Screenwriter/Producer: Karen Sperling

Filmmaker Karen Sperling in Person! Presented in collaboration with 7th House and the Philosophical Research Society.

Join 7th House and Vidiots in our microcinema as we rediscover Karen Sperling’s newly unearthed groundbreaking film, The Waiting Room, shot with an all-female crew at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island and virtually unseen for 50 years! Don’t miss your opportunity to be one of the first to revisit this mind-bending lost film at Vidiots!

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 experiential 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 whose feelings, and the unique environment women create together extends right into the filming of 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, Nancy Schreiber are notable filmmakers and film industry professionals themselves, while Sperling pursued interests outside the film industry. 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.

Note courtesy of Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts at the Block Museum in Chicago.

And don’t miss Karen Sperling’s other lost feature Make-a-Face at the Philosophical Research Society on Sunday, September 13th.