Tom Palazzolo began making films about  Chicago while a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid 60's. Coming to Chicago from St. Louis MO, he saw the ethnic parades and other unique Chicago events with fresh eyes and began a four decade career  documenting these happenings.

 At Maxwell Street   DVD          35 minutes

Jerry’s     10 minutes ( 1976)
          (also with Four Films)
For over thirty years Jerry Meyers has screamed and yelled at customers who come into his deli.  The film attempts to explain why people keep  coming back for more.  “Top award for the fastest camera in the west. To have captured the essence of Jerry and his deli in action proves this filmmaker one of the few who can make the documentary a high art form.” ~ Larry Jordan  
 

 He  '66  10 minutes

 DVD  or  with "Four Films" 

Barthomew Whoops and the bad, bad Ball                             2004

Illustrations: Amy Boyer

Written by :  Jack Helbig & Tom Palazzolo

Starring:  Turk Muller 

            DVD              9    minutes 

“"Palazzolo resides comfortably in his own sphere of reference,  a domain that includes a rich heritage of art history and film as well as his own personal memories. His familiar and gleeful attitude toward these weighty traditions allows him to draw from them freely while indulging in a virtuoso display of visual an verbal puns, sexual innuendo and  obscure references.”  

                       Callie Angel, Assistant Curator, Whitney Museum of Modern Art

  “O”         12 minutes     ( 1967)
“A film of extraordinary ambition and precision, involving a development of great ambition and complexity on both the visual and aural parameters.  It’s sound tract, composed by Berio, is almost unique in its interest.” Annette Michelson, judge, Yale Film Festival (’68).

 The Tatooed Lady of Riverview  "67

   15 minutes    DVD ( or with 4 films )

 Marquette Park I   30 minutes   ( 1976)
   Tom Palazzolo  & Mark Rance

“Marquette Park is a steamroller of raw cinema verite  and unsettling look at the reaction of white residents to a black civil rights march into their neighborhood, and roll played by local Nazi organizers in generation hostility.”  Filmmakers Newsletter.
 Shown  at the Cannes Film Festival.


Marquette Park II       35 minutes   ( 1978)
   Tom Palazzozlo & Mark Rance

 This film “trains its central gaze on the official on looker: the media covering the event, a march by the Chicago based Nazi party.  The films opening structure gracefully orders it’s priorities, giving us a flag-waving anti fascist followed by Nazi clubhouse antics; displaced in turn by an emblematic T.V.  screen  in the center of the frame- a sly comment of the media identity of the event. Later there is a shot picturing the arrival of the press core on the scene- a shot that rivals the entrance of the beggars parade in Pabst’s   THEE PENNY OPERA.   At Marquette Park Palazzolo an Rance provide us with priceless scenes of the on-the-spot reporters in the very act of recording their stream of conscientious impressions. The process reeks with such schizophrenia that the credibility of on location truth telling will never be the same.”
 Ruby Rich, The Chicago Reader.
 

 Down Clark Street.  25 minutes  (2000)

Tom’s nostalgic reminiscence of early 1960’s Chicago blends his vintage footage with new.  It is a chronicle of a time past and sometimes humorous look at the forgotten characters of the down and out Clark street of old.  “ Tom is a person of  interest and Chicago’s best known filmmaker.”  Jack Helbig, the Chicago Reader.