On the corner of Wellington and Wolcott, nestled snuggly above a long abandoned dry cleaner is a beat up old house that serves as a sort of epicenter for the Chicago filmmaking community.
When you enter the house there's no receptionist’s desk to screen out the riff-raff, no waiting room playing cloying elevator tunes and no one offering you an Evian with a lemon twist. Instead you'll find an old kitchen table that looks like it got dragged from the basement of the nearby Brown Elephant, scrappy filmmakers scarfing down a quick bowl of cereal before they return to work and a sign on the wall quoting Hunter S. Thompson:
Sitting at the kitchen table are Gordon Quinn, Steve James, Jerry Blumenthal and Jim Morissete of Kartemquin Films – makers of challenging, critically acclaimed documentary fare like "Hoop Dreams," "Stevie," and the upcoming 6-plus hour PBS special "The New Americans."
Gordon Quinn and Jerry Blumenthal
Kartemquin has been at the forefront of documentary filmmaking for over 35 years, encompassing an amazing breadth and depth of subject matter. From pioneering protest films like "What the Fuck are These Red Squares" to documentaries about the gentrification of their own 'hood in "Now We Live on Clifton Street," the group's focus has been consistently on making films that shed light on social problems.
All told, the group has made more than 30 films under the Kartemquin banner, utilizing the talents of a veritable who's who of the Chicago filmmaking community.
"Kartemquin has a tendency to collect the kind of people into our orbit that are doing the kind of work that Kartemquin is interested in," says Jerry Blumenthal.
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Over the years, writers, editors and filmmakers like Judy Hoffman, David Szabo, Ron Clasky, and Brita Paretzkin, Academy Award winner Richard Schmeichen and many more have joined the group to pursue projects focused almost exclusively on the Windy City.
"Kartemquin itself grew out of the relationships with the neighborhoods and community groups and the labor organizations who were based here in Chicago. They were what the work was about and for whom it was intended," says Blumenthal.
In its earliest years, the group used the abandoned storefront at the front of the house as a screening room for its work.
"It had been a cleaner's, Emily's Cleaners, when we first moved in. People from the neighborhood would come to the screening room and see our films. With the earlier Kartemquin films, what Gordon called agit-prop films, the audiences were very local and very intensely involved in the subject matter, in trying to accomplish some of the things that the stories in this film were about, so there was a built in audience in this very sort of local space," says Blumenthal.
As Kartemquin grew and took on more projects, both the audience and the distribution outlets changed.
"We started doing these labor films and the maternity center studies, although that didn't make it on PBS because it was censored. The labor stories were partially funded by public broadcasting, so they reached out to a larger audience, they could be used by the labor movement and by labor departments in colleges," says Blumenthal.
The group's unabashedly progressive mindset led it toward regular experimentation with new filmmaking formats, including some video projects on the labor movement that aesthetically left much to be desired. Gordon Quinn describes one:
"We were appalled at what it looked like. It had all these talking heads, it was 45 minutes long and could have really used some tightening. We had to schlep around this big deck so that people could watch it and I thought to myself, this is the worst thing we’ve ever done. But we took it around and people were riveted by it. It was about them and their lives were at stake. We got the sense that you don’t count every audience participation in the same way."
Fueling the Kartemquin fire at that time were slogans like "from the people to the people," regularly held "Structure and Identity" meetings and a heavy dose of left-wing ideology.
The name of the group in fact came by combining the names of founding members Stanley Karter, Jerry Temaner and Gordon Quinn to mimic the sound of Russian director Eisenstein's revolutionary cinematic masterpiece "The Battleship Potemkin."
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003: Kartemquin Films
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