CRUCIAL VIEWING
Andy Warhol’s THE LIFE OF JUANITA CASTRO (Experimental Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
The Theater of the Ridiculous—a movement started in part by director and playwright Ronald Tavel, who wrote the “script” for THE LIFE OF JUANITA CASTRO—is made even more ridiculous and likewise laid bare for its contrived eccentricities in this outrageous (aren't they all?) Andy Warhol film. A play within a film, Tavel appears on-screen as the director, feeding the actors their lines and giving them prompts; he and the main cast, comprised entirely of women, sit and stand in a stadium-like arrangement so that all appear in the frame. The play features an ongoing discourse between Juanita Castro (played by experimental filmmaker Marie Menken, whose only stipulation for participating was that she be allowed to drink during the shoot), her brothers, Fidel and Raul (Mercedes Ospina and Elektrah, respectively), and Che Guevara (Aniram Anipso). The dialogue ranges from being vaguely comprehensible to markedly incoherent, with a long section spoken entirely in unsubtitled Spanish. As in most Warhol films, it’s not the so-called plot that matters (though some lines, such as Juanita telling Fidel, “You never really cared about the peasants,” betray concrete politics) but rather the sensation, or lack thereof, it and the form evokes. Through vexing satire and distancing techniques, such as shooting the actors from a fixed position to the side of the action so that we see them looking out to an imaginary audience rather than at the camera, Warhol confronts us not only politically (in addition to addressing her brother’s authoritarian regime, Warhol declared in a press release that, in the play/film, “Juanita…condemns the infiltration of homosexuality in their lives,” referring to the post-revolutionary intolerance toward the LBTQ community and thereby adding another loaded element to the work) but also with regards to how theater and film are used to critique such concerns. Having loosely based the scenario on a 1964 Life magazine article written by Juanita titled “My Brother is a Tyrant and He Must Go,” Tavel also said that, after being introduced to one of Fidel’s cousins-in-exile by Warhol, “it was from him that I saw a ridiculous angle on politics: that the fate of the entire world could rest on the outcome of a family dispute.” Where Tavel confronts that ridiculousness with his scenario, Warhol also reveals the ridiculousness of the ridiculousness, perhaps causing one to question the piquancy of Tavel’s approach. Which is not to say that Warhol doubted the effectiveness of Tavel’s writing—it’s just that, as with much of Warhol's work, one wonders if it’s a critique or a facade, or both, or neither. For a few years in the mid-60s, Tavel worked on several films with Warhol, including POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL, CHELSEA GIRLS, and VINYL; he later based several of his plays on scenarios he had written for Warhol, among them an actual stage version of JUANITA CASTRO. It’s appropriate that some of Warhol’s collaborators became the unwitting auteurs of whatever project they were working on with him; but, as much as JUANITA CASTRO contains Tavel’s words and ideas, and even though Tavel appears in it (almost as a stand-in for Warhol, really), it’s through the pronounced arrangement of the camera—distant, unmoving, observant and confrontational—that one knows it’s a Warhol film. (1965, 66 min, 16mm) KS
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Introduced by SAIC professor Bruce Jenkins, co-author of the forthcoming catalog raisonné on Warhol’s films.
Eric Rohmer’s PERCEVAL (French Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7pm
Eric Rohmer’s most uncharacteristic film may also be the key to understanding his work on the whole. Rohmer (born Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer) was a high school French teacher before he became a critic and filmmaker, and he once said that among the happiest times of his life was when he analyzed Chrétien de Troyes' 12th-century epic poem with his students. In its effort to revitalize this old text for modern audiences, the film reflects Rohmer’s pedagogical nature, not to mention his desire (which he developed along with good friend André Bazin, who once had wanted to be a teacher himself) to use cinema to teach people how to see more fully. PERCEVAL is overtly stylized like nothing else in Rohmer’s canon; the writer-director’s engagement with Troyes’ text is formal as well as cinematic. Rohmer tries to imagine what movies from the 12th century might have looked like, and since three-dimensional perspective hadn’t yet entered into European art, the film’s backdrops are deliberately flat and inauthentic. (Nestor Almendros’ cinematography, always a crucial aspect of Rohmer’s art, still renders them gorgeous.) The dialogue, moreover, is delivered in a declaratory, premodern way, suggesting at times church readings of Biblical verse—indeed, the movie ends with a Passion Play. The stylistic essentialism of PERCEVAL reveals something about all of Rohmer’s films, whether they take place in the present or the past: Rohmer was after an essentialist view of humanity, one that characterized people as driven by the same desires and impulses that have motivated us throughout history. As such, he could commune with the past like few other filmmakers; PERCEVAL wears its formal devices comfortably, never feeling stilted or forced. Rohmer also had a gift for capturing the fleeting nature of youth, and the movie thrives in the graceful qualities of its young performers, among them Fabrice Luchini, Marie Rivière, Pascale Ogier, and Arielle Dombasle. (1978, 140 min, DCP Digital) BS
Bill Duke’s THE KILLING FLOOR (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
A rare American labor union drama centered on Black experience, THE KILLING FLOOR is a minor miracle of narrative history, succeeding as drama, as pedagogy, and as a model of independent, inclusive, collaborative, local, unionized filmmaking. Shot in Chicago in 1983 for PBS’s American Playhouse series—an indispensable platform for some of the best independent filmmaking of the era, and a haven for voices and stories far outside the Reagan-era mainstream—THE KILLING FLOOR tells the story of Frank Custer (Damien Leake), a Black sharecropper who travels north to work in a stockyard during World War I. Eager to improve his wages and to reunite his family in the “Promised Land” of Chicago’s flourishing south side, Custer defies the ridicule of fellow Black workers to join a scrappy, mostly-white labor union. When the war ends and white veterans begin returning to the workforce (and to zealously segregated neighborhoods), racial tensions inside the union and out boil over, resulting in the violent 1919 riot that left dozens dead and displaced thousands of mostly Black residents. Producer and co-writer Elsa Rassbach, with a perspicacity uncommon today (let alone in the 1980s), found her way into this frayed historical knot through a footnote in William Tuttle’s book on the riot—a reference to a court record of a labor dispute between Custer and “Heavy” Williams (portrayed in the film by Moses Gunn), a Black stockyard worker whose vocal distrust of white unionists helped the packing company disrupt union organizing across racial lines. Thanks largely to director Bill Duke’s handling, what could have been a binary conflict between Williams’ pessimism and Custer’s idealism becomes remarkably nuanced—after all, Custer has justifiable misgivings of his own, and the film’s central dramatic question is whether his belief in the union can withstand the corrosive racism of its membership. Duke weighs Custer’s ambivalence through performance and point of view, as demonstrated in Frank’s first visit to the Union hall. Taking in the hectic air of jubilation and multilingual speechifying, Leake’s darting eyes register the white faces and powderkeg atmosphere with both wariness and enticement, his voiceover comparing the gathering to a Southern prayer meeting. In this sequence and throughout, THE KILLING FLOOR draws on familiar tropes and narrative conventions, but lends them a charge by introducing an alienated Black gaze to typically white spaces, pointedly validating the cultural knowledge that Black southerners bring as spectators to both the union hall and the historical drama. Celebrated dramatist Leslie Lee’s screenplay further makes virtues of archetypes and blunt expository dialogue; such immediacy is critical to the film’s educational economy, which captures the riot’s myriad underlying causes—the Great Migration, the First World War, the growth of organized labor, the European diasporas, and the centuries of exploitation and disenfranchisement of African Americans—in broad yet affecting strokes. But the film is also rich in detail and atmosphere, a quality starkly revealed in this new digital restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, making its international debut just in time for the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago riots. The renewed digital clarity also exposes some rough edges, of course—that’s to be expected from an ambitious historical drama funded largely by labor unions and populated with volunteer extras (including many from the Harold Washington mayoral campaign). Seen today, that roughness reminds us that THE KILLING FLOOR wasn’t so much a product of its time as a renegade in it—and a treasure in ours. (1985, 118 min, DCP Digital) MM
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Producer-writer Elsa Rassbach and actor Damien Leake in person at the 7:45pm Friday screening (moderated by Kartemquin Films co-founder Gordon Quinn) and at both Saturday shows (with the 2pm moderated by Black Harvest co-programmer Sergio Mims, and the 7:30pm moderated by Cine-File contributor Michael Glover Smith); they will tentatively be joined via Skype by director Bill Duke.
Barbara Miller’s #FEMALE PLEASURE (New Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am
“They’re practicing patriarchy, which is a universal religion.” Leyla Hussein, a Somali-born activist who is trying to end the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) which she suffered as a 7-year-old girl, utters this line in Barbara Miller’s wide-ranging Swiss documentary #FEMALE PLEASURE. Her remark pretty much sums up the religious and societal rules and customs enforced by the targets of the film: the Catholic Church, Hasidic Judaism, Shintoism, Buddhism, and the Massai of eastern Africa. Hussein, ex-Hasidim Deborah Feldman, Japanese vagina artist Rokudenashiko, ex-nun Doris Wagner, and Vithika Yadav, the Indian founder of the love and sex education website Love Matters, tell the stories of how women are shamed, abused, killed, and otherwise put in straitjackets of fear and reprisal all over the world. The facts are sobering, but the strategies each woman employs to help change attitudes among women and men are ingenious and brave, from using a clay model to show how FGM is performed to a group of horrified men to outing abuses in book form. The contrast between a Shinto fertility festival during which little girls are allowed to suck on penis-shaped lollipops and Rokudenashiko’s obscenity trial for uploading images of her vagina to the internet for those who want to use them to create art is the height of absurdity. The title of the film might lead one to believe that it is about sexual pleasure, but the happiness experienced by the subjects of Miller’s documentary as they free themselves from the bonds of patriarchy is more to the point. (2018, 101 min, DCP Digital) MF
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Director Barbara Miller in person.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Theo Angelopoulos’ THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK (Greek Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm*
There’s no shortage of films from the past which we can liken to our contemporary situation with Trump and All He Entails, and so it’s become a critical crutch to evoke the dastardly Cheeto in connection with any film, television show, book, etc. that broaches certain topics, among them immigration, human displacement, and refugee crises, both at home and abroad (the latter of which exceeds Trump but is no less the result of our country’s influence). Admittedly, all this was on my mind as I watched Theo Angelopoulos’ THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK, the first in his “trilogy of borders,” a monument of a film that looks at refugee crises both as a plot point and a larger concept; but, rather than bringing to mind contemporary struggles, it simply suggests to me that everything is and always has been terrible. This realization is at once alarming (for obvious reasons) and comforting—if these struggles aren’t new, then perhaps they’re surmountable by virtue of being familiar. This latter sentiment isn’t shared by the film’s protagonists, with whom disillusionment is what we do have in common. Scripted by Angelopoulos and Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra (whose collaborations with Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky resonate in a similar manner), STORK follows Alexandre, a Greek television reporter (Gregory Karr), as he documents a refugee crisis looming over a small Greek village near the border to Albania, in an encampment wryly called “the waiting room.” There he thinks he sees a Greek politician (Marcello Mastroianni) who went missing several years earlier after he published a controversial book, delivered an enigmatic testimony in Parliament, and, finally, disappeared, leaving a confusing message for his beautiful French wife (Jeanne Moreau, credited simply as “The Woman”). The man presumed to be the missing politician now lives among the refugees, selling fish and raising a family; Alexandre has a tentative affair with the man’s adopted daughter. In a transcendental scene near the end of the film, she marries a young man across the border, the ceremony taking place from their respective riversides. Throughout all this, it’s ambiguous whether or not her father is actually the missing politician; the Woman supposed to be his wife declares he’s not. The film doesn’t belabor the ‘Is he or isn’t he?’ aspect of the plot, letting it provide instead the form to which the ecstasy of Angelopoulos’ images—delivered in long, contemplative takes—and the poetry of his and Guerra’s words adhere. Altogether it’s more mesmerizing than it is compelling, which is not to say that the heartbreaking details don’t register. (The film opens with images of several dead refugees in the water, shot from afar; it’s almost as if Angelopoulos was getting the less savory representation out of the way so as to eliminate the need for spectacle as a tool to compel.) Several scenes feature shots blatantly divorced from the realism—which is not necessarily overt but inherent to the subject matter—in which the movement is performative in an almost theatrical or choreographed way. The movement to which the title refers appears at the beginning and the end of the film, first by a guard whom Alexandre befriends and then by Alexandre himself; both men demonstrate the arbitrariness of borders by lifting one leg, like a stork, a foot hovering over the border, as soldiers from the other side cock their guns in anticipation. Like the stork, seemingly suspended in time, so, too, are the humanitarian crises that plague us, awaiting someone, anyone, to put their foot down. (143 min, 1991, 35mm) KS
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*Note that the previously scheduled 1:30pm Sunday screening has been cancelled.
Felix Feist’s THE MAN WHO CHEATED HIMSELF (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 3pm and Monday, 6pm
Known mostly for his boisterous and hard-headed characters, Lee J. Cobb had his first leading role in THE MAN WHO CHEATED HIMSELF, and shows a more subdued side. Lieutenant Ed Cullen (Cobb), a homicide detective, is forced to cover up a murder by his wealthy mistress, Lois Frazer (Jane Wyatt). In typical film noir fashion, matters are further complicated when Ed’s younger brother, Andy (John Dall), is assigned to his division and quickly picks up on the case’s breadcrumbs, keen to make a name for himself. At its core, the film is a character study about morality and the amorality those in positions of power find themselves tempted by, especially when it involves a loved one. Cobb’s detective toes the line between supportive sibling and a man trying to save his own skin, and he’s even allowed a flash of some romance. A classic noir wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the City by the Bay and this film proves no exception; in fact, it seemingly serves as inspiration for a litany of other classics based in the same locale, such as VERTIGO and DARK PASSAGE, with several shots under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. THE MAN WHO CHEATED HIMSELF is as brisk and fast-paced as noirs come and it’s one that shows the full range of an actor whose career had primarily been relegated to that of supporting roles. (1950, 80 min, 35mm restored archival print) KC
Terry Zwigoff’s LOUIE BLUIE (Documentary Revival)
The Chicago Film Society and Filmfront (1740 W. 18th St.) — Saturday, 7 and 9pm
In hindsight, Terry Zwigoff’s LOUIE BLUIE seems like a warm-up for the director’s subsequent documentary CRUMB, one of the great American films of the 1990s, and not just because the principal subjects of both films have so much in common. Howard Armstrong, the artist-musician-street philosopher hero of LOUIE BLUIE, is, like Robert Crumb, gifted, compulsively creative, obsessed with sex, and willfully eccentric. Both men are also obsessed with American popular music of the early 20th century; in Armstrong’s case it’s country-blues string band music, a genre once popular among both white and black musicians but which few black musicians still performed by the time LOUIE BLUIE was made. Armstrong may be one of the last of his kind, but the film is hardly mournful. It’s celebratory in its depiction of the musical tradition Armstrong helps keep alive and—thanks to Armstrong’s spirited harangues about everything from art to religion to pornography—often raucously funny. As he would do later in CRUMB, Zwigoff treats the art-making process with impressive seriousness; one gets a sense of the time, energy, and intellectual effort that goes into making good art, regardless of whether it’s string band music or a hand-illustrated anthology about sex. The affection for countercultures and subcultures that would distinguish Zwigoff’s later work is already in full flower; what’s missing from LOUIE BLUIE is any explicit critique of mainstream American culture as vapid and harmful, which would color Zwigoff’s affection in everything from CRUMB on. Another asset of the film: Chicago’s South Side has rarely looked cooler than it does here—Zwigoff makes it seem like a place where iconoclasts like Armstrong can thrive. Preceded by a selection of Soundie shorts (approx. 10 min, 16mm). (1985, 60 min, 16mm) BS
Roland West’s ALIBI (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 4:45pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Banned in Chicago when it was released in 1929 for its disrespect toward and violence against police officers, crime drama ALIBI probably still won’t pass muster with local law enforcement, particularly since the cops don’t come off much better than the robbers. The film opens with an amazing, expressionist scene of prisoners and prison guards moving in regimental fashion through a cellblock. One inmate is signaled to move out of line. He exchanges his prison garb for street clothes and is released. The ex-con, Chick Williams (Chester Morris), goes back to his old haunts and picks up with girlfriend Joan Manning (Eleanor Griffith), who believed his story that he was framed by the cops, including her father, Sgt. Pete Manning (Purnell Pratt). A robbery and the murder of a cop has Sgt. Manning and undercover detective Danny McGann (Regis Toomey) out to prove Williams was the killer, even though he is now Joan’s husband. ALIBI was shot in silent and sound versions by director Roland West, who cowrote the screenplay and title cards. West spent almost his entire career in silent films, and his direction shows it. Many sections are silent, and the acting is broadly gestural and often stilted and confused, though the charismatic Morris is a treat to watch. On the other hand, the Art Deco sets by William Cameron Menzies—including wallpaper that looks like it was repurposed from THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920)—full-face close-ups, and nightclub scenes provide some cinematic delights. I was intrigued by the procedural aspects of the police work, from beat cops sounding the alarm around the neighborhood by banging on poles with their nightsticks to investigating the murder by checking the timing of a performance Williams used as his alibi. The film, Morris, and Menzies were nominated for Oscars, but West made only two more films before leaving the industry. (1929, 90 min, DCP Digital) MF
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s DAUGHTER OF THE NILE (Taiwanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 3:45pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Until recently, DAUGHTER OF THE NILE has been the most difficult to see film of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s post-BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983) mature period. It has also been the director’s most critically neglected work to date; when discussed at all, most critics, including Jonathan Rosenbaum, have tended to compare this contemporary urban drama unfavorably with the rural period pieces that immediately precede and follow it in Hou’s filmography (i.e., 1986’s DUST IN THE WIND and 1989’s A CITY OF SADNESS). When seen from the vantage point of today, however, thanks to a superb new 4K digital restoration by the Taiwan Film Institute, it seems obvious that this is where the modernist Hou of the 1990s was truly born. Based on a proposal from a record company, and conceived of as a star vehicle for the young female pop singer Lin Yang, Hou, working with three screenwriters, turned the project into a highly personal and stunningly oblique examination of disaffected Taipei youth that prefigures his better known returns to the same milieu in later masterworks like GOODBYE, SOUTH, GOODBYE (1996), MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001), and the contemporary segments of GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN (1995) and THREE TIMES (2005). Lin, in her screen debut, gives a soulful, quietly riveting performance as Hsiao-yang, a teenage girl who works at a Kentucky Fried Chicken by day and goes to school at night, all the while trying to prevent her fractured family from breaking apart for good. Lin finds fleeting moments of happiness by imagining herself as the protagonist of her favorite manga, the source of the movie’s title, and when flirting with Ah-sang (Fan Yang), the best friend of her older brother, Hsiao-fang (future Hou regular Jack Kao), both of whom are on the verge of falling dangerously into a life of crime. Hou’s extensive use of nighttime exteriors, illuminated by neon lights and, in one unforgettable sequence, fireworks, combine with Lin’s past-tense voice-over narration to make the whole thing float by like a sad and haunting yet beautiful dream. If you have never seen a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien and are curious as to why a lot of critics, including me, consider him the best narrative filmmaker working today, this is an excellent place to start exploring his work. (1987, 93 min, DCP Digital) MGS
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Critic and artist Fred Camper lectures at the Tuesday screening. Note: DAUGHTER OF THE NILE replaces the previously scheduled THREE TIMES.
Ridley Scott's ALIEN (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Monday, 9:30pm
The history of horror films in America is basically a history of self-reflexive cultural negotiations regarding the appropriate monstrous representation of sublimated, dead labor (from industrial-era vampires to post-industrial/consumerist zombies, for example). The serial killer, in particular, is a monster born of the late 1970s, a time of increased independence and employment for women, as well as of increased corporate diversification. Emblematic here is Ridley Scott's ALIEN, in which a crew of highly-skilled co-ed journeyman space-laborers for the (presumably monopolistic) "Company" are obliged by their weak contracts into dangerous, unpaid overtime work exploring a nearby crashed spacecraft—resulting in one worker's being literally raped by an articulated organism of unknown origin. Left in a coma, his body immobilized by a unremovable death grip to the face—also known as your cubicle's computer screen—this employee violently gives birth to the titular illegitimate xenomorphic slasher, an outrageous H.R. Giger creation best described as a toothed vagina on a penis inside a toothed vagina on a penis. Its savage hypersexuality is in striking contrast to the celibate and demoralized crew, who in turn discover (as we all someday must) that their employer—mediated by a bureaucratic artificial intelligence system—considers them essentially disposable in the face of true biomechanistic innovation. ALIEN's innovative, languorously developed, and politically relevant narrative structure is also accompanied by simultaneously punishing and dazzling sound-effects work, romanticizing the harsh interstellar environment with a progressively intense and surprisingly passionate lullaby of humming, clicking, whirring, dripping, hissing, and shrieking noises. (1979, 119 min, 35mm) MC
Preston Sturges' THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 6pm
Critics of Preston Sturges' gradual canonization can find lots of ammunition in THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK: released in 1944, as World War II was winding down (and taking Sturges' career with it), the spirit of despair which had so memorably raised its head and been dismissed three years earlier in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS here flowers into so pervasive a misanthropy that when Hitler and Mussolini show up, they serve as comic relief. Not only is there no room at the inn for mooncalves Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton, there's no room in the nation—and the fact that Akim Tamiroff and Brian Donleavy are the tutelary deities of this deconstructed Nativity, reprising their roles as big-time crooks The Boss and McGinty (from 1940's THE GREAT MCGINTY), just speaks further to the intrinsic corruption of the world of bumbling, close-minded old men, guileless 4Fs, and callow, manipulative good-time girls that Sturges posits is waiting for the (literally) nameless Boys in Uniform, should they ever make it home. The comedy here is mainly located in Sturges' usual sinuous dialogue and just-as-usual blustering slapstick—crescendoing during the "miraculous" ending, whose frenzy owes more to Chuck Jones than Lubitsch or Hawks. On the other hand, true-believers: Despair! Akim Tamiroff! Sturges dialogue! Chuck Jones! Is the miracle of MIRACLE the most outrageous metatextual intervention since THE LAST LAUGH? Say nay if you must, but Sturges was his own genre, and whether he makes you chortle aloud or stare in disbelief, you are either way more than getting your money's worth. (1944, 98 min, DCP Digital) JD
Alejandro Jodorowsky's SANTA SANGRE (Mexican Revival)
Music Box Theatre - Friday and Saturday, Midnight
You wouldn't know it from the circus freaks, the religious cults, and the malicious (not to mention limbless) mothers, but SANTA SANGRE is Alejandro Jodorowsky all grown up. Separated from his early staples of hallucinatory cinema, EL TOPO and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, by sixteen odd years and a highly mythologized failed first crack at Frank Herbert's Dune, the film finds Jodorowsky with an unexpected amount of narrative confidence, and surrealist sensibilities half as wild, yet twice as perceptive as all his concoctions to date. He spins the story of Fenix, troubled son of the circus, both in flashback and flash-forward, and the first half even tugs a few heartstrings with its tale of love, loss, and complete mental breakdown in the world of ethereal trapeze artists and adulterous knife-throwers. The murderous second half shakes things up, and Fenix's story takes a most unorthodox Oedipal twist that could wake Freud from cold, dead slumber. It's here we recapture some of the Jodorowsky visual flair we once knew, but more importantly, as the film veers firmly into the horror genre, he gets to flex his muscles as a surrealist pioneer. Sure, it's nowhere Lucio Fulci hadn't dabbled before, but Jodorowsky's return proves a surprisingly wise and unsurprisingly creepy effort, not quite the sensory experience that his earlier works remain, but every bit as much a great film. (1989, 123 min, DCP Digital) TJ
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Leather Archives and Museum (6418 N. Greenview Ave.) hosts the CineKink Film Festival this weekend, with screenings on Friday at 7:30pm and Saturday at 6:30 and 9pm. Schedule and information at www.cinekink.com.
The Chicago Cinema and Media Conference presents a one-day tribute to the Chicago Film Seminar on Friday from 9:30am to 6pm at the Institute for the Humanities (UIC, 701 S. Morgan St., Lower Level, Stevenson Hall). The event includes talks by a number of area film scholars and a roundtable discussion by several founders and early members of the CFS. Free admission.
The Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) screens A. Edward Sutherland’s 1936 W.C. Fields comedy POPPY (73 min, 35mm) on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Preceded by Clyde Bruckman’s 1933 Fields short THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER (18 min, 16mm).
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents Short Works by Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby on Friday at 7pm, with Duke and Battersby in person. The program of experimental videos includes BAD IDEAS FOR PARADISE (2001, 20 min), LESSER APES (2011, 12 min), HERE IS EVERYTHING (2013, 14 min), and a work-in-progress version of CIVIL TWILIGHT AT THE VERNAL EQUINOX (2019, approx. 6 min).
South Side Projections and Columbia College’s Hip-Hop Studies Minor and Hip-Hop Club present Rusty Cundieff’s 1993 film FEAR OF A BLACK HAT (88 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 7pm at Columbia College (1104 S. Wabash Ave., Conway Center). Preceded at 6pm by additional short films and music, and followed by a discussion. Free admission.
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) hosts a pop-up edition of The Doc Talk Show, local documentary maker Jeff Spitz’s monthly event focused on non-fiction filmmaking. Tonight’s edition, “Cutting Remarks,” features film editors David E. Simpson, Greg Stephen Reigh, and Ashley Thompson.
PO Box Collective (6900 N. Glenwood Ave.) screens Sara Gómez’s 1974/1977 Cuba film ONE WAY OR ANOTHER (78 min, Video Projection) on Friday at 7:30pm. Free admission.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky's 2018 Canadian documentary ANTHROPOCENE: THE HUMAN EPOCH (87 min, DCP Digital) and Bill Haney's 2019 documentary JIM ALLISON: BREAKTHROUGH (90 min, DCP Digital) both play Friday-Wednesday.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Nisha Ganatra's 2019 film LATE NIGHT (102 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday at 4pm; Andrei Tarkovsky's 1961 featurette THE STEAMROLLER AND THE VIOLIN (46 min, Digital Projection) and Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra's 1983 Italian documentary VOYAGE IN TIME (62 min, Digital Projection) show as a double feature on Sunday at 7pm; and Youssef Chahine's 1997 French/Egyptian film DESTINY (135 min, DCP Digital; Free Admission) is on Monday at 7pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Noah Baumbach’s 2019 film MARRIAGE STORY (136 min, 35mm) and Robert Eggers’ 2019 film THE LIGHTHOUSE (109 min, DCP Digital) both continue, with LIGHTHOUSE preceded by Jonathan Glazer’s 2019 short THE FALL (7 min); Delbert Mann’s 1961 Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy LOVER COME BACK (107 min, 35mm) is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Elle Máijá-Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn’s 2019 Canadian/Norwegian film THE BODY REMEMBERS WHEN THE WORLD BROKE OPEN (105 min, Video Projection) Friday-Wednesday.
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. Warhol’s 1963 film HAIRCUT NO. 1 (27 min, 16mm) is on view November 19-December 8, The films screening at the top of each hour starting at 11am.
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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. Among the moving image works 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: November 22 - November 28, 2019
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Tristan Johnson, Michael Metzger, Michael Glover Smith
