To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the University of Chicago’s Documentary Film Group (that’s Doc Films to you) will be displaying some of its coolest possessions from July 16 to August 31 at the Joseph Regenstein Library, 1110 E. 57th. Along with old programs, posters, and programming calendars, you’ll find correspondence from Samuel Fuller and Jean Renoir, rare personal-appearance photos of John Ford and Howard Hawks—even Fritz Lang’s martini recipe.
Curator Kyle Westphal just completed a bachelor’s degree in Cinema and Media Studies at UC, and his thesis documents the history of America’s “longest continuously running student film society.” About half the items were culled from alumni association materials donated to the library’s special collections; Westphal, Doc’s current programming chair, dug the rest of the stuff out of the group’s archives. Among the artifacts on display:
• A cartoon by Fritz Lang, drawn in 1970 for a Doc staffer living in Los Angeles. Lang had recently visited the Hyde Park campus for a screening of Hangmen Also Die (1943); mostly blind by then, he had to be led around on both arms, but according to Westphal he insisted on attending the screening and shouted from the back of the theater that the print was out of focus.
• Silk-screened posters for Psycho and To Catch a Thief, autographed by Alfred Hitchcock during his 1967 visit, as well as excerpts from an unpublished interview.
• Letters from Jean Renoir in 1969 and Sam Fuller in 1970 regarding their campus appearances.
• Correspondence from Pauline Kael, Josef von Sternberg, and Stanley Kubrick, collected during the 1962-64 run of the Midwest Film Festival (a precursor to the Chicago International Film Festival).
• Photos of John Ford (sample above), taken during a 1968 visit to screen The Long Voyage Home, and of Howard Hawks in 1971.
• Publicity materials for Maya Deren‘s 1951 lecture at the university.
In addition to these items, says Westphal, the group’s calendars also allowed him to track programming trends and critical ideas that influenced Doc’s offerings to students over the years. “Doc Films at 75” is free and open to the public weekdays from 8:30 AM to 4:45 PM and Saturday from 9 AM to 12:45 PM. Westphal will give a guided tour of the exhibit during the opening reception on Monday, July 16, 3 to 4:30 PM. For more information contact the university’s Special Collections Research Center at 773-702-8705 or specialcollections@lib.uchicago.edu.