A Studs Terkel-ific program that includes JoAnn Elam‘s rough cut of EVERYDAY PEOPLE (1979-1990) – an unfinished film based on her experiences as a letter carrier for the US Postal Service in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. More on the program below (text courtesy of Nightingale Cinema).
Forty years on Studs Terkel’s monolithic book, WORKING stand as an insightful bench mark to our increasingly fraught relationship with our jobs. This screening pairs contemporary video and 16 mm shorts with excerpts from Terkel’s text to see what meaning we can find in between the now and then. How have our ideas of labor, purpose and prosperity changed under a fully globalized economy, the growing shift away from physical labor, and expanding economic disparity? Readings selected and performed by Mairead Case. Screening curated by Christy LeMaster.
Program Details:
WORK SONG by David Sherman (2005, digital file, 6 minutes)
EVERYDAY PEOPLE (ROUGH CUT) by JoAnn Elam (1979, S8-> Digital file, 22 minutes)
DAD’s STICK by John Smith (2012, blue-ray, 5 minutes)
DEAR BILL GATES by Sarah Christman (2006, 16mm & DV-> digital file,17 minutes)
WINDOW CLEANING IN SHANGHAI by Laura Kissel (2011, digital file, 3 minutes)
WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY (Dubai) by Ben Russell (2008, 16mm, 7 minutes)
Let’s Get Working (May 9-11, 2014)
The University of Chicago and the Reva and David Logan Center will host Let’s Get Working, a three-day citywide festival honoring the life and work of alum Studs Terkel. The festival will introduce Terkel’s work to new and younger audiences and celebrate individuals and groups, local and national, who sustain that work’s legacy. Let’s Get Working focuses on issues and themes woven throughout the body of Terkel’s broadcasting and literary work, such as labor, race, faith, and community. Featuring oral histories, film screenings, musical performances, art installations, storytelling, and community dialogues, it will showcase the remarkable depth of knowledge, diversity of subjects, and range of communities Terkel engaged in his work. This festival is organized by Leigh Fagin, Assistant Director of Collaborative Programming at the Logan Center; Paul Durica, Festival Program Coordinator; and Judy Hoffman, Professor of Practice, Department of Cinema and Media Studies.
For more information, visit studs.uchicago.edu.
Mairead Case is a writer, editor, and teacher. An MFA-W candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduate of the 2013 Summer Writing Program at Naropa, Mairead is Youth Services Assistant at the Poetry Foundation Library, a columnist at Bookslut, and project editor for Yeti Publishing, featherproof books, Curbside Splendor, and elsewhere.
Christy LeMaster has programmed screenings for The Chicago Film Archives, Intuit Gallery, Chicago Filmmakers, Chicago Film Forum, The Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, and The Chicago Underground Film Festival. She teaches at Columbia College in The Interactive Arts and Media Department. She is currently working on an interactive directory of microcinemas called splitbeam.org.