:: FRIDAY, JANUARY 17 - THURSDAY, JANUARY 23 ::

🎉 YEAR-END LISTS

Here at Cine-File we like to wait until the year actually ends to publish our “best-of” lists, which abide by whatever rules the contributor chooses. View them on our blog here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

The Worlds Of Wiseman

Gene Siskel Film Center – See days and showtimes below

Frederick Wiseman’s THE STORE (US/Documentary) and RACETRACK (US/Documentary)
Friday, 5:30pm (STORE) and 8pm (RACETRACK)
THE STORE (1983, 120 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) appeals to me on a personal level—I like fashion and shopping, and department stores are as much a part of my formative years as they are the American fabric—while RACETRACK (1985, 114 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) does not. I’ve never particularly liked horses, nor do I particularly care about horse racing, so much of what occurs in RACETRACK was new to me, but not necessarily in a way that engaged my interest. I thought about this distinction while reading an old New York Times review of THE STORE in which critic John Corry writes that Wiseman’s “film says only that here is Neiman-Marcus, this is what it is. As a cinematic record, this may be valuable, although as television it is scarcely compelling.” (The latter part refers to the film being shown on public television, once the predominant way to see Frederick Wiseman’s films.) He later exclaims that, “however masterly an example of cinema verite,” THE STORE “is not telling us anything new.” Now, of course, what we see may seem new to us, as many of Wiseman’s films are from previous decades; but in general it begs the question of how we watch his films and assign to them significance based on what they’re documenting. Shot between Thanksgiving and Christmas at the Neiman-Marcus in Dallas (also the store’s corporate headquarters), the film explores the store as an illustrative microcosm, containing within many disparate elements to form its labyrinthine whole. Cinema is rife with examples of the leviathan shopping experience as metaphor for something indicative of society’s ailments; George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979) and more recently Bertrand Bonello's NOCTURAMA (2016) come to mind, though both have a clear intent in utilizing the mall as a setting. Wiseman almost depoliticizes the concept of a large department store, presenting it so straightforwardly that Corry is not wrong in his assertion of what the film is saying. The store contains many departments, from furs and lingerie to housewares and cosmetics; it’s obviously more full-service than most of today’s shopping experiences, bringing us back to the customer-first world of in-person shopping, with the salespeople internalizing the ethos of their front-lines position. One salesperson exhibits expensive furs for an indecisive buyer; another laments the weight of a coveted skirt. The prices are insane—a jewelry set going for over $100K would be three times that nowadays—and the wealth immense, the result of illusory Reaganomics. In presenting such capitalistic excess so nakedly, Wiseman shows it for the insipid banality it is, the precision of depiction foregrounded a more obvious meaning. Yet there are those who dislike this more benign tactic, with Corry later writing that “some truths are more interesting than other truths, and most of the truth in THE STORE isn't interesting at all.” In Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman, the authors Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson note that reviewers think “Wiseman is at his best when condemning institutions.” Neither is RACETRACK an indictment of its respective institution, but also a neutral, if even amiable, probe into the entity’s relatively niche undertakings. It begins with a thoroughbred being born and the mating of other horses (if there’s a chance to show animals having sex, Wiseman will certainly take it). Leading up to its denouement, the 1981 Belmont Stakes (it’s set at the Belmont Race Track), he takes us through the ostensible life of a racehorse and all that occurs around them. One might almost imagine the wealthy clientele of THE STORE as the ones most invested in the lifestyle of horse racing; in spite of the messiness involved, it’s shown as an interest and undertaking of the upper classes, both animal and its attendees fodder for their amusement. But still it isn’t an indictment, pursuing a vastness of experience versus anything more specific. (One scene depicts some sort of church service taking place at the tracks wherein the preacher warns about television and overwork causing depression.) Ironically Corry also reviewed RACETRACK for the New York Times, proclaiming it “one of Wiseman’s better works,” with his intention being “to suggest that a racetrack is a hermetically sealed world, or perhaps a whole series of worlds, each sharing some time and space with the others,” as if THE STORE isn’t theoretically the very same thing. Watching both in such close succession was an interesting exercise, more fully exposing Wiseman’s films as canvases rife for projection, especially when the topics considered are expressed so temperately. One’s person THE STORE is another person’s RACETRACK, and vice versa. But there’s always ever only one Wiseman. [Kat Sachs]
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Frederick Wiseman’s DEAF (US/Documentary)
Monday, 5:15pm
The four films that Frederick Wiseman made about Alabama’s schools for people with disabilities mark a turning point in the director’s career. Compared with his previous documentaries, the 1986 tetralogy feels more patient and compassionate, setting the stage for his masterpieces of the 1990s and beyond. The scathing irony of such early films as HIGH SCHOOL (1968) and BASIC TRAINING (1971) is almost nowhere to be found; there’s also less editing within scenes, suggesting that Wiseman is more interested in spending time with his subjects than in forming opinions about them. The new approach of the tetralogy yields its biggest breakthrough in the longest sequence of DEAF, which runs almost 45 minutes and which could stand alone as its own short film. (The tetralogy, which runs about nine hours altogether, is also where Wiseman stops caring about conventional runtimes.) Beginning about an hour into the movie, the sequence presents a meeting between the principal of the Alabama School for the Deaf, a school social worker, the mother of a preteen student who has recently threatened to take his own life, and the student himself. Wiseman shows the adults speaking together before the student enters the room; it becomes clear that they care about the boy, want to understand his situation, and work out the most effective solution to his problems. After the boy enters, the conversation remains calm and deliberate, the adults making great effort to make him feel cared about and understood. Eventually, through Socratic dialogue, the source of the boy’s emotional pain is identified. He misses his biological father, who has not been present in his life for some time. (What isn’t discussed, but remains a specter over the discussion, is that the boy’s disability makes it especially difficult even to communicate his complicated feelings.) This revelation provokes the mother to share her damning opinion of her ex-husband, culminating with some of the most painful words a child could ever have to hear about a parent: “He does not love you.” One reason these words make such an emotional impact is that they arrive after Wiseman has spent roughly half an hour in the company of these subjects, carefully developing sympathy for all of them. Moreover, this moment stands out because practically every adult in DEAF until this point has shown the utmost care for the well-being of children. The film abounds with scenes of teachers excelling at their jobs, instructing their pupils and encouraging them to take pride in their achievements. Where earlier Wiseman films delineate processes of social control, DEAF considers how children internalize information and become independent. (1986, 164 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
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Frederick Wiseman’s BLIND (US/Documentary)
Monday, 8:30pm
The last of documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s tetralogy on Alabama services for people with disabilities, BLIND opens at an icon of Southern culture, Alabama’s Talladega Motor Speedway, where women in Daisy Dukes and halter tops and mullet-coiffed men waving the Stars and Bars have gathered to watch a stock car race. Amid all the NASCAR pageantry and rolling car advertisements, a small group of student musicians from the Alabama School for the Blind (ASB) assemble to perform for the crowd. The tuba is so large that its player has to sit sideways on a chair to play it, but the ensemble isn’t half bad. We don’t get a shot of the crowd’s reaction to the music, however, just the school bus pulling away from the track. This sequence feels jarring in its juxtaposition of a muscular spectator sport with the delicate, personal work that takes place at the school, but Wiseman’s feel for the ambitions of the community at large makes the car race enthusiasts and the eager students at ASB somehow harmonize. Like spectators in the stands, we watch and cheer on a very young, blind student who says he can go to see a teacher in another part of the school without help—and then does. We cheer when a young girl learns, step by step, how to use a cane to navigate through the school. The patience and care shown by the faculty and staff are incredibly inspiring; even when one of the students becomes a disciplinary problem, the care taken to discuss possible solutions, included a disagreement about whether spanking is in order, is a model for how I would like a child of mine to be treated. BLIND is the opposite of its title—an illuminating look at a corner of American society about which most of us only have misperceptions. (1986, 132 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Frederick Wiseman’s ADJUSTMENT & WORK (US/Documentary)
Tuesday, 5:30pm
On one level, ADJUSTMENT & WORK is as grounded in concrete detail as anything Frederick Wiseman has made. A characteristic early sequence presents people using specially designed machines to hone their hand, foot, and eye coordination, and this passage sets an air of fascination that will color the film’s overall depiction of job training facilities and the hyper-specific technology they employ. On another level, this film is one of Wiseman’s most abstract, as it raises questions about the purpose of work and what constitutes a meaningful existence. ADJUSTMENT & WORK climaxes with an extended tour of the factory floor of the Alabama Industries for the Blind, where workers assemble various products, mostly in assembly-line fashion. Wiseman’s sequences of people at work are always engrossing—no other filmmaker exhibits greater feeling for the rhythm of working—but rarely are they as meaningful as the ones in this film. That’s because Wiseman spends the rest of the film showing how practice and self-discipline are necessary for learning to live independently as a blind or deaf person. In this context, the factory work seems valedictory. The film practically begins with a recently blind man taking beginning to navigate a mock-up kitchen with some assistance; Wiseman lets it run on longer than most other filmmakers would, so that we not only understand the work he’s doing but experience some of the patience he must be exercising in order to advance at his task. The movie’s most dramatically intricate sequence concerns the meeting between a 35-year-old blind man and the committee at the Alabama Industries for the Blind who will determine his course of work. The man’s story (as we learn from the committee members before he enters) is a sad one. Blinded in an accident at 15, he completed high school at the Alabama School for the Blind, then attended college on and off for over a decade without graduating; in recent years, his mother took ill and his sister was murdered. Now he just wants to work, but no employer he’s applied to will hire him. He hopes to get into a knitting program. Wiseman develops no small sympathy for this man and the team responsible for finding him employment, rendering his placement at a knitting job a great victory. Throughout ADJUSTMENT & WORK, Wiseman asks spectators to rethink their idea of what is eventful in cinema as well as their sense of cinematic time. (1986, 118 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
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Frederick Wiseman’s MISSILE (US/Documentary)
Wednesday, 8:30pm
A church sermon in MISSILE referencing the recent explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger places the filming in the early weeks of 1986, two years into Ronald Reagan’s second term and only a few years before the collapse of the USSR. As in CANAL ZONE (1977) and SINAI FIELD MISSION (1978), Frederick Wiseman has set his sights on an institution—the 4315th Combat Crew Training Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base, training officers in the operation of weapon systems for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)--approaching its sell-by date. Having arrived to document a crack-up decades in the making, he is in one sense fashionably late yet in another—for MISSILE concerns a disordered reality that still underpins American life—perennially on time. The first voice in MISSILE belongs to commanding officer Col. Jim Ryan, whose even-keeled, avuncular affect sets the tone for his unit and for this eerily calm picture. In an opening scene, Ryan, paper cup in hand, presides over an informal classroom discussion on the ethics of military orders and of launching nuclear weapons; at the end of this, he says participants will be asked to sign a paper acknowledging that this perfunctory exercise has sufficiently soothed their consciences to proceed with the training. Flooded with alphabet-soup acronyms and minute discussions of process, the trainees are engulfed in a mind-numbing world of diagrams, logbooks, lights, switches, clocks, and dials, preparing to staff the underground facilities where they await an order which, Ryan assures them, will only be given if the President perceives a threat to "our way of life"; he adds later that these weapons are reserved for "the final solution." Frequent reference is made to the PRP, or Personnel Reliability Program, the military’s process of psychological evaluation for officers entrusted with nuclear weapons; as in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the policy stipulates that only the sanest officers are tasked with executing insane orders. Newcomers to Wiseman may be lulled into some comfort or even boredom by the kindly tone of the instructors and by the quiet, respectful pace of life at Vandenberg (the unit even provides a model of gender equality, as the two officers who pass the training with flying colors are a pair of young women); to the paranoid viewer, or to those attuned to this director’s use of irony in framing, structure, and montage, every scene of reasonable professionals at work only underlines the madness of his subject. (1987, 115 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Brendan Boyle]
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Also screening this week are New 4K DCP Digital Restoration of Wiseman’s MULTI-HANDICAPPED (1986, 126 min) on Tuesday at 8pm and CENTRAL PARK (1990, 176 min) on Thursday at 6pm.

Michael Snow's LA RÉGION CENTRALE (Canada/Experimental)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm

Michael Snow’s films of the 1960s and '70s came at a time in the broader art world when the avant-garde experimentation of the previous few decades had removed any sense of “rules” in artistic production. While there were forebears in the film world, Snow’s structuralist works of this period were more akin to paintings by someone like Gerhard Richter, showing a post-impressionist sensibility that emphasizes both the conventionally good-looking figuration of his subject and the abstracting capacities of his medium. His defining achievement in this regard is his mammoth 1971 film LA RÉGION CENTRALE. Like many structuralist works, the film can be described simply, its rudimentary concept driving everything that happens therein—Snow commissioned a robotic arm that could move a 16mm camera along all axes of motion by remote control, and he set it up in a mountain range in northern Quebec to capture the full landscape without any people in the shots. Over three hours (cut down from a reported 60 hours of footage taken), we see about a dozen camera placements that pore over the land and sky at different times of day. Far from being a catalog of every angle of the space, something defined algorithmically to include every possible speed and angle of motion the camera could do, Snow moves his camera musically, improvising and discovering details in the landscape and contours of motion that are particular to each shot. The film is bookmarked by its slowest and fastest passages, beginning with a crawling shot that looks at the ground directly next to the apparatus. By the film’s final shot, the camera is whipping around with such speed that even the line between land and sky gets caught up in a beautiful mush, all features blurring together into something unrecognizable. It’s the 2+ hours between these shots that clue the viewer in to Snow’s perceptive game, with the alternating speed and angles forcing the viewer to mentally toggle between the perception of definite, placeable photographic information and impressionist swirls, both produced within a single camera placement. The viewer is gifted a painter’s vision, the subject in each shot broken down into its constituent details which are then remixed at will to exhaust the space of its possible images. It’s this thorough alteration of vision itself that makes LA RÉGION CENTRALE an unparalleled achievement in the avant-garde. Screening as part of the Back and Forth, Around and Around: Michael Snow on 16mm series. (1971, 193 min, 16mm) [Maxwell Courtright]

John Ford's THE GRAPES OF WRATH (US)

Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

John Ford's most successful film was based on John Steinbeck's novel about a Great Depression era family who lose their farm and are forced to become migrant workers to survive, eventually making their way from Oklahoma to California. In many ways it shouldn't be surprising that Ford's most thoroughly depressing film is also his most accessible. Shots of Henry Fonda and company driving down Route 66 remind us of the inherent natural beauty of America and of the power and determination of the American psyche (seen in the curves of the industrial highway and the landscape it winds though), while the narrative of the film reflects harsh reality of that moment and a rising hopelessness in the American spirit; the film is both in love with America and furious with it. Even so, an exchange between Charley Grapewin and a girl at a truck stop, in which she sells him candy for his grandchildren at a greatly discounted price, knowing that he really can't afford even what he does pay, is enough to restore some faith in humanity. Preceded by a 10-minute Henry Fonda trailer reel on 35mm. (1940, 128 min, 35mm) [Julian Antos]

Her Expansive Self: Five Films by Women Exploring Identity and Multiplicity (US/Experimental)

Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 6pm

This program begins the much-anticipated Picture Restart series, 16mm films from the recently unearthed collection of films from Picture Start, “a well-established and now defunct distributor of underground film,” per Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon. (Read Cine-File contributor Joshua Minsoo Kim’s piece on it for the Chicago Reader to learn more.) The program description quotes Legacy Russell, who, in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, notes that “the glitch creates a fissure within which new possibilities of being and becoming manifest.” The first film, Heidi Tikka’s ON THE THRESHOLD OF LIBERTY (1992, 12 min, 16mm), embodies both program title and ethos completely. It begins with someone cutting onions, an obvious but nevertheless evocative visual representation of layering, made irreverent by the onions’ tips resembling large nipples. “The eye that is split cannot look back,” begins a woman’s voiceover following this silent progression. “In another film, the eye is split. The eye that is split cannot look back.” Does she refer to UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928), in which, at the beginning, a woman’s eye appears to be sliced (“split”) open? The Helsinki-based artist, who graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992, writes in her synopsis that she’s questioning “the Freudian notion of the split subject by replacing it with her vision of an endlessly layered, multiple and rhythmic process.” Indeed, I watched the short film several times, a few times with my eyes closed to focus on just the voiceover, and the film evinces that exactly, aptly defying the idea of a split self in favor of a multilayered one. The noirish black-and-white cinematography is mesmerizing, complementary of and distracting from the revelatory voiceover, providing literal layers to consider. Cathy Cook’s BUST-UP (1988, 7 min, 16mm) stars Holly Brown, a mainstay in the ‘80s Milwaukee queer club scene, as several female archetypes who bewilder a tea-time guest. Also in black and white, it’s a stark antithesis to its predecessor in tone but approaches multiplicity similarly. It’s rather straightforward but also really fun, thus resisting any overly formal critical analysis. In the early 1980s, before she was a got her start directing her husband Eric Bogosian in his solo theatrical shows, Jo Bonney worked with animator Ruth Peyser to co-direct two short films, one of which, ANOTHER GREAT DAY (1980, 6 min, 16mm), is being shown here. Collage-style animation depicts a housewife as she goes throughout her day and the media in which she submerges herself to escape the doldrums. This seems to represent what a woman may experience when, like the onions in ON THE THRESHOLD OF LIBERTY, she’s stripped of her layers and allowed only a singular identity. The projection of an identity onto a woman composes Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s RUINS WITHIN (1992, 10 min, 16mm). At the beginning, a young woman is shown in bed with a man who’s watching belly-dancing videos, rejecting his gaze of her similar to that being given toward the woman on screen. She then goes to a dance audition in a decrepit ballroom, which is being demolished while she’s in it. The short is free of dialogue, conveyed entirely through the woman’s being and the males’ observations of her (it’s a man overseeing the dance audition) with belly-dancing-style music playing throughout. The demolishment of the building she’s in reflects the destructive nature of the gaze itself, leveling something abstract into ruinous simplicity. The program concludes with the sound version of Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied’s MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943/1959, 14 min, 16mm), which buttresses the program nicely. When shown with other short films by relatively little-known women experimental avant-garde filmmakers, it raises the question of who else may have risen to such a stature had the barrier to entry not been so impenetrable. Another’s gaze may demolish the self, but such an exhibition of work helps to demolish the unseeing of these very expressions. [Kat Sachs]

Jane Campion's IN THE CUT (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm

Though many things in recent years have made me think to myself, “Hey, the kids really are alright,” one in particular chuffs me to no end: the re-evaluation by younger critics of Jane Campion’s 2003 erotic thriller IN THE CUT. Lambasted upon its initial release—one critic at the time said it “feels only vicariously dangerous, like a coffee-table collection of images from the inferno”; another declared it a “puzzling affair of murky motivations and leaps of logic that no amount of Meg Ryan skin and no number of faked orgasms can hide,” an assessment that didn’t age particularly well—Campion’s adaptation of Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel is, like many films of its caliber, one that graciously unveils itself only to those receptive of its brilliance. The reward is a blisteringly sexy and almost egregiously cool genre turn in which a woman’s sexuality is as much a mystery as the bizarre serial murders (a bizarre but nevertheless accurate equivocation). Meg Ryan, in perhaps her best performance, stars as Frannie, a New York City English teacher who becomes embroiled in the hunt for a serial killer after remnants of a murdered woman are found in her garden; she’d also been at the same bar as the victim, meeting with a student she consults on slang for a project she’s doing. Indicated by the film’s idiomatic title, a fascination with language persists throughout, as Frannie collects words and phrases from all over, even diligently observing community poetry displays on public transit. It's clear that Frannie doesn't make much time for romance, evidently having been put off by her parents’ disastrous marriage. That changes, at least to an extent, when she becomes involved with the investigating officer on the case, Detective Malloy (pre-Marvel Mark Ruffalo, when he was actually an interesting actor). Their affair accounts for the erotic sex scenes, which effectively disrupt the male gaze as much as anything that might lay claim to such an achievement. (In her excellent capsule for a previous Chicago Film Society screening, fellow Campion devotee Rebecca Lyon notes that the film was pitched to investors as something akin to David Fincher’s SE7EN; both have myriad virtues, but I’m more interested in Campion’s answer to the question, “What’s in the box?”, which Malloy does his best to find.) Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Frannie’s half-sister, Pauline, a hopeless romantic who’s the complete opposite of Frannie in her near-histrionic vulnerability. When the murders become personal for Frannie, her suspicions over Malloy potentially being the killer come to a head, leading to a dramatic but still provocative conclusion, fitting of both the genre and Campion’s interpretation of it. All this is made even more impactful by Dion Beebe’s cinematography, which presents Campion’s doleful grittiness superlatively. The visual aesthetic accomplishes many things, representing various elements at play within the film, from the literal violence of the murders to the emotional violence of the ever-apocryphal search for romance. As do the camera movements and shot compositions, which are heady and revelatory at most every turn, even as the dimness of the light sometimes obscures the action. That’s an apt metaphor for the film itself: there’s more there to what you can’t see than what you can. The abiding enigma of intimacy and the secrets that people, especially women, hold within are here appreciated for their unremitting mystery. Screening as part of the Lust & Intrigue: Erotic Thrillers series. (2003, 119 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Nicholas Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 5:30pm

The western is an odd beast, a genre bound only by location, easily shaped into something as desolate or as crowded, as stark or vivid, as is required. They come more varied than science fiction films, expanding the West into something more complex than outer space, and creating dozens of different landscapes out of the same mold—Anthony Mann's West, John Ford's West, Budd Boetticher's West. Nicholas Ray's West, at least as created in JOHNNY GUITAR, is one of the most bizarrely beautiful. From Peggy Lee's desperate title song and Victor Young's score, hanging over the film like a sympathetic vulture, to the unearthly two-strip Trucolor, which seems to bind the film's characters into their environment as if they're bleeding into one another, it's Ray's most aesthetic film. But it's every bit as personal as IN A LONELY PLACE or WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden don't seem fit for the west, and the same could be said of their gender roles, but it's their complete discomfort that gives the film its tense and uneasy beauty. Ray has a knack for finding poetry where others would surely fumble, and here he's at his most poetic. Followed by a discussion with critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of his new book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader. Admission is $40 for Film Center members, $50 for general audiences, and includes a signed copy of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. (1954, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Julian Antos]

Raúl Ruiz' MANOEL'S DESTINIES (France/Portugal)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm

Raúl Ruiz, whose films have a tendency to be plagued by (or even predicated upon) images of mutilated corpses, once offered by way of explanation two distinct justifications for the emergence of this central motif. Firstly, the director claimed that schoolchildren in his native Chile were invited to view autopsies to learn lessons about anatomy, adding that he himself witnessed numerous bodies disfigured by train accidents outside of his childhood home. Secondly, he accredits his exposure to the myth of Isis and Osiris, in which the latter god is duped, murdered and dismembered by Set, who proceeds to scatter the fragments of the body across Egypt, as the point at which a certain thematic valence of his artistic practice crystallized, for he saw Osiris' mutilation and subsequent transformation into the god of the dead as a metaphor for his own exile from Chile during Pinochet's ascension in 1973. It is perhaps too fitting that MANOEL'S DESTINIES, a macabre children's television miniseries shot on the island of Madeira, only seems to exist in a state of utter disfigurement. Originally conceived as a four-part Portuguese TV broadcast and later screened at Cannes in the form of a truncated theatrical cut, the film is now circulated as a three-episode series that was re-cut and dubbed especially for French television. Even more remarkable is the fact that this seemingly sole surviving copy of the film is a wickedly lo-fi VHS rip, supposedly recorded from a one-time broadcast on Australian television. While long purported to be Jonathan Rosenbaum's favorite of Ruiz's fantasies, the work has taken on new life over the course of the past decade, gradually becoming something akin to a cult classic and a uniquely beloved staple of the director's staggeringly vast body of work. The renewed interest is undoubtedly motivated by the alluring mythology of the "lost" film and the peculiar analogue beauty achieved by the garbled VHS transmission, as the chunky pixelation and audiovisual distortion exert a hypnotic pressure on a film whose prismatic colored filters and audacious practical effects—both staples of Ruiz's swashbuckling '80s output—already possess an intensely hypnagogic power. The product of a process-oriented filmmaker who worked at a furious clip his entire life and favored fragments and decay over unity and structural integrity, MANOEL'S DESTINIES stands as of the director's great cinematic ruins, utterly ravaged by the degradation of its images and by Ruiz's full-bodied repudiation of the strictures of conventional narrative cinema. While putatively made for an audience of children, the film is as lurid in its evocation of the perils of childhood experience, as philosophically charged in its musings on filmmaking and adult meaning-making, and as byzantine in its narrative construction as anything else in the director's diverse oeuvre. The first episode is a straightforward moral fable, following a child named Manoel, played by various actors at different ages, as he attempts to avert family catastrophe and alter his destiny (one of Ruiz' many pet themes) by rewinding the clock again and again, sailing backwards through time aboard a fisherman's boat and delivering dire imperatives to his past selves, each time failing to circumvent the harsh blows of fate. However, digressions abound, and the next two episodes slip loose from the tidy recursion of the first and into progressively choppier waters. The second episode sees Manoel trapped in the body of a ragged adult man, his own childhood form having been stolen by the spirit of a dread pirate, and by the magnificent third episode, an entire suite of child actors are set loose in a museum where they set to work deciphering the hidden codes of reality (a personal favorite: the Eiffel Tower is an iron code that transforms French body odor into perfume) and immerse themselves in a nightmarish bacchanal of shadow puppetry orchestrated by an insidious sea captain. Ultimately, the work seems to reflect the chaotic organization of the unconscious itself, throwing itself full-bore into the messy interpenetrations of childish naiveté and adult certainty that inform our entire lives. The film is also preeminently concerned with infantile play, manifest not only through its own giddy refusal of narrative congruity, but through the explicit link drawn between shadow puppetry and filmmaking. Manoel himself delivers the thesis in the second episode: "Grown-ups played too, conjuring the shadows of ghosts. They called it 'movies.'" The child's fantastical, terrifying and utterly boundless sense of the unknown, coupled with their propensity for games and unrestricted play, reemerges in the filmmaker's attempts to derive meaning through the artistic process. Screening as part of the Love Torn in a Dream: The Illusory Odysseys of Raúl Ruiz series. (1984, 152 min, Digital Projection) [David Whitehouse]

Peter Watkins' THE JOURNEY (England/Sweden/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday and Sunday, 11am

If you’ve heard of Peter Watkins’ RESAN (THE JOURNEY), it’s likely because of its length. While its 14 hours are remarkable for that reason alone, this pigeon-holing is also likely because the film, and Watkins’ work as a whole, is hard to describe simply. He developed a distinct, confrontational docudrama style throughout the 1950s, '60s, and '70s (even collecting an Oscar along the way for 1966’s THE WAR GAME), culminating in THE JOURNEY’s exhaustive nuclear treatise in 1987. By this point, Watkins’ cynicism towards dominant modes of media production had exploded the container of regular narrative or experimental modes, leading to the maximalist mix of interviews, appropriated footage, and speculative fiction that makes up THE JOURNEY. The sum total of Watkins’ material is a sort of encyclopedia of global life under the threat of nuclear war. He spends a good chunk of the runtime interviewing regular folks in various countries about their awareness of the nuclear threat and of its previous uses, particularly in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, paying special attention to where and when they’ve learned what they know. This question of media and education recurs throughout, with many of the film’s images themselves dissected by its soundtrack—early on, Watkins introduces the conceit that every piece of news footage will be marked with a beeping sound when it cuts between images, as well as another pitch of sound when text appears on-screen. Among his many concerns is the minutiae of editing when considering the state’s propagandistic approach to describing its own wars and violent capacities. But instead of sanctimoniously suggesting what a “correct” approach might be, Watkins continuously, frustratingly, puts the onus back on the viewer to parse out his onslaught of information. The film’s runtime aside, the most demanding thing about the whole piece is how it relies on the viewer’s participation and consideration of every piece of information presented. Copious title cards come on screen, some detailing government spending on defense programs, others just containing a big question mark, making sure the viewer doubles back to really think about what they’ve seen. Part 13 ends with a text card saying “Did we know this? If not, why not?”, a phrase that could be the subtitle for the whole film. As urgent as the film’s teachings on nuclear bombs are, this particular problem of what to do with an overwhelming amount of important but difficult-to-bear information has only become more relevant in the age of the internet. It’s exhausting to bear witness to everything one must, but in Watkins’ view our moral reality necessitates even more critical thinking, the great threat of nuclear holocaust carrying with it the great responsibility to stay exceptionally woke. Can you do this? If not, why not? This screening takes place over two days, beginning at 11am both days. (1987, 873 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]

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Raul Ruiz's THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR (France)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 3pm

As James Monaco put it, Raul Ruiz, who died in 2011, provided "more intellectual fun and artistic experimentation, shot for shot, than any filmmaker since Jean-Luc Godard." He was "a poet of fantastic images whose films slip effortlessly from reality to imagination and back again... A manipulator of wild, intellectual games" and labyrinthine narratives. As a boy who loved Lewis Carroll, this all connects with me. The Film Society of the Lincoln Center's capsule for THREE CROWNS gives us the situation ("an encounter between a student who has just committed a brutal murder and a drunken sailor") and the setting ("brothels and Latin American ports" which "Ruiz and master cinematographer Sacha Vierny fashioned out of real locations in Paris and Portugal using a series of ingenious optical effects.") THREE CROWNS was the first Ruiz film to enjoy relatively wide international exposure, though Jonathan Rosenbaum feels it may have made "a less than ideal introduction to Ruiz's work for viewers on this side of the Atlantic," in that it is "difficult to absorb without any understanding of Ruiz as a multifaceted phenomenon." However, he praises "the film's dazzling employment of wide-angle, deep-focus color photography (intermittently suggesting a comic book version of Welles) and many arresting and disturbing surrealist conceits." Who, then, was Ruiz? An artist who, according to Tony Pipolo, had an unmatched "passion for and knowledge of international literature," he fled his native Chile during the fascist coup against Salvador Allende in 1973, living in exile in Paris ever after. According to Adam Thirlwell, his career "can be understood as a sustained resistance, a manic guerrilla operation, against two forms of power: the violence of Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the control on conventional movie-making exerted by Hollywood." For Rosenbaum, his films defy classification, except in their unpredictability and their sense of "pure stylistic play." They are "closet comedies bent on undercutting" virtually all forms of solemnity. (Monaco notes his B-movie influence and his refusal to differentiate between "high" and "low" art.) For Dave Kehr, Ruiz was "the only real maker of fantasy films I know of," meaning his work is fantastic on the level of form, not just content. The "interpenetration of form and content—this endless circulation, really, of form into story into form into story—is the basis of Ruiz's cinema," creating "beautiful blurrings of sense" in which Ruiz's system of imagining "devours" the system of language, with images finally "free to signify everything and nothing." Finally, David Thomson feels "you could have a terrific time with" THREE CROWNS, adding that "especially if you're American, Ruiz is one of those figures you owe it to yourself to sample, to become obsessed with, for all the wonderful non-American ways he knows of holding the screen and turning your passing involvement into a critical model of what it is to be you." Screening as part of the Love Torn in a Dream: The Illusory Odysseys of Raúl Ruiz series. (1983, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]

Stephen Chow’s KUNG FU HUSTLE (Hong Kong)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm

Timeless while also feeling incredibly of its moment, KUNG FU HUSTLE has long stood out as one of my favorite films of the early '00s and a key gateway to a deeper dive into the kung fu genre and Hong Kong cinema. Set in 1940s Shanghai, the film moves seamlessly through a variety of typical classic Hollywood genres; it shifts from gangster film to musical even in its bold opening moments when the violent Axe Gang crew starts dancing in unison. It also establishes the film's distinctive cinematic quality, with large defined set pieces that allow for camerawork to show off the simultaneously impressive and irreverent fight scenes (choreographed here by Yuen Woo-ping, who worked on influential martial arts films like DRUNKEN MASTER and the THE MATRIX). Found within all of this is also some of the most hilarious slapstick comedy of the era; aside from Hollywood films, KUNG FU HUSTLE relies heavily on Looney Tunes as inspiration, with scenes including characters running pancaked into walls and dynamite shenanigans. With some added video game logic, its visual tone makes even the shiny early '00s CGI feel inherent to the narrative space. The performances, too, are outstanding. Sing (played by the film’s director, Stephen Chow) is an ambitious and insolent wannabe gangster who finds himself in the middle of battle between the criminal Axe Gang and their leader, Brother Sum (Danny Chan Kwok-kwan), and a poor neighborhood known as Pigsty Alley. The neighborhood just happens to be home to a slew of expert martial artists, including kung fu masters, the Landlord (Yuen Wah) and the hair-in-rollers, nightgown clad, cigarette-smoking Landlady (Yuen Qiu), whose loud mouth is a literal weapon—Yuen Qiu’s performance is iconic. Amidst all the chaos, violence, and outright silliness is Sing’s hero’s journey, which provides enough emotional resonance to make KUNG FU HUSTLE memorable for more than just its comedic action, though that alone is worth it. Screening as part of the “Martial” Arts series. (2004, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s HYENAS (Senegal)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s first feature, TOUKI BOUKI (1973), is one of the most important African films, a work that single-handedly brought an avant-garde sensibility to the cinema of Senegal and to that of the continent as a whole. (It’s also exuberant and laugh-out-loud funny—there’s nothing highfalutin’ about Mambéty’s experimentalism.) His second, HYENAS, is less groundbreaking in terms of imagery and decoupage, but it’s hardly a minor work. A fierce satire of Africa’s colonial history, HYENAS advances a deceptively subdued aesthetic that allows the caustic themes to resonate loudly. It tells the story of a poverty-stricken village in the middle of the desert that receives a visit from a woman who grew up there but left years ago to seek her fortune. She’s filthy rich now; indeed she seems to have nothing in common with the young woman the townspeople once knew. She’s also poised to lavish her wealth on the needy community. . . so long as the inhabitants agree to murder the shopkeeper who impregnated her and left her in the lurch when she was a teenager. Mambéty adapted the story from the 1956 play The Visit by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, yet he tailors it so perfectly to the concerns of modern Africa that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d learned after watching it that the writer-director conceived of it himself. In Mambéty’s clear-cut (and cutting) allegory, the rich woman represents foreign business interests and the village stands in for the African countries that aim to benefit from them; the relationship demands that both parties end up with blood on their hands if they’re to strike a deal. Mambéty’s willingness to make both sides look bad may be the film’s most courageous aspect. Rather than vilify solely the capitalist/colonialist, HYENAS also critiques the colonial subjects who go along with them and end up internalizing their exploiters’ warped morality. This moral vision brings to mind Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s explanation for his satire MOTHER KUSTERS GOES TO HEAVEN (1975): “I fire in all directions.” Screening as part of the Pan-African Cinema series. (1992, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

David Cronenberg's CRASH (Canada/UK)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 8pm

CRASH subjects us to a world in which we have become superfluous, in which people long for the cool, brutal purity of the machine. Largely a five-person piece, Cronenberg’s film drives characters played by James Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, and Ronanna Arquette into increasingly disturbing variations on a theme that equates automotive collision with orgasm. This is an apocalyptic film, not in the weak sense of a film that depicts an end of the world, but in a much stronger sense: CRASH is a fantasy that aims to discover what it means to exist within a world we have engineered to be uninhabitable by humans. Radically evacuated of interiority, the central characters of Cronenberg’s film are maneuvered as precisely and dispassionately as chassis of show cars: all gleam, all flawless exterior, but nothing underneath the skin. When first released, CRASH was acclaimed by a certain subset of the critical establishment, but also decried as just a half-step away from pornography. Nothing could be further from the case: in comparison to other entries in the curiously long list of people-wanting-to-fuck-cars films, this is almost the least erotic ever made. (Even Mater from Pixar’s CARS franchise is more erotically charged than the loveless, desperate couplings on display here.) Cronenberg’s passion is the machine, with the humans driving it mere vestigial organs in a new flesh of chrome and steel, speed and gasoline. When the ground has been turned to freeways, when the air is but exhaust, when all that is left is internal combustion, concrete, and gears, Cronenberg seems to be saying, the only thing for us remaining humans to do is fuck ourselves to death. Perhaps the greatest film by the world’s best living narrative filmmaker. Screening as part of the Lust & Intrigue: Erotic Thrillers series. (1996, 100 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Hou Hsiao-hsien's THE ASSASSIN (Taiwan)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm

Beginning with A CITY OF SADNESS, his 1989 masterpiece, nearly every film Hou Hsiao-hsien has given us since has been a great one, and even MILLENNIUM MAMBO, arguably the sole exception, is a work of unearthly beauty featuring one of the most indelible endings in modern cinema. Hou's best films, however--THE PUPPETMASTER, FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI, and now, possibly, this beguiling work--have achieved something even rarer than garden-variety greatness. They have suggested no less than a total re-imagining of cinema itself from the ground up, as if returning us to the silent era. Simply put, THE ASSASSIN is unprecedented. Ostensibly a wuxia film, this is worlds apart from anything King Hu might have dreamed up. There exists no film like it, though there are a handful of faint antecedents. Carl Dreyer's DAY OF WRATH, Akira Kurosawa's THRONE OF BLOOD, and Robert Bresson's LANCELOT DU LAC suggest something of the mysticism, the atmosphere of people under the spell of ancient superstition, that Hou casts over this Tang Dynasty legend. Both Kurosawa's and Kenji Mizoguchi's historical films draw on the aesthetic philosophies underpinning classical Japanese painting, just as this film draws on related traditions in Chinese painting. But neither of these potential lineages suffices to fully account for the swirl of sensations THE ASSASSIN induces in each of its richly appointed images. Likewise, Hou's previous work suggests ways one might understand and misunderstand the film in equal measure. If you're used to the allusive narrative strategies and long take style that reached full maturity with THE PUPPETMASTER, you may be disappointed to find that Hou's mode of address is slightly more direct here, his cutting within and between scenes is both more frequent and swifter. While he has not abandoned his aesthetic principles, he has tweaked them to fit his subject matter, achieving a level of concision that is new for him, but totally appropriate for what is fundamentally speaking a work of action cinema, albeit one of the oddest sort you are ever likely to encounter. The result is that this film feels simultaneously close to and remote from the films that came before it. There is nothing here like the entrancing, eight-minute take that opens FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI. Instead, a similarly entrancing rhythm is spun from the gradual drifting of one image into the next like lapping wisps of cloud, and the vertiginous alternation between deep, jewel-like interiors and vast, dream-like exteriors whose uncanny qualities surpass even those of Lisandro Alonso's JAUJA of last year. As with every Hou film since at least GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE, critics have charged that all this visual splendor is allowed to intervene between the audience and the story's human elements ("intriguing, but ultimately opaque", "a lovely, inert object", "no love for anyone, or anything, outside of beauty"), and indeed one or even two viewings may not be enough to unpack this work's most buried currents of feeling, but they are there to be sure, concealed like the titular assassin herself or like the wind in the trees. Screening as part of the Inner Voyages series. (2015, 105 min, Digital Projection) [Edo Choi]

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (Canada/UK) and Ten Shimoyama’s ST. JOHN’S WORT (Japan)

FACETS Cinema – Friday 7pm (eXistenZ) and 9pm (ST. JOHN’S WORT)

The World Wide Web became available to the masses for public consumption on April 30, 1993. Before the world stepped into their first IRC chatroom or understood how to use the AOL disks, society harbored a fear of this emerging technology. Cinema had cemented these fears from the start, with HAL-9000 from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), the replicants of BLADE RUNNER (1982), and espionage via non-reality vacations in TOTAL RECAL (1990). As technology evolved the fear of that tech evolved, the early 1990s saw films depict virtual reality (VR) as humanity’s next existential threat. In MINDWARP (1992), people traded real life for a virtual one. THE LAWNMOWER MAN (1992) explored the madness VR could induce, while BRAINSCAN (1994) linked VR games to murder. By the mid-1990s, VIRTUOSITY (1995) and JOHNNY MNEMONIC (1995) warned of AI and humans becoming little more than organic storage devices. As the millennium approached, anxiety over technological dependence culminated in the threat of Y2K, inspiring the cathartic juggernaut THE MATRIX (1999). Released in the same year Josef Rusnak’s THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999, 97 min, 4K Blu-Ray Projection) offered alternative views of the simulation we could be living in. Cronenberg, long fascinated by the intersection of technology and humanism—whether represented by automobiles, TV stations, or transport pods—crafted eXistenZ as a visceral exploration of virtual reality's implications. eXistenZ is a new virtual reality game designed by the renowned Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Alegra and the marketing team from Antenna Research have invited guests to test her latest game. Allegra is targeted by a militant group of "Realists" who oppose VR. After Allegra is shot in the shoulder, Ted Pikul (Jude Law) is tasked with keeping her safe. The game pods that connect players to Allegra's new VR game require body-mod spinal bio-ports, which Pikul lacks. Their journey leads them to a black-market mechanic (Willem Dafoe) who installs the port in a sequence laden with sexual symbolism, the port itself looks like an anus and accepts a phallic UmbiCord connection that must be stimulated and lubed prior to insertion. These elements echo Cronenberg’s earlier works, such as VIDEODROME (1983) and CRASH (1996), where themes of technology, human flesh, and sexuality converge. Once inside the game, the line between reality and simulation blurs as characters navigate multiple VR layers, until the confusion of reality or game becomes Cronenberg’s thesis: which reality is reality? eXistenZ masterfully bridges 20th-century fears and 21st-century anxieties, encapsulating society’s transition into the digital age. Similarly, Ten Shimoyama’s ST. JOHN’S WORT (2000, 85 min, DCP Digital) reflects on the blurring of reality with VR through the lens of Japanese horror. Based on Chunsoft’s visual novel Otogirisō, the film merges J-horror's eerie atmosphere with early survival-horror video game aesthetics. Megumi Okina stars as Nami, who, with her ex-boyfriend, explores a foreboding mansion she has inherited while gathering material for a game. The film’s labyrinthine mansion, adorned with disturbing paintings and porcelain dolls, fills the screen with the typical tropes of abandoned location horror and serves to immerse viewers in a world of dread and mystery. Shimoyama’s use of digital cameras and stylized visuals channels the lo-fi charm of Playstation games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Incorporating video game elements like text overlays and surveillance-style camera angles adds a meta dimension that complements its supernatural story. By weaving themes of technology’s power to distort reality into its narrative, ST. JOHN’S WORT feels both innovative and prescient. Together, eXistenZ and ST. JOHN’S WORT serve as cultural artifacts that explore the growing dread of living in a simulacrum. They stand as early representations of video game culture while offering insightful commentary on the human condition in an increasingly virtual world. Screening as a double feature as a part of FACETS' monthly Cold Sweat film series. [Shaun Huhn]

René Laloux’s THE TIME MASTERS (France/Animation)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, Midnight, and Saturday and Sunday, 11:15am

THE TIME MASTERS fits within the trend of science fiction films mixed with fantasy that got produced in the wake of STAR WARS’ major success. Like many of those, this animated film has a unique sense of style and storytelling, presenting a lot of complex ideas in visually distinct and strange spaces. Director René Laloux (best known for his more experimental previous film FANTASTIC PLANET [1973]) collaborates with legendary comic artist Jean Girard aka Moebius to tell the story of Piel, a young boy orphaned on a planet called Perdide. Speaking through a transmitter he refers to as “Mike,” Piel communicates with a friend of his father’s, Jaffar, who’s aboard a spaceship. Jaffar is transporting a pair of royal siblings, and the group has a series of escalating detours, all while they speak to Piel to keep him safe. Narratively, there’s much here that’s familiar, but the graphics make THE TIME MASTERS wholly distinctive. It’s an oddly quiet film for one that grapples with melancholic, existential questions about the nature of time; it makes the few moments where danger and violence arise all the more shocking. The coldness and sharpness of the space sequences are juxtaposed against the multiple planets, which feature rounded, soft-looking plants and creatures. THE TIME MASTERS uses lighting and shadows to dexterously express the varying natural shifts on alien worlds; a scene at dusk on a water-based planet particularly stands out. Throughout, the film presents a theme of nature versus technology but not necessarily in a combative way, more so to accentuate texture, both visually and aurally; background noise from both alien planets and machinery emit surprisingly gentle, repetitive sounds that blend into one another. While the film does feel visually like a sibling to NAUSICAÄ IN THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984), in what feels like an antecedent to later Ghibli Studio films, THE TIME MASTERS contains more than one type of bouncy, goofy guy: cute little alien creatures that both provide humor and poignantly emphasize the film’s overarching themes. (1982, 79 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Megan Fariello]

Lilly & Lana Wachowski's BOUND (US)

Leather Archives & Museum – Saturday, 7pm

At the Music Box several years ago following a screening of BOUND, Lana Wachowski shared that part of the inspiration for making the film was a traumatic viewing of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Lana had not transitioned yet, but she had struggled with her gender identity since childhood; she was physically shaken by yet another disturbing depiction of trans identity and queerness as psychopathic pathology. The Wachowskis were determined to create something different: an engrossing, entertaining genre film that didn't criminalize or pathologize queerness. The result, BOUND, is an incredibly entertaining debut from the directing duo who would go on to make THE MATRIX trilogy, CLOUD ATLAS, and the very queer sci fi series SENSE8. BOUND stays true to its genre as a film noir set in Chicago (the Wachowskis' home town) with sumptuous cinematography by Bill Pope, who went on to collaborate with them on the first three MATRIX installments. BOUND tells a tightly wound (pun intended!) heist story centered around Corky (Gina Gershon), an ex-con and expert thief, who meets Violet (Jennifer Tilly), a high femme mob moll looking to get out of the family business. Sparks fly when Corky and Violet meet in the elevator of an art deco high rise and Violet pursues Corky aggressively with big Barbra Stanwyck energy. The first third of BOUND features a series of erotically charged moments that thrilled the queer community at the time with their authenticity, in large part because the Wachowskis hired Susie Bright, a queer writer, activist, and self-proclaimed "sexpert," to consult on the film. (Bright also has a brief cameo at "The Watering Hole," a classic lesbian dive bar filled with Bright's friends from the San Francisco dyke scene.) Things get complicated after Corky and Violet decide to pilfer $2 million from Violet's lover, Caesar (Joe Pantoliano). In a Bogart-esque performance that descends into wild paranoia, Caesar derails Corky and Violet's careful plan to pit him against his mortal enemy, Johnnie Marzzone (Christopher Meloni). BOUND is a delight to watch on many levels: for the lesbian love story, the oh-so-'90s interior design of the claustrophobic film set, the suspenseful heist plot, and the creative visual and sound design that build a lush, atmospheric viewing experience. Screening as part of the Fetish Film Forum. (1996, 105 min, Digital Projection) [Alex Ensign]

Brady Corbet's THE BRUTALIST (US/UK/Hungary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Poised high atop the crest of a wave of giddy anticipation and propelled onwards by a swell of rave festival reports, a clean sweep of major awards at the Golden Globes, as well as the most eyebrow-raising trailer in recent memory, THE BRUTALIST is finally set to come crashing into a theater near you, clocking in at a whopping thirteen reels of 70mm film stock. Seven years in the making, three and a half hours in length (featuring an intermission, to boot), shot on an improbable budget of less than ten million dollars, and boasting a sprawling narrative that spans more than three decades of American history, this is a rare feat of megalithic classical ambition: a capital "A" Art film, a capital "E" Event film, something like a capital "F" Film per its own maddening sense of self-assurance and exaggerated scope of vision. It is difficult not to evoke THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007) and THE MASTER (2012), Paul Thomas Anderson's black-hearted oil rush parable and his mystifying examination of quackery and spiritual devastation in post-war America, respectively, in the course of evaluating Corbet's latest. Those kindred American epics—one, an authentic western epic, the other, a crass parody of one—represent not only the clearest antecedent for THE BRUTALIST in terms of their sweeping scale and material fetishism, but also the raw material from which the film is forged, as Corbet has nimbly synthesized the two modes of period filmmaking into a final product that is alternately dingy and lavish; crude and grandiloquent; didactic and frustratingly ambiguous. Adrien Brody stars as László Tóth, a formerly-renowned Hungarian-Jewish architect who, in a subversive visual riff on László Nemes' SON OF SAUL (2014), survives the horrors of the Holocaust and washes ashore in New York in the film's opening minutes. While he waits for his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), to secure her immigration papers, he plans on supporting himself working for a distant cousin's furniture store in Pennsylvania. Through several accidents of fate, his life will soon be dominated by his arduous relationship with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce) who recognizes Tóth's talent and recruits him to design a monumental city center, one whose elegant Brutalist design sensibility will gradually be disfigured by the competing demands of the local township and the patron himself, who demand in turn that the building fulfill the function of library, church, gymnasium, and town hall simultaneously. An aspiring enfant terrible, or at the least a burgeoning provocateur (lest we forget that Corbet's previous film VOX LUX [2018] opens with the Columbine massacre and breezes through the events of September 11 in rapid succession), Brady Corbet has produced in THE BRUTALIST a film that will likely generate white-hot discourse about its precise political intentions. Against the more conventional backdrop of an immigrant being led to the desert in search of the always-illusory American Dream, the film, much like Jonathan Glazer's recent THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023), examines the ideological foundation—the raw historical material—that underpins Zionism and informed the creation of the Jewish state, reflecting on the immense trauma of wayward survivors of the Shoah and centering a harsh dilemma: endure relentless othering abroad and toil under the tyranny of American capitalist enterprise, or attempt a rebellion against history itself by heeding the call of a fledgling Israel. (2024, 215 min, 70mm) [David Whitehouse]

Andrei Tarkovsky's THE SACRIFICE (Sweden)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 11:30am

Critic Wesley Morris observed of our collective cultural habits, "I think everybody might have a handful of books or movies that they happily return to because they honestly don't remember the plot—they just remember the mood or the experience." Similarly, I think everyone has movies they return to solely for a particular moment or scene. These moments can be so singular that everything around them fades slightly into the background. This isn't to make a virtue of flawed memory, but rather to highlight those directors with the rare gift to sculpt a mood or moment that hovers above a film. Andrei Tarkovsky's cinema is rife with these exalted moments: Capt. Kholin's acrobatic embrace of Masha over a trench and her limp surrender in IVAN'S CHILDHOOD; a floating candelabrum and a chandelier's subtle jangle in SOLARIS. Tilda Swinton encapsulated this phenomenon in a speech referencing STALKER: "I saw an image of a dream that I have been visited by all my life made real ... A bird flying towards the camera dips its wing into the sand that fills a room. Did I imagine this? I haven't seen the film for years. Can somebody tell me?" Released in 1986 and garnering Tarkovsky his second Grand Prix at Cannes (Roland Joffé's THE MISSION took home the Palme d'Or—a banner year for Christendom) THE SACRIFICE is considered by some to be a challenging, ancillary work by the Russian master. With time though the debates over 'slow cinema' and the film's relationship to Tarkovsky's legacy have faded, and what remain are some of the most haunting moments of the director's career: The sudden and uncanny desaturation of the film's image—courtesy of master cinematographer Sven Nykvist—as Erland Josephson roams his estate in a nuclear daze; the flickering TV test pattern reflected on the family in tableau; the film's breathtaking denouement, which never ceases to terrify me. These are the images I return to again and again, echoing Swinton's disbelief: Did I imagine this? (1986, 142 min, DCP Digital) [James Stroble]

Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Wednesday, 6pm

Now that two decades have passed since the last time Sight & Sound magazine named CITIZEN KANE the greatest movie ever made, maybe we can begin to recontextualize it in its historical moment and within Orson Welles’ career. Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose insights into Welles are bottomless, provided some useful starting points a few years ago when he introduced KANE at the Siskel Center, pointing out that the film’s overall project of deflating a media mogul and would-be demagogue reflects Welles’ leftist politics, which were already firmly in place by the time he made it. That Welles’ media mogul should appear so similar to William Randolph Hearst that Hearst himself tried to have the film destroyed speaks to Welles’ audacity, which was also an established part of his persona/legend by his mid-20s. Indeed, it’s astonishing what Welles had accomplished before making CITIZEN KANE, and the film incorporates his achievements in both theater (through the staging and performances) and radio (through the complicated soundtrack). It also builds upon cinematographer Gregg Toland’s then-recent breakthroughs with William Wyler (DEAD END, WUTHERING HEIGHTS) and John Ford (THE LONG VOYAGE HOME) with deep focus photography, which Welles employs to recreate the effect of the theatrical proscenium on film. For André Bazin, Toland’s work inaugurated a new era of cinematic realism in which viewers, presented with whole dramatic environments, could choose which parts of the shot were important based on their interpretation of the image. Yet Welles’ cinematic vocabulary contains a lot more than deep focus shots, and he often guides the viewers’ interpretation, in the expressionist tradition, through a mélange of cinematic devices. Consider the montage that condenses the dissolution of Kane’s first marriage into a few painful minutes; the extreme low-angle shots that turn characters into giants; or the famous camera movement that goes up and up and up through the rafters as Kane’s second wife makes her disastrous opera debut. What these passages have in common is their sheer exuberance—the style can be intoxicating, and it inspired generations of filmmakers. And while Herman J. Mankiewicz certainly deserves credit for the film’s verbal eloquence, there’s no mistaking that this is a film of visual splendor first and foremost. (1941, 119 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Pedro Almodóvar’s THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (Spain/US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Pedro Almodóvar has cited Ingmar Bergman’s chamber dramas as primary influences on THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, his first feature film in English, and the connection to those touchstones could not be plainer. Like those films, it features few characters and concentrates with unwavering intensity on the themes of death and identity; it’s also, like many of Bergman’s films, an actors’ showcase. Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and (to a lesser extent) John Turturro are called upon to channel complicated, even painful emotions, and because there’s little to distract from their performances, one really gets to savor their efforts. But while Almodóvar may admire the Swedish master, he seems constitutionally incapable of making a film as cold as PERSONA (1966) or CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972). THE ROOM NEXT DOOR still feels like the work of the director of THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (1995) or ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999): the colors, whether expressed through Bina Daigeler’s costumes or Inbal Weinberg’s production design, are vibrant and varied; the film regards sex as part of life and thus something to be enjoyed, like cooking or fashion; and Almodóvar inspires warm, grateful feelings about friendship. Indeed, camaraderie is often presented as the ultimate reason for living in the Spanish master’s films; in THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, he argues that it is a necessary part of dying as well. Swinton plays a former war correspondent who’s dying of stage III cervical cancer; Moore plays the novelist friend whom she turns to when she wants assistance ending her life. Almodóvar introduces the premise with hardly any exposition—however quietly, the film plunges us into characters’ experience, refusing to talk around Swinton’s impending death. There’s a fascinating narrative digression into Swinton’s estranged grown daughter and her memories of her daughter’s father, but this too feeds into the larger concern of the character’s preparation for dying. Moore’s character is just as important, as she has to process her friend’s decision and stand as a totem of emotional support; Almodóvar gives her as much, if not more, screen time than Swinton, balancing the theme of death with an equally important theme of living. There’s another, more urgent theme to THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, and it’s given voice eloquently by Turturro, who plays Moore’s climate activist friend and former lover—that is, the foreseeable decline and possible end of the human race due to climate change. Almodóvar intertwines the considerations of humankind’s collective suicide with the central narrative of Swinton’s suicide, arguing that our species as a whole might learn something from how her character approaches death: without fear and emboldened by the love of others. (2024, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Hong Sang-soo's A TRAVELER'S NEEDS (South Korea)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 3pm
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 6pm and Sunday, 3pm

This week on the Hong Sang-soo Show: the indefatigable director reunites with Isabelle Huppert for their long-awaited third collaboration, a serene meditation on language that centers Huppert as Iris, a hard-drinking French expat in Seoul who is beginning to eke out a modest living as a language tutor. Despite possessing a severity of affect that recalls Huppert's grim work in Haneke's THE PIANO TEACHER (2001), Iris emerges as an embodiment of uninhibited whimsy, totally shameless in her commitment to both authenticity and amateurism. She plays the recorder (horribly) on a park bench; she falls asleep in outlandish locations, no doubt owing to the makgeolli she nurses throughout the day; and she rooms with a young Korean lover (Ha Seong-guk), mortifying his overly protective young mother in the process. Most interestingly, while totally bereft of any prior teaching experience, she has nonetheless developed a novel form of French language instruction in which she probes her tutees (in English) for deeper insights into their emotional state of being, only to translate those thoughts into slivers of French poetry (taking great creative liberty in the process). Her students are meant to recite these passages again and again, presumably in order to circumvent the rote mechanical dimension of translating everyday language and to convincingly encounter deeper truth in these tentative first forays into a new tongue. Neither the circumstances of her expatriation nor the precise nature of her relationship with her young Korean roommate are meaningfully expounded upon. Clearly they bear no relevance to the story that Hong is crafting here—contrary to the assertions of his detractors, Hong still scripts and shoots his pictures with extreme precision, even as they appear increasingly shambolic and deploy more daring uses of ellipses. If A TRAVELER'S NEEDS, which predominantly contains dialogue in English, were simply about the extraordinary earnestness that emerges from communication in a lingua franca, then it would be a retreading of the director's 2014 minor masterpiece HILL OF FREEDOM, or even his fragmentary first feature with Huppert, IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (2012). Instead, this is a film that is intellectually concerned with poetry in translation, evoking Walter Benjamin's sentiment that the task of translating poetry is chiefly about achieving a sort of linguistic transparency which will allow the "pure language" of the original text to resonate on the level of connotation rather than denotation, particularly as Iris's exercises in poetic transcription are juxtaposed against several moving encounters with internet translations of work from Korean poet Yun Dong-ju. The film also seems like an attempt from Hong Sang-soo, a noted disciple of Cézanne and Rohmer, to situate his own work in relation to his myriad French inspirations, exploring the edifying potential of immersing oneself in another culture and tradition while also probing the tension that arises as the mother tongue pulls one decisively back to the domain of creature comfort and basic need. As with THE NOVELIST'S FILM (2022) or IN OUR DAY (2023), A TRAVELER'S NEEDS also functions tidily as a reflexive process-oriented work. It's difficult not to think about Iris's idiosyncratic teaching method in relation to Hong's own unorthodox production process. All in all, this is handily one of the strongest works of Hong's relentless late-career run. As an added bonus for anyone fatigued by the slapdash cinematography of his recent slate of films, the compositions here are the most striking and deliberate since Hong decided to become his own DP back in 2021. (2024, 90 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]

Payal Kapadia’s ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT (France/India/Italy/Netherlands/Luxembourg)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 5pm and Sunday, 1pm

Premiering as the first Indian film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in thirty years, Payal Kapadia’s sophomore feature—and her first official foray into fiction filmmaking—dazzles with a confidence of voice and spirit that continues her emerging canon of poetic and politically charged narratives. Kapadia’s vision of feminine perseverance through lives of longing crafts a sprawling and complex vision of Mumbai as a nocturnal city that shines menacingly with wonder and opportunity. Voices that open the film tell us of the entrancing promise of money and stability that can be found in Mumbai, yet such gifts can only realistically be bestowed on the lucky few. For everyone else, you may end up like Prabha (Kani Kusruti) or Anu (Divya Prabha), two women living together and working together at the same hospital, each with varying levels of dedication to their work. Kapadia’s slice-of-life storytelling mode often finds these two at their most intimate and vulnerable in silent moments alone, each desperately working to take in the overwhelming world and circumstances around them. Prabha is stuck in time, her husband working abroad in Germany, with no attempts to contact her in months, save for a recent delivery of a rice cooker; Anu is conversely fixated on the promise of future love, with her nights spent with her new love—the charming Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon)—embarking on that most epic of quests: trying to find a place to hook up. Just like her previous film A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING (2021), the repressive politics of mainstream Indian society find themselves hideously seeped into the fabric of the story, most prominently with Shiaz’s Muslim faith becoming a roadblock for any future life with Anu in an overtly Hindu nationalist society. Yet love, lust, and independence fight their way through to Kapadia’s hopeful ending, where a trip away from Mumbai literally uproots our protagonists from the horrors of living lives of passivity, and provides them each with opportunities to finally move forward in their respective lives. The gift of Kapadia’s film is in how major of a work it feels even with such slight and understated tools, the power of these emotional bubbles filling up to the point of bursting in ways cathartic and mystical and joyously communal. (2024, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Johan Grimonprez’s SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT (Belgium/France/Documentary)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 7:30pm and Sunday, 3:30pm

If you don’t know about the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of democratically elected Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1960, SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT offers an essential history lesson; and befitting a movie with soundtrack in the title, the music is killer as well. That’s because, in addition to being about geopolitics, SOUNDTRACK covers one of the most robust periods in jazz history, touching on the bebop and free jazz movements through such figures as Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus. These artists, along with Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong, were also unwitting actors in the Cold War, it turns out. Drawing on impeccably documented research, SOUNDTRACK explains how their music was used to sell American culture to people around the world (particularly behind the Iron Curtain) and how “goodwill concerts” in African nations were often fronts for espionage activity organized by the CIA. Director Johan Grimonprez cuts between footage of various jazz giants and vintage documentary material of the United Nations, the Congo, and other crucial sites in the short history of the Pan-African movement, culminating with Lumumba’s assassination; in doing so, he conveys how far-reaching the Cold War was while creating an engaging sense of counterpoint between political and artistic histories. The musicians profiled here represented the vanguard of Black creative expression, while some of the other subjects (Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X) represented the vanguard of Black political thought; they’re united by the fact that the CIA undermined them all. Grimonprez highlights this historical obscenity by relating the excitement around both jazz and revolutionary Black political movements in the late 1950s, which inspired people to believe in alternatives to white supremacy in both culture and third world politics. Ultimately, the film is about how different the world seemed when these alternatives were being seriously considered and the dominance of Western corporate interests over global affairs wasn’t so depressingly certain. (2024, 150 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Robert Zemeckis' DEATH BECOMES HER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 11:15am and Tuesday, 4:15pm

My first exposure to DEATH BECOMES HER, which came long before watching the film itself, was from seeing images in a coffee table book about the history of Industrial Light & Magic. Directed by the special effects-attentive Robert Zemeckis, it holds up as a visual marvel 30 years after its release: a stunning combination of practical and groundbreaking digital effects. It remains relevant as a camp classic, however, from its shrewd blending of genres and over-the-top performances; all combined, DEATH BECOMES HER, while maybe not flawless, is like the best of Zemeckis’ films, a perfectly satisfying watch. A biting commentary on aging in Hollywood, the film stars Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as frenemies waging war for the attention of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon played by Bruce Willis. Driving their rivalry and need for revenge is a desperation to find the secret to everlasting youth. They each discover a mysterious socialite (Isabella Rossellini) who claims to have a magic potion to reverse the aging process, but its side effects come at quite a disturbing cost. DEATH BECOMES HER’s combination of dark comedy and body horror is balanced seamlessly by the added melodrama of the four main performances—it's hard to argue a standout when they're all so great. The clever, slow-revealing camerawork and giant set pieces never let the iconic special effects scenes fall completely into the cartoonish, balancing the absurd and the grotesque. The film’s fun is in its constant teetering on the edge; DEATH BECOMES HER manages to express complete uninhibitedness with precise visual filmmaking. Screening as part of the Queer Theory 101 series. (1992, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Osgood Perkins' LONGLEGS (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:30pm

LONGLEGS has an unanticipated fairy tale quality about it. Though maybe one shouldn’t be too surprised, as horror director Osgood Perkins has trod into that arena before with his previous film GRETEL AND HANSEL. His most recent film is dreamy, focusing on imprints left by objects and images and their role in creating and warping memories. The physicality of objects is important, too; they have meaning and magic in a way that at times feels like a nebulous commentary on the importance of physical media—​its '90s setting with '70s flashbacks contributes to this as well. LONGLEGS is a procedural, often reminiscent of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and ZODIAC. Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is a young FBI agent working on a decades-spanning case concerning a serial killer known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), who targets families with young girls and leaves behind coded messages wrought with satanic imagery. Lee is naturally—​perhaps supernaturally—​intuitive, but she may have an even deeper connection to the case than she realizes. This all feels very familiar, but Perkins' distinct style gives an added layer. Lee is shot in warped close ups, as if the camera is trying desperately to get inside her head; Monroe’s strained expressions and reserved anxiety also adds to the sensation that she’s silently screaming. Subliminal, satanic imagery flashes on screen as both Lee and the audience try to piece together what evil is at work here. Cage’s performance is simultaneously what you expect and yet still so unsettling and funny in surprising ways—​despite the lack of visuals in promotional material, Perkins doesn’t hold back from ultimately showcasing this performance. Longlegs is more Twin Peaks' Bob than anything else, a very real threat shrouded in a bizarre supernatural element. The film does however feel cold in its cool-toned settings and the way it keeps the audience at an arm’s length from the details of the evil that’s occurring. Wide shots combined with overcrowded interiors suggest there’s a worse monster lurking just off screen, perhaps captured in a letter or photograph, hidden in the past somewhere. What is most disturbing and resonate about LONGLEGS is what’s left beneath the surface, a fairy tale disguised as a procedural horror, thematically reminiscent with something like THE COMPANY OF WOLVES about the terror of growing up; Lee’s religious mother (a haunting Alicia Witt) even repeatedly mentions a big bad wolf in reference to her childhood. LONGLEGS is impressive in that it’s suggestive without being exploitative: that surviving girlhood is a dangerous minefield that often takes a lot of sacrifice and rarely leaves one unscathed. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. (2024, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Robert Eggers' NOSFERATU (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Director Robert Eggers has consistently been interested in the nature of belief and faith—and how those things not only influence the individual but history as a whole. This perhaps is no better manifested in his first full-length feature, THE WITCH, as American history is explored through the wild and dangerous beliefs of the Puritans. His latest feature, NOSFERATU, focuses a bit more on the individual and relationships to examine belief and how that manifests within the body. A remake of the landmark 1922 German expressionist film by F.W. Murnau and the 1979 version by Werner Herzog, Eggers’ NOSFERATU takes inspiration from both. His dedication to historical accuracy is still discernible, most notably seen in the sumptuous costuming. Costume designer Linda Muir, who’s worked with Eggers on all his films, uses pre-Victorian era fashion to create storytelling within the narrative. Not only do the costumes comment on class and position, but heavy fabrics, textures, and patterns create dense and at times overwhelming barriers to the internal and visceral. This is particularly true of the female characters, namely Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), whose supernatural connection to the vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is what sets the story in motion. At times she violently rips away at her ornate dresses, desperate for release and to make others understand her visions and dreams are portent. Through costuming, set design, and occult-ish objects, Eggers creates a gothic tale that addresses the sensuality aspect of the vampire in twisting and interesting ways—the vampire as cultural myth is so much about consumption and consummation. Impressive, too, is the way in which the hysteria at the heart of the story is not relegated to the female characters (including Ellen’s best friend, Anna, played by Emma Corrin), who have an accurate understanding of what’s happening to them. Ellen’s husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), who sets off for Transylvania to meet with Count Orlok on a real estate assignment, really becomes the focus on the film’s central scares, a more often feminine role in the horror genre. None of the other fumbling male characters have a clue either as to how to defeat this monster, except the occult professor (played by Willam Dafoe), whose expertise also concludes it is solely Ellen who can. (2024, 132 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Alamo Drafthouse
Robert Deubel’s 1982 film GIRLS NITE OUT (96 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Terror Tuesday series.

Robert Downey Sr.’s 1972 film GREASER’S PALACE (91 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Weird Wednesday series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Alliance Française de Chicago
Thomas Napper’s 2023 film WIDOW CLICQUOT (90 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday, 6pm, followed by a post-screening discussion on the role of women in the Champagne industry featuring sommelière Alicia Barrett and Laura Kitaeff of Moët Hennessy. Guests will enjoy a tasting pour of Clicquot Yellow Label before the screening. Enter on 54 W. Chicago Ave. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.)
Carlos Véjar hijo and Edward Dein’s 1953 Mexican film THE SWORD OF GRANADA (80 min, 3D DCP Digital) screens Friday at 7pm. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Scott Lucas’ 2024 film LIFERS: A LOCAL H MOVIE (82 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 11:45pm, with Lucas in person.

Rated XXX and Ramona Slick present Wakefield Poole’s 1972 film BIJOU (88 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 9:15pm.

Chih-Hung Kuei’s 1981 film CORPSE MANIA (82 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 8pm, as part of the January Giallo 2025 series.

Strange and Found takes place Wednesday at 9:15pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

CINE-LIST: January 17, 2025 - January 23, 2025

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Kian Bergstrom, Brendan Boyle, Edo Choi, Maxwell Courtright, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Scott Pfeiffer, James Stroble, David Whitehouse