Event

CFS presents: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai in 35mm

Tuesday, February 1 @ 7 PM / Music Box Theatre

ONLINE TICKET SALES END 2 HRS BEFORE SCREENING START. TICKETS WILL STILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR!

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Directed by Jim Jarmusch 1999
Four years after he twisted the Western inside out with Dead Man, Jarmusch directed Ghost Dog, a mournful take on the crime film with a specific nod to the films of Seijun Suzuki and Jean-Pierre Melville. Ghost Dog is an unknowable mafia contract killer who finds himself the target of his own employers after a hit gone wrong. Played with fierce elegance by Forest Whitaker, he spends his days tending to his carrier pigeons (his only mode of communication with the mob), hanging out with his best friend (a French-speaking ice-cream vendor he cant understand), and reading the 18th-century warrior philosophical text, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, to which he fiercely adheres. Featuring a stuttering, hypnotic score by a 28-year-old Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA (his short cameo likely prompted 90s teens everywhere to lean over to their neighbor in the darkened theater and whisper thats RZA!), cinematography by master Robby Müller, and a supporting cast that includes Isaach de Bankolé, Henry Silva, and Cliff Gorman as a Flavor Flav-loving mafioso. Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote upon the films release, Its such an exciting, prescient, moving, and noble failure that I wouldnt care to swap it for even three or four modest successes. After over 20 years the film feels weightier and yes, eerily prescient. Ancient Japan was a pretty strange place is a sentiment echoed twice in the film; 2021 is a pretty strange place too.

116 min Lionsgate 35mm from Lionsgate, permission Janus Films

Preceded by: Woody Woodpecker in Pantry Panic (Walter Lantz, 1941) 7 min 16mm

All visitors to the Music Box Theatre will need to show proof of full vaccination and wear a mask while inside the theatre. This includes Chicago Film Society screenings. Please read their COVID guidelines before purchasing tickets.