Remembering Chuck Kleinhans

On 14 December 2017, we lost 75-year-old Chuck Kleinhans, an academic who was a staunch advocate for the academically disenfranchized. During three decades of college teaching and four decades of co-editing Jump Cut, Chuck ceaselessly championed unpopular and marginalized causes – including the study of sexual representation, independent/experimental media, cross-cultural aesthetics (particularly of Latin America media), and Marxist theory. And, as anyone who knew Chuck will tell you, he also had an impish sense of humour. Just a few days before heart failure claimed Chuck in Eugene, Oregon, he emailed me a photograph of a man in a werewolf costume, serving a turkey dinner to a roomful of men. No further explanation. Just something that tickled him and that he knew would amuse me.

Charles Nelson Kleinhans was born 2 October 1942 in a working-class neighbourhood of wartime Chicago. In the early 1950s, his family moved to suburban Park Ridge and he attended Maine Township High School – a classmate of Harrison Ford. His anti-authority streak developed early, as exemplified in one adolescent escapade: he and his cohorts would sneak into nearby O’Hare field, find their way into planes on the tarmac, and abscond with snacks meant for the passengers. The suburbs were not a good fit for the teenaged Chuck. He would often escape to Chicago art houses where he was introduced to cinema outside the mainstream – laying a foundation for his lifelong fascination with the moving image. His film education was further expanded during his time at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The 1960s saw an explosion of film activity on US campuses, much of which occurred outside the classroom, in film societies. Wisconsin’s very active film clubs allowed Chuck to immerse himself in American classics, foreign films, and independent cinema. He was also fascinated with the theatre and participated in an alternative group (the Mime and Man Theatre) that put on productions considered too avant-garde for the main UW stage. Further, he was an active photographer at this time – a skill he had learned in high school. However, his degree was not in photography, theatre, or film. Rather, he earned a BA in comparative literature in 1964.

Chuck’s political awareness was shaped by his time spent in Madison, where he roomed with left-wing New Yorkers. He was also in Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which led to some odd cultural juxtapositions between his lefty pals and his association with Naval ROTC. As he put it in an interview with Brian Winston, ‘I would go to the military ball on a Saturday night after which there was always an anti-military ball on Sunday [laughs], and I would go to both!’ (Winston 2016/17) During his two post-graduation years of active duty, Chuck managed to nurture his love of film while in the Navy. He often worked as a projectionist, screening popular films over and over again for the troops:

… I got used to showing two or three movies a night. I’ve seen every beach party movie ever made about five times; I saw every Western from the late 1950s and early 1960s at least ten times. I got this incredible education in mainstream films, just by watching these movies. (Winston 2016/17)

After Chuck’s time with the Navy was up, he entered the comparative literature graduate programme at Indiana University. He threw himself into political activism with the New University Conference, a nationwide group of graduate students and faculty that advocated for educational reforms and women’s rights and against the Vietnam War. He worked for New University Conference as a paid political organizer for several years. His political activism blended with his love of photography and led him to join an underground newspaper’s staff.

It was in Bloomington that Chuck met his long-time partner in politics and pranks, Julia Lesage, who came to Indiana University’s comparative literature programme just a few years after him. Chuck credits Julia with pulling him into the academic study of film. She told him, ‘These are the books you need to know about film; read those six books and you’re fine’ (Winston 2016/17). She was working on a dissertation on Jean-Luc Godard and invited Chuck to tag along as she went to Paris to interview Godard. The interview never happened, but after Chuck spent time in Paris reading Althusser and Barthes, and later attending a British Film Institute summer film workshop, the die was cast. Chuck was now hooked on film studies. He completed his dissertation on late nineteenth-century farce and began looking for academic jobs.

As Chuck was finishing at Indiana University, he, Julia, and John Hess conceptualized JUMP CUT: A Review of Contemporary Cinema – as it was originally named and as it typographically styled itself. Chuck told the origin story this way: ‘I can remember we were actually sitting having a coffee in the University library and saying, “We should start a film journal”’ (Winston 2016/17). Chuck, Julia, and John had each begun publishing academic essays and film criticism, and Chuck could contribute the practical publishing skills he had learned with the underground press. They finalized the plans for Jump Cut during 1973 and the first issue appeared in 1974. From the beginning, Jump Cut had a DIY, counter-cultural look about it. They did the typesetting (actually, typewriter setting in the early years) and layout themselves. They did not seek conventional advertising and instead they each contributed $1000 to cover the cost of the printing. From these humble beginnings grew the journal that delved deeply and enthusiastically into topics slighted, ignored, or devalued by conventional academic presses. It was in print for 27 years and made the transition to an online publication in 2001.

The inaugural Jump Cut issue established its ‘Last Word’ feature where the editors proclaimed their goals for the publication (The Editors 1974). Primary among them was ‘We stand for a political film criticism because understanding film has meaning only when we are also trying to change the world.’ For Chuck, Julia, and John, this was not an empty, unattainable aspiration. It was the core principle that guided all of their writing, media making, and teaching.

One reason Chuck and John were able to devote so much energy to Jump Cut was that they were both under-employed at the time and their partners had already landed teaching jobs. After completing his PhD, Chuck returned home to Chicago where Julia had a position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For several years, he worked an assortment of odd jobs – including driving a bus and doing community organizing – and managed to score temporary teaching gigs at Chicago State University and Northeastern Illinois University. His hiring by Northwestern University, in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, was surprisingly casual. In the 1976/77 school year, the Radio–TV–Film (RTVF) Department was in crisis, because Northwestern was short on film-theory faculty members – having just fired Peter Wollen from an ill-fitting double appointment in English and Film. The RTVF chair, Paddy Whannel, had got to know Chuck through his Jump Cut work and invited him to dinner at the penthouse apartment of a wealthy lawyer whose spouse was an RTVF graduate student. Chuck remembered it this way:

[the graduate student] serves us some frozen lasagne meal. I don’t know exactly why I am there. At the end Paddy says, ‘Can we talk for a moment? Chuck, would you be interested in teaching a couple of courses for us?’ I asked what he had in mind and he said the contemporary film theory course but I could also pick anything else I wanted. I had about four–five weeks to get my act together.

Thus began Chuck’s 32-year association with Northwestern, where he taught a vast range of innovative and sometimes controversial courses and shepherded over 40 dissertations.

I have some personal knowledge of Chuck’s beginnings at Northwestern, as I was a graduate student there and took those first two courses in the spring 1977 term: ‘D87-2 Contemporary Film Theory’ and ‘C88 Experimental Film’.¹ As would be true throughout his teaching career, his courses were provocative and risky – particularly for a new hire without the security of tenure. At the time, I took for granted that a professor could show an experimental film such as Ann Severson’s (1971) Near the Big Chakra (with its three dozen close-ups of vaginas) without repercussions, but I know now that academe often punishes taboo-breaking faculty members. Chuck himself recognized the perils of screening and discussing politically revolutionary and sexually explicit films:

I never expected to get tenure because I’m too leftist. [Northwestern] was a very conservative institution at the time; the president was a Chicago School economist …  So I went on my merry way and I knew that I wouldn’t get any form of promotion or commendation. I was totally surprised that I got tenure … I was embarrassing the administration; I was teaching things like pornography and showing avant-garde experimental films. (Winston 2016/17)

If you did not know Chuck, you might assume from his syllabi, his Jump Cut editorials, and his formidable Karl Marx beard that he would crush opposing views in the classroom with Stalinist malice. But that was never the case. In a pragmatic 1996 guide to ‘Teaching Sexual Images’, Chuck outlines his teaching philosophy:

The most important thing in teaching that involves highly charged issues such as pornography is to create a classroom atmosphere that promotes mutual learning. I value class discussions in which students can approach differences they may have with trust, tolerance, and respect for each other. I want students to respect diversity. (Kleinhans 1996)

In return, Chuck respected students’ diversity of opinion. I tested his tolerance for contrary student perspectives in that first experimental film course. Chuck arranged a field trip for us to view Stan Brakhage films at the School of the Art Institute’s Film Center at what felt like the crack of dawn to my graduate-student circadian rhythms (i.e. 9:00 a.m.). Struggling to keep my eyes open through The Text of Light (Brakhage 1974) and Dog Star Man (Brakhage 1964), I developed a deep and abiding distaste for Brakhage’s work. When Chuck allowed that our final papers could critique a filmmaker’s work that we disliked, I wrote a scathing indictment of Brakhage. Chuck found my points ‘debatable’, but graded it an ‘A’.

A quick scan through the list of the dozens of dissertations that Chuck oversaw reveals that he was no narrow ideologue who channelled students to share his views. For this and so many other reasons, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) chose Chuck for its very first award for outstanding pedagogical achievement (in 2007). Chuck engendered love and devotion from his hundreds of graduate students – regardless of their research interests. So it was entirely appropriate that dozens of them gathered at the 2018 SCMS conference to honour him and share stories of what Chuck meant to them professionally and personally.

I wept when I first heard that Chuck had died – sitting alone in my office, a pile of student papers absorbing the tears. I wept because Chuck had been a friend to me for some 40 years – making the transition from my advisor to my colleague/friend as no other professor had. And I knew that he had done the same for so many others. I wept because Chuck was an outstanding role model for ‘how to be a college professor’. He never stopped learning himself and brought that intellectual curiosity to the courses he taught. He never ceased thinking about pedagogy. He was always the first one I went to when trying to solve a thorny teaching problem. I wept because he was, and Julia Lesage is, the senior citizens that I want to become. They take joy in life. They are still intellectually engaged. They encourage others, especially others younger than them and just starting out.

I wept because I despair to imagine a world without Chuck Kleinhans.

Notes

1 These syllabi are available online: http://jbutlerphd.com/blog/chuck-kleinhans-syllabi/ (accessed October 5, 2018).