Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity. As more local venues and series expand or begin to offer online screenings, we are re-focusing the list to give greater priority to those and are attempting to be more comprehensive with local listings.
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Nanni Moretti’s CARO DIARIO (Italy)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
If you ever wanted to know why the critics at Cahiers du cinéma revere Italian writer-director-actor Nanni Moretti, CARO DIARIO is a good place to start. The film, which Moretti presents as re-creations of his recent diary entries, celebrates cinema and life as interrelated, with one teaching us how to appreciate the other and vice-versa. Thematically, it’s closer in spirit to Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP than it is to ANNIE HALL, despite the fact that Moretti’s onscreen presence is a comic neurotic everyman. CARO DIARIO is often very funny (most of Moretti’s films are), as the filmmaker finds humor in almost every aspect of daily life. Because gags come so easily to Moretti and because the film seems so casually structured, CARO DIARIO seems like it just materialized on its own—which is one sign of great cinema. The film unfolds in three parts. The first, “On My Vespa,” is a series of situational gags about life in contemporary Rome interspersed with passages of Moretti touring various neighborhoods on his scooter. Some of the observations yield great gags, as when Moretti, after commenting how he always wishes he could dance, picks up a microphone at a local concert, joins the back-up singers, and reveals he can’t carry a tune either. Other observations yield passages of understated poetry, as when the director says he likes looking at houses so much he wishes he could see a movie about them, then breaks the narrative with a montage of homes. One gets from this section of CARO DIARIO a sense of life as it’s being lived—the accumulation of fleeting observations that make up an individual’s point of view. The first part ends with an unexpected visit to the beach where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered, introducing a theme of death that will grow increasingly pronounced as the movie proceeds. The second part, “To the Islands,” finds Moretti visiting the Aeolian Islands with an older professor friend. Both intend to spend the trip doing research, but find themselves lazing about instead. The through line of the episode is the professor’s transformation from literary scholar to TV junkie over a couple of weeks; one of the movie’s best gags occurs when the duo encounter some American tourists at the volcano on Stromboli and the professor can’t stop asking them about The Bold and the Beautiful. It’s indicative of Moretti’s humanist worldview that the professor doesn’t come off as a snob when he’s introduced or a fool when he falls in love with television. The character’s reasons for loving TV are unique to him, and through his love he comes to appreciate a universal banality that connects him with others. It’s ironic that the professor reaches the height of his pop culture obsession when he’s touring some of the most antique places in Italy, but who’s to say what’s the best route for reaching enlightenment? The third part of CARO DIARIO, “The Doctors,” summarizes the year in Moretti’s life leading up to his being diagnosed with cancer. Afflicted with strange itching all over his body, Moretti visits one dermatologist after another and amasses what at one point seems a roomful of different prescription drugs. The comedy here is generally drier than before, but the central joke of Moretti being dependent on people who seem not to know what they’re doing is a good one. The troubling undercurrent of this episode is that everyone, if they live long enough, must face up to their own mortality and physical vulnerability. That’s a heavy thing to acknowledge in a seemingly lightweight comedy, but Moretti approaches the subject gracefully. Since CARO DIARIO is about the whole of life, it feels natural that it touches on death. The most remarkable thing about the film may be that its scope becomes obvious only in hindsight. (1993, 100 min) BS
Sasie Sealy’s LUCKY GRANDMA (US)
Available to rent through the the Music Box Theatre here
Imagine if the little old lady you always see on the bus was being hunted by gangsters, but she didn’t care because she completely ran out of fucks years ago when her husband died. There’s a confluence of so many great things in LUCKY GRANDMA that it feels incredibly hard to even parse them all out for description. After going to a fortune teller to learn what her lucky day will be, the elderly Grandma Wong empties her bank account and hops on the bus to the casino. She goes hard at the tables and her luck is non-stop... until it stops. Still, through a couple of blackly comic scenarios, she ends up with a suitcase full of money, shortly after which she ends up with a couple of gangsters after her as well. This classic noir turn of cursed, ill-gained money lets the film go all in as well. Pitting classic gangster types against a cantankerous Grandma who is far steelier than the mob could ever expect opens up a hilarious world of violent shoot-outs and cranky visits with the grandchildren. Soon enough she has to hire a personal bodyguard from a rival gang for protection, entrenching herself further in the underworld of New York’s Chinatown, all the while still arguing with her son about not wanting to leave her apartment and move in with the family so they can take better care of her. Her elderly problems are so inventively played on the same level as her gangster ones, it’s brilliant. LUCKY GRANDMA is a rejuvenating take on one of film’s oldest genres. The performance by veteran actress Tsai Chin as Grandma Wong is just splendid. It’s rare enough to see elderly actors playing leads in films, but women of her age, who aren’t white? Forget it. This is a one-person case against the discriminative casting Hollywood has been guilty of since time immemorial. Hilarious and incredibly clever, LUCKY GRANDMA offers all the things you want in a gangster movie, but in a way you never knew you wanted—or could even have. Don’t sleep on this one. You definitely want LUCKY GRANDMA on your side. (2019, 87 min) RJM
Agnieszka Holland’s MR. JONES (Poland/Ukraine)
Available to rent through the the Gene Siskel Film Center here
All historical films are propaganda; the stories selected, the funding received for production, the decisions made in production, and the width of distribution are the fingerprints of politics. It’s impossible to remove these stains from the celluloid, for better or worse. MR. JONES is as honest an example of this as one could make. Not content in simply recounting the 1933 reportage of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones regarding Stalin's mass starvation in Ukraine, it asks the question, “How could it have been otherwise?” Director Agnieszka Holland (most famous for her 1991 film EUROPA EUROPA) has no reluctance in making this film concretely about the Holodomor as an event of purposeful starvation. Using a very American/British style of dramatic thriller, Holland gives us the types of political intrigue and emotional stings that we want, and expect, in historical retellings. The result is a film not unlike SCHINDLER’S LIST, where human tragedy on an unimaginable scale is made palatable for, dare I say, entertainment. MR. JONES is a nearly platonic ideal of the historical political thriller film; it’s a well-made machine of Hollywood style history, each aspect (direction, acting, script, editing, etc.) perfectly calibrated to fit and run with the utmost efficiency. The film plays Gareth Jones as a Western Cassandra of the Short 20th Century. As a reporter in the 1930s he rode a plane with Hitler and Goebbels, returning with warnings that the Reich stag fire was a cynical false-flag ploy to gain more power, which no one believed. Shortly afterwards he spent March of 1933 undercover in the Soviet Union, traveling to Ukraine and keeping a diary about the mass man-made starvation that was occurring. Upon returning he reported it, only to have the New York Times publish reports directly against his, damning the veracity of his accounts. MR. JONES focuses on this Ukrainian trip and presents Jones’s experience as certain proof of the Holodomor, as well as suggesting that perhaps something could have been done by the West to assuage it if only someone had listened. Curiously, Jones’s story is book-ended by scenes of George Orwell working at a typewriter. The opening narration reads from his explanation of why the concepts of Animal Farm needed to be written allegorically with animals on a farm, while the closing narration reads passages of the book directly. There is no subtly in this film, nor is there any attempt towards it, and there is obvious political and historical motivation behind it. Holland sought to make a film about the Holodomor in a palatable manner, and it stakes a claim in regards to an event that is still, among certain historians and politicians, in question. MR. JONES acts to directly shout down those deniers. The end result is a strong film that definitely serves to introduce the Holodomor to an audience unaware of the event. To those already familiar with the event, it won’t do much to change or strengthen opinion; however, as a dramatic thriller about history, there are far worse films out there. Unlike Holocaust films, or films about slavery in the United States, there is a severe lacuna of representations of the Holodomor in media. Thus any additions to the canon are deeply needed. It’s incredibly difficult to make a movie about this kind of human tragedy that doesn’t exploit either history or the audience. Thankfully, MR. JONES does well to honor the memory of those who died in the famine, while also being a solidly engaging film. (2019, 119 min) RJM
Rami George’s UNTITLED (STANLEY, MY SECOND LOVER) (Experimental)
Presented online by Gallery400 through Sunday 5/24
Inspired by YouTube videos that involve an unlikely muse narrating his own 8mm footage, Rami George’s found-footage video essay UNTITLED (STANLEY, MY SECOND LOVER) is a personal and historical chronology utilizing imagery sourced from YouTube spanning the 1960s to the 1990s and featuring stories from both the YouTube muse and George himself, as well as various other texts. The result is a work that’s remarkably lucid despite its menagerie of sources, reflecting the medium’s ability to suggest coherence where it otherwise might not exist. One is struck by how singular and universal this work seems; with elements of imagined autobiography, it puts forth a notion of collective histories borne from intimate experiences, which then connects to a vision of politics that takes both into account. As George writes in the accompanying statement, “UNTITLED (STANLEY, MY SECOND LOVER) exists as an attempt to honor my queer and political predecessors, while also thinking towards a present moment, and a constructive future.” The work seemingly begins in 1968. “This is you,” says George as the unidentified narrator, speaking in second person. “This is before you realized you were gay or anything.” After this, the narrator loosely details his sexual past, consisting of various crushes and lovers, as well as his connection to such social concerns as queer activism and the AIDS crisis, all while what appears to be home movie footage—which is comprised of the footage sourced from YouTube—appears on screen. The work conveys an intimacy removed from reality that’s no less visceral despite being partly imagined. George notes, “Looking back I can see how pivotal this work was within my practice. It marked a recurring motivation to weave the personal and political, the historical and the fictional.” (2012, 8 min) KS
Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León’s THE WOLF HOUSE (Chile/Animation)
Available for rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
An instant classic of experimental animation, this short Chilean feature blends folk and avant-garde traditions so fluidly that it seems to belong to no era in particular. The writer-directors, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, conjure an out-of-time feeling from the start, presenting the movie, falsely, as a piece of outsider art found in the vault of a secluded, German-speaking community in Chile’s far south. An unidentified narrator explains that this community lives according to longstanding traditions and generally ignores modern customs; however, he insists that the communards maintain a healthy relationship with the surrounding Chilean population, contrary to nasty rumors about them being standoffish. This introduction, with its tone of cultural ambassadorship, suggests that the film we’re about to see will present the community in a positive light, yet the first sly joke of THE WOLF HOUSE is that it makes the communards seem awful right away. The movie proper starts with printed text informing us that the heroine, Maria (a member of the traditionalist community), has been sentenced to 100 days of isolation because she absentmindedly let three pigs escape from the community farm. Upset with her punishment, Maria flees into the surrounding woods and runs until she finds a strange abandoned house. She decides to squat there, unaware that the house has a life of its own—and that it thrives on torturing its human guests. It quickly becomes clear that this fairy tale is an allegory by and for the communards, showing what happens to people who disobey the community and try to make it on their own; the nightmare house represents the communards’ small-minded fears of the world at large. Cociña and León realize the story with an exquisite mix of painted and stop-motion animation, moving unpredictably between the two modes or else combining them in the same shots. There’s a handmade quality to it all befitting the (fictional) rustic community that it comes from; you can see the fingertip imprints on the three-dimensional figures, which seem to be made from clay, papier mâché, and other school-room art materials. Further, the story proceeds according to a dream logic that feels like it derives from folklore. In one passage, Maria finds two pigs living in the house, then casts a spell that gives the animals human arms and legs. Later, the half-animals transform entirely into human children. In another sequence, Maria accidentally sets fire to her house during dinner; Cociña and León depict the fire by having the backgrounds gradually turn gray, as if they were coloring over them. Such rudimentary effects speak directly to the imagination because the viewer must fill in the details of the scene in his or her mind—the very place where nightmares take root. (2018, 73 min) BS
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements
Jean-Luc Godard's BAND OF OUTSIDERS (France/Revival)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Time has been incredibly kind to Jean-Luc Godard's lightweight "crime movie," a notable flop in its day, which has emerged, more than half-a-century later, as one of the filmmaker's most enduringly (and endearingly) popular films. A seemingly tossed-off distillation of the themes, obsessions, and techniques of JLG's early period, this loose adaptation of a largely-forgotten American pulp novel—Fool's Gold, by Dolores Hitchens—stars Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur as a couple of incompetent dreamer hoods, and Godard's then-wife and muse Anna Karina as a girl they meet in their English class and rope into helping them commit a robbery. Karina gives what is perhaps her definitive performance, combining tragedy, resolve, and girlish charm into a single enigmatic package, and the film's giddy, scuzzy style—packed tight with references, meta-jokes, and directorial flight-of fancy—is downright intoxicating. If you've never seen a Godard film, this might be the place to start. (1964, 97 min) IV
D.W. Young’s THE BOOKSELLERS (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
When Bibi, the owner of Imperial Fine Books on the Upper East Side of New York City, talks about the moment she fell for fine, leather-bound books, a documentary that already had my sympathy won me over completely. My maternal grandfather was a bookbinder who fashioned finely tooled, gilt leather bindings, and a photo album he created is among my treasured possessions. The family connection matters, but my appreciation for a nearly vanished craft put me in the company of the like minds of antiquarian booksellers, archivists, curators, and writers whose world director D.W. Young explores in THE BOOKSELLERS. Young covers a lot of ground, from the history of bookstores and rare booksellers in New York to the effect of technology on the sales of physical books. Most intriguing are the collector/booksellers who fill their homes, shops, and warehouses with books and other artifacts they love. Young probes why they do what they do—the beauty of the books, the (formerly) years-long search for a particular volume, the preservation of underrepresented histories in archives like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A visit to Priceline founder Jay Walker’s Library of the History of Human Imagination, whose design is fashioned after an M.C. Escher drawing, is both fascinating and an homage to extreme acquisitiveness. But then, people of much more modest means in this film have amassed even more than Walker. If you are a book lover, and especially if you are seized by the collection bug, THE BOOKSELLERS will unite you with your people. (2019, 99 min) MF
Horace B. Jenkins’ CANE RIVER (US/Revival)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
When you hear about films that are or were previously thought lost, you typically think of films from way back when (for example, 24 of the BFI’s “75 Most Wanted” list are from the 1930s alone), rather than those from the near-distant past. Of course, more recently thought-to-be lost films do exist: there’s one from the 1980s on the BFI’s list, and another such example of a “lost” film that’s not yet 40 years old is writer-director Horace B. Jenkins’ CANE RIVER, which was believed to have been lost until a negative resurfaced several years ago. The longtime elusiveness of CANE RIVER is compounded by the fact that it was set to be released in New York, after having enjoyed a gala debut in New Orleans (where the film partly takes place), until Jenkins passed away unexpectedly in 1982; at one point, when Jenkins was still alive, the comedian Richard Pryor had even been interested in bringing it to Hollywood but was rebuffed by the film’s producers. Now, thanks to film preservation organization IndieCollect (which salvaged the 35mm negative from a defunct film lab and deposited it at the Academy Film Archive, which struck a new preservation print, which IndieCollect then used for a 4K restoration) and Oscilloscope Laboratories (who are giving it the theatrical distribution it never had), we can finally see Jenkins’ one and only feature film, a work made by a Black man about Black love amidst issues respective to Black life. Prior to making it, Jenkins was an Emmy-winning television producer and director, whose work ranged from segments of Sesame Street to a public television documentary called SUDAN PYRAMIDS: A ZANDI'S DREAM (which won two Oscar Micheaux Awards). Considering he spent much of his career in television, I was impressed by how cinematic CANE RIVER is—it’s imbued with a sense of weightiness, with references to offscreen developments, both present and past, that feels more at home in cinema than TV. The story follows Peter (Richard Romaine), a former college football star who rejected the pros to become a writer; he returns home to Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, where his family lives along Cane River. He meets Maria (Tommye Myrick) while on a tour of a local plantation that had been owned by his distant relatives. The two enter into a romance with Romeo and Juliet overtones: he’s from a prominent Creole family and she’s from a less affluent part of town. Jenkins explained in an interview that Peter’s family history was inspired by that of the real-life Marie Thérèse Coincoin, an African woman who liberated herself from slavery and went on to marry Frenchman Pierre Metoyer. Coincoin and Metoyer had ten children and owned the Melrose Plantation—and slaves, a point of contention between Peter and Maria. Jenkins also specified that Metoyer and Coincoin’s children “are considered to be the origin of the Creole culture in Louisiana,” lending a sense of history not made explicitly clear in the film. (When Peter and Maria meet, she’s reading Gary B. Mills’ The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color; I think it’s especially clever to have as its main historical signifier a book that viewers would need to seek out to fully understand the fraught cultural dynamic between the lovers.) That Jenkins is able to convey this history, along with several subplots, in a relatively compact film is telling of an artist whose existence as a Black man bore the burden of context: in this world, it’s not just boy meets girl, but light-skinned boy from a certain kind of family meeting a darker-skinned girl from the town over, the dynamics of which make the Montagues’ and the Capulets’ drama seem petty by comparison. Jenkins tempers the tension, both actualized and implied, with music by Leroy Glover and Phillip Manuel; the latter sings the songs that accompany many of the film’s illuminating montages. It’s unfortunate that Jenkins passed away at a relatively young age, but thankfully his work has been given new life in this handsome restoration. (1982, 104 min) KS
Chicagoland Shorts Vol. 6
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Chicagoland Shorts is a yearly rotating program of local short films presented by the film nonprofit Full Spectrum Features and selected by their lead programmer Raul Benitez and two guest judges. Instead of focusing on a genre or a theme, the project does a great job of giving a view into what is happening in various academic programs and artistic communities in our city. SATURDAY by SAIC student Pegah Pasalar is a lovely and quietly affecting family narrative shot in a lyrical international style. I DREAM OF VIETNAM by Northwestern student Jiayu Yang is an award-winning contemplative documentary essay about the border areas between China and Vietnam, and the filmmaker’s personal, familial, and political connections to the area. KILLING IRMA by Sarah Clark is a dark dramedy road film about friendship and end-of-life choices. GO GO, BOY! by Oriana Oppice is a coming-of-age piece about discovering your adolescent queer identity through the confusing but blunt eroticism of professional wrestling. OH BABY! by Meghann Artes skillfully combines a big musical production number with stop motion animation to create a colorful myth about the randomness of life and birth. OFF THE HIGHWAY LIKE ANOTHER DEER by SAIC student Sofia Alfaro is a playful mixed-media Eros and Thanatos rumination. MY MATTACHINE by Martin Mulcahy is an accomplished mix of found footage, animation, and personal voiceover telling the story of the filmmaker’s youthful quests into the gay community in the inhospitable southwest-side of Chicago. FORET by Lisa Barcy is a bouncing and bewitching twirl of collaged animations. (2019, 82 min total) JBM
Quentin Dupieux’s DEERSKIN (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
DEERSKIN follows Georges (Jean Dujardin) as he experiences a midlife crisis and decides to blow his savings by purchasing a deerskin jacket and running to a small town in the French countryside. Georges’ obsession with his new jacket and its ‘killer style’ grows exponentially and he soon develops a symbiotic relationship with the jacket, which begins to have a consciousness of its own, egging on Georges to rid the world of all other similar jackets. How does one achieve such a lofty goal? By becoming a guerrilla filmmaker with a handheld digital camera that was also given when the jacket was purchased and conning a starry-eyed bartender (Adèle Haenel) into becoming his editor. DEERSKIN is darkly humorous and beneath its absurd premise is a well-conveyed metaphor about the power of material possessions have to control one’s life. There are some HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING vibes present in the plot but instead the malevolence is directed outwardly instead of towards the protagonist. The film is also self-reflective by pointing out its own ridiculousness through the film-within-the-film that Georges is making. Georges’ confidence in himself mirrors the confidence of his filmmaking, with the jacket serving as the emboldened unifier. With a muted color palette that evokes a hazy, dreamlike feeling, DEERSKIN serves as a comedic cautionary tale about the dangers of unrestrained egomania. (2019, 77 min) KC
From Soil, Sand, and Salt Crystals: Films and Natural Processes (Experimental)
Presented online by the Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) through 5/28
There are some great films and videos in this program, and we will get to those shortly. But first a tip of the hat to programmer and UofC PhD student Sophie Lynch and the Film Studies Center for the facility and wherewithal to transform this program of intense material-specific works to the online environment with a keen act of academic legerdemain. Taking a program largely comprised of painted, punched, buried, and scratched celluloid and streaming the results will probably go down as one of the more perversely enlightening movie-watching experiences of our "stay at home" Chicago theater-going time. ATHYRIUM FILIX FEMINA (2016) by Kelly Egan is a patch of blue cyanotype weaving between stark vegetal imagery and menacing found footage. Jennifer West has three films in this program that star world-traveling strips of 16mm, 35mm, and 70mm film that take exotic baths in far-flung locales for your viewing pleasure. These are process-based films with unwieldy descriptions of their creations that sometimes elicit a murky beauty. LAGOS SAND MERCHANTS (2013) by Karimah Ashadu is an extraordinary piece that has some structural similarities to a Chris Welsby film, in which the camera becomes part of the action, rolling and tumbling through the space. Whereas Welsby was commenting on the connections between technology, nature, and art; Ashadu is creating a rhyming dance to the labor of the men at work and commenting on the strains of the environment and effort. Jürgen Reble’s ZILLERTAL (1991) takes a film trailer buried under the trees and chemically treats it to remove the surface story of sex and power back in to their cellular roots. TREE OF CONSUMPTION (1993) by Dana Claxton combines performance art with low-end video, stretching and slicing the images of nature and women to correlate and rhyme the mistreatment of both. SOUND OF A MILLION INSECTS, LIGHT OF A THOUSAND STARS (2014) by Tomonari Nishikawa features 35mm film covered by fallen leaves for a short period alongside a road near Fukushima, highlighting the sensitivity of film and other delicate things to the lingering radiation. ASBESTOS (2016) by Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield is an immersive documentary into the history and current state of an only-recently-defunct mining town. MOUNTAIN CASTLE MOUNTAIN FLOWER PLASTIC (2017) by Annapurna Kumar is deeply beloved work for me and one I have written about and shown many times before. It is a Robert Breer-esque, flickering, squirming, poetic trip through suggestive mountains, an 8-bit castle, gif-y flowers, and a shifting floating plastic debris island. It's a jolting and gorgeous tottering tumble of suggestive colors and shapes. LANDFILL 16 (2010-11) by Jennifer Reeves is a buried film that uses ominous natural and industrial sounds to suggest both a sadness over celluloid being an obsolete "junked" material and a dismay over the excess of man-made materials overwhelming the natural world. ALL THAT IS SOLID (2014) by Louis Henderson is a desktop documentary that explores exploitation and e-waste. RECYCLED (2013) by Lei Lei and Thomas Sauvin ennobles trashed images pulled from, well, the trash and animates the recovered images to create a portrait of shared humanity. This is a long, dense, rewarding program that thankfully we have two weeks to sample and enjoy. (101 min total) JBM
---
The second of two online panel discussions will take place on Thursday 5/27, featuring a number of the filmmakers; check the FSC website for details.
Dan Sallitt’s FOURTEEN (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Have you ever felt a sense of responsibility to a friend in the present because of feelings of indebtedness you may have had to that person in the past? Have you ever anguished over whether to provide emotional or material support to someone you once cared about because you thought they might no longer deserve it? Does the process of growing up with someone necessarily entail growing apart? These are just some of the ethical questions you might find yourself contemplating while watching Dan Sallitt’s remarkable new movie FOURTEEN, which features two of the best performances I expect to see all year: Tallie Medel plays Mara, a 20-something woman living in Brooklyn who goes from being a preschool teacher’s aide to a full-time teacher while simultaneously navigating the complicated world of adult dating; and Norma Kuhling plays Mara’s childhood friend Jo, an emotionally unstable social worker who has difficulty keeping any one job, boyfriend, or fixed place of residence for very long. The chemistry between these actresses is phenomenal: Through subtle body language, pointed glances, and rat-a-tat-tat line readings (in which they frequently seem to be collaborating over the heads of whoever else may be in the room with them), Medel and Kuhling always manage to suggest a rich and complex history between their characters. Sallitt, in his fifth and best feature to date, deserves credit for directing the pair to underplay even the big dramatic scenes: These women are in many ways temperamentally similar while being presented in stark contrast to one another visually (Medel is short and dark-haired with an open, honest face while Kuhling is tall, fair, angular and more guarded), suggesting that they are meant to be seen as doppelgangers. While it is probably going too far to say that Mara and Jo represent two halves of a single personality, there is a lingering sense that each of these women, while on opposite narrative trajectories, could have easily ended up on the path of the other. The way Sallitt charts the evolution of their relationship over a span of several years in his uniquely quiet and de-dramatized fashion only makes the drama that is present all the more affecting. Scenes take place primarily indoors in modest apartments, restaurants, and bars, unfolding in long takes that feature practical lighting, with the dialogue and performances always taking center stage. But what makes FOURTEEN not just a stirring experience but an exquisitely cinematic one is the daring nature of Sallitt's elliptical editing. He tends to end scenes without ceremony, often straight-cutting from one seemingly unimportant moment to another, making it seem as if no time has passed. Then, all of a sudden, the abrupt appearance of a new boyfriend or even a new offspring in a scene dramatically contradicts this prior impression. The cumulative effect of Sallitt structuring his deceptively simple 94-minute film this way is that he impressively conveys a sense of the ebb and flow of life as it is actually lived, felt, and remembered—and provides a devastating reminder of how time gets away from us all. (2019, 94 min) MGS
---
You can listen to a podcast interview with Sallitt by Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison Cinematheque’s Mike King (a former Cine-File contributor) here.
Matt Wolf’s SPACESHIP EARTH (US/Documentary)
Available for rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and the Chicago International Film Festival Virtual Cinema here
In 1991, much of the developed world was transfixed by the media circus surrounding the start of a great experiment. Biosphere 2, a geodesic structure on three acres in Arizona had been seeded with plant and animal life from around the world and was now ready to receive the eight people who agreed to be sealed in it for two years to run experiments in sustainability should humans ever populate distant planets. The idea behind the project was initially sparked by the environmental movement of the 1960s, particularly the ideas of R. Buckminster Fuller in his classic book Spaceship Earth, and even more specifically by a group of about 25 free-thinking, like-minded young people who had been exploring the biomes of the world in a series of adventures on an ocean-going vessel called the Heraclitus that they taught themselves to build. The story of these intrepid, idealist men and women is told through talking-head and archival footage in Matt Wolf’s engrossing SPACESHIP EARTH. The older, charismatic leader of the group, John Allen, as well as several of the biospherians and those who helped them complete their mission talk about the philosophy and camaraderie that began during the Summer of Love in San Francisco and continued through the building of an Arizona ranch that is still up and running today, the Heraclitus, and Biosphere 2. Although the media attempted to paint the group as a dubious cult that indulged in strange rituals (in fact, theatre pieces), its members did not do drugs, were businesspeople who bought property and set up for-profit ventures in various parts of the world that are still going, and conducted real science that is now being continued in Biosphere 2 by the University of Arizona with support from Ed Bass, the wealthy heir to a Texas oil fortune who had been bankrolling the group’s various projects for many years. A surprise appearance by Steve Bannon doing what he does best proves the point that biospherian Sally Silverstone makes: if you want to make a difference in the world, you have to recognize the very brief moments in time when it is possible to accomplish something and then act. SPACESHIP EARTH is interesting viewing for all of us and must-viewing for the young change agents of tomorrow. (2020, 113 min) MF
Michael Murphy’s UP FROM THE STREETS—NEW ORLEANS: THE CITY OF MUSIC (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
My wife Karolyn and I make at least one or two trips to New Orleans every year. What attracts us, more than anything else, is that town’s endlessly fascinating culture, history, and traditions. One way this culture is chronicled is in the music, and it’s through that prism that we view the city in Michael Murphy’s UP FROM THE STREETS—NEW ORLEANS: THE CITY OF MUSIC, a life-affirming and exhilarating documentary. Our tour guide is Terrence Blanchard, the consummate trumpeter. We meet him down by the Mississippi River, and soon we’re off to the birthplace of jazz and funk, Congo Square—where, in the 1740s, the French allowed their slaves to dance, sing, and play drums on a Sunday afternoon: an expression of freedom that still echoes, as Wynton Marsalis says—all the way up to bounce. Murphy shows how the unique New Orleans street culture—Mardi Gras Indians and second line parades—grew out of these celebrations, these preservations of West African cultural expression. As drummer Herlin Riley puts it, “The street has the beat, the beat embodies the rhythm, the rhythm embodies the culture.” Co-writing with Cilista Eberle, Murphy wisely abandons chronology, more or less, and instead approaches the music as a kind of Möbius strip of connections and inspirations between songs and performers—a bit of a Greil Marcus approach. It's a canny organizing principle that allows him to tie in contemporary performances, showing how these old spirituals and field songs continue to speak—to live—in different historical contexts. Along the way, we get the obligatory interviews with rock stars, mostly British (Sting, Robert Plant, Keith Richards), which makes sense: after all, it took the Brits to reawaken us Americans to the treasures of our own culture. Murphy does a good job of making the most important point: that this music is a multicultural fusion, a mix of ingredients from French and Spanish colonialists, Native Americans, escaped slaves, Creoles. It moves fast, but only occasionally did I feel rushed, as if I were being hustled through a Hall of Fame museum where I might wish to linger. At its best, each segment is a marvel of research and elegant concision. In just a minute of two, for example, he demonstrates the influence of Caribbean-Latin American music—the Afro-Cuban rhythms you hear in Fats Domino and Professor Longhair. I especially appreciated his take on the towering Louis Armstrong—occasionally today, you’ll come across the wrongheaded notion that Satchmo was a sellout. The film reclaims Armstrong as a courageous, cutting-edge musical revolutionary who invented solo improv, showing his subversive side—how he snuck the line “when it’s slavery time down South” into a recording of the famous song where the word “sleepy” would have been. Ben Jaffe of Preservation Hall makes the case that New Orleans music is about finding a new language as well as preserving tradition—the New Orleans pioneers were the punk rockers of their day. On the one hand, the film offers “NOLA music 101,” a history in a list of names: guitar legend Danny Barker, Cosimo Matassa, whose J&M Studio was one of the birthplaces of rock ’n' roll, piano genius James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, great drummers Earl Palmer and Ziggy Modeliste, gospel’s Mahalia Jackson, songwriter/bandleader Dave Bartholomew, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, saxophonist Lee Allen, Earl King, Irma Thomas, the Meters/Neville Brothers, and on and on, all the way up to the next unknown kid playing on the corner of Frenchmen Street. On the other, it offers enough well-chosen details, interviews, photographs and clips to enrich the understanding of the connoisseur. Murphy sees the music as a unified cultural expression that links the town to its history, but also shapes and unites its citizens as a family; after Hurricane Katrina, it offered them a living symbol of resilience, and fuel for rebuilding. UP FROM THE STREETS documents the fearless spirit of the New Orleans that Karolyn and I know, and for that I find it a beautiful and admirable film—a collection of moments of joy and solidarity. (2019, 104 min) SP
Hlynur Pálmason’s A WHITE, WHITE DAY (Iceland)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
This bleak character study of grieving widower would have been just another dry take on a police officer on the verge of breaking if it wasn’t for Ingvar Sigurdsson’s beguiling performance. As Ingimundur he lives fully in all facets of this man’s life: He’s a doting grandfather and family man, a self-sufficient man building his own home by hand, a police officer, a husband still deeply in love with his deceased wife. We watch Ingimundur’s attempts at therapy, to work out his grief for his wife. The stern, pillar of a man obviously uncomfortable and inconvenienced by the prodding of his ordered therapy. He’s a man doing his best under the worst of circumstances. When a box of his dead wife’s belongings is opened in his new home, he goes through them and starts to see that the woman he loved was not exactly who he thought she was. Infidelities come to light and we watch, in real time, Ingimundur having to learn who this new woman is and start to grieve all over again—this time in a shroud of anger, not sadness. Using his privileges as a police officer, he begins to track down the man with whom his wife had an affair. Drowning deeply in himself, he flails and lashes out at everyone close to him, burning nearly all his bridges as he marches on an offensive to confront the man who has sullied his wife’s memory. A WHITE, WHITE DAY was Iceland’s submission to last year’s Academy Awards, and it’s obvious as to why. This is a tense film, not quite a thriller but not quite a drama. Ingvar Sigurdsson’s performance fills the screen, and the story, with a cold ferocity that’s worth the price of admission alone. (2019, 109 min) RJM
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
Desktop Cinema Working Group: New Digital Ecologies, a free screening and discussion, is on Thursday at 4pm. Screening are Ben Mendelsohn’s 2019 essay film AS IF SAND WERE STONE… (35 min) and two episodes of the web documentary series WHAT IS DEEP SEA MINING? (2018-19, 12 min) by the Portuguese media collective Inhabitants. Followed by a discussion with Mendelsohn. Visit here for more information and for the livestream link RSVP.
Chicago Filmmakers
Visit here to find out about virtual screenings offered via Chicago Filmmakers.
Facets Cinémathèque
Miko Revereza’s 2019 documentary NO DATA PLAN (70 min) streams this week.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Halina Dyrschka’s 2019 German documentary BEYOND THE VISIBLE: HILMA AF KLINT (93 min), Benjamin Ree's Norwegian 2020 documentary THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF (102 min), Elizabeth Carrol's 2019 documentary DIANA KENNEDY: NOTHING FANCY (82 min), and Josephine Mackerras' 2019 Australian film ALICE (102 min) also stream this week.
Music Box Theatre
Josephine Mackerras’ 2019 French film ALICE (103 min), Justin Pemberton’s 2019 New Zealand documentary CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (103 min), Steve James’ 2014 documentary LIFE ITSELF (121 min), and James Sweeney’s 2019 film STRAIGHT UP (95 min) also stream this week.
Chicago International Film Festival
Benjamin Ree's Norwegian 2020 documentary THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF (102 min) also streams this week; and Brian W. Schodorf‘s 2019 documentary CHICAGO AT THE CROSSROAD (80 min) streams for free from 5/22-5/26 (visit here for information about a 5/26 online panel discussion).
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RECOMMENDATIONS
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s GERTRUD (Danish)
Available to stream on the Criterion Channel (subscription required)
Carl Dreyer, one of the greatest of all film directors, excelled at making polemical movies about love, faith and female martyrdom, the potent mixture of which reaches its zenith in GERTRUD, his sublime final work. This ascetic film’s singular character, which gives the impression of being distinctly Dreyerian while simultaneously striking out in a bold new direction for the 75-year-old auteur, is deceptively theatrical: It’s an adaptation of a play of the same title from 1906 by Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg that features pageant-like proscenium framing (where characters frequently speak to one another while facing the camera but not each other) and is reminiscent of both Henrik Ibsen (in its depiction of a prototypical feminist heroine) as well as August Strindberg (presenting the eternal conflict between men and women). But there are few films as truly and wonderfully cinematic as GERTRUD, wherein Dreyer’s unique aesthetic combination of stillness, slowness and “whiteness” (to borrow an adjective from Francois Truffaut) is perfectly suited to capturing the title character’s near-religious view of romantic love as an uncompromising ideal. When the film begins, Gertrud Kanning (Nina Pens Rode) is a retired opera singer in her mid-30s unhappily married to a wealthy lawyer and politician (Bendt Rothe). Among the men aggressively pursuing her are her ex-lover, a middle-aged writer celebrated for his love poems (Ebbe Rode), and a potential future lover, a callow young piano prodigy (Baard Owe); but none of these three men love her as much as she requires and so she chooses to live alone – without regrets. Unforgettable for its use of long takes, the function of which, in Dreyer’s own words, is “a penetration to my actors’ profound thoughts through their most subtle expressions,” and Rode’s luminous lead performance. (1964, 116 min) MGS
Amy Goldstein’s KATE NASH: UNDERESTIMATE THE GIRL (Documentary)
Available to rent through Alamo On Demand here
If you crafted your taste in music based on what was popular on MySpace in the mid-late 2000s, you’re probably familiar with the name Kate Nash. The eccentric British singer-songwriter catapulted from a sizable online following to real-world fame seemingly overnight, including a substantial record deal, a chart-topping hit and a smattering of sold-out shows. It’s the dream for any aspiring musician—especially in the internet age—but one that quickly became a nightmare as she confronted the uglier sides of the music industry. Amy Goldstein’s intimate documentary KATE NASH: UNDERESTIMATE THE GIRL chronicles the grueling, unrelenting, and often unrewarding realities of making a career in music. With Nash, who toes the line between saccharine and spitfire, as her muse, Goldstein experiments with the sometimes-formulaic music documentary. It’s not a flashy concert doc — rather, it’s an honest look at the relationship a young female musician has with an inherently unjust industry: from power struggles between artists and labels, to financial insecurity, and suppression of creativity outside of what one has been assigned to provide. The doc juxtaposes typical concert fare with more vulnerable insights into Nash’s life and career, serving as a precious crystallization of an unsung corner of a powerful industry. UNDERESTIMATE THE GIRL immerses the viewer in the highs and lows of doing whatever it takes to do what you love—but it also raises crucial questions of what that dream even means anymore, and if the pursuit is worth it if it’s not on your own terms. (2019, 84 min) CC
David Lean’s MADELEINE (UK/Revival)
Available for rent through Amazon Prime Video here
In 1857, a murder trial that tore at the veil of Victorian propriety and social rigidity gripped all of Scotland. It involved a beautiful, young woman named Madeleine Smith who appeared to have poisoned her socially inferior French lover. David Lean filmed the story as a gift to his new bride, Ann Todd, who played the suspected murderer at a repressed simmer that is a wonder to behold. A voiceover opens the film: “In this great city of Glasgow, there is a square which has nothing remarkable about its appearance. But there is one house that is exceptional: number seven.” In the spirit that has animated many a ghost story, Lean seeks to attach the echo of infamy to the image he puts before us—the sidewalk-level window covered with bars where the real Madeleine slept and occasionally signaled Emile L’Anglier (Ivan Desny) with a lighted candle that she would soon be able to meet him. When we first meet the Smith family, they are inspecting the home they will eventually inhabit. Madeleine notices a spiral staircase that leads to the basement bedroom. Magnetically drawn to investigate it, she descends, walks through it and stares as if transfixed at the barred windows slightly above her head. Thematically, Lean will return to this POV perspective—Madeleine, already a fallen woman in the midst of the affair that will ruin her, will be seen, variously, looking up and being looked down upon at important moments of her life. An utterly conventional scene of family life ensues, as Madeleine, her stern father (Leslie Banks), compliant mother (Barbara Everest), and middle sister Bessie (Patricia Raine) receive William Minnoch (Norman Wooland) in their fussy Victorian drawing room. The Smiths hope Minnoch will become engaged to Madeleine. Eventually, both her father and L’Anglier, who pressures her to introduce him to her family, will squeeze Madeleine into perhaps thinking the unthinkable. This very well-written and subtly acted film laces every one of Madeleine’s actions with ambiguity. For example, Madeleine uses arsenic as a cosmetic treatment for her skin that may or may not have made it into hot chocolate meant for L’Anglier. It seems perfectly conceivable that Madeleine is both in love with L’Anglier and narcissistic enough to poison him when he threatens her plans to marry Minnoch. Lean is coy in suggesting sex between L’Anglier and Madeleine, but his suggestive staging of one interlude on a hilltop leaves no doubt as to what is happening off camera. In another scene, Emile pushes a frantic Madeleine to the ground and stands over her as she cries impotently. Lean frames her feet, turned sideways, between Emile’s flanking legs. Then her body turns, her feet pointed upwards. Emile bends over her and seizes her in a violent kiss. Next, we see his cane smash violently to the floor. Is it rape? Is Madeleine trying to get what she wants by having sex with Emile? Is it a wild sexuality at play? While Lean superficially stacks the deck to make Madeleine appear innocent of the charges, the cumulative effect of these ambiguous gestures and scenes shows a keen intelligence at work. A chamber drama such as this gives Lean little room to display his skill with large-scale action. Nonetheless, MADELEINE has some wonderfully grand set pieces. For example, Glaswegians teeming in the streets hectoring Madeleine as the police wagon takes her to prison and then waiting expectantly outside the courthouse for the verdict to be read suggest a nation mesmerized by the scandal. Lean continually changes his camera perspective to shoot up at the crowds looking down on the duplicitous Madeleine at the ball where she accepts Minnoch’s proposal and then down on the crowds for their bloodthirstiness in consuming the trial. There is no question that more is being judged here than Madeleine Smith. The acting, with the exception of a rather palely realized L’Anglier, is first rate. Special kudos go to Banks, whose severe Mr. Smith threw a scare into me, Sellars as a somewhat impudent servant, and Eugène Deckers as Thuau, a friend from French embassy, whose skepticism about Madeleine’s innocence throws our natural sympathies into disarray. Most especially, Ann Todd’s performance gives little away, maintaining the mystery of Madeleine Smith within a script that strains to satisfy the audience’s desire to know the truth. (1950, 114 min) MF
Lynn Shelton’s WE GO WAY BACK (American)
Available free on Kanopy through participating libraries with your library card and to rent through Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, iTunes, and Vudu
Lynn Shelton passed away last weekend; she was only 54 years old. In addition to having been, by all accounts, a great person, the mumblecore maven was in the prime of her career, having recently directed the idiosyncratic comedy feature SWORD OF TRUST and several-episode arcs of such popular television shows as GLOW and Little Fires Everywhere. I’ll confess to coming to Shelton's work only somewhat recently, after being tasked with reviewing SWORD OF TRUST, which I found to be exceptionally offbeat and counted as one of my favorite films of 2019. Smartly written and confidently directed, with a hyper-specific scenario that made me think as much as it made me laugh, it sparked a desire to seek out more of Shelton’s films. Now seems like the time to do so, so here I begin with her feature debut, WE GO WAY BACK, from 2006, when it won the Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Slamdance Film Festival. Set in the writer-director’s native Seattle, the film centers on 23-year-old Kate, who’s celebrating her birthday when the story begins. She finds a letter that she’d written to her 23-year-old self as a 13-year-old; it’s full of the usual things a teenager might say to or ask of a young adult, as well as unusually knowing statements, like, “If you ever get sad, remember that I was thinking of you once.” Kate then goes to a party at the theater where she volunteers and sometimes acts, and there the company’s zany director announces that he’s cast her in the title role of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. The kicker is that she must read the lines in Ibsen's native Norwegian. This is just one of several curveballs thrown Kate’s way, all of which she accepts without question. (The concept of the play itself, a bizarre reimagining of Ibsen’s classic, is one of the film’s most ingenious elements; another such facet would be the excellent soundtrack.) Kate had been shown to be quietly experiencing the loss of a previous relationship and engaging in casual dalliances with her Norwegian tutor and a castmate; but after a disturbing sexual encounter with another castmate, Kate begins to break down. One could think that these plot points reinforce a stereotype of women-oriented stories revolving around men, but here it serves to reinforce Shelton’s characterization of Kate as being someone who doesn’t know what she wants, be it from a relationship or from a job. Her eventual breakdown marks the beginning of what one reviewer hinted made the film too experimental: Bill White wrote for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that “Shelton breaks too many narrative laws for it to work as a feature”—which sounds like an endorsement if there ever was one. After the aforementioned encounter, Kate opens up all the letters she’d written herself as a 13-year-old and submerges them in the bathtub, then later goes to run an errand for the show. This is when her younger self manifests and accompanies her, resulting in a heartbreakingly compassionate climax. It’s clear that Kate doesn’t really know herself at this point in her life, and it’s likewise clear that Shelton did; her first film exhibits much of what’s great about her work as a whole, which she continued refining until the end. (2006, 80 min) KS
SUPPORT LOCAL THEATERS AND SERIES
As we wait for conditions to improve to allow theaters to reopen, consider various ways that you can help support independent film exhibitors in Chicago weather this difficult time. Memberships, gift cards, and/or merchandise are available from the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Music Box Theatre, and Facets. Donations can be made to non-profit venues and organizations like Chicago Filmmakers, the Chicago Film Society, South Side Projections, and many of the film festivals. Online streaming partnerships with distributors are making films available via the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Music Box Theatre, and Facets; and Facets also has a subscription-based streaming service, FacetsEdge, that includes many exclusive titles.
COVID-19 UPDATES
All independent, alternative, arthouse, grassroots, DIY, and university-based venues and several festivals have suspended operations, closed, or cancelled/postponed events until further notice. Below is the most recent information we have, which we will update as new information becomes available.
Note that venues/series marked with an asterisk (*) are currently presenting or plan to do regular or occasional “virtual” online screenings.
Asian Pop-Up Cinema – Spring series postponed till the fall
Beverly Arts Center – Closed through the end of March (tentative)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Spring calendar on hold with no definitive start date*
Chicago Film Archives – the CFA’s annual “Media Mixer” event, previously scheduled for May, is postponed until late summer (date TBA)
Chicago Film Society – Remaining March and April screenings on their current calendar are postponed, with intentions to reschedule at future dates
Chicago Filmmakers – All screenings postponed until further notice, with the intention of rescheduling at future dates*
Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) – Programming cancelled with no set start date
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) – Remaining programs cancelled, with plans to reschedule at future times
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Spring programming cancelled
Facets Cinémathèque – Closed through April 17 (tentative date)*
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) – No April screenings/events; May programming is wait and see*
filmfront – Events postponed until further notice
Gene Siskel Film Center – Closed until further notice*
Music Box Theatre – Closed until further notice*
The Nightingale – March and April programs postponed
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Park Ridge Public Library) – Screenings cancelled through the end of March at least
Festivals:
The Cinepocalypse film festival (June) – Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
The Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival (March 12-15) - Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
The Chicago Latino Film Festival (April 16-30) – Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
The Windy City Horrorama festival (April 24-26) – Cancelled; will possibly be rescheduled or reconfigured at a future date
The Chicago Critics Film Festival (May 1-7) – Postponed until further notice
The Chicago Underground Film Festival (June 10-14) – Postponed (tentatively in September)
CINE-LIST: May 22 - May 28, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kyle Cubr, Marilyn Ferdinand, JB Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky