When motion picture film began, the 35mm gauge seemed like it could fulfill every conceivable commercial application — first the kinetoscope, allowing a single viewer to watch a short film, and then the projector, allowing vast audiences to experience feature-length films together in nickelodeons and movie theaters. Thirty-five millimeter was a professional format, and professionals didn’t flinch if their chosen medium occasionally resulted in nitrate fires. But it took 16mm film — simple, portable, nonflammable — to expand the horizons of cinema to encompass hitherto unimagined forms and new audiences. When the Eastman Kodak Company introduced 16mm and the Ciné-Kodak camera in 1923, it had a ready-made spokeswoman in Marion Gleason, a Rochester mother of four who had been fooling around with the new camera in her spare time. If she could make amateur movies, then so could anyone — even you! But whatever best-laid plans that Eastman Kodak had developed for the new film gauge, the company never could have imagined the profusion of creativity that 16mm would unleash: home movies, classroom films, avant-garde cinema, documentaries, jukebox soundies, clandestine erotica, amateur animation, student films, and more! Join us for a big celebration of our favorite little film gauge, with emblematic examples of 16mm wonder plucked from our own collection and archives across the country, including films from each decade of its first century.

SCHEDULE OF FILMS

I Want a Clean Cinema (1999, 2 min)

Projecting Motion Pictures (1951, 11 min)*

See Yourself as Others See You (1928, 4 min)**

The Spider and the Fly (Harry and Lillian Fulscher, 1938, 12 min)***

Bell & Howell (Julian Antos, 2018, 5 min)

Soundies Reel (circa 1940s, 6 min)

Mister E (Margaret Conneely, 1960, 12 min)**

Jamestown Baloos (Robert Breer, 1957, 6 min)

Sears Sox (Chick Strand, Pat O’Neill, and Neon Park, 1968, 4 min)

Permutations (James Whitney, 1968, 8 min)

**Intermission**

Project Yourself (Julian Antos & Rebecca Lyon, 2021, 2.5 min)

Sat. Night Books and Records (1975, 1 min) 

7362 (Pat O'Neill, 1967, 10 min)

Social Confrontation: The Battle of Michigan Ave (The Film Group, 1968, 11 min)

Bondage Boy (Chris Langdon, 1973, 5 min)+

Hard Core Home Movies (Greta Snider, 1989, 5 min)

No No Nooky TV (Barbara Hammer, 1987, 12 min)

33 Yo-Yo Tricks (P. White, 1976, 8 min)^

Hey Girls (1990, 4 min)**

28.IV.81 (Bedouin Spark) (Christopher Harris, 2009, 3 min)

Travel Stop (Mike Gibisser, 2018, 16 min)

You (Heather McAdams, 1983, 3 min)***

*From the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

**Provided by the Chicago Film Archives

***Preserved by the Chicago Film Society with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation

^Preserved with the support of the Harvard Film Archive and the National Film Preservation Foundation

+Preserved by the Academy Film Archive