The microcinema has become an increasingly popular venue in Chicago with a diversity of options for film lovers as independent venues are taking bold risks with their programming and curating local filmmakers. I recently visited Big M, a space which has only just begun curating musical acts and films but are already displaying promise in the vital Chicago cultural scene. Their inaugural local experimental short film showcase revealed that Chicago is growing as a hotbed of independent film making. Seated on the floor, admits a nest of pillows and blankets, there was an intimacy to the whole affair. The feeling of genuine connection is the advantage to operating as an underground venue. You are being invited into people’s homes and workspaces in order to engage in a mutual passion.

        Ian Hopkins, the local film maker who helped organize the event, stated in my conversation with him: “Especially with weirder and experimental films it’s hard to find festivals that want to screen your work… Now that I have space to host events like this, I wanted to make sure I could give people the platform they wouldn’t otherwise have.”¹ Big M began hosting local bands from a variety of genres, but has recently begun expanding its repertoire. This impulse to transform any environment into a cultural institution has long been the refrain of DIY spaces and has allowed for an explosion in cultural activity. There is an ongoing discussion regarding whether we have entered a period of cultural stagnation where ideas, aesthetics, and styles are endlessly recycled and reshaped instead of innovated upon.

        A particular highlight of the night was a film by Hopkins and Ainsley Ellison. With Kira Gurovich providing a live cello accompaniment. Dum Vita Est Spes Est was a fascinating exploration of how digital media is created, presented, and consumed. Hopkins and Ellison layered in disruptions to the footage alongside an electronic soundtrack with the sharp clipping bursts of white noise, exacerbated by Gurovich’s scrapping cello. The cumulative effect was a constant recurrence, an interplay of the sound and imagery as well as the disruptions which serve as a reminder of the artifice of film. Consider the gesture of presenting a live acoustic performance alongside the embedded electronic one. The juxtaposition forces the audience to listen closely in order to determine which sound is which; one becomes more carefully attuned to the distinctive tones of the hollow, wooden body of the cello and the sine wave generated sound of the computer. The film’s title translates from Latin to while there is life, there is hope. There seems to be a suggestion that through all the digital mediation of our lives, there is something organic which lingers and persists.

        Another intriguing entry was Kitty Euthanasia’s Leviathan. The short, chaotic stop-motion animation was unlike any I have seen before. The loose narrative follows a roughly sketched dog who feels particularly vulnerable, lacking the definition of its surrounding environment, which alternates between an overwhelming multitude of artistic styles, colors, photographs, and textures. The dog lacks any apparent agency, thrust from one distressing scenario to another, cowering in fear and melancholy.

        Kitty Euthanasia refused a coherent structure for their animated world. The illustrated background would give way to the wood grain of a table, decimating the suspension of disbelief which kept the audience engaged. I found this technique to be uniquely Brechtian in the visual incoherence of the animation. The audience is incessantly reminded that the dog, its crumbling reality, and the apocalyptic danger are all constructed. It is a technique which aims to force the audience to consider how this fictional construction is reflective of their own situation—caught in the colliding wakes of the domineering institutions of power which determine the course of everyone’s life.

        All this disruption and rupture was fitting for such an apocalyptic narrative, as hinted at by the title. Emerging from the Old Testament, the leviathan represented the underlying chaos which is brewing underneath the seeming stability of our lives. Where the biblical leviathan is a serpentine beast lingering in the ocean, the metaphorical figure has acquired a more metaphysical meaning for us today. The leviathan is an apt symbol for the feelings of younger generations who are endlessly concerned with the radical overhauls of politics, ongoing concerns about the state of the environment and noticeable ecological changes, as well as accumulating societal and personal debts.

        Perhaps, much like Hopkins and Ellison’s film suggested, there remains a lingering trace of hope for film making, and culture writ large, in the 21st century. As culture becomes increasingly dominated by the Capitalist mode of production, there is a palpable desire to abandon the institutions which have become entirely detached from the public. The perseverance of DIY spaces is focused on the task of building new institutions and adapting to our ever-changing technological society. The English language adapted the word culture as a metaphor for tending to and cultivating the mind the way one would a garden. In my opinion, changing culture is the act of changing how people think, and changing how people think begins with giving them a space to encounter and learn about new ideas and perspectives. Cultural institutions have become so preoccupied with the preservation of the past that they have neglected to water the seeds of the future.

John Thomure is an artist, musician, filmmaker, and art historian based in Chicago, IL. His work interrogates the contradictions of Capitalist culture, ecology, and local history. His written works have been featured in journals such as Coils of the Serpent and Gothic Studies in addition to presentations at the 32nd International Virginia Woolf Conference and Gothic Practices Symposium.

Notes

1. Ian Hopkins, interviewed by John Thomure, September 8, 2026.