I have been tinkering with footage and images and text written and/or gathered by the students, me and my colleagues for the upcoming "world premiere" of our humble short film "Tuscaloosa, 'The Nineteenth Century'." The event will be held at 4 pm December 4 in Room 118, tenHoor Hall on the campus of the University of Alabama. Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society, will speak.
As an aside, the film is brought to you by "Room 118 Productions." Posted here are some of the photos that the students took of local buildings. The film will also have snippets of footage from urban spaces outside of Tuscaloosa. In this short clip, note how we kept what we have learned about the tensions between frontier life and the urban space in view. Another aside: the footage of the bridge at the beginning of this clip was taken last month when I was in Chicago attending a conference.Meanwhile, it was wonderful hearing recently retired University of Alabama art historian Dr. Robert Mellown speak last week about his new book, as a presenter in the Alabama Center for the Book Lunchtime Speaker Series in Gorgas Library. Though I did not see a particular student in attendance, I was pleased to hear him say he needs to get to Gorgas and pick up Mellown's book as he - and the rest of the class - prepare to revise their final essays on local buildings. Their essays are a key inspiration behind the short film.
In our last in-class regular meeting, which will be held tomorrow, the students will discuss the first chapter of Jungle, Upton Sinclair's famous novel, and consider it alongside the late nineteenth century Second Industrial Revolution. They will see a short excerpt from PBS' Chicago: City of the Century documentary, which will push their thinking about Jungle. This reading is one of the ways we will prepare for this coming Sunday's field trip to Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama. Sloss curator and historian Karen Utz will be one of our tour lecturers. We are grateful for her support.I look forward to hearing how the students synthesized everything they have learned to date after that visit to Sloss. They certainly did a great job of doing as much when we used an Bravo Channel Actor's Studio interview approach to simply ask one another about the significance of Gunther Barth's City People. May the synthesizing (and editing) continue.
On a final note, Roll Tide! I was able to get some footage from the festivities on Saturday when Alabama played LSU. It will be incorporated into the section of the film in which the viewer hears something along the lines of, "Granted it is difficult to think of Tuscaloosa, a town into which people come primarily for football games, as a city. But by the middle of the nineteenth century it was just that." As the film and our research makes clear, in the United States you need only 2,500 people to have a city and Tuscaloosa had as many as 4,500 before the state capital moved to Montgomery in 1845.
