Film Fest Quick Pick #2: Love It/Leave It: Tom Palazzolo's America
Don't push things too hard on Friday night at the Wisconsin Film Festival, because you'll want to catch this survey of Palazzolo films Saturday morning, April 12 at the Bartell Theatre
If you have been paying attention to the contributions from the Chicago Film Archives at the Wisconsin Film Festival the past few years, you likely remember the name of Chicago’s Tom Palazzolo. The CFA collection of shorts at WFF 2023, “Tap Dancing Teens & Screaming Sandwichmen: Gems from Chicago Film Archives,” included Palazzolo’s short Jerry’s 1976), which follows deli owner Jerry Meyers, who was famous for berating his customers throughout the day. And if you attended the Heather McAdams screening last year, you may recall a brief discussion of Tom Palazzolo’s role in the Chicago independent film community (I recall it, because I asked the question!).
Palazzolo is so well ingrained in Chicago’s film community that his nickname, often used in in his on-screen credits and publicity for his films, is “Tom Chicago” or “Tommy Chicago.” And as CFA’s Olivia Babler reminds us in her program notes in the Festival guide, Roger Ebert dubbed Palazzolo “Chicago’s filmmaker laureate.”
My first encounter with Palazzolo and his films was as an undergraduate at UW-Madison in the early 1990’s (though it possibly could have been 1989, I haven’t been able to track the date down), when he visited for a screening of his short films and his experimental narrative feature, Caligari’s Cure (1982). My memory of Caligari’s Cure is hazy, beyond its expressionist set design (but in saturated 16mm color instead of black and white) and its riffing on Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Anadalou. But Palazzolo’s take on filmmaking, and on life in general, was idiosyncratic and inspiring, just what I needed to see and hear in my impressionable undergraduate days.
In 2023, the Chicago Film Archive received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to restore and photochemically preserve Caligari’s Cure. You can see the entire film at the Chicago Film Archives website, but hopefully it will play again in Madison at some point.
In fact, you can see many more Palazzolo films at the Chicago Film Archives website, including those to be included in the Wisconsin Film Festival screening on Saturday, April 12, at 11:00am at the Bartell Theatre. But if you do end up watching one or two online, I’m confident you’ll want to see the whole program with a crowd to appreciate the audience response. As the Chicago Film Archives explains in their notes for another Palozzolo program:
Palazzolo’s unique perspective on everyday life in the city, in combination with his dark sense of humor, results in films that are as tender and heartwarming as they are sharp and critical. Known for making documentaries on subjects as wide ranging as the 1968 convention, a neo-Nazi march in Marquette Park, Maxwell Street, and the “tattooed lady of Riverview” park, Palazzolo is as curious a citizen of the city as he is a filmmaker. His documentary approach ranges from observational to participatory, yet what always rises to the surface is his keen interest in the human condition.
Here’s a link to Jerry’s which screened at the Chicago Film Archives WFF presentation in 2023, and a link to an interview with Palazzolo for the Metrograph in New York, on the occasion of their 2023 retrospective of his films, to get you started on your Palazzolo journey. I hope to see some of you at the screening in April!