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Block Cinema

Block Auditorium

The Block Museum is home to one of the region’s most innovative cinemas. Through its quarterly screening series “Block Cinema,” the museum offers a balanced and expansive program that presents film and other time-based media across genres, from classic to experimental, with a global perspective.

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.

Films By Date

May284 PM CST

Online Event – Desktop Cinema Working Group: New Digital Ecologies

The Block inaugurates its desktop cinema screening series with Ben Mendelsohn's audacious documentary As If Sand Were Stone...(2019) and select episodes from Inhabitant TV's innovative Portuguese web series "What is Deep Sea Mining?" 

Past Cinema

Film Series

Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures

January 31 Through February 27
Drawing on the example of the 2019–2020 One Book One Northwestern selection, Margot Lee Shetterly’s "Hidden Figures," Block Cinema presents a yearlong series celebrating the history of women of color behind the camera.
Morning Will Come: Modernity in Indian Cinema

Morning Will Come: Modernity in Indian Cinema

January 24 Through March 13
This series, presented as a complement to "Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection," features seminal classics of Indian cinema that have rarely been projected in the United States.
Sonic Signature: Approaches to Film Sound

Sonic Signature: Approaches to Film Sound

February 13 Through March 12
These two films– one, an experimental biography of a pioneer of experimental music, the other, an invaluable primer on the history of sonic innovation in cinema–offer vastly different understandings of the possibilities of the soundtrack.
Selections from the Golestan Film Workshop

Selections from the Golestan Film Workshop

February 6 Through February 12
The Golestan Film Workshop was a collective of leftist Iranian artists that produced commissioned films in the 1950s and 60s. This series includes recent restorations of these signature works of Iranian modernist cinema.