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NEIU – End of an EraDecember 20, 2024

This will be the Film Society’s final season presenting films in the Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University. After May 2025, NEIU will be renovating the Auditorium and its projection booth, which will preclude the continued permanent installation of our 35mm film projectors in the space. We are sad to see our residency at NEIU end, but we’re very proud of the programming we’ve done there over the past decade, and we are deeply grateful to the thousands of people who have made the trip to NEIU to see something adventurous and wonderful.

When we began our screenings at NEIU, the Film Society was still a very young organization. We’d only been around since 2011, and we struggled in our first few years to find a long term home for our shows. In 2015, a tip from a student led to a sponsorship from NEIU’s Communication, Media, and Theatre Department that made the Auditorium available to us on most Wednesday nights, along with space to install our film projection equipment. The CMT department gave us complete curatorial autonomy, which allowed us to make our programs rich and world class, studded with Chicago restoration premieres, introductions from visiting archivists and critics, and 35mm and 16mm film prints from a wide variety of archives, private collections, and Hollywood studio vaults. We also worked with the department to facilitate “NEIU Cinémathèque,” a course that gave NEIU students the opportunity to get college credit for watching movies like Pumping Iron II: The Women and making artistic 16mm animation loops. We can’t thank the NEIU Communication, Media, and Theatre Department enough for making all of this possible.

Don’t worry — we will continue to present regular screenings at the Music Box Theatre and elsewhere in the city. This will include the return of our popular Technicolor Weekend and Celluloid Now programs later in 2025. We are also already hard at work identifying new places to show movies.

Like a circus troupe schlepping heavy equipment and live animals around the countryside looking for an open field in which to erect the “big top,” we see occasional changes of venue as part of the natural course of show business (though it can be hard work). The loss of NEIU as a venue will leave a temporary gap in our programming, but the Film Society has at one time or another projected film at every venue in Chicago equipped to do so (and some that needed a little extra help), including the rooftop of a pizza restaurant, a parking lot next to the Metra tracks, and a mosquito-infested marsh. We’ve spent almost 14 years proving that with the right crew and a few well-oiled projectors, the audience will come.

But we’ll need your help! If you have any ideas for spaces we could use, we’d love to hear about it. If you have professional experience with commercial real estate, we’d welcome your advice. If you’ve been thinking about making a donation, we’ll need financial assistance to help us plan and move to a potential new venue.

We are excited to plan what comes next, and to continue showing movies to our amazing audience at other venues around the city. We’ll see you there!

View our current lineup.

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NEIU – End of an Era

This will be the Film Society’s final season presenting films in the Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University. After May 2025, NEIU will be renovating the Auditorium and its projection booth, which will preclude the continued permanent installation of our 35mm film projectors in the space. We are sad to see our residency at NEIU end,……
Research Notes: The Trial of Vivienne Ware

It can be difficult to fit into a short screening intro all the fascinating details our Research Associate, Mike Quintero, uncovers about the films we show — so we’ll be sharing some of his raw research notes here on the blog, in no particular order and without much editing, because it seems a shame to……
Research Notes: The Criminal Code

It can be difficult to fit into a short screening intro all the fascinating details our Research Associate, Mike Quintero, uncovers about the films we show — so we’ll be sharing some of his raw research notes here on the blog, in no particular order and without much editing, because it seems a shame to……
Research Notes: The Ladies Man

It can be difficult to fit into a short screening intro all the fascinating details our Research Associate, Mike Quintero, uncovers about the films we show — so we’ll be sharing some of his raw research notes here on the blog, in no particular order and without much editing, because it seems a shame to……
Research Notes: Variety

It can be difficult to fit into a short screening intro all the fascinating details our Research Associate, Mike Quintero, uncovers about the films we show — so we’ll be sharing some of his raw research notes here on the blog, in no particular order and without much editing, because it seems a shame to……
Research Notes: The Incredible Shrinking Man

It can be difficult to fit into a short screening intro all the fascinating details our Research Associate, Mike Quintero, uncovers about the films we show — so we’ll be sharing some of his raw research notes here on the blog, in no particular order and without much editing, because it seems a shame to……
Research Notes: Spawn of the North

It can be difficult to fit into a short screening intro all the fascinating details our Research Associate, Mike Quintero, uncovers about the films we show — so we’ll be sharing some of his raw research notes here on the blog, in no particular order and without much editing, because it seems a shame to……
Research Notes: Sudden Fear

It can be difficult to fit into a short screening intro all the fascinating details our Research Associate, Mike Quintero, uncovers about the films we show — so we’ll be sharing some of his raw research notes here on the blog, in no particular order and without much editing, because it seems a shame to……
Research Notes: Stony Island

It can be difficult to fit into a short screening intro all the fascinating details our Research Associate, Mike Quintero, uncovers about the films we show — so we’ll be sharing some of his raw research notes here on the blog, in no particular order and without much editing, because it seems a shame to……
Negative Cutter: Mo Henry

If you’re the kind of person who stays until the end of the credits in movies, you’re probably familiar with Mo Henry, who has worked as a negative cutter on hundreds of feature films from the early 90s onwards. Henry often manages a team of several cutters depending on the size of each film, and……
Will Oldham on Old Joy

In advance of our 35mm screening of Kelly Reichardt’s OLD JOY, we exchanged a few questions over email with Will Oldham, who stars in the film alongside Daniel London. Based on a short story by Jonathan Raymond, the film follows two old friends on a road trip to a hot spring in the Oregon woods.……
Filmmaking through Machines: Hal Hartley on TRUST

In advance of our screening of TRUST on June 10th, we exchanged some questions over email with director Hal Hartley about his early films and independent film distribution. JA: A theme I admire in your films is a respect for people who work with their hands and do technical things. Robert Burke is a mechanic……
Taking Auteurism Too Far: The Short Films of Jacques Tourneur

The mythos of Jacques Tourneur often begins with his innovative and atmospheric horror film Cat People, the talent fully formed from the very beginning. Of course, when Cat People arrived in 1942, Tourneur was thirty-eight and had been working in movies for the better part of his life. He began as an assistant to his……
Taking the Taboo Off the Cinema: A Million Bid

Very few people have seen Michael Curtiz’s A Million Bid (1927), but it’s an interesting picture, moreso than its meager reputation would suggest. The film merits barely more than a paragraph in James Robertson’s The Casablanca Man: The Cinema of Michael Curtiz and earns a passing mention in Alan K. Rode’s newly released Michael Curtiz:……
An Interview with Filmmaker Danny Lyon: Part II

I made this recording with my parents Danny and Nancy Lyon in March of 2017, sitting in their apartment on Avenue A in New York City where I was visiting for the occasion of my dad’s 75th birthday. This is Part II of a two-part interview. Part I can be found here. – Rebecca Lyon……
An Interview with Filmmaker Danny Lyon: Part I

I made this recording with my parents Danny and Nancy Lyon in March of 2017, sitting in their apartment on Avenue A in New York City where I was visiting for the occasion of my dad’s 75th birthday. Many toasts were made on the eve of his birthday party the night before, most of them……
Fantastic Prints and Where to Find Them

Even for those paying close attention, the conversion from 35mm to DCP on all of Chicago’s multiplex screens happened with very little fanfare. In December of 2010, Regal City North 14 was playing True Grit on 35mm, but by the time Super 8 came out in June 2011 all screens were DCP – some bitter……
2016 in Review: Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

What makes a movie? This is a richly theoretical question that’s often been answered by glibly practical guidance. The most common criterion is highly circular: if it’s exhibited in a movie theater, then it’s automatically a movie. Never mind that there have long been grey areas—misfit media whose very names suggest their dual identities, like……
David Shepard: A Lion (1940 – 2017)

I heard last week that my friend David Shepard was in the hospital with pneumonia again, but not to let word get around. Yesterday I learned he was, in fact, in the hospital with stage four cancer and had been taken off life support. This morning I learned he had passed on. My last letter……
One Movie Worth a Fight: Restoring The Front Page

In 1967, the newly-formed American Film Institute released a preliminary list of 150 significant feature films that were considered endangered, already lost, or thought to survive only in substandard copies. Lewis Milestone’s 1931 adaptation of The Front Page was among the titles at risk. Based on the reviews that greeted The Front Page in 1931,……
From Boardinghouse to Angry Birds: The Adventures of Misfit Media

If you’re at all familiar with our activities at the Chicago Film Society, you probably know that we place special emphasis on the act of projecting motion picture film. At a point in cinema history when digital video has become the exhibition “norm,” we pride ourselves on providing a link to a pre-digital past and……
Saying Something New: In Defense of the Topical Film

Is there any more dismissive response to a film than slagging it off as “dated?” Does a film lose its relevance merely because its clothing and hair styles are passé, its slang forgotten, its topicality turgid, its passions yoked to a particular time and place? It’s a charge related to, but ultimately distinct from, the……
Don’t Trust Your Local Film Programmer

Which version of The Devils are you going to show on Monday? We’ve been asked this question over the phone, in person, and on social media since announcing we’d be screening The Devils at the Music Box. And it’s a perfectly reasonable question, as there are at least four versions The Devils commonly cited: the……
Feel the Burn: A Dispatch from the Nitrate Picture Show

Like most people who grew up in a town without a dedicated repertory cinema, I couldn’t afford to be picky about movies or the way I watched them. I sought out titles that I read about and didn’t much care how I encountered them for the first time. A first-run movie at the multiplex? Great.……
Sit Down: The Vanishing World of The Flick

In 2012, when I was between gigs, I picked up a few shifts a week as a projectionist at a struggling movie theater, among the last in the city that had yet to convert to digital projection. It wasn’t an act of principled resistance or anything—the management was just too undercapitalized to acquiesce. I always……
“Enhanced in Entertainment Value By About 25% (In Our Estimation)”: An Enlarged History of Magnascope

Old Ironsides—the 1926 super-production, helmed by one of Paramount’s most important directors, James Cruze—isn’t much shown these days. It’s never been released on DVD or Blu-ray, though it was briefly available on VHS in the late 1980s, when Paramount mined its silent library for a 75th anniversary promotion. If you’ve come across Old Ironsides at……
Are You Ready for the Great Atomic Power?: Decontaminating Doom Town

Before tonight’s screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, we’ll be presenting a rare short: Doom Town. Call it a prelude or a grim appetizer to Tarkovsky’s vision of the apocalypse, but Doom Town is so compelling in its own right that it deserves a few words. Originally released in polarized 3-D, Doom Town will be……
Pause of the Clock – 20 Years Later

Until relatively recently, 16mm and super 16 were the mediums of choice for anyone who wanted to make a feature film with limited resources. With the glut of independent features shot quickly and digitally over the past five years, it’s hard not to get excited about recent features like LISTEN UP PHILIP, HAPPY CHRISTMAS, and……
ORWO at the End of the World

Depending on who you talk to, motion picture film is either dead, floundering, or very much alive. In the past year, Kodak has announced the discontinuation of several 16mm stocks. Deluxe and Technicolor have closed their main film production labs and auctioned off all their equipment. (We got a couple splicers, other forward-thinking institutions purchased……
Our 2014 National Film Registry nomination

If you’ve ever come especially early to one of our screenings, you may have seen this image on the screen: the black and white pattern of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers‘s “RP 40” test loop that we use to set the 35mm projector’s focus and framing. We’ve wanted to nominated it for……
Andy Warhol’s Magic Trick: The Disappearing 16mm Projector

It’s not fair, the journalist reminds us, to pick apart and censure his headlines; the reporting is his work, but the boldface entrée is not. Case in point: Randy Kennedy’s informative dispatch on the state of the Andy Warhol film collection in last Thursday’s New York Times was saddled with a most unfortunate headline: “Digitizing……
Who Will Save the Cinema?

The celluloid community received its first positive news in recent months when the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that a consortium of studios was negotiating a long-term arrangement with Eastman Kodak Co. to maintain the company’s film manufacturing capacity. The Hollywood Reporter followed up Wednesday with word that the deal was “all but finalized.”……
Remember The Alamo? Movies, Markets, and Misaligned Incentives

Film preservation is rarely a sexy endeavor, the fantasies of archivists themselves notwithstanding. Preserving or restoring a film often requires years of semi-scholastic drudgery—research, grant-writing, lab tests, hair-splitting assessments of continuity and color-timing. The reward at the end of the process is posterity—for the film, not the preservationist, who must be content with providing a……
Sucking in the Seventies: Re-Examining the Wondrous, Incoherent Decade

I’m pretty sure the first movie book I read cover-to-cover was Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a high-calorie, sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ gross participation page-turner that maps the ascent and deflation of the “New Hollywood” filmmakers from 1967 to 1980. For a high schooler, it was a simple story with an irresistible through line……
Crimes of Opportunity: Ben Hecht, Anti-Auteur

We’re all auteurists now. The notion that the director is primary author of a film, once a fringe idea debated in little magazines and grindhouse theater lobbies, is now the implicit premise of movie production, criticism, and advertising. When 3 Days to Kill is promoted as “A McG Film” and Pompeii is, contractually speaking, “A……
Punch Cards, Veronica Mars, and the Digital No-Wave

Let Us Compare Mythologies You’ve probably heard by now that the ongoing digital cinema conversion has fundamentally transformed the way movies are produced, distributed, and exhibited. Taken on their own, petitions and protests that aim to save 35mm film can look nostalgic, naïve, or simply Luddite. With 92% of American screens already film-free, this looks……
Beacons of Cinema: In Defense of Trailers

Now that the film vs. digital debate is winding down, the National Association of Theater Owners has turned its attention towards more pressing matters. Last month the exhibitor’s trade group issued new guidelines for movie trailers and related promotional material, effective October 2014. It was a canny move, seizing upon public sentiment that “trailers are……
We Are the 92%: The Wolf of Wall Street and the End of 35mm

No sooner had this blog observed that film’s death watch was leveling off than the Los Angeles Times delivered a bombshell: Paramount Pictures was the first of the big studios to drop 35mm, with Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues being its last title released on film. Henceforth, all Paramount titles would be DCP only, beginning……
2013 in Review: Whose Film Is It, Anyway?

Global Recession Saves 35mm Tradition dictates that this blog publish an end-of-year overview looking back on distribution trends and chronicling the fate of film exhibition. Compared to the past two years, we saw fewer signal events in 2013—no headline-grabbing bankruptcies, less saber-rattling ‘do it or die’ announcements from the studios, fewer (or, at least, less……
Cinema & Shutdown: What the Library of Congress Teaches Us About Public Life

In the short history of the Northwest Chicago Film Society, we’ve faced some formidable challenges. In our first season, a 16mm print of Silver Lode was lost in transit. In our second season, one of the Portage Theater’s 35mm projectors fell off its pedestal right before a show of Comanche Station. And of course, back……
Burned Out: The Nitrate Legacy

Alfred Hitchcock frequently cited Sabotage as the film that forced him to refine his technique: suspense above all—or at least, up to a point. It was a mistake, he later reckoned, to mix suspense too closely with sentiment, to tighten the noose while remaining indifferent to the neck. In the film’s most (in)famous sequence, a……
The True Story of Tinted Talkies: An Interview with Anthony L’Abbate

Our new season begins on Wednesday with One Hour with You. If you’ve never seen it, you have a wonderful, adult, emotionally resonant musical to look forward to. If you have seen it before—say, on Criterion’s budget-line Eclipse DVD or in a 16mm print at the old LaSalle Bank Cinema—you haven’t really seen it either.……
Western Vernacular

The Lone Consensus For box office watchers, last month’s failure of The Lone Ranger offered an opportunity for city slicker schadenfreude and quick-draw conclusions. Boasting a combined production and marketing cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million, The Lone Ranger has no absolutely chance of turning a profit or kick-starting a new summer franchise.……
What Makes a Print Archival?

Early on in my career as a film exhibitor, I fielded a straightforward and slightly irate question from an audience member. The night before, my college had screened a rare Maurice Tourneur film in a soft, middling 16mm print, which we had advertised, correctly, as an ‘archival print.’ Shouldn’t an archival print look better than……
Lance Henriksen and I

Guest post by Alexander Bohan Thanks to Chicago filmmaker, projectionist, film historian and NW Chicago Film Society volunteer Alexander Bohan for sharing these scans of Lance Henriksen’s copy of the Dead Man script (click on the thumbnails to enlarge), and for sharing his experience getting to know Henriksen through his films and in person. ……
Sylvia Sidney: A Lovely Crook for Reforming

Thanks to Neil Cooper for sharing this clipping with us.
How Many Reels Is That One Again?

We’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but can we draw any conclusions about a movie from its running time alone? More than just numerical data, a film’s running time often offers substantive clues to its presumed audience, production circumstances, and formal strategies. Speaking personally, I tend to be suspicious of any……
Chicago Cinema and the Glass Ceiling

Macho Criticism (From the Seat of His Pants) Last week WBEZ’s Alison Cuddy interviewed our Executive Director Becca Hall about ‘Chicago’s stunning lack of female film critics and abundance of female film programmers.’ This disparity should be readily apparent and familiar to any sentient person, but its roots and effects merit further discussion. For better……
Searching for Efraín Gutiérrez – An Interview with Chon Noriega

Much has been written of the enormous strides made by genuinely independent cinema in recent years. In 2004, nearly every review of Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation cited its “budget” of $218 and touted its desktop iMovie roots as a harbinger of things to come. Theatrical distribution for no-budget personal documentaries didn’t last long. YouTube would launch……
The Anti-Restoration of Portrait of Jason: A Conversation with Dennis Doros

When Portrait of Jason opened in 1967, there were no LGBT film festivals. Major newspapers and respectable citizens referred to gays and lesbians in appallingly derogatory language. Civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin had been shunted to the sidelines by Adam Clayton Powell, for fear that this homosexuality would undermine the movement. To be black and……
CITY STREETS in the Chicago Daily News

City Streets opened at the Chicago Theater almost exactly 82 years ago. Here’s the original review from the Chicago Daily News (thanks to Neil Cooper for giving us the article). Check out the mini-reviews for other films on the right!
Irving Lerner: A Career in Context

The Director as Commodity I couldn’t help chuckling over a poster glimpsed in the Cinemark lobby recently—an advertisement that boasted that only RealD’s 3D system allowed the audience to see the movie exactly “as the director intended.” You probably don’t need a stereoscopic slogan to recognize that director is routinely and reflexively held up as……
From the Bottom Up: Mostly About Subtitles

Aside from Pulitzer-winning source material or a dose of Merchant-Ivory patina, subtitles are often judged the surest indication of a movie’s pedigree. Dialogue that would provoke guffaws and catcalls in its native tongue, the truism goes, reads profound and poetic in subtitled subterfuge. The snobbism cuts both ways, of course. “It’s already possible to determine……
2012 in Review: No Compromise?

Last year we presented a two-part analysis of trends and achievements from the preceding twelve months of cinema. Here’s this year’s edition. — Ed. Nothing But a Man, the independent feature from 1964 about apartheid conditions in the American South, plays in a new print at the Gene Siskel Film Center this weekend. It’s worth……
The Spoken Cinema

Can anything else be said about The Night of the Hunter? After a BFI monograph, two book-length accounts of its production, an exhaustive Criterion Collection edition, and numerous critical appreciations, one fears not. Robert Mitchum’s monologues are quoted with giddy abandon and the spectral image of Shelley Winters underwater is recalled with undiluted emotional immediacy.……
Cinema By Other Means: An Interview with Drew Dir About Manual Cinema’s Lula del Ray

“Film is Dead,” proclaimed one Logan Square art gallery last February, referring not only to the imminent end of film manufacture, but more broadly to moment when ‘film’ lost its currency and accuracy as short-hand for a diverse range of artistic activities. If everybody’s shooting on video/digital/data, then why persist in applying the genteel label……
Get Lost

What do Upstream, The Devil’s Passkey, Mare Nostrum, The Last Moment, A Woman of Paris, London After Midnight, The Old Dark House, The Case of Lena Smith, and Little Man, What Now have in common?
Saving Vintage Animation One 400-Foot Reel at a Time: An Interview with Tommy Stathes

Several of the shorts in our Wladyslaw Starewicz program (Screening Sunday 11/2 at 7pm at Cinema Borealis) are coming from film collector and animation historian Tommy Stathes. We exchanged a few questions with Tommy by e-mail about some of his ongoing projects and his role in keeping film alive. For more information, visit Cartoons on……
William S. Hart, Repetition Compulsion, and Us

Every other week, we seem to get a new lament about the End of Cinema. Usually, the blame falls on modern Hollywood and its infantilizing comic book movies. Never before in the history of movies, claims David Denby in The New Republic, was so much attention and capital devoted to an endless succession of sequels……
The Old Way of Getting It Out: An Interview with Lucy Massie Phenix About You Got to Move

Introduction Everyone brings their own personal baggage to the movies, and I don’t think I’m alone in treating them too readily as literature. Much of the vocabulary we apply to film comes from long-ago high school English classes. We assume that every detail is a puzzle piece that leads inexorably to a deliberate display of……
Swap Meet Cinema: Sheet Music and the Movies

Can we learn about film history through non-filmic means? By most metrics, this week’s film, Thanks a Million, is not a very familiar title. It hasn’t screened theatrically in Chicago—or anywhere else, for that matter—in many years. I don’t know of any video release, and I can’t recall many TV airings. It doesn’t have much……
IB, Therefore …

Between fuzzy adolescent memories and Amazing Dreamcoats, getting a real fix on Technicolor has always been difficult. A dizzying example of total branding supremacy, Technicolor was not just a process but cultural shorthand for a certain kind of overripe, retina-scarring engagement with the world around us. (It was a Hollywood fantasy, and an irresponsible one.)……
Early Talkies: A Primer

Acquired Tastes If one wanted, for whatever reason, to sketch a dividing line between the casual movie fan and the serious cinephile, the early talkies are probably the place to do it. Their stars are unfamiliar—flashes-in-the-pan whose popularity is more mysterious and unaccountable than those that came immediately before and after. (Modern audiences instinctively understand……
Instant Cinema: Home Movies and the Avant-Garde

Since avant-garde movies first attracted a substantial audience in America under the auspices of indecency and subversion of established ideas about politics, art, society, and especially sexuality, many don’t expect that such films can also be exceedingly gentle, even reverential towards their subjects.
The Demon in the Machine: Approaching Tony Scott

“Sometimes miniature electric train cars simply will not stay coupled. At some crucial tunnel, curve, or grade, the locomotive charges forward, leaving uncoupled cars behind and possibly derailed. It often seems that extra exertion at switches, curves, and grades has something to do with the uncoupling. “Much, perhaps most, of the film footage that you……
More on Programming: Not on Video

Our sixth (and best?) season starts on Wednesday at the Portage with Hands Across the Table. The occasion affords us an opportunity to talk about a programming issue that’s usually not critically aired in public—the impact, presumed or otherwise, that a film’s presence on home video has on its viability in a repertory slot. Programming……
Resurrecting Stage Struck

If a major American studio falls in the forest, does it make a sound? To the average movie fan in 1956, probably not. For those who got their Hollywood news from Hedda Hopper’s syndicated newspaper column, RKO’s Stage Struck sounded like business as usual, with casting news and production leaks coming at regular intervals. Early……
Who Wants To See Old Movies?

Last week the Los Angles Times published an unusual op-ed about young peoples’ attitudes towards movies from Neal Gabler, the writer responsible for such insightful social histories as An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. I call the article unusual not because its topic is especially exotic (more on that in a……
Moving Pictures That Move: House of Bamboo in CinemaScope

Would some films not exist at all but for their aspect ratios? Put another way: although we tend now to think of aspect ratios as somewhat perfunctory aesthetic choices made during the preproduction process, the equation was almost exactly reversed at the dawn of the widescreen era. The shape of the screen was the engine……
Invasion of the Aspect Ratios

This week’s feature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, has long been regarded as a political hot potato. Like High Noon, it’s either a preachment for vigilance in the face of a Communistic menace or a cautionary allegory of a conformist overreaction to that selfsame menace. But for a certain kind of cinephile, the aspect ratio……
The Cinema-Century

In 1995, cinema celebrated a distinctly ambivalent centenary, with most activity occurring at the intersection of Europe’s cinematheques, universities, and state-funded production centers. The collective commemoration yielded renewed scholarship on early cinema and even a few productions, such as the omnibus Lumière et compagnie and the BFI-commissioned ‘Century of Cinema’ documentary series. (Stateside, we made……
Radical Spinach: Wild Boys of the Road

Who was this movie made for? Often the answer is obvious enough (housewives, teenage boys, the Friday night drive-in bumpkin, the half-conscious grindhouse denizen, etc.), but in some special cases, the interrogation itself opens up and deepens the mystery of the film in question. In those instances, the absence of a readily identifiable target audience……
What Reanimated Russian Dog Heads Can Teach Us About Programming: The Legacy of Amos Vogel (1921-2012)

Last week’s news of Amos Vogel’s death, at 91, brought the expected—and deserved—tributes for the enormous influence of two ventures that he co-founded: Cinema 16, the New York-based film society that ran from 1947 to 1963, and the New York Film Festival, which Vogel programmed from 1963 to 1968. (In these ventures, equal credit must……
Programming: Selecting/Unselecting

The Northwest Chicago Film Society is starting its fifth season this Wednesday with a 35mm print of The Trouble with Harry, a film that has the strange distinction of usually being regarded as ‘minor Hitchcock’ despite the fact that most everyone quite likes it, especially around these parts. After that, we’re embarking on a collaborative……
Waiting to See Au hasard Balthazar: The Case for Snoozing and Other Bad Behavior in the Movie Theater

Bill Everson, close friend of many decades, writer, historian and teacher, at a film festival announced that his notion of hell would be to have all the films in the world but no projector. My own hell would be to have a projector and all the films but no one around to see them with……
‘A Mental and Emotional Red Sea’: The Ten Commandments (1923)

Tonight we’ll be screening an original IB Technicolor 35mm print of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments at the Portage. This 1956 epic is unequalled in its elemental power—its confusing mix of knotty, alien carnality and religious fervor has rightly frightened generations of children. (It’s also sufficiently iconic and hip enough to earn a nod……
You Ain’t Done Nothing If You Ain’t Been Called a Red

When Reds was released in late 1981, its admirers tended to downplay its political dimension. It was a sweeping romance that happened to be about Communists—a perhaps necessary bluff (or a revealing delusion) after American politics had taken a sharp swing towards the right. “It is that personal, human John Reed that Warren Beatty’s ‘Reds’……
Is a Film More than the Sum of Its Reels?

Sometimes even I wish that the digital conversion would just hurry itself up, if only so that we could forever forsake the journalistic convention of punning on matters of real and reel. You know, or could make up, the headlines: Professor examines reel history, Local woman finds reel love, Reel inflation fears send real a-reeling.……
Closed City: Give Us This Day

What do they call this place we are going to? Paradise. No, I mean, other people. Oh, they call it Brooklyn. What to do with a picture like Give Us This Day? For one thing, it stands up very well as a domestic drama, a successor in certain ways to King Vidor’s The Crowd. It’s……
Programming: How to Do Things with Films

Those of us who put in full-time hours (and often more) in the repertory cinema game are sometimes apt to lose sight of just how limited our ‘specialty aud’ looks these days. Old movies, once a staple of theater bills, are now relegated to a handful of screens. When was the last time a studio……
“…but I can’t be Sherlock Holmes”

Spend the night with Sherlock Holmes Hold me tight like Sherlock Holmes Just pretend I’m Sherlock Holmes … I can dance like Sherlock Holmes I can sing like Sherlock Holmes But I can’t be Sherlock Holmes. It’s no fresh insight to declare the 1960s the most schizophrenic and unsatisfying decade in Hollywood history. It’s certainly……
Forty Years of Film Preservation: A Conversation with David Shepard

This week we’ll be screening So’s Your Old Man, one of the finest examples of the elegant craft that characterizes Paramount Pictures’ silent output. Along with Universal Studios, they’re celebrating their one-hundredth anniversary this year. These days that means reissuing library chestnuts on spiffy new Blu-ray editions, but this level of attention to corporate heritage……
2011 in Review, Part II: Challenges

Earlier this month we offered a review of the seismic shifts in exhibition that characterized the last year. This week we offer a personal assessment of the films themselves. Moviegoing is most exasperating at the end of the year. The anointed awards contenders trickle out and carry with them a sense of obligation. I wind……
The Living Newspaper: …one third of a nation… from Stage to Screen

In 1939, sociologist Margaret Farrand Thorp called the movies “the vampire art” and it’s not difficult to see where she’s coming from. With Hollywood at the height of its powers (economic, cultural, political), everything bowed before the movies. They cannibalized and superseded competing media with finesse. Screen rights to big novels were snatched up before……
2011 in Review, Part I: Confusions

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 End of The Village Voice and the Future of Film Criticism?

By now we’re sure you’ve heard that the Village Voice has laid off J. Hoberman, senior film critic since 1988 and a regular Voice contributor since 1977. This is a devastating decision, but not entirely an unexpected one. After all, the Voice has also blithely sacked Robert Christgau, Nat Hentoff, and a number of other……
Sullivan’s Travels: A Very Serious Film, Not to Be Taken Too Seriously

Most every account of Sullivan’s Travels describes the movie as being something between autobiography and artist’s testament. It’s easy to see why: the central character, John L. Sullivan, is a comedy director whose string of uncomplicated hits has pleased the studio but left the man deeply unsatisfied. Sullivan sets out to make his first serious……
The Projection Booth, the Radical Seat

Recently, David Bordwell devoted a post on his blog to a crucial but undervalued question: where do you sit in the movie theater? Speaking for myself, I can’t fathom sitting anywhere but the first five or six rows, making some allowance, of course, for the design of the space. Many first and second row seats……
If I Had a Million: Paramount’s 99 Percent

Most people talk about movies on the basis of stars, directors, plots, sometimes genres. In some ways, though, the surest indicator of tone, style, and resonance, if not overall quality, is the production company. Film programmers tend to think about this rather often. More than we like to acknowledge, repertory screenings are dictated by the……
The Sudden Death and Life of Film

The emulsion is on the wall, so to speak. Film is finished as a mainstream exhibition format after more than a century. Roger Ebert, a long-time video projection skeptic, proclaimed as much a little over a week ago. One can see where he’s coming from. High-end digital projectors have overtaken 35mm in the multiplexes. Kodak……