Tom Palazzolo’s Caligari’s Cure (1982)

Though he is now known as “Tommy Chicago,” Palazzolo was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1937. He first came to Chicago in 1960 to study painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There he took classes with photographer Kenneth Josephson, who introduced Palazzolo to avant-garde filmmaking and lent him his first 16mm camera.¹ By the late 1960s, Palazzolo had produced a number of well-regarded experimental shorts, including The Bride Stripped Bare (1967), O (1967), and The Tattooed Lady of Riverview (1968).² Already established as the “puckish prince of Chicago film experimentalists,”³ Palazzolo was chosen by the United States Information Agency to travel the Middle East as a representative of American independent filmmaking in 1968.

In the 1970s, Palazzolo’s work became more collaborative as he began to experiment with forms of cinéma vérité filmmaking. In 1972, Palazzolo met 16 year-old filmmaker Jeff Kreines, and they worked together on six documentaries about American rituals, including Ricky & Rocky (1972) and Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think) (1974). Palazzolo began collaborating with Mark Rance in 1975, producing five films together including two documentaries about neo-Nazi rallies in Chicago’s Marquette Park. Other subjects featured in Palazzolo’s ‘70s documentaries include massage parlors, drag shows, nudist colonies, and an angry deli owner. By the end of the decade, critic Roger Ebert was calling Palazzolo “Chicago’s filmmaker laureate”⁴ and his films had been exhibited in one-artist shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (twice), and the Walker Art Center.

Palazzolo took his first stab at feature-length fictional storytelling in 1982 with the semi-autobiographical Caligari’s Cure, which he produced, wrote, directed, and edited. Caligari is an irreverent retelling of Palazzolo’s childhood that is both absurd and tender. A loose adaptation of Robert Weine’s 1919 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari set in a bizarro St. Louis, the 65-minute film deals in themes of religion, sexuality, death, and the power of art. Writing for The Village Voice, critic J. Hoberman characterized the film thus:

The difficulty with which an adult represents his own childhood–let alone another’s–is the running gag of Tom Palazzolo’s Caligari’s Cure. In Palazzolo’s cosmos, the kids are even played by grownups; he’s recast incidents from his Catholic midwestern working-class boyhood with personnel recruited from the [School of the Art Institute of Chicago]… The brazen, comic-book mise-en-scène resembles that of Red Grooms or the Kuchars; the tacky, off-kilter sets–houses as ostentatiously ramshackled as Frank Stella’s recent sculpture, wallpaper like Lucas Samaras’s quilt-shard collages, decrepit furniture painted pale pink or dusty green–are a kind of arty-idiot Toonerville Trolley Americana.

Heavily inspired by Palazzolo’s new-found interest in performance art, the film features burgeoning talents Carmela Rago, Andy Somma, and Ellen Fisher. “I was getting a surge of great ideas from them,” Palazzolo later reflected. “In a sense, we started a local culture to produce local fantasies.”⁵ Palazzolo filled the rest of the cast with non-actors, including his students and Chicago film scene stalwarts like Heather McAdams and John Heinz. Avant-garde cinema historian P. Adams Sitney even makes an appearance as Dr. Arthur Vision, a blood-splattered surgeon philosophizing about death.

When asked why he was interested in making a feature, Palazzolo told the Chicago Reader, “I wanted the challenge of a longer format. The city was getting to be dull and homogenized. The kind of people I would’ve been interested in filming seemed to have all disappeared. The charm had gone.”⁶ But while Caligari is a departure from Palazzolo’s previous films in many respects, its production and style are “pure Palazzolo,” as one reviewer put it.⁷ The film shares an ironic sense of humor that can be found across Palazzolo’s filmography. As early as 1968, “silly sloppiness” was recognized as Palazzolo’s “trademark” style,⁸ and it is a fine descriptor of his feature-length work as well. Known for his resourcefulness, Caligari was made for less than $10,000,⁹ with Palazzolo drawing on his network of friends and students to make the production cheaply despite the rising costs of film stock as more independent filmmakers turned to video.¹⁰

Caligari’s Cure received mixed reviews after premiering at The Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1983. Critic Nigel Andrews called it his “favourite American film” of the 1983 Edinburgh International Film Festival, writing that Palazzolo had “cheerfully rekindled the flames of High Camp (Warhol- or Waters-style).”¹¹ Meanwhile, Roger Ebert said it was the only film of Palazzolo’s that he did not like.¹² Reader critic Peter Keough described the film as simultaneously “brilliant, outrageous, annoying, and corny as hell.”¹³ It was featured as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s New American Filmmakers series in 1983, where it enjoyed a one-week run. Curator Callie Angell praised the film for breaking from the narrative tradition, writing,

Palazzolo resides comfortably within his own sphere of reference, a domain that includes the rich heritage of film and art history as well as his own personal memories. His familiar and gleeful attitude towards these weighty traditions allows him to draw from them freely while indulging in a virtuoso display of visual and verbal puns, improvised performances, sexual innuendo, appearances by friends, in-jokes and obscure references (many of which hold meaning only for the filmmaker and his colleagues). The ease with which Palazzolo accomplishes all this suggests a new, more relaxed, and freer approach to the structuring of film narrative, not only in its affirmation of the validity of autobiographical concerns and personal expression, but also in its liberation of cultural tradition as a source of inspiration and humor for the contemporary artist.¹⁴

In the years since, Palazzolo has continued to make films (including 1991’s Added Lessons, a sequel to Caligari’s Cure) and screen his work widely, including at the American Museum of the Moving Image and Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. Thanks in part to previous restorations funded by the Avant-Garde Masters program and NFPF, Palazzolo’s work continues to find and delight new audiences. In recent years, Palazzolo’s films were featured in the Neither/Nor program of the 2020 True/False Film Festival, and at the Cinémathèque Française in 2023. There was a 17 film retrospective of Palazzolo’s work at New York’s Metrograph Theater in July 2023. Caligari’s Cure, however, remains little-known and underseen, and we hope that by preserving it, audiences, scholars, and programmers can gain a deeper appreciation and broader understanding of Palazzolo’s one-of-a-kind body of work.

About the Preservation

Tom Palazzolo began donating his films to Chicago Film Archives in 2013. CFA’s Tom Palazzolo Collection now contains over 1800 items, most of which are 16mm prints, outtakes, and elements from Palazzolo’s independent films.

CFA worked with Colorlab on the photochemical preservation of Caligari’s Cure. Using the original 16mm A/B roll negatives, Colorlab produced a new interpositive of the film via liquid-gate contact printing. The original full-coat mag master mix was used to create a new negative optical soundtrack, which was synced with a duplicate negative to produce new 16mm polyester answer and release prints.

If you are a programmer or curator interested in showing Caligari’s Cure, please contact us.

Many thanks to The Film Foundation, the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, the National Film Preservation Foundation, and Colorlab for their help in preserving this film for the future!

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¹ Jack Helbig, “Tom Palazzolo’s Life in Pictures,” Chicago Reader, Sep 23, 1999.
² These three films, plus America’s in Real Trouble (1967) and He (1967), were photochemically preserved by Chicago Filmmakers with an Avant-Garde Masters grant in 2005. The preservation elements from that project have since been transferred to Chicago Film Archives and added to the Tom Palazzolo Collection.
³ Robert Cross, “Film Techniques Seminar Bizarre but Interesting,” Chicago Tribune, Oct 13, 1968.
⁴ Roger Ebert, “A retrospective by our filmmaker laureate,” Chicago Sun-Times, Feb 15, 1977.
⁵ Ted Shen, “Reel Life: recent adventures of Tom Chicago,” Chicago Reader, Feb 14, 1991.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Harvey Nosowitz, “Pure Palazzolo, Better Benning,” Chicago Reader, Mar 1983.
⁸ Rob Baker, “‘Response’ show is current, tough,” Chicago Tribune, Nov 3, 1968.
⁹ Ted Shen, “Group Efforts: Creating a Climate for Chicago Filmmakers,” Chicago Reader, Nov 11, 1983.
¹⁰ Helbig.
¹¹ Nigel Andrews, “Hollywood Comes to Edinburgh,” Financial Times, 1983.
¹² Tom Palazzolo, personal correspondence with Olivia Babler, Jun 16, 2023.
¹³ Peter Keough, “Reel People: Filmmaker Tom Palazzolo’s been looking at us,” Chicago Reader, Jan 1987.
¹⁴ Callie Angell, “Caligari’s Cure,” The New American Filmmakers Series: Exhibitions of Independent Film and Video Number 1, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982.