Rashomon @ Siskel Film Center

Rashomon. You know the name, but have you ever seen the film? Akira Kurosawa's classic film about how four separate people (one of them deceased) view a single event, a meditation about how unbiased observation is impossible to obtain, will be screening at the Siskel Film Center tonight at 6:00. The film winds up the Film Center's Kurosawa film festival, which you should have seen. You may also be interested in the 7:45 screening of The Sea is Watching, a film made from a Kurosawa script. Siskel Film Center: 164 N. State. (312) 846-2600.

Iroquois Theatre fire anniversary

Commemorate a grisly event: 100 years ago today, Chicago's Iroquois Theatre caught fire. The fire started backstage, and so was not seen by the audience until much too late. The resulting death toll: an astonishing 600 bodies, making it one of the worst disasters in city history (the number of deaths even higher than that of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871). Amazingly, nobody was held accountable for the disaster. More information on the disaster, and how its lessons are still being learned today, can be found in Anthony Hatch's book Tinder Box: The Iroquois Theatre Disaster, 1903. You might also wish to visit the monument in Montrose Cemetery.