Every Thursday the Rice Media Center presents a celebration of everything analog and archaic in cinema with Low-Fi. The free series, headed by film program manager and lecturer on film production Tish Stringer, is dedicated to unearthing oddballs and rare finds from the extensive Rice archive, many of which are not available anywhere else, including streaming.

Not yet, anyway. The project began this year as Stringer was looking to preserve the archive. Celluloid and film deteriorate quickly, and technical know-how is becoming scarce when it comes to showing some of the formats.

“We live in a swamp,” says Stringer. “It’s moldy and hot. They were in danger. We’ve excavated, cleaned, and disinfected the archives. Now they’re being sent off to be digitized. The first stuff we sent out is starting to come back. So many cool things we weren’t able to screen because you never knew if the next play would be your last. We wanted to share these gems with the world.”

Low-Fi events are purposefully mysterious, with the intended showing never divulged ahead of time. Recently, they had an entire moon-themed event marking the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. One of the works they screened was NASA test footage on 16mm . It shows astronauts galivanting about the Houston countryside in their suits while scientists sit in the background and smoke cigarettes. Eventually, all these sorts of items will be available in a research library for use, but for now the goal is to build a community through regular events that appreciates the physical medium.

Low-Fi When: 7 p.m. Thursdays Where: Rice Media Center, Entrance 8, University at Stockton Details: Free; vada.rice.edu/rice-cinema

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“We don’t have the same film culture as New York and LA,” says Stringer. “I’ve tried for 20 years to build one, especially the analog film nerd scene. People who want to see celluloid, the weird inconsistencies of VHS.”

Stringer’s passionate adoration of all things analog is apparent in how she describes the way films look because of how they are stored. She mentions a recent Low-Fi showing of the 1990 cult experimental horror fantasy film “Begotten” by E. Elias Merhige. Famously weird and dreamlike, it’s made even more so by the fact Stringer showed an old rental copy Rice picked up when Audio-Visual Plus went out of business. It adds a layer of mystery that modern, sharper films lose.

“Not only is it a VHS it’s a rental VHS that’s been played 500 times,” says Stronger. “It’s so grainy and low-fi that it creates a situation where the audience looks around corners to try and see what’s going on. It’s more dreamy. I went to see ‘Duck Soup’ recently in 4K. You can see Groucho’s mustache is painted on. I became obsessed throughout the movie with it. Or I watched the restoration of Dr. Strangelove. You can see the wires for the planes now. All these things that were going to be invisible in the medium they were made for are visible now. It’s much too clear. Too much like real life.”

Each Low-Fi event is accompanied by a brief talk on the formats. This does lead to some danger, as it’s not uncommon for films to break and have to be fixed halfway through the screening. One film required over 100 pieces of splice tape on the celluloid to hold it together enough to run. In a showing of the documentary “Who Killed Vincent Chin?,” Stringer actually had to stop a VHS tape to blow into it and to remove particles that were causing sound issues.

“I like it when people cheer when we fix things,” says Stringer.

The Rice archives are massive, including everything from student-made horror films to appearances by Werner Herzog and news footage. The devotion to original screening materials is a chance to appreciate a dying era of media, especially as the digitization project removes the possibility that these works will be lost forever. Stringer enjoys exposing a younger audience unfamiliar with analog to how it all used to (mostly) work. Even automated DVD scratch buffers can have attendees on the edge of their seats, says Stringer.

Stringer’s series is a connection to the storied past of media in the Houston area as well as a chance to see the sort of footage even YouTube doesn’t have.

Jef Rouner is a Houston-based writer.