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.
➡️ SAVE THE DATE!
We are pleased to present a program with the Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival this year. Onion City takes place June 9-13 and Eyes Without a Place: Cine-File presents Chloe Galibert-Laîné, featuring three works by French experimental video essayist Chloe Galibert-Laîné, screens virtually on June 12 and 13, with a Q&A on June 12 at 7:30pm. More info here.
🔊 CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
EPISODE #17
This latest episode 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
Rob Gordon Bravler’s MOBY DOC (US/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
At the beginning of MOBY DOC, electronic music sensation Moby poses a question: “Why in the world would I want to make a documentary about myself?” He claims he doesn’t want to make just another biopic of a weird musician. His aims are more existential. We know we count as nothing in the mega-ancient, vast-beyond-comprehension universe. Why then do we think that building, as he puts it, the right existential portfolio of accomplishments and material riches will make us happy and help us figure it all out? To answer this question, Moby then acts as the unreliable narrator of his personal journey to fame, fortune, and animal rights activism. Moby has enlisted long-time music video director/editor Rob Gordon Bravler, as well as friend and visual artist Gary Baseman, to create his biopic as a phantasmagorical music video loaded with animation and puppetry, generous clips from Moby’s huge stadium concerts and other venues, archival interviews Moby gave to the likes of Conan O’Brien and David Letterman, play-acted recreations of how Moby saw his early life of poverty and parental neglect, and burlesques of psychotherapy sessions he has with actor Julie Mintz. The filmmakers don’t trouble us with identifying labels for locations and people, presumably because they are unimportant to the question of why we do what we do, and that approach extends to Moby himself. The film is a superficial account of his troubled childhood, his punk phase, and his dip into the rock ‘n’ roll cliché of sex, drugs, and alcohol. He could be anyone who has hit it big, bottomed out, and confronted his demons, quite literally, as he has a conversation with an actor dressed as Death near the end of the film. All anyone can get out of this mythical white whale of a “documentary” is that Moby finds meaning in nature and helping animals, who have never treated him with anything but love and acceptance. Oh, and David Lynch is enough of a pal to appear in the film. To be sure, as a consummate performer, Moby delivers a great show. Just don’t expect anything more. (2021, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Also available virtually here
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George A. Romero’s 1973 film AMUSEMENT PARK (53 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday at 9:30pm and Monday, 6/7 at 7:15pm.
📽️ BACK ON THE BIG SCREEN: PRESENTED BY MUBI
The Music Box and the online streaming platform Mubi presents a two-week series of classic films, most showing on celluloid. Reviews of this week’s films below.
Terrence Malick's DAYS OF HEAVEN (US Revival)
Friday, 7:15pm, Monday, 8pm, and Thursday, 4:15pm
Who would have predicted that DAYS OF HEAVEN would be the most influential American film of the past ten years? A number of movies would be almost impossible without its influence—THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD, THERE WILL BE BLOOD (which tipped its hat by employing DAYS' ingenious production designer, Jack Fisk), most of the work of David Gordon Green—that Malick's unprecedented approach has come to seem almost familiar. But seen in a theater, DAYS OF HEAVEN is forever new. Malick's poetic sensibility, which combined an absurdist fascination with the banal with an awestruck view of open landscapes, renders the past era of pre-Dust Bowl Heartland America a gorgeous, alien environment. The film is structured around his lyrical observations, jutting forward in unexpected sequences like a modernist poem. More than one set piece (including the locust infestation and the bizarre entry of a flying circus troupe) has become a little classic in itself; it's easy to forget the primal romantic tragedy, which New City critic Ray Pride once likened to a Biblical fable, which gives the movie its towering structure. It is this feeling for eternal narratives—rooted, perhaps, in Malick's study of philosophy—that distinguishes the film from any of its successors, which could never replicate Malick's spiritual orientation. (1978, 95 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
Jacques Tati's PLAYTIME (French Revival)
Saturday, 12:45pm, Monday, 2:45pm, Tuesday, 4:15pm, Thursday, 6:45pm
Jacques Tati's psycho-geographical treatise par excellence, PLAYTIME, begins in a pedagogical mode: for the first hour, working entirely in and around a multimillion-dollar parody of contemporary skyscrapers constructed in the outskirts of Paris, he teaches the viewer a new way to watch a film. The primary use of long shots and deep focus suggests a Bazinian spectatorial freedom, but the meticulously dubbed, panlingual audio is constantly in close-up: from the cacophony of American tourists to the analog buzzing of an office intercom, from the crash of Mr. Hulot's umbrella to the comic deformation of a squeaky leather chair. By the time we reach a long sequence set outside an apartment with soundproof glass, we have learned that the ear can lead the eye as often as the reverse. And none too soon, for the next 40 minutes--detailing the opening night of the posh "Royal Garden" restaurant and its progressively chaotic, visually and aurally exhausting demolition at the unconscious hands of a repressed, consuming tourist society--is what Jonathan Rosenbaum calls "one of the most staggering accomplishments on film." Here, Tati inscribes an intricate, painterly progression on his enormous canvas: from a restrictive, rigid grammar of straight lines and orthogonal angles to the continuous sweeps of French curves, expressed most directly in the movement of his characters' bodies--progressively intoxicated and compelled not just by alcohol and the increasingly frantic music but by an inevitable collective camaraderie--as they travel through an overplanned and overheating environment that, in a series of destructive sight gags, has lost its organizational power to constrain human desire. Once a disastrous critical flop, PLAYTIME is an odd and striking masterpiece of urban studies that absolutely must be seen on the big screen. (1967, 124 min, DCP Digital except for the Thursday screening, which is 35mm) [Michael Castelle]
Akira Kurosawa's RAN (Japanese Revival)
Friday, 3:30pm, Saturday, 6pm, Sunday, 2:30pm
RAN is a film of exile—conceived in it, consumed by it. After the critical and box office failure of DODES'KA'DEN (which is, in fairness, a candy-colored slog hopelessly attuned to its director's worst instincts), Kurosawa found his already-shaky position in the Japanese film industry collapse completely. Supplanted by younger, more radical directors, he had to turn to Mosfilm to underwrite DERSU UZALA and leaned upon grown-fanboys Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas to sponsor KAGEMUSHA. All the while Kurosawa was quietly planning RAN—borrowing elements from King Lear and the life of sixteenth-century warlord Mori Motonari for the script and painting storyboards for a film that he feared might never be shot. When French producer Serge Silberman came through with financing, RAN became the most expensive film in the history of the Japanese film industry, to the apparent indifference of Kurosawa's countrymen. Most every critic of RAN has noted a parallel between the 75-year-old Kurosawa and the aging warlord Hidetoro, and indeed, both preside over kingdoms teetering on the flaming brink. Legacies can be extinguished in an instant, but respect must be paid. RAN certainly has a homicidal stateliness about it; the film feels exquisitely brooded over, drained of all spontaneity, as if even the grey clouds had no choice in the matter. It plays closer to the operatic insularity of Tarkovsky's THE SACRIFICE than the CGI epics that would follow in its wake. It's definitely the last of its species. (1985, 162 min, 35mm) [Kyle A. Westphal]
Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA (Italian Revival)
Friday, 9:30pm and Sunday, 9pm
Dario Argento is one of Italy's greatest living artists, and his 1977 SUSPIRIA is one of his greatest achievements in both storytelling and visual design. Jessica Harper plays Suzy, a dance student who becomes embroiled in a plot by her ballet school's faculty (revealed to be witches) to unleash the forces of hell onto the world. The first in Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy (the subsequent features are 1980's INFERNO and 2008's MOTHER OF TEARS), SUSPIRIA may not be the director's most complex or visually stunning work, but it's perhaps the crux of Argento's canon, the film that firmly established him as an auteur worthy of international discussion and analysis. Loved by genre fans for its excessive violence and pulsating score by the rock group Goblin, SUSPIRIA is as much a testament to Argento's love for classical art, which can also be seen in 1987's OPERA and 1995's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. Argento's genius is to set these films, all of them bloody and relatively sleazy, in the world of "high" art. By doing so, he not only satirizes the pompous nature of "connoisseurs" who dismiss cinema—particular genre films—as a "lower" form, but also recontextualize these "higher" forms to fit in the realm of "commercial" work. (1977, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Joe Rubin]
Orson Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL ("Director's Cut") (US Revival)
Saturday, 9:30pm, Sunday, 6:15pm, Wednesday, 4pm
The film opens with a close-up of a time bomb. A doomed couple crosses the border from Mexico to California with ticking death in the trunk of their convertible. Another doomed couple moves with them, on foot. In a moment, all the world will explode. But this isn't a film about explosions and death. It's a film about violence, about the horrifying disconnect between words and deeds, about betrayal and lies. As the racist bully of a policeman, Hank Quinlan, Orson Welles exudes grotesquery, sweating bullets of injustice and bigotry with every wheezing step. He blunders through the film, a monstrous presence prepared to do anything to enact his vision of law and order, willing to frame a man for murder just because he doesn't like his attitude. All is transient, in flux, not merely taking place on the border but being about borderlines themselves. Where do we draw that line between interrogation and torture, between investigation and harassment, between evidence and supposition, between the friend and the foe? TOUCH OF EVIL is a film of cold fury, one that gives us a vision of existence as a permanent state of emergency, in which all that was previously thought solid has not just melted but burst into flames. The film begins with a bomb in a bravura long-take that falsely shows the world as whole, coherent, legible, only to destroy that world, to show it as always having been destroyed just moments before. But it ends with a sequence of crushing beauty: Quinlan, pursued through a wasteland of Mexican architectural filth by the mock-heroic Vargas (Charlton Heston), finally learns that in this space of nihilism, where things themselves can lie (a stick of dynamite, a photograph, a corpse) his own words are the only things he cannot escape. Objects are mere opportunities for deceit here, and space just a field of power, mastered by evil and oppressive, corrosive, of the genuine. Only words, perversely, can be trusted, and it's through words, finally, that the monster will be slain, though it's a meaningless victory: the man Quinlan framed has been tortured into confessing anyway. Marlene Dietrich's famous line of elegy, 'What does it matter what you say about people?' is the loveliest and bleakest affirmation of the indefatigability of injustice ever put on celluloid. (1958, 112 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Cathy Yan’s DEAD PIGS (China)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Writing for MUBI about the influences on her debut feature, DEAD PIGS, writer-director Cathy Yan cited two films—Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE and Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA—and several contemporary photographers. These influences play out clearly in DEAD PIGS, an ambitious, multi-character narrative that’s rich in striking imagery. Like NASHVILLE and MAGNOLIA, the movie is as much about its setting (in this case, rapidly evolving Shanghai and its outskirts) as it is about the characters, and both are portrayed with a mix of sympathy and cynicism. Yan’s storytelling feels more closely aligned with Anderson’s than Altman’s: DEAD PIGS is not a hazy hang-out movie where the characters cross paths by chance (if at all), but rather a fully orchestrated affair in which people come together by destiny and grand fictional devices. Yan’s narrative machinations don’t become obvious for a while; for its first 20 or 30 minutes, DEAD PIGS hums along on the energy of the gliding camerawork and hyped-up cross-cutting, both of which convey a sense of constant activity befitting the ever-changing environment. The film largely takes place in two settings, old neighborhoods on the brink of demolition and the modern skyscrapers taking their place. Embodying the first of those settings is Candy Wang, a beauty parlor owner who refuses to leave the two-story home she was raised in, despite the fact that every other homeowner on her block has sold their property to a large-scale development firm, which has already razed all the other buildings before the movie starts. (Yan based the character on a real-life woman who helped start China’s “nailhouse” phenomenon of homeowners who refuse to leave their homes when developers attempt to demolish them.) Representing the new Shanghai is Sean, an American architect embarking on a career with the firm that wants to buy Candy’s house. A naive westerner who sees China’s wild capitalist dog race as an opportunity to make it big, Sean resembles the hero of John Maringouin’s gonzo independent production GHOSTBOX COWBOY (which premiered the same year as this), though DEAD PIGS never becomes a nightmare like Maringouin’s film does. The closest it gets is in the hideous spectacle of the title. Throughout the story, Shanghai is plagued by a disease that kills pigs by the thousands; the region’s poor pig farmers abandon the corpses in the rivers, and the image serves as a metaphor for the displaced victims of China’s avalanche-like urbanization. (2018, 122 min) [Ben Sachs]
Deborah Stratman’s KINGS OF THE SKY (US/Documentary)
Available for free on VBD TV
Legend has it that, in ancient times, a band of ghosts and demons took over a castle in what’s now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; a young hero ascended a rope fastened to the castle’s walls, with a sword in each hand for balance. From this courageous act came Dawaz, a centuries-old craft that involves crossing tightrope strung high above the ground. At the center of experimental filmmaker Deborah Stratman’s freewheeling documentary about this death-defying art is Adil Hoxur, a record-breaking Dawaz practitioner and, when the film was shot, the latest and most famous (he’s often called the King of the Sky, from which the film takes its name) descendent in a long line of stately troupers. Stratman spent four months with Hoxur and his crew, traveling around East Turkestan as they performed acrobatic feats for nervous and ecstatic onlookers. Exposition is kept to a minimum; Stratman sets the scene in a way that’s true to the experimental drift of this compact work, eschewing didacticism and instead using a vaguely ethnographic style to document Hoxur, Dawaz, and the Uyghur people, many of whom comprise Hoxur’s fanbase. Scenes of the troupe practicing, performing, engaging in silly behind-the-scenes antics, and contemplating the danger inherent to their job and their status as ethnic minorities are edited haphazardly to create an unsteady portrait that indulges the pleasure of disequilibrium its subjects cannot. Those scenes are profoundly humanizing, seeing as how one might think of the performers, almost like the legend they’re emulating, as being otherworldly. This takes on double meaning considering their status as Turkic Muslims, whose forced assimilation and large-scale internment in recent years has been likened to the Jewish Holocaust. In a way the Uyghurs take on a mythical quality—that of the far-away oppressed. Yet Stratman’s documentary grounds their experience in reality, allowing the audience to see the Uyghurs as people rather than a point of interest in the ongoing saga of China’s disconcerting geopolitics. (Apropos of nothing, this reminded me of Judy Hoffman’s Britney Spears documentary, THREE DAYS IN MEXICO, which streamed several weeks ago through the University of Chicago; both are not so much about as they are around their respective subjects, reveling in the ineffable rather than focusing on that which has already been documented about them.) Stratman incorporates footage of the troupe’s incredible acrobatics, including a harrowing scene where a performer falls while crossing a tightrope. This leads into a montage of the group showing off scars and talking about their own injuries—no less distressing are the references to unrest between the Uyghurs and the state government. KINGS OF THE SKY is more straightforward than much of Stratman’s other work, but it still contains choice experimental flourishes. In one scene, she records the hands of some female performers as they sleep, then, still holding the camera, decides to lay down herself, the ceiling coming into view. Toward the end, voiceovers of people not heretofore seen or heard in the film play over the accompanying footage. One is the almost mechanical-sounding voice of a woman detailing the economic potential of the Xinjiang region, which Stratman plays over slowed-down shots of Uyghurs dancing in celebration; the voice is almost mocking, suggesting omniscient powers-that-be machinating while the hoi polloi attempt to find joy. The other voice belongs to a man who speaks of the storied lineage and long suffering of the Uyghurs, which includes the banning of the Uyghur language and Uyghur books in the years following September 11. His narration plays over footage of a road in the night, the image duly representing a people traveling—balancing on a metaphorical tightrope of their own—in darkness. (2004, 68 min) [Kathleen 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]
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]
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]
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]
Melvin Van Peebles’ THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS (France)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and 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
Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Guest curator Ritika Kaushik presents an outdoor screening of Phantoms of the Past (2005-12, 65 min total, digital projection), a program of short films by UK/Indian filmmaker Ayisha Abraham. Free admission.
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
Block presents Martina Attille’s 1988 UK film DREAMING RIVERS (30 min) beginning on Thursday at Noon and running through June 6. The film is accompanied by a discussion between Attille, curator and writer Curio Clarke, and members of the han-heung 한흥 恨興 media collective. More info here.
Chicago Japan Film Collective
The Chicago Japan Film Collective presents a seven-day festival featuring nine films running through Monday. Details here.
Chicago Film Society
The CFS-programmed series Leader Ladies, for the NYC venue Metrograph, continues through June 1. One program is still available: Girls on Film – Program 2 (through Thursday). More info here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
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). Film Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum presents a series on World Cinema in the 1950s on Tuesdays and Thursday from June 8-July 1. Details here.
Music Box Theatre
Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
CINE-LIST: May 28 - June 3, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer, Joe Rubin, K.A. Westphal