The Millennium Park Summer Film Series ran Tuesdays at 6:30pm from June 30 to August 18, free, on the Jay Pritzker Pavilion’s screen. Running alongside it, and largely unnoticed, were the Cinema/Chicago Summer Screenings from June 3 to August 22 at the Chicago Cultural Center and the Chicago History Museum — free international cinema, indoors, curated.
Two free municipal film programmes in one summer, with entirely different theories of what film is for.
A Lawn Is Not a Cinema, and That Is the Point
One must be honest about the conditions. Watching a film outdoors on a lawn under a Frank Gehry trellis, in a downtown park, in August, is not an optimal viewing experience by any technical measure. The light does not fully go. The sound competes with Michigan Avenue. People arrive late, talk, and leave before the third act.
What it is instead is a public occasion organised around a film. That is an older and more sociable use of cinema than the reverent dark room, and it selects for a different sort of programming — work that survives interruption, that an audience can enter twenty minutes late and still follow.
The consequence is that a series like this cannot show difficult cinema, and one should not pretend to be disappointed about it. A lawn programme is a popular programme by physics, not by cowardice.
Which Makes the Cultural Center Series the Serious One
Which is why the Cinema/Chicago screenings deserve the attention the lawn series receives. Free international cinema, in an actual room, at the Cultural Center and the History Museum, across twelve weeks. Controlled light, controlled sound, and a programme that can therefore afford to be demanding.
One cannot survey the two side by side without concluding that Chicago runs a genuinely rigorous free film programme and a genuinely popular one, and that the city’s own publicity treats the second as the cultural event and the first as a listing. the published calendars is where most readers will have found either of them.
The pattern recurs across this entire summer. The house music festival put its conference at the Cultural Center and its crowds in Millennium Park. The Grant Park Music Festival plays to a lawn and programmes like a concert hall. The Cultural Center is where Chicago puts the thinking and the park is where it puts the people, and the building on Washington Street has been quietly doing the more interesting work for years.
If the lawn defeats you, as it will by the second reel, walk four blocks west to the Cultural Center and look at the Tiffany dome instead. Stand under it until you have worked out how the glass is held. It is free, it is indoors, and it is the better film.
Cover image: Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)