Representing Chicago: Media Burn Archive

New Chicago Studies article!

Media burn represents Chicago with innovative online archive on Thursday, May 6 at Film Studies Center
It was 1970, and Sony’s Portopak had just become the video camera of choice for a growing number of Chicago’s underground filmmakers. When Judy Hoffman wanted to interview garbage collectors, waitresses and aldermen to capture the images and sounds of a “different city” than what was shown on television, that camera made it possible.

“It was called Guerilla Television,” Hoffman, now a professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago, explained. “You couldn’t get anything seen on TV that wasn’t produced in a studio, but we started playing around with this new technology … to change how film was produced and received.”

Much of this independent work would be in danger of vanishing, Hoffman says, if not for Media Burn - a project to share the city’s most valuable independent films for free online. Hoffman sees Media Burn’s archive, which boasts hours of footage with city luminaries and everyday citizens - among them the legendary author and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel - to be a resource to students and researchers studying Chicago’s intricate cultural and political history.

Results of Media Burn’s six-year online archiving project will be shared with the University on May 6 at 7:00 p.m. in the Film Studies Center in a presentation called Representing Chicago: Experimental Video and Television at the Media Burn Archive. In addition to screening videos from the collection, the presentation will walk viewers through the Media Burn digital archive and discuss the particular role media plays in making Chicago’s people, politics, and culture accessible.

“The type of work you find in this archive doesn’t exist anywhere else—it’s totally unique. This is because it was done on a medium that was very looked down upon,” says Hoffman, who is using the archive to teach a spring course on Chicago’s film history.

Sara Chapman (AB 04), Executive Director of Media Burn Digital Archive, echoes this sentiment: “The type of work that came out of this movement is not easy to categorize. It does not at all resemble the feature-length documentary movies that are distributed in movie theaters, featuring voiceovers and archival photos or anything like that. The work is often very personal, and it is usually made by a small group of people, maybe a single individual or maybe a handful of people.”

But the material is extensive: Famed Alderman Vito Marzullo; former owner of the White Sox Bill Veeck; eight of the working-class men and women interviewed for Studs Terkel’s book Working.

And then there is Studs Terkel himself, who donated his own collection to Media Burn. Hoffman and her collaborator Tom Weinberg, Media Burn’s president and founder, shot him after their final Working portrait was finished. Hoffman describes the experience of working with Terkel as “tremendous,” as he flowed easily between the roles of mentor and subject.

“He respected people, and was thoroughly passionate about social justice.” Pair that independent spirit with a revolutionary new form of videography, she says, and: “There were no rules. We were about making [our own] rules, and making change.”

That particular film made it onto PBS. But Hoffman insists that what remains of the footage she and other independent filmmakers shot throughout the 1970s would not be available without Media Burn’s extensive efforts to digitize and share the work.

According to Chapman, the archive houses over 6,000 videotapes in total, and spans 40 years of video work from all over the world, including footage of the U.S. invasion of Panama and illegal art collectives in Moscow, Russia.

“Over one-third of the collection has a direct connection to Chicago, whether documenting the early video movement here, the arts, politics, or daily life,” she adds. “Nowhere else can students find these kinds of portraits of our city and its people, politics, and neighborhoods.”

Representing Chicago: Experimental Video and Television at the Media Burn Archive will be at the Film Studies Center (Cobb 307) on Thursday, May 6, 2010 at 7 pm. For reservations, call (773) 702-8596.