New On The Blog: You want lists? We’ve got lists! Lots of lists—Best Films of 2019 and Best of the Decade lists—from many of our Cine-File contributors.
CRUCIAL VIEWING
Jean Renoir's THE RIVER (International Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 4pm and Monday, 6pm
Often overshadowed by Powell and Pressburger's BLACK NARCISSUS, that other lush Technicolor adaptation of a Rumer Godden novel, THE RIVER was actually the film that earned the author's blessing, thanks in part to Jean Renoir and company taking production on location to India, far, far away from the (admittedly capable) confines of Pinewood Studios. No surprise then, that while displaced Brits abroad offer our waypoint into both films, Renoir's masterpiece is the more inquisitive. THE RIVER is languid like a summer dream, yet obsessive in the details; from the operations of the jute mills captured documentary style, to the exploration of Hindu tradition offered by precocious young protagonist, Harriet. It is in many ways a film about people trying to interact with a world they can scarcely comprehend, a theme defined as much by the increasingly futile British hold on the subcontinent as it is by the achingly romantic aspirations of a group of children still staring across the threshold to adulthood. In the course of one endless season, Harriet and her family's lives are turned upside down, first by the arrival of dreamy amputee Captain John, then later by unspeakable personal tragedy, events which give resonance to Renoir's poetic gaze, and land THE RIVER among the ranks of the great coming-of-age movies. Boasting an evocative palate on par with any Technicolor film before it—including the aforementioned Archers' classic—the film offers a spellbinding look at mid-century India, and an equally compelling glimpse of artistically evolving, mid-career Renoir. Resplendent, intoxicating, and wholeheartedly recommended. (1951, 99 min, 35mm) TJ
ANDY WARHOL FILMS X 6
Andy Warhol's VINYL (Experimental Revival)
Art Institute of Chicago (Rubloff Auditorium) — Saturday, 1pm (Free with museum admission; registration required)
Employing one set, a few props, and only two different camera positions in the course of 67 minutes, Andy Warhol's very loose adaptation of A Clockwork Orange is nonetheless a work of intense formal precision; those susceptible to it will find the film a spellbinding experience. Anthony Burgess' novel is reduced to just a handful of scenes: a young thug's sadistic assault on some innocent people, his arrest, and his subsequent torture/S&M seduction by state officials. The rest of the film consists of failed gestures of some sort, such as tripped-up proclamations or actors dancing by themselves. As in his later NUDE RESTAURANT (1967), Warhol creates something like euphoria within an apathetic void. Clockwork may not seem like the most obvious choice for Warhol's sole literary adaption (One of Richard Brautigan's quasi-novels would have seemed more a propos); but on further reflection Warhol's aesthetic mingles quite provocatively with Burgess' parable of free choice amidst social oppression. In spite of the restrictions both formal and ideological, Warhol displays a gifted pictorial sense throughout the film. He arranges his actors like a skilled portraitist (No one ever moves more than a couple feet in any direction), with superstar Edie Sedgwick sitting placidly on the right side of the frame for almost the entire duration. Her feminine beauty stands out like stark, contrasting brushstroke against the surrounding canvas of male homoeroticism. (1965, 67 min, 16mm) BS
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VINYL screens as a triple feature with BLOW JOB (1964, 41 min, 16mm) and CAMP (1965, 66 min, 16mm).
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Andy Warhol’s BEAUTY #2 and LONESOME COWBOYS (Experimental Revivals)
Art Institute of Chicago (Rubloff Auditorium) — Saturday, 7pm, Double Feature (Free with museum admission; registration required)
People in Andy Warhol’s circle sometimes referred to the visionary artist and filmmaker as “Drella,” a portmanteau combining the names Cinderella and Dracula, because it distilled the two sides of Warhol’s personality—naïf and vampire—into a single essence. The short feature BEAUTY #2 also represents a concentration of Warhol’s dual nature; the film is at once predatory and detached, presenting the harassment of Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick in affectless, static long takes that evoke the presence of a drugged-out voyeur. In an unchanging composition, the film presents Sedgwick in bed with her current boyfriend Gino Piserchio; both of them are in their underwear for most of the run time. Two offscreen figures, Gerard Malanga and Sedgwick’s ex-boyfriend Chuck Wein, talk to the performers in a nastily sarcastic way and ask invasive questions. Warhol’s “direction” consists of sitting back and recording as the situation turns ugly; in doing nothing to stop the brutishness of the offscreen participants, he effectively doubles it. BEAUTY #2 speaks to a number of eternal questions about cinema; namely, does the camera bear any moral responsibility for what it observes? And are the pleasures of cinema inherently voyeuristic? In keeping with Warhol’s naïf persona, BEAUTY #2 seems to innocently embody these questions rather than answer (or even raise) them. As in many of his films, the stubbornness and seeming randomness of the camera set-up gives the work the impression of found art. (1965, 66 min, 16mm) BS
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A high-concept movie by Andy Warhol’s standards, LONESOME COWBOYS contains characters, sets, and even something resembling a plot. Given these familiar elements—which the filmmaker nevertheless defamiliarizes with his typical entropic vibe—the film feels closer in spirit to the works that Warhol would soon produce for Paul Morrissey than it does most of Warhol’s other directorial efforts. Tellingly, Morrissey wrote the script of LONESOME COWBOYS, which was one of the last features Warhol signed, and also served as its uncredited co-director; one might read the film as Warhol passing his filmmaking torch over to his collaborator. COWBOYS anticipates such Morrissey-directed features as HEAT and TRASH in its lurid depictions of graphic sex (gone is the innocent gaze of Warhol’s BLOW JOB) and in the knowingness of the affected performances. Warhol superstar Viva plays Ramona, a ranch owner in the Arizona desert. The setting appears to be the Old West, though the film contains a reference to World War I and a scene of characters dancing to “Magical Mystery Tour.” (I’m not sure if the hairstyles discussed in one of the longer scenes were around in the 19th century either.) The nymphomaniac Ramona lives with her gay nurse (played by fellow superstar Taylor Mead), hangs out with her town’s cross-dressing sheriff, and lusts after a third man who’s drifting through the region. She encounters sexual rivals in the form of the half-dozen title characters, who arrive shortly into the film and whom are all quickly revealed to be gay. The pervasive erotic curiosity (one can’t really call it tension) motors whatever there is of a plot, though Warhol, as usual, is more interested in observing his subjects hanging out than he is in driving them towards conflict. LONESOME COWBOYS features an extended rape sequence, though it comes off as a non sequitur; the same can be said of Ramona’s attempt to convince the drifter to join her in suicide near the movie’s end. Yet Warhol generates fascination in other ways, principally through his haphazard, process-oriented filmmaking. Every edit in the film comes as a surprise, and one can never be sure when the soundtrack will cut out. Also, some of the longer sequences, in which the male characters shoot the breeze and which exude Warhol’s cool objective gaze, serve as compelling documents of gay counterculture of the 1960s. (1968, 105 min, 16mm) BS
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Andy Warhol's THE CHELSEA GIRLS (Experimental Revival)
Art Institute of Chicago (Rubloff Auditorium) — Sunday, 12:30pm (Free with museum admission; registration required)
1966: The dilapidated Chelsea Hotel had just been designated a New York City landmark and newly-elected John Lindsay organized the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting in a bid to stimulate local production. And in a flash of karmic fury that fused and profaned these civic projects, THE CHELSEA GIRLS proved so successful at the Filmmakers' Cinematheque that it moved uptown to the Regency at 72nd and Broadway, respectable digs that forced New York media and the trade press to acknowledge the movie's existence. Mainstream press coverage ranged from pandering praise to venomous hostility. It was a movie almost calculated to alienate self-styled liberals, who had heretofore encountered destitute junkies and hustlers in a prescriptive, consciousness-raising context. (Pace Jacob Riis, Warhol is more interested in How the Other Half Fucks.) Variety called it "an anti-film, or more accurately, a non-film," but breathlessly reported its grosses anyway. THE CHELSEA GIRLS became the biggest cross-over hit in the history of the American avant-garde—the title that sent bewildered theater owners scrambling to install 16mm projectors and presaged a brief vogue for split-screen and multi-projector presentations that would continue with Expo 67, THE BOSTON STRANGLER, WOODSTOCK, et al. During its original Cinematheque engagement, the twelve reels of CHELSEA GIRLS had been shown in a different order at every show, with distorting glass and spontaneous soundtrack adjustments. Andrew Sarris reckoned that "what with the problems of projection the personalities of projectionists, each showing of THE CHELSEA GIRLS may qualify as a distinctly unique happening." When demand spiked and the Filmmakers Coop rushed to fulfill orders, Jonas Mekas codified the structure of the film and gave us THE CHELSEA GIRLS as we know it today. (The original CHELSEA GIRLS projectionist, Bob Cowan, lamented this state of affairs a few years later: "I saw a version at the Elgin Cinema which was pedestrian to say the least. The sound was a garbled mess, the image grey-brown and lifeless. There were maybe three or four old men in the audience. It was all very depressing.... The enjoyment that I got was in projecting it, not in seeing it.") Even in its housebroken form, THE CHELSEA GIRLS is still a wild experience, heavily influenced by the whims and sympathies of the projectionist. Seen today, the whole is probably greater than the sum of its parts, with no single CHELSEA GIRLS reel approaching the perfection of Warhol's masterpieces. MY HUSTLER and CAMP are funnier, KISS, BLOW JOB, and POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL are more rigorously rewarding, and OUTER AND INNER SPACE and LUPE make more exacting use of the dual projection conceit—and yet THE CHELSEA GIRLS still stands as that quintessential work, the one that most fully synthesizes Warhol's soul-scratching sincerity with his live-wire threat to narrative artifice and traditional film grammar. There's no conventional crosscutting, but the sense of simultaneous action is even more bluntly effective in double projection, a sustained threat of collision never realized. The whole thing is staggering and exhausting, like we're forcibly ensconced in some surveillance state hivemind: we eavesdrop on one amphetamine-fueled rant after another, our eyes wandering away to the queer doings next door and back again. As it stretches on, THE CHELSEA GIRLS feels like it could recede out to infinity—until the return of Pope Ondine. There's not even a fourth wall left to break, and yet the Pope barrels through it anyway, summoning a freak energy that Mekas aptly described as a "holy terror." The image fades out, but the music continues—the movie is still going on, invisible, congealed into air. (1966, 204 min, 16mm Double Projection) KAW
We Tell: States of Violence (Documentary Revivals)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
At one point in AIN’T NOBODY’S BUSINESS (New Orleans Video Access Center, 1978, 22 min), the first video in the Film Studies Center’s We Tell: States of Violence program, social worker and women’s rights activist Andrea Canaan describes the stages that abused women go through on their path to independence. Canaan stresses the crucial assistance that organizations like her YWCA Battered Women’s Program provide: “until recently, there was no place to go.” Indeed, the country’s first battered women’s shelter had opened only four years prior, in 1974, in St. Paul, MN. But Canaan’s words also resonate with the simultaneous emergence of video in the 1970s as a technology for self-expression, community engagement, and activism. With its mixture of consciousness-raising testimony, candid interviews, still-image montage, and dramatic reenactment, AIN’T NOBODY’S BUSINESS embodies both the urgency of the women’s movement, and the myriad possibilities for video as an accessible and immediate vehicle for grassroots documentary practice. It’s one of seven tapes in States of Violence, a program that examines violence across domestic, local, and global scales through activist video and film works from the 1970s to today. (The event is itself the first in a touring series, “We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media,” organized by Philadelphia's Scribe Video Center, to be screened at the University of Chicago through March). Although they were made as instruments for specific causes, radical and resourceful works like INSIDE WOMEN INSIDE (Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio, 1978, 28 min), a bracing look at the deplorable conditions endured by detained women, and THE GULF CRISIS TV PROJECT #55: JUST SAY NO! (Paper Tiger TV, 1990-91, 28 min), a globe-spanning look at conscientious objectors and veterans for peace circa the first Iraq war, have lost none of their power today; the sickening timeliness of all of these tapes also suggests that the oppressors they challenge haven’t lost much power either. Given this week’s dismal Desert Storm flashback, JUST SAY NO! takes on a particular gravity today, but I’m more affected by its exuberance than its relevance. It has an accelerated, channel-surfing energy, reflecting a “participatory community” expanding beyond regional media centers and public access stations and into a worldwide activist network. JUST SAY NO! interpolates material shot by producers in California, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Iowa, Puerto Rico, Germany, and beyond, capturing the thrilling dispersion of the globalization era; later videos, including ones shot by Black Lives Matter and Copwatch members, focus instead on dissemination, as portable video and cell phone cameras make documentation affordable and ubiquitous. States of Violence says plenty about the changes in recording technology and their revolutionary effect on the visibility of violence, but even more about the revolutionaries that have seized on them—and about the continuity of their spirit across the decades. To that end, the Film Studies Center has brought together a panel of speakers (including series co-curator and media producer Louis Massiah, University of Chicago professor and film archivist Jacqueline Stewart, and Invisible Institute activist Maira Khwaja) whose work confirms the ongoing vitality of community media production. Also showing are: BOOKS THROUGH BARS (Scribe Video Center, 1997, 15 min), MILITARY OPTION (Third World Newsreel, 2005, 11 min), M4BL CEREMONY (Movement for Black Lives, 2016, 5 min), and A COP WATCHER’S STORY: EL GRITO DE SUNSET PARK ATTEMPTS TO DETER POLICE BRUTALITY (Copwatch Brooklyn, 2017, 6 min). (1978-2017, approx. 108 min total, Digital Projection) MM
Picture Yourself in Water: Short Films by Caitlin Ryan
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) — Saturday, 7pm
Is there a Midwest experimental film sensibility? Is there a radical cinematic extension of that "Midwest-nice" disposition, sense of humor, and mater-of-fact plainspokeness? Tom Palazzolo would definitely fit that mold with his eccentric, blunt, funny, and empathetic filmography. Visually Caitlin Ryan doesn't share much with Palazzolo, but she absolutely shares a point-of-view that foregrounds the quirky with deep compassion and understanding. VISITING HOME MOVIE (2016) reflects on strangeness of home and the struggles of how to represent it. Out-of-focus domestic images mingle with overblown and offhandedly framed shots of cheesy novelty t-shirts while the filmmaker reads some texts to make sense of her feelings of distance. HAILEY (2017) and MY BROTHER, THE PUNK SINGER (2014) are simple family musings that help set you in a place and a mindset for the rest of the program. THE HOUSE WITH NO CORNERS (2019) takes Ryan's preoccupation with suburban banality to a slightly different place with more poetic menace and more elegantly mannered visuals. The only purely narrative work of the evening, THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE YOGA GEAR (2018) is a delightfully funny portrait of a seemingly ill-prepared woman explaining her desire to radicalize hiking gear with randomly thrown together athletic clothing, replacing her GPS with guidance from rocks, her special tool for avoiding bear attacks. This program of Ryan's short films makes clear her overall project of accumulating banal and ghostly Midwest images and of appreciating the compelling personalities that pop out from those mundane spaces. Also showing are: LOOK (2017), I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU COUCH (2017), and PICTURE YOURSELF IN WATER (2017). (2014-19, approx. 61 min total, Digital Projection) JBM
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Filmmaker Caitlin Ryan in person.
JURAJ HERZ X 2
Juraj Herz’s OIL LAMPS (Czech Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 3pm and Monday, 7:45pm
It is no wonder that the works of novelist Jaroslav Havlíček (1896-1943) have been adapted for the screen with some regularity. Drawing from his own upbringing by teacher-parents in a provincial town and his experiences in the Austrian army, Havlíček’s works burrow into the conceits of the petit bourgeoisie and the savagery of peasants and soldiers in darkly satirical ways. His 1935 novel Parched Desires (revised by the author and republished in 1944 as Oil Lamps after his death) was the first of three novels that trace the fortunes of Štěpa, a pampered heiress and amateur actress whom the author will take from 30-year-old virgin and near-spinster to three-time wife over the course of the trilogy. Havlíček’s sardonic wit gives Czech New Waver Juraj Herz cover to tweak the sloganeering authorities in communist Czechoslovakia, which he does with a heartfelt speech on the utopian promise of the 20th century delivered on the first day of 1900 by Synacek (Karel Cernoch), a humble entertainer and friend of Štěpa (Iva Janžurová). The sad foreknowledge of how bitterly disappointing the century actually became presages the inevitable unhappiness the lonely and baby-crazy Štěpa will experience once she marries her cousin Pavel (Petr Čepek), a dissolute soldier who at least does her the favor of not consummating their marriage because he has syphilis. Herz skillfully moves Štěpa from frivolity to abject practicality, like a Czech Scarlett O’Hara, by transitioning from scenes teeming with celebration and song to ones of dark isolation. The tragedy of Štěpa’s desperate lurch toward a conventional life of marriage and motherhood is unbearably poignant, and the film as a whole reflects on the miserable lot of women in a society that sees them as little more than commodities to be exploited. Brilliant camerawork by Dodo Simoncic lives up to the usual high standard of Czech cinematography. (1971, 101 min, DCP Digital) MF
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Juraj Herz’s MORGIANA (Czech Revival)
Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 5pm and Thursday, 6pm
MORGIANA tells the tale of two sisters who have just inherited their rich father’s estate, with one mansion going to Klára (Iva Janžurová) and another beachfront property going to Viki (also Iva Janžurová). Viki visits a tarot card reader who informs her that Klára stands between her and all the riches she desires, so she begins scheming to murder her sister with poison. Her intense internalized greed and jealously manifest themselves outwardly in her jet-black wardrobe full of garish dresses, hats, and parasols, and are juxtaposed to Klára’s innate purity of heart as represented by her all-white clothing. This symbolic use of clothing is indicative to the stark black and white perspective MORGIANA has. There is relatively little moral grey area to be found. Stylistically, Juraj Herz’s film is a hallucinatory dream full of dizzying cinematography and viscous liquid imagery. The liquid motif begins innocuously enough, with a few sips of water or a saucer of milk being laid out for Morgiana, the titular cat from whose perspective Herz films several scenes, with the camera bouncing nimbly from room to room and across furniture. The fluid imagery escalates to a full on deluge symbolizing Viki’s tumultuous mental state as she contemplates her decisions. MORGIANA recalls the perverted etiquettes of Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME, the free-flowing spirit of Chytilová’s DAISIES, and the psychological fevers of Bergman’s THE HOUR OF THE WOLF to form something truly unforgettable. (1972, 99 min, 35mm Archival Print) KC
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Matt Wolf’s RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 4 and 7:45pm, Saturday, 7:45pm, and Tuesday, 6pm
In 1975, Marion Stokes hit record and never stopped. From then until her death in 2012, Stokes had as many as eight separate Betamax and VCR machines recording network and local news around the clock, ultimately amassing over 70,000 tapes and an invaluable archive of that most American of concepts: the 24-hour news cycle. After viewing Matt Wolf’s documentary RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT, Stokes might well be described as a visionary; the film, a straightforward but compelling account, details not just Stokes’ project, which serves as the film's through line, but also her life overall. I was previously unfamiliar with Stokes, so I’m grateful to the film for elucidating the biographical details surrounding the project: an African-American woman born into less-than-ideal circumstances, Stokes was better able to pursue her unconventional interests after marrying John Stokes, Jr., with whom she co-hosted a Sunday morning TV talk show in Philadelphia that was centered around current affairs. The film explores her relationships with the people in her life, ranging from her son from a previous marriage to her second husband and his children to her household staff, which included a secretary, a driver, and a nurse. These people not only explain Stokes’ preoccupation with taping things—detailing her commitment to recording the news at all hours of the day, even rushing home to change out the tapes—but the impetus behind her decision to do so. Stokes was eccentric, sure, but also extremely intelligent and ahead of her time, specifically with regards to how she recognized the 24-hour news cycle as a driving force behind the fast-changing socio-political landscape. Naturally, Wolf uses footage from Stokes’ collection, now in the possession of the Internet Archive, to punctuate the narrative of her life story. The footage ranges from ironically humorous to unironically disconcerting to genuinely terrifying, the latter evidenced in the expanded footage from 9/11 and various incidents of widespread racial violence. It’s clear from these sections how the broadcasts influenced our understanding of the events in question, lending weight to Stokes’ goal in creating her archive: news broadcasts can show us what memory has either transformed or altogether erased, as these things were unfolding in the moment, a sense of urgency still palpable all these years later. Whether that’s good or bad is up to the viewer. At one point in the film, someone remarks that we’d taken for granted that news stations would keep recordings of all their broadcasts. As it turns out, that’s not the case, and collections like Stokes’ are often all that remains, imparting to us the importance of physical media as well as the content. Like Stokes herself, there’s more to the film than meets the eye—one will come away not only having learned more about this extraordinary, if sometimes neurotic, woman, but also about our society’s relationship to that which she was trying to preserve, the news, an institution that’s more fraught than ever before. (2019, 87 min, DCP Digital) KS
Kelly Reichardt’s OLD JOY (American Revival)
Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) — Wednesday, 7:30pm
Kelly Reichardt’s second feature (after RIVER OF GRASS) is a languid meditation on male friendship and life in the George W. Bush era. Daniel London and Will Oldham star as two longtime friends, Kurt and Mark, who haven’t seen each other in some time. One day, Kurt arrives in Portland after a period of traveling and makes contact with Mark at the latter’s home; Reichardt establishes Mark’s life of uneasy domesticity with a few simple gestures, revealing the man’s hopes (his wife is pregnant) as well as his dissatisfaction (the spouses seem prone to bickering). Kurt proposes that the two men go on a short camping trip in the Cascade Mountains so they can visit a hot spring. After Mark makes a half-hearted attempt to invite his wife along, the men leaving together, taking Mark’s car. Again, Reichardt employs a few carefully chosen details to convey the men’s priorities and their connections to society: Mark listens compulsively to liberal talk radio, while Kurt gets high again and again and tells stories of his wayward life. The relaxed dialogue turns fraught about halfway through the film, when Kurt awkwardly confesses by a campfire that he no longer feels connected to his old friend; after that, the film resumes its relaxed air, though the men’s unresolved conflict hangs over the proceedings. Yet a bittersweet sense of an irretrievable past can be felt through the entirety of OLD JOY: the pundits we hear on Mark’s radio speak of the frustrating inaction of the American Left during the 2000s, the shots from his car window depict relics of American industry, and then there’s the nagging emotional distance between the protagonists. Reichardt doesn’t humanize one of the men at the expense of the other; both Kurt and Mark seem to have made choices appropriate to the lives they want to lead, and none of them seem especially right or wrong. That doesn’t stop the film from feeling so overcome by a sense of loss, nor does it inhibit one from feeling that passed sense of joy to which the title refers. (2006, 73 min, 35mm) BS
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Preceded by Greta Snider’s 1996 experimental documentary short PORTLAND (12 min, 16mm).
Robert Altman's McCABE AND MRS. MILLER (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 8pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Existing in a middle ground between the life affirming qualities of the Vancouver landscape where it was shot and his own self-loathing anti-human biases, McCABE AND MRS. MILLER is probably Robert Altman's most satisfying work. Roger Ebert, who can be credited with perpetuating much of the film's initial success, called it "an elegy for the dead," but as it progresses McCABE feels more like an elegy for the living; it's a film about misdirected intentions, poorly communicated emotions, and failed opportunities. Warren Beatty is a gambler and Julie Christie a prostitute in the mining town of Presbyterian Church, where they build a whorehouse as the rest of the infrastructure goes up around them. The town begins to fall apart as a major mining corporation takes interest in the town's financial prospects, and the lives of simple men and women are disrupted. Shot almost entirely in sequential order (by Vilmos Zsigmond, who may have a better feel for the zoom lens than any other cinematographer), McCABE AND MRS. MILLER is a slow burning grumble: nobody raises their voice in anger, but Warren Beatty throws his eyes to the ground and worries about the town's lack of poetry, and as everything falls apart, everyone seems more and more helpless. As it moves along it feels like the shot of Henry Fonda leaning back on a chair in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, but were he plucked out of Ford's film and thrown into Altman's, Fonda wouldn't be so hopeful, the name Clementine would bring him less solace, and he'd be leaning back in exhaustion. The whole thing suggests that just as the modern world we know is coming into existence, it has already failed. (1971, 120 min, 35mm) JA
Raoul Walsh's THE MAN I LOVE (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7pm
Unclassifiable in that distinctive Walsh way, this punchy/miserable film noir disguised as a melodrama (and vice versa) stars Ida Lupino as a singer caught between the moody musician (or is it just his choice of music?) she loves and the sleazeball gangster she doesn't. There's a lot to be said about Walsh's approach to form in directing (or, in a film this rich, one could almost say "inventing") THE MAN I LOVE, but that might overshadow his crackerjack handling of the actors, who seem to have been driven to the breaking point; this is one of Lupino's finest, fiercest, and most nuanced performances (presaging, in certain ways, Gena Rowlands' work with Cassavetes), and Gary Cooper sound-alike Bruce Bennett musters a surprising amount of depth as the pensive pianist. Out of all the classical studio directors, Walsh had the best nose for milieu, and the film is pungent with late-night nightclub atmosphere: musicians' sweat, cigarette smoke, bad perfume, spilled beer, alleyway piss. Seamy, steamy, brittle stuff. (1947, 96 min, 16mm) IV
Tsai Ming-liang's REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (Taiwanese Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
Along with Claire Denis in France, Pedro Costa in Portugal, and Paul Thomas Anderson in the U.S., Tsai is one of the rare living directors who still makes movies exclusively for the big screen. His scrupulous pacing, mise-en-scene, and sound design require the amplitude of a theater to achieve full effect: watching his work on TV inevitably leads one to miss the small details that tie together entire scenes. REBELS OF THE NEON GOD, Tsai's first feature, is an uncharacteristic work in that it features more music and camera movement than any of his subsequent films. (He claims that the move towards austerity was to accommodate his notoriously recalcitrant leading man, Lee Kang-sheng, who's appeared in virtually all his work.) Moreover, the focus on adolescent gangs makes this more of a piece with the Taiwanese New Wave in general (in particular Edward Yang's A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE) than with the rest of Tsai's oeuvre; yet there are observations of pained family interaction that anticipate his masterpiece, THE RIVER (1997), and fans should enjoy seeing the same leads from that film play a family here. (1992, 109 min, DCP Digital) BS
Dan Gilroy’s NIGHTCRAWLER (Contemporary American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7pm
“If it bleeds it leads” has been a guiding philosophy in journalism for decades, especially in local television news. It’s a damaging dictum that capitalizes on shock value and violence in absence of earnest and thoughtful reporting—and it’s seldom challenged within the industry given the lucrative high ratings it can generate. But recent treatments on the practice from outside the industry, like those found in Dan Gilroy’s NIGHTCRAWLER and Antonio Campos’ CHRISTINE, manage to capture the bleak reality of our flawed media landscape with the right amount of cynicism. Gilroy’s seedy thriller-satire follows Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), a petty criminal who makes a career for himself filming brutal murders and pawning them off to a local television station; he forgoes any semblance of ethical judgment for the false promise of capital and success. Gyllenhaal gives a wide-eyed and unhinged masterclass in moral bankruptcy—but he isn’t alone in his corruption. Rene Russo’s nuanced portrayal of a news director who encourages Louis’ sinister hobby to get higher ratings is unsettling at best, and reveals a lot about the rampant construction of trauma as a cultural product and the ways that it can be leveraged to benefit someone's self interest. With NIGHTCRAWLER, Gilroy gets at the moral sickness that still plagues the media industry, and its shrewd parody of just how far someone will compromise himself to climb the corporate ladder will resonate with audiences in one way or another for years to come. (2014, 117 min, DCP Digital) CC
Mario Bava’s KILL, BABY… KILL! (Italian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 9:30pm
A film that inspired the likes of Dario Argento, Federico Fellini, and Martin Scorsese, Mario Bava’s KILL, BABY… KILL! is an atmospheric and trippy example of the children-embodying-evil-entities subgenre of horror films. A small Transylvanian village at the turn of the 20th century has experienced a string of mysterious deaths that they blame on the unquiet spirit of a dead seven-year-old girl. A debonair doctor comes to investigate but is dismissive of the villagers’ outlandish claims, as the mystery only furthers. Bava’s film is splendidly moody, employing many of the same Gothic set pieces he was known for. Cobweb-infested corridors, mist-filled graveyards, and ornate props are all precisely lit in a veritable prism of colors. Throw in some experimental camerawork along with a few scenes of general mind-fuckery and the film emerges as a statement about the counterculture/psychedelic era of the 1960’s. Bava also eschews some traditional color use norms in the costuming, having the malevolent little girl clad in all white and the village’s kindly sorceress donning all black. His repeated use of this white imagery, along with the sound of the child’s flittering giggle offscreen to imply that her wicked presence is near, help to create a pervasive dread. KILL, BABY… KILL! might not be Bava’s most well known title but in the over fifty years since its release, it’s become perhaps his most influential. (1966, 83 min, DCP Digital) KC
Hayao Miyazaki’s HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE [English-Dubbed Version] (Japanese Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Hayao Miyazaki’s films were one of the first things my brother and I bonded over. He’s just shy of a decade older than me, so when I was growing up I desperately wanted his seal of approval. I often found myself spending hours on end watching animated movies and cartoons with him in an attempt to know what the cool older kids were talking about. He first showed me Miyazaki’s folklore-heavy SPIRITED AWAY, albeit at far too young an age for either of us to really understand it. But even still, we both knew that there was something about it that was magical. Every time I watch a Miyazaki film, I feel like a kid again. Wide-eyed and brimming with a child-like wonder as I marvel at the distinct worlds he’s able to create time and time again. The one that sticks with me the most in adulthood, though, is HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE. Sophie, a young and soft-spoken hat-maker, gets swept up by a charming wizard named Howl. A vengeful witch jealous of Sophie’s beauty and newfound relationship with Howl turns her into her worst fear: a 90-year-old woman. Howl and Sophie then embark on a journey to reverse the curse, a journey filled with kitschy side characters and a magically mechanical moving castle, and set against a backdrop of a kingdom at war. In many ways Sophie feels like an audience surrogate, falling into Miyazaki’s weird and fantastical world with the same curiosity as those watching. In addition to its intricate beauty, HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE is a deeply political work, with strong anti-war sentiments directly inspired by Miyazaki’s opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Miyazaki’s films cover a lot of ground, and HOWL’S may be especially hard to keep up with at times, but it would be a mistake to pass up the chance to revel in all of its complexities. (2004, 119 min, 35mm) CC
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Arthur Penn’s BONNIE AND CLYDE (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 2:45pm and Tuesday, 8pm
Writing about Nicholas Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, Cine-File contributor Kyle A. Westphal shrewdly asserted that it “has had more lives than many auteurist causes… [it’s] a genuine popular classic sustained by an endless supply of James Dean posters, magnets, t-shirts, and tchotchkes.” Along those same lines, BONNIE AND CLYDE belongs as much to popular consciousness as it does to the insiders who’ve championed it. Over fifty years later, no facet has gone unexamined—moviegoers and theorists alike have since diminished it to archetype, reducing nuances to aphoristic criteria or hollow fad. Directly influenced by the French New Wave (screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton greatly admired Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and they were both approached to direct before Arthur Penn, whose earlier films THE LEFT HANDED GUN and MICKEY ONE exhibited elements of the style and tone so favored by the young writers), BONNIE AND CLYDE didn’t just synthesize aspects of that movement, but helped to create a different one altogether. Even with a New Hollywood on the horizon, however, the film was widely misunderstood upon its release, due in part to graphic violence that audiences were unaccustomed to at the time. It defies any preconceived notions about what a criminal-lovers-on-the-run movie should be, expectations set by such precursors as Fritz Lang’s YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937) and Nicholas Ray’s THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948). Penn’s realization of the Bonnie and Clyde mythos—from a Lubitschian meet-cute to the bloody, balletic death scene—is at once judicious and grandiloquent, relishing as much in the real-world implications of their egregiously violent ways as it does in Warren Beatty’s id-laden mannerisms and Faye Dunaway’s whimsical sociopathy. In her staggering review for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael brilliantly details why the film is important and how it achieves its status as a singular work; her piece is a must-read for anyone interested in the film’s lasting influence on the medium. Her assessment also portends contemporary cinema and perhaps even current events; “[i]nstead of the movie spoof, which tells the audience that it doesn’t need to feel or care, that it’s all just in fun, that ‘we are only kidding,’ BONNIE AND CLYDE disrupts us with ‘And you thought we were only kidding.’” Penn and company may owe their vision to the enfants terribles of the Nouvelle Vague, but much recent cinema is indebted to Penn’s au courant provocation. (1967, 111 min, 35mm) KS
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Arthur Penn's MICKEY ONE (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm
While Arthur Penn's under-appreciated and ultra-rare MICKEY ONE was panned by critics upon its 1965 release, the film has aged well, and, since having been restored by Columbia in the 90s for a Penn retrospective in LA, is now commonly upheld as a misunderstood and forgotten masterpiece. The criticisms of MICKEY from the 60s are almost as interesting as the film itself. Time magazine called it a "failure" while praising Penn for coaxing "a snappishly smooth performance" from actor Warren Beatty, which they believed would, "raise him permanently from the ranks of man-tanned juveniles." Bosley Crowther of the New York Times remarked that MICKEY's impreciseness, as it skips around from scene to scene, is "most confusing and annoying—a dangerous weakness in the structure of the film." Penn, one of America's more European directors, was quoted as saying he just wanted to, "push American movies into areas in which Fellini and Truffaut have moved." Indeed, his movie is very much like something from the Nouvelle Vague, and it's even rumored that he was advised by Godard and Truffaut. The story follows Beatty, playing a comic hiding out from the Detroit mob in Chicago. Locals might enjoy spotting familiar locations (and wondering where some went), and everyone should appreciate Ghislain Cloquet's black and white cinematography, which is full of "terrible beauty" (Architecture Chicago Blog). (1965, 93 min, 35mm) KH
John Carpenter’s PRINCE OF DARKNESS (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Friday and Saturday, Midnight
A frequent narrative trope in John Carpenter’s films is groups of people attempting to keep the forces of evil from entering a house or other building. The characters look out windows, peering across streets into the inky darkness, unsure what is watching them and trying to find entry. These uninvited guests include the blood-pact street gangs waging war on an abandoned police station in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, the Shape drifting across a suburban street towards Laurie Strode and the children she’s protecting in HALLOWEEN, the phantom-lepers seeking vengeance on the residents of Antonio Bay in THE FOG, the team of men huddled inside an arctic weather station in THE THING, and the tribe of outer space savages waging war on the remote rescue team in GHOSTS OF MARS. Bands of people grouped together for the purpose of keeping out what shouldn’t be in takes its grandest shape in PRINCE OF DARKNESS. The film not only signals Carpenter’s triumphant return to relatively low-budget filmmaking following STARMAN and BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, it also showcases what may be Carpenter’s most exacting formalist construction of space and tension, or as the director himself put it, “Every shot I can see, every shot is basically set to a purpose, where in some films I will let things go (…) Every shot in here is specifically designed to communicate something.” The film’s premise is fairly simple: just before the sun goes down (very similar to the start of ASSAULT) a group gathers at an abandoned church to try to figure out what a mysterious vial of green liquid found by Father Loomis (Donald Pleasance, here playing a different Loomis than the Doctor he portrayed in HALLOWEEN) actually is. Loomis believes the goo contains something evil and sure enough, the slime turns out to be the disembodied Son of Satan, the Anti-God. The liquid seeps out in search of hosts (similar to the alien in THE THING), members of the research team are taken over by the Satanic host, and an army of possessed schizophrenics takes guard outside, not allowing anyone to escape, or to come in. It’s a twist on Carpenter’s familiar “under siege” theme—there is no keeping evil out, it's already inside (save for the seemingly undead horde waiting outside). These minions of the Anti-God don’t come inside, suggesting subservience to something far more insidious, and complicating the usual narrative of alien-zombie-ghosts or disturbingly human murderers. With PRINCE OF DARKNESS, it’s as if the alien from THE THING succeeded; evil has gained a secure foothold in our world. Wile Carpenter’s next film, THEY LIVE, would continue this idea, with increased pessimism and hopelessness, PRINCE OF DARKNESS is the most apocryphal film Carpenter has made; the evil is not after vengeance or mere survival, but rather the total domination of everyone within its reach. (1987, 102 min, 35mm) JD
Michael Curtiz's CASABLANCA (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Sunday, 7pm
A strong candidate for the most entertaining movie ever made, CASABLANCA irresistibly weds the theme of self-sacrifice for a greater good to a love story set against the backdrop of wartime intrigue. Mix in Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman at their most iconic, deliciously witty dialogue, a cast of colorful supporting characters played by unforgettable character actors and the able craftsmanship of director Michael Curtiz and you have Exhibit A for anyone looking to understand the genius of Hollywood's old studio system. You must remember this: Bogie as Rick Blaine, the American nightclub owner living in Morocco, whose cynical exterior conceals a sentimental heart; Bergman as Ilsa Lund, the Norwegian woman he loved and lost in pre-World War II France, only to find again under less-than-ideal circumstances in the Vichy-controlled title city. Out of all the gin joints in the world, why did she have to walk into his?! Thank God for the sake of movie lovers that she did. They'll always have Paris—and we'll always have CASABLANCA. (1942, 102 min, 35mm) MGS
Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD (New American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Saturday, 6 and 9pm and Sunday, 4pm
Having finally arrived, Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD could not be any truer to its creator’s decades-long fascination and obsession with 1960’s and 70’s cinema, though it also feels slightly atypical for the director. Without giving anything away, the long blocks of back-and-forth dialogue that Tarantino usually indulges in have begun to give way to more preoccupation with staging, fourth-wall-breaking camera moves, and all around color, resulting in an ambling and evocative dreamscape rife with a whole host of characters. Atmosphere has never been so palpable and dialogue between characters so natural in a Tarantino film—there’s nary a monologue in sight. The film begins at the tail end of an era in Hollywood filmmaking in which rapidly-fading TV actor/cowboy “heavy" Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is seeing his career head towards Italy, specifically towards the cheap and fast genre films of Sergio Corbucci. Burt Reynolds went to Rome to work with Corbucci, Eastwood did the same for Sergio Leone, along with character actors like Lee Van Cleef, and so did one-time TV western stars like Ty Hardin (Rick Dalton is probably most similar to the latter). In the cases of Reynolds and Eastwood, their careers were revitalized by the Italian industry, but many others, like Hardin, were pushed further into obscurity. While watching his star power sputter out in what he perceives to be his twilight years, Dalton is accompanied by his sidekick/assistant/stunt man/reflective image Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who lives in a trailer behind a drive-in theater, while Dalton lives in a Benedict Canyon home (with pool, naturally). He lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), and Manson family members are prowling around the streets of L.A., hollering at police officers and offering up blowjobs while they try to hitch back to their nesting grounds at the Spahn Ranch. Tarantino covers a lot of ground in ONCE UPON A TIME—an entire landscape of stories is on view, not dissimilar to something like Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE or even Richard Linklater’s DAZED AND CONFUSED. The film has a near three-hour running time, but three hours that have never seemed so short and compact in recent film memory. The movie has a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it pace, rare for a director who sometimes has a tendency to halt the rush of his work with overly bravura dialogue sequences. Tarantino seems to find fresh new ground within his already steadfast movie-making abilities, to let the scope of his powers extend further than previously thought possible. He barely pauses for the chance to show off his noted screenwriting abilities, and instead chooses to craft an ensemble work that somehow feels more epic than any of his films have ever felt; this is Los Angeles completely transformed back to the summer of 1969, in a way that only a very large budget and large talent could realize. It might possibly be one of the last times we see Hollywood bankroll such an ambitious project, by an auteur still powerful enough to retain final cut. ONCE UPON A TIME isn’t as cynical a look at Hollywood as other films have been (such as Altman’s THE PLAYER—even though it does share a curious opening shot). It’s more bittersweet nostalgia, and is perhaps Tarantino’s breeziest and best work to date; his entire career as a director bursts forth as both a marvelously crafted time-capsule and a fantasy-land-rendering of a mythical Hollywood, specifically the place where dreams, however real, are made. (2019, 161 min, DCP Digital) JD
Martin Scorsese's GOODFELLAS (American Revival)
Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Pickwick Theatre, 5 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge) — Wednesday, 1 and 7:30pm
This widely favored bildungsroman, which often seems to clasp the key to understanding (second-generation, male) America in an unattainable 1.85:1 crucible, remains a worthy artifact of interrogation in these cold days before, for example, the semi-inevitable Oscar crowning of the comparatively meaningless domestic allegory TRUE GRIT. While that latter film's ahistorical confrontation between isolated orphans and arbitrarily evil cowboy bandits might satisfy a sophisticated sixth-grader's definition of justice, GOODFELLAS rewrites the much-maligned "gang" (and its most infamous, yet imaginary superstructure: "The Mafia") into something understandable or even deeply familiar. For Sicilian immigrants were unknown peasants in an alien world. And as it turns out, reciprocal networks of both the threat and implementation of violence can become sustainable--even thriving--subcultures in the absence of feudal tyranny; the requisite decline of state-sponsored physical coercion slowly became a reality in 19th-century Sicily and it was certainly a reality on the streets of Depression-era East New York. The film is a mid-20th-century cross-section of this phenomenon: a charting of the coming to power of one man in this mafioso style (a style that might seem offensive to those who believe that social order is a product of police men). Ray Liotta's Henry Hill holds our hand, seducing us at every stage of (juvenile) development: at first by those things that "fall off of trucks," and then by the preposterous excesses of social capital (after a mythical one-take palm-greasing journey through the back door of the Copacabana, confiding to his girlfriend that he's "in construction"). At maturity, the insatiate id and the hyperrational ego (Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro) erupt in violent chaos: unable to negotiate with an increasingly juridically-minded state apparatus, our unreliable narrator must race to dispatch his extended family to the gallows. Scorsese's crucial narrative achievement is the meticulous setting of each sequence to diegetically-appropriate pop music as if it were an arranged marriage, and vividly portrays Hill's climactic coke/ziti-fueled breakdown as the ultimate Stones/Nilsson megamix. (1990, 146 min, Digital Projection) MC
Greta Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN (New American)
Music Box Theatre — 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
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The MCA Chicago presents Home Video Day on Tuesday from 6-8pm. Attendees can bring a tape to screen or just view. Area video archivists will be on hand to inspect your tape and answer questions. Co-presented by Media Burn Archive and Video Data Bank. One tape per person, five minutes maximum (cued to a particular point, or random). Tape formats accepted include VHS, VHS-C, Hi-8, Video 8, and Mini-DV. Free admission.
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) screens JD Schuyler’s 2019 documentary LAST MAN FISHING (approx. 60 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 7pm, with Schuyler in person.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Rob Garver’s 2018 documentary WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL (99 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week; Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film LAST TANGO IN PARIS (126 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 5pm and Thursday at 8pm; and Charlotte Juergens’ 2019 documentary SUNKEN ROADS: THREE GENERATIONS AFTER D-DAY (91 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 4:45pm and Wednesday at 7:45pm, with Juergens in person at the Sunday screening.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (83 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm; and Clara Law’s 1990 Hong Kong film FAREWELL CHINA (114 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 9:30pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Michael Apted’s 2019 UK documentary 63 UP (144 min, DCP Digital) continues; Mike Nichols’ 1996 film THE BIRDCAGE (117 min, DCP Digital) is on Monday at 8pm (pre-show events start at 7pm), showing as some kind of interactive event apparently; and Richard Sarafian’s 1971 film VANISHING POINT (99 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 8pm.
The Chicago Cultural Center hosts the Chicago Latino Film Festival screening of Harold Trompetero's 2012 Columbian film THE TRIP 2 (90 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 6:30pm. Free admission.
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 1967 film TIGER MORSE (34 min, 16mm) is the final film, and is on view through January 26. The film 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: January 10 - January 16, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Michael Castelle, Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Kalvin Henely, Tristan Johnson, JB Mabe, Michael Metzger, Michael Glover Smith, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky