NOTE: This list covers the two-week period from Friday, December 20 to Thursday, January 2. The Crucial Viewing and Also Recommended sections include films from both weeks, so be sure to check the dates. The More Screenings section is in two parts, one for each week. Some venues may have additional screenings not announced by our deadline.
CRUCIAL VIEWING
Mario Roncoroni’s FILIBUS (Silent Italian Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, December 20, 2:15pm, Sunday, December 22, 3:30pm, and Thursday, December 26, 6:15pm
Most official film histories, when bothering to acknowledge silent Italian cinema at all, relegate it to a footnote in the career of D.W. Griffith (who was inspired by epic period melodramas like Giovanni Pastrone’s CABIRIA to create feature films like THE BIRTH OF A NATION and INTOLERANCE). That is why this new 2K restoration of Mario Roncoroni’s 1915 FILIBUS, a joint project of Milestone Film and Video in the U.S. and the EYE Filmmuseum in the Netherlands, is so invaluable: This briskly-paced, enormously entertaining 70-minute feature—which combines the “master criminal vs. master detective” plot familiar from Louis Feuillade's mystery serials with science fiction trappings, absurdist humor, and a prototypical gender-bending screen romance—illuminates aspects of Italian culture in the early 20th century (i.e., “Futurist” gender-identity exploration) while also giving a fuller picture of what Italian cinema of the period was like. Interestingly, this low-budget affair, a product of the short-lived Torino-based production company Corona Films, received mostly negative reviews at the time of its release due to its primitive special effects and some derivative plot elements (scenes where Filibus frames her detective-nemesis by making a glove from a mold of a his hand in order to leave his fingerprints behind is taken directly from Feuillade’s FANTOMAS). But the treatment of the title character, a villainous yet fiercely independent, gender-fluid burglar and “aviatrix,” looks shockingly modern by today’s standards, which means that FILIBUS has generated more critical and commercial interest in the 21st century than it ever did in the 1910s. The film’s scenario, written by future sci-fi author Giovanni Bertinetti, concerns Filibus’ execution of a series of daring heists involving a futuristic airship that uses a capsule to lower her and her underlings onto the scene of a crime. Roncoroni’s use of optical effects, which superimpose shots of the dirigible and its criminal occupants over separate shots of a cloudy sky, look charmingly rudimentary today; but his inventive staging—including an extensive use of vertical movement in which characters frequently enter and exit shots from the top and the bottom of the frame—is positively inspired. The film’s most important effect, however, is Valeria Creti’s delightful performance as Filibus, a mischievous turn full of sly looks and gambits designed to seduce not only the characters in the film but the audience as well. By the time FILIBUS is over, contemporary viewers are likely to be rooting for the anti-heroine recently dubbed “cinema’s first lesbian ‘bad girl’” while also lamenting that the ending was left open for a sequel that sadly would never be made. (1915, 70 min, DCP Digital) MGS
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Live piano accompaniment by Dave Drazin at the Sunday screening; the other screenings will feature a pre-recorded musical score.
Jacques Rivette’s JOAN THE MAID 1 and 2: THE BATTLES and THE PRISONS (French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, December 21, 1pm (Part 1) and 4pm (Part 2)
One of the most enduring tales in Western civilization is that of Joan of Arc, the illiterate teenager from a small village in northeastern France who, in 1429, led a successful series of military campaigns to free French cities from English occupation, thus allowing the dauphin of France to travel safely to Reims to be crowned King Charles VII of France. Dubbed the Maid of Orléans for the first city she freed, Joan’s assaults on Paris and Compiégne were repelled, and she was captured and eventually burned at the stake as a heretic in 1431. Canonized in 1920, her story has inspired everything from works of art and literature to numerous screen adaptations—even an iconic TV series in its own right, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What has kept Joan a perennial favorite is not only the improbability of her quest and her dramatic, tragic end, but also the religious visions that propelled her into action and inspired the faith of seasoned soldiers and a would-be king to follow her lead. It seemed inevitable that French director Jacques Rivette, a man drawn to the theatrical and to stories about women, would undertake a telling of the life of this very French icon. His two-part, six-hour-long JOAN THE MAID: THE BATTLES and THE PRISONS has received a long-awaited restoration and release by the Cohen Media Group, a huge improvement over the extant versions of the film, at least one of which cut two hours out of its running time. Rivette is a director given to patient presentation, with a reverence for the written word that shows up on screen in stagey sequences of conversation and exposition. A work like JOAN THE MAID may try the patience of some viewers, but it is precisely in the atmosphere engendered by sitting still and paying attention to the how of Joan’s story that the film is able to work its magic. Sandrine Bonnaire is an actor of unparalleled skill who can get inside the skin of characters as disparate as a homeless rebel, a middle-aged factory worker, and, yes, a saint in the making and suggest the deep waters beneath a mysterious or withdrawn façade. Rivette wants us to see Joan as a living, breathing person who laughs and feels pain, fear, and the righteous conviction of her beliefs that is characteristic of most teenagers. Bonnaire suggests somewhat imperfectly Joan’s youth primarily through her put-on swagger and her fearlessness in battle, but it is the older actor’s maturity that imbues Joan’s seriousness of purpose with the power to sway powerful men to her cause. This is not to say that we viewers are necessarily persuaded. It is not our country that is occupied by a hostile force, so we have no reason to want to believe her. In fact, once Joan sees Charles crowned, the culmination of the mission she has steadfastly heralded from the beginning of the film, we can see that she is at loose ends. Her visions no longer give her explicit instructions, and it seems likely that Joan may be just a girl who wants to live as a man. In the 15th century, invoking St. Catherine and St. Margaret may have been the only acceptable way for a transgender person to live out their true identity. On the other hand, when, as a prisoner of the English, Joan agrees to wear women’s clothing—a bargain she makes to avoid being burned—it’s pretty obvious to see the disadvantages of being a woman at the mercy of men in or out of prison. The battle sequences, a bit paltry due to budget constraints, offer an object lesson in the mechanics of siege warfare at a time when most cities were surrounded by walls. Joan watches from a high window as French and English soldiers taunt each other across a stream. They throw stones at each other, and eventually, several of the French soldiers chase the Englishmen away from the shore. This gives Joan the idea to force the English to retreat by attacking them from an island farther removed from their strongholds. Combat is personal. We see her troops use ladders to scale the city walls and engage in hand-to-hand combat. When a page is killed, Joan offers a sympathetic ear to her own distraught page. There is room in her heart for compassion, both for the occupied and the occupiers. JOAN THE MAID provides a grounded version of a story best known to many of us only in terms of her fiery martyrdom. Rivette’s humanizing chronicle brings Joan back to life without disturbing her religious mystery. (1994, 160 min (Part 1) and 177 min (Part 2), DCP Digital) MF
Ildikó Enyedi’s MY TWENTIETH CENTURY (Hungarian Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, December 20, 6pm, and Monday, December 23, 7:45pm
Both times I’ve seen it, I’ve had trouble making sense of the plot of MY TWENTIETH CENTURY, but that doesn’t stop me from loving the film. Ildikó Enyedi’s debut feature abounds with ambition and originality, and it looks gorgeous to boot. The movie was made in the late 1980s but looks like it comes from at least five decades earlier; evoking Josef von Sternberg’s Marlene Dietrich vehicles, Tibor Máthé’s black-and-white cinematography makes all the lights seem to twinkle like stars and renders all the shadows voluptuously mysterious. In short, you can get drunk on the aesthetic of MY TWENTIETH CENTURY without fully understanding what’s going on, though I suspect that intoxicated bewilderment is close to what Enyedi wanted her viewers to experience. The film’s story crosses New Jersey, Budapest, Burma, Vienna, Siberia, and an unspecified African country; the events include kidnappings, romantic affairs, acts of terrorism and espionage, Thomas Edison’s unveiling of the electric light bulb, and a flashback narrated by a talking monkey. In its unorthodox consideration of the transition from the 19th to the 20th century—not to mention its narrative entanglements, loopy humor, and mix of real and fictional characters—the movie anticipates Thomas Pynchon’s epic novel Against the Day; that it does so in a running time of less than two hours makes Enyedi’s achievement all the more remarkable. MY TWENTIETH CENTURY begins in the 1880s and briefly follows the childhood of two impoverished identical twins. One Christmas Eve, the girls fall asleep outside after selling matches on a street corner (a nod to Hans Christian Andersen?), then get abducted by two men, who take the girls in separate directions, both literally and metaphorically. One twin grows up to be a courtesan, while the other becomes a revolutionary anarchist. In 1900 their very different, but comparably reckless lives lead them to ride the Orient Express, where they finally reunite. The fanciful conceits and implausible coincidences illuminate how unlikely were many of the real historical events that form the backdrop of the narrative; they’re also just plain fun, conveying the writer-director’s giddiness in spinning out tall tales. (1989, 104 min, DCP Digital) BS
Pedro Almodóvar’s PAIN AND GLORY (New Spanish)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday-Thursday, December 27-January 2; Check venue website for showtimes
While not exactly a valedictory work, Pedro Almodóvar’s PAIN AND GLORY signals that the 70-year-old director is feeling the passage of time more acutely. Working again with his long-time avatars, Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, who play fictionalized versions of the director and his mother, Almodóvar has created a fairly subdued memory piece taken from the point of view of an inactive elder statesman of film. Salvador Mallo (Banderas), suffering from the chronic pains of old age and writer’s block, gets word that his first film has been restored and is to be revived. Presenters want him and his star, Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), to appear together for a Q&A at the screening. This request forces Mallo to reconnect with Crespo, who hasn’t spoken to him since Mallo fired him more than 30 years before over his heroin use. This time, however, Mallo decides to “chase the dragon” himself. His antics trying to score some smack intermix with memories of his move as a child (Asier Flores) with his mother (Cruz) to the small village where his father (Raúl Arévalo), a meager earner, ensconced them in his home in a hillside cave. The contrast between Mallo’s childhood environment and his expensive adult home—fire-engine-red everything hung with museum-quality paintings that he is occasionally asked to loan out to exhibitions—offers the paradox of memory: the cave yields moments of great light, including young Mallo’s homosexual awakening, while his present-day home feels dark and somewhat institutional despite being awash in color. Uniformly fine performances, particularly Banderas’ wry portrait of the artist as a museum piece, inform the generosity of Almodóvar’s cinematic maturation. (2019, 113 min, DCP Digital) MF
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Greta Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN (New American)
Music Box Theatre – Opens Wednesday, December 25, Check Venue website for showtimes
As one of literature’s greatest hits, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women has been an endless source of identification for generations of girls. But do the four March sisters still have something to offer to modern women who live comfortably in a gender-fluid, marriage-optional world that is far removed from the types of constrictions Alcott’s characters faced? Perhaps we haven’t come as far as we think, if the considerable appeal of Greta Gerwig’s version of LITTLE WOMEN is any indicator. Gerwig has done a masterful job of scrambling the timeline of the story, beginning with Jo (Saoirse Ronan) selling her first story to a Boston newspaper, thus announcing a fresh take on the familiar story for a new generation. Gerwig creates an energetic, teeming mise-en-scène in which the sisters’ actions are much more relatable and real. Meg (Emma Watson), for example, is much less the staid and proper sister in this version, even voicing her frustration with her marriage to a man of modest means. The biggest shift Gerwig, as screenwriter, has made is moving Jo into a less commanding position and focusing more attention on Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) and Amy (Florence Pugh). I surmise this was done to play to Chalamet’s fan base, but it also downshifts the message of independence Jo has always represented to wallow in the excess of Downton Abbey-style riches. Also jarring was a Friedrich Bhaer played with a pronounced French accent by dreamy Louis Garrel, son of French director Philippe Garrel. Was the good professor Alsatian after all? And not to quibble, but could Gerwig not have found a single American actress to play the American March sisters? While Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN has not dislodged Gillian Armstrong’s emotionally resonant 1994 version from my heart, it is a worthy adaptation by one of our most gifted filmmakers. (2019, 134 min, 35mm) MF
Jayro Bustamante’s TEMBLORES [TREMORS] (New Guatemalan)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday-Thursday, December 27-January 2 (Check Venue website for showtimes)
Teeming with empathy for its characters, even those on the wrong side of the argument, Jayro Bustamante’s TREMORS is as diplomatic as it often is exasperating. The film follows Pablo (Juan Pablo Olyslager), an affluent, highly religious forty-something with a wife and two children, after it’s discovered that he’s gay. Amidst the turmoil that ensues, he goes to live near his lover, bohemian massage therapist Francisco (an affecting Mauricio Armas Zebadúa). Egregiously homophobic and thus convinced that there’s something wrong with Pablo, his family—namely his wife, Isa (Diane Bathen), and his skeevy brother-in-law—go scorched earth, getting him fired from his job as a financial consultant and preventing him from seeing his children. Pablo eventually begins to give in to his family’s assertions that his is a misguided path, questioning whether or not his happiness supersedes that of his family, though Francisco maintains that their love is pure. Perhaps unlike other films that explore the dissonance between faith and sexual identity, which often attempt to put forward a hopeful outlook, TREMORS goes to the extreme, showing Pablo willfully undergoing an absurd (and even dangerous) form of conversion therapy within his evangelical Christian church. Posited as a choice for Pablo, between embracing his homosexuality—and losing everything in the process—and denying who he is for the sake of his family’s happiness, the purported choice seems to represent more than just Pablo’s sexuality. Where Pablo and his family are tied down by capitalistic and almost fascistic mores, largely dictated by faith, Francisco and his friends seem liberated from such concerns, eschewing religion and the comforts of capitalism for a genuine sense of freedom. The film gets its title from two small earthquakes that happen in the film, one at the beginning, during Pablo’s family’s intervention after discovering he’s gay, and one near the end, the aftermath of which prompts Pablo to return to his family; a common occurrence in Guatemala, these temblores subtly ground the film in its location and thus to its specific struggles. Despite the film’s obvious grievances toward society’s treatment of Pablo, it’s sympathetic to the adversity, real or imagined, faced by each character, even the church members who seem to believe they’re doing the right thing and who do so with compassion, unwarranted though it may be. During an argument, Francisco tells Pablo that he’s not condemned for sucking dick; Pablo replies that he doesn’t know that, and neither does Francisco. Bustamante confronts us with that unknowingness, which can have a solidifying or troubling effect on its viewers, depending on their affiliations. It’s not what Bustamante is asking us, but what, like the characters, we’re asking ourselves. (2019, 108 min, DCP Digital) KS
Aaron Schimberg’s CHAINED FOR LIFE (New American)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday-Thursday, December 20-26 (Check Venue website for showtimes)
Opening with a scroll of text quoting film critic Pauline Kael expounding on the advantages that being beautiful lends to actors and actresses, CHAINED FOR LIFE immediately seeks to dispel this notion. Mabel (Jess Weixler) is a conventionally beautiful actress who’s never quite hit the mainstream, acting in a German auteur’s melodrama in which she plays a blind woman in a hospital filled with malformed patients. In addition to some actors and actresses who play the aforementioned patients, her immediate co-star is Rosenthal (played wonderfully by Adam Pearson), a man with neurofibromatosis. The film’s premise recalls Todd Browning’s FREAKS but director Aaron Schimberg subverts these expectations. CHAINED challenges pre-conceived ideals of what makes a person beautiful, both inwardly and outwardly. There is a certain sense of calmness that pervades the film in how it approaches this aspect. When Mabel first meets Rosenthal, she displays a sense of reverence towards him, assuming he’s an esteemed actor having landed such a role in this celebrated director’s film only to learn he’s never acted outside of a high school play. Indeed, both Mabel and Rosenthal come to find they have a lot to learn from one another. Dialogue is CHAINED’s strong suit and it manages to juxtapose endearing exposition with often times wry humorous jabs at modern cinephile culture. Shot on Super 16mm, the film’s cinematography has a warm aura that further resonates CHAINED’s message about the inner-warmth of the human soul. Tossing in a little Altman with a dash of Lynchian surrealism, CHAINED FOR LIFE is an astonishing effort, elevated by its two leads, and presents a humbling message about the modesty of people’s dreams. (2018, 91 min, 35mm) KC
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CURE (Japanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, December 27, 8:15pm and Monday, December 30, 6pm
Identity as a motif has preoccupied numerous filmmakers, from Ingmar Bergman (PERSONA) to Monte Hellman (ROAD TO NOWHERE) and Abbas Kiarostami (CLOSE-UP). Identity is often tied up with psychosis, and psychotics frequently feature in horror and suspense films because they channel the restless, faceless Id that resides in all of us. The idea that any one of us could become a gruesome killer if someone or something pierced our social conditioning is at the heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CURE. Kurosawa, interested in the shocked comments people invariably make after a neighbor or acquaintance commits a brutal murder (“He was such a nice man. They were an ordinary couple.”), explores the nature of identity and whether our bodies and minds are mere vessels waiting to be filled. On a busy street in Tokyo, a man (Ren Ohsugi) walks through a damp tunnel as cars pass on his right. A fluorescent light illuminating the tunnel blinks and buzzes. We next see the man in a hotel room with a naked prostitute. He is moving about the room, and she is sitting up in bed. Suddenly, he grabs a pipe and bashes her twice on the head. When next we enter the room, it is filled with police investigators. The lead detective, Kenichi Takabe (Kôji Yakusho), observes that a deep “x” has been cut across the prostitute’s neck and chest. The man is found naked, hiding in an air duct in the hallway. When he is questioned at police headquarters by Takabe and police psychiatrist Makoto Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), the man has no idea why he killed the woman. Takabe will have several more such murders to investigate as the film goes on, but he must balance this puzzle with the increasing burden posed by his wife Fumie’s (Anna Nakagawa) mental deterioration. As other “x” cases come to the fore, we and Takabe slowly discover what links them together: a young amnesiac who is soon identified as Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), a medical school dropout whose disheveled home reveals shelves of books about psychiatry, psychosis, and works about and by Franz Mesmer, a German physician who developed the idea of animal magnetism, or in the term used in the film, hypnosis, to influence behavior. As with most detective-centered stories, Takabe is no ordinary cop. Mamiya entices him with an accurate assessment of the detective’s torment. It is Mamiya’s conviction that most people don’t know themselves, the many selves hidden under the surface, the duality of their generous and vicious impulses. He considers Takabe extraordinary, like himself, for recognizing the split in himself. Kurosawa’s camerawork is beyond good. He scouted locations in and around Tokyo that reek of decay, giving us a fair approximation of a haunted house in the penultimate scene where the final showdown between Takabe and Mamiya takes place. He combines handheld work with static long shots of great beauty and atmosphere. He knows how to create tension by considering the images outside the frame, for example, having Sakuma enter Mamiya’s cell, which has a short wall hiding the toilet area in which Mamiya is standing. We don’t see the prisoner, but we know what he’s capable of, and the fear of actually looking at him infuses this scene powerfully. Indeed, Mamiya is rather like a filmmaker, bringing us under his spell, finding our triggers, and conjuring images through exposition and suggestion. With CURE, Kurosawa has created a powerhouse of psychological horror. (1997, 111 min, 35mm) MF
Hiroshi Teshigahara's ANTONIO GAUDI (Documentary Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Sunday, December 22, 2pm and Friday, December 27, 4:15pm
By now nearly a timeworn tradition, the Siskel's late-December run of Hiroshi Teshigahara's meditative and enigmatic ANTONIO GAUDI annually attracts a respectable and respectful crowd, with its fair share of SAIC architecture students done with finals and therefore blazed. In this film—devoid as it is of narration until the very end—every visual texture possesses its own subtle, droning sound: a particular class of curvature will produce an otherworldly gong-like shimmering; a long shot of Barcelona is accompanied by a low rumble. Anything involving intricate metalwork is, sonically, inexplicably menacing. Unless one is already ultra-familiar with Gaudi's oeuvre the viewer generally has no idea what they are looking at, where it is, or when it was constructed, and are thus transported to experiencing the cryptic persuasiveness of man-made structures before an age of writing and reading: to a time in which there may not have ostensibly been an explanatory narrative (or even a subtitle) for every surface. (1985, 72 min, 35mm) MC
Marlon Riggs’ TONGUES UNTIED (Documentary/Essay Revival)
Filmfront (1740 W. 18th St.) — Saturday, December 21, 7pm (Free Admission)
One of the landmark works of queer film activism, Marlon Riggs’ TONGUES UNTIED is a treatise on the enforced silence of gay black men and an emphatic corrective to it. Through a sequence of poetry and monologues delivered by Riggs and fellow gay rights activists, the film centers and amplifies the subjectivities of this doubly oppressed group, giving space for their voices to not only be heard in all their multiplicity, but to directly address and challenge the dominant white, heteronormative patriarchy that deprives them of this privilege in the real world. Riggs conducts this address through an arsenal of techniques, including oral histories spoken directly to camera, musical interludes, instructional videos, and aural collage that often takes on the form of incantation. The last of these is introduced at the start of the film, as a rhythmic chant of “brother to brother” builds in volume and tempo over the soundtrack, becoming mantra. Riggs proceeds to weave voices over and through his images, catalyzing discourses around racism and homophobia and invoking cathartic personal stories of shame, abuse, anger, and self-hate. The voices are not all from positive figures; demonstrating the persecution he faced while growing up in Georgia, Riggs cuts to extreme close-ups of mouths spitting epithets, making a grotesque symphony out of words he would eventually internalize. In a similar, later scene, preachers shout sweaty, fire-and-brimstone rhetoric around the placid visage of poet and activist Essex Hemphill, whose silence, he and Riggs tell us, serves as both a shield from such pernicious intolerance and a cloak that locks them into invisibility and muteness. TONGUES UNTIED searingly relays how this muteness festers into rage. “Anger unvented becomes pain unspoken becomes rage released becomes violence cha cha cha,” another chant on the soundtrack goes, turning a maxim into a song. “It is easier to be furious than to be yearning, easier to crucify myself than you,” Hemphill admits. From these nakedly first-person accounts and their attendant, often confrontational images, Riggs makes perceptible the stifling feelings that, in a horrible irony, are instilled by the very culture that refuses their outlet. But in TONGUES UNTIED, they are spoken. Anger becomes mobilized into art and activism. The silence of the AIDS crisis is breached. In the early 90s, the impact of the film was such that the announcement of its broadcast on American public television caused an outcry, most notably from Pat Buchanan, who chastised Bush’s government for allowing such “pornographic and blasphemous art” to receive federal funding. Of course, nothing about the film is inflammatory. Its candor, its poetry, its sensuality, and its politics only solicit our empathy and action. Riggs passed from AIDS complications in 1994, but thirty years on from the release of this seminal film, his voice has never left us. Presented by the Queer Film Series. (1989, 55 min, Video Projection) JL
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Showing as a double feature with Riggs' 1995 documentary/essay film BLACK IS…BLACK AIN'T (87 min, Video Projection).
Kidlat Tahimik’s PERFUMED NIGHTMARE (Filipino Revival)
PO Box Collective (6900 N. Glenwood Ave.) - Saturday, December 21, 5pm (Free Admission)
When PERFUMED NIGHTMARE appeared on the scene in 1977, winning three awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, it announced a vital new voice in international cinema—Filipino director, writer, and actor Kidlat Tahimik. Tahimik was recognized in 2018 as a National Artist of the Philippines, the state’s highest honor for artists, but he was just a 35-year-old man who had had experiences in and outside his native country when he picked up a camera and created the greatly fictionalized version of his own story that is PERFUMED NIGHTMARE. A character named Kidlat Tahimik introduces us in voiceover to the small jungle village in which he was born and lives. He makes special note of the fact that there is only one bridge by which people enter and leave the village, filming activities on the bridge, such as parades and funeral processions, and charting his growth by pulling increasingly larger vehicles on a rope to that bridge. As a grown man, Kidlat drives a jeepney, a taxi made from the parts of discarded military jeeps, noting that the villagers throw nothing away. He longs for more, however, as he listens to Voice of America broadcasts and becomes so obsessed with space travel that he forms a Werner von Braun Fan Club. When he leaves his village to work in Paris, however, his initial excitement about moving walkways, stone buildings that are 500 years old, and the plethora of bridges of all kinds transforms into horror at the excess of the modern world. Tahimik is associated with the Third Cinema movement for his criticism of neocolonialism, but he approaches his subject with a humorous, affectionate touch. The American businessman who takes Kidlat away from his village is stereotyped as both a bubble-gum vendor and a blue jeans manufacturer. Kidlat’s enthusiasm for flight leads him to give free rides to the richest woman in the village in exchange for her descriptions of what it was like to fly on an airplane. Wisdom comes from a craftsman with a large butterfly tattooed across his chest and the bemused voice of the Virgin Mary, to whom Kidlat prays. In a paean to the death of personal craftsmanship, he films the last handmade copper “onion” dome being placed on a church in von Braun’s homeland of Germany, incidentally sneaking in a storyline of a pregnant German woman played by his wife, Katarina. Special kudos are due to sound editor Billie Zöckler, who manipulates ambient sounds, voiceovers, vintage VOA broadcasts, and Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk speech to great effect. PERFUMED NIGHTMARE is an exuberant ethnographic film (unsurprisingly issued by Les Blank Films) with the underlying theme of the human need for freedom and preservation in an increasingly homogenized, throwaway world. This one is not to be missed. (1977, 93 min, Digital Projection) MF
WHITE/WONDERFUL Double Feature
Music Box Theatre – Various dates through December 24 – Check venue website for showtimes
Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (American Revival)
Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) SP
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Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (American Revival)
Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himself--a child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. Ironically, it's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film, it should be noted), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) BS
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS (December 20 - 26)
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) hosts an Open Screening on Saturday at 7pm. Maximum of 20 minutes per person (Blu-Ray, DVD, or Digital File). Free admission.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Errol Morris' 2018 documentary AMERICAN DHARMA (95 min, DCP Digital) continues a two-week run; and Stanley Nelson’s 2019 documentary MILES DAVIS: BIRTH OF THE COOL (114 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week. The Film Center is closed on Tuesday and Wednesday, December 24 and 25.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: the 21st Annual Animation Show of Shows (83 min, DCP Digital), a touring package of ten international animated shorts, opens on Friday.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Michael Kerry Matthews and Thomas Matthews’ 2019 film LOST HOLIDAY (75 min, Video Projection) Friday-Monday and Thursday (with additional screenings December 27 and 28).
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS (December 27 - January 2)
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie’s 2013 French animated film AYA OF YOP CITY (88 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week; and Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 Spanish film LAW OF DESIRE (102 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at 5:15pm and Thursday at 8:15pm. The Film Center is closed on Wednesday, January 1.
At the Music Box Theatre this week: Michael Apted’s 2019 UK documentary 63 UP (144 min, DCP Digital) opens.
Facets Cinémathèque continues Michael Kerry Matthews and Thomas Matthews’ 2019 film LOST HOLIDAY (75 min, Video Projection) Friday-Saturday. Facets will be closed December 29-January 17.
MUSEUM AND GALLERY SHOWS/EXHIBITIONS
The exhibition Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through January 26. The show features a wealth of Warhol’s short films (fifteen “Screen Tests” and other early shorts, which are all showing on 16mm), videos, and television commercials, including some very rare items. A complementary exhibit, Cinema Reinvented: Four Films by Andy Warhol, will showcase four films over the course of the Back Again show’s run, all in 16mm. Warhol’s 1963 film KISS (54 min, 16mm) is on view December 9-January 5; and his 1967 film TIGER MORSE (34 min, 16mm) is on view January 6-26. The films screen at the top of each hour starting at 11am.
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The 16mm short films (1963-66, approx. 4-5 min each) showing are: ELVIS AT FERUS, JILL AND FREDDY DANCING, EDIE SEDGWICK (SCREEN TEST 308), ANN BUCHANAN (SCREEN TEST 33), PENELOPE PALMER (SCREEN TEST 255), BIBBE HANSEN (SCREEN TEST 128), NICO EATING HERSHEY BAR (SCREEN TEST 246), ME AND TAYLOR, MARIO BANANA #1, JOHN WASHING, JACK SMITH (SCREEN TEST 315), RUFUS COLLINS (SCREEN TEST 61), BILLY NAME (SCREEN TEST 194), MARCEL DUCHAMP (SCREEN TEST 80), and SALVADOR DALI (SCREEN TEST 67); and the three television commercials are: THE UNDERGROUND SUNDAE (1968, 1 min, Digital Video), CADENCE [STANDING WOMAN] (1965, 1 min, Digital Video), and CADENCE [BOTTLE] (1965, 1 min, Digital Video).
CINE-LIST: December 20, 2019 - January 2, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Kyle Cubr, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith