CRUCIAL VIEWING
Lav Diaz's STORM CHILDREN, BOOK ONE (Contemporary Filipino Documentary)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) - Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
A strange thing happened to me while watching STORM CHILDEN, BOOK ONE, a mesmerizing, ambient, mostly wordless documentary by celebrated Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz. Its subject is rootless street urchins eking out an existence in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines in 2013, killing thousands. At two hours and 23 minutes, STORM CHILDREN ends where some of Diaz's films are just getting warmed up. Mainly photographed by Diaz himself in a series of striking, lengthy, stationary black-and-white compositions, the film can put you in a trance. At one point I felt hypnotized, and experienced a surge of euphoria. At another, I have to admit I nodded out. Yet, I can honestly report that the movie fascinated me, and never for an instant was I bored. Rather, it lulled me. The pitter-patter of falling rain. The rumbling thunder. The wind and traffic sounds. Women chopping food. Coughing. Burbling voices. An idling engine. So, I had a nice little doze, then went back to see what I'd missed. It goes to show that learning to be an active viewer is an acquired skill, even though I've seen my share of contemplative cinema, and feel an affinity for it. This film repays the effort. Diaz's images have a stunning depth of field; STORM CHILDREN should play especially well on the big screen, where you'll really be able to see the details. For example, if you squint in one shot, you'll see boys playing basketball deep, deep in the background. In the next shot, Diaz cuts right to them, shooting hoops as a beached ship looms over their makeshift "court." Likewise, we sometimes see foregrounded people in one shot as part of the distant background activity in the next. It is astonishing to watch, or even to contemplate, kids digging around in wreckage to survive, clawing through the dirt, so purposefully and patiently, hoping to find some treasure amidst the garbage, while Peter Frampton wafts over from a nearby radio. Yet there's a curious dynamic at work, here. We are witnessing a harsh reality, yet we somehow don't come away from STORM CHILDREN feeling we've seen a portrait in misery. In fact, as grim as their situation is, on one level these kids find life in the flooded city of Tacloban, on Leyte Island, to be kind of a blast. They smile easily and warmly. We come to wonder at their capacity, the way, with children, their good spirits go a long way towards creating their reality. There's no narration, and Diaz strives to be as non-manipulative as he can. I admire this approach. Of course, pure objectivity is impossible, and the "direct cinema" camera is never really invisible. After all, Diaz has selected what to frame—and that's just the most basic example of the myriad choices he has made that interpret, not just present, reality. Another would be the duration: the passing of time itself— that is, his slow style—is somehow inseparable from the cumulative existential effect. Late in the film, he talks to some boys in the harbor. They're diving in search of metals they can sell to the junk shop, "looking for money so we can live." One boy explains that during the typhoon, stationed ships swayed over, sweeping across their shantytown, destroying their houses and killing their family members. They take Diaz on a tour of what's left. Yet the film closes with gorgeous footage, eventually becoming silent and slow-motion, of the children playing on the abandoned ships. Scrambling up the sides and diving from the various decks, executing cannonballs and backflips over and over again, the children are a poem of resilience and survival. We've seen into their lives. STORM CHILDREN is a challenging, singular, finally transcendent experience. (2014, 143 min, DCP Digital) SP
Jon Jost’s BLUE STRAIT (New American)
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) – Saturday, 8pm
Spoilers! — The great American director Jon Jost made BLUE STRAIT in response to a challenge from his friend Marcus Hu (founder of Strand Releasing) to create a narrative that centered on gay characters. The film is, in part, a portrait of a middle-aged gay couple, but it’s so much more than that. Shot in the small town of Port Angeles, Washington, it’s the sort of meditation on regional American life of which Jost has long been a master; it’s also a shrewd examination of how relationships (gay or straight) can be made and broken by money. In an audacious, experimental move, Jost doesn’t introduce the characters until nearly 20 minutes into BLUE STRAIT. The film begins with a series of long, contemplative shots of Port Angeles and Jost periodically interrupts the elliptical narrative with more shots of this kind (between this and the Siskel’s recent run of Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 FRAMES, 2018 is shaping up to be a good year for soothing cinema). Jost doesn’t present any other people besides the couple until the end of the movie, but you’re always aware of how the characters function within a larger society. One long conversation between the two men (never identified by name, but played by Stephen Taylor and John Manno) concerns how much it costs to trim the hedges on the side of the house, and the climax finds one partner telling the other that he’s lost a $10,000 annual contract with a local high school. Neither of the two characters is particularly sympathetic—the character played by Manno is lazy and aloof, while the one played by Taylor can be vain and obsessive with money. The relationship’s dissolution seems the result of both men’s faults getting the better of them, and Jost’s always-brilliant use of banal conversation shows how the characters’ foibles are products of the society they inhabit. Jost in person. (2014, 85 min, Digital Projection) BS
João Moreira Salles’ IN THE INTENSE NOW (New Brazilian Documentary)
Facets Cinémathèque – Check Venue website for showtimes
A very personal prism of history, memory, and place, Joã oreir alles' IN THE INTENSE NOW is an unexpectedly touching and original film. It's about those intense 1960s moments, from France in May '68 to the Prague Spring, when revolution seemed both desirable and possible. The tenor of the times was summed up in the slogan, "Under the paving stones, the beach!" (I get all of this secondhand, as I wasn't quite alive yet.) Salles narrates a montage of amateur archival footage, which includes eyewitness accounts of Soviet tanks rolling into Prague, as well as home movies of his mother's trip to China at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, during which her joy in travel is palpable. (This aspect of the film resonated with me, since my own mother was a globetrotter in those years, and in that part of the world, as well: in '68, she was doing a stint as a nurse in Vietnam.) Since what followed '68 was not joyful liberation but cowed defeat, Salles ends up elegiacally, almost sentimentally, evoking the year's lost souls and lost spirit—those somehow innocent days when activists like Daniel Cohn-Bendit embodied a heady admixture of total commitment, bullshit, and, yes, joy. For a moment, the movement actually seemed poised to unite a tenuous and wary, yet real, alliance between students and the working class. At the same time, Salles offers a rigorous photographic analysis, an essay on authorship influenced by the likes of Chris Marker and Harun Farocki. He even excerpts a remarkable passage from Marker’s own LE JOLI MAI, wherein Marker listens to critiques from working class people of his attempts to make films about them. "But you film us as if we were slaves," they tell him. "We only suffer, we are only exploited. You think we do not love, we do not smile? That we do not marry and date? Why do you not show it in your movie?" To which Marker admits, "You're quite right," and concludes, "The portrait of the working class can only be made when the working class itself makes its films." There's a pleasing textural contrast between the movie's cerebral elements and Salles' wistful evocations of childhood. He analyzes the end of innocence, as well, as dissent became commodified, transactional, conflated with advertising—which, in the consumer societies, perhaps it always was (as Godard seemed to understand). On the one hand, Salles' film offers a lesson about images: don't take them at face value. On another, it contains a cautionary tale for today's resisters, and one in keeping with its own troubled relationship with nostalgia: it's dangerous to get stuck in a moment. "Absolute spontaneity is wonderful, but it passes, and then, what do you put in its place?" (2017, 127 min, Video Projection) SP
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Basma Alsharif’s OUROBOROS (New Experimental)
The Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival at Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) – Thursday, 8:30pm (7:30pm Reception)
An ouroboros is a snake eating its own tail, and Basma Alsharif’s experimental feature OUROBOROS is a film in conflict with itself. Alsharif employs an arsenal of tactics that render the onscreen action inscrutable; she plays scenes backwards, cuts between shots filmed in different parts of the world without identifying the settings, and features obscure cultural references. At the heart of OUROBOROS are images of bombed-out Gaza, shot from overhead; the stylistic devices seem to grow out of the chaos those images convey. Ben Russell is the cinematographer, and the movie sometimes recalls his work in that it feels like an ethnographic documentary turned inside out. The world is made to seem obscure, not understandable. “As a Palestinian in the Diaspora, I have watched and experienced the perpetual destruction of the Gaza Strip throughout the course of my life—as it has throughout my parents' lives and my grandparents' lives,” Alsharif explained in an interview with Mubi in August 2017. “With the privilege of distance coupled with the privilege of having access to visiting throughout my childhood into adulthood, I had the distinct feeling that it was regarded as a territory disconnected from the rest of the world. A place we get to watch on the news but most are not allowed into. After a 10 year absence from visiting, I returned in 2012, and was shocked by how degraded it had become and even more by how much people had adapted to such inhumane living conditions. Life had clearly become only about survival, people were moving on and had given up on humanity to rescue them. I felt distinctly, that civilization had failed in Gaza.” (2017, 77 min, Digital Projection) BS
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The Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival runs through Sunday, March 11. Check next week’s list for the Friday-Sunday screenings.
Zeinabu irene Davis’ SPIRITS OF REBELLION: BLACK CINEMA FROM UCLA (Contemporary Documentary)
Cinema 53 at the Harper Theater (5238 S. Harper Ave.) – Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
SPIRITS OF REBELLION: BLACK CINEMA AT UCLA is a clean, linear documentary tracking the history of the LA Rebellion from the early 1970's through the early 1990's, dominated by thought-provoking and informative interviews with many of the filmmakers from the movement, including the director herself, Zeinabu irene Davis. Davis includes herself within the film in an unobtrusive manner, both interviewing colleagues and appearing on screen, with everything contributing to the aim of illuminating and exploring just what it meant for this group of African American filmmakers to identify as a movement and a collective within the larger historical context of everything from the Watts riots (indicated as a clear catalyst of the movement) to the critical backlash within the African American community against Blaxploitation. The film deftly pivots from personal narratives in each filmmaker's self-trajectory to larger historical contexts and then pivots back again to the incredible relationships and community-building that emerged at UCLA in those two decades, sometimes in direct conflict with the faculty and/or institutional structure of the university. Intercut throughout the interviews are glimpses of the powerful, incredible body of work that these filmmakers developed: sophisticated in style, upending dominant genres, confounding audience expectations, and (most importantly) telling stories that the filmmakers never saw in dominant, mainstream film culture. Davis sits down with well-known directors such as Haile Gerima (SANKOFA) Charles Burnett (KILLER OF SHEEP) and Julie Dash (DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST) as well as lesser-known but no less talented directors from the collective. Davis also includes fellow Asian American filmmakers from a concurrent collective at UCLA, such as Robert Nakamura, to illustrate the intersection and collaboration that marginalized communities of color exercised in the spirit of the movement. The breadth and depth of the body of work shown all together in this single documentary, which Davis indicated she made in large part to preserve the legacy of these filmmakers while many are still alive, is staggering. A second, explicit goal of Davis that one hopes can be realized through wide dissemination of this informative work is yet more urgent: many of these seminal films that influenced and inspired a new generation of Black filmmakers are out-of-print and difficult to see, a situation that can and should be rectified, especially when their radical role in film history is so clearly illuminated by SPIRITS OF REBELLION. Davis in person; followed by a discussion with Davis, University of Chicago professor Allyson Nadia Field, and University of Chicago film scholar/Cinema 53 curator Jacqueline Stewart (2015, 100 min, Digital Projection) AE
Kelly Reichardt's WENDY AND LUCY (Contemporary American)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 2pm and Thursday, 8:15pm
"You know, scientifically speaking, Marian," says Matthew Modine in SHORT CUTS, "there's no such thing as beyond natural color." Is there such a thing as beyond naturalism? If there is, Reichardt has moved beyond it, beyond even neorealism, using an unvarnished eye to fashion impressionistic portraits of characters who inhabit very specific times and places. Though she's made only a handful of films, a randomly chosen moment from any one of them bears her distinct sensibility. Her newest, NIGHT MOVES, opens later this year. That's a great reason to revisit one of her previous masterpieces (though "masterpiece" seems like a pretentious way to describe this simple, heartbreaking story about loneliness). WENDY AND LUCY is centered on an outstanding performance by Michelle Williams and a painterly eye for the environs of Oregon. Anyone who's ever spent time in the Pacific Northwest will savor details like the greenness of the grass in an empty field or the slow clatter of a freight train going by. It's a small gem that has all the Americana of a John Ford movie yet recalls the naturalism of VAGABOND and even UMBERTO D. And like those movies it's about people literally living hand to mouth, an existence where a gift of $6 (which occurs towards the end) is truly a sacrifice. Owing much to co-screenwriter Jon Raymond's fiction, it unfolds like a perfectly constructed novella. (2008, 80 min, 35mm) RC
Jean-Pierre Melville's LE CERCLE ROUGE (French Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7 and 9:30pm
"[Jean-Pierre] Melville set out to synthesize all the thoughts and feelings he'd acquired about cops and robbers in fifteen years of genre moviemaking and a lifetime of movie watching in LE CERCLE ROUGE," wrote Michael Sragow for the Criterion Collection, adding, "he emerged with something greater than a summing up." The film is an expansive crime thriller in which every major character has the time to reveal novelistic depths and contradictions (in addition to a flamboyant personal style). Alain Delon, playing a variation on his cool assassin from Melville's LE SAMOURAI, is Corey, a recent ex-con who sets out to organize a perfect jewel heist—but as a fake Buddhist quote informs us at the movie's onset, no man can evade punishment if that's to be his fate. Like SAMOURAI but to even greater extent, Melville constructs the criminal progress around precise, professional maneuvers: It is a wholly cinematic work, in that characterization results of fetishized, highly choreographed movement. LE CERCLE ROUGE climaxes with a 25-minute, dialogue-free robbery scene where every action carries extreme consequence—a bold attempt on Melville's part to "outdo" a similar sequence from Jules Dassin's RIFIFI. But where Dassin's achievement stands out from the film around it, Melville's seems the culmination of a very personal style. As Sragow describes it: "Melville uses music minimally, deploys natural sounds like a virtuoso, and, along with cinematographer Henri Decaë, evokes vibrant color with a restricted palette by staying alert to the shifts in light that come with changing time and weather. One could call the result a feast for the senses, except that would imply satiation, even gluttony, and one emerges from this film with senses primed." (1970, 140 min, DCP Digital) BS
Ruben Östlund's THE SQUARE (New Swedish)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm
In Ruben Östlund's THE SQUARE, Claes Bang gives an exceptional comic and dramatic performance as Christian, the long-suffering, hapless director of a contemporary art museum in Stockholm. The movie is a wild, suspenseful satire of the art world that's also a cringe comedy: Östlund, the audacious provocateur who most recently gave us FORCE MAJEURE, a withering comedy of manners about masculinity, cheerfully accepts a definition of his aesthetic as a cross between Larry David and Michael Haneke. As we meet Christian, his museum has acquired a new installation: a "relational aesthetics" piece entitled The Square, to be carved into the cobblestones in front of the museum. A plaque reads, "The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations." Based on an exhibition Östlund actually co-mounted at Sweden's Vandalorum museum, the Square is an imagined "free zone" of humanitarianism, where if you ask for help, passersby must give it—where you could, say, leave your luggage if you're tired, without fear of its being stolen. Of course, the principles of the Square are the ones most often violated in public encounters, where structural societal inequities result in people living such different lives—lives freighted with material hierarchies that neither the Square, nor liberal niceties, can paper over. In fact, modern social convention dictates distrusting others, and tuning out cries for help, especially from the homeless, interactions with whom make up some of this movie's most memorably ironic scenes. Since the sense that anything can happen is a chief pleasure of the film, I'll restrict the plot summary to just a taste: to retrieve stolen items tracked to an apartment complex in a rough part of town, Christian's friend/employee (Christopher Læssø) hits on a brilliant, if ill-advised, scheme: they'll drop a threatening letter through each mail slot in the building. It's a lark, really, but the plan quickly goes south, and keeps going. At two-and-a-half hours, this big movie, winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, certainly takes its time to hoist Christian on his petard, yet it's so well paced, and Östlund so deft at playing with our minds, that we're always engaged. It helps that Bang is so spot-on and charismatic: Christian may be a bit of a fraud, but he's good-humored and, really, rather sympathetic: he just never really expected to find himself put on the spot. Gradually, he becomes aware of the fear and prejudices underlying his own veneer of sheltered, well-heeled liberalism. Some set pieces are so crazy we sense they could only be based on real life, as in the scene where a ballroom full of guests, including Dominic West as a visiting artist, is terrorized by a performance artist pretending to be a monkey (Terry Notary of the PLANET OF THE APES reboots): it's based on a Ukrainian performance artist who, playing a dog, went around actually biting people at a gala. That scene allows Östlund to examine the bystander effect, as well as to forgo realism altogether, as he does in a gobsmacking sex scene with a journalist played by Elizabeth Moss (what a whip-smart actress, what timing). If THE SQUARE is occasionally slightly pat and even facile, as a satire on the breakdown of the social contract, its aim is true. At its best, the skewering bears a dark moral complexity and the knowing gimlet eye of the insider. In fact, I suspect the people who get the biggest kick out of it will be folks who work at contemporary art museums themselves. (2017, 151 min, DCP Digital) SP
Christopher Nolan’s DUNKIRK (New British)
Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) – Wednesday, 1 and 7pm (Free Admission)
Christopher Nolan’s 10th feature film finds the director delving into the past to tell the story of Dunkirk, a moment during World War II in which 400,000 British and French soldiers find themselves cornered along the shore of the Strait of Dover with German forces closing in from all sides. Focusing on the extraction of the British soldiers, the film’s narrative is split into three timelines, from the perspectives of those on land, on the sea, and in the air. The most unique feature here is the differences in time dilation that each of these plot threads experiences—the time scale covering a week, a day, and an hour, respectively. Much like the structuring of Steven Soderbergh’s TRAFFIC, these scenarios are differentiated from one another via distinct tones. Despite being a war film and covering so much material, the film is relatively light on dialogue. Instead, Nolan seeks to create impact through visually stunning detail and intimate camera work. Cameras are strapped to planes, on boats, and to cameraman in the water, creating a deeply immersive experience. As seen throughout his oeuvre, in which he’s been a proponent of on-location shooting and the use of practical effects, the vast beaches coupled with huge warships create a daunting sense of scale. This immensity also helps to create isolation; some of the characters seem but a drop of rain in a storm—an impression accentuated by the use of soft focus during long shots. Hans Zimmer’s score creates foreboding and suspense. Rising and swelling like the sea itself, the music is underlined with the tick-tock of a pocket-watch, driving home the theme of elapsing time. Drawing inspiration from films as diverse as SUNRISE and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, and building on ideas explored in Nolan’s own films MEMENTO and INCEPTION, DUNKIRK immerses its audience with its complex, interweaving storylines. (2017, 106 min, 70mm) KC
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Chicago Feminist Film Festival opens on Wednesday and runs through Friday, March 9 at Columbia College’s Film Row Cinema (1104 S. Wabash Ave.). More information and complete schedule at http://chicagofeministfilmfestival.com.
The Chicago Jewish Film Festival continues through March 18 at several locations. Details and full schedule at https://jccfilmfest.jccchicago.org.
The Chicago Irish Film Festival opened on Thursday and runs through Sunday at the Gallery Theatre and the Logan Theatre. More info and full schedule at www.chicagoirishfilmfestival.com.
The One Earth Film Festival opens on Friday and continues through March 11 at various Chicago and suburban locations. Details and full schedule at www.oneearthfilmfest.org.
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) presents Blind Spots of Memory on Thursday at 7pm. The program is comprised of two of German filmmaker Harun Farocki’s documentary/essay films: RESPITE (2007, 40 min, Digital Projection) and IMAGES OF THE WORLD AND THE INSCRIPTION OF WAR (1988, Germany, 75 min, Digital Projection). Free admission.
The Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) screens Jacques Tourneur’s 1952 film WAY OF A GAUCHO (93 min, 35mm) on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Preceded by Tourneur’s 1938 short film THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (11 min, 16mm).
Also at Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) this week: Kyle Henry’s 2017 film ROGERS PARK (87 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 8pm, with Henry, co-writer Carlos Treviño, and lead actress Sara Sevigny in person.
The Conversations at the Edge series at the Gene Siskel Film Center presents Laura Huertas Millán: Ethnographic Fictions on Thursday at 6pm, with Millán in person. Screening are Millán’s Colombian/Mexican/French/US films SOL NEGRO (BLACK SUN) (2016, 43 min, DCP Digital) and LA LIBERTAD (2017, 31 min, DCP Digital).
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents Heaven Is a Place on Tuesday at 7:30pm. The screening will feature a selection of short works by Selina Trepp, Anthony Buchanan, Nazli Dinçel, and others not listed at press time.
The Art Institute of Chicago (Fullerton Hall) presents footage from Ruth Leitman’s Chicago Architecture Club-produced work-in-progress documentary TIGERMAN on Thursday at 6:30pm, as part of a panel discussion that will include Leitman and subject Stanley Tigerman. Free with museum admission, which is free for Illinois residents on Thursdays.
The March edition of the Midwest Independent Film Festival presents Midwest Shorts on Tuesday at 7:30pm (preceded by a reception at 6pm and a producers’ panel at 6:30pm) at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. www.midwestfilm.com.
Black Cinema House (at the Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative, 1456 E 70th St.) screens Nelson George’s 2015 documentary A BALLERINA’S TALE (85 min, Video Projection) on Friday at 7pm. Free admission.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents In Progress: OTV - Open Television Tonight on Tuesday at 6pm. The event will feature a selection of new pilot episodes and series that will be showing on the online platform Open TV. Selected series creators and Open TV personnel in person. Free with museum admission.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Yale Strom’s 2017 documentary AMERICAN SOCIALIST: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF EUGENE V. DEBS (98 min, DCP Digital; Strom in person at the Saturday screening) and the touring curated animated shorts program The Animation Show of Shows (93 min total, DCP Digital) both have week-long runs; Raúl Ruiz’s 1999 French film TIME REGAINED (158 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 6:30pm, Saturday at 2:30 and 7:45pm, and Monday and Wednesday at 6:30pm; Peter Davis’ 1974 documentary HEARTS AND MINDS (112 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at 5:30pm and Tuesday at 6pm, with a lecture at the Tuesday show by SAIC professor Nora Annesley Taylor; and Naoko Ogigami’s 2017 Japanese film CLOSE-KNIT (127 min, DCP Digital) is on Monday at 8pm, in a screening co-presented by Asian Pop-Up Cinema.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: William Wyler’s 1951 film DETECTIVE STORY (103 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday at 1:30pm; Sidney Lumet’s 1974 film MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (131 min, 35mm) is on Sunday at 7pm; Christine Swanson’s 2017 narrative short BLACKOREA (25 min, DCP Digital; Free Admission) is on Monday at 7pm, followed by a panel discussion with cast and crew; John Waters’ 1988 film HAIRSPRAY (92 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 9:30pm; Seijun Suzuki’s 1984 Japanese film CAPONE CRIES IN HIS SLEEP (130 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm; Colin Higgins’ 1980 film 9 TO 5 (109 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 7pm; and Robert Zemeckis' 1992 film DEATH BECOMES HER (104 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 9:30pm.
At the Music Box Theatre this week: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2017 Russian film LOVELESS (127 min, DCP Digital) opens; 2018 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts (showing in two different programs), Sebastián Lelio’s 2017 Chilean film A FANTASTIC WOMAN (104 min, DCP Digital), and Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2018 film PHANTOM THREAD (130 min, DCP Digital) all continue; Jean Rollin’s 1975 French horror film LIPS OF BLOOD (88 min, DCP Digital) and Brian O'Malley’s 2017 Irish film THE LODGERS (92 min, DCP Digital) are both on Friday and Saturday at Midnight; and Rodrigo Guardiola and Gabriel Cruz Rivas’s 2016 Mexican music documentary ZOÉ: PANORAMAS (90 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 7pm, with co-director Guardiola in person.
Also at Facets Cinémathèque this week: Ashley McKenzie’s 2016 Canadian film WEREWOLF (80 min, Video Projection) plays for a week-long run.
Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens Alicia Cifredo’s 2014 Spanish documentary TOCAORAS (108 min, DVD Projection) on Wednesday at 6pm.
Sinema Obscura presents Documentary Night, a program of short films, at Logan Bar (2230 N. California Ave.) on Monday at 7pm.
ONGOING FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
The Art Institute of Chicago (Stone Gallery) has on view a show of two large-scale installation works by French artist Philippe Parreno. One of these, With a Rhythmic Instinction to Be Able to Travel beyond Existing Forces of Life (2014) includes a moving-image component.
Also currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago: Frances Stark’s 2010 video installation NOTHING IS ENOUGH (14 min loop) in Gallery 295C; and Nam June Paik’s 1986 video sculpture FAMILY OF ROBOT: BABY in Gallery 288.
CINE-LIST: March 2 - March 8, 2018
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kat Sachs, K.A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Kyle Cubr, Alexandra Ensign, Scott Pfeiffer