Masks are required for all attendees and Cinema staff at indoor events.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival—yet criminally underseen for over three decades—Chameleon Street recounts the improbable but true story of Michigan con man Douglas Street, the titular “chameleon” who successfully impersonated his way up the socioeconomic ladder by posing as a magazine reporter, an Ivy League student, a respected surgeon, and a corporate lawyer. Elevated by a dexterous performance and daring direction from multi-hyphenate actor-writer-director Wendell B. Harris Jr., the film puts a lens on race, class, and performance in American identity that has lost none of its relevance. At once piercingly funny and aesthetically mischievous, Chameleon Street is a “lost masterpiece of Black American cinema” (BFI) long overdue to take its rightful place in the independent film canon. Newly restored in 4K from the original camera negative under the supervision of Wendell B. Harris Jr.

Masks are required for all attendees and Cinema staff at indoor events.

Since the 1960s, pioneering Japanese husband-and-wife team Takahiko and Akiko Iimura have produced works that routinely pushed the limits of cinematic and intermedial expression, with oeuvres that span experiments in abstraction, structuralism, and erotic surrealism. This program compiling a range of the duo’s works includes films by Taka focusing on the metamorphosis of cinematic color and the visualization of intimacy. The centerpiece, Taka and Ako, is a double portrait of the two filmmakers. Too rarely screened, this program also includes two works by Akiko Iimura, often remarked upon for their combination of film poetry, spiritualism, and the diaristic. Of note, music for the films includes original scores by Yoko Ono (Ai/Love) and Jacques Bekaert (Late Lunch, Mon Petit Album).

with Atar Arad, viola; Aram Arakelyan, piano; Peter Stumfp, cello; and Stephen Wyrczynski, viola

Sponsored by the Jacobs Diversity & Equity Committee [***Note that this performance will no longer be live streamed. Please join us at Auer Hall.]