CRUCIAL VIEWING
70mm Film Festival at the Music Box Theatre
The Music Box begins this year’s edition of their 70mm Film Festival with a brand-new, newly-commissioned (by the Music Box) print of Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which receives a week-long run. Steven Spielberg’s HOOK has the weekend matinee slot. The festival continues with a full roster of titles next week.
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Steven Spielberg’s HOOK (American Revival)
Saturday and Sunday, Noon
There’s a portentous scene in Steven Spielberg’s HOOK where Peter Banning (really Peter Pan, played by Robin Williams) first encounters Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman) in Neverland, desperate to save the children, his children, whom Hook had kidnapped from Wendy’s London townhouse. Hook had lured Peter to Neverland in order to reclaim his power over the Great White Father who had cut off his hand, thus enticing the crocodile that haunts his psyche; the caveat in Spielberg’s imagining, however, is that Banning, having grown up and now a work-obsessed lawyer, has no memories of his fantastical origins. “Oh, come on Peter, pick up your weapon,” Hook says, sly, narrative trickery leading one to wonder how there could possibly be an hour and a half of runtime left following the storied showdown. “All right,” Peter replies, deftly pulling from his pocket a checkbook and pen instead of a sword. “How much?” This scene, reminiscent of its era, when wallets were fat and family values were an unctuous talking point, not only encapsulates the central conflict of the film, which is really one of the interior, a conflict between Peter’s older and younger self, but also serves as the perfect metaphor for both the film’s rocky inception and even stonier reception. HOOK, a sequel of sorts to J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, surely ranks among Spielberg’s most youthful films, bravely asserting a kid’s—and even an adult’s—right to embrace childhood rather than encouraging feigned maturity, though its budget was certainly more developed—capping out at $70 million, more than $30 million over the projected budget, it was Spielberg’s most expensive production to date, and, even though sandwiched between the third installment of his INDIANA JONES trilogy and the first of several JURASSIC PARK-adjacent spectacles, it still holds a spot amongst his costliest endeavors. The bloat was evident to critics; in his review for the New York Times, Vincent Canby astutely notes that “[t]o be profitable, it must be all things to as many people as possible, including kids who can identify with a 40-year-old man in a midlife crisis, and 40-year-old men in midlife crises who long to fight pirates with cardboard cutlasses.” Indeed, it’s a self-reflexive amalgamation of auteurist fixations, from childhood wonder and the trials and tribulations of fatherhood (Spielberg had wanted to make the film in 1985 but temporarily abandoned it after his son was born) to an almost transcendental fascination with displaced imagination and the frustratingly impalpable nature of world building. Its merits—of which there are many, despite what practically every critic at the time may have written—are rooted in these career throughlines. I and most everyone I know in my age group consider HOOK a childhood classic; I have only fond memories of Williams’ warm gaze, Hoffman’s Minnelli-esque villain, the whimsical multi-colored paint that replaces both food and weaponry, and, of course, chants of “Rufio! Rufio! Rufio!” (A cursory Google search reinforces these claims, a number of revisionist think pieces written by 20- and 30-something critics for the film’s 25th anniversary last year topping the results.) Adult Peter’s dilemma mirrors not just Spielberg’s, but also that of a certain milieu of creative men torn between their work and personal lives; a privileged position, to be sure, one typically afforded to them by their spouses—it’s a shame that Peter’s wife Moira, who’s also Wendy’s granddaughter, doesn’t have a bigger presence. Though problematic in nature, this dynamic is hyper-respective to the Bush Senior era, when many a family-oriented film had at its core a neglectful father and overcompensating mother. (This is a stark contrast to various contemporary films in which helicopter parenting is less a cultural in-joke and more of an archetype. See: Andrew Jay Cohen’s THE HOUSE starring Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler as parents who start an illegal casino to replenish their daughter’s college fund. I guess student loans are out of the question?) One particularly endearing aspect of the film is its sweaty realism and rough-hewn set design, though, interestingly enough, Spielberg has lamented his de facto scrappiness. “I'm a little less proud of the Neverland sequences,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2011, “because I'm uncomfortable with that highly stylized world that today, of course, I would probably have done with live-action character work inside a completely digital set. But we didn't have the technology to do it then, and my imagination only went as far as building physical sets and trying to paint trees blue and red." (Unfortunately, he says the last part like it’s a bad thing.) Also compelling are the performances: Williams is reliably charismatic, but it’s Hoffman who really steals the show. His Hook represents, albeit entertainingly, a frightening alternative to Peter’s eventual epiphany: old, alone (save Smee) and still haunted by the past. Spielberg once us again reminds us that, yes, we do have to grow up, but it doesn’t have to be so bad. (1991, 142 min, 70mm) KS
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Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (British/American Revival)
Check Venue website for showtimes
For many, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is not simply a masterpiece, but the apotheosis of moviegoing itself. In no other film is the experience of seeing images larger than oneself linked so directly to contemplating humanity's place in the universe. Kubrick achieves this (literally) awesome effect through a number of staggering devices: a narrative structure that begins at "the dawn of man" and ends with the final evolution of humankind; one-of-a-kind special effects, the result of years of scientific research, that forever changed visual representations of outer space; a singular irony that renders the most familiar human interaction beguiling; blasts of symphonic music that heighten the project of sensory overload. It isn't hyperbolic to assert, as film scholar Michel Chion has in his book Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey, that this could be the most expensive experimental film ever made; it's certainly the most abstracted of all big-budget productions. As in most of Kubrick's films, the pervasive ambiguity--the product of every detail having been realized so thoroughly as to seem independent of an author—ensures a different experience from viewing to viewing. Much criticism has noted the shifting nature of "thinking" computer HAL-9000, the "star" of the movie's longest section, who can seem evil, pathetic, or divine depending on one's orientation to the film; less often discussed is the poker-faced second movement, largely set in the ultra-professional meeting rooms of an orbiting space station. Is this a satire of Cold War diplomacy (something like a drier follow-up to DR. STRANGELOVE)? An allegory about the limitations of scientific knowledge? Like the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence that makes up most of the film's final movement--an astonishing piece of abstract expressionist art every bit the equal of the Gyorgy Ligeti composition that accompanies it—one can never know concretely what it all "means," nor would one ever want to. (1968, 142 min, 70mm; Brand New Print) BS
Jacques Tourneur’s ANNE OF THE INDIES (American Revival) & Dave Fleischer’s POPEYE THE SAILOR MEETS SINBAD THE SAILOR (Animation Revival)
Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
Dave Fleischer’s two-reel Technicolor cartoon POPEYE THE SAILOR MEETS SINDBAD THE SAILOR (1936, 16 min, 16mm) slightly tones down the games of radical plasticity and discordance that marked the shorter, black-and-white entries in the Fleischer Bros. series of Popeye films, recognizing that an extended narrative demands a more coherent visual style. The film’s violence, always a hallmark of the series, is as extreme as ever, and it is matched and undermined now by patterns of foreground and background colors that are as intense and powerful as the physical altercations between the characters. Prefiguring the later Superman shorts that the Fleischer Bros. were to produce, color is used here in an otherworldly manner, with bands of off-putting greens, tans, and blues suggesting alien vistas and impossible geologies. The cartoons directed by Dave Fleischer never had the inventiveness, wit, and audacity shown by those directed by his brother Max, and this is no exception. All-too-often the film hints at stylistic possibilities rather than exploring them, and the gimmick of casting Bluto as Sinbad exhausts itself long before the film realizes it has, but the anarchic glee the film takes in exploring Popeye’s body and the rambling banter coming out of his mouth are as subversive today as they were in 1936. Even a somewhat weaker Fleischer Bros. short contains more moments of magic and concentrated surprise than whole decades’ worth of features by their mousey rival. Paired with the short is Jacques Tourneur’s ANNE OF THE INDIES (1951, 82 min, 35mm), an overstuffed confusion of a pirate film from one of Hollywood’s premier specialists in gothic romance. In it, Jean Peters plays Anne Providence, a highly fictionalized version of Anne Bonny, the famous 18th century pirate captain. Tourneur’s film tones down Bonny’s subversive gender performance, bisexuality, and autonomy: the closest Anne Providence gets to cross dressing is wearing pants; her lover Mary Read, the only other female pirate captain known to have operated at the time, isn’t in the film; and several characters insist, though Providence is a captain, that she sails under the command of Blackbeard, not on her own. But Tourneur isn’t making a toothless exercise in historical amnesia. ANNE OF THE INDIES is a complex, if haywire, portrait of a deeply morally compromised protagonist, a woman who is simultaneously a cruel murderer on a shocking scale and a romantic willing to sacrifice her life to protect that of the man she loves. Where a different film would draw a trajectory of redemption for her, Tourneur revels in the ambiguity of having a conscienceless killer also be deeply and selflessly in love. Tourneur, an expert at marrying the tempestuousness of a character’s emotions to the tumult of the natural world gone awry, milks his imagery of sea and sand and fire for all its worth, crafting image after image of expressionistic exaggeration and invention, always arrested just a hair before the mise-en-scene explodes. KB
Stom Sogo: PS When You Thought You Are Going To Die (Experimental Revival)
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) - Friday, 7:30pm
This program celebrates the life and work of the irrepressible, unique, and dynamic film and videomaker Stom Sogo, on the fifth anniversary of his passing (Sogo died accidentally in Japan in July 2012 at age 37). Born in Japan, Sogo spent many years in the U.S., primarily in San Francisco and New York, where he crafted crazed, powerful, infuriating, confounding, and amazing work in Super-8mm and video. One did not view Sogo's work, one experienced it—sometimes endured it. It was frantic, mesmerizing, loud, overwhelming work that pushed to abstraction, consuming work that often felt like a trip without the drugs (Sogo was well-known for his partaking of various substances). I had the pleasure of meeting Stom a few times in New York many years ago, and he was as vital, crazed, and memorable as his work. Stom was a force and this energy—unfocused, messy, compelling—found its way to his work. More than many artists, his work really felt like an inseparable extension of himself. Whether you engage with his work—which certainly can be hard—you won't soon forget it. The program includes SILVER PLAY (2002, 16 min), SONG FOR TV (2002, 4 min), YA PRIVATE SKY (2001, 4 min), SLOW DEATH (2000, 16 min), PERIODICAL EFFECT (2001, 10 min), REPEAT (2006, 10 min), and PS WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU ARE GOING TO DIE (2003, 18 min). (2000-06, approx. 78 min, Video Projection) PF
John Landis' THE SADIST (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7 and 9pm
Written and directed by James Landis, shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, and starring Arch Hall, Jr., this is a tense, tough exploitation movie. Three high school teachers—a young man, a young woman, and a middle-aged science teacher—are marooned at a seemingly abandoned mechanic’s shop in the middle of the desert when their car breaks down. They’re trapped and tormented by teenage thrill kill couple Charlie and Judy, whose car has also broken down. What follows is a clean flow of classic B-movie: vicious killers snarling at cardboard stoics through a series of dynamic, tightly-packed tableaux. For fans of this sort of thing the movie is an absolute formal rush. Sharp black-and-white cinematography from the man who lensed BLOW OUT, MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND draws out the viciousness of Landis’ invigoratingly heartless plotting. The film is at its best when the images take on their own self-contained momentum, winnowing down the cast—and the movie—to a final, primal confrontation. This is like a Russ Meyer movie with just the craft, minus the bawdy humor, crackerjack dialogue, and hyperbolic vividness of his framing and editing. It’s marred some by a labored attempt at psychologizing “The Sadist” of the title, with the sort of plummy faux-academic opening voiceover that Russ Meyer had dedicated himself to lampooning. One has to touch on the ludicrous performance by Arch Hall, Jr. as killer Charlie Tibbs. He gurns and lurches through the frame like an idiot James Dean. A Nic Cage could do this sort of thing and it would come off as tragicomic gonzo poetry, but here the performance feels lumpen, something the scenes happen around. Nonetheless, THE SADIST still moves like a rocket, as the work is sculpted around Charlie Tibbs, the chief object of fascination. The narrative accommodates the excess of his performance. In any case, Hall’s performance is probably closer to what a psychopath on a killing spree would be like in reality—buffoonish, repetitive, but a practiced hand at brutality. (1963, 95 min, 35mm) BM
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Michael Ritchie’s THE BAD NEWS BEARS (American Revival)
Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) – Wednesday, 1 and 7:30pm (Free Admission)
It’s hard to believe that Walter Matthau was the third choice (after Steve McQueen and Warren Beatty) to play Coach Morris Buttermaker—he makes the character so irreducibly Matthau-esque that you can’t imagine anyone else in the part. Buttermaker is crotchety, cynical, and yet never less than lovable, an alter cocker who makes not giving a shit seem like a talent. He’s also the perfect protagonist for a Michael Ritchie comedy, as the director was at his most spot-on when he was critiquing Americans’ obsession with competition (c.f., DOWNHILL RACER, THE CANDIDATE, SMILE). Despite being aimed at children, THE BAD NEWS BEARS is no less biting than Ritchie’s other classics, which makes it perhaps the most subversive of his films. It’s certainly one of his funniest, thanks to Matthau and the foul-mouthed kids who make up the baseball team. Bringing a documentary-inspired realist aesthetic to mainstream comedy, Ritchie encouraged his child actors to ad lib and employed handheld cameras during the (hilariously inept) sports scenes. The film feels weirdly gritty for a comedy about little league baseball—let’s hope the 35mm print showing is good and grainy. (1976, 102 min, 35mm) BS
Fritz Lang's SCARLET STREET (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Friday, 7 and 9:15pm
Edward G. Robinson is not merely an actor or performer. He's a force of nature. Much like Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson is both character and legend, a metatextual presence who charges the screen space around him. In SCARLET STREET he achieves a kind of nirvana: Playing against type, he's not a ruthless criminal but a meek, kind-hearted amateur painter, easily duped by femme fatale Joan Bennett because she seems to be the first person to pay any attention to him. In films such as LITTLE CAESAR, Robinson guns people down with the offhanded casualness of eating a hamburger; here, he's at the mercy of forces he cannot see or even imagine, and they gradually strip him of everything. We know that coiled deep inside him is the power and violence with which he could save himself. But it's not to be. Robinson is fated to wander the streets, penniless; forced to stare at his own priceless masterpieces, taunting him from art gallery windows with their inaccessibility; and finally, even have his sanity taken away from him. Lang's filmography is stuffed with majestic downers, but surely this is among his most bleak. (1945, 103 min, 35mm Archival Print) RC
Jean-Pierre Melville's LE SILENCE DE LA MER (French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm and Thursday, 6pm
Jean-Pierre Melville, the most compulsively eccentric of all great filmmakers, made his feature-directing debut with this ultra-low-budget chamber drama. It's at once Melville's most austerely minimalist film, and his most outrageous: while later Melville flicks would merely fetishize laconic cool, this goes as far as to have two main characters who don't talk at all for most of the film, and a third—a pathetic, tragic figure—who finds his ideals undermined by his own incessant chattering. Using the meager resources available to them—a single house, an ominous ticking clock, a handful of actors, and a lot of voice-over—Melville and his future right-hand man, cinematographer Henri Decaë (also making his feature debut), construct a stifling, cramped world of shadows, low-angle shots and empty stares. The black-and-white plot—about an artistically-inclined German officer (Howard Vernon, who bears a passing resemblance to Boris Karloff) who grows disillusioned with the Third Reich while lodging with a standoffish French family during the Occupation—may be Melville's least complex and ambiguous, but it also reveals a different, idealistic side of a director better known for his melancholy murkiness. Meanwhile, a few quintessentially Melvillian themes—mutual respect between opponents, resolve as the highest moral calling—make their first appearances. This object lesson in expressive economy is rarely screened in Chicago; it'd be a shame to miss it. (1949, 88 min, DCP Digital) IV
Jean-Pierre Melville's ARMY OF SHADOWS (French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 4:45pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Originally released in 1969 and poorly received, Melville's emotionally devastating film about the French Resistance has vaunted itself into film canon territory after its reevaluation and international revival in 2006. The film's intricate plot follows a band of resistance fighters struggling to survive their inexorable demise from Nazi occupation and themselves—sacrificing their humanity in the process. Anthony Lane marveled at Melville's ability to "render that fatalism not as a grind but as a source of tremulous suspense." The resisters seek to undermine the occupation while defending—sometimes harrowingly—against capture, torture, and execution. Just as frequently, however, they are quietly self-policing traitors and potential weak links with the same paranoia and brutality as the Gestapo. Filmed in color, ARMY OF SHADOWS appears almost gray, and its aesthetic stands in contrast to Melville's stylized gangster films. It is not completely removed from his oeuvre, borrowing from their pacing and quiet tone. In ARMY OF SHADOWS, there are no battles or spectacular acts of sabotage; only subversive attacks on a seemingly ever-present Nazi network. But more importantly, the paranoia the resistance fighters experience as infighting and self-protection becomes its own pervasive enemy, embodying, as Baudrillard wrote of modes of resistance, cockroaches teeming in the interstices. Melville, who served in the French Resistance, shows the heartbreaking futility of the struggle when one is attacked from both outside and in. (1969, 140 min, DCP Digital) BW
John Huston's BEAT THE DEVIL (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
Cited by Roger Ebert as the first camp film, BEAT THE DEVIL is arguably the most iconoclastic work of John Huston's generally formulaic filmography. Similar to Stanley Donen's CHARADE, the film is a combustible mix of noir, romance, and comedy. This amalgamation of genres may explain why it initially baffled 1950s audiences, but has since acquired a cult status. Originally intended to be a more mature, Graham Greene-esque thriller concerning colonialism, BEAT THE DEVIL was ultimately penned on a day-to-day basis by a young Truman Capote, lending it a brisk, madcap feeling. The charm of BEAT THE DEVIL results from the fact that none of its participants take themselves too seriously, Huston included; and indeed, the film is very much a satire of his earlier quest-driven noirs like THE ASPHALT JUNGLE and THE MALTESE FALCON. The plot, which deals with a rat race to a uranium deposit in British-occupied Kenya, is really just a pretense for the heavyweight all-star cast of Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Jennifer Jones to give unrestrained, over the top performances as caricatures of themselves. Bogart and Lorre were given the freedom to improvise much of their dialog, adding an extra dimension of farcical hilarity. (1953, 89 min, DCP Digital) HS
James Ivory's MAURICE (British Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
How refreshing to watch an Edwardian period drama in which what's queer is not relegated to the subtextual. MAURICE, the 1987 adaptation of E. M. Forster's posthumous novel, is the definitive coming-out blockbuster. For sixty years, Forster never felt the time was right to publish his work about an insuperable "congenital homosexual" (it was published in 1971, a year after his death). But seventeen years later the stars aligned for Merchant Ivory Productions' film. It's as stylish and sexy as PRICK UP YOUR EARS or the BBC's Brideshead Revisited, but concise and without the hammer fall or the lifetime of melancholy. It remains one of the few mainstream queer-topic films from that era that doesn't feel dated (even today there is no abundance of movie men resolutely climbing through each other's windows). James Wilby plays the title character, a guileless lummox whose incapacity for subterfuge lands him in a radical position. The expansion of his consciousness begins with a tentative advance from a classmate, Clive (Hugh Grant). Behold Grant's first major performance; he's uncommonly subtle as the apprehensive lover and then as the shell into which he disappears. As Maurice grows surer of himself and Clive retreats behind his moustache, Clive's under-gamekeeper, Scudder (the unspeakably charming Rupert Graves), appears, bringing Maurice's first taste of class struggle with him. Maurice falls between A ROOM WITH A VIEW and HOWARD'S END in Merchant Ivory's E. M. Forster trilogy, and is the only film of the three not screen-written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. This is the boy's club, and the exclusion is hilariously delineated in the first scene by young Maurice's professor as he illustrates an extempo beach lecture on sex with a series of 'waginas' and 'membrus wirilises' sketched in the sand and hopes the tide comes in before any ladies should see. (1987, 140 min, DCP Digital; New Restoration) JF
Alison Klayman's AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY (Contemporary Documentary/Oppositional Viewing)
The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Low Res Studio (1821 W. Hubbard St., #203) – Thursday, 7:30pm
Rock star artist, political firebrand, blackjack aficionado, cat enthusiast—Ai Weiwei is a man of many hats. Alison Klayman's AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY follows the demigod of the contemporary Chinese art world as he works on a handful of new projects while constantly being harassed by the police. Over the past decade plus, he has thrust a proverbial (and with the poster art for this film, literal) middle finger in the face of Chinese officials, calling out the government for widespread corruption, cover-ups and human rights violations. For Ai Weiwei, the boundary between art and activism is nonexistent—one necessitates the other. This is evident in his "So Sorry" piece, a mural made of backpacks to memorialize the students who died during the Sichuan earthquake as a result of shoddy "tofu" construction. All of Ai Weiwei's art is about uncovering the truth; it's therefore no surprise that he calls Twitter, an integral part of last year's Arab Spring, the most important medium of our time. Though this film features a comprehensive survey of Ai Weiwei's work, from his Warhol-esque Coca-Cola urns to his sunflower seeds project at the Tate Modern, viewers would be remiss not to seek out the artist's own documentaries. Since the filming of NEVER SORRY, Ai Weiwei has endured even more government bullshit in the form of trumped-up tax evasion charges, and to suggest that he's unflappable or fearless in the face of this kind of intimidation would be to misunderstand his motivation: "I act brave because I know the danger is really there." But as this long overdue film shows, Ai Weiwei has ignited a fire, influencing an entire generation of artists in both his home country and worldwide. (2012, 91 min, Video Projection) HS
Ana Lily Amirpour's THE BAD BATCH (New American)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
Following 2014’s A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, Ana Lily Amirpour returns to the screen with her sophomore film, THE BAD BATCH. In a dystopian future and in a world where the notions of community and camaraderie have become isolated and ethnocentric, loner Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) finds herself banished to the desert. The barren wasteland she’s forced to traverse, reminiscent of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and the MAD MAX series (specifically FURY ROAD), is full of cannibals and hostiles at every turn. She forms an unlikely bond with the no-nonsense Miami Man (Jason Momoma) in an effort to find a missing girl. THE BAD BATCH employs the same genre-mashing style Amirpour employed on GIRL but with slightly less satisfying depth in scope. The silky, dynamic shadows, pulsing electronic music, and skateboards all make a return here; but the focus has shifted more towards grander ideas about the extremes humanity goes to when the normal way of life has ceased to exist. Nevertheless, it remains a beautiful film to look at and shows flashes of Amirpour’s abilities to tackle larger subject material. The idea of “it’s not what you know, but who you know” plays strongly and the inter-weaving of the strong and empowered Arlen amongst various communities showcases the director’s skill at writing compelling lead characters. THE BAD BATCH, although uneven at times, displays fantastic vision and aesthetic as Amirpour continues to refine her style early in her career. (2016, 118 min, DCP Digital) KC
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Comfort Film at Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents an outdoor screening of Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro’s 1911 silent Italian film L’INFERNO [DANTE’S INFERNO] (approx. 68 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 8:30pm, with a live score performed by Volcano Radar. Preceded by the 1938 Uruguayan short ECLIPSE SOLAR DE 1938 (8 min, Digital Projection). Free admission.
Black Cinema House and the Chicago Film Archives present an outdoor screening of the program 1968 with Gordon Parks: 4th Annual Movies Under the Stars on Friday at 8:30pm at the Muffler Shop (359 E. Garfield Blvd.). Screening are two documentaries worked on by Gordon Parks: Josef Filipowic's DIARY OF A HARLEM FAMILY (1968, 20 min, 16mm; narrated and photographed by Parks) and Parks’ own film WORLD OF PIRI THOMAS (1968, 60 min, 16mm). Free admission.
The Society for Arts (1112 N. Milwaukee Ave.) screens Marie Noëlle’s 2016 French-Polish film MARIE CURIE: THE COURAGE OF KNOWLEDGE (100 min, Video Projection) for a week-long run. It plays Friday and Monday-Thursday at 7 and 9pm; Saturday at 5 and 7pm; and Sunday at 3, 5, and 7pm.
The Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 200) screens Axel Ranisch’ 2013 German film ROBBER (70 min, Video Projection) on Thursday at 6pm. Free admission.
The Windy City Film Festival takes place Friday-Sunday at the Mercury Theater (3745 N. Southport Ave.). Complete schedule at www.windycityfilmfest.com.
Bedsheet Cinema (3149 W. Lyndale, Apt. 1, in the courtyard) presents an outdoor screening of Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8 ½ (138 min, Unconfirmed Format) on Wednesday. Unconfirmed start time (check their Facebook page).
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 Japanese animated film YOUR NAME (106 min, DCP Digital), Nacho Vigalondo’s 2016 Canadian/Spanish film COLOSSAL (109 min, DCP Digital), John Scheinfeld’s 2016 documentary CHASING TRANE: THE JOHN COLTRANE DOCUMENTARY (99 min, DCP Digital) and Lydia Tenaglia’s 2016 documentary JEREMIAH TOWER: THE LAST MAGNIFICENT (102 min, DCP Digital) all have multiple screenings this week. Check the Siskel website for showtimes.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Toni Venturi’s 2001 Brazilian film LATITUDE ZERO (85 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 7pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: João Pedro Rodrigues’ 2016 Portuguese film THE ORNITHOLOGIST (117 min, DCP Digital) and David Leveaux’s 2016 UK film THE EXCEPTION (107 min, DCP Digital) both open.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Babak Jalali’s 2016 film RADIO DREAMS (94 min, Video Projection) and Lutz Gregor’s 2016 German documentary MALI BLUES (93 min, Video Projection) for week-long runs.
At the Chicago Cultural Center this week: Cinema/Chicago presents a screening of Matthew Salleh’s 2017 Australian documentary BARBECUE (102 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 6:30pm. Free admission.
The Gorton Community Center in Lake Forest (400 E. Illinois Rd., Lake Forest, IL) screens Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (142 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 30 - July 6, 2017
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Kyle Cubr, Josephine Ferorelli, Harrison Sherrod, Ben Medina, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Brian Welesko