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The National Film
Preservation Foundation has awarded CFA funding to preserve
Susan Stechnij’s film
Mi Raza: Portrait of a family.
Mi
Raza: Portrait of a Family is a documentary film about
a working class Mexican-American family dealing with the stresses
of maintaining their cultural heritage in the face of the
dominant Anglo society. Made by Susan Stechnij in 1973 as
part of her thesis for a Master’s Degree in Anthropology
from the University of Illinois, the film follows the daily
activities of the multi-generational Navarro family living
in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Each member of the
family responds differently to the pressures of assimilation,
revealing a complex family portrait that encapsulates broader
issues of immigration faced nation-wide. Yet the personal
details of their family life and culture place the film squarely
inside the notion of Chicago as a city of multiple ethnic
neighborhoods. Mi Raza is invaluable as an example
of a new style of ethnographic film making, an intimate portrait
of working class domestic life, and a historical record of
a community in a state of flux due to immigration and political
upheaval.
The film focuses on the family unit as the
site where issues of immigration and acculturation are contested.
The three generations of the Navarro family respond differently
to these pressures: from the Grandmother Chepa who has little
interaction with Anglo culture and still believes in the folktales
of her youth, to her son-in-law Clemente Sr. a factory worker
whose main contact is work, to the grandchildren who face
constant pressure from the educational system to assimilate
and forego their heritage. The film does not, however, describe
a simple path to acculturation over time. Instead it records
the family’s attempt to strike a balance between their
Mexican cultural heritage and their life in America. This
balance is portrayed as an outgrowth of the then emerging
Chicano political awareness. The Chicano attitude is exemplified
in shots of art classes at a community center where children
build Aztec pyramids, protests over labor concerns at a grocery
store, and a raucous school board meeting where activists
(including mother Lola) attempt to force a recalcitrant school
board to rectify the poor status of schools in Latino neighborhoods.
Along with the charged relations with the
outside world, the film captures the personal details of the
Navarro family life. From the opening scenes of Chepa cooking
breakfast for her husband to the simple, sweet celebration
of Rosemary’s 15th birthday (quincenera) the film adopts
the interior view of family life common to home movies made
for private viewing. That the film can provide such intimacy
is a testament to the openness of the Navarro family and the
delicacy with which Stechnij approached the project. However,
even in these private moments this ethnographic film records
the transmission of cultural knowledge, as in the scene where
Clemente Sr. teaches his son to make a special goat soup.
Susan Stechnij previously worked as an applied
anthropologist in the largely Mexican-American neighborhoods
of Pilsen and Little Village. She often used an early portable
video camera to record visual data in the community for her
research and as a historical document for the Mexican-American
community it depicts. This dual concern of creating work to
be utilized both by scholars and the people studied informed
the creation of Mi Raza. In the study guide that accompanies
the film, Stechnij expresses the hope that [ethnographic]
films made in the future will take into account the desires
of community people, and the filmmaker whenever possible will
make films that are not only about people, but also for them.
Mi Raza exhibits this with its bi-lingual subtitles,
translating the Spanish for the benefit of Anglo viewers,
and the English into Spanish for those, like Grandmother Navarro,
who only speak their native tongue.
Mi Raza: Portrait of a Family is
a fascinating hybrid of styles blending the ethnographic,
the home movie, and the direct cinema documentary. It continues
Chicago Film Archives’ mission of using film to tell
the history of Chicago’s varied inhabitants and neighborhoods.
It also furthers the CFA’s commitment to the study and
preservation of Chicago’s documentary movement. More
broadly, the film is relevant to telling the story of immigration
in Chicago and therefore America. While the film deals with
issues specific to its time – the Bracero Worker Program,
the Chicano political movement – the film remains highly
relevant to the current hot button issue of Mexican immigration.
The only remaining print of the film suffers
from a technical problem in which the sound and image are
out of sync. The grant
provided will allow for the creation of a new print and video
copy restoring the film and making this piece of living history
available again to the Pilsen community and researchers for
the first time in over 30 years.
The
National Film Preservation Foundation has awarded CFA funding
to preserve three Don B. Klugman films: Nightsong,
I’ve Got This Problem, and You’re Putting
Me On.
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 Nightsong
is a rare and unique portrait of the Chicago Near-North folk
club and nightlife scene in the mid-1960’s, its real
significance lying in its critical depiction of the racial
and sexual tensions present in mid-1960’s Chicago. The
story centers around the struggles and romantic desires of
the film’s protagonist, long-forgotten African-American
folk sensation Willie Wright. The backdrop of Nightsong is
the vibrant folk and nightclub scene in Chicago in the mid-1960’s,
and the film features rare exterior and interior footage of
legendary hot spots such as The Fickle Pickle, Mr. Kelly’s,
the Kismet Club, the Esquire, and the Tender Trap. Nightsong
contains what is likely the only extant performance footage
of Willie Wright, an African-American performer who crossed
from the doo-wop and soul music scenes of Chicago’s South
Side into the Near-North side’s burgeoning folk music
community. Wright, who gives an incredibly charming and heartfelt
performance both on stage and as the film’s protagonist,
a man struggling for respect and survival as an African-American
artist in a primarily white musical genre and neighborhood,
achieved a small amount of recognition in the 1960’s
for his folk performances, but quickly fell into obscurity.
Wright’s
roots were in the Chicago doo-wop scene, and he got his start
playing in a group that formed out of Cabrini Green called
the Medallionaires. After having not succeeded in three successive
doo-wop groups, Wright decided that there had to be a better
way. Since folk music had become all the rage in the mid-1960’s,
and with the remarkable success of black performers such as
Harry Belafonte, Josh White, Odetta, and John Lee Hooker singing
folk music in coffeehouses, Wright decided that he would become
a folk singer too. His decision was aided by Chloe Hoffman,
who, according to the Chicago Defender, suggested that he
try folk music. Hoffman provided him with a guitar and some
albums of folk songs and Willie returned three months later
– a selfmade folk singer. Willie Wright is the glowing
focal point of Nightsong, and while he released two
self-titled folk albums on local labels in the late 1960’s,
hasn’t performed since the early 1970’s when he
was severely disabled, losing the use of both of his legs.
Nightsong
won the “Coupe Kodak-Pathe” prize at Cannes in 1965,
was named one of the “Ten Best Winners” in the Amateur
Cinema League’s 1964 International Film and Video Festival,
and was acknowledged at the time of its release for its extraordinary
and expressive use of color.
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 I’ve
Got This Problem, released in 1966, was a collaborative
production between Don Klugman, Ron Clasky, Judy Harris, Josephine
Forsberg, and Mike Shea, among others (gathered under Klugman’s
production group “The Problem Company”). The film
was formerly distributed by Walter Reade, CCM, and Films Incorporated,
won awards at the Cork, Edinburgh, Mannheim, Melbourne, Sydney,
and American Film Festivals, and screened in theatrical release
in the United States before Peter Watkins’ The War
Game.
I’ve
Got This Problem traces the development of a romantic
relationship between a young man and woman (played by Klugman
and Judy Harris) who meet in a downtown Chicago coffee shop.
Their unconventional attraction to one another is based in
their mutual ability to analyze each other’s actions,
which range from the quotidian (whether or not to have sugar,
and how many lumps, in one’s coffee)
to the
psycho-sexual (relayed in his remembered Oedipal dreams and
her guilt-ridden dates with Ferrari-driving playboys). The
non-stop dialogue between the couple fluctuates between playful
psychobabble and sincere attempts to relay their innermost
feelings and sense of displacement in modern society. The
film’s humor is based in their relentless self-analysis
and superficial adaptation of the tropes of psychoanalysis,
yet this overt criticism of the popularity of psychoanalytic
discourse in the mid-century is matched by the ridiculous
futility of Klugman and Harris’ sincere attempts to analyze
the greater ills of society by means of a conscious turn inward.
In keeping with the film’s movement between humor and
a more serious criticism of the role of psychoanalysis in
the public consciousness, the film intercuts between shots
of the couple talking, and scenes of them interacting in 1960’s
Chicago.
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 You’re
Putting Me On, released in 1969, traces the
same aesthetic style, themes, and criticism of pop psycho-analysis
present in You’re Putting Me On, and seems to
pick up the same couple, again played by Klugman and Harris,
a few years into their relationship. It was also produced
by Klugman’s “The Problem Company”, previously
distributed by Walter Reade and Radim, won awards at the Cork,
Edinburgh, and Sydney Film Festivals, and screened in theatrical
release in the United States before Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Blowup.
You’re
Putting Me On follows the young couple from a car to the
streets of Chicago, and finally into a swinging 1960’s
bohemian party - complete with a bearded, pipe-smoking bouncer,
scientific-discourse espousing priest, and a meditating “enlightened
soul” wearing only sunglasses, underwear, and knee socks.
The couple’s non-stop self-analytical
psycho-babble is taken a step further in this film, as they
prattle on about their fears of everyday activities such as
driving, and the overwhelming complexity of mechanized objects
such as lipstick tubes. Their incessant, free-association
style dialogue centers around their desire for real emotional
connections and difficulties in achieving true intimacy. As
the two encounter the party-goers, they pocket various personal
items from them – including a lighter from the priest
and the wallet of a young, self-absorbed, neurotic sex-kitten.
You’re Putting Me On ends with the couple, still
engaged in analysis, talking in bed about the difficulty of
overcoming the obstacle of a rumpled sheet that separates
their two bodies. Combining a sense of humor and social criticism
similar to that in I’ve Got This Problem, You’re
Putting Me On pushes Klugman’s comedic commentary
on the inability (or unwillingness) of young people to move
beyond self-absorption into the realm of political activism
to new and outrageous heights.
Nightsong,
I’ve Got This Problem and You’re Putting
Me On, are extraordinary examples of experimental films
made by a director who is primarily known for commercial,
industrial, and educational filmmaking. Mr. Klugman currently
teaches presentation skills and commercial production at Columbia
College in Chicago, and has worked as a producer, scriptwriter,
director, cameraman, and stage manager for various films and
audio-visual corporations. He earned a Master’s Degree
in Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California,
and his films, I’ve Got This Problem and You’re
Putting Me On, have won awards at Cork, Edinburgh, Mannheim,
Melbourne, Sydney, and The American Film Festival. Nightsong’s
producer, Marv Gold, was extremely active in the local Chicago
experimental and commercial film community in the 1960’s.
Nightsong also features rare early footage of Second
City performer Avery Schreiber, who went on to work with Jack
Burns in the comedy duo Burns and Schreiber.
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