Under Construction
Please read Introduction to the Documents Section
The Madison Film Forum was a student organization whose members were graduate students in the Communication Arts department at the University of Wisconsin—Madison between 1995 and 2000. We organized several film series and screenings that eventually changed how campus film events were covered in the local media, especially Isthmus. The series was integrated into UW-Cinematheque programming in 1998. In addition to myself, members included Jonathan Walley, Lisa Dombrowski, Christopher Sieving, Jane Greene, Paul Ramaeker, Katherine Spring, Ethan de Seife, and James Udden, among others.
This poster’s claim that the 1995 screening of Michael Snow’s La Région centrale (1971) was “RARE” turned out to be more accurate than we realized at the time. To my knowledge, it has not been projected on 16mm film in Madison since 1995.
The lack of in-depth local coverage for initial Madison Film Forum screenings was discouraging, so the programming strategy changed to feature length films that would otherwise never play in Madison. We briefly looked into buying advertising in Isthmus, and while we never came up with that kind of money, the promotional material for potential advertisers that Isthmus provided was very revealing. I can’t remember the exact statistics, but circa 1995 a significant percentage of moviegoers in Madison used Isthmus to help them select what to see. We focused our efforts on getting full length reviews of unconventional feature films in Isthmus.
The breakthrough was a lengthy November 15, 1996 Kent Williams review of Mark Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995).
This might not seem like it was a big deal, but it was. Previous to this, campus screenings were relegated to a separate “On Campus” section of the Isthmus calendar, not the main movie section which was used by, as mentioned above, a significant number of Madison moviegoers. Soon after this, campus screenings were integrated into the Isthmus capsule reviews as well.
I’ll document and write more about this history in more detail in the blog.
I was not the only one who thought that this full length review of a campus screening was significant, and possibly a turning point in campus film coverage. I had completely forgotten about the following letter to the editor in Isthmus, December 27, 1996, until I found it in my archive.
If I remember correctly, Tara Kachgal was involved with WUD Film, thus their knowledge of upcoming plans for the following semester. The Andy Warhol series did not manifest itself until the Cinematheque Fall 1998 season, presented by Madison Film Forum and the Communication Arts department.
God is My Witness (Kudah Gawah, 1993) turned out to be a hard sell at the time, despite being a fantastically entertaining film. That screening was my introduction to Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan, whom I would see years later in person, performing live at the Sears Centre in Hoffman Estates, Illinois stop on his Unforgettable Tour in 2008. Now, of course, Madison’s Indian community supports screenings of Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu language films at both Marcus Theaters and AMC Fitchburg 18. I wrote about the local market for Indian popular cinema for Isthmus in 2013.
The Madison Film Forum also presented experimental film programs at the Madison Art Center, now known as the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.
The four-part series American Avant-Garde Cinema: Seven Decades of Film in the Spring of 1997 was organized by Jonathan Walley. Jonathan is now Associate Professor and Chair of Cinema at Denison University. His book Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
I don’t have a complete run of Madfilm, the newsletter of the Madison Film Forum. But below you can access or download a .pdf file of one of the later issues, Fall 1999. The Madison Film Forum series had by then been integrated with the UW-Cinematheque schedule with some pretty interesting results.
By Fall 1999, the inaugural Wisconsin Film Festival had taken place that past spring on campus. Henry Doane’s proposal to purchase the Orpheum Theater provided new hope for film downtown. Probably the most significant detail in my contribution, “New Opportunities for the Madison Film Community,” was the following passage:
The best thing about the Festival’s success was that it pointed the way to a second festival in 2000, as this years festival ended with a roundtable discussion with representatives from each of Madison’s downtown exhibitors.
Madfilm, Fall 1999
Mary Carbine moderated that roundtable discussion on the last day of the inaugural Festival, which I would argue was the first day of the Wisconsin Film Festival as we know it today. More on that later . . .