I didn’t see a lot of movies growing up. I was not allowed to watch television. So it was sort of a surprise when I was in high school that my mother suddenly was very enthusiastic about the idea of going to this silent film festival that had popped up in this little town in Maine where my grandfather lived. And so we went and that was the first time I ever realized that you could see old films on film—and probably that films were shown on film at all and not just some kind of apparition that was mysterious and similar to what you would see on a television screen. It’s hard to explain, because I don’t completely remember what it was like to not know how movies actually work. But it was pretty gripping, the idea that there’s all this physical machinery behind it.
Rebecca Hall, 25, arrived here from Connecticut in 2005 to study anthropology at the University of Chicago and soon became active as a film projectionist around town, doing shows at Doc Films, Gene Siskel Film Center, and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. She and Julian Antos were the last programmers of the 30-year-old Classic Film Series at the Bank of America in Old Irving Park; when the series lost its corporate sponsorship in 2010, they banded together with Kyle Westphal to launch the Northwest Chicago Film Society, whose quirky and adventurous Wednesday-night shows are a highlight of Chicago moviegoing. —J.R. Jones
