:: FRIDAY, JUNE 2 - THURSDAY, JUNE 8 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

John Ford’s HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (US)

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

One of the most prominent themes in John Ford’s vast filmography is the discrepancy between the reality of a historical event and how that event is perceived after the fact. This theme is implicit in YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939), explicit in FORT APACHE (1948), and perfectly encapsulated in a famous line of dialogue from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE in 1962: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, Ford’s ultimate past-tense movie, tells the story of an adolescent boy, Huw Morgan, as he reminisces from the vantage point of 50 about his family life in turn-of-the-century Wales (with Huw’s adult voice-over narration being supplied by the director Irving Pichel). This means that Ford’s images are not meant to represent “reality” so much as the decades-old memories of Huw’s off-screen (and perhaps unreliable) narrator-self. The subjective nature of the visual storytelling also explains why this child protagonist, portrayed by Roddy McDowell in one of cinema’s finest-ever child performances, doesn’t seem to age even though the narrative spans many years. (Huw appears to be “too young” at the end of the movie in the same poignant way that John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart are “too old” in the flashback sequences of THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.) Perhaps the most impressive thing about it is how, despite being an 11th-hour replacement for original director William Wyler, Ford still somehow managed to turn HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY into one of his most personal and beautifully realized films: it boasts amazing deep-focus cinematography courtesy of Arthur Miller, a stirring Alfred Newman score, and a star-making performance by Maureen O’Hara (working with Ford for the first of five times). The project’s personal nature shines through in Ford’s melancholy depiction of the disintegration of one family in a mining town beset by union struggles and generational conflict. In so doing, Ford presents an ephemeral vision of an idealized family life, the kind that he personally never knew (where Donald Crisp’s patriarch can preside with tough-but-loving authority over a brood of dutiful, mostly male offspring), and offers a transcendental illustration of his Catholic belief that “death is not the end” besides. Yet his obsessive focus on the inevitability of change also marks this as one of the director’s most pessimistic works: Huw may be leaving his hometown for good at the age of 50 when the film begins but it’s clear by the end that he hasn’t known this now-black valley to be “home” in the decades following childhood’s end. Preceded by Dick Lundy’s 1952 short BUSYBODY BEAR (7 min, 35mm). (1941, 118 min, 35mm) [Michael Glover Smith]

Chuck Russell's THE MASK (US) and Hiroshi Teshigahara's THE FACE OF ANOTHER (Japan)

Highs & Lows at the Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

To quote David Foster Wallace’s essay on David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997): “An art film's point is usually more intellectual or aesthetic, and you usually have to do some interpretative work to get it, so that when you pay to see an art film you're actually paying to work (whereas the only work you have to do for most commercial films is whatever work you did to afford the price of the ticket).” While it serves as a solid explanation, the programming of the Music Box’s series of double features combines these distinct categorizations into a conversation on a theme. THE MASK (1994, 101 min, 35mm) is about an everyman nice guy, Stanley Ipkiss, who can’t catch a break and who consistently places others' convenience before his own needs. After blowing his chances with potential client/girlfriend at his bank job, he finds a Norse mask that turns him into a green-headed deity with Looney Tunes-like powers and carries out his repressed desires. Russell’s original script reflected the dark nature of the source material, a comic book series created by Mahnke and John Arcudi, in which anyone who wears the mask turns into a psychopathic killer. The story was reshaped around Jim Carrey's comedic gifts when Russell realized the boundless possibilities of the actor’s talent. Few times in modern movie making has the filmmaking worked so in tandem with the actor. Seven years had passed since Russell’s previous film, THE BLOB (1988), a film utterly different in tone and style. Due to Carrey's impressive physicality and flexibility, the production saved money by not having to computer generate the actor’s movements or stunts. To date, THE MASK is Russell’s only comedy (with musical numbers, nonetheless). Russell didn’t play to Carrey’s strength because a studio told him to—he observed the actor’s abilities and allowed them to influence his filmmaking. Carrey shot into stardom months before the film’s summer release due to the explosive popularity of ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE. Cast in her first film as the bombshell blonde love interest, Cameron Diaz has charisma from her entrance on screen. The male gaze of the filmmaking emphasizes Diaz’s sensuality so strongly, it feels like self-parody for a modern audience. Though cornered as the film’s two-dimensional sex appeal, Diaz proves her star power, and this film establishes her as the sex symbol she would become by the late '90s. (Russell originally wanted Anna Nicole Smith before giving the role to the 21-year-old former model.) Based on Kōbō Abe’s 1964 novel of the same name, THE FACE OF ANOTHER (1966, 124 min, 35mm) is a lesser-known film by Hiroshi Teshigahara. The story opens with a factory worker suffering horrible burns to his face in an accident. He returns to living at home with his wife, whom he believes has no desire for him post trauma. When an experimental new procedure allows him to wear a convincing prosthetic face mask of another man, he plots to seduce his wife as a stranger. For their third collaboration together (the most famous being WOMAN OF THE DUNES [1964]), Abe and Teshigahara wrote the script together and agreed to expand on the novel's subtler themes. In a subplot, the audience watches a woman as she navigates modern Japan as a burn victim from the bombing of Nagasaki. In literary form, the reader follows the consciousness of man who must navigate the world newly disfigured, self-conscious about his disposition to the extreme. While the film takes its time and employs monologues, it’s never overly explanatory through voiceover or dialogue. When first hearing the premise of such a story, one would assume the audience would pity and root for the main character, especially after such a horrific tragedy, but Okuyama becomes so abusive and manipulative to the other characters, the audience isn’t with him from the start. It’s striking how unlikeable the hero is from the get-go. With legendary experimental musician Tōru Takemitsu's droning score, the film carries a dark somber tone and bookends with an original waltz in Viennese style. Both films reveal cultures reflecting on their identities. THE MASK makes constant cultural references, from Elvis Presley impressions to Twin Peaks, during the most retrospective decade in 20th-century America, on the cusp of the internet’s potential. It could be post-Tarantino film culture, but it feels like Carrey plays his version of American culture’s “greatest hits” throughout the film. The Japan of THE FACE OF ANOTHER was figuring out its own identity, as an isolationist imperial power now fully embracing western influence (a tension that would eventually lead to the 1968-1969 Japanese University Protests), Japanese society was still processing the best way to move forward as globalization went into hyperdrive. The film borrows from Europe’s various New Waves through such innovative techniques as freeze-frames, wash-away wipes, stuttered editing, jump cuts, and montaged stills, to name a few. Particularly in line with the nation’s questioning identity, German culture specifically makes an appearance through various forms throughout the film: characters drink in a beer hall, and recordings of Adolf Hitler plays during sequences in the mental hospital. Like many Japanese New Wave directors, Teshigahara embraces these new techniques but then uses them to recognize the destruction the West delivered Japan. Though Russell’s story adapted to make a more pleasing, entertaining experience around his star, both films originally invoked a kind of ode to Freud in their address to the unconscious/inhibited identity human beings present to society, and the costs that come from liberation, whether it’s throwing a magic idol into a river or walking into the ocean. [Ray Ebarb]

Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (UK)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am

At once the origin story of a pop icon, a McLuhan-esque critique of mass media, a postmodern western, and a commentary on the space age, Nicolas Roeg's elusive, kaleidoscopic THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH firmly defies classification. David Bowie plays Thomas Jerome Newton (in his first film role), an extraterrestrial who has traveled to Earth in search of water for his drought-stricken planet. Candy Clark and Rip Torn turn in equally offbeat performances as Newton's lover and scientific consultant, respectively. The plot, which involves Newton becoming a technology tycoon and celebrity enigma, is disjointed and incoherent. The sooner one can refrain from attempting to impose a conventional narrative structure onto the film, the easier it becomes to appreciate it as a freeform, hallucinatory head trip. Stylistically, the film is as capricious and unpredictable as Bowie's off-screen shape-shifting persona. Roeg hurls every trick in his cinematic arsenal at the screen, from point of view shots to trippy flashbacks. Time is warped to the point that days, months, and even years vanish between scenes, and just when things begin to feel stagnant, the viewer is bombarded with a neon lit alien sex scene right out of a Jodorowsky graphic novel. A film that could have only been made by a foreigner, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a twisted fun house mirror image of post-60s America in which even the most far out of outsiders embraces the ways of the establishment: capitalism, religion, and the imbibing of copious amounts of gin. Screening as part of the Stranger in a Strange Land series. (1976, 139 min, 35mm) [Harrison Sherrod]

William Castle’s HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm and Thursday, 9:30pm

Beginning with darkness pierced by blood curdling screams, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL then presents main characters as floating heads, directly addressing the camera. Eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren (Vincent Price at his very best) explains the film’s premise: he and his wife are hosting a party in an alleged haunted mansion, and anyone who can stay the entire night will win $10,000. His disembodied head breaking the fourth wall, it’s clear he’s not inviting just some assorted group desperate for cash, but the audience, too. We’re asked to participate directly. It’s part of director William Castle’s distinction as a director, known for his low-budget horror films that relied heavily on gimmicks, both on and off screen. HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL was the first of these, promoting something called “Emergo,” in which the audience would experience live effects in the theater. A huge financial success, it proved that horror didn’t need expensive effects to be effective. HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL provides some unsettling moments—including an iconic jump scare—despite its often-campy nature. The campiness comes particularly from Vincent Price’s performance and the relationship between his character, Frederick, and his wife, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart, in impeccable and inscrutable costumes); it’s a dynamic Castle uses again in THE TINGLER, another Price vehicle released the same year in which he also somewhat inexplicably despises his wife. In HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, Frederick is convinced Annabelle’s tried to poison him, and their back-and-forths are simultaneously vicious, hilarious, and confusing—in fact much of the plot is. But that perplexity ultimately doesn’t matter. Through its visuals and gimmicks, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL often feels like a carnival ride as it firmly establishes the now-familiar tropes of the haunted house film horror subgenre. The magic of Castle’s filmmaking is that, regardless of whether you get the chance to see this in full, awesome Emergo, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL still feels like a standout cinematic event. Per the Music Box, “we’re rigging up the theater just like William Castle intended.” Attend if you dare. (1959, 75 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

György Fehér’s TWILIGHT (Hungary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Aesthetically, there’s much to commend about Hungarian filmmaker György Fehér’s newly restored first theatrical feature, a cult classic in its home country: Fehér was a protege of Bela Tarr, having served as a producer on SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994), and TWILIGHT, renowned in Hungary as a hard-to-see masterpiece and only just now receiving its stateside release, was shot by Miklós Gurbán, who also did Tarr’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES. The sum total of this influence and collaboration is evident. It’s a dark movie, and not just narratively. Sometimes one can hardly make out what’s happening on screen, as the darkness of all its elements congeal to create a cinematic void into which the viewer is drawn. (This is one of those films I highly, highly recommend seeing in a theater. On a television—or, worse, a computer—the subtlety of its chiaroscuro lighting is all but lost.) It looks beautiful, but what most strikes me portends beneath the hazy surface. At various points, either in extreme close-up or framed abstractly within the composition, people act extraordinarily awkward in the face of tragedy. A near-retired detective and a junior colleague are assigned to investigate the grisly murder of a young girl. The colleague questions a friend of the girl as the camera focuses on her face from behind his shoulder as he grips her roughly. The opacity of her expressions is captivating; what she’s saying—details that inform the mystery of who murdered the little girl, which basically becomes a MacGuffin as the story advances—is less important, or at least less intriguing, than how she’s saying it. That encapsulates the nuance of Fehér’s vision, an adaptation of Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 novella The Pledge (subtitled “Requiem for the Detective Novel,” a lamentation of the genre’s penchant for tidy resolutions, the book having been adapted from his rejected screenplay for Ladislao Vajda’s IT HAPPENED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT; Sean Penn adapted it in 2001, with Jack Nicholson playing the main detective). The details of the crime and how it’s being investigated are, for anyone even remotely familiar with the form, very rote: seasoned detective close to retiring, “one last case,” fingering the wrong suspect, et cetera, et cetera. Even the detective’s obsession with solving the case is de rigueur, except for Dürrenmatt’s (and, subsequently, Fehér’s) existential considerations of unknowingness set against the natural world. “I want to show to what extent the search for justice stands in ridiculous contrast to the eternity of nature,” Fehér said aroundabout film’s release. “Meanwhile, it is precisely this search that I am so fascinated by.” Bleak stuff, the idea that justice is not just arduous but perhaps meaningless as well. It makes sense, then, why a Hungarian filmmaker might be drawn to such philosophical ponderings over justice, the treatment having been doled out and withheld in spectacularly arbitrary fashion for much of Hungary’s 20th-century history. The conspicuously noirish schema is further compressed by a visual motif at the beginning and end of the film consisting of aerial shots of densely wooded terrain, the joys and tragedies of humanity nothing but a mite among the mass of flora and fauna. There’s a certain Lynchian quality to it—but without any levity whatsoever—and in much the same way that Angelo Badalamenti’s score is so crucial to, say, Twin Peaks, László Vidovszky's haunting refrain adds a spiritual quality that complements the existential reverie. Fehér utilizes all aspects of the medium to draft this metaphysical tome, which prompts only more questions even as it appears to be answering the one at its generic core: whodunnit. (1990, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

2023 Fetish Film Forum: Cronenberg Edition

FACETS Cinema – Friday through Sunday (showtimes listed below)

David Cronenberg's CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (Canada)
Friday, 7pm
David Cronenberg is the most phenomenological of directors. I never feel more aware of being human, more embodied than while watching his films. This is certainly spurred on by his visual body horror, but it’s also found in his fascinating themes about what it means to exist—about consciousness being firmly grounded in the corporeal and whether technology amplifies or obstructs that experience. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is this Cronenberg at his best, with themes from his previous films coalescing and evolving into something new. Particularly reminiscent of his last true body horror, eXistenZ (1999), where video game consoles are essentially external organs, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE imagines technology as textured and tangible, beautiful and grotesque; with a lot to admire in the film, the viscerally stunning design of the futuristic technologies stands out. It's set in a dystopian future where humans are mutating so they no longer feel pain, surgeries are performed on the streets and new government agencies like the National Organ Registry are founded. Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, an enthusiastic and awkward assistant at that agency, is the highlight in a film of striking and funny performances. But the protagonist here is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen). He and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are well-known performance artists, sensually using Saul’s body— primarily the unique organs he can grow—as their canvas. They find themselves at the center of a secretive conflict about humanity’s future—will these strange new mutations be stopped or is there a leaning into the evolution? The plot draws heavily on neo-noir, as Saul covertly slinks through the city, trying to uncover secret factions at work. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is overall claustrophobic; this dilapidated future is rich with dark corners, shadows, and crumbling structures. At one point a character speaks of the interior of the body as "outer space," suggesting the external world is empty compared to what’s going on inside. The science-fiction world of CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is completely realized, but expertly reveals only so much of its secrets, leaving one with the disappointment that it must end and an eagerness to revisit all of Cronenberg’s work. (2022, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
---
David Cronenberg's CRASH (Canada/UK)
Saturday, 7pm
Looking at pictures, we're naturally drawn to human figures. We're people, and we like, above all, to watch other people do things. It's difficult to equate a machine and a person in a moving picture. You can do it through editing, but within a single shot, it's difficult to pull off. It's the sound in CRASH that does it. That, and the dispassionate way all of the actors talk, as though making notes into a tape recorder for themselves, like medical examiners. Every sentence seems to have been recorded separately. It sounds less like we're listening in on conversation than that a particular sort of noise made by people is being played for us, like a Chris Watson recording of some forest. And, as when recording animals one inevitably catches the sound of rustling leaves and rain (it is, after all, the animals and the trees together that form a "forest"), it's inevitable that when recording "society," one should have both human voices and city sounds at equal levels. Above all the other elements of the film—the pharmaceutical composition of its images, the clinical editing, Howard Shore's machine shop music—it's the sound mix that makes CRASH David Cronenberg's most fully realized film. Taking the story of a group of people who confuse sex and car crashes (or moans and squealing tires) to its formal extreme, he creates something more effective than the most gruesome special effect—with nothing more than some microphones and a mixing board. (1996, 98 min, 4K UHD Blu-ray Projection) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
---
David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME (Canada)
Saturday, 9pm
Since his first feature, 1975's SHIVERS, David Cronenberg has focused on the concept of "body horror"—the idea that the human body is not a self-sustaining entity, but rather a portal capable of being penetrated by both physical and metaphorical "diseases" that reduce the human to his basic animalistic desires for sex and power. VIDEODROME is the culmination of the theme of sexual frenzy interlaced with violence that Cronenberg had explored in both SHIVERS and his subsequent film, RABID (1977). While both of those earlier works deal with "real" events (disease epidemics), VIDEODROME takes a more metaphorical and overtly intellectual approach. James Woods stars as Max Renn, the owner of a sleazy cable station that specializes in hypersexual and violent programming. Renn has discovered a low-fi broadcast feed of a show called "Videodrome," in which women are tortured and killed by cloaked men. Renn decides that "Videodrome" is exactly what his audience craves and sets out to find the producer. Although warned by his assistant that "Videodrome" is much more sinister than it seems, Max continues his search and becomes obsessed with watching the show. Soon the world of "Videodrome" starts to become all too real, and Max's body begins to undergo a series of changes, including developing a VCR in his stomach. The film was released a year before the home video craze swept North America, but it serves as a haunting prediction of how video would revolutionize home entertainment and, more importantly, the way in which people would become increasingly dependent on audio/video technology. Video became the first organic technology; it allowed for personalized "controlled viewing" (stop, pause, rewind) and thus the perfect device for Cronenberg to exploit. The same video could be watched in completely different ways by different people, making it a wholly different experience for each viewer. The video itself would become a literal extension of the viewer's interests. Cronenberg's use of this concept in VIDEODROME is both obvious (Max literally becomes the VCR) and subversive: Cronenberg's criticism doesn't lie with a general dislike or fear of how video can impact the sense of the individual; rather that the connection that is able to be forged between man and machine disconnects him from the conscious linear world. The technologies in his films (such as the teleport machine in THE FLY, the video game system in eXistenz, and the videotape in VIDEODROME) all represent a late 20th century obsession with excess and escapism; his horrors are the dangers that come from living in a "reality" that is a product of technological obsession. Renn's transformation into a piece of technology, whose only purpose is to execute commands programmed into him by the insertion of a videotape, is a modern-day cautionary tale; the audience is forced to reflect on Renn's failure to distinguish between "Videodrome" as a product and "Videodrome" as life. Cronenberg cleverly confuses those two opposites to the point that they become fused. The hope is that the audience can again separate them. (1983, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Joe Rubin]
---
David Cronenberg's RABID (Canada)
Sunday, 3pm
One of the highest grossing independent Canadian films of all time, RABID shot underground Toronto filmmaker David Cronenberg into the stratosphere of career possibilities. It played an essential role in garnering Cronenberg attention and credit among audiences and studios. His previous film, SHIVERS (1975), faced controversy to the extent that the director was evicted from his apartment and had great difficulty funding future projects, as his work was dismissed as too violent and overly sexual. Despite the challenges, SHIVERS was a box office hit, and its record was equaled, if not broken, by its successor. When it came time to finance RABID, the Canadian Film Development Corporation quietly funded the entire project. Cronenberg recounts wanting to submit the film to Cannes but knowing that hundreds of films just like it got submitted and were either rejected or never gained any enthusiasm from international audiences. To avoid this fate, the production knew they needed to attach a big name to the picture. Executive producer Ivan Reitman heard rumors that Marilyn Chambers, one of the biggest porn icons of the 1970s, wanted to act in "legitimate films," to which Cronenberg replied, "I’m glad someone would consider my films legitimate." Having not seen any of her work, the director agreed to audition Chambers and was moved by her audition and work ethic. Willing to work at a lower fee, she got the role and she signed onto the picture (her only non-adult film) immediately. With RABID, it feels like there is someone behind the camera saying, "I don’t have a lot at my disposal but I’m going to be bold and tell the best story I know how to right now." The then-33-year-old director would pause in the middle of shooting to tell his producers his own script didn’t make any sense: "A woman with a stinger in her armpit? It feels ridiculous to say out loud." To counter, RABID was made at a larger scale than his previous work. Not only did he take over the streets of Montreal to photograph military vehicles, but he took his time to light his actors as beautifully as he pleased. From the opening push-in for Chambers’ closeup on the motorcycle until the end, where garbage men are throwing bodies in trucks, it’s his first film to display a new flare of cinematic sensibility. (1977, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
---
David Cronenberg's SHIVERS (Canada)
Sunday, 5pm
There are certain terms that get pinned to an artist, become a shorthand, and lose their meaning from lazy overuse. By now, "body horror" and "David Cronenberg" are nearly interchangeable, but for those who want to know why he was saddled with the moniker, his third feature (and first to be widely distributed) is a great place to start. A sleek apartment building outside Montreal is overrun by larval parasitic worms that crawl inside residents' bodies causing them to go on wild, sometimes cannibalistic, but always polymorphously perverse sprees throughout the sprawling complex. No taboo is beyond the pale once the creatures take control and the hapless authorities who attempt to restore order are easily defeated by the infected hordes. The idea of desire as disease is one Cronenberg will return to often in his work, but here also is his first developed exploration of the tension between civilized contemporary life and uncontrollable primal urges. The Mies van der Rohe high-rise with its cold Bauhaus geometry is almost reason enough for the slimy sex worms to proliferate. They're a protest against the sedate logic of modernity. Sure, they cause some damage, but overall, most of the complex's surviving dwellers are happy enough with their new parasitic pals to go out and spread the word. (1975, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Sidney Lumet's FAIL-SAFE (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

Released the same year, based on a strikingly similar premise, and realized in an equally stark, monochromatic palette, Sidney Lumet's 1964 Cold War nuclear mishap thriller FAIL-SAFE has for too long lived in the shadow of Stanley Kubrick's DR STRANGELOVE. At times Lumet can be stagey, hyper-literal, and self-serious to a fault, but his uncluttered vision and uncompromising critical stance have informed some of the most soul-rattling moral dramas of the past six decades (and FAIL-SAFE is arguably the pinnacle). Kubrickian parody was one inspired response to the absurdity of dual civilizations on the brink of mutual destruction, but Lumet and screenwriter Walter Bernstein's insights into the ideological horrors of the nuclear age run deeper. Walter Matthau puts on the show of a lifetime as a fascinatingly brusque embodiment of right-wing intellectualism, and Henry Fonda takes patriotic hyper-sincerity to surrealistic new heights (imagine the Young Mr. Lincoln multiplied by the activist juror in 12 ANGRY MEN) as an incorruptible Chief Executive ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the species. So dark a movie would seem an odd choice for a weekend matinee, but FAIL-SAFE is utterly devastating and oddly life-affirming in equal measure. It's a largely overlooked but critical piece of American mythology. Presented as part of the Science on Screen series. Followed by a post-screening discussion with Daniel Holz, member of the SASB and Professor at the University of Chicago in the Enrico Fermi Institute; the Department of Physics, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. (1964, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Darnell Witt]

Christophe Honoré’s WINTER BOY (France)

Chicago Filmmakers – Friday, 7pm

Seventeen-year-old Lucas (Paul Kircher) is plunged into a deep, dark winter after his father is killed in a car crash. In a confessional woven throughout the film, he describes a soul-wrenching pain that has left him seemingly shattered beyond repair. His mother Isabelle (Juliette Binoche) is similarly bereft, while his surly older brother Quentin (Vincent Lacoste) copes by suppressing his feelings. Lucas does his best to escape the pain by setting off to Paris, where he discovers a sense of adult freedom living with his brother and his roommate in their high-rise loft. Although openly gay back in his provincial French hometown, he flowers even more in the City of Light, where worldly, handsome queer guys—including his brother’s artist roommate—are easy to find. But happiness is transient, and as his relationship with his brother returns to one of acrimony, Lucas becomes more emotionally distraught than ever. WINTER BOY is about the alternately depleting and galvanizing potential of grief and the long, unsteady road toward healing from tragedy. It understands that any substantial process of recovery is contingent, circuitous, ungainly, and time-expending, prone to ups and downs that don’t arrive in predictable order. However, the film is not punishing in the paces it puts its protagonist through; in fact, it could stand to be a lot more arduous. It’s easier to imagine the suffering that Lucas speaks of than to really read it through Kircher, whom Honoré scarcely deigns to ruffle in his closeups of the actor’s bright, cherubic face. Coupled with the underdeveloped characterization of the father (Honoré himself, appearing too briefly), such aestheticization dampens the film’s emotional veracity, making its depiction of grief a few shades too facile. Thankfully, WINTER BOY has the gravitas of the ever-reliable Binoche, whose scenes with Kircher are lovely duets of mother-son commiseration and surcease. We believe their relationship, and we believe—if ever there was any doubt—that Lucas will be able to put himself back together. Screening as part of the Reeling Pride Month film showcase, presented by MUBI. (2022, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Jamie Babbit’s BUT I’M A CHEERLEADER (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 11am and Monday, 7:45pm

Instead of rewatching BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER, a hilarious, if occasionally inexpert, sendup to John Waters in a hard, vinyl bubble gum palette that skewers gay conversion therapy, gay culture, and binary gender roles, among other things, instead I decided to read contemporary reviews of the movie (spoiler: most critics hated it). Having loved the movie so much that I've seen it a good half dozen times, I wondered what I was missing, or what those critics were missing, and then I realized no one seemed to be mentioning just how camp this movie is, and why it could not be enjoyed as anything else and still enjoyed. Lou Lumenick of the New York Post called it "dumb, heavy-handed satire." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly declared, "Any self-respecting lesbian should rear up in horror at [this movie]." (Spoiler: I didn't.) Gemma Files at film.com disparaged the film's "Ungainly sentiment and unnecessary stylization." (Emanuel Levy's moustache also hated the movie.) Did these critics watch the same movie as me? Or do they just not love camp? In lieu of tracking them down and asking why they hated the movie so much, I re-read Susan Sontag's popular essay from 1964, "Notes on 'Camp.'" Sontag admitted in her notes, "I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it." How presciently that hints at the enduring magnetism of PINK FLAMINGOS and the rest of Waters' glorious spectacles! Sontag also notes, "Many examples of Camp are things which, from a "serious" point of view, are either bad art or kitsch." ...much like BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER. The subject matter of Jamie Babbit's first feature film is, in many ways, so horrifying and traumatic in reality that the only way to properly tease out the absurdity, the trauma, and the brutally oppressive systems at play that sculpted these actual camps where fragile LGBT youth were sent to "pray the gay away" or learn how to properly conform to gender roles is through camp, in Sontag's definition of the term. The only way to process and analyze just what was at stake (and still is, by the way...this pseudoscientific "therapy" is only banned in 15 states today, and that only for minors), was through extreme stylization and aestheticization, devotion to overblown artifice, and "failed seriousness" that define camp. Sontag goes on to say, "The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious." "Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness." Babbit's direction of BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER is crystal clear in this sense. She skewers each subject she tackles with "heavy-handed satire," or, as Sontag would put it, that feeling of "it's too much!" through fabulous actors like RuPaul as an "ex-gay" counselor who constantly displays his (failed) masculinity in a sort of reverse-drag performance, Clea DuVall as the brooding fellow inmate at camp who lures Natasha Lyonne's innocent cheerleader to the dark side of homosexuality, Dante Bosco (whom you may remember as Rufio from HOOK, an accidental, as opposed to deliberate, camp film), and of course, Cathy Moriarty as the seethingly angry director of "True Directions." Perhaps, now that I think about it, BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER isn't a good movie. Is it so bad that it's good? Or is it that gay conversion therapy is so morally repugnant you just have to laugh, have to make it playful? Perhaps it's just so camp that it doesn't have to be good. Camp is a sensibility that doesn't lend itself to traditional criticism. All I can say is that the first time I walked out of this movie I chuckled at remembered jokes, but I also felt seen and understood in a unique way that only queer, camp movies can do, and that it reached something beyond the comedy and made me feel quite tenderly about the earnest first love the teens experience in one of the few lesbian films from the 1990's with a happy ending. Because, as Sontag put it so well, "Camp is a tender feeling." (1999, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

Bob Fosse’s CABARET (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Sunday, 11am

CABARET starts off with a bang—it’s got one of the best opening sequences in the New Hollywood canon. Bob Fosse synthesizes a stunning range of influences: the ironic, modernist songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht; the circus-like atmospherics of Federico Fellini; the immersive camerawork and editing of direct-cinema documentaries (Fosse conveys the high of performing like few other directors); and the richly detailed yet subtly melancholy depiction of a past era that one finds in Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST and in Luchino Visconti’s films from THE LEOPARD on. And all this in the service of reviving the Hollywood musical, one of the great popular genres. Fosse’s choreography is astonishing in its forthright eroticism; the dance numbers draw out the film’s themes of sexual liberation and exploitation in a way the conversations can only suggest. The subsequent musical numbers sustain the energy of the introductory number, and they comment on the drama in a Greek chorus-like fashion. The story follows the relationship between Brian (Michael York), a closeted gay British writer who’s moved to Berlin in 1931, and Sally (Liza Minnelli), an American expat who performs at a burlesque club. They fall in love, but the relationship, like the liberated Weimar era, can’t last. Brian says can’t adjust to Sally’s libertine ways, but really he can’t respect her for the moral compromises she makes for show business. It’s still remarkable that a serious, two-hour consideration of sexual revolution under the Weimar Republic could get released with a PG rating. I wonder how many kids learned about threesomes, transvestism, and queer-positive attitudes from CABARET. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography (for Geoffrey Unsworth, who also shot 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and Polanski’s TESS). (1972, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Albert Magnoli’s PURPLE RAIN (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Wednesday, 7:35pm

Unbearably campy in its daytime scenes and nearly sublime in the nighttime sequences (Donald Thorin, who shot this, was also the cinematographer on the greatest of all Night Movies, THIEF), PURPLE RAIN, Prince's Albert Magnoli-directed Minneapolis Sound creation myth/excuse-for-concert-footage forms a strange counterpart to UNDER THE CHERRY MOON, the 1986 follow-up. While the little man from Paisley Park remains a cipher—more of an overwrought presence than a star in his own film—Morris Day and Jerome Benton steal the show, gamely embracing the sort of 30s-influenced dialogue humor that would dominate CHERRY MOON. A theory: every generation produces a group of people who could conceivably become classical Studio Era character actors, but only in the 1930s to the 1950s did any of them fully embrace that potential. Day, with his shoulder-twitching cockiness and oversized suits, and Benton, who walks a fine line between straight man and comic foil, join Divine's turn in TROUBLE IN MIND as the finest representatives of that tendency to come along in the 1980s. (1984, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Ignaity Vishnevetsky]

John Waters’ PINK FLAMINGOS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Thursday, 9:45pm

Even by today’s more desensitized standards, PINK FLAMINGOS retains its shock value. Babs Johnson (Divine) wears her tabloid-branded moniker “Filthiest Person Alive” with great pride. Living in a trailer park with her toddler-like mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills), and roommate Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) somewhere in the sticks just outside Baltimore, Babs is hiding from society and authorities due to her countless crimes, which includes murder. Meanwhile, perverted couple Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary) are outraged by Babs’ title—deeming themselves to be the filthiest—and set out to usurp her dubious designation. In a series of ever-escalating scenes more revolting than the last, the Marbles and Babs and her cohorts engage in a battle of one-upmanship. Waters’ film subverts damn near all societal norms and employs an almost cinéma vérité style of filmmaking, particularly in shots of Babs/Divine walking around town with onlookers gawking. No topic is too taboo here. Besides the infamous dog-poo scene, scenes featuring cannibalism, fetishes of all varieties, and rape also feature. This is a film not for the faint of heart—like a pig rolling around in its own filth and loving every second of it, PINK FLAMINGOS knows that it is trash, but glorious, artful trash. It’s not surprising that this is the film that brought John Waters (and Divine) out of underground cinema obscurity and into a broader collective consciousness. (1972, 93 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

Felix van Groeningen & Charlotte Vandermeersch’s THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS (Italy/Belgium/France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

A man and two young boys approach a glacier in the Italian alps, a huge crevasse separating the mountainous terrain from the icy expanse. The man jumps onto the glacier, followed by one of the boys. The other, contending with altitude sickness, struggles. This is the man’s son, Pietro; the other boy is his friend, Bruno, who lives in the secluded region year round. That Pietro’s father and Bruno have in common such a tolerance for the excesses of the natural world is the start of the fissure between the patriarch and his son, which becomes a crevasse in its own right. Their strained relationship finally falls between the cracks during a pivotal moment some years later wherein Pietro tells his father that he’s wasted his life, a declaration spurred by the engineer’s workaholic tendencies. More time passes, the father dies, and Pietro (played by MARTIN EDEN star Luca Marinelli as an adult) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) reconnect in the mountainside where, per Pietro’s father’s wish, they build a house. This house becomes a reconvening point for the two men over the coming years. Bruno stays put, reopening his uncle’s alpeggio, finding a wife in one of Pietro’s friends from Turin, and later having a daughter with her. Pietro is a wanderer, however, traveling the world and returning to the mountainside only in summer. He later likens their dynamic to that of a parable he’s heard among his odyssey: he’s the man who’s traveled the eight mountains while Bruno is the one who’s ascended the single mountain at the range’s center. Each approach has its benefits, its drawbacks; where initially it may seem as if Pietro’s wandering is for naught, it becomes clear that this is how he’s found meaning in life, and how he’s come to terms with his relationship with his father. And what may have originally seemed like the definition of freedom—a mountain, all one’s own, reliant only on one’s self—has become a sort of voluntary imprisonment for Bruno. Ultimately both men contend with their own proverbial crevasse, with only the other to understand their existential disjuncture. As a tale of selfhood, the film is remarkably poignant; as a tale of friendship, even more so. It’s also strikingly beautiful, shot by Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens. The only real issue I have with it is the music intended to punctuate passages of time, written and performed by Daniel Norgren. While not necessarily bad, it does evoke 2010s indie-folk rock (think Mumford & Sons, etc.) in a sometimes nauseatingly sentimental way. Marinelli’s elegiac narration of certain parts, however, helps to balance this out. Adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s 2016 novella of the same name by co-directors and partners Felix van Groeningen (THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN, BEAUTIFUL BOY) and Charlotte Vandermeersch (in her directorial debut), THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS is a captivating examination of the ties that bind us and those which set us free. (2022, 147 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Emanuele Crialese’s L’IMMENSITÀ (Italy)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

If Penélope Cruz is the Sophia Loren of her generation, then this may be her TWO WOMEN—the film that lets her deliver an instantly iconic characterization of motherhood. L’IMMENSITÀ is Emanuele Crialese’s autobiographical drama about a well-to-do family coming apart in 1970s Italy, and Cruz anchors the work as Clara, a wife and mother who withstands an abusive marriage in order to be close to her three kids, whom she loves with heroic might. Crialese honors the children’s perspective most of the time, so the episodes of abuse are limited to the few scenes they witness (those scenes are plenty harrowing, however). Generally, it’s one of those bittersweet celebration-of-childhood movies that the Italians are especially good at making, with naturalistic scenes of kids playing in groups, kids discovering physical intimacy, and kids rebounding from tragedy. There’s at least one good fantasy sequence too, a musical number where Cruz and the kids ham it up for the camera like all those brats in LICORICE PIZZA. The fantasy sequence specifically belongs to Adri, a preteen who’s first starting to assert his gender identity, and one thing that makes L’IMMENSITÀ distinctive is how it acknowledges the character’s imagination as both a talent and an escape from traumatic situations. Clara is wholly supportive of Adri in his gender affirmation and provides him not only emotional support; she downright spoils him whenever she can. Cruz plays the role like a diva, and this seems fitting, given the towering role Clara plays in Adri’s life. Indeed, the film derives so much of its power from the relationship between mother and son that it could be classified as a love story. (2022, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
“Universal Particulars: Signal to Noise,” the Documentary Media MFA showcase, screens Wednesday and Thursday at 7pm. View a trailer for the Wednesday screening here and the Thursday screening here. More info on both screenings here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation now playing at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, called we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video, which has a runtime of approximately 48 minutes, will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station. The video will run day and night through mid-March next year. More info here.

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Andrea Segre’s 2022 Italian film WELCOME VENICE (100 min, Digital Projection) screens on Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago History Museum (1601 N Clark St.). More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Charlotte Le Bon’s 2022 film FALCON LAKE (100 min, DCP Digital) begins this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

“Digging Deeper Into Movies with Nick Davis,” presented by the Chicago International Film Festival, takes place on Saturday at 11am. The event is titled Worlds of Possibility: Recent Trans Cinema. Free admission; RSVP here.  More info on all screenings and events here here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
It’s officially Music Box Garden Movies season! See Venue website for films and showtimes. 

Pierre Földes’ 2022 animated film BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN (110 min, DCP Digital) begins this week, and Nicole Holofcener’s 2023 film YOU HURT MY FEELINGS (93 min, DCP Digital) and Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy BLACKBERRY (119 min, DCP Digital) continue. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Shôjirô Nishimi and Guillaume Renard’s 2018 animated film MFKZ (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight. Arrive early for an AMV pre-show featuring legendary fight scenes set to Japanese music. 

The Front Row presents Kazuhiko Yamaguchi’s 1975 film WOLF GUY (86 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at midnight. 

Wakefield Poole’s 1972 queer fantasia BIJOU (88 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 9:30pm, preceded by Poole’s 1974 short film FREEDOM DAY PARADE (11 min, DCP Digital). Programmed and presented by Henry Hanson and the Front Row. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Premiere Film Festival
DePaul University's annual student film festival is back at the Music Box Theatre on Friday at 6pm. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.

⚫ Women in Film Night
DaVinci Street Productions presents Women in Film Night on Saturday, 6pm, at the Madron Gallery (1000 W. North Ave. 3rd Floor). Includes talks by female and non-binary Chicago-based filmmakers, film screenings, and live-music performances. More info here.

🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING

⚫ Media Burn Archive
On Thursday at 6pm, Media Burn Archive is hosting a virtual screening of Jeff Krulik and Brendan Conway’s 1995 cult documentary MR. BLASSIE GOES TO WASHINGTON, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers moderated by Justin LaLiberty, as part of the ongoing Virtual Talks with Video Activists series. More info here.

CINE-LIST: June 2 - June 8, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Joe Rubin Dmitry Samarov, Harrison Sherrod, Michael Glover Smith, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Darnell Witt