Au Revoir, Nightingale (For Now)
When I come out of a film screening at The Nightingale Cinema, there’s always a small moment of shock as I re-adjust to the outside world. The voodoo of this volunteer-run microcinema, which closed its doors last month after a fourteen-year run, has a way of making the rest of the world disappear, like going through a cinematic wormhole. The Nightingale’s programming was home to “expanded cinema, new media, experimental narrative, documentary, and video art” and its staff of programmers, projectionists, critics and artists, running the place entirely on a gift economy system, supported and championed “artist, activist, underground, outré, avant-garde, après-garde, unconventional, independent, forgotten, and unforgettable cinema.” The Nightingale website’s laundry list of offerings was no exaggeration. It was a community meeting place for screening, education, performance, live studio shoots and artist talks. Venues like these offer the kinds of cinematographic experience that change your perception of cinema.
the screen at the Nightingale
I attended the Nightingale’s Farewell (for now) Festival both days near the end of April 2022. Its well attended screenings spoke of the impressive relationship between cinephiles and the cinema culture of the theater. It’s the old building at the corner of Milwaukee avenue and Thomas in Chicago’s Noble Square neighborhood, with the beauty of its exterior structure diminished by the sight of an iron gate on the front door that resembles prison bars. You’ll always find discussions on the corner sidewalk among patrons about the film that was just screened and this was a part of the experience.
I believe what happens after a film is as important as what happens during a film. Cinema is cinema and the discussion about the film afterwards. Because so much of what was screened at the Nightingale was challenging and experimental in nature, with works completed in a multitude of different formats often nowhere in the vicinity of singular and linear storytelling, these exchanges became a vital part of the experience. Cinemas like these believe that the total experience is a “collective and bodily event” (the Nightingale website’s words) and that bringing together audiences and artists alike is what makes this exchange illuminating.
What spots like The Nightingale also provide is the giddy anticipation of the unexpected. I rarely knew anything about what I was seeing there and this was a big part of the satisfaction. Most things you go to see, it’s sticking to some established formula because studios are obsessed with trying to standardize prior successes. You know the actors. You’ve seen trailers. The thing is tied tightly to a storyline that’s mostly literal and liminal in the way it unfolds. The amount of familiarity in that experience can be maddening to me.
At makeshift underground moviehouses, those expounders of purer and more unitive artistic endeavors, you must relinquish control and let yourself be transported. It’s like traveling without an itinerary in the best way. And there’s the experience of being surrounded by so many others who are passionate about the cinema. While it’s great that we have so many choices about technological formats, it seems they’re taking us further and further away from each other. It’s bad enough how little our government and so many of our fellow citizens value art in terms of funding for artists and filmmakers and for the development of arts programs in schools. People must re-acquaint themselves with the task of being fully immersed, leaving their living rooms to find interesting cinema, taking risks with what they see and relinquishing control. We can’t be so individualistic that the venues that house these shared experiences have to go away.
The Nightingale’s program for that final weekend could have stood for any given two day program stretch for the theater, with individual programs curated by the theater’s own staff: An advance screening of the trans feature BROS BEFORE by Henry Hanson, films by local artists like Paige Taul and Ben Balcom, and an expanded cinema performance called Dada’s Daughter by Milwaukee-based artist, Sara Sowell. Numerous shorts programs were also curated and screened. I enjoyed Erin Hayden’s Flower-o’-The-Moon, and Sky Hopinka’s When You’re Lost In The Rain.
A highlight for me was the queer masterpiece, Psykho III, The Musical. Mark Oates’ and Tom Rubnitz’s 24-minute 1985 camp approximation of Hitchcock’s prototypical mad slasher film, with its fanciful pasteboard DIY production was much more fun. I found it highly reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Vinyl (1966), which featured Warhol Factory denizens acting out the Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange in front of a fixed camera with virtually nothing in the way of sets, props or costumes.
Respect was also paid to some of the pioneering artists of experimental and avant-garde filmmaking. The great George Kuchar’s Terror by Twilight (1988) was screened, as was Peggy Ahwesh’s The Scary Movie (1993). Ahwesh is as much a media historian as she is a filmmaker and artist. She’s a crucial voice in contemporary filmmaking. The political urgency of her rigorous but playful body of work demands a larger audience.
Images from some of the short subjects at The Nightingale's Farewell (for now) Festival, which showcased a multitude of different formats, subjects and viewpoints.
The audience is always happy to see thoughtful cinema, bigger than life and luminous. It’s a shame that this type milieu is regarded by the mainstream as esoteric, something for outsiders. But sadly in America, to step even modestly beyond the boundaries of well defined forms is to step beyond the boundaries of permissible communication. Venues like these, however, do seek the most diverse cross section of artists and audiences possible. Artists of all races as well as LGBTQ and non-binary artists can showcase their work and this kind of welcoming atmosphere makes such a different sense of the truly collective experience that sees a validation of their stories and perspectives and of the story we make as a collective. There is ideological diversity as well, as the venue did its best to spotlight activism in film and video. Art in service of social justice and political awareness and this commitment on the part of venues like the Nightingale to non-commercial cinema is rare and vital.
A movie house is a dream palace. Even multiplexes in strip malls where the dreams offered are the property of Disney are dream palaces. When groups of people are transported to somewhere else in a given space, night after night, it becomes something else. The atmosphere becomes ethereal and rarified (I call it voodoo). Even if, like the Nightingale, a nondescript space more closely resembles a prefab apartment or a social club, it too is a dream palace. Moreso, in fact - as your fellow moviegoers sitting next to you are also interested in cinema that explores the regions beyond plot.
The operators are looking for a new space at the moment. I hope they find one, and that more places like the Nightingale don’t get gentrified out of existence. Or at least they can take advantage of pop-up venues and continue in a more mobile and mutable form, screening work in whatever spaces will have them. There’s certainly an audience for it.
But these spaces of community cinema, and their preference for new, unconventional and truly independent voices are what create the strongest memories one can have at the movies. You’re caught up in the strange new world of whatever you were watching, in the excitement of discovering something you’d never see at the strip mall, on a journey in a dark space watching a film with your fellow cinephiles and then opening the door realizing, “Ah right, yeah, I’m just on a quiet city street corner in front of a bus stop.”
Back to reality.
The duel projector setup at the Nightingale, for 16mm presentations screening two simultaneous layers of images
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