The tone of the screening was casual and relaxed as the eager young community of student filmmakers came together to examine their work on a big screen. The film that garnered the most response was fourth-year Jack Mayer’s “Artist,” a short about a young artist as he struggles through the realization that his work has been once more rejected. It was a theme with which many members of the film group could probably empathize, and there were some unsettling moments when the film hit a little too close to home.

For some members the club simply serves as a creative outlet, but others pursue filmmaking with the voracious appetite of those committed to making it in the industry. Perhaps this characteristic is responsible for the disparity of production values apparent in the films produced by the group; some are artfully shot on a prized HD camera, while others appear thrown together in a lo-fi whirlwind of reckless inspiration. Despite this discrepancy, it was clear that each audience member had come to the screening lured by the simple magic of movie making. As the lights dimmed and the screen flickered to life, the audience relaxed into the darkness as happily as they had their very first time.

“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.

A worker at Windy City Harvest; courtesy of Mitra Sticklen

A graduate student in the UofC’s Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), Sticklen had little experience with filmmaking when she began the documentary. She worked on a student organic farm as an undergraduate at Michigan State University and now studies the anthropology of food and agriculture, an interest she decided to try to translate into film. “I really wanted to show people on the South Side of Chicago all the things going on in the last year and a half,” she says. “There’s a lot people don’t know about, and the farmers’ market is a great place to get involved.”

Sticklen found ample support at Fire Escape Films, the UofC student film club, which supplied her with the equipment and training necessary to begin the documentary. In the winter, she enrolled in a class on documentary video taught by Judy Hoffman, who encouraged her to expand the project beyond her original vision. She also began collaborating with Christine Nielsen, another MAPSS student with an interest in urban agriculture.

“The documentary has been a great opportunity to make a lot of connections, and to learn and document the learning process,” says Nielsen. She expects to continue learning this summer, when she will be moving to New Jersey to live and work on an organic farm. Sticklen also has big plans for the summer: starting in mid-June, she’ll be running a blog about “how people in the city relate to food,” following the various paths from farm to plate, in part through high-definition video. The blog will also cover Sticklen’s work at Uncommon Ground in Rogers Park, an eco-conscious restaurant with the country’s first certified organic rooftop garden.

Sticklen and Nielsen see their work as a way to spread the word about a growing movement that may still seem insular to the uninitiated. “A lot of people in the university tend to read and write articles in peer-reviewed journals—they’re in this kind of ivory tower,” Sticklen explains. “I want something accessible to the average Chicagoan, to highlight all the wonderful opportunities popping up around the city.”

Windy City Harvest is just one such opportunity, but it’s an appropriate starting point for a film that is meant to engage a broader audience for urban agriculture. Most of the participants in the less than two-year-old program—including adults who are unemployed or have criminal records—come to it with little prior knowledge about agriculture, much less of the urban or organic variety. “I knew nothing about growing,” admits Ricky Ross, a graduate of the program who joined during its first season in September 2007. Now, after learning how to farm organically, he says he realizes “there’s more to it” than it might seem.

For Ross as for others, urban agriculture is much more than an esoteric hobby. “People often think about farming as something that only a specific group of people are interested in,” Nielsen points out. With “Growing Change,” she and Sticklen hope to show all the different reasons people choose to pursue it, in a way that is also visually captivating. “It’s incredibly beautiful subject matter to film—the plants and the people working,” Nielsen says. “It’s a pleasure to videotape and to look at the footage for hours and hours.”

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.

Saturday, an hour and a half before we begin filming, our team is having a meeting to toss around some ideas and hopefully come up with a plan for our time with the camera. We decide to go without a script, for better or for worse, and form a loose schedule of places to film: Promontory Point, 53rd Street, Valois, Walgreens, the frathouse DU. Hopefully the movie will just create itself from a little imagination and a lot of spontaneity…hopefully.

Saturday night, we’ve reached the end of our allotted camera time and it’s time to return it and work with whatever we have. When we go to import the movie, Cox Lounge is full of entertainment. Half the room is filled with huge flat screen computers with high technology film editing software. A local band, The Names That Spell, is playing while teams are watching their movie take shape. There’s excitement—“Isn’t this a cool shot? Apocalyptic, you know?”—and some disappointment—“So you can’t see his face, at all?” After looking over some of the shots that we took, and seeing how some of our experimental ideas turned out, our team decides it’s safe to leave the remainder of our project for tomorrow.

As Sunday morning rolls around, I decide to head over to Cox a little early to see how everyone’s projects are culminating as the end of the day is approaching. With coffee and doughnuts to start the creative wheels turning, plenty of people are in good spirits; minus of course the Fire Escape members who have been diligently working during the entire weekend. Despite BA papers among other things, the Fire Escape staff has been supervising equipment, helping the teams individually, and making sure the whole process goes smoothly and successfully, which, as a general opinion, seems to be the case. First-year student Asher Klein remarks that the experience was “Really stressful…but a lot of fun. You know it’s not going to be a big deal no matter what.” With a variety of filmmakers, the movies range from murder mystery to comedy, detailed to abstract, each of which presents its own difficulties. Klein expresses a little concern with his group’s project: “Ours is kind of a silly video, so the biggest worry is that, well, the jokes needed to work…but when the nudity happened I think it all came together.” Klein opted not to contextualize the information, but let the movie speak for itself at the screening, which will take place on March 10 at Max Palevsky Cinema, and should be entertaining to say the least. Fourth-year undergraduate Oliver Mosier, also a first-timer with the festival, describes the weekend as “fun—we basically just cracked open a couple PBRs and filmed until one or so in the morning…”

Now our group is churning out the final cut of our movie, and six o’clock is quickly approaching. At 5:55, we all gather around to watch the final version of our film, “The Tribal Life.” As we watch scenes, plots, and themes unfold in a film we barely planned, we all congratulate each other on a job well done before walking to Cox to hand in the final product.

Jared described the premise of his film, pausing often as he chose the right words. “It’s a coming-of-age film. It’s sort of a movie about someone trying to find their place in a city. And so, it’s sort of like a meditation on being anonymous in a city, both the freedom and the loneliness.”

The film is structured as a voice-over journal of an anonymous character’s thoughts and his time in the city. He likes to wander the city, ride trains, that kind of thing. We never learn about his personal life, or, I should say, his background. All we know is this journal of his time in the city.

Jared first began the project of creating a film in his senior year, when he adapted a large body of his own poetry into a screenplay. Jared said that he was motivated to consolidate his work after discovering the Beat movement. “I read ‘Howl,’ and I thought it was so cool how it was pages and pages long. I also thought that ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ was a lot like one big poem.” He noted that the decision to turn his consolidated work into a screenplay was a relatively late one, since he paid little attention to film for most of high school and only got involved with actual film production in college.

In his first year of college, he revised the script and picked up the technical skills he would need by assisting in odd projects with Fire Escape Films. He considers these early projects “Random stuff, just so I could hone my chops and get comfortable.” He bought a $200 super-8 camera, as well as all the film on which “John Doe” would be shot, with his bar mitzvah money.

Most of the shooting happened during the weekends of his second year, with the remainder of the shooting taking place alongside the editing during his third year. Tom Discepola and Dusty Plotnick helped with the shooting, and Greta Honold and Echo Gonzalez acted in the film. Most of the time, however, Jared was alone in downtown Chicago or accompanied only by a single camera operator. Upon reflecting on the production process, one particularly vivid story came to Jared’s mind, and he told it all excitedly, repeatedly rising from his seat and sitting back down.

“Once when I was filming, I got arrested by the FBI, and also the Department of Homeland Security. Well, not arrested, but, you know, they were questioning me there on the spot. I had to show my ID and everything. Okay, so the problem was, I was shooting in a tunnel, that tunnel that connects the Blue Line and the Red Line, the Jackson Tunnel, because I think it looks really cool. But apparently they think that that tunnel is at high risk for terrorism and… stuff. They caught me on their cameras, and I knew they had cameras, and it was really hardcore because I knew I only had a limited time. It was one of those security cameras with the black sphere, so you can’t see it. A Panopticon. So, all of a sudden, we’re in the tunnel at our cameras and we’re shooting and this guy in civilian clothes comes up and says, ‘What are you doing there?’
‘Oh, I’m working on a film!’
‘Do you have permission to shoot here?’
‘Um, no?
So he says, ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘You know, your identification.’ And he flashes his badge. I think it was FBI or DHS, but maybe he was working for both. And so, he looks at my ID and he sees my last name, and he sort of realizes, oh it’s this lanky Jewish boy. So he asks me, ‘Do you understand why you shouldn’t be doing this?’
And I say, ‘Because of terrorism and stuff?’
And he didn’t respond to my response, but he says ‘Okay, I realize that you don’t have malicious intent, but you have to realize that you can’t do this in the future.’
And I got off lucky because he could probably have taken me back to wherever for questioning and stuff. I probably could have gone to jail, as well.”

Although “John Doe and the Anonymous Nothing” is now complete, Jared’s work involving the film is far from over. He is now in the process of submitting the film to festivals. One possible hazard in the submission process is acquiring the “festival rights” to the music he used in the film, including Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run” and Charles Mingus’ “Pithecanthropus Erectus.” He says that “it shouldn’t be a huge problem, even if I can’t make contact with some of them, since I’m not making any money off of it. So I’m probably not going to jail.”

He also plans to use the film as a creative component of his BA project, which he has already titled “Bare-Bones Cinema: Towards an Aesthetic of the Raw.” The academic paper component of this project will examine the constraints imposed by a low budget and how filmmakers embrace the visual experience that these constraints create. Jared explained that he wants to incorporate “Italian neorealist stuff, a lot of New Wave stuff as well. The attitude of ‘pick up a camera and go.’”

Jared then rose from his seat and held his hands out as though framing a large scroll or tabard. “Technically, it’s a paper supplement, but I want it to be a manifesto.”
“John Doe and the Anonymous Nothing” was screened at Doc Films on Monday, October 8 at 9pm. A preview is available at www.johndoethemovie.com, as well as stills from the film, Jared’s contact information, and a movie poster that Jared encourages his well-wishers to download and spread. Jared also welcomes viewers to offer their feedback and criticism, explaining that “I’ve been working on the film for so long, I can’t step back and look at the whole film without a very, very biased perspective.”

When Jared receives his BA, he will have spent a total of six years working, in one way or another, on “John Doe and the Anonymous Nothing.” Toward the end of the interview, he reflected on the consequences of devoting so much of his life to a single project. “So I wrote the film when I was 17 and 18, but later on, when I edited the film when I was 20, and I found that I wasn’t as interesting in exploring the themes I wanted to explore when I was 17 and 18. I didn’t feel as attached to them, I guess. I got frustrated and stuff. So I decided to use that young aesthetic to its advantage, use those themes that would be somewhat naïve and use it to the film’s advantage. Make it intentionally innocent. My parents were really worried when I was done with the film, that if the film turned out bad, I’d be really sad and stuff, because I’d spent so much time on it. But I feel that, even if I weren’t pleased with the final product, and I am pleased, it still would have been a worthwhile project, because of all it taught me. Some of the important stuff about the movie, more than anything else, was the life skills it taught me, like perseverance. I know it sounds corny, but, like, never giving up. So, I know it sounds corny, but it’s really how I felt when I was going through it. If you believe in yourself enough, other people start believing in you.”