Chuck Kleinhans 1942–2017: A Tribute

Abstract

Chuck Kleinhans 1942–2017: A Tribute* Joan Hawkins and Tom Waugh Jump Cut co-founder/co-editor-publisher Chuck Kleinhans, one of the most influential film scholars and activists of the era of the New Left and onwards, died suddenly of heart failure on December 14, 2017 in Eugene, Oregon. The forty-three-year-old magazine, in print since 1974 and online since 2001, has a long-standing tradition of addressing media in all its socio-political dimensions, but especially the way it impacts and is impacted by questions of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Jump Cut will continue to address “contemporary media” with all its well-known commitment, passion and astute analytic vision. But in a journal where longtime life and professional partners Julia Lesage and Chuck Kleinhans often spoke with one voice, Chuck’s absence is deeply felt. An entire generation of scholars, those of us who came of age at a time when film studies was just beginning to be well and truly instantiated in the University, grieve his passing. And as social media has made abundantly clear, multiple generations of film scholars, historians, activists and critics have lost a devoted mentor and astute reader-editor. Chuck was Associate Professor Emeritus in the Radio/Television/Film Department at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he served from 1977 to 2009. The courses he taught over those decades say much: introductory courses in microcomputer graphics, film and video making, media literacy, and popular culture; advanced courses in production aesthetics, experimental and documentary film and video, and Hollywood cinema; and graduate courses in film/tv theory, mass culture theory, digital culture, and cross-cultural media. A connoisseur of documentary and the avant-garde and sexual representation and everything in between, local and global, Chuck was a legendary piercer of bullshit and complacency in academia, on the left, and everywhere else, a brilliant identifier of the exact political and artistic issues at stake in every film and piece of film scholarship. He wrote extensively—essays on documentary, on porn, on sexual [End Page 1] politics, on Latin American Cinema, on radical cinema and political praxis, on Hollywood, on Third World Media, and on pedagogy. He worked hard to unearth or call attention to films in danger of falling through the historical cracks. And he prided himself on opening conversation. His work on Ken Bland’s Cry of Jazz,1 for example, jump started a dialogue with Michael T. Martin, leading to a subsequent essay on the film that Martin coauthored with David Wall.2 Martin disagreed—on many key points—with Kleinhans’s reading of Bland’s film, but that was exactly the kind of intellectual discussion that Chuck valued. Intelligent, committed, passionate debate that recognized the political stakes in knowledge production. He was a generous mentor and friend to young scholars, including the authors of this essay. When Tom Waugh disagreed with a piece that Chuck had written for Jump Cut, Chuck invited him to join the journal’s staff. At a time when it was still difficult for women—especially women graduate students—to publish feminist work, Jump Cut provided a space where we could publish, under our full names—Joan Hawkins instead of the gender-neutral J. Hawkins. When they rejected material, Chuck and Julia always gave good, useful critiques. Chuck was also a frequent and generous contributor to Frameworks, the Experimental Film Discussion List. In addition to his print scholarship, Chuck made at least twenty-three short films, mounted nine one-person exhibitions and participated in at least fourteen group shows, some of which he curated. When Jump Cut went online in 2001, Chuck and Julia carried their filmmaking experience and skills over to the new format, transforming the journal into one that truly used the digital platform. Written essays in Jump Cut generally contain more stills than journals typically allow. These are arranged with substantive captions to provide something like a photographic essay that can be read—either in tandem with the written piece or as a separate independent work. Throughout his career, Chuck cultivated a brand of critical analysis that drew from personal history and personal observed experience, as well as from scholarly works...