Movies |

The Chicago Film Society loans movie lovers 16mm projectors to help catalogue their collection

We’ve heard plenty about the business side of moviegoing these past few months, as theaters gradually reopened and earlier this month Warner Bros. released “Tenet” in the hopes of averting an indefinite future where new films only arrive via PVOD. Things are not looking good. As IndieWire put it: With reduced theater capacity coupled ongoing concerns about safety, there’s “not enough box office to cover exhibitors’ operating expenses.”

Amid this pandemic-induced predicament, there are smaller cinema organizations experiencing their own existential crisis. You might think they’d be hit the hardest. But the programmers who make up the Chicago Film Society say they are well-positioned to weather this ongoing uncertainty.

In normal times, the group schedules a lineup of obscure, older, funky or hard-to-find movies that they track down — 35mm and 16mm prints only; forget digital for these folks — for showings on the big screen at the Music Box Theatre (where most of the film society’s programmers also work) as well as at the auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University in the city’s North Park neighborhood.

Friends and colleagues, the programmers are Rebecca Lyon, Cameron Worden, Kyle Westphal, Rebecca Hall and Julian Antos. To give you a sense of their collective eclectic tastes, this time last year they were screening the low-budget 1976 comedy “Drive-In,” about the shenanigans at a Texas drive-in movie theater (from director Rod Amateau, who would later become infamous for the 1987 stinker “The Garbage Pail Kids Movie”). But just as often, the film society will track down a black-and-white film from the ’30s or ’40s.

Here’s Lyon on their present situation: “Obviously we put our public screenings on hold indefinitely until we feel like it’s safe, but we’re not under a lot of financial pressure to put screenings on.” Even though the Music Box is indeed open, “it feels like it’s not quite the right time for us,” she said. “And financially it doesn’t make sense. They have a 50-person cap in the main auditorium and we’re basically renting from them when we do screenings there, so we would never make our money back.”

Archives at public institutions and museums are also reluctant to loan out prints for the time being. That’s OK, because as a non-profit with no theater of their own, that also means no mortgage or lease payments are due. And also no full-time salaries. The film society’s budget can sit in the bank untouched until they’re ready to ramp back up.

“We’re not bleeding money,” said Antos. “I think we figured out we can sit tight for several years, actually, not doing screenings.”

That’s because none of the programmers were relying on the film society as their primary job; they’ve been doing this for free, on the side, as a passion project informed by their extensive scholarly and cinephile backgrounds.

The group has kept busy these past few months nonetheless. “What do we do when we can’t show films to people? Well, there are a number of projects that we’re able to do,” said Westphal. “Right now we’re finishing up two preservation projects. We think it’s important to maintain our collection and do preservation so that we’re able to loan out prints eventually.”

This month they’re also publishing a 35-page zine, a charming throwback of an idea that they are mailing to donors, audiences members and anyone else who wants one. It’s called “Infuriating Times” and it is written and compiled “by your projectionist friends.” If you’ve ever read a film synopsis provided by the film society, you’ll know these are smart, puckish, witty writers.

Westphal has a column in the zine that captures the film society’s hope for a future where, despite the prevalence of streaming and the business interests therein, there is still a “sanctity of brick-and-mortar, popcorn-and-soda, here-and-now cinema … a dream of strangers congregating together and experiencing kinetic emotions simultaneously.”

While that’s on pause, the film society has thought about ways to bring that experience home for people in the Chicagoland area. “One thing we’re working on during the pandemic is starting a 16mm projector loan program,” said Antos, “where people can borrow a 16mm projector and we’ll give them a film — it’ll be of our choosing, so it’ll be like a mystery screening — and they’ll watch it and give us notes. That’s because we don’t have the ability to watch every single print that we have in our collection.”

Don’t be intimidated if you’ve never handled 16mm films before. The format was a “very everyday format that people who were not film experts were using in schools or churches, up until the 80s when home video took over,” said Hall.

Most of us are removed from that experience now, so the film society will offer the necessary info for anyone who needs it. “In a public screening setting, the projector and the film are these mysterious things happening behind you,” Hall said. “But when you’re the one running the projector and being confronted with this machinery you’ve never used before, it’s pretty hard to ignore how amazing it is when the image comes into motion on the screen in front of you.”

Lyon said she went to a friend’s house for a backyard screening using a projector borrowed from Antos. “I couldn’t believe how wonderful it was. And the movie wasn’t even good! But it was so bright and the sound was so good. And I’m not a luddite, I watch streaming all the time, but having gone from staring at my computer all day long to this sparkling amazing thing, it was like having a switch flipped. So hopefully people will have that experience a little bit, I think it’s pretty fun.”

To inquire about receiving a copy of “Infuriating Times” or borrowing a 16mm projector and mystery film, contact the Chicago Film Society at info@chicagofilmsociety.org.

nmetz@chicagotribune.com