Celluloid Pueblo:

Western Ways Films and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest

Saturday, October 22, 4:00pm – Blue Room

Presented by Dr. Jennifer Jenkins,
Professor University of Arizona

Dr. Jenkins will present two film clips and discuss the impact these films had on America of the 1940s, in conjunction with the release of her new book.

The Sonoran desert borderlands have compelled photographers since the advent of the technology. The region’s variety of Native, Spanish Colonial and hybrid Mexican subjects, from people to landscape to architecture and all of their complex cultural blends, continue to present picturesque compositional opportunities. Charles and Lucile Herbert’s Western Ways footage, shot in the late 1930s, bridges the archaeological and the commercial, showing the Kino missions in settings often largely unchanged for 250 years and invoking the romantic-nostalgic imagery of Old Mexico.