CRUCIAL VIEWING
Dorothy Arzner’s WORKING GIRLS (American Revival)
Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
First woman to direct a feature film. First woman nominated for a best-director Oscar. Second woman (meaning there was one before—I guess that’s progress?) to win the best-director award at Cannes. All female crew. These distinctions have been especially prevalent as of late, both within Chicago and the film world at large. The first two were oft-applied qualifiers to recent retrospectives for Lois Weber and Lina Wertmüller, respectively, the former a silent film pioneer active as a director between 1912-1927 and the latter a schismatic auteur best known for the grotesque political salvos she made in the 1970s. The third and fourth apply to Sofia Coppola’s THE BEGUILED and Zoe Lister-Jones’ BAND AID (which opens this week at the Music Box; see our review below), respectively, both contemporary films discussed as much for these labels as their filmic content, the merits of which are often made to seem inextricably linked to a larger social and even political context. (Don't get me started on WONDER WOMAN.) That’s not to say such designations aren’t important—indeed, it’s crucial these women are given recognition for their accomplishments within a male-dominated industry, especially one so obsessed with accolades, gendered though the lauding may be—but rather that they also have the dual function of illuminating how marginalized women have been and continue to be in this world and how goddamn lucky we are to have so much of their output available to us to be viewed on the big screen and, when possible, on film. There may be too little, but what exists deserves to be screened—and often. The next entry in this trend (hopefully to become the norm, a staple in our cinematic diet, so to speak) is Dorothy Arzner’s WORKING GIRLS. Arzner is herself the holder of a large number of the aforementioned qualifiers, including having been the first female member of the Director's Guild of America, the only female director in Hollywood continuing to work into the 1940s, and, according to the Women Film Pioneers Project, “the most prolific woman studio director in the history of American cinema,” among others. WORKING GIRLS also has the distinction of being her biggest commercial flop; the Pre-Code drama was virtually shelved by Paramount, receiving neither a national nor general release. Based on a play that was based on a novel, the script was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Zoë Akins and follows two sisters, Mae and June, after they move from Indiana to New York City in search of love and/or money. Being small-town girls from the wrong side of the tracks, they’re resigned to living in a boardinghouse for “working girls,” soon finding employment suitable for their skill set. They find love just as efficiently, Mae with a society guy and June with an imbecilic sax player. Though the younger of the two sisters, June is pragmatic where Mae is idealistic, if a little naive—it’s June who must step in when Mae needs a job and when things go south with her Harvard-man, party boy beau, Boyd Wheeler. Their dynamic with each other, the other girls in the boardinghouse and their gentleman suitors (June later falls for the professor with whom Mae had previously been involved) is navigated with more nuance than other films of its era, Arzner foregrounding the women’s personal evolution over details of romantic preoccupations. Perhaps the most progressive aspect of WORKING GIRLS is its handling of premarital sex; Mae is “rewarded” rather than punished after she falls pregnant with Boyd’s child, as he comes to realize his affection for her, subsequently marrying her with both presumably living happily ever after. Arzner was an out lesbian, a fact that contributes both to one’s understanding of her work and one’s appreciation of her pioneerism. “[An] important feature of Arzner’s career is the way lesbianism affects her films in diffuse ways,” writes professor Judith Mayne in her book Directed by Dorothy Arzner. “There are no lesbian plots, no lesbian characters in her films; but there is constant and deliberate attention to how women dress and act and perform, as much for each other as for the male figures in their lives.” Perhaps helping to inform this perspective is the women she worked with—in addition to being written by Akins, it was edited by Jane Loring, whose career path as an editor-turned-assistant-director mirrors Arzner’s own trajectory to a certain degree. It has this in common with Lister-Jones’ film, with another connection to the recent Chicago cinema scene being that Arzner briefly worked writing scripts for Dorothy Davenport’s production company, whose LINDA the Chicago Film Society screened last month. I’d like to say this is an embarrassment of riches, but that one must feel thankful for an opportunity to see so many films made by women is just an embarrassment. Preceded by Hal Roach’s 1931 Thelma Todd and Zasu Pitts short THE PAJAMA PARTY (20 min, 16mm). (1931, 77 min, 35mm) KS
William Wyler's JEZEBEL (American Revival)
Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) - Wednesday, 1 and 7:30pm (Free Admission)
JEZEBEL is a genteel William Wyler-directed Southern Gothic potboiler starring Bette Davis as Julie, a debutante run amuck in the antebellum South. Julie insists on wearing red instead of virginal white to the Olympus ball, leading to her shunning by the whole of New Orleans high society. Her banker beau, Preston Dillard, played by Henry Fonda and his pompadour, flees to the North. He returns with a Yankee bride one year later, on the eve of an outbreak of yellow fever. Everything falls to pieces around Julie—a duel in her honor, abandonment by her fiancé, and lots of foreboding palaver about Southern honor, Northern greed, and meddling abolitionists. This framework allows the movie to indict the gentility while still basking in its fallen woman narrative. The looming Civil War hovers in the background. JEZEBEL keeps historical criticism and its pulpier elements at the edge of frame, primarily constructing itself as a Bette Davis showcase. She pouts, cries, twirls, and collapses through Wyler’s crisp deep focus frames. Davis is terrific, simultaneously petulantly self involved and tragically outraged. (1938, 104 min, 35mm) BM
Bill Morrison's DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 6pm, Sunday, 5:15pm, and Wednesday, 7:45pm
If you're familiar with Bill Morrison's work, particularly his major experimental features DECASIA and THE GREAT FLOOD, the opening minutes of his latest effort, DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME, may come as a shock: in place of the usual distressed nitrate imagery, we see clips from "High Heat," a cable television baseball talk show from 2014, a late 1970s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation newscast, and even a conventional talking head interview recorded at the home of two retired curators, complete with visible lav mics and all. Has Morrison found work at PBS? Over the course of two hours, DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME becomes something else, with Morrison's characteristic obsessions peeking through the topsoil of the orderly, televisually sterile contemporary documentary template. Morrison sketches a story familiar to film archivists of a certain age, and obscure to most everyone else: the 1978 discovery of over 500 reels of nitrate film under the permafrost of a demolished hockey rink in Yukon Territory. The scope of DAWSON CITY is more expansive and unruly than that: it encompasses the history of Dawson City's indigenous Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in people, the 1919 World Series, a trove of glass plate negatives used as cabin insulation, the Canadian banking system, the murder of one-time "Yukoner" William Desmond Taylor, and the tawdry origins of Donald Trump's family fortune. (It goes without saying that if the Trump "golden shower" tape referenced in the Steele dossier actually exists, Morrison should have right of first refusal to incorporate it into his next film.) Each digression seems gratuitous and shapeless at first, but emerges as part of a grander design. Dawson City, a boom town that reverted to its humbler origins within a few years, is the land of eternal returns: sooner or later, the cycle of fire—some incidents nitrate-inflicted, but many not—will come for your theater, your hotel, your casino, your library. Real estate contracts, telegrams, photographic records, and newspaper listings reverberate through the years, their implications not fully understood for decades. Morrison's form is something of a reclamation, too: reviving the intertitle as a unit of construction and a suggestive promise, DAWSON CITY is the last silent film, a finale a century in the making. (The score, by Alex Somers, leans on sound effects that amount to atmospheric Mickey Mousing, but that comes with the territory.) Incorporating clips from newsreels, serials, and features pulled out of the ground (including work by major talents like Lois Weber, Maurice Tourneur, and Alice Guy Blaché), as well as Hollywood films depicting the Klondike (Chaplin's THE GOLD RUSH, Handschiegl footage from THE TRAIL OF '98), DAWSON CITY's major act of cinematic historiography is Morrison's elevation of CITY OF GOLD, a nearly-forgotten National Film Board of Canada production from 1957 that apparently inaugurated the now-standard documentary technique of zooming and panning across historical photographs. The revelation of the NFB film, which predates Ken Burns' influential documentaries by three decades, reorients our relationship to Morrison's seemingly straightforward DAWSON CITY aesthetic; everything was new once if you burrow deep enough. Morrison in person at the Sunday screening. (2016, 120 min, DCP Digital) KAW
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Stéphane Brizé’s A WOMAN’S LIFE (New French)
Music Box Theatre - Check Venue website for showtimes
Stéphane Brizé’s films are uncommonly intimate, less character studies than circumstantial examinations of a given point in his characters’ lives. The two I watched to prepare for writing about his most recent film, A WOMAN’S LIFE, are elegantly precise compendiums: the first, MADEMOISELLE CHAMBON (2009), follows a construction worker and the titular Mlle. Chambon, his son’s teacher, as they navigate a short and timid affair, and the second, his acclaimed 2015 film THE MEASURE OF A MAN, depicts its protagonist as he seeks work after having been laid off. Both were shot in widescreen, adding a voyeuristic layer as we observe the characters and their situations from afar; perhaps it’s paradoxical, but with more space in which to linger there’s much to be gained. Based on Guy de Maupassant’s first novel, Une Vie, and shot in 1.33:1, A WOMAN’S LIFE spans most of the protagonist’s life as viewed through the Delphic box that is the Academy ratio. Yet it’s similarly intimate and humanistic despite these disparities, eschewing the staid trappings of the period film genre in favor of a friable sort of realism that exposes the vitreous universality of its subject matter. The film follows Baroness Jeanne Le Perthuis des Vauds from her charming, albeit sequestered, youth through her initial relationship with and later marriage to the dashing Julien, whose apathetic demeanor and numerous affairs slowly erode her idealism, much as various aspects of contemporary life erode the vigor of characters in Brizé’s earlier work. Her best friend and priest betray her; her son is egregiously spoiled. Jeanne doesn’t persevere, she withstands, with only abstracted memories of happier times to console her. “It is absolutely beautiful to find a woman like Jeanne, whose idea of mankind and the world is probably very naive,” Brizé told Film Comment in an interview. “She is unable to accept and mourn the loss of the paradise that you live in as a child, and to recognize that when entering adulthood, you simply have to change your views and accept things you did not have to before.” It’s unsurprising that Brizé was able to apply his modern-day concerns to this venerable 19th-century text. "Life is never as good or as bad as you think,” Jeanne tells her cherubic baby granddaughter at the film’s end—or is it Brizé telling us? Just as we’re close to his characters, reveling in their joy but more often sympathizing with their sorrows, Brizé’s intimacy extends to us as well, reflecting back a similar compassion for the shared human experience. (2016, 119 min, DCP Digital) KS
Jean-Pierre Melville’s TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN (French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 5:45pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Primarily an homage to the films of old Hollywood, TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN is Jean-Pierre Melville’s most ‘American’ film. When the French delegate fails to appear during the final United Nations session just two days before Christmas, reporter Moreau (stoically played by the director himself) teams up with the cynical French photographer Pierre (Pierre Grasset) to try to track down the missing statesmen using several of his mistresses as starting points. The film takes time to appreciate the major sites and sounds of the Big Apple in the 1950’s: long shots featuring the glowing neon of Times Square, darkened streets with the Empire State building looming in the distance, and the endless stampede of taxis. These images evoke how imposing it is to find one man in such a sprawling city. The plot is a fairly straightforward mystery, but Melville’s more interested in exploring the dichotomy between Moreau and Pierre and this is where the film truly excels. Where Moreau is moralistic and steadfast in his search, Pierre is more interested in drinking and in hitting it big by taking a photograph that will make him rich. The juxtaposition of how these two characters interact with the various secondary characters further illustrates how foreign they are to one another despite both being French and in similar professions. Not to be forgotten is the film’s score that alternates between free-flowing jazz and boisterous, brassy big band pieces. In combination with the shadowy lighting Melville is known for, these two elements of the film’s production help to elucidate the character’s moral inner-workings. Lesser seen than some of his most famous works like LE SAMOURAI and BOB LE FLAMBEUR, TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN takes Melville’s cool, sexy style and applies to it a more American sentiment. Preceded by Melville’s 1946 short 24 HOURS IN THE LIFE OF A CLOWN (18 min, DCP Digital). (1959, 84 min, DCP Digital) KC
Jean-Pierre Melville’s LE DEUXIÈME SOUFFLE [SECOND BREATH] (French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm and Thursday, 6pm
One of Melville’s most popular films in his native country, LE DEUXIÈME SOUFFLE was also, Adrian Danks wrote for the Criterion Collection, “an important watershed in the director’s career. It points back to the somewhat abstract, elemental, and iconographically precise hypermasculine gangster milieu of BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956) and LE DOULOS (1962) and forward to the more expansive, rarefied, and philosophically circumspect works—such as LE SAMOURAI (1967) and LE CERCLE ROUGE (1970)—that followed... [It begins with] one of the greatest and most exquisitely pared-down sequences in Melville’s cinema, a wordless flight from prison that demonstrates the director’s devastatingly powerful economy of means... During the escape of Gu Minda (Lino Ventura), who will subsequently occupy the nominal position of protagonist in this tightly focused but dispersive narrative, we can feel the physical sensation and tension of his actions. In fact, this muted but palpable physicality is often all we can grasp on to in the murky half-light of the compositions, a corporeality that nevertheless emphasizes the weariness and age of the character and helps communicate the sense that the film is really dealing with what we might call ‘the end of things.’ As Melville suggested, it is almost as if Gu has been waiting—or on reprieve for ten years in order to break out and fatalistically arrange the complex pattern of actions that will lead to his bloody death. There is nothing about Gu’s character, or his movement through the film, that suggests he will escape such a fate; all that is at issue are the ethical and ritual dimensions that this entails. The ‘second wind’ of the title is really just an extended final breath." (1966, 144 min, 35mm) BS
Zoe Lister-Jones's BAND AID (New American)
Music Box Theatre - Check Venue website for showtimes
Rather like a cross between SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE and Curb Your Enthusiasm, BAND AID, Zoe Lister-Jones's debut feature as writer/director, is witty and touching, if also a bit hackneyed. A bickering LA couple (Lister-Jones and Adam Pally), frustrated creatives in their 30s, decide to turn their fights into songs to avoid fighting in real life. They start a garage band, enlisting their creepy neighbor (Fred Armisen, always a pleasure) as drummer. The songs are sometimes quite funny, and if you enjoy the ironies of squirm humor, you'll likely have a good time with this. Still, the comedy and the emotional pain don't always make for a comfortable fit, and Lister-Jones's small-screen background shows—this feels more like an edgy cable-TV comedy than cinema. The film is marred, as well, by sitcom commonplaces about men and women. On the other hand, I'd wager that most heterosexual couples will relate to aspects of the film's portrayal of the gender gap. As a performer, Lister-Jones has an expressive face, and her smile and laughter are infectious. There's a damn honest scene where she sings about what she can't say: she feels she's failed as a woman because she had a miscarriage. At such moments, the film conveys real heartbreak. I liked it best, though, when they start having fun, putting me in mind of Found a Job, that great Talking Heads song about a bickering couple who find happiness making things together. Conversely, one of the best scenes is not funny at all: she performs a song that may be overwritten, but which movingly tries to find a way out of the age-old war of the sexes. It's fitting, then, that her first feature is a mixed success, given its good sense of humor about the struggles, terrors and joys inherent in the reach to make something meaningful and put it out there, imperfections and all. If you stay for the end credits, you might notice something special: every single person who worked behind the scenes on this film, from grips to gaffers to drivers, is a woman. (2017, 94 min, DCP Digital) SP
Steve James' ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
True stories can be just as absorbing as narratives, and real people as memorable as characters, as Steve James' suspenseful courtroom documentary demonstrates. This David versus Goliath story chronicles the five-year trial pitting the inexhaustible resources of the Manhattan DA's office against the small Abacus Federal Savings Bank. Founded by a Chinese immigrant and run today by himself and his daughters (the Sung family), Abacus was the only bank indicted during the 2008 global financial crisis. Ironically, Mr. Sung has the integrity of a real-life George Bailey (and Mrs. Sung's favorite movie is Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE), having founded Abacus expressly to serve New York's Chinatown. James gives us a rare glimpse into this somewhat unmelted immigrant community. The steely, whip-smart daughters turn out to be not so easy to push around, and their loving bickering banter with their parents is a delight. Director Steve James and producer Mark Mitten in person at select screenings; check the Siskel website for details. (2016, 88 min, DCP Digital) SP
Margaret Byrne’s RAISING BERTIE (New Documentary/Oppositional Viewing)
Black World Cinema at the Studio Movie Grill Chatham (210 87th St.) – Check Venue website for showtimes
In the time since Donald Trump became president of the United States, there have been a wealth of think pieces focused on the rural, white, middle-to-lower class people who came out in spades to vote for a Cheeto as leader of the free world. But I digress. The hyperfocus on the so-called “silent majority” is frustrating, but not surprising; one might be led to believe, however, that rural areas are inhabited exclusively by such people, entirely free of the diversity that’s inarguably made this country great. Margaret Byrne’s RAISING BERTIE is thus a breath of fresh air for its inadvertent timeliness and the way in which it brings to light a largely overlooked demographic. Co-produced by Kartemquin and filmed over six years, it follows three African American boys—nicknamed Bud, Dada, and Junior—in Bertie County, North Carolina as they come of age amidst life’s daily struggles and egregious systemic oppression. (Bertie County is over 60% Black or African American with almost a fifth of its families living under the poverty line.) A focus of the film is The Hive, an alternative school for at-risk youth that’s spearheaded by a similarly inspirational educator, but it avoids accouterments of poignancy. Instead, it’s a microcosm of a society that experiences the trials and tribulations of both rural and minority America while likewise being ignored—and doubly so—for those very reasons. “We realized there's not enough attention being paid to rural youth and particularly rural youth of color,” said the film’s producer Ian Kibbe at a recent Q&A, foreshadowing the sad irony that’s playing out before our very eyes. The longitudinal approach also impresses the impact; though it’s hardly unprecedented, one realizes the value of documentary filmmakers spending significant amounts of time with their subjects as the three boys and their friends and family visibly open up in front of the cameras. It’s a diplomatic mix of direct cinema and cinéma vérité; Byrne and crew are never seen, but their involvement is evident. "Building trust is the key to making a film like this,” Byrne said during the aforementioned Q&A, “which is really about building relationships.” At what point does subjectivity evolve into a sort of de facto objectivity? A few months? Six years? Sometime in between a boy’s emotional visit with his imprisoned father and another boy’s revelation that his young girlfriend is pregnant? Byrne doesn’t shy away from reflecting some of the young men’s’ “bad decisions,” instead placing them before the viewer to be considered within the context of a holistic—and empathetic—viewing experience. In this new era of the silent majority, the silenced minority are more important than ever. Filmmakers in person at weekend screenings. (2016, 102 min, DCP Digital) KS
Nick Alonzo’s SHITCAGO (Contemporary American)
Sinema Obscura at Township (2200 N. California Ave.) – Monday, 7pm (Free Admission)
In a review of Jacques Becker’s MONTPARNASSE 19 for Cahiers du Cinéma in 1958, Jean-Luc Godard movingly wrote: “I would give the whole of the postwar French cinema for that one shot, badly acted, badly composed, but sublime, in which Modigliani asks five francs for his drawings on the terrace of La Coupole.” This is how I feel about Nick Alonzo’s SHITCAGO; the performances may be uneven, some of the location sound may be poorly recorded but this brisk first feature is thrillingly alive and uproariously funny in a way that other contemporary American movies are not. Made on a shoestring budget by a cast and crew of friends, this day-in-the-life-of-Chicago comedy is consistently inventive in its black-and-white cinematography and crisp editing schemes as it follows the mundane adventures of an unnamed protagonist (Jeremiah Aviles) traversing the city in search of& something. It’s hard to say exactly what. Aviles’ character is as passive as protagonists get. Wearing a black skullcap and a permanently neutral facial expression (think of a Latino Buster Keaton), this wonderfully inexpressive young man bikes, walks, and rides trains and buses from one neighborhood to the next from morning to night, encountering a bizarre assortment of obnoxious or hostile characters to whom he shows little or no reaction: a man talking loudly about his colonoscopy while vaping, a self-described “tree rights activist,” a man blatantly perusing porn in a public library, a drunk girl looking for a party, a pretentious art critic, an aggressive weed dealer, and, best of all, a character referred to in the credits only as “Hot Dog Stand Jerk.” The scene involving this last character stands out as the most Chicago-centric scene in what is undoubtedly one of the most Chicago-centric movies ever made: the jerk harangues the protagonist about putting ketchup on his hotdog with uncommon vitriol, at one point exclaiming “They should put you in fucking jail for that!” A title card informs us that all of the characters and situations in the film are loosely based on “real life personal experiences” that happened in Chicago. Real experiences. Real people. Real funny. (2015, 65 min, Digital Projection - Unconfirmed Format) MGS
Ken Loach’s I, DANIEL BLAKE (New British)
Music Box Theatre - Check Venue website for showtimes
It’s been slightly over a year since Ken Loach won his second Palme d’Or at Cannes for I, DANIEL BLAKE (he won his first in 2006 for THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY), where he joined an exclusive list of just seven others that have shared such distinction. Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) is 59-year old carpenter out on disability due to a recent heart attack and living in Newcastle, but his disability payments are threatened when the bureaucratic entity that pays them out deems him fit for work despite his doctor telling him otherwise. He forms an unlikely bond with Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mother of two kids, whose aid he comes to when he feels she’s also being treated unfairly by the same people. At its core, I, DANIEL BLAKE is a moving drama with dark humor elements about fighting the system and standing up for what one believes in. Daniel is painted as the ‘everyman’ trying to take on a broken system in a display of fierce individualism as well as trying to contribute the greater good of his community. On the matter of subtext, tinges of Brexit bleed from every corner as Loach’s film is unabashedly political and the ideology of ‘taking back control’ sold as the purpose for leaving the European Union aligns with Daniel’s quest. Much of the film deals with the ‘System’s’ failure to properly care for those that need its help most. Rife with social commentary on the current British political situation, I, DANIEL BLAKE is heartfelt and honest. The hyper-realism that Loach strives for makes it feel as though the situation is happening to a close family member, and the audience cannot help but empathize with Daniel’s plight. (2016, 100 min, DCP Digital) KC
MORE OPPOSITIONAL VIEWING
The Queer Bits Film Festival takes place at The Broadway, Pride Arts Center (4139 N. Broadway) on Saturday at 7:30pm. The shorts screening features comedies, dramas, and documentaries, with work by Michael Cicetti, Kim Yaged, Jake Graf, Sydney O’Haire, Omery Chrystophe, Scott Simonsen, Angie Panganiban, Faraz Arif Ansari, Suma Filmes, and Paul Scheufler.
The UIC School of Theatre and Music (1040 W. Harrison St., # MC255) screens Mandar Apte’s 2017 documentary FROM INDIA WITH LOVE (45 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 7pm, with Apte in person.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents Another as a Second Self: New Video Work by Grace Mitchell on Friday at 7pm. Milwaukee-based videomaker Mitchell will be in person with a program of her recent work.
WeWork Fulton Market is hosting an appearance by letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., a fundraising event for his printing plant. In addition to a talk by Kennedy and a “Cash & Carry” (with posters for sale), Laura Zinger’s 2008 documentary on Kennedy, PROCEED AND BE BOLD! (95 min, Video Projection) will be screened, with Zinger and Kennedy doing a Q&A afterwards. It all starts at 4pm on Thursday. RSVP at www.amospaulkennedyjr.splashthat.com.
ArcLight Cinemas Chicago (1500 N. Clybourn Ave.) screens local filmmaker Jerzy Rose’s 2017 film NEIGHBORHOOD FOOD DRIVE (85 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 8pm. Part of the Slamdance Cinema Club series.
Alliance Française (54 W. Chicago Ave.) screens Louis Malle's 1958 drama ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (88 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 6:30pm. Preceded by Andy Berlin’s 2015 short MARLENE (6 min). Introduced by Naomi Beckwith, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago.
Doc Films (University of Chicago) screens Humberto Solás’ 1969 Cuban film LUCIA (160 min, 16mm) on Thursday at 7pm.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Emil Ben-Shimon’s 2016 Israeli film THE WOMEN’S BALCONY (96 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: James Mangold’s 2017 film LOGAN, showing in a black and white version, LOGAN NOIR (137 min, DCP Digital), opens; Brad Bird’s 1999 animated film THE IRON GIANT (86 min, 35mm) is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am and Tuesday at 7:30pm; D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 music documentary MONTEREY POP (78 min, DCP Digital; New Restoration) is on Saturday and Sunday at 2pm; Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) is on Friday at Midnight; and Jim Sharman’s 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at Midnight.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Anocha Suwichakornpong’s 2016Thai/French/Dutch/Qatari film BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK (105 min, Video Projection) and Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent’s 2015 French documentary TOMORROW (118 min, Video Projection) for week-long runs.
At the Chicago Cultural Center this week: Now & Next: A Celebration of The Chicago Track is on Friday at 5pm. The event features performances by members of the Making the Band Music Cohort of Young Chicago Authors and a screening of Free Spirit Media Industry Pathways Film Cohort member Terrence Thompson’s new film DRIVE SLOW. Followed by a panel discussion; and Cinema/Chicago presents a screening of Kim Ju-Hwan’s 2013 South Korean film KOALA (100 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 6:30pm. Free admission.
Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens Jaume Balagueró’s 2011 Spanish film SLEEP TIGHT (107 min, DVD Projection) on Tuesday at 6pm. Free admission.
The Gorton Community Center in Lake Forest (400 E. Illinois Rd., Lake Forest, IL) hosts a screening of Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film THE DARK KNIGHT (152 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 7pm.
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.
CINE-LIST: June 16 - June 22, 2017
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kyle Cubr, Ben Medina, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael G. Smith