Over three nights, Block Cinema organized a series of talks and screenings with three leading video artists and filmmakers. These wide-ranging conversations touched on everything from landscape representation to abstraction, and from environmental segregation to racial violence. I don’t think experimental films in and of themselves are accessible or inaccessible. I think the apparatus around […]
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On February 25, 2022 filmmakers Frédéric Moffet, Joelle Mercedes, and Deborah Stratman joined Block Cinema for a conversation on their short films centered on birds and birdwatching practices. With works by Kevin Jerome Everson, Margaret Tait, Frédéric Moffet, Deborah Stratman, and additional artists, the program explored human-avian relationships from a variety of formal, emotional, and conceptual perspectives. I often […]
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In 1971, ten civil rights activists, including 24-year-old Rev. Benjamin Chavis of the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice, were wrongfully convicted of arson in Wilmington, North Carolina. Through interviews with the parents of the Wilmington 10 (as well as political prisoner Assata Shakur, filmed just before her escape from the Clinton Correctional […]
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“Terra Femme is Stephens’s magnum opus. It is also a meditation on the unresolved matter of women’s relationship to earthly places. What kind of home is earth, family, society? Where does the body go to live and to die? What does it mean to move through the world with this particular body, raced and gendered, […]
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In November 2021, Block Cinema screened Property (1978) by filmmaker Penny Allen. In Property, Penny Allen turns her lens to the eccentric residents of a bohemian neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. The film, a critically under-seen gem of 1970s independent filmmaking, delivers an economic critique of urban renewal to warm, satirical effect. Property revels in the joy and […]
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In Winter 2021 the Block Museum hosted a discussion between UK filmmaker Onyeka Igwe and Professor Bimbola Akinbola of the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. The conversation was presented as part of the Block Cinema program The Loose Ends of Empire: Unforgetting Colonialism a screening of experimental film and audio-visual works from the […]
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This groundbreaking drama Majdhar (1984) was among the first to bring the inner lives and struggles of South Asian communities to popular audiences in the UK. On January 28, 2021 Block Cinema was proud to host a screening of the film followed by a discussion with Ahmed Alauddin Jamal, the co-founder of the legendary Retake […]
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For many, London is an imaginary landscape, a composite of images that circulate in art, literature, and popular culture. On November 12, 2020 Block Cinema explored this landscape with Unreal City: Film Essays on London by Ayo Akingbade and Reece Auguiste a program of experimental essay films from the UK. The screening was followed by a […]
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On November 5, 2020 Block Cinema welcomed California-based artist Fox Maxy (Ipai Kumeyaay and Payómkawichum) for a screening and conversation of his work. The works in the program, California Girls (2018), Maat Means Land (2020), and San Diego (2020), offered a prismatic and timely vision of the artist’s home state, viewed through the lens of […]
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In 2002, artist Paul Chan was working as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, formed by the Chicago-based activist group Voices in the Wilderness (now Voices for Creative Nonviolence), which was on the ground in Bagdad to protest the imminent Iraqi war. Chan captured the calm before the storm in his “ambient video essay,” […]
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