Chicago’s filmgoing scene isn’t exactly a hotbed of activity, says cinephile and programming prodigy Gabe Klinger. Things are pretty chilly and distant. We slink silently into one of our handful of art houses, spend an hour or two in front of a flickering screen, and slink anonymously back out. No matter how mystifying or inspiring the film, in most cases there’s nothing said, nothing shared, no sense of an event. We might just as well watch alone in our bedrooms–which, increasingly, we do. Klinger and a couple of like-minded friends, Christy LeMaster and Darnell Witt, are attempting to do something about that by launching Chicago Cinema Forum, a cinesalon hosting laid-back but serious screenings and discussions of seldom seen work, cheap or free, often in someone’s living room.
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Klinger, who was 19 when he programmed the Block Museum’s film series and now, at 24, teaches film at Columbia College, says Chicago’s existing film venues are part of the problem. His students don’t regularly patronize the Film Center, he says, in part because it’s too expensive, but also because of the space: “They don’t feel invited in. Some of that’s attitude, but part of it is the building–the Lenin-like portrait of Gene Siskel looking at you as you’re entering. The place can be intimidating.” Facets, he says, has its own problem: “People hang out around the box office, but the space doesn’t lend itself to communal discussion” because there’s no place to sit in the lobby. At the Music Box, “people just come in and out.” Klinger says he’s “been a regular at these spaces for years, got my chops there,” and isn’t looking to compete with them but wants to create a “different type of experience” that he thinks will galvanize a latent community of film fans.
Klinger and company want to do film in the neighborhoods, they say: Pilsen galleries, Humboldt Park lofts. But they also have grander ambitions. Klinger doesn’t much like the Chicago International Film Festival and wants to do his own showcase, one that would include revivals and draw “the entire spectrum” of the film world. LeMaster wants to open a theater in Wicker Park with Klinger as programmer. She’s working a day job to save toward this goal and figures it’ll take four years. Her inspiration is Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, Missouri, where she once worked. Ragtag recently went nonprofit, but LeMaster thinks her theater could be a profit-making enterprise, supported in part by media classes for kids. Klinger says the hope is that Chicago Cinema Forum, which doesn’t yet have nonprofit status, will build an audience for the proposed Wicker Park facility.
