In 2018

I had recently completed my Ph.D. in Literature, Theory, and Culture, and was teaching a course called “Film as Art” in the English Department at New Mexico State University, just as Orville Wanzer had done 60 years before me.

During fall break, I stopped into the Rio Grande Historical Collections reading room and met the Archives and Special Collections department head, Dennis Daily, who told me about an unassessed film archive belonging to a former NMSU Professor, who made a “horror Western” in the 1960s. Like a moth to a flame, I went down the rabbit hole of the Orville “Buddy” Wanzer Archive in the Branson LIbrarary at NMSU.

In the last 6 years, I have digitized almost all of the 115 16mm reels in the archive, discovering many more of Wanzer’s films, along with the student films that he saved from his 20 years running NMSU’s first film school that he started in 1966 when the journalism dpeartment