Professor Jennifer Jenkins will present a talk, "Western Ways Film Service and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest" as part of the State of Arizona Research Library’s 2021 Arizona Author Series. The talk is at 1 p.m., Thursday, September 23rd, and will be held virtually on Zoom. Attendees are encouraged to register below to receive the link to the presentation. After the talk, there will be time for questions from the audience.

Charles and Lucile Herbert brought the first motion picture sound gear into Arizona in the summer of 1929, tasked with filming the “Baby State” and testing Fox Movietone’s new sound-on-film technology. After that two-week stint, the Herberts would travel the world for Movietone and Magic Carpet, finally settling in Tucson in 1936. At its busiest, the Western Ways Film Service ran studio portrait, aerial photography, news photo, photo-story, and motion picture divisions out of an adobe building in downtown Tucson. In this presentation, Professor Jenkins will discuss the career of the Herberts and show how their films of Arizona and Sonora shaped the image of the region in the popular imagination.

Jennifer Jenkins is Professor of Literature and Film and Research Social Scientist in the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona. She is active in the moving image archives community, and founded Home Movie Day Tucson and the Tombstone Home Movie Project. She leads an NEH-funded project to repatriate midcentury educational films about Native peoples of the Southwest through recording new, culturally competent narrations from within the communities represented. This project is publicly accessible at Tribesourcingfilm.com. Her book, Celluloid Pueblo: Western Ways Films and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest (UArizona Press, 2016) examines the careers of independent news feature filmmakers Charles and Lucile Herbert. Her current project is Screening Americans: Cinema and Citizenship at WRA Camps and Los Alamos, 1942-46, a study of the films shown to sequestered populations at Japanese internment camps in Arizona and the atomic research reserve at Los Alamos, NM.

This event is part of the 2021 Arizona Author Series. This program is supported by the Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records, a division of the Secretary of State, with federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Arizona Center for the Book, a Library of Congress Center for the Book Affiliate.