CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago International Film Festival continues through Sunday at River East 21. We’ve got reviews below of select films that have screenings this weekend. Also visit our blog for an interview with PARADISE NEXT director Yoshihiro Hanno by Cine-File contributor Kyle Cubr. More info and full schedule at www.chicagofilmfestival.com.
---
Check last week’s list for reviews of the following films that have repeat screenings this weekend: Fabrice du Welz’s ADORATION, Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia’s INITIALS S.G., Jean-François Laguionie and Xavier Picard’s THE PRINCE’S VOYAGE, Shorts 7: Some Kind of Tomorrow—Black Perspectives, Jonás Trueba’s THE AUGUST VIRGIN, Damien Manivel’s ISADORA’S CHILDREN, Levan Akin’s AND THEN WE DANCED, and Shorts 8: Histories—Experimental.
Frederikke Aspöck’s OUT OF TUNE (Denmark)
Friday 10/25, 11:30am and Saturday 10/26, 8pm
Deemed a flight risk due to his wealth and connections, financier Markus (Jacob Lohmann) is placed in remanded custody while he awaits his trial for investment fraud. Assuming the power he maintained in his normal life would carry over to his time in prison, Markus expects his stay to be easy but is quickly proven wrong when he’s beaten by a biker gang. Fearing for his safety, Markus opts to be placed in isolated custody, which is reserved for pedophiles, rapists, and other unsavory criminals. This collection of individuals takes part in a prison choir that Markus quickly joins, hoping to rise quickly to the top of its hierarchy using all of his guile and cunning to supplant those he deems beneath him; but choir leader Niels (Anders Matthesen) sees through his facade. OUT OF TUNE underlies its inherent drama with plenty of dark comedy and a fascinating score. The confined space of the prison is a claustrophobic environment for the characters, one in which some thrive and others don’t. Full of a cast of quirky characters, OUT OF TONE is a satirical take on class structure, the haves and have nots, and Machiavellian mischief. (2019, 93 min) KC
---
Maya Da-Rin’s THE FEVER (Brazil/France/Germany)
Friday 10/25, 3pm
Forty-five-year-old Justino (Regis Myrupu), a member of the Tukano tribe from the northwestern part of the Amazon rainforest, has lived all of his adult life in Manaus, a city at the confluence of the Negro and Solimões rivers where ocean-going vessels carrying containers are offloaded to waiting tractor-trailers to be driven to industrial centers around Brazil. Recently widowed, he works at the port as a security guard and raised two children who are adapted to modern, “white” life. Just as his daughter, Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), is preparing to attend medical school in Brasília, Justino starts running a fever and has unsettling dreams about being pursued by white men with dogs and confronting himself in his work uniform in the forest. With quiet urgency, director Maya Da-Rin sounds the alarm about ecological catastrophes encroaching on Brazil and the contempt white Brazilians have for both indigenous people and the natural landscape. Her film shows the behemoth machinery at work at the docks, but also the primordial rainforest that surrounds Manaus as a potent force in the lives of the Brazilian people. First-time actor Myrupu is a mesmerizing and sympathetic guide through this world. It is with poignancy that the film’s producer, Leonardo Mecchi, who will attend the screening, speaks about the burning rainforest and the fact that THE FEVER was the last film to be funded by the government before a far-right regime took power and ended arts funding. (2019, 98 min) MF
---
Bas Devos’ GHOST TROPIC (Belgium)
Friday 10/25, 6:15pm and Saturday 10/26, 12:30pm
The first shot of Bas Devos’ GHOST TROPIC depicts a domestic interior, well kept despite some slight hints of untidiness; over four full minutes, nothing moves within the frame except the light, dimming as night falls. Eventually, shadows consume the screen, and a whispered voice on the soundtrack claims the space as her own, as a labor of love and a container of memories. “But if suddenly, a stranger appearing from nowhere were to enter this room,” the voice asks, “what would he see, what would he hear? And would he feel anything by being here?” Like the patience-testing shot, this question offers a muted provocation to the viewer, asking us to strain our eyes and ears to absorb the richness of quiet lives lived on the margins of Brussels. In its opening scenes, GHOST TROPIC appears so radically pared-down, and so immaculately composed, as to feel more like a photo essay than a narrative feature—a generously grainy portrait of the nocturnal life of Khadija, a middle-aged cleaning woman from North Africa. We begin to make out the warmth of the film’s subject and the chill of the night air, and gradually, a plot takes shape between cinematographer Grimm Vandekerckhove’s patinated frames: having fallen asleep on the train home, Khadija must cross the city on foot. On first glance, this Kiarostami-like narrative has an almost sub-anecdotal level of incident, leaving ample room for atmosphere, sociological insight, and characterization. But the depth of detail we discern in Khadija’s fleeting interactions with night watchmen, squatters, shopworkers, and partygoers steadily develops, and as it does, the nature of Khadija’s dilemma changes. The question is no longer how to find our own way home across a strange city, but how to make a home for one another in a more familiar one. As GHOST TROPIC examines how community forms and diverges across classes, cultures, generations, and the boundary between night and day, its deeper ambitions come into focus: the film’s spectral utopia is in fact an invisible form of decency, one that should be implicit in our day-to-day exchanges, yet which has seemingly vanished from both our social reality and our cinema. As the film’s opening monologue suggests, our capacity for compassion depends on the sensitivity of our eyes and ears. Through its perceptive, self-sacrificing heroine and its supremely intentional use of 16mm, the film both models, and solicits, an empathetic, care-giving form of looking. (2019, 85 min) MM
---
Yoshihiro Hanno’s PARADISE NEXT (Japan/Taiwan)
Friday 10/25, 8:15pm
Shima (Etsushi Toyokaw) and Makino (Sean Huang) are two gangsters who fled to Taiwan in exile. Each having flubbed separate jobs, the mismatched pair forms an unlikely union as the tough and serious Shima secures transportation out of Taipei from his new boss to the countryside for himself and the jovial Makino. A slow-burn, seething neo-noir, PARADISE NEXT relishes in its ambiguities and its summoning of feeling, aided in part by a dirge-heavy soundscape. Shima and Makino’s relationship is strengthened their respective desires to escape from their past and their opposite personalities play off each other in perfect harmony, as each becomes a foil for the other. Yoshihiro Hanno previously worked as a film composer, including for films by Jia Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-Hsien; the visual sensibilities of those directors can be seen in the shrouded mystery and distinct cinematography of PARADISE NEXT, marking it as both a beautiful and mournful gangster film. (2019, 101 min) KC
---
Sebastián Muñoz’s THE PRINCE (Chile/Argentina)
Saturday 10/26, 7:15pm and Sunday 10/27, 6:15pm
In a sly, easy-to-miss linguistic detail, Sebastián Muñoz’s THE PRINCE announces itself with the subtitle, “Based on the homonymous novel by Mario Cruz.” The “homo” prefix here is significant not only because of how it indicates the orientation of the film’s sexual content, but because it highlights the complex ways its characters’ relationships are structured by both physical and psychological homology, by an intersubjective, body-first knowledge of what it’s like to identify and experience oneself as male. The Cruz novel was an obscure work of pulp fiction that had little circulation after its release in the 70s; without being aware of its source, one could easily be fooled into thinking this adaptation comes instead from the transgressive, homoerotic criminal milieus of Jean Genet. The setting is right out of that author’s playbook, but transposed to Chile just before the election of Salvador Allende. Twenty-something Jaime (Juan Carlos Maldonado) has just arrived in prison for murdering a man in a bar, and is placed in a cell with a group of older inmates led by the grizzled, imperious Ricardo (Alfredo Castro). Before long, the nervous, reticent Jaime is acclimating to a world seething with hostility and sexual longing, where acts of violence and desire are impossible to separate. As Jaime opens up and grows closer to Ricardo, gaining self-confidence through displays of libido and power often tied to Narcissus-evoking mirror imagery, we learn about his background and what led to his crime. As in the work of Genet, THE PRINCE offers a gritty but phantasmatic world of social deviance and sexual liberation, where the close proximity of barely clothed or naked male bodies sparks an irrepressible eroticism that can only be answered through intercourse or violence. Muñoz, a first-time director, does an elegant job of balancing the lurid and the tender; there’s certainly enough exposed flesh here to reflect the material’s pulp origins, but the feelings that are evinced, the yearning for intimacy and affirmation between men who’ve been denied them, is just as affecting. (2019, 96 min) JL
---
Shannon Murphy's BABYTEETH (Australia)
Saturday 10/26, 9pm, and Sunday 10/27, 3:30pm
Shannon Murphy’s directorial debut, like many, deals with coming of age and first love, but hers features a young protagonist for whom, unfairly, firsts could also be lasts. Teenager Milla (Eliza Scanlen, outstanding) is a talented violin student whose wigs mask her ongoing chemotherapy. When she falls for a volatile, troubled 23-year-old druggie, Moses (Toby Wallace), her scandalized parents, psychiatrist Henry and pianist Anna (Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis), learn to humor the relationship. What begins as a relationship of convenience for all concerned blooms into something more. Soulfully acted, the film boasts a sweet, sly heart and a sharp, witty script by Rita Kalnejais, adapted from her play. I can't report that it misses every familiar beat of cancer fiction, but at its best this is exquisitely moving, wrestling with existential questions and the true meaning of love in a way that sometimes recalls Haneke's profound AMOUR. (2019, 117 min) SP
CRUCIAL VIEWING
The Attractions of the Moving Image: A Celebration of Tom Gunning (Special Event)
Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Friday (beginning at 9am) and Saturday (beginning at 9:30am) (Free Admission)
This two-day event marks the retirement earlier this year of University of Chicago professor Tom Gunning. 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 (see immediately below); Saturday 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 (all Digital Projection): Ken Jacobs’ JOAN MITCHELL: DEPARTURES (2019), Lewis Klahr’s MONOGRAM (2019), Jodie Mack’s WASTELAND NO. 2: HARDY, HEARTY (2019), and Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser’s REVELATION MACHINE (2019); along with 16mm prints of Mack’s 2014 film RAZZLE DAZZLE, Klahr’s 2002 film DAYLIGHT MOON, and Ernie Gehr’s 1968 film WAIT, with all filmmakers in person.
Frank Borzage's 7TH HEAVEN (Silent American Revival)
Along with Murnau's SUNRISE, Frank Borzage's 7TH HEAVEN was the most accoladed American film of 1927, and in fact received more nominations at the first-ever Academy Awards. Its stature has since been eclipsed by that of SUNRISE, but it remains a major film by one of American cinema's major artists. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell play working-poor types in pre-World War I Paris. They are brought together by circumstance and are forced to marry; as this is a Borzage film, however, the arbitrariness of their union only intensifies the love that develops between them. In his later masterpiece THE MORTAL STORM (1940), Borzage would demonize Nazism by showing a good family ripped apart by its dictates; in 7TH HEAVEN, he depicts the Great War as a force that cruelly separated the lovers of Europe. Such ideas may seem facile on the page, but Borzage's greatness is in the utter conviction with which he argues them: No, there is nothing more important in life than to love and anything that prevents us from doing so should be treated with skepticism, if not repulsion. Even though Borzage spent the second half of his directorial career in the Sound Age, he remained one of the great silent filmmakers until his retirement in 1959: Few directors were as good at charting a direct passage from the image (especially the sensitive close-up of a loving face) to pure emotion. (1927, 110 min, DCP Digital) BS
Jacques Tourneur’s I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Jonathan Rosenbaum has opined that Jacques Tourneur is a filmmaker who doesn’t film characters or actors, but rather souls. It’s a quality that links him to Pedro Costa, who remade Tourneur’s I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE as CASA DE LAVA (aka DOWN TO EARTH) in 1994. Tourneur and Costa go about filming souls in very different ways, but both like to reveal important background information about characters through dialogue, keeping the onscreen action relatively subdued and mundane. This subtle approach allows both filmmakers to focus on the poetic and political repercussions of the material—and achieve galvanizing dramatic effects whenever something major does happen onscreen. Both ZOMBIE and LAVA are concerned with the legacy of colonialism as it plays out within the characters; the supernatural elements represent just one aspect of the native culture they will never fully understand. Tourneur’s film weaves this theme into a subtle and sordid psychosexual study of repressed passion and the passage from innocence to experience. Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is a Canadian nurse who takes a position at a manor in the West Indies. She’s to care for the comatose wife of one of the inhabitants, cynical playboy Paul Holland (Tom Conway, in the best of his performances for producer Val Lewton). Before Betsy arrived, the wife had an affair with Paul’s half-brother Wesley (James Ellison), who now carouses about the island in a self-pitying, alcoholic stupor. Betsy narrates the film in the past tense, and she reflects on how she felt during the story with wistful resignation; she sounds wearied by the experience, yet also grateful to it for having allowed her to mature. The filmmakers convey this psychological complexity in astonishingly brisk fashion—ZOMBIE runs just a little over an hour, yet it covers as much emotional territory as the average film at least twice that length. With just a few sentences and gestures, Tourneur (working from a script credited to Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray) can convey feelings of discovery, elation, and regret, all while advancing a narrative that covers years in the characters’ lives. The cinematography is some of the most expressive of the 1940s; in addition to the brilliantly shadowed scenes of voodoo ritual, the interior scenes are exquisite in their lighting, which hints subtly at the characters’ intense emotions and dark pasts. Lewton deserves a lot of the credit here; it may be the best film he produced. He bought the rights to the article “I Walked With a Zombie” because he thought it was a good title, then threw out the story and replaced it with this pulp variation on Jane Eyre. I don’t know who decided to make it critical of colonialism as well, but the film’s account of a family metaphorically poisoned by setting up an outpost in the West Indies feels sharp and modern. (1943, 69 min, 35mm archival print) BS
Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR (Soviet Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Sunday, 7:30pm
Long before the great TREE OF LIFE euphoria of 2011, another film (from another director's famously sparse oeuvre) went off uncharted into the space between memories past and present, mapping onto them a universal significance. Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR may lack dinosaurs and metaphorical doors in the desert, but it does set a mean precedent for everything a passion project can be when an auteur is working on such an intensely personal level. Long a dream project of Tarkovsky's, it was only in the wake of SOLARIS that he was able to secure funding, and armed with a meager allotment of film stock, he began production in late 1973. Given the non-linear, dreamlike progression of the film, such obstacles aren't hard to comprehend, and they perhaps explain why this is his most fleeting film outside his debut, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD. Drawn across the middle of the 20th century, THE MIRROR takes a stream of consciousness journey through familial memories, with actors in dual roles as father and son, as wife and mother. Woven in are poems penned by Tarkovsky's own father, assorted clips of wartime newsreel footage, and the quiet, ethereal imagery characteristic of all his films. It all makes for a hazy dream of cinema, one from which you tragically wake too early. But lest the length should fool you, this is not Tarkovsky for beginners. No surprise that at his most personal he's also at his most esoteric, so an afternoon spent with one of his aforementioned films would be a good primer. As for those already in his thrall, this is imperative viewing. (1975, 108 min, 35mm) TJ
Michelangelo Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
Antonioni most divisive work, his only one in CinemaScope, and a response to the US counterculture of the late 60s, ZABRISKIE POINT is something far different—and more elusive—than the anti-American screed detractors have made it out to be. Like a number of European artists ranging from Franz Kafka in Amerika to Bruno Dumont in TWENTYNINE PALMS (2003), Antonioni regards the United States as something like a poetic construct. Its spirit of debate and varied topography (particularly the Arizona mountain range of the title) elicit sincere awe, while Antonioni reserves his characteristic dread for police and consumer culture. But even this last subject becomes a source of arresting compositions: Early on, there's an eerie montage of billboard ads that's equal parts Pop Art and experimental film; it sets the stage for the final sequence, a series of slow-motion explosions that leaves audiences dead silent. As in L'ECLISSE, Antonioni is contemplating a world taken over by consumer goods, though there are moments of refuge here—namely, the dialogue of student radicals (directed with cinema verité excitement) and blissful communal lovemaking. (1970, 113 min, 35mm) BS
ALSO RECOMMENDED
John Carpenter’s PRINCE OF DARKNESS (American Revival)
ArcLight Chicago - Tuesday, 7:30pm
A frequent narrative trope in John Carpenter’s films is groups of people attempting to keep the forces of evil from entering a house or other building. The characters look out windows, peering across streets into the inky darkness, unsure what is watching them and trying to find entry. These uninvited guests include the blood-pact street gangs waging war on an abandoned police station in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, the Shape drifting across a suburban street towards Laurie Strode and the children she’s protecting in HALLOWEEN, the phantom-lepers seeking vengeance on the residents of Antonio Bay in THE FOG, the team of men huddled inside an arctic weather station in THE THING, and the tribe of outer space savages waging war on the remote rescue team in GHOSTS OF MARS. Bands of people grouped together for the purpose of keeping out what shouldn’t be in takes its grandest shape in PRINCE OF DARKNESS. The film not only signals Carpenter’s triumphant return to relatively low-budget filmmaking following STARMAN and BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, it also showcases what may be Carpenter’s most exacting formalist construction of space and tension, or as the director himself put it, “Every shot I can see, every shot is basically set to a purpose, where in some films I will let things go (…) Every shot in here is specifically designed to communicate something.” The film’s premise is fairly simple: just before the sun goes down (very similar to the start of ASSAULT) a group gathers at an abandoned church to try to figure out what a mysterious vial of green liquid found by Father Loomis (Donald Pleasance, here playing a different Loomis than the Doctor he portrayed in HALLOWEEN) actually is. Loomis believes the goo contains something evil and sure enough, the slime turns out to be the disembodied Son of Satan, the Anti-God. The liquid seeps out in search of hosts (similar to the alien in THE THING), members of the research team are taken over by the Satanic host, and an army of possessed schizophrenics takes guard outside, not allowing anyone to escape, or to come in. It’s a twist on Carpenter’s familiar “under siege” theme—there is no keeping evil out, it's already inside (save for the seemingly undead horde waiting outside). These minions of the Anti-God don’t come inside, suggesting subservience to something far more insidious, and complicating the usual narrative of alien-zombie-ghosts or disturbingly human murderers. With PRINCE OF DARKNESS, it’s as if the alien from THE THING succeeded; evil has gained a secure foothold in our world. Wile Carpenter’s next film, THEY LIVE, would continue this idea, with increased pessimism and hopelessness, PRINCE OF DARKNESS is the most apocryphal film Carpenter has made; the evil is not after vengeance or mere survival, but rather the total domination of everyone within its reach. (1987, 102 min, DCP Digital) JD
Preston Sturges' THE LADY EVE (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7 and 9:30pm
Preston Sturges' THE LADY EVE may be one of the best revenge movies ever made. Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) is a beautiful con artist; Charles (Henry Fonda) is a wealthy snake enthusiast. They fall in love aboard an ocean liner, only to break up when he learns of her cardsharp predilections. She gets her revenge by posing as an English aristocrat—Lady Eve—and seducing him into (another) marriage proposal. They wed, and hilarity ensues. By the end, Jean has likewise exacted her revenge and gotten exactly what she'd wanted, leaving the audience as smitten and bewildered as Charles. Sturges' nimble direction lends itself to the narrative finesse of this befuddling romantic comedy, which, as the title suggests, is a parable of Adam and Eve, the snake and the apple, and the rest of that Biblical nonsense. But the moral lesson at its core doesn't warn against temptation. Rather, it warns against judgment and inability to forgive, though it's not beyond reproach—Jean makes her swindler self seem more appealing by having Lady Eve be something of a floozy. On one hand, it's sort of a backhanded commentary on censorship; on the other, it's odd to see such sl*t shaming in a film that's arguably sexier than it is humorous—and it's pretty darn funny. But I don't mean sexy like Marilyn Monroe in SOME LIKE IT HOT is sexy; I mean sexy as in ‘I can imagine them having sex,’ something I can't say about many other films. Sturges expertly balances the sensuous, screwball comedy and the straight-up slapstick that further complements the sexiness. For example, Charles can't seem to stop falling over things when in Jean/Eve's presence, which is not only humorous, but also emphasizes the strength of their attraction. Whereas Lubitsch had his touch—and Wilder his slap—writer-turned-director Sturges seems to abide by Jean's father's motto: "Let us be crooked but never common." Some of it may be crooked, but, certainly, nothing in the film is common. (1941, 94 min, 35mm) KS
ABBAS KIAROSTAMI X 3
---
Abbas Kiarostami’s FIVE (FOR OZU) (Iranian/Japanese/French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 5:15pm
Comprised of five long, mostly stationary shots of nature, FIVE (FOR OZU) fosters a profoundly intimate encounter with the material world in its temporal flux. Waves lap, people walk by, dogs wander on the shore; watching this life transpire, seemingly uninterrupted, we might find ourselves induced to a range of perceptual states: an alternating sharpening and drift of consciousness, perhaps, or an ataraxy caused by the suspension of thought. Conversely, our thoughts might become deeply analytical as we contemplate the ontology of these visual and auditory stimuli. Like Kiarostami’s 24 FRAMES, of which this is a sort of precursor, FIVE uses its deceptively simple conceit to explore the porous boundaries between reality and representation, between human and technological activity and the contingency of the life-world they index. But where the former film used digital manipulation to explicitly blur these lines, FIVE is more subtle—and analog—in approach. Its first shot, of a piece of driftwood eventually getting carried out to sea, feels the most naturalistic of the five; the wood operates outside of any design, its aleatory motion produced from its interaction with nature. Yet for all the shot’s seeming spontaneity, Kiarostami’s camera here makes its sole, motivated movement, tracking the wood as it bobs out of frame. The subsequent shots draw on a similar dialectic of the adventitious and the intentional, in even more striking and winking ways. In the second, pedestrians walk laterally across the frame on an oceanfront boardwalk. To what degree did Kiarostami coordinate the transit of these passersby? The third shot more obviously underscores human intervention, as an image of dogs lazing on the shore becomes gradually overexposed, bleaching away its mimetic properties until it slips into abstraction. The fourth shot, the shortest and funniest, reprises the second, but this time with hordes of ducks loudly pattering through sand. Again, one wonders about the logistics of this set-up, and who was managing the animals’ comically timed entrances and exits. The fifth and final shot (excluding a brief coda) is the most visually and sonically complex, and the most enveloping. We observe a reflection of the moon rippling in a lake as a chorus of chattering birds, frogs, and crickets wax and wane on the soundtrack. Thunder cracks and rain pours, flashes of lightning sporadically illuminating the darkness. It’s a transfixing, 25-minute sensory immersion that evokes an Apichatpong Weerasethakul-style hypnagogia, and, at the same time, reminds us of just how much its figuration and perception are dependent on the instrument of cinema. Mercurial in its individual movements but masterfully and meticulously controlled in terms of creating and localizing them, this climactic shot encapsulates the director’s modus operandi in the most sensuous of ways. FIVE may be dedicated to Ozu, and it certainly shares his reverence for quotidian poetry, but this one is all Kiarostami. (2003, 78 min, DCP Digital) JL
Abbas Kiarostami's 24 FRAMES (Contemporary Iranian/Experimental)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 3:45pm and Monday, 6pm
24 FRAMES is the final film by the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, left unfinished when he died in 2016 and completed through the efforts of his son. Here, Kiarostami has made one of the most experimental films of his career: it’s a series of twenty-four short (roughly 4 ½ minutes each) scenes, or “frames,” of mostly landscapes. The first is of a Bruegel painting (he had originally intended to compose the film entirely of various paintings) and the remaining ones are based on twenty-three of Kiarostami’s own still photographs. Kiarostami then manipulates the images digitally, compositing various moving elements to imagine what was taking place immediately before and after the moment of stillness he captured with his camera. Particular visual themes recur: snowy fields, the seashore, cows and other farm animals, and birds. Lots of birds. Each frame is a minimalist miniature, carefully composed and strikingly shot. Or sort of shot, and that’s the point. What we are seeing didn’t really exist. These are creative constructions, based on reality but not real. They are imaginary, artificially constructed spaces, but ones that (with one exception) are believable. The level of Kiarostami’s fabrication is not entirely evident—though they all achieve an otherworldly quality that calls into question the truth of what we’re seeing. I could quibble at the margins (I might lose a few of the particular frames, and think perhaps the film is a bit too long), but overall the film is extraordinary and at times profoundly moving, even as Kiarostami displays some wry humor and makes some surprising, but effective, music choices. (2017, 114 min, DCP Digital) PF
Abbas Kiarostami's LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE (Contemporary Japanese/French)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm
In recent years, master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has moved out of his native Iran into the eclectic arena of world cinema: LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE, set and shot in Japan, is his second film to be made outside of his home country after the critically acclaimed CERTIFIED COPY (2010). Despite his emerging status as a symbol of international cinema, Kiarostami remains true to his roots in both of his recent productions. That's not to mean that aspects of Iranian culture are evident in these films, but that his artistic voice remains the same despite the stamps in his passport. LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE is about the chance meeting between a young call girl and an elderly client, a deceptive union that is more familial than sexual. Such seemingly chance meetings occur often in Kiarostami's films, with the relationships toeing a fine line between being fortuitous or fated. Much of the film takes place in a car, bringing to mind his films TEN (2002) and the Palme d'Or winning film TASTE OF CHERRY (1997). And just as in those and some of his previous films, the forward shots of singular persons within such a claustrophobic space combine uneasy feelings of voyeurism with replications of personal conversation, which create a perplexity that parallels the story. That which is lurid might actually be innocent, or even pure: prostitution is maybe just friendship, broken marriage could be a chance at new love, and death can be overruled by life. As always, Kiarostami doesn't care to correct his viewer's assumptions one way or the other. Though his work provides a wealth of material over which one could exhaust their brain, it's better to watch with the heart. (2012, 109 min, DCP Digital) KS
Yvonne Rainer's A FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... (Experimental Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Tuesday, 6pm
If you haven't seen the movie, the title might make you ask, "who does what?" Fair question; movies are, after all, almost always about people doing something. What director/dancer Yvonne Rainer's film is about, ultimately, is the actual women inhabiting any plot description. It's not so much about what comes after its title ("who does what"), but about the woman who does anything ("about a woman who"). The focus is being reclaimed from the action and given back to the woman doing it; it's saying that action may be more filmable, but what about the person doing those things? Rainer's interests lie in how women are represented in media and also what they are thinking and feeling, rather than they how they look and what they do. For instance, in bed she doesn't show the sex because she's not interested in how sexy a woman's body can look naked; rather she informs us of the woman's thoughts as she lays next to a man with a sheet fully covering her. The woman thinks, "Oh Christ, now he'll never screw me again," after asking the man to hold her, but then, since emotions, especially repressed emotions, aren't that simple, she realizes she actually just wants to "bash his fucking face in." Always self-reflexive, Rainer then inserts on-screen text that reads "(do you think she could figure her way out of a paper bag?)." Part-and-parcel to her approach of disorienting viewers is to alienate them. Often you'll be shown something, but the voice-over will be leading you in another direction. A scene will start textually but then end visually, or vice versa, implying that there's an equivalency and sameness between the two. But, since each technique has its own capacity, a friction is created that breaks up any sense of smoothness, causing us to reflect on the differences between words and images, imagination and the real thing. As Acquarello points out on the Strictly Film School website, a silent scene where we are shown a family getting ready to pose for a happy picture at the beach "illustrates the deliberateness and artifice of the idealized image. It also underscores the act of performance in creating the illusion of happiness." When we are shown a woman awkwardly being stripped down to nothing by a man for an extended period of time, we are seeing a reversal of decades of images of women being denuded for the pleasure of the male gaze. The scene works like a would-be trick, like when a man is lured to the house of a young girl on the show To Catch a Predator only to find out he's been busted in his philandering tracks. Critic and artist Fred Camper lectures at the screening. (1974, 105 min, Digital Projection) KH
Jack Arnold's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON [3D Version] (American Revival)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) - Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
In Jack Arnold’s 3D monster feature CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON a group of plucky scientists journeys deep into an Amazonian cul-de-sac in search of a fossil, definitive proof of an aquatic hominoid from the Devonian Period. (Why a hominoid would be from the Devonian of all times is a mystery too deep to plumb.) They find instead that the species they seek is still alive, and it lives in lovesick solitude in a cave at the base of a serene lagoon. Narratively, CREATURE is a great plodding beast, lurching from one plot point to the next with all the dexterity of a half-man/half-fish out of water. But once in the lagoon, the film becomes a feast for the eyes, a series of languorous plays of depth, movement, and cross-species eroticism that is genuinely scary, and deeply disturbing. The film's 3D effects on land are often limited to cheap, but effective, shock effects—the creature approaching the lenses, his claw raking our eyeballs, and so on—but the uncannily unrealistic effects of 3D cinema become the very subject matter as the monster propels himself easily, strangely, through a primeval seascape. As the scientists close in on the Gill-Man, threatening to capture it, or kill it, the film literalizes its theme of humanity versus nature, making the advancement of learning a process that can only succeed at the expense of the world it studies. The wild, in the person of the creature, its libidinous needs created by the presence of a woman amongst the scientists, must either capture and rape her or be destroyed in the attempt. In CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, the only response possible to the evil we bring on nature is to finish the job of destroying it before it takes revenge upon us. (1954, 79 min, 3D DCP Digital) KB
Tod Browning's DRACULA (American Revival)
Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Pickwick Theatre, 5 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge) – Wednesday, 1 and 7pm
In DRACULA, Tod Browning, the greatest horror director of the silent period, famously inaugurated Universal's long cycle of scary movies. Browning's Dracula, played with astounding charisma by Béla Lugosi, is a handsome, collected, and hyper-civilized monster whose lust for blood and power plays out not in fangs, hairy palms, and vivid, animalistic transformations (as in Bram Stoker's novel) but in the pregnant look, the deliberate pause, and the contorted, barely controlled fury threatening to boil over in every gesture. Lugosi's performance as the titular count was a radical departure from the rat-like portrait drawn in the novel, but has become the gold standard in stately and erotic menace, haunting the nightmares of the susceptible for three-quarters of a century now. The product of a deep collaboration with Karl Freund, perhaps the greatest cinematographer ever to live, DRACULA is a beautiful and disturbing film, one of the great financial successes in Universal's history, and a high-point in any consideration of the genre. The film's oneiric pacing and logic defy summary: nothing makes any sense at all, and yet feels so utterly and terrifyingly inevitable. For years, critics were fond of dismissing DRACULA as a shallow and sloppy exercise that contrasted poorly to James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN, arriving later the same year. But in the roughness of DRACULA's style, its stagy performances, its incoherent plotline, its strange, stuttery dramaturgy, they missed the ways all of these ostensive faults only enhanced the film's true power. Dracula is a demonic, supernatural force of evil that, repeatedly, is equated in power and malice, to cinema itself. His hypnotic gaze penetrates into our eyes as much as into those of the innocent flower-vendor he murders upon his arrival in England, and that gaze is symbolically and visually linked to that of his exact opposite, the mysterious foreigner Van Helsing, whose glasses have the unearthly power to reflect the lights of artifice itself. (1931, 75 min, Digital Projection) KB
---
Showing as a double feature with James Whale's 1931 film FRANKENSTEIN (70 min, Digital Projection).
Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA (Italian Revival) / Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION (International Revival)
MCA Chicago - Thursday, 7pm (Double Feature)
Dario Argento is one of Italy's greatest living artists, and his 1977 SUSPIRIA is one of his greatest achievements in both storytelling and visual design. Jessica Harper plays Suzy, a dance student who becomes embroiled in a plot by her ballet school's faculty (revealed to be witches) to unleash the forces of hell onto the world. The first in Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy (the subsequent features are 1980's INFERNO and 2008's MOTHER OF TEARS), SUSPIRIA may not be the director's most complex or visually stunning work, but it's perhaps the crux of Argento's canon, the film that firmly established him as an auteur worthy of international discussion and analysis. Loved by genre fans for its excessive violence and pulsating score by the rock group Goblin, SUSPIRIA is as much a testament to Argento's love for classical art, which can also be seen in 1987's OPERA and 1995's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. Argento's genius is to set these films, all of them bloody and relatively sleazy, in the world of "high" art. By doing so, he not only satirizes the pompous nature of "connoisseurs" who dismiss cinema—particular genre films—as a "lower" form, but also recontextualize these "higher" forms to fit in the realm of "commercial" work. (1977, 92 min, Unconfirmed Format) JR
---
Originally hacked down for American release to a schlocky—and downright absurd—ninety-minutes, POSSESSION has been restored to Zulawski's original cut, showing in a new 35mm print. The added footage doesn't necessarily make the infamous tentacled-monster sex thing any less nuts, because it still is a shocking sight to behold. But its purpose is more nuanced and creepy when the film really goes off the rails. Drawing from his own divorce, Zulawski's film follows the collapse of Mark and Anna's marriage and the impossibility of Mark ever fully knowing, or possessing, his wife in love. Largely set in an apartment near the Berlin Wall, Mark is confronted with divorce and descends into severe depression. He emerges in a near-psychotic state intending to reclaim Anna and their son. He soon becomes aware of Anna's lover, but after confronting him, both men realize Anna is seeing someone—or something—else. Zulawski keeps the camera in almost constant motion, pushing in and pulling back during confrontations between Mark and Anna as their fights escalate to bloody moments that are somehow both expected and completely terrifying. In one scene, Anna grinds meat as Mark maniacally berates her. The noise of the kitchen rises with the tension and Anna, tired of the diatribe, takes an electric knife to her neck. Paired with scenes of their individual genuine tenderness toward their son, POSSESSION is filled with mirrors. Mark meets his son's schoolteacher, a benevolent doppelganger for his wife, and a double of Mark appears with Anna at the end. Even the setting is exploited for an otherworldly nothingness and an exactness in East and West Germany, itself perversely mirrored. The unrestrained acting—Anna thrashing hysterically could describe many scenes—adds to a heightened reality where Anna's possession is not demonic, but love can be. (1981, 124 min, Unconfirmed Format) BW
---
Hosted by local horror drag queens Kat Sass and Siichele.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
Toni Morrison is a great writer, full stop. She could almost be considered the creator of a genre of fiction, one that surveys with blazing originality and honesty the lives of African-American girls and women. Therefore, predictably, attempts to marginalize her, ignore her, change her, and ban her have dogged her from the moment her first novel, The Bluest Eye, debuted in 1970. Being the highly intelligent, imaginative, and socially committed person that she is, Morrison has triumphed over her detractors, eventually winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Now we are able to share a bit in her journey through Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ documentary TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM, a film that focuses probingly, and almost exclusively, on her working life and accomplishments. We are edified about how Morrison used the early morning hours to turn out her stellar debut novel with two young sons to raise and provide for, and how now the world always looks better to her at dawn. We learn how, as an editor for Random House, she was able to bring other African-American voices into the world. We see her fun-loving side and her clear-eyed compassion. The documentary is packed with talking-head admirers, but really, Morrison can tell her own story perfectly well without them, as she has for 50 years. TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM is a competent portrait of a life well lived. (2019, 120 min, DCP Digital) MF
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Chicago Film Society and the Music Box Theatre (at the Music Box) screen Erle C. Kenton’s 1928 silent film THE SIDESHOW (67 min, 35mm) on Saturday at 11am. Preceded by Otto Messmer’s 1926 cartoon FELIX THE CAT TRUMPS THE ACE (8 min, 16mm). Live accompaniment by Dennis Scott.
The Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) screens Edward F. Cline’s 1944 Olsen and Johnson comedy GHOST CATCHERS (68 min, 35mm) on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Preceded by Harry Edwards’ 1945 short SPOOK TO ME (17 min, 35mm).
The Conversations at the Edge series (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) screens Shengze Zhu’s 2019 US/Hong Kong documentary PRESENT.PERFECT (124 min, Digital Projection), with Zhu in person.
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) screens Kamau Patton’s 2014 video documentation of a live-streamed performance event, THE SKY ABOVE (66 min, Digital Projection), on Saturday at 7pm, with Patton in person.
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: Xavier Burgin’s 2018 documentary HORROR NOIRE: A HISTORY OF BLACK HORROR (83 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 7pm, with author and media historian Robin R. Means Coleman, on whose book the film is based, in person. Free admission.
The Zhou B Art Center (1029 W. 35th St.) hosts Moving_Image _00:06, a one-screening festival of moving image works by local artists, on Sunday at 7pm. The screening includes work by Emma Rozanski, Caitlin Ryan, Ally Fouts, Lisa Barcy, L Koo, Morgan Green, Pamela Hadley, Lia Call and Harvey Hayes, Marina Resende Santos, and Kandis Friesen. Free admission.
The Workers Education Society (3339 S. Halsted St.) screens Joris Ivens’ 1937 documentary THE SPANISH EARTH (52 min, Unconfirmed Format) on Monday at 8pm. Showing as part of Hothouse’s “On Whose Shoulders” series.
The Justice Hotel at 6018North (6018 N. Kenmore Ave.) screens Mitsuo Sato and Kyoichi Yamaoka 1985 Japanese documentary YAMA—ATTACK TO ATTACK (110 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 7pm. Free admission.
Alliance Française (54 W. Chicago Ave.) screens Dominic Rocher’s 2018 French film THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD (94 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 8pm.
The Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) hosts the Reel Film Club screening of Emilio Ruiz Barrachina’s 2018 Spanish film BERNARDA (98 min, Digital Projection) on Monday at 7pm (6pm reception).
The Beverly Arts Center screens Jim Sharman’s 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7:30pm.
Also at ArcLight Chicago this week: Robin Hardy’s 1973 UK film THE WICKER MAN (88 min, DCP Digital) is on Monday at 7:30pm.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Wendy Jo Carlton's 2019 film GOOD KISSER (75 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week, with Carlton in person at the 8:30pm Friday, Saturday, and Sunday screenings; Fatih Akin's 2019 German/French film THE GOLDEN GLOVE (111 min, DCP Digital) has five screenings; and Paul Schrader's 1982 film CAT PEOPLE (118 min, 35mm) is on Friday at 6:15pm and Thursday at 8:30pm.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Carlos Reygadas' 2018 Mexican film OUR TIME (177 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7pm and Sunday at 4pm; Youssef Chahine's 1986 Egyptian film THE SIXTH DAY (105 min, DCP Digital; Free Admission) is on Monday at 7pm; M. Night Shyamalan's 1999 film THE SIXTH SENSE (107 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 9:30pm; Nietzchka Keene's 1990 Icelandic film THE JUNIPER TREE (78 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 7pm; Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 film BOOGIE NIGHTS (155 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 7pm; and Robert Rodriguez's 1996 film FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (108 min, 35mm archival print) is on Thursday at 10pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Robert Eggers’ 2019 film THE LIGHTHOUSE (109 min, DCP Digital) opens; Todd Phillips’ 2019 film JOKER (122 min, DCP Digital) continues; a double feature of John Carpenter’s 1978 film HALLOWEEN (92 min, DCP Digital) and David Gordon Green’s 2018 reboot/sequel HALLOWEEN (106 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 7pm; Jim Sharman’s 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight, and Wednesday and Thursday at 10pm; and JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT (90 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Phillip Youmans’ 2019 film BURNING CANE (78 min, Video Projection) for a week-long run.
MUSEUM AND GALLERY SHOWS/EXHIBITIONS
The exhibition Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago 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.
---
The 16mm short films (1963-66, approx. 4-5 min each) showing are: ELVIS AT FERUS, JILL AND FREDDY DANCING, EDIE SEDGWICK (SCREEN TEST 308), ANN BUCHANAN (SCREEN TEST 33), PENELOPE PALMER (SCREEN TEST 255), BIBBE HANSEN (SCREEN TEST 128), NICO EATING HERSHEY BAR (SCREEN TEST 246), ME AND TAYLOR, MARIO BANANA #1, JOHN WASHING, JACK SMITH (SCREEN TEST 315), RUFUS COLLINS (SCREEN TEST 61), BILLY NAME (SCREEN TEST 194), MARCEL DUCHAMP (SCREEN TEST 80), and SALVADOR DALI (SCREEN TEST 67); and the three television commercials are: THE UNDERGROUND SUNDAE (1968, 1 min, Digital Video), CADENCE [STANDING WOMAN] (1965, 1 min, Digital Video), and CADENCE [BOTTLE] (1965, 1 min, Digital Video).
Re:Working Labor, a multi-media exhibition curated by SAIC faculty members Ellen Rothenberg and Daniel Eisenberg, is on view at SAIC’s Sullivan Gallery (33 S. State St.) through November 27. Included in the show are a ten-screen installation of Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s LABOUR IN A SINGLE SHOT, Carole Frances Lung’s four-hour-plus video FRAU FIBER VS. CIRCULAR TUBE SOCK KNITTING MACHINE, and a series of five video programs curated by Aily Nash and Andrew Norman Wilson.
CINE-LIST: October 25 - October 31, 2019
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, John Dickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Kalvin Henely, Tristan Johnson, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Metzger, Scott Pfeiffer, Joe Rubin, Brian Welesko
