The Augustas

The Augustas (filmed in the early 1930s and the late 1940s)[1] is a home movie made by Scott Nixon, an avid member of the Amateur Cinema League and a traveling salesman based in Augusta, Georgia who enjoyed recording his travels on film. In this 16-minute silent film, Nixon documents some 38 streets, storefronts and cities named Augusta in such far-flung locales as Montana and Maine. Arranged with no apparent ordering, the film strings together brief snapshots of these Augustas, many of which are indicated at the point of a pencil on a train timetable or road map.

Nixon photographed his odyssey using both 8mm and 16mm movie cameras loaded with black-and-white and color motion picture film stock, amassing 26,000 feet of film that now resides at the University of South Carolina. While Nixon's film does not illuminate the historical or present-day significance of these towns, it binds them together under the umbrella of Americana. Whether intentionally or coincidentally, this amateur auteur seems to juxtapose the name's lofty origin—‘august,’ meaning great or venerable—with the unspectacular nature of everyday life in small-town America.