Chuck Kleinhans

Chuck Kleinhans (October 2, 1942 – December 14, 2017) was an associate professor of film studies at Northwestern University for 32 years and co-founded Jump Cut with Julia Lesage and John Hess. He co-edited the journal from its inception in 1974 until his death.

In 2007, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies awarded him its Outstanding Pedagogical Achievement Award.

Early life and education

Charles Nelson Kleinhans was born in a working-class neighborhood of Chicago. In the early 1950s, his family moved to suburban Park Ridge.

He graduated from Maine Township High School in 1960, a classmate of Harrison Ford. He then enrolled in the University of Wisconsin–Madison, from which he earned a Bachelor of Arts in comparative literature.

Kleinhans was in Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps in college and after graduating was obligated to spend two years in the Navy. Afterward, he resumed his study of comparative literature as a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington. There, in Bloomington, he met his future spouse, Julia Lesage, a fellow graduate student.

Career After earning a PhD in comparative literature, Kleinhans found temporary teaching jobs at Chicago State University (fall 1974–fall 1975) and Northeastern Illinois University (winter 1976–winter 1977). In spring 1977, Northwestern University's Radio/Television/Film Department hired him to teach courses on contemporary film theory and experimental film. In fall of that year, he started a tenure-track line at Northwestern as an assistant professor and taught "introductory courses in microcomputer graphics, photography, film and video making, media literacy, popular culture; [and] advanced courses in production in aesthetics, film/tv theory, mass culture theory, experimental film and video, Latin America media." The three edited it collectively until the deaths of Hess and Kleinhans. As stated in an editorial in the first issue, Jump Cut's principal goal was:

Quote|...we want to develop a political film criticism; that is, a film criticism which does not accept as binding the bourgeois idea that art is somehow separate and detached from the social life of women and men. Films often entertain, but, more importantly, they manipulate our image of people, of our society, of our world. We feel that it is important to reveal this manipulation in our most popular and successful films. We stand for a political film criticism because understanding film has meaning only when we are also trying to change the world.