A pair of Block Cinema screenings that might seem unrelated at first glance share a common inspiration: the films of David Lynch. Loosely inspired by and programmed in collaboration with Northwestern School of Communication Professor Jacob Smith’s course Media and the Environment: Meet David Lynch, The Block’s presentation of The Black Stallion (Ballard, 1979) and Avant-Garde Apocalypse: The End (Maclaine, 1953) and 23rd Psalm Branch (Brakhage, 1966) draw on lesser-explored avenues of the celebrated artist’s collaborations and inspirations.  

“To what extent are collaborators responsible for the Lynchian authorial signature?” Smith said. “It makes us wonder about the nature of authorship and collaboration in film.” 

That question animates much of the focus of Smith’s course on Lynch, and it’s the reason he finds The Black Stallion a useful teaching tool. While directed by Carroll Ballard from the children’s book by Walter Farley, the film features an immersive soundscape reminiscent of the sonic worlds of Lynch’s early films and crafted by a frequent partner in the early portions of his career, Alan Splet. Splet worked with Lynch on his first four features, Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), and Blue Velvet (1986). And his sonic signature is recognizable in The Black Stallion in a way that Smith finds useful for thinking about authorship and sound work more generally.  

“There are particular scenes in it that suddenly very much feel like we’ve moved into this very distinctive tone and atmosphere that we associate with a David Lynch film,” Smith said. 

Smith previously collaborated with Block Cinema to screen The Elephant Man and Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954) with sound designer Gary Rydstrom, and Electro-Pythagoras (a portrait of Martin Bartlett) (Fowler, 2017) and Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (Costin, 2019) as part of Sonic Signature: Approaches to Film Sound. 

“Whenever I know what I’m teaching for the year, I always stop and think about how there might be some kind of partnership or spinoff event with The Block,” he said. “It’s always nice to have a class bleed out of the classroom.”  

Smith had wanted to screen The Black Stallion at The Block since before the pandemic. Programming with Block Cinema, he said, is both an enriching opportunity for collaboration and a chance to pool resources and aims towards engaging a broader audience. If Smith wants to give his students a chance to see The Black Stallion in the best viewing environment possible, programming it with The Block allows the Northwestern and Chicagoland communities access, too, and collaboration with The Block also often means the ability to bring in guest speakers for lectures and Q&As. 

“It’s one of the ways that we like to work with faculty in a way that’s generative,” said Block Museum Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts Michael Metzger. “Sometimes it’s about presenting a film that’s being directly taught in a class, and sometimes it’s about giving students an opportunity to go outside of the syllabus and find points of connection with the work that’s being taught that are productive and interesting.”  

The other program, Avant-Garde Apocalypse, grew out of an idea to screen the famed eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, a bravura journey into the formal and narrative beyond that sees Lynch returning to a bevy of experimental influences across hypnotic (and largely silent) passages that ruminate on the atomic bomb, the genesis of good and evil, and his characters’ pasts. The most famous sequence – and the entrypoint into the episode’s transformative back half – features a recreation of the Trinity Test, the first test denotation of an atomic bomb in White Sands, New Mexico.  

Twin Peaks: The Return: Part 8 (Lynch, 2017)

Where the former program aligned with Smith’s interest in sound design, the latter ties to Metzger’s abiding love of experimental cinema.  

“I was excited to particularly try to do something that might relate to the notorious eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return,” Metzger said. “For me, as a great fan of David Lynch’s work, that episode was profoundly impactful both just because it’s such a stunning piece of filmmaking, but also because it seemed to really draw on a history of avant-garde cinema that has always been somewhat of a kind of early influence when you look at some of his early shorts and films like The Grandmother and Eraserhead.” 

Both programs exemplify Block Cinema’s approach to programming and ability to offer uniquely rewarding moviegoing experiences to its community. Where another cinema might have screened more commonly discussed reference points to Lynch’s cinema like Sunset Boulevard (referenced in Twin Peaks and echoed by Mulholland Drive), Persona (a commonly cited inspiration for Mulholland Drive), or the horror films of James Whale (potential inspirations for The Elephant Man), this pair of programs explore less traveled paths through Lynch’s cinema. 

“I think for us these two programs really reflect the range of what we can do at The Block,” Metzger said. “We can show films which are sort of adored classics of all ages cinema like The Black Stallion and we can show classics, but less frequently shown films, like The End and 23^rd Psalm Branch that are quite challenging and where we’re one of the few venues that wants to go out of its way to facilitate an encounter with these films in this format.” 

In offering both programs, it was important to the Block Cinema team to offer them in the best quality possible. The End will be shown on a 16mm print and 23^rd Psalm Branch in its rarely exhibited original 8mm format. Metzger noted in his introduction for The Black Stallion that Block Cinema was unable to find a 35mm print of the film but was pleased with the quality of the digital restoration shown.  

For its May 30 screening of the films, Block Cinema was able to secure a 16mm print of The End and an 8mm print of 23^rd Psalm Branch. The latter is most often exhibited in a 16mm blowup made by Brakhage in 1978. Both films will be presented in their original formats, an endeavor that required extra effort and preparation for Block Cinema’s programmers.  

To exhibit 23^rd Psalm Branch, Block Cinema will bring in an outside projector and projectionist. While the museum’s projection booth is equipped to project films digitally and on 16mm and 35mm film, exhibiting smaller gauges requires setting up a projector in the cinema itself. 

For this program, Chicago-based projectionist, filmmaker, and librarian Josh Mabe will project 23^rd Psalm Branch on a projector borrowed from local filmmaker Karen Johannesen. Mabe and Johannesen previously collaborated to run Chicago 8, a small-gauge film festival founded in 2011 by Mabe, Johannesen, and filmmaker Jason Halprin. Mabe recently projected an 8mm shorts program for Humboldt Park’s Sweet Void microcinema. 

“Thankfully Chicago has access to a couple of those through true believers and small-gauge filmmakers who put a lot of effort into keeping the formats alive,” Mabe said. 

In addition to showing 23rd Psalm Branch on its original format, presenting it on 8mm film will bring sound into an otherwise silent experience: the hum of the projector, the sound of the projectionist changing reels, and other reminders that the film’s presenter is working from the same space as the audience. 

That experience might be more intimate – in keeping with the smaller scale of 8mm projection – and truer to the way 23^rd Psalm Branch would have originally been exhibited, but it will also provide a bit of comfort, easing the experience of watching such an overwhelming film. 

“This isn’t so much about fetishizing the original or attempting to take us back to the moment when this film was made, as much as it is recognizing that for this moment and for the experiences and feelings that our audiences are going to be bringing in with them to watch it, that something a little bit more humble, something a little more intimate, something not so overwhelming is going to provide a more meaningful experience,” Metzger said. 

Presenting the two films in these formats required drawing on an array of local knowledge and connections. Block Cinema borrowed a print of The End from local critic and artist Fred Camper, who acquired a print of the film – one of his favorites – in case access to it ever became limited. Camper has also written extensively about Brakhage, including on optimal presentation of 23^rd Psalm Branch. 

“One of the things that’s exciting about this program is that we’re drawing on a real wealth of local knowledge about these two films,” Metzger said. 

That knowledge will allow Block Cinema to present the film not only in its rarely screened original format, but according to Brakhage’s standards for projecting the film. On his website, Camper writes that 23^rd Psalm Branch “has been consistently projected contrary to the maker’s original intent for much of the last four decades.” 

According to Camper, who projected the film for Brakhage at its world premiere, the filmmaker gave instructions to readjust the frameline only at the start of its first and third reels, allowing the image to drift between them. “Viewers often wrongly assume there’s a problem with the projector,” he notes in a 2006 review of the film for the Chicago Reader. Because of the difference in formats, observing these instructions is only possible when screening the film on 8mm. To be able to do so at all is exceedingly rare; to Metzger’s knowledge the film has not been screened in that format in North America since 2003. 

“We’ve conferred with experts and devised an approach to projection that is as close to Brakhage’s specifications as possible,” he said. 

Finding a print with which to accomplish that proved more difficult. Patrick Friel, Columbia College Adjunct Professor of Instruction, aided in the search. One connection had a print but sold it decades ago; another, a film programmer in San Francisco, had one but said it had been damaged the last time it was projected; another still had purchased a copy directly from Brakhage’s wife Marilyn when she sold prints from his collection after his passing in 2003, but had donated it to the Austrian Film Musem. 

Uncertain that they would be willing to loan the print for outside exhibition, Friel contacted the museum to make the case for Block Cinema’s planned program. Likely because of The Block’s connection to the donor – a former Block Cinema programmer himself – they said yes. Block Cinema also had to confirm with Marilyn that the 8mm print it wished to screen had not faded, as had later copies of the film on more fade-prone stock.  

“We’re not only showing them both on film in the formats that they were shot in, but we’re showing probably the best possible copies that are obtainable at this point,” Friel said.  

For Metzger, it wasn’t only a matter of wanting to provide the best experience possible for attendees, there was also a sense that Chicago was one of the only places in the world where a program like this might be possible.  

“It’s one of those things that I felt could only happen in a few places in the world, and Chicago has the resources, the infrastructure, and the knowledge to present this film in this format,” he said.