January 10, 2008
UW’s historic films so popular they get an encore performance
This could be your only chance this year to see film of a pig rodeo. Or Yakima’s largest box of apples, circa 1934.
The first screening of historic films from UW Libraries Special Collections in October was so popular, they’ve decided to do it again. Northwest Film Forum will present, “Film Soup: An evening of films from the Special Collections Division at the University of Washington Libraries” at 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 17. Northwest Film Forum is located at 1515 12th Ave. Cost of the screening is $8.50 general admission and free to film forum members.
The screening includes clips that are historic, funny, or just strange. Among them are:
- A demonstration on the UW campus in 1969 protesting the low level of minority hiring in the construction industry. In the course of the demonstration, a bulldozer ends up at the bottom of a large excavation.
- The conclusion of the first world’s championship motorcycle race on a board track, held at the Tacoma Speedway in 1915.
- The groundbreaking ceremony for a power-generating nuclear reactor at Hanford, in which President John F. Kennedy uses a piece of uranium to initiate the action of a construction crane.
- A home movie of traveling in Alaska very, very slowly over a very, very muddy unpaved road.
The screening will include program notes and comments from Nicolette Bromberg, visual materials curator, and Hannah Palin, film archives specialist. Most of these films are rare or unique and have not been shown publicly before.
Thanks to a grant from The Libraries Twenty-First Century Fund, Special Collections has been able to preserve and display these films. The UW has no permanent budget for film preservation, so the work relies on grants. See our story on the preservation efforts <a href=http://uwnews.org/uweek/uweekarticle.asp?Search=films&articleid=13603>here</a>.
For more information, see http://www.nwfilmforum.org.
