Tag Archives: portoluz

The Old Way of Getting It Out: An Interview with Lucy Massie Phenix About You Got to Move

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Introduction
Everyone brings their own personal baggage to the movies, and I don’t think I’m alone in treating them too readily as literature. Much of the vocabulary we apply to film comes from long-ago high school English classes. We assume that every detail is a puzzle piece that leads inexorably to a deliberate display of thematic unity and artistic expression. Analyze this film, we’re asked, and we begin to point out a camera movement like it’s an enjambment in a poem. We’re blessed with a bag of critical tools but we apply them as if every work is a self-contained thing that we can understand without leaving the house.

Luckily, there are some films that demand a different kind of engagement and derive the whole of their meaning and impact from what we do with them afterwards. They can’t exist without oxygen. Every Oscar season we’re inundated with films that we’re assured are ‘inspiring’ in a non-threatening, heart-warming sort of way (witness The King’s Speech, War Horse, or this year’s Flight), but it’s another thing to talk about a film that aspires to instigate its audience to action.  (I like especially the card that ends the second part of Hour of the Furnaces, Fernando Solanas’s four-and-half-hour essay film about the history of neocolonialism and resistance in Argentina: “Intermission—for debate.”)

For the past seven years, Amy Heller and Dennis Doros have been working to resurrect a forgotten strand of agitational American political films through the Milliarium Zero imprint of their distribution company Milestone. Winter Soldier, the first Milliarium Zero release from 2005, documents a landmark 1971 hearing organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It’s a film with such unimpeachable moral clarity that it makes every other war film I’ve seen look tremulous and small. (Winter Soldier is also a film record of the short-lived rectitude of John Kerry, who offers sharp testimony about Vietnam atrocities in a cameo; his performance is a universe removed from the uncritical military pageantry that engulfed his 2004 Democratic National Convention.)

Following Winter Soldier, Milliarium Zero handled theatrical distribution for UCLA’s restoration of Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, an oral history of queer Americans who had outgrown, outlasted, and overcome the closet. Long before LGBTQ became a standard acronym, Word Is Out already demonstrated that label’s inadequacy.  (And right now, Milestone is also raising funds to restore another cinematic artifact that explodes received notions of queer history: Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason, the shaggy dog monologue of a singularly self-contemplating male hustler.)

It only makes sense, then, that Milliarium’s latest release, You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South, charts society’s advance through the self-empowerment of everyday people. Its co-director, Lucy Massie Phenix, who also contributed to the collective productions of Winter Soldier and Word is Out, spoke with us last week about the film and its implications for present-day political problems.

KW: Let’s start out by talking about why you made the film.

LMP: The film was made to be an organizing film. I’m sure that there are many other factors involved, because I wanted it to be a really good film in the time that it was made. But the film was always meant to be a film that inspired people to go out and get involved themselves. I think of it still as an organizing film, even though it’s about a time that is now historical. So when it’s shown, it’s really nice to have it shown in the context of people going out and using it and to find their own role in the change that we’re challenged to make in these times. And that’s the reason I’m so happy that you’re showing it.

KW: How did it come about?

LMP: In 1980, I had just finished editing The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter. I was learning a lot about propaganda, especially propaganda during the Second World War. A lot about unions during that time. But I also was very aware that we were moving into a different era because of the election of Reagan. I happened to go to a conference organized by the Physicians for Social Responsibility on the medical consequences of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

That was something that was very much in the forefront of our consciousness then. It wasn’t just Reagan. Carter had just signed the First Strike Initiative, which said that we would make a first strike in a nuclear confrontation. I got very, very affected by that conference when I went to it. I was already feeling pretty powerless. I was wondering whether making films was the way I could be most effective in bringing about change.

Shortly after that, Myles Horton came out to lecture for a few days at the University of California at Berkeley. I had been involved with the Civil Rights movement and had gone to the Highlander Folk School back in the mid-’60s, so I knew Myles. It was what he said when he came out here that made me realize that Highlander’s work had always addressed itself to the question of people coming into their own power. It started out with unions in the South in 1932 and even the organization of unemployed workers in Grundy County, Tennessee. Highlander had always addressed itself to people who wanted to move on their own power and also really wanted to feel their own power.

The influence and philosophy behind Highlander really had to do with bringing people together to analyze what their powerlessness consisted of. Analyze what was going on in their communities, and analyze what could be done, who were the forces at work, and what part it is that the people in the community wanted to effect.

I thought, ‘This is worthy. This is what I want to make a film about. How do people who feel powerless come to realize that they are empowered?’ And I had that question because I felt it myself and I think that’s a perennial question. It comes up with all of us from time to time.

KW: In the years since the film came out, do you think these questions have changed? Sometimes our era seems more receptive to this kind of discourse but in other ways, more hostile. Union busting is now a bipartisan political tactic.

LMP: I’m glad you’re showing it now because I think we’re in another place like that. It’s certainly relevant for people looking at what has been happening and what is right now happening with unions. We’ve just come from an election where we have to say we have a very divided country.

KW: It wasn’t an accident that we scheduled You Got to Move for the first weekend after the election. Of course, we didn’t know the outcome when we made the booking. Either people would be very discouraged and have a lot to organize about or be happy and—

LMP: Still have a lot to organize about.

KW: Exactly.

LMP: As soon as the election was over, the work has become for me, and for the people around me, how do we organize now to put pressure on Obama? How do we organize to understand the forces on him so that the pressure we apply can really be creative? How do we move from here? We can’t get stuck by any of this. I’m not at all interested anymore in the election. I could look at it and analyze it, and I’m sure that’s what the pundits are doing, but to me it looks like I learned a lot from what happened with Occupy.

I can’t speak from experience, because I wasn’t really involved in Occupy, but if you’ve been following what’s been going on in Far Rockaway, where Hurricane Sandy was really devastating, it was the Occupy people who really knew how to come in there and help the local people because some of the Occupy people were the local people. How to get organized and deliver what people needed, including food and flashlights and diapers. How to make a relevant response to a real crisis.

We really need to work across the traditional divides and discover the ways that people in communities can come together to make changes. Redefine what the ‘we’ is, as Myles put it.

We also have to redefine what it is that we’re doing. There’s this fiscal cliff that they say we’re on. And we’re not on a fiscal cliff. This country isn’t broke. People are being robbed. But as long as they define it as the fiscal cliff, we’re accepting other people’s definition of our struggle. I think this film has the power to make people see beyond.

KW: Can you talk about the distribution that You Got to Move received after you finished it in 1985?

LMP: It was never distributed well enough. It was screened at the York Cinema in San Francisco. There were places that it was screened—not big theaters, but university settings and community settings. It’s never been on public television and I think that’s a real shame. At one point, the MacArthur Foundation selected You Got to Move for inclusion in its Library Video Classics Project, which meant that they put copies in every public library with a circulating VHS collection. That’s the way that it was really most widely seen at the time.

As soon as VHS was defunct and before DVD came in, You Got to Move was just not seen by anybody. People would contact me and see if they could use a copy. That’s why it was so wonderful that Milestone wanted to pay for the remastering and get it out on the DVD.

Over the last year, I’ve been talking about new strategies for getting it out to people, too, including streaming it on the web, because that’s how people do things now. But we can’t ignore the old ways of getting it out. It was shot on 16mm and it was always shown in 16mm. That’s how it was. I’m not interested in that for nostalgic reasons.

KW: Right now we hear about how digital is this very democratic medium that allows people from all walks of life with a very small investment to create media and agitate. That’s very true, but at the same time, there’s so much hubbub about that, we get a very skewed sense of the past and how widely 16mm was used and how flexible its use was and how varied its audience was.

LMP: I don’t think young people really get it at all. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is how people are all walking around with their phones and watching YouTube on their phones and everyone is watching it by themselves and they send a link to someone else. It’s wonderful that it can move so quickly through the population, but it takes away the power of an audience.

One of the places that we showed the film that was most effective to me was at the American Friends Service Committee downtown meeting. Maybe six or seven years ago. There were all of these young organizers there from the Latino community who just didn’t know that history. But it wasn’t just what people were learning about the subject, but the fact that they were learning it together in the same room. The room just crackled with people who wanted to tell stories to each other and talk about strategy for organizing. That’s why I made it.

If people in the audience have any ideas about the use of the film now, I want to hear from them. It’s not a historical piece, but about bringing history into the fore to make use of it. I hope it’s useful.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will screen You Got to Move: Stories of Change in the South on Sunday, November 11 at 6:00 and 8:30pm at Cinema Borealis, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave. The 8:30pm screening will be accompanied by a discussion with film critic and Highlander alumnus Jonathan Rosenbaum. The film will be screened in the only circulating 16mm print. Special thanks to Amy Heller, Dennis Doros, and especially Lucy Massie Phenix.

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Radical Spinach: Wild Boys of the Road

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

Who was this movie made for?

Often the answer is obvious enough (housewives, teenage boys, the Friday night drive-in bumpkin, the half-conscious grindhouse denizen, etc.), but in some special cases, the interrogation itself opens up and deepens the mystery of the film in question. In those instances, the absence of a readily identifiable target audience makes the fact of a film’s production and release all the more beguiling.

Let’s talk about Wild Boys of the Road. It’s commonly reckoned an exemplar of the social problem film as developed by Warner Bros. in the 1930s. As Nick Roddick points out in his study of the studio corpus, A New Deal in Entertainment, such films were memorable and distinctive, but hardly plentiful. Warner Bros., like every other major studio, released a film a week in the 1930s, most of them bread-and-butter pictures that kidded campus life or military hijinks. The ambitious, socially-conscious pictures like Black Legion or They Won’t Forget were the exception to the surly, comfortable rule.

On a film-for-film basis, the distinction between the Warners output and that of every other studio seems to shrivel. Jack Warner made no effort to keep his politics off the backlot and modern audiences are still somewhat surprised by the forthrightly partisan gestures that crop up in the studio’s films, like the FDR portrait in Footlight Parade or the ubiquitous National Recovery Act eagle in judge’s chambers in Wild Boys. But Fox’s contemporaneous The Man Who Dared showed no compunction about the stridently Democratic remarks made by politico Preston Foster, a transparent stand-in for the recently assassinated Anton Cermak. Warner’s famous I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is strong stuff, but so is RKO’s less-heralded chain gang picture Hell’s Highway. Urban poverty permeates the Warner Bros. pictures, but it’s equally strong in Columbia’s Man’s Castle or UA’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.

The whole notion of a studio-specific attitude towards daily life is a convenient critical device, but one that sometimes runs at compelling cross-purposes with the way the studio itself tried to position its films. In the case of Wild Boys of the Road, it was one of a handful of titles triumphantly announced by Warner Bros. in June 1933. (Depression or no Depression, the 1933-1934 season would see the largest capital commitment on Warner’s part in the past eight years.) The centerpiece of that announcement was, of course, the immediate production of Footlight Parade, the natural follow-up to the mega-hits 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933. Without any marquee names, Wild Boys took a back seat to numerous star vehicles—including some that never reached the screen, like the Napoleon biopic that Edward G. Robinson was supposedly set to make right after completing Red Meat (itself re-titled, much less evocatively, as I Loved a Woman before release.)

The adults in Wild Boys of the Road were below-the-line character actors in decidedly supporting roles. (Ward Bond, recognizable today but totally unknown in 1933, played the bit part of the freight train rapist.) The juvenile leads were hardly the stuff to hang a publicity campaign on. To get some idea of just how far afield Wild Boys was from a conventional business proposition for Warner Bros., consider the studio’s big pre-release gambit in the New York Sun:

Dorothy Coonan has many freckles—182 in fact. Now in her teens, Dorothy earns her living by facing the cameras and exposing her good-looking but freckled countenance to the public gaze on movie screens. [Coonan had appeared uncredited as a chorine in several Busby Berkeley musicals for Warners.] Her contract provides that she’s out of a job if she loses her freckles. So yesterday she applied for $100,000 worth of freckle insurance.

If only those kids in Wild Boys of the Road had freckle insurance; no riding the rails for them. (Coonan never had to cash in her insurance claim; she married director William A. Wellman in 1934.)

Was Wild Boys a daring social problem picture with a touch of uplift, as we tend to regard it today, or an awkward exploitation challenge with no ready roadmap? It certainly wasn’t promoted to the public as a righteous act of corporate protest. Warner’s trailer promises something like the vaguely educational cinema-smut hawked not in conventional theaters but in ad hoc fairground tents:

the LIVING TRUTH about
600,000 WILD BOYS
… INNOCENT GIRLS
Driven to
VAGRANCY!
CRIME!
FATES worse than DEATH!

JOLTING FACTS about humanity’s SHAME
THE ABANDONED GENERATION!
A Thousand Times More Sensational Than
“I AM A FUGITIVE”

SHOCKING ENOUGH
to make the very earth TREMBLE IN TERROR

By all accounts, when the Wild Boys were released into the wild, box office returns proved disappointing. (It didn’t help that Wellman ran $29,000 over-budget for a lean, 68-minute movie destined for double bills.) Exhibitors can be forgiven for lax support in light of Variety’s extraordinary notice:

Granting that boys on the road is a vital public question and that this picture gives it absorbing treatment, the outstanding fact is that it makes a depressing evening in the theatre, one that the general fan public would gladly avoid. Fact is that while the picture has been very well done, it should never have been done at all for general commercial release. Subjects of this class as a business proposition are a good deal like a man who ran a restaurant and insisted upon putting on his bill of fare only those items that he felt sure were good for his customers—spinach for instance—and ignored the desires of his customers for viands that might not be so good for them in general, but which they liked and wanted to buy. You might applaud his good intentions, but you’d have a poor opinion of his business capacity.

Indeed the very merits of ‘Wild Boys of the Road’ are its difficulties. The acting is so gripping and the incidents so graphic that they conspire to make the hour’s running of the subject one of considerable discomfort to the spectator. The picture presents a distressing condition only too absorbingly ….

It may be a public service to herald these facts to unwilling ears, but the theater cannot well hope to prosper materially in such a venture …. The times, in short, have anxieties enough without going to the theatre to learn about more.

Perhaps the bottom line-oriented Variety misjudged the effect of the admittedly downbeat subject. The Motion Picture Herald advised exhibitors that the air of familiar unease could be a net-positive at the box office, with possible community tie-ins. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported that Warner Bros. sponsored a preview of the film for a hundred boys from the local forestry camp, who offered a different verdict: “The boys considered the event a great lark and undoubtedly a source of satisfaction to view themselves portrayed as besting both railroad and city police in pitched battles in their travels over the land. Judge Sam Blake of the juvenile court said the picture revealed stories he hears every day in court.”

(Boys will be boys: the Wild Boys extras were paid three dollars a day to throw eggs at the police, decidedly better than standing in a breadline.)

No one would deny that Wild Boys of the Road is a confused venture on many levels. The social challenge of Wild Boys of the Road has received skeptical treatment from subsequent critics, who are quick to note that the original, harsher ending was softened and re-filmed at the behest of the studio. Yet the optimism of the finale hardly negates what’s preceded it: the half-serious notion of the kids setting up a squatter’s republic, the basically untroubled endorsement of violent resistance to police brutality, the barely-expressed but deeply felt account of fluid adolescent sexuality. (It’s a testament to artless efficiency of Wild Boys of the Road that its implied ménage-a-trois is much more affecting than the explicit arrangement of Lubitsch’s Design for Living from the same year.) These facts are more than enough to confirm Wild Boys’ radical credentials. (And besides, the re-tooled ending provides the set-up for one defiantly exuberant gesture and a related moment of recognition that’s as devastating as anything else in the film.)

A follow-up article in the Times offered an equally upbeat account of the city’s migrant youth dilemma, going so far as to conclude that “from them Los Angeles might gain the leaders for the next crop of useful citizens.” It’s this attitude that makes Wild Boys of the Road a quintessential picture of New Deal ideology—for once in American life, the system was blamed and the victim lionized, rather than vice versa. In today’s austerity atmosphere, where centrist wisdom supports entitlement cuts and bolsters the status quo on foreclosure, taxation, and all manner of other destructive policy choices, Wild Boys of the Road remains a rare achievement in empathy.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be screening Wild Boys of the Road in a 35mm preservation print from the Library of Congress on May 2 at the Portage Theater as part of our Classic Film Series. Please see our current calendar for more information. Special thanks to Rob Stone and Lynanne Schweighofer. Wild Boys of the Road is the inaugural screening in our collaborative series with portoluz. Please visit portoluz to learn more about their WPA 2.0: A Brand New Day programming.

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Programming: Selecting/Unselecting

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Kyle Westphal

The Northwest Chicago Film Society is starting its fifth season this Wednesday with a 35mm print of The Trouble with Harry, a film that has the strange distinction of usually being regarded as ‘minor Hitchcock’ despite the fact that most everyone quite likes it, especially around these parts.

After that, we’re embarking on a collaborative series with portoluz, a local and like-minded non-profit organization devoted to, in their words, “creating sanctuaries for progressive culture.” Throughout the summer, portoluz will be sponsoring and curating a variety of cultural programming that re-examines the travails of the Depression and its policy legacy—a timely focus given renewed efforts to rollback and eradicate the progressive achievements of the twentieth century.

Though we feel there’s long been a political consciousness running through our programming and this blog, we had no qualms about making this commitment explicit.

But in many ways, the whole idea of running a series as such did represent a shift in what we do, and we want to talk about it this week on the blog.

When the Northwest Chicago Film Society began assembling its first schedule in late 2010 after news of the imminent closure of the Bank of American Cinema, we opted to emulate the programming style of the old calendars. Though there would be an occasional, very loose series on a given calendar in the Bank days—like Michael King and Michael Phillips’s storied Mustache Cinema series in the latter half of 2006—these were the exception rather than the rule. Mustache Cinema is actually an emblematic example: while Gene Kelly in The Pirate, Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter, and Humphrey Bogart in Virginia City all sport uncharacteristic mustaches, no one would ever look at that grouping and conclude it represented a serious critical position rather than an amused, up-front diversion. (To talk about Mustache Cinema at any length here is to undercut its self-evident force and perfection.)

But the decision to run Northwest Chicago Film Society without a series template—just one film after another, week after week—was a conscious one, born out of something larger than inertia.

When working as a programmer, there’s a heavy temptation to conflate the final product with the perfect distillation of your own taste and erudition. Programmers instinctively think in terms of double features, even if their venues don’t run double features.  “The Devil, Probably is so amazing—and it would make a great pairing with Gus van Sant’s Last Days, wouldn’t it?” or “I really want to program Johnny Guitar, but I can wait until there’s a new print of Rancho Notorious. They would make for a wicked double feature, am I right?” While there’s nothing wrong with these hypothetical match-ups, they beg the question of what the point of programming is in the first place.

Hiring film critics with minimal programming experience has been a fad as of late: witness Elvis Mitchell at LACMA. But the two jobs are quite distinct. While film programming obviously involves opinion and judgment, they are not its reason for being. (Compare this to film criticism in the pre-Internet days, when the lay readership giddily flipped through the Friday paper in hopes of finding a savage review with quotable bon mots.) Programming means bringing films to the public and sustaining the institutions that disseminate them.  The audience should emerge with a broader understanding of film history and social history and with some consciousness about the material screened (e.g., a new print from a years-in-the-planning restoration). Knowing where a particular film falls in the programmer’s personal Top Ten Films of 1974 is considerably less important.  (It’s also essential to remember that programming has its own unique skill set, which occasionally intersects with criticism, but also equally with theater management, logistics, advertising, fundraising, public relations, preservation, accounting, institutional politicking, and scavenger hunting.)

Series necessarily impose an overt critical framework on the films being presented. Sometimes it’s a simple and uncontroversial framework, like a director or actress retrospective. (I’ve had a Zita Johann season in my head for a while now.) Such series are easy for the audience to understand and allow the programmer to recede somewhat: when the calendar advertises an Ingmar Bergman retro, hardly anybody gives thought to the programmer. Doesn’t a series like that just program itself?

Yes and no. Our friend Jason Guthartz has imported to the film world the useful vocabulary of ‘selected/unselected’ from the jazz percussionist Paul Lovens. When winnowing a long career down to the digestible series, films need to be selected and unselected, with emphases and omissions putting forward an (often-unstated) interpretation.

And yet programmers are not always free to select and unselect. Can you imagine that Bergman retrospective without The Seventh Seal or Persona? Or take a case like Robert Mitchum. Any self-respecting Mitchum series needs to include The Night of the Hunter, and that’s all well and good. The Night of the Hunter is one of the indisputably great films and it could stand to be shown every week without diminishing the experience. And even though it’s a much lesser movie, it would be odd to exclude Cape Fear from our hypothetical Mitchum season, as it’s such an iconic working-out of the whole psychosexual Mitchum case. The noir aficionados expect you to program Out of the Past, too. Pretty soon, you’ve filled up your appointed five or eight or ten slots, but through obligation and convention. For the last slot, you show The Locket and the regulars whisper that you’re making a daring gesture towards the received canon. (Or try a massive, seemingly impartial, comprehensive Mitchum series and that’s another kind of gauntlet gesture: by showing the totality, you’re attaching a certain weight to Mitchum’s body of work.)

To show these movies singly—not in the context of Mitchum but amidst a clutch of other, seemingly random selections—changes the equation considerably. Each stands or falls on its own merits. Anyone for Two for the Seesaw?

But again we’ve fallen into treating film programming as a critical activity: Does this Mitchum selection have integrity on its own terms? Do we have the space to put forward a meaningful summation of his career?

But programming considerations are more often practical. Is the series framework a net positive for the films themselves? For the venue? An Alfred Hitchcock series sells itself. But what about a more obscure auteur like John M. Stahl?

In our experience, repertory audiences, even dedicated and curious ones, select and unselect with impunity. You read through an extensive calendar and can’t possibly attend everything. You make choices and series help facilitate those choices. You discriminate. You’ve never heard of that director. You don’t like Westerns. You’re tired of depressing films about immigration or alcoholism. You’re enrolled in a class at the local Alliance Française and gravitate towards French-language films this month.

To call these decisions ‘prejudices’ may sound harsh, but that’s what they are, reasonable or not. You look at the series and make a snap judgment about it before getting down into the weeds of the films themselves. The individual capsule might be a beautiful sell job, but it’s irrelevant if you check out before reaching it.

We tend to prefer the non-series approach for this reason. Without guideposts, everyone has to read about each film before jumping to conclusions. We try to use our capsules to make the case in multiple registers. You might not like Westerns, but we don’t spend a preponderant amount of space describing The Halliday Brand in those terms. It’s also a political allegory, a terrific Ward Bond vehicle, an impressive low-budget triumph for Joseph H. Lewis.

Series also tend to bring about a certain fatigue. Even if you do like Westerns, do you really want a straight diet of them for a whole month or two? Some folks would be very interested in a Japanese New Wave retrospective but can’t pencil in twelve successive Thursday evenings because, unlike programmers, they have lives and commitments outside the cinémathèque. Does the series cannibalize or intimidate the audience?

To be sure, there are many pragmatic reasons for pursuing series. When staring at a blank calendar that you’ve been tasked with filling, there’s a certain efficiency in thinking in series terms, rather than coming up with twenty one-offs. In some situations, series are a necessity: a foreign archive or consulate is more likely to devote time and energy to helping a venue scrounge up prints, rights, and guest speakers in a series context. The series represents a buy-in for all parties involved.

Of course, series aren’t always so clear-cut. The more conceptual outings—freed from personality, genre, or period—walk a very fine line. At their best, such series help us to see more clearly. Some years ago, when Ian Birnie was still at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, they mounted a series about Hollywood’s representations of psychoanalysis. The usual suspects like Spellbound were there. But Ian also programmed Sleep, My Love—a dreadful Douglas Sirk film with Claudette Colbert in the Gaslight or Suspicion mode. If one were programming a Sirk series or a Colbert series, Sleep, My Love would be unselected during the preliminary rounds. Programmed singly at the Northwest Chicago Film Society, we would have a great number of disappointed patrons. But in the right context, this minor film becomes a major one, a key text in the elaboration of a particular line of argument. (Are we shading into criticism again?) Most importantly, it’s about finding a context where a film is essential and satisfying on its own terms.

I could cite many other examples: Miriam Bale’s Bluebeard series at Anthology Film Archives, Peter Conheim and Steve Seid’s Southern (Dis)comfort at PFA and the Roxy, Kian Bergstrom’s Impossible Adaptations at Doc Films. All of these drew together films that are otherwise not often programmed. (But none of them is Mustache Cinema either.)

The latitude required to pursue series like these is often dictated by mundane things like the venue’s calendar layout. In the Doc Films example, the calendar itself has been more or less unchanged for the last twenty-five years: a 24”x36” poster with an eight-column, ten-row grid of capsules. Each column represents a series and each row is a week in the academic quarter. It’s a great format for a barren dormitory wall, not so great for reading on the Red Line. If the idea of the series isn’t immediately clear, the reader will skip over to the next column. On Film Forum’s calendar, week-long runs get extensive coverage, but individual films in big series get a single line, if that.

Our favorite repertory house of old, the late Bruce Trinz’s Clark Theater in the Loop, didn’t run series, but produced a grid calendar where every film received a catchy couplet, like this one for The Public Enemy: “He made a career / On killing and beer.”

Generally speaking, the more complicated the series and the more involved the explanation behind it, the less room the designer and editor have for capsules. Add in pictures (especially pictures for every screening) and you’re down to fragments. It’s a trade-off that speaks to a venue’s values.

Luckily, the internet has freed up programmers and designers alike. A short version of a capsule can be edited for the print publication and a longer version can hit the web. Blogs can provide in-depth coverage of a particular film or series without any thought towards word count.

In the case of our collaboration with portoluz, we felt the series framework was productive without imposing too much. The general idea is to look at films of and about the Depression, but the berth is sufficiently wide to include everything from a neglected Fritz Lang-Kurt Weill musical to a cheerfully fascist DeMille pageant. We made a particular effort to minimize series fatigue by varying the tone and genre as much as possible. At best, we hope the films are more legible for being in dialogue with one another. At the same time, we won’t carp if you don’t even recognize the series as such.

 

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