News

January 4, 2013

An Early Peek at the Ruth Page Collection!

BOLERO at Ravinia (HIghland Park, IL), 1928 Dancing with the Ravinia Opera as early as 1926, Ruth Page (herself only 26 years old) was also given the chance to choreograph large-scale performances at Ravinia’s north of Chicago outdoor venue. Last year CFA discovered several 35mm nitrate film elements in the Page Collection. As a result of a grant from the...

December 28, 2012

BIG THANKS!

…to so many people. CFA has kept its doors open, the back room chilled, the bench occupied and the telecine humming because of your decisions to support us. We are creating a massive 20th century Midwest/Chicago moving image time capsule that is built by each CFA customer, each CFA donor, and each foundation and agency that supports our work. Thank...

September 28, 2012

Ty Segall Promo w/ CFA Footage!

Super excited to see our footage being used in new shape and forms, including this new commercial for Ty Segall‘s upcoming release on Drag City Records. Video assembly by Kent Lambert, who previously collaborated with CFA & CAVE (another Drag City affiliated entity) during our first annual CFA Media Mixer. (and no, we do not have any copies of WHITE...

August 27, 2012

CFA Media Mixer (in review)

For our first annual CFA Media Mixer benefit at the Hideout, we asked 3 (well, technically 4) local video artists and 3 local musicians to team up and create 3 video pieces made up of CFA footage. These commissioned pieces premiered at the August 17th event to a packed house. We realize some of you couldn’t make it, so here...

July 22, 2012

CFA Collections Go Online!

Left:  VIGNETTES “Waitress” (Harry Mantel, 1970s) ; Right: GWENDOLYN BROOKS (WTTW, 1966) Chicago Film Archives invites you to explore our collections online! Our approach to CFA’s holdings CFA’s films are organized and considered through the lens of each collection.  We first gather information about the collection as a whole in order to better understand its historical relationship to Chicago and...

July 11, 2012

Earliest-known Eiko & Koma film discovered and preserved

Below is a press release from Imogen Smith over at the Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC). In June, we volunteered our services to the DHC and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts by hand inspecting, re-housing and digitizing a reel of 16mm film featuring an early work of the performance duo, Eiko & Koma. We are happy & honored...

June 21, 2012

CFA named “Best Film History Organization”

The A Side cover of this week’s Chicago Reader by Paul Higgins and Paul Octavious. As many of you Chicagolandians already know, each year the Chicago Reader dedicates one of its publications to the “Best of Chicago” list. The list consists of both “Critics’ Picks” and “Readers’ Poll,” or categories voted on by readers of the alternative weekly newspaper. The Critics’...

May 24, 2012

Millie Goldsholl (1920-2012)

Chicago artist and experimental filmmaker Millie Goldsholl passed away yesterday at 92 years old. Her films are among our favorites here at CFA. An early student of the Chicago School of Design (now IIT), Millie created films that are expressions of Maholy Nagy’s vision of industry, art and design. They are playful, human and profound all at once. The same...

April 25, 2012

CFA Awarded NEA Grant to Process Ruth Page Dance Collection

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chairman Rocco Landesman announced today that Chicago Film Archives is one of the 788 not-for-profit national, regional and state organizations nationwide to receive an NEA Art Works grant.  These Art Works grants support the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning...

April 18, 2012

Orphans 8 Film Symposium

This past Saturday, I was lucky enough to attend the final day of the 8th Orphans Film Symposium. For those unfamiliar with this NYU biennial symposium, it is a “gathering of scholars, archivists, curators, and media artists devoted to saving, screening, and studying neglected moving images.” These neglected moving images are often referred to as “orphan films,” which encompass films...

April 6, 2012

Behrend’s ‘Babbit Blast’ to Screen at the Iowa City Doc Film Fest

Next Friday (the 13th..eek!) at 7PM, Patrick Friel will present Jack Behrend’s “Babbit Blast” (1961) as part of the Iowa City Documentary Film Festival’s “Portraiture, Performance, and Industry: The Documentary Fringe and the Avant-Garde” program. Patrick is managing editor of Cine-File Chicago (a weekly Chicago guide to independent and alternative cinema), founder of the White Light Cinema series and festival director...

February 29, 2012

CFA True/False Film Fest Instillation

For those of you headed to the True-False Film Fest in Columbia, Missouri this week, be sure to check out the CFA video instillation at the Blue Note!  It features vintage ads and consumer-oriented films from our vault. Here’s a taste of what it’ll look like…except the actual instillation consists of stacked coral-covered television sets, all playing different sequences of CFA...

February 23, 2012

Sybil Shearer (1912-2005)

Today marks what would have been Sybil Shearer’s 100th birthday. Sybil Shearer (1912-2005) was a leading pioneer of modern dance and arguably one of the finest dancers of the 20th century. Shortly after a critically acclaimed solo debut at Carnegie Hall in 1941, Sybil moved to Chicago and developed a studio in Northbrook, where she worked independently, close to nature,...

February 17, 2012

LORD THING materials found!

Well it happened more quickly than we thought it could.  Last year South Side Projections and the South Side Community Arts Center presented a program that included CFA’s THE CORNER (1963, Robert Ford) and a VHS copy of LORD THING, a documentary on the Conservative Vice Lords shot from 1954 to 1969 made by Dewitt Beall.  Over the years, the film...

January 31, 2012

Alison Cuddy Interview with Ruth Page Dancers

Thanks to Andy Resek (andyresek.com), we have this wonderful documentation of Alison Cuddy’s (WBEZ) interview with Ruth Page dancers, Delores Lipinski Long (Ruth Page Center for the Arts, Civic Ballet of Chicago) and Patricia Klekovic Irwin (Ruth Page Center for the Arts). Together, they discuss the behind-the-scenes dance culture that supported and defined the world of twentieth century dance generated by Chicago’s own prima ballerina...

January 9, 2012

Generous Donations – thanks!!

We here at CFA are so thankful of our supporters, as donations are hugely important to our work in processing and giving access to our varied and unique collections. Here's a list of our more recent supporters: JoAnn Elam Collection: CFA has begun processing the films of Chicago filmmaker JoAnn Elam (1949-2009), a central figure in the in the history...

December 14, 2011

CFA Joins the Internet Archive

To give greater exposure to our unique films collections, we are joining other collections at the Internet Archive. We will be adding more videos in the upcoming days, weeks and months, so be sure to keep an eye out as we build our presence on the site! Our recent activity on the Internet Archive has even generated a bit of...

November 15, 2011

CFA is Headed South for AMIA

Anne and Nancy are headed down to Austin, Texas this week for the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) annual conference, and can do this only because of the support from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. THANK YOU! The annual AMIA  conference provides an opportunity for colleagues and those interested in the field of audiovisual preservation to meet, share information, attend...

September 21, 2011

NEW WEBSITE

Welcome to CFA's new website. We hope to expose you to more moving images within our collections while bringing stories and context to the historical Midwest documentation that CFA preserves. Currently we are in the process of building an online, open source collections management system that will allow us to publish our collections' intellectual and media content online. Be on...

August 25, 2011

BE A PRESERVATION PARTNER

CFA is seeking preservation sponsors for two new collections, showcasing the work of two Chicago artists: Dancer/choreographer Ruth Page and experimental/feminist filmmaker JoAnn Elam. Still from DANSE MACABRE (1923) starring Ruth Page and Adolph Bolm Ruth Page (1899-1999) was a primary figure in Chicago’s dance history.  Almost 1,000 moving image items make up this major artistic collection of dance performances...