If you passed the rear entrance to the Harold Washington Library Center on one of several days in May 2003 you might have seen a group of people, including Nancy Watrous, forming what she calls “a conga line for carrying films to car trunks.” They’d volunteered to move the library’s collection of more than 5,000 16-millimeter films to a warehouse on LaSalle Street, the first home of the Chicago Film Archives.
Carole Medal, then the library’s division chief of visual and performing arts, says that the films were collected over the decades “to support the programming of the Chicago Public Library and Chicago Public Schools” but that by 2001 only two teachers were regularly using them. They could be checked out by anyone with a library card, but in recent years they rarely were, probably because of competition from videos. So the library decided to use the space for something else and shift the funds for maintaining the films to buying more computers and providing more Internet access.
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Watrous and Medal both wanted to keep the library’s collection together. Watrous contacted Bruce Sheridan, chair of Columbia College’s film and video department, found he was interested, and put him in touch with Medal and with Jeff Hamand at the Cultural Center. When it seemed that Columbia and the Cultural Center would agree to joint custody of the collection, Watrous turned to other things. “I was happy that it was being saved,” she says, “and kind of felt like I had a hand in the deal.”
In May 2003 the library signed over ownership of the collection to the Chicago Cultural Center “with the understanding that it would oversee the creation of a not-for-profit” that would care for the films and keep them available to researchers and institutions. Watrous’s Chicago Film Archives wouldn’t be incorporated until later in the year and wouldn’t be a not-for-profit for another year, but the library wanted the films out, and people were afraid they’d wind up in a Dumpster. So she organized the volunteers and moved the films to the building on LaSalle.
Charles Tepperman, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago who plans to write his dissertation on amateur filmmaking in Chicago, has been helping Watrous find amateur films and home movies made in the Chicago area. “In the 50s and 60s there were about a dozen amateur filmmaking clubs in Chicago,” he says. “The only one that remains right now is on the south side. They made fiction films and travelogues. There are members as old as 90.” Some of them have already donated their films to the archive.
When: Fri 12/10, 7 PM
