The Chicago Public Library may be about to add a nail to the coffin of 16-millimeter film, but library patron Jim Finn is determined there should be no burial without a last hurrah. When rumors reached Finn last May that the Harold Washington Library Center had decided to take its 6,000-title collection of 16-millimeter films out of circulation, he got on the phone.
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Finn’s first reaction was to try, at least with Chicago’s public library collection. A regular at the library’s audiovisual department, he told the staff there that he wanted to organize public screenings before the films disappeared. He even thought he might be able to help raise money to save the collection, but the staff told him that unless he could come up with $100,000 he should forget it. “I wanted to do this film festival at the library. I thought, ‘Look, I want to curate this. I know the collection fairly well because I’ve been showing the films in my backyard.’” Last year he’d bought a used projector for $25, and since then he’s hosted some 20 screenings for friends and neighbors in the yard behind his Ukrainian Village apartment.
But the library’s staff passed him from one department to another. “Basically, I just decided that it wasn’t going to happen at Harold Washington,” says Finn. “They just didn’t seem like they were very interested.”
Carole Medal, the public library’s chief of visual and performing arts, says that 16-millimeter films accounted for less than one percent of the library’s total media circulation–films, videos, DVDs, CDs, etcetera–last year; 16-millimeter films were checked out 1,200 times. “The usage doesn’t justify the cost of preserving these films,” which Medal says could run to hundreds of thousands of dollars. “When you have to weigh where your money can be used, the films just don’t come to the top. We have a need for more computers, for increased Internet access.”
The New York Public Library has taken a completely different approach to its 16-millimeter collection. Library patrons there can watch films from the 6,000-title collection at any of eight carrels. Branch libraries as well as the central library sponsor screenings. Marie Nesphus, who heads the New York Public Library’s Donnell Media Center, discusses the viability of collections in chicken-and-egg terms. “We have an absolutely magnificent collection, so therefore people want to see it, so therefore it’s used, and therefore we buy more.” (A Chicago friend of Nesphus’s says filmmaker Spike Lee spent hours at Donnell watching 16-millimeter films.) “The New York Public Library has made a decision which is different from nearly all public libraries,” says Nesphus. “That’s good for New York, I suppose, but not good for the rest of the public library patrons around the country.”
To get around the library’s 90-minute rule and put on a three-hour program, Finn says, his girlfriend will check out some of the films in her name.
