Current Season

Our screenings are held at multiple venues around Chicago. This season you can find us at:

• The Music Box Theatre
3733 N Southport Ave — Directions • Parking
Tickets: $13 – $15

• The Siskel Film Center
164 N State St — Directions • Parking
Tickets: $14

• Constellation
3111 N Western Ave — Directions • Parking
Tickets: $15

• Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
40 Arts Circle Drive — Directions • Parking
Tickets: Free

• The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (Film Studies Center Screening Room)
915 E. 60th St. — Directions • Parking
Tickets: Free

Want to attend our screenings but having financial hardships? Contact info@chicagofilmsociety.org

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SEASON AT A GLANCE

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Monday, August 31 @ 7:00 PM
Music Box / Tickets: $13
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S ROMEO + JULIET
Directed by Baz Luhrmann • 1996
For some teens in the mid-’90s, time was cleaved into two distinct eras: before the release of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and after. In the dark ages, Shakespeare was forced reading in school, hard and unintelligible. Claire Danes was merely a small-screen star, Leonardo DiCaprio an art-house baby. When Luhrmann’s swirling, garish film exploded onto the scene, the world cracked open (for some people, at least — Roger Ebert called the adaptation “greatly depressing”). In a bold move, Luhrmann kept Shakespeare’s dialogue intact but modernized everything else. The Verona of the original play was transformed into Verona Beach, a place where the universal truths of Shakespeare were revealed to the sounds of Radiohead and Prince, Danes was lifted to stardom with angels’ wings, and everyone understood that it was best to hold a handgun sideways for maximum tragedy. Thirty years on, the film has not wavered in its ability to make flesh the ridiculous, outsized, and violent emotions of youth. In a 1996 interview after the film’s release Luhrmann mused,  “With Romeo and Juliet I’ve dealt with their world as if their parents are like a Busby Berkeley musical on acid and it’s coming at them all the time and it won’t shut up… if you pass down to an incoming generation your hatred, your anger and bitterness, then you are going to end up with a tragedy, it is going to come back on you.” (RL)
120 min • 20th Century Fox • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society, permission Disney

Preceded by:  1996 trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm from the Chicago Film Society

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Thursday, September 10 @ 8:00 PM
Constellation / Tickets: $15
CALIGARI’S CURE
Directed by Tom Palazzolo • 1982
Since the 1960s, Tom Palazzolo has pursued a relentless and idiosyncratic career, earning the honorific “Chicago’s filmmaker laureate” from no less than Roger Ebert. Best known for the string of hilarious and keenly observed short documentaries he made throughout the 1970s, Palazzolo’s most famous works shine a light on the diverse range of strange customs, personalities, cranks, and eccentrics endemic to Chicagoland. Palazzolo’s first feature looks, at least on the surface, like a break from his earlier, cinéma vérité-leaning films: a semi-autobiographical account of his own St. Louis childhood staged inside of a spoof of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and inspired by the new wave of performance artists working in Chicago at the start of the 1980s. But while the thrift-store expressionist art direction and Midwestern-Weimar trappings may be a novelty, there’s no mistaking Caligari’s Cure for anything but pure Palazzolo, an affectionately prankish send-up of the very idea of filmmaking starring a number of familiar faces from across Chicago’s art and film scenes, including performance artist Carmela Rago, filmmaker Heather McAdams, and Visionary Film author P. Adams Sitney. CFS is thrilled to partner with our friends at Chicago Film Archives to present the world premiere of their brand-new 16mm preservation of Caligari’s Cure, here to confuse and delight a new generation of Chicago cinephiles. Preserved by Chicago Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. (CW)
66 min • 16mm from Chicago Film Archives

Preceded by: “Venus and Adonis” (Tom Palazzolo, 1966) – 19 min – 16mm from Chicago Film Archives

Filmmaker Tom Palazzolo in person!

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Sunday, September 13 @ 11:30 AM
Music Box / Tickets: $14
SPARROWS
Directed by William Beaudine • 1926
At age 33, Mary Pickford had reigned for a decade as Hollywood’s most popular and powerful actress, enjoying unprecedented control over her productions. Often portraying children or teens, Pickford’s “sweetheart” persona proved adaptable to innumerable scenarios; Sparrows, her penultimate silent starrer, found her cuteness anchoring a dark Southern Gothic tale. Here, in a scenario to rival Dickens at his most cartoonish, Mary plays Molly, the mother figure at a “baby farm” in the deep South, where the demented Mr. Grimes keeps as prisoners a gaggle of plucky tots. To keep their spirits up, Molly teaches them half-remembered Bible stories and sends out an occasional kite-string SOS to the world beyond the high fence. The film’s tone is operatic and moralizing (at one point Jesus himself makes an appearance!), yet it’s also a breathtaking monument of popular entertainment and a marvel of “total” art direction — a live oak swamp, infested with alligators and bubbling quicksand, was constructed from scratch on the West Hollywood backlot of Pickford-Fairbanks Studios. A contemporary review in Picture Play captured the joy of surrendering to the film: “So heavily does the hand of melodrama smite ‘Sparrows’ that the picture passes beyond the bounds of credibility. Thus the spectator relaxes, content to give way to his amazement at Mary’s skill.” (GW)
95 min • Mary Pickford Company • 35mm from the Library of Congress

Preceded by: Trailer for Sparrows (1926) – 3 min – 35mm from the Library of Congress

Live musical accompaniment by David Drazin

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Saturday, September 26 @ 11:30 AM
Music Box / Tickets: $15
Chris + Heather’s 16mm Big Screen Blow-Out #3
Heather McAdams has been projecting and collecting 16mm film since she was a kid. Many 16mm folks look for feature films or cartoons, and trade prints in the parking lots of suburban hotels. Heather and her husband Chris Ligon have a different line: oddities and junk, A/V cart discards and thrift store scores. They’ve developed connoisseurs’ eyes (and ears) for ludicrous jingles, trashy trailers, commercials for forgotten products, and transcendent musical clips. For the third edition of their beloved Big Screen Blow-Out, Chris and Heather dive back into their collection and pull together another program of all-killer, no-filler material, screening for one show only! If you miss this show, you’ll never be able to see this assemblage again, and you’ll live the rest of your life wondering why “rock ‘n’ rollin’ means bowling” or how to play the Swack! Game. You’ll miss performances by Slim Gaillard, the Cotton Club Tramp Band, Jeannie C. Riley, and Ronnie “The Hawk” Hawkins. And you won’t be able to recite the dialogue from 1,000 Convicts and a Woman or The Million Eyes of Sumuru, the only feminist exploitation movie where Frankie Avalon co-stars with Klaus Kinski. (KW)
Total program length: Approx. 90 min

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Thursday, October 8 @ 7:00 PM
Music Box / Tickets: $13
PEEPING TOM
Directed by Michael Powell • 1960
Steeped in voyeurism and anxiety, Peeping Tom is as unsettling today as it was in 1960. Carl Boehm delivers a haunting performance as Mark Lewis, a painfully withdrawn photographer and aspiring filmmaker whose childhood was shaped by psychological experimentation at the hands of his father. Mark channels his obsession with the camera into photographing pin-up models — and documenting their murders on 16mm as quasi-scientific snuff films. Powell crafted a film that forces viewers to confront the uneasy relationship between cinema, desire, and violence, but upon release, it was met with critical outrage. (In 1960, Dilys Powell excoriated its “vulgar squalor” and dismissed it as “essentially vicious” in the The Sunday Times, though she would recant decades later and proclaim it a “masterpiece.”) The backlash fully derailed Powell’s career, despite his earlier stature as one of Britain’s most celebrated filmmakers. Today Peeping Tom is recognized as a thrilling, disturbing, and beautiful landmark of psychological horror, a film that implicates its viewers as accessories to death-by-cinema. (TV)
101 min • Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors • 35mm from Rialto Pictures

Preceded by: “The Miracle of Change” (J. Leighton Pierce, 1984) – 7 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema

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Wednesday, October 21 @ 8:00 PM
Constellation / Tickets: $15
An Evening with Jim Trainor
Harrowing. Death-obsessed. Uproarious. The short films of Chicago-based artist and filmmaker Jim Trainor rank among the bleakest and funniest work to be found in American underground animation. The men and beasts of Trainor’s cinema are invariably mired in psychosexual dysfunction: too blind, stupid, or otherwise incapable to find sense or meaning in an often senseless, meaningless universe. Instantly recognizable by their characteristically stark linework and lucid, beautifully written voiceover, Trainor’s animations frequently take the perspective of nonhuman life, giving voice to profound existential enquiries through characters like a rotten-vegetation-loving Moschops, or a cave-dwelling bat simply enjoying the pleasures of a clean anus. This program brings together a selection of Trainor’s work from across the early years of his career, a collection of roughly textured, poetically blunt explorations of natural order and bestial philosophy presented in original 16mm prints. Included in this program is Trainor’s series “The Animals and Their Limitations,” featuring The Bats (1998), The Moschops (2000), The Magic Kingdom (2002), and Harmony (2004), as well as his mid-length film The Fetishist (1997), a biography of Chicago-based serial killer William Heirens. (CW)
16mm prints courtesy of Jim Trainor.
Total program length: Approx 80 min, plus an intermission

Jim Trainor in person!

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Sunday, November 1 @ 11:30 AM
Music Box / Tickets: $14
THE DOCKS OF NEW YORK
Directed by Josef von Sternberg • 1928
“You left all that slush in the river, baby. All you need is a good time.” If only life were so simple! Bill Roberts (the strapping George Bancroft) works as a lowly coal stoker on cargo ships, but once he’s back in port, he’s a brawler, a charming, Bluto-like libertine who takes what he wants from whomever he wants — until he happens upon the drowning, suicidal prostitute Mae (Betty Compson), rescues her, and finds himself mysteriously softened by her fragile charm. A rowdy, impulsive wedding ensues (never mind that he’s already married to Shanghai Lou), but how will this union function when Bill goes back to sea — tomorrow? One of Sternberg’s last works of the silent era, the film is a visual feast, set almost entirely among the titular docks, a ramshackle demimonde of vice, violence, and disposable labor. The Sandbar, a saloon where much of the action takes place, is populated by an Altman-esque ensemble of kooky characters, and is thrillingly, chaotically photographed. For a silent film, the dialogue really crackles; to today’s viewer, Docks suggests an alternate universe in which films like this were not displaced by talkies and audiences were left with characters’ colorful lines ringing in the mind’s ear. (GW)
75 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from the UCLA Film & Television Archive

Preceded by: “New York Near Sleep for Saskia” (Peter Hutton, 1972) – 10 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema

Live musical accompaniment by Whitney Johnson

As Matchess, Whitney Johnson composes, improvises, and installs multi-channel sound with viola, sine tones, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. Her upcoming recording The Supplicant encounters Persephone’s annual entreaty to escape the underworld.

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Saturday, November 7 @ 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM
Chicago History Museum / Free
Home Movie Day
Drop in between 11 AM and 3 PM and archivists and projectionists will be on hand to inspect and project a selection of YOUR celluloid home movies in 16mm, 8mm, or Super 8. No films to share? Feel free to just sit back and enjoy the show! Presented by Chicago Film Archives, Chicago Film Society, & the Chicago History Museum.

Live musical accompaniment by Dave Drazin!

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Thursday, November 12 @ 7:00 PM
Music Box / Tickets: $13
BOOM!
Directed by Joseph Losey • 1968
Hollywood’s favorite pair of mismatched lovers, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, made eleven films together, and Boom! counts among the kookiest. In veteran director Joseph Losey’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Taylor plays Flora Goforth, a wealthy, dying woman living in solitude in an island villa. She spends her days on a liquid diet, tossing displeasing items off the nearby cliffs, abusing her staff, and dictating her life story over an intercom system that pumps her memories and madness into every room. When a mysterious visitor (Burton) appears, she becomes convinced he will bring about her demise. Boom! is a feast of exploded art direction, extravagant costumes, and freakish rich-people behavior — it’s as if the Taylor of 1963’s Cleopatra stuffed her best headdresses and jewels into a suitcase and hightailed it to Capri with death hot on her heels. It never, ever lets up, and it’s a joy to behold. A critical and financial failure, the film attracted supporters who were nevertheless a “quality over quantity” bunch. Tennessee Williams himself considered it one of the greatest adaptations of his work, and John Waters called it “the best failed art film ever, so genuinely beautiful and awful that it’s perfect.” The magic of the film even affected Taylor herself, who kept trying to purchase the island villa, only to be told repeatedly that it wasn’t available (because it wasn’t a real house). (RL)
113 min • Universal Pictures • 35mm IB Technicolor print from Universal

Preceded by: Elizabeth Taylor trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm

Introduced by Karina Longworth

Karina Longworth is the writer, creator and host of You Must Remember This, a podcast about 20th Century Hollywood. This screening is connected to the new season of You Must Remember This, called “The Bisexuals”. Launching on September 15, “The Bisexuals,” will cover the life of torch singer — and accused murderess — Libby Holman, and her sexually-fluid group of friends and lovers from the 1920s to the end of the 1960s, which included Montgomery Clift, Tallulah Bankhead, Josephine Baker, Nicholas Ray and many more.

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Friday, November 13 @ 7:00 PM
Block Cinema / Free w/ RSVP
DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY
Directed by Hans Richter • 1947
Hans Richter had produced some of cinema’s first abstract experiments in Germany in the 1920s, but after the Nazis branded him a “cultural Bolshevik” and destroyed his studio, he fled west and eventually joined a community of expatriate artists and intellectuals in New York. With backing from Peggy Guggenheim, he embarked upon an improbable feature film: a portmanteau of dream episodes suggested by fellow artists Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp. The sequences are strung together with a framing story about Joe, a “self-appointed bum” who pays the rent by setting up a psychoanalytic shingle and exposing his patients’ deepest desires, like a surrealist version of Lucy’s therapy stand in Peanuts. Shot on 16mm Kodachrome, with assistance from Richter’s students at the City College of New York, Dreams That Money Can Buy was produced at a time when the borders between home movies, amateur films, and avant-garde art were porous. Although the first public screenings were ineptly projected on the ceiling, Dreams went on to become an improbable art-house hit in New York, playing for seventeen weeks at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse. Restored with funding from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Fund, and The Film Foundation. (KW) 
84 min • Art of This Century Films, Inc. • 16mm from the Museum of Modern Art

Preceded by: “Dreamworks” (Tatsu Aoki, 1983) – 12 min – 16mm from the Chicago Film Society

Preserved by the Chicago Film Society through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Introduced by Karina Longworth, writer, creator and host of You Must Remember This.

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Wednesday, November 18 @ 6:00 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $14
RACHEL GETTING MARRIED 
Directed by Jonathan Demme • 2008
A loving and joyful portrait of dysfunction and the family condition, Rachel Getting Married stars Anne Hathaway as a recovering addict who’s been temporarily released from rehab to attend her sister Rachel’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) wedding in beautiful and gossipy Connecticut. Shot on HDCAM video (a format just a hair higher-end than most dads and wedding videographers were using at that time — and here a beautiful example of video transferred to 35mm film), Rachel Getting Married gives the emotional and aesthetic sensation of really being there, leaving no uncomfortable moment unrecorded. How wonderfully stressful! What great dresses! And what great music! Is she okay? What’s wrong with these people? Like the best home videos, the film offers an inherent closeness to its subjects: experiencers of great humiliation, frustration, hope, secrets, rage, kindness, and humor. And like the best of commercial cinema, it invites us to parties we might not really want to go to, where we might run into people just as messed up as we are. (JA)
113 min • Sony Picture Classics • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society
Preceded by: Jonathan Demme trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm

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Friday, November 20 @ 7:00 PM
Logan Center / Free
SUICIDE NOTE
Directed by Fred Camper • 1976–1984
In 1975, artist and critic Fred Camper’s stepfather leapt from the fifteenth-floor window of the family’s apartment without leaving so much as a note. Numb from shock and haunted by the annihilating void of a wordless suicide, Camper began cataloging the world left behind on rolls of silent Super 8 film. This practice became, for Camper, “an act of rejecting suicide,” a means of remaining critically engaged with the world around him. Over the next eight years, he would record and organize diaristic dispatches from New York City: street scenes in Herald Square, an inventory of his mother’s living room, a fireworks show over New York Harbor, a record of the first art installation at PS1, lateral views from the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. Stitching together overlapping strands of personal, architectural, and ecological concern, Suicide Note would function for Camper as “a portrait of Manhattan’s constricted spaces, and more generally of the way humans occupy space,” while also chronicling “the failed journey of a self to organize, or become present in, the world.” The result is a vivid tapestry of a society on the brink. Restored by the Chicago Film Society with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation and Big Creek Cooperative. (KW)
110 min • 16mm from the Chicago Film Society

Introduction and post-screening discussion with filmmaker, artist, and critic Fred Camper.

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Monday, November 30 @ 7:00 PM
Music Box / Tickets: $13
GANGS OF NEW YORK
Directed by Martin Scorsese • 2002
Ostensibly “suggested” by Herbert Asbury’s 1928 historical chronicle of New York’s 19th century underworld, Martin Scorsese’s American epic bore little relation to its source material by the time it unfurled in theaters as a remorseless holiday offering in 2002. A hulking, feral slab of gouging, stabbing, and cleaving, Gangs of New York emerged from the catacombs of development hell as a primordial work of historical fiction, with real-life personages Boss Tweed and Horace Greeley braided into the fictional story of Irish gang leader Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his nativist rival William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). Set primarily in 1863, in the lead-up to New York’s Civil War draft riots and anti-Black pogroms, Gangs of New York plays like an ancient song from an illiterate bard, unmetered poetry pitched to sate the unsophisticated palates of the Know-Nothings in the back room of a bawdyhouse — or, as A.O. Scott summarized it, “historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology.” The recreation of New York’s Five Points neighborhood remains staggering, a spectacle evocatively summoned by Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek as “too big for any screen it could possibly be projected onto; it spills and sprawls off the margins, and you can imagine whole panoramic worlds outside the frame.” (KW)
168 min • Miramax Films • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society, permission Paramount Pictures
Preceded by: “The Big Shave” (Martin Scorsese, 1967) – 5 min – 16mm

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Wednesday, December 9 @ 6:00 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $14
ALICE IN THE CITIES
Directed by Wim Wenders • 1974
In German & English with English subtitles
A scruffy man sits beneath a pier along the Carolina coast, beatifically frowning at a row of Polaroid photos. With this unforgettable opening image, Wim Wenders delivered a statement encapsulating the issues that would fuel the next ten years of his filmmaking. The director grew up in postwar West Germany, haunted and enraptured by the omnipresence of American culture, and obsessed with ways of capturing reality. Aspiring at first to become a painter, Wenders eventually stumbled into cinema, and Alice, his fourth feature, was where his mature style finally soared. Working with a tiny crew (including legendary DP Robby Müller), and shooting on 16mm black-and-white, Wenders relished the flexibility to devise scenes based on locations encountered in real life, and this shaggy approach befits his searching sensibility. The first of Wenders’ series of “road movies” (he’d later name his production company for the genre), Alice concerns a depressed German writer (Rüdiger Vogler) adrift in the States, here to complete an assignment; instead he compulsively snaps Polaroids which compare unfavorably to life itself. “They never really show what it was you saw.” Eventually he finds himself agreeing to escort a stranger’s child, 9-year-old Alice, back to Europe, and this uneasy alliance provokes possible new ways of seeing. The film’s drifting mood is enhanced by an eerily affecting soundtrack, dashed off by 3/4 of Krautrock titans Can. (GW)
110 min • WDR • 16mm from the Chicago Film Society (gift of Richard White), permission Janus Films

Preceded by: Chuck Berry clip reel – 5 min – 16mm from Heather McAdams

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Wednesday, December 16 @ 8:00 PM
Constellation / Tickets: $15
CFS Annual Holiday Party

Celebrate the start of winter and the end of our 15th year in showbusiness with a disarming array of short films, performances, and special appearances. More details coming soon!

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Programmed and Projected by Julian Antos, Becca Hall, Rebecca Lyon, Tavi Veraldi, Kyle Westphal, and Cameron Worden.

Ambassador / Additional Capsules: Gabriel Wallace

The Chicago Film Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. CFS acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.

Heartfelt thanks:
Brian Andreotti, Will Morris, & Ryan Oestreich of the Music Box Theatre; David Antos; Brian Beloavarc; James Bond of Full Aperture Systems; Fred Camper; Amy Crismer of Walt Disney Pictures; Justin Dennis of Kinora; Eric Di Bernardo of Rialto Pictures; Jack Durwood & Emiah Washington of Paramount Pictures; Steven K. Hill of UCLA Film & Television Archive; Satria Leech of The Revival House Perth; Christy LeMaster, Brennan McMahon, & Michael Wawzenek of the Gene Siskel Film Center; Heather McAdams and Chris Ligon; Jason Jackowski of Universal Pictures; Gabrielle Lyon; Tristen Ives; the Media History Digital Library; Brett Kashmere of Canyon Cinema; Jane Keranen, Douglas McLaren, & Ben Ruder of the University of Chicago Film Studies Center; Mike Quintero; Mike Reed & Nicole Muto-Graves of Constellation; Beth Rennie of George Eastman Museum; Lynanne Schweighofer, Andrew Whitmore, & Heather Linville of the Library of Congress; Jim Trainor; Nancy Watrous, Olivia Babler, Justin Dean, & Mickey Gral of Chicago Film Archives; Kathryn Wilson; and Hannah Yang.

And extra special thanks to our audience, who make it all possible!