THE WAITING ROOM (1973) with guest Karen Sperling (OFFSITE)

Details:

THE WAITING ROOM

Screening and discussion with special guests Karen Sperling, Prof. Peter Alilunas, and Marya E. Gates, author of Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words (Rizzoli, 2025)

NOTE: This event is NOT taking place at the Block Museum of Art. Instead, the screening will be held at the Wirtz Center Chicago at Abbott Hall in downtown Chicago, at 710 N Lake Shore Dr, Chicago, IL 60611. Free parking is available - see details below.

Advance RSVPs for this event have sold out. Because this is a free event, we expect that some RSVP holders will not attend. Doors open at 6:00 PM. A standby line for the event will form at Abbott Hall at 6:15 PM. At 6:50 PM, our team will begin admitting standby guests for unclaimed seats.

• If you are an RSVP holder, please be sure to arrive before 6:50 PM, as RSVP does not guarantee admission to the event, and remaining seats will be opened to standby guests 10 minutes before the start time.
• If you are RSVPed you or a member of your party are unable to attend, please consider updating or canceling your order so that others can reserve tickets.
  
  

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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 35-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 describes it, "The production crew [was] made up of women who were chosen because I wanted to hire women so that they could have experience to get into the Unions, and to create a 'sterile' environment that supports the storyline and reinforces the concept of the film."

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 with Block Cinema curator Michael Metzger, Prof. Peter Alilunas (University of Oregon), and Marya E. Gates, author of the recently-published Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words (Rizzoli, 2025).

About the guests:

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

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu