Jay Bliznick was introduced to underground films by his local video store clerk, Christian Gore, who’d just started publishing the cult fanzine Film Threat out of a garage in Detroit. “I started to rent every weird film I could get my hands on,” Bliznick says. “Suddenly I realized that you could shoot something on Super-8 or video and have people see it, have it get a reaction. It was then that I decided–Yes! This is what I want to do!”
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Bliznick came to Chicago in 1992 to study film at Columbia College, but he felt the school was teaching only conventional methods of moviemaking. “The great films were stressed at the expense of other kinds of work,” he says. “You’d never see an experimental or underground film there.” Bliznick decided to get into video, making compilation tapes of shorts by Chicago filmmaker Raoul Vehill as well as a tape of B-movie trailers. “I went out to the Famous Monsters of Filmland convention in Arlington, Virginia, and I spent more money than I had and only sold two tapes.” But Bliznick made valuable contacts, and he returned to Chicago with the idea of organizing a film festival.
The Chicago Underground Film Fest starts with an opening night party at 7 PM next Thursday, July 20, featuring the film What About Me? by Rachel Amodeo, who’s usually associated with the Cinema of Transgression movement of the early-80s New York punk scene. Admission is $15; the band Big Chief will perform after the film. It will be at the International Cinema Museum, 319 W. Erie.
