CRUCIAL VIEWING
Devotional Form: Films by Nathaniel Dorsky (Experimental Revival)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Organized around filmmaker and author Nathaniel Dorsky's notions of cinema as an art-form with restorative and spiritual powers, and cinema-going as a devotional, though not necessarily religious, act (ideas which are laid out in his slim but powerful book Devotional Cinema), this screening features three films that dwell deep in the mystery. Dorsky carves sensuous images into lovely and lush film stocks. He creates a musical play of light and dark more boldly emotional than almost anyone else in the avant-garde film world. He edits with a deeply personal poetic style that—at it's best—creates a new cinematic language. In HOURS FOR JEROME (1982), Dorsky lovingly arranges a document of four years in his life, each section of the film representing a different season; it speaks perhaps most plainly among the works in Dorsky's oeuvre to his belief in cinema as a spiritual practice. ALAYA (1987) is a bit of an outlier in his work in that it doesn't focus on everyday portraiture; instead it is a powerful rhythmic study of blowing sand that spins mysteries of nature's grace. TRISTE (1996) arguably marks the beginning of his later period, when Dorsky's output increased and his style resolved into masterful and ravishing documentation of his everyday world. Of course, any chance to see Dorsky's films should be enthusiastically embraced. (1982-96, 92 min total, 16mm) JBM
Lori Felker: Intrusions and Interruptions (New Experimental/Narrative)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center — Thursday, 6pm
The experimental film community is a small one. When watching an experimental film, it’s likely that even if you don’t know the filmmaker, you feel as if you do—so inherently personal and intimate is the mode. I have the privilege of knowing Chicago-based filmmaker Lori Felker, though after watching the films in this program, I realized that even if I didn’t previously know her, I would feel as if I did; this, in turn, further affirmed my love for the form and its ability to convey personhood through cinema. This sensation is exuded most prevalently in the three films from this year: SPONTANEOUS (2020, 14 min), I CAN’T (2020, 5 min), and NOT YOU (2020, 10 min). The first two are of a kind, SPONTANEOUS detailing a devastating miscarriage Felker had in 2016 while attending the Slamdance Film Festival—where DISCONTINUITY (2016, 15 min, DCP Digital Projection), also featured in the program, was screening—and I CAN’T putting forth, in filmic form, via bubbles, the grief she was experiencing after a friend’s sudden death. Both lay bare Felker’s emotions about the tragedies, the former employing more of a narrative structure and the latter, which is silent, using text overlaid onto a beautifully shot roll of 16mm film to convey those thoughts which may at times seem inexpressible. Part of their effectiveness, to me, seems a result of Felker’s unwavering honesty and audacious inclination to put herself out there. Similarly, Felker makes her experience as a new mom keenly felt in the short narrative film NOT YOU. Shot in her apartment with then-real-life neighbor Jared Larson and her daughter Elodie, it follows a tapped-out new mom (played by the filmmaker) as she calls on her awkward upstairs neighbor to watch her daughter so that she can go to the bathroom. Of the films screening in this program, it’s most similar to DISCONTINUITY, which Felker considers to be her first, true narrative. In that one, a woman returns home from working in a different state to discover that her long-time boyfriend has amassed several cats. This and NOT YOU have more in common than being narrative films; both explore, through long-established forms, a dissonance that’s not often found in them. Both hint that their maker enjoys conventional narratives—especially comedic ones—but finds them unable to convey incongruity. As such, Felker subverts the narrative tradition, making something at once enjoyable to watch and curious to ponder. (Plus, there really are a lot of cats. Come for the Lynchian vibes, stay for the dilute tortie.) If there’s an outlier among the films, it’s MEMORIA DATA (2018, 12 min), commissioned by the Chicago Film Archives and Lab 80-Cinescatti in Italy for the 2018 International Media Mixer. For those unfamiliar with the event, it involves filmmakers and musicians working together to make new films, complete with new music, out of footage from the archives. All of the work in the program can be said to explore the unnerving realities that are life and cinema, but MEMORIA DATA (which features music by Patrizia Oliva) is the most haunting. Utilizing archival footage in which the subjects are somehow interacting with the camera (or, more likely, the person behind it), Felker examines the ontological nature of archival footage, which executes the dual functions of preserving moments in time and extending them through safeguarding that serves as a sort of immortality. The films in this program represent the range of Felker’s work but also reveal her to be a filmmaker of remarkable consistency, a person you continue to know even as she continues to grow. (2016-20, approx. 56 min total, DCP Digital) KS
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Filmmaker Lori Felker in person.
Ritwik Ghatak’s THE RUNAWAY (Indian Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Ritwik Ghatak may be best known in the U.S. for two politically charged narrative features about West Bengal’s lower classes, THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR (1960) and A RIVER CALLED TITAS (1973), yet Ghatak’s career is more diverse than these films suggest. Not only did he make documentaries in addition to narrative films, but he also wrote plays, short stories, poetry, and film criticism. One finds impressive range even within Ghatak’s eight fiction features; just look at the two he directed in 1958, AJANTRIK and THE RUNAWAY. The first of these is a comedy about a sentient taxicab, while the other is a picaresque drama about a well-intentioned eight-year-old delinquent. Often suggesting a film version of Oliver Twist directed by Roberto Rossellini, THE RUNAWAY concerns the adventures of Kanchan, a poor little rich boy who flees his rural home because he fears the corporal punishments of his taskmaster father. The boy heads to Kolkata and attempts to fend for himself, but, naturally, life in the big city is more challenging than he anticipates. In his journeys, he meets a gallery of memorable adults, most prominently Haridas, a disgraced schoolteacher who now oversees a crew of child street peddlers. Haridas is more lovable than Dickens’ Fagin, though he shares a certain amorality with that character; both point to the ethical compromises that the poor make when trying to survive in an uncaring city. Kanchan also encounters beggars, thieves, and a street magician—none of them especially compassionate—as well as adults capable of showing kindness to strangers, namely a lonely older woman who takes pity on Kanchan in part because she wishes she had children of her own. Ghatak imbues his naturalistic aesthetic with a certain fanciful air that stems from his identification with the young hero. (At least one critic has compared THE RUNAWAY to Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS, which was made a year later.) As in other films by the director, the rough-around-the-edges quality of the filmmaking suggests smears of reality entering the frame from without; this quality prevents the story from ever feeling precious. (1958, 118 min, DCP Digital) BS
Alma Har’el’s HONEY BOY (New American)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
Many have noted the unusual number of auto-fictional films released in 2019, from Joanna Hogg’s austere artist’s origin story THE SOUVENIR to Pedro Almodóvar’s wistful retrospective PAIN AND GLORY. Even amongst such a frequently lacerating, soul-baring crop of personal portraits, HONEY BOY stands out as particularly raw and self-confrontational. That’s because the film is literally a therapeutic exercise. Written by erstwhile Disney child star and longtime enfant terrible Shia LaBeouf as part of a rehabilitation program, it’s as explicit an example of cinema as self-therapy as the medium has ever seen. This can be attributed to the fact that LaBeouf, bravely setting himself the task of corporeally revisiting childhood trauma, has cast himself within his own story; what’s more, that he’s cast himself as his own abusive, alcoholic, Vietnam vet/rodeo clown father (dubbed James in the film), whose emotional and physical torments fueled that trauma. LaBeouf “appears” twice more, in surrogate form: as the twelve-year-old actor Otis (Noah Jupe), who lives with his father in a seedy LA motel, and, ten years down the road, as a 22-year-old (Lucas Hedges), whose angry, drunken run-ins with authority land him in rehab, where he’s diagnosed with PTSD. Through alternating flashbacks, the film tracks the fragile, beleaguered Otis in 1995 and the traumatized, institutionalized Otis of 2005, with LaBeouf’s pernicious James, himself burdened with PTSD and a family history of alcoholism, the connecting node. It’s a simple, schematic structure—director Alma Har’el connects the timeframes through easy visual echoes—but it’s elevated by the rather ingenious meta-fictional conceit that underlies it. By staging multiple, mirroring versions of LaBeouf, and by using the actor to reproduce and embody his (real) father’s abusive persona, HONEY BOY posits a novel and potent way of dramatizing the cycle of intergenerational trauma. LaBeouf astonishes in this performance-cum-conjuring, and his scenes with the equally canny Jupe are models of intuitive scene partnership on an emotional razor’s edge. Their aching, noxiously codependent dynamic is utterly heartrending, made all the more so by Alex Somers’ haunting score, which evokes nothing less than a sad, broken music box feebly trying to will itself back to life. It’s easy to image HONEY BOY as a narcissistic exercise in self-pity, or an apologia for malign behavior, and perhaps it would have been had LaBeouf taken on more than just writing and acting duties. As directed by Har’el, though, it’s modest and tender, devastating and cathartic, attuned to both a specific life and the painful experiences of so many. For Otis, as for LaBeouf in real life, one can only hope it brings some lasting measure of peace. (2019, 94 min, DCP Digital) JL
Three Films by Forough Farrokhzad and Ebrahim Golestan (Documentary Revivals)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Wednesday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Ebrahim Golestan and Forough Farrokhzad each directed a key film in the pre-revolutionary first wave of the Iranian New Wave: BRICK AND MIRROR (1965), Golestan’s first narrative feature (which screened at Block this past Thursday) and THE HOUSE IS BLACK, Farrokhzad’s sole film, showing in this program. Golestan and Farrokhzad also had a nearly-decade-long relationship as well, from 1958 to Farrokhzad’s untimely death in a 1967 car accident. Both of their careers are marked by thin filmographies, too. Farrokhzad made only the one film; Golestan directed only two narrative features, nearly ten years apart, and eight or so documentary shorts, all between 1957 and 1974 (he never directed again after leaving Iran for the U.K. in 1975). This program features two of his nearly impossible to see documentaries (none have been released commercially on DVD or Blu-Ray; and only 1961’s A FIRE is easy to find in decent copies online). The longer of the two films showing, WAVE, CORAL AND ROCK (1961, 40 min, 16mm archival print) was unavailable for preview. It concerns the laying of oil pipelines. The other, THE HILLS OF MARLIK (1963, 15 min, Digital Projection) is showing in a new digital restoration from the Cineteca di Bologna (as is THE HOUSE IS BLACK). It is a beautifully shot, semi-experimental film about archeological excavation and the objects recovered coupled with poetic ruminations on life and existence. It’s quite good, if a bit too obvious in its juxtapositions of image and poetic narration. The major film on the program is celebrated poet Forough Farrokhzad’s 1962 Iranian experimental documentary THE HOUSE IS BLACK (26 min, Digital Projection). Previously, this was also extraordinarily hard to see, but a DVD from Facets has been available for many years now, though the quality was not exceptional. This new restoration is exceptional, however. It’s also a well-deserved restoration, as THE HOUSE IS BLACK is one of the most exceptional films I’ve ever seen. It is a portrait of the residents of a leper colony in Iran; surely difficult subject matter for most viewers, as Farrokhzad does not shy from showing the severe deformities that the disease causes in its victims. But in her sensitive hands, the film is an achingly beautiful and profoundly human exploration of perseverance and the capacity for joy even amongst unimaginable hardship. Farrokhzad forces us to look at what we’d prefer to turn away from, and allows us the opportunity to see past the ravages of the disease to find the individuals there; it’s a move from surface to soul. This humanizing vision is abetted by Farrokhzad’s stunning filmmaking. She has an exquisite eye for detail; the editing is sharp—sometimes used for sly humor, sometimes for profoundly moving couplings of images. But it’s the sound that most stands out. Farrokhzad uses recitations of her own poetry to compliment and counterpoint what we see on screen; the plaintiveness in her voice is heartbreaking, as she speaks for the subjects, wondering of God “why”? She also creates an intricate and musical “score” for the film from the sounds and voices recorded during the filming. It’s a masterclass in sound design, and perhaps one that could only have been accomplished by a poet; the musicality is as expressive and meaningful as her own voice-over poems. I could go on and on about this film, but I’ll stop here. It is a unique, devastating, and life affirming masterpiece. (1961-63, 81 min total, 16mm and DCP Digital) PF
Tsai Ming-liang’s WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (Taiwanese Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm
One of the key films of the early 21st century, WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? communicates feelings of alienation on both an intimate and global scale, with neither level overwhelming the other. Similarly it’s never entirely funny nor melancholic—Tsai Ming-liang achieves a perfect fusion of his two cinematic modes here, achieving painful laughs and moments of wry poignancy. The movie concludes a loose trilogy started by Tsai’s REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (1991) and THE RIVER (1997), centering on the same unhappy Taipei family played by Lee Kang-sheng, Lu Yi-Ching, and Miao Tien. Miao’s character dies near the beginning of the film, and his death casts a thematic pall over the story that follows. His grieving widow (Lu) gets wrapped up in Buddhist rituals, trying to summon her late husband’s spirit at some points; meanwhile his son (Lee) turns into a full-blown eccentric. The young man, who sells watches as a street vendor, becomes obsessed with a female customer (Chen Shiang-chyi) who tells him she’s going on vacation to Paris. He acts on his obsession by trying to change every clock he sees to Paris time, and his strange behavior occasions some of the best sight gags of Tsai’s career, one of which deliberately evokes the famous clock scene of Harold Lloyd’s SAFETY LAST! Tsai intercuts Lee’s strange misadventures in Taipei with Chen’s lonely French vacation, using crosscutting to suggest a communion of souls of which neither participant is ever aware. (In its contemplation of missed connections in the globalized world, the film feels like a successor to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s RED.) The closest thing the director had to an American breakout hit, WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? reminded numerous U.S. critics of more than just Lloyd; Tsai’s deadpan minimalism inspired comparisons to Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, Yasujiro Ozu, and Robert Bresson, among others. Those directors might be useful points of reference for viewers new to Tsai’s world, but what’s most satisfying about the film is how it marked the full flowering of his style up to that point. The oblique compositions are particularly inspired—consider how Tsai shoots the family’s apartment, finding new ways to shoot the cramped interior in every scene. (The first time I saw the film, it took me most of the run time to realize that all the rooms belonged to the same domicile.) The long takes, ever integral to Tsai’s art, achieve wonders too; rather than conjure a spirit of confinement or patience (as they do in so much durational cinema), the static, minutes-long shots underscore the sense of longing common to all of the film’s major characters. (2001, 116 min, 35mm archival print) BS
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Introduced by Cine-File associate editor Kathleen Sachs.
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Ernst Lubitsch's NINOTCHKA (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 2pm, Saturday, 3:15pm, and Wednesday, 6pm
In his interpretation of the phrase “the Lubitsch Touch," critic Jonathan Rosenbaum opined that this so-called touch is made up of three distinct qualities that both set German-born Ernst Lubitsch apart from his contemporaries and account for his being a significant source of inspiration to his successors. The first two parts of his definition refer to Lubitsch's "specifically Eastern European capacity to represent the cosmopolitan sophistication of continental Europeans to Americans" and "[his] way of regarding his characters that could be described as a critical affection for flawed individuals who operate according to double standards"; the third part refers to Lubitsch's incorporation of music in his films, but while Werner R. Heymann's score is certainly a compliment to the wonderfully funny and romantic story in NINOTCHKA, it is not as necessary to his distinct style in this film as it was in his acclaimed musicals from the late 20s and early 30s. Though Rosenbaum acknowledges that all three elements are not present in every one of Lubitsch's films, the first two most definitely account for the winning effect of "the Lubitsch Touch" in this 1939 MGM production. Similar to his 1942 film TO BE OR NOT TO BE, NINOTCHKA satirizes and even romanticizes a touchy but timely subject using Lubitsch's above-mentioned abilities. In the film, a typically steely Greta Garbo plays a Russian envoy sent by the Soviet Union to Paris in order to broker the sale of the dissolved aristocracy's opulent jewels. The jewels once belonged to the former Grand Duchess Swana, who now resides in Paris and has the charming Count Leon as her uncommitted romantic companion. Much to their own surprise, Ninotchka and Count Leon meet and fall in love; as a Communist from the Soviet Union and a capitalistic Count living lavishly in Paris, respectively, their coupledom is the base double-standard from which Lubitsch's 'touch' emanates. As with couples from other Lubitsch films, their romance is seemingly ill-fated, not so much against the odds as just odd, and insurmountable only in that, in a film by anyone else but Lubitsch, it wouldn't work at all. But above their romantic dynamic in terms of a double-standard is their political and cultural dynamic, which calls back to Rosenbaum's ideas about Lubitsch's sophistication. Film historian Jeremy Mindich declared NINOTCHKA "arguably the most complex American movie ever made about the Soviet Union," and while that is definitely arguable, it says a lot about Lubitsch's own cosmopolitan sophistication that his film both satirizes and humanizes Communist characters. Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the script, once described the Lubitsch Touch as being the "elegant use of the Superjoke. You had a joke, and you felt satisfied, and then there was one more big joke on top of it. The joke you didn't expect." When asked by the three envoy-stooges who preceded her to Paris about the mass trials happening in their home country, Ninotchka replies that they were a great success, declaring, "There will be fewer but better Russians." In NINOTCHKA, political humor one-ups sexual humor in terms of salaciousness, so such an off-color joke is satisfying to the viewer who expects as much from Lubitsch. But the joke that no one's expecting is Count Leon's response to Ninotchka's communist ideals. He reads Marx and even tries to convince his personal attendant that their professional dynamic is unfair. From there, the jokes get bigger and bigger until even Lenin is cracking a smile. In his essay for the Criterion Collection release of TROUBLE IN PARADISE, critic Armond White observes that Lubitsch is "able to indulge carefree behavior because it is undergirded with his appreciation of life's hard facts." No less than such a sophisticated double standard is to be expected from Lubitsch, and NINOTCHKA is a prime example from his canon. And the music is great, too. (1939, 110 min, 35mm) KS
David Cronenberg’s THE BROOD (Canadian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 9:30pm
THE BROOD might be described as a transitional work for David Cronenberg. On the one hand, it was one of his first films to feature well-known actors and glossy production values; on the other, it arrived before the breakthroughs of SCANNERS and VIDEODROME, which expanded Cronenberg’s worldview to consider global conspiracies. The focus here is on domestic strife, with the Canadian auteur’s signature body horror serving mainly as a metaphor for the breakdown of a nuclear family. Inspired by Cronenberg’s messy divorce from his first wife, THE BROOD begins after Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) has abandoned her husband Frank (Art Hindle) and five-year-old daughter Candy to take part in an experimental psychotherapy retreat without any definite plan of coming home. Nola still sees Candy on weekends, and when Frank goes to retrieve their daughter after a visit, he discovers that the child’s body is covered in scratches and bruises. He begins to investigate what’s going on at the retreat and discovers that the experimental therapy is giving way to the creation of Lovecraftian beasts. The head doctor of the retreat, Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), has created a process called psychoplasmics, wherein patients expunge their repressed emotions by channeling them into physical transformations. Some patients leave the retreat with scabs and abrasions, while others emerge with freakish, cancerous growths. What, then, is happening to Nola? And why are the people with whom she enters into conflict getting killed off by monstrous small children? As usual, Cronenberg presents the bizarre, lurid story with somber precision, rooting the horror in relatable emotions and realistic locations—which, in turn, he defamiliarizes with the unusual content. Consider the opening sequence, which plunges viewers into Dr. Raglan’s role-playing session with a male patient. Cronenberg begins in closeup, denying viewers any context for the men’s relationship; when he cuts to medium shots, he shows them to be on stage in an auditorium, which poses more questions as to what they’re doing. The rest of THE BROOD proceeds in a similar fashion, as Cronenberg limits the contextualizing information so that one always feels uncomfortably close to whatever’s happening. The intimacy of the nightmare is consistent with the director’s other horror films, which force viewers to reflect on their relationships to their own bodies. Yet Cronenberg’s body horror is ultimately existential in nature—what does it say about our identities, his films ask, if they can be corrupted by forces from without? In THE BROOD, those forces include psychotherapy as well as marital breakdown; in a sense, the movie would find its complement in Cronenberg’s later A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011), which considered the relationship between Freud and Jung. (1979, 92 min, 35mm) BS
Brian De Palma's HI, MOM! (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 8pm and Thursday, 6:15pm
Like many of Brian De Palma's films, HI, MOM! is an allusive and subversive curiosity that feels both familiar and entirely bizarre. The film draws from De Palma's mainstays—Hitchcock, Powell, Antonioni—hinting at issues like scopophilia, voyeurism, and other complexities surrounding the making and viewing of movies, but without the ostensible warnings that came with REAR WINDOW, PEEPING TOM, or BLOW UP. De Palma exhibits deep skepticism—or at best, ambivalence—toward the artifice of the cinema's recreation of feeling, emotion, and empathy. In a series of loosely interrelated scenes, De Palma's film features Jon Rudin (Robert De Niro) as a young, amateur pornographer intent on capturing sexual acts from his apartment window (given the scathing and sarcastic title "peep art"), a militant, and a leftist theater performer. Each segment shows a failed attempt to use art—even lowbrow forms of it—as a means of communicating understanding, love, etc., while simultaneously subverting it for satire. As Jon tries to connect with an earnest young woman, the film adopts hammy TV tropes, foregrounding the manipulative emotional devices used on audiences. HI, MOM!'s most jarring and complex sequence is a faux cinema verité-style documentary depicting a group of white liberals who wish to experience being black, albeit in a safe theater space. They are treated to a sort of hall-of-mirrors performance where they touch black skin, eat black-eyed peas, get painted in blackface, and are eventually mugged at gunpoint by the cast. This segment is reason enough to watch. HI, MOM! is undisciplined in many ways, but where those better-known films are contained and thematically anchored around the implications of the camera and the relaying of what it captures, HI, MOM!'s richness comes from its scattershot, allusive approach. (1970, 87 min, 35mm) BW
George Stevens' SWING TIME (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 6pm, Saturday, 5:30pm, and Monday, 6pm
Of all the Astaire and Rogers musicals, SWING TIME has been the most emphatically embraced by the dance community, with Arlene Croce referring to it as the "miracle of the film series," and Robert Gottlieb adding, "In no other film in the world is dancing used so persuasively as a simulacrum of adult passion and serious sexual commitment." Previous installments of the series toyed audiences with the anticipation of the dance partners finally taking the stage, but in SWING TIME the dancing serves as the dramatic stakes—Astaire's Lucky Garnett, doomed to marry the wrong woman, mourns that he will, "never dance again." Dance numbers in these films aren't simply—as has often been lazily assumed—a substitution for sexuality, but a sacred ritual of courtship, the most immaculate form of communication (it is no coincidence that Lucky finds himself unable to explain himself with words throughout the picture). SWING TIME's climactic action involves Astaire losing his orchestra and doomed to wed a woman who doesn't dance, thereby ensuring that the eventual fulfillment of his romantic promise with Rogers also restores music and dancing to the picture. In utilizing dance as a necessary means of expression, no other film in the Astaire and Rogers cycle creates a better argument for their craft as an art form. Featuring the memorable geometric surrealism of "Bojangles of Harlem" and the duo's most sumptuous ballroom number in "Never Gonna Dance" (which brilliantly reprises the entire plot of the film), SWING TIME is the most seductive and accomplished of the team's pictures, and it is the best argument for their unusual genius. (1936, 104 min, 35mm) EF
Big Shoulders International Student Film Festival
Davis Theater — Saturday, 2 pm (Program 1) and 4pm (Program 2) (Free Admission)
Twenty-two short student films will be shown at the Big Shoulders International Student Film Festival. Below are reviews of selected titles. Some of the directors will be in attendance.
Program 1: Yaou Chen’s HUNGRY (US, 2019, 3 min) is a delightful animated film that pays clear homage to cartoons from Hollywood’s Golden Age, especially Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. A desert creature of uncertain species gets hunger pangs and sets out in search of food. Other creatures use ingenious methods to cook up a dinner for themselves, but refuse to share. Ultimately, however, the entire group finds that communal dining has its pleasures. Maliheh Gholamzadeh’s TANGLE (Iran, 2019, 7 min) is an evocative, black-and-white animation of a refugee’s escape from her war-torn home. Her ties to her home travel with her, up mountains and across featureless snowscapes to the barbed-wire border of a distant land. Her rending from the familiar and uncertain future meshes with all refugees in the final, breathtaking image. Ecem Çelik’s UKDE (Turkey, 2019, 18 min) tells a simple story that goes in an unexpected direction. Güzide, a middle-age seamstress, is working at home when Leyla, who may or may not be a relative, comes in to ask her to stitch up a torn suit jacket she needs to wear to a job interview. Güzide refuses. Later, when Leyla drops a 9-year-old orphan girl at Güzide’s house “for a couple of days,” the older woman is forced to play temporary babysitter. She warms slowly to the girl, presaging a happy ending. However, there are no happy endings in a country scarred by war and economic privation. Close-up camerawork and subject treatment are reminiscent of the Dardennes and make this economically shot film a devastating experience. Lorenzo Fresta’s WALTER (Italy, 2019, 7 min) is a fanciful, beautifully rendered watercolor and line-drawn animation that captures an encounter by a froglike creature one assumes is named Walter and a cloud. Walter harnesses the cloud’s moisture for his own purposes, but learns that natural phenomena need to be free to all. Sara Grguić zeroes in on a lonely woman in ANDELA IS A STUDENT WHO DECIDED TO STAY IN ZAGREB DURING HER WINTER HOLIDAYS (Croatia, 2019, 12 min). The title character spends her days in a dark apartment sleeping, polishing her fingernails, and watching a loving couple whose apartment window faces hers across a courtyard. Her imaginary immersion in their lives leads Andela to an actual encounter that shatters their idyll. Grguić skillfully interrogates the dangers of isolation, dislocation, and envy in this sad film. Special kudos to the title designer. --- Program 2: Roberto Telles’ I LOVE TO KILL (Mexico, 2019, 2 min) is a miracle of economy that packs a wallop, as a boy with a toy machine gun listens to a song of graphic violence as he rides with his mother in their family car. When she parks the car and gets out, the boy comes face to face with what his imaginary indulgence in violence has done to his psyche. The line between imagination and reality is blurred with amazing facility. Dana Brandes-Simon’s documentary NO SUCH SUNRISE (US, 2017, 15 min) takes a chilling look at hate in the United States through the experience of three college students who are confronted by a drunk ex-con spouting xenophobic language and brandishing a knife. Mixing footage from a smartphone and police dashcam with animation and voiceover narration by the students, the film forces us to face the horror of this incident—one of numerous anonymous encounters that take place every day. The heartbreaking final scene in which the Chinese student targeted in the encounter doubts the existence of a fabled, beautiful sunrise shows the indelible damage hate inflicts. HOLLOW CASTLE (Mexico, 2019, 9 min), from Sebastián Amaya, blends horror, fantasy, and reality to reveal a child’s view of violence. Shadowy cinematography obscures the setting from which Nicolas and his sister, Natalia, flee, even as they know that escape is just an illusion. Amaya’s creation packs a not-unexpected, but still potent punch in the end. Alireza Ghasemi’s BETTER THAN NEIL ARMSTRONG (Iran, 2019, 20 min) is an imaginative romp through outer space by four Iranian children. The Captain centers the film, heading up the exploits of her crew as they try to outdo Neil Armstrong’s moon landing by flying to Mars and returning with red soil. The sets and costumes are terrific, the children are endearing, and the troubles from which they are fleeing into fantasy will bring you to your knees. Annabella Schnabel’s REFERRAL (Hungary, 2019, 17 min) condemns the impersonal judgments and actions of bureaucrats as a teenage girl tries to get a prescription for birth control. The opening of the film, a cute smartphone look at the girl and her boyfriend, contrasts with the rundown health clinic full of old women and an indifferent clerk whose default answer is “no.” Schnabel’s protagonist could be a girl anywhere in the world, and that’s the tragedy. MF
Wen Muye’s DYING TO SURVIVE (New Chinese)
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) — Saturday, 7pm
Equal parts outrageousness and earnestness, Wen Muye’s DYING TO SURVIVE is a much needed film for our current health care moment. Based on a true story, it follows a drug store owner who is approached by a cancer patient to smuggle illegal medicine from India. What starts as a heist to make a lot of money quickly evolves into treatments for thousands of patients whose health care system has failed them. What ensues is a sometimes morally murky but nonetheless in-your-face takedown of China’s big pharma and its prioritization of dollars over human lives. It may not be entirely revolutionary from a filmmaking standpoint, but DYING TO SURVIVE’s popularity helped spur serious change within China’s policies about taxing imported cancer drugs. In an age of endless GoFundMe pages for basic health care, DYING TO SURVIVE’s cultural and political success in China amplifies the necessary changes needed in the states. (2018, 117 min, Digital Projection) CC
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Co-presented by Asian Pop-Up Cinema.
Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s HONEYLAND (New Macedonian Documentary)
Music Box Theatre — Check Venue website for showtimes
"Half for me, half for you." This iron rule is spoken by a wild beekeeper in North Macedonia to her bees, but it could also serve as the epigraph to Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s harshly beautiful documentary HONEYLAND. It's a moving, mysterious work of poetic realism that's also frank and tough and physical; it's abuzz with gentle power. The beekeeper is Hatidze, a visually arresting Turkish woman in her mid-50s with an ebullient snaggletoothed smile. As she intones these words, she pours honey onto a rock for her worker bees to eat, from the honeycomb she has just retrieved from the hive with her bare hands. (Armed only with dry-dung-fueled smoke pumps, she never gets stung: she dances for her bees, she sings to them.) She lives what most of us would consider an extreme existence: residing in a deserted village with no running water, electricity, or roads, she depends for her subsistence on selling her honey in the markets of Skopje. Nonetheless, she still strives to distribute an equal share of benefits between user (that is, herself) and provider (that is, nature—in this case, her worker bees). Imagine if America's capitalists had a similar ethos. She is also the sole caretaker for her 85-year-old, housebound mother, who is nearly deaf and blind. They're cantankerously bonded; all they have is each other. Then one day, a boisterous, volatile nomadic family pulls into the village, with their trailer, truck, livestock, and seven kids in tow. At first, Hatidze is glad of the company, but when the patriarch, Hussein, decides to get into bee breeding himself, he discards her most important teaching—take half, but leave half. Under the influence of a buyer from Skopje, who wants him to ramp up the scale of his production, Hussein gets greedy. (Even the bees don't like the way he does business: they sting the hell out of him and the kids, and there's a bit of intergenerational conflict when one of Hussein's young sons rebels against his dad and bonds with Hatidze.) Hatidze's conflict with the family is meant to dramatize a conflict we all face, as a species: the overuse of natural resources. That would have made it easy for the filmmakers to paint the hardscrabble family as the villains of the piece. I admired the way they don't quite do that. The somewhat hapless, ineffectual Hussein, and his hardboiled wife Ljutvie, aren't merely selfish: they're working desperately to eke out an existence for their children. Still, there's little doubt of their role as wrecking ball. Their calves die; Hussein's bees kill Hatidze's, because Hussein has taken all their honey. Human need, and greed, overwhelms nature. It's not all squabbling and hand-to-mouth deprivation, though. We witness moments of real rough-and-tumble joy, like when Hatidze and the family attend a Hidrillez festival together, and the boys wrestle. I like the ethos here of "show, don't tell." There's no narration: the parable on environmental sustainability is very much here, if you want it; others may well see it as a film about loneliness. Kotevska and Stefanov allowed themselves a period of three years to ingratiate themselves with these folks, and it's from this longitudinal approach that the film draws its uncanny sense of the turning of the world, the cycle of life and the seasons. It's also a breathtaking visual experience, with shots of such scale they actually made me gasp. Cinematographers Fejmi Daut and Samir Ljuma used only natural lighting—the sun, the moon—and they create stark, stunning chiaroscuro compositions from people huddled around the elemental illumination of a bonfire or flickering candle. We could say that Hatidze has had a hard and lonely life, and yet that judgment doesn't always square with the resilient, generous, cheerful woman we see before us. It's a life of physical work, of intimate harmony and balance with nature. HONEYLAND is about the life-force; it opens up the imagination. In a way that's at once very concrete and very cosmic, it shows us a world in which there's no separation between humans and the environment; we feel as though we're witnessing the passing away of a way of life. It makes you think about what, if anything, we in Western consumerist society can learn from a simple principle voiced by an unforgettable woman in a faraway place: half for you, half for me. (2019, 85 min, DCP Digital) SP
Ivan Dixon’s THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm
THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR, based on the book by native Chicagoan and committed Marxist Sam Greenlee, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, chronicles the activities of the portentously named Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook). Freeman is one of a cohort of all-male black applicants to a CIA affirmative action program foisted upon the agency by U.S. senators who are more worried about approval ratings than equality. The cohort of hopefuls doesn’t realize that their white trainers will use every opportunity to eliminate them from contention. In the end, only Freeman has made the grade. He is appointed section chief of reproduction services, aka photocopying, and remains with the agency for five years before returning to his native Chicago. Then the real purpose of his CIA stint becomes clear—to use the skills he acquired to recruit and train guerrilla freedom fighters in all the major urban centers in the country to battle Whitey to a standstill and force the Establishment to grant black Americans freedom in exchange for safe and peaceful streets. Greenlee provides a graphic depiction of the lumpenproletariat rising up against their bourgeois oppressors. After first establishing Freeman as a charismatic leader who can win respect with his muscles as well as his brains, the film shows him recruiting his former gang, the Cobras, to be his first platoon of revolutionaries. Ivan Dixon, perhaps best known as one of the POWs on the TV series Hogan’s Heroes (1965–1971), had a full career as an actor and TV director. His only two feature film assignments, TROUBLE MAN (1972) and SPOOK, came during the short window of opportunity for independently produced “Blaxploitation” films, and both films balance intelligence and aspiration with the more common elements of sex and violence. Dixon shoots parallel scenes and dialogue of Freeman training his men as he was trained at The Farm, a still-relevant example of American forces opportunistically training people who just as opportunistically will turn on them some day. The film has no real place for women as active fighters, but Dahomey Queen (Paula Kelly), a black prostitute with whom Freeman hooks up during his CIA training, becomes an invaluable informer. In 2012, SPOOK was added to the National Film Registry as a “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” American film. Faced with the violence against the black community that we know is absolutely real from recent events, Freeman’s desperate actions “to be free,” as he puts it, are likely to be met with a good deal of sympathy from a large portion of today’s audiences. (1973, 102 min, 35mm) MF
Jean-Luc Godard's LE PETIT SOLDAT (French Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Sunday, 7pm
Immediately following the production of his 1960 film BREATHLESS, Jean-Luc Godard went to work on both LE PETIT SOLDAT and A WOMAN IS A WOMAN—though LE PETIT SOLDAT is technically Godard's second film, he had published a preliminary six-page treatment of A WOMAN IS A WOMAN in the August 1959 issue of Cahiers du cinema. Philippe de Broca had already made his version of actress Genevieve Cluny's story, THE GAMES OF LOVE, so Godard documented that in Cahiers as a preemptive measure, and then temporarily shelved it while he worked on LE PETIT SOLDAT, which was eventually released in 1963 after being banned. "Having made BREATHLESS, which exemplified existential engagement minus the politics that Sartre considered constitutive of it," critic Richard Brody said in his book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, "[he] would now make a film on the subject of political engagement itself—and would contrast it negatively to a more subjective, personal form of engagement." The political engagement in question centers around the Algerian War; the main character, Bruno Forestier, is a Frenchman who fled to Geneva with the assistance of the Organisation of the Secret Army (OAS) in order to escape the draft and is required to assassinate an Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) sympathizer to prove he's not a spy. While in Geneva, he falls in love a young woman named Veronica Dreyer (played by Anna Karina), who is later revealed to have once helped the FLN. Both are tortured by their opposing faction, depictions of which caused the film's ban in France until the end of the war. (Ironically, Godard was criticized by leftist intellectuals for only depicting Bruno's torture at the hands of Algerian revolutionaries and not Veronica's torture by the French, while the French government, claiming to not want to condone torture in any capacity, censored the film specifically because of Bruno's torture scenes.) Despite the specificity of the film's setting, Godard never intended for it to be unequivocal commentary; as Brody states in his book, "[I]n taking on the question and nature of freedom, he was approaching the existential question par excellence." But Godard did intend for the film to be self-referential, a fact echoed in literally every scene. It was filmed without direct sound, thus allowing him to speak the dialogue directly to the actors and then dub their voices in post-production. He intentionally had the sound designed to seem separate from the film, further adding to its personal nature—though the actors themselves are talking, Godard seemingly inserts himself into the disconnect between the visual and the sound, hinting to the audience that what they're hearing doesn't belong to the film, per se, but to its author. And just as Godard famously referenced other films in BREATHLESS, he references many types of literature in LE PETIT SOLDAT. (He also references other films in the latter, most obviously Orson Welles' THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, but here the literary allusions speak more to Godard's overall vision.) Per Brody's research, a poignant monologue near the film's end contains references to both left- and right-wing authors, and Bruno Forestier is named after a character from the Jacques Cocteau novel La Grand Ecart, in which the similarly named character "dreamt of a pure far-right, meeting up with the far-left to the point of being a part of it, but in which he could act alone." As the film was decried by opposing parties for essentially the same reasons, Godard's politics within the context of this film are clearly ambiguous; it's the "acting alone" that embodies his personal motivations. (The film also contains that famous quote, "Photography is truth, and the cinema is truth twenty-four times a second," a fact worth noting for those unaware of its origin.) (1960, 88 min, 35mm) KS
Martin Scorsese's THE KING OF COMEDY (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7pm
Robert De Niro is fine, and Sandra Bernhard is aces. But without Jerry Lewis there would be no KING OF COMEDY. The proof of it is the look on Jerry's face in his final scene. After Masha serenades him with the creepiest/loveliest rendition of "Come Rain or Come Shine" ever captured on celluloid, he gently convinces her to untie him. As the last bit of packing tape is about to come loose, he quickly breaks free, stands up, advances towards her. Her expression, all lustful anticipation, says, "He's about to ravish me." Instead he smacks her once, hard, and runs out of the room. When we see him next he's alone on a New York City street. He pauses in front of a shop window that's filled with televisions, all showing Rupert Pupkin as he delivers his monologue on Jerry's hijacked program. Then, the look on Jerry's face (which is the very last time we see him): the look of a man who realizes that he's just been beaten, that he's suddenly much closer to the end than the beginning, that in due time he will cease to have a place in the new order of things. We are now living in that new order, confirming that KING OF COMEDY is one of the most prescient satires of the 20th century. (1982, 109 min, Digital Projection) RC
Ida Lupino's THE HITCH-HIKER (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
"This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man." The film belongs to Ida Lupino, gravel-voiced actress and one of the rare female directors in classic Hollywood. Produced under her short-lived The Filmakers banner, THE HITCH-HIKER alternates between sensory deprivation and overload. After a dazzling credits sequence awash in disembodied limbs and darkness punctuated by gun blasts, Lupino toys with the viewer like her psycho protagonist (William Talman) toys with the hapless fishermen (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) who make the mistake of offering him a ride. Noir-veteran cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (OUT OF THE PAST) spends much of the brief running time right up in the three men's pores. Meanwhile, Lupino's script almost daringly switches allegiance from psycho to victim to viewer, featuring extended scenes in unsubtitled Spanish and a hilarious meta moment when it acknowledges its debt to previous insane-hitchhiker movies. In an era when "noir" gets stamped on any black-and-white film that takes place outside of the drawing room, this is a wallow in real darkness. The prologue warns that, "What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you"; by the fadeout, it felt like it had happened to me. (1953, 71 min, DCP Digital) MP
Anthony Mann's WINCHESTER '73 (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 4pm, Saturday, 3:45pm, and Monday, 8pm
With WINCHESTER '73, Anthony Mann introduced westerns to the heady psychological overtones and nebulous morality of film noir. Similarly, star Jimmy Stewart abruptly dropped his aw-shucks act and unveiled the conflicted, taciturn personality that made him the go-to leading man for the increasingly complex films of Alfred Hitchcock. Ostensibly following a coveted rifle as it passes between owners, the plot eagerly scrambles the conventional story arc; all the requisite raids, hideouts, and showdowns are accounted for, but everything seems to take place out of order. Beautifully photographed in black and white, this marks visually Mann's thematic transition from the claustrophobic alleys of RAW DEAL (1948) to the expansive, vacant frontiers of THE NAKED SPUR (1953). The key to Mann's brand of genre revisionism lies in his pragmatic modesty: the self-conscious arrogance that plagued fashionably PC westerns like BROKEN ARROW (1950) is completely absent. (1950, 92 min, DCP Digital) MK
Howard Hawks’ RIO BRAVO (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre — Saturday, 7:30pm
RIO BRAVO marks the symphonic culmination of themes that Howard Hawks had been developing for most of his directorial career, and the film delivers such a profound sense of coming together that it’s easy to understand why many Hawks fans consider this to be his greatest work. On one level, it’s a passionate love letter to Hollywood movies (which explains why it was such a crucial text for the French New Wave). The actors aren’t playing characters, per se, but rather larger-than-life variations on their screen personas; and the archetypal premise, about a group of committed good guys working together, reflects on ideas central to the western in general and Hawks’ filmography in particular: namely, the beauty of teamwork and the desires of the individual versus the needs of the society. On another level, RIO BRAVO is an audacious experiment in film form, as Hawks (working from a script by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, two of the greatest screenwriters in Hollywood history) frequently relinquishes any sense of narrative momentum to consider niceties of character and the joys of hanging out. Starting around the mid-40s, Hawks claimed to have stopped approaching films as stories and started looking at them as collections of scenes, and RIO BRAVO shows this method at its finest. The film contains funny scenes, poignant scenes, romantic scenes, and suspenseful scenes—it’s as though Hawks, who famously worked in every Hollywood genre, wanted to condense his entire career into a single feature. Yet for all his ambition, Hawks maintains the direct, understated visual style that was as central to his filmmaking as any of his themes. (1959, 141 min, 35mm) BS
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The film is screening as part of the podcast Filmspotting’s 15th anniversary; $25 tickets include the film and a post-screening taping of the podcast; $50 VIP tickets also include a pre-screening meet & great and priority seating.
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
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 (New Polish/British Animation)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Saturday, 4pm
Here's another chance to see the "world’s first hand-painted feature-length film" on the big screen. A breakthrough work, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s LOVING VINCENT 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 greys 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, DCP Digital) SP
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Chicago Film Society and Spektral Quartet present An Evening of Music and Film on Sunday at 7:30pm at the Music Box Theatre. The event included two musical works performed by Spektral Quartet: composer Alex Temple’s “Behind the Wallpaper,” featuring singer-songwriter Julia Holter; and “Arnika,” a re-working of a Sufjan Stevens song. The live performances are followed by former Chicagoan Lyra Hill’s 2017 short film UZI’S PARTY (30 min, 16mm).
The Chicago Film Society and the Music Box Theatre (at the Music Box) screen J. Robert Wagoner’s 1979 film DISCO GODFATHER (93 min, 35mm archival print) on Monday at 7pm. Preceded by a reel of Blaxploitation film trailers (approx. 10 min, 35mm).
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: Luke Fowler’s 2017 UK/Canadian experimental documentary ELECTRO-PYTHAGORAS (A PORTRAIT OF MARTIN BARTLETT) (45 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 7pm, with the film’s sound designer, Ernst Karel, in person. Free admission.
Cinema 53 (at the Harper Theater, 5238 S. Harper Ave.) screens Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly’s 2014 documentary THE HOMESTRETCH (90 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 7pm. Followed by a conversation between author and series curator Eve Ewing and Univ. of Chicago Professor Gina Samuels. Free admission.
The Rebuild Foundation at the Stony Island Arts Bank (6760 S. Stony Island Ave.) screens Theodore Melfi’s 2016 film HIDDEN FIGURES (127 min, Video Projection) on Sunday at 2pm. Followed by a discussion. Free admission.
PO Box Collective (6900 N. Glenwood Ave.) presents a TBA screening on Friday at 7:30pm. Free admission.
The Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio St.) screens Carlos Agulló's 2017 Spanish documentary ALL THE OTHER DAYS (90 min, DVD Projection) on Tuesday at 7pm. Free admission.
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Pickwick Theatre, 5 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge) screens Norman Jewison's 1987 film MOONSTRUCK (102 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 1 and 7:30pm.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Li Cheng's 2018 Guatemalan/US film JOSÉ (86 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week: Taghi Amirani's 2019 UK/Iranian documentary COUP 53 (118 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2pm, with Amirani in person at both shows; Amir Homayoun Ghanizadeh's 2019 Iranian film A HAIRY TALE (100 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 5:15pm; and Shin'ya Tsukamoto's 1989 Japanese film TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (67 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 6pm, with a lecture by SAIC professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Noah Baumbach’s 2019 film MARRIAGE STORY (126 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday at 4pm; and Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 film NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (122 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 9:30pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Céline Sciamma’s 2019 French film PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (121 min, DCP Digital) has an advance screening on Wednesday at 7pm, with Sciamma in person; The 2020 Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films (DCP Digital) and Richard Stanley’s 2019 film COLOR OUT OF SPACE (110 min, DCP Digital) both continue; Jan Komasa’s 2019 Polish film CORPUS CHRISTI (115 min, DCP Digital) has a sneak-preview screening on Friday at 7pm; Ant Timpson’s 2019 New Zealand film COME TO DADDY (94 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday-Sunday at 9:45pm; Penelope Spheeris’ 1992 film WAYNE’S WORLD (94 min, Digital Projection) is on Saturday at 2pm (showing as a charity benefit with $30 tickets that include the film, popcorn, and a beverage); Joe Heslinga’s 2019 documentary FOOSBALLERS (96 min, DCP Digital) is on Tuesday at 7pm, with Heslinga in person; Rob Reiner’s 1987 film THE PRINCESS BRIDE (98 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 7pm; Hiroyuki Morita’s 2002 animated Japanese film THE CAT RETURNS (75 min, 35mm; English-dubbed version) is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am; and Tim Burton’s 1996 film MARS ATTACKS (106 min, 35mm) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Trey Edward Shults’ 2019 film WAVES (135 min, DCP Digital) for a week-long run.
The Chicago Cultural Center hosts the Chicago Latino Film Festival screening of Marcos Carnevale's 2013 Argentinean film HEART OF LION (108 min, Video Projection) on Wednesday at 6:30pm. Free admission.
CINE-LIST: February 7 - February 13, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Cody Corrall, Marilyn Ferdinand, Eric Fuerst, Michael King, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, JB Mabe, Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Scott Pfeiffer, Brian Welesko