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| PHOTO COURTESY OF WALDORF COLLEGE
Showing off several new movies that are now part of the Waldorf College Hanson Library collection are (from left) Jeremy Fiebig, Waldorf College’s assistant professor of theatre; Alexandra Collins, Film Club president; Robert AuFrance, director of theatre; and Jim Kapoun, Hanson Library director. AuFrance recently donated 500 films to the library.
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It's a proverbial film fest
Or at least it could be after Waldorf professor makes grand donation to library
FOREST CITY - Waldorf College director of theatre Robert AuFrance has donated 500 titles from his personal movie collection to Waldorf's Luise V. Hanson Library. Heading down to Hanson Library to check out a movie will never be the same.
Earlier this year, AuFrance and Jeremy Fiebig, assistant professor of theatre, helped form Waldorf's student Film Club.
There was just one problem: Nobody was satisfied with the selection of available movies. AuFrance, a cinematic connoisseur with an estimated 14,000 titles in his personal library, came to the rescue.
“It just seems natural that we should incorporate this at our library,” AuFrance said, “so that way it's regulated, films don't disappear, (and) if there's a change in faculty, these films will be here for students to enjoy.”
So what's in store for movie buffs at Hanson Library? You really have to see it for yourself. While some college libraries have more titles, few can stand toe-to-toe with the vast and varying makeup of AuFrance's eclectic gift.
Waldorf students now have access to all-time classics, modern classics, cult classics, classic TV and selections that simply can't be classified as anything but “other.”
For example, upon one randomly selected shelf sits a copy of “Back to the Future.” Next to it sits a VHS compilation of classic British farcical sitcom “Fawlty Towers.” There's also modern cult classic “Napoleon Dynamite,” bizarre Japanese children's import “Gamera vs. Guiron” and modern horror epic “The Devil's Rejects.” And that's just in one two-foot space.
How did this smorgasbord come together? Location, location, location.
“We went down into the front room of my house,” AuFrance said, “where the movies that I've bought from the last three years are stored at, and we started there. Out of probably 2,000 films, these 500 were selected to be donated. My hope is, later on over the next couple years, I'll start going through the storage room upstairs where the main bulk of my collection is at and continue to make a yearly donation to the library.”
Hanson Library Director Jim Kapoun was happy to accept AuFrance's donation. Upon arriving in 2004, one of Kapoun's goals was to build a film library that houses every Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated film, as well as titles from American Film Institute lists and independent and genre titles.
“This is exciting because it helps us fill in genres, and it helps us actually fill in some of the gaps we've been collecting the last three years,” Kapoun said. “There are some we just can't get - [the 1933 original] King Kong was hard for us to get; [AuFrance] had a copy and he donated it. In Iowa, we're the smallest library with possibly one of the largest genre collections.”
AuFrance's donation arrives just in time, as he plans on unveiling a new Film Studies minor beginning in the 2008-09 school year.
Story created Dec 24, 2007 - 12:21:34 CST.
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