Last year, Chicago Film Archives was awarded a $44k grant through the Recordings at Risk grant program of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to digitize, catalog, and make publicly available 70 hours of Super 8 sound footage shot by Chicago photojournalist Bill Stamets between the late 1970s and early 2000s.
A year later, the work is complete. All 271 films digitized through this project are now publicly available to watch and explore through our website.
Stamets’s films chronicle what he described as “a miscellany of civic occasions where Americans make sense of power.” He was an especially avid documenter of Chicago’s many protests, parades, and political campaigns, both mainstream and marginal. These films include extensive footage of local officials (Chicago’s first woman mayor Jane Byrne, Chicago’s first Black mayor Harold Washington, Illinois Congressmen Chuy Garcia and Bobby Rush), national political figures (Reverend Jesse Jackson, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George H.W . Bush), and artists and entertainers (Sun Ra, Claes Oldenburg, Stan Brakhage, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, Richard Hunt).
The value of Stamets’s reportage is in its significant departure from standard news footage—his films offer an alternate, singular perspective. He captures his subjects after they leave the podium, after other journalists have taken their quotes back to the office; Stamets films them—whether they are performers, politicians, or protesters — when they step off the stage and come face-to-face with their assistants, their admirers, and their own real selves. His employment of the handheld Super 8 camera enabled him to capture the raw honesty in events with a distinct small gauge aesthetic — capturing fleeting moments that would otherwise have gone unrecorded, whose enduring value reflects the humanity of Chicago history. Describing Stamets’s “personal verité” filmmaking style, film scholar
still from “Sheila Jones”
Chuck Kleinhans wrote:
“Stamets would be the first to recognize his marginal status in the press corps. But it would be a huge error to mistake marginality, a position in relation to a dominant (and usually unreflectively accepted) set of norms, for lack of seriousness and intellectual rigor. He is not a journalist manqué or an unprofessional social- documentary maker. Rather, he is a rigorous ethnographer whose primary tool for investigation is the Super 8 camera and whose primary medium for presentation is the audio/visual screen. In short, Bill Stamets is a significant intellectual working outside of academia’s narrow protocols.”
— Chuck Kleinhans, “Documentary on the Margins: Bill Stamets’ Super-8mm Ethnography,” Cinematograph, Vol. 4 (1991), 164.
Because his subject was the city of Chicago and all its civic mechanizations and cultural festivities, Stamets’s work is notable both for its artistic merits and for the way that it reflects the evolution of the city’s social, political, and cultural landscape. The films included for this project encapsulate CFA’s mission to preserve Midwestern history and culture; these depictions of political ritual and everyday life in Chicago are idiosyncratic, warts-and-all portraits of our frequently polarized city.
still from “Girl with a Microphone”
Also digitized through this project are some of Stamets’s “titled works,” including visual ethnographies (Washington for Jesus, depicting the titular 1980 rally), independent documentaries (Our Bamboo Gingerbread House, about young Cambodian refugees in Evanston), experimental essay films (A Lecture on the Eyeball in Culture, an assemblage critiquing artworld posturing), and personal films (Dad and Mona, a portrait of Stamets’s father and stepmother that draws on ten years of holiday visits).
All of these films are now digitized and stored in our newly strengthened digital preservation system, while the Super 8 originals — all 61,820 feet of them — will remain safely in our cold storage vault.
We’re grateful to the technicians at George Blood LP for their work digitizing these reels, and to Joe Lachajczyk for his meticulous cataloging.
Our hope is that these films will be a resource and source of inspiration for teachers, researchers, curators, and the general public for years to come.
If you are interested in licensing a film or footage from the Bill Stamets Collection, please contact us.
This project was supported by a Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program was made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation.
