102. It is free and open to the public.

Pop culture and the academy collide as Science Study Break features relevant faculty and experts from The University of Texas at Austin discussing the reality and fantasy portrayed as fact in science-themed books, television and film. Past presentations have featured presentations on bioterrorism and its treatment in the Fox thriller 24, artificial intelligence gone wild in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the comic realities of Spider-Man and epidemiological models for the proliferation of zombies.

Science Study Break occurs twice each semester and is generously supported by the University Federal Credit Union.

UPDATE: You can view Matz’s Avatar presentation on the university’s YouTube channel. Thanks, Misha.

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¡A Viva Voz! Goes to the Movies

And…action!

The Benson Latin American Collection presents its ninth annual ¡A Viva Voz! at 7pm this Thursday featuring film producer Elizabeth Avellán, co-owner (with director Robert Rodriguez) and vice president of Troublemaker Studios.

Avellán co-founded Los Hooligan Productions with Rodriguez when the two began work on El Mariachi (1992) in 1991. She co-produced From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Desperado (1995) and The Faculty (1998). In 2000, Los Hooligan became Troublemaker Studios, which has since generated such notable films as the Spy Kids franchise, Sin City (2005), the Rodriguez/Tarantino double-feature, B-Movie homage Grindhouse (2007), Predators (2010) and Machete (2010).

Avellán will discuss her work and rare position as a Latino woman in the traditionally male-dominated film business.

Charles Ramirez-Berg of the Department of Radio-Television-Film will make an introduction, and food will be provided by El Meson.

An exhibit of cinematic materials from Troublemaker Studios and Cine Las Americas as well as rare materials on the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema from the Benson’s extensive archival holdings will be on view at the Benson, as well.

Check out the trailer for Avellán’s latest production credit, just off its SXSW showing, Blacktino.

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