Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity. We will list/highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, and list streaming/online screenings below. Cine-File takes no position on whether theaters should be reopening, nor on whether individuals should be attending in-person. Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
🔊 CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
Episode #13
Last month in the Cine-List, contributor Scott Pfeiffer recommended John Huston’s THE DEAD, thereby setting off a long, spirited email conversation about Huston's career between several of our writers. On Episode #13 of the Cine-Cast, we continue that conversation in audio form, as Pfeiffer, fellow contributors Edo Choi, John Dickson, and Marilyn Ferdinand, and Associate Editor Ben Sachs delve into Huston’s work, critical reception, and legacy. But first, Sachs and contributor Megan Fariello discuss a few recent online releases of note, focusing on one of our favorite new movies of the year, Ephraim Asili’s THE INHERITANCE (which is currently available for rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center).
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The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen. Find out more about his work here.
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Listen here!
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Adam Wingard’s 2021 film GODZILLA VS. KONG (113 min) continues.
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COVID policies for the Music Box here.
🎞️ CHICAGO LATINO FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago Latino Film Festival opens on Thursday and runs through April 18, with online screenings and the Opening, Centerpiece, and Closing Night films also showing as drive-in events. We review the Opening Night film below; check back next week for coverage of additional films. More info and full schedule here.
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Lissette Feliciano’s WOMEN IS LOSERS (US)
Screening Thursday at the ChiTown Movies Drive-in at 7:30 pm – info here;
also available to rent Friday, April 9 to Sunday, April 18 here
WOMEN IS LOSERS immediately sets up its sociopolitical stakes with an acerbic fourth wall-breaking opening scene. Taking its title from the Janis Joplin song of the same name, the film is set in late 1960s/early 70s San Francisco. Young mother Celina Guerrera (Lorenza Izzo) is acutely aware of the inequalities she and the women in her life are up against. After becoming pregnant and dropping out of high school, Celina is unwavering in her determination to get herself and her son out of poverty and out of her abusive childhood home. Characters continue breaking the fourth wall throughout, directly alerting the audience to the sexism and racism they are facing daily—Celina’s interludes are especially astute, highlighting both a very personal struggle and larger systemic issues. The plot, admirably tackling a lot, including abortion rights, the Vietnam War, and domestic abuse, sometimes feels unfocused and thus the film can never fully commit to its meta-narrative framing. It is, however, successful in balancing contrasting tones; despite its confronting of serious subjects, WOMEN IS LOSERS has an instant brightness to it, both in its colorful cinematography and gregarious performances. First time feature director Lissette Feliciano drew inspiration from her mother’s own experiences for the film, and the result, like its namesake, is a charismatic and empowering feminist anthem. (2020, 85 min) [Megan Fariello]
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Rental also comes with the short film SOLUTION FOR SADNESS. The film is only available in Illinois.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Judy Hoffman’s STAGES: THREE DAYS IN MEXICO - BRITNEY SPEARS (US/Documentary)
Film Studies Center (Univ. of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm here
Britney Spears is not the voice of a generation. Rather, it’s her lack of a voice—a predicament not willfully undertaken by the vulnerable superstar but imposed on her by society, one more interested in Britney Spears as an almost chimerical figure than as a real person—that has kept supporters invested over the years. In the new (and hotly debated) New York Times documentary FRAMING BRITNEY SPEARS, available on Hulu, a queer #FreeBritney activist epitomizes the dichotomy that has defined Spears for over a decade. She was initially marketed as America’s Sweetheart, whose breasts—real or fake?—and virginity—existent or not?—onlookers felt privy to consider as if they were their own; eventually it came to light that, like many of us, Britney was deeply lonely, unduly alienated, and in fact suffering from what appeared to be significant mental health issues. Linger do the events of 2007, when Britney had a highly publicized breakdown that included her shaving her head, attacking a paparazzo's car, and being hospitalized several times. The aforementioned documentary covers most of this; little of the sort is broached in STAGES: THREE DAYS IN MEXICO - BRITNEY SPEARS, an hour-long 2002 documentary about the last days of her Dream Within a Dream tour, when she played two shows in Mexico City. Keeping with the eternal surprise that is Britney Spears, it should be no wonder that it was directed by Judy Hoffman and shot in part by Albert Maysles. Yes, that Judy Hoffman, Kartemquin progenitor extraordinaire, and that Albert Maysles, whose accomplishments in the world of documentary filmmaking, like Hoffman’s, are too many to list. Released in conjunction with the photo book Stages, a shoot for which features prominently in the film, STAGES: THREE DAYS IN MEXICO is a direct-cinema glimpse into a lightly sanitized fragment of the performer’s life during this time. Keep in mind that 2002 was during the height of Britney-mania, both positively and less so. She had released her third studio album, Britney, the previous year and was touring in support of it; she made her acting debut in CROSSROADS; and, on a more personal note, she split from Justin Timberlake, details of which dominated the gossip rags, with Britney painted as the bitch who broke the boy-bander's heart. None of this, however, comes into Hoffman’s bittersweet paean. Instead, we see Britney in what we assume is her everyday life on the job. This includes holding press conferences, going to photo shoots, and preparing for concerts; footage of the former, which takes place in front of a backdrop plastered with corporate logos, emphasizes the uncomfortable nature of these junkets, where journalists ask bizarre and intrusive questions. One reporter asks her to turn around to show off her outfit from behind (she replies that he can see it when she leaves), while another asks her how much her house cost (“None of your business,” she says sweetly). Britney ends the conference early, and the crowd erupts in boos—this is but one of several incidents in Mexico that caused Britney to be dragged by the press, the others being when she flipped off paparazzi (can you blame her?) and later had to end the second show early due to storms (again… can you blame her?). Less insidiously but more wistfully, the documentary features Britney’s interactions with her entourage, including her assistant (who features prominently in the New York Times documentary), her hair and makeup artist, her dancers, and others involved in the elaborate arena shows Britney would put on for months at a time; she also communicates with her beloved mother, Lynne, by phone. (#FreeBritney advocates might notice the conspicuous absence of her father and now legal conservator, Jamie Spears.) The spaces Britney inhabits—the beige hotel hallways, the sparsely decorated crew trailers, etc.—are far from glamorous. Nevertheless, they’re fitting aesthetic representations of how the superstar lives in the service of a wanton public: blank and impersonal, a canvas onto which audiences project their own hopes and fears. In an interview with Vanity Fair for an illuminating article on the documentary, Hoffman is quoted as saying this kind of lifestyle is that of “being somewhere but really nowhere.” She also elaborates on why certain items, such as Britney’s cell phone, beverages she’s drinking, and other such sundry are blurred out, saying that this was among several concessions required by Britney’s label, Jive Records. Notably, Hoffman had wanted to include more straightforward documentary interviews with Britney but was unable to sit down with the singer one-on-one. Though she later got that interview in New York, Hoffman remarked to the Vanity Fair writer that seeing Britney’s hectic life made her question her complicity in the media ruckus surrounding the besieged idol. The effectiveness of the resulting film is rooted in its largely observational approach, punctuated by thoughtful close-ups and attentive long takes. The film ends with scenes of Britney and her team making quick decisions about the upcoming show as storms loom on the horizon, spryly edited with footage of the truncated performance. Almost presciently, we see Britney in total control, the then-21-year-old singer making decisions about a multi-million-dollar tour that would overwhelm even the most seasoned professional. Such scenes exist in stark contrast to the current mayhem surrounding Britney’s conservatorship, wherein questions of Britney’s ability to take care of herself are being debated by the whole world. While it’s clear that, for better or worse, different forces are at play now, it’s clearer even still that Britney Spears did and still does have a voice of her own, and her undoubtable ability to use it comes through in this extraordinary document. (2002, 60 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
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Following the Twitch stream, Hoffman will appear in conversation with NPR Arts Desk reporter Neda Ulaby.
Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
If the films nominated for this year’s Best Live Action Short Film Oscar appeared together in any other context, one would believe they were curated specifically to cover as many of our present-day sociopolitical challenges as possible: immigration policy and homelessness, racist police violence, and the prison-industrial complex. That the Academy has managed to include films from both Israel and Palestine further reinforces a sense of an engineered optics, a reassurance that Oscar is leaving no stone unturned. None of the nominees exemplify this earnest appeal to the zeitgeist more than Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe’s TWO DISTANT STRANGERS (30 min), a riff on GROUNDHOG DAY through the lens of Black Lives Matter. Here, the time loop conceit is used to convey the grinding recurrence of police brutality against people of color, as a young black man keeps reliving his day each time he is murdered by the same white officer. While initially effective in its bluntness, the short eventually groans under its heavy-handed and manipulative construction (there’s a cute pooch the guy needs to get back home to); a late-breaking twist, meanwhile, diminishes the systemic racism at play by making the cop character seem like a lone loony with a vendetta. I suspect others will be more receptive to the film’s mix of high-concept storytelling and social justice messaging. Other nominees are decidedly less didactic, locating their political concerns in intimate human drama. In Doug Roland’s FEELING THROUGH (18 min), a homeless teen develops a friendship with a deaf-blind man, helping him get home in the middle of the night. Roland’s patient, understated direction, sensitively attuned to the characters’ haptic mode of communication, grounds this moving tribute to everyday altruism. Similarly unfussy is Farah Nabulsi’s THE PRESENT (23 min), which portrays how a routine shopping trip in the West Bank turns into an arduous border-crossing ordeal for a Palestinian man and his daughter. The big ticket here, so to speak, is Elvira Lind’s THE LETTER ROOM (32 min), starring Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat. Isaac is a corrections officer at a penitentiary who is tasked with reading and monitoring the prisoners’ incoming missives. The film is evocatively shot, taking advantage of the strong overhead lighting in the prison hallways; the resulting sense of danger parallels the plot’s building intrigue, as Isaac’s officer is drawn deeper into the private lives of an inmate and his girlfriend. Tomer Shushan’s WHITE EYE (20 min), for my money the best of the nominees, closes out the program. A sort of modern-day BICYCLE THIEVES, this moral parable concerns a fraught encounter between an Israeli man, the Eritrean immigrant who supposedly stole his bike, and law enforcement. Unfolding entirely in a single take that navigates around a street corner and through a butcher shop, the film depicts how a seemingly just pursuit can have terrible and unforeseen consequences. Despite this, it’s never polemical or showy; its power lies in its anguished, unvarnished empathy. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Thomas Vinterberg’s ANOTHER ROUND (Denmark)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Reuniting with leading man Mads Mikkelsen, Danish writer and director Thomas Vinterberg’s (THE HUNT) newest film, ANOTHER ROUND, reaches for a full bottle of vodka and lands in a drunken state of elation, depression, and mid-life difficulty. Denmark’s submission to the 2021 Oscars for Best International Feature Film, ANOTHER ROUND finds Mikkelsen in an acting showcase, surrounded by other steady and solid counterparts in Magnus Millang, Thomas Bo Larsen, and Lars Ranthe, playing four high school teachers that enter into an odd experiment: keeping themselves at a blood alcohol content of .05 at all times. Vinterberg directs the film like a drunken night on the town, from the joy of dancing on tables with great friends to waking up disoriented, broken, and desperate to either never see alcohol again or grab the nearest bottle and take a swig. ANOTHER ROUND’s tonal shifts work, mostly with ease, due to Mikkelsen’s performance, one in which every look, smirk, and curling of his lips is measured and intentional. It’s not a film filled with speeches or fights that last longer than a couple of minutes. ANOTHER ROUND becomes a snapshot into life at its most middling, in which characters reexamine their place in the world, and the oft overwhelming dreams they feel they haven’t accomplished. Though the structure of the film, especially its third act, falters in finishing this wild idea (and experiment), ANOTHER ROUND should satisfy one’s thirst for high-quality acting, careful and considerate storytelling, and a chance to remember, forget, or attempt to capture the supposed “good ole days.” (2020, 117 min) [Michael Frank]
Kwok Cheung Tsang ’s BETTER DAYS (China/Hong Kong)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Part crime drama and part romantic melodrama, BETTER DAYS is a powerfully dark coming of age story. Exacerbated by the tragic suicide of fellow bullied student, Hu Xiaodie (Zhang Yifan), Chen Nian (Zhou Dongyu) becomes the next target of harassment by her peers. Her excellent grades make her competition, and her impoverished background only exacerbates other students’ resentment of her; their bullying is violent and relentless. With the stress of college entrance exams on the horizon and her mother (Wu Yue) in serious financial trouble, Chen Nian is still compelled to find justice for Hu Xiaodie. In this broken system, however, the bullies responsible are let off easy. Chen Nian’s impulse to stand up to injustice is also demonstrated when she intervenes in the violent beating of a young local street thug, Xiao Bei (Jackson Yee). Their friendship blossoms into romance as he becomes her protector, but a murder investigation puts both their futures at risk. Director Kwok Cheung Tsang creates a consistently intense, claustrophobic vision, moving between closeups and wide shots to mirror the intense inner emotions of the characters and their precarious place in society—juxtaposed by colorful montages of the everyday life of more carefree students who are not struggling with the same dire pressures as Chen Nian or Xiao Bei. As the dynamic, unsteady camera moves through the cityscape it reflects how Chen Nian is constantly under surveillance, scrutinized for her grades and terrorized by classmates; Xiao Bei’s life is also dictated by the spaces he can navigate seen or unseen. Surveillance as a compelling visual theme is reflected in the prominent role smartphones play throughout, as well as in the subplot surrounding a young police officer (Yin Fang) investigating both the suicide and the subsequent murder. The main performances are quietly moving, particularly the exceptional Zhou Dongyu; Zhou Ye is also an impressive standout as Chen Nian’s vicious main bully, Wei Lai. BETTER DAYS meanders from its main focus at times but is impressive in its unswerving confrontation of dark themes while ultimately maintaining a sense of hope—mirrored beautifully in its final few moments. (2019, 135 min) [Megan Fariello]
Olivier Assayas’ DEMONLOVER (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
DEMONLOVER was one of the first movies to address the internet’s impact on communication and interpersonal relationships; what distinguishes it from many of the other, lesser movies on the subject to have come in its wake is that Olivier Assayas, a cineaste of the highest order, doesn’t regard the Information Age from a detached, moralizing position, but rather from an immediate and sensuous one. Perhaps the defining trait of the movie’s intoxicating style is Assayas’ tendency to cut from one tracking shot to another and then another. The technique conveys a sense of constant movement through the physical world and, more importantly, the fluidity with which we move online between ideas, cultures, and the intimate details of other people’s lives. Likewise, the narrative of DEMONLOVER is a fusion of high- and lowbrow cinematic references that include David Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME, Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER (Gina Gershon, who appears here, essentially plays a variation on her character from that movie), espionage thrillers, and animated S&M porn. This mixture suggests an early 21st century update of the French New Wave in that Assayas—who, like the New Wave directors, wrote criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma before he started making movies—builds on his references to craft a statement about the zeitgeist. What he has to say is unsettling as well as seductive: the movie posits that the most typical relationships in the Information Age involve people using or being used by others; it also suggests a dark underside to the world of knowledge created by the Internet. Yet Assayas’ concerns never come across as cerebral, thanks to the mobile filmmaking and the exciting plot, which has to do with power plays (both corporate and sexual) within internet bondage porn companies. The score—written and performed by Sonic Youth when they were a five-piece with Jim O’Rourke on third guitar—adds to hypnotic effect. (2002, 122 min) [Ben Sachs]
Francine Parker’s F.T.A. (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
In 1971 Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Paul Mooney, and a few other performers, put together a war protest roadshow aimed specifically to entertain the American G.I.s deployed abroad—a sort of anti-U.S.O. tour. Traveling to Hawaii, the Philippines, and Okinawa, the group set up performances outside of American military bases and performed satirical sketches along with outright anti-Vietnam War protest songs. Director Francine Parker’s camera and crew documented each of these performances, capturing the energy and excitement of the internal anti-war movement of the American military. What makes this documentary especially important and insightful are the segments in which the members of the F.T.A. roadshow and crew interview the members of the military. With so much of the popular narrative about the protest of the Vietnam War centered on activity back home in the U.S., by mostly white, middle-class college students, F.T.A. gives voice to the people actually deployed and their thoughts against the war. Black soldiers speak out against being sent to die for a country that doesn’t respect them, as well as a military that treats them with extreme prejudice—how they see themselves aligned with the Vietnamese as oppressed POC. Both the roadshow and the filmmakers give space for performers and people of the occupied countries to express their sentiments about the war, and the US military presence in their homelands. Nearly half of the film’s running time is given to voices of protest, making it less of a concert film than an out-and-out piece of radical left propaganda. Considering when this was made, it’s almost shocking how virulently, and overtly anti-war, anti-military, and anti-colonial this film is. There is zero ambiguity about the politics involved, and because of this F.T.A. was, until 2009, largely forgotten. The film was pulled from theatres a mere two weeks after release, and suspicions abound that the U.S. government itself was behind this decision. After all, the distributor, American International Pictures, was notorious for milking their films for all they’re worth, especially the more exploitative and controversial ones. Once nearly impossible to find (the only other time I was able to track it down was via an Nth generation bootleg DVD by an older Maoist I met while living in San Francisco, natch), this new version is a wonderful 4k restoration that gives the film the clarity of picture and sound that really allows for the verité immersion Parker was attempting to achieve. As the U.S. enters its second decade of continuous foreign war, F.T.A. provides a reminder that there has always been political dissent in the military, and, if given a chance to speak about it, people will. So while this is a great document of a specific time, place, and movement, it’s still just as riveting and straight-up entertaining now as it was in 1972. Rentals of the film are accompanied by a new introduction by F.T.A. troupe member Jane Fonda. (1972, 96 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Maya Da-Rin’s THE FEVER (Brazil/France/Germany)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Forty-five-year-old Justino (Regis Myrupu), a member of the Tukano tribe from the northwestern part of the Amazon rainforest, has lived all of his adult life in Manaus, a city at the confluence of the Negro and Solimões rivers, where ocean-going vessels carrying containers are offloaded to waiting tractor-trailers to be driven to industrial centers around Brazil. Recently widowed, he works at the port as a security guard and raised two children who are adapted to modern, “white” life. Just as his daughter, Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), is preparing to attend medical school in Brasília, Justino starts running a fever and has unsettling dreams about being pursued by white men with dogs and confronting himself in his work uniform in the forest. With quiet urgency, director Maya Da-Rin sounds the alarm about ecological catastrophes encroaching on Brazil and the contempt white Brazilians have for both Indigenous people and the natural landscape. Her film shows the behemoth machinery at work at the docks, but also the primordial rainforest that surrounds Manaus as a potent force in the lives of the Brazilian people. First-time actor Myrupu is a mesmerizing and sympathetic guide through this world. It is with poignancy that the film’s producer, Leonardo Mecchi, wrote about the burning rainforest and the fact that THE FEVER was the last film to be funded by the government before a far-right regime took power and ended arts funding. (2019, 98 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Éric Baudelaire’s UN FILM DRAMATIQUE (France/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
I could relate easily to UN FILM DRAMATIQUE, a French documentary about middle school students in a diverse urban community with a large immigrant population. Since the fall of 2019, I’ve taught middle school students in Chicago’s Uptown, which is also a diverse urban community with a large immigrant population. Director Éric Baudelaire captures this milieu so precisely that I must admit I found the movie a little tiring—watching it felt like tacking an extra two hours onto my work day. In its design, UN FILM DRAMATIQUE resembles a big class project: Baudelaire didn’t just document a group of students over four years; he taught them about filmmaking along the way, assigning kids different tasks of shooting, recording sound, editing, et cetera, so that they became co-creators of the project. This clever (and aptly pedagogical) approach to documentary cinema provides an ideal means of considering the subject of pre-adolescence, an exciting time when kids take long strides toward independence and self-awareness. The film is most compelling when it presents kids speaking frankly with each other on such subjects as current events, national identity, filmmaking, and life in the Paris suburbs (an area comparable to the “inner city” of most American metropolises). These scenes provide an inside look at kids discovering new intellectual frontiers as they form complex arguments and articulate abstract ideas. It’s gratifying to watch their conversations grow more sophisticated as the movie proceeds; more immediately uplifting is the humanist spectacle of kids from so many different backgrounds working together and becoming friends. The onscreen subjects come from all over (eastern Europe, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa), but they find common ground in their experiences as foreigners, as pre-teens, and, finally, as filmmakers. The kids’ ideas about what makes films “dramatic” aren’t highly developed—the scenes they stage and shoot are the least interesting in the movie, making one long for the imagination and control of THE WE AND THE I (2012), Michel Gondry’s fiction feature made with New York high school students. Still, the subjects’ bourgeoning awareness of how filmmaking works allows for some enjoyable, self-reflexive moments. Michael Sicinski likened UN FILM DRAMATIQUE to Agnès Varda’s work, and I can understand where he’s coming from. In drawing attention to the filmmaking apparatus to illustrate learning, Baudelaire creates the impression that the film itself is thinking, growing. (2019, 114 min) [Ben Sachs]
Rodney Ascher’s A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Revolving around a 1977 lecture by legendary sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick, A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX explores the ever-expanding idea that the world in which we exist is actually some kind of computer simulation. Ascher—best known for his documentary ROOM 237, about outré interpretations and readings of THE SHINING—pieces together a loose overview of this increasingly popular idea through an essay-style framework that never leans too far into staking a claim for, or against, this idea. Not to say that Ascher’s film lacks conviction; it instead leaves space for the viewer to contemplate. There are interviews with experts such as Oxford professor Nick Bostrom (whose 2003 article “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” has become one of the biggest influences on the popularization of Simulation Theory) and culture writer Emily Pothast, as well as interviews with average people who have come to this idea themselves as children—and even a man currently incarcerated for murdering his family after becoming obsessed with THE MATRIX. Stylistically, A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX falls somewhere between a standard talking-head documentary and an Adam Curtis collage essay. Ascher leans heavily on Fair Use to bring visual clips of examples of the various arguments made—STAR WARS, BLADE RUNNER, STARSHIP TROOPERS, Grand Theft Auto, Wolfenstein 3-D, The Man in the High Castle (and various other Phillip K. Dick adaptations), and countless more are all intercut throughout to buttress points made. There are two very interesting choices made, though. Firstly, for a film with the title in its name, no one from THE MATRIX is interviewed in the film. It leans heavily on it as being the biggest pop culture parcel that introduced Simulation Theory, but neglects to speak to anyone involved in the franchise. The second interesting choice is that while the “experts” are shown in a Zoom/Skype style window all the “average people” are made visually anonymous by overlaying them with a digital avatar. Does Ascher want us to think of them as lost in their own personal simulation? Possible biases aside, A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX does a good job of not making anyone seem any more eccentric than anyone else even though the chance to paint some of the people interviewed as complete tinfoil wingnuts is right there. The film gives everyone involved a dignity, which helps the viewer take the film seriously as a whole, because as a movie exploring a mind-altering philosophical conceit, it does a great job of explaining what Simulation Theory is, and the various ways people view it. The film also doesn’t shy away from discussing the theological implications of what living in a simulation brings. If we are in a digital simulation and we are in a world created by a computer programmer, how is that different than being created by God? The mythologies of Christianity and Hinduism are given the same conceptual weight as Minecraft, an idea that might seem offensive until you see it unpacked here, so well done that it almost seems obvious in hindsight. A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX manages to cover its complex subject matter deftly, in a way that guides you while never insulting your intelligence. (2021, 108 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Molly Hewitt’s HOLY TRINITY (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
A movie about gaining the ability to speak to the dead after huffing Yoruba Orisha cleansing spray from a paper bag. Are you in or are you out? What if there also were casual hi-glam and drag elements? What if the film was the spiritual coming-of-age story of a queer femme dominatrix? What if someone made a film that somehow landed dead center in the Venn diagram intersection of John Waters’ and Bruce LaBruce’s films, the Ramones’ song lyrics, and Cindy Sherman’s and David LaChappelle’s photography? So… are you in or are you out? HOLY TRINITY is a film made exactly for the type of people who are going to love HOLY TRINITY. Director, and star, Molly Hewitt has created a world that is casually, yet still somehow aggressively, queer—nothing is particularly queer in the film’s world because everything is queer. It’s an amazing accomplishment. The casually absurd is just casual, the fringe is front and center. Yet, for a movie centered on huffing, Hewitt has made a lovely story about the spiritual dynamics of power and how it affects the film’s protagonist, Trinity. After looking for a quick high and huffing her roommate’s spiritual room cleansing spray (think a can of Lysol, but from the corner botanica) she discovers she can communicate with the dead. This new talent becomes both a gift (she now has an edge on her submissive clients) and a curse (she becomes internet famous to the detriment of her personal love life). With her new gift, Trinity has to learn to re-calibrate the power dynamics of her life, and the world around her. The entire movie is filled with these ideas. She has to re-question consent with her clients and the capitalist structure that surrounds that, her lifelong relationship with Catholicism, the personal relationship with her partner, Baby. It’s almost as if huffing just may have unintended consequences—ones both hilarious and serious. You’d think the story would get convoluted with all the concerted ridiculousness, but it doesn't. You can feel the sex-positivity, body-positivity, queer-positivity, radiating from this movie. HOLY TRINITY is absolutely shameless in the best way possible—in a literal way. No one feels any shame for what they do, or how they act, because there’s no need to—that’s just the way life is. Queer folks just living their outrageous lives, on their own fantastic terms. So… are you in, or are you out? (2019, 91 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Fernanda Valadez’s IDENTIFYING FEATURES (Mexico/Spain)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Watching Fernanda Valadez’s auspicious debut feature, I was struck by how a film about something so ugly—the ugliness of pain, of an exodus spurred and eventually terminated by a too-cruel world—could also be so beautiful; each shot wringed for a certain visual ecstasy is at odds with the disquieting subject matter. Claudia Becerril Bulos’ cinematography is extraordinary, but the true achievement is how the visual sublimity complements the story of a middle-aged mother in Mexico seeking her teenage son, Jesus (Juan Jesús Varela), who’s left their small town for the southern U.S. border. The film begins as Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández, outstanding) recounts in voiceover the circumstances of her son’s departure while the memory is realized onscreen. Valadez then cuts to Magdalena and her friend, the mother of another boy with whom Jesus left for the border, in a sterile office, attempting to locate their children after months without contact. The friend discovers that her son was found dead, while Jesus is still missing. This begins what Valadez describes as a road movie, with Magdalena traversing the countryside to discover the whereabouts of her child. At a facility where she’s nearly coerced into having her son declared dead (on the basis of authorities having found just his duffle bag), she meets another mother in a similar situation; she encourages Magdalena to continue searching. Along her journey to find a man who’d allegedly been on the same bus as her son, she meets a young man, Miguel (David Illescas), himself a migrant who had been compelled to self-deport from the U.S. back to Mexico. The film is deliberately ambiguous, though it’s clear that the ongoing presence of Mexican drug cartels is to blame for the lingering violence and chaos; the threat of disappearance and senseless murder, especially among the migrant population, looms large. Valadez and cowriter Astrid Rondero aren’t explicit in their indictment of this culture. Instead they consider the phenomenon on a metaphorical level, with Magdalena representing all those impacted by the brutality, her journey a modern-day odyssey as regrettable as it is epic. Some elements of the film are disturbing—early on, we see someone cutting into an eyeball, and, later, rotting animal corpses and people being murdered by what appears to be the devil incarnate—and others are reminiscent of the thriller genre, but in general it’s breathtakingly beautiful. Valadez renders transcendent such mundane images as a makeshift office formed out of plastic and the crack in a windshield, to say nothing of the verdurous landscapes that the protagonists tread. The beauty serves to lay bare the ugliness that Magdalena and others like her suffer. Other techniques (such as not subtitling the dialogue over a pivotal flashback, a recurring motif of people speaking to the protagonists not shown in full) convey a sensation of uncertainty that plagues not just the characters, but a society in crisis. (2020, 95 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
Ephraim Asili’s THE INHERITANCE (US)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Based on writer and director Ephraim Asili’s own experiences, THE INHERITANCE combines a scripted narrative about a group of Black artists and activists starting a collective in a West Philadelphia home with a documentary-style exploration of Black political and artistic movements; the film focuses particularly on Philadelphia’s MOVE organization and the infamous 1985 police bombing of their row house. THE INHERITANCE is an impressive and exceptional amalgamation of cinematic forms with direct and profound audience engagement through musical performance, dance, and readings of theory and poetry; integrated, too, are segments of the collective’s workshops with real-life MOVE members and poets, including spoken word artist Ursula Rucker. With a subplot revolving around the creation of a house library, Asili emphases the significance of text within the collective, featuring numerous shots of book piles, photographs, vinyl records, and ever-changing quotes largely written in chalk on the walls. The cast at times reads directly to the audience from important 20th century works of the African diaspora, looking straight into camera, encouraging the audience to engage in the experience of exploration and education in the collective; this is particularly felt in a scene where poet Sonia Sanchez reads from her work, glancing up frequently into the camera, acknowledging the viewer as part of her audience. Asili uses bright, bold colors within the collective house itself which mirror shots of West Philadelphia and its vibrant outdoor spaces. Sound, too, is distinctive throughout: the whirring of the camera provides background noise, there are moments of persistent silence, and the recurring tuning of an obstinate radio. Asili also weaves in levity, with the scripted scenes of the collective members working through the everyday logistics of sharing space with others providing genuinely funny and sincere moments. THE INHERITANCE is a spectacular and unique first feature—a jubilant and commanding expression of Black culture, art, and politics. (2020, 100 min) [Megan Fariello]
Robin Lutz’s M.C. ESCHER: JOURNEY TO INFINITY (Netherlands/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
This documentary about M.C. Escher hangs on a clever conceit: all the narration comes from Escher’s letters and diaries, so the film proceeds as if the great Dutch artist is telling his own life story. Recited with delicious hamminess by Stephen Fry, the narration allows for a more intimate portrait than one usually gets from contemporary biographical docs; you come away from the movie having learned not just about Escher, but how Escher saw himself. One of the more interesting insights is that Escher didn’t see himself as an artist, but rather as a mathematician who worked in visual design to realize various logical puzzles. Apparently, Escher described the whole creative project of his mature period as one of depicting infinity within defined spaces—a paradox to describe a series of paradoxes! He also claimed to have less interest in achieving beauty with his work than a sense of wonder, which reveals his creative intentions as well as his modesty. Much of the personal information presented in JOURNEY TO INFINITY supports the film’s characterization of Escher as self-effacing: he maintained a low profile, spent much of his adulthood caring for his mentally ill wife, and gently disparaged the individualist youth counterculture that popularized his designs in the 1960s. The movie really sings when it gets into the designs themselves, often deploying animation to illustrate Escher’s lucid explanations of his work. (2018, 81 min) [Ben Sachs]
Ousmane Sembène’s MANDABI (Senegal)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
By the time Ousmane Sembène directed his second feature at the age of 45, he was already a legend. Sembène had been a war veteran, a labor organizer, the author of several book-length works of fiction, and the first sub-Saharan African to release a feature film. One might expect a movie by such an accomplished individual working at the height of his renown to display a certain grandeur or sweeping perspective, yet the greatness of MANDABI (as with most of Sembène’s films) lies in its humility. The story unfolds so plainly that it could be understood by a child, while the imagery, however bright and engaging, tends to be organized around such basics as character and locale. In short, MANDABI feels like a folktale; and like many folktales, the apparent simplicity serves as a conduit to deep wisdom. Dieng, the film’s put-upon hero, is an unemployed, but big-talking man who lives on the outskirts of Dakar with his two wives and seven children. Near the start of the story, Dieng receives a money order from a nephew living in Paris (in a bittersweet montage, Sembène illustrates what the young man has had to do to earn the money), who asks his uncle to cash the order, set aside most of the money, and keep some for himself. Dieng sees this windfall as a chance to pay off his debts, but cashing the money order (or mandabi in Wolof) opens up all sorts of new problems. He learns he lacks the proper documentation required for any banking transaction—and that acquiring this documentation means tangling with an especially messy local bureaucracy. Dieng also finds himself besieged by strangers and acquaintances coming out of the woodwork and asking for loans. But the biggest setback of all comes in the form of a “New African” businessman who promises to help Dieng solve his problems. Sembène characterizes the businessman with the same bitter, satirical sensibility he’d later flesh out in his novel Xala (and his film adaptation of it), but for the most part, the writer-director reserves his anger for institutions rather than individuals. MANDABI condemns the societal factors that keep people in poverty while maintaining, against all odds, an ingratiatingly cheery tone. When seen from the proper perspective, Sembène asserts, injustice is nonsensical enough to seem funny. (1968, 92 min) [Ben Sachs]
Michael Glover Smith's MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
I previously praised Michael Glover Smith’s strong debut, COOL APOCALYPSE, for its subtle dissection of relationships in the inflexion point of their collapse. His sophomore feature, MERCURY IN RETROGRADE, builds upon and expands the earlier title’s strengths, presenting a nuanced and troubling portrait of six people who, over the course of a long weekend, quietly and privately reveal that they are in the process of exploding inside. It is a movie about three good-natured, loveable, charming men who each, in his own insidious way, is a manipulative, dehumanizing sexist, and the three spirited, jovial, smart women who have fallen for them. Built in two rough halves, the first part of MERCURY IN RETROGRADE shows us a deceptively idyllic group friendship, three couples who love one another, understand one another, and love being around one another. They eat, drink, joke, play, and seem to grow together as people. Everything feels wrong, but only with the second part in mind do the tension lines in the first become clear. An extended pair of alcohol-fueled conversations, one all-male at the cabin and the other all-female at a nearby bar, are intricately intercut and woven together, cutting away the pretense of kindness, decency, and equality that the characters have worked so hard to convince themselves of. Set almost exclusively in a palatial cabin in the Michigan woods, the movie’s roving compositions, highly mobile camerawork, and idiosyncratic editing keep placing characters in off-putting juxtapositions, dividing spaces, preventing the six principals from ever fully integrating with the natural world they’re surrounded by. Instead, following Smith’s title, they spin around and are trapped by one another like celestial bodies mere moments before collision. The phrase ‘mercury in retrograde’ itself comes from a term of pseudoscientific bullshittery that attempts to explain away misunderstandings and conflict by blaming it on the different orbital speeds of Mercury and Earth, and is a neatly symbolic way of signaling the viewer that the characters will both argue over important issues with one another and both misunderstand the nature of those arguments and be satisfied with papered-over illusions rather than actual resolution. Indeed, the narrative is awash in oddly revealing moments of internalized oppression and violence that are rationalized away as evidence of love: a throw-away comment one woman makes about convincing a partner to ‘let’ her have an abortion; another woman breaking out of a relationship of physical abuse only to pursue her abuser’s career path; a third whose desperate need to keep her history of violent exploitation, victimization, and addiction secret from her partner drives her to break years of sobriety. Many of the actors deserve special acclaim, especially Jack Newell and Alana Arenas, two local actors who play Jack and Golda, the one couple amongst the three to be married, inhabit their complex roles to a chilling degree. It’s one thing to play a dysfunctional couple, but another level entirely to play one that believes itself to be fully equal and loving. It is a trenchant, beautifully and disturbingly stylized look at misogyny and oppression, neither the first nor the last word on the subject by any means, but a modest and welcome addition to the conversation. (2017, 105 min) [Kian Bergstrom]
Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR (USSR)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Long before the great TREE OF LIFE euphoria of 2011, another film (from another director's famously sparse oeuvre) went off uncharted into the space between memories past and present, mapping onto them a universal significance. Andrei Tarkovsky's THE MIRROR may lack dinosaurs and metaphorical doors in the desert, but it does set a mean precedent for everything a passion project can be when an auteur is working on such an intensely personal level. Long a dream project of Tarkovsky's, it was only in the wake of SOLARIS that he was able to secure funding, and armed with a meager allotment of film stock, he began production in late 1973. Given the non-linear, dreamlike progression of the film, such obstacles aren't hard to comprehend, and they perhaps explain why this is his most fleeting film outside his debut, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD. Drawn across the middle of the 20th century, THE MIRROR takes a stream of consciousness journey through familial memories, with actors in dual roles as father and son, as wife and mother. Woven in are poems penned by Tarkovsky's own father, assorted clips of wartime newsreel footage, and the quiet, ethereal imagery characteristic of all his films. It all makes for a hazy dream of cinema, one from which you tragically wake too early. But lest the length should fool you, this is not Tarkovsky for beginners. No surprise that at his most personal he's also at his most esoteric, so an afternoon spent with one of his aforementioned films would be a good primer. As for those already in his thrall, this is imperative viewing. (1975, 108 min) [Tristan Johnson]
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s ROSE PLAYS JULIE (Ireland/UK)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
People who have been adopted often feel as though their identity is somehow incomplete until they can connect with their birth parents. Sometimes knowing about one’s birth parents can fulfill fantasies or, at least, fill in some nagging blanks to achieve more peace of mind. But what if one is the child of rape? That is the shocking fact veterinary student Rose (Ann Skelly) learns when she finally tracks down her birth mother, Ellen (Orla Brady), an actress based in London who has tried to forget her trauma and the daughter she named Julie before giving her up for adoption. What happened to Ellen sets Rose on a quest to find her birth father, Peter (Aidan Gillen), and try to right his wrong. ROSE PLAYS JULIE is an atmospheric, slowly episodic film filled with pregnant silences and mournful music. The symbolism of Peter’s occupation as an archaeologist and the fact that Rose is learning about euthanizing animals overburden the film with a certain obviousness that shows up the cracks and conveniences in the plot. Nonetheless, the performances are magnificent. In particular, Skelly inhabits a quiet, emotional Rose who can play her cards close to her chest and act swiftly when necessary without losing her humanity. For those who like their revenge served cold, this film will hit quite a few right notes. (2019, 100 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Jennifer Reeder’s SIGNATURE MOVE (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Jennifer Reeder’s debut feature is a charming rumination on modern relationships and identity. Zaynab (Fawzia Mirza) is a proud Pakistani, Muslim lesbian who takes up luchador-style wrestling when she’s not working at her day job, but she finds herself compartmentalizing the many facets of her identity when her recently widowed conservative mother moves in—and tries to search for a suitable husband for her only daughter. But when Zaynab falls for Alma (Sari Sanchez), her worlds collide in unexpected ways—and she realizes she can’t keep who she is away from the people she loves. As with the rest of Reeder’s work—including KNIVES AND SKIN and a wide array of intimate short films—SIGNATURE MOVE is most interested in peeling back the layers of how we communicate with one another and the relationships that mold us. The relationships you have with your partner, your family, and your own sense of self are all interwoven, even if you spend so much of your life trying to separate them or hide them from others. SIGNATURE MOVE uses the glitz and performance of wrestling to initiate thoughtful conversations on the masks we all wear, especially as queer people. It’s full of heart, introspection, and endearing humor—all while being wholly Chicago. (2017, 80 min) [Cody Corrall]
Elizabeth Lo’s STRAY (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The first film from documentarian Elizabeth Lo often moves in slow motion. STRAY follows several dogs living on the streets of Istanbul, focusing on one homeless animal named Zeytin. She walks around the bustling city looking for food, familiar faces, and a place to rest her head at night, as the camera follows close behind. Lo never involves herself in Zeytin’s life, or the lives of both the strays and people she interacts with, keeping a level of distance despite the camera’s close proximity. You experience her life from ground level, only hearing conversations that she hears from restaurant tables, park benches, and late-night protests. Lo decides not to craft a heartbreaking story from Zeytin’s kind eyes, instead opting for a clear-eyed look at loneliness, connection, and the way we treat others, humans and dogs alike. Lo doesn’t rest on any one shot or scene for longer than a few moments and, like its protagonist, the camera keeps moving along, looking for the next place to rest. A beautiful, different look at the city of Istanbul, STRAY forces you to think about the obvious metaphors in this story, from how we treat our fellow passersby, especially a person without a roof over their head, to our apathy towards the people and things that don’t directly affect us. Zeytin drifts around the city without a final destination. Even without a constant stream of love or affection, she seems to have a stake in this place, and a sense of warmth fills you by the time the film ends. Whether you want to watch some good boys and girls run around and play in a bustling city, or you’d like to examine the isolation of city life, Lo’s STRAY satisfies both with certainty and intentionality. (2021, 72 min) [Michael Frank]]
Filippo Meneghetti’s TWO OF US (France)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
TWO OF US eerily opens with a game of hide-and-seek between two young girls, during which one of them suddenly vanishes. A traumatic memory or a nightmarish omen, this prologue summarizes the predicament of the two septuagenarian women we’re about to meet, whose decades-long, closeted lesbian relationship has never progressed beyond the “hide” part of the game. Living across from each other in an old Parisian apartment complex, Madeleine (Martine Chevallier) and Nina (Barbara Sukowa) have become accustomed to carrying out their romance in secret, Nina routinely crossing the hallway for a meal or late-night rendezvous with her beloved. The two agree to sell Madeleine’s apartment and move to Rome; it seems the couple will finally find the freedom they’ve been looking for. But obstacles loom, particularly in the form of Madeleine’s children, who guilt their mother into staying put. The situation becomes even more fraught when a stroke leaves Madeleine in a semi-catatonic state, and the installment of a live-in caretaker augurs the end of the women’s apartment-hopping trysts. Rather than hit the obvious keys of melodrama, first-time filmmaker Meneghetti unfolds this ripe scenario using a cinematic language more allied with a psychological thriller, making especially unnerving use of peepholes, reflections, and pregnant silences punctuated only by the churn of a washing machine or the sizzle of a frying pan. Implacably driven to get her Madeleine back, Nina ends up taking matters into her own hands, Sukowa expertly and scarily conveying the mania that can grow from a love denied. The horror and tragedy of TWO OF US lie not so much in her increasingly unhinged behavior, but in the suppression of desire that fosters it, the absence reflected in the sad, hollow eyes of a mute Madeleine, forced to listen to her children prattle on about her nonexistent devotion to her late husband. Meneghetti invests so strongly in the women’s indestructible bond that he has the tendency, intentionally or not, of belittling his other characters, while too easily waving away Nina’s ruthless actions. Yet the performances from Chevallier and Sukowa are so powerful, you can’t help but root for them to find their way back to each other. “I will follow him / follow him wherever he may go,” goes the Little Peggy March song. An Italian translation of the earlier version of this song, Petula Clark’s “Chariot,” plays throughout TWO OF US as the women’s theme. Here, in lieu of “him” or any sexist declarations of obedience, there is only the mountains-moving force of love. (2020, 95 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Chris McKim's WOJNAROWICZ: FUCK YOU FAGGOT FUCKER (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
This documentary about the late New York City artist David Wojnarowicz is incredibly impressive. Using an abundance of primary documentary sources from Wojnarowicz’s life, we get to have the late artist be a living voice in his own story from beyond the grave. The sources are an embarrassment of riches: 8mm home movies, audio diaries dating back to his early 20s, letters to and from family members, video interviews, journals, live footage of his no-wave band 3 Teens Kill 4, sketches, photographs, and even answering machine messages. For a film about a (mostly) visual artist, this is a heavenly bounty. Using all of these materials, WOJNAROWICZ charts the biography of the artist, who through his early street art and conceptual pieces (such as his photo series Rimbaud in New York) inadvertently made a name for himself in the New York art scene of the late 1970s and early 80s. What director Chris McKim does with the narrative form of the doc, however, is to curve the story—the politics of Wojnarowicz’s work and life, which become fully realized in both his art and anger after his diagnosis of AIDS in 1987, are given as much emphasis as the art itself. McKim shows the art making and attitude at the end of Wojnarowicz’s life were inevitable given everything that he lived before. The film opens with Wojnarowicz being filmed in December of 1989 while doing a phone interview about a group show about AIDS he was participating in that was losing funding due to the perception of it being too political. On the call you hear him very succinctly argue, “I don't have health insurance and I don't have economic access to adequate health care, isn't that political? To try to pretend that the subject of AIDS doesn't have a political tinge to it is ridiculous.” Three years later Wojnarowicz would be dead from the illness. Weaving us back to the beginning of his life, the film takes us through his history, from his childhood in an abusive home, to his street life and street art, to his first exposure in a legitimate gallery show, and to his later highly politically charged work and political activism of his post-AIDS diagnosis years. What makes WOJNAROWICZ a brilliant film, though, is that it is more than a film just about David Wojnarowicz. This is a film about queer art. About queer history. About queer anger. There is an overt indignation throughout the film at American society of the time. Something that is still echoed loudly right now. As is said in the film, this isn’t “gay as in I love you, [it’s] queer as in fuck off.” In the footage of Wojnarowicz at an ACT UP protest we see him wearing the now (in)famous jacket reading, “If I die of AIDS — forget burial — just drop my body on the steps of the FDA.” Produced by WOW Docs (the documentary arm of RuPaul’s production company) and directed by the former showrunner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, this is a movie made with an obvious love and passion for queer culture, for one’s own culture. I can’t even imagine what this film would have been like if it only focused on Wojnarowicz’s art in and of itself. We don’t ever need another hollow story about art, with a patina of queer politics, focusing on the New York art world ever again. I so wish it was possible to destroy those films before they're even made. This is a documentary on the level of THE NOMI SONG, a doc that has the distinct possibility to bring its subject back into the limelight of the (queer) community from which he left far too soon. It could quite possibly even take David Wojnarowicz’s name out of the art world, and academy, and back into the streets—where he belongs. I hope it does. Wojnarowicz’s art, writings, politics, and especially his voice—of which there is so very much of in this film—are just as relevant now as they were 30 and 40 years ago. When he sang “we are all essential laborers / you will die soon enough” in 1982, we can feel that now. When he said “There’s absolutely no way you can separate politics from AIDS” in 1989, we can feel that now. This film is David Wojnarowicz as a mouthpiece for an epidemic that killed tens of thousands of Americans before the President addressed it in a major policy address. This is David Wojnarowicz as the specter of all the art we know we lost, and all the art we’ll never possibly know we lost, because of AIDS. This is David Wojnarowicz not as a metaphor, but as example. WOJNAROWICZ shows the artist’s life and work as the angry, queer mirror reflecting back the American culture that is truly diseased. This film has the capacity to truly affect people. Queer folks have forever been under attack in our society and we’re always in need of heroes of action, we need to hear the stories about the people like us that used every bit of themselves to fight against this perpetual pressure. If not an angry queer role model, WOJNAROWICZ gives us an angry queer role hero—and we could use one now as much as ever. (2021, 105 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
University of Chicago
Multiple centers and programs at the UofC present Mama Gloria: Luchina Fisher in Conversation with zakkiyyah najeebah on Wednesday at 6pm. Fisher, director of the 2020 documentary MAMA GLORIA, speaks with visual artist Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O'Neal about her film and its subject, Chicago Black transgender activist Gloria Allen. Registration here.
Asian Pop-Up Cinema
Asian Pop-Up Cinema presents a mix of online and drive-in screenings of more than 30 films for their Spring season. The online programming continues through April 30 and the drive-in screenings take place April 15-May 1. More information and a complete schedule here.
Video Data Bank
VDB presents Stephen Varble’s 1982 experimental video work LADY HERCULES, A PRELUDE TO ‘JOURNEY TO THE SUN’ (41 min) here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
A program of the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films, a program of the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts, and Emma Seligman’s 2020 film SHIVA BABY (77 min), are all available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles.
Current and upcoming offerings in the Film Center’s new online lecture series, Talking Pictures, include critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum (Tuesdays, continuing through April 13) and journalist and curator Sergio Mims (Mondays in April and May). Details here.
Music Box Theatre
A program of the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Films, Emma Seligman’s 2020 film SHIVA BABY (77 min), and Evgeny Afineevksy’s 2020 documentary FRANCESCO (116 min) are all available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Busby Berkeley and George Amy’s SHE HAD TO SAY YES (US)
With misogyny and sexual violence back in the headlines, now seems to be the perfect time to reflect on how ancient these related practices are with a viewing of the nearly 90-year-old pre-Coder SHE HAD TO SAY YES. The directorial debut of both Busby Berkeley and the film’s editor, George Amy, SHE HAD TO SAY YES is without a doubt the most degenerate pre-Code film I have ever seen. The capricious, promiscuous, rape-happy Greek gods have nothing on the male leads in this film: Lyle Talbot as Danny Drew, a customer of salesman Tommy Nelson (Regis Toomey), who works for clothier Sol Glass (Ferdinand Gottschalk). It appears to be standard business practice for buyers to be “entertained” by models and specially hired “customer girls.” But the Depression is raging, and keeping customers happy with the same old whores they see on every buying trip just isn’t working. Tommy hits on the idea of recruiting women from the secretarial pool to take their place—on a voluntary basis, of course, and with a sizable bonus for their after-hours efforts. One of those secretaries, Florence (Loretta Young), is engaged to Tommy. He wants her to stay out of the customer entertainment business, that is, until he starts cheating on her with one of the new customer girls, Birdie (Suzanne Kilborn), whom he screws so he doesn’t have to sully his virginal bride-to-be. To spend more time with Birdie, Tommy pushes Florence at Danny, who nearly rapes her and then falls in love with her when he discovers she is pure as the driven snow. Sexual pathology anyone? All the men in SHE HAD TO SAY YES are sexual predators, cheating on their wives and pimping out their employees and girlfriends for financial gain. In a standard Hollywood love triangle, Danny would have been a stand-up guy from first to last, but his initial encounter with Florence shows his true colors, which come flying back when he wants her to help him secure an important business merger. When she does too good a job, though, he shoves her off the pedestal he put her on. In a strange way, this film deals with the loss of innocence all adolescents face, but Florence is not allowed to mature with her sense of integrity intact. Despite the desperately awful messages of this film, it is quite honest about Florence’s behavior in the face of so much schizophrenic depravity, and Loretta Young is great as a young woman who finally gets wise to the world she’s expected to live in. The opening sequence reveals Berkeley’s elegant and suggestive eye as the camera travels silently from sketches of women by the film’s costume designer, Orry-Kelly, to models in the showroom, and secretaries in the steno pool. A bit of comic relief comes from Winnie Lightner as Florence’s roommate and Hugh Herbert as a buyer, but the film is largely an earnest affair. You may be tempted, as I was, to turn it off early, but I’m glad I stayed and saw what this film has to say about the price of saying, “yes.” (1933, 64 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Prismatic Ground: The Films of Anita Thacher (US/Experimental)
Streaming live here on Thursday at 8pm EDT (7pm CDT)
As the name suggests, the new film and video festival Prismatic Ground—a co-presentation of the Maysles Documentary Center and Screen Slate, Cine-file’s East Coast cousin—offers a dazzling salmagundi of experimental moving image works for our delectation. Organized by founder Inney Prakash into a series of four “waves,” each containing a feature and at least a dozen and a half shorts, Prismatic Ground presents a generous international survey of contemporary artist’s cinema, all free of charge. The festival opens with a suite of works by Anita Thacher, a multi-hyphenate New York artist whose five-decade career, ended by her unfortunate passing in 2017, was studded with gemlike short films and videos. Each of the films I previewed from the program is marked by Thacher’s striking graphic sensibility, on display across a range of formats. The earliest work included, 1966’s PERMANENT WAVE (3 min), is an intriguing piece of avant-smut, like a stag film snagged in the projector gate. As the corporeal contortions of nude performers give way to the corneal convolutions of split-screen and superimposition, PERMANENT WAVE points to a moment when a structural tendency was just beginning to bubble up from the lower depths of the New York film underground. The elegant visual puzzles of 1974’s HOMAGE TO MAGRITTE (10 min) maintain a faint bouquet of structuralism: with their emphasis on optical- and step-printing techniques and their witty deconstruction of cinematic illusion, the film recalls Gary Beydler at points. But Thacher is unique in putting domestic space at the center of her playful transformations, across works as formally disparate as 1979’s satirical made-for-TV divertissement BREAKFAST TABLE (14 min) and 1986’s crystalline LOOSE CORNER (10 min). The latter, undoubtedly the highlight of the program, could easily be one of those gateway-drug experimental films, like Zbigniew Rybczynski’s TANGO, Takashi Ito’s SPACY, or Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren’s BEGONE DULL CARE, which matches the highest formal and technical sophistication with a sense of universal wonderment reminiscent of early cinema. Drawing equally on the aesthetics of minimalism and the mischief of Lewis Carroll, Thacher gets up to all manner of cinematic sleight-of-hand, from zooms to mattes to multiple exposures, in a series of delightfully confounding vignettes. Though more modest, Thacher’s later efforts in video don't fall too precipitously from these divine analogue heights. LOST/IN MEMORIAM (2006, 7 min), in particular, is an adroit exercise in kinetic ikebana in which layers of floral imagery pay tribute to women artists no longer with us—much like this memorial program itself, which will also host a discussion of Thacher's life and work with legendary film critic Amy Taubin. It’s hard to say whether Thacher’s spirit is a guiding one for Prismatic Ground, a festival which promises to follow its own idiosyncratic muse; nonetheless, as an opening gesture, this program of ingenious and beguiling films beckons towards great things. [Michael Metzger]
CINE-LIST: April 2 - April 8, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Cody Corrall, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Tristan Johnson, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger