Description:

Unseen for over 50 years, Karen Sperling’s mesmerizing second feature film, THE WAITING ROOM (1973), makes its return to the screen in a new digital transfer commissioned by Block Cinema from the best surviving elements. This historic screening, held off-site at Northwestern University’s Abbott Hall in downtown Chicago, will be followed by an in-person conversation with Sperling.

In the spring of 1973, 28-year-old filmmaker Karen Sperling assembled a 53-woman crew and took over a deserted wing of a psychiatric facility on Manhattan’s Ward Island to produce her second self-financed feature film, THE WAITING ROOM, a dreamlike exploration of a young woman contemplating a marriage proposal.

The granddaughter of Harry Warner, Sperling was Hollywood royalty, but THE WAITING ROOM looks nothing like a conventional drama—instead, the stylistically audacious film freely blends closely-observed dialogues between women with hypnotic Cocteau-esque psychodrama, Brechtian theatricality, performance and video art. As in her first feature, the disturbing chamber piece MAKE A FACE (1971), Sperling writes, directs, produces, and stars, but the film is as much a personal work as a collective portrait of its unprecedented feminist approach to film production. As Sperling herself remarked in a DAILY TIMES article in 1973, “the production crew is made up of women who wrote, who have feelings, and the environment extends right into the story, reinforcing the conception.”

Refracting the broad concerns of second-wave feminism through the prism of Sperling’s idiosyncratic eye, THE WAITING ROOM is a sui generis work that broke ground later explored by legendary filmmakers like Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Akerman. But the total creative and financial freedom Sperling enjoyed was double-edged: after a handful of press and industry screenings in 1973, the film went undistributed and was never publicly screened again. 

In the intervening 50 years, the original prints and negatives of both Sperling’s films have been lost or discarded, with only U-matic tape transfers remaining. Block Cinema has commissioned industry leaders BAVC to create new transfers of these tapes, preserving Sperling’s uncompromising, ahead-of-her-time creative vision for future generations of curious viewers.

Following the film, Sperling will appear for discussion and audience Q&A.

With thanks to Karen Sperling, Peter Alilunas, Tim Lake/BAVC, and Elena Gorfinkel for their support of this project.