Film All Around Us: The “we love” Installation
With a Sag-Aftra strike now buttressing a Hollywood writers’ strike in 2023, the public can learn that the entertainment they take in – from theatrically released feature films to the TV shows streamed in their homes – is not in any way unique when it comes to the American tradition of sweatshop bargains. Rampant exploitation is what drives the entertainment industry, and it’s always been this way. What makes the criminality of the Hollywood movie industry feel different than that of say, Nike, is the fact that much of the public is still clueless about how movies arrive into the cultural space. We’re made to believe movies are things which just fall out of the sky and land in theaters already brandishing their sham Tomatometer ratings, ready to be consumed and disposed of the moment they’re over.
But film is not that kind of dead, mercantile practice. It’s elastic and mutable. It can shape-shift, depending on what conditions contain it, like liquid. Ubiquitous and transient, it requires none of the elements that picketers demand from their studio oppressors in order to function. Viewing a film is a social act, a shared and unspoken participation between the artist and the viewers, between the viewers and each other, between the screening space and the parties viewing it. It is fluid and interactive, and it belongs ultimately not to the studios, distributors and promoters who masquerade as journalists or even the talents they rob and exploit, but to all of us. It belongs to everyone. Film knows us better than we think. It is in control.
Film criticism too, is something I see as a social act. Not a lecture but part of an ongoing conversation among spectators regarding an artwork. Not some stuffy scholar doling out rote factoids about films but a discussion or meditation on the work as a means rather than an end, with the possibilities for exploration provided by questions being more important than arriving at answers or conclusions. It’s in regarding film and film analysis this way that I can eagerly write about archival film installations as forms of public art with no regards for how much money they take in or how they serve the corporate cultural initiatives engaged in repackaging what people have already seen before. These interests and their yes-people spend hundreds of millions of dollars making what I’m writing about here seem esoteric and scarce in advertising their products. But this installation can be viewed by anyone who goes to see it. It costs nothing, requires no film literacy and is housed in a humble pedestrian environment as an enhancement of the experience of daily life. Most of all, no strike or disruption in the business of film releasing will ever affect it.
The Cicero Green Line station, housing the CTA-sponsored we love installation
The installation is called we love and the Chicago Film Archive’s intention in setting it up at the Green Line El station at the corner of Lake Street and Cicero Avenue is part of an effort by the Chicago Transit Authority “to expand public art to bus and rail facilities throughout the City.” The exhibition at this commuter train stop projects a 48-minute exhibition of amateur home movies and films selected from the CFA’s in-house collections. It’s being projected on a wall in a mezzanine of the station and will play on a loop until March of 2024. All the footage present was shot in Chicago and taken from contributors to the Archive’s vault.
In the spirit of openness, the contributions that make up we love span multiple decades and depict an ethnically and racially diverse cross-section of Chicago citizens. The title of the installation hints at the kind of material that’s in focus; family, gatherings like summer cookouts, or snowball fights in the winter, children playing with dogs in their backyards, bustling city corners, murals being painted on buildings, married couples dancing to records in their living rooms, two guys fixing up an old car in their driveway, the cop directing traffic in an evening snowstorm, the municipal pool. Those little joyful moments that are unspectacular on their own but add up to everyday life. Those things that foster love. A barbeque, a carousel ride, teenagers mugging and goofing for the camera, flower petals opening up. Those things we might see any day – shots of people driving, a mail carrier doing her thing, women letting their hair down at the beach, a black family dances in an empty swimming pool followed by footage of Chicago’s Union Station. Forms of ritual quotidian, improvised or rarefied. And on and on and on.
images of the footage of murals being painted in we love, which photograph better in black & white
Most of the footage was shot outside, where life happens communally, where you meet your neighbors. This comes through in we love. This is not some utopian hippie claptrap. It serves as a much-needed antidote to the sense of isolation and fracture that pervades 21st century American life. To believe in the potential of America is to believe in the idea of the American community as a vibrant, cohesive, cooperative entity. The project could just as fittingly be titled, “we all live here,” with the “we” encompassing those who’ve already lived and died here and those will continue to do so in the years to come. A sense of social responsibility set in for me about 20 minutes into the presentation in light of these observations, which I think lends a sense of nobility to the project and to the medium. This is what film preservation and public exhibition exist for.
The project is housed in a train station in a low-income neighborhood that I’d be reluctant to visit at night, when the projected images would look best. The projection wall faces the west and the brightness of late afternoon’s eastward sunlight made it hard to see the images properly when I visited the installation. So the pictures I took don’t do the project much justice. It’s easy to see that the haze on the wall deadens the image’s capacity to grab the attention, which may be why nobody walking by the wall stopped to pay much attention in the time that I was there. Of course, the station is a place of transit, and people have trains to catch and destinations to walk or bus to after they arrive. The installation has just gone up. Perhaps it takes a few instances of quickly eyeballing the wall in one’s periphery on occasion before curiosity builds to where a commuter may stop and give the project a few minutes of their time. Just seeing the different clothing, hair and vehicle styles from the 40’s or the 70’s is interesting enough for me, but hopefully interest in the project will build in the months to come as the project comes to be seen as a fixture of the station space.
One interesting element is what happened in the absence of sound. What filled in for any kind of soundtrack was what happened behind and above me; the trains entering and leaving the station, the cars in the street, their radios blaring behind me as they accelerated and occasionally honked, the passersby on the sidewalk, some of whom might be talking or piping in their own musical soundtrack from a tiny Bluetooth speaker. Cicadas in the nearby trees. Real life in the present moment provided all the soundtrack for the presentation that was necessary. Occasionally, car windshields would reflect the setting sun as they rounded the corner and passed by the station wall, throwing angular shards of light across the screen as if adding the effect of overexposed stills.
Why would any want to watch someone else’s home movies? Isn’t that like being forced to listen to someone tell you about a dream they had? CFA Founder and Executive Director Nancy Watrous in the press release for the we love installation: “As we sifted through our collections for footage to include in this exhibition, we discovered how often the images from any family's home movies are universally relatable. We can easily recognize ourselves in these historic images of small moments: family rituals, loved ones, and the personal shenanigans we all act out in our private lives.”
We love celebrates not glamour or show business or the money spent making it, but everyday Chicagoans. Urban life, unfolding as it did decades ago and still does, frozen in time, now enlivening an otherwise drab transitory public space in a hardscrabble part of town, ensuring the members of that community that they too are worthy of love and the presence of art in their lives, that they belong and that they have this to take with them on the creaky, stalwart CTA trains they ride every day.
Driving home later that night, I noticed another projector playing a looped heart-shaped film onto a painted brick wall of an apartment building. The projector looks to have been placed on the roof of a long closed-down gas station at the corner of Fullerton and Western avenue, across from a bar I frequent. I had never seen it before. The barrage of images fit into the space of a portion of the huge mural that resembles a white heart, which handily serves as the screen. The images seem to consist of manipulated footage from the old Soul Train TV show from the 70’s – another Chicago creation. One day, it was just there, doing the same thing as the train installation: giving life to cultural history, enriching our daily existence, uniting us with our fellow city-dwellers. It will exist for a while and then it will be gone.
The heart-shaped Soul Train projection in Logan Square, with an ad warning about Gonorrhea in Spanish above it
My support is of course with the parties on strike, who deserve livable wages. Their livelihoods are what make the cool movies and addictive television shows we all love possible. May they get all of their demands met. But in a way, it is only the film industry that is in danger, not Film itself. Film is everywhere. It is happening all around us. It will never go away. It exists anywhere there is light, power and a vertical surface, in the holes in the wall or the cracks in the pavement if need be. They take us by the hand and show us the world. But they also show us what we see every day. Ourselves. Our lives. Not a telescope but a mirror. A published memoir by another means. We are reminded that we are not wholly alone, even as we wait on a train platform in what may be the most insulated portion of our day. Film becomes the atmosphere.
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