Rebecca Fons is always excited to get a call from the Block Cinema team. Fons is Director of Programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and usually calls from either of Block Cinema’s co-programmers foreshadow exciting collaborations; in 2022, they anticipated Tsai Ming-liang’s visit to The Block and artist talk plus screening series at the […]
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In October 2023, Northwestern Department of Asian Languages and Cultures Professor Licheng Gu was at AMC Newcity 14 for a movie. The renowned Chicagoland film festival Asian Pop-up Cinema was celebrating the closing night of its season, with the South Korean musical-comedy-thriller Killing Romance (2023). Both its star, the late Lee Sun-kyun, and its director, […]
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Not all audiences may realize that most theatrically screened films are not actually film at all. Outside of venues like art theaters – The Block included – and the occasional multiplex special occasions, most contemporary cinema presentations are digital projection rather than analog. As cinema has evolved, so too has the role of projectionist, and […]
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For scholar, visual artist, and philosopher Byron Davies, a collection of finely crafted anti-communist propaganda cartoons produced in Mexico by some of the country’s top animators with support from the United States government offers a window into the relationship between the United States and Latin America, insight into the economy and function of propaganda, and […]
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The Block Museum is proud to be part of Northwestern Buffett’s Climate Crisis + Media Arts Global Working Group, which is co-led by Michael Metzger, The Block’s Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts. Earlier this fall the working group announced its support for the production of ten films depicting manifestations of climate change across the globe. […]
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As a freshman, Northwestern student Rowan McCloskey attended as many Block Cinema screenings as he could. As a sophomore, he became a Block Museum Student Associate (BMSA) after learning about the program through a posting in The Daily Northwestern’s e-newsletter. “Both of those things really cemented my relationship with The Block,” he said. “And because […]
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Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’ visionary hybrid of documentary and science-fiction, Dry Ground Burning (2022) envisions an alternate present, in which a daring group of outlaw women pirates, refines and distributes petrol in the working-class neighborhoods of Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Between run-ins with inept security forces and tense negotiations with motorcycle-riding couriers, gang leader Chitara (Joana […]
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The renowned Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul became fascinated as a young boy by the sounds and moving images his mother, a physician, could conjure with medical equipment – the beat of a human heart heard through a stethoscope, the sight of a microorganism wriggling under a microscope. “I think, more or less, at that time […]
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Damien Chazelle’s meticulously-realized film First Man (2018) follows astronaut Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and wife Janet (Claire Foy) on the long and difficult path that led from the death of their daughter Karen in 1962 to his 1969 moon landing. While FIRST MAN has no shortage of thrilling astronautical sequences, Chazelle is less interested in […]
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Roger Corman’s visionary 1963 sci-fi classic X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes follows a scientist (Ray Milland) who develops eyedrops that allows him to see beyond the spectrum of visible light, penetrating mysteries of the human body and the deepest reaches of the cosmos. What starts out as a hospital drama about medical ethics […]
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