She brought gay film fest in from the cold 25 years ago, Brenda Webb gambled and it paid off big
CHICAGO GAY AND LESBIAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
She brought gay film fest in from the cold 25 years ago, Brenda Webb gambled and it paid off big
By Web Behrens
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published November 1, 2006
Tucked away in a classroom inside the expansive second-floor offices of Chicago Filmmakers, Brenda Webb reminisces about a naive wondering she had 25 years ago.
"The very first year, we called it `the first,' and we were laughing," she says, speaking of Reeling, the Chicago Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival, celebrating its silver anniversary with 11 days of programming in November. "We thought, `Will we look like idiots if we call it `the first' but we don't do it again? Do you think anybody will come?' It wasn't really clear to me there would be an audience."
To her amazement, Webb soon discovered she had let a genie out of a bottle. Lines formed down the street as Chicago's gay and lesbian community turned out in force. The offbeat woman who orchestrated it all had never seen anything like it.
"I was used to showing films to tiny audiences," says Webb, now executive director of Chicago Filmmakers (back then, the tiny non-profit's program director). "We had this little 90-seat screening room jam-packed with people. To see experimental film! They didn't even know what they were seeing, just that it was a gay and lesbian film. People were literally crying to get in: `Oh, but my friend's in there!' There was just this incredible sense of -- um ... "
Webb pauses for a moment, clearly moved as she remembers those encounters with people who had been deprived of their own reflection for far too long. Behind her stylish green-and-black-framed glasses, her eyes glisten. She smiles self-consciously. "It was a very powerful emotional experience," she says, "this feeling of doing something important."
Four locations
Twenty-five years later, the projectors are about to roll again, unfurling the nation's second-oldest annual gay and lesbian film fest at four venues around the city Thursday through Nov. 12. (Only San Francisco's gala showcase, begun in 1977, predates Reeling.) Although a pair of gay people at Filmmakers functioned as midwives to the baby fest, Reeling's mother is (perhaps ironically) a brainy heterosexual ally with a big heart and an outsider's soul. "I may not be gay, but I'm resolutely non-hetero-normative," says Webb, who lives in Skokie with her life partner, Neil, and their adolescent daughter.
Webb grew up in Indianapolis and studied psychology at Indiana University. It was during those formative undergrad years that the woman who "never identified with mainstream culture" found community inside a gay bar and passion in art that burst beyond prescribed boxes. The work of European directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni motivated her to migrate to Chicago in the mid-'70s, her still-warm psych degree already lying fallow, to study film at Columbia College Chicago.
In 1978, she took a job with Chicago Filmmakers, where she quickly stepped into outreach, bringing feminist films to women's groups in church basements or documentaries about Agent Orange to gatherings of Vietnam veterans. So her idea to showcase gay and lesbian avant-garde film was, in her mind, just another such project. This one, however, had momentum like no other.
The success hasn't come without a cost: Webb occasionally feels the sharp barbs of criticism that she's not "family." The comments can get nasty. Once in the mid-'90s, a now-defunct gay zine alleged that Filmmakers was "sharecropping in the gay and lesbian community, living off the fat of the festival for the rest of the year," Webb recalls. "It was laughable, because it's really our classes that are Chicago Filmmakers' bread and butter." Though it runs in the black now, Reeling has at times been a money-loser.
"It's really significant that this festival is still going," says gay academic Ron Gregg, who served on Reeling's programming committee when he lived in Chicago. (He joined the film-studies faculty at Yale this summer.) "I have a lot of respect for Brenda. She brings in really strong and often youthful lesbian and gay programmers who bring the perspective of the community."
Logan Kibens, a gay filmmaker hired by Webb as co-director of the 2001 Reeling, says the festival's job has become more difficult as gay cinema becomes more mainstream. Still, none of that has anything to do with its founder's sexual orientation.
"It does seem like a Chicago gay community joke," Kibens notes, "where some people are somehow programmed to say, `Oh, the festival is run by a straight person.' They mean it in a negative way. ... I don't agree with them at all. What could she be trying to pull?"
Deep sense of commitment
The issue occasionally puts Webb in a weird place. "I understand it on a political level," she allows. "I would never hire myself as a straight person to do this festival. ... But I just happened to have the idea, and I did it, and I can't be blamed for that. It's something I'm doing with a strong, deep sense of commitment."
Beyond criticism of her, some people wonder, in the age of Ellen DeGeneres and all-gay cable channels, if there's even a need for Reeling. These days, most of the bigger-buzz gay films win distribution deals, which makes them unavailable to Reeling by the time the November festival comes around; instead, they screen throughout the year at cinemas such as the Music Box or Landmark's Century Centre. Nevertheless, Webb says, the festival "still fulfills an important sense of community. A lot of the films we show won't come out on video or be shown on Logo, though some will."
As a nod to their anniversary, Webb and company have programmed a variety of experimental work that probably won't make the Logo channel (which specializes in gay programming), including a program of homoerotic shorts from the '40s through the '70s that screened during early Reeling years. Also, two directors come full circle: "Barbara Hammer and Marc Huestis had films in the first festival," Webb says. "They both have brand-new films that we're showing this year. It's great to acknowledge that 25 years later, they're still making new work."
----------
ctc-tempo@tribune.com
Reeling runs from Thursday to Nov. 12, with screenings in various locations, including Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark St. Admission varies (typically $10, matinee $7). Visit www.reelingfilmfestival.org or call 312-458-1407.
She brought gay film fest in from the cold 25 years ago, Brenda Webb gambled and it paid off big
By Web Behrens
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published November 1, 2006
Tucked away in a classroom inside the expansive second-floor offices of Chicago Filmmakers, Brenda Webb reminisces about a naive wondering she had 25 years ago.
"The very first year, we called it `the first,' and we were laughing," she says, speaking of Reeling, the Chicago Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival, celebrating its silver anniversary with 11 days of programming in November. "We thought, `Will we look like idiots if we call it `the first' but we don't do it again? Do you think anybody will come?' It wasn't really clear to me there would be an audience."
To her amazement, Webb soon discovered she had let a genie out of a bottle. Lines formed down the street as Chicago's gay and lesbian community turned out in force. The offbeat woman who orchestrated it all had never seen anything like it.
"I was used to showing films to tiny audiences," says Webb, now executive director of Chicago Filmmakers (back then, the tiny non-profit's program director). "We had this little 90-seat screening room jam-packed with people. To see experimental film! They didn't even know what they were seeing, just that it was a gay and lesbian film. People were literally crying to get in: `Oh, but my friend's in there!' There was just this incredible sense of -- um ... "
Webb pauses for a moment, clearly moved as she remembers those encounters with people who had been deprived of their own reflection for far too long. Behind her stylish green-and-black-framed glasses, her eyes glisten. She smiles self-consciously. "It was a very powerful emotional experience," she says, "this feeling of doing something important."
Four locations
Twenty-five years later, the projectors are about to roll again, unfurling the nation's second-oldest annual gay and lesbian film fest at four venues around the city Thursday through Nov. 12. (Only San Francisco's gala showcase, begun in 1977, predates Reeling.) Although a pair of gay people at Filmmakers functioned as midwives to the baby fest, Reeling's mother is (perhaps ironically) a brainy heterosexual ally with a big heart and an outsider's soul. "I may not be gay, but I'm resolutely non-hetero-normative," says Webb, who lives in Skokie with her life partner, Neil, and their adolescent daughter.
Webb grew up in Indianapolis and studied psychology at Indiana University. It was during those formative undergrad years that the woman who "never identified with mainstream culture" found community inside a gay bar and passion in art that burst beyond prescribed boxes. The work of European directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni motivated her to migrate to Chicago in the mid-'70s, her still-warm psych degree already lying fallow, to study film at Columbia College Chicago.
In 1978, she took a job with Chicago Filmmakers, where she quickly stepped into outreach, bringing feminist films to women's groups in church basements or documentaries about Agent Orange to gatherings of Vietnam veterans. So her idea to showcase gay and lesbian avant-garde film was, in her mind, just another such project. This one, however, had momentum like no other.
The success hasn't come without a cost: Webb occasionally feels the sharp barbs of criticism that she's not "family." The comments can get nasty. Once in the mid-'90s, a now-defunct gay zine alleged that Filmmakers was "sharecropping in the gay and lesbian community, living off the fat of the festival for the rest of the year," Webb recalls. "It was laughable, because it's really our classes that are Chicago Filmmakers' bread and butter." Though it runs in the black now, Reeling has at times been a money-loser.
"It's really significant that this festival is still going," says gay academic Ron Gregg, who served on Reeling's programming committee when he lived in Chicago. (He joined the film-studies faculty at Yale this summer.) "I have a lot of respect for Brenda. She brings in really strong and often youthful lesbian and gay programmers who bring the perspective of the community."
Logan Kibens, a gay filmmaker hired by Webb as co-director of the 2001 Reeling, says the festival's job has become more difficult as gay cinema becomes more mainstream. Still, none of that has anything to do with its founder's sexual orientation.
"It does seem like a Chicago gay community joke," Kibens notes, "where some people are somehow programmed to say, `Oh, the festival is run by a straight person.' They mean it in a negative way. ... I don't agree with them at all. What could she be trying to pull?"
Deep sense of commitment
The issue occasionally puts Webb in a weird place. "I understand it on a political level," she allows. "I would never hire myself as a straight person to do this festival. ... But I just happened to have the idea, and I did it, and I can't be blamed for that. It's something I'm doing with a strong, deep sense of commitment."
Beyond criticism of her, some people wonder, in the age of Ellen DeGeneres and all-gay cable channels, if there's even a need for Reeling. These days, most of the bigger-buzz gay films win distribution deals, which makes them unavailable to Reeling by the time the November festival comes around; instead, they screen throughout the year at cinemas such as the Music Box or Landmark's Century Centre. Nevertheless, Webb says, the festival "still fulfills an important sense of community. A lot of the films we show won't come out on video or be shown on Logo, though some will."
As a nod to their anniversary, Webb and company have programmed a variety of experimental work that probably won't make the Logo channel (which specializes in gay programming), including a program of homoerotic shorts from the '40s through the '70s that screened during early Reeling years. Also, two directors come full circle: "Barbara Hammer and Marc Huestis had films in the first festival," Webb says. "They both have brand-new films that we're showing this year. It's great to acknowledge that 25 years later, they're still making new work."
----------
ctc-tempo@tribune.com
Reeling runs from Thursday to Nov. 12, with screenings in various locations, including Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark St. Admission varies (typically $10, matinee $7). Visit www.reelingfilmfestival.org or call 312-458-1407.
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