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 stable of the Block Museum’s exhibition program.
Films By Date
Sep267 PM
Chicagoland Shorts Vol. 5
Organized by Full Spectrum Features this annual showcase of local work includes a dynamic selection of recent experimental, narrative, documentary, and performance-based short films
Sep276:30 PM
Félicité (2017)
The award-winning drama stars Congolese musician Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu as a nightclub singer who learns that her teenage son has been gravely injured in a motorcycle accident.
Oct37 PM
Ism, Ism, Ism: Dialogues with Che: Appropriations of a Revolutionary Figure
Images of Ernesto "Che" Guevara are the most contested and reproduced in Latin America, and this program explores ways this iconic figure has been represented in experimental films.
Oct47 PM
My First Film (2019)
A feature-length multimedia performance in which filmmaker Zia Anger interacts with media on screen and with the audience, using real-time text, spontaneous Google searches, audience directives, and AirDrops.
Oct107 PM
The Elephant Man (1980)
David Lynch’s second feature with an emotional landscape derived from its rich, atmospheric use of sound. Introduced by Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom.
Oct117 PM
Ism, Ism, Ism: Dreams of Suitcases and a Blue Lobster
A program of short films that explore cinema’s oneiric, disturbing, and irrational potential.
Oct167 PM
Sisters in Cinema: An Evening with Yvonne Welbon
To inaugurate a year of programming around the One Book One Northwestern 2019-2020 selection, "Hidden Figures" Block Cinema welcomes Chicago-based filmmaker Yvonne Welbon.
Oct177 PM
Nostalgia for the Light (2010)
This moving film explores Chile’s Atacama desert, home to one of the world’s most powerful observatories—and to the bones of hundreds of political prisoners abducted and murdered by the military regime.
Oct187 PM
Ism, Ism, Ism: Countercultures and Undergrounds
This program explores countercultural and underground practices across a range of local and global movements.
Oct237:30 PM
One Way or Another (1974/1977)
A film using a fictional love story between a man and woman from vastly different backgrounds to study the complexity of post-revolutionary Cuban society.
Oct247 PM
The Red Light Bandit (1968)
This delirious “Third World western” offers a subversive, New Wave-inspired spin through the trash heap of Brazilian pop culture.
Oct257 PM
Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror
A look at the alternately problematic and affirming history of Black Americans in the horror genre, in front of and behind the camera
Oct317 PM
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
The darkest shadow cast in this Gothic melodrama is the one cast by the island’s ugly history of slavery and colonialism.
Nov18:30 PM
Ism, Ism, Ism: Estrellas de Ayer: Latin Camp
Filmmakers in borrow an alternative reading of Hollywood stars, emphasizing queer nostalgia and excess.
Nov17 PM
Ism, Ism Ism: Recycled Cinema
Presenting acts of decolonization and critique through collages of appropriated images and audio, challenging dominant modes of representation.
Nov212:30 PM & 3 PM
2019 Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation
A thoughtfully-curated showcase of animation that features brand-new work, recent discoveries, and tantalizing retrospective selections.
Nov77 PM
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016)
The Block welcomes Toronto-based filmmaker Brett Story for two nights of her acclaimed documentary films.
Nov87 PM
The Hottest August (2019)
Brett Story’s newest film is billed as “a film about climate change, disguised as a portrait of collective anxiety.”
Nov147 PM
Spotlight on Undergraduate Filmmaking
This screening celebrates Northwestern student filmmakers with a showcase of recent work.
Nov157 PM
Whose Streets? (2017)
A searing, up-close and personal document of the resistance movement that emerged in the wake of the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by Missouri police.
Nov217 PM
Amazements: Videos by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby
For 25 years, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby have been producing one of the most singular and exciting bodies of work in experimental cinema.
Nov227 PM
Andy Warhol's The Life of Juanita Castro (1965)
Andy Warhol's loosely-scripted, irreverent portrait of Fidel Castro and his family.
Dec67 PM
When the Earth Trembled, or The Strength of Love (1913)
A selection of early films that survive purely by chance or only as fragments with live accompaniment.
Film Series
Made in Chicagoland
September 26 Through November 14
Block Cinema continues its ongoing series of screenings spotlighting the work of filmmakers from Northwestern and the larger Chicago community with two screenings that focus on local organizations that support diversity in media making, on-campus and off.
Pop América
October 24 Through November 22
Pop América, 1965-1975 presents Pop Art as a cultural dialogue transgressing the borders of nations, the boundaries of media, and the limits of “good taste.” The same can be said of these two films, made in Brazil and the United States, which speak to each other in languages borrowed equally from advertisements, news reports, soap operas, and the avant-garde.
Perspectives on Horror
October 10 Through October 31
This October, Block Cinema explores the history of horror cinema through a variety of critical and creative lenses. Pairing new documentaries and classic films with in-depth introductions and discussions, including guest appearances by celebrated artists and scholars, this series promises to shed new light on film fright.
Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America
October 3 Through November 1
Presented in conjunction with the Block'’'s exhibition Pop América:1965-1975, Block Cinema screens selected programs from Ism, Ism, Ism, a groundbreaking touring film series that offers the first comprehensive survey of Latin America’s vibrant experimental film history. Organized by filmmakers and curators/critics Jesse Lerner and Luciano Piazza as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time II: LA/LA initiative, these programs feature key works made between the 1930s and the 2000s across the Americas. The Block will host five programs from the series, and will copresent another six programs at venues around Chicago.
Hidden Figures
October 26 Through October 23
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.