It’s a Thursday night in late February at the University of Chicago. The cramped and darkened space in the offices of Doc Films, on the third floor of Ida Noyes Hall, exudes a tangible, living history with its mounds of books, film poster art, past film calendars and reels of film lining the floor.
Moving deeper into the interior leads one to the projection booth, where the whir of the machines produces a slightly disorienting though intuitively pleasant sound. “Our projectors are kind of like Frankenstein monsters,” explains Chris Cuiroga, 21, a technical specialist and third-year student in the college. “They’re odds and ends, custom fit to our cinema from different projectors,” he said.
This is not the automated system found in multiplexes; this is the classical, old-fashioned brand of projection, with a principal operator and two assistants working off two projectors and changing reels about every 20 minutes. “Occasionally, you notice the errors in the reel change, but that is part of the charm here. We try our best, and we’re still learning,” says Terri Francis, 28, a graduate student in the English department.
Francis, Cuiroga and five of their peers, roughly half of the programming committee that meets each week to discuss film selections and quarterly series, are strategically positioned at a long boardroom table in a second-floor room. They are among the 130 volunteers who staff, organize and operate Doc Films, the country’s oldest university film society. Kenny Kutner and Alex Pile, both 21 and third-year students at the college, have just completed their yearlong terms as co-chairs of programming.
The seven were drawn into the organization by chance, curiosity, word of mouth or just primal pleasure (“I just wanted to see free movies,” Pile says). “It has always had the reputation for a really great volunteering experience. There’s a great mix, underclassmen, graduate students, people from the community,” Francis said. The programming is ambitious, historically acute, eclectic and shrewd, borne out by the winter schedule showcasing early African-American cinema, German silent works, a retrospective of Stanley Kubrick, and adaptations of Shakespeare and Graham Greene.
“I don’t know that there’s any unified pattern about the programming,” says Jim Cantarelli, 33, a graduate student in German and cinema studies.
“I tend to pick films that I’m really into, what sounds interesting to me and what I want to see. There are people who choose more obscure, auteur-driven series, or even experimental series. There are other people selecting more popular, contemporary movies. We have a weekly meeting; we hash it out, recommend stuff, vote and then choose the program,” he said.
It is a difficult and tricky process, maintaining the credibility and creativity of the past, reconciling the personal taste and idiosyncrasies of the programmers with the demands and interests of the larger student body.
“As a committee we generally try to create some kind of balance with the final schedule between different type of themes, art films, films of historical importance, with more of a concern of movies that make money,” said Garth Bond, a 30-year-old graduate student in English.
According to Dan McCormick, co-chair of Doc Films, the organization has an annual operating budget of $180,000, money earmarked through a combination of student activity fees, box-office receipts, and cultural and foundation grants.
It requires a small army to staff and maintain the grueling schedule — typically eight films and 14 screenings per week — and run the 500-seat auditorium, the Max Palevsky Cinema, named for a university graduate whose generous donation allowed for the building of the theater in 1985. “The one thing we try to hold onto the most is providing a venue for people on campus and Hyde Park to see films that you can’t see anyplace else. Compared to [other places], we have a more diverse program,” McCormick said.
Doc Films has always shrewdly counterprogrammed profitable second-run Hollywood product such as “Spy Game” and “Harry Potter” on the weekends to compensate for its more commercially marginal titles. A recent university study showed that in the past two years, earnings from these weekend screenings have declined precipitously. Even as a nonprofit organization, Doc must pay a rental — a percentage of the receipts returned to the distributor.
“What Hollywood has been producing is far from profitable, and we’re at the lowest end. We’re plagued by our non-theatrical status. Our ticket sales the last four years have been decreasing, on average 35 percent per film, per screen,” McCormick says.
Remaining economically viable is the organization’s critical directive, though the iconoclastic group has always written its own rules, anticipating the university film societies that would flourish in the 1950s and ’60s.
Founded in 1932 as the Documentary Film Group, the organization screened 16 mm films in a classroom setting. By the 1940s, the programming was expanded to showcase fiction films. Eventually, a screening room was created at Cobb Hall, and the group used its programming to make forceful and compelling arguments that movies were not merely entertainment, but a powerful art form and academic discipline.
In the ’60s and ’70s, Doc Films was a key battleground in the ideological skirmishes about “auteurism,” the intense and fractious debates waged by critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael over the role of the director in the shaping of content and style in movies. A number of key film critics, scholars and essayists, among them former Tribune critic and current New York Times film columnist Dave Kehr, were film programmers at the university.
The advent of video had damaging economic repercussions for the repertory and university film societies, inflicting irreversible changes in social habits and viewing tendencies. Contemporary college students are typically more resistant to subtitled and silent period films. These are only a few of the obstacles typically thrown in the organization’s path.
As an all-volunteer organization, Doc Films suffers a high turnover rate. The personal demands exacted from the organization are also severe. Pile and Kutner say it is not unusual for them to spend 30 hours a week in their fluctuating job titles (McCormick says only one of the previous 10 Doc Films co-chairmen has graduated, though he himself is near completing his work on a degree in sociology).
The organization remains committed and resourceful, involved in two parallel projects, Focus, a quarterly publication of film essays, articles and reviews, and Fire Escape productions, providing training in production of 16 mm, Hi-8 video and SVHS. It is part of a deeper imperative to do something relevant and socially engaged.
“The impetus of this is very direct,” Terri Francis said. “We’re part of the constellation, a part of the world, and we want to show that history, show that part of the world, and bring some of that world to our particular space.”
Program sampler
The spring program of Doc Films is typically erudite, funky and engaging, passing through film history and popular culture with verve and imagination.
“Springtime in Paris,” inspired by the controversy surrounding the hugely popular French film “Amelie,” concerning the accuracy of its portrait of Paris, looks at the way the city has been captured in French and international cinema.
“Cut It Out” is a collection of theoretical, silent and experimental films, with a particular emphasis on the works of the great American filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who is scheduled to attend one of the screenings.
“Fantasy Film Scores” looks at the popular, science-fiction influenced film scores of composers such as James Horner and Harry Goldsmith.
“Modern Texas” is an off-beat exploration of independent American films set in Texas, including Richard Linklater’s “Slacker,” Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” and Ben Stiller’s “Reality Bites.”
The final series explores the stylistic and formal connections between Preston Sturges (“The Lady Eve”) and the Coen Brothers. The title of their hit 2000 film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” is a reference drawn from Sturges’ masterpiece, “Sullivan’s Travels.”
— Patrick Z. McGavin
