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Splices of Life: Chicago Film Archives Collects, Preserves the Region's Past in Film -- the Reel Labor Includes Inspecting Its 5,500 Movies

Posted on: Friday, 30 December 2005, 12:00 CST

By John Owens, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune

Dec. 30--They're the stark, black-and-white images from Chicago's racially charged past. A group of about 300 African-Americans stages a civil rights march that travels west on Cermak Road and into the all-white suburb of Cicero. There, the marchers are met by hundreds of outraged residents.

"Go back to Brookfield Zoo with the rest of the baboons!" shouts one angry resident, then others follow up with equally crude epithets.

This real-life drama was captured in the rarely seen 1966 documentary "Cicero March," an eight-minute production that is one of the crown jewels in the collection of a recently created local arts organization, the Chicago Film Archives.

"This is an absolutely wonderful document of Chicago history," says CFA director Nancy Watrous of "Cicero March," produced by the legendary Chicago-based Film Group production house. "It's a perfect example of what we want our collection to be--films from Chicago filmmakers, representing this city and the Midwest."

"Cicero March" is one of approximately 5,500 films now in the collection of the Chicago Film Archives, a not-for-profit group founded by Watrous after she received a donation of around 5,000 films from the Chicago Public Library in late 2003. That collection, which consists primarily of 16 mm films (with some 8 mm movies and a few 35 mm films thrown in for good mea-sure), is now housed in a climate-controlled Pilsen warehouse.

Watrous, who has spent the last 25 years working in a variety of capacities with film production crews in Hollywood and Chicago, rescued these films after Columbia College decided not to take over the collection.

"I had heard about these films and had been telling the library not to split up this collection, so they said, 'OK, it's yours,'" Watrous recalled. "I wasn't originally thinking about taking the collection, but I thought it was important to get them relocated here in Chicago."

In addition to Watrous, the CFA now has five other volunteers devoted to cataloging and inspecting the prints in the collection.

The group also has a nine-person advisory board consisting primarily of members of Chicago's film community.

Watrous and her five-member volunteer staff are now spending several hours each week in the Pilsen warehouse where the films are housed, inspecting the prints for damage. The group has a budget of $20,000 annually for warehouse and inspection costs. Much of that money was acquired through grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation, the City of Chicago Community Arts Assistance Program and the Illinois Arts Council. Recent fundraisers such as a May event at the Chicago Cultural Center are also utilized, along with donations and film rentals.

Members of Chicago's film community say the CFA is a necessary addition to the local arts community.

"A lot of what's in their collection are films that probably deserve to be forgotten," said Milos Stehlik, the executive director for Facets Multimedia. "But it's a noble effort because everything is worth preserving, specifically the films that were interesting oddities."

The collection now has a varied group of films. There's a rare 16 mm print of "Paracelsus" (1943), from "Pandora's Box" director G.W. Pabst, made while he was stuck in Nazi Germany; a number of silent films from Hollywood, including some Charlie Chaplin shorts; and home movies and amateur productions going back 80 years, the oldest example of which probably is rare footage of Navy Pier in the 1920s.

But perhaps the most valuable part of the CFA collection is the hundreds of locally produced industrials, documentaries, educational films and corporate training films from the 1940s through the 1980s. They include pleasant surprises like "Chicago: Midland Metropolis," a beautifully shot 1963 color documentary produced by Encyclopedia Britannica featuring bygone images of Chicago neighborhoods; and "The New World of Stainless Steel", a 1961 color industrial possibly shot at the Republic Steel plant on the Southeast Side by Chicago-based Wilding Studios.

"It's the one area in this collection which is really worth preserving, because Chicago from the 1950s on had a strong independent film scene," Stehlik said. "There were a lot of interesting educational films produced here, and there was a rich tradition of social documentaries."

Those documentaries, industrials and educational films were produced by local companies that became leaders in the industry: Coronet Films, Fred Niles Studio, Film Group, Encyclopedia Britannica.

"There was a lot of important work done here," said Stephen Poster, a Hollywood cinematographer ("Daddy Day Care,""Donnie Darko,""Big Top Pee-Wee") who started his career in Chicago working on documentaries and educational films in the 1960s.

"In a way, these films document how important Chicago was as an industrial hub," Poster said. "They're cultural artifacts."

These films also provide a valuable snapshot of a Chicago that has long since disappeared.

"What did factories look like in the '40s and '50s, what did people look like then?" said Jack Behrend, a Chicago-based industrial filmmaker during the 1960s and '70s who donated dozens of his films to the collection. "We know how it looked on a Hollywood set, but the real world is different."

"Chicago was kind of the center of not only the production of these films, but the distribution of them," Watrous added. "These are the films we want to preserve, because they're significant to our region's history."

The group has added to its initial collection of Chicago Public Library films. Over the last year, the CFA has acquired around 500 additional titles through donations from local and national filmmakers. These include 169 movies from Chicago-based amateur filmmaker Margaret Conneely, who made 16 mm narrative films with friends and family members during the '40s and '50s; and eight titles from the aforementioned Film Group, including that company's entire series of "Urban Crisis" non-fiction films, a series that documented the social and political unrest of Chicago in the 1960s.

"Cicero March" was one of the seven films in the "Urban Crisis" series, which also included "The People's Right to Know: Police Versus Reporters" (1968), a short documentary about the confrontations between police and demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago; and "Black Moderates and Black Militants" (1969), another short film that documents an intense dialogue between a member of the radical Black Panther Party and a more politically moderate African-American school principal.

The CFA also has longer films from the Film Group in its collection, including the 1968 "American Revolution II," another documentary about the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Mike Gray, a founding member of the Film Group who later went on to write the screenplay for "The China Syndrome," heard about the Chicago Film Archives and felt that it was the perfect place to archive the documentaries he had worked on 40 years ago.

"I had a number of prints of 'Cicero March' in my basement, and they were all in pretty good shape," said Bill Cottle, a partner of Gray who facilitated the Film Group donations to the CFA. "But these films don't last forever. If they had started to decompose, they would have been lost."

A few other prints exist of the "Urban Crisis" series. But in some cases, the Chicago Film Archives owns the only existing prints of works in their collection. That's why the staff has been working furiously to inspect the prints in stock to see what's worth preserving. The staff already has inspected about 300 films in the collection. And some of those films have already been designated for preservation.

For instance, the group got grants totaling $4,770 from the National Film Preservation Foundation to create new negative and master prints for three films in the Film Group's "Urban Crisis" series--"Cicero March", "Black Moderates and Black Militants" and "The Peoples' Right to Know: Police Versus Reporters." The CFA also got a $1,930 grant from the film board to preserve "The Fairy Princess," a Christmas film made by Conneely in the 1950s using rudimentary stop-motion animation.

But the inspectors continue to deal with problems. The most pressing issue in the collection is faded color prints.

"From the late '50s to the early '80s, Eastman Kodak had manufactured a 16 mm color print stock that faded relatively easily," Watrous said. "When this stock fades, almost all color except for red is drained out of it."

The CFA has been able to send some of the films in its collection to a local lab for color correction, most notably a color narrative film directed by Poster in 1974, "Another Saturday Night." But preserving all of the films in the collection is cost-prohibitive.

"The more central a film is to our mission, the more attention we will give it," Watrous said. "We are a regional archive, so films that reflect either Chicago/Illinois history, character or culture are more important to us to preserve."

Even while CFA volunteers continue to inspect the films in their collection, Watrous says she wants to present some of these films to the public through an ambitious screening schedule.

The CFA has had successful screenings for some its films (including "The New World of Stainless Steel"). But Watrous says she would like to present films like the "Urban Crisis" series to minority audiences in Chicago's neighborhoods.

"We want to blend some of the audiences for our films," she said. "The Cultural Center is great, but it's not always easy for people from the neighborhoods to get downtown for these screenings."

For more information about the Chicago Film Archives, call 773-478-3799 or visit online at www.chicagofilmarchives.org.

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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