Chicago History Museum
1601 N. Clark Street • Free Admission
Saturday, October 19 from 1:30 PM to 5:30 PM
HOME MOVIE DAY 2019
Co-presented by Chicago Film Archives.
Go down to the basement and dig out your Super 8 memories of that interminable trip to Idaho or that embarrassing 16mm footage of your mother’s rockin’ bat mitzvah and bring them to the Chicago History Museum on Saturday, October 19 for this year’s edition of Home Movie Day. Jointly presented for the ninth year in a row by Chicago Film Archives and the Chicago Film Society, Home Movie Day offers Chicagoans the opportunity to gather together and share their celluloid histories. Home movies provide invaluable records of our families and our communities: they document vanished storefronts, questionable fashions, adorable pets, long-departed loved ones, and neighborhoods-in-transition. Many Chicagoans still possess these old reels, passed down from generation to generation, but lack the projection equipment to view them properly and safely. That’s where Home Movie Day comes in: you bring the films, and we inspect them, project them, and offer tips on storage, preservation, and video transfer–all free of charge. And best of all, you get to watch them with an enthusiastic audience, equally hungry for local history. More information about this yearly, world-wide celebration of home movies at homemovieday.com
-coming soon-
Tuesday, October 22 @ 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre
JAZZ ’34: REMEMBRANCES OF KANSAS CITY SWING
Directed by Robert Altman • 1997
Don’t ask us how, but one way or another Robert Altman, patron saint of anarchist stoners everywhere for gifting the world Brewster McCloud and O.C. and Stiggs, once wound up directing an episode of the PBS culture-vulture staple Great Performances. (The series would get back to business the following season with Henry V and an opening-night gala from the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.) Jazz ’34 was conceived as an exploratory footnote to Altman’s 1996 narrative feature Kansas City, reusing its sets and some of its cast to fashion a memory piece based on the director’s boyhood recollections of his hometown’s hottest clubs. Harry Belafonte narrates, but mostly stays out of the way of the performances, which need no elaboration. Employing some of the finest jazz interpreters of the ’90s (including Joshua Redman, James Carter, Geri Allen, and David “Fathead” Newman) as stand-ins, surrogates, and reanimators of the ’30s sound, Jazz ’34 is a concert film of ghostly exuberance. Originally stuffed into an hour-long TV slot, Jazz ’34 was expanded slightly to a ‘theatrical’ version that never actually saw theatrical release in the US; nevertheless, the VHS release of the extended version was greeted by a lengthy celebration in the Chicago Reader from Jonathan Rosenbaum, who regarded this “awesome existential endeavor” as “the best Robert Altman feature in more years than I care to remember.” (KW)
72 min • Sandcastle 5 Productions/CiBy 2000 • 35mm from the Robert Altman Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archives, permission Sandcastle 5
Short: Betty Boop & Cab Calloway in “Minnie the Moocher” (Fleischer Studios, 1932) – 35mm – 8 min
Presented with the Jazz Institute of Chicago as part of their 50th Anniversary.
