The trouble with writing about experimental films is that you can’t compare them with each other very usefully,” wrote Roger Ebert in 1967, back when Chicago’s alternative film scene received regular atten-tion in the daily newspapers. “Commercial films all exist in more or less the same universe. They want to communicate, and they may also want to inform, entertain, influence, or sell soap. Not so with experimental films, where the makers have to please only themselves.”
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In a four-day festival beginning next Thursday, the Museum of Contemporary Art will screen 33 experimental films made in Chicago between 1959 and ’95, representing 33 unique universes, as part of its current exhibit “Art in Chicago, 1945-1995.” The mix of hybrid documentaries, myth-inspired narratives, and optically manipulated reveries honors the unwieldy diversity that once exasperated Ebert.
In reaction to the Film Center’s tilt toward features and narrative, Filmgroup (later Chicago Filmmakers) started to showcase experimental shorts at N.A.M.E. gallery. And when that organization began to screen political documentaries and other types of films, avant-garde purists started their own groups, like the Experimental Film Coalition and later X-Film.
