Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity. We will list/highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, and list streaming/online screenings below. Cine-File takes no position on whether theaters should be reopening, nor on whether individuals should be attending in-person. Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
CINE-FILE SELECTS: FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO
In partnership with film distributor Cinema Guild, Cine-File is presenting a virtual screening of independent/experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ 2020 documentary feature FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO. The film is available at the link below for a $12 rental, with half the proceeds going to Cine-File (funds will be used for general expenses, future programming, and to provide honoraria to our contributors). FILM is also available via our friends at Facets.
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Lynne Sachs’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Cine-File here through Facets Cinémathèque here
In Horace’s Odes, one among many texts where this sentiment endures, the Roman poet wrote, "For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer." It’s hardly an esoteric dictum, but nevertheless it’s duly reflected in experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ wholehearted documentary portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Something of a longstanding work-in-progress, the film draws from decades of footage shot by Sachs, her father, and her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (whose own 2005 film FORTY SHADES OF BLUE was inspired by the same so-called “Hugh Hefner of Park City”), plus others, documenting not just the sybaritic “hippie-businessman” patriarch, but also his numerous descendants. Sachs’ knotty chronicle reveals that her father has a total of nine children with several different women, two of whom the other siblings found out about only a few years back. (The film opens with Sachs brushing her elderly father’s hair, working out a particularly unpleasant snarl. “Sorry, dad,” she says. “There’s just one part that’s very tangly.” The irony is faint and benevolent, but present even so.) Sachs considers the enveloping imbroglio from her own perspective, but also takes into account the viewpoints of her eight siblings, her father’s ex-wives (including her own mother) and girlfriends, plus Ira’s mother, a gracefully cantankerous old woman in a certain amount of denial over her son’s wanton predilections and the role she played in his dysfunction. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO—the title an homage to Yvonne Rainer's FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO...—is comprised of footage recorded between 1965 and 2019 and shot on 8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV, and digital; the fusion of all this material (by editor Rebecca Shapass) ranks among the most astounding use of personal archives that I’ve ever seen. It all exists in a state between documentary and home-movie footage, a paradigm that aptly reflects the conflict between reality and perspective, and the uncomfortable middle-ground that bisects the two. Sachs’ work often features her family, but this feels like an apotheosis of her autobiographical predisposition, likewise a question—why do the sins of the father linger?—and an answer. Among the most affecting scenes are roundtable discussions between the siblings where they consider revelations about their father and the implications of his actions. These scenes are heartrending not for their sadness, but rather for their naked honesty; it’s not just a film about a father who, but also a film about a love that defines a family. Sachs’ filmography is centered on infinite poetic quandaries (in voice over, she explores some of them here, such as when she muses on her father’s profession as a developer in Utah: “What happens when you own a horizon?”) and this feels like a logical conclusion to a lifetime of such profound impasses, though I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to probe life and its enigmas in a similarly masterful fashion. For all the suffering on display, Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love. (2020, 74 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Olivier Assayas’ DEMONLOVER (France)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
DEMONLOVER was one of the first movies to address the internet’s impact on communication and interpersonal relationships; what distinguishes it from many of the other, lesser movies on the subject to have come in its wake is that Olivier Assayas, a cineaste of the highest order, doesn’t regard the Information Age from a detached, moralizing position, but rather from an immediate and sensuous one. Perhaps the defining trait of the movie’s intoxicating style is Assayas’ tendency to cut from one tracking shot to another and then another. The technique conveys a sense of constant movement through the physical world and, more importantly, the fluidity with which we move online between ideas, cultures, and the intimate details of other people’s lives. Likewise, the narrative of DEMONLOVER is a fusion of high- and lowbrow cinematic references that include David Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME, Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER (Gina Gershon, who appears here, essentially plays a variation on her character from that movie), espionage thrillers, and animated S&M porn. This mixture suggests an early 21st century update of the French New Wave in that Assayas—who, like the New Wave directors, wrote criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma before he started making movies—builds on his references to craft a statement about the zeitgeist. What he has to say is unsettling as well as seductive: the movie posits that the most typical relationships in the Information Age involve people using or being used by others; it also suggests a dark underside to the world of knowledge created by the Internet. Yet Assayas’ concerns never come across as cerebral, thanks to the mobile filmmaking and the exciting plot, which has to do with power plays (both corporate and sexual) within internet bondage porn companies. The score—written and performed by Sonic Youth when they were a five-piece with Jim O’Rourke on third guitar—adds to hypnotic effect. (2002, 122 min) [Ben Sachs]
Andrei Konchalovsky’s SIN (Russia/Italy)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Multifaceted Russian screenwriter/director Andrei Konchalovsky has made many types of films over the past 60 years, from Chekhov adaptations (UNCLE VANYA, 1970) to mainstream Hollywood fare (TANGO & CASH, 1989). He will probably always be best known as the screenwriter of Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterwork ANDREI RUBLEV (1966), an impressionistic rendering of the life of the eponymous Russian artist. It seems even Konchalovsky is haunted by this indelible association. In an interview, he said of RUBLEV, “There is no love story, just an enigma of his life, and only at the end of the film his works are shown, which, to some extent, could be projected to what you’ve just seen. And once I’d written the script of THE SIN, I realized it was, in a sense, a continuation of RUBLEV.” There are indeed similarities of approach between the two films. Both are as interested in the harsh and teeming worlds in which their dramas are set as they are in their protagonists, both are biopics of a sort, and both end with allusory comparisons of the art with the artist. SIN focuses on a short period in the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (Alberto Testone), from the completion of the Sistine Chapel frescos under Julius II (Massimo De Francovich), the pope and a member of the reigning Della Rovere family, to his assumption of a commission from the newly empowered Medicis under their kinsman, Pope Leo X (Simone Toffanin). Political intrigue mixes with Michelangelo’s obsession with money, beginning with his instruction to his family of financial leeches to buy several properties near Florence before the Medicis take power and jack up the prices. He returns to Rome, determined to redo the Sistine frescos to correct a proportion problem, only to be restrained as workers dismantle the scaffolding, bringing his work to its divine conclusion. Way behind on his commission to create 40 sculptures for the pontiff’s tomb, the plan is permanently derailed when Julius dies. From then on, he maneuvers between the Della Roveres and the Medicis, taking their money and stringing them along. Seeing this genius play politics, steal, lie, and lose the trail of conversations while he studies people’s hands provides a grounded portrait of the artist during the height of his fame. Every frame of this film shot by Aleksandr Simonov is a miraculous work of art that brings this world completely to life, including actions on the edges and behind the main focal point in ways that reminded me of Michelangelo’s Dutch contemporary Pieter Breugel’s human mélanges. The film is interspersed with evocative dreams and hallucinations, many of which relate to Michelangelo’s idol, Dante Alighieri, disorienting not only the artist, but also the viewer and leading us to doubt what we are seeing. Testone, who bears a resemblance to the man he plays, is perfect as he moves precariously between inspiration, paranoia, and shrewd intelligence. The major set-piece and moment of greatest suspense in SIN is Michelangelo’s procurement of a huge marble slab “as white as sugar” nicknamed the “monster.” Moving a piece that size had never been done and proves irresistible to the Carrara quarrymen who help him with this quest. The parallels with Moby-Dick and Ahab are obvious, but this white monster helped Michelangelo realize his artistic ambitions, offering a vision of hope instead of destruction and elevating the filmic experience. (2019, 134 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Shatara Michelle Ford’s TEST PATTERN (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Like Joyce Chopra’s SMOOTH TALK and the more recent PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, the most affecting films I’ve seen about sexual assault are those that do not shy away from complete terror of the situation as they teeter into full horrors from other genres—in this case a romance film. TEST PATTERN, unlike the aforementioned films, however, brings in a necessary consideration of race, highlighting the injustices and failures of a system that is concurrently sexist and racist. The tension built throughout the film is palpable, as director Shatara Michelle Ford begins with the assault and then flashes back to the lead up. The first section follows the meet cute start of the relationship between Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) and Evan (Will Brill), an interracial couple. The title—and only opening credit—doesn’t appear until about fifteen minutes in, as the film establishes that the two’s burgeoning relationship has resulted in them now happily living together. After Renesha is sexually assaulted by a man she met while out for the night with a friend, Evan insists they go to a hospital so she can get a rape kit done. Renesha now has to navigate a dismissive healthcare system that makes it exceedingly difficult to get any kind of help. Hall is incredible as she skillfully captures the heartbreaking reality of self-blame and confusion as Renesha—mostly silently—tries to piece together the trauma of what’s happened to her. This is all while Brill brings a more frenzied performance as Evan, who is taking action and making decisions on how Renesha should handle the situation; a scene where she watches on as he and a police officer—two white men—discuss her assault is quietly shocking. First time feature director Ford, who also wrote TEST PATTERN, provides deliberate pacing and nuance throughout, slowly making clear that Renesha is not only facing sexism and racism in this moment of trauma, but throughout her relationship with Evan. This is achieved in part through unsettling flashbacks, which are filmed like romantic interludes, shot in gorgeous sunlight, but are instead unsettling insights into Evan’s treatment of Renesha. TEST PATTERN is a remarkable and timely first feature—an honest and important portrayal of sexual assault and the many injustices that surround it, particularly for a Black woman. (2019, 82 min) [Megan Fariello]
Keith Piper’s THE TROPHIES OF EMPIRE (UK/Multimedia)
Available for free through Block Cinema (Northwestern University) from Thursday, 7pm to Saturday, February 27, 7pm here
The 1980s in Britain saw the development of a number of art and film groups and collectives by young Black artists in response to continuing, pervasive racism, entrenched Thatcherism, and social, political, and economic inequity and disenfranchisement. Their art making, curating, and film and video productions addressed these realities head-on, creating some of the most dynamic, thoughtful, and unapologetic political art of the last fifty years. Best known among these were Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa Film and Video Collective, out of which, respectively, emerged John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien as the best-known members. One less-known group was BLK Art Group, co-founded by artist and then-student Keith Piper. BLK Art Group was a wider-ranging arts collective, not focused specifically on film and video; Piper, though, would quickly gravitate to image and sound multimedia works, and continue to pioneer the use of media technologies in his art and installations. THE TROPHIES OF EMPIRE, made in 1985, is an early work in this vein: it’s a looped series of 162 slides, shown via slide projectors and accompanied by an audio track. (It’s showing here as a recently made fixed digital version that cycles through the slides 1.5 times.) Though not specifically a “film,” it does use sequenced images in time and was in fact influenced by another slide-based work by Black Audio Film Collective. Piper’s images include newspaper stories and photos, contemporary photos of UK businesses, and historical illustrations. He added text—sometimes his own commentary, sometimes quotes from historical texts or excerpts of speeches by Margaret Thatcher—on top of the images using Letraset letters. The audio is an ambient sound collage (though for the first presentation he used an LP of Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”). Through these simple means, Piper constructs a direct and powerful critique of Britain’s racist past and involvement in the slave trade (noting that important British corporations such as Lloyds of London and Barclays had their roots in financing slavery) and shows that the racist descriptions of Black peoples from one or more centuries ago in the press and encyclopedias is still found, though in more coded language, in Thatcher’s speeches. Piper demonstrates that 1980’s British political, social, and financial realities were largely the result of the slave trade and the country’s expansionist colonial project: racism was the foundation of contemporary Britain. This view may seem self-evident today, and it certainly wasn’t new or original to Piper, but TROPHIES was part of an important reckoning by UK artists with the country’s past and its negative legacies. A reckoning that is still unfinished and is as needed now as it was in 1985. (1985, 11 min slide cycle showing 1.5 times in a 14 min digital iteration) [Patrick Friel]
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Showing as part of the program “The Loose Ends of Empire: Unforgetting Colonialism.” See “Also Screening/Streaming” below for additional information.
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Thomas Vinterberg’s ANOTHER ROUND (Denmark)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Reuniting with leading man Mads Mikkelsen, Danish writer and director Thomas Vinterberg’s (THE HUNT) newest film, ANOTHER ROUND, reaches for a full bottle of vodka and lands in a drunken state of elation, depression, and mid-life difficulty. Denmark’s submission to the 2021 Oscars for Best International Feature Film, ANOTHER ROUND finds Mikkelsen in an acting showcase, surrounded by other steady and solid counterparts in Magnus Millang, Thomas Bo Larsen, and Lars Ranthe, playing four high school teachers that enter into an odd experiment: keeping themselves at a blood alcohol content of .05 at all times. Vinterberg directs the film like a drunken night on the town, from the joy of dancing on tables with great friends to waking up disoriented, broken, and desperate to either never see alcohol again or grab the nearest bottle and take a swig. ANOTHER ROUND’s tonal shifts work, mostly with ease, due to Mikkelsen’s performance, one in which every look, smirk, and curling of his lips is measured and intentional. It’s not a film filled with speeches or fights that last longer than a couple of minutes. ANOTHER ROUND becomes a snapshot into life at its most middling, in which characters reexamine their place in the world, and the oft overwhelming dreams they feel they haven’t accomplished. Though the structure of the film, especially its third act, falters in finishing this wild idea (and experiment), ANOTHER ROUND should satisfy one’s thirst for high-quality acting, careful and considerate storytelling, and a chance to remember, forget, or attempt to capture the supposed “good ole days.” (2020, 117 min) [Michael Frank]
Valentyn Vasyanovych's ATLANTIS (Ukraine)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Every now and again a film appears that gets compared to Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic STALKER. More often than not the comparisons are facile at best, using only the basic plot points as comparison—think 2018’s ANNIHILATION. But Valentyn Vasyanovych’s ATLANTIS falls so precisely into that slow cinema sci-fi micro-genre that it feels like it could be taking place in the same universe at STALKER. ATLANTIS is set in a near future Ukraine of 2025, where, after a prolonged war with Russia, the country, and its people, have been devastated. Serhiy is a former soldier with PTSD who loses his job as a smelter when the local works is closed due to automation. The world he once knew is so far in the past that it’s almost unrecognizable. Water now has to be shipped in. A giant wall is being built along the border. As he tries to cope with this new normal, Serhiy takes on a job exhuming corpses. Here he meets Katya, one of the rare individuals who can see past the immediate. Serhiy’s world in ATLANTIS has the same kind of meditative expanse as Tarkovsky’s STALKER and Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES. It’s a sci-fi film only in that it presumes a near future; it could very well be in a contemporary setting—I can think of at least one American city that has lost its metalwork economy and requires bused-in drinking water. ATLANTIS has a poetic ugliness to it that is an absolute joy to revel in. The psychic devastation of a post-war society, resigned into submission of duty, is rendered nearly physical as we watch the quietly mundane pace of people’s lives. With nearly nothing left, the past literally becomes the future: the exhuming and examining of the dead has become one of the only reliable means of employment. Filmed with nearly all wide-angle stationary shots, the film immerses us as voyeurs in this world. We have no choice but to examine everything, including ourselves. Vasyanovych’s framing both creates a sense of claustrophobia with its tight borders and a pronounced sense of agoraphobia, from an inescapable emptiness that threatens to go on forever. Despite its darkness, ATLANTIS is a gorgeous film, and a must see for anyone interested in slow cinema, speculative sci-fi, or explorations of existentialism. As the official Ukrainian entry for the 2021 Academy Awards, I very much hope this becomes Ukraine’s first ever film nominated for Best International Feature Film. (2019, 106 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Zeinabu irene Davis’ COMPENSATION (US)
Available for free streaming via SAIC’s Conversations at the Edge series and the Gene Siskel Film Center from Thursday through March 3 here
Zeinabu irene Davis' Chicago-made COMPENSATION is a formally ambitious film that alternates between two stories set nine decades apart. Each one concerns the romance between a deaf woman and a hearing man, both of whom are African-American—making this one of the rare films to consider the experience of physically disabled minorities. Davis draws inspiration from silent cinema; the first story, set around 1910, is actually presented as a silent film, while the second, set in the 1990s, contains little spoken dialogue, with most of the communication conveyed through body language. “Both stories are dreamy, atmospheric reveries,” wrote Roger Ebert on the occasion of COMPENSATION’s premiere at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, adding that the film broaches the larger topic of “the changing nature of African-American lives during the [20th] century.” (1999, 92 min) [Ben Sachs]
Andrei Konchalovsky’s DEAR COMRADES! (Russia)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, DEAR COMRADES! is writer-director Andrei Konchalovsky’s fraught depiction of the Novocherkassk massacre that occurred June 2, 1962, in Soviet Russia. We follow the labor strike leading to the massacre, the pandemonium of the massacre itself, and the chaos and uncertainty of its aftermath. Yuliya Vysotskay, is Lyudmila, a committed Communist still reeling from the death of Stalin. When her daughter disappears in the anarchy of the massacre, she frantically has to search for her, threatening not only her own safety, but that of those around her. She begins to question not only the methods of the Party but the idea of faith itself. DEAR COMRADES! is filmed in black and white, giving it a gorgeous patina of false historicity that allows us to fall deep inside of it, forgetting that this is a period drama, confusing it for a film of the time. Konchalovsky plays with the perception of the Soviet government quite cleverly through Lyudmila and her family. While she openly laments Stalin’s death, her nameless father gets drunk and wears his pre-Soviet military garb and expresses his wish that JFK would just nuke them all. Lyudmila’s daughter is a product of the era of de-Stalinization and is willing to go against the Party and participate in the strike and demonstrations that lead to the massacre. Konchalovsky pulls off the feat that so many filmmakers attempt and rarely, if ever, achieve, successfully taking a single moment or event and turning it into a true microcosm of the greater political zeitgeist. While I wouldn’t be so brash as to say he thoroughly dissects the entirety of Soviet Russia through this single film, Konchalovsky does manage to leave his fingerprints across it in a way that shows a deft handling. All this, through a story of desperation and mystery; a mother searching for her missing daughter, in the face of the government she has worked her whole life for. DEAR COMRADES! is a dramatic political thriller of the most personal nature. Where faith in government, self, others, God, and oneself all come into question. Films reflect the times in which they are made. Right now, across the globe, we’re seeing a rise of a type of politics that feeds on unquestioning faith, DEAR COMRADES! utilizes the framework of history to unfold today, and warn us about tomorrow. (2020, 120 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Fernanda Valadez’s IDENTIFYING FEATURES (Mexico/Spain)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Watching Fernanda Valadez’s auspicious debut feature, I was struck by how a film about something so ugly—the ugliness of pain, of an exodus spurred and eventually terminated by a too-cruel world—could also be so beautiful; each shot wringed for a certain visual ecstasy is at odds with the disquieting subject matter. Claudia Becerril Bulos’ cinematography is extraordinary, but the true achievement is how the visual sublimity complements the story of a middle-aged mother in Mexico seeking her teenage son, Jesus (Juan Jesús Varela), who’s left their small town for the southern U.S. border. The film begins as Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández, outstanding) recounts in voiceover the circumstances of her son’s departure while the memory is realized onscreen. Valadez then cuts to Magdalena and her friend, the mother of another boy with whom Jesus left for the border, in a sterile office, attempting to locate their children after months without contact. The friend discovers that her son was found dead, while Jesus is still missing. This begins what Valadez describes as a road movie, with Magdalena traversing the countryside to discover the whereabouts of her child. At a facility where she’s nearly coerced into having her son declared dead (on the basis of authorities having found just his duffle bag), she meets another mother in a similar situation; she encourages Magdalena to continue searching. Along her journey to find a man who’d allegedly been on the same bus as her son, she meets a young man, Miguel (David Illescas), himself a migrant who had been compelled to self-deport from the U.S. back to Mexico. The film is deliberately ambiguous, though it’s clear that the ongoing presence of Mexican drug cartels is to blame for the lingering violence and chaos; the threat of disappearance and senseless murder, especially among the migrant population, looms large. Valadez and cowriter Astrid Rondero aren’t explicit in their indictment of this culture. Instead they consider the phenomenon on a metaphorical level, with Magdalena representing all those impacted by the brutality, her journey a modern-day odyssey as regrettable as it is epic. Some elements of the film are disturbing—early on, we see someone cutting into an eyeball, and, later, rotting animal corpses and people being murdered by what appears to be the devil incarnate—and others are reminiscent of the thriller genre, but in general it’s breathtakingly beautiful. Valadez renders transcendent such mundane images as a makeshift office formed out of plastic and the crack in a windshield, to say nothing of the verdurous landscapes that the protagonists tread. The beauty serves to lay bare the ugliness that Magdalena and others like her suffer. Other techniques (such as not subtitling the dialogue over a pivotal flashback, a recurring motif of people speaking to the protagonists not shown in full) convey a sensation of uncertainty that plagues not just the characters, but a society in crisis. (2020, 95 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
Robin Lutz’s M.C. ESCHER: JOURNEY TO INFINITY (Netherlands/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
This documentary about M.C. Escher hangs on a clever conceit: all the narration comes from Escher’s letters and diaries, so the film proceeds as if the great Dutch artist is telling his own life story. Recited with delicious hamminess by Stephen Fry, the narration allows for a more intimate portrait than one usually gets from contemporary biographical docs; you come away from the movie having learned not just about Escher, but how Escher saw himself. One of the more interesting insights is that Escher didn’t see himself as an artist, but rather as a mathematician who worked in visual design to realize various logical puzzles. Apparently, Escher described the whole creative project of his mature period as one of depicting infinity within defined spaces—a paradox to describe a series of paradoxes! He also claimed to have less interest in achieving beauty with his work than a sense of wonder, which reveals his creative intentions as well as his modesty. Much of the personal information presented in JOURNEY TO INFINITY supports the film’s characterization of Escher as self-effacing: he maintained a low profile, spent much of his adulthood caring for his mentally ill wife, and gently disparaged the individualist youth counterculture that popularized his designs in the 1960s. The movie really sings when it gets into the designs themselves, often deploying animation to illustrate Escher’s lucid explanations of his work. (2018, 81 min) [Ben Sachs]
Ousmane Sembène’s MANDABI (Senegal)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
By the time Ousmane Sembène directed his second feature at the age of 45, he was already a legend. Sembène had been a war veteran, a labor organizer, the author of several book-length works of fiction, and the first sub-Saharan African to release a feature film. One might expect a movie by such an accomplished individual working at the height of his renown to display a certain grandeur or sweeping perspective, yet the greatness of MANDABI (as with most of Sembène’s films) lies in its humility. The story unfolds so plainly that it could be understood by a child, while the imagery, however bright and engaging, tends to be organized around such basics as character and locale. In short, MANDABI feels like a folktale; and like many folktales, the apparent simplicity serves as a conduit to deep wisdom. Dieng, the film’s put-upon hero, is an unemployed, but big-talking man who lives on the outskirts of Dakar with his two wives and seven children. Near the start of the story, Dieng receives a money order from a nephew living in Paris (in a bittersweet montage, Sembène illustrates what the young man has had to do to earn the money), who asks his uncle to cash the order, set aside most of the money, and keep some for himself. Dieng sees this windfall as a chance to pay off his debts, but cashing the money order (or mandabi in Wolof) opens up all sorts of new problems. He learns he lacks the proper documentation required for any banking transaction—and that acquiring this documentation means tangling with an especially messy local bureaucracy. Dieng also finds himself besieged by strangers and acquaintances coming out of the woodwork and asking for loans. But the biggest setback of all comes in the form of a “New African” businessman who promises to help Dieng solve his problems. Sembène characterizes the businessman with the same bitter, satirical sensibility he’d later flesh out in his novel Xala (and his film adaptation of it), but for the most part, the writer-director reserves his anger for institutions rather than individuals. MANDABI condemns the societal factors that keep people in poverty while maintaining, against all odds, an ingratiatingly cheery tone. When seen from the proper perspective, Sembène asserts, injustice is nonsensical enough to seem funny. (1968, 92 min) [Ben Sachs]
Lee Isaac Chung's MINARI (US)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The title of Lee Isaac Chung's wonderful semi-autobiographical film refers to an edible, parsley-like plant cultivated throughout Asia. It only makes a brief onscreen appearance in this early-1980s-set family drama—when an elderly Korean woman (the legendary Youn Yuh-jung) plants it on the banks of a creek in rural Arkansas after immigrating to America to live with her daughter—but, on a metaphorical level, the title has a powerful resonance: This is a uniquely American movie about the Korean diaspora and what traditions do and do not take root when its members attempt to transplant their culture into new and unfamiliar terrain. The Korean-American family at the center of MINARI, the Yis, have recently moved from California to a farm in the Ozarks when the film begins. The parents, Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Han Ye-ri), get menial jobs at a chicken hatchery where they are tasked with determining the sex of baby chicks while Jacob simultaneously attempts to make a more substantial living as a farmer on their newly purchased plot of land. Monica is less than thrilled by their modest new trailer home and is worried about the heart condition of David, their seven-year-old son. There is a palpable sense that most of this narrative is being filtered through the consciousness (even if not always seen through the eyes) of David and his older sister Anne; as in Terrence Malick's DAYS OF HEAVEN, the problems of the adult world that drive the movie are not fully grasped by the child protagonists who frequently bear witness to them. Yeun, so effective as the creepy, moneyed sociopath in Lee Chang-dong's BURNING, shows off an entirely different set of colors on his acting palette in the creation of Jacob, a down-to-earth working man whose admirable ambition and problematic stubbornness seem inextricably intertwined. Han likewise imbues the not-so-quietly suffering Monica, a woman visibly struggling against the confines of her narrowly defined social role, with a novelistic complexity. The scenes of conflict between the two of them, often patiently captured by Chung in widescreen master-shots, blow something like Noah Baumbach's contrived MARRIAGE STORY out of the water. Equally good are the more humorous scenes of the Yis attempting to assimilate into the broader community. Their interactions with members of the local church, and Paul (Will Patton), a religious zealot who works for Jacob, are wryly funny precisely because they're devoid of the stereotypes that usually plague American films set in "the deep South" (undoubtedly because the script was based in part on Chung's own childhood memories of growing up in Arkansas). The Reagan-era period details, from Jacob's slightly ill-fitting red trucker's cap to the fake wood-paneling in the interior of his trailer home, likewise impress for their subtle but potent authenticity. (2020, 115 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR (USSR)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Long before the great TREE OF LIFE euphoria of 2011, another film (from another director's famously sparse oeuvre) went off uncharted into the space between memories past and present, mapping onto them a universal significance. Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR may lack dinosaurs and metaphorical doors in the desert, but it does set a mean precedent for everything a passion project can be when an auteur is working on such an intensely personal level. Long a dream project of Tarkovsky's, it was only in the wake of SOLARIS that he was able to secure funding, and armed with a meager allotment of film stock, he began production in late 1973. Given the non-linear, dreamlike progression of the film, such obstacles aren't hard to comprehend, and they perhaps explain why this is his most fleeting film outside his debut, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD. Drawn across the middle of the 20th century, THE MIRROR takes a stream of consciousness journey through familial memories, with actors in dual roles as father and son, as wife and mother. Woven in are poems penned by Tarkovsky's own father, assorted clips of wartime newsreel footage, and the quiet, ethereal imagery characteristic of all his films. It all makes for a hazy dream of cinema, one from which you tragically wake too early. But lest the length should fool you, this is not Tarkovsky for beginners. No surprise that at his most personal he's also at his most esoteric, so an afternoon spent with one of his aforementioned films would be a good primer. As for those already in his thrall, this is imperative viewing. (1975, 108 min) [Tristan Johnson]
Stéphanie Chuat’s and Véronique Reymond’s MY LITTLE SISTER (Germany)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Through and through, Stéphanie Chuat’s and Véronique Reymond’s MY LITTLE SISTER is about the twin pairing of Lisa (Nina Hoss) and Sven (Lars Eidinger). Born two minutes prior, Sven is battling a brutal bout of leukemia, though the majority of the film exists to service Lisa’s journey. More often than not, the writer-director duo focus on this younger sister, mom of two, and dutiful wife to her private-school-running husband. Once a playwright, Lisa serves others throughout this German drama, showing her willingness to compromise, to care, and, finally, to drop everything to live solely for her dying brother and her family’s well-being. MY LITTLE SISTER hits a familiar rhythm in its depiction of cancer within the family, complete with marital fights, relapses, and one wild night in which Sven is able to let loose, despite the obvious repercussions. Still, the film strikes a chord, as Hoss gives a gut-wrenching, full-body performance, causing the emotion to well up inside of you, even if you know it might not be wholly warranted. MY LITTLE SISTER remains compelling due to the strength of its performances and the sheer emotional punch it has the ability to produce, especially if, as many of us do, you have seen the pained depths that cancer can instill into a once-healthy person. (2020, 99 min) [Michael Frank]
Lili Horvát's PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN PERIOD OF TIME (Hungary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Feeling middle age encroaching, brilliant neurosurgeon Dr. Marta Vizy (Natasa Stork) returns to her native Budapest after 20 years of practicing in America. Dr. Janos Drexler (Viktor Bodo), a visionary in her field, is the man she met a month earlier at a conference in New Jersey; as she recalls, they arranged a rendezvous at her favorite bridge back home. Yet at their next encounter Janos claims not to know her, and Marta begins to wonder if she wanted love so badly she dreamed up the whole thing. Lili Horvát wrote and directed this intriguing, poignant story about loneliness and tricks of perception. Her well-made film is worth a look for its sensitively handled treatment of love’s dark, obsessive, potentially destructive side. Horvát keeps Marta framed closely as she glides through the city in cabs and trams, and Stork gives her a shaky self-possession, a secretive expression encompassing Marta’s angst and hope. (2020, 95 min) [Scott Pfeiffer]
Philippe Garrel’s THE SALT OF TEARS (France)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
THE SALT OF TEARS is distinctive among Philippe Garrel’s narrative films in that it doesn’t center on intellectuals or creative types; as such, it feels less immediately autobiographical than much of the great French director’s other work. Yet this distance between the author and his subjects doesn’t result in a sense of coldness or impersonality. Rather, Garrel (writing, again, with the venerable Arlette Langmann and Jean-Claude Carrière) seems downright rejuvenated, more curious about people than he has in years. The life lessons of his post-REGULAR LOVERS work open onto universal wisdom here, reflecting the callousness and impetuousness of young people everywhere. The protagonist is a 20-ish carpenter named Luc, who arrives in Paris at the start of the film to take an admissions exam at an elite woodworking school; before the test, he crosses paths with Djemila, a young working-class woman about his age. The two fall in love, but Luc returns home before things can get serious. Back in his home town, Luc chances upon his first love, Geneviève, for the first time in several years. They enter into a hot and heavy romance, and Luc begins to neglect Djemila when she calls or texts from Paris. This chain of events repeats several months later when Luc, accepted into the woodworking school, goes back to Paris, takes up with a nurse named Betsy, and gives Geneviève the cold shoulder. Only too late does he learn how wrong he was to reject women who cared for him deeply. As usual, Garrel is less interested in generating suspense than he is in capturing delicate states of being (erotic fascination, romantic yearning, regret) and finding endless nuance in the physicality of his performers and the textures of black-and-white 35mm widescreen. There is, however, a compelling spikiness beneath the movie’s gentle surfaces, and it becomes especially prominent once you realize that Garrel and his co-writers have placed a villain in a position normally occupied by the hero of a story. Luc doesn’t see himself as a villain (but, then, who does?) because he doesn’t open up to the people around him and thus doesn’t get close enough to people to really hurt them. He may successfully lie to himself, but as the film’s abrupt, devastating conclusion reminds us, one can succeed on this front for only so long. (2020, 100 min) [Ben Sachs]
Lance Oppenheim’s SOME KIND OF HEAVEN (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and Facets Cinémathèque here
I’m not sure when I first heard about The Villages, but my curiosity about this vast Disneyland for retirees in South Florida clearly was shared by director Lance Oppenheim, himself a South Floridian. Designed for faux nostalgia built around a faux history complete with a bronze statue of its founder, land speculator Harold Schwartz, The Villages has become a haven for its almost entirely white residents who want to retreat from the world into the country’s most elaborate summer camp, where custom golf carts are the vehicles of choice. Oppenheim emphasizes the pursuit of conformity at The Villages in the opening scene, which features a synchronized golf cart team, a rowing team, and a synchronized swimming team. But we learn all is not fun and games once Oppenheim introduces us to four people in this bubble—married couple Reggie and Anne Kincer, recent widow Barbara Lochiatto, and Dennis Dean, who lives in his van and is not an official resident of The Villages. None of them looks particularly happy, and we learn why as Oppenheim unfolds their stories. Reggie seems like an old hippie, indulging in polydrug abuse and yoga to find enlightenment, much to the unhappiness of his neglected wife. Barbara works in The Villages’ healthcare system, yearning to return to her native Boston but unable to because her savings are gone after 11 years on the property. Dennis is on the run from a California warrant related to a DUI conviction; he’s a restless man whose credo is to live fast, love hard, and die poor. All four of them face their troubles and different varieties of loneliness in ways that seem to demonstrate that our essential character remains relatively fixed throughout our lives. David Bolen’s gorgeous cinematography and ability to capture facial emotions in unguarded moments contrast the heaven of the South Florida landscape with the frenetic activity of the seniors who are determined, as the song goes, to live till they die. It’s tempting to think Oppenheim cherry-picked outliers from this community to feature, but nothing is as idyllic as it seems at first glance, nor is enduring one’s hardships as hopeless at it sometimes seems. Exposing these truths in such an affecting way does all of us—and especially the residents of The Villages—a service we all need. (2020, 81 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Filippo Meneghetti’s TWO OF US (France)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here, the Gene Siskel Film Center here, and the Music Box Theatre here
TWO OF US eerily opens with a game of hide-and-seek between two young girls, during which one of them suddenly vanishes. A traumatic memory or a nightmarish omen, this prologue summarizes the predicament of the two septuagenarian women we’re about to meet, whose decades-long, closeted lesbian relationship has never progressed beyond the “hide” part of the game. Living across from each other in an old Parisian apartment complex, Madeleine (Martine Chevallier) and Nina (Barbara Sukowa) have become accustomed to carrying out their romance in secret, Nina routinely crossing the hallway for a meal or late-night rendezvous with her beloved. The two agree to sell Madeleine’s apartment and move to Rome; it seems the couple will finally find the freedom they’ve been looking for. But obstacles loom, particularly in the form of Madeleine’s children, who guilt their mother into staying put. The situation becomes even more fraught when a stroke leaves Madeleine in a semi-catatonic state, and the installment of a live-in caretaker augurs the end of the women’s apartment-hopping trysts. Rather than hit the obvious keys of melodrama, first-time filmmaker Meneghetti unfolds this ripe scenario using a cinematic language more allied with a psychological thriller, making especially unnerving use of peepholes, reflections, and pregnant silences punctuated only by the churn of a washing machine or the sizzle of a frying pan. Implacably driven to get her Madeleine back, Nina ends up taking matters into her own hands, Sukowa expertly and scarily conveying the mania that can grow from a love denied. The horror and tragedy of TWO OF US lie not so much in her increasingly unhinged behavior, but in the suppression of desire that fosters it, the absence reflected in the sad, hollow eyes of a mute Madeleine, forced to listen to her children prattle on about her nonexistent devotion to her late husband. Meneghetti invests so strongly in the women’s indestructible bond that he has the tendency, intentionally or not, of belittling his other characters, while too easily waving away Nina’s ruthless actions. Yet the performances from Chevallier and Sukowa are so powerful, you can’t help but root for them to find their way back to each other. “I will follow him / follow him wherever he may go,” goes the Little Peggy March song. An Italian translation of the earlier version of this song, Petula Clark’s “Chariot,” plays throughout TWO OF US as the women’s theme. Here, in lieu of “him” or any sexist declarations of obedience, there is only the mountains-moving force of love. (2020, 95 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Gwendolen Cates’ WE ARE UNARMED (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The recent January 6th domestic terrorist attacks on the U.S. Capitol sharply contrasts with the Indigenous-led resistance of the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock and other such peaceful protests that were met with violence from law enforcement, highlighting the government’s tolerance of white supremacy and the systemic racism in its policies. Gwendolen Cates’ WE ARE UNARMED is an emotionally powerful and extremely timely look at the DAPL protests through the lens of the current political climate. The film also places significance on framing the present moment through an understanding of the historical context; as Kelly Morgan, a Standing Rock Lakota and Tribal Archaeologist states, “there is so much to tell and so few who know the true history of the United States.” Morgan and two other Lakota women are featured as noteworthy and eloquent figures of the movement, including a longtime activist, Phyllis Young, and a camp leader, Holy Elk Lafferty. WE ARE UNARMED follows the stand they took against the treaty violations of the DAPL from the beginning of the protests in September 2016 to a forced evacuation which occurred the following February. The inspiring struggle to protect culture and land, including water rights, is juxtaposed against the unjust and violent—both current and historical—treatment of Indigenous peoples. Cates’ camera lingers on flags and signs and sounds of prayer, music, and song are featured throughout, creating a collage of visual and aural symbols that emphasize the power in collective words and voices—as one sign reads, “no spiritual surrender.” Morgan profoundly observes, “Every day that we breathe as Native people—that is a political act.” WE ARE UNARMED will always be an essential watch, but right now, it is critical. (2020, 77 min) [Megan Fariello]
Tom Noonan’s WHAT HAPPENED WAS… (US)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Filmmakers had drawn on stage plays for inspiration for as long as movies have existed, but the success of films like HOUSE OF GAMES and SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (both 1987) signaled the rise of a particular kind of theatrical cinema that would remain in vogue in the U.S. for at least a decade. In their 1990s work, writer-directors Whit Stillman, Hal Hartley, and Neil LaBute (to name some of the most popular of this trend) foregrounded language over mise-en-scene—or, more appropriately, they made language part of the mise-en-scene, with the visual style and even the arrangement of physical space seeming to grow out of how the characters talked. WHAT HAPPENED WAS…, the first feature written and directed by character actor Tom Noonan (who adapted his own stage play), certainly belongs to this wave of American indie cinema; at the same time, its most likely theatrical reference points—the quasi-absurdist dramas of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee—come from three or four decades earlier. Like certain Pinter and Albee plays, WHAT HAPPENED WAS… teeters at the edge of realism; the film is exacting in its depiction of some things (middle-class banality, certain ways of speech), but eerily vague in other areas. It’s often unclear whether the characters are lying or telling the truth; to further complicate matters, it’s often unclear if the characters know the difference themselves. The film unfolds more or less in real time as two single, middle-aged co-workers, Michael (Noonan) and Jackie (Karen Sillas), have dinner at the latter’s apartment. What begins as a portrait of urban lonelyhearts mutates into something richer and stranger, as the characters get lost in the stories they tell to each other and themselves. WHAT HAPPENED WAS… displays a lot of visual invention for a movie that takes place in a single apartment; Noonan executes deft camera movements, stark lighting, and a snappy montage that respects the rhythm of the dialogue. Still, it’s the film’s tone that leaves the most lasting impression. Noonan has always been a distinctive onscreen presence (as anyone who’s seen MANHUNTER can attest), his soft voice and lanky gait suggesting a looming force that’s too close for comfort. WHAT HAPPENED WAS… advances a worldview in keeping with that presence. (1994, 91 min) [Ben Sachs]
Amjad Abu Alala’s YOU WILL DIE AT TWENTY (Sudan)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Stunning from its opening shot, YOU WILL DIE AT TWENTY is a fully realized, flowing visual examination of faith and mourning life before it’s fully lived. Set in a small Sudanese village on the Nile, the film was the winner of Lion of the Future Award at the Venice Film Festival and is Sudan’s first-ever Oscar submission. After being told by a Sheikh that her newborn son will die before he reaches age twenty, Sakina (Islam Mubarak) shelters the boy throughout his life, protecting what little time he has left—his father (Talal Afifi), takes off immediately, unable to cope with the anticipation of death. Muzamil (Mustafa Shehata), grows up fully aware of his predicted fate and, like his mother, is preoccupied by the knowledge that he’ll die young. As he reaches closer to twenty, however, Muzamil begins to question both his belief in the prophecy and his faith in general, prompted by those in his life who are unconvinced, including his frustrated childhood sweetheart (Bunna Khalid) and a local (Mahmoud Maysara Elsarraj) who’s back from spending years travelling abroad. Individual shots are strikingly composed, as director Amjad Abu Alala contrasts the beige, rocky, static spaces of the village with mindful, colorful movement of life, including people, wind, and water; in addition, sounds of life—breath, heartbeat, and even the recurrence of a buzzing fly—all work subtly yet effectively to reflect Muzamil’s strange position as a young person expecting death. The remarkable and sometimes dreamlike visuals are complimented by a series of earnest performances, particularly by Mubarak as a mother mourning her son his whole life. The film does miss some opportunities in its more grounded moments to directly speak to suggested themes surrounding the political backdrop and even sexual abuse—a few scenes stand out as completely unaddressed, but particularly unsettling is one towards the end between Muzamil and an older woman. Overall, however, YOU WILL DIE AT TWENTY artistically threads its themes on life and death through both its gorgeous visuals and thoughtful performances. (2019, 102 min) [Megan Fariello]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Block Cinema
Northwestern University’s Block Cinema presents The Loose Ends of Empire: Unforgetting Colonialism from Thursday at 7pm to Saturday, February 27 at 7pm. The free program includes three works: artist Keith Piper’s 1985 UK multimedia slide and audio tape installation THE TROPHIES OF EMPIRE (showing in a 13-minute digital version), Onyeka Igwe’s 2019 UK video THE NAMES HAVE CHANGED, INCLUDING MY OWN AND TRUTHS HAVE BEEN ALTERED (26 min), and UK artist Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s 2018 Ugandan/Austrian/German video PROMISED LANDS (20 min). The works are accompanied by a recorded conversation between Igwe and NU performance studies professor Bimbola Akinbola. More info and registration link here. Check the list on our website over the weekend for a review of THE TROPHIES OF EMPIRE.
Media Burn Archive
Media Burn and the UofC Dept. of Cinema and Media Studies presents a free online screening and discussion with video maker and academic Julia Lesage on Thursday at 6pm. As part of Media Burn’s ongoing series of talks with activist video makers, Lesage will screen her 1986 video LAMENTO (12 min) and discuss its production in Sandinista Nicaragua with UofC Associate Professor Salomé Skvirsky. Register here.
Conversations at the Edge
SAIC’s Conversations at the Edge series presents “This Set of Actions is a Mirror,” a two-program online screening and an online discussion about the representation of disability in artists’ films and videos. Program one, New Channels of Access (1995–2018, 72 min total) is a collection of shorts by Carolyn Lazard, Leroy Moore Jr., Sharon Snyder, David Mitchell, Liza Sylvestre, Joseph Grigely, Christine Sun Kim, and Thomas Mader, and is available from Monday through February 28; program two is Zeinabu irene Davis’ 1999 feature COMPENSATION has a review above. A panel discussion featuring community organizer Dustin Gibson, queer theorist and author Robert McRuer, and shorts program curators Liza Sylvestre and Minh Nguyen is on Thursday at 7pm. More information and screening and panel links here.
Chicago Filmmakers
Chicago Filmmakers continues From the Outside In, an online shorts-program screening of documentaries by local makers, through Sunday. More info here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Isaac Cherem’s 2021 Mexican film LEONA (94 min) is available for rent this beginning this week. Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles. The Film Center also begins this week a new online lecture series, Talking Pictures, that will present three thematic strands through the spring featuring critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum (Tuesdays, beginning this week through April 13), filmmaker John Sayles (Mondays in March), and journalist and curator Sergio Mims (Mondays in April and May). Details here.
Music Box Theatre
Davy Rothbart's 2019 documentary 17 BLOCKS (126 min) is available for rent beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Miloš Forman’s BLACK PETER (Czechoslovakia)
Available to stream on the Criterion Channel (subscription required)
There is nothing geographically or temporally specific about the bored, disaffected young adult, who exists throughout history as a reminder of the constancy of pubescent malaise, generational conflict, and skepticism of the status quo. In theater and cinema, this figure achieves a particularly iconic form in the 50s and 60s, shortly following the advent of “teenager” as a distinct demographic. Usually male, the British called this rebellious young person the Angry Young Man; the listless titular character in Miloš Forman’s BLACK PETER would fit this label to a T, if only anger didn’t require such commitment. The only thing active about Peter is his gaze, and even that’s mostly ineffective. Hired among a conspicuously all-female staff to spot shoplifters at a general market, Peter does a lot of looking, but fails to take action when he’s unable to confront a suspected thief he follows, with comical furtiveness, into the street. Timid and somewhat indolent, the young man’s social impotence is contrasted with the authoritarianism of his father, who upbraids his son in a series of chauvinistic lectures about the integrity of a man’s work—notably, with Peter’s back always to the camera. Browbeaten at home and at work, Peter turns his gaze to the pretty Pavla, gets caught up with a couple of local hooligans, and tries, or maybe doesn’t, to finally make a meaningful move. With its breezy mixture of coming-of-age drama, wry social satire, and vérité-style shooting, BLACK PETER heavily anticipates Forman’s LOVES OF A BLONDE, which would catapult the director to international fame the following year and cement the reputation of the Czechoslovak New Wave. While the latter film skewers gender inequities under Communism from a female perspective, BLACK PETER pokes at the patriarchy through a feeble male gaze, and wonders if perhaps a younger generation’s putative aimlessness isn’t also, in some way, a subconscious rejection of totalitarian control. This possible stealth subversion becomes most evident in the film’s closing moments, when the youthful ennui of Peter and his ambivalent peers triggers one of cinema’s most perfect and hilarious final freeze frames. (1964, 90 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Aldo Tambellini’s THE DAY BEFORE THE MOON LANDING (US/Experimental)
Available to stream for free on the Electronic Arts Intermix website through February 23 here
One might say that channel surfing, now an outmoded pastime in the streaming era, is something akin to a single-player game of exquisite corpse: switching between one channel and the next, then another, so on and so forth, this recreation of the distracted and indecisive alike yields its own unwieldy narrative from scraps of errant transmission. Coincidence assumes the illusion of foreordained meaning as disparate threads connect to form a hypnagogic tapestry. The first in a series of videos he made to capture the experience of watching live broadcast television, aptly called A Day in the Life of Television, Aldo Tambellini’s THE DAY BEFORE THE MOON LANDING exemplifies this, featuring an amalgamation of broadcasts as the multidisciplinary virtuoso switches between different TV networks. There’s no obvious connection between what’s shown, just that everything included was broadcast on July 19, 1969, the day before the Apollo 11 space mission landed on the moon. Famous for his obsession with the color black and renowned in the art world for myriad triumphs (among them leading the charge in experimental video and expanded cinema, as well as co-founding the Gate Theatre and then the Black Gate Theatre), Tambellini was a bona fide pioneer in television art, having created the first non-commercial work of art for television for a station in Germany, along with Otto Piene. “Television is not just an object,” he said in conjunction with the release of another work from 1969, the television sculpture BLACK SPIRAL, “it’s a live communication media.” Many of Tambellini’s more well-known television pieces include the image, images, or even the machine’s circuitry being manipulated, but THE DAY BEFORE THE MOON LANDING instead uses the presumed logic of broadcast television—one channel always preceding the next, etc.—to manipulate itself; the systematic is at first disjointed, then imbued with revived coherence via Tambellini's adroit discordance in switching from one channel to another. Footage of the lunar surface taken from Apollo 11 accents otherwise commonplace television programs, such as an “expose” on sex in the movies, that year's Miss Universe pageant, and László Benedek’s THE WILD ONE, starring Marlon Brando. (Ironically, the gang to which Brando’s character belongs is called the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club.) The contrast between images from Apollo 11 and an old Brando flick serves to illuminate just how big—and small—cinema is, a world in itself that provides a visible, albeit illusory, contrast to ours. Like the moon, and even space in general, it is at once perceptible and imaginable but wholly removed. Television then stands in seeming opposition to cinema, more accessible and thus considered ripe for liberation as a prospective art form. As man was then exploring the vast unknown, Tambellini probed the intimately familiar—the technology that existed in most every person’s very home. What’s on display here is not any more than what those people could ostensibly do themselves, infinite exquisite corpses awaiting a breath of life. (1969, 47 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
Rob Christopher’s ROY'S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD'S CHICAGO (US/Documentary)
Streaming at the Beloit International Film Festival through February 28 here
If the name Barry Gifford rings a bell to Cine-File readers, it’s likely for his contributions to what you might call “David’s world”: David Lynch, that is. Lynch’s WILD AT HEART (1990) was an adaptation of a Gifford novel, and they co-wrote LOST HIGHWAY (1997) together. Until I saw ROY'S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD'S CHICAGO, a dreamy, immersive documentary by Cine-File contributor Rob Christopher, I was unfamiliar with his Roy stories, myself. Roy is the character Gifford invented as an alter-ego for himself as a boy/young man, a movie-loving street kid whose coming-of-age adventures Gifford has been chronicling in works of autobiographical fiction for nearly 40 years now. “Roy’s world” is a specific time and place—Chicago, mostly, in the 1950s and early ‘60s. This documentary celebrates these writings by adhering to a strict no-talking-heads policy. Christopher eschews entirely the standard on-screen interviews in favor of voice-over narratives: reminiscences from Gifford himself provide context for readings from the work. For these, Christopher and producer Michael Glover Smith (also a Cine-File contributor) scored a coup: they got Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, and Lili Taylor to read, and their distinctive timbres and tough-but-tender personas embody the texts. Gifford/Roy’s Chicago is a wintry, working-class world. His father ran an operation called Lake Shore Pharmacy, across from the old Water Tower. It was a 24-hour kind of joint, ostensibly a drug store; showgirls would drop by on their breaks and repair to the basement, where he’d administer some kind of pep shot. The people who hung around the store, including Gifford’s own family, were “not people to mess around with”; some had been gangsters during Prohibition. The film pulses with the seamy romance of the town’s jazzy nightlife, enhanced by a cool, atmospheric score by jazz vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz. Still, a young boy experienced the corruption of organized crime, and the intertwined iron fist of Richard J. Daley’s machine, as just a part of the atmosphere. Hardboiled as it was in attitude, the town nevertheless seems like it must have been a hell of a place to grow up. Gifford’s mom was from Texas, a former beauty queen, 20 years younger than his dad. The marriage didn’t stick, and her struggles—during an era when being a “divorcee” was still rather a scandal—are poignant. In fact, Gifford confides in us that one of his chief motivations for creating Roy was to remember the time he had with his mother. The story “Chicago, Illinois, 1953” recalls a humiliating incident when a shopkeeper mistook his mom, bronzed from a season under the tropical sun, for a Black woman, and refused to serve her. It is illustrated by shimmering black-and-white animated drawings. When young Roy later asks his shaking mom why she didn’t simply tell the man she was white, she replies, “It shouldn’t matter, Roy.” The story “Bad Girls,” set during the early ’60s and illustrated by rotoscoped footage from Graceland Cemetery, nicely evokes the feeling of teenage discovery, as Roy and a new female friend roam our fabled “city of neighborhoods.” Christopher’s design also includes found footage in striking black-and-white and eye-popping saturated color, and archival materials ranging from Gifford’s home movies to neighborhood newspapers. Zooming carefully into photographs from a bygone world, patiently waiting for them to reveal their secrets, Christopher encourages us to imagine the individual lives and stories spilling outside the frame. For locals, the film transforms Chicago into a fascinating palimpsest, allowing us to trace the former lives of buildings and neighborhoods behind our everyday cityscape. While the film is deliberately unhurried, its open-all-night vibe will cast a spell on anyone open to its urban jazz-noir mood. Gifford’s Roy stories work as history and as autobiography, but above all they’re a form of make-believe. It required almost an equivalent act of imagination for Christopher to conjure up a world that opens up as richly as his inspiration, but that’s what he’s done with ROY’S WORLD. I emerged from this sensory experience as if from a waking dream, blinking and momentarily disoriented, though with a heightened alertness. It was as if I’d visited a land of phantoms—but of course, these were really only the shades of men and women just like us. ROY’S WORLD made me feel as if the past never really went anywhere, if only we look closely enough. (2019, 75 min) [Scott Pfeiffer]
William Richert’s WINTER KILLS (US)
Available free on Kanopy through participating libraries with your library card; also streaming for free (with subscription) or available to rent on Amazon Prime
Hilarious and depraved, William Richert’s WINTER KILLS advances a notion of American politics as a sick game: the opening credits unspool over the eerie shuffling of pieces on a chessboard; a venomous shouting match between Nick Kegan (Jeff Bridges) and Z.K. Dawson (Sterling Hayden) only momentarily interrupts a group engaged in frightening tank warfare roleplay; there’s even a character called Gameboy Baker, played with seedy relish by Ralph Meeker. The movie’s sentiments of an all-seeing surveillance state and greed at the highest levels of power are familiar from the wave of 1970s conspiracy thrillers, but Richert—with the aid of a wildly accomplished cast (Toshiro Mifune, Dorothy Malone, Anthony Perkins) and crew (cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, production designer Robert Boyle)—articulates these ideas with a singularly diabolical sense of humor. A wayward sort with little interest in the sprawling business empire presided over by his domineering father (John Huston), Nick picks up new information that spurs him to reinvestigate the presidential assassination of his golden-boy half-brother—a years-earlier killing that, though shrouded in mystery, was officially deemed the act of a lone assailant. (The story’s Kennedyesque echoes are carried over from the source material, the novel by Manchurian Candidate author Richard Condon.) Nick’s quest for the truth subjects him to a cycle of increasingly bizarre and life-threatening confrontations, and Richert delights in the boyish cluelessness Bridges brings to the character. One of the movie’s funniest running jokes is that Nick keeps finding himself, sometimes unwittingly, patronizing businesses and institutions his father owns—an airline, a restaurant, a hospital. Though Nick purports to renounce the trappings of wealth, he’s not above coasting on the Kegans’ spoils to achieve his wishes. (“Maybe Pa owns it. Do you want a promotion?” he says to the magazine editor he hopes to marry.) More than a political whodunit, WINTER KILLS delivers a feverish look at the inner workings of a dynasty—and its vision of a ridiculous family manning the controls of an entire nation today appears indisputable. (1979, 97 min) [Danny King]
SUPPORT LOCAL THEATERS AND SERIES
As we wait for conditions to improve to allow theaters to reopen, consider various ways that you can help support independent film exhibitors in Chicago weather this difficult time. Memberships, gift cards, and/or merchandise are available from the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Music Box Theatre, and Facets. Donations can be made to non-profit venues and organizations like Chicago Filmmakers, the Chicago Film Society, South Side Projections, and many of the film festivals. Online streaming partnerships with distributors are making films available through the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Music Box Theatre, and Facets; and Facets also has a subscription-based streaming service, FacetsEdge, that includes many exclusive titles.
COVID-19 UPDATES
Most independent, alternative, arthouse, grassroots, DIY, and university-based venues and several festivals continue to have suspended operations, are closed, or have cancelled/postponed events until further notice. Below is the most recent information we have, which we will update as new information becomes available.
Note that venues/series marked with an asterisk (*) are currently presenting or plan to do regular or occasional “virtual” online screenings.
CLOSED/POSTPONED/HIATUS:
Beverly Arts Center – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Closed until further notice
Chicago Film Society – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice*
Chicago Filmmakers – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice*
Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) – Programming cancelled until further notice
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) – The Spring 2021 season will take place online
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Screenings cancelled until further notice
Facets Cinémathèque – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)*
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) – Closed until further notice
filmfront – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Gallery 400 (UIC)*
Gene Siskel Film Center – Closed until further notice*
Music Box Theatre – The Music Box has again suspended in-person screenings; it continues to present online-only screenings*
The Nightingale – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Park Ridge Public Library) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
FESTIVALS:
Postponed with no announced plans yet:
The Cinepocalypse film festival (June) – Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
The Windy City Horrorama festival (April 24 - 26) – Cancelled; will possibly be rescheduled or reconfigured at a future date
The Chicago Critics Film Festival (May 1 - 7) – Postponed until further notice
CINE-LIST: February 19 - February 25, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITOR // Ben Sachs, Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Tristan Johnson, Danny King, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith