The five founders of the new group X-Film Chicago are recalling their perplexed first encounters with experimental films. Martin Rumsby says he saw a film from Oklahoma–David McCullough’s Four Possible Variations–about 20 years ago in his native New Zealand. “A static camera viewed four bowls, and the same cracker was put into different types of soup and slowly absorbed,” he explains. “We saw these crackers disappear at differing rates. I thought it was pretty interesting,” though, he allows, a bit “impractical.” Francis Schmidt saw Kenneth Anger’s films in his teens, and “afterward I suddenly realized I could remember every single frame and nuance,” which had never happened to him before. Chicago native James Bond, viewing Len Lye’s abstract Free Radicals on an editing bench rather than a projector, remembers being “blown away by the richness and color and subtlety of each frame.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The group, which also includes Scott Trotter and former New Yorker Gregg Biermann, was born out of frustration with the lack of exhibition opportunities in Chicago. “For nine years I wrote letters, sent videotapes, and even came to Chicago from Regina, Saskatchewan, and showed a program to a programmer,” says Rumsby, who owns many films by a variety of filmmakers. Schmidt recounts a string of unanswered letters, faxes, and phone calls until the Film Center finally showed one of his movies as a short before a Myrna Loy comedy.
X-Film takes a more open approach, screening a mix of short works, both from the past and present, at the International Cinema Museum and the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Cafe. They feel a kinship with Cinema Museum director Carey Williams, who “doesn’t rely on grants to operate day to day: he’s built what he has out of his own pocket,” says Biermann. “He has a passion and he’s sharing it,” adds Rumsby. Bond, who designs and builds projection facilities for a living, supervises the group’s screenings.
Rumsby hints at a utopian dream behind their enterprise. “If there’s going to be social change of any sort, or even individual change, then you have to have pictures of the place you want to go.”
