Elaine Patton, 07/26/12

Today I did just a couple of KHOU reels (edited to add links to uploaded videos):

• Box 6901, reels 06 & 18.

Very straightforward with no difficulties except for trying to check/verify the few names given in the titles to try to establish their identities in the clips. Two stand-out scenes for me:

06: Leftover painted Christmas trees in a surreal array of color

18: Standing in front of Dr. Cooley is a nurse with a massive hairdo, 
dutifully covered by a surgical cap. 
I'm just amused at how alien-headed she looks, really.

 The other task for the day was something new: newly digitized footage from 1935 taken by Orris Brown. The original reels are now no more, having had only one play left in their lifespan which was used up to digitize them. It's very awesome. I viewed:

•  the fourth (reel 4, part 1, part 2) and tenth reels (reel 10, part 1, part 2)

#4 concerned the Houston flood of 1935, which was nicely topical in light of the recent flooding in northwest Houston.

Downtown Houston flood damage... looks like WW2 photos after a bombing.

It was a little difficult to match titles to scenes, and the only way any of them made sense was if I rearranged the title order. The titles given didn't do many clips justice which deserve their own bookmark in the footage (by dint of being both interesting and unique to its immediate neighbors), in my opinion at least, so I threw in many more time cues (ditto that for #10). The second part of the first reel was dedicated to advertisements, introducing a sponsor and their location by title card, then following up with some footage from around the business. I loved the scenes of the customers being served at the markets as well as the gas station (15 cents/gallon!). Just so very slice-of-life.

Flashbacks to O Brother, Where Art Thou? for some reason.

Also, I didn't really think about it until now, but there's a very good reason, I suppose, why the "funeral church" only briefly showed exterior shots of the building along with the owner and nothing else.

#10 was, basically, scenes from a road trip to New Orleans, with most of the footage being from NOLA itself. The only real challenge here was incomplete titles throwing off my geographical identification. The first few headings, from when Brown was still en route, are: Lake Charles, New Iberia, and Sugar Cane Harvesting (probably in the New Iberia area). Unfortunately, there's a lingering shot of a church I figured out was in Lafayette, LA, which had no mention (it was also preceded by another building I wasn't able to identify at all, unfortunately). It's interesting how little has changed, at least in the French Quarter.

All in all, though, I think it went pretty smoothly once I got the hang of it. I approached the Brown reels by watching them all the way through to get a feel for them (since they aren't as consistently and obviously divided up the way the KHOU reels are), and I actually ended up working sort of backwards, simply because the later clips were more straightforward than the very first (depicting the floods, which I already noted didn't match up with the given headings very well).