“As I’ve been thinking about our history, people know a lot about what we do, but what they don’t know are the things that we tried to do or did early on,” Chicago Filmmakers executive director Brenda Webb tells me from across a table at the organization’s recently revamped firehouse building in Edgewater.
This year, Chicago Filmmakers celebrates its 50th anniversary, a landmark achievement in the history of any nonprofit, let alone one focused on the cinematic arts. That’s 50 years of providing the city with alternatives to the more mainstream options readily available elsewhere—alternative programming as well as alternative educational opportunities for aspiring filmmakers.
In 1973, it wasn’t yet Chicago Filmmakers, but rather Film Group at N.A.M.E. Gallery, the latter of which was established the same year and cofounded by art critic Jerry Saltz. Multidisciplinary artist and film preservationist Bill Brand was among the small cohort that established the group.
“This is the early 70s, which is really still the 60s,” he says. “Countercultural ideas and [our beliefs that] we were creating an oppositional alternative that was somehow separate from main culture were very much in the wind. So I had this idea that I would start something like that, and I had the idea that to create the kind of experimental film culture that I was interested in, in an institution like this, it needed to have exhibitions that supported local arts. It needed to bring in the best of outside artists. It needed to foster critical writing and newspapers—thinking of Jonas Mekas and such, with his [Movie] Journal [column in the Village Voice]. And it needed to foster production. It needed equipment and stuff like that. . . . This was the conceptual structure of what I was doing, but I was very naive. I ran into a couple of fellow [School of the] Art Institute students who were doing a similar thing for galleries . . . they were starting N.A.M.E.”
The very first program featured films by Brand, Stan Brakhage (then a professor at the School of the Art Institute, flown in on a regular basis from his home in Boulder, Colorado), Shirley Erbacher, and Yvonne Rainer. Brand and Erbacher were in attendance.
Dan Ochiva, Brand’s classmate and one of Film Group’s cofounders (the others were Warner Wada and Brand’s then wife, filmmaker JoAnn Elam), says he was particularly galvanized by a desire to take action rather than “sitting back and letting school happen around me.” Despite this resourceful mindset, the screenings and events themselves were rather unstructured. “Maybe it was just due to the 60s and the 70s,” he says, “but we didn’t really make a big deal out of presenting things to people in a very structured or didactic way, but trying to find a flow, trying to find what people were interested in and how to elicit that from the filmmaker.”
When Brand left, Ochiva took over, with help from Elam (a local hero of sorts whose films, housed by the Chicago Film Archives, include: Rape [1975], described by critic and early Chicago Filmmakers board member B. Ruby Rich as an “an early classic of feminist avant-garde agitprop”; Lie Back and Enjoy It [1982]; and Everyday People [1979-1990]) and Susan Goldberg, who also stayed on when Ochiva departed and Elam was in charge. In 1976, the group broke off from N.A.M.E. and officially incorporated as Chicago Filmmakers.
“At some point . . . we did decide to become more independent and a separate entity from N.A.M.E. Gallery,” Goldberg says, “because it just felt like the way we were growing and evolving.”
Goldberg remembers that they had an advocate in a renowned local film critic. “God bless him—Roger Ebert, he was a big supporter, and he would try to give us reviews when he could,” she says.
She recalls when he reviewed The Police Tapes (1977) by Alan and Susan Raymond. “We were mobbed. Mobbed. We had to open the second room; I think we had to put up two screens. It was crazy. There were lots of policemen there. I remember putting on Roxy Music, ‘Love is the Drug,’ and it got booed. That was just one experience that we had.”
Webb began working at Chicago Filmmakers in 1978 on a recommendation from Goldberg, her friend and then roommate. She was one of the organization’s first paid employees as part of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, an extension of the Works Progress Administration that was utilized especially by arts organizations to employ artists and arts workers. She has been involved ever since, a staggering 45 years of dedication.
“When I was hired at Chicago Filmmakers, I was hired to start an educational program,” Webb says, referring to the ongoing program that now involves adult classes, youth classes and camps, and workforce development (specifically, the organization facilitates a Production Assistant Training Program). “That was what my job description was supposed to be. I was not brought on to be the film curator. But when I started, basically, the board disbanded . . . I take this job and suddenly there’s no equipment. I’m supposed to start this film program, but there’s no equipment to teach filmmaking on or anything like that.
“I had to suddenly run the film screening program, which was a preexisting program that had to continue. It took a little while, a year or so, before I was able to really focus attention on the educational program. And even so, we really pretty much had a borrowed Bolex [camera].”
In terms of film programming, Webb went up against the screening committee to show David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977)—her “first act of defiance” against them, she says, an indicator of tensions often prevalent in nonprofit organizations, especially those centered on the arts—which resulted in lines around the block and some people waiting up to four hours to see it. “That made me realize you can show weird, experimental films, and it doesn’t have to be that nobody shows up or that very few people show up.”
This extended beyond film. “There’s a lot of things about our history that people don’t know. . . . We were one of the first places, if not the first place, where punk bands played in Chicago, because the bars wouldn’t let them in, because they were too rowdy,” says Webb. “And we did until they ruined our screen by somebody throwing beer at it.”
“We did a feminist film series, where we were schlepping a projector around to various women’s facilities, trying to turn them into radicals. Stuff like that. We did a Super 8 mm class at Robert Taylor Homes, for young kids, to teach them to make oral histories for their families. We did some screenings at Cabrini-Green, at the community center there, and showed some Black Panther films.”
There are too many to list here, but standout screenings have included, in no particular order, films by Mekas, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, Chicago documentarian Tom Palazzolo, Chick Strand, George Kuchar, Jon Jost, and Vincent Grenier (who just recently passed away); a smoky screening of Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone (1973); The Forgotten Half: Restoring Women to History, a several-part series of programs dedicated to female filmmakers, such as Agnès Varda, Alice Guy-Blaché, Lotte Reiniger, Suzan Pitts, and Maya Deren; a “dada soiree,” featuring a collection of French and German dada films made between 1922 and 1931; a five-part retrospective of films by Yoko Ono; and even a documentary about Allen Ross, a cofounder of Chicago Filmmakers along with Elam, Goldberg, Amy Carter, and John Van Wagner. Ross had also served as the organization’s first program director; the aforementioned documentary, per filmmaker and critic Fred Camper’s Reader review of the film, detailed how Ross “vanished mysteriously in 1995, two years after he surprised friends by marrying alleged cult leader Linda Greene and leaving Chicago.” His remains were found in a Wyoming basement in 2000.
In general among the group, “aesthetic and ideological differences were often handled by shifting emphasis to different kinds of work on a show-by-show basis,” writes Van Wagner in an email. “We knew our general parameters, toward ‘independence’ and ‘experimentation,’ toward the idiosyncratic and unclassifiable, and away from the mainstream. Many of us were strongly allied with and sympathetic to the experimental orientation of work seen around the country in what would now be called ‘microcinemas,’ but we were open to work that was uniquely local and cut across genres, such as works of visual anthropology made for audiences that were mainly academic.”
(Because it’s too good not to mention, Van Wagner recounts one particularly star-
studded event: “On the occasion of a screening with a personal appearance by Kenneth Anger, a man showed up in a very large fur coat with an entourage, taking up the center of the front row. The volume of this coat made viewing Anger’s films difficult for anyone in the central seating section. It was revealed, many of us found out later, that this was Tennessee Williams, in town for the opening of one of his
late plays.”)
In addition to punk shows, Chicago Filmmakers was one of the few places where members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians played improvisational jazz on the north side, a connection made by filmmaker and programmer Floyd Webb (no relation to Brenda), a longtime board member still heavily involved with the organization. David Hauptschein hosted a spoken word cafe series that attracted the likes of David Sedaris. Another series, PerforMedia, was a salon of sorts that involved other mediums in addition to film. “The idea was to introduce experimental film to people interested in poetry or people interested in avant-garde music or things like that,” says Brenda Webb.
“One of those things that we tried was the Reeling Film Festival, which is just one thing that sort of took on a life of its own. It came out of that spirit of like, how can we get more people to see experimental film?”
Its 41st edition having just concluded in early October, Reeling, the Chicago LGBTQ+ international film festival (the second-longest-running of such festivals) remains a cornerstone of the vision of Chicago Filmmakers. Originally called the Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival, it’s Webb’s proudest accomplishment in her 45-year tenure.
“I guess in some ways I’m most proud of Reeling just because, at the time I started the festival, I didn’t even know if such a thing existed,” she says, “so I feel like that was something that married filmmakers and a community, and that’s what I think Chicago Filmmakers is all about. It’s not just the art, but connecting the art with the community.”
Chicago Filmmakers also facilitates the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, which is going into its 34th edition. Established by the Experimental Film Coalition in 1987, Chicago Filmmakers took it over in 2001, after which it was led by program manager Patrick Friel until 2015. “It had been dormant for a couple of years,” Friel tells me, though it’s been running steadily under the auspices of Chicago Filmmakers and a handful of festival programmers since then.
Over the years, Chicago Filmmakers has been in various spots around the city’s north side, from Clark and Hubbard to Belmont, where Theater Wit is now housed, to Clark again, in Andersonville, and then, most recently, the firehouse on 1326 W. Hollywood.
Webb credits Alderperson Harry Osterman with Chicago Filmmakers getting that space. As it had once been a fire station, “he was really committed to seeing this facility go back into the public function,” Webb says. Community members help with the landscaping, and they still host voting as it did when it was a fire station.
In addition to such community involvement, Chicago Filmmakers is supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events; Voqal and the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and corporate entities such as Disney Entertainment Television and NBCUniversal. Personal contributions are also accepted.
Education has remained a focus, and for many years they provided equipment rental, a function that was pivotal during a time when it was prohibitively expensive for filmmakers working outside the mainstream.
“The average filmmaker did not own their own Steenbeck editing flatbed, or even their own Bolex,” Webb says. “When they would go to the rental house, [they were] paying the same thing that the TV commercial producers are paying to the film rental houses. The equipment was very expensive, and usually you had to put down a credit card and a deposit, and a struggling filmmaker didn’t have that. Equipment access was a really important part of what we did at that time, that really empowered people to make their films.”
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Chicago Filmmakers is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a series of monthly programs extending into 2024. The first took place on November 11 as part of the Black Harvest Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Programmed by Floyd Webb and honoring the Blacklight Film Festival, which began at Chicago Filmmakers, the event featured a screening of Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 silent film Symbol of the Unconquered with live accompaniment performed by Edward Wilkerson Jr., Jim Baker, and Jonathan Woods. Program managers and curators previously associated with Chicago Filmmakers will also be involved, and there will be tributes to Women in the Director’s Chair (another festival that started there), and the aforementioned spoken word cafe series and PerforMedia.
In this day and age, it’s hard to believe that any arts organization could last this long, as funding dries up and audiences become more consumed with mainstream offerings. It’s truly a spark sustained by tenacity and a singular dedication.
“It’s sort of like, if you’re making a fire in the woods, you want the tinder that catches fire quickly,” Ochiva says. “And that’s sort of what happened with Chicago Filmmakers. Here’s something you can do at the beginning—it doesn’t matter if you have technology or a steady place to meet or anything like that—it’s ‘Start this group first and make it happen,’ and that was it. That was the fire.”
