AV Club Is Helping to Uncover a Trove of Miami History

Though Miamians of a certain age may be loath to admit they recognize the signature clack clack clack of film in a projector, there's an anticipation built by an actual reel that is lost in the endless scroll of modern video consumption. As the medium begins yet another evolution away from its origins, it would be easy to dismiss the analog form as more extinct than the AI-generated wooly mammoths that are rapidly starting to fill our screens. But there's a hunger for the communal aspect of watching film that even a feed generated specifically for you cannot fill. Local librarian Katharine Labuda's AV Club project has drawn on the long-forgotten archives of the Miami-Dade Public Library System to bring a lost generation of local filmmakers and a new generation of enthusiasts together to watch movies that haven't seen the light of day in decades.

The library began collecting films in 1956, containing about 4,000 reels from hundreds of filmmakers. They vary from educational films clearly meant for elementary school teachers and librarians to arthouse experiments to slices of lost Florida life and history intentionally and lovingly captured by locals in a pre-@onlyindade era. Around 30 percent do not exist online in any form, and many have not been projected for decades.

Labuda hosts curated monthly viewings at MDPLS' main branch in downtown Miami and Gramps, as well as her own sessions at the New Schnitzel House and the Club in North Miami. Devoted fans of the analog format often attend all screenings, regardless of the venue. "Often on the feedback cards, each patron lists a different film as their favorite," Labuda says. "Everyone says that they want to see more. It's become like a social club for learning and engaging with the collection." Only a few films, like the one focusing on the 1979 Orange Bowl Parade and an arthouse piece about the experience of swimming by Homer Groening, father of The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, have seen repeat screenings due to popular demand.

There's something almost haunting these days about seeing something once and not having the instant gratification of being able to watch it back on demand. A recent screening at the Club included a film that followed a young boy wandering around Miami, with quick shots of long-paved dirt roads in the Old Grove and Purvis Young murals on a now-demolished building in Overtown. Like a child, the camera moves quickly through the city without realizing the unique moment in time it's capturing. Thirty years later, as the film reel began to stutter, signaling its ending, an audience mostly too young to remember that point in time still wanted to hit rewind.

Luckily, that film and many others are in the process of being digitized by the Wolfson Moving Image Archives at Miami Dade College due to Labuda's efforts. Before she took an interest in the collection, the films rarely circulated. In 2021 and 2022, the archive was used fewer than ten times. But at least one AV Club patron has now bought a projector, and several researchers and school groups have recently booked appointments to view specific reels. In 2023, the archive saw more than 100 circulation uses. After an introductory appointment to prove that a patron possesses and understands how to use a projector, any film can be checked out for personal use with a library card.

Miami is lucky to have it as a resource at all. After World War II, entire committees were created to steward the collection of new avant-garde and experimental films. Similar collections used to be held by libraries across the country but were disposed of in the late '90s and early 2000s as videotapes and DVDs slowly replaced 16mm film. Many libraries simply did not have the space or resources to maintain their collection, and thousands of films, including work that was never digitized, were disposed of across the country in just a few years.

MDPLS did not remove as much of its collection and was thoughtful during the process, mostly only removing feature films held in other formats while maintaining its vast and unique collection of films on Florida life, Black and queer history, and Spanish and Cuban immigration and culture. Labuda attended a conference in October where she was able to connect with other archivists and film historians about her work. The group determined the Miami Dade Public Library's collection is currently one of the largest publicly held in the country, only rivaled by Baltimore and New York's libraries. It is almost certainly the largest in the South.
A couple of decades ago, even more films were held in the vault downtown, but the city's hot and humid climate has taken a toll on the collection. Some films have developed rot or issues that make them unplayable, while a larger percentage has developed some degree of "redshift," where the other colors in the film slowly fade so that only red tones are left. Labuda estimates this affects about 35 percent of the collection, along with vinegar syndrome and other signs of decay. These films are playable, if a bit menacing; a recent Mardi Gras parade screening with 1980s clown costuming and face paint remade in red perhaps took on a slightly different tone than when it was filmed. But in a way, the mark of humidity makes the work even more localized to this place.

Labuda curates the sessions around central themes, which have recently included Black History Month and Hispanic Heritage Month evenings, as well as looser themes like films about water, transformation through observation, or consumption and creation. She creates a handout for the night with descriptions of the films pulled from a digital database that is always available to search on the MDPLS website, along with well-researched historical context and further readings about the selections on the other side.

Though she works in special collections at the library, the AV Club project is more of a personal labor of love for the films, the library, and the city she grew up in. The collection is unique, but so is Labuda. There is no similar project to AV Club in New York or Baltimore, and the excitement around the films here is a direct result of her work to get them out of the stacks and into local bars and venues.

Labuda has spent extensive time investigating the collection and the local filmmakers who donated their work to it. She has researched and screened several pieces from Mel Kiser and Corky Irick's "Sense of Place" series, which tried to capture what they saw as the rapidly transforming social fabric of 1980s and '90s Miami. Several of their films premiered at the auditorium at the library downtown. "What sets Miami apart," they said in an interview with the Miami Herald before the films were screened on WPBT in 1987, "is that it is being torn down and rebuilt continually to attract tourists and newcomers, abandoning residents, landmarks, and neighborhoods to the quicksands of inhospitable change." Their films are beautiful and far ahead of their time in capturing, well, the very sense of place the city seems desperate to find these days, with an increasing interest in local history and context matching the steady march of demolition and development.

Neither was destined to win an Oscar for their work; they both seem to have more or less vanished after creating four irreplaceable time capsules of local culture, including the unique-to-MDPLS classic Calling Miami Home, which features oral history from Marjory Stoneman Douglas on the Everglades, Arva Moore Parks on local landmarks, and architecture critic Beth Dunlop on Miami buildings. In its predecessor, A Few Things I Know About Miami, former manager of the Olympia Theatre, Jimmy Barnett, reflects on Miami's once-busy movie district. Today, the Olympia has been closed since the pandemic began. But there is excitement in Miami around local film again.

"They specifically were making films to document these things and places that they loved in Miami," Labuda says, "and for me, when I watch the films and show them to other people. It really ignites something to see this old footage of Miami, to revisit how it looked at a different time period. And to hear people talk about what it means to have a connection to the place that you live."

At the last session held at the main branch, Labuda screened Miami River Drive, a film by George Vallejo capturing "a day in the life of the river" in 1976. His personal copy was lost in a hurricane, so the film at MDPLS is the only known copy in existence. Still local to South Miami, Vallejo attended with the camera he used to make the film decades ago and answered questions from film enthusiasts of all ages who appreciate his work. A young boy approached him after to show him his digital camera and explain that he was also a filmmaker. "I've been working in archives for over ten years, and so much of my time has been dedicated to making people want to dive into the past here and do research, and nothing has captured people so quickly as the films. It shows the importance of libraries in preserving these things and dedicating the time and resources to saving these materials. It speaks to the power of film as a medium to re-enliven history."

For future events and to stay current on the AV Club, follow Katharine Labuda on Instagram at @strangepursuits.

AV Club. 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, February 21, at Gramps, 176 NW 24th St., Miami; and 8 to 10 p.m. Thursday, February 29, at the New Schnitzel House, 1085 NE 79th St., Miami. Admission is free.