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
Bruno Dumont’s JOAN OF ARC (France)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Good or bad, any new movie by Bruno Dumont is a major cinematic event. Few living filmmakers challenge viewers or themselves as consistently as Dumont does; every composition and sound cue in his work reflects the utmost precision and consideration. The director’s rigorous aesthetic was clearly influenced by that of Robert Bresson, and, like him, Dumont regards filmmaking as a spiritual concern. Despite being an avowed atheist, Dumont has returned to religious issues over and over, compelled as much by his personal fascination with religion as by the reverential nature of his intense focus on the material world. Bresson, who never spoke openly about his faith, didn’t proselytize through his films, but rather left key details out of view so that audiences had to decide whether there was anything more to them than what’s onscreen—in a sense, one has to believe in a Bresson film as one believes in a higher power. Dumont’s Bressonian style preserves Bresson’s spiritual ambiguity, allowing viewers to believe in some presence beyond the action of his films even if the director himself does not. (For those who share in Dumont’s atheism, his films convey the frightening power of discovery that comes at the end of a search for ultimate meaning, where all one finds is a great, uncaring void.) Given their predilections, it was perhaps inevitable that both Bresson and Dumont would make films about Joan of Arc, whose religious conviction has been a subject of debate for centuries. Bresson’s 65-minute THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC (1962) was about exactly that—Joan’s trial for heresy in 1431—but Dumont’s 137-minute JOAN OF ARC (the original title was simply JEANNE) spends about as much time considering Joan’s military leadership as it does her time in court. Joan is 17 years old when the story begins and 19 when it ends, but through the whole film she’s played by a 10-year-old girl. Dumont’s casting draws attention to how unique Joan’s story is: A girl, claiming God told her to take charge of the French Army and drive the English out of France, assumed a position of authority almost never granted to women in her society, to say nothing of girls. That no one in JOAN OF ARC calls attention to the unusual presence of the lead makes the character’s story that much more remarkable. (There’s one exception: Fabrice Luchini, who has a cameo as the King of France, sweetens his tone with Joan as if he were talking to any typical grade-schooler.) This Buñuelian conceit aside, there’s nothing as wacky here as there was in JEANNETTE (2017), Dumont’s previous film about Joan of Arc. There are fewer songs, and the ones we hear aren’t heavy metal. No one levitates, either. The relative starkness of the film forces one to meditate on the enigma of the girl who convinced an army that God spoke to her. (2019, 137 min) BS
Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller’s OTHER MUSIC (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
This is a love letter of a documentary about the now-closed New York City record store Other Music, which was in operation from the mid-1990s through the mid-2010s. A film like this is somewhat hard to watch in the middle of a pandemic that is keeping so many people inside their homes; so much of the film is anchored in the idea of the record store as a physical space, a place to congregate and meet like-minded people. Thankfully, it spends time talking about the positivity of the community built around Other Music and doesn’t go too far down the curmudgeonly nostalgic hole of “Everything was better back before the internet” that a lot of documentaries covering similar subjects tend to fall into. Though I never set foot in the store, I felt a sadness at its passing through the interviews in the movie. The directors do a great job of showing how the personalities of the staff and owners came together to give the store its own unique personality. There are a lot of celebrity talking head testimonies here, but none of them are people that have been trucked in to provide indie/DIY cred (read: no Dave Grohl or Keith Morris, thank god). It’s obvious this film is a labor of love by members of the community, memorializing a place that had an indelible effect on them and their music scene. As a fan of outré/fringe/indie music, I do have to say that this shop seems like it was truly incredible. I now regret not going all the times that I had the chance to. A common refrain in the film is how influential and important the handwritten employee recommendation tags were. The fact that I paused the movie about 15 minutes in so that I could order, from Australia, a book that some employee recommended four years ago kind of says it all. For the remainder of the film I kept a notepad next to me, jotting down the names of artists that either sounded interesting, or whose music was played in the film. I’ll admit that it’s always a bit hard to get invested in a documentary that is basically a memorial to a place, person, or event you missed out on. But while Other Music was obviously a very unique and special place, this film keeps reminding you that places like that are made of up of the people and the memories. You can easily replace Other Music in your mind with your own favorite record store, bookstore, cafe, or movie theater, inspiring in me an anxiety that these places that I love may no longer exist once this pandemic passes and reminding me not to take them for granted. Institutions aren’t forever, so appreciate the those you love while you can. (83 min, 2020) RJM
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements
Sasie Sealy’s LUCKY GRANDMA (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here and the Gene Siskel Film Center 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
Matt Wolf’s SPACESHIP EARTH (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque 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
Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León’s THE WOLF HOUSE (Chile/Animation)
Available to 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 – Also Screening/Streaming
PO Box Collective
Latham Zearfoss’ video “mixtape” Speech! Speech!! Speech!!! (which combines Zearfoss’ own work and additional work; made for Roots and Culture’s Playlist series in 2014) livestreams on Friday at 6:30pm, followed by a discussion with Zearfoss. Zoom link here.
Gallery 400 (UIC)
Fawzia Mirza and Ryan Logan’s 2011 short THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS (3 min) streams through June 8.
Chicago Filmmakers
Visit here to find out about virtual screenings offered via Chicago Filmmakers.
Facets Cinémathèque
Michael Herbig’s 2019 German film BALLOON (125 min), Benjamin Ree's Norwegian 2020 documentary THE PAINTER AND THE THIEF (102 min), and Miko Revereza’s 2019 documentary NO DATA PLAN (70 min) also stream this week.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Mounia Meddour’s 2019 Algerian/French film PAPICHA (108 min) and Halina Dyrschka’s 2019 German documentary BEYOND THE VISIBLE: HILMA AF KLINT (93 min) also stream this week.
Music Box Theatre
The expanded, six-part mini-series version of Raul Ruíz’s 2011 Portuguese film MYSTERIES OF LISBON (330 min), Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2013 documentary BLACKFISH (83 min), and Steve James’ 2014 documentary LIFE ITSELF (121 min) also stream this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
Chicago International Film Festival
Alana DeJoseph’s 2019 documentary A TOWERING TASK: THE STORY OF THE PEACE CORPS (107 min) streams this week. Check CIFF’s website for additional titles.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RECOMMENDATIONS
Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh (Experimental)
Available at the artist’s Vimeo page here; individual links in the text
Pittsburgh-born Peggy Ahwesh makes volatile and overstuffed films. They are slippery and unwieldy things. Some are overlong and sledgehammer-subtle. Some are brief and bursting with excess. She's a master of some kind of sui generis punk-formalist feminist-horror Americana. She's equally inspired by Georges Bataille and Pee-wee's Playhouse and it shows in the crude, thoughtful, belligerent play on display. According to Ahwesh, FROM ROMANCE TO RITUAL (1985) is shot like an "ethnographic film without the expert observer" and a "home movie without the father." Women talk about terrible boyfriends, recreate druid rock formations in their backyard, and everyone plays with dolls. NOCTURNE (1998) is visually complex but dead simple in plot. It's a blunt and brutish horror story about a woman burying a man, with some shards of rhetoric about nature, flesh, murder, morality, and desire, then a haunting return. THE SCARY MOVIE (1993) is a condensed shock of childhood play-acting through horror tropes, with two little girls destroying and recreating a whole genre with gleeful abandon. THE VISION MACHINE (1997 ) is an ingenious blend of destructive play, half told jokes, and spinning records and text. It's an explosive distillation of Ahwesh's overall project, with a ramshackle cinematic structure having its roots ripped up with wild zeal. SHE PUPPET (2001) is a feminist machinima featuring a repetitively respawning Lara Croft and cryptic texts. Lara's creator-designated limitations are criticized while her centrality is celebrated in this canny classic. (1985-2001, 95 min total) JBM
Nae Caranfil’s DO NOT LEAN OUT THE WINDOW (Romania/France)
Available to rent from the Making Waves Romanian Film Festival here
Less than three years after Romania’s brutal dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown and executed, Nae Caranfil released a look back at the waning days of communism that, while comical, differs from other such films in being neither absurd nor tragically noble. Caranfil, considered the best Romanian director of the 1990s, takes aim at the youth raised under communism who will be charged with building a free and democratic society. What he finds is a bunch of loutish men who can think of little besides sex and adolescent girls who are feeling the pull of freedom, erotic and otherwise. The film’s new, correctly translated title in English (it was known as SUNDAYS ON LEAVE during its brief appearance in English-speaking theaters) is certainly a caution about the future of Romania, but it has a literal reference in the first scene of the film. A small unit of young, inexperienced Romanian soldiers are standing alongside a train track chaotically running drills when a train approaches. Some soldiers salute as the train passes. The last window is open, and a young woman is leaning out looking off into the horizon. She is Cristina (Natalie Bonifay), a much-desired high school girl who is leaving her provincial town for the promise of Bucharest. The film then reels back in time to show how she ended up on the train. Caranfil, who also wrote the screenplay, sets up a sequence of events, and in RASHOMON fashion, presents them from the points of view of Cristina, The High School Girl; Dino (“Like The Flintstones?”) Staroste (George Alexandru), The Actor; and Horatiu (Marius Stanescu), The Soldier. Each of these characters is using the others for sex and other purposes, and the worlds they inhabit all seem increasingly infected with counter-revolutionary thoughts and actions, from the circulation of birth control pills in opposition to the regime’s directive to procreate to having a sound-effects tape from Radio Free Europe substituted for another one in Dino’s play. DO NOT LEAN OUT THE WINDOW is a boisterous film that looks at the seismic shift in Romanian society with the cautious joy of a caged animal set free. It is a crucial precursor to the revelatory Romanian New Wave that should not be missed. (1993, 103 min) MF
Julia Reichert and Jim Klein’s GROWING UP FEMALE (US/Documentary)
Available to stream on the Criterion Channel as part of the “Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories” series (subscription required)
Heralded for being the first feature-length film of the modern women's movement, Julia Reichert and Jim Klein’s GROWING UP FEMALE—Reichert’s first film overall, her senior project in college—takes a simple approach to convey how, in the words of no less than Susan Sontag, “females are brainwashed into passivity, mental sluggishness and self-contempt.” This may sound ominous, but much of what makes Reichert and Klein’s documentary so effective is its somewhat restrained approach to how it puts forth this notion. Set in Reichert’s hometown of Yellow Springs, Ohio, the film focuses on six girls and women from the area, whose interviews comprise the majority of the film. Advertising also comes into the mix, with an assemblage of ads which more or less confirm that a woman’s perceived role in society is in service to men; there’s also a male advertising executive who speaks straightforwardly about the industry's machinations. Interviews with the girls and women are no less disturbing, though they’re more enervating than enraging. Each interviewee is brimming with potential but is nevertheless resigned (increasingly so amongst the older women) to the patriarchy defining their life’s purpose. Even more jarring are the teenage girl and twenty-something women who seem excited by the prospect of male companionship and children being their ultimate goals. Toward the end, Reichert, in voiceover, summarizes and laments this view of the American woman. “There are no easy villains,” she remarks, a rather generous perspective that reflects the sociological complexities of gender dynamics. But, she concedes, “there are many victims.” Reichert and Klein’s filmmaking style is subdued, mostly letting the women speak for themselves. Shot on black-and-white 16mm, the film is unassuming but still eye-catching; thoughtful close-ups bring us closer to these girls and women, many of whom have unconsciously closed off a part of themselves to the outside world. Sontag also said that the film is "[o]ne of those painful experiences that's good for you”; though it’s more a knowing testimony than a scathing indictment, she's nonetheless accurate in her assessment. It’s excruciating at times, but Reichert and Klein’s film is an enduring testament to the need for women’s liberation, then and even now. (1971, 50 min) KS
Bong Joon-ho’s OKJA (South Korea/US)
Available on Netflix (subscription required)
A couple years before his triumph with PARASITE, sly Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho made OKJA. You might try to sum it up as a funny, rousing adventure film, or a dark culture-clash comedy, but even that doesn’t quite cover Bong’s eccentric vision. The story concerns a brave 13-year-old girl, Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun), who lives in the idyllic mountains outside of Seoul with her farmer grandfather (Hee-Bong Byun) and their beloved “super pig” Okja—imagine a mix of porker, hippo, and manatee. Okja, a playful, gentle giant, is a “miracle of technology” in two senses: on the one hand, she is the creation of the evil GMO firm Mirando (based, I’d assume, on Monsanto), which markets her kind as an environmentally-friendly “revolution” in livestock. As the great Tilda Swinton, in a delicious double role as Mirando’s twin-sister CEOs—one incompetent, one psychopathic—says of these porcine inventions, “They need to taste fucking good.” Okja is also the creation of a VFX team headed by Erik-Jan de Boer, and she is a rather magical feat of animation, with a marvelous sense of physicality—as Bong has pointed out, Okja’s animation really constitutes a form of acting. Mija and Okja spend their days playing in the forest and frolicking under waterfalls, but when Mirando confiscates Okja to be taken to the U.S.—to be paraded for the cameras, then processed for food—Mija follows her, first to Seoul. There, she meets an intrepid international gang of the most whimsical, and polite, animal-rights militants you’ve ever seen, led by Jay (Paul Dano). The Animal Liberation Front is rounded out by K (Steven Yeun), Blond (Daniel Henshall), Red (Lily Collins), and Silver (Devon Bostick). Their plan is to expose Mirando’s animal abuse—but the scheme involves allowing Okja to be taken to New York City, into the heart of the beast, wearing a secret video transmitter. From there, the film goes to some very dark places—my heart broke as Okja was violated, and a horrific scene set in a factory farm/abattoir/concentration camp even had my mind flitting back rather sympathetically to my bygone, and previously unlamented, vegan days of the ‘90s. However, if you think from that description that you can’t bear the movie, I will console you by saying that the film, and Bong, are never heartless. What makes it all work so swimmingly are the truly amusing satirical performances from a smart international cast. There’s Giancarlo Esposito as a bemusedly cool Mirando adjutant, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the vain, phony reality-TV zoologist Dr. Johnny. Provided good money and utter creative freedom by Netflix, Bong was able to go as weird as his imagination allowed, bringing a kind of cult-movie sensibility to the project, while at the same time putting on a show in the tradition of the best popular art. If you overlooked OKJA in 2017, as I confess I did, why not catch up now? It’s got the vision we need now: an unblinking critique of capitalism and, in the heroic, ragtag ALF, a metaphor for international cooperation. All of this is embedded within a series of set-pieces that manage to be hair-raising, spectacular, and witty all at once, and infused with warmth and humanism. It’s not so much that we must believe that Okja is “real.” Rather, we must believe that the bond between Mija and Okja is. Ahn Seo-hyun, a tiny action hero, made me believe with her fierce, implacable refusal to allow their bond to be broken, and the animators seal it with the look of love and intelligence they’ve put in Okja’s eye when Mija whispers in her ear—they’ve imbued her with what can only be described as soul. (2017, 120 min) SP
Bill Duke’s A RAGE IN HARLEM (US)
Available free on Tubi
I haven’t read anything by the celebrated Black author Chester Himes, but A RAGE IN HARLEM—an adaptation of Himes’ 1957 novel For the Love of Imabelle—makes me want to dive into his work. One of the great things about the film is how it feels drunk on language, which I presume is a tribute to the quality of Himes’ prose. The actors deliver their dialogue as though reciting poetry; even the profanity achieves a certain musical flow. Another great thing about A RAGE IN HARLEM is how the filmmakers situate Himes’ achievement within a lineage of Black American art: the movie takes place in the late 1950s, though its look is explicitly modeled on the Harlem Renaissance paintings of the 1920s and 30s. (Heightening the out-of-time feeling, director Bill Duke and cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita execute lots of crooked camera angles reminiscent of 1940s film noir.) The expressionistic colors and lighting are so vibrant that the aesthetic borders on cartoonish, and this has an exciting impact on the tone—you’re never sure if the film will go in a comic or troubling direction. The convoluted plot centers on a gangster’s moll (Robin Givens) who flees Mississippi with a trunk full of stolen gold after a violent showdown between two parties interested in the loot. She goes to Harlem, seduces a timid, virginal undertaker (Forest Whitaker), and convinces him put her up while she’s in town. Inevitably, some bad dudes from down south follow Givens to New York in search of the gold; Whitaker, meanwhile, turns to his estranged half-brother Goldy (Gregory Hines), a jolly pimp, for help with his situation. Practically every scene introduces some new colorful character, among them a smooth-talking gambler named Easy Money (Danny Glover) and Goldy’s cross-dressing business partner Big Kathy (Zakes Mokae). Duke’s direction emphasizes niceties of character and setting over story without sacrificing any sense of narrative momentum, resulting in a supremely entertaining film that’s also artful and distinctive. (1991, 108 min) BS
Gillian Armstrong’s WOMEN HE’S UNDRESSED (Australia)
Available free on Kanopy through participating libraries with your library card
Since the 1970s, Australian filmmaker Gillian Armstrong’s career has moved back and forth between documentaries (including an UP-style series following the fortunes of three girls from Adelaide over 40 years) and narrative features focused on women’s experiences and her homeland. WOMEN HE’S UNDRESSED combines these two concerns as Armstrong creates a hybrid documentary about costume designer Orry-Kelly, the Australian from the tiny coastal town of Kiama, New South Wales, who made it big on the other side of the Pacific dressing some of Hollywood’s brightest stars. Armstrong combines traditional talking-head interviews and clips from some of the nearly 300 films for which Orry-Kelly made costumes with depictions of Kelly, engagingly played by Australian TV star Darren Gilshenan, breaking the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience about his life from a stage, the place where Kelly first gained inspiration and experience in show business. The film proceeds roughly chronologically from Orry George Kelly’s childhood and takes liberal dives into his experience of being an out gay man in homophobic Hollywood. His nurturing mother, played by Deborah Kennedy, encouraged his art studies and theatrical ambitions, while his father, a tailor and reformed drunk, propagated a bright pink carnation he dubbed the “Orry” in oblique reference to Kelly’s being “different.” Much is made in the film of Kelly’s “matehood” with Archie Leach when they were both struggling actors living together in New York. Through Kelly’s narration, we learn that the two had a lot in common and subsidized their anything-goes lifestyle in Greenwich Village by making and selling Kelly-Leach ties by the hundreds. Throughout the film, Armstrong returns to Archie’s transformation into Cary Grant. The main event, of course, is Kelly’s spectacularly successful career. He was hired by Warner Bros. to bring some gloss to their proletarian style of filmmaking, and he outdid himself. He worked with colleagues Adrian and Travis Banton to make Kay Francis Hollywood’s “best dressed woman.” Ruth Chatterton, another Warner Bros. star, called his designs “well bred.” His gowns for 42ND STREET (1933) show the energy of the unforgettable penny costumes and double-hooped skirts that he may or may not have had a hand in creating; the film suggests that he admired the creative volcano that was Busby Berkeley. It was his working relationship with Bette Davis, however, that provided him with his greatest challenge. It’s fascinating to learn that Davis refused to allow Kelly to use a metal underwire to boost her sagging breasts because she feared the metal would give her cancer, so he had to design other foundations for her. Armstrong shows us clip after clip of Davis and the challenges her figure posed to Kelly. His tests of fabrics for the red gown in JEZEBEL (1938) were extensive and successful, as many people who have seen the black-and-white film swear it was a red dress they saw. Another figure that gave Kelly trouble was Natalie Wood on GYPSY (1962). Her slender form did not make her the ideal candidate for the role of Gypsy Rose Lee, the world’s most famous stripper. Armstrong takes a peek inside one of her costumes for the film to show the padding Kelly used to fill out her breasts and hips. Kelly also liked to push the envelope of the stuffy 1950s. His designs for AUNTIE MAME (1958) allowed him to create flamboyant, colorful outfits for the outsized personality of the main character, a visual tweak to the Establishment that Mame Dennis defied. He was determined to bring all of Marilyn Monroe’s sex appeal to the screen in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959) and saved Monroe’s pregnancy-swollen breasts from censorship with some strategic beading. Gillian Armstrong brings almost as much design panache and ingenuity to her film about Orry-Kelly as he had himself. Her strategy of offering a theatrical setting for the imagined scenes with Kelly, complete with stage make-up and tinny sound effects, evoke the era in which he grew up and from which he claimed his influences. WOMEN HE UNDRESSED makes the outspoken, entertaining Orry-Kelly as unforgettable as his costumes. (2015, 100 min) MF
Frederick Wiseman’s ZOO (US/Documentary)
Available free on Kanopy through participating libraries with your library card
The cinema of Frederick Wiseman is invariably anthropocentric, filled with the pleasures of watching and learning about people. It’s only fitting, then, that a film of his called ZOO would largely focus on humans. Wiseman often figures them in parallel to the animals in the Miami Zoo where he films, observing through his camera the assortment of visitors observing, with their own cameras, the creatures on display. A lesser filmmaker might have cynically driven this analogy into the ground, but Wiseman only complicates it, his inductive approach revealing new layers and connections that subtly modulate our perspective. During one of those elephant “dance” shows, for instance, we become less attuned to the pachyderms than the goading chant of their trainer, which carries on eerily after the scene has ended. Wiseman lavishes loving attention on the bounty of gorgeous creatures, but his curiosity, as always, gravitates deeper and toward more unexpected subjects: amateur filmmakers disguising the tiger habitat as wilderness footage for their picture, or a tent filled with giant animatronic sea creatures, or the monorail that hovers overhead as a constant reminder of the fundamentally artificial environment of the zoo. If there is a central idea that accrues across ZOO, it is this concept of the titular institution as an uncannily synthetic space, one designed for the human species to assert its dominion over the animal kingdom. Wiseman emphasizes this notion by showing, in frequently graphic detail, the work of the veterinarians and zoo staff, who don’t only care for the animals but intervene, Godlike, into their lifecycles. We see vets attempting and failing to revive a stillborn rhino, then eviscerating it for its organs and incinerating its remains. Dead chicks are fed to a Komodo dragon; a gorilla is knocked out for a physical, a dog to be neutered; alligator eggs are incubated by lab technicians; and a feral pit-bull is hunted and killed after it slaughters some deer. For Wiseman, death is as integral to the zoo as life, but it’s something his human subjects are curiously above, as if their position at the top of the food chain makes them impervious to the animal mortality they deal with and facilitate each day. ZOO builds up an existential chill recalling nothing so much as Peter Greenaway’s A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS, and it comes to a head during a finale set at an evening gala. As the zoo’s members and donors line up at the buffet, the irony that meat is on the menu comes as no surprise. (1993, 130 min) JL
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
Gallery 400 *
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) - Newly announced plans to present the festival online; no details yet
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 29 - June 4, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, JB Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer