By Patrick Z. McGavin
Cook prepared a grant proposal, and funding–about $7,500–was secured that summer. On November 26, 1972, Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel wrote a story applauding her efforts: “This article is dedicated to the hundreds of persons who have stopped me in movie theaters, dinner parties, baseball games, and lecture halls and complained that Chicago is a cinematic hick town, that they can never find any good art films….Your problems are over.” The Film Center at the School of the Art Institute, he wrote, “will concentrate on films that make adventurous use of the medium and, consequently, have little commercial viability.” In the final paragraph, Siskel issued a call to arms: “This is a needed and ambitious project, and it needs your help if it is to succeed.”
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In June 1976 the Film Center moved to its current space in the School of the Art Institute at Columbus and Jackson. “It couldn’t have been in a worse place,” says the school’s president, Tony Jones. “In the winter, it was a bleak corner. It isn’t near a bus route, you haven’t been able to park anywhere near there.” And it had to shut down for a week and a half every July to accommodate Taste of Chicago.
No one wants to attack the memory of the recently deceased, at least not in public. “He didn’t really cover Film Center films,” complains one film programmer who asked to remain anonymous. A local critic adds, “It not only opens up the problematic nature of Siskel’s own legacy as a critic but brings into question whether the values of the Film Center, which aggressively pushes the idea of film as a serious art form, are being compromised in making Siskel something he wasn’t, namely, a cinephile.” A $5 million capital campaign has already been launched, and some see the name change as an appeal to people who never had any interest in the Film Center’s philosophy.
Richard Pena, the Film Center’s director from 1979 to 1987, organized major, pioneering retrospectives featuring the works of Budd Boetticher, Andrei Tarkovsky, Raul Ruiz, and Manoel de Oliveira that Siskel never even bothered to attend, much less write about.
The Film Center’s programming is largely culled from film festivals–Scharres regularly attends Cannes, Toronto, and a number of smaller regional festivals. In recent years the Film Center has advanced the careers of Iranian masters Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the great Taiwanese filmmakers Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, and lesser known Fifth Generation Chinese mainland directors such as Tian Zhuangzhuang. Siskel was out of touch with this world. He went to Cannes once, in 1990, not for the Tribune but as part of a team for CBS This Morning.
Ebert agrees. “The people that are critical, I think they’re being pretty ungenerous. We’re going to have two full-time cinematheques in the middle of the Loop. They don’t build themselves, they don’t pay for themselves.” o
