Event Details
Date & Time:
Fri November 13, 2026
7 PM
Audience:
Open to the public
Details:
Chicago Film Society presents Hans Richter's DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947) with guest Karina Longworth
DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (Hans Richter, 1947, 80 min, color, sound, 16mm from the Museum of Modern Art)
Block Cinema welcomes Chicago Film Society for this special presentation of Hans Richter’s surrealist landmark, featuring introduction and discussion with film historian Karina Longworth.
Hans Richter had produced some of cinema’s first abstract experiments in Germany in the 1920s, but after the Nazis branded him a “cultural Bolshevik” and destroyed his studio, he fled west and joined a community of expatriate artists in New York. With backing from Peggy Guggenheim, he embarked upon an improbable film: a portmanteau of dream episodes suggested by fellow artists, including Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, strung together with a framing story about a ”self-appointed bum” who pays the rent by setting up a psychoanalytic shingle and exposing his patients’ deepest desires. Shot on 16mm Kodachrome with assistance from Richter’s students at CUNY, Dreams was produced at a time when the borders between home movies and avant-garde art were porous. Dreams became an improbable art-house hit in New York, playing for seventeen weeks at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse. (CFS)
16mm print courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. Restored with funding from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Fund, and The Film Foundation.
Introduction and post-screening discussion with Karina Longworth, writer, creator and host of You Must Remember This.
About the speaker:
Karina Longworth is a writer, film historian and podcaster. She is the creator, producer and host of You Must Remember This, a podcast on the secret and forgotten history of 20th Century Hollywood, as well as the author of books on Howard Hughes, George Lucas, Al Pacino and Meryl Streep.
About Chicago Film Society:
Founded by projectionists in 2011, the Chicago Film Society promotes the exhibition and preservation of film in context. CFS screenings provide access to the restoration efforts of archives, studios, and private collectors, the work of artists exploring the film medium today, and the experience of seeing film projected live in a theater, with an audience. As physical artifacts, the film prints we show hold the stories told by films — but also the stories of the industries that produced them, the labs that printed them, the places where they were exhibited, and the people who watched them. Through screenings, writing, film preservation projects, and workshops, CFS works to make all of this context visible and accessible to the public.
Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu