Northwest Chicago Film Society Maintains Nomadic Screening Schedule

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on May 30, 2013 4:40PM

Eddie Carranza’s indefinite closing of the Portage Theater while he waits for a liquor license for the Six Corners venue (that will never come) caught local film societies and other community groups unaware and, as Alison Cuddy notes, they’re scrambling to find new locations for their screenings and events.

One of the more notable groups is the Northwest Chicago Film Society, which managed to find new locations for their screenings this week at the Music Box Theatre and Patio Theater. The NWCFS returns to the Patio Wednesday 8 p.m., June 5, with a screening of the 1929 film High Treason.

Originally released as a silent film, a version with sound added was released in 1930, becoming the second British “talkie” to be released. The plot and set design for the dystopian futuristic thriller owes more than a small debt of gratitude to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and predates George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by two decades. The story centers around tensions between the world’s two remaining superpowers and the efforts of the ironically named “Peace League” can keep an all-out war from breaking out.

The sole remaining version of High Treason with sound was held in the collection of the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association. The Library of Congress restored it and it’s this print that will be screened next week, the first time the film has been screened in Chicago since its original release 84 years ago.

NWCFS executive director Rebecca Hall said in an email the society is working to secure a new venue for their screenings and will announce the venue very soon.