On a recent cool night in a warm Miami winter, patrons drank pints of German beer and ate schnitzel as a rare historical film projected onto a screen, showing scenes of Overtown before I-95 demolished entire parts of the neighborhood.
Behind a rolling 16mm film projector, musician Kronos 9 blasted beats from cassette tapes and analog instruments, providing a live musical score for the film.
“I love the experimentation. The live scoring along with the archival footage, you know, the traditional celluloid presentation, I think it’s fantastic,” said Jerry Delince, a North Miami resident who came to the New Schnitzel House for the evening.
The eccentric scene came into being thanks to the AV Club, a program started by Katherine Labuda, a librarian in the Miami-Dade Public Library System. The mission of the AV Club, short for ‘audiovisual” club, is simple enough: To bring 16mm films off the shelf of the library collection and into the world.
The 16mm films can be checked out just like a library book. But as so few people have 16mm film projectors anymore, fewer and fewer of the films have been checked out in recent years.
“I just started the program in 2023, and from 2021 to 2022 there were less than ten films checked out, and we have over 4,000 reels in the collection,” said Labuda. “The majority of the films have not been seen in decades.”
The library system hosts a monthly AV Club screening of films at the main library in downtown Miami. Separately, Labuda hosts her own showings like this one.
“The idea kind of came about as a way to screen the films and get people to see them, and also for people like us in the department to get to learn about the collection and kind of see what we have,” said Labuda. “Using it will actually help to sort of shake off the dust, if you will.”
“What happens with film is it deteriorates and it gets brittle, and by using it you can kind of prevent it from going to brittle like that, which will cause it to snap,” she added.
Sole existing copy of some local films
Out of more than 4,000 films in the collection, less than 100 were locally produced, she estimated.
But many of the locally produced films cannot be found anywhere else. Labuda pointed to the film Miami River Drive, directed and produced by local filmmaker George Vallejo in the 1970s, as an example.
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A hurricane destroyed Vallejo’s only hard copy of the film and last summer the filmmaker contacted the library system. He remembered that he once donated a copy of the short documentary to the collection.
“We had the copy still, and he actually got it restored and color corrected and digitized. And in January of this year we hosted a special AV Club where he was the guest presenter,” said Labuda.
“That was really amazing and special, and also to know that even he as a filmmaker didn’t have that film, it really kind of highlighted how special the collection is here and how unique it is.”
With the rise of VHS tapes and later DVDs, many public library systems across the country offloaded their 16mm film collections.
The fact that Miami-Dade kept its original collection makes it a rarity among large public library systems, said Elena Ross-Snook, a film specialist and collection manager of the New York Public Library’s Reserve Film and Video Collection.
“If you’re going to sustain a collection you need to have cold storage with low humidity. You need to have all kinds of protocol and infrastructure in place. It’s very resource heavy,” said Rossi-Snook.
In New York, Rossi-Snook said there has been “an explosion of interest” in 16mm film, especially among Gen Z. She said she is still trying to understand it, but imagines it as a rebellion against a digitized world, where digital companies and algorithms increasingly shape the contours of what we see and how we access the material.
“When you come into a space in which you have a film showing on a projector, you engage with that very differently,” she said. “The film as it was made is the thing you are watching. It hasn’t been processed through a computer. You don’t have to question whether what you’re seeing has been co-opted by AI.”
“There is something really valuable in the immediate, indexical, tangible quality of film that you absolutely lose when all of your data is encoded in 1s and 0s and lives in hard drives and up in the cloud."Dave Rodriguez, filmmaker and audiovisual archivist at Florida State University.
The 16mm format was invented in 1923, and was revolutionary for how it allowed emerging filmmakers to create films outside of the Hollywood studio system. For the first time, people were able to make experimental films and documentaries on their own.
“Because of that, there’s a huge amount of film history that lives on 16s,” said Dave Rodriguez, a filmmaker and audiovisual archivist at Florida State University.
A crucial way to think about the importance of preserving analog materials like 16mm films is for the benefit of future archaeologists, say, or an alien species that discovers earth in a distant future, said Rodriguez.
“There is something really valuable in the sort of immediate, indexical, tangible quality of film that you absolutely lose when all of your data is encoded in 1s and 0s and lives in hard drives and up in the cloud,” he said.
Labuda credits the fact that the Miami-Dade Public Library System has maintained its 16mm film collection to the vision and dedication of her predecessors.
At the New Schnitzel House screening, Labuda showed the 1972 Ron Williams film The Matter With Me, following an unnamed Black boy as he walks through Coconut Grove, Coral Gables and Overtown, before the construction of I-95.
The unnamed boy in the film notes the differences between swank areas of Coral Gables and the Overtown slum he lives in. There is no dialogue in the film, but the visuals are striking, amounting to a social commentary through a child’s eyes.
“Libraries are more than just books ... They’re really about bringing these cultural experiences out to the community and inspiring people to want to know more."Katherine Labuda, librarian and founder of the AV Club.
In one scene, the boy walks past a street lined with murals painted by Overtown native artist Purvis Young, decades before Young’s work appeared at top museums. One shot pans from ground level to showing an aerial view of Overtown before I-95 was constructed, the camera overlooking streets in a neighborhood that was erased from the map shortly after the footage was taken.
“It’s a very special film,” Labuda told the crowd. “Amazing footage of Miami. It’s really so beautiful and effective.”
The slight physical imperfections of the 14-minute film — now over 50 years old — only added to the experience for the audience.
“The white splotches and the visual noise that you see is specific to the Miami-Dade copy and no other copy. And even the red tint is different in that one than any other one, and that’s cool,” said Derek Gabaldon, who attended with friends.
Labuda said the screenings are important to showcase the deep collections and archives that the library system holds, and to foster conversation and a deeper understanding of the city.
“Libraries are more than just books, and they’re more than just the location and the space. They’re really about bringing these cultural experiences out to the community and inspiring people to want to know more,” she said.
The AV Club features monthly 16mm film screenings at the Main Library in downtown Miami. Labuda also hosts AV Club screenings from the library collection on her own time. You can find more information about dates and times by following the Strange Pursuits account on Instagram.
