Best Chicagoan to Introduce a Film Screening
Jim Trainor
I'll never forget the time Jim Trainor introduced a screening of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) at the Chopin Theatre. An accomplished animator and a professor at the School of the Art Institute, Trainor spoke knowingly of the film but also interspersed his critical observations with personal stories and lots of humor ("Woody Allen once said he was apprehensive to visit Bergman in Sweden because he was afraid there'd be nothing to eat but yogurt"). Bergman had recently died, and Trainor's conversational approach served to humanize an artist whom most obituaries had mythologized. Trainor's talks can be as entertaining as the movies they precede, as local audiences learned last year, when he presented a series on psychological horror at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
