Episode #95 - Chicago Film Archives (American Revolution 2)

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"We have an impulse to simply collect and preserve. We don't want things to disappear."

For many historians, what made the 20th century so unique from the time before was the idea of the visual, the idea that we as a society began responding to images (both still and moving) rather than text. This visual life did not just happen through Hollywood, but in films made by advertising groups, for school children, and by families across the world as we documented the world's beauties and scars. Saving a particular section of these images has become the goal of Chicago Film Archives. The institution has spent over a decade finding and saving the images that define the Great Lakes city and the surrounding area, demonstrating how visual images capture and display American life through the 20th century. In this episode, Peter sits down with multiple members of the archives (Michelle Puetz—Curator of Programming; Brian Belak—Collections Manager; Amy Belotti—Digital Collections Manager) to discuss its history and its future. They end their conversation examining one of its most prized works, American Revolution 2, in which ideology along the left becomes an increasingly impossible debate.

0:00-3:42 Opening
4:17-12:27 Establishing Shots — Blockbuster Auteurs (Dunkirk and Logan Lucky)
13:12-50:19 Deep Focus — Chicago Film Archives
50:57-54:10 Sponsorship Section

55:19-1:12:19 Double Exposure — American Revolution 2 (Howard Alk and the Film Group)

1:12:23-1:14:00 Close

Notes and Links from the Conversation

—Visit the Chicago Film Archives website and follow their Twitter
—Watch American Revolution 2 on the Chicago Film Archives website
—Ben Sachs on the history of Chicago Film Archives
—MoMA's information of the 1996 Ken Jacobs show
—More info about CFA's founder, Nancy Watrous
—Doc Films in Chicago
—The Grove Press Collection at Harvard Film Archive
—Charles Tepperman
—Home Movie footage of Riverview Park in 1952
—Footage of University of Chicago's football team in 1920s
—Black Cinema House in Chicago
—Cicero March
—A 1928 report on using Kodacolor for Amateur Filmmaking
—The footage of the Edgewater Hotel appears in the Frommeyer Collection (1926)
—The Murder of Fred Hampton was restored by UCLA
—The Chicago Police documentary What Trees Did They Plant? is unavailable 
—Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson's Useful Cinema

Theme Music: “Forward” by Northbound

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