In the late aughts, young Chicagoan and Odd Obsession video counter clerk Joe Rubin began amassing a huge collection of vintage adult films on 16mm and 35mm and presenting series of rare film prints at Doc Films, including "American Regional Horror," "The Golden Age of American Sexploitation: Forgotten Works from the Sexual Underground", and "Cinevangelism: Evangelical Films from the '70s and '80s" (co-programmed with CFS cofounder Becca Hall). By 2012, Rubin and Ryan Emerson had founded Vinegar Syndrome, a genre film distribution company named for the term archivists and film collectors use to describe the (not remotely fun) chemical decomposition of acetate film base. Today, in addition to their many Blu-ray releases, Vinegar Syndrome has amassed an archive of close to 100,000 individual reels of film, spanning nearly every format and film gauge imaginable. It is the largest genre film-focused archive in the world and one of the largest non-institutional film archives in the United States. For this show, Joe Rubin and Vinegar Syndrome archivist Oscar Becher will join us to discuss the conservation and preservation work they do and to showcase selections from the Vinegar Syndrome Film Archive, including 16mm and 35mm shorts, trailers, and other demented oddities which haven't seen the light of a projector in decades. - Text courtesy of the Chicago Film Society

16mm and 35mm from the Vinegar Syndrome Film Archive