CRUCIAL VIEWING
Otto Preminger's CARMEN JONES (American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
At the height of his popularity, Otto Preminger drew as much attention from manipulating controversy (c.f., his public battles with Hollywood censorship) as he did from his formidable skills as a filmmaker. Case in point, in 1953 he leapt at the chance to direct a film based on CARMEN JONES, a stage revue that transplanted Bizet's Carmen to a modern African-American setting. Intended as an independent production, it ended up an A-list feature for Twentieth-Century Fox and Preminger's second in CinemaScope—an ideal format for the director's inquisitive formal interests. In the words of biographer-critic Chris Fujiwara, "[Preminger's] response to the increased width of the frame [was] to expand the characters' fields of action and motion, emphasizing the vastness of both their physical environment and the sphere of moral decision." Physical environment is indeed a key factor in CARMEN JONES, which was shot largely on location: The South Side of Chicago, seldom used in American movies prior to this, becomes a prominent setting. Likewise, Preminger rewrote all the dialogue of the stage show (which he considered flat) in favor of more realistic speech that addressed the impulsive sexuality of the material. (It also helped him to elicit distinctly modern performances from the gifted cast, which included Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, and Diahann Carroll.) And yet, the realist flourishes hardly add up to anything you'd call "realism." As Fujiwara notes, "the absence of jazz, blues, gospel, or contemporary popular music [all the songs are set to the original Bizet score] accentuates the artificiality of the film." More notably, the film lacks a single white character, which makes "white racism...the major structuring absence of CARMEN JONES." In short, it is another technically inspired, psychologically acute, and ultimately bewildering film from this notoriously contradiction-loving filmmaker—no less majestic to behold as it is to contemplate. (1954, 105 min, 35mm imported archival print) BS
Brian De Palma’s CASUALTIES OF WAR (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 7:45pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Jean-Luc Godard once praised veteran filmmaker Brian De Palma for his “work on the image,” a notion that once irked Chicago-film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, but in turn gave him pause to afford the filmmaker another look. Second looks, sights missed on first glance—the very DNA of some of De Palma’s best movies—create a necessity for looking twice at the director and his films. First it was John Travolta unable to reverse the mistakes of his past in BLOW-UP, and in CASUALTIES OF WAR it’s Michael J. Fox who becomes an unwitting protagonist, robbed of his ability to see/act, as he traverses the fields and jungles of Vietnam. One night, after a hellish battle with unseen enemies in underground tunnels, Private Max Eriksson’s (Fox) fellow troops go AWOL and decide to kidnap a young Vietnamese girl from her home, intending to hold her as a hostage in retaliation for the deaths of their squad members. Eriksson, feeling powerless and unable to intervene, remains impotent on the sidelines, unable to act. He is like many of De Palma’s characters, who are usually too late, and unable to shake the memory of not acting. Conventional opinion often misunderstands more recent films by De Palma—one of the most provocative New Hollywood masters—probably because he has operated so far outside the system for over a decade. Critics seem to think he has grown angrier over the years with films like THE BLACK DAHLIA (2006) and PASSION (2012); many who rightfully praise works like BODY DOUBLE (1984) and CARLITO’S WAY 1993) miss just how angry those films are. His latest, 2019’s DOMINO (maybe his meanest), was met with almost unanimous befuddlement for some obvious reasons, some not so. It was plagued by production problems and a producer who removed nearly half of the footage De Palma had intended to include in his film, leaving it feeling like one of his most abandoned (though with the director’s recut of RAISING CAIN (1992) surfacing a few years ago, there is hope yet for De Palma’s vision of it). As altered as the film is, there is still a wealth of beauty and horror to pore over, familiar elements for anyone who has been properly steeped in De Palma’s kinetic cinema. Another film of his, 2007’s Cahiers du cinéma-lauded REDACTED, also faced a critical hostility and sabotage (this time at the sticky hands of the film’s producer Mark Cuban). REDACTED couldn’t be more important—it is a virtual retread of CASUALTIES, with the same plot, except this time the solider we follow is fighting in the also senseless Iraq War. De Palma’s anger of the last decade plus and continuing full-on in REDEACTED, isn’t suddenly or reckless; it’s been there all along, but working in an continually uglier present has made his recent output seem more ugly and more visibly so. Love her or hate her, Pauline Kael was one of the first critics to understand the importance of CASUALTIES, and were she still alive, she’d probably have also understood REDACTED. In the words of Kael herself, “De Palma has such seductive, virtuosic control of film craft that he can express convulsions in the unconscious (…) His art is in controlling everything, but he still can't account for everything. He plans everything and discovers something more.” Whether or not we start another unjust foreign war, it’s going to be hard not to think of CASUALTIES and REDACTED, movies that show us how the senseless brutality of war can start to feel like an endless loop that we will be forced to watch one way or another. You can’t really blame De Palma for being so angry. (1989, 112 min, 35mm) JD
Tsai Ming-liang’s VIVE L’AMOUR (Taiwanese Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
Throughout VIVE L’AMOUR, Tsai Ming-liang frequently holds a shot until the frame begins to feel like a prison. One doesn’t think of the world outside the frame—the mise-en-scene tends to draw one’s attention inward, towards the middle of the image, and Tsai’s fastidious arrangement of the visual content makes it seem especially sacrosanct. This helps to explain why the film is one of the best ever made on the subject of urban loneliness: Tsai makes you feel the characters’ sense of alienation before he lets you know what they do for a living or how they’re connected. He achieves this feeling not only through his exquisite compositions and modernist narrative structure, but through his choice of Taipei locations, which include vacant apartments, fluorescent-lit offices, and dim downtown sidewalks where black-marketeers sell designer clothing knock-offs after hours. Rarely has modern architecture and urban design seemed so devoid of emotion; not for nothing have numerous critics likened VIVE L’AMOUR to the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. As in many of the Italian master’s films, this reveals the characters’ identities and desires only gradually, after establishing their psychic distress. The film opens with a young man (Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s eternal muse) stealing the key to an unsold high-rise apartment with the intention of squatting there. The real estate agent responsible for selling the apartment (Yang Kuei-Mei) also keeps a key so she can use the place for her one-night stands. She starts going there with a stranger she meets on the street (Chen Chao-jung); later do we learn that he’s also in sales, vending black-market goods at night. All three characters yearn for something beyond their everyday lives, though Tsai never reveals what that is or, for that matter, whether the characters even know what they’re after. The first act of VIVE L’AMOUR climaxes with one character’s suicide attempt; the film ends with an agonizingly long take of another sobbing uncontrollably in a public park. What comes between is a criss-crossing of lives that never quite achieves entanglement, though Tsai creates some memorable near-farcical moments when Lee’s character must hide from the other people who unknowingly share his hideaway. These scenes feature some Keatonesque sight gags that derive humor from who’s in the frame versus who isn’t; Lee’s stone-faced performance style (coupled with Tsai’s general eschewal of dialogue) strengthens the association with the American director-star. Tsai would make further connections between Keaton and Antonioni in his subsequent WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?, while he’d develop the motifs of watermelon and pornography (both so prominent in VIVE L’AMOUR) in THE WAYWARD CLOUD. Neither film, however, comes close to repeating the palpable despair of this one. (1994, 117 min, 35mm imported archival print) BS
Rouben Mamoulian’s LOVE ME TONIGHT (American Revival)
Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) — Wednesday, 7:30pm
Before Jeanette MacDonald paired up with Nelson Eddy, she made several films with that prototype of French bon vivants, Maurice Chevalier. Most of these films were made with the fabled touch of director Ernst Lubitsch; the final mating of this threesome, scored by the great operetta compositions of Franz Lehar, is the most sublime of them all: THE MERRY WIDOW (1934). Somewhere in the middle, Rouben Mamoulian, whose knockout debut as a director was the melodrama APPLAUSE (1929), was given his chance with these appealing stars and fashioned LOVE ME TONIGHT, one of their stock stories of an aristocratic woman and her common courter. The film is rightly famous for its opening scene, which give a panoramic view of the Paris skyline and then moves in to listen to the rhythms by which the city wakes up, finally landing on Maurice Courtelin (Chevalier), a Parisian tailor singing of the noise of Paris in “That’s the Song of Paree.” This is the first of several delightful, often memorable songs by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers, perhaps the most famous of which, “Isn’t It Romantic,” foreshadows the romance of Maurice and Princess Jeanette (MacDonald). The pair is brought together when Maurice sets off to collect payment for the wardrobe he made for the notorious freeloader, the Viscount Gilbert de Varèze (Charlie Ruggles). On the way, he hears a woman singing (“Lover”). It is the princess. When she stops, he declares his love for her in the impertinent and naughty tune, “Mimi” (“I’d like to have a little son of a Mimi by and by!”). We watch her full face assume an insulted but gauzily romantic look in the camera of Victor Milner, who shot several films for Lubitsch and knew how to get just the right touch. For a pre-Code film, this one’s attempts at suggestiveness are pretty tame. Maurice insults Jeanette’s seamstress for building her a dowdy riding habit and bets that he can do better. Then we get to see him remove Jeanette’s unfinished riding jacket and take a tape measure to her every body part. It could have been sexy, but Maurice is all efficiency and Jeanette doesn’t melt even a little at his ministrations. Seeing her flirty, womanly performance in THE MERRY WIDOW, this was, for me, like seeing an entirely different actress, and again, with Chevalier. Thus, the tepid romance may be on Mamoulian. Still, between the meeting and the inevitable clinch, much hilarity ensues, delivered by such comic stalwarts as Ruggles; Charles Butterworth, as Jeanette’s nebbishy suitor; and Myrna Loy, as a man-crazy countess. While Mamoulian falls short of the waltz-like grace and romantic sensuality of Lubitsch, his humor more than makes up for it. (1932, 89 min, 35mm) MF
---
Preceded by Dave Fleischer’s 1933 cartoon BETTY BOOP’S BIG BOSS (7 min, 16mm).
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Numa Perrier’s JEZEBEL (New American)
Facets Cinémathèque — Check Venue website for showtimes
There can certainly be a fatigue with the coming-of-age story, but that’s largely a result of constant exposure to films that are more or less stale carbon copies of what came before—only just different enough to justify their existence. But it’s not an inherently bad formula. In fact, when used in earnest, the coming-of-age film has the power to amplify to a universal level meaningful and unique life experiences that are rarely depicted as the norm. Numa Perrier’s JEZEBEL is a stellar example of how to do a coming of age film right in the modern era. Based on Perrier’s own life, JEZEBEL follows 19-year-old Tiffany (Tiffany Tenille) as she enters the world of fetish cam-modeling to support herself and her family amidst financial struggles. Perrier navigates the obstacles that can come with sex work as a young Black woman with a refreshing sharpness: racism, fetishization, and exploitation by bosses who will take advantage of you without a second thought. But while those criticisms are made, the film never once treats sex work as something shameful. It’s just a job; and within the structures of capitalism, sometimes jobs are just shitty. JEZEBEL’s strength lies in how it prioritizes Tiffany’s interpersonal relationships—with her clients, her boss, her sister (played by Perrier)—as well as the weirdly intimate relationships you can have online with strangers. It’s a remarkable touchstone of our current moment because it hones in on the escapism and performativity that comes with being online. “None of it’s real, but it looks real. And that’s all that matters.” (2019, 88 min, DCP Digital) CC
Luke Lorentzen’s MIDNIGHT FAMILY (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, Tuesday, and Thursday, 8:15pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Often, calling attention to exceptional cinematography in documentary films feels like a form of superficial praise. But in the case of MIDNIGHT FAMILY, Luke Lorentzen’s keenly-observed, immersive portrait of a family-run private ambulance in Mexico City, what makes the cinematography so remarkable goes right to the core of the complex ethical and economic terrain the film covers. On the surface, the film’s nocturnal neon cast is certainly impressive, evoking an urban landscape saturated by the light of permanent emergency. But the shrewdness of Lorentzen’s cinematography is largely a measure of his framing, which is both intuitive and assured. The context of MIDNIGHT FAMILY is framed sparely, offering only two terse title cards to set the scene: “In Mexico City, the government operates fewer than 45 emergency ambulances for a population of 9 million. A loose system of private ambulances has taken over much of the city’s emergency healthcare.” MIDNIGHT FAMILY scrutinizes this chaotic industry through the windows of one ambulance, operated by the Ochoa family, as they scramble across the city in search of accidents–and, hopefully, cash. A crew of one, Lorentzen directed, shot, and edited MIDNIGHT FAMILY, spending over 80 nights riding along with the Ochoas. Like his protagonists, who range in age from early adolescence to middle-age, his two widescreen cameras take in a lot. One, mounted on the hood, is trained fixedly on the ambulance cab, where generational family dynamics and split-second navigations play out through a reflected veil of city lights. The other moves more fluidly in and around the cramped vehicle, which becomes an arena for negotiations of life, and death, and money. Lorentzen’s cool-headed compositions wisely push the physical carnage off-screen, deflecting accusations of voyeurism and keeping the focus on the responders rather than on the victims. But violence pervades the image nonetheless, in the form of vastly unequal and corrupt systems that deny care to those in need and which ask private citizens like the Ochoas to absorb, often at their own expense, the responsibility of the civic institutions. Financial considerations inform every decision the Ochoas make; tellingly, some of the film’s most thrilling high-speed rides proceed not from but to the scenes of potentially lucrative accidents, where the family scrambles to arrive ahead of their competition. When they do make some money, the police inevitably take a cut, compounding the sense that corruption and profiteering is always in the night air. Embedded with the Ochoas, Lorentzen breathes that same air, and edits the film with a respiratory rhythm that brackets frenzied emergency responses with deep exhalations of anxious stillness. As his subjects wait tensely for the next shot at a bloody payday, arguing about how to cut costs and emotionally recounting rescues gone wrong, one realizes that the Ochoas are as traumatized by the system they occupy as the accident victims they subsist on. Despite its seemingly narrow focus, MIDNIGHT FAMILY offers broad insight into a society in a state of emergency. (2019, 90 min, DCP Digital) MM
Jerry Schatzberg’s SCARECROW (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Tuesday, 7pm
SCARECROW shared the Palme d’Or at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival and received accolades across Europe, though its success didn’t carry over to its home country. A box-office flop in the U.S., the movie remained out of circulation for decades, and its director, fashion photographer-turned-filmmaker Jerry Schatzberg, never developed much of an auteurist following here. But from a contemporary vantage point, SCARECROW looks like one of the stronger American films of its era, a poignant drama about social outcasts that’s almost as affecting as that other major New Hollywood road movie, Bob Rafelson’s FIVE EASY PIECES. Gene Hackman, in one of his best performances, stars as Max, a hot-headed ex-con who spends his life hitchhiking across the United States because he can’t stay comfortably in one place for long. At the start of the film, Max takes up with Francis (Al Pacino), another emotionally unstable drifter who recently got out of the Navy. Francis, whom Max rechristens Lion, is as sweet and vulnerable as Max is brusque and shut-off; the two quickly develop a Martin-and-Lewis-style give-and-take. The two decide they’re going to open a car wash together in Pittsburgh, but they have to make their way across the country first; what ensues is a low-key odyssey over American backroads that exhibits the sort of hard-won feel for the national landscape one finds throughout the New Hollywood canon—not just in PIECES, but also Altman’s THIEVES LIKE US, Ashby’s BOUND FOR GLORY, and Scorsese’s ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. Further, the film’s likening of geographical drift to emotional driftlessness anticipates Wim Wenders’ 1975 masterpiece KINGS OF THE ROAD. The overall vibe of SCARECROW, in fact, feels vaguely European; Schatzberg’s unobtrusive long takes, which give the performers plenty of room to shine, and his understated yet observant mise-en-scene suggest a post-war update on French poetic realism. Meanwhile Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography, at once sunny and gritty, conveys the flavor of assorted eastern European new waves. The photography is reason enough to see this on celluloid, though the towering characterizations surely benefit from a big screen as well. (1973, 112 min, 35mm) BS
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME: WRIGHT OR WRONG (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 5:15pm and Monday, 7:45pm
Winston Churchill said, “We shape our dwellings, and afterwards, our dwelling shape us.” If this is true, and I daresay it is, does a house commissioned from a famous architect affect its occupants even more? That question and the very concept of home is at the heart of Chicago-based Iranian-American filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s documentary, A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME: WRIGHT OR WRONG. The director, who has been the artistic consultant to the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Festival of Films from Iran since its inception in 1989, says that her attraction to physical dwellings began in childhood, even as the home her parents commissioned in Tehran became a huge source of antagonism between them, helping to end their marriage and solidify a mutual animosity that lasted to the end of their lives. Perhaps because of this home/house-related drama, which she partially explores, as well as her co-authorship with film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum of Abbas Kiarostami, Saeed-Vafa delves into the effect Rosenbaum’s childhood house, the Frank Lloyd Wright–Rosenbaum House, had on him and his brothers. She spends the better part of the film exploring the house in Florence, Alabama, with and without Rosenbaum and his brothers, getting a tour of this structure that is now a municipally-owned museum along with reminiscences of life in one of Wright’s cantilevered concoctions that are lovely to look at and very inconvenient to live in. That the brothers remember the house in different ways is not surprising, nor is their feeling that the changes wrought when it was turned into a museum have broken the bond they had with it. While Saeed-Vafa’s thesis is interesting, her film focuses on personal emotions that don’t necessarily illuminate the concept of home. The firsthand accounts of life in a Wright house, on the other hand, are fascinating. (2020, 74 min, DCP Digital) MF
---
Director Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and subject Jonathan Rosenbaum in person at both screenings.
Ida Lupino’s THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
Though she was well known for both her nuanced acting and gritty, neorealist directing of noirs and social melodramas, Ida Lupino proved herself to be a more versatile director with this charming, warm, and sweet coming-of-age comedy. The film is worth seeing if only for the sheer pleasure of watching Rosalind Russell roll her eyes and dole out sarcastic one liners as the Mother Superior of a Catholic convent and boarding school for girls. Russell, one of the most gifted comedic actresses in Hollywood in everything from HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940) to AUNTIE MAME (1958), earns a lot of laughter and shared snickers with this performance, but also manages to bring a good deal of wordless pathos and complexity to her interpretation, which testifies both to her incredible acting talent and Lupino's skillful, nuanced direction. This movie is also a treat for those who might have grown up as I did on a series of Disney's live-action family films from the 1960s starring Hayley Mills: POLLYANNA, THE PARENT TRAP, and THAT DARN CAT! Mills was effortlessly charming and endlessly watchable as a child actress, and even though THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS presented an opportunity for her to play a slightly edgier role in her post-Disney years, it's difficult to believe she's really that bad as the rebellious Mary Clancy, butting heads with Mother Superior. Though not as compelling or complex or daring as Lupino's OUTRAGE or THE HITCH-HIKER, THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS is a fun, fluffy palate cleanser for this Doc series on the director. It's also a chance to see several other veteran actresses like Mary Wickes (you've seen her in many things, including as another nun in SISTER ACT!), Gypsy Rose Lee, and Binnie Barnes throw in some delightful one-liners. It's a shame that this was the last film Ida Lupino directed, though she did continue acting well into the 1970's. (1966, 112 min, 35mm) AE
Matthew Barney’s REDOUBT (New American Experimental)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
As with his previous films, the CREMASTER CYCLE and RIVER OF FUNDAMENT, REDOUBT finds iconoclastic artist Matthew Barney returning to the mythological well to offer a recasting of the goddess Diana, champion of the hunt, animals, and fertility. In Barney’s retelling, Diana has traded in her bow and arrow for a high-powered sniper rifle, and her dominion is now Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountain range. Redoubt is a military term that refers to a stronghold or protective barrier, and here Diana’s snow-covered sanctum is intruded upon by the Engraver (played by Barney) and the Electroplater, an embodiment, perhaps, of art and science, respectively. There is no dialogue in REDOUBT; instead, characters communicate via micro-gestures and slow-mo, choreographed dance movements. There is a profundity of evocative and grandiose imagery in Barney’s filmography, but it’s always filtered through the prism of the artist’s arcane hermetics and hermeneutics; similar to his literary forerunners Joyce and Eliot, whether or not all the symbology coalesces may depend on an understanding of the source text, be it Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, human anatomy, or Barney’s own drawings and sculptures. Like much of avant-garde cinema, there has been a debate about whether Barney’s films belong in a movie theater or an art gallery, in part because of the duration of his magnum opus, the five-part CREMASTER CYCLE, which runs around nine hours total. By Barney’s standards, REDOUBT is brief, clocking in at a little more than two hours, and indeed, compared to the rest of his oeuvre, the film feels more austere and ascetic overall. That isn’t to say REDOUBT is any less beguiling, though; in his appropriation of classical mythic stories and structures, Barney engages in his own form of postmodern myth-making that encompasses history, technology, pop culture, and everything in between—however, the function of Barney’s elliptical fables is not to instruct or moralize, but rather to create a vision that’s singularly otherworldly. (2019, 134 min, DCP Digital) HS
Ladj Ly’s LES MISÉRABLES (New French)
Music Box Theatre — Check Venue website for showtimes
Testifying to the nearly unmatched power of sporting events to unite people across ethnic and class boundaries, Ladj Ly’s LES MISÉRABLES opens with rousing footage of French citizens flooding into the streets to celebrate their country’s 2018 World Cup victory. Ly focuses especially on exultant black faces, including those of characters officially introduced later, as he films this very real national eruption of joy. Accentuated by the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe looming on the horizon, the sequence encapsulates the foundational French tenet of fraternity, realized in one outsized moment of esprit de corps that Ly will soon show as utterly fleeting. There will be plenty more images of bustling congregations to come, but their animating communal pleasure will be replaced by melees of inequity-fueled desperation. Taking its inspiration from the 2005 suburban Paris riots, LES MISÉRABLES chronicles a 48-hour period of pullulating racial tensions in Clichy Montfermeil, where housing projects provide residence to many North African immigrants. Hewing closely to policier genre conventions, Ly uses an anti-crime unit as our initial point of entry to this world, introducing us to the coolheaded Gwada (Djebril Zonga) and the unapologetically racist sergeant Chris (Alexis Manenti), who’re joined by taciturn new recruit Stephane Ruiz (Damien Bonnard). The irony is immediately apparent that this nominally “anti-crime” unit, which spends much of its time harassing random black residents on the street, is really only exacerbating the problem. The film’s main inciting incident comes when Issa (Issa Perica), a boy from the projects, steals a lion cub from a Romani circus. His theft sets off a domino effect of raucous confrontations, hair-trigger police violence, digital media incriminations, and winching civic unrest, cracking racial, religious, and economic fault lines wide open in every direction across the city. Ly brings his background in documentary to bear on the proceedings, using vérité-style mobile shooting to enhance the urgency and chaos of the increasingly fractious conflicts he depicts. At its best, this febrile on-the-ground energy brings to mind the gritty docu-dramatic aesthetics and angry revolutionary politics of Gillo Pontecorvo or Costa-Gavras; at other times, the film can feel hampered by its broad characterizations and reliance on crime-narrative tropes. Still, as a snapshot of a turbulent 21st-century Western sociopolitical climate—and a sonorous reminder of the legacy of institutional oppression and precarious revolt it carries on—LES MISÉRABLES packs a solid punch. “What if voicing anger was the only way to be heard?,” rebuts a Muslim character to Ruiz’s wariness of the growing societal disorder. Ly leaves us with the same question, hanging in the middle of an internecine stalemate between a Molotov cocktail and a gun. (2019, 104 min, DCP Digital) JL
Robert Mulligan’s THE OTHER (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 9:30pm
Robert Mulligan’s most celebrated asset may have been his ability to work with young actors. In TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), SUMMER OF ’42 (1971), and THE MAN IN THE MOON (1991), Mulligan elicited sensitive, knowing performances from pre-teens, yielding three-dimensional characters who never come across as precocious or cute. The director’s sole horror film, THE OTHER, also centers on fully realized young characters, but where his other coming-of-age narratives depict growing up as a beautiful experience punctuated by passages of fear and loss, this one presents early adolescence as a nightmare only occasionally lightened by moments of levity. Set in a Connecticut farm town in 1935, THE OTHER follows 12-year-old twins Niles and Holland over the course of a summer when their childhood games take a dangerous turn. Holland, the more cavalier of the two, likes to goad Niles into mischief, taking advantage of the fact that his brother is too timid to protest. But when people start dying as a result of Holland’s mischief, Niles’ inability to stop his brother begins to look like willful complicity. The film is more unsettling than straight-up scary; Mulligan takes a slow-build approach to horror, drawing out themes and relationships so that one feels disturbed by the overall implications rather than individual moments. Yet those implications are genuinely chilling, particularly when considered in the context of Mulligan’s filmography. THE OTHER suggests that beneath the idealized childhoods of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, et al., lies something primal and monstrous. The director underscores this message with picture-perfect settings and characteristically exacting visual compositions—the world of the film seems too good to believe, and, as it turns out, it is. When THE OTHER was first released, the film’s advertising campaign played up its third-act plot twist, and while it’s indeed a doozy, the film would sneak up on you even without it. This is the rare horror film that frightens you more after it’s over than while it’s running. (1972, 108 min, DCP Digital) BS
Satoshi Kon’s MILLENNIUM ACTRESS [Subtitled Japanese-Language Version] (Animated Japanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 2 and 6:15pm, and Thursday, 8:30pm
When Japanese filmmakers Satoshi Kon and Sadayuki Murai decided to collaborate on a film script, the guiding principle was to create a stereogram, a story within a story. The result, MILLENNIUM ACTRESS, appears to be exploding with stories within stories—but that is a bit deceptive. The film tells in relatively linear fashion the story of its titular character from girlhood into her 70s, touching on important events in 20th-century Japanese history. But the reigning atmosphere is one of fantasy—the fantasy of being able to immerse oneself in successive filmic worlds. TV documentarian Genya Tachibana (voice of Shôzô Îzuka) and his hip, young cameraman Kyōji Ida (voice of Masaya Onosaka) are filming the bulldozing of Ginei Studios, formerly a prestige studio during the first 100 years of filmmaking in Japan. Realizing there isn’t much to the story, Genya seeks out the studio’s biggest star, Chiyoko Fujiwara (voice of Miyoko Shōji), now elderly and living in seclusion. She agrees to be interviewed on camera and slowly unravels the story of her life in episodes that freely float between her real life and her screen roles. For Chiyoko, every role she played submerges into the same psychodrama—her attempt to reunite with a mysterious stranger she fell hopelessly in love with when she was ten. Her undying devotion is linked to a key he gave her for safekeeping that he says opens “the most important thing in the world.” The desire to discover that thing is as propulsive to us as it is to Chiyoko. Kyōji and Genya, the latter of whom worked at Ginei and idolizes the actress, are literally pulled into the plot of every story she tells; the older man occupies roles as her heroic retainer and the younger man remains himself—bewildered, frightened, and wondering how to get back to reality. Genya represents all the movie lovers who can’t wait to live vicariously in the high drama and romance of motion pictures. For Chiyoko, her single act of kindness set her on the path to a successful career and a lifelong pursuit that gave her existence meaning. Beautifully illustrated and imaginatively scripted, MILLENNIUM ACTRESS takes viewers along on the ride of their lives. (2001, 87 min, DCP Digital) MF
Martin Scorsese's MEAN STREETS (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 6pm and Wednesday, 8pm
The film that put Martin Scorsese on the map is one of the most fiercely personal works in American narrative cinema. Scorsese reportedly worked on the script while driving around Little Italy with co-writer Mardik Martin and reminiscing about the places where he grew up; the ample soundtrack is mostly made up of songs from the director’s own record collection. (Roughly half of the film’s budget went to clearing music rights, so important was it for Scorsese to set these moments to these particular songs that by this point were in his blood.) The first draft of the screenplay focused almost exclusively on the spiritual conflict of Charlie, Scorsese’s autobiographical stand-in; though the final draft would take a broader perspective, devoting much attention to Charlie’s efforts to help his troubled friend Johnny Boy, religious themes still predominate. Emphasizing their personal nature, Scorsese himself performs Charlie’s voice-over narration, a technique the director borrowed from Fellini’s I VITTELONI. That reference is not incidental or indulgent—cinephilia is as much a driving force here as Catholic guilt or autobiographical candor. Going to the cinema is source of comfort for the characters, and one senses in Johnny Boy’s acting out a wish to make life more like the movies. Moreover, one feels the influence of the French New Wave in MEAN STREETS’ spontaneity, as well as the influence of postwar Italian cinema in its deeply rooted sense of place. (In spite of its reputation as one of the quintessential New York movies, however, this was actually filmed largely in California, as the filmmakers couldn’t afford to shoot on location for very long—blame those pesky music rights, I guess.) Yet the intoxicating style is Scorsese’s own, rooted in a desire to transmit his feelings about each moment in the most visceral way possible. The rhythms of the rock and pop songs on the soundtrack feel like racing heartbeats, and each camera movement suggests the director whipping his head around to take in what’s going on. (1973, 112 min, 35mm) BS
Billy Wilder's ACE IN THE HOLE (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7pm
Billy Wilder's films often carry with them an underlying contempt for the hostility of society, but his 1951 follow-up to SUNSET BLVD.—itself part noir and part fraught elegy for obsolesced silent film stars—finds his disgust in full flourish. ACE IN THE HOLE, alternatively released as THE BIG CARNIVAL by a skittish Paramount, features a menacing Kirk Douglas as a down-and-out newspaper reporter banished to Albuquerque intent on reviving his career. Stumbling upon a local trapped in a collapsed silver mine, the reporter seizes on the chance to create and prolong a media circus, keeping the story alive while the victim be damned. A wrenching and all-too-accurate portrayal of vulture media, Wilder strikes a raw nerve. Dusky and textured mine walls contrast with the severe lighting outside, suggesting the states of mind of victim and voyeur. The reporter, opportunistic and self-interested, floats between the spaces as Kirk Douglas's angular features are used to great effect: jagged and inscrutable in the shadows of the mine, jutting out with confidence among the frenzy. Wilder later called ACE IN THE HOLE "the runt of my litter" in response to audiences' tepid reaction. But by downplaying it, Wilder actually underscores the central role contempt and cynicism play in his films. Perhaps Wilder's most honest work, ACE IN THE HOLE might be a breath of fresh air if it didn't knock the wind out. (1951, 111 min, DCP Digital) BW
Jean-Luc Godard's BAND OF OUTSIDERS (French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Sunday, 5pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Time has been incredibly kind to Jean-Luc Godard's lightweight "crime movie," a notable flop in its time, which has emerged, nearly half-a-century later, as one of the filmmaker's most enduringly (and endearingly) popular films. A seemingly tossed-off distillation of the themes, obsessions, and techniques of JLG's early period, this loose adaptation of a largely-forgotten American pulp novel—Fool's Gold, by Dolores Hitchens—stars Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur as a couple of incompetent dreamer hoods, and Godard's then-wife and muse Anna Karina as a girl they meet in their English class and rope into helping them commit a robbery. Karina gives what is perhaps her definitive performance, combining tragedy, resolve, and girlish charm into a single enigmatic package, and the film's giddy, scuzzy style—packed tight with references, meta-jokes, and directorial flight-of fancy—is downright intoxicating. If you've never seen a Godard film, this might be the place to start. (1964, 97 min, DCP Digital) IV
Peter Bogdanovich's THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7pm
In THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, Peter Bogdanovich tells a coming of age story about three teenagers simultaneously living their own lives and seemingly reliving those of their parents and grandparents in the small town of Anarene, Texas. While finishing high school in the early 1950s, Duane (Jeff Bridges) dates the gorgeous Jacy (Cybill Shepherd), and Duane's best friend, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), tentatively begins an affair with his football coach's wife (Cloris Leachman). As a film critic, Bogdanovich popularized the classic Hollywood era by praising its great filmmakers, including John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles; he later described the larger aim of his film, "I saw the story as a Texas version of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, which was about the end of a way of life caused by the coming of the automobile. This was about the end of a way of life caused by the coming of television." In Bogdanovich's Anarene, the cinema is closing. The owner complains to Duane and Sonny that no one comes to the movies anymore, because they are at home watching TV. The cinema's last picture show is Hawks' RED RIVER (1948), starring John Wayne as a tough cattle driver in the Old West. Hawks depicted yet another way of life from times gone by that only exists in the movies. While Bogdanovich too quickly mourned the passing of a representation of life that is still with us, his co-writer, Larry McMurtry, laments life itself as lived in Anarene, also known as the Archer City of his youth. McMurtry and cinematographer Robert Surtees create an extraordinary sense of both the place of this poor town and the vast, empty space that nearly engulfs it and its last few inhabitants. Anarene is dying; it may soon be a ghost town with no one left at all. It begs questions like: Why did it exist? Why is it still here? In the middle of THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, Sam the Lion, played by veteran western actor Ben Johnson, tells Sonny that he is just as sentimental as the next when it comes to "old times." Their conversation and the film as a whole remind one of a statement by Terrence Malick, who also deals in memories of his Texas boyhood: "Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything." THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is a beautiful evocation not only of old times, but also of the possibility—whether great or small—time once held. (1971, 118 min, DCP Digital) CW
Wanuri Kahiu’s RAFIKI (New Kenyan)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
In 2007, Monica Arac de Nyeko became the first Ugandan to win the Caine Prize for African Writing for her lyrical short story “Jambula Tree.” Anti-gay sentiments were rising in Uganda and would culminate in the most severe anti-gay legislative proposals in the world. De Nyeko, based in Nairobi, Kenya, countered this hate with a heartbreakingly beautiful observation of lesbian love whose spirit has been sensitively adapted to the big screen by award-winning Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu, who also wrote the screenplay. RAFIKI (Swahili for “friend”) economically sets the scene in the Slopes neighborhood of Nairobi, where butch, soccer-playing teen Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) and Ziki (Sheila Munyiva), a feminine mass of rainbow braids, lock looks as a prelude to their grand passion. Their ambitions for their lives fill them with hope, but the realities of their world conspire to tear them apart and ensure they return to being “good Kenyan girls.” First-time actors Mugatsia and Munyiva make a very charismatic, attractive couple, and the bright colors and carefree nightlife in Slopes, where the couple does their courtship dance, heighten their experience of first love. An excellent supporting cast, especially Jimmy Gathu as Kena’s sympathetic, but conflicted father, rounds out this deeply humane film. (2018, 83 min, DCP Digital) MF
---
Introduced by anthropologist Erin Moore (Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health).
Hayao Miyazaki's MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO [English-Dubbed Version] (Japanese Animation Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Saturday-Monday, 11:30am
The seminal Studio Ghibli film MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO is one of director Hayao Miyazaki's most beloved and celebrated. Thought-provoking and poignant, Miyazaki's fourth feature is an enchanting, hand-drawn masterpiece that demonstrates his creative passion. Mei and Satsuki, the two female protagonists, are perfect vehicles to allow the viewer to see the world through the eyes of children. The film does not rely on traditional narrative structure, where conflicts arise and obstacles must be overcome. Instead, Miyazaki appeals to the viewer to live in the now much like a child would. Both the pain and elation that Chika Sakamoto (Mei) and Noriko Hidaka (Satsuki) emote through their voice acting is palpable in every scene. From this vantage point, a feeling of wonderment occurs, and the dazzling animation invites a sense of nostalgia. This perspective makes it easy to believe that the strange magical spirit Totoro, his band, and the soot spirits are all very real. While these creatures may only be symbolic of nature (the wind, why plants grow, etc.), they serve as a source of comfort and hope for the two girls. Miyazaki's animation is bright and vivid—an homage to rural life—and the mystical quality of the film is bolstered by Joe Hisaishi's uplifting score. MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO is a beautiful tale about love, family, and hope that makes for joyous viewing for people of all ages. (1988, 86 min, 35mm) KC
Samuel Fuller's PARK ROW (American Revival)
Filmfront (1740 W. 18th St.) — Saturday, 6pm (Free Admission)
It could be said that Samuel Fuller is the Ernest Hemingway of directors—both participated in at least one of the two World Wars and were journalists before becoming well known in their respective creative endeavors. They were veritable manly men whose artistic pursuits reeked of a vulnerable machismo that turned even the most brutal conflict into an earnest reflection of human behavior. Though Fuller's war films provide for more obvious comparisons, their similarities are especially noticeable in Fuller's PARK ROW, his film about rival newspapers in the golden age of the eponymous New York City printer's district. In it, a newspaperman, Phineas Mitchell, starts his own newspaper to compete with another established publication after he is fired for disputing their unethical criminal reporting tactics. His newspaper is an instant success thanks to a ragtag team of volunteers, but they soon find trouble as the other publication's publisher, Charity Hackett, toys with Mitchell's paper and his pride. Some parts of the film are almost absurd in their didacticism; Ottmar Mergenthaler invents linotype with Mitchell's dedication as inspiration and the paper single-handedly raises enough money for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. But both incidences occurred in real life, and Fuller manages to gracefully insert these and a multitude of other brief history lessons throughout the film. Just like Hemingway, Fuller's past as a reporter is blatantly reflected in his portrayal of an almost God-like profession that separates the real men from the masses. And just as Hemingway featured strong leading ladies who sometimes emasculated their male counterparts through not only equality, but oftentimes superiority, Fuller creates an antagonist/love interest in Hackett, a beautiful publisher who is just as interested in efficient typesetting as she is in handsome brutes. A difference between the two comes in the form of length; while Hemingway was the master of short, succinct prose, Fuller is an expert at long, uninterrupted takes that bring decided realism to the somewhat-daffy plot. His combination of long takes and a thoughtful editing style reflect the decisiveness of a good newspaper editor, with emphasis on the action and a little room left only for the necessarily extraneous. Just like Mitchell, Fuller achieved his vision through independence—after Darryl F. Zanuck suggested he make the movie as a Cinemascope musical, Fuller decided to finance it himself so he could exert complete creative control over even the most minute details. A similar defiance was evident throughout Fuller's career; Howard Hawks rejected him as director of an adaptation of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises due to his brusque interpretation of the protagonist's impotence, which is probably the closest the writer and director ever got. But a shared spirit is evident in PARK ROW as stouthearted sincerity and idealistic contemptuousness paint a picture of a world both ravaged and saved by the truth. (1952, 83 min, Video Projection) KS
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
Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s LOVING VINCENT (Contemporary Polish/British Animation)
Beverly Arts Center — Wednesday, 7:30pm
A breakthrough work, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s LOVING VINCENT, the "world’s first hand-painted feature-length film," is comprised of 65,000 gorgeous oil paintings, on canvas, executed by a team of over 125 classically trained painters, working from live-action reference footage and Van Gogh's own paintings. A pulsing, exhilarating experience, I imagine it will only continue to find new audiences: I'm one of them. What the filmmakers have managed to do is get Van Gogh's experience of life, of nature, on screen, in all its richness and lust. Connoisseurs will love the details: you can hear that horse famously in the center-background of Cafe Terrace at Night clip-clopping towards you, under the starry, starry night. It's a pretty staggering technical accomplishment—you can enjoy it just for the texture of those big, thick, swirling impasto brushstrokes. But what's really remarkable is how they were able to craft a story with an emotional impact that does justice to this life, and to a body of work in which so many continue to take solace. The story takes us from Arles in the south of France, via Montmartre, to Auvers-sur-Oise in the north, where Van Gogh died in 1891. It's a year later, and we join Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), the son of Postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O'Dowd), on his quest to deliver the last letter written by lonely, ill Van Gogh (Robert Gulaczyk) to his brother Theo (Cezary Lukaszewicz). Each character is a famous Van Gogh portrait come to life. There's Dr. Gachet (Jerome Flynn); his daughter Marguerite (Saoirse Ronan), at her piano or in her garden; innkeeper Adeline Ravoux (Eleanor Tomlinson). Sometimes, as with the Boatman (Aidan Turner), they've imagined a character based on "just a really tiny character at the shore of the river in a painting," as Kobiela put it. Miraculously, these all ring true as real, dimensional humans. Playing detective, Armand questions them about what really happened on the days leading up to Van Gogh's death: suicide, murder, or accident? Color—throbbing, shimmering, clashing—is for the present; black and white, evoking the grays of Van Gogh's early Nuenen style, is for memories. To describe the film's structure, critics have evoked CITIZEN KANE or RASHOMON. The surreal visual experience they've compared to WAKING LIFE—there's a similar feeling of life as a waking dream, which reminded me of AKIRA KUROSAWA'S DREAMS, with our Marty Scorsese as Van Gogh. ("The sun! It compels me to paint!") I was even reminded of JFK, what with Dr. Mazery's musings on what we might call the "Rene Secretan theory." Everyone Armand talks to has a different theory about "why," a different perspective on who and what we saw before. I think what he comes to understand is that he's looking in the wrong place. The truth is in the beauty, and the life force, of what Van Gogh left behind, a love this film celebrates in every frame. Cracking entertainment, too. A modern classic. (2017, 94 min, Digital Projection) SP
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: Families in Transition is on Thursday at 7pm. The program features two recent documentaries: Oli Rodriguez and Victoria Stob’s LYNDALE (2018, 24 min, Digital Projection) and “A Family Matter” (2017, 19 min, Digital Projection), an episode from André Alan Pérez’s webseries, AMERICA IN TRANSITION. Rodriguez and Pérez in person. Free admission.
South Side Projections and the DuSable Museum (at the DuSable) screen Frank Olivo’s 1978 documentary MARTIN LUTHER KING: AN AMAZING GRACE (60 min, Digital Projection) on Monday at 3pm. Followed by a discussion.
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) screens Eva Lewis’ 2019 documentary UNDETERRED (76 min, Digital Projection) on Saturday at 7pm.
Cinema 53 (at the Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave.) screens Bernardo Ruiz’s 2013 PBS documentary THE GRADUATES (120 min, Video Projection) on Thursday at 7pm, with Ruiz and series curator Eve Ewing in person. Free admission.
PO Box Collective (6900 N. Glenwood Ave.) presents Animations on Saturday at 5pm. The screening is a program of TBA animated short films. Free admission.
The Italian Cultural Institute (500 N. Michigan Ave.) screens Gianni Zanasi’s 2015 Italian film THE COMPLEXITY OF HAPPINESS (117 min, Video Projection) on Thursday at 6pm. Free admission.
The Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens Carlos Saura’s 1990 Spanish film ¡AY, CARMELA! (102 min, DVD Projection) on Tuesday at 7pm. Free admission.
Hector Babenco’s 2015 Brazilian film MY HINDU FRIEND (124 min, Digital Projection) opens at the Classic Cinemas Cinema 12 on Friday.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Charles Chaplin's 1923 silent film A WOMAN OF PARIS (82 min, 35mm) is on Friday at 2pm, Sunday at 5pm, and Monday at 6pm; Charles Chaplin's 1967 UK film A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (108 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 3:45pm, Sunday at 2:45pm, and Thursday at 6pm; Juraj Herz's 1981 Czech film FERAT VAMPIRE (93 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 3pm and Tuesday at 8:30pm; and Juraj Herz's 1966 Czech film SIGN OF CANCER (87 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 5pm and Monday at 6pm.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Robert Eggers’ 2019 film THE LIGHTHOUSE (109 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday at 4pm; Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 Polish film ASHES AND DIAMONDS (103 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 7pm; and Ana DuVernay’s 2014 film SELMA (128 min, DCP Digital) is on Monday at 7pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Panos Cosmatos’ 2018 film MANDY (121 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight; and a sneak-preview screening of Richard Stanley’s 2019 film COLOR OUT OF SPACE (111 min, DCP Digital) is on Wednesday at 7pm.
Also at Facets Cinémathèque this week: Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s 2018 film EMPTY METAL (83 min, Video Projection) has a week-long run.
The Chicago Cultural Center screens Ray Santisteban’s 2019 documentary THE FIRST RAINBOW COALITION (56 min, Video Projection) on Saturday at 2pm, followed by a discussion (registration required); and hosts the Chicago Latino Film Festival screening of Alejandro Springall's 2006 Mexican film MY MEXICAN SHIVA (98 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.
---
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 17 - January 23, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Alexandra Ensign, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael Metzger, Scott Pfeiffer, Harrison Sherrod, Brian Welesko, Candace Wirt, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky