Texas Archive of the Moving Image

The Texas Archive of the Moving Image was founded in Austin in 2002 by film archivist and University of Texas professor Caroline Frick. Its focus is material the film industry never set out to protect: home movies, industrial and educational films, advertising, local television and newsreel fragments. In 2009 the Austin Chronicle found its office in a small brick building on the East Side, crowded with film canisters just delivered by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which held safety films from the 1950s and 1960s. Frick argued that films like those, seen next to Casablanca or Giant, are what let people understand the role of media in society. That year TAMI took its argument to theaters and the road. It programmed Wanted: Texas Film at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, pairing Written on the Wind, The Getaway and The Legend of Billie Jean with regional footage from its collection. On March 7 and 8, 2009, it launched the Texas Film Round-Up, a traveling preservation program, with screenings and a Reel Ride bus tour that played historical films of Austin as riders moved through the city. Free digitization was the centerpiece: Texans who brought Texas-related film or video and agreed to donate a digital copy got copies back. Stops in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in May and Lubbock in July were planned next. The Round-Up became a standing partnership with the Texas Film Commission, which also calls it the Texas Moving Image Archive Program. It accepts Super 8, 8mm and 16mm film and most home video formats, up to 50 reels or 3,500 feet of film and 10 tapes per household. The collection it built streams more than 3,600 moving images free to anyone and makes up about two-thirds of TAMI's video library. The archive's website also carries Teach Texas lesson plans for classrooms, and its holdings have reached national audiences: in 2010 The New York Times ran KTBC interview footage, supplied by TAMI, recorded during the making of the 1966 Batman feature. TAMI moved into the Baker Center, a 1911 Hyde Park school building restored by Alamo Drafthouse founders Tim and Karrie League, in the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. After cellphone interference disrupted its digitization work on an upper floor, it settled into a ground-floor archive shared with the American Genre Film Archive, where both use Lasergraphics film scanners. Managing director Elizabeth Hansen's team now handles more than 1,000 pieces of footage a year and puts its material online for viewers and researchers.