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
NEW! -- EPISODE #17
Episode #17 of the Cine-Cast opens with Associate Editors Ben and Kathleen Sachs discussing the new Golden Bear-winning Iranian film by Mohammad Rasoulof, THERE IS NO EVIL. Next, contributors Megan Fariello and Josh B. Mabe chat with Music Box Theater's operations manager (and fellow Cine-File contributor) Kyle Cubr about the ups and downs of the movie theater business during the pandemic; Kyle also shares the theater's reopening strategy and news about upcoming programming. Finally, in a new closing segment to the podcast, we chatted with a friend of Cine-File to discuss a recent film they watched that they want to share with you! Sharon Gissy, the organizer of the Mental Filmness film festival, joined us to discuss Chantal Akerman's radical musical THE GOLDEN EIGHTIES. 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
The Front Row Presents is renting out the Music Box Theatre’s screening room to present a double feature of Keith Li’s 1982 film CENTIPEDE HORROR and Lucio Fulci’s 1973 film A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, both on DCP. The screening takes place on Sunday, May 23, starting at 7:30pm. Get tickets here.
Haifaa Al-Mansour’s THE PERFECT CANDIDATE (Saudi Arabia)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
The lot of women in a male-dominated and bigoted world has been Saudi Arabian director Haifaa Al-Mansour’s preoccupation. WADJDA (2012), her breakout feature debut about a girl who enters a Koran recitation contest, set her on her storytelling path. Educated in the West, Al-Mansour also confidently created English-language stories along this same line: MARY SHELLEY (2017), a biopic of the feminist writer who created Frankenstein, and NAPPILY EVER AFTER (2018), about an African-American woman who struggles with her attitude toward her natural hair. Al-Mansour has returned to her home country with her latest film, THE PERFECT CANDIDATE. Her protagonist, Dr. Maryam Al-Safan (Mila Al-Zahrani), works in a hospital where the lack of a paved road imperils her patients. Hoping for a better job, she makes plans to attend a medical conference in Dubai where she might be able to connect with a future employer. However, she finds it impossible to leave because her father is not available to approve her travel visa. Maryam becomes an accidental feminist when she signs up to run for city council so that she can get into the office of a family friend she thinks will approve her visa. Al-Mansour helps us feel every indignity Maryam suffers because of the strictures of Saudi Islamic rule, including having a male patient vehemently refuse to be treated by her. While the film heads toward a feel-good ending that marks THE PERFECT CANDIDATE out as a fairly mainstream film, Al-Mansour’s inside look at Saudi society is fascinating. As with her short film THE WEDDING SINGER’S DAUGHTER (2018), the director seems intrigued with how Saudi women celebrate weddings, paying particular attention to class distinctions. She also trains her gaze on the restrictions under which Saudi men labor by paralleling Maryam’s story with that of her father (Khalid Abdulraheem), a musician who has waited 20 years to be allowed to tour with his band to play “artistic” concerts. His journey offers a welcome look at the Saudi countryside and small-town life. (2019, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Rubén Galindo Jr.’s DON’T PANIC (Mexico)
Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday at 9:45pm
Inspired by supernatural slashers like A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, director Rubén Galindo Jr.’s DON’T PANIC is equal parts amusing and bewildering. Michael (Jon Michael Bischof) and his mother have just moved to Mexico City from Beverly Hills. After hosting his birthday party, Michael’s friends inexplicably stay behind in his house to throw him a second party that same night. His surprise gift is an Ouija board, though he’s less than thrilled, especially when one friend contacts someone named Virgil. Between struggling with his complicated home life and romancing the new girl in school in a classic 80s montage, Michael also has to deal with this released supernatural spirit who’s possessing and murdering his friends. Part slasher, part after-school special, DON’T PANIC begins with Michael’s hammy voiceover—with hilariously cliché lines like, “I knew it definitely was going to be a different birthday”—setting up a film filled with a cavalcade of enthusiastic overacting. The most iconic part of DON’T PANIC is unquestionably the brightly colored and too-small dinosaur pajamas Bischof spends the film running around in, though his performance of the film’s aggressively synth theme song over the credits is also pretty wild. Though certainly more ridiculous than scary, Screaming Mad George notably provides some impressive visual effects; he also has credits on two A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequels, as well as effects-heavy films like PREDATOR and SOCIETY. (1988, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Also at the Music Box this week: Richard Linklater’s 1993 coming-of-age classic DAZED & CONFUSED screens on Monday at 9:15pm and Tuesday at 7:30pm, with a pre-recorded cast reunion hosted by Jack Black and featuring Linklater, Matthew McConaughey and Parker Posey; and the Music Box Garden Movies series continues seven nights a week. Find more information about that here.
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COVID policies for the Music Box here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Garrett Bradley: Short Films (US)
Available for free viewing starting Monday at 12pm until Friday, May 28 through Block Cinema (Northwestern University) here
Garrett Bradley’s feature-length documentary TIME stands out amongst 2020 releases, as a poetic, intimate, and commanding examination of the American prison system, using both home video and original footage. The only non-documentary in this program, AMERICA (2019, 30 min), is perhaps most parallel to TIME as an artistically powerful reply to and visual dismantling of white supremacy in cinema. The experimental film is directly in conversation with LIME KILN FIELD DAY (1914), which is believed to be the earliest surviving film to feature African American actors. Bradley intersperses scenes from the silent film between her own dreamy and yet materially expressive responses, shot on gorgeous black-and-white 35mm. These feature portrayals and celebrations of everyday Black life—of individuals and community, work and play, romance and spirituality. These scenes communicate with and strikingly offset the archival footage, envisioning an alternative cinematic history free of racist depictions. An ambient score for the mostly silent film is punctuated by a moving sound design, which emphasizes that AMERICA is as much about the present moment as it is about history. The following two shorts establish Bradley’s unique journalistic approach in directing interrogative and eloquent documentaries. The first, LIKE (2016, 10 min), looks at the pay-for-likes industry in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Workers paid to “like” Facebook posts explain their roles in social media marketing and how shifts in the industry affect their everyday lives. Bradley emphasizes the people behind this largely unseen—and largely dehumanized—labor. In THE EARTH IS HUMMING (2018, 13 min) natural disaster itself is a business, as Bradley investigates the earthquake preparedness industry in Japan. Evocative, at times, of educational films, THE EARTH IS HUMMING also has the dreamy visual and aural quality of AMERICA, moving from scenario to scenario as it illuminates the very real fears and anxieties about earthquakes—especially as expressed by the youth featured in the film; as one interviewee states, “We’re always living somewhere between daily life and disaster.” Like with all of Bradley’s films, there is a focus on individual people—their daily lives and their voices—as well as larger systemic and global themes, with a palpable sense of empathy that is so lyrically expressed. [Megan Fariello]
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On Thursday at 6:30 pm, Block Cinema and the School of Communication at Northwestern will host a live screening of AMERICA, followed by a conversation and Q&A with the director.
John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke’s DRUNK BUS (US)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
DRUNK BUS, a comedy from directors John Carlucci and Brandon LaGanke and writer Chris Molinaro, features faces you’ve likely seen before. Starring Ozark’s Charlie Tahan as Michael and Moonrise Kingdom’s Kara Hayward as Kat, the film often drifts, like its main character, a bus-driving recent graduate stuck in a town he can’t escape. The film impresses due to an unknown name, that of Pineapple Tangaroa as Pineapple, a Samoan bodyguard hired to protect the young driver, who spends his nights on a route designed to accommodate drunk college students. Pineapple sears wisdom into Michael’s brain, encouraging him to move forward in his life, forget his ex-girlfriend living in New York City, and attempt to take back some control over his life. We’ve heard most of Pineapple’s wisdom before, but the film isn’t trying to transcend these clichés. Instead, Pineapple says each piece of advice with endearing earnestness. Real care develops between this unlikely duo, adding an important, albeit obvious, layer to the buddy-comedy genre. Still, DRUNK BUS evolves into a movie about Pineapple, a single, heavily-tattooed father of a daughter he rarely sees, living life in a story he revised in order to keep waking up each morning. The film exists without a central driving force, outside of the bus continuing to drive in circles each night, an apt metaphor for post-college tedium. Even when Pineapple’s advice backfires, it doesn’t matter. That’s not the point of DRUNK BUS. Rather, a break in routine seems to be the only thing necessary for Michael, and Pineapple represents that break, a way to recapture the singularity of the possibilities within each person’s life. That’s not to say that DRUNK BUS is a film overly concerned with the existential; it’s a silly, aimless comedy that hopes to get you out of your own head. (2021, 101 min) [Michael Frank]
Suzanne Lindon’s SPRING BLOSSOM (France)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Suzanne Lindon was just 20 years old when SPRING BLOSSOM (which she wrote, directed, and starred in) received its virtual premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, making her one of the youngest filmmakers—if not the youngest—to have a film in competition there. It is very much a young person’s movie, for better and for worse. On the one hand, Lindon conveys youthful feelings of vulnerability, restlessness, and self-involvement with striking accuracy; on the other, the film sometimes comes off as simple and naive, and Lindon’s tendency to place herself at the front and center of the scene makes the film’s self-regarding perspective indistinguishable from the one it depicts. SPRING BLOSSOM doesn’t approach the level of narcissism that Vincent Gallo reached with THE BROWN BUNNY, but it seems to come from the similar place, as Lindon demands viewers watch herself as she watches herself. Underscoring the personal nature of the project, Lindon plays a character named Suzanne. A seemingly well-adjusted 16-year-old Paris high school student, Suzanne is tired of her routine: she’s introduced surrounded by friends, their conversation muffled into background noise, as she finds herself unable to engage with them with much interest. One afternoon, Suzanne notices an actor outside a theater where the play he’s in is being performed. She becomes smitten with the older man (whom, we later learn, is 35), and gradually works her way into an acquaintance with him, setting up “accidental” meetings until he decides to invite her to a cafe on his own. Viewers dreading the story of an illicit sexual relationship will be pleasantly surprised to find that Lindon keeps the budding romance chaste, focusing on Suzanne’s growing confidence rather than her sexual awakening. Raphael, the actor, may come off as something of a cipher (the film never establishes convincingly why he’d welcome the romantic attention of a high school student), but Arnaud Valois at least succeeds in making him not seem like a creep. Lindon parts with realism in a few unexpected sequences where the characters break out in choreographed movements (it would be an overstatement to call it dancing), putting their ineffable feelings into moving images. The technique, like most of SPRING BLOSSOM, walks such a thin line between charm and preciousness that it will probably take another few films before Lindon falls decisively on one side or the other. That’s just fine—she certainly has time. (2020, 74 min) [Ben Sachs]
🎞️ 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]
Damon Griffin’s GREEN SUMMER (US)
Available to stream here 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]
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]
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 personal 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 culminated in this meditative reflection on her formative years in the City of Light. And much like Varda, Ottinger admits viewers into her private world, if only temporarily—the film covers seven years of her life (1962 through 1969) in just over two hours. Segmenting the film into chapters, Ottinger details her journey as a 20-year-old woman from a small city in Germany to Paris, a tale that involves a band of French gangsters and a sky-blue Isetta painted to resemble an owl. The journey spans the several years she spent working to become “an important artist,” as she admits. The film addresses the period before Ottinger started making films, focusing primarily on her visual art, which ranged from earth-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 of memory—is introduced with a title card with red, blue and occasionally yellow or white 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 émigrés gathered—to such luminaries as Jean Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Rouch, and Max Ernst. The film concentrates on the influences of art and culture on her life, with a later focus on cinema; the avant-garde iconoclast was a frequent attendee of Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque française. Yet politics come into play as she examines the Algerian and Vietnam Wars, enumerating these events 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 tendencies within the context of the Algerian War. Ottinger’s ruminations on colonialism and other geopolitical forces are philosophical, regarding them as unfortunate historical realities that mar our collective understanding of the past. She evokes this through her use of archival footage, movie clips, and still images of the things she references; she likewise engages the past with contemporary invocations, such as when she recalls hearing the sounds of Paris street sweepers for the first time and uses footage of present-day attendants. Or, similarly, 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 paneling. 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 included here: FREAK ORLANDO, DORIAN GRAY IN THE MIRROR OF THE YELLOW PRESS, JOAN OF ARC OF MONGOLIA.) The confluence of words and images create their own calligramme, or image composed of text or, as like here, “text”—the narration—that manifests an image of sorts, resulting in a multidimensional document that’s unrestrained by form. (The narration is performed in English by Jenny Agutter; Fanny Ardant narrates the French version; and Ottinger 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 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 outward perception of a complicated world, full of beauty, repugnance, and 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]
Charlène Favier’s SLALOM (France/Belgium)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center 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]
Melvin Van Peebles’ THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
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]
Mohammad Rasoulof’s THERE IS NO EVIL (Iran/Germany/Czech Republic)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
Mohammad Rasoulof wrote and directed this suspenseful, wise anthology about Iran’s death penalty and its impact on concepts of sacrifice, duty, and denial. The lengthy film contains four diverse stories: a portrait of a family man’s domestic life builds to an ending I mustn’t spoil; a young conscript, under duress, faces his state-mandated turn at executing a prisoner; an engaged couple is reunited in time for the woman’s birthday, but the fiancé, on leave from the army, stumbles upon a terrible realization about something he’s done; a dying man welcomes his niece, a student in Germany, for a visit, but harbors a secret he shudders to tell. From tale to tale, Rasoulof dramatizes decisive moments and the life trajectories resulting therefrom. See this for its nuanced look at saying No to injustice, which suggests the tragedies, but also the compensating rewards, of such a choice. For his efforts, Rasoulof has been sentenced by the authorities to one year in prison for “propaganda against the system.” (2020, 150 min) [Scott Pfeiffer]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Chicago Japan Film Collective
The Chicago Japan Film Collective presents a seven-day festival featuring nine films starting May 25 through May 31. Details 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-programmed series Leader Ladies, for the NYC venue Metrograph, continues through June 1. Three programs are still available: Girls on Film Shorts – Program 1 (available through Friday); HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT’S INFERNO (see review below); and Girls on Film – Program 2 (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
A program of New French Shorts is 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
Johan Von Sydow’s 2020 film TINY TIM: KING FOR DAY, narrated by Weird Al Yankovic, and Kim A. Snyder’s 2020 Peabody Award-winning documentary US KIDS are both 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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Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT’S INFERNO (France/Documentary)
Available to stream through Metrograph (with membership) through Saturday here
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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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 continuing programs.
CINE-LIST: May 21 - May 27, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer