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. Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
🔊 CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
Episode #16
Episode #16 of the Cine-Cast finds us talking about movies about talking! To begin, Associate Editor Ben Sachs and contributor John Dickson reflect on some new and old movies available to Chicagoans in early May before delving into MALMKROG, a divisive, 200-minute philosophical gabfest written and directed by Romanian New Wave stalwart Cristi Puiu and which has been available to stream on MUBI.com for the past month. (Ben also wrote about it for this week's Cine-List—see below.) Next, Ben joins contributors Scott Pfeiffer and Michael Glover Smith to discuss Éric Rohmer's final film cycle, the Tales of the Four Seasons, which was recently restored by Janus Films and had been available to rent through the Music Box Theatre through April. This wide-ranging discussion addresses not only Rohmer's late period, but also his evolution as a filmmaker, his pioneering work as a film critic, his days as a schoolteacher, and his mysterious private life. The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen. Find out more about his work here.
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Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Melvin Van Peebles’ THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS (French Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS, the first feature by influential independent Melvin Van Peebles, inspires comparisons with Jean-Luc Godard’s BREATHLESS with its intercontinental romance and jazzy montage, but a more fitting point-of-reference may be the films of William Klein, another American expatriate working in France when this was made. Like Klein, Van Peebles shifts frequently between naturalism and cartoonish exaggeration, and he exhibits a chic visual sensibility throughout. (The black-and-white cinematography is by Michel Kelber, whose long filmography includes Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN and Nicholas Ray’s BITTER VICTORY.) The three-day pass in question belongs to Turner, a Black American soldier who’s stationed in France. The white superior officer who grants the leave makes clear that he’s doing so to reward Turner for his obsequious behavior; in fact, he promises Turner a promotion when he gets back. The protagonist has mixed feelings about all this, and Van Peebles dramatizes the character’s ambivalence through scenes where he talks to another version of himself in the bathroom mirror, the mirror-image raising doubts and even calling his double an Uncle Tom. Turner manages to put his concerns aside when he leaves his base for Paris, enjoying himself first as a tourist and then as a paramour, entering into a romance with a white Frenchwoman named Miriam. Van Peebles presents their relationship in a freewheeling, Nouvelle Vague-like style, though the aesthetic doesn’t distract from the obstacles they face in finding happiness. Everywhere the couple goes, they’re met with dirty looks, insidious questions, and even physical confrontations; things reach their worst when Turner runs into some suspicious fellow (white) soldiers when he and Miriam are on the beach. The impediments to interracial romance are portrayed, alternately, as scary and comic. In one of the more inspired visuals, Van Peebles cuts from the couple’s first time in bed to a shot of Miriam being surrounded by a group of Africans in traditional tribal garb. This sort of bold imagery points ahead to Van Peebles’ incendiary classic SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971), the film with which the writer-director would cement his reputation. (1967, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Also at the Music Box this week: David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s 2021 film THE DJINN (82 min, DCP Digital) is showing once daily on weekdays and twice on Saturday and Sunday.
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COVID policies for the Music Box here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Damon Griffin’s GREEN SUMMER (US)
Available to stream here now through June 3
The feature film debut of Chicago-based filmmaker Damon Griffin, GREEN SUMMER is a coming-of-age film that never quite goes where you expect it to, its slippery nature resulting in consistently surprising narrative, thematic, and formal developments. Before you know it, you’re wading neck-deep in the brewing psychopathologies of its teen protagonist. In retrospect, the signs are there from the beginning. Aaron, a gangly, bespectacled misfit, has a sinus condition that causes green goo to ooze from his nose (Griffin’s loving closeups of the snotty runoff may not be for the squeamish). A physical manifestation of his difference—a difference the film links with the boy’s latent homosexuality—Aaron is made the target of bullying, and is rejected from his school’s track team. Determined to prove himself and “get jacked” over the summer, he starts training with fellow runner Adrian, an older teen whose ulterior motives are visually suggested by the way Griffin shoots him straight on, peering down sinisterly at the camera. There’s also a wheelchair-bound Arab boy named Hami, in whom Aaron finds a strange kind of commiseration and empowerment. It’s this relationship, introduced fairly late in the story, that effloresces GREEN SUMMER’s ripe psychosexual tensions, turning the film into an unexpected study of childhood regression and transgression, with shades of Todd Solondz. Griffin is balancing a lot in this thorny narrative—some of the subjects include suicide, medication, xenophobia, disability, queerness, and rape—and, admittedly, it doesn’t always cohere with the greatest elegance (an inconsistent sound mix and an over-reliance on voiceover add to the shagginess). And yet, GREEN SUMMER feels audacious, even rare, in its willingness to enter perverse places, in its frank grappling with the confusing and often unseemly psychical geography of pubescence. As Aaron, the intrepid and quite impressive Jack Edwards may be cute, but he’s also tasked with being petulant, willful, even downright cruel; the portrayal flies proudly in the face of so many sugarcoated depictions of kids in film. It’s a mark of GREEN SUMMER’s refusal of trite formula that, by the end, his “coming of age” feels far from over. (2020, 66 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Ulrike Ottinger’s PARIS CALLIGRAMMES (Germany/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
One can’t help but be reminded of Agnès Varda’s later, more autobiographical documentaries when watching this memoiristic essay film by subversive German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger. Much like Varda, Ottinger distinguished herself through an idiosyncratic body of work, which culminates in this meditative reflection on her formative years in the City of Light. And also like Varda, Ottinger graciously admits viewers into her privy, if only temporarily—though she’s as bold in duration as in virtuosity, covering just seven years of her life (1962 through 1969) in a film over two hours long. Segmenting it into chapters, Ottinger details her journey as a 20-year-old woman from a small city in Germany traveling to Paris (a tale that involves a sky-blue Isetta painted to resemble an owl and a band of French gangsters) and the several years she spent there working to become “an important artist,” as per her own admission. The film addresses the period before Ottinger started making films, focusing primarily on her visual art, which ranged from earthen-colored etchings (inspired by a country, Israel, she’d never been to) to Nouvelle Figuration enormities (which, like their pop-art cousins here in the States, wryly and colorfully reflect the contemporaneous socio-political landscape). Each chapter—all welcome digressions within the film, which mimics the catalogued stream of consciousness that is memory—is introduced via a title card with red, blue and occasionally white or yellow text spelling out the accordant theme. Within each, Ottinger explores her cultural and artistic progress in relation to the people with whom she associated; the tally includes lesser-known local personages—like Fritz Picard, who ran the bookstore Calligrammes, where Ottinger and various other German emigres gathered—to such luminaries as Jean Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Rouch, and Max Ernst, among others. The film concentrates on the influences of art and culture on her biography, with a later focus on cinema; the avant-garde iconoclast was a frequent attendee of Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française. Politics inevitably come into play as she examines the Algerian and Vietnam Wars, enumerating these phenomena and the cultural responses to them. She ecstatically describes going to the Odeon Theatre to see Jean Genet’s five-hour play The Screens, an evisceration of France’s colonialist bearings within the context of the Algerian War. Many of Ottinger’s ruminations on colonialism and other geopolitical forces are philosophical, regarding them as lamentable realities that mar our collective understanding of the past. She engages with history, both the country's and her own, through her use of archival footage, movie clips, and still images of the things she references; she likewise engages antiquity with contemporary invocations, such as when she recalls hearing the sounds of Paris street sweepers for the first time and presents footage of present-day attendants. Ottinger provokes a similar attitude when she shows the escalators at a famous Parisian auction house, where the people going up and down, buying the spoils of bygone times, are reflected in mirrored panelling. It’s a subtly expressive image—subtlety not being a quality for which Ottinger is known. (Consider even the titles of some of her most famous films, many of which she references and scenes from which are featured: FREAK ORLANDO, DORIAN GRAY IN THE MIRROR OF THE YELLOW PRESS, JOAN OF ARC OF MONGOLIA.) The confluence of the narration and such images create their own calligramme, an image composed of text, or, as like here, “text”—the narration—that manifests an image of sorts, resulting in a multidimensional document unrestrained by form. (The film is narrated in English by Jenny Agutter; Fanny Ardant narrates the French version, and Ottinger herself narrates the German one.) Toward the beginning, a clip from Marcel Carné’s CHILDREN OF PARADISE provides the ethos by which Ottinger abides: “A spectacle for those who don’t keep their eyes in their pocket.” The line comes from a scene where Arletty’s Garance, as the Naked Truth, is advertised as an attraction in a carnival. It’s fitting that the radically feminist Ottinger appropriates this exclamation, bellowed out in Carné’s film as a means of attracting viewers to gawk at Garance’s naked body, to signify her own curiosity toward and perception of a complicated world, full of beauty, repugnance, and so much art. (2020, 131 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
Paul Bishow and James Schneider’s PUNK THE CAPITAL: BUILDING A SOUND MOVEMENT (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Early in PUNK THE CAPITAL: BUILDING A SOUND MOVEMENT, Jake Whipp of the band White Boy states, “If D.C. seems like a town that punk shouldn’t happen in, then maybe that’s exactly where it should happen.” The film is anchored by constant clashing images of the growing punk scene with stodgy shots of D.C. government buildings and workers; particularly notable is archival footage of members of the band Teen Idles rattling off which government department each of their fathers work at. Directors Paul Bishow and James Schneider present the establishment of the D.C. punk scene as audible outrage during the Carter and Reagan eras. PUNK THE CAPITAL chronologically traces the early groups that came up in the mid-70s, the powerful entrance of the influential band Bad Brains, and the formation of the distinct D.C. hardcore sound and scene in the early 80s. Using montage of talking head interviews, conversations filmed at local places around D.C., and archival footage, the film quickly establishes the complicated, experimental, and often unsung aspects of this unique city-centric music community. Then, of course, there’s the music, played relentlessly throughout and tracking a vibrant evolution of sound and message. What PUNK THE CAPITAL does best, however, is illuminate the importance of building a music community beyond the bands themselves, through local radio, labels, record stores, music publications, and venues—and acknowledging the individuals behind it all. (2019, 90 min) [Megan Fariello]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Roy Andersson’s ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Sweden)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here, the Gene Siskel Film Center here, and the Music Box Theatre here
Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson trades almost exclusively in tableau-like shots that suggest the offscreen space goes on forever—in this regard, all of his features beginning with SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) could be called ABOUT ENDLESSNESS. Andersson’s style is by now immediately recognizable; as Nick Pinkerton summed it up in a November 2020 article for Sight & Sound: “It comprises a string of vignettes, almost all playing out in a single take, viewed by a locked-down camera with a static frame that holds its human subjects in the philosophical distance of a deep-focus long shot… The skies in his Stockholm are overcast or pale; the light in the city is weak and milky; and the walls are bare in the city’s seedy cafés and offices and flats. Grays and off-whites proliferate, and the palette is desaturated, as though colors have lost their will to live in this cold climate.” For those who appreciate his aesthetic or his dry, Scandinavian wit, Andersson’s approach is endlessly compelling. Each shot feels like a little world unto itself (too bad Chicagoans can’t see this on a big screen); the director strews details all around the frames, creates expansive backgrounds, and brings each scene to a pointed observation reminiscent of a fable or parable. ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (for which Andersson won the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival) feels especially parable-like in its focus on big philosophical questions. The movie runs just 76 minutes but has the air of an epic, since Andersson seldom strays from considerations of what it means to live, love, believe, act morally, kill, grieve, and die. Most of the scenes are narrated by an omniscient figure who flatly delivers pithy descriptions of the onscreen action (e.g., “I once saw a man who wanted to surprise his wife with a nice dinner…”), which renders them, alternately, universal and almost comically simple. Indeed, the straight-ahead, presentational style is a reliable source of deadpan humor; even the recurring character of the preacher who’s lost his faith comes across as a little funny when seen from such an exaggerated distance. Andersson’s style can be devastating too, as in the scene of a man who instantly regrets carrying out an honor killing; and it can be majestic, as in a scene occurring roughly halfway into ABOUT ENDLESSNESS that finds three young women improvising a dance in front of an outdoor cafe in late afternoon. A director prone to using miniatures to create the illusion of outsize spaces, Andersson is very good at reminding us how small—which is to say, precious—humanity is in light of eternity. (2019, 76 min) [Ben Sachs]
Grímur Hákonarson’s THE COUNTY (Iceland)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The people united will never be defeated. Many a social movement has started with that mantra in mind and carried its true believers to victory. But what happens when a people’s movement becomes institutionalized? Dairy farmer Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) finds out the hard way that the co-op that she and her husband belong to has become corrupted by greed and power, making their members dependent on them for survival and demanding so much in return that many of the members are reduced to the status of tenant farmers on their own land. Grímur Hákonarson, director of the well-regarded Icelandic pastoral RAMS (2015), is back in familiar territory as he surveys the relationships that can both help and harm the people carrying on the traditions of rural Iceland. Hákonarson’s opening long shot of Inga’s farm surrounded by shield volcanoes is the perfect metaphor for this story of resilience against the barely seen coercive forces against which Inga will fight to break the stranglehold of the co-op. Immediately, he eschews the metaphorical for the literal, as he gives audiences a strong taste of farm life by showing Inga helping a cow to give birth, dumping fodder for the herd to eat, filling a trough with milk for the new calves to drink from rubber udders, and using technology to hook the cows to milking machines and clean their barn. Hrönn Egilsdóttir is, for me, the Frances McDormand of Iceland, and she is ably supported by the understated performances of the rest of the cast. Particularly touching is Hinrik Ólafsson as her husband, Reynir. (2019, 92 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Dieudo Hamadi’s DOWNSTREAM TO KINSHASA (Democratic Republic of the Congo/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
In Kisangani, a city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a six-day war occurred between Uganda and Rwandan forces in 2000. Approximately 1,000 people died, and 3,000 more were injured. Five years later, the International Court of Justice compelled the former country to pay reparations in the sum of ten billion dollars, one billion of which was to be allocated to people wounded in the conflict. In his visceral, evocative documentary, Congolese filmmaker Dieudo Hamadi accompanies a cadre of differently abled survivors as, almost 20 years after the fact, they make their way to Kinshasa to demand their due. Apart from opening title cards that explain the circumstances of the Six Day War and a sequence where some of the town’s residents take Hamadi to a mass grave (and explain directly to the camera the atrocities that occurred there), the film avoids didacticism by immersing viewers in the subjects’ stories in a manner at once intimate and extensive. Hamadi initiates these tactics subtly, showing the lives of some of those wounded as they go about their day-to-day in Kisangani; in particular he focuses on a young woman, Sola, who lost both her legs and uses prosthetics (which are generally in disrepair) to walk. The journey to Kinshasa via the Congo River is introduced by way of meetings held by a de facto committee of victims deciding who should represent the group in the capital city. Their perilous voyage, shot on Hamadi’s iPhone, composes the middle part of the film. It’s direct cinema to the extreme, as the camera moves among the passengers of a cramped boat whose roof is made of plastic tarps and the like. The ride is no pleasure cruise, with passengers crammed together like sardines, eating bad food and contending with the elements. Some of the most harrowing scenes involve intense rain and wind storms that compromise the boat’s slipshod roofing. The group takes it in stride, however, as their challenges on the boat are relatively minute compared to the ones they face in life—consider a conversation between a man and woman in the group as they discuss being told by their families to commit suicide, so as to relieve the burden on them. The faction makes it to Kinshasa, where more strife awaits; upcoming elections, which were eventually postponed, become an excuse for lawmakers to ignore them. But the group forges on, employing protest tactics to make their stories heard. Throughout Hamadi includes footage of performances by members of the group as cohorts of the Troupe les zombies de Kisangi, a collective comprised of victims of the Six-Day War. In the rehearsal space, a woman without arms or legs called Mama Kinshade (a truly inspirational spirit) gives a rousing speech, encouraging the others to perform before a new audience. They break into song and dance, the release brought on by such creative activities almost palpable, especially as one participant writhes on the floor without shame. Hamadi himself experienced the Six Day War when he was just 15 years old; he spent an arduous 24 hours hiding in a church with his siblings until they could go home. His commitment to the stories of his people is reflected in his filmmaking, the camera urgent and unwavering. The film also has the distinction of being the first from the DRC to be an official selection at Cannes. (2021, 89 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
Maria Sødahl’s HOPE (Norway/Sweden/Denmark)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Scandinavian filmmakers seem to have a particular affinity for stories of troubled marriages. Along with the brilliant marital dramas of such luminaries as Ingmar Bergman and Jan Troell, we must add Norwegian director Maria Sødahl’s masterful film HOPE. Two of the world’s finest actors, Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård, play Anja and Tomas, a long-time couple with a large, blended family of adult and dependent children. Anja is a dancer/choreographer who has just had a great success in Amsterdam, the first such opportunity in a long time. Tomas, a theatrical producer who is extremely busy and often absent from home, is about to start a new project. Their world is turned upside down when they learn that the lung cancer Anja was treated for the year before has metastasized to her brain. Sødahl, who also wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay, moves deftly between Anja and Tomas’ home life filled with friends, family, and celebrations, and the medical diagnostics and consultations that begin just before Christmas and culminate in brain surgery on January 2. However, the main focus of the film is on Anja and Tomas, who are forced to face their emotional alienation. They are together, but not married, and it is easy to see that Anja has suffered the fate of many women, sacrificing her own career and tending to Tomas’ children with his ex-wife and the three they had together as Tomas happily immerses himself in his work. With death staring her in the face, Anja can finally voice how much she has felt like a convenience to him, challenging him to really stand beside her as a fully committed partner. It is a privilege to see two titans of cinema, under Sødahl’s sensitive direction, create not only two separate individuals, but also the “one” they have struggled for nearly two decades to become. Their intensely personal moments are handled with complexity and understanding, illuminating what it means to confront not only the fear of death, but also the fear of intimacy. (2019, 130 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Charlène Favier’s SLALOM (France/Belgium)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Elite athletics is a perilous place for youngsters. Freighted with demanding coaches, strict and often punishing training regimes, and physical hazards like anorexia, amenorrhea, and injury, it’s not a track most parents would choose for their children. Yet the exhilaration and accolades of competing often make it the course children choose for themselves, not realizing that they may be risking much more than they realized. That is certainly the case with Lyz Lopez (Noée Abita), a teenage Alpine skier with Olympic dreams and the talent to realize them. Her father is absent, and her mother (Muriel Combeau) is the opposite of a sports mom, barely taking an interest in Lyz’s training and aspirations. Quite naturally, Lyz looks to her coach, Fred (Jérémie Renier), for approval. Once she becomes a winner, he focuses a great deal of attention on her and eventually rapes her. In her first full-length feature, director Charlène Favier offers an unflinching look at a teenage girl wrestling with her emotions as an angry, disappointed man comes close to destroying her while insisting he is helping her achieve her dreams. Favier’s close observations reveal the complicated situation of the two main protagonists while surrounding them with supporting characters who help paint a portrait of the elite sports world in all its pain and glory. Footage of the ski runs is thrilling, and the location shooting in Val-d’Isère, a mecca for competitive skiing in the French Alps, provides a perfect backdrop for the beauty and danger Lyz faces as she tries to discover her strength in a fraught situation. SLALOM is a riveting, horrifying film that goes behind the headlines to show exactly what some of these young athletes suffer. (2020, 92 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Mohammad Rasoulof’s THERE IS NO EVIL (Iran/Germany/Czech Republic)
Available for rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Elite athletics is a perilous place for youngsters. Freighted with demanding coaches, strict and often punishing training regimes, and physical hazards like anorexia, amenorrhea, and injury, it’s not a track most parents would choose for their children. Yet the exhilaration and accolades of competing often make it the course children choose for themselves, not realizing that they may be risking much more than they realized. That is certainly the case with Lyz Lopez (Noée Abita), a teenage Alpine skier with Olympic dreams and the talent to realize them. Her father is absent, and her mother (Muriel Combeau) is the opposite of a sports mom, barely taking an interest in Lyz’s training and aspirations. Quite naturally, Lyz looks to her coach, Fred (Jérémie Renier), for approval. Once she becomes a winner, he focuses a great deal of attention on her and eventually rapes her. In her first full-length feature, director Charlène Favier offers an unflinching look at a teenage girl wrestling with her emotions as an angry, disappointed man comes close to destroying her while insisting he is helping her achieve her dreams. Favier’s close observations reveal the complicated situation of the two main protagonists while surrounding them with supporting characters who help paint a portrait of the elite sports world in all its pain and glory. Footage of the ski runs is thrilling, and the location shooting in Val-d’Isère, a mecca for competitive skiing in the French Alps, provides a perfect backdrop for the beauty and danger Lyz faces as she tries to discover her strength in a fraught situation. SLALOM is a riveting, horrifying film that goes behind the headlines to show exactly what some of these young athletes suffer. (2020, 92 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
Block Cinema presents the free two-program series The Impasse of Blackness: Interrogating the Possibility of Resolution through Sunday. Showing are Ngozi Onwurah’s 1995 UK feature WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME (90 min) and a Shorts Program (1988-2019, 101 min) that includes films by Onwurah, Languid Hands, and Ebun Sodipo. More info and registration here.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The 2021 Film, Video, New Media, Animation, and Sound Festival, comprised of work by graduating BFA and MFA students at the School of the Art Institute, takes place online through the Gene Siskel Film Center through Sunday. It includes four shorts programs and a work-in-progress feature. The programs are free and tickets can be reserved here.
Chicago Filmmakers
Chicago Filmmakers presents the next program in their local filmmaker spotlight series The Spirit of Chicago through Sunday. Included are short films by Brandon Jones, Sarah Clark, Shelby Gamble, Eric Liberacki, and John Fay. More info and tickets here.
Video Data Bank
VDB is streaming local filmmaker Deborah Stratman’s 2004 documentary KINGS OF THE SKY (68 min) here.
Chicago Film Society
The CFS has programmed a series of six online screenings, titled Leader Ladies, for the NYC venue Metrograph which take place from this Sunday through June 1. Three programs continue this week: Girls on Film Shorts – Program 1 is available through May 21; Sarah Jacobson’s 1996 independent feature MARY JANE’S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE (98 min) is available through Monday; and Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2009 film DADDY LONGLEGS (100 min) is available through Tuesday. Three additional programs begin this week: HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT’S INFERNO and DEATH PROOF (see reviews below); and Girls on Film – Program 2 (Wednesday through June 3) All programs will include various trailers and snipes. More info here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Rajat Kapoor’s 2021 Indian film RK/RKAY (95 min) and Kim A. Snyder’s 2020 documentary US KIDS (98 min) are both available to stream beginning this week. Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles.
The current offering in the Film Center’s new online lecture series, Talking Pictures, is from journalist and curator Sergio Mims (Mondays through the end of May). Details here.
Music Box Theatre
Grégory Magne’s 2019 French film PERFUMES (100 min), Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider’s 2020 documentary LOS HERMANOS/THE BROTHERS (84 min), and Hannah Berryman’s 2021 documentary ROCKFIELD: THE STUDIO ON THE FARM (93 min) are all available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Leader Ladies Series
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Quentin Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF (US)
Available to stream through Metrograph (with membership) on Tuesday and Wednesday here
A live screening with introduction by Chicago Film Society’s Cameron Worden is available exclusively to Metrograph members on Monday
Though originally released theatrically in the U.S. as Quentin Tarantino’s half of the exploitation-inspired double feature GRINDHOUSE, DEATH PROOF is perhaps more effective in its standalone form. Remnants of its connection to Robert Rodriguez’s contribution, PLANET TERROR, are there, but the film is distinctive in its female-led meticulous examination of 70s exploitation and slasher films. DEATH PROOF is split into two distinct segments, each following a group of friends as they are stalked by the murderous Stuntman Mike (played by an ominously off kilter Kurt Russell)—his weapon of choice being muscle cars. It all culminates in a wildly impressive extended car chase sequence, featuring stuntwoman Zoë Bell playing a fictional version of herself. In between moments of escalated violence, DEATH PROOF is predominantly a hangout film, unhurriedly lingering on minutia as it builds characterization for its ensemble cast—all the while the tension grows. Unsurprisingly, it’s stuffed with detailed conversations about pop culture, hammered home by blatant references to films like VANISHING POINT; each group of women also work in media, the first led by a local radio DJ and the other part of a film production. Tarantino cleverly draws on a pastiche of oft-considered lowbrow subgenres while also dissecting their unique tropes. There is clear affection for these films without ignoring their much darker elements and turning them on their head. The film ends with a fantastical freeze frame encompassing female rage, resilience, and joy that has continued to stick with me almost fifteen years since its release. I still, too, regularly listen to DEATH PROOF’s commanding soundtrack, filled with one standout song after the next—it’s Tarantino’s most exceptionally curated compilation. (2007, 127 min) [Megan Fariello]
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Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT’S INFERNO (France/Documentary)
Available to stream through Metrograph (with membership) Sunday through May 22 here
A live screening with introduction by Chicago Film Society’s Kyle Westphal is available exclusively to Metrograph members on May 15
Film history is littered with the carcasses of unfinished films, scraps of film tests, legendary ideas that never got off the ground. Among them, the aborted INFERNO, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s attempt at trying to make a film in the style of the Nouvelle Vague, is one of the more notorious. Clouzot, scorned by the auteurs of the French New Wave for his tightly scripted and controlled film style, immersed himself in the pop/op culture of the 1960s. He engaged France’s biggest star at the time, Romy Schneider, to play Odette, the lead character, and Hollywood backers gave him a blank check to create this internalized tale of jealousy. He compiled highly detailed storyboards and started an elaborate series of optical tests in preparation for this half color/half black-and-white film. He began principal shooting in the resort town of Garabit in 1964. The production foundered, and Clouzot abandoned it after he suffered a heart attack during shooting. Clouzot’s widow, Inès, turned over about 13 hours of film to directors Bromberg and Medrea in hopes that INFERNO might somehow see the light of day. The contents largely comprised the tests Clouzot’s camera crews did to achieve various effects that would suggest the jealous insanity of Odette’s husband, Marcel (Serge Reggiani). The documentarians relate the events surrounding the film from start to finish and sample rather more generously than necessary from the experiments, as well as whatever completed footage was available and archival interviews with Clouzot. They also conducted interviews with a number of people who worked on the shoot, including then-production assistant Costa-Gavras, to gain more insight into the methods and problems that killed INFERNO. Their film is an interesting look at how a film is made, as well as unmade. The preproduction optical, makeup, and costume tests are interesting to watch, as we see the odd and unflattering costumes Schneider modeled for the camera. Many tests were made to create the color effects Clouzot wanted in an era before such things were easy to achieve. For example, in one scene, Odette is supposed to waterski and then drop into the water. Clouzot wanted the water to turn blood red. The camera effects and the proper makeup and costume colors would need to work like green-screen technology to achieve this and other objectives. Clouzot planned four weeks of location shooting that would involve the famous Garabit viaduct designed by Gustave Eiffel, of tower fame, and the artificial Garabit Lake. The lake was due to be drained, so Clouzot was on a fixed clock. He had three camera crews ready each day; the only problem was that Clouzot would stay all day with the first crew shooting a scene over and over and never give instructions to the other two. Clouzot was wasting a lot of talent, including Claude Renoir and Rudolph Maté, mere months from death, who shot Theodor Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928). Worse, Clouzot pushed his cast and crew to the breaking point. A chronic insomniac, he would wake those staying in the central hotel whenever he got an idea. He and Reggiani were engaged in a battle of wills. Clouzot forced Reggiani to run nearly 10 miles a day as he shot and reshot a sequence of Marcel following the boat containing Odette and Martineau (Jean-Claude Bercq), her imagined lover, by land and over the viaduct. This relationship strained to breaking when Reggiani walked off the set. An attempt to replace him with Jean-Louis Tritignant ended quickly, and then the fateful heart attack stopped the film entirely. Why did Clouzot fail to finish INFERNO? I don’t think you have to be Fellini to figure it out. When his first wife died, he went into a “real depression,” as he says in an archival interview. So, too, he was trying to answer his critics. His rather caustic retort that he “improvised on paper” shows that melding the new style with his meticulousness would be a difficult proposition. In fact, I think it was an impossible one that gave him the equivalent of writer’s block. But Bromberg and Medrea seem to want to actually get inside his head to answer this lingering question. Clouzot’s interest in obsessive jealousy might have been engendered by his obsession with the beautiful and seductive Schneider, but I thought the directors overdid this aspect of Clouzot’s method, while ignoring the more obvious causes of his creative paralysis. They end their film with a long series of test shots showing Schneider doing various things under garish, otherworldly makeup and lighting. They seem to have fallen for Schneider themselves. (2009, 102 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Both films are showing as part of the Chicago Film Society-curated series Leader Ladies, presented by the NYC venue Metrograph. See “LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming” above for info on the other programs.
Elio Petri’s PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT (France/Italy)
Available to stream on the Criterion Channel (with subscription)
Three years making after INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION (1970), Elio Petri revisited many of its themes and images with PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT, exchanging the earlier film's cool tone for twitchy and sweaty dark comedy. After the opening credits’ procession of drawings of faces, accompanied by an Ennio Morricone’s score with moaned vocals, the protagonist, Total (Flavio Bucci), introduces himself to the audience, speaking directly to the camera against a black set. He’s a bank teller who needs to wear gloves on the job because he’s allergic to money. Resenting his job and the wealthy men the bank serves, he becomes energized when he lives through a bank robbery, then decides to explore theft as a profession and as a means of revenge on a nameless butcher (Ugo Tognazzi). Much of the second half of PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT is gracefully lit and directed—for a short section, it even turns into a caper film—yet Petri also indulges a penchant for grotesquerie, with exaggerated performances and close-ups of mugging actors. The look of Brigadier Pirelli (Orozio Orlando), with his fashionable suits and greased-back hair, is modeled on Gian Maria Volonté in INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION, but Orlando plays him without Volonté’s dark charisma. If the film is steeped in Marxist ideas about the ills of society coming from the concept of private property, it doesn't romanticize its poor characters. Total’s idea of getting back at the butcher involves sexually assaulting his mistress (who gives a speech about her objectification by men), and a long eulogy delivered at a thief’s funeral suggests that legal and illegal stealing are too intimately linked for the latter to have any subversive power. The third part of Petri’s trilogy about various forms of insanity created by social conditions, PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT is far from subtle, but as the world’s second-richest man just appeared on Saturday Night Live to try and make himself look hip, its blunt take on the madness of living under capitalism hardly seems inaccurate. (1973, 127 min) [Steve Erickson]
CINE-LIST: May 14 - May 20, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer