Saving Brinton
This event took place Jul 25 - Jul 29, 2018
$12 General Admission
$9 Student/Senior
$7 Member
Tommy Haines & Andrew Sherburne
US
2017
1h 30m
Series -
Visiting Artists
Visiting Artist
Collector Mike Zahs, subject of Saving Brinton, and Hannah Palin, Film Archives Specialist at the UW Libraries Special Collections, will join us for a post-screening Q&A on Wednesday, July 25!
About
In an Iowa countryside basement, collector Mike Zahs has unearthed, curated, and restored a long-lost collection of cinematic treasures – once owned and operated by William Franklin Brinton in the early 1900s – and has taken it upon himself to bring them back into the spotlight.
Among the treasures, Zahs has rare footage of President Teddy Roosevelt, the first moving images from Burma, and a lost relic from Georges Méliès. But the old nitrate reels are just some of the artifacts that belonged to Brinton. From thousands of trinkets, handwritten journals, receipts, posters, and catalogs, emerges the story of an inventive farm boy who became America’s greatest barnstorming movieman. Saving Brinton is a portrait of this unlikely hero, celebrating living simply but dreaming big.
“It’s clear five minutes into Saving Brinton that the line between hoarder and preservationist really is fine. It’s also clear that you need sensitive, humane filmmaking to insist that one is very different from the other. The average documentary would gawk. This one reclassifies: One person’s pack rat is another’s collector. And Michael Zahs, this movie’s sturdily built, mighty bearded subject, does indeed collect.” – Wesley Morris, The New York Times
