The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University presents Exhausted America, a Block Cinema film series featuring rare 16mm and 35mm screenings that explore endurance, competition, and disillusionment in American life. The series runs February 19 through March 12, 2026, and includes Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Robert Altman’s […]
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This past year, Block Cinema set out to explore a big question:How can moving images be created in ways that honor and protect the environment? With support from the Earth Rising Foundation’s Sustainable Visions grant and in partnership with Northwestern’s Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group, Block Cinema hosted a three-part series of eco-processing […]
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In August 2025, Block Cinema’s groundbreaking Trans Portraiture series traveled beyond Evanston to Philadelphia, where Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts, presented highlights of the program at the 31st annual Visible Evidence Conference. Visible Evidence, the premier international gathering of scholars and practitioners of documentary and nonfiction media, convened this year […]
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Project highlights Block Cinema’s growing role as a center for media research and discovery at Northwestern University. The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has received a Basic Preservation Grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) to support the restoration and preservation of four rare films by independent Kentucky animator Ed Counts (1946–2009). […]
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On April 3, 2025 Block Cinema will host a historic screening of The Waiting Room (1974), marking its first public showing in over five decades. This rare cinematic event will take place at the Wirtz Center Chicago in Abbott Hall on Northwestern University’s Downtown Chicago campus, coinciding with the 2025 Society for Cinema and Media […]
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March 2025 program showcases rediscovered archival films and contemporary works by trans filmmakers. Block Cinema at Northwestern University proudly presents Trans Portraiture, a groundbreaking film series running throughout March 2025 that explores historical and contemporary representations of transgender lives on screen. Timed to culminate with International Trans Day of Visibility (March 31), the series spotlights […]
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The Block Museum of Art’s Block Cinema continues its tradition of celebrating work by under-seen media artists with a rare screening of Amy Halpern’s FALLING LESSONS (1992), a classic of American independent and experimental cinema. This special event is part of “Palm Down: The Films of Amy Halpern,” a citywide collaboration celebrating Halpern’s legacy and […]
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In One Man Dies a Million Times, a “true story, set in the future,” two young botanists who work at the Institute of Plant Genetic Resources commit themselves to tending seeds meant to sustain future populations while contending with the present reality of mass starvation. Emerging from a process of historical research, artistic imagination, and […]
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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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