From 2014 to 2019, I edited and published Madison Film Forum, a website created to promote and discuss local film culture. I couldn’t come up with a good name for it, so I borrowed the name of the no longer active graduate student group. (See the Madison Film Forum film series page for that history.)
I wrote over 250 posts for Madison Film Forum in that period (most under my name, a few under “Madfilm Staff”), and edited 200 contributions from local writers. Contributors included Jake Smith, Jason Fuhrman, Taylor Cherry, Edwanike Harbour, and Emily Caulfield (who chimed in from North Carolina).
The Madison Film Forum legacy website can still be found at madfilm.org. The fact that I’m paying to keep Madison Film Forum available online was one of the motivations for starting this website (I might as well make better use of the hosting account.)
Since Madison Film Forum is still available, I won’t be posting very much material from it here.
I occasionally will draw from those articles and reviews when discussing Madison film culture during that time. The most valuable section that remains useful is the Wisconsin Film Festival coverage from 2014 to 2018.
Highlights from 2014
After a quick skim of my posts in the first year, 2014, here are some I hope to re-visit at some point as a starting point for new discussions here.
An important note about the state of these posts: there are formatting issues due to a theme change shortly before the end of Madison Film Forum as an active website. At the time I did not go back and make formatting corrections for archived articles (and I’m not going to do so now).
“Lessons from Chicago: Northwest Chicago Film Society on Film Exhibition,” January 15, 2014. We’ll need to untangle the definition of theatrical and non-theatrical venues in Madison. The NCFS article briefly discussed in this post is a good starting point.
“#WIFILMFEST: MFF partners with Arts Extract and LakeFrontRow,” February 21, 2014. David Klein’s LakeFrontRow.com deserves a discussion in Madison film culture history. And Scott Gordon’s Arts Extract was a precursor to Tone Madison.
“Review: Domestic @ Wisconsin Film Fest, Apr 4 & 5,” March 22, 2014. This review provides an example of what I hope to do with this website: occasional long-form reviews that I can sink my teeth into.
“Jimbo’s Mock Draft: Navigating the #wifilmfest Schedule,” March 13, 2014 and “Welcome to Our Coverage of the 2014 Wisconsin Film Festival,” March 6, 2014. There is no sustainable way to design festival coverage like we did in 2014. But I think there are lessons here on how to make a large amount of information manageable for a reader.
“Larry and Dee Dee’s 2014 Wisconsin Film Festival Picks and Ratings,” April 16, 2014. Even though they don’t want the attention, Larry and Dee Dee were very kind to share their thoughts on what they saw in 2014.
And, finally, my four-part Wisconsin Film Festival suggestion box in 2014, which is interesting to look at almost 10 years later as the Festival faces a post-Hilldale era in 2024.
- A Good Time to Hit Refresh, April 28, 2014
- If Festival Likes Sundance, Then Put a Ring on It, April 29, 2014
- The Kids Are Alright: Bring Back WUD Film Programmers, April 30, 2014
- A Mile in Their Shoes: Improve Experience Between Screenings, May 11, 2014
The Alternative Screening Calendar
One feature that is no longer visible is the Alternative Screening Calendar (only an early 2014 post provides a sense of how it worked).
The Alternative Screening Calendar attempted to track all of the interesting screenings on and off campus. Yellow was Wisconsin Union Directorate. Red was UW-Cinematheque. Green and Purple were Marcus Point and Marcus Eastgate (not sure which was which). Sundance 608 was included, of course (I can’t remember its color), but it doesn’t happen to appear in these screen grabs from 2014. The Calendar also included screenings at MMoCA’s Rooftop and Spotlight Cinema and Brandon Colvin’s Micro-Wave Cinema Series, founded by graduate student and filmmaker Brandon Colvin.
Why were Marcus Theaters showing Gigi in 2014? That is explained in a January 20, 2014 post about the Marcus Theatre Entertainment Network.
For a period, film screenings on the Calendar were automatically tweeted to @MadFilmForum 10 hours before showtimes (in theory).
I’ll attempt a more helpful reconstruction of the Alternative Screening Calendar when I post more generally about the slow decline of movie listings in Madison (and in general).
The post announcing the end of the Alternative Screening Calendar is dated February, 2017, but I think it was on its last legs for quite a while before that. Problems with the WordPress plugin used to generate the calendar, and the increasing difficulty of getting commercial theater schedules, made it not worth the effort.
The End
It was hard to keep up the momentum that Madison Film Forum had in 2014. And we didn’t. But there were many highlights, and two frequent Madison Film Forum contributors, Jason Fuhrman and Edwanike Harbour went on to write for Tone Madison. Grant Phipps, the stalwart film editor at Tone Madison, contributed reviews in 2016.
The post announcing the official end of Madison Film Forum is dated March 20, 2020, but my last posts were published the summer of 2018 (program notes for my first season of Rooftop Cinema). Jason Fuhrman continued to post his program notes for his Cinesthesia series at Madison Public Library Central Branch through November 2019.
