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 – $15

• 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 7 – 9

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☆ Add the schedule to your google calendar!

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Saturday, May 30 @ 7:00 PM
RSVP Required
Erica Sheu (徐璐) : Material Language
Chicago Film Society welcomes Celluloid Now-alum Erica Sheu for an evening of films and projection performances. Prolific in recent years as both an artist and educator working in celluloid, Sheu has amassed a corpus of bewitching analog works which reach to the very core of sense memory. For her first solo showcase in Chicago, Sheu will be presenting a number of works (including past Celluloid Now hits Transcript and pài-la̍k ē-poo 拜六下晡) across what is perhaps the most projection formats ever included in a single CFS program: super 8, single-and-multi-projection 16mm, and 35mm in both motion picture and slide forms.
Approx. 60 min • Multiple film formats from Erica Sheu

Erica Sheu in person!

Presented in collaboration with SAIC’s Taiwanese Graduate Student Association

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Sunday, June 7 @ 11:30 AM
Music Box / Tickets: $11
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
Directed by Orson Welles • 1942
Back in those years when the 20th century was only a dim light on the horizon, the wealthy Amberson family reigned over the midland everytown they called home, the embodiment of opulence in an era when “all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet.” Such a dynasty, built on genteel custom and practical business sense, could never withstand the modern era’s hairpin shifts in culture and technology. As their friends and neighbors get used to calling the horseless carriage an “automobile,” the Ambersons face middle-class destitution. The tumultuous post-production of The Magnificent Ambersons has all but secured its own wing in the museum of Hollywood history: Orson Welles’s epochal follow-up to Citizen Kane, placed in the meddling hands of craven studio executives to mangle irreparably, its maker a continent away in Brazil, partying and directing yet another film he couldn’t see through to completion. There’s no doubt the original Ambersons cut was something to behold. The irretrievable Holy Grail of film culture, its totemic reputation alone is still enough to inspire sham investigative documentaries, costly A.I. reconstructions, and other episodes of desperate cinephilic madness. But even in its present, molested state, few films match it for technical bravura, caustic pathos, and sheer all-around magnificence. (CW)
88 min • RKO Radio Pictures • 35mm from Park Circus

Preceded by: “Wheeeels No. 2” (Stan VanDerBeek, 1958) – 5 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema

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Thursday, June 25 @ 6:00 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $13
I MARRIED A WITCH
Directed by René Clair • 1942
Veronica Lake stars as the embodiment of a mischievous witch’s spirit who returns to the mortal plane nearly 300 years after her death, intent on haunting the descendant of her Puritan persecutor. The heir to her vengeful desires and supernatural wiles is Salem’s reluctant gubernatorial candidate, played by a hapless but ultimately game Fredric March. Lake’s burst of stardom in the 1940s was short-lived, ending with her self-imposed exit from Hollywood and steep decline into alcoholism, but in I Married A Witch she’s at her funniest and most effervescent. Her presence as the Pepé Le Pew-like temptress adds fizz and sparkle to a film already rich with dreamy optical effects, gorgeous Edith Head costumes, and art direction by Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté. In the words of Guy Maddin, “Sorting through the career trajectories of those who worked on I Married a Witch makes me feel like an air traffic controller amid a strange confusion of spirits — phantoms arriving from far-flung corners of time’s oblivion to work together on one bedazzling movie.” (RL)
77 min • United Artists • 35mm from the Library of Congress, permission Shout Factory

Preserved by the Library of Congress and the Film Foundation. Funding Provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

**Introduction by Andrew Whitmore, Archives Technician at the Library of Congress.

Preceded by: “Day of the Dead” (Charles Eames and Ray Eames, 1957) – 15 min – 35mm from the Library of Congress
Restored by the Library of Congress with funding provided by the National Film Preservation Foundation.

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Monday, June 29 @ 7:00 PM
Music Box / Tickets: $11
2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1967
In French with English subtitles
During the production of 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard explained its raison d’être: “I want to include everything, sport, politics, even groceries.” After nearly 60 years and countless pages of critical hypothesizing, nobody has distilled the film’s subjects quite so concisely. Alternatively, one might describe it as a hermetic personal essay covering both the changing face of mid-century Parisian culture and the horrors of the American war machine, rendered in the language of popular television, comic books, and CinemaScope spectacle via riotous, eye-searing art direction in every primary color. With a plot inspired by a journalistic exposé on a supposedly popular side-hustle for suburban French housewives, the film unfolds over a day, following wife and mother Juliette (Marina Vlady) as she runs some errands, does a little bit of (weird) sex work, and eventually returns home to her family. Amid this wisp of a narrative, Godard connects, via his own whispered narration, the banalities of consumer culture to the international atrocities that keep it afloat, cramming in innumerable gags, quotations, digressive episodes, bleak suburban panoramas, and a haunting exegesis on finding galaxies in a cup of coffee. (CW)
87 min • Argos Films / Anouchka Films • 35mm from Rialto Pictures, permission Janus Films

Preceded by: “Qolga (Umbrella)” (Mikheil Kobakhidze, 1966) – 20 min – 35mm from the Chicago Film Society

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Sunday, July 5 @ 11:30 AM
Music Box / Tickets: $12
YOU NEVER KNOW WOMEN
Directed by William A. Wellman • 1926
The show business love triangle was a standard setup in silent-era Hollywood, but have you ever seen that story unfold among the cosmopolitan artistes of the Imperial Vaudeville of Moscow, who nonchalantly tour America as if the Czar were still ensconced at the Winter Palace? Florence Vidor and Clive Brook star as Vera Jenova and Ivan Norodon, “Russia’s Sovereign Conjurers,” whose magic act provides an ethereal dollop to a variety show otherwise dominated by El Brendel and his bespectacled goose. Brook “politely keeps out of the romantic life of the woman he loves, just doing his job throwing knives at her, until she needs him,” in the moony phrasing of film historian Jeanine Basinger. Leave it to rich heel Lowell Sherman to intervene and make an unscrupulous bid for Vidor. Director William A. Wellman generally affected a he-man air and earned his sobriquet “Wild Bill” with a series of hard-edged projects (Wings, The Public Enemy), but he was also capable of a sophisticated touch, evoking the insular camaraderie of professional performers with casual ease. (The script is based on a scenario by Ernest Vajda, the Hungarian writer who’d go on to contribute to many of Ernst Lubitsch’s musicals.) A beautifully designed and costumed production, You Never Know Women is a Fabergé egg among the run-of-the-mill gewgaws of contemporary romantic melodramas. (KW)
71 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from the Library of Congress

Live musical accompaniment by Robbie Ellis and Nicholas White

Preceded by: “The First Circus” (Tony Sarg, 1921) – 6 min – 35mm from the Library of Congress

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Sunday, July 12 @ 7:00 PM
Music Box / Tickets: $11
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
Directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger • 1946
When Royal Air Force squadron leader Peter Carter (David Niven) finds himself facing an imminent crash with no working parachute, he does what anyone would do: quotes poetry to the lady on the other end of his radio and asks her to polish a farewell letter to his mother. But providence and the stubborn idiosyncrasy of the English climate intervene: the conductor (Marius Goring) who’s been appointed to escort Carter to the afterlife can’t locate his body in the fog, and the pilot receives an accidental reprieve. Living again on borrowed time, Carter finds his airwave amanuensis — June (Kim Hunter), a radio operator from the US Army Air Force — and it’s love at first sight. But shouldn’t he really be dead after all? From this deeply romantic premise, Powell and Pressburger craft a work of maximalist cinema, with the quotidian hillsides of wartime England rendered in Jack Cardiff’s retina-scorching Technicolor while the afterlife gets the art-moderne “dye monochrome” treatment.  Powell would later describe A Matter of Life and Death as “a tilt at the documentary boys,” as if sweeping away an entire tradition of unvarnished cinematic realism with the insouciance of an eighteenth-century dandy.  The film is a genre unto itself, a mad swirl of delirious fantasy, celestial courtroom drama, imperial introspection, and visionary cinema. (KW)
104 min • The Archers • 35mm from the ConstellationCenter Collection at the Academy Film Archive, permission Sony Pictures Repertory

Preceded by: “All My Life” (Bruce Baillie, 1966) – 3 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema

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Sunday, July 19 @ 5:00 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $13
THE QUEEN
Directed by Frank Simon • 1968
“Bathing suit competition is the toughest. It’s right down to the nitty-gritty. No feather, nothin’, just them.” Shot over five days in the lead-up to the Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant of 1967, The Queen eavesdrops on a cadre of female impersonators as they primp, preen, sing showtunes, and turn New York upside down in search of the right wig. The pageant was promoted as a “satirical happening” and “psychedelic rewrite of Hellzapoppin’” mounted and hosted by Jack Doroshow, who held court as Flawless Sabrina. (“I’m 24 years old, but in drag I come across like 110, and I do this whole bar mitzvah mother thing.”) A priceless snapshot of a pre-Stonewall underground of drag queens, gay men, trans women, and performers (including Mario Montez, muse to Jack Smith and Andy Warhol) coming together and kvetching and kvelling for the camera as if their lives depended on it, The Queen remains an endlessly quotable documentary and wellspring of fashion advice. (KW)
66 min • Evergreen Films • 35mm from Elizabeth Purchell, permission Kino Lorber

Screening with…

MEET … BRADLEY HARRISON PICKLESIMER
Directed by Heather McAdams • 1988
Bradley Harrison Picklesimer is your favorite “redneck in sheep’s clothing,” proprietor of Club LMNOP, Lexington’s neighborhood drag bar with the best jukebox in town. This offbeat portrait film offers Bradley a platform to share his hairdo tips, his tragic family history, and his unfiltered opinions about everything from queer youth (“a social embarrassment on every level”) to Mommie Dearest herself Joan Crawford (innocent!) Initially conceived by Heather McAdams as a short documentary on Kentucky’s under-the-radar drag scene, Meet … Bradley Harrison Picklesimer grew until it became as expansive and unpredictable as its subject, an experimental collage festooned with Flintstones clips, hair cream commercials, and all the junkshop connoisseur’s details that make McAdams an irreplaceable filmmaker. “I used a variety of film stocks because I thought they looked cool and I didn’t plan very much out beforehand because I felt it would force me to be more inventive during the editing process,” recalled McAdams. “As a result, cutting this film was sort of like a bad LSD trip with Bradley as my guide, but one I really enjoyed.”(KW)
32 min • Dizaster Produckshuns • 16mm from the Chicago Film Society

Preserved by 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.

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Thursday, July 23 @ 8:00 PM
Constellation / Tickets: $15
Two Films by Germaine Dulac
Directed by Germaine Dulac • 1923 – 1928
With English intertitles
No other filmmaker of her era had a career quite like Germaine Dulac. Having spent her twenties writing for foundational feminist publications La Fronde and La Française, Dulac became interested in the emergent art of cinema, founding her own production company in the early years of World War I. Specializing in perverse chronicles of marital discord, Dulac’s early films bore a close enough resemblance to the cinematic melodramas of the day to bring her a measure of commercial success. Dulac’s films from the 1920s, however, count among the most daring and stylistically explosive of the era, the wellspring for a subsequent hundred years’ worth of radical avant-garde cinema. This program brings together two of Dulac’s most provocative and iconic works from this period. The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922, Colisée Films) is a scabrous portrayal of a disintegrating marriage, marked by disquieting daydream visions and constant, ironic threats of suicide. Featuring a screenplay by the transgressive writer Antonin Artaud, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928, Délia Film) follows a priest’s descent into psychosexual madness through a series of destabilizing, erotic hallucinations. (CW)

Approx. 70 min, plus an intermission • 16mm from the University of Chicago Film Studies Center

Live musical accompaniment by Where We Were (Erez Dessel – keyboard,  Beth McDonald – tuba & electronics,  Tyler Damon – drums)

Band bio: Featuring Erez Dessel on keyboard, Beth McDonald on tuba, and Tyler Damon on drums, Where Were We is a group based around close contact and deep exploration. Free to float between styles and textures, the band’s completely improvised approach keeps the music strongly rooted in the present moment. Their commitment to spontaneous composition pervades each performance, and their intensity, both in quiet and loud moments, is unmatched.

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Sunday, August 2 @ 5:00 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $13
I AM CUBA
Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov • 1964
In Russian and Spanish with English subtitles
“Amazingly poetic and terminally wrongheaded,” proclaimed the Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum when this cast-off artifact of Communist camp-propaganda was finally released to U.S. audiences in 1995. “Undeniably monstrous and breathtakingly beautiful, ridiculous and awe-inspiring.” After the revolution of 1959 put Fidel Castro in power, his new government partnered with the USSR for military support, food assistance, and yes, cinema. The Soviet government tapped Kalatozov, along with his The Cranes Are Flying cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky, to helm this co-production, in which four moral fables (set in Batista’s pre-revolution Cuba) unfold, all illustrating the urgent need for a socialist uprising. The film, despite electrifying camera movements and a uniquely bizarre high-contrast B&W look, was unsuccessful in both Cuba and the USSR — but eventually found a rabid art-house audience in America some thirty years later, after being championed by capitalist tastemakers Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. (GW)
141 min • Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC) / Mosfilm • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society, permission Kino Lorber

Preceded by: 1964 trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm from the Chicago Film Society

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☆ = Technicolor Weekend August 7 – 9

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 2026’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 7 @ 6:00 PM
Film Center /  Tickets: $13
☆ SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN ☆
Directed by Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly • 1952
A warmhearted look back at the period in the late 1920s when studios were scrambling to make the transition from silent films to talkies, Singin’ places a typical Hollywood mirror before a trio of plucky troupers forced to adapt to the unknown world of sound cinema. As in Grease or Dazed and Confused (both successful period pieces similarly distant from the eras they depict), the film puts forth a resonant vision of an age passing just beyond the edge of recent cultural memory. Filtered through the rosy postwar sensibilities of the then-present, Singin’ creates a false but irresistible pop monument which has all but overtaken the actual era it depicts. But the songs! Debbie Reynolds’s sunny flirtations saturate the cheerfully tender “Good Morning,” the platonic ideal of a morning-after celebration. Donald O’Connor leaves no gag unattempted in his breathless, bravura “Make ‘Em Laugh.” And top-billed Gene Kelly’s miraculous solo performance of the title song has come to exemplify all the optimism, pathos, and dream-magic of the American film musical itself. (GW)
103 min • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer • 35mm from the ConstellationCenter Collection at the Academy Film Archive, permission Park Circus

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Friday, August 7 @ 8:30 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $13
☆ HORROR OF DRACULA ☆
Directed by Terence Fisher • 1958
Dracula has been interpreted by a wide range of actors, from Udo Kier and Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman and William Marshall. But no one wore the cape quite like Christopher Lee, who returned to the role again and again with unmatched intensity. Horror of Dracula marks his first turn as the Count, a performance that reshaped the character into something befanged and sexier. Opposite Lee, Peter Cushing is a honed, relentless Van Helsing, grounding the film’s supernatural terror. Breaking from the black-and-white gothic look of Universal monster movies, Hammer traded shadows for garish Technicolor, fully exploiting the lurid palette to full blood-soaked effect. The result is lush, visceral, and unforgettable. (TV)
88 min • Hammer Film Productions • 35mm from private collections, permission Park Circus

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Saturday, August 8 @ 1:00 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $13
☆ MEET ME AT THE FAIR ☆
Directed by Douglas Sirk • 1953
Fresh off Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, Douglas Sirk turned to another scrappy musical, this one about an orphan on the run who joins up with a traveling medicine show headed by the charming Doc (undersung song-and-dance man Dan Dailey) and his assistant (a scene-stealing Scatman Crothers, making his Hollywood debut). Local do-gooder Zerelda (Diana Lynn) has focused her zeal on improving conditions at the orphanage and doesn’t think much of medicine shows, but that doesn’t stop her from getting tangled up with this one anyway. A lively slice of Americana filtered through the eye of German émigré and melodrama master Sirk, Meet Me At the Fair serves up romance, small town corruption, and showbiz hustle, with a Technicolor cherry on top. (TV)
87 min • Universal-International • 16mm from the Chicago Film Society, permission Universal

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Saturday, August 8 @ 3:30 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $13
☆ THE BUSY BODY ☆
Directed by William Castle • 1967
On rare occasions a film’s marketing tagline is accurate, and this is one of them: “All this picture has is SEX, GANGSTERS, STRIPPERS, A MILLION STOLEN BUCKS, 3 STIFFS IN A COFFIN and some of the other little Happenings in life.” Robert Ryan and Sid Caesar star as members of a Chicago criminal outfit on a wild goose chase for a missing dead body (a fatal BBQ accident victim) holding a pile of cash. Based on a novel by crime fiction master Donald Westlake, the film features some mildly ghoulish touches fitting of director Castle, beautiful exterior shots of ’60s Chicago, Dom DeLuise as a mortician, and a young Richard Pryor in his film debut. (RL)
101 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society collection at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, permission Paramount

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Saturday, August 8 @ 6:30 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $13
☆ THE GODFATHER PART II ☆
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola • 1974
Set both before and after the events of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster picture sequel is just as violent, devastating, self-serious, actually serious, and as full of life as its reputation suggests. Pauline Kael identified one reason we’re still so drawn to the Corleones: “the casting is so close to flawless that we can feel the family connections.” Technicolor delayed the decommissioning of their dye-transfer printers to accommodate the release printing of The Godfather Part II, a film which has the distinction of being one of the last films printed in Technicolor — as well as one of the longest. (JA)
202 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, permission Paramount

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Sunday, August 9 @ 1:00 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $13
☆ THAT DARN CAT! ☆
Directed by Robert Stevenson • 1965
Like most bad cats, “D.C.” comes home with other people’s ducks, sneaks into kitchens, knocks over dishes, and wreaks havoc at local businesses — but our hero (immortalized in song by Bobby Darin) also finds time to catch kidnappers. Hired as an informant for the FBI after bringing home a piece of evidence, D.C. is trailed by agent Zeke Kelso (Dean Jones) with the help of Hayley Mills, hoping to recover a missing bank teller and a suitcase full of cash. Disney’s funniest and most leisurely-paced live-action romp was directed with total conviction by Robert Stevenson (Mary Poppins, Old Yeller) and rings true for any of us who’ve had to answer for an only partially domesticated pet. The terrific ensemble cast includes William Demarest and Elsa Lanchester as nosy neighbors, Tom Lowell as the surfing-crazed boyfriend, Roddy McDowall as the duck hunter, and Dorothy Provine as the older sister who thinks the whole thing is ridiculous. She’s right! (JA)
116 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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Sunday, August 9 @ 4:00 PM
Film Center / Tickets: $13
☆ HATARI! ☆
Directed by Howard Hawks • 1962
After the “comeback” success of RioBravo in ’59, Hawks doubled down on his late-period style, bringing John Wayne over to Tanzania for another loosely plotted adventure pic in which, basically, a group of men (and one or two women) hang out at their very dangerous workplace and occasionally take breaks to perform extremely difficult feats. Here they aren’t flying mail planes in South America, driving cattle across the high plains, or defending a besieged Western jail, but capturing live African animals for zoos. Extended scenes of the team members navigating their sociosexual statuses at basecamp alternate with thrillingly photographed sequences of actual rhino hunts. (The title of the film, as any poster will tell you, means “Danger!” in Swahili.) Red Buttons shows up as comic relief, Elsa Martinelli provides a formidable romantic foil for the Duke, and Henry Mancini contributes an appropriately scattershot soundtrack, including the indelible calliope-driven “Baby Elephant Walk.” (GW)
157 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from private collections, permission Paramount

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Saturday, August 22 @ 11:30 AM
Music Box / Tickets: $12
A PAGE OF MADNESS
Directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa • 1926
By age 30, Teinosuke Kinugasa was already a cinema veteran, having broken into the business as an actor for Nikkatsu in 1917, playing in over a hundred silent films and directing over thirty. With his film credentials firmly established, the director formed the Kinugasa Motion Picture League and financed an independent production that would be photographed in Shochiku’s Kyoto studio. Working with future Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata on an original scenario, Kinugasa developed A Page of Madness, later described by critic Michael Atkinson as “a monster out of time, perhaps the most psychotic Japanese silent film ever made.” Set in an insane asylum where an ex-sailor works as a janitor to keep tabs on his wife who’s been committed there, the filmdeploys a panoply of avant-garde techniques (and techniques atop and within techniques) to suggest derangement and dislocation. A sui generis work that effectively treats the audience as just another inmate, A Page of Madness had little in common with the silent samurai pictures that otherwise defined Japan’s film industry. It opened in Tokyo art house theaters that played foreign fare and scarcely traveled outside of Japan until 1971, when Kinugasa discovered a print in a rice barrel in his shed and unleashed his radical fossil upon the world. A century later, it’s still ahead of its time — and ours. (KW)
71 min • Kinugasa Motion Picture League • 35mm from George Eastman Museum

Preceded by: “Seance IV” (Don Cooper, 1968) – 4 min – 16mm from the Chicago Film Society

Live musical accompaniment by the MIYUMI Project Japanese Experimental Ensemble

Sponsored in part by Asian Improv aRts Midwest.

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Monday, August 31 @ 7:00 PM
Music Box / Tickets: $11
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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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; Wes Archer; Brian Beloavarc; James Bond of Full Aperture Systems; Amy Crismer of Walt Disney Pictures; Justin Dennis of Kinora; Eric Di Bernardo of Rialto Pictures; Jack Durwood & Emiah Washington of Paramount Pictures; Bob Furmanek; Tim Hunter; Christy LeMaster, Brennan McMahon, & Michael Wawzenek of the Gene Siskel Film Center; Jason Jackowski of Universal Pictures; Dave Jennings of Park Circus; 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; Glenn KnicKrehm of ConstellationCenter; Elizabeth Purchell; Mike Quintero; Mike Reed & Nicole Muto-Graves of Constellation; Beth Rennie of George Eastman Museum; George Schmalz of Kino Lorber; Lynanne Schweighofer, Andrew Whitmore, & Heather Linville of the Library of Congress; Amanda Smith of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research; 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!