Event Details
Date & Time:
Fri November 14, 2025
7 PM
Location:
The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Audience:
Open to the public
Details:
Reel Politik: PUTNEY SWOPE (1969) with cartoonist Nathan Gelgud
(Robert Downey Sr., 1969, 84 min, 35mm)
In September 2024–a time of deep uncertainty for both American democracy and traditional cinema exhibition–cartoonist and ardent cinephile Nathan Gelgud introduced REEL POLITIK, a daily web comic following the exploits of a band of disgruntled theatre employees and filmgoers who “seize the means of projection” and introduce a program of revolutionary, anti-bourgeois cinematic reforms. Taking inspiration from the films of Godard and Gorin, Straub-Huillet, and underground firebrands like Robert Kramer and Robert Downey, Gelgud’s endlessly inventive comics forge a blend of agitprop, magical realism, and trenchant insight into the shortcomings–and emancipatory possibilities–of film art.
Now collected in paperback form by Drawn and Quarterly, REEL POLITIK is staging a coup at Block Cinema, with Gelgud appearing in person for a rare 35mm screening of one of his most important source texts: Robert Downey’s uproarious 1969 satire PUTNEY SWOPE. One of the most notorious films of the dawn of “midnight movies,” SWOPE offers a gleefully anarchic vision of a New York advertising agency taken over by the company’s only Black employee. With its breakneck, punchline-per-second pace, SWOPE shatters the illusion of cinematic realism (and the boundaries of “good taste”), but the film also possesses a lucidity and grace befitting the credit Downey famously gave himself–“a prince.”
Following the screening, Gelgud will appear for a discussion and audience Q&A.
Image credit: PUTNEY SWOPE (1969)
About the guest:
Nathan Gelgud is a cartoonist and illustrator. Lately his comics have been about mostly about movies and books for The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Hyperallergic.
His debut graphic novel, A HOUSE IN THE JUNGLE, which is not about movies or books, but about a hermit who lives in the jungle, was released by Koyama Press in 2018. Gelgud’s illustration clients include Paris Review, Nike, Penguin Random House, ESPN, New York Review of Books (NYRB Classics), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Ford Foundation, and The Believer. He lives in South Pasadena.
