The Student Voice

Film and Radio
It was on milk shakes and steampipes that University of Chicago students entered the age of mass media. In the mid-1920s Clifton Utley (AB 1927) attempted to form a film society, but he was unable to create a significant student following. In 1937 the University Film Society led by C. Sharpless Hickman (Ex 1938) began showing films in the Oriental Institute's Breasted Hall. The group presented mostly silent classics, although it also screened The Jazz Singer and later sound works such as Pare Lorenz's The River. In 1941 the idea of organizing a new film group was proposed by Jack Atlee (SB 1941), Robert E. Lewis (AB 1941), and other International House students while they sipped milk shakes in a coffee shop. What emerged was the Documentary Film Group, which today is the longest continuously running student film organization in the country.

Financed by membership fees and driven by a belief in film's heuristic powers, Doc Films, as it came to be called, opened by showing documentaries to audiences of thirty to forty students and ended the year with crowds of over two hundred students. Doc Films later added feature films to its agenda, but it remained committed to presenting movies which contained political and social criticism. Doc Films was an outspoken proponent of film as an art, comparable to literature, worthy of critique, open to experiment, and possessed with its own style, grammar, and construction.

At the same time that Doc Films encouraged the appreciation of film as a specialized art form, it was careful not to lose the general audience for which the documentary film series had first been created. As its staff noted in autumn 1962, "we wish to provide a background of good films to serve as touchstones, guardians against the critical indolence cum buttered popcorn to be induced by theatres in [the film viewers'] future suburbias."