Film archivists save history through careful preservation

UNIVERSITY CITY — Inside the Tivoli Theatre, a couple of hundred people sat in the dark, watching an oddball smattering of movies: a tottery, fuzzed-up video of a blues singer playing guitar, footage from the 1940s of Japanese-Americans being released from an Arkansas internment camp, a home movie of a woman sweeping the front steps of her wrecked house after Hurricane Katrina and her husband, holding his hand above his head, showing just how high the water had come.