About Doc Films: History of Doc

Doc Films is on record with the Museum of Modern Art as the longest continuously running student film society in the nation. The organization was founded in December 1940 as the International House Documentary Film Group, though its antecedents stretch back to 1932. Initially the group focused on "the realist study of our time via nonfiction film," but the documentary alone could not sustain the organization; within a few years, the group's programs expanded to include fiction and experimental films, a mixture that it maintains to this day.

Providing an unquestioned resource to the University of Chicago and wider city community, Doc Films screens movies every night of the academic year, often showing movies that would not be shown elsewhere.

Doc Films's outstanding facility is matched by its rich and colorful programming. Students develop programming themes for each quarter of the academic calendar, dedicating one night a week to a particular theme. One recent series presented a tantalizing selection of German Expressionist films from the Munich Filmmuseum. Other series have showcased the diverse national cinemas of Iran, Canada, China, Mexico, and France or tackled subjects like feminism and human rights. Doc has unearthed and presented genre treasures - silent westerns, anarchist comedies, zombie cinema, naughty one-reelers. Recent retrospectives have examined the works of Spike Lee, James Wong Howe, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Erich von Stroheim, Graham Greene, John Ford, Preston Sturges, Powell and Pressburger, Satyajit Ray, and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Doc also routinely shows prints from some of the country's leading film archives, including the Library of Congress, UCLA, and Harvard.

Many film directors, familiar and obscure, have visited Doc to present films and lead discussions. Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Joseph Losey, Samuel Fuller, Josef von Sternberg, Jerry Lewis, George Cukor, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Otto Preminger, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, G.W. Pabst, Frederick Wiseman, Guy Maddin, Terrence Malick, Harold Ramis, Michael Powell, John Milius and Woody Allen have led discussions and answered questions about their films. A number of notable critics have also graced Doc's stage -- including Andrew Sarris, Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Thomson, Fred Camper, Peter Wollen, Gerald Mast, Pauline Kael, Robin Wood, and Arthur Knight. And over the decades Doc has hosted an astonishing number of Chicago premieres, giving the city its first glimpse of such masterpieces as The Rules of the Game, An Autumn Afternoon, Au hasard Balthazar, The Loyal 47 Ronin, Masculin-Feminin, and countless underground landmarks by Andy Warhol and others.

Volunteering for Doc has led several former students to careers in filmmaking and film criticism. Former members include Ernest Callenbach, founding editor of Film Quarterly; Gordon Quinn and Gerald Temaner, co-founders of Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams, Golub, Home for Life); Terry Curtis Fox, a playwright and former movie critic for the Village Voice; Dave Kehr, former film critic for the Chicago Reader and current columnist at the New York Times; Henry Sheehan, Los Angeles Film Critics Association President; and filmmakers Aaron Lipstadt (City Limits, Android) and Myron Meisel (It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles).

Perhaps Doc is best encapsulated by our entry in "The Film Snob's Dictionary":

The film society of the University of Chicago, founded in 1932 as the Documentary Film Group. Hard-core beyond words and lay comprehension, the society is populated by 19-year olds who have already seen every film ever made, and boasts its own Dolby Digital-equipped cinema and an impressive roster of alumni that includes Snob-revered critic Dave Kehr.

Vanity Fair, "The Film Snob's Dictionary," March 2004, p. 332

The students who run Doc Films hope to reach a wide-ranging audience, from film aficionados to casual moviegoers, by cultivating and facilitating an excitement for the study of film. Their mission is to nurture and inspire future writers, filmmakers, and creative artists to tackle the professional world of cinema.

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