About this Event
CHICAGO: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY
(Denis Mitchell, 1961, 60 min, digital, courtesy of the BBC)
“The impact of America, on somebody who had never been there before is enormous. It’s like a slap in the face. And perhaps that was why, to some people, the Chicago film was so violent.” – Denis Mitchell, speaking to Studs Terkel in 1962.
In 1960, local ABC affiliate WBKB-TV invited Denis Mitchell, one of the UK documentary scene’s most innovative filmmakers, to come to Chicago and make a portrait of the city. With celebrated journalist Studs Terkel as a guide, Mitchell found his way to the city’s hidden corners and open secrets, translating his encounters into CHICAGO: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY, an hour-long “city symphony” of great vividness and force. Without a single word of narration, Mitchell takes viewers from the Playboy penthouse to the lower depths, his candid interviews with everyday people and briskly contrapuntal editing exposing the stark divisions that define American life.
When CHICAGO: FIRST IMPRESSIONS was broadcast on the BBC in 1961, its striking sounds and images of street drunks, crime squads, stockyards, Lake Shore Drive cruises, Maxwell Street bazaars, beatnik diatribes, and vaudeville parlours overwhelmed English viewers and incensed American journalists and officials abroad. One official at the U.S. Embassy described the film as “savagely dishonest and thoroughly anti-American”; a review in the Chicago American called it “dishonest, distorted, and disgusting.” A Variety headline in March 1961 read, “All Chi in a Furore Over Mitchell Film Produced for BBC; WBKB Has U.S. Rights But May Never Show It.”
Mayor Richard Daley called the film a “monstrosity,” successfully pressuring to have it withheld from American broadcast – and threatening to punch Mitchell in the nose. Though CHICAGO: FIRST IMPRESSIONS was finally broadcast 5 years later on another local station, Mitchell’s documentary nonetheless had an immediate and profound influence on Terkel, whose approach to listening to and recording the voices of everyday people was shaped by Mitchell’s methods. Seen 65 years later, its quality as a documentary masterpiece is indisputable.
CHICAGO: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY (1961) is presented in conjunction with the Block’s Fall 2026 exhibition, Picturing the Modern Metropolis, offering an aural counterpoint to the show’s exploration of the forms of visuality that emerged in response to the speed and scale of the 20th-century city.
Event venue & nearby stays
Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States
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