Through the stories of 26 men and women, “Word is Out” showed the contradictions of LGBT life in the ‘70s. Nearly a decade after the Stonewall Riots and Harvey Milk’s successful political campaign, homosexuality was still a crime across the country, and the police regularly raided gay bars. One individual in the film commented on the prevailing popular attitude towards homosexuals—that they were “criminal, sick, or wicked.” Two interviewees who had been institutionalized because of their sexual orientation described being forced to undergo shock treatments. One man was surprisingly calm as he commented on his near brush with castration. He estimated that he had received “somewhere between ten and twenty… probably around twenty-five [shock treatments].”

The subjects of the documentary were incredibly diverse, from a bouffanted blond Southern woman to a gay activist, business suits to pride parades. All of the people interviewed in the film struggled with issues that we still struggle with today: discrimination, gender roles, and the fight for wider acceptance.
The most beautiful aspect of the film was how firmly it was set in its historical context. “Word is Out” managed to show how difficult it was to be gay in the ‘70s while capturing the joy of honest, real-life love stories. In one interview, a man describes how finally falling in love “meant I was a real person…I was using a part of myself that I never felt before.”

“Clyde” is Mayer’s third feature film and the first for Justin Staple, who edited most of the film. It’s also one of the most professional films to come out of Fire Escape Films. Staple, a third-year undergraduate, is loose and completely unworried as he describes the dilemma of a student film. “We made this movie for more than ourselves…and that’s a bad thing…or maybe not.” He laughs and clarifies, “We want to make something universally enjoyable—which could also mean ‘commercially viable.’” The film follows the 20-something Clyde on a road trip from Atlanta to Texas as she struggles to find herself in a universe of sincere, bored, and directionless friends. The cast and crew spent 25 days shooting over 50 hours of footage in Atlanta, Austin, and Galveston, and they’ve gotten good at improvising solutions. “The whole crew was eating ramen for a day and a half while we waited for a check to clear,” Mayer recalls between phone calls to find a projector. On the drive between Atlanta and Austin, the rear axle of Mayer’s car snapped and spun off of the highway, somehow injuring no one. The project’s biggest setback came when Staple tripped and dropped a hard drive, erasing hours of important footage. The filmmakers brought in an illustrator who drew 450 frames to animate some of the lost scenes.

That same problematic hard drive is now sitting on the floor of the Doc Films projection room, attached to the little white cord, which has been located and is not working. Mayer did find a projector, though, and it appears that the premiere will be happening. Staple is positioning the projector in a window of the projection booth, but he’s forgotten his glasses and his vision is making it difficult. “Sometimes,” he contemplates, as he holds the projector back from a thirty-foot drop, “it’s hard to know what student film is all about.” The first UofC student film to be shot in high definition ends up having its premiere shown from a mediocre projector balanced precariously on a stack of course books and CD cases. Mayer adjusts the color as best he can, and the anxious crowd of about 250 enters the theater only ten minutes behind schedule.

When the lights go down, the film that plays is a lot like the hours that led up to its premiere. It’s surprising, makeshift, a little haphazard and a little hurried as it struggles to be both sincere and professional. It alternates between relaxed dialogue and moments of genuine distress; it’s honest, moving, and really entertaining. The editing is gorgeous and the quality of the production is impressive, although Mayer looks physically ill when several scenes are too dark. The film overflows with music from Chicago and the various hometowns of its creators. “A Girl Named Clyde” is a genuinely good film, and the premiere is a genuinely good place to be. The film’s future is unknown; Mayer and Staple hope to sell a DVD on the project’s website under a pay-what-you-want model, and they will submit the film for festival consideration. But tonight, at least, is a success.

As the credits roll, Staple attempts an apology for the image quality. Nobody seems to have minded. People are excited; they congratulate the cast and crew on their way out, and discreetly toss a few PBR cans into the trash. Staple is still relaxed as he talks with well-wishers; Mayer still seems nervous, but he seems happy with the premiere and the long process that produced it. In the lobby he gives his dad a long hug and heads upstairs to retrieve the unused hard drive, which he carries with both hands.

But perhaps I misspeak. After all, Cary is just the icing on the cake. The real treat is Doc’s ten weeks of programming. Let’s take a look.

On Sunday, Doc gives us a continuation of last quarter’s series on Japanese film maestro Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu’s melancholy films examined the complexities of modernity in Japan. These films are all post-World War II, and show the despair and destruction that followed Japan’s defeat, as well as the economic boom that overtook the country in the 1950s. Ozu slams the personal against the social, and while his films can be heart-wrenching, they can also be perceptive and sweet—don’t worry about them bringing down your weekend.

Monday’s series on Taiwanese filmmakers is cosponsored by the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Library. Most of the films screened are from the ‘80s and early ’90s, with three each by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang. Hsiao-Hsien’s “City of Sadness”(May 11) and Yang’s “Brighter Summer Day” (May 18) are highlights.
Tuesday brings us a series on the evolution of documentary film! Starting with “South,” produced in 1918, these ambitious films trace (and invent) footage from the South Pole to Iran to the North Sea.

On Wednesday, we have a very compelling series, perhaps the most compelling of all. Why? Because Cary Grant is in all of the films, of course. The series starts this week with ur-LOL-cat comedy “Bringing up Baby,” which also features a leopard! Grant stars as a paleontologist, and Katherine Hepburn is his love interest, a wry society girl. The series focuses on Grant’s work with George Cukor and Howard Hawks, including the Hawks and Grant screwball collaboration “I Was a Male War Bride” on May 20.

Kicking off this week with 1969’s “Easy Rider,” directed by and starring Dennis Hopper, Doc’s early Thursday series on “American Grit” explores the seedy underbelly of life against flower power. Iconic performances by Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson examine macho angst, while films like “Diary of a Mad Housewife” and “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” look at the fraying of American norms after the ’50s, fueled by changing perspectives on vices like drugs and sex.

Late Thursday probably speaks for itself, with the scintillatingly titled “WTF?”. With films by mainstays of absurdity Ed Wood (“Glen or Glenda,” this Thursday at 9pm) and Cecil B. DeMille (“This Day and Age”), the series also features ridiculous plots and images by Norman McLeod (“Alice in Wonderland”) and an evangelical epic by Ron Ormond who converted to Christianity after surviving a plane crash.

As usual, weekends are a series of second-run gems. This spring brings us a combination of Oscar nominees and winter blockbusters, but also look for little independent gems like “Let the Right One In” (April 17 and 19), which combines Sweden, vampires, and the 1970s (elements that together, make my heart go boom about as fast as Cary Grant does) and “Wendy and Lucy” (May 2 and 3), a film that, I have been told, causes intense anxiety and precarious feelings in its audience. Looking forward to graduation, indeed.

In the meantime, I’ll have Cary Grant on my wall to keep my company. Swoon.

College was supposed to be a land of both social and academic opportunity. To a large extent it is, even at a work-intensive school like the University of Chicago. But how exactly these opportunities present themselves, and how ardently we protect them and involve ourselves, is a more complicated tale.

As a forlorn first-year, one sometimes feels like a worthless fish, adrift in a gigantic, somewhat hazy sea. For the first week or so of college, the opportunities that arise are forced, nonspecific group outings, rather than anything truly exciting or necessarily compelling. Anything extracurricular is also intensely communal. This is not to say that a little bit of forced bonding is an awful endeavor, but it is one that can make a new student feel as if among a herd of cows munching on free cud (in addition to feeling like a worthless fish). And while I like Michigan Avenue, community service, and John Hughes movies just as much as the next person, the first week of college can certainly leave one feeling stripped of anything resembling individuality. Even once we all get our placement test results and end up enrolled in some liberating and/or numbing combination of courses, that first autumn at the UofC is an experience of lumping, not separating.

But when the RSO (Recognized Student Organization) fair comes around, a small bit of freedom is offered. The cows and fishes all scatter to various tables, lured by eager, smiling faces. Students brandish a pen to sign up for dozens of mailing lists, pick an identity, join a club.

Of course, at this point, classes start, and after the free pizza offered at the initial meetings of many RSOs runs out, attendance tends to dwindle. It could be any number of things; nobody can actually be expected to show up at a dozen weekly meetings, or sit through rehearsal for a handful of different shows. At some level, RSOs tend to offer students a grasp at identity as they meet their first casual or close friends outside their dorm, students who share their interests. Yet for some reason, RSOs at the UofC often have a lifespan only slightly longer than those fake clubs that groups of friends would make up in high school, just so that they could have a picture in the yearbook together. Even RSOs that are generally successful can fade as leadership shifts, or attendance or submission lags. By one’s third or fourth year, even minimal RSO involvement is often left to a few hundred hardcore individuals, who run meetings and bring dozens of reimbursement receipts to the basement of the Reynolds Club.

The mystery of student organizations is a difficult one to unpack. There are six RSOs that receive funding separately—WHPK (radio), University Theater (drama), Major Activities Board (huge concerts), Council on University Programming (large parties), Doc Films (cinema), and Fire Escape Films (making movies), and they tend to involve a lot of students and get a lot of money from the college. These RSOs are also some of the oldest on campus. WHPK has been broadcasting from the Reynolds Club for over fifty years, and Doc Films is the oldest continuously screening student film society in the country. Yet contributing in a leadership role to either of these organizations can be a huge time commitment, and on top of a stressful class schedule, having to commit a serious amount of extra effort to a large organization can be both rewarding and draining. But for the most part, the continued existence of these RSOs is rarely in jeopardy.

Not so for the smaller schools of fish. The most visible casualty of this tends to be publications. If a magazine or review can’t produce enough content to fill an issue, or if they don’t have an editorial board (or even a single person) willing to trudge through submissions, they often fall apart. Some, such as Sliced Bread (formerly Aubade), have re-branded and re-energized. Others’ publishing simply dwindles, or ceases entirely. Their registered organization status is switched to ‘inactive,’ until an eager or entrepreneurial student attempts to revive or resuscitate the cause. RSOs don’t really die, you see. They simply retire quietly and wait until someone new finds them.

When one searches for a list of all RSOs, active and inactive, on the Student Activities website, 456 organizations are returned. The first is the undergraduate chapter of the American Medical Student Association, and the last is the Zombie Readiness Task Force. The Zombie Readiness Task Force was only established as a registered organization within the past year, whereas pre-med students have existed since the dawn of the university. Between these groups, both intellectually and alphabetically, exists hundreds of other options for students.

But the question of what fails and what succeeds has to do as much with zeitgeist as anything. Despite the fact that the Zombie Readiness Task Force received thousands of dollars of funding from Student Government’s Uncommon Fund, they still need to keep an active membership to survive. Maybe when the apocalypse does come calling, there will be no one to protect campus from a gaggle of flesh-eating beasts because students have joined the Anti-Cyborg Coalition, or the Alien Invasion Support Group. All facetiousness aside, the possibility of a continuous student life is often undercut by us students ourselves. After all, we graduate.

Sunday, Beyond Frankenstein: The Other Films of James Whale: This quarter, Doc prepares for a British Invasion, featuring the works of James Whale, father to some of the greatest box-office horror flicks of all time, including “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein.” However, don’t plan on catching any of these notorious classics at Doc. Instead, expect to see some of his obscure works, which include 1932’s “The Impatient Maiden” appearing on April 13 at 7pm. Adapted from a racy novel, this early Whale film explores the sexual exploits of a woman who refuses to respect her wedding vows.

Monday, Impossible Adaptations: Co-sponsored by the Smart Museum, this film series is devoted to “impossible” film adaptations which include works by directors like David Cronenberg, D.W. Griffith, and John Huston. Throughout this series, directors explore and adapt modernist works to the big screen, featuring authors such as James Joyce and Marcel Proust. If you’re looking for suggestions, check out Huston’s Malcolm Lowry-inspired film “Under the Volcano” at 7pm on May 12, and follow the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a hopeless alcoholic living within a “menaced civilization.”

Tuesday, Children of Paradise: French Films of the Occupation and post-war period: Providing hard-to-find works, some of which are imported from France, the France Chicago Center lights up our big screen with French films of the ‘40s including a few by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Carné. Although somewhat cliché, check out the April 8th screening of Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” his adaptation of the classic fairy tale which has become one of the most popular French films of all time.

Wednesday, ’60s Thrillers: Adding some suspense to mid-week screenings, Doc plans on tossing some sixties into the mix. Stay tuned for Polanski’s first English-language film “Repulsion,” scheduled for May 28th. Witness Carole Ledoux’s spiral into madness through her experiences of isolation, sexual repression, and violent fantasy.

Early Thursday, The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema: 1933-1943: Never before screened in Chicago, an array of Mexican films will flash across our screen thanks to a collection from Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional. The films range from “expressionistic, religiously-tinged horror movies” to more artsy films, but the first to attract outside critical attention is Fernández’s “María Candelaria,” which recounts the struggles of a young Indian girl living outside of Mexico City.

Late Thursday, Cinemasaurus!: Don’t miss University of Chicago professor Paul Sereno’s introduction to Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” on June 5th. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mr. Sereno, he’s the paleontologist who digs up newly discovered species of dinosaur across the globe (and one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People in 1997). For those of you itching with excitement, check out Cooper and Schoedsack’s 1933 “King Kong” in the meantime, playing on April 10th. Actually, never mind. Check out all of these films.

Weekends, There will be Doc: As usual, Doc has a pretty ripe array of new releases making their way to Hyde Park. We can expect to see flicks like “There Will Be Blood,” “Juno,” and “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” and an array of other recent popular and critical favorites.

SAVE THESE WEEKEND DATES: On April 26th, Oscar-nominated director Milcho Manchevski will present three of his recent films all night starting at 4:30pm. Expect to see “Before the Rain” (his most famous), “Shadows,” and “Dust.” Seriously. Rumor also has it that Bayona’s “The Orphanage” is a good pick if you’ll be interested in having your pants scared off on May 9th. Also, may we add that on May 16th, Schaffner’s classic 1968 “Planet of the Apes” is screening in a brand-new 35mm print—damage control for Burton’s film.

Check it.

Westphal claims, “We haven’t faced any controversy—yet. [But] it’s early in the quarter.” Controversy may not be written in the stars for Doc Films, though, as history shows that it has treaded this path on at least two other occasions and survived unscathed. In fact, Doc Films experienced near riots when the film “Deep Throat” of the History of Erotica in Film series sold out a few years ago—but never as much consternation over the series itself.

Today, the Sexploitation series being shown is the love-child of two series that came before it, a sort of experiment to see if University of Chicago’s Doc Films sect can wade any further into the vein of pornographic cinema and still attract audiences with fresh voices and films.

Despite the fact that the first series—entitled The History of Erotica in Film—debuted prior to his arrival on campus, Westphal claims it was a “coy spin on a scatter-shot, grab-bag series of sex films” ranging from French boudoirs that came on single reels made in 1910, to the politically savvy and artistic films “Last Tango in Paris” and “I Am Curious Yellow” that were uplifted by the bourgeois art house audiences, including the more recent but far less bashful American pornographic movie “Deep Throat” that hit theaters in the summer of 1972.

But while the first series was somewhat haphazardly compiled—the only factor of coherence stringing the pieces it featured together being their common gratuitous exploitation of the act of sex —the second series, entitled “Cinematic Sexualities in the Twenty-First Century,” was more thoughtfully put together. It aimed to demonstrate the thirst that directors of the new century felt for creating the serious, adult-oriented sexual art cinema.

“’Cinematic Sexualities’ premise was that American exhibitors had finally thrown off the Reaganist impulse and returned to bringing audiences the kind of hardcore content that had been de facto banned from our screens since the late 1970s,” explained Westphal.

Unfortunately, most of the pieces were foreign films with, and so while the idea proved interesting and provocative, the series itself was not a ticket-seller, much to Doc’s disappointment. “Ultimately, the campus audience just was not interested in coming to obtuse and pretentious Italian cinema, even with a title like ‘Uncut’—with all that that implies,” said Westpham.

In order to achieve the past success of “Deep Throat” and to outdo the past two series concerning erotica, Doc Films is featuring Westphal’s ribald and unabashed “Sexploitation” series this Winter Quarter. The films here are arousing and fascinating, crafted by directors with drastically varying agendas and temperaments and yet all for the sole purpose of bringing nudity to the cinema and selling it as art.

“I thought for a long time about why the first series had been such a success and the second one had been such a disappointment—fiscally, not artistically, speaking. I surmised that if people wanted films about sex, they didn’t want subtitles—they wanted them to deliver the goods. They wanted the films to be fun,” said Westpham.

The Sexploitation series features films that, while regarded in some cases as avant-garde material today, were screened in secret underground venues when they first premiered, dogged by police interference, subjected to dubious hack jobs, sold as mere titillation material to covert audiences and seen by the public as mere skin-flicks—too salacious to be termed anything but smut. By focusing on works that best captured the essence of the sleazy yet artistic style that was unique to the sexploitation genre of the twentieth century, Doc Film’s new series showcases films that illustrate the full-circle aspect of the genre, beginning with early pieces like “This Nude World” that disguised its smut as didactic matter and moving on to later pieces such as “Flaming Creatures” and “Dirty Pool” that—despite their budgetary constraints—garnered relatively high praise. Succeeding those are rough films such as “The Scavengers” and “Thundercrack!” that meshed sex with violence in a way that was “guaranteed to offend anyone,” as Westphal puts it. Capping off the quarter are the films “Behind the Green Door” and “The Opening of Misty Beethoven,” both attention-grabbing pictures that combined real acting and intense narrative with the sexy overtones of the field, a veritable first for the sexploitation genre.

“We have an arty selection, a ‘cheapjack’ production with beatnik dialogue grafted onto the footage after shooting, a ‘roughie’ that appealed to the sadist trade—they’re fun, but they should also be taken seriously,” said Westpham. “[These films can] be examined as a reflection of the distinctly American attitudes towards sexual mores that first prompted them to flicker on our screens.”

Though shown first in the series, “Showgirls” is actually the most recently produced film in the sequence, and is known for its revival of the sleaziness that the sexploitation genre’s earliest films were renowned for, thereby taking the series back to its roots. Judging by the high turn-out rate for its screening on January 10, there may be reason for Westpham to anticipate that “Sexploitation” will yield more profits than even “Deep Throat” and the series before it.

“We had around seventy people for our Thursday screening of ‘Showgirls.’ It was a wonderful experience. Everyone was quite involved in the movie. They laughed in all the right places. They groaned at all the right lines. They even moaned a collective sigh of pity when fallen angel Nomni Malone succumbs to the demon cocaine, which she had sworn off earlier in the movie,” Westphal said. “It was a great atmosphere. ‘This Nude World’ will be even better.”