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The 12th and last in the series of the Chicago screenings of the L.A. Rebellion touring film series, will take place this Friday June 7, with a screening of a newly restored print of filmmaker Larry Clark’s seminal 1977 feature film, Passing Through.The film deals with a jazz musician, recently released from prison and refusing to play for the powers that be, who control the music industry. Looking for inspiration and a sense of purpose he searches for his musical mentor, Poppy Harris (played by Clarence Muse). The film is a fusion of fiction documentary and concert film with a brilliant score featuring the music of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Sun Ra and was called by...

Ashby was born fully formed as a film-maker with this debut, a wise and exact meditation on race relations in New York at the end of the 1960s

Sometimes I imagine a scene of a time capsule opening years after its burial, and a noxious stink arises from the urn because its socio-temporal contents have lost all their context, and thus all their meaning. "Ew," says the crowd assembled, "why ever did we bury that?" Not so Hal Ashby's The Landlord, long unavailable despite being, to my mind at least, one of the most assured directorial debuts in Hollywood history, and also perhaps my favourite of all his work. I saw it as a teenager in the 70s, before it vanished out of circulation for decades. This particular time capsule is all madeleines and bitter almonds, its contents apparently not having aged a day in 42 years.

Ashby, one of...