Funerals & Fascism: Four Films by Bill Stamets

Chicago-based photojournalist, film critic and filmmaker Bill Stamets (b. 1953) has been filming what he describes as “a miscellany of civic occasions where Americans make sense of power” since 1976.¹ Armed with his Super-8 camera and microphone, he has been an especially avid documenter of Chicago’s many protests, parades, and political campaigns—both mainstream and marginal. Principally influenced by Ricky Leacock and Stan Brakhage, his films straddle the borders between independent documentary, experimental art, and amateur home movies. Describing Stamets’ ‘personal verité’ filmmaking style, film scholar Chuck Kleinhans wrote,

Stamets would be the first to recognize his marginal status in the press corps. But it would be a huge error to mistake marginality, a position in relation to a dominant (and usually unreflectively accepted) set of norms, for lack of seriousness and intellectual rigor. He is not a journalist manqué or an unprofessional social-documentary maker. Rather, he is a rigorous ethnographer whose primary tool for investigation is the Super-8mm camera and whose primary medium for presentation is the audio/visual screen. In short, Bill Stamets is a significant intellectual working outside of academia’s narrow protocols.²

Stamets donated his films and personal papers to Chicago Film Archives in 2014 and has continued to build on his collection since. CFA’s Bill Stamets Collection now contains 381 items, almost all of which are one-of-a-kind Super-8mm reversal originals with magnetic stripe soundtracks. Working from the reversal original workprints, Colorlab has photochemically preserved these four titles to 16mm polyester film with optical soundtracks, making them significantly more accessible for exhibition and research.

____
¹ Bill Stamets, “Political Theater as News Art,” San Francisco Cinematheque, Oct 1992.
² Chuck Kleinhans, “Documentary on the Margins: Bill Stamets’ Super-8mm Ethnography,” Cinematograph, Vol. 4 (1991), p. 164. Kleinhans defines ‘personal verité’ as “a technology, a style, an aesthetic, and a politics of film/video making that uses single camera sync sound to make documentaries marked by the director’s distinct personal vision and interpretation.”

Rock Sox Disco Sux is an experimental ethnography of “Disco Demolition Night,” a promotional stunt-turned-riot aimed at “destroying” the disco music subculture of the 1970s. The infamous event took place after game one of a July 12, 1979 doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. Spearheaded by shock jock Steve Dahl of 97.9 FM WLUP “The Loop,” a Chicago rock station, fans were able to attend the games for only 98 cents and a disco record, with Dahl detonating the donated albums at center field between games. The promotion went off the rails, and the White Sox were forced to forfeit the second game when some 7000 anti-disco demonstrators rioted on the field for more than an hour after the explosion, causing significant damage to the park and several injuries.

Stamets’ uncanny ability to find his way to the heart of the action is on full display in Rock Sox. His economical choice to shoot on Super-8mm allowed him a mobility on the field that those with bulkier video equipment did not have. He captured the events’ key figures (Dahl, WLUP spokesmodel Lorelei Shark, and Dahl’s sidekick Gary Meier) from low, close angles as they led the crowd in a “Disco sucks!” chant. The film includes surreal footage shot from the press booth, as an agitated Harry Caray looks over the smoke-filled park. Stamets also filmed from outside the stadium, as a rowdy overflow crowd wearing “DISCO DESTRUCTION ARMY” and “FUCK THE BEE GEES” t-shirts hurled records at the side of the over-capacity building.

The cultural significance of the event has loomed large in the decades since. Some attribute the “death of disco” to the night’s events. Several compared it to a book burning. Given disco’s importance in Chicago’s Black and gay communities, many viewed it as a “venting of ominous mass sentiments (homophobia, racism, facism)”³ and a harbinger of the incoming conservatism of the 1980s. When discussing Stamets’ coverage of the event, critic Lawrence Bommer wrote that the night was “an example of a nonpolitical event that, symbolically at least, has profound political overtones.”⁴

______
³ Stamets, University of Chicago Society for Social Research Spring Institute, Apr 1980.
⁴ Lawrence Bommer, “A Taste of Acid in ‘Novo Dextro,’” Advocate (Sept 1982).

In Novo Dextro: Purity and Danger, Stamets turned his camera to a more overt example of fascist politics, this time primarily focusing on an “anti-queer, pro-life” rally by the American Nazi Party during Chicago’s 1982 Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade. He tracks the movements of the far-Right contingent of about 25 as they travel to Lincoln Park, where they are met by roughly 2000 protesters. Stamets interviews several young neo-Nazis as well as a handful of anti-Nazi protesters and confused passersby, juxtaposing the day’s events with a collage of images of pollution, television screens, and animals going about their day in the park.

Novo Dextro is among Stamets’ most widely-exhibited films; the Super-8 original showed locally at the 1982 Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and later traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and Los Angeles Filmforum. The film has undergone a number of versions: when first exhibited in 1982, it had a runtime of 58 minutes, while the “final” version deposited at CFA is closer to 35, with some shots removed and incorporated into other films (notably, an earlier cut of the film explicitly linked Steve Dahl’s anti-disco rhetoric to that of the neo-Nazis, incorporating footage of Dahl’s antics—“a disco demolition rally held in Comiskey Park gives a glimpse of how you don’t need Nazis to act like them.”⁵)

Art critic Lucy R. Lippard wrote, “Novo Dextro is disarmingly straightforward. It captures the repellent undercurrents of ‘fascinating facism’ with grim tenacity, set off by unexpected sight gags, intercuts of Psycho, the harmless recreation of those in Lincoln Park not indulging in political theater, and menacing shots of jets over a churning lake.”⁶ The Los Angeles Times called it “a raw, vital record” when it showed at Filmforum in 1992.⁷ Kleinhans wrote of the film, “Thus while [Novo Dextro] falls outside the typical boundaries of the social-political documentary, it illuminates something else which is not dealt with very well, if at all, in other modes. It shows the emotional bonding of declaring that one is part of a rule-bound group. It depicts the need to demonstrate belief in a public theatrical event. It represents the special state of community or threshold experience gained in collective public behavior.”⁸

______
⁵ Lawrence Bommer, “A Taste of Acid in ‘Novo Dextro,’” Advocate (Sept 1982).
⁶ Lucy R. Lippard, “Out of place, out of mind,” In These Times (May 21, 1986).
⁷ Kevin Thomas, “Nazi ‘Danger’ Tops Super 8 Works,” Los Angeles Times (Oct 26, 1992).
⁸ Chuck Kleinhans, “Documentary on the Margins: Bill Stamets’ Super-8mm Ethnography,” Cinematograph, Vol. 4 (1991), p. 167.

This loosely constructed footage captures Chicago’s response to the murder of Mexican-American labor rights activist Rudy Lozano. The rising political star had worked to build a coalition between Chicago’s Black and Hispanic communities during the 1983 mayoral election that brought Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, to power. Lozano narrowly lost his own race for alderman in his home neighborhood of Pilsen, but had just been enlisted by Washington as his liaison to the Latino community when he was shot to death in his home on June 8, 1983.

The reel begins at the 1983 Bud Billiken Parade in Bronzeville, where Mayor Washington marches with Lozano’s campaign manager (and future Illinois Congressman) Jesús “Chuy” García and fellow activist Juan “Mama” Velázquez, who carry a Mexican flag with photos of Lozano attached to it. The crowd is both celebratory and mournful, as the South Side community embraces the city’s first Black mayor while also grieving the loss of an ally who helped him to victory. The second half of the film focuses on Lozano’s funeral in Little Village; many of Chicago’s political leaders are in attendance, including Washington, civil rights activist Robert Lucas, and alderman Charles Hayes. Two thousand mourners are seen marching from Lawndale to Little Village, holding banners of Lozano’s face along with signs declaring that the activist’s work will continue.

While this film is less “edited” than the other films being preserved and was never publicly exhibited, it is representative of a kind of film that is plentiful in Stamets’ collection. Stamets documented dozens of public ceremonies from an ethnographic perspective, viewing them as culturally revealing events fraught with symbolism.

The media estimated that somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 mourners passed by Washington’s open casket in the days leading up to Washington’s funeral. Only 25,000 amassed in Memphis to view Elvis Presley’s. It may be crass to compare two famous men by counting heads at their funerals, but how better to make the point that the reaction to Washington’s death resembled the death of a celebrity more than that of a local politician?⁹

– Gary Rivlin, Fire on the Prairie: Harold Washington, Chicago Politics, and the Roots of the Obama Presidency

As a filmmaker, Stamets is attracted to “densities of people making meaning manifest in public”¹⁰; both [Rudy Lozano] and Harold is Gone probe how Chicagoans make meaning of loss. Harold is Gone was shot in the days following the sudden death of Chicago’s Mayor Harold Washington on November 25, 1987, including his funeral procession and funeral service. Stamets’ Super-8 camera follows the thousands of Chicagoans who lined the streets to watch the procession of Washington’s casket to the Christ Universal Church on Chicago’s South Side. Mostly shot in black-and-white and without sound, the film is somber but does not lack Stamets’ knack for witty observations: color scenes with sync sound include a hawker making a quick buck selling buttons and portraits of Washington, and on a lone out-of-tune bagpiper. 

Stamets was an avid documenter of Washington’s political career, making a number of films about the spectacle of Chicago’s political landscape with the charismatic Washington at the center.¹¹ Harold is Gone was exhibited throughout Chicago in the years after Washington’s death, and showed at Los Angeles Filmforum and San Francisco Cinematheque in 1992, along with Novo Dextro.

____
⁹ Gary Rivlin, Fire on the Prairie: Harold Washington, Chicago Politics, and the Roots of the Obama Presidency, 2012, Temple University Press.
¹⁰ Quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, “Out of place, out of mind,” In These Times (May 21, 1986).
¹¹ See Chicago Politics: A Theater of Power, Stamets’ video work on the 1983 and 1987 Chicago mayoral campaigns.

Many thanks to the National Film Preservation Foundation and Colorlab for their help in preserving these films for the future!

If you are a programmer or curator interested in showing one of these films, please contact us.