Note: Our list is quite long this week, with extensive Chicago International Film Festival coverage and more-packed-than-usual Crucial Viewing and Also Recommended sections. But don’t skip the More Screenings and the Museum/Galleries sections! There are an incredible number of don’t-miss events that either are not reviewable (lectures, etc.) or that our reviewers did not select for whatever reason. Of special note are the advance notice for next weekend’s tribute event to retired UofC professor Tom Gunning; a lecture on (and brief screening of) Andy Warhol’s films; the opening of two Warhol exhibits at the Art Institute, with a wealth of films included; the UofC’s Humanities Day, with a keynote by talk by Jacqueline Najuma Stewart and a presentation by Allyson Nadia Field; the Music Box’s annual Music Box of Horrors marathon; a talk by and conversation with French director François Ozon; a very rare Robert Altman film; and much more! Whew!
CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago International Film Festival continues through October 27 at AMC River East 21. We’ve got reviews below of select films that have screenings this week (some repeat this week; some next week). Check our list next week for additional coverage. More info and full schedule at www.chicagofilmfestival.com.
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As part of our festival coverage, we are pleased to feature on our blog a short interview with the great Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa, director of VITALINA VARELA (showing at the festival, but not available for reviews), by Cine-File contributor Michael Glover Smith. VITALINA VARELA screens on Monday at 6pm, Tuesday at 5:45pm, and next Friday, October 25, at 2:45pm.
Fabrice du Welz’s ADORATION (Belgium/France)
Friday 10/18, 1pm, Sat 10/26, 9:45pm, and Sunday 10/27, 8:15pm
ADORATION is a simple, moody fable about the vagaries of love, seen from the eyes of a pubescent boy slowly discovering its frequently deranged manifestations. Paul (Thomas Gioria), a sullen, tow-headed teen who sort of resembles Jérémie Renier circa LA PROMESSE, lives with his mom in a remote home near a psychiatric facility, where she works as a nurse. When he’s not in her smothering, Oedipal presence, he’s off tending to birds in the woods, specifically an injured finch he’s trying to nurse back to health. Everything changes when Gloria (Fantine Harduin), a particularly volatile patient from the facility, literally knocks him sideways during one of her routine escape attempts. It’s something like lust at first sight, although it’s nothing the boy can quite articulate. All he knows is that he can’t get her out of his mind, and when his mom, presumably out of jealousy, fatally tosses the finch he was looking after, Paul is galvanized to bring Gloria with him in a bid for freedom from their domestic constraints. The two take off into the night, launching a treacherous, hormonal odyssey through forests and rivers that double as the discombobulating, psycho-topographic terrain of adolescence. ADORATION thus falls into a long line of films that have figured the coming-of-age process as a kind of Grand Guignol drama, and it gets a fair amount of mileage out of this approach, especially in the later stretches that find Paul’s gentle naïveté giving way to a kind of incipient amour fou. The film is far less successful in considering the perspectives of its female characters, unfortunately, who are stuck playing symbols of very conservative ideas of male sexual anxiety (Gloria’s undisclosed mental illness is, in other words, rendered queasily as gendered hysteria). But if one is able to look past this symptom of a three-time male-authored script, there are rewards to be found in du Welz’s clammy conjuring of feverish adolescence. (2019, 98 min) JL
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Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia’s INITIALS S.G. (Argentina)
Friday 10/18, 3pm, Saturday 10/26, 5:45pm, and Sunday 10/27, 6:45pm
Sometimes you have to revel in your own misfortune to truly understand it. That seems to be the through-line of INITIALS S.G., which chases the hard-to-swallow shot of reality with dark humor and a complicated sense of earnestness. Sergio Garces (Diego Peretti) is at a crossroads in his life: he’s an aspiring actor who’s stuck being a featured extra, he’s got festering anger management issues, and he’s not sure if Argentina has what it takes to win the World Cup. After a cycling accident breaks his nose, Sergio’s problems get exponentially worse and an inciting incident enables the film to switch gears to a far more twisted and cynical series of events. INITIALS S.G. shines when it allows itself to enter dark territory, and it shines even brighter when it's done with absolutely no regrets. It’s hard to describe what’s so remarkable about INITIALS S.G. without spoiling it—and it’s probably advised to go in with little to no expectations—but much of it comes from Peretti’s sometimes sympathetic, sometimes upsetting, but always achingly human performance. With INITIALS S.G., Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia hit the nail on the head on what exactly is so painful about the human experience: from musings on the romanticization of misery, to trauma bonding and relational codependency, to the harrowing theatrics of life itself. (2019, 98 min) CC
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Jayro Bustamante’s TREMORS (Guatemala)
Friday 10/18, 8:15pm and Saturday 10/19, 2:15pm
Teeming with empathy for its characters, even those on the wrong side of the argument, Jayro Bustamante’s TREMORS is as diplomatic as it is often exasperating. Set in Guatemala, the film follows Pablo (Juan Pablo Olyslager), an affluent, highly religious forty-something with a wife and two children, after it’s discovered (though not onscreen) that he’s gay. Amidst the turmoil that ensues, he goes to live near his lover, bohemian massage therapist Francisco (an affecting Mauricio Armas Zebadúa). Egregiously homophobic and thus convinced that there’s something wrong with Pablo, his family—namely his wife, Isa (Diane Bathen), and his skeevy brother-in-law—go scorched earth, getting him fired from his job as a financial consultant and preventing him from seeing his children. Pablo eventually begins to give in to his family’s assertions that his is a misguided path, questioning whether or not his happiness supersedes that of his family, though Francisco maintains that their love is pure. Perhaps unlike other films that explore the dissonance between faith and sexual identity, which often attempt to put forward a hopeful outlook, TREMORS goes to the extreme, showing Pablo willfully undergoing an absurd (and even dangerous) form of conversion therapy within his evangelical Christian church. Posited as a choice for Pablo, between embracing his homosexuality—and losing everything in the process—and denying who he is for the sake of his family’s happiness, the purported choice seems to represent more than just Pablo’s sexuality. Where Pablo and his family are tied down by capitalistic and almost fascistic mores, largely dictated by faith, Francisco and his friends seem liberated from such concerns, eschewing religion and the comforts of capitalism for a genuine sense of freedom. The film gets its title from two small earthquakes that happen in the film, one at the beginning, during Pablo’s family’s intervention after discovering he’s gay, and one near the end, the aftermath of which prompts Pablo to return to his family; a common occurrence in Guatemala, these temblores subtly ground the film in its location and to its specific struggles. Despite the film’s obvious grievances toward society’s treatment of Pablo, it’s sympathetic to the adversity, real or imagined, faced by each character, even the church members who seem to believe they’re doing the right thing and who do so with compassion, unwarranted though it may be. During an argument, Francisco tells Pablo that he’s not condemned for sucking dick; Pablo replies that he doesn’t know that, and neither does Francisco. Bustamante confronts us with that unknowingness, which can have a solidifying or troubling effect on its viewers, depending on their affiliations. It’s not what Bustamante is asking us, but what, like the characters, we’re asking ourselves. (2019, 107 min) KS
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Helena Třeštíková and Jakub Hejna’s FORMAN VS. FORMAN (Czech Republic/France)
Saturday 10/19, 11:30am and Monday, 10/21, 2:45pm
The abbreviation for “versus” is apt in the title of Helena Třeštíková and Jakub Hejna’s made-for-TV tribute to the late Czech film director Miloš Forman, FORMAN VS. FORMAN. The term pops up in one of his well-regarded American films, THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT (1996), and in a documentary called CHYTILOVÁ VERSUS FORMAN (1981) in which he is questioned by his fellow Czech New Waver, Vera Chytilová. More to the point, Forman’s work was frequently defined by protest. Losing both of his parents in the Holocaust by the age of ten, shuffled from household to household, and then suffering under an oppressive Communist government, Forman was constantly at odds with his circumstances and with ideological pressures in Czechoslovakia. In his groundbreaking Czech films, including LOVES OF A BLONDE (1965) and THE FIREMEN’S BALL (1967), he sought to put the real faces and lives of ordinary Czechs on screen to counter the idealized cinema mandated by the government. When he exiled himself to the United States, he only had filmgoers to please, and that suited him fine. FORMAN VS. FORMAN provides an interesting, if superficial, précis of the director’s life through the use archival footage, film clips, and archival interviews (including from CHYTILOVÁ VERSUS FORMAN). It is interesting to learn that once he got to the U.S., the loss of his own language made it impossible for him to make films from his own scripts. It’s also interesting that he produced twin sons from two different marriages. Forman’s life was not charmed, but he made his own luck and a lot of movie magic along the way. (2019, 78 min) MF
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Shorts 2: Portraits (International Animated Shorts Program)
Saturday 10/19, Noon and Tuesday 10/22, 3pm
Boasting an array of styles, tones, and sensibilities, CIFF’s 2019 program of animated shorts is a characteristically eclectic one that has something for everybody. Its elastic mix of tonalities is evident in the five-minute span of Piotr Milczarek’s RAIN alone, which begins with the absurdist premise of a man falling, seemingly endlessly, from the top of a corporate office building, and grows into a haunting portrait of blind groupthink as workers start lining up en masse to take their own leaps, sure that they’ll be saved by a caped hero. The minimalist animation—monochromatic black, white, and baby blue, with faceless figures and only a handful of “camera” set-ups—reinforces the short’s parable-like simplicity. Minimalist but in a decidedly more whimsical register is Sonja Rohleder’s NEST, a jungle-set jaunt that brings birds of paradise to life through borderline abstract luminescent shapes that dance upon a black background. Tweaking that visual approach to something resembling an animated scratchboard, Agnès Patron’s AND THEN THE BEAR weaves a magical-realist coming-of-age tale about a boy whose existence is disrupted when his brutish, shotgun-wielding father comes back into his mother’s life. The titular ursine becomes the boy’s spirit animal as a woodwind-heavy score drives the film toward a thunderous climax. Wiep Teeuwisse’s delightfully droll INTERMISSION EXPEDITION offers a fizzier kind of journey, as a gaggle of gangly pastel tourists venture through a desolate, Mars-like landscape. The short’s striking color contrasts, geometric motifs, and delicate pencil aesthetic ably create an otherworldly aura, underscoring the tourists’ increasingly strange immersion in their enigmatic locale. Even more off-kilter is Luca Tóth’s MR. MARE, about a little deformed man who pops out of a guy’s armpit and proceeds to surreptitiously observe and manage his life. It only gets weirder from there, but also more melancholy, as the little man’s aching yearning goes unrequited by his host. A multi-media meditation on living with HIV, Tiago Minamisawa, Bruno H. Castro, and Guto BR’s I BLEED is considerably more straightforward in its emotional address. Using the pages of books as a canvas for stop-motion charcoal drawings, and inserting figures into Hieronymus Bosch paintings, the film is a creative, diaristic rendering of a man’s grappling with the cultural stigmas that have conflated him with his disease. Through its tenacious first-person narration and ceaseless movement, the short embodies not only his will to survive, but also his will to truly live. Also showing are Gabriel Böhmer’s THE FLOOD IS COMING and Marion Lacourt’s SHEEP, WOLF AND A CUP OF TEA…, which were not available for preview. (2019, 79 min total) JL
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Jean-François Laguionie and Xavier Picard’s THE PRINCE’S VOYAGE (Animation/France/Luxembourg)
Saturday 10/19, 5:15pm and Friday 10/25, 3:45pm
Jean-Francois Laguionie's animation—undoubtedly impressive in his recent films THE PAINTING (2011) and LOUISE BY THE SHORE (2016)—is lovely, but it's his and Anik Leray’s elegiac script that makes this absorbing parable, which Laguionie co-directed with Xavier Picard, worth seeing. A loose sequel to Laguionie's 1999 film A MONKEY’S TALE, THE PRINCE’S VOYAGE follows the titular prince, Laurent, a sort-of monkey man and ruler of the Laantos, after he crosses a frozen sea and finds himself among another simian race, the Niokous, that, like his own once did, assumes they’re alone in the world. Discovered washed ashore by Tom, an orphaned monkey boy who lives in an abandoned museum with his adoptive parents, a disgraced professor and his botanist wife, plus their friendly lab assistant, he’s met with misplaced enthusiasm from the professor, cautious skepticism from the botanist, and genuine accord from the lab assistant and young Tom, who’s especially gifted in the language of the surrounding forest and its diverse inhabitants. The professor, however, intends to use Laurent to prove to the closed-minded academy that their race is not alone in this fictional world, but before that happens, Tom takes Laurent into the city—which is being encroached upon by the forest—where he witnesses the Niokous’ close-mindedness first-hand. Everyone looks and thinks alike in this Victorian-ish society, focusing on work during the day; only at night can they have fun, which involves the Festival of Fear, an amusement park/carnival where order is kept through the exploitation of their collective anxieties. Only escape into the sprawling forest will help Laurent and Tom find salvation. The writing is poetic, its sprawling tale similar to that of a Studio Ghibli film, as it conveys complex themes through bizarre, almost fantastical, means, though with a level of decidedly piquant sophistication. (2019, 77 min) KS
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Gitanjali Rao’s BOMBAY ROSE (India/UK/Qatar/France)
Saturday 10/19, 7pm and Sunday 10/20, 12:30pm
The Bollywood musical is subverted in Gitanjali Rao’s animated drama set in a waterfront district of Bombay among its marginalized inhabitants. Opening on a typical Bollywood scene of heroic actor Raja Khan (voice of Anurag Kashyap) vanquishing a villain, the story shifts to Salim (voice of Amit Deondi), the young Muslim who has been watching this, Khan’s latest movie, to escape from his life as a refugee from violence in Kashmir who sells bouquets of flowers stolen from graves to earn money. His budding romance with Kamala (voice of Cyli Khare), a Hindu woman who lives across the street from him who earns a meager living selling garlands and dancing in a men’s club, is troubled by their unstable circumstances. Rao’s first feature-length film is a tour de force that creatively captures the real and imaginary worlds of her characters, one of which is a rose placed on the grave of a Bollywood actor by her elderly costar, Ms. D’Souza (voice of Amardeep Jha). Rao’s rendering of the rose’s point of view is singular and inventive, as is how she morphs modern Mumbai into a black-and-white rendering of Bombay as it was in the early 20th century as Ms. D’Souza moves through the city. Rao’s nimble direction and editing create an affecting world in which flights of fancy offer her downtrodden characters temporary respite from their lonely, difficult lives. (2019, 93 min) MF
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Ivan-Goran Vitez’s EXTRACURRICULAR (Croatia)
Saturday 10/19, 8:45pm and Sunday 10/20, 3:30pm
Upset that he can not excuse his young daughter from school on her birthday to spend time together, divorced father Vlado (Milivoj Beader) decides to take the extreme measure of bringing both a cake and a rifle to her classroom and holding her entire third grade hostage. As this situation unfolds, many other players enter the fray with their own self-serving motives, from the local journalist seeking to vaingloriously capitalize on the story, to the children’s concerned parents, to the corrupt mayor seeking to politicize the situation just ahead of the upcoming election. Although there are many story threads in play, director Ivan-Goran Vitez juggles them exceedingly well, flowing easily from one viewpoint to the next. Where the film falters slightly is unifying the multiple social issues it raises. While the subject of schools and guns is a fraught one in America, EXTRACURRICULAR handles the material with jet-black comedy, as its ridiculous premise spirals further and further out of control for its subjects. (2019, 101 min) KC
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Miguel Llanso’s JESUS SHOWS YOU THE WAY TO THE HIGHWAY (Spain/International)
Saturday 10/19, 10:30pm and Sunday 10/20, 12:45pm
There are few things more satisfying in this world than finishing a film and thinking: “What the fuck?” That is sure to be the unifying reaction towards JESUS SHOWS YOU THE WAY TO THE HIGHWAY, the second feature from Spanish director Miguel Llanso that aptly bills itself as a “WTF thriller.” The year is 2035 and two CIA agents are tasked to combat a dangerous computer virus named “Soviet Union” that has the ability to take over a fully computer-driven megalopolis. What follows is an audacious exploitation flick with afro-futurist sensibilities—navigating between parallel universes, kung-fu fighting, virtual reality, Batman porn, masked politicians, Cold War-inspired paranoia, ninjas named Ravioli and Spaghetti, and a man who thinks he’s Jesus Christ. There are excellent stylistic choices made here: from the use of stop motion to ‘70s-feeling cinematography that contrasts its futuristic world to its myriad of filming locations—hopping between Spain, Estonia, Ethiopia, Latvia, and Romania. These elements are complemented by a bizarre plot that is just as uncomfortable as it is hilarious. It’s boldly over-the-top, sometimes to its own detriment, but its reckless abandon towards the absurd will feel right at home with the midnight crowd. There’s no doubt that it will be polarizing, but JESUS SHOWS YOU THE WAY TO THE HIGHWAY is, for better or for worse, unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. (2019, 83 min) CC
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Patricio Guzmán’s THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS (Chile/France)
Sunday 10/20, 6pm and Tuesday 10/22, 1pm
For Patricio Guzmán, epic chronicler of the fall of Allende in THE BATTLE OF CHILE, the trauma of history is an elemental matter. His 2011 documentary masterpiece NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT, a mournful rumination on landscape, memory, and the persistent trauma of the Pinochet regime, exposed echoes of tragedy in the dusts of the desert and the stars; 2015’s THE PEARL BUTTON dredged the waters of Chile to reveal the history of genocidal violence against the nation’s indigenous tribes. THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS completes this triptych, as Guzmán trains his gaze on the vast Andes mountain range while reflecting, in a halting, pensive voiceover, the nation’s granite-faced indifference to its own tragedies past and present. NOSTALGIA presented a true formal breakthrough, which CORDILLERA is content to refine, but Guzmán’s craft remains unparalleled, chiseling an unthinkable poetry from barren landscapes and painful testimonies to Chile’s brutal history. A sequence meditating on the paving stones of Santiago—cut from Andean rock, they were once a playground to Guzmán in his youth, but today they bear the names of the dictatorship’s victims—is exemplary of the director’s vision, which finds in unprepossessing materials an archive of both personal and collective history. Guzmán addresses these histories metonymically, at a remove that figuratively reflects his own geographic displacement: living in exile since 1973, Guzmán only briefly faced the hardship of Pinochet’s reign directly. THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS compares his distance with the work of another documentarian, Pablo Salas, who remained, filming decades of unrest, resistance, and repression. In the film’s most urgent passages, Guzmán draws on Salas’s unruly archive, amassed in seemingly every analog and digital format, and on his observations, which trace a direct line from the Pinochet years to the demoralized neoliberal order of the present. Like Salas, Guzmán has committed (or condemned) himself to preserving the memory of an injustice that many would prefer to erase; the film communicates, more intimately than in any of his works, both the necessity and the profound loneliness of this endeavor. (2019, 85 min) MM
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Belén Funes’ A THIEF’S DAUGHTER (Spain)
Monday 10/21, 5:45pm and Tuesday 10/22, 8:30pm
One can't deny the obvious influences at play here (namely the Dardenne brothers), but still director and co-writer Belén Funes’ A THIEF’S DAUGHTER so fully brings us into its protagonist’s world that it feels like something thoroughly singular. This is due to both Funes’ focused direction—impressive considering it’s her first feature—and the performances of the extraordinary cast, led by Greta Fernandez as Dani, a resilient young woman whose problems seem never-ending. Just as Dani’s life is relentless, so too is the narrative; Funes throws us into it, either leaving out information entirely or requiring that we infer it. From the beginning we’re able to glean that Dani is a young mother who struggles to find gainful employment. Funes soon reveals that Dani lives in public housing with her son, and with a roommate and her child (it seems recipients of this benefit are assigned who to live with and frequently have someone come to check on them); that her brother, either disabled or having recently been injured, is in foster care; that Dani and her baby’s father, while amicable, no longer have an explicitly romantic relationship; and that her father, alluded to in the film's title, is generally no good, having just been released from prison and likely not present for portions of Dani and her brother’s lives. The film’s central conflict involves Dani trying to get custody of her brother, though it’s so finespun in its construction that that doesn’t feel like the point to which it’s striving. Despite the similarities to the Dardenne brothers with respect to its use of socially conscious realism, I felt more invested in Dani as a person, even more than just a character, than I did in the iniquitous details of her woebegone struggles. Fernandez is phenomenal—both she and Funes are certainly ones to watch—and the ending, in which she delivers one revealing line so beautifully, elevates this above a merely adequate pastiche. (2019, 102 min) KS
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Juris Kursietis’ OLEG (Latvia)
Monday 10/21, 8:15pm and Tuesday 10/22, 6pm
A study of migrants and the extreme lengths some must take for work in order to scrape by, OLEG is centered on the titular Oleg (Valentin Novopolskij) as he travels from his home country of Latvia to Belgium to earn enough money to pay off his debt and support his grandmother. A butcher by trade, Oleg comes across the enigmatic, charismatic, and sometimes frightening Andrzej (Dawid Ogrodnik) who offers him comfort, aide, and work—albeit at the price of sometimes breaking the law. When Andrzej reveals himself to be part of the Polish mafia, Oleg finds himself caught between the underworld and his own dizzying life crashing down around him. Director Juris Kursietis’ film draws parallels to the rippling effect of the Deal/No Deal Brexit and the transient nature of migrants across Europe. Primarily shot using handheld cameras, the cinematography, in tandem with quick edits, gives the film a fast pace. The dichotomy between Oleg and Andrzej is the crux of the film and helps to highlight the film’s theme about the dangers of being a sycophant. (2019, 108 min) KC
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François Ozon's BY THE GRACE OF GOD (France)
Tuesday 10/22, 5:45pm and Wednesday 10/23, 8:30pm
Acclaimed French writer/director François Ozon (8 WOMEN) presents an absorbing true story, timely in its quest for truth. Something of a French SPOTLIGHT, this memorable drama moves quickly while taking all the time it needs to study three middle-aged survivors of sexual abuse who form an association to defrock a pedophile priest, Bernard Preynat, when they learn he is still working with children. These men live in the shadow of what Preynat did to them in their various ways: one devout and methodical (Melvil Poupad), one atheistic and hotheaded (Denis Ménochet), one troubled and misshapen (Swann Arlaud)—all courageous. The film features an unusual three-stage structure, with each man getting a turn as protagonist, and an interesting human messiness. Alternately heartbreaking, haunting, and heartening, and always engaging, this picture may have had real-world effects: after it opened in France, an ecclesiastical court defrocked Preynat. (2018, 137 min) SP
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Arthur Franck’s THE HYPNOTIST (Finland)
Tuesday 10/22, 8:30pm and Wednesday 10/23, 1pm
An interesting look at the power of suggestion, Arthur Franck’s documentary THE HYPNOTIST follows life and controversial career of Finnish hypnotist Olliver Hawk, who rose to great fame in the 1960s. As his notoriety and influence grew, so did the increased acceptance of hypnotherapy as a legitimate medical treatment; though later it led to charges of fraud against him and a trial in the 1980s. Hawk’s political past during the Cold War is also explored, and his story becomes intertwined with former-Finnish President Urho Kekkonen. Full of archival footage, Franck’s film interweaves factual material and the myths about Hawk, crafting a subversive narrative that forces the audience to decipher true from false for themselves while comparing and contrasting the powers of suggestion necessary for hypnotism and populism. (2019, 72 min) KC
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Shorts 7: Some Kind of Tomorrow—Black Perspectives (International Shorts Program)
Wednesday 10/23, 12pm and Saturday 10/26, 3pm
This program boasts seven shorts. The exhilarating ALL ON A MARDI GRAS DAY highlights the Mardi Gras Indian tradition of New Orleans, wherein African-American "chiefs" spend the better part of the year carefully sewing beautiful, amazingly detailed costumes of elaborate beadwork and feathers, in homage to the Native American tribes who once helped runaway slaves escape to freedom. Michal Pietrzyk documents Big Chief Demond Melancon's all-day sewing sessions as he works tirelessly to finish his masterpiece in time for Mardi Gras, the day Big Chiefs mock-battle with their suits to win the title of "the prettiest." The film dramatizes the transformative power of this centuries-old tradition of music and celebration. For Demond and so many other Indians whose post-Hurricane Katrina fate was to be gentrified out of their Ninth Ward neighborhood, the stakes couldn't be higher: Demond emphasizes that practicing this cultural heritage saved his life. Crystal Kayiza's SEE YOU NEXT TIME poetically depicts the conversation and thoughts of a Chinese manicurist and the African-American regular she makes feel beautiful. Other shorts on the program examine, with various degrees of irony, what it's like to be perceived as the "other," as a dangerous and undesirable element. In the uproarious NORTH LOOP, this antagonism plays out as farce, as director Nataki Garrett follows two funny female friends, Chaz Shermil and Dame Jasmine Hughes, as they wander into a fraught interaction with a hipster in the streets of Minneapolis. Somebody give these two ladies their own Netflix show! Prejudice plays out as something sadder in Vanishing Elephant's memorable MTHUNZI, from South Africa, where a man passing through a Cape Town neighborhood attempts to be a Good Samaritan while black. The film has all the specificity, and the randomness, of a remembered real-life incident. In Kalu Oji's wry, poignant BLACKWOOD, from Australia, racism is subtext, as the film takes place on a big day for a mother and her son. She's to be interviewed about her novel; he has tryouts before a soccer scout. It culminates in the mother imparting her deepest wish: that, through her art, she might somehow imbue her beloved boy with all the fierce self-love he'll need to survive in a hostile world. Also showing are LIBERTY and EASTER SNAP. (2019, 86 min) SP
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Jonás Trueba’s THE AUGUST VIRGIN (Spain)
Thursday 10/24, 2pm, Saturday 10/26, 5:15pm, and Sunday, 10/27, 2:30pm
THE AUGUST VIRGIN announces its intentions right from the start, when Eva (Itsaso Arana) is ushered into the Madrid apartment she will live in for the first two weeks of August by its current occupant, who is leaving the city to escape the oppressive heat and settle his recently deceased mother’s estate. He tells her he is working on an article about American philosopher Stanley Cavell and the influence of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson on Cavell’s work. He explains to Eva that Cavell is best known for his book on 1930s Hollywood comedies, Pursuits of Happiness, and voices his admiration for actors like Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn who were self-possessed and strong. This opening sets the stage for Eva’s quest to discover her true self as she moves through her picturesque hometown by day and celebrates the festivals of San Cayetano, San Lorenzo, and La Paloma by night, going out with friends, having long talks about life, and wondering what it takes to really emerge into adulthood. Arana wrote the screenplay, and she hones in on the issues that matter to women in their thirties and what it looks like to let go of limitless possibilities and put some stakes in the ground. THE AUGUST VIRGIN will hit many viewers where they live; for those long past this stage of life, Eva’s struggle is a bit nostalgic and very touching. (2019, 125 min) MF
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Damien Manivel’s ISADORA’S CHILDREN (France)
Thursday 10/24, 5:45pm and Sunday 10/27, 12:15pm
Isadora Duncan, pioneer of modern dance, composed “Mother” in the throes of grief at the loss of her daughter Deirdre and son Patrick. ISADORA’S CHILDREN offers a study of three women learning this somber piece; it’s a work of such artless eloquence that I wince to call it an “art film”—though it certainly isn’t a conventional drama or documentary. Similarly, to call it a “dance film” would unfairly consign it to a realm reserved for specialists and enthusiasts; it demands to be seen precisely by those with as little sensitivity to dance as I had before watching it. The best I can do is to call it a four-hanky educational film, at once an exceptionally illuminating lesson in the physical and emotional mechanics of performed movement, and an almost unbearably poignant meditation on grief. In its three sections, ISADORA’S CHILDREN advances alternative models of learning, proceeding from the abstract to the concrete. In the first, a young professional dancer teaches herself Duncan’s movements from notation; here, the film’s patient observational style initially seems cool and remote, but expressive touches of fiction add dimension to the characters, as details of mise-en-scene, fluctuations of tone, and deviations from film’s primary thread start to whisper about the interior lives of the learners. The second sequence observes a dance instructor coaching a younger student towards a deeper personal engagement with the piece; in the devastating final third, an audience member, clearly touched by an unseen performance of the work, carries her weary body home through the night. Each section culminates when the familiar gestures of the dance suddenly resolve with the weight of true empathy. Director Damien Manivel presents dance not as an expression of physical mastery, but of intentionality, tracing these recurring gestures through bodies that, due to the facts of age and disability, impose increasing degrees of resistance to them; ISADORA’S CHILDREN invites us to perceive the same force of intentionality in the motions of daily life. An unassuming yet profoundly moving film. (2019, 84 min) MM
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Levan Akin’s AND THEN WE DANCED (Georgia)
Thursday 10/24, 7:45pm and Friday 10/25, 5:30pm
Despite shifting cultural norms and advancements in modernity, dance remains to be an art form still heavily steeped in tradition. This is especially pertinent in Gregorian dance, according to Levan Akin’s third feature film AND THEN WE DANCED, which places strength and control above softness in order to capture both the essence of perfection and the spirit of the nation. Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) has danced since he could walk and is used to this structure, but he finds himself stuck between two polarizing worlds after a new male dancer named Irakli (Bachi Valishvili) evolves from an object of competition to one of desire. In private, they grow closer—at odds both with the binary roles they perform on the dance floor as well as the permeating threat of homophobic violence in their homeland—and the public repression of their desire bubbles up inside of them until it explodes. While these threats are real and taken seriously, this is by no means a tragedy. At several points, AND THEN WE DANCED is effortlessly sun-kissed and optimistic, underscored by an ABBA and Robyn laced soundtrack that encapsulates the infectious innocence of being young, gay, and in love. It brims with hope even in its darkest moments, walking the tightrope between tradition and progression with expert precision. Gelbakhiani gives a performance of a lifetime both as an actor and as a striking dancer; it's almost impossible to take your eyes off of him. AND THEN WE DANCED doesn’t simply yearn for a world that is “accepting” or “tolerant” of queer people—it dares for the world to see us for everything we are regardless of the hatred and violence that is thrown at us, especially globally. That we are still standing, we will keep fighting, and we will keep dancing in spite of it all. (2019, 106 min) CC
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Shorts 8: Histories—Experimental (International Shorts Program)
Thursday, 10/25, 8:30pm and Fri 10/25, 12:15pm
Take away the thread of narrative causality, and the relationship between any two shots in a film becomes an open question: why should this image follow the last? Any successful experimental film, whether by challenging ideas of what cinema should be, or by teasing the promise of what it could be, will at least be able to replace the question of why with that of why not—and a worthwhile film festival should ask the same questions. So it’s heartening to see the Chicago International again making space for them after the well-received return of experimental short films to its program last year. Shorts 8: Histories offers a tight grouping of three works united by their seductive use of 16mm film and their exploration of distant, distinctive environments. VOLCANO: WHAT DOES A LAKE DREAM? is an ecstatic landscape film, exploring the Azores archipelago across spectra of light and history. Romanian-French director Diana Vidrascu incorporates four interviews, five film stocks (including an exceptionally beautiful infrared positive film), and numerous extended techniques of montage and superimposition, challenging viewers to chart a course between these disparate creative approaches. But the film’s formal restlessness clearly mirrors the geographic volatility of its subject, a group of volcanic islands formed at a point of convergence between three continental plates. Though it presents the Azores as a hyperobject, a site whose spatiotemporal contours resist delineation, there’s something slightly schematic about Vidrascu’s tectonic approach—but the why of VOLCANO mostly remains satisfyingly submerged beneath its brilliant surfaces. Altogether more beguiling is SANDOVAL’S BULLET, which likewise arrays disparate filmic techniques and textures around an elusive central theme. Reminiscent of recent films by Nicolas Pereda and Andrea Bussman, SANDOVAL’S BULLET rejects spatial and temporal continuity, instead invoking what Michel Chion called “acousmêtre”—a disembodied voice, somewhere between character and narrator—to forge a legible relation between image, sound, and image. Here, the voice is of a man recounting his brother’s near-death experience; the images, shots of verdant rainforests interspersed between passages of blackness and abstraction. These semi-hallucinatory visions tease hidden answers, glimpsed across impassable thresholds. Even through the obscure labyrinth of these images, however, director Jean-Jacques Martinod’s editing feels intuitive, surefooted. The longest, most anticipated film in the program is COLOR-BLIND, the latest “psychedelic ethnography” by seasoned world traveler Ben Russell. I’m not 100% persuaded by Russell’s gonzo schtick, which dares to ask: “why not use Paul Gauguin as a figure through which to understand French Colonialism in the Marquesas?”—but appears blithely unconcerned with any of the legitimate answers one might offer to that question. Of the film’s strengths, playfulness is cardinal: one recurring conceit invents intriguing games with French and Marquesan language, text and image, on- and off-screen space. But there are also hints of gamesmanship, even trolling, in his contradictory investments in decolonial critique and thrillseeking. Shooting between Polynesia and Brittany, Russell toys with the tropes of both ethnography and exoticism, his ultra-saturated Super 16mm photography capturing queasily dazzling images of indigenous culture. Russell certainly knows the game he’s playing with these images, at times more reminiscent of a Club Med ad more than a classroom film, and he figures the paradox of the ethnographer-adventurer with impish touches of self-reference. COLOR-BLIND takes a late swerve into solemnity with one figure’s recollections of French nuclear tests (horrifically undertaken for decades in the archipelago) only to throw water on itself with a dumb gag; is that a mushroom cloud, or just a picture-perfect cumulonimbus on the horizon? I’m left, needless to say, with a lot of questions, lingering like light after a sunset. (2019, 67 min total) MM
CRUCIAL VIEWING
Michelangelo Antonioni's RED DESERT (Italian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 11am
Antonioni's first film in color (and how!) begins deliberately out-of-focus; it seems as though the theater projectionist has erred until the credits appear fully legible. There are plenty of similar tricks throughout RED DESERT, which befits the theme of humanity's disorientation from modern life. Various settings—namely the chemical plant owned by the heroine's husband—suggest science-fiction until the film reveals their real, albeit arcane, function; and major sequences begin without explaining how the characters arrived and end without suggesting they're going. For several films, the director had innovated formal strategies to convey the transience and spiritual poverty of industrial society: In L'AVVENTURA (1960), he famously had the main character disappear from the film one-third of the way in, never to return; and the final seven minutes of L'ECLISSE (1963) removed people from its urban setting entirely. But RED DESERT represents the full-on Antonionification of the world, a film in which individuals make little impact on their surroundings, whether they inhabit them or not. (Hence the quiet heartbreak of the film's conclusion, which some viewers misinterpret as anticlimax: the heroine simply realizes there's nowhere for her to escape to.) Monica Vitti's Giuliana has recognized this crisis, and her failure to respond to it has driven her to madness. The film depicts an unspecified period following her release from a sanitarium, a series of abortive attempts at emotional connection. Giuliana stares abjectly at a factory workers' strike, a monumental new device that will allow people, ironically, to "listen to the stars," and an aristocratic party that fails to transform into an orgy. The last of these accounts for one of the great sequences of Antonioni's career, and it alone is worth the price of admission. (Needless to say, this new 35mm print is not to be missed.) It's staged in a shipyard shack where Giuliana and several of her husband's friends—including the introspective engineer (Richard Harris) with whom she's contemplating an affair—have retreated for an extended bacchanal. The two-room structure becomes a microcosm for the already-cloistered world of the shamefully rich; and within Antonioni's masterful frames it becomes as frightfully imposing as any of the giant industrial structures owned by any of the characters. The camera finds numerous snaky passages through the space, time itself seems to have been elongated; these characters, so full of imagination and drive, transform the space into a little paradise. But the air turns chilly the following morning, and the men and women proceed to demolish the wooden walls and furniture to add to the furnace. As Giuliana (and Antonioni himself) knows all too well, the heedless expedition of pleasure gives way to destruction and leaves a gaping absence in its wake. (1964, 118 min, 35mm) BS
Lucio Castro’s END OF THE CENTURY (New Argentinean)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Venue website for showtimes
A sly, elusive art-film brain-teaser with echoes of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD and CERTIFIED COPY, Lucio Castro’s END OF THE CENTURY unfolds like a dream growing increasingly less lucid, each successive section in its subtle three-part structure confounding the last until everything seems to slip away from one’s grasp. It starts straightforwardly enough, though. Arriving in Barcelona for work, the withdrawn, forty-something Ocho (Juan Barberini) spends his time reading, hanging out at the beach, and people-watching from the balcony of his third-story Airbnb. It’s a solitary, taciturn routine Castro captures in an extended, exquisitely wordless opening passage. At about twelve minutes in, the first spoken word breaks the silence. “KISS!,” Ocho hollers to the man in the KISS shirt walking past his window, the same guy he spotted earlier at the beach. Ocho invites him up, the two introduce themselves (his name is Javi, played by Ramón Pujol), and they have sex. Their personalities and histories are astutely conveyed in the following scenes as they walk-and-talk about the city. Javi, a Spaniard living in Berlin, is in a relatively new, open marriage with his husband, and has a little daughter. Ocho, an Argentine poet living in New York, is enjoying his independence after coming off an exhausting twenty-year relationship. Then, in the midst of this deepening connection, Javi drops a bombshell: this isn’t the first time they’ve met. A set-up that seems redolent of BEFORE SUNRISE or WEEKEND is thus abruptly subverted as END OF THE CENTURY sends us imperceptibly back in time, to when Ocho first(?) arrived in Barcelona and had his first(?) fling with Javi. Because both men look exactly the same, and because the flashback contains imagery similar to what we’ve already seen, it takes a while for one to realize the timeframe has shifted; adding to the confusion is the notion that anyone, no matter how drunk or ill, could forget a person with whom they spent so much time. By the time the film gets to its even more enigmatic coda, it has seemingly compressed decades of experiences real and imagined onto one nebulous temporal plane, and the spectator has become furnished with enough ambiguous information to make all interpretations seem at least somewhat possible. What is the nature of this relationship? How much of it is actually taking place, and when? To what degree are its elisions, feints, and erasures subjective manifestations of Ocho’s anxieties around commitment? Castro doesn’t give us answers. His film suggests a poetic, nearly cubist rendering of what a relationship can feel like, how its memories become liable to revision and replacement, how it can reconfigure one’s sense of time. END OF THE CENTURY gets its name from a documentary Javi had planned to make prior to 2000, but never got around to. Rejecting Y2K fears, he believed the world would keep on spinning long past that date. The film itself displays something of that disbelief in endings, creating a perpetual cycle of drift and indeterminacy that even love can’t resolve. (2019, 84 min, DCP Digital) JL
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (British Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7pm
“Music is the most romantic of art forms because its sole subject is the infinite,” wrote the German critic and author E.T.A. Hoffmann in an essay on Beethoven. Hoffmann may have been right about music, but that hasn’t stopped artists in other media from trying to approach the infinite through the deliberate manipulation of form. The British director Michael Powell was one such artist. Beginning with BLACK NARCISSUS in 1947, Powell began to refine what he termed the “composed film,” instructing the composer of the movie’s score to write the music to key sequences before they were shot, then planning the scenes so they flowed just like the soundtrack. Narrative cinema, of course, can never achieve pure formal abstraction—the content keeps the work too grounded in concrete ideas. Still, some of the greatest passages in Powell’s work with his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger come close to abstract beauty in their irreducible fusions of color, movement, special effects, and, yes, music. The central ballet sequence of THE RED SHOES (1948) is about as close to pure cinema as you’ll find in the narrative canon; ditto much of THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, the duo’s feature-length attempt to expand on said sequence. Based on Jacques Offenbach’s opera-ballet (itself based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short stories), the film is a visual and auditory spectacle that exploits the magic of cinema to heighten the splendor of music and dance. It consists of a prologue and three tales that Hoffmann tells to a group of bar patrons during the intermission of a ballet. The first two stories are fantastical in nature, featuring marionettes that come to life, evil sorcerers, and magic tricks that fuse beautifully with the film’s special effects. The third tale is more realistic, centering on the tubercular daughter of a dead opera singer whose father has mysteriously forbidden her from singing. Hoffmann is a character in all three vignettes; in each one he looks for love, only to have his hopes dashed by black magic or tragic fate. None of the stories are as interesting as the imaginative way that the filmmakers realize them: practically every shot exults the possibilities of Technicolor, with combinations of lurid hues and/or pastels, and the camera’s movements (which often mirror those of the dancers) seductively draw one into Hoffmann’s world. In that world, time and space seem marvelously fluid, which is another way of saying that Powell and Pressburger’s filmmaking here approaches the infinite. (1951, 128 min, DCP Digital) BS
Rogério Sganzerla’s THE RED LIGHT BANDIT (Brazilian Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
To fully analyze director/screenwriter Rogério Sganzerla’s THE RED LIGHT BANDIT, one would have to be a psychiatrist, preferably a Jungian or Freudian. Rarely have I seen a film that proceeds so completely and successfully as a dream—the kind I have experienced as an extended story with which I entertain my sleeping self during particularly dull times of my life—and yet channels the zeitgeist of its time. Sganzerla’s dream interprets the story of João Acácio Pereira da Costa, a notorious criminal operating in São Paulo at the time the film was conceived, and the police working to end his burglaries, sexual assaults, and murders. Pereira da Costa, who grew up in the slums of São Paulo, became something of a folk hero in Brazil, though his reputation as a Robin Hood who stole from the rich did not usually extend to giving to the poor. Nonetheless, Sganzerla, who was only 21 when he made this film, is clearly aligned with his bandit, likely because he, too, saw himself as an outsider. He has been grouped with the Cinema Marginal movement in Brazil as a filmmaker who was more experimental and even more critical of Brazilian society than those of the Cinema Novo movement, which Sganzerla lightly mocks in THE RED LIGHT BANDIT even as he pulls influences from them and other sources. Paulo Villaça, who strongly resembles Pereira da Costa, plays Jorge, the title bandit who is often referred to as “Light.” His nemesis, a police officer named Cabeção (Luiz Linhares) and nicknamed “Big Head,” always seems to be one step behind Light, though Sganzerla doesn’t make him seem that much of a fool—rather Light is much more clever. Light has relationships with many women of many types, but it is his liaison with a hooker named Janete Jane (Helena Ignez) that proves his undoing, in a clear bow to Godard’s crime films—indeed the look (though extremely low-budget) and especially the energy of THE RED LIGHT BANDIT is very reminiscent of BREATHLESS (1960). J.B. da Silva (Pagano Sobrinho), the crime boss who drinks (what else?) J.B. scotch, will remind people of a certain inhabitant of the Oval Office and clearly signals the government crackdown on dissent that would occur the year the film was released. Throughout THE RED LIGHT BANDIT, voiceovers by a man and a woman, as well as an electronic ticker on a building, add commentary on the commercialization of crime and the folkloric clichés that the rest of the world has used to sentimentalize Brazil and that Brazil has used to cloud its own violent present. The film’s denouement ends on just such a cliché, as Light’s demise quotes directly from Marcel Camus’ lyrical Brazilian masterpiece, BLACK ORPHEUS (1959). At a time when student protests were rocking Brazil and other countries, THE RED LIGHT BANDIT is juvenilia that skillfully captures the passion of youth. (1968, 92 min, DCP Digital) MF
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ANDREI TARKOVSKY X 2
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Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER (Soviet Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Monday, 2:30pm and Tuesday, 9pm
Loosely based on the Soviet novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky's STALKER creates a decrepit industrial world where a mysterious Zone is sealed off by the government. The Zone, rumored to be of alien origin, is navigable by guides known as Stalkers. The Stalker of the title leads a writer and a scientist through the surrounding detritus into the oneiric Zone—an allegorical stand-in for nothing less than life itself—on a spiritual quest for a room that grants one's deepest subconscious wish. Tarkovsky composes his scenes to obscure the surroundings and tightly controls the audience's view through long, choreographed takes. Shots run long and are cut seamlessly. Coupled with non-localized sounds and a methodical synth score, sequences in the film beckon the audience into its illusion of continuous action while heightening the sense of time passing. The use of nondiegetic sounds subtly reminds us that this may be a subjective world established for the Stalker's mystical purpose. Where sci-fi films tend to overstate humanity's limitless imagination of the universe, Tarkovsky reappropriates the genre's trappings to suggest the cosmos' deepest truths are in one's own mind. STALKER posits—perhaps frighteningly—that, in this exploration of the self, there is something that knows more about us than we know ourselves. The writer and scientist, both at their spiritual and intellectual nadir, hope the room will renew their métier; the Stalker's purpose, as stated by Tarkovsky, is to "impose on them the idea of hope." But STALKER is a rich and continually inspiring work not for this (or any other) fixed meaning but rather for its resistance to any one single interpretation. (1979, 163 min, imported 35mm print) BW
Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS (Soviet Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Sunday, 7pm
In Tarkovsky’s luminescent and beautiful adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, has been sent to a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, which is covered entirely by a potentially sentient ocean. Kelvin is to take charge of the station and either close it down or take drastic, violent measures against the ocean in order to generate scientific data. When he arrives, though, he discovers that the station is regularly populated with ‘visitors,’ people seemingly generated out of thin air while one sleeps, who are manifestations of one’s own memories and dreams. In adapting Lem’s book, Tarkovsky develops a complex structure of flashbacks, dream sequences, and fantasies that are at times indistinguishable from the ‘actual’ events of the plot, and alternates between color and black-and-white cinematography to further alienate us from the narrative flow. The way he shoots Natalya Bondarchuk, uncannily incandescent in nearly every shot as she ethereally wafts through the sets, is in direct conflict with the staid, weathered and deeply conflicted Donatas Banionis, questioning her very existence. While the novel is set solely on the space station, Tarkovsky developed a crucial prologue set on Earth, in which the philosophical and aesthetic issues are introduced that will later play out in dramatic form. It is there that Burton appears, a retired scientist who is the only one we meet to have actually returned from the mysterious planet. It is Burton who gives voice to a potential thesis of the film, that “knowledge is only valid when it is based on morality,” when he learns of the potentially destructive nature of Kris’ mission. Burton’s shadow hangs low over the film, over the violence that the story heaps on the body of Hari, Kelvin’s lost love reborn. If Burton is right, what are we to make of Kelvin’s own understanding of his relationship with her, which is based on betrayal and pain? What conclusions are we to draw on the apparent attempts by Solaris itself to study the scientists by means of the ‘visitors,’ when their inevitable result is heartbreak? Late in the film, the camera lingers on a print of Breughel’s “Hunters in the Snow,” a painting that seems to imply that the titular hunters, instead of returning home empty-handed, are instead on the trail of the ice-skating children in the distance. It is an invocation of the untamable nature of violence, which once released can never be controlled. Kelvin’s reaction to his first ‘visitor,’ the first appearance of Hari, is to attempt to destroy her. Breughel’s hunters with their ambiguous target are mocking commentaries on Kelvin’s own predetermined failure as a scientist and as a human being. Like them, his inability to come to terms with his own nature leads him to lash out against those closest to him, and in so doing to destroy himself. When, in the end, he returns to a heavily ironic homecoming with his surely deceased father, it is with a sense not of a journey completed, but of a cycle repeated, with inevitable tragedy and with inescapable loss that he can never come to terms with. (1972, 166 min, 35mm) KB
Preston Sturges’ THE GREAT MCGINTY (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - 7 and 9:30pm
Preston Sturges was so eager to step behind the camera that he sold the screenplay of THE GREAT MCGINTY to Paramount Pictures for $10 on the grounds that he could direct it as well. As a result, he became the first official writer-director in American movie history—as well as one of the greatest. THE GREAT MCGINTY kicked off an extraordinary run of eight films that Sturges made in just five years, from 1940 to 1944. Each one (save, perhaps, THE GREAT MOMENT) is breathtaking in its own way, but taken together they advance a memorable view of American society that balances cynicism and warmth. MCGINTY is an affectionate tribute to crooked politics, following the title character as he goes from being an apolitical hobo to a stooge for the party machine and ultimately a state governor. Brian Donlevy is swell as McGinty, but as is often the case in Sturges’ directorial efforts, the supporting cast steals the show. Akim Tamiroff is especially riotous as the hero’s handler (known only as “The Boss”), an outsized wheeler-dealer who gets such a kick out of being corrupt that his pleasure is infectious, and William Demarest is a hoot as the party functionary who schools McGinty in political dishonesty in the stubborn, blustery, big-talking manner he brought to all his great performances for Sturges. As opposed to the writer-director’s supreme masterpieces, the film doesn’t knock you flat with its whirlwind comic invention; it’s just consistently hilarious. But the satire of all-American corruption still feels fresh, and there are enough good one-liners to fill several movies. (1940, 82 min, 35mm) BS
Oscar Micheaux's WITHIN OUR GATES (Silent American Revival)
Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm (Free Admission)
During the Red Summer of 1919, the Chicago Race Riot awoke the nation from its foolish reverie; with 38 people dead and approximately 1,000 black families displaced, the riot in Chicago and others like it across the nation reflected the increased willingness amongst African Americans to fight back against institutionalized racial oppression. Made in 1919 and released in early 1920, WITHIN OUR GATES was appropriately timed against the conflict and also viewed as a direct response to D.W. Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION (1915). Oscar Micheaux's second film tells the story of a black Southern school teacher, Sylvia, who goes North to seek funds for her school after the enrollment exceeds the money allotted per black child by the state. Along the way she falls in love with another idealist, and the story of her past is disclosed in a revelatory flashback: Sylvia was adopted by a black couple who are later lynched after her adoptive father is accused of killing his employer. Sylvia also escapes an attempted rape at the hands of her white birth father; between this and the lynching, the Board of Censors in Chicago and other cities initially rejected the film for fear that it would incite more racial violence. Shot mostly in Chicago, the film's sole print is the earliest surviving print of a feature film directed by an African American; it was discovered in Spain during the 1970s and restored by the Library of Congress is 1993. Micheaux's film is significant not only for its place within American film history, but also for the way it displays the complexity of race relations between people and regions. Live score by DJ Rae Chardonnay. Followed by a discussion between Chardonnay and UofC professors Jacqueline Stewart and Allyson Nadia Field. (1920, 79 min, 16mm Archival Print) KS
George A. Romero's MARTIN (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 9:30pm
The greatest film by George A. Romero, MARTIN is thoughtful, restrained, and melancholy. It follows a young man who may be a vampire as he tries to make a new life in the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Plagued by visions of Old World vampire hunters, villagers with torches, and creepy castles, Martin tries, and fails, to keep himself from killing, to believe he is merely a man. And perhaps he is: one of the great strengths of the film is Romero's refusal to close down either possibility. Eventually, Martin's bloodlust, whether pathological or spiritual, gets the better of him, but who the film's real monster is remains in question right up to the end. Whom do we have the right to kill, MARTIN asks, and what do we do with ourselves after the act is done? Horrifying, and brilliant, and not-to-be-missed. (1978, 95 min, Digital Projection) KB
Chantal Akerman’s FROM THE OTHER SIDE (De L'autre Côte) (Documentary Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 3:45pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Of the late Chantal Akerman’s greatest strengths as a filmmaker are her eye for outdoor shot composition and the ability to create a compelling story from the lives of ordinary people, and in so providing a platform for those whose voices would otherwise not be heard. In FROM THE OTHER SIDE, Akerman explores the U.S.-Mexico border, including those that live nearby as well as those who work there. In these discordant times where xenophobia and nationalism have reemerged in the collective American consciousness, Akerman’s film, perhaps now more than ever, elegantly humanizes all sides involved in the U.S. border debate. This humanization seeks to highlight the struggles faced in the name of wanting to create a better life for oneself on a personal, communal, and national level. OTHER SIDE is an exercise in minimalism, especially with its recurrent landscape shots along the boundary (both static and sweeping) that invoke the very nature of what barriers are and how they can be torn down to unite. Part journalism, part video essay, and part investigation, this revisit to a time during the most previous Republican president’s administration’s intercontinental, foreign policy and its effects on those directly involved displays both the resentment and benevolence of the human spirit. Critic and artist Fred Camper lectures at the Tuesday screening. (2002, 103 min, Digital Projection) KC
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI X 3
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Abbas Kiarostami's CERTIFIED COPY (International Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm
CERTIFIED COPY was Abbas Kiarostami's first narrative feature after a decade of video experiments and it was also his first feature shot in Europe. These facts alone would deem the film a major work, but it's a milestone for Kiarostami regardless. The premise is teasingly simple, in the grand tradition of THE TRAVELLER and TASTE OF CHERRY: A British art historian (William Shimell) has written a book on the history of forgery. In it, he posits that it's irrelevant whether great art is authentic or merely copied because it's the impact of the work that determines its legacy. After giving a lecture in Tuscany, he meets a beautiful antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche) who likes the book but disagrees with its argument. They hit it off anyway and then decide to spend the afternoon together, visiting historic sites and bickering about art. This promises, and essentially delivers, a genteel conversation piece in the Eric Rohmer mold; but in its particulars, the film is every bit as weird as Kiarostami's prior masterpieces. Much of the dialogue feels improvised or tossed-off, though the characters are often filmed in a manner that suggests cosmic significance: They're isolated in symmetrical, icon-making close-ups; reverently followed in tracking shots that emphasize the fragility of any moment in the course of time; and (Kiarostami's calling card) made into specks in landscape shots that identify them only by the car they're riding in. At different points of their afternoon, this man and woman behave like strangers, a long-married couple, and smitten kids on a first date. Which of these interactions is real? Does it matter? Nearly every scene of CERTIFIED COPY touches on some profound aspect of human experience—falling in love, realizing one's place in the universe, et cetera—and in each of their incarnations, the characters are so fully realized by the leads that they never seem ciphers for bigger themes. (Binoche won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance, which contains some of her most attenuated and unpredictable work; Shimell, an opera singer in his major first film role, is a more limited actor by comparison, but he makes a fine Cary Grant to her Katherine Hepburn.) Their entire experience, in short, has been recast by their passion for art: Everything is mysterious and full of promise. Some critics writing about the film have invoked Henry James in describing this tale about the enticements of the Continent, but the results have less in common with, say, The Ambassadors than with James' inexplicable freak-out The Sacred Fount. Who would have expected this great artist of open spaces to take after the most psychoanalytical of writers? Only the film's aftertaste is truly shocking: Kiarostami has arrived at these Jamesian conclusions through entirely his own means. The film applies to psychology the same coy, unassuming perspective that Kiarostami directed at landscapes and faces, respectively, in FIVE (2005) and SHIRIN (2008). Remarkably, the project remains the same: to regard the subject as if it's never been contemplated before. That CERTIFIED COPY maintains such a light surface tone while pursuing such meaningful questions makes most other recent filmmaking seem trivial or overwrought. Kiarostami's son Ahmad Kiarostami in person at the Wednesday screening. (2010, 106 min, 35mm) BS
Abbas Kiarostami's SHIRIN (Iranian Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 6pm and Monday, 8pm
Shot on digital video--like all his films since ABC AFRICA (2001)--SHIRIN is another chapter in Kiarostami's experimental film journey. The project is simple enough: a series of 112 close-ups of Iranian women (and Juliette Binoche) as they watch a film. The film, though based on an actual poem (a 12th century Persian epic titled The Story of Khosrow and Shirin), is in fact entirely fictional, existing solely as an elaborate soundtrack prepared by Kiarostami. By recording this soundtrack after shooting the close-ups, Kiarostami creates a provocation/game in the vein of the "conversations" in TASTE OF CHERRY and THE WIND WILL CARRY US that were shot one character at a time. As in all his work, the mystery of the present moment takes precedence over cause and resolution; as SHIRIN's moments are made of the most slender elements, the mysteries should be pretty vast, indeed. Writing about the film for Variety last year, Ronnie Schieb interpreted it this way: "All the Sturm und Drang of the offscreen pageantry functions as mere pretext for the richness of emotions that flit across their watching faces. Kiarostami fabricates a fascinating tension between film narrative and film imagery, the spectators' closeups simultaneously reading as a ghostly reflection of theatrical artifice and as the story itself... SHIRIN [also] comes across as inescapably feminist, suggesting Kiarostami's personal stake in employing Iranian actresses whose talents he has never before tapped. The film also tips toward feminism in that the younger, prettier faces are not necessarily the ones that capture the eye." (2008, 97 min, DCP Digital) BS
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Also this week: Kiarostami’s 1977 Iranian film THE REPORT (110 min, Digital Projection) is on Saturday at 5:15pm.
Home Movie Day (Special Event)
Chicago History Museum (1601 N. Clark St.) – Saturday, 1:30-5:30pm (Free Admission)
This yearly, worldwide celebration of home movies is absolutely essential viewing for anyone who cares a whit about motion picture art, history, sociology, ethnography, science, or technology. Anyone who loves the sound of a projector. Anyone who loves deep, luscious Kodachrome II stock that is as gorgeous as the day it was shot. Anyone who loves dated, faded, scratched, and bruised film—every emulsion scar a sacred glyph created by your grandfather's careless handling 60 years ago. Anyone who wants to revel in the performance of the primping and strutting families readying for their close up. Anyone who wants to see what the neighborhood looked like before you got there. So find your 100 foot reels of 16mm you just had processed from your sister's Quinceañera or your grandfather's thousands of feet of Super 8mm from your uncle's Bar Mitzvah in 1976 or that 8mm your great aunt shot from Dealey Plaza in 1963 and come out for Home Movie Day. Just walk in with your films for staff and volunteers from the Chicago Film Archives and the Chicago Film Society to inspect your home movies that day! Select films will be screen throughout the day. As part of this year’s event, the Chicago Film Society will be premiering their newly-restored print of Harry and Lill Fulscher’s 1938 sound home movie THE SPIDER AND THE FLY (12 min, 16mm). Co-Presented by the Chicago Film Archives and the Chicago Film Society. JBM
Pedro Almodovar’s ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Spanish Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Friday, 9:30pm (Rescheduled Show)
In ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, Pedro Almodovar uses widescreen in a manner similar to Cukor and other such early masters of color-and-‘Scope melodrama as Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli, using widescreen to show off the lushness of his production design and augment the presence of his actors. MOTHER was the movie that cemented Almodovar’s international reputation as a modern master, and for obvious reasons. The mix of comedy and melodrama feels natural and confident (not provocative or intentionally jarring, as it was in the director’s early films), and it offers numerous life lessons that make you feel good. Like the melodramas of Sirk, Cukor, and Minnelli, it’s also an actors’ showcase, featuring at least a dozen roles that allow the actors inhabiting them to shine. Not for nothing did Almodovar dedicate the film to three major actresses (Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, and Romy Schneider); MOTHER celebrates not just actresses, but assertive, highly present women in general. (1999, 101 min, 35mm) BS
François Ozon’s FRANTZ (Contemporary French/German)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 5pm (Rescheduled Show)
Like Steven Soderbergh, François Ozon is a cinematic chameleon, exploring multiple styles and genres over the course of his career. Unlike Soderbergh, Ozon has a consistent theme that unites his disparate work: he’s fascinated by the human impulse for perversion, the curious instinct that leads people to explore taboos. The taboos that Ozon’s characters confront (and often break) tend to be sexual in nature, and when they aren’t, you can easily detect a sexual subtext in the films. In FRANTZ, Ozon’s sublime reworking of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 melodrama BROKEN LULLABY (aka THE MAN I KILLED), that subtext is further beneath the surface than usual; the passion it addresses is essentially metaphysical. The film concerns a young German woman’s friendship with—and growing desire for—the mysterious Frenchman who murdered her fiancé on the battlefield during World War I. Their relationship may be chaste, but that doesn’t keep Ozon from emphasizing its perversity. Before Adrien, the Frenchman, reveals that he is Anna’s fiancé’s killer, he pretends to be a long-lost friend whom the fiancé, Frantz, met while studying in Paris. He introduces himself to Anna and to Frantz’s parents under this ruse, and they respond by incorporating him into their lives as though he were the reincarnation of their dead loved one. That the principal characters are acting out of grief doesn’t make their arrangement any less strange, and, as in Ozon’s previous feature, THE NEW GIRLFRIEND, the way the characters normalize their desires comes to seem no less perverse than the desires themselves. Yet the writer-director never condescends to these people; rather, the film is gentle and delicate, shot mainly in gossamer black-and-white widescreen and in compositions that grant a certain spatial integrity to each character. Ozon respects the emotional sincerity of classic Hollywood melodrama without slavishly imitating it. (To return to the Soderbergh comparison, this is not Ozon’s THE GOOD GERMAN.) The acting styles feel contemporary even when the mores depicted onscreen do not. Further, the brief flashes of color that occur whenever Frantz is evoked in others’ hearts may feel sometimes like a gimmick, but at least it isn’t an ironic, postmodern one. Ozon wants to understand these characters and their period on their own terms, despite using entirely personal means to arrive at that understanding. (2016, 113 min, DCP Digital) BS
Herbert J. Biberman's SALT OF THE EARTH (American Revival)
The Workers Education Society (3339 S. Halsted St.) – Monday, 7pm
Produced independently by Hollywood Blacklistees—who were inspired to make a pro-labor film as a way of getting even with HUAC—SALT OF THE EARTH is a landmark act of civil disobedience and the rare film that's entitled to masterpiece status without having to be any good. Thankfully, its artfulness is commensurate with its conviction. A docudrama about a lengthy miners' strike in New Mexico, shot on location and featuring many of the actual miners as extras, it's also one of the few American films of the period comparable to the Neorealist masterpieces made in Italy around the same time. Arguably, the makers of SALT OF THE EARTH went even further than Roberto Rossellini in developing an artistic process that reflected their collectivist ideals: The script was frequently revised according to input from the miners and their families—most notably, to devote more attention to the role played by wives and mothers in organizing the strike. (Jonathan Rosenbaum has called this ahead of its time in its feminist sentiment.) Telling the miners' story in their own words often gives this the stolid feel of community theater; but on the other hand, it lends the film a certain no-bullshit authenticity that separates it from slicker—and ultimately patronizing—stuff like NORMA RAE. It's also plenty suspenseful. A sort of moral inversion of the hostage-standoff movie, the prolonged strike sees the workers' community become more unified as pressure increases from bosses and police. Showing as part of Hothouse's "On Whose Shoulders" series. (1954, 94 min, Video Projection) BS
Assia Boundaoui’s THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED (New Documentary)
PO Box Collective (6900 N. Glenwood Ave.) - Friday, 7:30pm (Free Admission)
Algerian-American director Assia Boundaoui investigates the FBI’s scrutiny of the Muslim community in Bridgeview, Illinois, where she grew up. Dubbed “Vulgar Betrayal,” the operation went back over 20 years and made Boundaoui and her neighbors suspicious of workmen and any other strangers they’d see on the street. Coupled with the fact that it yielded no substantive terrorism-related convictions, it led the director to conclude that her community was being targeted mostly on the basis of race and religion. The film works best when Boundaoui focuses on her family’s and her own experiences rather than theorizing on the broad aims of the US government. Preceded by Meriem Sadoun's 2019 documentary short NEW YORK 1998 (6 min). Boundaoui in person. (2018, 86 min, Video Projection) DS
Joe Talbot’s THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO (New American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Saturday, 7 and 9:30pm
San Francisco has served as the backdrop for countless movies over the years; it’s distinct topography and landmarks make it instantly recognizable to an audience. With each film’s reinterpretation, it takes on different roles—as if it were an actor—and differing aspects of the city emerge. In THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO, two lifelong friends navigate gentrification, their friendship, and their families’ pasts in the City by the Bay. Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) and aspiring-playwright Mont (Jonathan Majors) are inseparable pals with a history of squatting, but both are currently crashing at Mont’s grandfather’s house. Jimmie longs for his childhood home, a Victorian house that was built by hand by his grandfather. Jimmie frequently trespasses onto the property, now owned by a white baby-boomer couple, not for nefarious purposes but to provide renovations, much to the owners’ annoyance. After the family suddenly moves out, Jimmie steps in to claim squatter’s rights to reclaim his family’s legacy and to provide a place for Mont to stage a production of his play. THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO explores current issues plaguing the city—gentrification, absurd property costs, and homelessness—with equal parts playfulness and despair. Nostalgic notions of the past are merged with the contemporary realities, yielding a poignant juxtaposition. Do we really not know what we have until we lose it? The film is based on director Joe Talbot and lead actor/writer Jimmie Fails‘ own childhood friendship in the city, which lends an earnestness and truthfulness to the actions depicted on screen. THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO is a unique take on one of California’s most distinct and filmed cities. (2019, 121 mins, DCP Digital) KC
David Schalliol’s THE AREA (New Documentary)
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) - Saturday, 7pm
David Schalliol’s THE AREA, which makes its Chicago premiere at this year’s Black Harvest Film Festival, follows community matriarch-cum-activist Deborah Payne as she crusades to save her neighborhood from mass demolition at the hands of the Norfolk Southern Railway corporation. The title refers to an 85-acre residential pocket of Englewood surrounding Payne’s home near 57th and Normal that’s scheduled to be bulldozed for the purposes of an intermodal freight hub, i.e. a glorified parking lot for shipping containers. Schalliol, a photographer and sociologist by trade who possesses a canny eye for architectural portraiture, is careful to eschew the ruin porn aesthetic in which dilapidated structures are treated as pure spectacle devoid of any contextual information about the socioeconomic forces that led to their demise. In one of the film’s most poetic shots, two houses are juxtaposed side by side: one in sound condition, the other abandoned, shuttered, and in the midst of dismantlement. It’s a stark contrast that symbolizes the conflicting perceptions of Englewood itself—there’s the nightly news caricature of Englewood, reducible to poverty and gun violence, and there’s the actual Englewood that’s home to a community of people. Indeed, THE AREA is deeply rooted in a sense of place, so much so that we’re often told the precise intersection or address where a scene is unfolding, and, like THE INTERRUPTERS and 70 ACRES IN CHICAGO before it, this is an urgent and compelling documentary about a dimension of city that’s rarely seen on the big screen. Though the scope here is hyperlocal, the themes of political apathy, corporate avarice, and the disenfranchisement of a minority community extend well beyond the parameters of the Area. Faced with the encroachment of the railroad company, some residents enthusiastically take buyouts; others want to stay, but aren’t given much of a choice. In order to execute their land grab, Norfolk Southern employs dubious tactics like enacting eminent domain, which allows the government to acquire private property and transfer it to a third party, and persuading at least one homeowner not to pay her mortgage in order to facilitate a “short sale.” Moreover, as a result of the entire neighborhood getting razed, residents are exposed to a slew of environmental hazards, including increased diesel emissions and gas leaks, bringing to mind Chicago’s recent pet coke scandal, the Flint, MI, water crisis, and countless other instances of environmental racism. At a town hall meeting, a Norfolk Southern representative argues that, “What we have to do is we have to balance the business imperative with our desire for the environmental need,” unaware or indifferent to the fact that these are diametrically opposed agendas. What bothers Payne most isn’t the inevitable railroad takeover, but the lack of respect for the families being displaced. Despite the efforts of a collective bargaining coalition and help from community organizations, homes inside the Area, which total around 400 at the outset, continue to dwindle until the film reaches its tragic conclusion. What’s missing, perhaps, is an in-depth interview with Norfolk Southern or 20th Ward alderman Willie Cochran, who endorses the sale of land in an about-face, in which they are taken to task for the fallout from their actions; the documentary, however, is less concerned with hard-hitting investigative journalism and more with chronicling Payne’s personal struggle. On its surface, THE AREA might seem like a tale of defeat, but this is ultimately a story about resistance, resilience, and collectivism. As Payne reflects near the end, “I feel good that we stood up to people who thought they could do anything…I think that it made me a better person.” Payne and co-producer Brian Ashby in person. (2018, 93 min, Digital Projection) HS
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Advance Notice for The Attractions of the Moving Image: A Celebration of Tom Gunning, a two-day event marking the retirement earlier this year of University of Chicago professor Tom Gunning. The event is on Friday and Saturday, October 25-26, but since the Friday schedule begins at 9am and our list generally goes live in the early afternoon, we’re including a note this week. Friday includes several presentations by film studies scholars Dudley Andrew, Murray Pomerance, Thomas Elsaesser, Vivian Sobchack, and others, grouped in four sessions, followed by a 6pm reception and a 7:30pm screening of Frank Borzage’s 1927 silent film 7TH HEAVEN (110 min, DCP Digital); Saturday begins at 9:30pm and includes a session featuring André Gaudreault, Charles Musser, and Yuri Tsivian, an open mic at 1:30pm, and a 4pm screening. The screening includes new work by Ken Jacobs, Lewis Klahr, and Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser, a TBA film by Jodie Mack, Lewis Klahr’s 2002 film DAYLIGHT MOON, and Ernie Gehr’s 1968 film WAIT, with all filmmakers in person. At the Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago). Free admission.
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The Music Box Theatre presents the 24-hour film marathon Music Box of Horrors from Noon Saturday to Noon Sunday. Paul Leni’s 1928 silent film THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (110 min, 35mm), with a live score by Maxx McGathey, is at Noon; Cindy Sherman’s 1997 film OFFICE KILLER (82 min, 35mm archival print) is at 2pm; John Hancock’s 1971 film LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (89 min, 16mm), with Hancock in person, is at 3:45pm; at 5:45pm there’s a brief tribute to director Larry Cohen; Lamberto Bava’s 1986 film DEMONS 2 (88 min, 35mm) is at 6pm; Shinichi Fukazawa’s 1995/2012 Japanese film BLOODY MUSCLE BODY BUILDER IN HELL (62 min, Blu-Ray) is at 7:55pm; Neil Marshall’s 2002 film DOG SOLDIERS (105 min, 35mm), with Marshall in person, is at 9:15pm; Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1997 film EVENT HORIZON (96 min, 35mm) is at 11:45pm; Guy Magar’s 1987 film RETRIBUTION (107 min, 35mm archival print) is at 1:30am; Lewis Teague’s 1980 film ALLIGATOR (91 min, 35mm) is at 3:30am; Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 Japanese film TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (67 min, DCP Digital) is at 5:15am; Rick Rosenthal’s 1981 film HALLOWEEN II (92 min, 35mm) is at 6:45am; Chris Walas’ 1989 film THE FLY II (105 min, 35mm) is at 8:30am; and Fran Rubel Kuzui’s 1992 film BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (86 min, DCP Digital) is at 10:30am.
The Little México Film Festival takes place on Saturday from 1-9pm at the Citlalin Art Gallery Theater (2005 S. Blue Island Ave.). More info at https://limefilmfest.com.
The Chicago Film Society (at the Music Box Theatre) screens the theatrical version of Robert Altman’s 1997 made-for-PBS quasi-fictional concert film JAZZ ’34: REMEMBRANCES OF KANSAS CITY SWING (72 min, 35mm archival print) on Tuesday at 7pm. Preceded by Dave Fleischer’s 1932 Betty Boop cartoon MINNIE THE MOOCHER (8 min, 35mm).
The Art Institute of Chicago presents Take Three: An In-Depth Look at the Cinema of Andy Warhol on Wednesday at 6pm. This lecture event will include Bruce Jenkins (SAIC professor) and Bill Horrigan (Wexner Center for the Arts), who are writing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on Warhol’s films, and Claire Henry, assistant curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum. Select short films (showing in 16mm) are scheduled as part of the talk. Free admission but RSVP required at www.artic.edu.
The University of Chicago’s Humanities Day event takes place on Saturday, with a full day of talks and presentations in a wide variety of disciplines. The film-related ones include a keynote address at 11am by Jacqueline Najuma Stewart titled Home Movie Day: Personal Archives Lost and Found; a presentation titled The Visual Record: An Introduction to the South Side Home Movie Project at 1pm; and a talk by Allyson Nadia Field titled Recovering Black Love in Film at 2pm, which is focused on Field’s role in identifying the previously-lost 1898 William Selig film SOMETHING GOOD—NEGRO KISS. Free admission for all. More information and details on locations at https://humanitiesday.uchicago.edu.
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: the program Countercultures and Undergrounds screens in the ongoing Ism, Ism, Ism series on Friday at 7pm. Included are: JUVENTUD, REBELDIA, REVOLUCION (Enrique Pineda Barnet, 1969, Cuba, 30 min), ISM ISM (Manuel DeLanda, 1979, Mexico/USA, 9 min, 16mm restored archival print), MARABUNTA (Narcisa Hirsch, 1967, Argentina, 8 min), ESPLENDOR DO MARTIRIO (Sergio Peo, 1974, Brazil, 10 min), COTORRA 2 (Rolando Peña, 1976, Venezuela, 10 min), and SEGUNDA PRIMERA MATRIZ (Alfredo Gurrola, 1972, Mexico, 13 min). All Digital Projection except where noted; and Sara Gómez’s 1974/1977 Cuba film ONE WAY OR ANOTHER (78 min, 16mm archival print) is on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Free admission.
The Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) presents Beyond Appearances: An Evening with François Ozon on Wednesday at 6:30pm. Ozon will give a talk, and then be joined in conversation with UofC professor Jennifer Wild; and Liam Young: Film Screening and Talk on Thursday at 7pm. Architect Young will discuss and show examples of his films, which combine documentary footage and speculative narratives. Both free admission.
The Conversations at the Edge series (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) presents An Evening with Rachel Rossin on Thursday at 6pm. The NYC artist will present and discuss a selection of her experimental video and virtual reality works.
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) hosts an event presented by Homeroom and the Japanese American Service Committee, Japanese American Immigration, Incarceration, and Resettlement, on Wednesday at 7pm. The screening and discussion will include excerpts of oral history films from 1975 produced by the JASC and Anna Takada’s 2019 documentary RESETTLED ROOTS: LEGACIES OF JAPANESE AMERICANS IN CHICAGO. Participants include Homeroom’s Fred Sasaki and JASC’s Ryan Yokota. Free admission.
The Chicago Film Archives presents Light in Motion: The Influence of the New Bauhaus on Wednesday at 6pm at the Chicago Cultural Center. The screening will include: Milt and Millie Goldsholl's NIGHT DRIVING (1957, 9 min), the Goldsholl's DISSENT ILLUSION (1963, 11 min), Byron Grush's CIRCLES (c. 1965, 9 min), Grush's FLESH COLORED CRAYONS (c. 1992, 4 min), Robert Stiegler's LICHT SPIEL NUR I (c. 1967, 3 min), and Larry Janiak's LIFE AND FILM (c. 1965, 4 min). Free admission.
South Side Projections and Filmfront (1740 W. 18th St.) screen Noel Buckner, Mary Dore, and Sam Sills’ 1984 documentary THE GOOD FIGHT: THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR (98 min, Digital Projection) on Tuesday at 7pm. Introduced by historian and author Jerry Harris, who will speak about his father Syd Harris’ experiences with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Showing as part of Hothouse’s “On Whose Shoulders” series. Free admission.
Also at Filmfront (1740 W. 18th St.) this week: Bilingual Aesthetics: Negotiations in Between Languages (1990-2015, 82 min total, Digital Projection), part of the Ism, Ism, Ism series and co-presented by Block Cinema, is on Saturday at 7pm. Screening are: MEETING ANCESTORS (Vincent Carelli and Dominique Gallois, 1993, Brazil, 22 min), NANDERU PANORAMICA TUPINAMBA (Sérgio Péo, 1991, Brazil, 8 min), THE LAND BELONGS TO THOSE WHO WORK IT (Chiapas Media Project, 2005, Mexico, 15 min), PAWQARTAMPU (Felipe Esparza, 2015, Peru, 8 min), ESTELA (Bruno Varela, 2012, Mexico, 8 min), WE’RE HERE TO SERVE YOU (Ximena Cuevas, 1999, Mexico, 3 min), and DILEMMA I: BURUNDANGA BORICUA (Poli Marichal, 1990, Puerto Rico, 18 min); and hosts the Queer Film Series’ double feature presentation of Harry Kümel’s 1971 Belgian film DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (100 min, Video Projection) and Tony Scott’s 1983 film THE HUNGER (96 min, Video Projection) on Sunday at 7pm. Followed by a discussion. Free admission for both.
Full Spectrum Features presents Cuban Animation from the 1960s to Today on Saturday at 7pm at the Athenaeum Theatre (2936 N. Southport Ave.) in their year-long “Cuban Visions” series. The screening is followed by a discussion with the program’s curators, Cuban animator Ivette Avila and historian, law professor, and former Deputy Director of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, Julio César Guanche Zaldivar.
The School of Cinematic Arts at DePaul University is hosting a work-in-progress screening of Kristian Hill’s documentary GOD SAID GIVE ‘EM DRUM MACHINES on Friday at 5:30pm, with Hill and producer Jennifer Washington in person. It’s in DePaul’s CDM Theater (247 S. State St., Lower Level). Free admission, but RSVP at depaulvas.eventbrite.com.
Rebuild Foundation at the Stony Island Arts Bank (6760 S. Stony Island Ave.) screens an episode from Bill Jersey’s 2002 documentary series THE RISE AND FALL OF JIM CROW (56 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 4pm. Showing as part of Hothouse’s “On Whose Shoulders” series; and screens Robert Wyrod’s 2002 documentary about Gregory Jaco’s Tornado School of Martial Arts, SOUTH SIDE WARRIORS (31 min, Video Projection), on Sunday at 2pm, followed by a discussion with Tornado students and Gregory Jaco’s daughter Ayesha Jaco. Free admission.
Comfort Film at Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) screens Pat Bishow’s 1987 film THE SOULTANGLER (62 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission.
The Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens Ana Cruz’s 2017 Mexican documentary HUMBOLDT IN MEXICO: THE GAZE OF THE EXPLORER (85 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 6pm; and Jonás Trueba’s 2016 Spanish film THE RECONQUEST (108 min, DVD Projection) on Wednesday at 6pm. Both free admission.
ArcLight Chicago screens David Cronenberg’s 1977 film RABID (91 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 7:30pm; and Takashi Miike’s 2001 Japanese film ICHI THE KILLER (129 min, DCP Digital) on Tuesday at 7:30pm.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Louie Schwartzberg’s 2018 documentary FANTASTIC FUNGI (81 min, DCP Digital; Schwartzberg in person for the 8pm Friday and Saturday screenings) and Stuart Swezey’s 2018 documentary DESOLATION CENTER (95 min, DCP Digital) both play for a week; Paul Hegeman’s 2019 Netherlands documentary THAT PÄRT FEELING: THE UNIVERSE OF ARVO PÄRT (75 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 2:15pm and Sunday at 2pm; Robert Morgan’s 1963 documentary IN THE MOUTH OF THE WOLF (55 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7:30pm, with August Ventura, Verdi aficionado and creator of the Verdi Documentary Project, in person; Jim Sikora’s 2000 documentary MY CHAR-BROILED BURGER WITH BREWER (41 min, Digital Projection) is on Sunday at 5:30pm, with Sikora in person, in a discussion moderated by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. The program will include a selection of Sikora's music videos featuring such bands as Urge Overkill, Tar, Mutts, Sabers, and the Leaving Trains.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: François Ozon, 2013 French film YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL (95 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 5pm; Hu Bo’s 2019 Chinese film AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (230 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 1pm, with Director of Photography Fan Chao in person; Youssef Chahine’s 1957 Egyptian film MY ONE AND ONLY LOVE (110 min, DCP Digital; Free Admission) is on Monday at 7pm; Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 Mexican film ROMA (135 min, DCP Digital) is on Monday at 9:30pm; and Gordon Parks, Jr.’s 1972 film SUPER FLY (91 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 7pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Kevin Smith’s 2019 film JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT ROADSHOW (90 min, DCP Digital) is on Monday at 7 and 10pm, with Smith and actor Jason Mewes in person (both screenings are sold out); Kenny Ortega's 1993 film HOCUS POCUS (96 min, 35mm) is on Friday at 7 and 10pm, in a "Hex-a-Long" interactive screening; Jocelyn Deboer and Dawn Luebbe’s 2019 film GREENER GRASS (95 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 4pm; and 1919 Cinema Centennial, presented by Blue Whiskey Independent Film Festival, is on Wednesday at 7pm. The program features Victor Fleming’s 1919 Douglas Fairbanks film WHEN THE CLOUDS ROLL BY (85 min, 16mm), preceded by Otto Messmer’s 1919 Felix the Cat cartoon FELINE FOLLIES (6 min), Max Fleischer’s 1919 Koko the Clown cartoon THE TANTALIZING FLY (4 min), and Hal Roach’s 1919 Harold Lloyd short BUMPING INTO BROADWAY (25 min). The shorts are all DCP Digital.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Ulrich Köhler’s 2018 German/Italian film IN MY ROOM (119 min, Video Projection) for a week-long run.
MUSEUM AND GALLERY SHOWS/EXHIBITIONS
The Art Institute of Chicago opens the exhibition Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again on Sunday, and it will be on view through January 26. The show features a wealth of Warhol’s short films (fifteen “Screen Tests” and other early shorts, which are all showing on 16mm), videos, and television commercials, including some very rare items. A complementary exhibit, Cinema Reinvented: Four Films by Andy Warhol, will showcase four films over the course of the Back Again show’s run, all in 16mm. Up first is his 1966 double-projection film OUTER AND INNER SPACE (33 min), which will be on view daily from Sunday to November 17, screening at the top of each hour starting at 11am.
CINE-LIST: October 18 - October 24, 2019
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, JB Mabe, Michael Metzger, Scott Pfeiffer, Dmitry Samarov, Harrison Sherrod, Brian Welesko
