CRUCIAL VIEWING
Mário Peixoto’s LIMITE (Silent Brazilian Revival)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Often cited as one of the greatest Brazilian films, the sole feature completed by celebrated author Mário Peixoto (made when he was just 22 years old) represents a thrilling fusion of French-style poetic realism and Soviet-style avant-gardism. The narrative, defined by absences and non-sequiturs, also suggests the influence of surrealism: LIMITE begins on a small boat lost at sea, then proceeds through flashbacks to the lives of the three people onboard the boat; never does Peixoto reveal how the passengers know each other or how they came to be adrift. As such, the story expresses the illogic and immediacy of a dream—the characters’ situation feels especially dire since it isn’t grounded in any rational explanation. At the same time, the film is immersive and highly sensuous; privileging location and fleeting, poetic details over plot, Peixoto makes LIMITE an environment to get lost in. Adding to the film’s sensuousness is Peixoto’s inspired use of music. LIMITE is scored to works by Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Stravinsky, and others, and no matter which composer Peixoto chooses to spotlight, the subtle montage and visual compositions fall brilliantly in line with the tone of what’s on the soundtrack. In one scene, Peixoto plays an intricate symphonic piece over a montage of a seamstress at work to convey her sense of total engagement; shortly after, the director plays a more minimalist composition over shots of the protagonists at sea, suggesting the elemental nature of their conflict. Wavering beguilingly between the abstract and the concrete, LIMITE anticipates the poetic cinema that Philippe Garrel would create in the 1970s and that Philippe Grandrieux would make in the 1990s and 2000s. It was also an influence on Orson Welles’ uncompleted South American feature IT’S ALL TRUE, and for obvious reason: Edgar Brasil’s imaginative, mobile cinematography suggests a spiritual forebear to the kind of visual feats that Welles would execute with cameramen. LIMITE was difficult to see for several decades, and at one point was even considered lost. Though it’s now readily accessible, this singular achievement still feels like a film out of time. (1931, 116 min, DCP Digital) BS
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Introduced by University of Brasília, UnB assistant professor Pablo Gonçalo.
Joselito Rodriguez’s SANTO VS. THE EVIL BRAIN and SANTO AGAINST THE HELLISH MEN (Mexican/Cuban Revivals)
Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm (Double Feature)
At the beginning of SANTO VS. THE EVIL BRAIN [SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL] (70 min, DCP Digital), Santo is cornered in an alley by three henchmen of a power-hungry scientist (the “evil brain” of the title), subdued, and taken to the laboratory of said scientist where he’s subjected to a mind-control procedure that renders him an unwitting participant in the scientist’s plans. He remains in this incapacitated state for most of the film, with a second masked crime fighter, El Incognito, filling the active hero role. It’s a strange introduction for Santo in what was his first film. There’s no backstory explaining who Santo is, he’s not presented as a wrestler but as a more generic masked crime fighter, and he’s in effect a secondary character in the film. This plot outline feels more like an episode ten chapters in of a 1930s or 40s Republic serial than a stand-alone feature film. For Mexican and Mexican-American audiences in 1961 no contextualization would have been necessary: Santo (the stage name of Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta) was by then one of the most famous (possibly the most famous) figures in Mexican popular culture, more of a folk hero at that point than just a simple celebrity. He was the most popular luchador wrestler (with his now-iconic silver mask) in a country obsessed with the sport, had a career dating back to the 1940s, and he was the subject of a wildly popular and voluminous comic book series, which had been running for almost a decade. But the displacement of Santo in the film’s narrative is still curious, and continues in the second Santo film, SANTO AGAINST THE HELLISH MEN [SANTO CONTRA HOMBRES INFERNALES] (74 min, DCP Digital), also from 1961 (they had been filmed concurrently in Cuba in 1958), in which he appears occasionally to assist an undercover agent who has infiltrated a smuggling outfit. What audiences of the time thought is a question; their delayed release might be reflective of this sidelined presence. The films feel like false starts, with the third film in the legendary and long-lasting series (52 films total through the early 1980s) serving as a more official beginning, which features Santo as star and now depicted as a wrestler. The films are rough in their narrative structure (with some odd threads that don’t seem to go anywhere and that are repeated in both films), but the black and white cinematography is sharp and there is good use of Havana locations. The new digital restorations are quite amazing for 50+ year-old Mexican genre films that have had no significant archival attention over the years. But a relatively new organization, the Permanencia Voluntaria Archivo Cinematográfico Mexico, founded by Viviana Garcia Besne (whose grandfather produced these two films, and whose family has a long history in Mexican cinema exhibition, distribution, and production), is focused on collecting, preserving, and championing the genre films from Mexico. For these Santo restorations they worked with the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles and enlisted support from filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn. As curious as these two films are, they mark a pivotal moment in Mexican popular film history, they’re both fun and puzzling, and you’ll never see them look better. PF
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Local film programmer Raul Benitez, who organized the screening, and film archivist Viviana Garcia Besne, founder/director the Permanencia Voluntaria Archivo Cinematográfico Mexico, in person.
Catherine Breillat’s BLUEBEARD (French Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Tuesday, 7pm
Note: Spoilers! In 1697, French author Charles Perrault published Bluebeard, a dark fairy tale of a rich nobleman with the bad habit of murdering his young brides. Perrault is credited, more or less, with inventing the fairy tale, and in 1901 motion picture pioneer Georges Méliès was the first to film Perrault’s story. Since then, a number of filmmakers have approached the tale, sometimes following Perrault faithfully by sparing Bluebeard’s latest child bride, sometimes sending her to share the tragic fate of his previous wives. Regardless of the ending, however, Bluebeard is a tale affirming the power of patriarchy and the danger women face when they disobey the rules of men. With her BLUEBEARD, Catherine Breillat unleashes her feminine point of view and cinematic ingenuity on Perrault’s invention. Breillat starts with Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benites) and her timid older sister Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti) reading Bluebeard for the upteenth time and intersperses their play and conversation with scenes from the tale. The fairy tale opens in a convent school. Two sisters, Anne (Daphné Baiwir) and Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton), are brought before the severe Mother Superior (Farida Khelfa), who informs them that their father has been struck and killed by a carriage as he leapt to save a small child from its wheels. With a quick prayer for the father’s bravery and a stern admonishment for the girls to stop their blubbering, Mother Superior banishes the now impoverished sisters from her uncharitable school. In hopes of securing their future Anne and Mary-Catherine are sent to a party at Bluebeard’s castle. Mary-Catherine goes off alone into the woods, where she meets Bluebeard. He tells her that people call him an ogre, so that is what he has become. Mary-Catherine is not afraid of him, nor does she think he’s an ogre. This is the first of several touching scenes between the two, together in their isolation and thirst for knowledge. Breillat has a tricky balancing act in structuring a film with two rather fanciful, parallel stories. She has a number of points to make—not only is she taking a look at masculine and feminine power, but she also has a go at sibling rivalry. But rather than diluting the story, Breillat pulls it off brilliantly. Her fabulous locations for the Bluebeard story, particularly at the convent school, are like an instant time machine, with the authentically medieval office from which the authentically severe Mother Superior ruled without an ounce of humanity creating the threatening ambiance of the best fairy tales right from the start. Although Anne is prettier, Bluebeard chooses Mary-Catherine on whom to bestow his love and riches, emphasizing a theme Breillat has said she wanted to bring out—the competitiveness of siblings and how that competitiveness can play out in unexpectedly good or tragic ways. Marie-Catherine is always honest, and Bluebeard assures her that as long as she remains truthful, she will never have anything to fear from him. But when he returns from an extended journey to find party guests at the castle—something he encouraged Marie-Catherine to do—he grows cross and jealous. He cannot overcome his primitive nature, and chooses almost immediately to test his new bride by giving her the gold key to the room that contains the bloody corpses of his previous wives, and admonishing her not to use it. Ah, the weakness of Eve! Marie-Catherine’s curiosity sets up the grisly scene of three decaying corpses nailed above a huge pool of blood, which the horror-loving present-day sister Catherine wades into. On Bluebeard’s return, he asks Marie-Catherine for the gold key, but she lies and says she lost it. Exposed to his violence and his capriciousness, she has been forced to betray her own nature to survive. In this way, Breillat explores the gender dynamics that confront women. Marie-Catherine and Anne’s father was their sole financial support, but by acting on his humanity, he has compromised the welfare of his family. Marie-Catherine is a clever and empathetic girl, but she can’t tame the beast of patriarchy represented by Bluebeard. Even though Breillat is careful to show Bluebeard’s ambivalence about sending Marie-Catherine to her death, we are still faced with the entire weight of patriarchy (note Bluebeard’s enormous girth and appetite)—its suspicion of women, its demand of absolute obedience even as it makes obedience nearly impossible to practice, and the necessity of women to be untrue to themselves to survive. The final two shots set up a parallel between Marie-Catherine and Catherine in an unexpected way. Marie-Catherine, now as wealthy in her own right as she hoped to be, stares vacantly as she gently strokes the severed head of her husband, which rests on a silver platter. This can be seen as a challenge to patriarchy that this film itself represents, but it also serves to reinforce negative stereotypes of women in its parallel with the wanton, amoral Salome. The delightedly “wicked” Catherine, too, finds that imposing her will on her gentle sister results in a form of wish fulfillment that has a price. Breillat provides an obvious moral to men, but an equal caution to women to care for their sisters in arms and avoid the excesses of conquest. (2009, 80 min, DCP Digital) MF
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Haifaa al-Mansour’s WADJDA (Saudi Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm (Free Admission)
As much as I dislike comparing a woman director’s film to those made by a man, I don't mean for it to sound reductive when I say that Saudi filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour’s feature debut, WADJDA, recalls the early films of Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, specifically in how it utilizes children as a resourceful narrative construct, the unassuming means to a richly satisfying end. The title character (the delightful Waad Mohammed, in her first role) is a 10-year-old Saudi girl who lives in Riyadh with her mother (Reem Abdullah); her father, seemingly devoted to Wadjda and her mother, is frequently away, and it’s soon revealed that his mother is trying to find him a new wife because Wadjda’s mother can no longer have children. At school, Wadjda, an especially rambunctious pre-teen, is singled out by the school’s principal for indiscretions such as failing to cover her head and for not leaving when male construction workers come into sight in the schoolyard. Despite these difficulties (and those of others, including a teenage girl, who’s married off after being caught with a boy, and Wadjda’s classmate, a girl in her age group who it’s revealed gets married to a 20-year-old man), which are rooted in the oppressiveness of religion and the patriarchy, Wadjda is a happy young girl whose greatest desire is to buy a green bike from a local toy shop. At first she attempts to save for it by selling handmade bracelets and fleecing money from those who ask her for favors (in this way it’s similar to Kiarostami’s THE TRAVELER); later she conspires to get the money in a lump sum by winning a Quran-recitation contest. The first feature-length film to be made entirely in Saudi Arabia—and the first to be directed by a Saudi woman—it doesn’t belabor obvious inequalities or attempt to teach its audience (largely presumed to be foreign, as there were no movie theaters in Saudi Arabia between 1983 and 2018). Rather, through its sprightly young protagonist, it assumes a truly innocent perspective from which its society's nuances can be observed, good and bad. As in Kiarostami’s films, youth is a symbol of guilelessness seemingly free from politics (which then allows the films to either evade the subject altogether or transmit societal critiques more discreetly); the bike is a symbol of autonomy, especially as it relates to Wadjda, who, as a girl, is not technically supposed to be riding one. Very few directors of children succeed in emulating their spirit and reflecting their inner worlds; Kiarostami is one, al-Mansour another. Fewer even succeed in working under the same conditions as al-Mansour, who couldn’t interact with male crewmembers and thus had to direct some scenes from a nearby van, giving instruction via walkie-talkie. That she was able to convey a sense of innocence and hope in spite of such obstacles is, like her subject, inspiring. (2012, 98 min, 35mm) KS
Susan Sontag’s DUET FOR CANNIBALS (Swedish Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 9:30pm
Most cultural critics have come across the works of Susan Sontag at one point or another. Throughout her life, the essayist, philosopher, and activist touched on—if not founded entirely—critical and analytical positions that are still rampant in cultural teachings today: from the weight put on taste, to the emergence of camp, and the ethics of photography and visual documentation. It seems natural, then, for her work as a filmmaker to reflect these same concerns and to ask similarly tough questions of humanity and culture. Her debut feature DUET FOR CANNIBALS (1969) serves as a somewhat bumpy, but provocative nonetheless, interpolation of her philosophical work to the screen. A married couple hires a young man as their secretary, inviting him and his fiancée to live with them over the course of the job. But it becomes apparent early on that the relational power dynamics in place are not just askew, but are almost begging to be bent and distorted—resulting in some PERSONA-esque moments of role switching, melding of minds, and sexual fervor. DUET FOR CANNIBALS can feel disjointed or too conceptual for its own good at times, often getting in the way of its own messaging. But Sontag is her best when she boldly hones in on the nature of power, showing it to be a polarizing, all-consuming, and deeply transformative force at its core. (1969, 105 min, DCP Digital) CC
Preston Sturges’ THE GREAT MOMENT (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7 and 9:30pm
THE GREAT MOMENT is the kind of film that leaves the viewer wondering what could have been. Preston Sturges’ biopic about Dr. William Morton (Joel McCrea) and his 1846 discovery of ether’s use as an anesthetic during surgical procedures is as honest and faithful to its historical sources as most films come. Sturges’ vision for the film and the final version Paramount ultimately released were quite different, though, with the studio deciding to make sweeping cuts to the prologue as well as removing many scenes and entire plotlines. Much of the film is told through the use of effective flashbacks, grounded by McCrea’s strong performance. A departure from Sturges’ usual social comedies, THE GREAT MOMENT is decidedly a drama, one focused on an individual’s tremendous discovery and the ripple effect it would have within the medical community. That’s not to say there is no comedy present; comedic moments indeed are sprinkled throughout the film, lightening moments of drama and adding to character. THE GREAT MOMENT is full of engaging scenes but lacks cohesion. One can’t help but wonder how the film may have turned out had Paramount respected Sturges’ original plans. (1944, 83 min, 35mm) KC
Stephen Frears' HIGH FIDELITY (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 7pm
Now that Stephen Frears has retreated into middle-brow British heritage filmmaking (THE QUEEN, PHILOMENA, etc.), his director credit on HIGH FIDELITY, the all-American Sub-Pop rom-com, is all the more mysterious and unaccountable. Transplanting Nick Hornby's London-set novel to Chicago with the assistance of star/producer/writer John Cusack and his boyhood friends from Evanston, HIGH FIDELITY succeeds largely on the basis of its slippery but firmly committed command of local detail. Cusack's record store, Championship Vinyl, is located at the intersection of Milwaukee and Honore in a Wicker Park that's post-Liz Phair but still pre-gentrification and consequently overrun with over-achieving Charlie Brown crust punks. All the aspiring grown-ups live in one of those lovely old apartment buildings in Rogers Park or Lakeview, where the rain washes away your tears as you stomp through the unkempt courtyards. The hyper-specific observation always wins out, even when it's purely invented. (There's a moment when Cusack hops onto the Purple Line at Armitage. The train enters a tunnel and goes underground. Now, every CTA rider knows that the Purple Line remains elevated for the duration, but that's banal. HIGH FIDELITY implicitly suggests something better: a Purple Line ride that retains the ecstatic promise of coming out again on the other side in a blast of sunshine.) You always feel grounded in the film's crowded chronology, calling up personal memories that are inevitably intertwined with pop signposts: we had that conversation the week that "The Boy with the Arab Strap" came out; we went on that date the same night that THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS opened at the Music Box. It's all of a piece with the incessant list-making, the encyclopedic editorializing, the ever-fragile mantel of expertise. "This is a film about—and also for—not only obsessed clerks in record stores," suggested Roger Ebert upon HIGH FIDELITY's release, "but the video store clerks who have seen all the movies, and the bookstore employees who have read all the books. Also for bartenders, waitresses, greengrocers in health food stores..." Yes, HIGH FIDELITY speaks to all these people fine, but let's be real: this is a movie that is deeply, specifically, and unmistakably about the culture of record stores. It uncannily contains a piece of every single record store in which I've ever stepped foot. And if they all vanished tomorrow, the species could be genetically reconstituted purely on the basis of the collected side-eyes, chortles, guffaws, growls, and straight-up asshole moves in HIGH FIDELITY. It's anthropology, but it's also a superlative romantic comedy—an up-to-date ANNIE HALL purged of Allen's misogynistic impulse to crack all the jokes at the woman's expense. No matter how small the role, everybody here from Iben Hjejle to Todd Louiso is a three-dimensional presence. (In the closing reel, Jack Black gets elevated to a crowd-pleasing four-dimensional plateau.) It might not be in my Top 5, but it's damn close. (2000, 113 min, 35mm) KAW
Alejandro Landes’ MONOS (New Colombian)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
In the first scene of MONOS, a group of blindfolded teens plays a game of soccer high on a misty mountaintop. They mill about as night falls, listening for each other’s presences, hoping for a goal. It’s an apposite, concise introduction to this grim fable of moral and ideological blindness, in which a regiment of militarized youth clambers around in metaphorical darkness, stranded from their humanity. The kids, who carry noms de guerre such as Smurf, Wolf, and Lady, are also stranded from geographical coordinates: stationed on a remote mountain somewhere in Latin America, the only real connection they have to the outside world is via their stout sergeant, known as the Messenger (Wilson Salazar), who puts them through rigorous training exercises while reminding them of their loyalty to an obscure Organization. When he departs, leaving them to monitor an American hostage, Doctora (Julianne Nicholson), and a cow named Shakira, things go to hell fast. The Lord of the Flies may be the obvious driving influence for Landes (if you weren’t sure, a rotting pig head makes a late appearance), but unlike that tale of social entropy, the makeshift youth civilization here is poisoned from the start, induced to feral aggression and base survival instincts by the invisible military faction that has radicalized them before the story even begins. Abandoning their foggy highland post after an attack by a rival group, the squad ventures deep into the rainforest, where a combination of the elements, personal hostilities, and panic over their escaped hostage further plunges them into atavistic chaos. It’s also here that Landes most viscerally conjures the film’s experiential intensity, enveloping the senses in the sounds of squelching mud, chattering monkeys, and peals of gunfire, and in the palpably fatiguing images of the actors trudging through the unforgiving landscape, dirt and sweat clinging to their skin. Mica Levi’s score, meanwhile, churns unnervingly throughout, oscillating between ethereal flutes and pulsing electronic distortions that suggest the musical analog of asphyxiation. All of the young actors do impressively committed work here, particularly Sofia Buenaventura as the ironically named Rambo, who emerges as the group’s brittle conscience, but Julianne Nicholson deserves special mention for a performance so grueling and full-bodied one feels taxed just watching it. Battered, chained, and ambushed by mosquitoes, yet relentless, we empathize with her even as her own animalistic will to survive tips over into desperate violence. Nearly all of its characters are, in some way, victimizers, but MONOS maintains some sliver of humanity in recognizing them as victims first, as people who have been subjugated and turned against one another by systems they can hardly begin to understand. In a lingering moment that locks on the fearful eyes of one of the children, Landes’ film perhaps evokes nothing so much as Elem Klimov’s devastating COME AND SEE, registering atrocity in the face of a child whose youth it has annihilated. Its thesis about war may not offer anything new, but MONOS does a worthy job of making us feel a twinge of its harrowing, internecine effects. (2019, 105 min, DCP Digital) JL
Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi's WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (Contemporary New Zealand)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 9:30pm
Once upon a full moon, vampires were considered to be pure horror. With Bram Stoker's original Dracula, Bela Lugosi's 1930s and 40s Universal films, the iconic German expressionist film NOSFERATU, and Carl Theodor Dreyer's VAMPYR, their gothic mythology was firmly rooted in the collective conscious. These immortal creatures of the night relied on charm, sexuality, and dark magic to enchant and lure their victims. Over time, filmic (and other popular culture) representations of vampires strayed from the original formula, delving into comedy, romance, science fiction, and more. All of these varieties inevitably led to the ill-conceived TWILIGHT and its unavoidable sequels. The vampire film had reached a point of stagnation. WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS breaks free of this vampire-moribundity, and is also one of the most original and refreshing comedies in recent memory. This mockumentary combination of The Office meets LET THE RIGHT ONE IN meets The Real World satirizes what life would be like for a vampire living today, dealing with the mundane aspects of contemporary urban life. SHADOWS dares to asks such questions as who's going to clean the dishes, what clothes should vampires wear to the club, and is a human an appropriate plus one to bring to an undead masquerade ball. The answers play out in droll, hilarious fashion, aided by FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS' Jermaine Clement and Rhys Darby, who dazzle as two of the bloodsucking flatmates. Bram Stoker may be rolling over in his grave seeing what has transpired since his vaunted masterpiece, but for the viewers, SHADOWS rewardingly proves that there is still blood left in the veins of the vampire movie. (2015, 86 min, DCP Digital) KC
John McTiernan's DIE HARD (American Revival)
Beverly Arts Center - Wednesday, 7:30pm
Non-aficionados of narrative overanalysis are basically going to have to step off in the case of DIE HARD, which is inarguably a modern masterpiece of both structuralist and psychoanalytic semiosis. As an n-dimensional mythological lattice posing as an unpretentious, violent movie, DIE HARD simultaneously pits East Coast vs. West Coast, Eastern capitalism vs. Western capitalism, work vs. family, local vs. global, working class vs. upper class, white vs. black ad infinitum, all entirely immersed in the sacred moment of the pagan Winter Solstice. How, indeed, will John McClane (Bruce Willis) reassert values of patriarchy and Anglo supremacy during this longer-term period of acute economic and multicultural transformation? The answer is by defeating a band of indeterminately Euro monsters who erupt from his unconscious on Christmas Eve as he attempts to renegotiate the terms of his marriage in a building played by—in one of Hollywood's premier self-reflexive architectural cameos—20th Century Fox's brand new office tower. Additionally, the film is creatively suffused in a wide variety of explicit and implicit Christmas-related symbolism (our red-footed hero frequently sends explosive "presents" to lower floors, bond certificates float through the air like snow, etc.) However, the present-day evidence of the film's DVD commentary track suggests that director John McTiernan is almost completely unaware of what he has done, remaining entirely concerned with the implementation of shrill, irrelevant action set pieces. (1988, 131 min, Digital Projection) MC
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Chicago Film Society (at the Music Box Theatre) screens Charles Stone III’s 2002 film DRUMLINE (118 min, 35mm) on Monday at 7pm. Preceded by the anonymously-made 1968 short NEW ORLEANS STREET PARADE (5 min, 16mm restored archival print).
The Logan Theatre hosts a screening of local filmmaker Todd Tue’s 2019 documentary WHEN IT BREAKS (75 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 5:30pm, with Tue, the film's subject, Konrad Wert, and local educators in person for a discussion.
ArcLight Chicago (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) screens Shun’ya Itô’s 1972 Japanese film FEMALE PRISONER SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41 (90 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 7:30pm and Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 Japanese film LADY SNOWBLOOD (97 min, DCP Digital) on Tuesday at 7:30pm.
The Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens Fernando Fernán Gómez's 1986 Spanish film VOYAGE TO NOWHERE (134 min, DVD Projection) on Tuesday at 7pm. Free admission.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Michael Engler's 2019 UK film DOWNTON ABBEY (122 min, DCP Digital), Kirill Mikhanovsky's 2019 film GIVE ME LIBERTY (110 min, DCP Digital), and Olivier Meyrou's 2007 French documentary CELEBRATION [aka YVES SAINT LAURENT: THE LAST COLLECTIONS] (74 min, DCP Digital) all play for a week; Laurel & Hardy: Fugues of Destruction, a program of four recently-restored shorts, is on Saturday at 3pm and Wednesday at 6pm. Included are THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY (Clyde Bruckman, 1927, 19 min, DCP Digital), HOG WILD (James Parrott, 1930, 19 min, 35mm), BRATS (James Parrott, 1930, 21 min, 35mm), and PERFECT DAY (James Parrott, 1929, 20 min, 35mm); and John G. Blystone's 1933 film MY LIPS BETRAY (76 min 35mm restored archival print) is on Saturday at 4:45pm and Monday at 6pm.
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); Tom Harper’s 2019 UK film THE AERONAUTS (100 min, 70mm) opens on Thursday; the annual Sing-a-Long SOUND OF MUSIC is on Friday-Sunday; a double feature screening of Samuel Collardey’s 2018 French film A POLAR YEAR (94 min, DCP Digital) and Rayhana’s 2016 French/Greek/Algerian film I STILL HIDE TO SMOKE (90 min, DCP Digital) is on Wednesday at 7pm; George Seaton’s 1947 film A MIRACLE ON 34th STREET (96 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 7pm (the screening is a benefit for The Chicago Help Initiative and tickets are $20; pre-show activities begin at 6pm); and the Wachowskis’ 1999 film THE MATRIX (136 min, 35mm) is on Friday and Saturday at 11:30pm.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Pema Tseden’s 2018 Chinese film JINPA (87 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. Warhol’s 1963 film HAIRCUT NO. 1 (27 min, 16mm) is on view through December 8. The films screen 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).
CINE-LIST: November 29 - December 5, 2019
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt
