CRUCIAL VIEWING
Lewis Klahr's SIXTY SIX (Experimental Animation)
Film Studies Center (Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) - Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Lewis Klahr has been creating ingenious, graceful, and often-enigmatic collage animations for some 30 years now. While his visual and emotional interests mature, there's an elusive but definite through-line in all his work. There's no mistaking his style for anyone else’s. SIXTY SIX is a feature-length film, but it's not a single long-form work, like his masterful 1993 film THE PHARAOH'S BELT. Instead, it's akin to a visual suite—a 12-chapter mid-career rumination on past obsessions, friendships, and personal history—as well as being a propulsion forward with new digital techniques and tools. It's nimble and gorgeous. Those unfamiliar with Klahr's work will be entranced by his magical control over stark pop-culture objects and imagery—his ability to create hypnotic hyper-compressed mini-narratives out of simple means. For those more familiar, it's lovely to see new techniques deeply explored and what seems at times to be a touching sentimental streak. One of the new techniques only possible in the digital age is the ability to simultaneously see the front and back sides of paper objects he films to create age-worn natural superimpositions. This is on full display in the show-opener MERCURY, which is deeply beautiful and affecting. The oddly funny SATURN'S DIARY is another highlight. Also, for the love of Pete, there are some straight-up Bert I. Gordon giant bug effects (more easily executed in a collagist's scale) thrown in for good measure. Klahr in person. (2002-15, 90 min, DCP Digital) JBM
Dorothy Davenport’s LINDA (Silent American Revival)
Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Tuesday, 7:30pm
Did the Film Center’s Lois Weber series leave you hungering for more silent films directed by women? Then you’re in luck—LINDA was not only directed by one of Weber’s protégé, Dorothy Davenport, who also started her career as an actress, but is similarly concerned with hazily egalitarian ideals. Another parallel between the two is the way they were credited: Weber’s husband, Phillips Smalley, was often listed as a co-director, even though such claims are dubious at best, and Davenport billed herself as “Mrs. Wallace Reid,” either to exploit the controversial circumstances surrounding her husband’s death or to redeem him via her enduring devotion, depending on the source (if the former, you almost have to admire the shrewdness). What LINDA lacks in observable technical aptitude, it makes up for in its lack of moralizing; Weber’s distinct brand of antithetical pontification was often suffocating, where LINDA is more complex and latitudinarian, and thus more capacious. The eponymous Linda (Helen Foster), a young country girl who yearns for education, is forced by her father to marry an older man (Noah Beery, brother of Wallace) even though she’s in love with a young doctor. Despite this, she and her husband have an amiable relationship up until she discovers that he already has a wife and child—and that she’s pregnant. It takes a few unexpected turns before a predictable, albeit satisfying, ending, the overall result being a solid melodrama from an early film pioneer. Preceded by Clyde Bruckman and Leo McCarey silent 1928 Laurel and Hardy short THE FINISHING TOUCH (19 min, 35mm Archival Print). Live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren. (1929, 75 min, 35mm Archival Print) KS
Robert Bresson's THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC (French Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
Rejecting acting and theatricality, Robert Bresson chose 20-year-old college student Florence Delay to portray the national heroine of France and the Roman Catholic saint in THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC. In 1431, Bishop Pierre Cauchon (Jean-Claude Fourneau) and members of the Anglophile University of Paris tried Joan of Arc for the crime of heresy against the Catholic Church. Beginning in a public courtroom and later moving behind the closed doors of a cell guarded by English soldiers, Joan defended her service to God before that to the Church. In an intertitle that introduces his method of making the film, Bresson states, "Joan of Arc died on May 30, 1431. She received no burial and no portrait remains of her. But we have a better portrait: her words before the judges of Rouen. I have used the genuine minutes of the trial. For the last moments, I have used the witness statements from the Trial of Rehabilitation which took place twenty-five years later." To emphasize the importance of Joan's words, Bresson repeatedly films a churchman's hand writing them down as a new audience now hears them nearly six hundred years later. The actual words of Joan and the clergy convey a deeper understanding of the worldview in fifteenth century France than a modern filmmaker's interpretation of them in the mid-twentieth century. They also reveal the churchmen's preoccupation with Joan's gender when they discuss her dress and virginity at length. Bishop Cauchon orders her to dress like a woman before her judges, but she refuses to do so. At her eventual sentencing, he repeats the demand, and when Joan complies, the English soldiers beat and molest her. Similar to the image of the book containing the words of the trial, Bresson frequently returns to a peephole into Joan's cell where the churchmen and soldiers leer at her. The audience only sees the eye of a man, in contrast to the man himself, and the woman held in his gaze. However, Joan knows the pleasure the judges take in their power, and she denies it in staring back. THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC is a great film due to Bresson's simple, yet radical choice to use her words. A saint now speaks for herself and in turn reinterprets history. (1962, 65 min, 35mm) CW
Saul Bass’ PHASE IV (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm
In an amazing essay published in October 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked what it is like to be a bat. He proposed that there must be subjective characters to our individual consciousnesses, the ‘what it is like’ of different forms of life, and those aspects would necessarily be irreducible to mere biological or chemical functionality. In his example, no matter how detailed our understanding of echolocation, eyes that are receptive to different wavelengths and amplitudes of light than ours, and the life-cycle of bats get, no matter how much we know about bat physiology and behavior, we will never know what it is like to be at bat. We will never be able to get closer than imagining what it would like to be ourselves going through a bat’s life. The bat, close as it is to us biologically, is a fundamentally alien being. In a remarkable coincidence, only one month before Nagel’s essay was first published, a film meditating on the same ideas was released, PHASE IV. Saul Bass’ sole feature film, this thought experiment in disguise as a science-fiction horror film begins with an outlandish hypothetical: what would happen if a colony of ants were to become our intellectual superiors? From there, it sets up a dramatic pretext—an entomologist and a mathematician set up a geodesic science laboratory in Arizona (really Kenya) in order to observe and experiment upon a group of ants that has been behaving very strangely. Rapidly, the humans find themselves under siege by the insects with their only hope of survival being finding a way somehow to communicate with them. Bass stages the scenes inside the bunker in increasingly mechanistic, dehumanizing ways—people in thrall to wall after wall of computer equipment, humans turned into tools for operating harmonic analyzers and vector plotters—while inside the ant nest, vibrant, emotionally-rich lives dwell in incredibly complex architectures and social organizations that are as mysterious as they are intricate. Shot in breathtaking microcinematography by Ken Middleham, the ants engage in ritual, self-sacrifice, mourning of their dead, and plotting their revenge in recognizable but wholly alien manners. Just as the built, human environment above ground is made mechanistic, a place of process and procedure, the natural world, both above and below ground, is made impossible, extra-terrestrial, permanently strange. Fields of color whip across the frame, deep yellows and greens and browns. The ground falls away into chthonic horrors of design and danger. Human bodies are made into hollow, ant-infested abominations. All this is in the service of a project in parallel to Nagel’s own: can the alien be made human and the human be made alien? We may never be able to make the jump to feeling as a bat feels, but, PHASE IV suggests, a life form even further removed from our capacities may be far more approachable. Late in the film, one of the scientists reads a message sent to them by the ants and realizes that they, the humans, are the ones being experimented upon and that the ants have been the actual scientists all along. This rare 35mm screening will be accompanied a DCP of the movie’s original ending, an elaborate montage of alien intelligence, that was cut by the distributer and only recently rediscovered. (1974, 84 min, 35mm Archival Print) KB
Edward Yang’s TAIPEI STORY (Taiwanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 6pm and Sunday, 5pm
One of the seminal works of the Taiwanese New Wave, TAIPEI STORY brings together the two most important directors of that movement, Edward Yang (who directed and co-wrote) and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (who co-wrote and stars). This slow-building masterpiece has a lot to say about the state of Taiwan during its period of rapid modernization, though its aesthetic and worldview are shaped by outside influences. Yang, who studied electrical engineering at the University of Florida and went on to work in computers in Seattle, cited Michelangelo Antonioni’s films as the chief influence on TAIPEI STORY. One feels the influence of Antonioni in Yang’s depiction of Taipei as a global city and in the stinging sense of alienation felt by most of his characters. Like Antonioni’s L’ECLISSE, TAIPEI STORY soberly contemplates existential angst within the world of modern business, following a woman’s gradual unraveling in work and love. Hou plays her boyfriend, a former Little League baseball star now running a factory. As Cine-File alum Ignatiy Vishnevetsky recent wrote at the A.V. Club. “The decline of a couple who has been together for too long is almost submerged within circumstances and incidents: Lung’s decision to dip into their savings to lend Chin’s father money to pay off an underworld loan shark; his recollection of the recent trip to America; rides and walks through the bustling city at night; the power going out at a nightclub in the middle of Kenny Loggins’ 'Footloose,' leading everyone on the dance floor to whip out their cigarette lighters.” (1985, 110 min, DCP Digital) BS
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Richard Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES (American Revival)
Chicago Film Critics Film Festival (at the Music Box Theatre) – Saturday, 8:30pm
After NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, Richard Kelly's follow-up to DONNIE DARKO was the most divisive US film of 2007. Critics and audiences alike dismissed it, but the impassioned defense among cinephiles included veteran reviewers at the Village Voice, who were all but in awe of the film's attempt to encompass the entire zeitgeist. (Nathan Lee went so far as to name it movie of the year.) A confusing, hallucinatory work, it's difficult to summarize SOUTHLAND TALES' tangle of paranoid sci-fi premises, which touch on federal corruption, terrorism, declining energy sources, Hollywood schlock, and other issues currently plaguing the American psyche. Detractors argued that the satirical free-for-all lacked a cohesive political awareness, but that seems integral to the film's impact: Politics emerge as simply another facet of the contemporary confusion. Where NO COUNTRY was deeply conservative in its structure and iconography, SOUTHLAND TALES was defiant--indeed, anarchic--lashing out at even the desire to be taken seriously while attempting bravura changes in tone and genre. This clash between formal ambition and weird humor is reminiscent of the novels of Thomas Pynchon (to which the movie was sometimes compared), as is Kelly's obsession with pop culture as a distorted mirror of mainstream ideology. Like the intentionally bad songs that litter Pynchon's books, the cast of SOUTHLAND TALES is drawn from the detritus of pop culture, but Kelly still elicits some resonant performances. Dwayne Johnson (formerly pro wrestler The Rock) is strangely touching as a conservative action star who's lured into an anti-government plot; Sean William Scott (of AMERICAN PIE and DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR?) also stands out as twin police offers with amnesia; other major roles are played by Saturday Night Live veterans, HIGHLANDER's Christopher Lambert, and Justin Timberlake, who performs a disturbing and brilliantly staged musical number. Director Richard Kelly in person. (2007, 144 min, 35mm) BS
Michael Caton-Jones's URBAN HYMN (New British)
Facets Cinémathèque – Check Venue website for showtimes
URBAN HYMN is a gem, a heartbreaking and joyous coming-of-age story about music as catharsis and lifeline. While watching I kept thinking, who is that remarkable, skinny young actress? Her name is Letitia Wright; tremulous and tremendous, she played on my heartstrings as Jamie, a troubled teen with an untapped gift for singing. (It gladdens my heart to read that 2018 will find her cropping up in the new Spielberg and Black Panther pictures.) We first see her with her bosom friend Leanne, gleefully tallying up the loot they've just scored in the 2011 London riots. They live in a ward for disturbed, unloved youth. Shirley Henderson (TRAINSPOTTING) plays Kate, a comfortably middle-class woman who takes a job there as a social worker. Her own life was forever changed by a violent crime committed by at-risk youths, and Henderson conveys Kate's sad-eyed, bone-weary grief, which transforms into happiness when she sings with the community choir. When she discovers Jamie's great talent, she gets her involved in the choir, a whole new world for her. Soon, Jamie has a potentially life-changing opportunity. However, she can't—won't—shed Leanne, who, as played by Isabella Laughland, is a menacing kid on a downward spiral: full of rage, possessive, fiercely loyal, and seemingly unreachable. Laughland and Wright capture the intense bonds between kids who basically raised each other. Under the tutelage of director Michael Caton-Jones (ROB ROY, SCANDAL), Wright expresses Jamie's shyness and kindness, the hurt beneath her aggressive front, her wary pride as she discovers her own powers. As the truthful moments gradually accrue, they transform what could have been a clichéd, generalized tale into the unique story of this particular girl. Cinematographer Denis Crossan's exquisite lighting had me musing on the painterly idea that "God is light." You can feel a tragic story forming around these characters, yet in its vision of music-making as healing, bonding, and redemption, URBAN HYMN put me in mind of John Carney films like ONCE and SING STREET. (2015, 114 min, DCP Digital) SP
Lina Wertmüller’s SWEPT AWAY (Italian Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Like Bertrand Blier’s GOING PLACES or Pedro Almodovar’s TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN!, Lina Wertmüller’s SWEPT AWAY presents a fantasy of male domination with comic irony to call into question the validity of such fantasies. And like those films, the brazen way in which it presents the fantasy serves to critique of the subtle ways that such fantasies enter into more “tasteful” entertainment. It begins on a pleasure boat sailing in the middle of the Mediterranean where everyone talks politics: on deck the well-to-do guests spout liberal-moderate and hard-right views; below the servants talk revolution. By chance, the most conservative guest and the most radical-left servant get stranded at sea together. They find a small abandoned island, and to get back at her for treating him meanly on the boat, the servant makes the rich conservative woman his sex slave. Here’s where things get especially provocative: the rich woman comes to enjoy her domination. Whether you find SWEPT AWAY funny, erotic, offensive, or some combination thereof says a lot about your own biases, both political and sexual. And that’s what Wertmüller intended the film to do: hold a mirror up to the viewers’ prejudices. The film was the third of four hits that the writer-director made over as many years with star Giancarlo Giannini, who plays the servant with typically compelling bravado. As the rich woman, Mariangela Melato has the harder role: How to play the character’s masochism without degrading herself in the process? Wertmüller pours on a lot of directorial style, leaving the actress and the audience to solve the problem on their own. (1974, 116 min, DCP Digital) BS
Nicolas Winding Refn's DRIVE (Contemporary American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:15pm
This movie teaches us three things: crime doesn't pay, pulling off one last job before quitting the business never quite pans out, and you shouldn't make any deals with the guy who's just killed your best friend. But Refn does his best to make the hackneyed plot beside the point, taking the basic mood of Walter Hill's original THE DRIVER and slathering it with style. Said style includes the steely Brandoesque mumbling of Ryan Gosling and Newton Thomas Sigel's widescreen cinematography, which drenches dusty SoCal vistas with nighttime neon sheen. There's also an ubercool score by Cliff Martinez, doing a spot-on Giorgio Moroder impersonation. But the kicker is an arresting performance by Albert Brooks as an oddly likable villain, the kind of guy who tries to calm you down after slashing your wrists. Brooks adds some needed zest to what is essentially a glossy and entertaining but empty exercise. (2011, 100 min, 35mm) RC
Raoul Peck's I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO (New Essay/Documentary/Oppositional Viewing)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7 and 10pm and Sunday, 3:45pm
If the role of the public intellectual is to speak truth to power, then James Baldwin was one of the greatest America ever produced. A searing and compassionate social critic, he was equally penetrating when he turned his novelist's gaze toward film, as this galvanizing, heartbreaking essay/documentary by Raoul Peck demonstrates. Its voiceover is in Baldwin's own words, the beautiful music of his language measured out by Samuel L. Jackson in an intimate spoken-word performance. In televised interviews and debates from the 1960s, Baldwin is pensive and incendiary, and the film cuts between his embattled times and our own. Baldwin investigated the mystery of the fathomless hatred of white Americans for blacks, and while his analysis was economic, it also involved a kind of psychoanalysis of the American psyche. This film's jumping-off point is Remember This House, his unfinished manuscript about the intertwining lives, and violent deaths, of his friends/foils Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers. Soon it turns to The Devil Finds Work, his earthy, shattering essay about growing up a child of the movies. Baldwin understood cinema as "the American looking glass," and he wrote with such lucidity, and such painful honesty, about what he saw reflected there, about himself, race, and his country. "To encounter oneself is to encounter the other," he wrote, "and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and, if I can respect this, both of us can live." Viewer identification is complex: as a youngster whose heroes were white, who rooted for Gary Cooper, it came as a huge shock for him to realize "the Indians were you"—and these heroes aimed to kill you off, too. Peck has called his film an essay on images, a "musical and visual kaleidoscope" of fiery blues, lobotomized mass media, classic Hollywood, TV news, reality TV, and advertisements. He causes a government propaganda film from 1960 about U.S. life, all baseball games and amusement parks, to collide with the Watts uprising; a Doris Day movie meets lynched bodies. The point is not even that one is reality and the other is not. It's that these two realities were never forced to confront each other—and they must, because one comes at the other's expense. When Baldwin speaks of the "death of the heart," of our privileged apathy, of an infantile America, an unthinking and cruel place, he could be speaking of the Trump era. He feared for the future of a country increasingly unable to distinguish between illusion, dream, and reality. "Neither of us, truly, can live without the other," he wrote. "For, I have seen the devil...[I]t is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself." Let this movie inspire today's young dissenters, and let James Baldwin be our model of oppositional, critical thinking as we raise our angry voices against Donald Trump and everything he stands for. A panel discussion will follow the 7pm Saturday screening. (2016, 95 min, DCP Digital) SP
Robert Mulligan's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (American Revival)
Gorton Community Center (400 E. Illinois Rd., Lake Forest) – Friday, 7pm
Despite the novel's critical and commercial success, the film adaptation of Harper Lee's Pulitzer-Prize winning To Kill A Mockingbird was initially considered something of a Hollywood nonentity. "The other studios didn't want it because what's it about?," the film's director Robert Mulligan recounted. "It's about a middle-aged lawyer with two kids. There's no romance, no violence, except off-screen. There's no action. What is there? Where's the story?" Shot in black and white, MOCKINGBIRD's racial tension is set against an ironically 'colorless' backdrop that gives sharp contrast to the characters' social divide. A guilelessly straightforward title sequence and a score that brings to mind youthful musical experimentation add further innocence to the film's mature overtones. Lee intervened to have Gregory Peck cast as Atticus Finch, a deep-voiced Southern lawyer of high morale who moonlights as World's Best Dad, and two kids with no professional acting experience (Mary Badham and Phillip Alford) were cast as Scout and Jem, the novel's young protagonists. Robert Duvall also made his film debut as Boo Radley, the man whose presence sparks the imaginations of the precocious children. With deceptively simple styling and a faithful screenplay by noted playwright Horton Foote, Mulligan succeeded in tastefully representing the inherent simplicity of Lee's acclaimed novel. Post-film discussion of the book and film with Lake Forest College Professor of English Zach Martin. (1962, 130 min, Digital Projection) KS
MORE OPPOSITIONAL VIEWING
Black Cinema House (at the Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave.) presents Augmenting Black Realities: An Evening with Ben Caldwell on Friday at 5:30pm. The noted L.A. Rebellion filmmaker will screen a selection of his works, including I & I: AN AFRICAN ALLEGORY (1977, 32 min) and SANKOFA CITY (2017, 6 min), and discuss his filmmaking, artistic practice, social and political activism, community efforts, and how all those things intersect. Free admission.
The Center on Halsted (3656 N. Halsted St.) presents a sneak preview of local filmmaker Michelle Citron’s 2017 documentary LIVES: VISIBLE (35 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 7pm, with Citron in person. The film draws from two thousands photographs, chronicling the lives of a pre-Stonewall lesbian couple in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1970s.
The Chicago Cultural Center hosts the Queer Film Society’s Cinema Q series screening of David France’s 2012 documentary HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (110 min, Video Projection – Unconfirmed Format) on Friday at 6:30pm. The film is a history of the AIDS activist group ACT UP. Free admission.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Ordinary Media Workshop at Northwestern University (focused on new media and digital practices in moving image works and art making) presents a symposium titled Always-On Formats, Genres, Aesthetics on Thursday and Friday, May 18 and 19. Thursday’s events run from 3-8pm at Block Cinema, and include a 4pm performance, a 5pm Keynote talk by Shaka McGlotten (Purchase), and a 7pm screening (details below); Friday’s events run from 10am-8pm at the Kaplan Institute and include panels at 10am, 1pm, and 3pm, and a 5pm Keynote talk by Rita Raley (UCSB).
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The screening at 7pm Friday includes: Nick Briz’s HOW TO/WHY LEAVE FACEBOOK (2014, 11 min); Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus’ twohundredfiftysixcolors (preface) (2013, 6 min); Erin Hayden’s TOO MUCH? (4 min); Kevin B. Lee’s TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (2014, 25 min); Shawné Michaelain Holloway’s A PERSONAL PROJECT, IV: PASSWORD PROTECTED THAUMATROPE, SECURITY MEASURES FOR A CAGE BIRD.MOV (2014, 3 min); Jodie Mack’s UNSUBSCRIBE #3: GLITCH ENVY (2010, 6 min, 16mm); Pox Party’s INTRODUCING SATROMIZER OS (2011, 4 min); and Jon Satrom, ROM 0 (2007, 3 min). All Digital Projection, except where noted. Free admission. Full schedule at: https://sites.northwestern.edu/ordinary/symposium.
Comfort Film at Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) hosts Once In A Lifetime’s presentation of Doug Campbell’s 2015 made-for-television film STALKED BY MY DOCTOR (88 min, Video Projection) on Tuesday at 8pm. The screening features live commentary from The A.V. Club's Katie Rife and others TBA; and Open TV Re-Presents is on Wednesday at 8pm, featuring works from the online screening platform Open TV. Free admission for both.
Sinema Obscura at Township (2200 N. California Ave.) screens a program of shorts by filmmaker Mykee Morettini on Monday at 7pm, followed by Lucky McKee’s 2002 horror film MAY (93 min) at 8:30pm. Both Video Projection – Unconfirmed Format.
Amanda "Oldphan" Sukenick’s short film THE EFIList (16 min) is screening as part of the closing night of Sukenick’s show of YouTube Dioramas at Free Range Gallery (3257 W. Lawrence Ave.) on Sunday. The closing event runs from 6-9pm and the video will screen near the end. Free admission.
The Chicago Film Critics Film Festival, taking place at the Music Box Theatre this week, presents 22 new feature narrative and documentary films, two programs of shorts, and a retrospective screening of Richard Kelly’s 2007 film SOUTHLAND TALES (see above). The film MR. ROOSEVELT and SOUTHLAND TALES are in 35mm. Full schedule at https://chicagofilmcritics.org/2017-chicago-critics-film-festival.
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series at the Pickwick Theatre (5 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge) screens Lewis Gilbert’s 1967 James Bond film YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (117 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 2 and 7:30pm. The evening show includes prelude music by Jay Warren at 6:30pm and guests Colin Clark of the Ian Fleming Foundation and James Bond author Raymond Benson in person at 7pm. Additionally, the SPECTRE IFF Helicopter RC Model used in the film will be on display in the theater lobby. http://parkridgeclassicfilm.com
At the Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) this week: Amma Asante’s 2016 film A UNITED KINGDOM (111 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 2 and 7:30pm; Gareth Edwards’ 2016 film ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY (133 min, Video Projection – Unconfirmed Format) is on Tuesday at 7pm, showing as part of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Movie Discussion Group’s meeting, and will be followed by a discussion; and Anatole Litvak’s 1956 film ANASTASIA (105 min, DCP Digital) is on Wednesday at 1 and 7:30pm. Free admission for all screenings.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Matt Tyrnauer’s 2016 documentary CITIZEN JANE: BATTLE FOR THE CITY (92 min, DCP Digital); Richard Dewey and Timothy Marrinan’s 2016 documentary BURDEN (88 min, DCP Digital); the SAIC Film, Video, New Media, Animation, and Sound Festival continues on Friday, with screenings at 4:15, 6, and 9pm; Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 Italian film ALL SCREWED UP (105 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 5:15pm and Monday at 7:45pm; Léa Fehner’s 2015 French film OGRES (142 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 5pm and Thursday at 6pm; Olivier Babinet’s 2016 French documentary SWAGGER (84 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 2:30pm and Tuesday at 6pm; and Ryan Suffern’s 2016 documentary FINDING OSCAR (100 min, DCP Digital) screens once daily Monday-Thursday.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Yoshifumi Kondō’s 1995 Japanese animated film WHISPER OF THE HEART (111 min, 35mm) is on Friday at 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday at 1:30pm; Cherien Dabis’ 2009 film AMREEKA (97 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm; and Drew Goddard’s 2012 film CABIN IN THE WOODS (105 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 7pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Jon Nguyen and Rick Barnes’ 2016 documentary DAVID LYNCH: THE ART OF LIFE (93 min, DCP Digital), Dash Shaw’s 2016 animated film MY ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL IS SINGING INTO THE SEA (75 min, DCP Digital), and Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 Japanese animated film YOUR NAME. (107 min, Digital Projection; check website for subtitled vs. English-dubbed showtimes) are all held over; an “interactive” Mother’s Day screening of Phyllida Lloyd’s 2008 film MAMMA MIA (108 min, 35mm) is on Sunday at 2pm; and Phil Grabsky’s 2017 documentary THE ARTIST’S GARDEN: AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISM (100 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am.
Also at Facets Cinémathèque this week: Vera Glagoleva’s 2014 Russian/French/UK/Latvian film TWO WOMEN (103 min, Unconfirmed Format) and Jeremy Teicher and Alexi Pappas’ 2016 film TRACKTOWN (87 min, Unconfirmed Format) play for week-long runs.
Also at the Chicago Cultural Center this week: the Open TV screening of IN REAL LIFE is on Sunday at 3pm. Free admission.
The Italian Cultural Institute (500 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1450) screens Roberto Faenza’s 2005 Italian film THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT (96 min, Video Projection) on Tuesday at 6pm. Introduced by Loyola University Professor Cristina Lombardi-Diop. Free admission.
The Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 200) screens Percy Adlon’s 1981 German film CELESTE (106 min, Video Projection – Unconfirmed Format) on Thursday at 6pm. Free admission.
ONGOING FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
The Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Zhang Peili: Record. Repeat is on view through July 9. The artist’s first US exhibition features over 50 channels of video from 1989-2007. It is on view in Modern Wing galleries 186 and 289.
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.
Updates: The South Side Projections and the DuSable Museum screening of Prince and Albert Magnoli’s concert film SIGN O’ THE TIMES scheduled for Wednesday, and to have featured an introduction by film critic Armond White, has been cancelled. SSP and the DuSable plan to bring White back later in the year to introduce a different film.
CINE-LIST: May 12 - May 18, 2017
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Jb Mabe, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael G. Smith, Candace Wirt