You might get the impression from the films we program at the Northwest Chicago Film Society that we aren’t especially interested in new cinema. Actually, though, we don’t show films from the 1930s to retreat into an uncomplicated past, to shut ourselves off from the present. If anything, we’re often interested in these films for the way they challenge our complacency about received history (of cinema and of society) and the trite frameworks that homogenize cultural experience.
To that end, we have a lot to say about this year’s movies, too.
Just what it meant to go to the movies in 2011 is hardly straight-forward. The irreversible shift from 35mm projection to wholly digital presentations continued apace, with digital penetration breaking fifty percent of American screens sometime in the first half of 2011. We have much to say about the digital conversion and its ideological implications elsewhere, but let’s focus on its most salient results.
