Projecting the Future: Block Cinema at 25 celebrates a milestone with a year of special programs and new initiatives

The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of its Block Cinema program with Projecting the Future: Block Cinema at 25, a year-long series exploring the evolving possibilities of the moving image.

Founded in 2001 as a programming showcase for Northwestern’s student-run Film and Projection Society, Block Cinema has grown into one of the Midwest’s most distinctive university cinema programs. Today, its work encompasses public screenings, teaching and research, film preservation, artist collaborations, and student learning. More than 40 free public programs each academic year bring audiences together around cinema from across the globe, with a particular emphasis on underrecognized and difficult-to-see work and original 16mm and 35mm formats.

“Seeing films is not an exercise in nostalgia. It’s a way to come together in the present and think about ways of living together in the future. We’re infatuated with the possibilities of cinema. For us, that means not only showing films, but supporting the people who make them, uncovering histories that have been overlooked, preserving works in danger of disappearing, and finding new places for discovery and encounter.”

– Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator of Cinema and Media Arts at The Block

The anniversary takes Block Cinema’s first twenty-five years as a starting point for exploring what cinema can make possible now. Programs throughout the 2026–2027 academic year will be organized around three areas: Discover Hidden Histories, highlighting research, archival discovery, and preservation; Experience Expanded Cinema, exploring performance and new forms of collective viewing; and Imagine the Future of Cinema, creating new opportunities for Northwestern students to shape what comes next.

A major anniversary event in Spring 2027 will feature a keynote by Jacqueline Stewart, one of the nation’s leading scholars of cinema and African American film history. Stewart is a professor at the University of Chicago and host of Turner Classic Movies’ Silent Sunday Nights, and previously served as director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. At Northwestern, Stewart will reflect on the formative experience of encountering film in a university cinematheque and the role campus film culture can play in shaping lifelong engagement with cinema.

“Block Cinema embodies The Block’s commitment to art as a form of research and knowledge creation,” said Lisa Graziose Corrin, Ellen Philips Katz Executive Director of The Block Museum of Art. “Cinema can bring together people working across very different fields and create a shared space for inquiry. At Northwestern, that makes Block Cinema not only a place to experience extraordinary films, but a place where students, faculty, artists, and the public can make discoveries together.”

Anniversary Season Opens with Irma Vep and Les Vampires

The anniversary year opens September 24, 2026 with a 35mm presentation of Olivier Assayas’ IRMA VEP (1996), the same film that launched Block Cinema programming in September 2001.

Starring Maggie Cheung as a fictionalized version of herself, Assayas’ film follows a Hong Kong actor arriving in Paris to appear in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s silent serial LES VAMPIRES. Moving between silent cinema, the French New Wave, and the international filmmaking landscape of the 1990s, IRMA VEP embodies the global scope and spirit of reinvention that have remained central to Block Cinema.

The connection continues October 14, 2026 with a special 16mm presentation of “Hypnotic Eyes,” the sixth episode of Feuillade’s LES VAMPIRES (1915–1916). Chicago musicians Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart will perform a live improvisational score. Presented in partnership with International Anthem, the program brings historic film into conversation with contemporary Chicago music and performance.

Explore the Anniversary Themes

Discover Hidden Histories

Explore rediscovered films, archival research, and preservation projects that are expanding our understanding of cinema’s past.

Research and preservation have become increasingly central to Block Cinema’s work. Through partnerships with filmmakers, scholars, libraries, archives, and collections, the program has helped return rarely seen and, in some cases, previously lost films to public view.

Recent projects have included the recovery and first public screening in more than 50 years of Karen Sperling’s THE WAITING ROOM (1973), research into overlooked trans film histories, and the rediscovery of films by Kentucky experimental animator Ed Counts. In 2025, Block Cinema received its first National Film Preservation Foundation grant to preserve three Counts films. A second NFPF grant, awarded in 2026, supports the preservation of two experimental animated films by artist Rowena Pattee Kryder.

Anniversary programs, including a new “Special Collections” quarterly film series, will build on this work through archival screenings, preservation projects, and conversations with historians and archivists. The first “Special Collections” program on November 19 will welcome Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive (IULMIA) director Carmel Curtis and media preservation specialist Charles Allen for a “You (Probably) Haven’t Seen This Before,” an extension of the IULMIA series dedicated to “using archival film to challenge dominant cinematic canons and foreground historically marginalized voices.”

Experience Expanded Cinema

Experience performances, outdoor projections, and cinematic events that rethink the relationship between audience, image, and place.

Block Cinema has long treated film as more than an image on a screen, exploring how projection, performance, sound, and setting can transform the experience of cinema. Projecting the Future builds on that approach, activating the Block auditorium and spaces beyond the museum through live performance, analog projection, artist collaborations, and hands-on workshops.

Live-scored film events like LES VAMPIRES and October 9th’s 35mm presentation of surreal silent landmark ELEVEN P.M. 1928) with accompaniment by Chicago artist and musician Damon Locks represent the first of these programs, pairing a century-old films with contemporary Chicago musicians. Further programs throughout the year will experiment with the relationship between image, audience, and place, bringing moving images into new spaces and inviting audiences to experience cinema as a live, communal art form.

Imagine the Future of Cinema

Discover how students are helping shape the future of Block Cinema through new opportunities for programming and public engagement.

Reconnecting with its roots in the student-led Film and Projection Society, The Block will launch a new undergraduate film-programming initiative in its anniversary year. The program will create paid opportunities for Northwestern students to work alongside Block Cinema staff researching films, developing programs, and presenting screenings for public audiences.

Designed to extend beyond the anniversary, the initiative will provide hands-on experience in film curation and give students a meaningful role in shaping Block Cinema’s programs. It builds on the cinema’s longstanding integration into teaching at Northwestern and its commitment to creating opportunities for students to engage directly with the moving image.

The Film That Changed Your Life

As part of Block Cinema’s 25th anniversary, we invite filmmakers, artists, scholars, alumni, students, and audience members to reflect on a deceptively simple question: What film changed your life? The answers may come from a celebrated classic, an obscure documentary, a childhood favorite, or a chance encounter with a film seen at exactly the right moment.

This anniversary initiative explores the many ways cinema shapes how we see ourselves and the world around us. Across disciplines, professions, and biographies, films have inspired careers, sparked research, deepened understanding, challenged assumptions, and opened new ways of thinking.

“Film offers us an encounter with the past that we can carry forward with us throughout our lives,” Metzger said. “Block Cinema has always been about creating the conditions for those encounters. Twenty-five years in, we’re interested in where they might lead next.”

Additional Projecting the Future screenings, performances, guests, and student programs will be announced throughout the 2026–2027 academic year. Block Cinema programs are free and open to all.

Anniversary Year Partnerships and Support

As part of the anniversary year, Block Cinema is proud to sponsor two leading independent film festivals. Block Cinema is a sponsor of the Chicago Underground Film Festival, supporting a longstanding Chicago platform for independent and experimental film, and the Camden International Film Festival, presented by Points North Institute in Maine, a major gathering for documentary filmmakers and artists. These partnerships extend Block Cinema’s engagement with moving-image communities in Chicago and nationally.

Block Cinema’s 25th anniversary programming is made possible through the generous support of an anonymous friend of The Block, Drs. James Pick and Roz Laudati, and the Romenesa Foundation. The Block Museum is grateful for their commitment to film and the arts at Northwestern University.