“Real shape of the earth”: Short Films with Ben Balcom
2026-02-05 19:00 - 21:30 (America/Chicago) | Block CInema, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL, 60208, United States
Join us for a program that spotlights the work of Milwaukee-based filmmaker Ben Balcom whose films turn a lens to progressive social projects of the past with a playful visual language adept in analogue techniques of experimental cinema. Across these films, rural landscapes, cities, poems, and letters combine to cast the “real shape” of places and histories into possible futures.
Included in the program is Balcom’s newest film, THE PHALANX (2025), which traces the everyday lives and utopian aspirations of participants in the Ceresco community, a vibrant yet short-lived socialist settlement in mid-19th-century Wisconsin.
To accompany Balcom’s work, this program incorporates two short films that employ kindred gestures to explore time and place: Rhea Storr’s OKAY KESKIDEE! LET ME SEE INSIDE, an account of Black community spaces in the UK lost to gentrification, and a late 70s gem, VISIBLE INVENTORY SIX: MOTEL DISSOLVE by American multimedia artist and educator Janis Crystal Lipzin.
Screening followed by a conversation with the filmmaker.

Works screened:

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NEWS FROM NOWHERE (Ben Balcom, 2020, 8 min, 16mm-to-digital)
“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not misery but refinement.” – William Morris
Two slow pans across a public park in Milwaukee. Words from Bernadette Mayer imagining the possibility of a perfect summer day. -BB
GARDEN CITY BEAUTIFUL (Ben Balcom, 2019, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital)
One sunny afternoon in the middle west, suspended in a time between, two commuters daydream about a life lived otherwise. -BB
OKAY KESKIDEE! Let Me See Inside (Rhea Storr, 2025, 19.5 min, Super 16mm-to-digital)
A personal account of Black community spaces in the UK, focusing on Caribbean diaspora. By visiting the site of the former Keskidee Centre that is now luxury apartments, the film considers the conditions which allowed this historical space to thrive. -LUX
SILENT WITNESS (Ben Balcom, 2023, 3.5 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Filmed in Jackson Park in Milwaukee during summertime, 2020. Featuring the Statue of Commerce by Gustav Haug, 1881. -BB
VISIBLE INVENTORY SIX: MOTEL DISSOLVE (Janis Crystal Lipzin, 1978, 15 min, 16mm)
A space filled with moving…a series of panning shots of motel rooms in which the film-maker stayed during semi-annual transcontinental auto trips – homogenous accommodations lacking locational cues. Superimposed over the screen image are the names of the towns in which the rooms are located and the car’s odometer reading at each location. The sound track consists of two Gertrude Stein texts: “America I Came and Here I Am” and “American Food and American Houses” both from 1935.
THE PHALANX (Ben Balcom, 2025, 14 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time. -BB

Total runtime: ~ 72 min
Materials courtesy of Ben Balcom, LUX, Canyon Cinema
*Program title “Real shape of the earth” is quoted from UTOPIA by Bernadette Mayer, as voiced in NEWS FROM NOWHERE.

Avant to Live! The Films of Craig Baldwin with guest Brett Kashmere
2026-02-06 19:00 - 21:30 | Block CInema, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL, 60208, United States
San Francisco-based filmmaker Craig Baldwin embodies the subversive spirit of American underground film. Since the 1970s, Baldwin has been crafting dense, corrosive found-footage films that bend the detritus of American mass culture against the stagnant myths of Western progress. Though utterly singular, his work is uniquely challenging to characterize: as Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta, editors of the new, career-spanning volume Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live!) write, Baldwin’s films are “informed by left politics, cult cinemas, agit-prop activism, structural film, the Situationists, the Yippies, Arte Povera, media archeology, compilation documentary, and other found footage forms.”
For this screening celebrating the recent publication Avant to Live!, Kashmere will appear to present two of Baldwin’s most enduring films, TRIBULATION 99: ALIEN ANOMALIES UNDER AMERICA (1991) and ¡O NO CORONADO! (1992), in 16mm. Taken together, these two works offer a scathingly funny (and, in 2026, frighteningly relevant) counterfactual history of 500 years of colonial misadventure in this hemisphere.
Followed by a post-screening conversation between Brett Kashmere and Luisela Alvaray, Associate Professor at DePaul University.
Works screened:Empty heading
TRIBULATION 99: ALIEN ANOMALIES UNDER AMERICA
(Craig Baldwin, 1991, 48 min, 16mm)
Arguably Baldwin’s most visionary assemblage, TRIBULATION 99 presents a dizzying 48-minute alternative history of CIA meddling in Latin American politics, congealed from the cinematic dregs of 20th-century educational and industrial ephemera, TV news, and B-picture sci-fi. Two years before the premiere of The X-Files, Baldwin describes American foreign policy as an occult struggle against a reptilian race of hollow-earth dwelling “Quetzals,” with crackpot narration that splits the difference between William Burroughs, Alex Jones, and Castle Films News Parade.
¡O NO CORONADO!
(Craig Baldwin, 1992, 40 min, 16mm)
In ¡O NO CORONADO!, Craig Baldwin combines his trademark techniques of “recycled cinema” with gloriously janky reenactments to tell the story of 16th-century conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s ill-fated expedition in what is now the American Southwest. Baldwin’s appropriations from forgotten swashbucklers and old Lone Ranger episodes paradoxically may seem sardonic, but they cohere to form a damning account of colonial violence.

Total runtime: ~ 88 min
Screening materials courtesy of Canyon Cinema

NASHVILLE (1975) in 35mm with Professor Heather Hendershot
2026-02-27 18:45 - 21:00 | The Block Cinema, 40 Arts Cir Dr, Evanston, IL, 60208, United States
“If you had to pick one film to represent 1975 America,” writes celebrated historian Heather Hendershot, “you could not do better than NASHVILLE.” A freewheeling musical satire about the collapse of American idealism, Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE was perfectly timed for an era of oil shocks, future shock, sticker shock, and the shocked conscience of the Watergate scandal. But, paradoxically, it also represents the best that American cinema had to offer, with boldly stylized screenwriting, performances, cinematography, and editing that improbably coalesce into a signature film from a thrilling and turbulent decade for movies.
In her forthcoming BFI Classics monograph on the film, Hendershot–the Cardiss Collins Professor of Communication Studies and Journalism at Northwestern–takes on the formidable task of breaking down Altman’s masterwork, examining the film’s often-overlooked commentary on gendered exploitation and drawing attention to the “guarded hopefulness” that tempers its cynical portrayal of political spectacle.
Block Cinema welcomes Heather Hendershot for an introduction to this special 35mm presentation of NASHVILLE, offered in celebration of the October publication of her new book: NASHVILLE (BFI Film Classics).

About the speaker:
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Heather Hendershot is Professor in Communication Studies at Northwestern University, USA. Her books include When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America (2022) and What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (2011). Her research interests include American film, television, and political culture, focusing on the 1960s-70s. Her essays have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, The Conversation, and Politico.
