Temple of Film is Glorious to Watch, But Comes With a Price

The French film theorist Andre Bazin famously likened going to the movies as a near religious spectacle. Approaching Block Cinema, housed on Arts Circle Drive inside a beautiful glass and limestone structure, it is easy to feel a similar sensation.

From the neatly arrayed rows of chairs to the stunning theater screen, the Block Cinema space is considered by many to be one of the best places to watch a movie. The film series programming started there in 2001, about a year after architect Dirk Lohan designed the new iteration of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.

Block Cinema has acquired a reputation as a first-rate repertory house, or in movie parlance, "cinematheque," meaning a theater that specializes in showing classic American movies, documentaries, foreign language titles and art-driven films.

Mimi Brody, a Bay Area-native who spent the previous seven years working as a programmer for the UCLA Film and Television Archive, was named the chief curator and director at Block Cinema in August 2009. She has a versatile and eclectic background, having also spent time programming film festivals in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Block's reputation notwithstanding, Brody faces considerable cultural, technological and social hurdles in trying to make the theater more economically viable during a time the audience for this kind of programming has grown increasingly fragmented and dispersed.

The core audience, Brody said in an interview, is older North Shore and Chicago film enthusiasts. Her strategic imperative is to make Block Cinema relevant to younger audiences. But that does not mean suddenly programming  The Social Network.

"We do very well with anything [programming] art related at Block, but it is very important to try and engage a younger audience," Brody said.

"It was a major problem in Los Angeles and everywhere else, that is getting younger people interested in the communal experience of sitting down and watching films as a collective experience."

Brody's mission is to maintain the interesting and provocative three-day a week programming with nods to more accessible fare, like the occasional studio sneak preview (like directed by Northwestern alumnus Greg Berlanti), free screenings or a special program dedicated to showing the works of Northwestern University film students. The students also have a more hands-on impact on programming the winter and spring calendars.

"Here and New York, Los Angeles and the Bay Area to a degree are really the only major cities where people have options to see this kind of programming in more than one space. There's the Music Box, Facets, the Gene Siskel Film Center and there's a healthy competitiveness in this business," Brody said.

Brody has held informal talks with students to get their take on how to extend awareness for the film series programming. She is looking at different social network initiatives, like text alerts.

Now, she just hopes, to extend the church metaphor of Field of Dreams, if she programs it judiciously, providing both the carrot and the stick, they will come.