Chicago Filmmakers | 7/19/2025 6pm

Dana Hodgdon was a beloved Chicago-area film professor whose own works were totally singular - they embody a unique mixture of amateur-style efficiency and labor-intensive structuralism that often makes you wonder whether Dana is deeply serious or if the whole idea is a bit of an inside joke. It doesn’t make it any easier that, according to rumor, Dana removed his films from circulation after becoming frustrated with the aesthetic directions of the experimental film world. Luckily for us he left a few copies with the Picture Start company, and now we can watch them in glorious 16mm. His style seems sparse at first, but it is full of language games and intertextual references to other filmmakers like James Benning and Michael Snow, that force you to reconsider the meanings of the images. These seemingly simple constructions reveal much more just beneath the surface.