Block Cinema: Block Museum - Northwestern University
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Block Cinema

Block Auditorium

Block Cinema is dedicated to encounter, exchange, and learning through the art of the moving image.

The Block Museum is home to one of the region’s most innovative cinemas. Through its quarterly screening series “Block Cinema,” the museum explores the global past and present, showcasing film and other time-based media across genres, from classic to experimental.

This free, in-house cinema is dedicated to providing Northwestern, the North Shore, and Chicago a quality venue for film and to highlighting the diversity of voices and practices in the media arts field. Post-screening discussions with a filmmaker or scholar, are a staple of the program, providing a unique opportunity for audiences to gain valuable context about the works and offering unique insights into the creative process. In keeping with the Museum’s commitment to presenting art across time, culture, and media, media art is a staple of the Block Museum’s exhibition program.

Always free and open to all

Upcoming Screenings

Oct107 PM

Activist Lens: Bev Grant & Newsreel Films

Block Cinema welcomes lens-based artist and activist Bev Grant for a screening of two films that showcase the range of her artistic and political practices.
Oct117 PM

The Feminist Film Collectives of Cinenova

Co-presented with Cinenova, a volunteer-run distributor of independent feminist films in the UK, this program celebrates women-led film collectives of the 70s and 80s by spotlighting the works of the UK's Sheffield Film Co-op and the Jamaican Sistren Theatre Collective. Followed by Q&A with Charlotte Procter, a member of the Cinenova Working Group.
Oct177 PM

WILL (Jessie Maple, 1981) – New 4k Restoration

Jessie Maple's WILL (1981) is a tough but tender independent film about addiction, recovery, and second chances in Harlem. This landmark film – the first independent feature directed by an African-American woman – appears in a new 4k digital restoration from Indiana University's Black FIlm Center/Archive and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Oct185 PM

Background Echoes: Mexicanness and the Production of Race in Hollywood

Join us for a unique screening-lecture exploring the concept of "atmosphere" and racial ideologies in the production practices of archival 35mm Hollywood trailers presented by scholar Laura Isabel Serna.
Oct247 PM

STRAWBERRY FIELDS (1997) with filmmaker Rea Tajiri

Politics, family drama, and history collide in the story of a Japanese-American teenager growing up in Chicago in the 1970s and grappling with the legacy of her family's internment during WWII.
Oct257pm

WISDOM GONE WILD (2022) with filmmaker Rea Tajiri

Rea Tajiri's personal documentary WISDOM GONE WILD patiently observes and empathetically inhabits her aging mother’s cognitive decline. Tajiri will appear for conversation after the film.
Oct307 PM

No Master Territories: Feminist Short Films with Curator Erika Balsom

Scholar and curator Erika Balsom joins us for a trio of feminist short films—in Balsom's words, "moving image works by and about women, made in defiance of commercial norms, that seek to invent new languages for the representation of gendered experience.”
Nov77 PM

KONKOMBE: THE NIGERIAN POP MUSIC SCENE (1979)

KONKOMBE offers a vital document of 1970s Nigerian pop, featuring recently-reissued feminist musical trailblazers the Lijadu Sisters.
Nov87 PM

WEST INDIES (Med Hondo, 1979) – New 4k Restoration

A stunning new restoration of Med Hondo's politically charged musical, which presents a sweeping history of the Caribbean on a single set

 
"We’re very conscious of the valuable role that university cinemas like ours can play in the ecosystem of non-theatrical film. We look for opportunities to support and showcase the work of distributors who are expanding access to adventurous cinema, archives that are preserving endangered cinematic legacies and scholars and filmmakers who are promoting a more inclusive film culture.
We try to act as a conduit between that international community of passionate cinema workers, and diverse local communities at Northwestern and beyond, who see cinema as a way to encounter the world and exchange ideas."

– Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts, Block Museum

 


 

Explore conversations and stories from past Block Cinema programs