The Chicago Film Archives vault is located in a room of a beige, nondescript former warehouse on 18th Street in Pilsen. The Archives’ physical archive, its trove of celluloid materials and related ephemera, numbers more than 20,000 items that offer a diverse cultural record of the midwest throughout the 20th century. Film cans line rows of tightly packed metal shelves that are icy to the touch; in keeping with professional archival standards, the humidity never goes above 40 percent and the temperature never exceeds 50 degrees.
Finding a suitable location for the films proved difficult at first, due to the organization’s meager operating budget. Marshaling support, however, was relatively easy. Even before CFA officially formed, Watrous had assembled dedicated volunteers who “sat around my dining room table and started planning” how the nascent nonprofit would function. This group included Michelle Puetz, now a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, local archivist Carolyn Faber, and Andy Uhrich, currently a doctoral student in film preservation at Indiana University Bloomington. Watrous also called on colleagues in the film community to help drum up financial assistance. (Over the years, support for CFA has come from a range of sources, including individuals, corporations, and such grant-giving organizations as the Illinois Arts Council and the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, which specializes in giving to regionally significant collections.)
As collections manager, Wells now oversees the CFA vault, determines the order in which materials will be processed, and works with people who want to donate films. She also maintains the CFA website—where more than 1,000 titles from the collection can be viewed for free—seeks out collaborators for the organization’s public events, and tries to find “new ways to get people involved with our materials”—not a small job considering the size of the archive.
Watrous and Wells admit they’ve watched only a fraction of the archive, so they say there’s no telling what else its contents might reveal. At least they have a good idea of what they have, thanks to the completion, in 2012, of a comprehensive online database (compiled from materials donated along with the films) detailing the author, genre, and production decade of every item in the collection. Now with this information in place, the first big undertaking of CFA’s second decade, Watrous says, is “to start interpreting the films and doing more archival preservation,” which involves inspecting and storing the materials properly. She and Wells don’t plan to embark on this project alone. They intend to keep reaching out to artists, historians, and anyone else who’s interested to provide context for the materials they’ve amassed.
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