Mention the term “film archive,” and most people envision subterranean vaults stuffed with carefully cataloged film reels on the verge of crumbling to dust. But this weekend, something unusual is occurring downtown at Anthology Film Archives, where several stored works belonging to a young and vital vault — the Chicago Film Archive — are making the 800-mile journey to be screened for New York audiences.

Think of it as an archive road show — a special program of artifacts preserved by one of the nation’s youngest archival institutions that sheds light on a city not typically embraced as a hotbed of experimental or avant-garde cinema.

“Chicago film history has been a little neglected,” the programming director for the Chicago Film Archives, Michelle Puetz, said. “Being located between the art film scenes in New York and Hollywood, there have been numerous local production companies, particularly educational film productions, that have set up here because of its location in the middle of the country.”

Indeed, Chicago is more than a bridge between the artistic coasts of America. Its distinctive ethnic and racial mix, where urban segregation gives way to suburban sprawl, and where the lines of history and ancestry separating various neighborhoods are still very much a reality, has naturally fostered for the city a filmic history that is unique and worthy of examination.

Nevertheless, it was only five years ago, when some 5,000 films were being removed from the collection at the Chicago Public Library, that the Chicago Film Archives was founded out of a sense of necessity.

“It’s a trend that’s happening nationwide,” Ms. Puetz said. “Institutions are converting films into video formats because films are big and difficult to care for. It takes a considerable amount of resources. We wanted to preserve these works from the library collection.”

In the five years since, the Archives’ mission has become more ambitious, preserving and promoting films not only from the “Chicagoland” area, but from the wider Midwestern region. From time to time, Ms. Puetz and the Archives’ executive director, Nancy Watrous, pore over their mountain of 16 mm films and assemble “Out of the Vault” programs to be screened for the public at the Chicago Cultural Center. Two weeks ago, the featured program was called “Year of Confrontation,” and it highlighted the developments that led up to the infamous Democratic National Convention in August 1968. On Friday night, Anthology Film Archives will feature a special slate of films that Ms. Puetz has handpicked from these “Out of the Vault” programs.

“We’re highlighting films that aren’t necessarily derivative of the experimental and documentary works people are familiar with from New York,” she said. “Here we have movies taking on the issue of race in ways that most experimental films don’t. Many of the documentaries break out of the conventional model. You can see filmmakers who are excited about the possibilities of cinema, of the cinema vérité form, of letting events speak for themselves.”

The five shorts chosen by Ms. Puetz for Friday night’s program — all of which were produced in the 1960s and ’70s and operate outside the realm of standard commercial fare — focus on issues of political turmoil, class segregation, and racial tension. The experimental filmmaker and photographer Margaret Conneely is among the filmmakers chosen. According to Ms. Puetz, Ms. Conneely went surprisingly dark in her 1962 promotional film “Chicago: The City to See in ’63,” which was conceived as a project that would attract members of the Photographic Society of America to the group’s annual conference in Chicago. But Ms. Conneely strayed from the conventions of a tourist video, juxtaposing the metaphors of a strong, proud, glimmering city with the unsavory underbelly that was evident in Chicago but rarely exposed on film.

Much the same disconnect is apparent in the 12-minute film “Super Up” (1966), by the Japanese filmmaker Kenji Kanesaka. Filmed with the objective eyes of a foreigner, the movie offers a stinging critique of Chicago’s social networks and business structure, illustrating the simultaneous decay and rebirth of a major industrial city through depictions of race, the emerging sexual culture of the era, and consumerism. His narrative arc, linking the functions of advertising and the consumerist mind-set of the average Chicagoan, renders the city — as does Ms. Conneely’s work — as a dual entity, a place of dreams and nightmares, of beauty and horror.

Elsewhere in the AFA program, Jeff Kreines’s “Ratamata” (1971, 9 minutes) and Chuck Olin’s “8 Flags for 99 Cents” (1970, 35 minutes) give life to the voices of Chicago citizens during times of strife. Mr. Olin, who wanted to make a simple anti-Vietnam War film, originally set out to contrast the pro-war views of a select group of suburban Chicagoans with his own critiques and scenes of horrific wartime violence. “But what he found when he went out,” Ms. Puetz said, “was that all of these suburban citizens were almost unanimously against the war. And that’s what makes it such a remarkable document. At the time, you had Spiro Agnew talking about the ‘silent majority,’ and people were making assumptions about what the average person was thinking. But ‘8 Flags for 99 Cents’ ended up being very different than [Mr. Olin] intended.”

Finally, Don B. Klugman’s feature-length “Nightsong” (1965), a captivating profile of the folk musician Willie Wright, serves as a breakthrough profile of the nightclub scene on the North Side of Chicago in the mid-1960s, and as a classic tale of urban gentrification. “It exposes the tense race relations at the time, and the differing opinions in the city,” Ms. Puetz said. “The prevailing opinion was that ‘new is good,’ and that glittering steel skyscrapers and expansion were the signs of progress. But here you have this defiant film that shows there are people trying to counter this trend, who think about progress far differently, and who are being pushed aside.”

ssnyder@nysun.com