CRUCIAL VIEWING
Agnès Varda and JR's FACES PLACE (New Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
I love this sportive, altogether magical film—it's light and simple and funny, and all the more profound for it. FACES PLACES is a buddy/road trip comedy about a deepening cross-generational friendship; it's also an insightful documentary, a mutual portrait of two unique artists whose visions harmonize. Agnès Varda, who was 88 at the time of shooting, is of course the legendary French New Wave pioneer (before even Chabrol's LE BEAU SERGE, there was Varda's LA POINTE COURTE, in 1955). JR, 33, is a street artist known for making giant, collaborative outdoor image installations. Together, they drive around the French countryside in JR's photo-booth van, which spits out large-format pictures of the people they meet at beaches, ports, factories, and villages, blowing the locals up into massive figures which they paste onto community landmarks. These "framing" structures, whether homes or stacks of cargo containers, nod to personal stories and struggles, and honor unsung people as heroes—dockworkers' wives, a postman, a woman from a mining family who refuses to let her home be demolished. The subjects get to talk back, and to see them interact with their magnified selves, the happiness on their faces, the wonder, or even the bemused ambivalence, is a beautiful thing. Mounting the portraits is a collective, social event in which the subjects themselves participate, creating spectacles as rich and full of humanity as Hollywood's are empty and dehumanized. They paste an image of Varda's late friend, the photographer Guy Bourdin, to the side of a German WWII bunker that's fallen onto a beach. In the image he's very young, almost a boy, and the bunker seems to cradle him. When they come back the next day, the image has been washed away by the tide. How fleeting is memory, how fleeting are the years. How fragile, finally, is life. That's why there's a certain urgency to their work: as JR says, we must get as many images as we can, before it's too late. Varda is happy, even as she finds her vision growing dim and her memory fading. She feels herself winding down, but her curiosity about other people remains undimmed. The two laugh a lot, teasing each other. He is irreverent with her in a somehow deeply respectful manner—which is to say, he's never patronizing. (You are good to old people, she tells him at one point, as they visit his grandmother, who's pushing 100). Their friendship is a real dialogue, and as it deepens, we sense he'd do anything for her. Well, almost anything: he lives behind dark glasses, and a running joke in the film has Varda trying to coax him out of them, just as she was once able to do with the young Jean-Luc Godard. Speaking of Godard, I mustn't reveal too much of a final surprise involving their pilgrimage to reconnect with him. (As a factory worker, admiring the group portrait of his co-workers, points out, art is meant to surprise us.) I'll only say the scene finds just the right strain of wistfulness on which to end, evoking, cryptically but movingly, happy days with Varda's late husband, the great Jacques Demy. FACES PLACES is about history and memory and the power of imagination. It is about art and life—the ways they mirror each other, and what's important in both: love and creativity and travel and leaping at chances, and seeing things that make you dream. It is about the life force—as, at its best, was the French New Wave. At one point Varda and JR recreate Godard's famous race through the Louvre, and I actually bounced in my seat and clapped. In the end, they photograph faces because faces are beautiful, and every face tells a story. It is as simple—and as profound—as that. (2017, 89 min, DCP Digital) SP
Alex Gerbaulet: Digging Deep (New Experimental Documentary)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm
The short works in this program display the likely influence of Claude Lanzmann’s SHOAH in their use of landscapes to consider the weight of history. In DEPTH OF FIELD (2016-17, 15 min), Gerbaulet and co-director Mareike Bernien present locations in contemporary Nuremberg while a narrator describes how neo-fascists murdered several immigrants in the city over a decade ago. There’s often an anonymous quality to the locations where the most atrocious acts took place, suggesting a visualization of historical amnesia. The narrator goes on to ponder, how do we design places so that they honor the history of what occurred there? That’s not an easy question, and the filmmakers don’t attempt to resolve it in DEPTH OF FIELD’s short running time, but they do conclude that it’s shameful to do nothing in the wake of violent, racist history. In an earlier work, DATTERODE (2005, 7 min), Gerbaulet visits a town in Germany where a Dutch Nazi collaborator lived to old age without being captured. The geometric organization of homes in the town evokes memories of fascist order; the images, when paired with narration about the collaborator’s crimes, are chilling. The longest work in the program, SCHICT (2015, 28 min), is the most ambitious as well as the most personal. The film tells the story of Gerbaulet’s parents, placing them within the context of 1970s German economic history. Combining stock footage, home movies, and newly shot images, Gerbaulet creates a compelling mosaic of national and personal memories. The narration is cold and detached (it’s delivered in the third person, as if to distract from the personal nature of the project), yet the impact is emotional nonetheless; Gerbaulet conveys the sad experience of repressing one’s feelings in the process of recovering from a traumatic experience. Also playing on the program is TATTOOED PRISONERS (2007, 14 min). Gerbaulet in person. (2005-17, approx. 65 min, Digital Projection) BS
Fernando Ayala's LOS TALLOS AMARGOS (Argentinean Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 5pm and Monday, 6pm
After winning Argentina's Silver Condor Award as the best film of 1956, LOS TALLOS AMARGOS was largely unknown outside of its home country for decades. Now, following its recent rediscovery by cinephile Fernando Martín Peña (the collector who found the complete METROPOLIS) and Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation, LOS TALLOS AMARGOS can justly take its place as one of the great noirs of the 1950s. In the film, a Buenos Aires journalist (Carlos Cores) finds himself involved in a correspondence school scam with a conniving Hungarian expat (Vassili Lambrinos). Whereas many noirs consider the psychology of men led astray by a chance encounter with a devilish woman, director Fernando Ayala's thriller echoes Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN in imagining a ripening fraternal connection between men whose jealousies and insecurities lead down a path to violence. In the film's knockout set piece, the journalist's paranoia is rendered as an expressionistic fever dream that involves alternating symbols of capitalism and fascism—cash is monolithic in scale, soldiers in a trance march towards their death, a young boy is seduced by military regalia, and so on. Cinematographer Ricardo Younis, a pupil of the great Gregg Toland, was recognized by the prestigious American Cinematographer magazine when LOS TALLOS AMARGOS was regarded in 2000 as one of the fifty best-photographed films of all time. (1957, 88 min, Restored 35mm Print) EF
Tod Browning’s THE UNKNOWN (Silent American Revival)
Film Studies Center (Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Tod Browning's masterful THE UNKNOWN is a perverted and haunting hallucination of a film in which Lon Chaney plays Alonzo, an armless knife-thrower for a traveling circus whose obsession with Nanon, his assistant--played with electrifying sensuality by Joan Crawford--grows more intense with every flick of his toe-thrown blades. But she loves the strongman, and Alonzo is secretly a serial killer specializing in strangulation. In roughly an hour's worth of runtime, Browning packs in a lifetime's worth of passion, bad life-choices, sexual fetishes, and unruly, dangerous bodies. Containing Chaney's greatest, most disturbing performance, the film is fatalistic, hopeless, and sublime. Live accompaniment by Kent Lambert and Sam Wagster. (1927, 63 min, 35mm) KB
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Mark Robson’s THE SEVENTH VICTIM (American Revival)
Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Tuesday, 7:30pm
In the estimation of Martin Scorsese, the low-budget horror film CAT PEOPLE (1942)—directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton—was as groundbreaking a film as CITIZEN KANE. Not only did the filmmakers repurpose B-movie budgetary constraints as a creative advantage, leaving the monster to the viewer's imagination and building effect through shadow and ambient noise; they brought psychological sophistication to an otherwise disreputable genre, making the horror a metaphor for (Scorsese's words again) "a woman's fear of her own sexuality." Lewton’s 1943 film (with director Mark Robson) THE SEVENTH VICTIM, set in the same New York milieu of CAT PEOPLE, is the tale of a young woman who comes to the city in search of her missing sister. Jonathan Rosenbaum has cited this as his favorite horror film, and he wrote of it: "What's remarkable about the poetry in THE SEVENTH VICTIM is that it manages to coexist gracefully with a fast-moving plot, over a dozen important characters who have complex and nuanced relationships, and a running time of only 71 minutes...The film feels both cozy and oppressive as it deals frankly with one character's death wish, familial and romantic love, the power of a cult to drive a member toward suicide, the sustaining warmth of a circle of friends, and the seductive allure of both art and oblivion. Here, as elsewhere in Lewton's oeuvre, belief in the supernatural is used mainly to evoke, contain, or account for a certain kind of emotional excess." Preceded by Dave Fleischer’s 1931 cartoon BIMBO’S INITIATION (7 min, 16mm). (1943, 71 min, 35mm Archival Print) BS
Howard Hawks' TWENTIETH CENTURY (Classic Revival)
Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) – Wednesday, 1 and 7:30pm (Free Admission)
Howard Hawks is usually credited with having a hand in the invention and/or popularization of the screwball comedy, but more important, within his own oeuvre, is the fact that he shepherded the "genre" from TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934) to a burnished modernity six years later in HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940). Whereas HIS GIRL, with its subtle but nonetheless present heart of darkness (corruption, obsession, madness, murder), seems very much of its and our time, TWENTIETH CENTURY, by comparison, has a foot—like the New York-Chicago passenger train that it's named after—in the nineteenth: in blackout sketches and quack entrepreneurial optimism. Far from making TWENTIETH CENTURY a relic, however, this quality of being out of time makes its every rediscovery a pleasure: viewing it lets us breathe an air more foreign and surprising than HIS GIRL's, which has, by so becoming so definitively the "face" of sophisticated screwball, turned invisible, entered into our language. TWENTIETH's popeyed frenzy is clear and brittle by comparison: Carole Lombard and John Barrymore spar with operatic desperation, not urbane restraint. Since Hawks' comedies tend to get revived with a certain regularity, it's difficult to imagine that there are many fans left who know this side of his work mainly from BRINGING UP BABY (1938) and HIS GIRL, but in case there are any holdouts, here is a golden opportunity. (91 min, 35mm) JD
Brian De Palma’s SCARFACE (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm
The director’s second biggest theatrical hit, and the one with the longest life as gangsta staple and dorm room wallpaper (not to mention decades of legendarily risible censored AMC schedule filling.) De Palma needed a grabber after the financial disaster of BLOW OUT, and he delivered in spades: a headline-ripping, three-ring circus of excess, causing an epic battle with the MPAA over its ultraviolent set-pieces and spare-no-expense disreputability. It was, and still is, despised by all the right people, and a few of the other kind, too. It’s not seen by De Palma partisans as anywhere near the purest representation of his sensibility, and they have a point; whole sequences roll by in a logy, somewhat rote haze. One can spend stretches of the film daydreaming about what it could have been if directed by its writer, Oliver Stone, in full Warners-meets-SALVADOR punch-and-parry tabloid mode. But despite those passages, SCARFACE still has its fascinations, beginning with its star. Nothing quite prepared 1983 audiences for the 180-degree change in Al Pacino’s basic attack, his very mien, his transformation from supreme underplaying to jabbing, bobbing, ostentatious bombast. The accent is broad and ludicrous, but the kinesis is unfettered, utterly free; for better or worse, this is the film where he became a wholly different kind of actor, and it is nothing if not captivating. And many of those set-pieces really are something; De Palma’s native willingness to go there, to deliver the goods, to break out the chainsaws, grenade launchers, and defenestrations with a childlike glee, a delinquent’s love of pissing off the squares, is appreciated if you’re just plain in the mood to get off. Even the three-hour running time works if you feel it as a cokey hangover instead of the rush that you go to a Scorsese for. It is, in the final analysis, a deeply strange affair when looked at in the right light. With Michelle Pfeiffer in the first bloom of career luminescence, F. Murray Abraham as a guy you can’t wait to see die, a bonhomous Robert Loggia, and the great actor Harris Yulin, who delivers the finest expulsive “Fuck you!” in the whole of American cinema. (1983, 170 min, 35mm) JG
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's TROPICAL MALADY (Thai Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday and Monday, 8pm
Having almost single-handedly brought Thai film to the eyes of the world, yet working with little support from the once-moribund Thai film industry, and even facing open hostility from Thai authorities and censors, Weerasethakul has assembled an almost unique methodology, bringing together elements of a folky, naturalistic, aleatory cinema with extreme formalist structuring and stylization—though in both modes evincing a deep concern for stillness, landscape, and gesture. MALADY features a two-part structure, much like AW's most rapturous and creepy masterpiece-to-date, SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (2006), and much as in SYNDROMES, the two parts of MALADY tell more or less the same story, albeit with vastly different styles and emphases. The opening section begins the story of a burgeoning romance between an elusive young provincial man and a soldier stationed in his village, while the second plays out the soldier's pursuit of his recalcitrant object of desire as a minimalist folktale: a quest for a fierce, shape-changing tiger-shaman through a mythical landscape peopled with spirits. Essential work, and essential viewing. (2004, 118 min, 35mm) JD
Haile Gerima's SANKOFA (African Revival)
Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Saturday, 3pm (Free Admission/Sold Out/Waiting List*)
Casually described as a masterpiece in the UCLA Film & Television Archive's program notes for their recent touring “L.A. Rebellion” series, SANKOFA has provoked passionate devotion from African American audiences while barely making a dent with the white critical establishment. The acknowledged landmarks of the L.A. Rebellion, such as KILLER OF SHEEP, BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, and Gerima's thesis film BUSH MAMA, cultivated their reputations through non-theatrical play—classrooms, academic conferences, community screenings and the like. Other filmmakers like Jamaa Fanaka made inroads through traditional exploitation and teenpic frameworks in urban grindhouses. By contrast, SANKOFA played in competition at the Berlin Film Festival but found no distributor in the US. Gerima wound up releasing it ad hoc through his own Mypehduh Films—renting out movie theaters in African American communities, partnering with local groups to spread word-of-mouth, maximizing box office through personal appearances. It screened to sell-out crowds and ultimately grossed $3.5 million. Essentially continuing the four-wall "race films" strategy pioneered by Oscar Micheaux, SANKOFA brought the tent-show tradition to its psychotronic, politicized conclusion. When SANKOFA came to Chicago in September 1994, the Hyde Park Herald promised that it would screen "exclusively in Loews Hyde Park Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave., until people stop going to see it." By the time of that declaration, it had already been playing for three weeks and showed no signs of dropping off. (It even performed well on Monday nights—typically the slowest slot for any theater.) That Gerima's film achieved this level of business while playing alongside FORREST GUMP and TIME COP (!) in a neighborhood movie theater marks SANKOFA as something fundamentally out-of-time—a grassroots, showbiz phenomenon in the shadow of ever-deafening Sundance hype. That SANKOFA received new attention via the UCLA-sponsored screenings at the moment when pundits everywhere described 12 YEARS A SLAVE as the finest movie made on the subject (and implicitly, the only real contestant) was surely no accident. Presented by the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago (ECAC) and the Chicago Cultural Alliance. (1993, 125 min, 35mm) KAW
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With Haile Gerima in person, and followed by a discussion featuring Gerima, artist Kerry James Marshall (production designer and props person for the film), Jacqueline Stewart (UofC Cinema Studies & Film History) and Adom Getachew (UofC Political Theory).
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* The screening is at capacity for RSVPs. There is a wait list; to join the list, email inheritchicago@chicagoculturalalliance.org and show up 15 minutes before the event to see if spaces become available.
Fred Zinnemann’s FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Friday, 7 and 9:30pm, and Sunday, 1:30pm
Taking place in Hawaii in 1941, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY follows Private Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) and his wrongful mistreatments for refusing to join his company’s inter-unit boxing team, while one of his superiors (Burt Lancaster) falls for their captain’s wife. Fred Zinnemann’s film aims to follow the army at a smaller, more personal level as the looming shadow of WWII lingers ominously. Prewitt, and his refusal to box (due to a prior incident in which he blinded his opponent), serves as an analogy for the USA’s pre-conflict involvement in the war. Despite all instigations and misguided provocations aimed at him, Prewitt (much like America) remains steadfast in his pacifism. Amidst the Korean War that was occurring during the film’s production, Zinnemann’s film takes a pro-war approach. He offers an intimate perspective, which provides an empathetic viewpoint towards the army. Soldiers and those close to them are examined closely in a manner not usually provided during war films. Much like TORA, TORA, TORA, the film truly shines during its scenes depicting the attack that occurred at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Intermixing production footage with actual bombing footage, Zinnemann replicates the horrors of that day in the most realistic way possible. There is a passion that is palpable throughout FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, one that extends beyond the reaches of on-screen romance and fiery tempers. This passion resonates as a form of patriotism and exemplifies the national pride felt during that era. (1953, 118 min, 35mm) KC
James Whale's THE OLD DARK HOUSE (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
James Whale's tongue-in-cheek THE OLD DARK HOUSE stands tall in the lineage of haunted mansion horror, even though it's also a parody of that sub-genre—but leave it to Whale to make a movie that succeeds at multiple, often contradictory, purposes. As demonstrated by THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) and lesser-known masterworks like WATERLOO BRIDGE (1931) and ONE MORE RIVER (1934), Whale was capable of covering a wide range of styles and emotions within relatively short running times: of all the directors to make their greatest films in the 1930s, he remains one of the most modern and thoroughly surprising. The cast, playing well in Whale's refined style adapted from early 20th century British theater, includes Boris Karloff (in his first major role after FRANKENSTEIN), Gloria Stuart, and Charles Laughton. In an example of Whale's subversive gender politics (which were at least four decades ahead of their time), this also features the stage actress Elspeth Dudgeon playing a man. (1932, 71 min, DCP Digital) BS
George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
George Romero would go on to make better films than NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD—movies that suggest the unlikely fusion of Mark Twain’s all-American satire, Michael Powell’s fanciful curiosity, and John Cassavetes’ intimate, handmade aesthetic within the confines of the horror genre. But his debut is still an object lesson in independent filmmaking: Rather than cover up his distance from Hollywood (budgetary and geographical), Romero embraces it. The resulting film boasts a sharp sense of location—the suburbs and rural areas outlying Pittsburgh—and an understanding that the banal makes the horror all the more scary when it arrives. Much has been written about the radical implications of casting a black actor to play the heroic, gun-toting lead in 1968, though Romero (one of the few popular U.S. filmmakers so consistently open about his radical politics) claims to have no political motivation in this decision. More focused is the film’s pointed anger at middle-class conformity, which gives the film its enduring bitter rage. (1968, 96 min, DCP Digital) BS
Lina Wertmüller's SEVEN BEAUTIES (Italian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm
"Oh, yeah." A pitch-black sex tragicomedy, writer/director Lina Wertmüller's outrageous SEVEN BEAUTIES is one of the key films of the '70s. It first found me in the mid-'90s, screened for me by an art lover from the '60s generation who was scandalized I'd never seen it. I vividly recall him intoning "oh, yeah" with gusto along with that audacious opening: a rocking, spoken litany of societal types who dampen down the day (Enzo Jannacci's "Quelli che..."), playing over a montage of Hitler, Mussolini, and WWII footage. A perverse, cynical picaresque, incoherent in its politics, SEVEN BEAUTIES features Giancarlo Giannini in a great comic (and dramatic) performance as the craven, vain Pasqualino, who finds his skill at saving his own skin put to the ultimate test when he winds up in a Nazi concentration camp. The key set piece has him hilariously attempting to woo the sadistic, impassive, massive commandant (Shirley Stoller, as unforgettable here as she was in Leonard Kastle's THE HONEYMOON KILLERS). In delightful flashbacks, Pasqualino, who fancies himself a gangster and a ladies' man, struts around pre-war Naples like a cross between Marcello Mastroianni and John Cleese. He has seven sisters, shot by Wertmüller as Felliniesque grotesques. (She began her film career as an assistant director on the towering 8½.) He stumbles into murdering his sister's pimp, then incompetently dismembers the flatulent body. Back in the hell of the concentration camp, Fernando Rey plays the anarchist prisoner who mounts an unforgettable last stand for "man in disorder." Wertmüller was all the rage internationally in the mid-'70s, and SEVEN BEAUTIES even racked up multiple Academy Award nominations, including best director (the first ever such nod for a woman). Her critical stock, down for years, may be going back up. Look at her vivid colors and camera angles, her thrilling deployment of closeups and music, her rhythmic cutting and the way she moves the camera. SEVEN BEAUTIES still has great brio and power. Drenched in pessimism and irony even as it strikes a blow for the life force and against authority, it's a true emblem of the '70s. (1975, 116 min, DCP Digital) SP
Ceyda Torun’s KEDI (New Turkish Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 2:15pm
In Istanbul, Turkey, feral cats can be found everywhere; however, unlike the rats of our fair Chicago, these animals experience a peaceful co-habitation with the populace that, for some, borders on the reverential. KEDI packages Istanbul’s admiration for its felines in several vignettes and is meant for cat lovers and non-cat lovers alike. The stories told are uplifting. For some of the interviewees, these cats represent a tangential relationship between themselves and their beliefs in religious omnipotence. The cinematography found in KEDI is superb and beautiful. At times providing a cat’s eye view of the city, the camerawork bounces from rooftop to rooftop, scurries up trees, and dives down pathways that only the nimble footed could traverse. Combined with the staccato score, KEDI has succinct and upbeat tempo. The film follows seven cats’ lives and the nuances of their individual personalities are allowed to flourish on screen. Ceyda Torun explores the circumstances of how these animals came to become so prevalent in Istanbul and to paint a portrait of why their existence is a joyous thing for everyone. KEDI is the kind of film that gives essence to mankind’s love for cats and showcases all of the natural and urban beauty that can be found in Istanbul. (2016, 80 min, DCP Digital) KC
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Also at the Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) this week: Archivist Rick Prelinger presents his documentary/audience interactive film LOST LANDSCAPES OF LOS ANGELES (2016, Unconfirmed Running Time) on Thursday at 7pm. Free admission.
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) screens Madsen Minax’s 2017 film KAIROS DIRT & THE ERRANT VACUUM (90 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 8pm, with Minax in person.
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) screens Femi Odugbemi’s 2016 Nigerian film GIDI BLUES (103 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 7pm, with Odugbemi in person. Free admission.
Asian Pop Up Cinema presents Choi Kook-Hee’s 2016 South Korean film SPLIT (123 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7pm at AMC River East 21. www.asianpopupcinema.org
The Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema continues this week and runs through November 5 at various locations in Chicago, Glenview, and Skokie. Full schedule at http://israelifilmchi.org.
The Chicago International Children's Film Festival opens on Friday and runs through November 5 at Facets Cinémathèque and other locations. Visit www.facets.org for a full schedule.
Comfort Film at Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents 38-Hour Screening: A Thing of Great Power and Size has Gone Missing (October 7, 2001 - Present) from 8am Friday through 10pm Saturday. For the event “Lucky Pierre will screen for 38 hours the highest grossing films for each of the war years. The films have been re-edited to remove human bodies while maintaining the original runtimes.” Free admission.
Filmfront (1740 W. 18th St.) presents the final of three marathon screenings in the series The Lips, The Teeth, The Tip of the Tongue: Trauma and Memory in the Context of Horror on Sunday. The film titles will be announced on Friday. Screenings at 2, 4, 6, and 8pm.
Black Cinema House (at the Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave.) presents The Horror on Friday at 7pm. The screening is comprised of Lewis Vaughn’s SILVERHEAD (2016, 20 min) and Monika Estrella Negra’s FLESH (2016, 15 min). Free admission.
Culture Connection 360 presents Tariq Nasheed’s 2017 documentary 1804: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF HAITI (115 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 7pm at the Studio Movie Grill (210 W. 87th St.) Tickets and more information at www.cultureconnection360.com.
Also at the Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) this week: Kenny Ortega’s 1993 film HOCUS POCUS (96 min, Digital Projection) is on Tuesday at 7pm. Free admission. www.northbrook.info/events/film
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Mark Stokes’ 2017 documentary REVOLUTIONS OF THE NIGHT: THE ENIGMA OF HENRY DARGER (104 min, DCP Digital), José Maria Cabral’s 2017 Dominican Republic film WOODPECKERS (107 min, DCP Digital), and Reiner Holzemer’s 2017 documentary DRIES (90 min, DCP Digital) all play for a week; Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi’s 2014 animated film THE BOXTROLLS (96 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 3pm and Tuesday at 6pm, with a lecture by film scholar Donald Crafton at the Tuesday show; and Alfred Werker and Anthony Mann’s 1948 film HE WALKED BY NIGHT (78 min, Restored 35mm Print) is on Saturday at 3:15pm and Wednesday at 6pm.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Jeff Baena’s 2017 film THE LITTLE HOURS (90 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7 and 9pm and Sunday at 4pm; Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 German film THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (124 min, 35mm) is on Sunday at 7pm; Wojciech Has’ 1973 Polish film THE HOURGLASS SANATORIUM (124 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 7pm; Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 Spanish/Mexican/US film PAN’S LABYRINTH (118 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 9:30pm; David Gordon Green’s 2000 film GEORGE WASHINGTON (90 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 7pm; and Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (124 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 9pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s 2017 UK/Polish animated film LOVING VINCENT (94 min, DCP Digital) continues; Jim Sharman’s 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight and Tuesday at 9:30pm; Adam Green’s 2017 film VICTOR CROWLEY (83 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight; and Kenny Ortega’s 1993 film HOCUS POCUS (96 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 7pm, in an audience-interactive screening.
Sinema Obscura presents a screening of short films and trailers on Friday at 8pm at Antique Taco (1360 N. Milwaukee Ave.); and the shorts program TV Party 10 "All Hallow's Eve" on Monday at 7:30pm at Township (2200 N. California Ave.).
The Gorton Community Center in Lake Forest (400 E. Illinois Rd., Lake Forest, IL) screens Chris Columbus’ 2001 film HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE (152 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at 2pm; and Luc Jacquet’s 2015 French documentary ANTARCTICA: ICE & SKY (89 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 7pm.
ONGOING FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
The SAIC Sullivan Galleries (33 S. State St., 7th Floor) presents Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness through December 8. The show features many short films and video installations by the SAIC graduate, along with a selection of photography, sketches, and archival materials.
The Graham Foundation presents David Hartt’s installation in the forest through January 6 at the Madlener House (4 W. Burton Place). The show features photography, sculpture, and a newly commissioned film.
The Art Institute of Chicago (Modern Wing Galleries) has Dara Birnbaum’s 1979 two-channel video KISS THE GIRLS: MAKE THEM CRY (6 min) currently on view.
CINE-LIST: October 27 - November 2, 2017
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Kyle Cubr, Jeremy Davies, Eric Fuerst, Jim Gabriel, Scott Pfeiffer