What is film?
Or more appropriately in our age of image making by everyone, what is “film”? YouTube claims 144,000 hours of video are posted every single day. (A woman who reaches the age of eighty has lived 701, 280 hours: hardly even five YouTubeDays.) And how many hours in a life are there to produce, consume, examine, remember film? (One definition, esthetically, could be: looks like life, feels like a dream.)
Chicago’s film profile was elevated from the 1980s forward by movies like “Hoop Dreams,” “Risky Business,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “The Fugitive,” “The Dark Knight” and decades of great documentaries and experimental work by many important figures whose history is still being written. But the link between Chicago and film is more expansive than that, starting with the movie industry: who shoots them, who finances them, who writes them, who finds locations. Then there is the increasingly large number of students in the city, studying some form of film or television or media. The number of students specializing in some kind of media studies or media production at Chicago’s many universities is enormous, from Columbia College, Northwestern, the School of the Art Institute, the University Of Chicago, DePaul, Tribeca Flashpoint, and so on—a shocking number next to the number of films of any shape or size that even the most devoted of us are about to enjoy in any given year. “Film”? It used to be just something you loved seeing on the big screen with the smell of fresh popcorn in the darkness. Even universities are changing the names of their programs in fast-changing times: DePaul, for instance has its “School of Cinema and Interactive Media.” Then there’s “transmedia” and the selling: What stories do we have to tell about the stories we have to tell?
The work goes on. But what is the “work” in a time of “creative destruction” when all models for financial return have gone out the window? In the lists we compiled, we were looking for people who aren’t isolated or cloistered, but who are working, and putting work out into the world. This list is in no way exhaustive nor is it a list of up-and-comers—a groundbreaking image, narrative, economic model could be hatched tonight and launched tomorrow, gone viral quicker than flu itself—but it’s more of a list of those who have found ways to continue their practice, exert their personalities and offer a few examples, both young and long-lived, for the world in ways that are impeccably Chicagoan: rough and ready, come what may. (Ray Pride)
Film 50 was written by Ray Pride and Brian Hieggelke
20 Howard Tullman, Chairman, Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy
After turning around Kendall College, a culinary school, serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman threw himself into the whole-cloth invention of a media arts school with a core digital focus and a two-year vocational program. Before long, Flashpoint would ink a vast partnership with Tribeca Enterprises, of Robert De Niro and Tribeca Film Festival fame, giving the fledgling brand a blue-chip Hollywood association, one that manifests in an aggressive philosophy in developing projects with “The Industry,” including Tyra Banks and the late Roger Ebert, who collaborated with them on the final iteration of his TV show. It’s too early to truly measure the influence of TFA grads yet, but given Tullman’s track record, it’s hard to count him out.
- See more at: http://newcityfilm.com/2013/10/03/film-50-chicagos-screen-gems-2013/2/#sthash.tWh7AHBD.dpuf
