CRUCIAL VIEWING
Ernst Lubitsch’s MONTE CARLO (Silent American Revival)
The Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Monday, 7:30pm [Re-scheduled from October]
I had the opportunity to view a silent version of Ernst Lubitsch’s MONTE CARLO while attempting to rewatch the sound version; as fate would have it, I was alone, and the convoluted sound system attached to my less-than-deserving television was hooked up to the record player, something I have no idea how to adjust. Thus I watched the last 40 minutes in silence with the subtitles turned on, frustrated with my home theater set-up but amused by the irony of the situation. MONTE CARLO was Lubitsch’s second sound film—and a musical at that, a genre he helped pioneer—yet a silent version was intentionally produced both for foreign distribution and theaters not yet ready for the talkie takeover. This was common practice at the time, but screenings of these wordless iterations are rare; it’s especially exciting to view one of a film heralded for its innovative use of the new technology (see, for example, its first song, “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” which, as Dave Kehr described it in his review for the Chicago Reader, is “begun by the wheels of a train, picked up by [Jeanette MacDonald], and carried by the peasants in every field the train passes through”), made by a man whose purposeful silents are regarded as some of the best of the era. MacDonald stars as a countess-cum-runaway bride who flees to Monte Carlo after leaving her dopey prince fiancé at the altar. She’s rich in newfound independence, but poor in...well, in money, so she plans to regain her fortune by gambling what little she has left. She soon meets a count (Jack Buchanan), who then presents himself as a hairdresser to get closer to her. The silent version, which is likely a mix of the sound version and newly shot silent footage, is said to follow the plot of the sound version minus the songs, though I don’t know for sure—no one does, except maybe those who saw it at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater screening in 2015. Rare indeed, and infinitely better than a muted DVD. Preceded by the pilot episode of Jay Ward Productions’ television show Fractured Flickers (1961, 24 min, 16mm). Live accompaniment by Jay Warren. (1930, 71 min, Restored 35mm Print) KS
Mark Webber's FLESH AND BLOOD (New American)
Facets Cinémathèque – Check Venue website for showtimes
Mark Webber's friends and family members play versions of themselves in FLESH AND BLOOD, a candid, moving drama that also carries a personal dimension for me (see below). On the one hand, Webber imagines himself as someone he never was: a man who's just been released from a five-year prison stretch, struggling to readjust to life in depressed North Philadelphia, which appears unremittingly wintry and bleak. On the other, as in real life, Webber's character was raised, sometimes in abandoned buildings and cars, by the well-known anti-poverty activist Cheri Honkala. I knew Cheri a bit 20 years ago, during my own activist days, and I admired her, then as now. In the film, as in life, she was a teenage, single mother, often homeless, and a survivor of chronic domestic abuse, first at the hands of her mom's boyfriend, then from Mark's dad, a heroin addict. She comes off in the film very much as I remember her: warm and good-humored in private, fiery on the barricades, and unreasonable, in a good way, in the face of injustice. I don't know if she'd say she's an actress, but she gives quite an affecting performance here. Much as she did in life, Honkala runs for Vice President on the 2016 Green Party ticket. There's footage of her in action at real-life demonstrations. (If more had been made of this, the film could have had a MEDIUM COOL-like frisson.) Webber's half-brother Guillermo is a self-professed nerd, a bright, bespectacled, skinny 13-year-old with braces, curly hair, and a huge smile. He's recently been diagnosed with Asperger's. I kind of fell in love with this kid; he has a nice, ironic sense of humor about himself. After he tells his brother he wants to grow up to be a filmmaker, Webber buys him a video camera, and he starts interviewing family members, making a documentary about his life. There's a heartbreaking moment when he turns the camera on himself and talks about being bullied—how it makes him feel depressed, suicidal, and even (for this self-proclaimed "pacifist") homicidal. Webber specializes in what he calls "reality cinema," blending the dynamics of real-life relationships into fictional narratives. He's looking for something more raw and authentic than we get in conventional films. The documentary-fiction hybrid is not new, nor is Webber's approach to it the most bravura I've ever seen. Yet he forges an exceptionally emotionally complex variant of the form. When his work hits, it is deeply poignant, even cathartic. When we watch Guillermo, we say to ourselves, this is a real kid. When Webber fights with his mom, they're really fighting. (And at the same time, they're performing, on some level; but isn't that just a version of what we all do everyday?) He confronts her over her parenting choices, blaming her for his sadness, his pain, and the fact he can't love himself, worrying she's traumatizing Guillermo anew. (One thing the film is about is how cycles of pain, trauma, and addiction repeat.) On a meta level, I think it speaks volumes about what a good mother Honkala was that Webber grew up to forge a successful career as an actor, and FLESH AND BLOOD is his fourth feature as a writer/director. When Honkala tells a horror story about Mark's dad, who was 30 when she was 15, terrorizing her and little Mark, the fact that the story is true raises the stakes for a scene late in the film, when Mark reunites with his father after almost 30 years. We see before us a rather enfeebled older man, his arms covered in tattoos and patches from dialysis, who now seems kind, even gentle. His regrets, and his love, burn on his face as he attempts father-son banter. He seems to have found some peace of mind, a measure of self-acceptance, his drug-and-alcohol demons long stilled. This man behaved horribly. This man is not an actor. The scene's reality complicates what we feel as we watch, which we can't quite put our finger on, any more than Webber can—until we realize, with a real jolt, that if feels like forgiveness. Here is life unfolding before our eyes, and it leaves most Hollywood scenes in the dust. If you need to see a film that's hopeful about human connections, FLESH AND BLOOD's vision of a unique American family, and how they keep going, with love, is for you. (2017, 91 min, Video Projection) SP
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Rob Christopher's PAUSE OF THE CLOCK (New American)
Transistor (5224 N. Clark St.) – Sunday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Originating as a student film, PAUSE OF THE CLOCK was started in 1995-96 by Rob Christopher and then abandoned after funds ran out, the partially edited original 16mm reels and audio tapes languishing, mostly forgotten, in storage. It's safe to say that when he returned to the project twenty years later, his distance and maturity and honed critical acumen allowed him to create a final product that would have been impossible for his early-20s self to achieve. PAUSE OF THE CLOCK has been billed as a time capsule of a film, a work produced in two different centuries and encapsulating a vision of the past as urgently present through its fresh, present-tense look at a mid-1990s world that no longer exists. That sells it short. Central to the film's power and expert manipulation is how it plays with as many as four different chronologies, different nows, overlaid upon one another simultaneously. There is the now of the ostensible plot line, which tells of a student filmmaker, Rob, played by Christopher, making a film called “Crueler Than Truth” with his friends, starring his roommate Dylan (Dylan Lorenz) and shot by his friend Tchavdar (Tchavdar Georgiev). Over the course of the shoot, Dylan reads through Rob's diaries and learns that his character in “Crueler Than Truth” is based on Rob's own life. There is the now of the film within the film, in which two young lovers gently explore their sexualities and learn to come to terms with the overwhelming beauty of nature surrounding them. There is the now of the original shoot, with Christopher and Georgiev collaborating on some of the most picturesque and expressive cinematography I've ever seen in a student production. And, most importantly, there is the now of Christopher's return to the material, refashioning the raw mass of footage into a network of overlapping congruences and ambiguities worthy of the best gamesmanship of Rohmer and Resnais, for while the putative central relationship is between the characters of Rob and Dylan, Christopher's dangerously seductive quadruple narrative builds itself out of layers of interference and implication into a covert examination of how far a film's camerawork and editing can be in tension before it deconstructs itself into incoherence. Georgiev's gorgeous and intricate patterns of shadow and space create meshes of autumnal languorousness, currents of liquid movement that gently explore the ways a face can betray a feeling, the ways a thought can emerge from the hidden recesses of a gesture. As sensuous as the camerawork is, the precise, entomological editing threatens to excise the erotics of the visuals just as they are on the point of emerging. Christopher, working with editor Petr O'Sirhc, turns the warmth and intimacy of the visuals into a clinical investigation, dispassionately allowing events to unfold until they reveal their own absurdity and exactly no further, juxtaposing moments of despair and passion in such a way as to make them seem the love affairs of strange, extinct civilizations. In essence, the master game Christopher is staging is between the utopian dream of a unified, beautiful existence, once that can always be recuperated and is always worth reconstructing, no matter what the cost might be, and the disassembled, patchwork charade of life we pretend we don't lead. Time, PAUSE OF THE CLOCK insists, scars and heals to exactly the same degree; this film itself is an intricately sutured scar formed into 78 short minutes of astonishment. Christopher in person. (2016, 78 min, Digital Projection) KB
Ruben Östlund's THE SQUARE (New Swedish)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
In Ruben Östlund's THE SQUARE, Claes Bang gives an exceptional comic and dramatic performance as Christian, the long-suffering, hapless director of a contemporary art museum in Stockholm. The movie is a wild, suspenseful satire of the art world that's also a cringe comedy: Östlund, the audacious provocateur who most recently gave us FORCE MAJEURE, a withering comedy of manners about masculinity, cheerfully accepts a definition of his aesthetic as a cross between Larry David and Michael Haneke. As we meet Christian, his museum has acquired a new installation: a "relational aesthetics" piece entitled The Square, to be carved into the cobblestones in front of the museum. A plaque reads, "The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations." Based on an exhibition Östlund actually co-mounted at Sweden's Vandalorum museum, the Square is an imagined "free zone" of humanitarianism, where if you ask for help, passersby must give it—where you could, say, leave your luggage if you're tired, without fear of its being stolen. Of course, the principles of the Square are the ones most often violated in public encounters, where structural societal inequities result in people living such different lives—lives freighted with material hierarchies that neither the Square, nor liberal niceties, can paper over. In fact, modern social convention dictates distrusting others, and tuning out cries for help, especially from the homeless, interactions with whom make up some of this movie's most memorably ironic scenes. Since the sense that anything can happen is a chief pleasure of the film, I'll restrict the plot summary to just a taste: to retrieve stolen items tracked to an apartment complex in a rough part of town, Christian's friend/employee (Christopher Læssø) hits on a brilliant, if ill-advised, scheme: they'll drop a threatening letter through each mail slot in the building. It's a lark, really, but the plan quickly goes south, and keeps going. At two-and-a-half hours, this big movie, winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, certainly takes its time to hoist Christian on his petard, yet it's so well-paced, and Östlund so deft at playing with our minds, that we're always engaged. It helps that Bang is so spot-on and charismatic: Christian may be a bit of a fraud, but he's good-humored and, really, rather sympathetic: he just never really expected to find himself put on the spot. Gradually, he becomes aware of the fear and prejudices underlying his own veneer of sheltered, well-heeled liberalism. Some set pieces are so crazy we sense they could only be based on real life, as in the scene where a ballroom full of guests, including Dominic West as a visiting artist, is terrorized by a performance artist pretending to be a monkey (Terry Notary of the PLANET OF THE APES reboots): it's based on a Ukrainian performance artist who, playing a dog, went around actually biting people at a gala. That scene allows Östlund to examine the bystander effect, as well as to forgo realism altogether, as he does in a gobsmacking sex scene with a journalist played by Elizabeth Moss (what a whip-smart actress, what timing). If THE SQUARE is occasionally slightly pat and even facile, as a satire on the breakdown of the social contract, its aim is true. At its best, the skewering bears a dark moral complexity and the knowing gimlet eye of the insider. In fact, I suspect the people who get the biggest kick out of it will be folks who work at contemporary art museums themselves. (2017, 151 min, DCP Digital) SP
VACATION/ACTUALLY Double Feature
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Jeremiah S. Checik's CHRISTMAS VACATION (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm
It may seem odd to compare the first (and by far the best) of John Hughes' Christmas themed screenplays to REMEMBER THE NIGHT, but here goes. In Mitchell Leisen's holiday classic (penned by Preston Sturges) there's a pivotal scene where Lee, the thief played by Barbara Stanwyck, has just discovered that her hopes for a tearful Christmas reunion with her estranged family are utterly misguided. She's desperate, completely broken up. Then John, played by Fred MacMurray, who has taken it upon himself to escort Lee on this cockeyed errand, makes a decision; as casually as he can, tells her that she's welcome to spend Christmas with his own family. She cries, "Gee!" and collapses into his arms. But rather than linger on this sentimental moment, Leisen immediately dissolves to a close up of a painting of John's cross-eyed grandfather. This dissolve to the wacky painting immediately wipes away any whiff of heavy-handedness; in effect, comedy has been used as a tool to "sober up" the movie. Hughes does exactly the same thing in CHRISTMAS VACATION. Clark has locked himself in the attic, watching in vain as his family drives away for a holiday excursion without him. Stuck where he is, what can he do but dig out an old 8mm projector and watch some home movies from his childhood? As he rediscovers the tender scenes of yesteryear and Ray Charles croons "That Spirit of Christmas" on the soundtrack, something remarkable happens. A movie which up until now has been silly, vulgar, and sarcastic suddenly becomes downright, unapologetically sentimental. For a moment. But then the family returns and Beverly pulls down the attic door that Clark happens to be sitting on ...wham-o. CHRISTMAS VACATION also captures to a tee that hothouse, semi-claustrophobic atmosphere caused when too many relatives take up residence together during the holidays. "Can I refill your eggnog for you? Get you something to eat? Drive you out to the middle of nowhere and leave you for dead?" (1989, 97 min, 35mm) RC
Richard Curtis' LOVE ACTUALLY (British Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 9:15pm
Of the world of modern romantic comedies, so shaped by Richard Curtis' pen (BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY, NOTTING HILL, FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL), I once knew naught. This, despite my great affection for the rom-coms of the 30s and 40s. It took a connoisseur like my wife to clue me in. Upon first viewing LOVE ACTUALLY, Curtis' maiden attempt at wielding the camera, I was scandalized. "Curtis, you have no shame!" I cried. It took repeated administerings over several holiday seasons. Slowly, my amazement grew to fascination, and pretty soon I was clamoring for it as soon as December rolled around. Today, I believe it to be one of the age's great entertainments, a milestone in the canon of UK-US Christmas pop culture. It dawned on me that it was Curtis' utter lack of shame that constituted his greatness. He is completely sincere; he cannot be embarrassed. He achieves moments of real dramatic and psychological verisimilitude, then happily chucks them in favor of fantasy. I began to see the film as a modern, cheerily explicit, sexy equivalent of my cherished P.G. Wodehouse novels. Like Wodehouse, Curtis breezily choreographs a complex farandole of plot and subplot, stacking and spinning ten storylines at once. Even after umpteen viewings, one spots new connections, marvels at Curtis' conducting of the relationships and destinies of a bevy of Londoners, embodied by pleasing players like Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightly, Laura Linney and Bill Nighy. LOVE ACTUALLY is a film that even the vinegary David Thomson, in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls "a triumph." It will restore your faith in humanity. It's very funny, and it gets you in the mood. My wife reckons that the transcendent detail is the way the "enigmatic" Carl (Rodrigo Santoro) plays with Linney's hair as they dance. In response, I can only muse happily over how much I still have to learn. (2003, 135 min, 35mm) SP
WHITE/WONDERFUL Double Feature
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Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, Check Venue website for showtimes
Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) SP
Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, Check Venue website for showtimes
Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself--a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. Ironically, it's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film, it should be noted), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) BS
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IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (Video Projection) is also showing at the Gorton Community Center in Lake Forest (400 E. Illinois Rd., Lake Forest, IL) on Thursday at 7pm.
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WHITE CHRISTMAS (Video Projection) is also showing in the Park Ridge Classic Film Series at the Pickwick Theatre (5 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge) on Tuesday at 2 and 7:30pm.
Tommy Wiseau's THE ROOM (Cult Revival)
Music Box Theatre - Friday, Midnight
A woman announces, "Well, the results came back - I definitely have breast cancer," and that's the last we ever hear of it. A group of men don tuxedos for no apparent reason and then toss around a football. A drug dealer threatens to kill someone and then disappears for the rest of the movie. Upon awaking, a man picks up a rose from his night table, smells it, and throws it on top of his sleeping girlfriend. A recurring rooftop "exterior" is obviously a studio set, with a backdrop of the San Francisco skyline digitally composited behind the action. Accidental surrealism can be even more potent than the conscious kind, and THE ROOM is some kind of zenith of its type, the equal to anything Ed Wood committed to celluloid. Although what's on screen looks like it cost about $14.99, the actual budget was upwards of $6 million, in part because actor/producer/writer/director Wiseau shot simultaneously in 35mm and HD (supposedly he didn't understand the differences between the two formats). Now the film has become a worthy successor to THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, with enthusiastic fans performing a series of rituals at each screening. Ross Morin, assistant professor of film studies at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, calls it "one of the most important films of the past decade. Through the complete excess in every area of production, THE ROOM reveals to us just how empty, preposterous and silly the films and television programs we've watched over the past couple of decades have been." (2003, 99 min, 35mm) RC
Ceyda Torun’s KEDI (New Turkish Documentary)
The Gene Siskel Film Center “On Location” at the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel (12 S. Michigan Ave.) – Sunday, 3pm
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, DVD Projection) KC
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Nightingale (1984 N. Milwaukee Ave.) screens Jimmy Schaus’ 2017 independent feature ST. FRANCIS HEARS A NOISE (130 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at 6pm, with Schaus in person; and presents A Very Kuchar Christmas: Seasonal Potluck and Screening on Thursday at 6:30pm (screening at 7:30pm), which will include a program of works by experimental filmmaker George Kuchar. Screening are: XMAS 1987 NEW YEARS (1987), FILL THY CRACK WITH WHITENESS (1989), and DINGLEBERRY JINGLES (1994) (approx. 46 min total, Video Projection). Free admission for the Kuchar/Potluck.
Elastic Arts (3429 W. Diversey, #208) hosts HOT Signals in YOUR Area: All of Our Computers Are Singing on Friday at 7pm. The program is a series of realtime audio/visual performances by students in SAIC’s Realtime class. Free admission.
The monthly Pride Film Festival takes place on Tuesday at 7:30pm at the Pride Arts Center (4139 N. Broadway). Screening are: ADULT (Jamieson Pearce, Australia, 12 min), CAS (Joris van den Berg, Netherlands, 50 min), POOL (Leandro Goddinho, Brazil, 29 min), and THE CYCLE (Benjamin Zhang and Dewi Tan, US, 13 min).
The Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens Juan Cavestany’s 2013 Spanish film PEOPLE IN PLACES (83 min, DVD Projection) on Tuesday at 6pm. Free admission; and Eva Vizcarra’s 2015 Spanish documentary THE ARCHITECT OF NEW YORK (60 min, DVD Projection) on Wednesday at 6pm. Free admission for both, but reservations are required for ARCHITECT. RSVP at http://www.brownpapertickets.com.
Black Cinema House (at the Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave.) screens episodes of the 1987-93 television series A Different World on Friday at 7pm. Followed by a discussion. Free admission.
At the Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) this week: Destin Daniel Cretton’s 2017 film THE GLASS CASTLE (127 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 2 and 7:3pm; and John Ford’s 1952 film THE QUIET MAN (129 min, DCP Digital) is on Wednesday at 1 and 7:30pm. Free admission.
The Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave.) screens Katrin Rothe’s 2016 German/Swiss animated documentary 1917 – THE REAL OCTOBER (90 min, Video Projection) on Friday at 5:30pm. Free admission.
Alliance Française (54 W. Chicago Ave.) screens Xavier de Lauzanne’s 2016 French film LITTLE GEMS [Les pépites] (98 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 6:30pm. Preceded by Michelle Fiodaliso’s 2016 short film THE STREETS ARE OURS: TWO LIVES CROSS IN KARACHI (16 min).
South Side Projections and the Hyde Park Art Center (5020 S. Cornell Ave.) screen Architecture and Design (1990, 60 min, Video Projection), an episode of the PBS series The 90s, on Sunday at 2 and 3pm. Free admission.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: James Franco’s 2017 film THE DISASTER ARTIST (98 min, DCP Digital) continues; and George Seaton’s 1947 film MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (96 min, Digital Projection) is on Thursday at 7pm (sing-along at 7pm; film at 7:30pm).
Also at Facets Cinémathèque this week: Benedict Andrews’ 2016 UK film UNA (94 min, Video Projection) has a week-long run.
Sinema Obscura screens Craig Jacobson’s 2017 film ELLIOT (Unconfirmed Running TIme, Video Projection) on Monday at 7:30pm at Township (2200 N. California Ave.).
ONGOING FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
Currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago: Elizabeth Price’s 2015 video installation K (7 min loop) in Gallery 186; Frances Stark’s 2010 video installation NOTHING IS ENOUGH (14 min loop) in Gallery 295C; and Nam June Paik’s 1986 video sculpture FAMILY OF ROBOT: BABY in Gallery 288.
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.
CINE-LIST: December 8 - December 14, 2017
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Kyle Cubr, Scott Pfeiffer