• Block Cinema’s revival of the silent classic The Wind featured live music as well as live sound effects.

Chicago has such a tremendous repertory film scene that every year we get to see as many great old movies as new ones. So in addition to compiling a list of my favorite Chicago premieres, each December I make another list of the year’s best revivals and rediscoveries. I’ll acknowledge right out the bat that this list is incomplete—as much as I try to keep up with all the city’s worthwhile programming, inevitably there are screenings that pass my attention. Please contribute to the comments section if you feel there are any important shows I missed. And to any local programmers reading—keep up the great work.

The Black Vampire (Music Box Theatre, September) This year’s lineup of Noir City: Chicago (an annual collaboration between the Music Box and San Francisco’s Film Noir Foundation) was the festival’s most diverse yet, with movies from all over the world. This Argentinian reworking of Fritz Lang’s M (1953) was the most obscure selection—reportedly this screening marked the first time it ever played in the U.S.

  • Clown Torture

Domitor Conference (June) Northwestern University and the U. of C. played host to this biennial international conference on early cinema. The five-day event featured four film programs, two of which were drawn from the archives of the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam. The materials ranged from documentaries to slapstick comedies to effects-driven fantasies. (The 1904 travelogue A Pictorial Story of Hiawatha, a mixed-media spectacle recently restored by Chicago Film Archives, was presented as well.) These programs gave viewers a sense of what it was like to go to the movies more than a century ago.

  • A Pictorial Story of Hiawatha

Films by Helen Hill (Chicago Filmmakers, July) This July brought two exceptional programs of experimental animation: the Siskel Center showcased the work of John and Faith Hubley, and Chicago Filmmakers honored Helen Hill, a talented artist whose life was cut short in 2007. Both programs served as reminders that experimental cinema can be plenty of fun.

  • Helen Hill’s Scratch Crow

Films by Suzan Pitt (Chicago Filmmakers/Gallery 400, September) Another great experimental-animation program was this overview of Suzan Pitt’s four-decade career. Best known for Asparagus (1977), a 20-minute work that originally screened before David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Pitt brought nightmarish, psychosexual undertones to whimsical storybook imagery. I’d sooner revisit any of the shorts on this program than the Disney version of Into the Woods, but that’s just me.

  • Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in A Rage in Harlem

The Shanghai Gesture (Block Cinema, October) I wonder what inspired the unofficial Josef von Sternberg celebration that took place all over town this year. Doc Films screened his final masterpiece Anatahan this summer, the Music Box screened all seven of his films with Marlene Dietrich a few months ago, and Block revived Underworld in January and this lesser-known title (1941) in October. The Shanghai Gesture played as part of a brilliantly curated tribute to groundbreaking French programmer Henri Langlois, who was, among many other things, a fan of this film. An ostentatious, innuendo-packed fever dream that only Sternberg could have devised, this rarely revived feature showcases the director’s mad genius as well as anything else he made.

  • The Shanghai Gesture

  • The Spook Who Sat by the Door