We will highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that are open, grouped in our standard Crucial Viewing and Also Recommended sections, as well as all other physical screenings, and list streaming/online screenings below.
Remember to check venue websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place for COVID prevention. We recommend verifying those before every trip to the theater.
🧅 ONION CITY EXPERIMENTAL FILM + VIDEO FESTIVAL
The 32nd annual Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival goes through Sunday, in-person at Chicago Filmmakers (1326 W. Hollywood Ave.) with competition programs also available to rent virtually. Filmmakers will be present for post-screening Q&As, either in-person or virtually, at most events. We have reviews of all the programs; view the entire festival schedule here.
Nina Menkes’ THE BLOODY CHILD (US)
Co-presented by Cine-File – Friday, 7pm
Showing as one of the special events at the Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival (and co-presented by Cine-File) in a new digital restoration by the Academy Film Archive, Nina Menkes' 1996 independent feature THE BLOODY CHILD is a cool, distanced crime film. Like her other early features and featurette (made between 1983 and 1996) THE BLOODY CHILD is an elusive work, more interested in exploring narrative construction than it is in providing narrative pleasure. The film is centered on a Marine captain (played by Menkes’ sister Tinka, who stars in all four of these early films and is also a major collaborator on them in multiple roles) who, along with her partner, discovers a Marine digging a grave in the desert outside of Twentynine Palms, California, preparing to bury his murdered wife. Two parallel narrative strands follow the events in short fragments that proceed backwards in time; Menkes cuts between them to create a jigsaw puzzle structure that the viewer must piece together. Also intercut with the crime and arrest are shots of a nude, dirt-covered woman alone in a woods, sitting still or scratching text or emblems in the grime on her arms and, later, shots of a woman in various settings in North Africa (Tinka Menkes also plays both of these women). The soundtrack features sing-song-y voices, whispered and giggling, reciting snatches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Bible, and children’s rhymes. These shots, contrasting the documentary-like observational quality of the crime thread, move the film into a hallucinatory dream-space, imagining an alternate world for the female captain, the lone woman in this regimented male space. THE BLOODY CHILD, like Menkes’ other early work, occupies a curious place in American independent film. It’s experimental, but not emphatically so like Yvonne Rainer’s early features; it’s interested in the lives of female protagonists, but its feminism is more nuanced than strident; it’s confrontational, but in a more subtle way than the punkier films of the 1980s and early '90s. It's more aligned with European modernist literature and film—one can see resonances with Marguerite Duras’ and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s narrative deconstructions, Jacques Rivette’s use of mystery and intertwining stories, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s diffused psychological portraits of female characters. Despite all this, THE BLOODY CHILD retains a strong American feel from its positioning of its female protagonist within and against U.S. military culture and the extended off-base spaces of poolhalls and honky-tonk bars. It’s a film that sits in between, out in a forest, making markings that we’re left to interpret. Preceded by Kym McDaniel’s 2021 short A STORY THAT DOESN’T HAVE TO DO WITH ME (7 min, Digital Projection). (1996, 86 min, Digital Projection) [Patrick Friel]
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Shorts Program: The Immanent Grove (Shorts)
Friday, 9:15pm
No onscreen imagery makes you feel like you’re somewhere other than a dark movie theater quite like the verdant landscape of a forest. We’ve always loved looking at footage of trees, and everyone from Kurt Kren to Kelly Reichardt has looked on them fondly in film. What a treat for the eyes, then, that Onion City has devoted The Immanent Grove to our complicated personal and cinematic relationships with the forest. Maybe the most “marquee” name on the program is Cecelia Condit, showing her newest work titled AI AND I (2021, 7 min). Condit, known to modern audiences for her unexpectedly viral 1983 short POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN, continues her distinctly outside-the-outside approach, splitting the difference between avant-garde aesthetics and home movies (albeit the modern, HD-glossed kind). As Condit walks through the forest, a computer-generated voice guiding her, she humanizes the digital world’s longing to be like ours. This push-pull between the natural and computerized worlds crops up in several shorts on the program, like Olivia Ong Evans’ standout IDENTITY KARMA (2022, 11 min). Evans’ film is a much denser collage than any other on the program, using a mixture of still and moving footage of landscapes and other objects, often layering them 3 or 4 at a time with added color-correction and pixelation, which collide everything into a gorgeous, data-moshed rainbow. Evans’ accompanying (though sparse) text begins, "After many migrations there is a stillness," cluing us in to the intended obscurity of the image--the entropy of the images gives way to a sort of placidity in the film as the floral and the digitized smear to create a new, potently psychedelic third category. Competing for the other most maximalist film on the program is the shorter POSSIBLE WORLD (2021, 3 min) by Ezra Wube. Clocking in at a tight 3 minutes, the film has a hand-painted animated style that crams the frames with brushstrokes, collecting all of the film’s outsourced suggestions (the credited speaker list is too long to count) for what might make a better world into dense panoramas of flowers, gardens, and people living in harmony. If this sounds a bit like a kindergarten art project, the film more than makes up for the happy simplicity with undeniable animation technique. Other films in the program take a more minimal approach. Simon Quehaillard’s AMBUSH IN SUSPENSE (2021, 17 min) explores its theme in the most rewarding and comedic way, staging a series of set pieces in which a tree cut down in the forest falls and hits, or maybe doesn’t hit, big plastic objects such as a chair or table. Though this idea is repeated with little variation over the film’s 17 minutes, it manages to generate some true suspense, often feeling like an incredibly dressed-down version of an FX-driven horror film where you wait every scene in anticipation of that satisfying crunch. The horror inflection is even more felt in Kara Hansen’s COMPANION (2021, 7 min), as a woman wearing a helmet outfitted with several side-mirrors is chased by someone who looks exactly like her into a wooded glen. The remaining films take a more conceptual approach to nature, asking us to look within and consider imagined natural worlds. Justin Jinsoo Kim’s PERSONALITY TEST (2021, 8 min) frames the titular test as a series of questions asked to the first-person narrator, judging personality based on how one imagines themselves in nature. GUIDED MEDITATION FOR FANTASIES OF VIOLENCE (2022, 24 min) by Sid Branca takes an even more removed approach; the images in the film certainly line up with the others on the program, but Branca layers images-within-images, asking us to consider the constructed nature of nature. A friend asks them in the prologue, “So, this is like a tour of some kind of interior landscape?” They reply, "This is maybe more like trying to feel safe by examining feeling unsafe. Or getting to a sense of embodiment by exploring disembodiment," letting us know that even the materially understood grass in the film is in some sense unreal; this is a forest of the soul, one imagined when trying to center oneself in meditating. In a program dedicated to mediating personal relationships with the forest, it’s by far the most personal of the lot, and one that caps The Immanent Grove with a necessary dose of introspection. [Maxwell Courtright]
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Shorts Program: Survival Mode (Shorts)
Saturday, 3pm
Most of the works in this program reflect the confrontational side of experimental cinema, employing abrasive techniques and/or discomforting content to stir up the audience. It begins with Philip Thompson’s I’M AT HOME (2021, 13 min), which devolves from a straightforward send-up of public access children’s programming into a head-spinning, nightmarish montage. The structure recalls the virally popular Adult Swim short TOO MANY COOKS from a few years back, though Thompson’s inclusion of glitch art and the performance-art nature of his central performance suggest other, more highbrow reference points. Alex Tahereh Kaucher’s UTERA (2021, 5 min) also defamiliarizes children’s programming, in this case old commercials for dolls, by incorporating them into an audiovisual collage that touches on gynophobia, global warming (in the form of upsetting documentary footage of starving polar bears), anxieties about body image, and abusive male behavior. As you might infer from the title, Kaucher’s overarching themes are motherhood and femininity, particularly as the hegemonic culture indoctrinates us to look at them. The next short in the program, Hogan Seidel’s 3-D work GENITAL REVEAL PARTY (2021, 7 min), openly mocks heteronormativity by stringing together YouTube video clips of “gender reveal parties” gone awry. (Apparently people throw parties to guess the sex of their unborn children; per the selections here, the guesses can take the form of lighting fireworks that may be blue or pink.) If I’M AT HOME suggests a nightmare version of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Siedel’s piece suggests a mean, pointed episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos, although the ending switches to a more ominous tone with footage of wildfires intercut with apocalyptic Bible quotes. More jarring juxtapositions follow in METEOR (2021, 16 min), by the Mexican filmmaking collective Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico. Compelling and genuinely strange, it starts with a narrator relating a biographical sketch of Macaulay Culkin over images taken from nautical movies like John Huston’s MOBY DICK and Wolfgang Petersen’s THE PERFECT STORM. Somewhere in the middle, the narration shifts to the recitation of a letter by an unidentified European explorer in Africa; this section is illustrated with shots from movies about colonialism like AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD, BEAU TRAVAIL, and ZAMA. There are other, non-fictional images in the stew, some of them deeply unsettling. Shifting tone once again, Leslie Wool’s FUNCTIONS, UNLIMITED (2020, 11 min) is an absurdist comic short that hits its stride with an extended gab session between two estranged female friends who reunite over a cup of tea; it turns out one of the friends is going mad. She’s obsessed with a “plant influencer” she’s discovered on Instagram—a slight exaggeration of the weird obsessions we all develop through the internet. The last two pieces in the program—Lydia Moyer’s THE WELL-PREPARED CITIZEN’S SOLUTION (2021, 5 min) and Jessica Bardsley’s LIFE WITHOUT DREAMS (2022, 13 min)—introduce a sense of poignancy that throws new light onto the program's connective theme of discomfort in our present digital age. Moyer’s is a sketch of her experience of being an outsider in a small town in Oregon; the richly textured shots of country life contrast with the stark feelings of loneliness conveyed by the narration. It begins and ends with some colorful, painterly visual effects that add even more character to an already distinctive work. Bardsley’s short auto-fiction draws inspiration from her experience of chronic insomnia, with diaristic onscreen text, meditative astronomical imagery, and a generally fragile tone. The film’s climax is scored elegangly to Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream,” which (as Adam Curtis has proven elsewhere) has great pulse to set a montage to. [Ben Sachs]
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Sharon Couzin Shorts
Co-presented by Chicago Film Society – Saturday, 7pm
Sharon Couzin, an experimental filmmaker and longtime chair of the School of the Art Institute’s film department, was instrumental in the founding of what’s now known as the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, where, this year, in a co-presentation with the Chicago Film Society, several of her short films will screen on 16mm. Couzin was teaching at SAIC when she helped co-found the Experimental Film Coalition, an organization that provided support for filmmakers working outside the mainstream and which evolved to include a monthly screening series, some publications, and the creation of Onion City, originally called either the Festival of Experimental Film or the Experimental Film Festival, around 1984. To her a great debt of gratitude is owed, payment acceptable by way of attendance and appreciation; the films in this program were not available to preview and are not widely screened, making physical witness necessary. Per a 1983 essay in Jump Cut, “Couzin works within a tradition of autobiography, personal vision, and imaginative art. Her vision of these things reflects a personal view of this common ground of daily life.” Furthermore, the writers assert that “Couzin's work is important for any discussion of women artists aesthetics which grows out of women's lived experiences in our culture.” About her practice overall, a critic for the Chicago Reader said that her films “present surreal bricolages of fetishized objects and enigmatic utterances. Her best work… infuses the random with an elegant, playful logic.” The screening includes a 16mm restoration of ROSEBLOOD (1974), considered her breakout film. As per the aforementioned Jump Cut article, it’s “influenced by that tradition in which Maya Deren worked” and “focuses on the sensuality of the female body and on the artist's vision of the relation between women and nature.” Using architecture and the concept of physical and societal structures as its grounding metaphors, A TROJAN HOUSE (1981) “experiments with narrative form in the same way that the contemporary novel has come to be an experiment with words,” in the process making “a concrete, critical statement about the place of the woman artist within the male-controlled art world.” In a short review of SHELLS & RUSHES (1987) for the Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that Couzin “accompanies the frenetic palpitations of [the film] with some very strange-sounding Eskimo throat music,” an addendum that piques interest. Another critic summarizes that it “recalls the uncanny eclecticism of the surrealists. Strange, flesh-like sea shells, restlessly turning and quivering; enigmatic allusions to classical mythology, such as the Birth of Venus and Leda and the Swan; and paradoxical uses of positive and negative space variously bring to mind Man Ray, Dali and [Joseph] Cornell. But Couzin's film creates its own rich, secretive world and provides its own astonishing pleasures.” That last line speaks to the screening on the whole—come revel in Couzin’s world and discover its astonishing pleasures. Note: The event description mentions that other short films by Couzin will also screen but are not listed by title. [Kat Sachs]
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Shorts Program: Where Perfect Grace Remained (Shorts)
Saturday, 8:30pm
The program summary for Where Perfect Grace Remained aptly says, “The filmmakers use celluloid film as a means to preserve stories of lost loved ones, challenge colonial histories, and savor the sights and sounds of places that were once called home.” This excellent collection of shorts truly achieves the temporal potential of cinema, with fragments of time carefully preserved and then glazed with a veneer of warm nostalgia. In GREETINGS FROM BONITA (2022, 5 min), Caitlin Ryan reflects on her grandparents in a way that you can only once you start to age yourself—when you’re no longer a kid, you grasp how human, and mortal, they are. Next is KICKING THE CLOUDS (2021, 15 min) by Sky Hopinka, a name that we’ve been seeing a good amount lately. Hopinka uses the 15-minute runtime to show beautiful images of his family's current home in Washington state along with generations' worth of audio from his family. This is all sandwiched between perfectly selected songs that make the whole film feel like an exercise in honoring one’s lineage but also a cherished relic. With SUMMER LIGHT FOR TULA (2021, 9 min), Silvia Turchin takes us through a cycle of day and night. It feels like those memories of stillness, peace, and simplicity that are much harder to replicate in our daily lives. HOME WHEN YOU RETURN (2021, 30 min) is an experimental exploration of spaces both fictional and real. It's a somber reminder of how things can evolve based on the context that they're in, like the home of filmmaker Carl Elsaesser’s grandmother. Finally with GOLDEN JUBILEE (2021, 19 min), the final film in a trilogy by Suneil Sanzgiri, we see some memories that are not as sweet as the others. It's a work of diaspora that utilizes contemporary technology to revisit memories of colonialism and oppression in experimental ways. This program shows that memories and history, both good and bad, absolutely need to be preserved and safeguarded for reexamination in the future. [Drew Van Weelden]
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Shorts Program: A Hiccup of Ubiquity (Shorts)
Sunday, 1pm
Two fanciful, yet rapidly edited pieces sit at the middle of this program, which (per the festival notes) meditates on “searching for ways to exist between an oversaturated digital landscape and an ever-eroding physical world.” Ross Meckfessel’s ESTUARY (2021, 12 min) is actually somewhat calming in its pile-up of sounds and images; the dream logic of this montage-cum-reverie never slips over into the realm of nightmares. Though the filmmaker has said in an artist’s statement that he wanted to consider “the ramifications of a world where all aspects of life are curated and malleable,” there’s a surprising amount of natural imagery, which ameliorates the theme of dehumanization. Grace Mitchell’s EASY GO (2021, 7 min) is a little too vague thematically to be troubling; still, the wry, quizzical tone makes for an entertaining collage. Some of my favorite moments include a deer standing still at night, a woman failing at karaoke, and a little boy stoically lifting a wooden plank above his head while another boy stands next to him with arms crossed. The program takes its title from a line in Charlotte Zhang’s EVERY METHOD OF BEING IN THE WORLD LOOKS WRONG BUT FEELS SPECTACULAR (2021, 9 min), which also features some unlikely combinations. Many of the shots are of amateur racing enthusiasts performing car stunts in Los Angeles at night, while the flashes of narration are decidedly highbrow, with verbose, poetic descriptions of the zeitgeist. Zhang demonstrates a sense of authority in the way she cuts and layers her elements (which also include hip-hop songs on the soundtrack), making this feel coherent on an emotional level when it isn’t always clear what the work is saying. Similarly, Joshua Gen Solondz’s IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS (2021, 4 min) follows an arcane, even private logic one rarely finds outside of experimental cinema. Inspired by a dream Solondz had, the work consists of a few minutes of film leader and the filmmaker saying “Buenos dias” over and over; at one point, this pattern is interrupted by brief shots of flowers. IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS, which comes almost halfway into A Hiccup of Ubiquity, epitomizes the alluring opacity that connects the middle pieces in the program; in contrast, the opening and closing selections are marked by a certain straightforwardness. Kayla Anderson’s STAY WITH THE BODY (2019, 17 min), which comes first, is mostly an essay film about how Google Street View images are created, processed, and disseminated. Anderson frames her consideration of everyday surveillance with musings about a rare psychological condition that leads people to believe they don’t exist. The considerations of being and nonbeing (both literal and metaphorical) yield a distinctive take on the contemporary world. Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ HAIL MARY (2021, 22 min), which closes the program, is no less distinctive in its profile of the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. Combining off-the-cuff interviews, rap songs, music video outtakes, and journalistic street photography, Phyars-Burgess creates a lively portrait of urban blight. It’s occasionally upsetting, namely when loud gunshots bring the action to a halt or when the sight of an approaching police car inspires a group of people congregating in an alley to disperse in fear. These moments speak to how our “ever-eroding physical world” is plagued not only by environmental ills, but social ones as well. [Ben Sachs]
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Shorts Program: Standing by the Ruins (Shorts)
Sunday, 3pm
What remains of human civilization and enterprise after it has undergone decay and cultural redefinition is the overarching theme of this excellent collection of experimental shorts. American filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson’s homage to Andy Warhol’s experimental film CHELSEA GIRLS (1966), CHELSEA 5124 (2022, 3 min), imitates Warhol’s split-screen presentation, circling a sculpture of shipping cartons that contained Heinz 57 ketchup. In a humorous conceit, the asynchronous black-and-white and color halves could have been lifted from Warhol's film, as was the practice adopted in its various showings. American filmmaker and educator Ben Balcom surveys the abandoned building and grounds of Black Mountain College in LOOKING BACKWARD (A RARELY SUSTAINABLE VISION) (2022, 10 min). The liberal arts college based in Asheville, North Carolina, tried to center its educational practices around philosopher and education reformer John Dewey’s principles of holistic learning and the study of art—an approach that, like liberal arts education itself, has faded. Balcom uses garbled recordings of one of Black Mountain’s students, Charles Olson, an influential poet and self-described “archeologist of morning,” to help resurrect ideas that have become little more than ghosts. Lebanese director Raed Rafei’s poetic essay film THE RUINS (AL ATLAL) (2021, 16 min) sees worlds in the humble hammam (bathhouse). Exploring the ruins of an ancient hammam and the illustrated text of a 15th-century French travel book, Rafei conjures feelings and images of homoeroticism that mix pleasure and pain, sexual tourism and empire, state repression and torture. He samples from several films, from a Navy SEAL training exercise to Salah Abu Seif’s MALATILY BATHHOUSE (1973) and Sergei Parajanov’s THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (1969), to document the enduring bonds between men that even imprisonment and death cannot negate. A sign in a clothing store that says “Made to Last” offers the slightly ironic moral of American filmmaker Sally Lawton’s WE MAY GO IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION (2021, 10 min). Lawton’s film centers on the 118-year-old Ford Motor Company, which endures and is moving into the electric and self-driving car business, and the neoclassical Michigan Central Station, closed since 1988 and now being repurposed as Ford’s innovation district in central Detroit. Whether train travel through this Detroit station really deserved to go extinct is hard to prove. Whether Ford’s new direction will endure is anyone’s guess. However, Lawton’s Bakelite clock-radio, which is older than my 50-year-old clock-radio, still ably broadcasts the appeal by WDET-FM for donations to replace a costly 1-year-old transmitter that failed to work. The King’s Road Foot Bridge in Hong Kong is the focal point of Yan Wai Yin’s compelling TUGGING DIARY (2021, 16 min). It was there, between August 2019 and January 2021, that protests against the mainland Chinese regime took place. Leaflets, posters, and graffiti gave voice to the rallies and strikes, but in defeat, the resistance has left only these contextless remnants on walls and pillars. Using a combination of colors, single words, still images, archival footage, and animation, Yan reanimates the protests and subsequent violence. Gradually, however, she, too, feels like a dislocated remnant of her utterly changed hometown. In ALL MY LIFE (2021, 3 min), Ariana Hamidi, a filmmaker and adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, turns her camera on the Marcus-David Peters Circle in Richmond in tribute to transformation. The circle, which contained the Robert E. Lee Monument, is encircled by fencing in preparation for its complete removal. Her airy, 360-degree regard of the circle to the love tune “All My Life” sung by Ella Fitzgerald turns the fencing into a highly permeable veil. The imagery both mourns the loss of a life to police violence on the site while celebrating the reclamation of the space for the entire Richmond community. Canadian artist and filmmaker Gabi Dao’s LAST LOST TIME (2021, 17 min) uses collage, narration, and industrial sounds to juxtapose the remains of a Vancouver sugar-refining factory and the Vancouver Art Museum, which exhibited her installation Last Lost Time. There is an implied critique of the use of industrial workers for rarified consumption by the art-going public. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Shengze Zhu's A RIVER RUNS, TURNS, ERASES, REPLACES (US/China/Documentary)
Co-presented by the Nightingale Cinema – Sunday, 7pm
In documentary, the wide, static frame embraces the subject with proverbial open arms, allowing for as much to fill the visual enclave as possible. Shengze Zhu’s A RIVER RUNS, TURNS, ERASES, REPLACES contains within its conspicuously long shots not just its content—in which any distinct human activity is often obscured by distance—but implications of the past, present, and future, for which the titular watercourse is an emblem. The film was shot in Zhu’s hometown, Wuhan, China, between 2016 and 2019; obviously, the location gained worldwide significance toward the end of that period, after which nothing has been the same. But this isn’t a film about the pandemic, outside of several segments toward the beginning, captured on CCTV, of sparsely populated streets and some random, pandemic-specific occurrences that happen on them. Rather, it’s about the increasing development of Wuhan and how it relates to the Yangtze River, which serves as a throughline for this otherwise rather opaque assay. Over this footage, unwavering in its patient observation, is text of letters devised from the real-life experiences of people who lost loved ones during Covid. In each, the letter writer mentions something related to the river, connecting the disparate texts and allowing the film to flow like a boat on water, stopping at sporadic intervals to observe scenes of life within and alongside its depths. The film subtly comments on the downsides of development, among them the homogenization of places and the disenfranchisement of people. Still, there’s a raw optimism throughout, conveyed through colorful projections cutting through thickets of smog and the laughter of people swimming in the symbolic behemoth. Bridges also play an important part in the film; the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, built in 1957, was the first bridge on the river, which people had previously crossed via ferry or (in the case of soldiers) pontoon bridges. This bridge and others evoke allusions of connection in spite of surrounding development (indeed, they’re also a factor of it). Zhu rounds out her silent treatise with old photographs of groups of people alongside the river with bridges visible in the background and a punk song on its soundtrack, connecting the past and the present with an indeterminate premonition for the future. Preceded by Liz Cambron’s 2022 short THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DIRT AND SOIL (10 min, Digital Projection). (2021, 87 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Nicolas Ray's BIGGER THAN LIFE (US)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm
While Douglas Sirk was busy picking at the veneer 1950s American society—finding trouble in paradise via his biting melodramas and his darkening of Rock Hudson’s romantic image—Nicholas Ray attacked the decade’s complacency and social ills more directly. BIGGER THAN LIFE feels like it should be included among the mad rush of anxiety-ridden science fiction films of the time. Just as overblown and beautiful as Ray’s perverse western JOHNNY GUITAR, BIGGER THAN LIFE is it’s own kind of perversion—it’s what would happen if The Dick Van Dyke Show had been left to rot. James Mason plays an overworked schoolteacher on his way from nausea to Middle American insanity. Given an experimental drug intended to cure his irregular blackouts, Mason's Middle American mores are set on overdrive (mass consumerism, wife hating, and hyper-enthusiasm for sports). This was Ray's third film shot in 'Scope and it's here that he masters the art of telling two stories at once. The film's characters and its contrived society close in and give way at the same time, balancing a world of cartoons with a world of people, and emulating the dizzy feelings of its leading man. Preceded by the 1954 short FABULOUS LAS VEGAS (35mm). (1956, 96 min, 35mm) [Julian Antos]
Prefiguring Immediacy: Video Art by Mako Idemitsu (Experimental/Shorts)
South Side Projections (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm [Free Admission]
The idea of the screen as an omnipresent entity is nothing new—just think of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or, hell, daily life, where we’re all glued to our phones and computers—but Japanese experimental media artist Mako Idemitsu employs it in such a way that’s distinctly stimulating. Via the ubiquitous screen, Idemitsu challenges the influence of media as well as patriarchal values on Japanese society, specifically as these things relate to women and their role in the prescribed family unit. The four videos in this program exemplify these concerns; repetition across Idemitsu’s work has the surprising effect of making it more impactful, versus tired or spent. It also mimics the litany of daily life for many women, especially housewives expected to perform the same tasks over and over again, day in and day out, with little opportunity for rest, much less time to indulge themselves creatively. Born in Tokyo in 1940, Idemitsu is intimately familiar with these dynamics, having been disowned by her father after deciding to stay in California, where she began her moving-image practice, in the mid-1960s and early ‘70s. She was likewise frustrated by these attitudes in Japanese higher education and even in the countercultural happenings on the US West Coast during the flower power era. Thus Idemitsu’s work extends beyond nuances respective to her cultural upbringing and is understandable to viewers, especially women, in myriad locations, where sexism and misogyny lurk beneath the surface of even supposedly enlightened factions. But juxtapositions between repression in the East and the freedom of the West are highlighted in INNER-MAN (1973, 4 min, Digital Projection), with wry, subliminal commentary on the latter. In it, footage of a naked, long-haired man dancing uninhibitedly is imposed atop footage of a traditional female Japanese dancer, whose ornate make-up and clothing provide stark contrast to the nude figure. The way these two people interact through the filmic yoking is often humorous and evocative, far past the obviousness of the visual metaphor itself. The naked man, who’s white and possibly American, is not celebrated for his freedom so much as that privilege is held up in contrast to the woman’s constriction, the former a state of being the man did not earn but was granted in part because of his sex. Idemitsu notes that this is also meant to evince Jung’s theory of the animus, that inner part of the female psyche that is allegedly masculine. Dual feelings of idealization and resentment add layers to this compact notion. The ‘screen as motif’ makes its first appearance in ANOTHER DAY OF A HOUSEWIFE (1977, 10 min), wherein a Japanese housewife goes about her day while a screen broadcasting a black-and-white shot of a blinking eye is present nearby. A personal work for Idemitsu, it reflects the idea of another version of herself watching as she goes about the mundane tasks that comprise the daily life of a housewife. HIDEO, IT’S ME, MAMA (1983, 27 min) considers a mother obsessed with her college-aged son, who’s left the household; here the screen figures as a stand-in for the boy, as his mother continuously plays recorded footage of him, even interacting with it (e.g. placing meals in front of the television) as if it were her real son. She does these things to the detriment of her own life, what little she has outside the family, and even to her relationship with them. It’s humorous and unnerving, shedding light on this two-dimensional stereotype of devoted motherhood. In KIYOKO’S SITUATION (1989, 25 min), the dilemma present in the previous films is explored more explicitly, centering on a woman who is passionate about painting but who is forced at first by her father and later her husband into the soul-crushing trappings of domesticity. Another version of the woman watches this happening on a television, manifesting inner discontent with her actions outside the screen. The denouement of the film (and the whole program) is melancholy and resolute, befitting the severity of the subjects. [Kat Sachs]
Agnès Varda's VAGABOND (France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm
Not all who wander are lost, but it could equally be said that not all who wander wish to ever find or be found. Some are happy to be forever sans toit ni loi (the film's original French title)—without roof or law. Such is the case for Mona, the protagonist of Agnes Varda's staggeringly recusant VAGABOND. The aimless wanderer in question is played by a teenaged Sandrine Bonnaire; her greasy-haired, unwashed lack of naïveté brings a decidedly enigmatic element to the film's already elusive structure. The plot accounts for Mona's last weeks before she freezes to death in a ditch, with Varda employing a combination of narrative enactments and documentary-like interviews with those who encountered her before she died. A mysterious narrator voiced by Varda herself declares that no one claimed her body after she died, and that she seemed to emanate from the sea; Mona is then seen emerging naked from a cold ocean while two boys admire her from afar. Thus begins the film's overarching point of view, one in which the vagabond is little known and used only as a blank slate onto which her acquaintances project their own expectations and disappointments. Though it opens with Mona's death, the rest of the film is not at all hampered by the inter-film spoilers. She lived just as aimlessly as she died, and the details of her life weeks before her demise present another slate onto which viewers can project their hopes for the seemingly apathetic drifter. Varda's poetic filmmaking encourages the disconnect between the viewers and the characters, and even between the characters themselves. Slow tracking shots imitate a voyeuristic gaze and first-person interviews reveal some deceit among the fictional subjects. Even Varda's use of nonlinear structuring suggests such discord, as the confusion imitates Mona's mysteriousness. A string-heavy score betrays underlying anxiety, while music from The Doors and Les Rita Mitsouko highlight her rebellious nonchalance. The film's disarray comes together to present only one knowable fact about Mona: that no one really knew her at all. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1986, 105 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
Nadav Lapid’s AHED’S KNEE (Israel/Germany/France)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See venue website for showtimes
Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s four films lay out an ongoing crisis in the director’s relationship to his home country. In SYNONYMS (2019) and AHED’S KNEE, he gives some of his own experiences and opinions to his anti-heroes. AHED’S KNEE is blatantly autobiographical. Not only is its protagonist, Y (Avshalom Pollak), a filmmaker based on Lapid, but the story was inspired by his experience with Israel’s censorious Culture Minister in 2018. Y plans to make a film about Ahed Tahimi, a Palestinian teenager who served eight months in prison for hitting an Israeli soldier serving in the West Bank. But after holding auditions for the role, he heads to the desert town of Sapir, where he’s greeted by Yahalon (Nur Fibak), who works for the Ministry of Culture. She lays down the law, telling him to avoid controversial subjects, but admits she’s less than thrilled by these dictates here. Y rages for the entire film, which is interspersed with flashbacks to his days in the Israeli army. Lapid’s style is extremely abrasive, using dizzying whip-pans, showing Pollak’s face in unflattering, huge close-ups and setting montages to rap-metal. If this is a self-portrait, it does not spare the artist. Y’s politics may be thoughtful, but he expresses them in a particularly boorish way, aiming his anger at the wrong people. (The scene where he pisses a circle into the desert shows both his opinion of Israel and his tendency toward empty macho gestures.) While the army scenes suggest that the IDF’s draft is a way of making all Israeli Jews (who have to serve when they turn 18, apart from Orthodox Jews) complicit in their country’s violence, by the film’s end they show an authoritarian streak to his personality. AHED’S KNEE is excitingly confrontational in a way that’s rare these days. (Recent Radu Jude films might be the best comparison.) As Richard Brody noted in his review for the New Yorker, Lapid could only deal with the anger and isolation expressed in AHED’S KNEE by moving to France again. (2021, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Kate Tsang’s MARVELOUS AND THE BLACK HOLE (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 7:30pm
Although crowd pleasers have long been a part of Sundance’s portfolio, the festival isn’t exactly known for developing and showing films for audiences under 18 years old. That’s why it’s so satisfying to see the neglected child and young-adult audiences get some attention from the festival by its premiering MARVELOUS AND THE BLACK HOLE, the feature directorial debut of Kate Tsang. MARVELOUS deals with a familiar topic for young adults—grief. Fourteen-year-old Sammy (beautifully realized by Miya Cech) is grieving the loss of her mother, Sue (Jae Suh Park), six months before the opening of the film. Enraged that her older sister (Kannon) and father (Leonardo Nam) seem to have moved on so soon after Sue’s death, Sammy acts out by getting in fights and locking herself in her room to listen to a tape of her mother telling magical stories. One day, while skipping out of a class, Sammy runs into Margot (Rhea Perlman), a magician who is on her way to entertain some school children. Under Margot’s influence, Sammy slowly finds a way to channel her anger and sorrow, and make peace with her family. Director Tsang cleverly intersperses animation and fantasy sequences into the film; I particularly like how she shows and resolves Sammy’s murderous regard for her father’s fiancée (Paulina Lule) and likewise transforms Sammy’s self-harming DIY tattooing into an act of friendship. It’s so great to see Rhea Perlman back in action, playing a sympathetic character whose light touch and respect for Sammy highlight what young people in emotional turmoil need so badly. In the process, Sammy, the Black Hole, helps the Marvelous Margot find some connection and closure for her own family drama. The touching ending of the film brought a grateful tear to my eye. Screening as part of the Asian American Showcase. More info here. (2021, 81 min, DCP Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Joseph Losey's MR. KLEIN (France/Italy)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Watching MR. KLEIN, you’re never sure when director Joseph Losey will present the action with a fluid tracking shot or a shaky handheld camera; he alternates between the two methods so unpredictably as to instill the movie with a sense of instability. The seeming randomness of Losey’s method befits the content of MR. KLEIN, which charts one individual’s loss of control over his own life and, more generally, Europe’s societal breakdown during World War II. Alain Delon (who also produced) stars as the title character, a suave Parisian art dealer who doesn’t mind the Nazi occupation of France or the German persecution of his nation’s Jews. (In fact, he cynically exploits the persecution by buying art at cheap rates from Jews trying to get rid of their possessions so they may raise money to flee the country.) Over the course of 1942, he discovers that there’s a Jewish man in Paris who shares his name and that this other Klein has been taking advantage of the coincidence, switching identities with the art dealer to benefit himself. The first act of the film details Delon’s growing awareness of the other man (who never appears onscreen); this section conjures up the air of existential dread that Losey achieved in his first two collaborations with Harold Pinter, THE SERVANT and ACCIDENT. Once the antihero fully understands the situation, he finds that the authorities are beginning to believe he’s the Jewish Klein—and that he’s incapable of convincing them otherwise. In this development, the film escalates from low-lying dread to explicit nightmare, and Losey’s detached style makes the progression feel eerily inevitable. Many people who write on MR. KLEIN feel compelled to invoke Kafka, who died before the Second World War yet who articulated the nightmare of the Holocaust more vividly than almost any other author. The film is indeed Kafkaesque, as was the historical era it depicts. (1976, 123 min, DCP - 4K Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
Francis Ford Coppola's THE GODFATHER (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
It's tough (or impossible) to summarize the impact THE GODFATHER has had. So, instead, only three points. Gordon Willis's brilliant cinematography—Rembrandt by way of Manhattan—made it acceptable for studio-made color films to be as shadowy and moody as the black and white noirs had been earlier. Where would classic paranoiac thrillers be without that added palette? Its flowing, epic structure, courtesy of Mario Puzo's screenplay and Francis Ford Coppola's subtle, no-nonsense direction, remains a model of classic storytelling. And finally, because of its amazing critical and commercial success, gangster movies have been continuously in vogue ever since. Utterly disgraceful then that, according to a New York Times article, the original negatives "were so torn up and dirty that they could no longer be run through standard film laboratory printing equipment, and so the only option became a digital, rather than a photochemical, restoration." Luckily Robert A. Harris, working with Willis and Coppola, stepped in to save the day. (1972, 175 min, DCP - 4K Digital Restoration) [Rob Christopher]
David Lynch's BLUE VELVET (US)
Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 7pm
This is where the legend really began. It's curious to think how Lynch's career would have developed if DUNE (1984) had not been a box office failure, but cinema history can thank him for not playing it safe with this rebound project. Though Lynch had already made three features, VELVET was the first full articulation of his core theme of the evil that lurks in small towns everywhere. Not the outright surrealist endeavor that was ERASERHEAD, it is also not the most accessible of narratives. Dark, violent, sexual, and reeking of 1963 suburbia, the film is at times a noir mystery and at others a violent thriller. Many of the visual symbols that would populate TWIN PEAKS are introduced here, such as red curtains appearing when danger is present in a scene, and Lynch's continued growth as a complete cinematic artist is evident. Despite having a cast that didn't feature a legitimate star (Dennis Hopper may be the exception, but his career was in the dumps when he was cast...as the third choice), the film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, as well as praise from critics throughout the world. It's also notable that Kyle MacLachlan (essentially playing Dale Cooper) might never have worked again if not for his excellent performance. Still dangerous twenty-five years later, the film is as gorgeous as it is classic. Screening as part of David Lynch: A Complete Retrosective - The Return, going on through April 14. More info here. (1986, 120 min, 35mm) [Jason Halprin]
Wong Kar-wai's IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Hong Kong)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
Taking place in 1960s Hong Kong or in the memory of 1960s Hong Kong—that city deemed too modern, many of the film's exteriors were shot in Bangkok, after all—Wong Kar-wai's film is a beautiful rumination on its title. Much has been made of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE's restraint, and there is that: a couple, married to other people who are themselves having affairs, become intimate in every way but physical—save for slight, loaded gestures and tight spaces. The film is pregnant with the overwhelming feeling of infatuation, executed in a lusciousness that recalls something from a dream. But for every restraint there is a counterpoint in excess: Maggie Cheung's many gorgeous dresses are as flamboyant as they are confining; the musical score is both pitch-perfect and overwhelming, familiar and foreign; the cinematography is so rich and meticulous that its multitude of color is evocative of Douglas Sirk's melodramas. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE has hit upon such acclaim because of its local particularity—a commemoration of sorts for Hong Kong's transfer of sovereignty that had not yet happened—as well as its thematic universality as a transnational melodrama. As characters move through Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Cambodia, and the film shifts forward and backward in time, we are reminded of the fluidity of borders, time, and memory. The moment is paramount, and Wong Kar-wai gives us a series of beautiful, sumptuous moments that we can live in forever. (2000, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]
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Note that Doc Films website has not yet been updated; until then, we will be publishing a review for the film whose capsules we have on file. Keep checking the Doc Films website for this quarter's calendar and more information about what else is screening this week.
Fern Silva's ROCK BOTTOM RISER (US/Experimental)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 2:30pm; Monday, 8:15pm; and Thursday, 4:30pm
Fern Silva is looking to expand “nature films” beyond their stuffy reputation. To the beat of a loud, mixed-genre soundtrack, he doesn't just look at a piece of land but fully grapples with its messy past and future. In Silva’s short work, his love of the natural world is apparent, and it's exactly this love that pushes him to engage with nature in a way that recognizes human culture as not outside, but an extension of the natural world. His debut feature ROCK BOTTOM RISER is of a piece with these shorts, focusing loosely on the Hawaiian mountain of Mauna Kea, where the proposed site for a new space telescope threatens to pillage historically protected indigenous lands. Spending time with the active volcano on the mountain and the citizens who coexist with it, Silva weaves landscapes with found footage and historical texts to build an essay film around the competing natural and scientific histories of the land. Silva knows the conventional pleasures of nature films well, and he does a commendable job balancing the research that a film like this requires with the sense of wonder needed to be blown away by how cool a stream of lava looks. Compared to his contemporaries, Silva leans further into the sublime, propulsive, and funny aspects of his material, like when he features an extensive, context-free scene of employees at a tobacco shop doing vape tricks to a dubstep soundtrack. This scene, confusing and gradually more hilarious the longer it lasts, is a bit of local color that encapsulates the radial approach Silva brings to the feature. It’s here that Silva’s film feels most similar to those of Theo Anthony, a fellow essayist with a tendency to take roundabout ways to his politically trenchant theses. Silva does a bit less hand-holding in his work though, letting the ties between his collection of explorers, mystics, and scientists explain themselves. For all its density, though, ROCK BOTTOM RISER is most effective as a landscape film capturing the awesome power of Mauna Kea, a power that requires images more than words. (2021, 71 min, 35mm) [Maxwell Courtright]
Ti West’s X (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
With clear inspiration from the likes of Brian DePalma, Tobe Hooper, and John Carpenter, Ti West’s X is a love letter to late '70s horror. Like West’s outstanding HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2009), X utilizes familiar horror tropes and visuals while making something fresh. Set in rural Texas in 1979, the film follows a group of actors and filmmakers as they set off to make a porno. Maxine (Mia Goth) is determined to become a star by any means necessary; her producer boyfriend (Martin Henderson) is keen to make it rich by taking advantage of the burgeoning home video market. With two seasoned stars (Scott Mescudi and a standout Brittany Snow), an eager aspiring auteur director (Owen Campbell) and his sound assistant/girlfriend (Jenna Ortega) joining, they settle down to shoot in a rented house on farmland property. The elderly landowner and his wife are unwelcoming, to say the least, and as night falls, the porn shoot turns bloody. With blatant eroticism, X turns the slasher on its head, challenging the established ways in which the genre deals with sexuality, especially in female characters, and it's complicated by its larger themes about aging and vitality. The film also maintains a sense of humor, always quite self-aware of how it distorts and restructures expectations. Perhaps most noteworthy is X’s overall aesthetic, as the film looks and sounds like it’s straight from the late 70s. West’s editing choices, directly inspired by the aforementioned horror icons, is particularly fantastic; with quick cross cutting, overhead and splitscreen shots, the film inventively reveals its themes while successfully building dread. X is both fun and introspective and proof that the slasher is a genre that can be consistently reconsidered and recalibrated. (2022, 105 min, 35mm and DCP [check venue website for screening format]) [Megan Fariello]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive Asian Pop-Up Cinema continues their fourteenth season. The myriad in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list here. (A good problem to have!) Visit their website for more information.
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The Asian American Showcase opens Friday and goes through Wednesday, April 13, with several documentaries and narrative films and one short film program. Select filmmakers are scheduled to attend in-person. More info here.
Cine-File contributor Michael Glover Smith’s 2022 film RELATIVE (97 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday at 7pm as part of the Midwest Film Festival, followed by a Q&A with the cast and crew. Note that the screening is sold out.
The Chicago Film Society co-presents Mikhail Kaufman’s 1929 silent film IN SRING (79 min, 35mm) on Thursday at 7pm, with live piano accompaniment by David Drazin, as part of the Ukrainian Cinema series. More info on all screenings here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2021 film THE LOST DAUGHTER (121 min, Digital Projection) screens through Sunday.
Peter Weir’s 1977 Australian film THE LAST WAVE (106 min, Digital Projection) screens on Friday at 7pm as part of Facets’ Arthouse Environmentalism series. More info on all screenings here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Hong Sang-soo’s VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (South Korea)
Available to rent through Facets Cinema here
Hong Sang-soo’s films oscillate between different versions of reality. Often showing the same scenes with slight changes multiple times in his films, he distorts our perception of what’s playing out onscreen. Each character morphs into someone a little different, a new perception brought forward. His third feature, VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (titled after the Marcel Duchamp artwork The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), finds the director honing this skill. Following a love triangle between a TV news director, his assistant, and his wealthy friend, the film examines the exploits and advances, both wanted and unwanted, of these two men toward this young woman. Much colder than Hong’s later works, this film, cut into two nearly equal parts, examines fleeting, realistic relationships, placing them in contrast to the expectations of each party involved. It also serves as a showcase for Lee Eun-ju, who plays the titular virgin and whose film career was cut short by suicide in 2005. She’s fantastic as a woman gliding through these relationships, forced into moments and actions she’d rather avoid, mediating the foolish and abusive actions of her would-be romantic partners. The two men swirl around her, acting like grown children, confused why they aren’t getting what they want, and entranced by the idea of her virginity. As in many of Hong’s films, these men spend their days eating, drinking, and hoping to have sex, their sensual natures on full display. It contains an air of exploitation as well as a sense of disdain that Hong has for how these people treat each other; the director looks at these relationships with a keen, yet unsympathetic, eye. (2000, 126 min) [Michael Frank]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ Facets Cinema
Ivaylo Hristov’s 2020 Bulgarian film FEAR (100 min) is available to rent through April 28. More info here.
CINE-LIST: April 1 - April 7, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Maxwell Courtright, Rob Christopher, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Patrick Friel, Jason Halprin, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko