CRUCIAL VIEWING
Moving Images: Avant-Garde Dance on Film (Experimental/Dance Film Revival)
Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Dance films are intimidatingly difficult to pull off. Filmmaker Sidney Peterson gets to the root of the trouble: "If dancing were basket-weaving, there would be no problem about its being relegated to the role of subject matter in a cinematic or televised message. The main difficulty arises, I believe, because dance too is an art of the moving image." Hell, even Maya Deren, who unarguably made some of the best dance films ever, threw up her hands: "Dance, for example, which, of all art forms would seem to profit most by cinematic treatment, actually suffers miserably." Considering the challenges, it's especially magical when someone pulls it off. And thankfully the films in this program presented in conjunction with an exhibition of Silke Otto-Knapp’s paintings at the Renaissance Society have some of that magic. The brilliant Babette Mangolte is better known as a cinematographer for Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Akerman, but she is a truly excellent filmmaker in her own right. Her film WATER MOTOR (1978, 16mm) features dancer Trisha Brown in a perfectly composed wide shot that makes only the most minor changes in response to Brown's movements. There's a great restraint, avoiding showy techniques; Mangolte knows how to perfectly balance the collision of camera and dancer. After the action runs in real-time, the film starts over at half-speed. The effect is fantastically edifying and poetic at the same time. Yvonne Rainer’s TRIO A (1978) is a similar film in content and framing, but gets a tiny bit flashier with its camera movements and cutaways to emphasize particular gestures. CHANNELS/INSERTS (1982) features Merce Cunningham as choreographer and Charles Atlas as director and editor. Atlas, with his Steadicam, becomes an active participant in the dance, swirling in and out of the choreography and bounding down hallways and across the studio space. There is a lot more non-human intervention in the work as well; stairs and doorframes are integrated into the dance and traveling mattes and other post-production techniques are used. Whereas the earlier two films create a gentle balance between the cinema and dance, this film has both elements running at a much higher pitch. Also, screening is video documentation of Yvonne Rainer’s Three Seascapes performed by Patricia Hoffbauer at Dia: Beacon in 2012. (1978-2012, 61 min total, 16mm and Digital Projection) JBM
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Followed by a discussion between Renaissance Society curator Karsten Lund, and UofC PhD candidate Tien-Tien Jong. Note that artist Silke Otto-Knapp, who selected the program and was originally scheduled to participate, will not be able to be present.
Anna Biller’s THE LOVE WITCH (Contemporary American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Monday, 9:30pm
THE LOVE WITCH is a remarkably dense pastiche, recreating elements of American melodramas, sexploitation comedies, and low-budget horror films from the 60s and early 70s with loving care and deadpan assurance. Writer-director Anna Biller (who also designed the sets and costumes) invokes Radley Metzger, Elizabeth Taylor vehicles like BUTTERFIELD 8, Stephanie Rothman’s THE VELVET VAMPIRE, George Romero’s SEASON OF THE WITCH, and likely many other cult films and filmmakers. The mise-en-scene is striking and loud, at times verging on Kenneth Anger levels of expressiveness; the sex is lurid and silly, the politics blunt and sincere; and Biller demonstrates such command over tone that even the odd pauses in the dialogue feel carefully considered. The heroine, Elaine, is a California witch living a life of leisure and looking for a man to love. While she manages to lures a number of men to her bed—employing a combination of sexual allure, magic spells, and burlesque dancing—she never lands on a lasting relationship. Part of the problem is that Elaine’s magic turns her lovers into pathetic devotees; another is that Elaine’s lovers keep dying on her. The lovers’ demises represent grotesque exaggerations of the ways in which women can feel disappointed by men; these scenes communicate a certain raw honesty that used to exist commonly in disreputable genres when filmmakers were given a high degree of creative freedom. THE LOVE WITCH is a tribute to that era and a provocation for ours, calling into question the expectations that women have of men, and vice-versa. (2016, 120 min, 35mm) BS
CHICAGO EUROPEAN UNION FILM FESTIVAL
Gene Siskel Film Center
The Siskel’s European Union Film Festival opens this week and runs through April 2. We’ll have select reviews each week, but note that most of the higher-profile films have press holds (no reviews allowed) until their later theatrical runs.
Nevio Marasović’s COMIC SANS (Croatia)
Friday, 6pm and Wednesday, 7:45pm
It’s a tale as old as time: a sad man, broken by the end of a relationship, finds solace in less than ideal coping mechanisms: excessive use of drugs and alcohol, breakup sex, sex with strangers, and anything else to fill the void of a broken existence. It’s an often-used formula, sure, but it’s not one without legs. COMIC SANS, Croatian filmmaker Nevio Marasović’s foray into this formula, follows Alan (Janko Popović Volarić) whose career blows up in his face in an exceptionally disastrous post-breakup spiral. Faced with the weight of his mistakes, Alan decides to live with his estranged father in the small, picturesque island of Vis—but when faced with another old flame and her new significant other, it’s clear that his destructive tendencies are hard to ditch. COMIC SANS is a fascinating look at a man who makes mistakes, but it never coddles him or makes him out to be some misunderstood victim. His problems are his own, and he’s the only one who must be held accountable. COMIC SANS is largely an insular look at Alan's psyche, but it's also about the complicated dynamics of family and how we navigate relationships with other people—intermixed with glimmers of wry humor and plenty of self-pity. COMIC SANS doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does introduce some interesting ideas about the pervasiveness of masculinity, sex, and our compulsion to comfort men who don’t always deserve it. (2018, 103 min, DCP Digital) CC
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Attila Szasz’s TALL TALES (Hungary)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 5pm and Monday, 7:30pm
Post-World War II Europe has proven to be one of the most evocative locations in which to set a film thanks to the utter chaos left in the war’s wake, and is used admirably in Attila Szasz’s Hungarian film TALL TALES. The film postures itself as a neo-noir in which Hankó (Tamas Szabó Kimmel) takes advantage of bereaving mothers and a longing lover, pretending to be the best friend of a presumably lost soldier. As new emotions flourish, the soldier reappears, complicating matters for Hankó and his newfound love interest and leading to a murderous revenge plot. Director Szasz’s focus on a con recalls Christian’s Petzold’s PHOENIX, but with its point of view flipped to that of a soldier instead of a casualty of war. A stunningly stylized take on the man-returned-from-war trope, TALL TALES is a brooding look at a world full of uncertainty and the steps people take trying to mitigate it. (2019, 112 min, DCP Digital) KC
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Radu Dragomir's MO (Romania)
Saturday, 8pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Despite its whirlwind setup (American audiences may be disoriented by Romania’s collegiate administration: can a professor publicly demand to see what's under someone’s dress? And can he by fiat remove a student from the university?), MO settles in to an itching, building discomfort. Two women take an overnight train for an economics exam; one of the women has been tasked with looking after the other, never leaving her side. They prepare to cheat, a phone is confiscated, and, lackadaisically, they plan to re-sit the exam the next day. In the evening, the women are driftless; they bicker amiably about studying and eating and other small-scale priorities, but they end up meeting Professor Phone-Confiscator in hopes that he will become Professor Phone-Returner and they can return to cheat again tomorrow. They meet him in a café; he demands that they have a drink, nay, that they come back to his house for dinner. They oblige; how do you say no to someone who pontificates to the point of such airlessness? Especially when he’s already tried to boot you out of school? You don’t. And he talks and talks and talks, and he shows off his DVD collection like such an overgrown child that you feel sorry for him, almost, but you also find yourself wishing one of these women would smash a lamp over his head or something. But of course they don’t, and the feeling is the same as keeping aware of who’s behind you as you walk down the street: disquieting, banal, potent with risk. (2019, 77 min, DCP Digital) CM & DM
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Marie Kreutzer’s THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET (Austria)
Sunday, 3pm and Monday, 7:30pm
Fans of Maren Ade’s TONI ERDMANN will likely experience some déjà vu while watching Marie Kreutzer’s THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET. Like TONI ERDMANN, it centers on a successful but emotionally isolated businesswoman and presents her professional milieu in thorough, almost documentary-like fashion. The film also follows a similar narrative trajectory in which a Type-A heroine gradually loses control of her life after resuming her relationship with a long-neglected family member, in this case a schizophrenic older sister. But where ERDMANN was ultimately a comedy, THE GROUND BENEATH MY FEET tells a somber, even tragic story with some engrossing passages of suspense. Lola (Valerie Pachner, last seen here as Fani in Terrence Malick’s A HIDDEN LIFE) is a highly paid business consultant who’s addicted to her high-stress lifestyle. She often works 48-hour shifts, acts competitive with her coworkers, and seems to derive pleasure from telling her clients to lay off their employees. Kreutzer makes it clear that Lola invests herself in work to compensate for a lack of meaningful human relationships. (Lola may be involved with her direct superior, Elise, but the relationship seems primarily sexual.) Lola’s troubled sister, Conny (Pia Hierzegger), reminds Lola of her connection to others, something she regards as a burden. Early in the movie, Lola gets a phone call from a hospital where Conny’s been admitted after a suicide attempt. The first thing she asks: “Is she dead?” As Conny’s legal guardian, Lola begrudgingly sees to her sister’s hospitalization and treatment while devoting every other waking moment to a big project at work. Kreutzer generates some nice tension in suggesting that Lola’s life could fall apart at any second; this, in turn, raises interesting moral questions about whether we’d rather see Lola succeed in her career or in her relationship with her sister. Pachner delivers a performance refreshingly unconcerned with fostering audience sympathy—we’re meant to weigh her character’s choices with cold, almost Premingerian rationalism. (2019, 108 min, DCP Digital) BS
ONION CITY EXPERIMENTAL FILM + VIDEO FESTIVAL
Please note that this screening has been canceled.
Presented by Chicago Filmmakers, the Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival opens on Thursday and continues through Sunday, March 15. The opening night program, TWO SISTERS, is co-presented by SAIC's Conversations at the Edge series.
Beatrice Gibson’s TWO SISTERS (UK/France)
Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) – Thursday, 7pm (6pm Reception)
Comparing cinema to theatre, Gertrude Stein observed that cinema shares “the same impulse to solve the problem of time in relation to emotion...the same impulse to solve the problem of the relation between seeing and hearing...in short the inevitable problem of anybody living in the composition of the present time.” All three problems are felt acutely in the work of British artist-filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, who inaugurates the 30th Onion City Film Festival with a program of two recent, thematically-linked films. Of the two, I HOPE I’M LOUD WHEN I’M DEAD (2018, 20 min) seems especially concerned with the problem of living in our unbearable current composition. A sort of prayer for deliverance from the chaos of the present, Gibson’s film juxtaposes scenes of her young children at play with found footage of contemporary catastrophes, from the Grenfell tower fire to the collapse of Arctic ice shelves. Against this cascade of images, reflecting the moral and mortal anxiety of motherhood in the age of Trump and Brexit, Gibson arrays radical poetic recitations by and from CA Conrad, Eileen Myles, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich, texts that offer something like what Rebecca Solnit describes as “hope in the dark.” Addressing her son on the soundtrack, Gibson explains, “I wanted to put all these voices in one frame for you...Grief, war, destruction, fear: it’s almost all ok because these voices exist.” A playful finale, reenacting one of modern cinema’s most exalted scenes, resolves the tension between Gibson’s dense, distressing montage and the multi-voiced creative redemption offered by the soundtrack. But “the problem of the relation between seeing and hearing” remains at the center of DEUX SOEURS QUI NE SONT PAS SOEURS [TWO SISTERS WHO ARE NOT SISTERS] (2019, 22 min), which takes its name from a film script written by Gertrude Stein. The central themes, again, are the solicitudes of motherhood and politics, but Gibson is further decentered here, and the voices of her collaborators (including filmmakers Ana Vaz and Basma Alsharif, educator Diocouda Diaoune, poet Alice Notley, musician and performance artist Adam Christensen, and cinematographer Ben Rivers) come more strongly to the fore. Visually, the saturated widescreen compositions, musical performances, and flashes of dramatic narrative—a missing poodle, an altercation, an extended reverie in an empty discotheque—invoke arthouse and music-video aesthetics, but the soundtrack’s recitations, reflections, and confessions keep the film grounded in a personal mode. In the penultimate scene, Gibson brilliantly puts these diaristic and hyper-cinematic registers into direct confrontation. Alsharif appears on a television screen in the club where Vaz is dancing and drinking, and the soundtrack fuses the music Vaz hears with a letter read by Alsharif to her unborn child; the moment powerfully synthesizes the film’s conflicting affects. It’s a work that keeps running off in opposite directions, but this is no shortcoming: its various characters, like the divergent strains of genre that it absorbs, reflect a range of alternative strategies to solving the problem of time (the present and the future) in relation to emotion. (2018-19, 42 min total, DCP Digital) MM
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Note: Filmmaker Beatrice Gibson will no longer be appearing in person.
JCC CHICAGO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
The JCC Chicago Jewish Film Festival continues through March 15 at various locations.
Yaron Zilberman's INCITEMENT (Israel)
CMX CinéBistro at Old Orchard, Skokie — Sunday, 3:15pm
Century 12 Evanston/CineArts 6 - Sunday, 7:30pm
From the perspective of the diaspora, recent Israeli cinema can look sadly predictable: a gentle ribbing of the ultra-Orthodox, but nothing that could actually offend them; a lament for a vanished age of liberal consensus, without any expression of culpability or critical thought about the moribund state of the Labor Party; a desire for peace and understanding with the Palestinian people, if not the stomach for the radical reorientation of Israeli society this would require. Samuel Maoz's FOXTROT, the 2017 winner of Israel's Ophir Award, ends with a middle-aged couple lamenting the dance of violence and retribution in which they've been swept up—passively, as if the Israeli people have no political agency, no avenue for registering a dissenting view or building a new political coalition around it. In this context, Yaron Zilberman's INCITEMENT, the 2019 Ophir recipient, is a swift punch to the gut, a taboo meditation on recent Israeli history that locates and names the maladies coursing through the body politic. INCITEMENT is nominally a handheld, faux-verité account of the radicalization of Yigal Amir, following him down the perverse path that would culminate with his 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Some critics and festival programmers have been hung up on the question of whether the film glamorizes or humanizes Amir, but though he's in every scene, INCITEMENT isn't especially about him; as the title implies, the film's greatest strength is its uncanny evocation of the climate of equivocation and fear in the mid-'90s, the ubiquity of violent rhetoric in Orthodox settler communities, the absurdly unhinged comparisons between Rabin and Hitler in the wake of the Oslo accords, and all the rest of the right-wing fervor that boiled over inevitably, tragically, definitively in November '95. With its scenes of bored teenagers in communes transfixed by recitations of Maimonides and endless Talmudic exegeses, INCITEMENT occasionally suggests the negative-image of an Olivier Assayas film: a diabolical hang-out movie that regards reactionary youth with an intense, near-anthropological stupor. If not Amir, INCITEMENT implies, someone else—anyone else—would have taken his place. To that end, the most heroic (and, so far, fruitless) task of Zilberman's movie is drawing together reams of archival footage, effortlessly interweaved with the film's precise recreations, to remind us that many of the instigators of Rabin's assassination are still with us—not least Benjamin Netanyahu, seen late in the film stoking the flames at a terrifying anti-Oslo rally. Telling Amir's story is the least of it—INCITEMENT works because it never loses sight of the fact that he was a hateful nobody, ignorantly abetting some of the most powerful forces in his society. He's perhaps less than a perpetrator, and also much less than a victim—he knows better than anyone where this dance leads. (2019, 123 min, DCP Digital) KAW
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Dror Zahavi’s CRESCENDO (Germany)
Century 12 Evanston/CineArts 6 – Saturday, 5:15pm
Logan Theatre – Sunday, 3:30pm
Landmark Renaissance Place Cinema, Highland Park – Sunday, 8pm
There have been many approaches to reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable differences of Israelis and Palestinians, with most of them focused on bringing young people from both sides of the conflict together to get beyond the rhetoric and see each other, first and foremost, as people. Dror Zahavi’s CRESCENDO centers on one such effort to build rapport by creating a chamber orchestra composed of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians who will perform together in a concert for peace to be staged in Germany. German conductor Eduard Sporck (Peter Simonischek), whose Nazi parents were concentration camp physicians, is the man who must find a way to get these angry young men and women to make beautiful music together on and off the concert stage. Zahavi’s set-up is involving, if a bit farfetched in expecting a conductor to be an effective mediator, but he leans a little too heavily on the contrast between the comfortable lives of the well-training Israeli musicians and the chaotic lives of the oppressed Palestinians. The progression of his Romeo and Juliet subplot doesn’t make a lot of sense and tips the film into schematic melodrama that undermines the strongly built relationships he has developed. A near-miss, but still interesting. (2019, 106 min, Digital Projection) MF
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Max Lewkowicz’s FIDDLER: A MIRACLE OF MIRACLES (Documentary)
Century 12 Evanston/CineArts 6 – Saturday, 1pm
CMX Arlington Heights – Sunday, 7pm
For my money a best of the fest, FIDDLER: A MIRACLE OF MIRACLES is a packed 92 minutes of intellectual stimulation and emotional fulfillment. Director Max Lewkowicz doesn’t miss a thing in this definitive look at the development of the phenomenally constructed and wildly successful musical Fiddler on the Roof, which premiered on Broadway in 1964. He deftly covers the source material from Sholem Aleichem, even burrowing into the Yiddish writer’s antipathy for matchmakers in a close reading of the underlying brutality of the song “Matchmaker”; a clip from Alexis Granowsky’s JEWISH LUCK (1925), a film based on Aleichem’s sinister creation, Menakhem Mendl, shows that Mendl’s “matchmaking” scheme amounted to trafficking Jewish women to brothels in Argentina. He threads us through the production numbers from the beginning of the musical to the end, using excerpts from various productions and the 1971 Norman Jewison film, and commentary from a wide variety of luminaries: actors, including four Tevyes (Michael Bernardi [son of former Tevye Herschel Bernardi], Danny Burstein, Steven Skybell, and Chaim Topol); Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, and Joseph Stein, the writers of the lyrics, music, and book, respectively; and even the obligatory appearance of Hamilton phenom Lin-Manuel Miranda, who, for once, actually contributes something meaningful to a documentary about something he wasn’t part of. We learn that the title and set design were strongly influenced by the paintings of Marc Chagall. We learn that reviews of the first out-of-town tryout in Detroit—not written because of a newspaper strike—would have been bad; how much reworking the show went through under the inspired, but tyrannical, rule of director Jerome Robbins. We see parts of a Japanese production and learn that the Japanese team wondered whether an American audience could understand a work that was so Japanese in feeling. The amount of information that is skillfully conveyed is truly breathtaking, but more astonishing is the depth of feeling communicated through the performances and interviews. Topol tearing up when remembering the last scene he shot in Jewison’s movie—saying good-bye to Hodel (Michele Marsh) in “Far From the Home I Love”—had me choking up as well. I’m really only scratching the surface of what this documentary offers. You may not think you need to know more about Fiddler on the Roof, but, trust me, you do. (2019, 92 minutes, Digital Projection) MF
70MM FILM FESTIVAL
Music Box Theatre
The 70mm Film Festival continues through March 19. In addition to the films below, also screening this week are Kenneth Branagh’s MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017, 114 min, 70mm) and Alfonso Cuarón’s ROMA (2018, 135 min, 70mm). Check the Music Box website for showtimes.
John McTiernan’s LAST ACTION HERO (US)
Friday, 10:30pm, Saturday, Noon, and Monday 7pm
A commercial disaster on its release in 1993, LAST ACTION HERO is the kind of would-be blockbuster that is surprising it even got made. The plot is relatively simple: when day-dreaming youngster Danny stumbles across a magic ticket that allows him to enter into the world of movies, he decides to go into the latest installment of an action/blockbuster franchise starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack Slater IV. Once inside the movie he creates unintended havoc by merging the “real" world with the film world, allowing the movie’s villains a chance to escape their cinematic fates. HERO packs its filmic references deep inside a sun-dappled cinematic fantasia, where everything lives and moves in one. Sharon Stone’s murderous author from BASIC INSTINCT shows up, along with the T-1000 of TERMINATOR 2, along with a bounty of familiar character actors. HERO feels firmly rooted in the early 1990’s, yet it also somehow feels out of time, in a possible future or alternate reality, one that has Tina Turner as the mayor of a major city, and where America has turned an even more unforgiving eye at the cruelty of the world, and a kid’s only respite is wandering into a decrepit movie theater owned by a kindly old projectionist (something that in itself feels highly fictional). Its worlds and realities blur at a certain point, even though the film signals its reality jumps, but oddly it’s this slipperiness that makes the film gel. What seem like storytelling mistakes are actually director John McTiernan sending-up action movie expectations and conventions, yet still maintaining the genre’s pulsing motion. It takes an audience further out than they were probably willing to go at the time. Take for example a scene in which Danny shows up for junior high English class; is shown Laurence Olivier’s film HAMLET, by his teacher, played by Olivier’s real wife, Joan Plowright; as Danny watches, the 1948 original morphs into McTiernan’s zany bastardization of the Shakespeare play starring Schwarzenegger; and finally transforming into a Chuck Jones cartoon in Danny’s living room. Earlier in the film when Danny is re-watching the opening of Jack Slater III—a scene involving a Slater’s child being thrown from a roof by a villainous Tom Noonan—he expresses disappointment when the scene cuts out before he can see it again. It appears to be the fault of the old projector, but it’s really LAST ACTION HERO itself announcing its disruptive intentions. McTiernan is deliberately walking a line regarding cinema violence; indulging in it while also seemingly critiquing it through absurd excess. The film keeps its fingers on both pulses without succumbing to soapbox mediocrity. Violence has always been essential to movies, only never has it been made to question itself so thoughtfully in a summer tentpole film. The hyper-masculine action stars of the 80’s were starting to dim by the time of LAST ACTION HERO, but it and McTiernan’s next film, DIE HARD: WITH A VENGEANCE, helped cap one of the more endearing genres of the 80’s and 90s, while acknowledging their roots in our own discernible reality, where tough guy posturing and self-seriousness rarely result in heroics. (1993, 131 min, 70mm) JD
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Tobe Hooper’s LIFEFORCE (US/British)
Thursday, 6:30pm (plus additional shows next week)
LIFEFORCE is one of the absolutely nuttiest film experiences, complete with an iron guard of kitsch that may be difficult to pierce, but that is in line with the complex themes and vision distinct to Tobe Hooper. Hooper’s films are unique; they awkwardly refuse an identifiable moral position, they suggest a long past before dooming the reality of the present, and they hold out no hope of a peaceful, non-destructive catharsis for the viewer at the end. That isn’t to say he creates bleak or deliberately open-ended films; rather, films whose finales don’t provide tidy resolutions. LIFEFORCE starts with the discovery an enormous spaceship floating within the debris of Haley’s comet. Inside the ship, are glass coffins containing the bodies of three space-vampires, which are brought back to Earth, setting off a series of personal and global crises. Hooper has said that the film is “about relationships. It’s about the relationship between men and women and how that can turn, how there can be a dominance in a relationship that can flip flop back and forth […] men dealing with the feminine mystique or the feminine terror […] the feminine inside themselves.” Hooper, tasked by Canon, the low-budget genre-specializing production company, with adapting a book called The Space Vampires, was able to craft a deeply personal, hallucinatory, and often comedic allegorical observance about male sexuality. The widescreen space Hooper employs is breathtaking, and he uses colors and shadows effectively in his particular brand of scuzzed up satire masquerading as horror. Ultimately, he made something way outside of the mainstream, something that was so out of step for the time. LIFEFORCE is certainly kitschy and comedic, with Hooper himself confirming the odd intended mixture of tones. Post-POLTERGEIST, Hooper leaned in more on his blackly comedic and exaggerated sensibilities, allowing them to become more prominent, culminating in films like THE MANGLER and the extremely under-seen THE TOOLBOX MURDERS. While Hooper’s films were never as explicitly political as his fellow contemporary horror film master George Romero, LIFEFORCE captures the dawn of a new America, that of the 80s, one of rampant excess and hedonism. LIFEFORCE pairs well with his late-80s film SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, both films of considerable camp, they also contain unexpected emotional weight, with Hooper dearly embracing the idea of the doomed couple, forced to grapple with the imperfections and dangers of their love; l’amour fou for the midnight crowd. (1985, 116 min, 70mm) JD
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Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s WEST SIDE STORY (American Revival)
Saturday, 3:30pm, Sunday, 7pm, and Monday, 2:30pm
The United States is a young country with an old history. Rising to the highest heights of power in the blink of an eye through rapid expansion across a broad land rich in natural resources, achieving unity far before the much more ancient Europe even made a start at it, and now prematurely gray as it struggles to adapt to a global economy and a shattered self-image, the American story has been a tough one to tell. Perhaps with the exception of the Great American Novel, Huckleberry Finn, no work of art has broken through as a wide-ranging reflection not only of who we want to be, but also of who we really are. So it may be a bold declaration to make, but if I had to pick the one work that has been and will continue to be the greatest telling of the Great American Story, it would be WEST SIDE STORY. Riding on the timeless popularity of tragic love as rendered by William Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet while delivering that play’s crucial message about the costs of hate, WEST SIDE STORY poses a direct challenge to the complacent belief in the American Dream and the elusive principle for which it stands, “liberty and justice for all,” through the most American narrative of all—immigration. Director Harold Robbins (Robert Wise was brought in when Robbins was fired), composer Leonard Bernstein, book writer Arthur Laurents, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim—all members of despised and persecuted groups in American society—crafted a coming-of-age tale for America itself and those who would lose themselves in its myth through its focus on adolescents struggling to mature and find a place for themselves in the world. The creative team centered the rivalry among the children of poor European immigrants precariously established in New York City and those from the American territory of Puerto Rico who moved to the mainland during the 1950s. As Sondheim’s lyrics to “America” ironically suggest (“Nobody knows in America/Puerto Rico’s in America”), the members of the Sharks might have an earlier claim to being American than do the teens who make up the Jets. This conflict already distinguishes WEST SIDE STORY from Shakespeare’s blood feud of two aristocratic families as a pointedly American concern. The film features a magnetic cast of dancers and actors, with George Chakiris and Rita Moreno as standouts. Natalie Wood was put in the unfortunate position of being an Anglo playing a Latina and disliking costar Richard Beymer, the man she was supposed to be passionately in love with, but her professionalism (if not her dismal Puerto Rican accent) carry the day. All of the singing was dubbed, with veteran singing double Marni Nixon taking on Maria’s songs and Jimmy Bryant taking on Beymer’s. This is understandable considering the difficulties of Bernstein’s operatic score and does not, in my opinion, detract from the overall effect. The otherwise soundstage-bound film opens up in the “Prologue,” which was shot on location in New York, thus creating a mise en scène of the contested turf that lingers in the audience’s mind as the rest of the film progresses. Robbins, comfortable with stage choreography, manages to combine the best of both worlds throughout the film. His work in the opening “Prologue” illustrates the Jets’ exuberant dominance of their turf. Robbins moves them wordlessly from playground, to street, to basketball court in a combination of random, everyday movements by individual Jets that build to a coordinated dance. Jets leader Riff (Russ Tamblyn) whoops happily as some children run past on the street and leaps joyfully with his gang, only to run immediately into Sharks leader Bernardo (Chakiris). Bernardo handles their taunts, only to strike an obviously symbolic red stripe on a wall with his fist. Small gestures again build, this time menacingly, and the “Prologue” ends in an all-out brawl. Camera cuts, overhead shots, close-ups of smug and resentful looks form a dance of their own, one the dancers assault by running directly at the camera lens, forcing it to cut away. Robbins may have been a novice filmmaker, but his dancer’s understanding of space and how a frame can open and choke it is second only to Gene Kelly’s. Many music scholars have commented on Bernstein’s use of tritones—playing a key note followed by a note three whole tones away from the key note—which is an important method of introducing dissonance in Western harmony. During the Middle Ages, tritones were considered diabolus in musica (“devil in music”) for being hard to sing in tune. While many people consider “Maria” one of the most beautiful songs in the score, it is sobering to realize that its first two notes form a tritone; considering that Maria’s admonishment to Tony to stop the rumble ends in the deaths of her brother, Tony’s best friend, and Tony himself, she certainly does seem to have done the devil’s work, however unwittingly. Again and again, the songs and characters of WEST SIDE STORY communicate the need to belong. Maria and Tony, caught in the ethnic divide, find their sense of place in each other, which they affirm in the moving “Somewhere,” a place that is destroyed when Tony is gunned down by Maria’s formerly gentle suitor Chino (Jose De Vega). And a very interesting character nicknamed Anybodys (Susan Oakes) exemplifies a different kind of exclusion; dressing and acting like a boy, she rejects society’s assigned role for her and is, in turn, rejected by the Jets. But she refuses to go away or give up on being a part of the action. At a time of great social foment, WEST SIDE STORY offered a narrative to help Americans find a new, more worthwhile image for a more mature and realizable Great American Story. (1961, 153 min, 70mm) MF
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Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (British/US)
Friday, 7pm, Saturday, 10:30pm, Sunday, 11:30am, Tuesday, 7pm, and Thursday, 2:30 and 9pm
For many, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is not simply a masterpiece, but the apotheosis of moviegoing itself. In no other film is the experience of seeing images larger than oneself linked so directly to contemplating humanity's place in the universe. Kubrick achieves this (literally) awesome effect through a number of staggering devices: a narrative structure that begins at "the dawn of man" and ends with the final evolution of humankind; one-of-a-kind special effects, the result of years of scientific research, that forever changed visual representations of outer space; a singular irony that renders the most familiar human interaction beguiling; blasts of symphonic music that heighten the project of sensory overload. It isn't hyperbolic to assert, as film scholar Michel Chion has in his book Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey, that this could be the most expensive experimental film ever made; it's certainly the most abstracted of all big-budget productions. As in most of Kubrick's films, the pervasive ambiguity—the product of every detail having been realized so thoroughly as to seem independent of an author—ensures a different experience from viewing to viewing. Much criticism has noted the shifting nature of "thinking" computer HAL-9000, the "star" of the movie's longest section, who can seem evil, pathetic, or divine depending on one's orientation to the film; less often discussed is the poker-faced second movement, largely set in the ultra-professional meeting rooms of an orbiting space station. Is this a satire of Cold War diplomacy (something like a drier follow-up to DR. STRANGELOVE)? An allegory about the limitations of scientific knowledge? Like the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence that makes up most of the film's final movement--an astonishing piece of abstract expressionist art every bit the equal of the Gyorgy Ligeti composition that accompanies it—one can never know concretely what it all "means," nor would one ever want to. (1968, 142 min, 70mm) BS
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Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE (Contemporary American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Tuesday, 7pm
At the beginning of Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE, a mother says, "The nuns taught us there are two ways through life—the way of nature and the way of grace." Shortly after, her son, a middle-aged architect named Jack O'Brien, remembers the death of his younger brother, R.L., at the age of nineteen. Jack then travels back to his idyllic childhood in 1950s Waco, Texas to find this brother that he lost. In a larger sense, THE TREE OF LIFE explores the nature of being, including those aspects of it neither children nor adults understand. It questions birth and death throughout the history of time, beginning with the origin of the universe, continuing through the evolution of the species, and finally to the untimely death of this one young man. Malick renders the small family at the center of the story as grand as the life of the universe itself. Why do we not see the world this way? What prevents our sense of wonder? We no longer experience life, so we turn to cinema. TREE OF LIFE appears to be a collection of memories and imaginings. It is a film of images more than of words. Malick focuses on imagery of the family and, in particular, the three boys, capturing them in close-up and only natural light. The audience often views the spontaneous unfolding of life from a child's eyes, which look up to encounter the world. Malick's camera behaves like a human being in its own right, expressing a variety of emotions in its movement. He films the world, both great and small, with such reverence that every image of it is truly beautiful. To return to the film's beginning, the mother continues, "You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. It accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it, too. Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy and all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you whatever comes." THE TREE OF LIFE is a man's testament to Spirit that captures the phenomenon of being in its glory. (2011, 139 min, 35mm) CW
Emily Railsback’s OUR BLOOD IS WINE (New Documentary)
Comfort Film at Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) — Wednesday, 8pm (Free Admission)
Craft beer. Locally sourced. Organic. Farm-to-table. Heirloom. These are the mantras of our current moment in foodie history, and there is little that adherents to these food principles will not do to find new sources of gastronomic inspiration. In Emily Railsback’s OUR BLOOD IS WINE, award-winning, Chicago-based sommelier Jeremy Quinn, whose resume includes stints at Bluebird, Telegraph, and Webster’s Wine Bar, leads a trek through the regions that make up the Republic of Georgia in search of wine. Quinn, whose championing of naturally made European wines won him a spot on Food & Wine’s 2012 Sommeliers of the Year list, became somewhat obsessed with wine made in qvervi—large, clay vats that are filled with the juice, skins, and stalks of locally grown grapes, sealed, and buried over the winter to ferment. This uniquely Georgian wine-making technique is thousands of years old, but during the Soviet occupation of Georgia, vineyards were confiscated for collective farms that turned wine into an industrial product that the traditional winemakers in the region call “garbage.” Railsback, shooting with an iPhone 6, shows all the steps in the handcrafting, transporting, and placement of qvervis in the wine cellars—no, not racks of wine bottles, but rather large, deep holes in the ground—of a handful of Georgian winemakers who are carrying on the tradition. She interviews an archaeologist who shows that the basic form of a qvervi hasn’t changed for centuries. She records a young collector of heirloom grape cultivars that he plans to plant in an abandoned terrace vineyard. And she and Quinn taste a lot of wine. It probably isn’t possible to get a bottle of these individually crafted wines anywhere but the places where they are made, but the Georgian spirit, which one winemaker says lives on in the wine that is fertilized by the blood of countless Georgians slaughtered by successive waves of invaders, can be tasted in this heartfelt documentary. (2018, 78 min, Digital Projection) MF
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Director Emily Railsback tentatively in person.
Mitchell Leisen’s EASY LIVING (American Revival)
Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Park Ridge Public Library, 20 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge) - Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
The entire screwball subgenre could be encapsulated by two comedic set pieces from Mitchell Leisen’s EASY LIVING: first, a food fight set at an automat (a type of low-brow restaurant once called “the Maxim's of the disenfranchised" by Neil Simon); and second, a flirtatious slip-and-slide in a luxury bathtub the size of a kiddie pool, with embellishments to rival even the most ostentatious sculpture garden. These scenes embody the explorations of class and sex (or the conspicuous lack of it) that comprise the most effective screwball comedies—this certainly being one of them—complete with jocose humor and straight-up slapstick to sweeten the deal. Jean Arthur stars as Mary Smith, a beautiful, young, down-on-her-luck woman who has a fur coat fall in her lap whilst on the top level of a bus. Seeking its owner, she meets J.B. Ball (Edward Arnold), a bullish banker (the Bull of Broad Street, to be exact) who had thrown the coat, belonging to his spend-happy wife, from the roof of their penthouse apartment. Mary accepts the coat and a hat—and a lesson about interest—though what seems like merely a fortuitous meeting turns into something more. As with any screwball film, detailing its labyrinthine plot is an exercise in joyful futility, but it should go without saying that Mary meets a guy, in this case J.B.’s son, John (Ray Milland), who’d left the nest to seek financial independence by working at the aforementioned automat. Also in the mix is a French hotelier who attempts to evade foreclosure by housing Mary, J.B.’s supposed mistress, in his luxury hotel, where she and John then attempt to figure out the aforementioned bathtub. Preston Sturges wrote this Depression-era Cinderella story, somewhat early in a career that would become synonymous with screwball; the dialogue is appropriately daft and sometimes heedful, as when a disgruntled chef tells J.B., “Go and fry yourself in lard, you dirty capitalist!” Jean Arthur’s is my favorite performance of the bunch—is there an actress whose literal voice better exemplifies the screwball tone? She and Arnold provide the foundation out of which the other actors’ performances grow, the supporting characters—and even lead Milland—benefitting from their dedication to respective extremes. That said, Leisen’s direction is what really sets the film apart, specifically his commitment to the more cosmetic aspects of the mise-en-scene; I can’t imagine any other director putting the same level of focus on a tour of a luxury hotel room, Leisen having started out in the art and costume departments before moving into the director’s chair. It’s reported that he personally oversaw Arthur’s hair and wardrobe, and that her lavish furs and jewelry were genuine, elements that seem incidental but lend an air of elegance to the inanity. (All this may go against the genre’s inherent subversiveness with regards to depictions of class, but gosh, it sure is pretty.) It’s also reported that this attention made the notoriously nervous Arthur more comfortable on set, likely contributing to her exceptional performance. All told, winsome absurdity and unexpected sophistication, informed by Leisen's attention to detail, make this a screwball gem rather than a diamond in the rough. (1937, 89 min, Digital Projection) KS
South Side Irish Parade Film Festival
Tomm Moore's THE SECRET OF KELLS (International Animation Revival)
Beverly Arts Center - Saturday, 3pm
THE SECRET OF KELLS is a slender and simple story, light on the usual Disney and Pixar-style comic relief and plot machinations. Instead it makes use of the origin myth of Ireland's national treasure, an illuminated manuscript known as the Book of Kells, to explore an extraordinary hodge-podge of visual styles, some stunning, others less so. The major division of style is between the Stepan Zavrel-style environments and the unarticulated Cartoon Network-style characters that inhabit them. Art Director Ross Stewart creates atmospheres that are so divine it's hard to believe they are populated with such schematic humans, including racial caricatures that really don't fly anymore. There is one very charming character with some texture (on his face and clothes); he's a kind of monastic Willie Nelson. But the humans are beside the point: this movie makes radical use of perspective, presenting you with panoramic and bird's eye view at the same time, then dissolving into a kind of boundary-less digital snow-globe world, not laboring to explain these episodes rationally. Long sections of the film are wordless, and better for it. The visual language borrows from Insular artistic tradition but it isn't weighed down by faithful mimicry. The scenes that are built to resemble illuminated manuscripts are formidable, but they give way gracefully to Australian aboriginal geometries and watercolor worlds that resemble Eastern European children's book painting. And there are always enough obviously digital movement and lighting effects that the aesthetic doesn't turn into one big, false nostalgic vision. (2009, 75 min, Digital Projection) JF
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Carol Reed's ODD MAN OUT (British Revival)
Beverly Arts Center - Saturday, 7pm
It seems improbable at this late date that Carol Reed should still need rescuing from his own accomplishments with erstwhile screenwriter Graham Greene—namely, THE FALLEN IDOL (1948), THE THIRD MAN (1949), and OUR MAN IN HAVANA (1959)—but due in part to the undeniable deliciousness of this trio, and the fact that they are the only Reed films to generally see revival, the rest of his oeuvre typically gets dismissed on the strength of lukewarm reviews and career summaries that highlight the unevenness of his overall output. As such, it is all the more imperative to treasure the occasional screening of that ugly duckling of Reed's visible (at least insofar as home video) corpus, 1947's ODD MAN OUT: a work of unvarnished Catholic pessimism about the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, and almost as discomfiting a mixture of religious allegory, poetic realism, and hardboiled thriller as Frank Borzage's loopy STRANGE CARGO (1940)—albeit never crossing the line into outright fantasy, and with a profoundly hopeless cosmology, by comparison. "I know no other film which conveys such utter despair," wrote documentary editor and novelist Dai Vaughan in his excellent BFI monograph on ODD MAN, and it's true that there are few films—with or without allegorical baggage—to treat their protagonists (in this case, James Mason, though often subsumed by the rest of Reed's superb ensemble) with so casual a fatalism. This odd and portentous hybrid will never go down as easy as the Greenes, but that's all the more reason to pay attention and give it, and Reed, their due. (1947, 115 min, Digital Projection) JD
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Both films are showing as the "South Side Irish Parade Film Festival."
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Kelly Reichardt's 2016 film CERTAIN WOMEN (107 min, DCP Digital at Doc/Digital Projection at DePaul) screens on Tuesday at 9:30pm at Doc Films (University of Chicago) and on Wednesday at 5:30pm at DePaul University (247 S. State St.), with Reichardt in person introducing the DePaul screening. Doc Films also presents a free advance screening of Reichardt’s 2020 film FIRST COW (122 min, DCP Digital) on Wednesday at 7pm, with Reichardt in person and Cine-File Associate Editor Kathleen Sachs moderating the Q&A.
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The DePaul screening is free. RSVP here. Note that they overbook the RSVPs and having one does not guarantee entry. RSVP holders will be admitted on a first-come basis until capacity is reached.
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Note: The DePaul event has been canceled; Kelly Reichardt will no longer be appearing in person at either event, but the preview screening of FIRST COW at Doc is still happening, though they’ll only be admitting the first 100 attendees.
The One Earth Film Festival opens on Friday and continues through March 15 at various locations. More info and complete schedule at www.oneearthfilmfest.org.
The University of Chicago’s Green Line Performing Arts Center (329 E. Garfield Blvd.) presents We Tell: Turf on Thursday at 7pm. Screening are: SURVIVAL INFORMATION TELEVISION (SIT): MUST YOU PAY THE RENT? (New Orleans Video Access Center/Jeanne Keller and Burwell Ware, 1975, 12 min), THE TAKING OF ONE LIBERTY PLACE (Scribe Video Center/Carlton Jones and Louis Massiah, 1987, 8 min), SHOWDOWN IN SEATTLE: WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE (PART 5) (Big Noise Films and others, 1999, 28 min), FREEDOM ON THE BLOCK? (Vietnamese Youth Development Center/Sammy Soeun, James Varian, Vinh Dong, Dennis Hwang, Pearl Quach, Seyha Tap, and Spencer Nakasako, 2004, 6 min), OCCUPY PORTLAND EVICTION DEFENSE (Tim and Rio, 2011, 5 min), WHY ARCHIVE? (Activist Archivists and others, 2012, 1 min), and TAKE ME HOME (Detroit Eviction Defense and others/Orlando Ford, 2018, 13 min). Followed by a discussion with Allyson Nadia Field (Univ. of Chicago), Denise Zaccardi (Community TV Network), Angela Aguayo (Southern Illinois University), Anton Seals (community organizer), and Gordon Quinn (Kartemquin Films).
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) screens Midge Costin’s 2019 documentary MAKING WAVES: THE ART OF CINEMATIC SOUND (94 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 7pm, with sound designer Tom Myers and writer/producer Bobette Buster in person. Free admission.
Also at Chicago Filmmakers (5720 N. Ridge Ave.) this week: local filmmakers Kara Wackrow and Helen Gebregiorgis' 2019 US/Eritrean experimental documentary LOVE, PAIN AND LEMONADE (83 min, Digital Projection) is on Saturday at 7pm, with co-director Gebregiorgis in person.
Presented by Asian Pop-Up Cinema this week: Wong Hing Fan’s 2019 Hong Kong film I’M LIVING IT (115 min, Digital Projection) is on Tuesday at 7pm at AMC River East 21, with Wong Hing Fan and actress Kathy Wu in person; Fung Chih-Chiang’s 2019 Hong Kong film A WITNESS OUT OF THE BLUE (104 min, Digital Projection) is on Wednesday at 7pm at AMC River East 21, with Fung Chih-Chiang in person; and Stanley Kwan’s 2018 Hong Kong film FIRST NIGHT NERVES (100 min, Digital Projection) is on Thursday at 7pm at AMC River East 21.
PO Box Collective (6900 N. Glenwood Ave.) screens Ronit Bezalel’s 2015 documentary 70 ACRES IN CHICAGO: CABRINI GREEN (56 min, Video Projection) on Friday at 7pm, with Bezalel in person. Free admission.
Uri-Eichen Gallery (2101 S. Halsted St.) presents Cuban Animation from the 1960s to Today on Friday at 7pm. Animator Ivette Avila in person.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Mark Bozek's 2018 documentary THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM (74 min, DCP Digital) continues its two-week run; and Zhang Meng's 2010 Chinese film THE PIANO IN A FACTORY (106 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 6pm, with a lecture by SAIC professor Jennifer Dorothy Lee.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Tsai Ming-liang’s 2009 Taiwanese/French film FACE [VISAGE] (138 min, 35mm) is on Friday at 7pm and Sunday at 1:30pm; Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2019 film UNCUT GEMS (135 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday at 4pm; Ken Loach’s 2006 UK film THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (127 min, 35mm) is on Sunday at 7pm; Bernard Rose’s 1992 film CANDYMAN (99 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 7pm; Ida Lupino’s 1953 film THE BIGAMIST (80 min, DCP Digital) is on Wednesday at 4 and 10pm; William Klein’s 1977 French/Swiss film THE MODEL COUPLE (101 min, Digital Projection) is on Thursday at 7pm; and Bill Condon’s 2011 film THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN PART 1 (117 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 9:30pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Céline Sciamma’s 2019 French film PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (121 min, DCP Digital) continues; and Dan Bush’s 2019 film THE DARK RED (99 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday and Saturday at Midnight.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Emily Ting’s 2019 US/Chinese/Hong Kong film GO BACK TO CHINA (97 min, Digital Projection) for a week-long run.
At the Chicago Cultural Center this week: the 12x12 Short Film Showcase is on Saturday at 1:30pm; and Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s 2020 documentary EAST LAKE MEADOWS: A PUBLIC HOUSING STORY (104 min) is on Monday at 6pm (5pm reception), with Burns and McMahon in person. Both digital projection. Both free admission.
CINE-LIST: March 6 - March 12, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Josephine Ferorelli, JB Mabe, Chloe McLaren, Doug McLaren, Michael Metzger, Candace Wirt