ANALOG FANS ARE HIGH ON RICE’S LOW-FI SUPPLY
TISH STRINGER IS FILM PROGRAM MANAGER AND LECTURER ON FILM PRODUCTION AT RICE MEDIA CENTER.
Every Thursday, the Rice Media Center presents a celebration of everything analog and archaic in cinema with Low-Fi. The free series, headed by film program manager and lecturer on film production Tish Stringer, is dedicated to unearthing oddballs and rare finds from the extensive Rice University archive, many of which are not available anywhere else, including streaming.
Not yet, anyway. The project began this year as Stringer was looking to preserve the archive. Celluloid and film deteriorate quickly, and technical know-how is becoming scarce when it comes to showing some of the formats.
“We live in a swamp,” says Stringer. “It’s moldy and hot. They were in danger. We’ve excavated, cleaned and disinfected the archives. Now they’re being sent off to be digitized. The first stuff we sent out is starting to come back. So many cool things we weren’t able to screen because you never knew if the next play would be your last. We wanted to share these gems with the world.”
Low-Fi events are purposefully mysterious, with the intended showing never divulged ahead of time. Recently, they had an entire moon-themed event marking the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. One of the works they screened was NASA test footage on 16 mm film. It shows astronauts galavanting about the Houston countryside in their suits while scientists sit in the background and smoke cigarettes. Eventually, all these sorts of items will be available for use in a research library, but for now, the goal is to build a community that appreciates the physical medium.
“We don’t have the same film culture as New York and LA,” says Stringer. “I’ve tried for 20 years to build one, especially the analogfilm-nerd scene. People who want to see celluloid, the weird inconsistencies of VHS.”
Stringer’s passionate adoration of all things analog is apparent in how she describes the way films look because of how they are stored. She mentions a recent Low-Fi showing of the 1990 cult experimental horror fantasy film “Begotten” by E. Elias Merhige. Famously weird and dreamlike, it’s made even more so by the fact Stringer showed an old rental copy Rice picked up when AudioVisual Plus went out of business.
“Not only is it a VHS, it’s a rental VHS that’s been played 500 times,” says Stringer. “It’s so grainy and low-fi that it creates a situation where the audience looks around corners to try and see what’s going on. It’s more dreamy. I went to see ‘Duck Soup’ recently in 4K. You can see Groucho’s mustache is painted on. I became obsessed throughout the movie with it. Or I watched the restoration of ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ You can see the wires for the planes now. All these things that were going to be invisible in the medium they were made for are visible now. It’s much too clear..”
Each Low-Fi event is accompanied by a brief talk on the formats. This does lead to some danger, as it’s not uncommon for films to break and have to be fixed halfway through the screening. One film required over 100 pieces of splice tape. For “Who Killed Vincent Chin?,” Stringer actually had to stop a VHS tape to blow into it and to remove particles that were causing sound issues.
“I like it when people cheer when we fix things,” says Stringer.