On Friday, March 20, Duke Performances will present the world premiere of “Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait,” an original film and music commission incorporating footage and a live score.  For tickets and information visit dukeperformances.org

DURHAM — Before there were “selfies” and YouTube, there were “Movies of Local People.”

For a nickel or dime, Depression-era moviegoers across North Carolina and the Piedmont South could see themselves on the big screen at their local movie house whenever traveling cameraman H. Lee Waters came to town.

Now Waters’ films can once again be enjoyed. A large collection of them has been digitized and made freely available online by the Duke University Libraries, which began collecting them in the 1980s. Hundreds of hours of digitized footage offer a rare glimpse of everyday life in the Piedmont South during the Great Depression, often in rich Kodachrome color.

Herbert Lee Waters (1902-1997) was a studio photographer in Lexington, North Carolina. In 1936, he began supplementing his income by filming ordinary people going about their daily lives in small towns around the region.

Waters worked with local movie theaters to screen his silent 16-mm films, which would be shown before the feature presentation. Audience members who flocked to see the latest Groucho Marx or Alfred Hitchcock film delighted in seeing their friends and neighbors on the same screen, and Waters received a percentage of box office proceeds for the pre-show entertainment.

Between 1936 and 1942, Waters produced 252 “Movies of Local People” across 118 communities in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. It is the only collection of its kind by an itinerant American documentary filmmaker of the era.

Waters’ small-town imagery included children playing at school, people shopping on Main Street and workers arriving and departing from mills and factories. Waters, who was white, was also one of the few filmmakers of the era to capture candid scenes of African-American life in the segregated South.

Shot in 1941, “Kannapolis, North Carolina” is one of the 91 films now available on the Duke University Libraries website (http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hleewaters).

Waters’ films are also the inspiration for a forthcoming show from composer, singer and violinist Jenny Scheinman.

On Friday, March 20, Duke Performances will present the world premiere of “Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait,” an original film and music commission incorporating footage from Waters’ films and a live score by Scheinman, at 8 p.m. in Reynolds Theater on Duke’s West Campus. Scheinman will be joined onstage by singer, guitarist, banjo player and North Carolina native Robbie Fulks and multi-instrumentalist Robbie Gjersoe.