Film screening: "The Unknown Man of Shandigor" (1967) @ Museum of Surgical Science
Secret laboratories. Mobile mortuaries. Gleaming surgical instruments. Rival spy organizations. Serge Gainsbourg at an organ wearing black leather gloves. And a home video with plans for the end of the world.
The International Museum of Surgical Science and Chicago film programmer Stephanie Sack conclude SCALPEL SUMMER with a rare theatrical screening of Jean-Louis Roy’s delirious 1967 cult classic "The Unknown Man of Shandigor."
Part Cold War spy satire, part mad-scientist nightmare, part Pop Art fever dream, "Shandigor" imagines a world where science has escaped the laboratory and become spectacle, weapon, performance, and obsession.
The movie unfolds through surgical imagery, medical procedures, bodily transformation, scientific rivalry, polished instruments of uncertain provenance and one unforgettable liquified spy. Inside the museum’s historic Hall of Immortals, its sinister laboratories and modernist medical caverns should feel less like distant science fiction than an alternate wing of the building.
The screening also celebrates the work of Deaf Crocodile, the boutique restoration and distribution company dedicated to rescuing bold, strange, visually inventive international cinema from obscurity.
Founded by veteran arthouse programmers Dennis Bartok and Craig Rogers, Deaf Crocodile has become an essential home for films that resist easy classification: animation, fantasy, science fiction, political satire, cult cinema, and forgotten works of cinematic imagination.
"The Unknown Man of Shandigor" is exactly the kind of film Deaf Crocodile exists to champion.
Long difficult to see, the film was restored in 4K by the Cinémathèque suisse using the original 35mm camera negative and optical soundtrack. Director Jean-Louis Roy participated in the restoration’s color grading, preserving the film’s extraordinary high-contrast black-and-white photography.
The result is a movie filled with angular faces, cavernous laboratories, black corridors, white coats, gleaming metal, strange machines, and images that look as though they were torn from an underground comic book.
The cast includes Daniel Emilfork as the tyrannical scientist Herbert Von Krantz, Howard Vernon, Jacques Dufilho, Marie-France Boyer, and Serge Gainsbourg as the leader of a black-clad organization of assassins operating from a candlelit funeral parlor.
Gainsbourg also wrote and performs the film’s incomparable song, “Bye Bye Mr. Spy.”
Funny, menacing, stylish, morbid, and genuinely unpredictable, "The Unknown Man of Shandigor" is the kind of film that deserves to be seen collectively...and nowhere is more fitting to do so than Chicago's International Museum of Surgical Science.
Presented in French with English subtitles.
EVENT DETAILS
The Unknown Man of Shandigor
Switzerland, 1967
Directed by Jean-Louis Roy
Thursday, August 20, 2026
Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Screening and program: 7–9 p.m.
International Museum of Surgical Science
Hall of Immortals
1524 North Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ADVANCE TICKETS
$15 general admission
$10 students with code STUDENT
$10 IMSS members with code IMSSMEMBER
AT THE DOOR
$20 general admission
$15 students
$15 IMSS members
GETTING TO SHANDIGOR
Unless you are being dropped off by private prop plane—or transported inside a mobile mortuary—the International Museum of Surgical Science is easily reached by bus, train, car, or rideshare.
Take the #151 Sheridan bus to Lake Shore Drive and North Avenue, just half a block north of the museum.
From the Red Line’s Clark/Division stop, walk east along Division Street to Lake Shore Drive, then north to the museum.
From the Sedgwick Brown or Purple Line stop, walk east along North Avenue to Lake Shore Drive, then south one block.
Rideshare drop-off is directly in front of the museum at 1524 N. Lake Shore Drive
The museum does not have on-site parking, but discounted parking with museum validation is available nearby at 1350 N. Lake Shore Drive, with the entrance on East Banks Street, and in the Chicago History Museum lot, entered from Stockton Drive.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3774842-0
