There’s magic in finding something we might only half-remember, if it hadn’t ended up in somebody’s movie camera once upon a time.
“It’s one thing to have old photos of your family,” says University of Chicago Cinema and Media Studies professor Jacqueline Stewart, back in Hyde Park after three eventful years in Los Angeles. “It’s different when you have home movies. It’s like you’re bringing these people back to life.”
Twenty years ago, founder Stewart and some UChicago colleagues launched the South Side Home Movie Project, a sublimely analog treasure hunt. Stewart was looking for South Side residents’ old home movie footage, shot on 8 millimeter, Super 8 and 16 millimeter film. Family gatherings. A game of tennis. A Bud Billiken Parade from the 1940s, or the 1950s.
Supporting by an increasingly wide array of UChicago departments and outside funders, the project grew. Stewart and company now have more than 1,200 reels of everyday treasure in the archive, thanks to 50 or so South Side families. In return, these residents of Hyde Park, South Shore, Bridgeport, Chatham and other neighborhoods get their memories digitized, and their original, often imperiled analog film reels preserved and stored at the right, chilly temperature in an archive at the Logan Center for the Arts.
Through Aug. 24, a 20th-anniversary exhibit at the Logan Center — “The Act of Recording is an Act of Love: The South Side Home Movie Project” — showcases many of these visual artifacts of everyday, non-touristy Chicago, spanning the early 1930s through the early ’80s. You can also learn some of what Stewart learned herself, from the families and their stories of what ended up on film because someone was there, filming.
The last few years have been objectively remarkable for Stewart, an author and a leading scholar in the far-flung specialties of early Black cinema and Black American cultural history. Among the benchmarks: Turner Classic Movies host, as of 2019. MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, 2021.
That same year, the closely watched, pandemic-delayed Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles hired Stewart as chief artistic and programming officer. In 2022 she was appointed museum director and president.
In 2024 the museum opened an exhibit titled “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” which had advisory input from, among others, Neal Gabler, whose excellent book “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” covered the same historical ground.
Accuasions of antisemitism came nearly instantly from a slew of major Hollywood players, including “Pulp Fiction” producer Lawrence Bender. “A hatchet job on the Jews,” he called the exhibit. Museum staff revised and neutralized some of curator Dara Jaffe’s accompanying wall text — though some critics, including Michael Schulman of The New Yorker, thought there was little or nothing for which to apologize. After touring the revised version of the exhibit, he read the original wall text, and he “couldn’t believe how mild — and how historically sound — it was.”
The Academy Museum then announced a revision of its own: a wholesale administrative restructuring to better align the various museum departments’ evolving missions, or some corporate folderol along those lines. This was on the same day Stewart and the museum announced Stewart’s decision to return to academia and to UChicago. A month earlier, she had notified CEO Bill Kramer of her exit, well before the “Hollywoodland” exhibit opened.
“The timing of my leaving LA, and the issues that came up around the ‘Hollywoodland’ exhibition,” she says, “made it seem like the two were connected. And they were not.”
It was, she says, “a quality of life decision,” as we talked in the Arts Incubator space, located in a restored stretch of Garfield Boulevard buildings in Washington Park. The Incubator serves as home base for UChicago’s Arts + Public Life department; the South Side Home Movie Project exhibit comes under the Logan Exhibitions and Arts + Public Life banners.
She adds: “On every exhibition I’ve ever worked on, anywhere, I’ve learned this. You put something out into the world; you do your best to tell the story; and then you get the feedback.”
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: Jacqueline, what’s the origin story of the South Side Home Movie Project?
A: Twenty years ago! Well. Twenty years ago, scholars weren’t doing a lot of work on amateur films, home movies. Back in 1999 I had occasion to see some home movies shot at one of the Japanese internment camps in America, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. It just blew my mind, seeing what this man, Dave Tatsuno (whose internment camp footage was later made into the film “Topaz”), had captured. People at church. Kids sledding. The staff of the internment camp cafeteria. There was this sense of ordinary daily life, even in those circumstances.
Q: Where did you see the footage?
A: This was at something called the Orphan Film Symposium, Archivists, scholars, artists were there, all discussing and presenting on these “orphan” films we hadn’t paid much attention to in the scholarly world. But they make up the majority of the films that have been made throughout film history. Educational films, training films, home movies. I thought about what we might do with this volume of work, and it might even de-center film studies. Then I thought about local films, and the probability that there were people who shot all kinds of home movies in my neighborhood, in Hyde Park, and all across the South Side. What could those films show us today?
So in 2005, a team of UChicago students and I made flyers and postcards and handed them out at the Bud Billiken Parade, asking for contributors to this archive project we had in mind. Sure enough, people had tons and tons of films, more than we could handle, really.
Q: But this wasn’t a drop-off-only project.
A: No. Not at all. We wanted people to show their films with our help, and to talk about them. We interviewed the families for the archive we were building, asking questions like: What brought you to Chicago? How’d you end up in this neighborhood? It started to feel like an important project when we did our first screening over at the Little Black Pearl arts center on 47th Street. We had a family from Bridgeport, families from Bronzeville, all over, and they’re all watching each other’s home movies, saying things like: “Oh! My mom had that same lamp!” (laughs) And remember, these are people who wouldn’t have talked to each other in 1954, or 1963. But in those families represented that night, there was a shared middle-class status. And home movies were part of it.
Q: The footage in your archive, and what we can see in the Logan Center exhibition, all comes from the pre-selfie epoch, when we weren’t entirely surrounded by screens within screens —
A: Not as prevalent, no. But there were a lot of screens in our lives then. We underestimate the importance of screens across 20th Century American culture. Obviously things accelerated with the Camcorder and the phones we have now. But I hope the South Side Home Movie Project shows that there’s a long history of self-documentation and, in some cases, even citizen journalism. We have a collection of films from Ramon Williams, who was basically a newsreel company in his own right. He shot Bud Billiken parades, banquets held by the Chicago Defender, so much community history.
Going through our archive, you can find footage of just about anything. A UIC graduation ceremony from decades ago. The old CTA buses. Buildings no longer standing. This kind of material has so much rich history to offer.
Q: And you’re teaching in the fall?
A: Yes! I’m teaching the history of Black media in Chicago: film, WVON radio, Johnson Publications, “Soul Train.” To name a few. I thought I’d have time to teach when I was out in LA, which turned out to be delusional thinking (laughs). I feel like I’m home now. Which is wonderful.
It’s also a challenging time for people who do scholarly work right now. I’ll do what I can to demonstrate and help support the idea that scholarship is important, and that delving into complex and sometimes painful histories is important.
Q: You’ve been away three years, but how do you think UChicago’s doing on that front, in light of the Trump administration’s punitive relationship with higher education right now?
A: It’s a hard time. What I’ve been hearing from colleagues about the leadership is that they embrace our well-deserved reputation for open exchange of ideas, and a kind of complexity of thought, and we have to stick to it. No matter what.
Q: Given the Academy Museum duties, your TCM hosting, everything else, I can’t believe you even thought about adding teaching to your time in LA. You also walked a dizzying amount of red carpet for countless events, not just around Oscar time.
A: I will never make fun of anyone’s red carpet experience again (laughs). You enter a kind of performative zone on the red carpet. I did it from the point of view of a scholar, learning the different heirarchies for the media outlets, and the talent, depending on the Hollywood event that night. It was great to get to do it on behalf of the Academy Museum.
But the classroom — that’s where I belong. To teach and to do research. That’s what I was born to do.
“The Act of Recording is an Act of Love: The South Side Home Movie Project” runs July 11 to Aug. 24 in the Logan Center for the Arts on the University of Chicago campus, 915 E. 60th St. For exhibit hours and special events, go to loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.