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: $11 – $12

• The Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N State St — Directions • Parking
Tickets: $13

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

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

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SEASON AT A GLANCE

☆ = Technicolor Weekend August 22 – 24

☆ Add the schedule to your google calendar

☆ Sign up for our newsletter for screening reminders!

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Friday, May 23rd @ 8:00 PM
Skin, Inscribed – Contemporary Brazilian Hand-Processed Films
Attendees of the 2023 edition of Celluloid Now, CFS’s recurring showcase for working analog filmmakers, may have noticed a preponderance of handmade films from Brazil. With a steadily growing network of artist-run film labs servicing a healthy number of DIY filmmakers, the largest country in South America has quietly become a hotbed for analog experimental cinema, fostering a community of artists practicing a rough- and- tumble and totally punk form of celluloid materialism. Curated by Tetsuya Maruyama (whose super 8 short ANTFILM was one of the standouts of Celluloid Now 2023), Skin, Inscribed brings together a number of recent films to come out of this scene, utilizing a variety of techniques which involve the direct manipulation of the film’s surface and presented in one-of-a-kind 16mm prints.
Approx. 60 min • 16mm from filmmakers
Tetsuya Maruyama in person!

Limited Seating. RSVP required to attend.

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Saturday + Sunday, May 24th & 25th @ 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Japanese Matchbox Pinhole Camera Workshop w/ Tetsuya Maruyama
In this two-day workshop, filmmaker Tetsuya Maruyama will lead participants in making and using 16mm pinhole cameras using vintage Japanese matchbooks. Participants will have the opportunity to process the material they shoot during the workshop and watch it at the end of the second day of the workshop. All workshop supplies will be covered.

Registration is full for this event.

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Saturday, May 31 @ 2:00 PM / Music Box Theatre
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE
Directed by John Ford • 1946
Shakespeare in Tombstone? Assigned by 20th Century-Fox to turn out a new version of the well-trod story of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford delivered an unhurried, episodic Western that ambles from one yarn to another against the majestic expanse of Monument Valley. Each incident, from a church dance in resplendent sunshine to a barbershop appointment interrupted by gunfire to, yes, an oddly effective tag-team recitation of a soliloquy from Hamlet, plays like a tall tale recounted from the tranquil side of the saloon. (Variety huffed that “[a]t several points, the pic comes to a dead stop to let Ford go gunning for some arty effect.”) The barest summary suggests a more action-oriented story than My Darling Clementine cared to sustain: Wyatt (Henry Fonda) has a reputation from his time in Dodge City but no desire to bring his marshalling to Tombstone — until his brother is murdered by the cattle-rustling Clanton clan (headed by Walter Brennan, cast against type as a whip-wielding sadist). The Earp vs. Clanton conflict mostly hums along in the background, while the film focuses on Wyatt’s tentative courtship of schoolmarm Clementine (Cathy Downs) and his ever-evolving friendship with Doc (Victor Mature), an affection that remains mysterious to both men. Mature, who found stardom playing a caveman in One Million B.C. and remained typecast as a shirtless lunkhead, summons an extraordinary performance as Doc, a twitchy, tubercular secret cosmopolitan hiding out among gamblers and ladies of leisure in an undiscovered country all his own. (KW)
103 min • 20th Century-Fox • 35mm from Disney
Preceded by: “Shakespearian Spinach” (Fleischer Studios, 1940)  –  6 min  –  16mm

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Sunday, June 8 @ 11:30 AM / Music Box Theatre
ALIAS JIMMY VALENTINE
Directed by Maurice Tourneur • 1915
On Christmas Day, 1909, Chicagoans at the Studebaker Theater were the first to see a stage production of Alias Jimmy Valentine, which Paul Armstrong had adapted from O. Henry’s short story “A Retrieved Reformation.” A month later, the play about a debonair safecracker and his tempestuous path to rehabilitation opened on Broadway and became a sensation. The film version would wait until 1915, when New Jersey’s World Film Corporation was bringing stage successes to the screen at the rate of one per week. Robert Warwick starred as Lee Randall, a society swell who moonlights as bank robber Jimmy Valentine because, alas, he is cursed with talent: his sensitive fingertips can detect minute tremulations from combination locks. He repeatedly tries to return to the straight and narrow but finds his efforts foiled by criminal confederates, merciless cops, and the irony of fate. The movie version of Alias Jimmy Valentine had two advantages that the stage rendition lacked. First, from the perspective of verisimilitude and ballyhoo, it boasted scenes actually shot in New York’s Sing Sing Prison. (As a token of appreciation, the film screened at Sing Sing, with an inmate providing piano accompaniment, before opening theatrically.) More significantly, Alias Jimmy Valentine benefited from the extraordinary visual sophistication of director Maurice Tourneur, a French émigré who’d been working in America for less than a year. Finding odd angles and painterly lighting to enliven a familiar story, Tourneur established the contours of the gangster film in high style. (KW)
50 min • World Film Corp. • 35mm from Library of Congress
Preceded by: “The Narrow Road” (D.W. Griffith, 1912)  – 17 min  – 35mm from Library of Congress

Live musical accompaniment by David Drazin

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Tuesday, June 17 @ 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre
WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS
Directed by Mikio Naruse • 1960
In Japanese with English subtitles
At thirty, a single woman ponders: Is it time to get married? Or is it time to open a bar? Tragically, she’ll need a man to do either in Naruse’s slinky, sharp ode to a modern woman living a life fit for the Stone Age. Keiko (Hideko Takamine) — or as everyone calls her, Mama — considers her limited options as she climbs the defeating, seemingly endless stairs up to her dead-end hostess job at a Ginza bar. She’s surrounded by sleazy, unreliable men (suitors that don’t suit her) and hates alcohol. However, her stylish apartment is expensive. Naruse, one of the great chroniclers of women’s labor and lives, creates an unsentimental yet quietly devastating depiction of a woman with all the potential in the world and none of the funding. But the movie never feels too bleak: the film is modern and assured, a matter-of-fact story told in a hazy, dimly lit room to the sound of clinking glasses and Toshiro Mayuzumi’s jazz-tinged score. The artistic collaboration between Naruse and Takamine spanned three decades and resulted in seventeen movies. In them, Takamine portrayed women with all kinds of jobs — hostess, bus conductor, novelist, grocery store manager, wife — subsisting in a world created by men. Often, they are women who lack — whether upward mobility, familial support, education, money, or friends. With actual independence shapeless and just out of reach, what is Keiko to do? She takes it one step at a time. (RIN)
111 min • Toho • 35mm from the Japan Foundation, permission Janus
Preceded by: “Holiday Magic” (Heather McAdams, 1985) – 7 min – 16mm
“Holiday Magic” has been preserved by Chicago Film Society with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation

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Thursday, June 26 @ 6:00 PM / Film Center
LIGHTNING
Directed by Mikio Naruse • 1952
In Japanese with English subtitles
You’ve never met a more cheerful urban ambassador than Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine), who works as a tour guide on a bus and spends her days airily comparing the sights and sounds of postwar Tokyo to the old-world charms of Paris. Unencumbered by marriage, children, or professional anxiety, Kiyoko is obviously living her best life — and yet everyone in her family wonders when she’s going to settle down with the right man. Her mother, who’s been married and divorced four times and had a child with each husband, suggests (and suggests and suggests again) the local baker as a suitor with squarely “good enough” appeal. Both of Kiyoko’s sisters attest to the pleasures of coupledom, despite much evidence to the contrary. Kiyoko laughs it all off, breezily informing any interlocutor that men are just terrible. (Luckily, she can readily cite the example of her ne’er-do-well brother, with his slovenly, unshaven legs and his meager pachinko parlor winnings.) Adapted from a novel by Fumiko Hayashi, whose hardscrabble, lower middle class milieu was brought to the screen six times by Mikio Naruse, Lightning is an unassuming marvel, a work that teeters on the edge of romantic comedy but never succumbs. Kinema Junpo magazine declared it the second-best Japanese film of 1952 behind only Kurosawa’s Ikiru, but Lightning, along with the rest of Naruse’s postwar output, did not get distributed in the US and remains undeservedly obscure. Like its heroine, Lightning simply engages with the world, avoids shunting its characters into ready-made boxes, and looks over the horizon for fleeting release. (KW)
87 min • Daiei Studios • 35mm from the Japan Foundation, permission Kadokawa
Preceded by: “Safety on Our School Bus (Second Edition)” (Encyclopedia Britannica Films, 1980) – 12 min – 16mm

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Saturday, July 5 @ 11:30 AM / Music Box Theatre
A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS
Directed by Yasujirō Ozu • 1934
Early in his career, Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu regularly channelled the snappy verve of American commercial cinema, name-checking Ernst Lubitsch and Harold Lloyd and fashioning transpacific translations of gangster films and melodramas. (In the fanciful world of silent Ozu, everyone is a cinephile with a Hollywood sweet tooth, with posters for Our Dancing Daughters and The Champ hanging in office buildings and apartments.) Even A Story of Floating Weeds, an understated and seemingly culturally-specific account of a kabuki ensemble touring the Japanese countryside, was inspired by the 1928 carnival drama The Barker from American studio First National. In Ozu’s version, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto) leads a band of actors eking out sustenance and little more, cheerfully trouping through provincial theaters with leaky roofs. When they arrive by train at a quiet town in the mountains, Kihachi seeks out Otsune (Chôko Iida), the mother of the son he fathered on a tour many years ago. The son, Shinkichi (Kôji Mitsui), believes that Kihachi is his long-absent but fun-loving uncle, good for a fishing lesson and nothing more. When Kihachi’s lover Otaka (Emiko Yagumo), a fellow actor, learns of his clandestine meetings with Otsune, she orchestrates a plot to smoke out his secret passions. This simple, beautifully spare narrative demonstrated Ozu’s evolving craftsmanship and pointed the way towards a more idiosyncratic style that left familiar genre tropes, Hollywood or otherwise, far behind. The sturdy perfection of Ozu’s new style was confirmed a quarter century later when he remade the film as Floating Weeds, which, despite the addition of sound, color, and a seaside locale, repeated many of the same shots, gestures, and jokes with undiminished impact. (KW)
86 min • Shochiku Film Group • 35mm from Janus Films
Preceded by: TBA

Live musical accompaniment by the MIYUMI Project Japanese Experimental Ensemble

Sponsored in part by Asian Improv aRts Midwest.

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Monday, July 14th @ 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre
PIERROT LE FOU
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1966
In French with English subtitles
Given the half-century or so of his career spent bouncing between televisual experiments, incendiary collectivist agitprop, and narrative ruminations on the fractured state of culture, it can be easy to overlook that for a few years in the 1960s Jean-Luc Godard was considered a bankable box office prospect. The director’s 1964 announcement of his forthcoming adaptation of Lionel White’s crime novel Obsession gave little sense for how far afield he was about to stray from the era’s commercial cinema. By the time the cameras were scheduled to roll on Pierrot le fou, Godard still had no concrete plans for the production beyond a handful of scheduled location shoots and a cast which included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Godard’s ex-wife Anna Karina as the leads. Ostensibly guided by the source novel’s plot, in which a middle-class father abandons his family to pursue a relationship with their criminally-connected babysitter, Godard and his collaborators made the film up as they shot it, taking inspiration from the era’s political upheavals, Godard’s own personal and professional crises, and, inevitably, the films and art the director loved. The result is as unconventional as its technique, careening through a series of episodes between the unfortunate lovers Marianne (Karina) and Ferdinand (Belmondo) in which they petulantly argue about romance and philosophy, perform lo-fi musical production numbers, accumulate a menagerie of exotic pets, pantomime the colonial occupation of Vietnam, and, in a climax which inspired a 15-year-old Chantal Akerman to (cinematically) blow up her town, explode. (CW)
110 min • Films Georges de Beauregard • 35mm from Rialto Pictures
Preceded by: “Duck Amuck” (Chuck Jones, 1953) – 7 min – 35mm

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Thursday, July 24 @ 6:00 PM / Film Center
TEA AND SYMPATHY
Directed by Vincente Minnelli • 1956
This bruising melodrama follows Tom Lee (John Kerr), a keen but shy student with unusual sensitivities and “feminine” skills (love of poetry, ability to sew and cook) that immediately mark him as an outcast among his brutish male peers at their all-boy prep school. Tom takes solace in the friendship of a fellow lonely soul, the neglected wife (Deborah Kerr) of the school’s head coach (Leif Erickson), further inflaming the suspicions and insecurities of the men who surround him. Deborah Kerr, John Kerr, and Leif Erickson all reprised their roles from the 1953 hit Broadway play by Robert Anderson, while Minnelli took over the directing reins from Elia Kazan. The play was an explicit indictment of homophobia and rigid masculine ideals, but Hollywood was still far from ready to directly grapple with queer themes. Predictably, the Production Code forced Anderson (who also adapted the screenplay) to make considerable concessions, resulting in what writer Michael Koresky describes as a film that “plunges in and recoils from its own subject matter, resulting in a still-strange, heavily coded experience that’s neither here nor there—but which, thanks to Minnelli’s singular sensitivity and visually expressive style, remains a remarkable, compromised work of mainstream American filmmaking.” If you peer deeply into the resulting murkiness, Tea and Sympathy is still a tender portrayal of deep loneliness and moral courage, with the visual language of cinematographer John Alton’s lush and moody CinemaScope imagery replacing some of what was censored from the written word. (RL)
122 min • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer • 35mm from Park Circus
Preceded by: “Wisconsin Wildflowers” (Staber Reese, 1959) – 10 min – 16mm

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Sunday, August 3 @ 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre
EARTH
Directed by Alexander Dovzhenko • 1930
An old man dies, a baby is born, and still the wind ripples through the apple trees. The ancient, quasi-mystical connection between a people and their soil has been torn asunder: a tractor brings hope for a better way of life to the countryside, but the landed gentry oppose any challenge to their power. The kulaks orchestrate the murder of a young agitator, whose death sends the peasantry into a paroxysm of revolutionary rage and psychosexual fury. Seemingly inventing principles of montage and poetic embellishment that remain obscure and almost supernatural, Earth more than earns its lofty title, merging the cosmic and the quotidian. Alexander Dovzhenko’s final silent film, produced by Ukrainian studio VUKFU to spread the good news of agricultural collectivization and modernization under Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, has been celebrated, lambasted, and misunderstood from every possible angle over the last century. Was Dovzhenko striking a blow for Ukrainian nationalism and advocating for the folkways of a culture being plowed under by totalizing Soviet homogeneity — or was he putting a shine on ghoulish propaganda for a system that would soon result in widespread famine? Soviet censors denounced Earth as “counter-revolutionary” and “defeatist,” mandating extensive cuts, and curtailing the release. (Amusingly, the British Communist critic Ivor Mantagu dismissed any non-dogmatic interpretation of Earth: “Pantheism? No. Nature worship? Not at all. Sound Marxist dialectic: the union of opposites.”) Dovzhenko’s film remains unclassifiable, a dispatch from a society uprooting itself but clinging strenuously to its mythic inheritance. (KW)
75 min • VUFKU • 35mm from George Eastman Museum

Live musical accompaniment by Whine Cave (Kent Lambert & Sam Wagster)

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Thursday, August 7 @ 6:00 PM / Film Center
TIME AND TIDE
Directed by Tsui Hark • 2000
In Cantonese with English subtitles
Fresh off a disappointing stint in Hollywood, where he’d made two great (but underperforming) Jean-Claude Van Damme action flicks, the prolific Tsui Hark returned to Hong Kong ready to reimagine his filmmaking and what contemporary cinema could be. The result was Time and Tide, Tsui’s celebration of renewal and birth. In the film, Tyler Yim (Nicholas Tse), a naïve young man on the precipice of a new career as a bodyguard, attempts to embrace unexpected fatherhood. Nine months after the drunken tryst that changed his life, he befriends Jack (Wu Bai), an assassin and fellow father-to-be, though they eventually end up on opposite sides of an all-out gang war. The freewheeling film attempts to seize the helm of 21st century action cinema, taking the choreography of Tsui’s earlier wuxia films to a new and more hyperreal level, drawing inspiration from the work of his Hong Kong New Wave contemporaries and emulating the dynamic movement of video game characters. The film’s relentlessly frenetic and inventive style features a constantly moving camera, curiously quiet gunfights, gonzo editing, and maximalist set pieces. Twenty-five years into the new millennium, there have been few action sequences to surpass Time and Tide‘s apartment complex shootout centerpiece or what might be cinema’s greatest gunfight scene involving a baby. (This is in no way meant as a slight towards John Woo’s Hard Boiled.) Most of all, this movie is cool. It’s the type of film where taking a bathroom break is dangerous, because you might miss a new way to evade death during an explosion. (RIN)
116 min • Columbia Pictures Film Productions Asia • 35mm from Sony Pictures Repertory
Preceded by: Tsui Hark Hollywood trailer reel – 5 min – 35mm

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Wednesday, August 13 @ 8:30 PM / Constellation
Music of the Spheres: Films by Jordan Belson
Across dozens of films made from the late 1940s until 2005, Jordan Belson crafted a hyperspecific language of cinematic exploration, one connected to Buddhist spirituality, proto-psychedelia, and sometimes literal space travel — one as personal as dreams yet universal as the cosmos itself, and designed to be experienced only as cinematic events under controlled circumstances. Revered by notable peers like Stan Brakhage and Harry Smith, Belson (who’d trained as a painter) spent his life developing unique, experimental optical techniques distinct from traditional animation to illustrate his searching ideas; like a good magician, he declined to discuss his methods, often destroying the evidence of their creation once his synaesthetic visions were realized. Even in death (he left this world in 2011 at age 85), his works are carefully stewarded as immersive experiences, not distributed digitally, and theatrical exhibitions are rare. These films do not “exist” except in the moment of their projection, when sound, image, time, and the eager minds of viewers all combine to create something unknowable. (GW)

In this program we present the following works in 16mm prints:
Phenomena (1965, 6 min)
Momentum (1968, 6 min)
Meditation (1971, 8 min)
Chakra (1972, 8 min)
Music of the Spheres (1977, 10 min)
Infinity (1979, 8 min)
Total program runtime approximately 1 hr.

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☆ = Technicolor Weekend August 22 – 24

The Technicolor printing process involved transferring yellow, cyan, and magenta dyes one by one onto the film base to create the release prints shown in theaters, in a process analogous to offset printing. Originally developed in concert with the three-strip Technicolor filming process (discontinued in 1955), the dye imbibition printing process proved resilient, adapting itself to create stunning prints from single-strip Eastmancolor negatives.  Prints produced using this method were known for their deep, saturated colors, and the resulting “look” is effectively impossible to replicate using 2025’s digital or analog technologies.

Technicolor prints also have the archival benefit of extraordinary color stability. While the colors in an original print on Eastmancolor stock (the leading Technicolor competitor from the 1950s to the 1970s) would be completely faded to pink today, Technicolor prints  have color just as rich as the day they were released.

Although Technicolor printing ended in the US around 1974, the process was so beloved that it was very briefly revived from 1996 to 2001 (at incredible expense), during which time a handful of large studio titles were printed. The process was retired permanently when Technicolor was bought by the British media company Carlton Communications, rendering every surviving Technicolor print completely irreplaceable.

All of the films in this series will be projected from prints that were at one point or another saved by private collectors. They were intended to last only through their initial runs, but instead have endured hundreds of screenings, studio mergers, film exchange closures, and multiple private owners. These unlikely survivors offer us a view of what these films looked like before digital color correction and other modern restoration techniques, and are stunning examples of an incredibly complex industrial process that delighted millions.

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Friday, August 22 @ 6:00 PM / Film Center
☆THE BIRDS☆
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock • 1963
Hitchcock’s late classic could’ve been a wholesome pet store meet cute between Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren, but it unravels into an apocalyptic nightmare as their Sonoma County idyll is swarmed by thousands of birds, who descend on the town like locusts, only bigger, louder, and more bloodthirsty. The Birds spares no child, adult, updo, or body part from the feathered freaks raining down from the sky. With over 350 special effects shots combining live birds, mechanical birds, and the sodium vapor process, this Technicolor print just might pluck your eyes out! (TV)
120 min • Universal-International • 35mm from private collections, permission Universal

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Friday, August 22 @ 8:30 PM / Film Center
☆BLACK BELT JONES☆
Directed by Robert Clouse • 1974
In this heated blaxploitation flick, Black Belt Jones (Jim “Dragon” Kelly) takes on the mob to stop them from seizing the karate dojo run by his friend Pops (Scatman Crothers). Coming hot off his role alongside Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, Kelly exudes confidence, black power, and an indecent number of one-liners that will equip you to annoy your friends long after you leave the theater. In addition to being a great entertainer, Kelly was a trained martial artist, with at least one international karate title under his black belt before his acting debut. This slice of blaxploitation history is not to be missed, ya dig? (TV)
87 min • Warner Brothers • 35mm from private collections, permission Park Circus

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Saturday, August 23 @ 2:15 PM / Film Center
☆LILI☆
Directed by Charles Walters • 1953
Five years before Gigi, Leslie Caron starred as Lili, a happy-go-lucky French lass surrounded by lecherous men (and impressively crafted puppets) in Charles Walters’s largely forgotten, winsomely kooky MGM musical. Lili doggedly pursues a manipulative magician (Mel Ferrer), eventually lands a decent job at the carnival, and finds her niche in the troupe after her colleagues discover her earnestly conversing with the puppets as though they’re her friends (she cares quite deeply for them). Screenwriter Helen Deutsch was nominated for an Academy Award for her script; she later pitched the concept to Broadway, where it became the stage musical Carnival!  (RIN)
81 min • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer • 35mm from Chicago Film Society, permission Park Circus

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Saturday, August 23 @ 4:45 PM / Film Center
☆ARABESQUE☆
Directed by Stanley Donen • 1966
On the heels of the Cary Grant showpiece Charade, Universal Pictures and choreographer-turned-director Stanley Donen looked to replicate their success with another frothy continental romance-caper. Gregory Peck was cast as a kidnapped hieroglyphics expert with Sophia Loren as the woman who helps him escape certain death; their enthusiasm for the project carried the film into production, despite Donen’s growing distaste for its script. Rather than attempt to rein in its jumbled intrigues and inscrutable motivations, Donen opted to focus on the film’s visual design, bringing a dazzling and experimental flamboyance to action set pieces (including a bonkers LSD-addled bicycle chase and a deadly showdown during an optometry appointment) and otherwise-rote exposition alike. (CW)
105 min • Stanley Donen Enterprises • 35mm from Chicago Film Society, permission Universal

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Saturday, August 23 @ 7:45 PM / Film Center
☆THE PARALLAX VIEW☆
Directed by Alan J. Pakula • 1974
“There will be no questions.” In this tense and scrambling film, a headstrong news reporter (Warren Beatty) quixotically struggles to expose a sinister Kennedy-style assassination conspiracy. Pakula’s second collaboration with legendary lensman Gordon Willis (Klute, The Godfather) wedded the burgeoning genre of “American political thriller” to a severe, Antonioni-ish sense of scale, composition, and color — Beatty and other puny humans are frequently dwarfed by pale, unfeeling cityscapes and gargantuan modernist architecture in vibrant primary hues. Among the film’s other monuments: a small, stirring performance from the great Paula Prentiss that serves as the story’s emotional linchpin. (GW)
102 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, permission Paramount

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Sunday, August 24 @ 2:00 PM / Film Center
☆THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY☆
Directed by Frank Tashlin • 1964
It’s Jerry Lewis and he works in a sanitarium. What more do you need to know? Tashlin, directing the Maestro for the eighth and final time, delivers a blistering cavalcade of visual gags, aural puns, and hospital slapstick, with his signature cartoon-bred flourishes that (arguably) propel Lewis’s manic schticking to the level of High American Pop. The film occasionally explodes with garish chromatic touches as though it’s moonlighting as a test film for the Technicolor process itself. We must also single out for praise the title song, surely one of filmdom’s most bizarre, which is hauntingly crooned over the opening credits by Sammy Davis, Jr. Don’t find a gag funny? Just wait a couple seconds, there’ll be another one along soon. (GW)
90 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from private collections, permission Paramount

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Sunday, August 24 @ 4:30 PM / Film Center
☆MARY POPPINS☆
Directed by Robert Stevenson • 1964
Walt Disney spent years trying to convince author P. L. Travers to let him make a film of Mary Poppins, finally securing her permission with the stipulation that she would be a consultant on the production. The result is an astonishing blend of live action, animation, early animatronics, painted backgrounds, and myriad other practical effects. Beloved for its beautiful Sherman Brothers songs, the incredible performances of Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, and its 14-minute chimney sweep dance sequence, Mary Poppins may also be more timely than ever, a film which advocates for charity, humility, laughter, and common sense in a world which increasingly lacks all of these things. (JA)
139 min • Walt Disney Productions • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society collection at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, permission Disney

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

Ambassador / Additional Capsules: Gabriel Wallace
Additional film inspection: Tristen Ives

The Chicago Film Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. CFS acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council and from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events’s CityArts grant program.

Heartfelt thanks:
Brian Andreotti & Ryan Oestreich of the Music Box Theatre; David Antos; Brian Belovarac of Janus Films; James Bond of Full Aperture Systems; Edo Choi of the Metrograph; Chris Chouinard of Park Circus; Amy Crismer of Disney; Justin Dennis of Kinora; Jack Durwood of Paramount; Eric Di Bernardo of Rialto Pictures; Alexander Fee of the Japan Society; Rebecca Fons & Michael Wawzenek of the Gene Siskel Film Center; Raymond Foye; Bob Furmanek; Dan Halsted; Tim Hunter; Jason Jackowski of Universal Pictures; Dave Jennings of Sony Pictures Repertory; Gabrielle Lyon; Heather McAdams & Chris Ligon; Douglas McLaren & Ben Ruder of the University of Chicago Film Studies Center; Nicole Muto-Graves and Mike Reed of Constellation; Mike Quintero; Beth Rennie & Sophia Lorent of George Eastman Museum; Akinaru Rokkaku of the Japan Foundation; Lynanne Schweighofer & Andy Whitmore of the Library of Congress; Amanda Smith of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research; Tommy Jose Stathes; Kathryn Wilson; and Miki Zeze of Kadokawa Corporation. Particular thanks to CFS board members Raul Benitez, Mimi Brody, Steven Lucy, Brigid Maniates, & Artemis Willis, and CFS advisory board members Brian Block, Lori Felker, & Andy Uhrich.

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