The Chicago Film Society exists to promote the preservation of film in context. Films capture the past uniquely. They hold the stories told by feature films, but also the stories of the industries that produced them, the places where they were exhibited, and the people who watched them. The Chicago Film Society believes that all of this history — not just of film, but of 20th century industry, labor, recreation, and culture — is more intelligible when it’s grounded in unsimulated experience: seeing a film in a theater, with an audience, and projected from film stock.
Chicago Film Society
35mm test film on screen before a screening of The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926), 2019. Photo credit: Katherine Greenleaf
Students focusing projector lamps at the archival film handling and projection workshop, 2018. Photo credit: Katherine Greenleaf.
Fred Camper, Dan Potter,1968, 16mm print. Preserved by CFS in 2016. Image courtesy the filmmaker
A lesson in contrast and optics at the archival film handling and projection workshop, 2018. Photo credit: Chicago Film Society.
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“Few arts funders have the independence and clarity of purpose to defend the rights of artists and arts organizations to freely express difficult, uncomfortable, even radical ideas as courageously and consistently as the Andy Warhol Foundation.”
John Taft, Vice Chairman, Baird