During its heyday, the Maxwell Street Market in Chicago was the biggest and most populated open-street market in America, and a singular cultural melting-pot – it has been called “the Ellis Island of the Midwest”. Thousands of people swarmed there every weekend to shop for bargains and second-hand junk on pushcarts and in stores (Ron Popeil got his start there). They also came for the entertainment: hucksters, hustlers, eccentrics, sidewalk preachers and, most famously, the street musicians, including many of Chicago’s blues greats.
Mike Shea’s only film is a seldom-seen pioneering cinema-vérité masterpiece, an essential historical document of Chicago and the market as a quintessential public space (the market was dismantled in 1994 to make room for student housing). Shea, who had been a photojournalist for Life and other magazines, shot the film over 16 Sundays (the market’s busiest day) in 1964, and was often accompanied on the shoot by 21-year old Mike Bloomfield, later of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Dylan’s Highway 61-era band, who knew the street musicians and helped facilitate filming.
AND THIS IS FREE is one of the greatest documentaries of the 1960s and perhaps the liveliest portrait of American street life ever captured on film. The 50-minute feature will be supplemented by additional rare footage documenting the market and the musicians who played there.
THURSDAY, JUNE 26
7:30pm at Spectacle Theatre, $5
124 South 3rd Street, Williamsburg
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