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.
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
George Romero’s THE AMUSEMENT PARK (US Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7:15pm
In 1973 George Romero was hired by The Lutheran Society to make an educational film about ageism. When he turned the final product in it was, unsurprisingly, turned away for being too terrifying for its audience. For the next four decades the film was considered lost, until a single print was found and given a 4k restoration. Knowing the background of THE AMUSEMENT PARK definitely helps elevate the film. With a feel more like a visually cinematic episode of The Twilight Zone (replete with direct to camera introduction and epilogue) than a traditional Romero film, THE AMUSEMENT PARK plays out like a tone poem nightmare than a plot driven horror movie. Following an older man around an amusement park we get glimpses into how society and time relentlessly chip away at both his sanity and physical well-being. Even though this was a work for hire, Romero’s thumbprint is still clear on the film. Made only a few years before his classic DAWN OF THE DEAD, you can see how Romero is already angry with the cultural shifts his generation was taking. While DAWN OF THE DEAD points its finger directly at the ashes of the post-hippie, consumer driven, “me” culture, THE AMUSEMENT PARK taps the shoulder of the same generation to remind them that even if their elders are old and out of touch, one day they will be too. And that one day they will be just as disgusting and grotesque as they believe these people to be. Romero uses THE AMUSEMENT PARK to show that the one true horror we have is time. Time will come for us all. So while the context as an “educational” film presents the message a bit heavy handedly, Romero still manages to deliver his patented existential horror of society and man. This is a great reminder of how a truly revolutionary and independent filmmaker will cast their shadow over any type of film that they decide to make. (1973, 54 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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More info, including Music Box Theatre’s COVID protocols, here.
Nothing Is Too Small for a Revolution: Anarchist Films by Nick Macdonald (US Experimental Revival)
Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. – Outdoor Screening) – Wednesday, 8pm [Free Admission]; Co-presented by South Side Projections
The short films in this program are at once dogmatic and playful, illustrating an intellectual anarchist perspective on then-contemporary events with cheeky humor and visual flair. Nick Macdonald employs visual puns, rat-a-tat editing, sardonic narration, and shifting onscreen text to convey a spirit of curiosity about the world and how to better it. The director’s use of cinema as an interrogatory tool in general and his use of onscreen text in particular recall Jean-Luc Godard, although Macdonald explicitly rejects Godard as a role model in his 1970 short BREAK OUT!, a mini-manifesto about how to challenge the workings of capitalist/militarist society through everyday activity. BREAK OUT! doesn’t paint Godard as an enemy so much as one more unnecessary figurehead in a culture built around submission to authority; Macdonald’s subsequent NO MORE LEADERSHIT (1971) takes this idea even further, calling on viewers to reject all leaders regardless of their political orientation. The homemade quality of Macdonald’s work speaks to his faith in a leaderless culture, suggesting that anyone can—and should—make movies instead of relying on the entertainment-industrial complex for information and visual storytelling. Macdonald’s optimism can also be found in THE LIBERAL WAR (1972), a mostly sobering history of America’s military intervention in Vietnam. The narrator speaks to us from the distant future, when civilization has evolved to become a power-free anarchist utopia; this device serves to remind viewers that we oughtn’t forget the goodness of which people are capable even when we consider the worst of humanity. (1970-72, 62 min total, Digital Projection) Ben Sachs
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More info, including Comfort Station’s COVID protocols, here.
📽️ 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 most of this week’s films below. Also showing are Joe Dante’s 1993 film MATINEE (99 min, 35mm) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 Italian film CINEMA PARADISO (123 min, 35mm); check the Music Box website for showtimes. COVID policies for the Music Box here.
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 fifteen 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]
Tsai Ming-liang's GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (Taiwanese Revival)
Saturday, 3:45pm, Monday, 4:30pm, Wednesday, 7:15pm
Tsai Ming-liang's GOODBYE, DRAGON INN is a gorgeous, heartbreaking, and strangely exhilarating film. Set in a condemned Taipei movie palace, on the occasion of its sparsely attended, last-ever film screening, GOODBYE is a bizarre drama of fleeting passions and empty spaces, which meditates on the slow death of the traditional moviegoing experience even as it formulates audacious cinematic poetry that relies on its viewers' participation in that same moribund ritual. Along with contemporaries like Bela Tarr, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Gus Van Sant, Tsai makes profound use not only of silence, but also slowness and extreme long takes, reinventing the concept of Bazinian realism with topical potency. It is cinema that, when experienced in the proper setting, engulfs completely, proving that there are tricks other than CGI and accelerated montage that filmmakers can use to dazzle modern audiences. The proper setting is, of course, a movie theater. Though nothing can take away from the richness (and strangeness) of Tsai's characters or the beauty of his mise-en-scène, the pure magic of his tone and pacing is largely dispelled by small screens and remote controls. (2003, 82 min, 35mm) [Darnell Witt]
Sarah Jacobson’s MARY JANE’S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE (US Revival)
Saturday, 9:15pm and Tuesday, 6:45pm
I’m so in love with writer-director Sarah Jacobson’s DIY classic MARY JANE’S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE as to be unqualified to write about it—there’s no illusion of impartiality when I say the film is a masterpiece, one of the best I’ve seen in a good, long while, and, upon further consideration, perhaps one of my new favorites. I reference impartiality because this is, for me, a very personal film, one that chronicles the coming-of-age of a young, female cinephile whose stint at a local movie theater leaves a lasting impression. I, too, worked at a movie theater during that tenuous period between high school and college, when you’re free from the confines of childhood but facing the even more agonizing limitations of adulthood, torn between what you want to do and what everyone else expects you to do. Granted, I graduated in the mid-aughts, but in 1996 (the year the film was released—by Jacobson herself, who not only wrote, directed, shot, edited, and produced it, but also self-distributed and promoted it with her mom when she was only 23 years old, on the heels of her landmark 1993 short I WAS A TEENAGE SERIAL KILLER), I was already starting to admire girls like the film’s protagonist (played by the unforgettable Lisa Gerstein, who hasn’t done much since), a 17-year-old working at a Midwestern movie theater during her last several months of high school and into that ever-memorable summer before college, and her bad-ass coworkers, with their cool style and even cooler interests. (And their zines, oh, the zines. Be still, my sloppily Xeroxed heart.) The film opens with Mary Jane, called Jane, losing her virginity in a graveyard to the shockingly forgettable Steve, who brazenly ask-demands, “So did you come yet?” We then meet Jane’s coworkers, partying at the theater after hours, asking about her date. Here begins the ‘first-time’ motif, which involves each character detailing the first time they had sex. To wit, this is a film about sex, and more broadly, relationships. (I’m unsure whether or not it passes the Bechdel test—I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t—but here that’s irrelevant.) Jacobson, herself a young woman when she made the film, is best equipped to make a work preoccupied with these subjects, however passé they may seem nowadays. But it’s these concerns, namely sex, romance, and friendship, that often dictate how us women see the world—no one is an island. Our interpersonal relationships, and what we demand from them, matter, regardless of how whole we are outside them, and that’s what Jacobson is saying. She explores variations on the theme, from heterosexual to same-sex relationships, to always important friendships, including platonic ones between the sexes, and even the unfortunate circumstance of one of the older girls having been raped (she bravely tells Jane that it didn’t count as having lost her virginity, even though she had never had sex before the assault). The film has an impressive script, with a lot of worthwhile conflict crammed into a relatively compact running time, but it’s the actual filmmaking that truly astounds. Shot on 16mm (and not Super-8mm, as is oft reported), Jacobson utilizes the DIY aesthetic masterfully, the barest and most decrepit of settings turned into striking, punk rock tableaux. She embellishes the narrative with playful interstitials that subtextually expand its thematic concerns; when Jane masturbates for the first time, Jacobson transitions the scene from its ‘reality,’ tattered pajamas and all, to a fantasied depiction of the act in which Jane is literally glowing. Women are not only the heroes of their own stories, but also the objects of their own desire, those responsible for the acquiring of it. Less significantly but still super fun, MARY JANE features cameos from legendary underground filmmaker George Kuchar, under whom Jacobson studied, and the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra. Sadly, the rightfully self-proclaimed “Queen of Underground Cinema” passed away in 2004 at the age of 32; she died from endometrial cancer, proof that we only have our bodies a short time. If MARY JANE’S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE should leave us with anything, it’s that we should love ‘em—and our local cinemas!—while we got ‘em. (1996, 98 min, 16mm) KS
Akira Kurosawa's RAN (Japanese Revival)
Friday, 3:30pm
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]
William Castle’s THE TINGLER (US Revival)
Friday, 9:30pm, Sunday, 6pm, Tuesday 4:30pm, Thursday 9:30pm
THE TINGLER is, on the surface, a serviceable 50s B-horror, but there’s an abundance to enjoy about the film’s wacky plot and, especially, how it directly engages the audience. Vincent Price stars as a doctor with very questionable morals, who’s discovered that every human has a parasite within them—the tingler. This tingler feeds on fear, attaching itself to the spine and growing larger the more frightened the person becomes. Screaming can send the creature into retreat, something made perfectly clear to the audience as director William Castle introduces the film by urging the viewers not to hold back their fright—or else. With a final set piece in which the creature is set loose in a silent movie theater, THE TINGLER completely immerses viewers in the experience happening on screen. Castle, well-known for his gimmicks, also promoted the film with “Percepto,” a buzzer wired to select theater seats that would go off at corresponding moments, causing a tingling sensation for the audience member. The film also has some bizarrely entertaining performances and subplots—I’m particularly obsessed with deciphering the confusing familial relationships surrounding the doctor and the wife (Patricia Cutts) he seems to inexplicably despise. It’s reminiscent of another Castle-directed Price vehicle released the same year, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. The film is also often cited as the first to depict an LSD trip. THE TINGLER is primarily, though, a classic example of Castle’s work as a producer and director. His gimmicky and meta-approach to filmmaking and the theater-going experience are beloved by directors like Joe Dante (his MATINEE is largely a homage to Castle’s work) and John Waters (who got to portray Castle in FX’s Feud). (1959, 82 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
Orson Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL ("Director's Cut") (US Revival)
Sunday, 12:45pm
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]
📼 ONION CITY EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL
The Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival, presented by Chicago Filmmakers, opens on Wednesday and runs through June 13 with a mix of online screenings and in-person events. While all of the online group screenings are available for the full length of the festival, we are splitting our reviews over this week’s list and next week’s, based on when the Q&A sessions are scheduled; check next week’s list for additional reviews. The full schedule and more info are here.
Program 1: Family Time Changes
Available to view between June 9 - 13; purchase tickets here
The vagaries of memory and assumptions made in the absence of real information are the subjects of director Paige Taul’s TOO SMALL TO BE A BEAR (2020, 5 min). Taul interviews her sister Jessie about their father, a short man nicknamed Cub who lost his chance to play professional baseball because he missed the bus going to the Negro League tryout. As Jessie theorizes that this unrealized ambition made him give up on his life, we see archival footage that focuses on No. 15 of the Indianapolis Clowns, a team that played in the style of the Harlem Globetrotters. His clowning seems to stand for the hopeless man who became a drunk over his missed opportunity. When Taul turns to her mother for reminiscences about her husband, the film cuts in and out as Dorothy tries to remember who played which positions. All that remains for her is the enjoyment baseball brought to the community. Luis Arnías’ MALEMBE (2020, 12 min), filmed in both Venezuela and the United States, is a memory film of a South American immigrant to the U.S. In Venezuela, we see a young boy in a soldier’s uniform in front of a bronze bust of some long-ago hero; is he a stand-in for Arnías? A parade, some elderly women sitting in a sunbaked courtyard, an abandoned ballpark with the sound of voices and crowds of years past—all give way to a winter scene, and a white woman and a young girl shoveling snow, and Arnías’ beloved tropical fruit frozen and unpalatable. As he chokes on some seeds, he spits out his tongue, his native language no longer acceptable in a country where his people clash with the police. With AVANTI! (2020, 8 min), EJ Nussbaum takes a short dive into the world of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist founder of the Italian Communist Party who was imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascists in 1926 and died a few days after his release in 1937. In three vignettes, Nussbaum dramatizes Gramsci’s poetry and philosophical writing. Most touching are his letters to his son, Giuliano, whom he never met, and his meditation on whether loving the masses is really possible if one doesn’t love someone personally. Amusingly, he criticizes the quality of the photos his wife sends him, but admits they are still of interest to him. Amber Bemak and Angelo Madsen Minax’s video TWO SONS & A RIVER OF BLOOD (2021, 11 min) considers containers—pyramids, empty rooms, wombs—and how they are filled. The sexy beginning celebrating procreation and the anticipation of new life gives way to a sad, matter-of-fact consideration of emptiness. In the final scene, the filmmakers affirm that life goes on. In MAYA AT 24 (2021, 4 min), Lynne Sachs turned a fanciful gaze on her daughter, Maya Street-Sachs, through images she filmed in 2001, 2013, and 2019 running and spinning. The black-and-white images are overlaid with created film dust and pops, as well as intricate, animated designs that suggest the increasing complexity of the person Maya has become. Loving and beautiful, Sachs’ short is mesmerizing. In BORDER (2020, 5 min), Bryan Angarita recalls the day his brother was denied entry into the United States and how their mother visits him in the border town where he lives. The opening image of a tree-lined river viewed through what appears to be a screen window becomes obscured as the lines of the screen shift and reconfigure themselves as a border fence, a gun sight, a target, and other forms. The plain, black-and-white title cards seem devoid of emotion, but the Google Earth logo in the corner of many of the images speaks to the constant surveillance Angarita senses. LETTER FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY (2020, 18 min) puts director Suneil Sanzgiri and his father together through Zoom and text messaging to discuss their family history, specifically, Prabhakar Sanzgiri, a writer, activist, and Communist Party leader in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Inspired by a prose poem written in the form of a letter, the director writes to his long-dead relative with news and questions, particularly about the 1989 rebellion in Kashmir that led to the death of Safdar Hashmi, a communist playwright and director, and the disappearance and murder of thousands of people. History, Sanzgiri says, runs through the personal lives of those who live it. His mission is to discover some kind of truthful continuity through art. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Artist Q&A for Program 1 is on Wednesday, June 9 at 7pm; register here.
Program 2: Mass Extinction Psychodrama
Available to view between June 9 - 13; purchase tickets here
Birds comprise a recurring motif in four of the seven shorts in this program, and other animals (bears, horses, cows) feature prominently in the remaining three. The works are also united by thematic purpose; in almost all the selections, the filmmakers utilize non-human subjects to hint at liberties that exist outside the human experience. Given the state of the world, why would anyone want to be a human being today anyway? That’s the implicit question of Canadian filmmaker Kathryn Mockler’s THIS ISN’T A CONVERSATION (2020, 6 min), which opens the program and introduces the overarching concerns. Over medium-closeups of birds, Mockler presents the text of a sobering conversation between two friends about the ongoing ecological crisis that threatens much life on this planet. The conversation is more emotional than rational, focusing on the speakers’ dread over looming catastrophe and their guilt over having done nothing to stop it. The birds, ignorant of the issues at hand, appear blissful, providing a sense a serenity amidst the all the doomsaying. New York-based filmmakers Liyan Zhao and Milton Secchi achieve a similar effect in the program’s penultimate selection, THE VISITORS (2020, 9 min), which largely consists of close-ups of animals, insects, and plants in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. Filmed during Covid-19 quarantine, the subjects seem carefree and liberated when considered alongside the people watching them. They also suggest, when presented with such staggering immediacy, how Earth’s fauna and flora might appear to visitors from outer space. (To underscore the point, Zhao and Secchi play clips from The X-Files and some big-budget sci-fi movies on the soundtrack.) A standout in the program, the Canadian short CIVIL TWILIGHT AT THE VERNAL EQUINOX (2021, 12 min) makes contemporary North American culture seem like the stuff of another planet. Filmmakers Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby assemble a head-spinning collage of memes, pseudo-scientific discourse, sound-bite culture, and some nifty time-lapse photography of flowers blooming and wilting. The piece climaxes with a funny exchange between a far-right lunatic and a far-left lunatic, both of whom are so caught up their particular worldviews that they can barely acknowledge each other’s existence. Local filmmaker Drew Durepos mines the zeitgeist for humor—albeit rather dark humor—with his collage-like piece ANIMAL TRIALS (2020, 19 min). The complex assemblage incorporates a personal phone conversation between the filmmaker and a friend; Donald Trump’s first public speech after winning the Presidency; psychedelic video effects; and scenes from a pair of 1970s adventure films about “the Wilderness Family.” The sharp juxtapositions can be funny, but they’re also unsettling, suggesting a concentrated, hyped-up version of the dense multimedia landscape we traverse every day. The remaining shorts in the program—Ann Oren’s PASSAGE (2020, 13 min), Heehyn Choi’s BIRDSAVER REPORT VOLUME 1 (2020, 8 min), and Jaakko Pallavuo and Anni Puolakka’s CAFÉ HELSINKI (2020, 6 min)—are more amusing than disturbing, but they help buoy the program by providing welcome relief from the heavy themes. PASSAGE, about an androgynous foley artist who grows hooves and a tail while recording sound effects for scenes of a horse, is particularly accomplished. It has the stately, opaque surface tone of much classic Surrealism, and cineastes will appreciate the close-up look at how sound effects are made. [Ben Sachs]
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Artist Q&A for Program 2 is on Wednesday, June 9 at 9pm; register here.
Program 3: Didascalies
Available to view between June 9 - 13; purchase tickets here
This program, named after the French word for "stage direction," highlights art school theatricality, identity forging and demolition, and abstractions of personal storytelling. Jade Wong's AROMATICS OF LONGING 爆香 recounts "the end of a long-term relationship with a birth control implant" with private visual puns rhyming child-care with self-care and curious and poignant performative moments in domestic spaces. The always excellent Malic Amalya's I WAKE UP WITH A FLOWER IN MY HAND is a remix of his high school cable access show. It's chockablock with 90s nostalgic imagery and attitude, with a wistful gaze to adolescent freedoms and friendships. Mai Parinda Wanitwat's 12 KALPAS: A BEGINNING OF BEGINNING is a beautiful slow-burning, mildly-impenetrable performance piece of sexual mime and idiosyncratic mythmaking. Annie MacDonell and Maïder Fortuné's COMMUNICATING VESSELS is an intriguing psychological thriller featuring a purposefully glitching zoom monologue from an art school professor telling the odd story of a student, while on screen the student's identity is muddled as they perform gestures and themes borrowed from classic performance pieces. Ayanna Dozier's SOFTER is a brisk and colorful short mocking the absurdities and burdens of gendered and racial expectations. A. Moon's HOW DO THEY DO IT? is a found footage essay with frank, repetitive on-screen text questioning the motivations of the performers and creatives, both well-known and forgotten. Rounding out the program is Stephanie Barber's excellent ANOTHER HORIZON. Horizons and borders are the central theme. Audibly, you hear pre-written text poetically dancing around the idea of what a horizon means, intermixed with the filmmaker’s personal recordings of her chummy interactions with a voodoo priest, somewhat exhaustedly, somewhat tipsily trying to explain that death is an impartial seemingly-nonthreatening force that wants you to enjoy yourself first and foremost. Visually, the horizon explodes in several different directions. Mundane postcards clumsily repeat. Crude animation starts literally describing the liminal space then snaps into focus making the audible physical. It's a hardcore rhythmic punch of total cinematic confidence and playfulness. (2020-21; approx. 82 min total) [Josh B. Mabe]
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Artist Q&A for Program 3 is on Thursday, June 10 at 7pm; register here.
🎞️ 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]
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]
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]
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]
Rob Gordon Bravler’s MOBY DOC (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
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) [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
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
Block presents Judah (Martina) Attille’s 1988 UK film DREAMING RIVERS (30 min), which continues through Sunday at Noon. 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.
Facets Cinémathèque
Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
The D’Innocenzo Brothers' 2020 Italian film BAD TALES (98 min) and Chicago-based filmmaker Jack C. Newell's 2021 film MONUMENTS (94 min) are both available to stream beginning this week. Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles.
The current offering in the Film Center’s new online lecture series, Talking Pictures, is from film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. It's on World Cinema in the 1950s and takes place on Tuesdays and Thursdays from June 8-July 1. The first week's films are reviewed below. More details here.
Music Box Theatre
Caleb Michael Johnson's 2020 film THE CARNIVORES (87 min), Chase Ogden's 2020 French film SUPER FRENCHIE (87 min), the 2021 horror anthology SCARE US (97 min), and Paul Negoescu's 2016 Romanian film TWO LOTTERY TICKETS (86 min) are all available to stream beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Talking Pictures Lecture Series with Jonathan Rosenbaum x 2
STARS IN MY CROWN and THE WHITE SHEIK are the subjects this week of the Gene Siskel Film Center’s online lecture series by Jonathan Rosenbaum on “World Cinema of the 1950s.” The events are on Tuesday and Thursday at 6pm, respectively. More info and a link to purchase tickets for the lectures here.
Jacques Tourneur’s STARS IN MY CROWN (US)
Available to rent on Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube
A seeming aberration in one auteur’s filmography does an enduring auteurist cause célèbre make. Jacques Tourneur’s STARS IN MY CROWN—made a few years after his seminal OUT OF THE PAST and one before the rousing ANNE OF THE INDIES—may be chief among these kinds of films (in his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that it’s “one of the most neglected films in the history of cinema”); so uncharacteristic does it seem for a filmmaker (one from Paris, even) best known for his collaborations with B-movie producer Val Lewton to have directed such a delicate film about the complex indelicacies respective to American life. But not only did Tourneur direct it, after being introduced to the project by its star, Joel McCrea, he would go on to cite it as his personal favorite among his films. Produced by MGM, it’s also the first film Tourneur made after his departure from RKO; furthermore, according to Chris Fujiwara’s book on the director, it’s “the only film he fought to do.” All this enthusiasm can be keenly felt from the film’s first scenes, which show how McCrea’s Parson Gray arrives in the fictional town of Walesburg in the post-Civil War South. Faced with the unruly townspeople of the pre-settlement era, the parson begins to preach in a saloon; he whips out his pistols to command their attention, after which their respect follows. The audience’s attention is commanded, too, as the film’s paradoxical tone—straddling the sentimental earnestness of one kind of film and the waggish jocularity of another, neither of which was Tourneur’s métier—is established. What follows is an accumulation of similarly drawn vignettes about the lives of Parson Gray, his organist wife (whose dislike of the titular song is source of humor), their young ward (Dean Stockwell), an elderly physician and his doctor son, a freed slave who’s mentored the town’s children in fishing and other outdoor activities, and a local businessman with an eye on the Black man’s deposit-rich property. Key threads involve the young doctor (James Mitchell), unsure of his position in a town that remains dedicated to his father, and the Black man, Famous (Juano Hernandez), who’s targeted by the local Klan after refusing to sell his property to the miner. The doctor rejects both the parson’s faith and the hold he has over the townspeople, who look to the parson as the doctor wishes they’d look to him. As Fujiwara points out, the dichotomy between some sort of faith—be it voodoo, Eastern European mysticism, or religion—and pragmatism factors into this apparent deviation for Tourneur similarly to how it’s exemplified in his more quintessential endeavors. The parson begins to doubt himself and his mission when the town is afflicted by a typhoid epidemic; his commitment is re-established when he learns he wasn’t the cause of the sickness, as the town doctor initially proposes. Gray is then summoned to the bedside of the doctor’s girlfriend, Faith, who recovers miraculously with the Parson by her side. Faith is literally restored. For any skeptics left in the audience, what follows is a sequence that challenges not fate, but rather will, man’s will to be either good or bad toward one another. As the Klan sieges Famous’ farm, the parson calls upon their base humanity to spare the old man from being lynched. The final scene back at the church, wherein an inside joke throughout the film culminates in the parson’s disbelieving war buddy finally coming to service, is at once bolstering and evocative. If only it were that simple. (1950, 89 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
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Federico Fellini’s THE WHITE SHEIK (Italy)
Available on the Criterion Channel (subscription required)
A newly married, provincial couple arrives in Rome for their honeymoon and to meet members of the groom’s extended family. Unknown to the “master of the house,” who has set a rigid agenda for their first day in the Eternal City, his bride has been corresponding with the White Sheik, her idol from the photo magazines called fumetti that were all the rage in Italy. She sneaks off to meet him and is swept into the cadre of photographers, actors, and costumers who set off to create the Sheik’s latest adventure on a beach far from Rome. In this, Federico Fellini’s first solo outing as a director, the Italian showman of the screen sets out many of the elements that will distinguish his ingenious body of work. His years working for the humor magazine Marc'Aurelio and his lifelong avocation as a caricaturist made him the perfect person to take this simple premise and fashion a comic gem. Brunella Bovo and Leopoldo Trieste, as Wanda and Ivan Cavalli, are perfect provincials in the big city, where their fantasies and moral rectitude are blown to bits by the events that overtake them. Wanda’s encounters with the magazine crew offer the three-ring circus so iconic in many Fellini movies. I especially loved her first meeting with the Sheik, aka Fernando Rivoli (a beautifully foppish Alberto Sordi). He is shown swinging on a swing suspended between trees high above her head. The obvious distortion of his position in the air perfectly expresses the adoration Wanda feels for him, paving the way for his future advances on her as he casts her as an Arabian girl in the fumetto shoot, the better to get her into a skimpy outfit. For his part, Trieste, once a serious playwright, was encouraged by Fellini to bring out his inner clown and to widen his eyes to create his distinctive trademark as a comic actor. When the couple are reunited, instead of performing the prepared dialogue, Fellini told them to snivel loudly, thus creating a wordlessly hilarious moment. While Wanda declares repeatedly to Ivan that, despite appearances, she is still pure and innocent, we have no doubt that the city has knocked the umlaut off their naïveté. Watch for a short scene in which Giulietta Masina makes her first appearance as the prostitute Cabiria. (1952, 83 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
CINE-LIST: June 4 - June 10, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Josh B. Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, K.A. Westphal, Darnell Witt