CRUCIAL VIEWING
Patricio Guzmán X 3
Patricio Guzmán’s THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS (New Chilean/French Documentary)
Check Venue website for showtimes
For Patricio Guzmán, epic chronicler of the fall of Allende in THE BATTLE OF CHILE, the trauma of history is an elemental matter. His 2011 documentary masterpiece NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT, a mournful rumination on landscape, memory, and the persistent trauma of the Pinochet regime, exposed echoes of tragedy in the dusts of the desert and the stars; 2015’s THE PEARL BUTTON dredged the waters of Chile to reveal the history of genocidal violence against the nation’s indigenous tribes. THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS completes this triptych, as Guzmán trains his gaze on the vast Andes mountain range while reflecting, in a halting, pensive voiceover, the nation’s granite-faced indifference to its own tragedies past and present. NOSTALGIA presented a true formal breakthrough, which CORDILLERA is content to refine, but Guzmán’s craft remains unparalleled, chiseling an unthinkable poetry from barren landscapes and painful testimonies to Chile’s brutal history. A sequence meditating on the paving stones of Santiago—cut from Andean rock, they were once a playground to Guzmán in his youth, but today they bear the names of the dictatorship’s victims—is exemplary of the director’s vision, which finds in unprepossessing materials an archive of both personal and collective history. Guzmán addresses these histories metonymically, at a remove that figuratively reflects his own geographic displacement: living in exile since 1973, Guzmán only briefly faced the hardship of Pinochet’s reign directly. THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS compares his distance with the work of another documentarian, Pablo Salas, who remained, filming decades of unrest, resistance, and repression. In the film’s most urgent passages, Guzmán draws on Salas’s unruly archive, amassed in seemingly every analog and digital format, and on his observations, which trace a direct line from the Pinochet years to the demoralized neoliberal order of the present. Like Salas, Guzmán has committed (or condemned) himself to preserving the memory of an injustice that many would prefer to erase; the film communicates, more intimately than in any of his works, both the necessity and the profound loneliness of this endeavor. (2019, 85 min) MM
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Patricio Guzmán's THE PEARL BUTTON (Chilean Documentary Revival)
Saturday, 4:15pm and Wednesday, 7:45pm
Water: it’s the very stuff of life, the definition of the elemental. Our bodies, plants, the earth itself—it’s all mainly water. Patricio Guzmán's THE PEARL BUTTON is a highly personal and visionary cinematic essay that envisions water—the sea, the ocean—as a repository of Chilean history and memory: as a kind of language, really. BUTTON is the second film in Guzman’s breakthrough documentary trilogy, with its fluid, almost Joycean approach to nature and culture, present and past. The stars of the night sky, as viewed from Chile’s Atacama Desert, was the theme of the first film, 2010’s NOSTALIGA FOR THE LIGHT; the third, 2019’s THE CORDILLERA OF DREAMS, riffed on the Andes Mountains. BUTTON links the astronomers of NOSTALGIA to Chile’s indigenous Patagonians, based on the notion of water’s celestial origins. Oceans, whether terrestrial or galactic, represented life for both; water was brought to earth by comets. Guzman takes us to the gorgeous estuary of Western Patagonia, a “timeless place,” an “archipelago of rain” where these water nomads lived a canoe-based way of life for 10,000 years. The film links the advent of European settlers and their extermination of the indigenous with Pinochet’s fascist military coup, which overthrew the democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Strikingly, Guzman reconstructs the final moments of a woman, Marta Ugarte, whose body washed up on the shore in 1976: she had been tortured, tied to a rail, wrapped in plastic bags and potato sacks, and cast into the sea. It makes me furious and ashamed when I consider that the Pinochet junta’s obscenities were carried out with the backing and support of the U.S. government. When a button is found on a 40-year-old rail excavated from the sea floor—the only sign of the human being to which it had once been roped—it reminds Guzman of the story of “Jemmy Button,” a Patagonian man who, in exchange for a pearl button, gave up his land, freedom, and life. In a real sense, Guzman is asking us to see the “disappeared”: totalitarians, after all, work by erasing memory. The film is a stimulating philosophical experience, as well as an eye-popping visual one: the seracs of the Chilean fjords left me full of wonder. My ears were titillated, as well: by wordless chanting inspired by the surging “voice” of the water, by whisperings in ancient languages accompanied by startling archival photos of indigenous folks who painted the cosmos on their bodies. Guzman ties together survivor stories, too: we meet a roomful of once-imprisoned opponents of the junta, as well as a few of the 20 direct descendants left after the colonists’ genocide of the indigenous. (Movingly, Guzman asks these folks to name things in their native language.) There’s an intimacy to Guzman’s soft-spoken narration. His tone is patient, elegiac. He’s given to poetic flights of fancy: he wonders if, somewhere in the cosmos, there could be a planet with an ocean so vast that the water people could have found refuge from the killers. He’s a kind of dreamer. After all, he muses, what is the intermediary between us earthbound souls and the stars? Water. (2015, 82 min, DCP Digital) SP
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Patricio Guzmán's NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (Contemporary French/German/Chilean Documentary)
Friday, 6pm, Saturday, 2:30pm, and Monday, 7:45pm
More than the other physical sciences, astronomy is recognizable (through the gauze of its multiple and infantile popularizations) as a manifestation of a universal human practice: the desire for, and construction of, origin myths. Reduced to incomprehensible theoretical abstraction by astrophysicists (and to hopelessly broad generalizations by fashionable cosmologists), its humble observational arm persists wherever artificial light and cloud cover remain absent. The apotheosis of such an environment—the barren Atacama desert of Chile—is the site of NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT, a patient, Weschlerian documentary which trains itself on the resonances between the modest local astronomers and on an unrelated, nearby crowdsourced human anthropology: the searches of dozens of frail women for the remains of their relatives and loved ones—the victims of Pinochet's mid-70s concentration camps, buried in and around the region's former nitrate mines. By the laws of special relativity, the astronomers' observation of distant objects is also an observation of long-past events; by the laws of entropy and ideological repression, the women's intermittently successful searches for los desaparecidos provide evidence for long-unpunished crimes. Nevertheless, the viewer will note that it is the male science that is (weakly) funded by the Northern research apparatus. Finding infuriation and contemplation where Werner Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS found humor and hubris, this international winner of the European Film Awards' Best Documentary prize is also, of course, rather local: the free-market policies which succeeded the concentration camps were part of an infamously grand experiment by several University of Chicago Economics graduate students—the CIA-financed "Chicago Boys" (Sergio de Castro, Pablo Baraona, and others). But it is clear that Guzmán—like many of his fellow Chileans—instead worships across the quad, at the court of Edwin P. Hubble (S.B. '10, Ph.D. '17). (2010, 90 min, 35mm) MC
Zeinabu irene Davis’ COMPENSATION (American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
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, 16mm) BS
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Introduced by NU professor Gerald Butters and followed by discussion with Butters, Golden Owens (NU PhD candidate), and Davis (via Skype).
Jane Campion's AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (New Zealand Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Saturday, 4pm
AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE is a film of quiet intensity, absorbing and moving, delicate and deliberate in what it withholds and what it reveals. The film is, on its surface, a biopic about the New Zealand author Janet Frame, based on three autobiographies. It originally aired as a television miniseries in New Zealand, and then was packaged as a single film, winning raves and a score of prizes at prestigious film festivals and an Independent Spirit Award. Like Campion's previous film, SWEETIE (1989), AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE unflinchingly delves into the meaning and manifestations of mental illness, but unlike SWEETIE, a more violent film that's rather rough around the edges, AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE explores Janet Frame's mental state and subjectivity carefully, intimately, and precisely. The film continued a theme of exploring women protagonists in unusual ways, in an almost tactile sense. Many scenes in ANGEL depict items that Janet is touching for various reasons: holding a piece of chalk as she succumbs to a panic attack as a young schoolteacher, stroking the velvet of her dress as a young child. The many close-ups of Janet's face and hands serve to draw us inexorably into her subjectivity, feeling her anxiety and painful shyness, her vulnerability, her hopefulness, her loneliness, and her own intense absorption in observing the world around her. Campion also employs a technique throughout the film that unites us with Janet's perspective: she often begins scenes not with establishing shots, (Campion has confessed in interviews that she loathes establishing shots and always struggles to include them.) but with close-ups or medium shots of characters-who-are-not-Janet, panning slowly through their conversation and alighting upon Janet's vivid reaction to them. This cinematic style continues in THE PIANO (1993), Campion's film of greatest acclaim, which made her the first and only woman director to date who has won the Palm d'Or at Cannes. Because Ada McGrath, the protagonist in THE PIANO, is mute, her voice-over and her reactions to the world through touch and through looking are our only path to entering her subjectivity. And like THE PIANO, AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE uses voice-over narration sparingly, and to wondrous effect. The lines of Frame's autobiographies that Campion chooses to quote in the narration are by turns cutting, comic, raw, poetic, stark, and always unsentimental. Indeed, AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE is a resolutely unsentimental biopic: it does not shy away from depicting Janet's dark years in an insane asylum, misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, nor does it shy away from showing the viewer just how impoverished and tragic Janet's childhood was. But the film also depicts how fiercely Janet was loved by her family and by several mentors who helped her to flourish as a writer, without an ounce of maudlin feeling. In the end, this biopic reads almost nothing like a traditional biopic, and the force that Campion wields with Janet's story is breathtaking. This is a film to be watched over and over again, despite how painful some of the moments are to live through with Janet (and you will feel them, vividly, alongside her, every tender expression, every moment of despair). It was only upon this latest viewing that I realized, for example, that one of the most interesting absences that I had never noticed before was the word "anxiety." For a film about someone who suffered from acute anxiety, the word is never mentioned—not a single time! But no film I have ever seen has shown the paralysis and the tactile feeling of anxiety and panic as clearly and compassionately as AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE. This is just one small example of the mastery of cinematic technique clearly visible in only her second film. It is unlike any other biopic ever made, and not to be missed. (1990, 158 min, 35mm imported archival print) AE
The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye (American Shorts Revivals)
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) — Sunday, 7pm
Damn, Cheryl Dunye has a lot of fun making movies. Many people comment on how funny her work is, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily laugh-out-loud. It's more infectiously spirited, engaged, and often silly. The realities of interracial tensions are considered seriously, but a joking moment doesn't fall far behind. Erotic moments are handled bluntly, but the scene will be spiked with some meta jocularity. New Queer Cinema was never so gay. JANINE (1990) is a funky, scratchy video essay featuring a monologue about growing up black and gay, and the way straight and white friends can judgmentally fall away. SHE DON'T FADE (1991) is an exceptional short narrative that follows the dating life of a young woman (played by Dunye) in the queer art-scene of Philadelphia. It's probably the most pleasurable film of the program with a great amount of humor and sensuality both in the narrative proper and also in the sometimes real/sometimes fictional behind-the-scenes moments. The closing gag of the film typifies all of Dunye's work—a flubbed line is kept in because the filmmaker isn't striving for perfection but for a serious playfulness. VANILLA SEX (1992) is the most directly experimental piece, a short essay investigating othering language used by various racial and sexual communities. AN UNTITLED PORTRAIT (1993) considers some old home movies, familial hopes, separation, and feet. THE POTLUCK AND THE PASSION (1993) explores tensions along age and racial lines at an anniversary party. GREETINGS FROM AFRICA (1994) is her first high-budget short film and it continues the concern with the complications of interracial sexual relationships, while letting Dunye's joking neurotic personality be the center of the film, rambling about bras while getting seduced. It's a good summation of Dunye's overall project—lively and joking, but dead serious about pleasure. (1990-94, approx. 80 min total, DVD Projection) JBM
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Nicholas Ray’s (and Ida Lupino’s) ON DANGEROUS GROUND (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
Nicholas Ray showed his greatest sympathy for outcasts, misfits, and the mentally unbalanced—in other words, for the damaged souls for whom it’s difficult, if not impossible, to function in normal society. One of the many riches of ON DANGEROUS GROUND is that here the Ray hero is a police officer, which raises multiple fascinating questions about America’s obsession with law and order. Cop Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan at his best) can barely repress his hatred for the criminals he takes in; early on in the movie, he even gets reprimanded by his Captain for being too rough with suspects. Yet it’s clear that Jim is also a terminally isolated person whose brutality masks a deep yearning to be loved. What is it about law enforcement that attracts people like Jim? Moreover, does society need people like Jim to do its dirty work? The first half-hour of ON DANGEROUS GROUND meditates on these questions while delivering an engrossing character study and a decent policier to boot. Jim and his partners join the search for two men who killed a couple of officers, and Ray (working from a script he co-wrote with A.I. Bezzerides) presents the police work matter-of-factly, emphasizing the tedium and thankless work that are part of any widespread investigation. The city where Jim works goes unnamed, and this anonymous quality, coupled with all the quotidian detail, adds to our sense of the hero’s alienation. Ray introduces Jim in a pithy yet revealing sequence that shows his partners saying goodbye to their families as they leave for the night shift, then cuts to Jim eating dinner alone. These shots set up a divide between Jim and other people that expands as the investigation goes on. Jim catches the killers, but only after creating a rift with his partners and getting his superiors in hot water. To get him out of the way of a PR fracas, the Captain sends Jim 70 miles upstate to assist with a small town’s search for a runaway child killer. The change in setting from urban (flat, brightly lit) to rural (mountainous, snowy) happens in seconds, and the resulting sense of physical displacement feels in keeping with the general portrait of spiritual displacement. (It’s one of the movie’s finest poetic flourishes.) No sooner than Jim arrives does he meet the victim’s father (Ward Bond), who’s so bent on revenge—he vows to shoot down the killer if he finds him before the police do—that he makes Jim’s bloodlust seem tame by comparison. Jim recognizes this, in the first of several epiphanies that occur during his time in the country. The next few arise during the time he spends with the killer’s sister, a blind woman who lives outside of town and who puts Jim up for the night when his car gets damaged during a snowstorm. Ida Lupino plays the sister (she also directed parts of the film when Ray became too sick to work), and her interactions with Ryan are some of the most poignant in either director’s filmography. The characters’ growing comfort with each other stems largely from their mutual feelings of loneliness; this comfort gives way to what Doc programmer Kathleen Geier describes as “a luminous Borzagean drama about the spiritually redemptive power of romantic love.” Howard Hughes, then head of RKO Pictures, demanded that Ray change ON DANGEROUS GROUND’s downbeat ending (he also cut the film by ten minutes), and it’s possible that he made the right call. The evolution from despairing crime drama to optimistic love story is one of the most sublime and satisfying narrative arcs in American cinema. (1951, 82 min, 35mm) BS
Michael Powell's and Emeric Pressburger's I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! (British Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 4:15pm and Monday, 6pm
A rebuke of materialism and the wonton acquisition of wealth, Powell and Pressburger's atmospheric romance is also a soft-sell for British wartime bonhomie. Set in the Hebrides of Scotland, a determined woman intends to meet her industrialist fiancé on the Island of Kiloran, but is held on shore by fate and bad weather. When the woman meets the Laird of Kiloran—an upstanding man on leave from active duty, unconcerned with the value of his land—her faith in upper class wealth is undermined. The film plays like a parable, with the Laird acting as the romantic lead and a model for its war-weary audience: honorable, selfless, moralistic, and satisfied with what he has. I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! is never didactic and its precisely paced romance leads its characters gently to its theme. Complete with its own mythology of curses and legends, the film uses the island's people to mirror the woman's conflict. Gaelic is spoken casually and an affecting Scottish dance ritual celebrating a couple's enduring marriage provokes her further. Both picturesque and portentous, the Hebrides' fog gives way to gales, then to heavy seas and a massive ocean whirlpool. Through an enveloping sound design and striking photography, Powell and Pressburger's mastery of the elemental is on full display. The effect is a profound diagnosis of their audience's restlessness with war's humbleness and sacrifice, and a lyrical romance that simultaneously allows them to escape. (1945, 91 min, 35mm) BW
Richard Donner's THE GOONIES (American Revival)
Beverly Arts Center — Sunday, 2pm
The retreat into infantile adventure as a way to resolve genuine economic problems is a hallmark of the early Spielbergian oeuvre, and Richard Donner's autumnal 2.35:1 children's epic (bankrolled by Spielberg) is no exception. The middle-class gifted children of drizzly seaside Astoria, Oregon, facing eviction of their families by an expanding preppie country club, are inspired by their region's poorly-documented colonial past to literally descend deep into the earth to recover an entombed bounty of pre-fiat riches. Pursued by a small, villainous Italian-American crime family unconsciously preserving the tricks of the pirate trade (robbery, counterfeiting, murder), our perpetually-yelling heroes combine their scholastic talents (mechanical engineering, Spanish proficiency, and sight- reading) to linearly "complete" a variety of video-game-adaptation-ready action sequences and save their steep, hilly neighborhood from becoming what would have been the Pacific Northwest's shittiest golf course. Millions of the film's original viewers, by contrast, would in fact ultimately lose their homes in this decade's housing bubble. (1985, 114 min, 35mm) MC
Bong Joon-Ho's MOTHER (South Korean Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 2pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Ah, the plot twist. Who could argue that it isn't one of the most overused and badly used narrative devices going? What Mr. Serling honed to a fine art, Mr. Shyamalan bastardized. Luckily there are some current filmmakers who know that when the twist is implemented at the right moment and in the right way, its effect is matchless. Bong is one. MOTHER is a knotty tale—part drama, part suspense mystery, part black comedy—that knows exactly when to unfurl a new twist. Unlike lesser films of its ilk each twist actually enriches our understanding of the characters rather than undermining it. Bong displays a complete mastery of the camera and editing. He never shows you something unless it's something he wants you to pay close attention to. Every shot is crammed with details and clues, the importance of which is sometimes not revealed until much later. This is a film crying out for multiple viewings. (2009, 128 min, 35mm) RC
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SAIC professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee lectures at the Tuesday screening.
Cheryl Dunye’s THE WATERMELON WOMAN (American Revival)
The Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7:30pm (Free Admission)
It’s 1997 in Philadelphia, but Cheryl (Cheryl Dunye) can’t get her mind off the 1930s. An aspiring filmmaker who pays the bills by juggling various wedding gigs and shifts at a video store, Cheryl becomes fascinated by an obscure film actress named Fae Richards—also known as The Watermelon Woman—who played Black “mammy” roles throughout the ‘30s. Cheryl turns this obsession into her first real film project, a documentary that leads to a journey of finding forgotten pieces of Black lesbian history and filmmaking. At the same time, Cheryl navigates her budding relationship with a white woman, Diana (Guinevere Turner), often mirroring Richards’ rumored relationship with director Martha Page. Dunye makes it clear that THE WATERMELON WOMAN is both a Black film and a lesbian film, and that acknowledging the importance of how those identities relate to one another is integral to understanding a broader picture of queer history in America. This is not a film that cares about a white gaze—nor should it—but it is crucial viewing all the same. The dialogue is sometimes charming, sometimes awkward, and always laugh-out-loud funny, making THE WATERMELON WOMAN a breeze to watch. But there is real heart and substance in addition to all that; the yearning for a past that was never yours, a future that isn’t quite here yet, and an identity that guides how you move through the world. (1997, 90 min, Digital Projection) CC
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The screening is part of an “Open Classroom” section of Allyson Field and Ghenwa Hayak’s “Cinema Without an Archive” course. Followed by a discussion.
Tsai Ming-liang's GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (Taiwanese Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
Tsai Ming-liang's GOODBYE, DRAGON INN is a gorgeous, heartbreaking, and strangely exhilarating film. Set in a condemned Taipei movie palace, on the occasion of its sparsely attended, last-ever film screening, GOODBYE is a bizarre drama of fleeting passions and empty spaces, which meditates on the slow death of the traditional moviegoing experience even as it formulates audacious cinematic poetry that relies on its viewers' participation in that same moribund ritual. Along with contemporaries like Bela Tarr, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Gus Van Sant, Tsai makes profound use not only of silence, but also slowness and extreme long takes, reinventing the concept of Bazinian realism with topical potency. It is cinema that, when experienced in the proper setting, engulfs completely, proving that there are tricks other than CGI and accelerated montage that filmmakers can use to dazzle modern audiences. The proper setting is, of course, a movie theater. Though nothing can take away from the richness (and strangeness) of Tsai's characters or the beauty of his mise-en-scène, the pure magic of his tone and pacing is largely dispelled by small screens and remote controls. (2003, 82 min, DCP Digital) DW
Richard Linklater's BOYHOOD (Contemporary American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7pm
Why revisit BOYHOOD? Exhibit A: with unthinking universal acclaim more befitting a generic Pixar or Marvel endeavor, the collective corpus of extant BOYHOOD reviews are a sign that contemporary film criticism (and its extraordinarily brief post-screening turnaround times) needs to be burned to the ground and its ashes tossed to sea. This is not because the movie isn't any good—it's because the myth of its diachronic production revealed the majority of pundits' inability to distinguish between fiction, documentary, and/or real life. (Even a relatively reflective late submission in the New York Review of Books explicitly assumed that there must be footage left over for one or "several" features.) Once one accepts that BOYHOOD is a conventional narrative fiction, with actors, a script, and the usual Linklater IRL influences (such as the armchair philosophy and/or unsubtle musical taste of Ethan Hawke) that happens to have had an extraordinarily staggered production schedule, it might become possible to consider—as few critics seemed to have managed to do—what the subject matter of the film might be. For example, it's not about "time" (none of the scripted content has anything interesting to say about that). A little bit is about adolescent psychological development—note the academic lectures moving from teacher to student: Pavlov replaced with Bowlby. But now observe the film's morality of technicity: 35mm cameras, cars, guns, blues-rock, (small amounts of) drugs: good, everything else (TV, beer, steroids): bad. It's pure Austin, TX, but Linklater's take on video games, cell phones, and the mobile Internet is far from incidental (no director points a camera at Halo on Xbox—or holds a lengthy Facetime conversation within a single static frame—by accident). Ellar Coltrane's Max Weber-esque speech on the iron cage of social media is the film's passionate précis; and its suggestive conclusion for the youth of today—to tune in, drop out and Be Here Now at Big Bend National Park—as radical a statement as one would find in any 2014 film festival. What Twitter-crippled, deskilled scribe could resist it? (2014, 163 min, DCP Digital) MC
Lucile Hadžihalilović’s EVOLUTION (Contemporary French)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 9:30pm
Lucile Hadžihalilović’s second feature, EVOLUTION, is a curious, Magritte-like work, marked by rigorous formal control and a narrative communicated in the language of dreams. It takes place in a tiny, isolated community bound by the ocean on one side and a mountain range on the other. Living there are a group of prepubescent boys and a dozen or so women who take care of them. Hadžihalilović doesn’t reveal how long the characters have been at this location or how long they intend to stay, and as in the writer-director’s sole other feature, 2004’s INNOCENCE, it’s difficult to say even when the film takes place—it could be anytime in the last 50 or 60 years. The nature of the medical procedures that the women sometimes perform on the boys is also left obscure, ditto the strange rituals the women undertake at night. (And why does one of the women have octopus-like suction cups on her back?) Hadžihalilović’s mise-en-scene is scrupulous; every prop has an inviting textural quality while at the same time projecting an air of mystery, and her use of negative space within the widescreen frame heightens the aura surrounding each object. The film proceeds less like a story than a series of paintings, but that’s hardly a bad thing, given the visual sensibility at play. (2015, 81 min, DCP Digital) BS
Levan Akin’s AND THEN WE DANCED (New Georgian)
Music Box Theatre — Check Venue website for showtimes
Despite shifting cultural norms and advancements in modernity, dance remains to be an art form still heavily steeped in tradition. This is especially pertinent in Georgian dance, according to Levan Akin’s third feature film AND THEN WE DANCED, which places strength and control above softness in order to capture both the essence of perfection and the spirit of the nation. Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) has danced since he could walk and is used to this structure, but he finds himself stuck between two polarizing worlds after a new male dancer named Irakli (Bachi Valishvili) evolves from an object of competition to one of desire. In private, they grow closer—at odds both with the binary roles they perform on the dance floor as well as the permeating threat of homophobic violence in their homeland—and the public repression of their desire bubbles up inside of them until it explodes. While these threats are real and taken seriously, this is by no means a tragedy. At several points, AND THEN WE DANCED is effortlessly sun-kissed and optimistic, underscored by an ABBA- and Robyn-laced soundtrack that encapsulates the infectious innocence of being young, gay, and in love. It brims with hope even in its darkest moments, walking the tightrope between tradition and progression with expert precision. Gelbakhiani gives a performance of a lifetime both as an actor and as a striking dancer; it's almost impossible to take your eyes off of him. AND THEN WE DANCED doesn’t simply yearn for a world that is “accepting” or “tolerant” of queer people—it dares for the world to see us for everything we are regardless of the hatred and violence that is thrown at us, especially globally. That we are still standing, we will keep fighting, and we will keep dancing in spite of it all. (2019, 106 min, DCP Digital) CC
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The University of Chicago's Green Line Performing Arts Center (329 E. Garfield Blvd.) hosts We Tell: Collaborative Knowledges on Thursday at 7pm. Screening are: IN THE GOOD OLD FASHIONED WAY (Herb E. Smith/Appalshop, 1973, 29 min), CRUSIN' J-TOWN (Duane Kubo/Visual Communications, 1974, 24 min), HERB SCHILLER READS THE NEW YORK TIMES #3: THE SUNDAY TIMES: 712 PAGES OF WASTE (DeeDee Halleck/Paper Tiger Television, 1981, 28 min), and SEEDS OF AWAKENING: THE EARLY NATION OF ISLAM IN PHILADELPHIA (Jullanar Abdul-Zahir, Furquan Khaldun, and W. Zein Nakhoda/New Africa Center, 2011, 15 min). With Jacqueline Stewart (Univ. of Chicago), Carmel Curtis (XFR Collective), and Margaret Caples (Community Film Workshop) in person. Digital Projection. Free admission.
The Conversations at the Edge series (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) presents South by Southeast (2017-19, approx. 60 min, Various Formats) on Saturday at Noon (note special day and time), with curator Greg de Cuir Jr. in person. Screening are works by Damir Čučić, Armando Lulaj, Igor Simić, Peter Lichter, Julia Lazarkova, Diana Vidrascu, belit sağ, and Igor Bošnjak; and in the regular Thursday at 6pm slot is Linda Mary Montano: Laughing, Crying, Living Art, with artist Montano in person. Montano will performatively discuss her body of work, present a selection of videos, and guide the audience through an interactive healing modality.
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: Ömer Lü̈tfi Akad's 1973 Turkish film GELIN (THE BRIDE) (97 min, Digital Projection) is on Friday at 7pm. Free admission.
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) presents Chicago Memories: Del Close, The Bleacher Bums, and The Lost Era of Vaudeville on Saturday at 7pm (SOLD OUT) and Sunday at 3pm, with Will Clinger in person. Screening are three WTTW-produced documentaries produced, directed, and hosted by Clinger: THE LEGEND OF DEL CLOSE (2000), VANISHING ACT: MEMORIES OF VAUDEVILLE (1996), and THE BLEACHER BUMS: RABID FANS OF WRIGLEY FIELD (1998).
The School of the Art Institute’s Department of Film, Video, New Media & Animation and SAIC’s Wellness Center present Trans Pictures: An Evening of Short Films Exploring Trans Lives on Wednesday at 6pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Screening are: FLOAT (Sam Berliner), FRAMING AGNES (Chase Joynt and Kristen Schilt), GENDER GAMES (Veronica Lopez and Meg Smaker), HERE WITH YOU (Nona Schamus), BURTON BEFORE AND AFTER (Courtney Hermann), and FLYING SOLO (Leslie Von Pless). With program curator Mickey R. Mahoney (filmmaker and SAIC professor) and Nick Adams (Director of Transgender Representation at GLAAD) in person. Free admission.
PO Box Collective (6900 N. Glenwood Ave.) screens local filmmaker Silvia Malagrino's 2005 US/Argentinean documentary BURNT ORANGES (90 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 7pm, with Malagrino in person. Free admission.
The Rebuild Foundation at the Stony Island Arts Bank (6760 S. Stony Island Ave.) screens George C. Wolfe’s 2017 made-for-television film THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS (93 min, Video Projection) on Sunday at 1pm. Free admission.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Sam De Jong's 2019 film GOLDIE (88 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week; William Wyler's 1953 film ROMAN HOLIDAY (119 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday and Sunday at 2pm; Marie Clémence Andriamonta-Paes' 2018 French documentary FAHAVALO, MADAGASCAR 1947 (90 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 7:45pm, with Andriamonta-Paes in person; Ehsan Khoshbakht's 2019 Iranian/UK documentary FILMFARSI (83 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 6:15pm and Sunday at 5pm; and Nima Javidi's 2019 Iranian film THE WARDEN (90 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Bong Joon-Ho’s 2019 South Korean film PARASITE (132 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday at 4pm; Hany Abu-Assad’s 2005 Palestinian film PARADISE NOW (93 min, 35mm) is on Sunday at 7pm; John McNaughton’s 1986 film HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (83 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 7pm; and Pablo Larraín’s 2012 Chilean film NO (118 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 7pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Céline Sciamma’s 2019 French film PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (121 min, DCP Digital) opens; Jan Komasa’s 2019 Polish film CORPUS CHRISTI (115 min, DCP Digital) continues; the CatVideo Fest is on Saturday and Sunday at Noon and Tuesday at 7pm; Haruka Fujita’s 2019 animated Japanese film VIOLET EVERGARDEN: ETERNITY AND THE AUTO MEMORY DOLL (90 min, DCP Digital; Subtitled Japanese-language version) is on Saturday at 11:30am; Danny Garcia’s 2019 documentary ROLLING STONE: LIFE AND DEATH OF BRIAN JONES (90 min, DCP Digital) is on Thursday at 7pm, with Jones’ daughter, Barbara Anne Marlon, in person; Richard Stanley’s 2019 film COLOR OUT OF SPACE (110 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight; Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) is on Friday at Midnight; and Jim Sharman’s 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at Midnight.
Facets Cinémathèque screens Josh and Benny Safdie's 2019 film UNCUT GEMS (135 min, DCP Digital) from Friday-Sunday (check website for showtimes); and presents the "Religion in the Frame" series from Sunday to Thursday. Screening in that are: Imre Gyongyossy and Barna Kabay's 1983 Hungarian film THE REVOLT OF JOB (105 min) is on Sunday at 7pm; Gabriel Axel's 1987 Danish film BABETTE'S FEAST (103 min) is on Monday at 7pm; Michael Ritchie's 1986 film THE GOLDEN CHILD (94 min) is on Tuesday at 7pm; Jaco Van Dormael's 2015 Belgian film THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT (113 min) is on Wednesday at 7pm; and Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's 2014 Israeli film GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM (115 min) is on Thursday at 7pm. All Digital Projection. Each screening in the series features a guest speaker and is hosted by Gretchen Helfrich. The "Religion in the Frame" screenings are free admission, with donations welcome.
CINE-LIST: February 21 - February 27, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Rob Christopher, Cody Corrall, Alexandra Ensign, JB Mabe, Michael Metzger, Scott Pfeiffer, Brian Welesko, Darnell Witt