Buñuel was here

Whenever people ask me what I did over the weekend, it can be anticlimactic to say that I saw several movies. Maybe I went to several different venues and experienced multiple genres (some even on celluloid!), as well as encountering numerous people. That’s very exciting to me, but it often feels boring to simply say, “Oh, I just watched some movies.”

This past weekend ended up being more of the usual, but of course, actually loving film can look decidedly unusual.

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### Home Movie Day at the Chicago History Museum

On Saturday, I went to Home Movie Day at the Chicago History Museum, co-presented by the Chicago Film Archives and the Chicago Film Society. It’s an annual, approximately four-hour event where these film institutions inspect and project home movies brought in by the general public. These movies are part of their personal or family histories.

In her introduction to the book *Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories*, Patricia R. Zimmermann wrote:

> “Home movies constitute an imaginary archive that is never completed, always fragmentary, vast, infinite.”

I had only attended one Home Movie Day before, in 2021, and I arrived during its final hour when participation was dwindling. This year, I left an hour before it ended—and it was still standing room only.

Among the screenings were some amateur films. One gentleman brought a short he’d made while in film school in the late 60s/early 70s, an homage to George Romero’s *Night of the Living Dead* (1968), with a lone zombie played by an anthropomorphic vacuum cleaner.

Otherwise, the films were personal artifacts—footage of families at home, at play, on vacation. When a person’s film was shown, they would stand up and talk about it, often moved to tears reminiscing about family members now passed. One woman’s grandmother, shown alongside her mother as a young child, had just died the week prior. It was beautiful and eerie.

Sometimes I’m moved to think about similar ontological issues when watching older films where the actors have definitely passed. This felt especially appropriate to reflect on during Halloween weekend, as did how I spent my Sunday.

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### Día de los Muertos and Luis Buñuel

In early October, I wrote about seeing the surrealist films of Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel at Doc Films. Shortly after, the Luis Buñuel Film Institute reached out to me on Instagram to alert me to a Buñuel exhibition on view through February 22 at the International Museum of Surgical Science.

On Día de los Muertos, the museum hosted an unveiling of Buñuel’s ashes, which had recently been returned to the filmmaker’s son after being missing for decades. Who could resist attending such an event?

I went, and it was surreal—again, quite appropriate for the occasion. People were invited to leave offerings, so I unhooked the Labubu from my purse to give to Buñuel. (Surely that sentence has never been written before!)

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### More Films This Week

Last week I also saw:

– Jean Rollin’s *The Shiver of the Vampires* (1971) at the Alamo Drafthouse
– Kelly Reichardt’s latest, *The Mastermind* (2025), at the Siskel Film Center (it’s an incredibly subtle film, so I’m still thinking about it)
– Gregg Araki’s *The Doom Generation* (1995) at Doc Films, during another volunteer fireguard shift

So yes, I “just” saw some movies this week—but how often does that lead to spending a day with the remains of one of cinema’s greatest auteurs?

Until next time, moviegoers.
https://chicagoreader.com/film-tv/the-moviegoer/home-movie-day-luis-bunuel/

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