On April 3, 2025 Block Cinema will host a historic screening of The Waiting Room (1974), marking its first public showing in over five decades. This rare cinematic event will take place at the Wirtz Center Chicago in Abbott Hall on Northwestern University’s Downtown Chicago campus, coinciding with the 2025 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference. Director Karen Sperling will be in attendance for this long-overdue celebration of her work.

Karen Sperling emerged as a pioneering yet underrecognized figure in American independent cinema of the 1970s. The granddaughter of Hollywood mogul Harry Warner, Sperling carved her own artistic path, directing two highly distinctive films in the early part of the decade.

In 1971, at just 27 years old, she wrote, produced, directed, starred in, and composed the score for Make a Face, an experimental psychodrama reminiscent of Repulsion (1967). Two years later, she made history by assembling an all-woman film crew to create The Waiting Room, an enigmatic exploration of personal, familial, and institutional relationships between women. Shot entirely within the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island, the film blends naturalism with avant-garde techniques—incorporating elements of dance, theatricality, and video art.

As Sperling 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.” 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.

Despite its groundbreaking nature, The Waiting Room was largely forgotten, though its approach anticipated the work of legendary filmmakers like Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Akerman. Many members of its pioneering all-woman crew, including Roberta Findlay and Alexis Krasilovsky, are notable filmmakers and film industry professionals themselves, while Sperling pursued interests outside the film industry.

In the intervening years, the original prints and negatives of both of Sperling’s films have been lost or discarded, with only U-matic tape transfers remaining. In collaboration with Sperling, Block Cinema has undertaken the painstaking process of restoring The Waiting Room from the only surviving video transfers. The Block commissioned industry-leading video preservation specialists Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) to create new transfers of these tapes, ensuring Sperling’s bold, ahead-of-her-time creative vision can be seen by future generations of curious audiences. Sperling’s astonishing grasp of cinematic form comes through powerfully in these new digital transfers, whose limitations and artifacts also bear witness to the decades of neglect this overlooked chapter of feminist filmmaking has endured.

“Karen Sperling’s films have an uncanny, otherworldly-yet-familiar quality. They feel less like lost films than beloved cult classics from an alternate timeline. That haunted feeling is intensified by the limitations of the remaining copies: the tapes offer a shadow of original film elements that no longer exist,” says Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts.

“As an act of cinematic archaeology, it’s fascinating, but it wouldn’t be so exciting if the films themselves weren’t also incredible works of art. The challenge for us at Block Cinema has been to understand what tools are available for bringing these films back to life in a way that does justice to Karen Sperling’s singular vision, while also highlighting for new audiences how their material condition reflects hierarchies of gender and cinematic form.”

The event will include a discussion with Sperling, who will reflect on her filmmaking journey, the unique challenges of independent film production in the era, and the rediscovery of her lost works. Joining Sperling and Metzger in the conversation will be Peter Alilunas, an associate professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon, and one of the Block’s partners in recovering Sperling’s films.

The Waiting Room complements Block Cinema’s Films by Women/Chicago ’74 series, presented in the Fall of 2024. This series examined the overlooked contributions of female directors to independent and avant-garde cinema. This event offers a rare opportunity to experience a film that was nearly lost to history and to engage directly with the artist who brought it to life.

Event Details

What: Screening of The Waiting Room (1974) with filmmaker Karen Sperling in attendance
When: April 3, 2025
Where: Wirtz Center Chicago, Abbott Hall, Northwestern University Downtown Chicago campus
Admission: Free and open to the public, RSVP