Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity.
We at Cine-File acknowledge and champion the current protests for and activist work around anti-police violence and justice for Black Americans; we’re a tiny blip on the cultural map, but we hope to show our support even in this small way. We lead off this week’s list with a thoughtful reflection from our newest contributor, Raphael Martinez, which includes a personal selection of film recommendations; following that, we offer a small, but powerful, selection of new and old reviews of films that celebrate Black lives, highlight racial injustice, and speak to the diversity and complexity of Black experiences in the U.S., with a small emphasis on Chicago-centric work; next is some additional relevant viewing and resource links. We end with the regular online-viewing list sections.
50 Films for After the Protest
With all that's been going on these past few days, I've found myself so incredibly exhausted. Being in the streets, talking to friends, documenting what's been happening—it takes a psychic and emotional toll.
As a Person of Color who has a history of being victimized by the police it's been hard for me to focus on the arts. I have both physical nerve damage and PTSD from one particular encounter with law enforcement, so writing about movies at the moment feels a bit overwhelming.
Though for some, the arts are more important than ever. Film especially. And of all artistic mediums, I feel it has the power to make the unfamiliar familiar in a truly meaningful way. A way to escape into, and explore, a new and unknown world.
Over the past few days there's been a glut of recommendations of articles and books to read, podcasts to listen to, and, of course, films to watch. What I keep seeing, though, is a trend for heavy films—films that are teaching a lesson. Films that treat the lives and experiences of POC as politically, socially, revolutionary minded text.
And those are very necessary.
But people shouldn't only be focusing on the most exacting aspects of the lives of POC. Especially at this moment. There are so many movies celebrating the exuberance of culture, the humor, the ironies, the romances.
This is a time to celebrate life, not fetishize death.
So instead of write-ups I would simply like to present a list of movies that span the spectrum of the lived experiences of American POC. From documentaries to stoner movies, rom coms to horror films.
Everyone at Cine-File is a volunteer; no one is paid—we all do this because we love film and want to champion it. But right now, in this moment, if I'm going to do some unpaid labor, I'd like to flip the script a little and do it on my own terms.
So, here are 50 films, either written by, directed by, or starring American POC. Worlds and cultures myriad.
Enjoy.
-RJM
The Brother from Another Planet; Dear White People; Downtown 81; American Me; Up in Smoke; Tongues Untied; Night of the Living Dead; Blue Collar; The Spook Who Sat by the Door; Car Wash; Lost Boundaries; Girlfight; Candyman; Go Down, Death!; Millie and the Lords; Cabin in the Sky; Selena; Incident At Oglala; Machete; Paris Is Burning; White Men Can't Jump; The Murder of Fred Hampton; Naz & Maalik; Queen of the Damned; Punishment Park; Detroit Unleaded; Half-Baked; Go Fish; A Good Day To Die; House Party; Pariah; A Rage in Harlem; The Watermelon Woman; Devil in a Blue Dress; Barry Michael Cooper's "Harlem Trilogy" (New Jack City, Sugar Hill, Above the Rim); The Blues Brothers; Sweet Love, Bitter; Sorry To Bother You; Putney Swope; Intruder in the Dust; Mi Vida Loca; I Called Him Morgan; School Daze; Real Women Have Curves; Smoke Signals; A Raisin in the Sun; Imitation of Life; The Big Sick.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Mike Gray and Howard Alk's AMERICAN REVOLUTION 2 (US/Documentary)
Available for free on the Chicago Film Archives’ Vimeo page
Early footage of the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests turns to the comparatively quieter world of revolutionary discourse, capturing the wide array of progressive talk in groups large and small in neighborhoods around Chicago in this landmark documentary by the Film Group. From Black Panther gatherings to house parties and Young Patriots rallies, Howard Alk and Mike Gray document some of the different communities who, in response to severe police brutality, were ready to meet violence with violence. A detailed and intriguing look at the people who wanted a new America desperately, how they tried to build it, and the language they used to envision it, the film displays the often rough and chaotic ways disparate groups of the engaged left aimed to unite themselves into one committed voice of dissent. Alk is unafraid to let long takes expose the complex arguments that arise when Black Panthers speak to an awakening middle class at a council meeting, or when a circular disagreement about Vietnam takes over an apartment party. AMERICAN REVOLUTION 2 assumes its audience is as engaged in these ideas as its subjects. (1969, 77 min) CL
Cory Bowles’ BLACK COP (Canada)
Streams free on Kanopy through participating libraries with your library card
Playwright Tony Kushner’s masterpiece, Angels in America, uses Communist hunter and all-around fiend Roy Cohn as the embodiment of the callous, craven power elite running the United States. Cohn was a homosexual, but in Kushner’s play, Cohn defines himself in a completely different way. He says “AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that. Like all labels they tell you one thing, and one thing only: Where does an individual so identified fit into the food chain, the pecking order? … A homosexual is somebody who, in 15 years of trying, cannot get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through the city council. A homosexual is somebody who knows nobody and who nobody knows. Who has zero clout. Does this sound like me?” This speech came to mind as I watched Cory Bowles’ provocative BLACK COP, a complex look at the identity crisis of a Black cop in the wake of Michael Brown’s slaying by militarized police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Working from his own script, which expands on his 2016 BLACK COP short, Bowles inserts footage from Ferguson and then takes us to an unnamed city where he introduces us to his unnamed Black cop, superbly played by Ronnie Rowe, standing guard as Black Lives Matter protesters picket outside a municipal building. He only smirks when a demonstrator calls him a race traitor and then enumerates in voiceover the supposed reasons he became a cop, finishing with his genuine desire for control over others. When he is racially profiled by two white officers while out for a run, he soon becomes every white person’s nightmare—a Black man empowered by his badge and his weapon to revoke their white privilege. If this were only a film about Blacks turning the tables on whites, it would be a competent revenge flick but not much more. Bowles is interested in the question of whether his Black cop is a race traitor or considers himself as such. Bowles inserts theatrical interludes during which his Black cop speaks his thoughts and acts out his self-loathing as the wall between his work and his Black identity starts to crumble. Beneath his struggle is a radio talk show hosted by a Black woman who reads to me as an internal monologue of sorts for the Black cop, responding to her racist callers with undisguised contempt. The soundtrack by Dillon Baldassero that mixes soul, hip hop, and jazz punctuates beautifully the Black cop’s actions and states of mind. I wondered whether he was going to eat his gun at several points, but Bowles doesn’t go for an easy out. In fact, his film challenges all of us, regardless of our identity, to understand and empathize with souls in torment over a rigged, dehumanizing system. (2017, 91 min) MF
The Film Group’s CICERO MARCH (US/Documentary Short)
Available for free at the Chicago Film Archives’ YouTube page
On Sept. 4, 1966, cameraman Mike Shea and sound engineer Mike Gray were on hand to document a march by African Americans in Cicero, Illinois, to protest housing covenants that kept them from renting or owning homes in the suburb. The result, CICERO MARCH, is an eight-minute, black-and-white moment in Chicago’s racial history. It was produced by the Chicago-based The Film Group, Inc. (1964–1973) as part of a seven-part educational film series called The Urban Crisis and the New Militants that was intended for school and community groups to “teach by raising questions rather than by attempting to answer them.” The series sold poorly, and few extant copies remain. Fortunately, it was part of the Chicago Public Library film collection that was the founding collection of the Chicago Film Archives (CFA). CFA restored it in 2006 with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation, and it was added to the National Film Registry in 2013. To watch it is to recognize the timelessness of entrenched racism and its expression in the United States. It opens with the deafening sound of a helicopter. U.S. Army troops armed with fixed-bayonet rifles and machine guns come in to guard the perimeter while a thick blue line of police guard the marchers and keep white counter-demonstrators on the sidewalks. The demonstrators sing traditional songs of resistance like “Which Side Are You On” and “We Shall Not Be Moved,” while being jeered with comments like, “Take a bath the next time before you come here,” “2-4-6-8, we don’t want to integrate,” “Your mother is a whore,” and “Hey, the Brookfield Zoo is that way.” One demonstrator has “Black Power” scrawled on the back of his shirt, indicating an early adoption of the powerful political slogan first used as a rallying cry by Stokely Carmichael in a speech he gave two months earlier after the attempted assassination of civil rights leader James Meredith. A counter-demonstrator holds a handmade sign featuring a swastika and the words “White Power” in visual answer. Things get hot between members of the two camps, and police chase down and arrest two white men. The film ends with a swarm of cops taking down and dragging a third white man to a waiting squad car. He was not beaten, though he covered his head as though he expected to be. As ugly as it is to see white people parading their ignorance and hate so baldly, in some ways, CICERO MARCH feels like a hopeful exercise of civil liberties that we should never cede to anyone. (1966, 8 min) MF
Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s EMPTY METAL (US)
Available to watch on Amazon Prime here
EMPTY METAL may be the most radical film of Trump era. I don’t mean that stylistically–co-directors Bayley Sweitzer and Adam Khalil’s junk-punk aesthetic and piebald plotting are plenty out there for an indie movie, but the movie’s unmistakeable didacticism–this is, after all, an insurrectionary recruitment video–does inhibit any truly wild excursions beyond the limits of form. It’s an experimental feature with a plot (to me, always something of a freckled whelp), but EMPTY METAL’s is at least audacious: a hipster DIY noise trio, on the eve of a tour, are indoctrinated by a cabal of psychic Indigenous, Rastafarian, and Buddhist militants and turned into political assassins. Khalil and Sweitzer’s digressive bent regularly steers us into the fringes, recreating viral courtroom videos and imagining hilariously abject militia training exercises for the looming apocalypse. But they stick to the script enough for the film to work as what they’ve called a “trojan horse” for its content, which is truly radical. The band’s decision to avenge the widely-publicized murders of unarmed Black men signals a not-just-metaphorical demand for purportedly “countercultural” arts, and the predominantly white artists who make it, to serve as accomplices in a project of violent emancipation. What’s radical here is not the cause, nor even the bloody retribution the musicians enact. In fact, the executions are actually staged comically, flatly, almost perfunctorily. It’s in these sequences where the film’s queer, glassy-eyed performance style works best, as everyone involved seems to be carried along by a force they can neither articulate nor contradict. What I find radical is the sense of the inevitability of these killings, their absolute necessity in the face of dire consequences. EMPTY METAL understands, better than any film that I’ve seen, that the current reality of white supremacy, of extractive capitalism and total surveillance, is more violent than any “radical” action that could be taken against it. When doing nothing produces a result far more horrific and incomprehensible than that of taking drastic but necessary action, what does the word “radical” mean? That’s a question we confront today with the crisis of white supremacy and law enforcement in the United States. The Black Lives Matter movement’s demands for the abolition of the police appear unprecedented, even unthinkable to some, but this week’s appalling and depraved scenes of police violence against peaceful protesters reveal that the perpetuation of the status quo is the more unfathomable reality–at least, to anyone concerned with justice and human dignity. These apocalyptic scenes confront us with the reality that for some members of our society, as one character in EMPTY METAL puts it, “the end of the world happened a long time ago,” and a new one struggles to be born. The task of the radical in this moment is to reveal, to the timid and the uncommitted, the truth that unthinkable transformations, and the sacrifices they demand, are rational, requisite, and just–and are the moral responsibility of those, above all, who stand to lose the most from their coming to pass. EMPTY METAL is radical, in the end, not as a narrative or an experimental film, but as an ultimatum posed to the viewer, spoken with a conviction that its weirdness and wonkiness and irony belie. Under the guise of trying to blow your mind, EMPTY METAL puts ideas into your head–dangerous, incendiary, and frighteningly timely ideas that you’re not likely to stop thinking any time soon. (2018, 84 min) MM
Kasi Lemmons’ EVE’S BAYOU (US)
Available on multiple streaming platforms
As far as Hollywood accolades are concerned, this writer couldn’t care less; however, when Roger Ebert exclaimed, “If it is not nominated for Academy Awards, then the academy is not paying attention” at the end of his review for EVE’S BAYOU, he raised an interesting point—this is a film whose quality resides in the blindspot of many. Kasi Lemmons’ directorial debut is heavily concerned with memory and race. Set in 1962, the story revolves around Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett) and her Creole-American family in an affluent Louisiana community. On the surface, her family is idyllic, they live in a mansion, her father (Samuel L. Jackson) is a doctor, and they come from a lineage of French nobles. One day, Eve witnesses her father cheating on her mother, and the family’s picturesque facade starts to show cracks. Eve’s sister, who has a very close relationship with her father, informs Eve that what she thought she saw was misunderstood and the idea of memory being flawed is raised and remains as the film’s central theme. The film’s narrative unfolds as a series of memories whose reliability is left questionable; shades of RASHOMON are felt as stories are recounted by multiple characters. Eve must navigate her coming of age while coming to terms with her family’s shortcomings. The cinematography is warm and bright, yet harbors nefarious undertones with its dark shadows, furthering the film’s desire for the audience to determine what is respectable or not. EVE’S BAYOU relies on its characters’ perspectives to tell a story that is dreamlike and open to multiple interpretations. (1997, 109 min, 35mm) KC
Raoul Peck's I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO (US/International/Documentary)
Streams free on Kanopy through participating libraries with your library card; and is also available to rent via the Wilmette Theatre here
If the role of the public intellectual is to speak truth to power, then James Baldwin was one of the greatest America ever produced. A searing and compassionate social critic, he was equally penetrating when he turned his novelist's gaze toward film, as this galvanizing, heartbreaking essay/documentary by Raoul Peck demonstrates. Its voiceover is in Baldwin's own words, the beautiful music of his language measured out by Samuel L. Jackson in an intimate spoken-word performance. In televised interviews and debates from the 1960s, Baldwin is pensive and incendiary, and the film cuts between his embattled times and our own. Baldwin investigated the mystery of the fathomless hatred of white Americans for blacks, and while his analysis was economic, it also involved a kind of psychoanalysis of the American psyche. This film's jumping-off point is Remember This House, his unfinished manuscript about the intertwining lives, and violent deaths, of his friends/foils Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers. Soon it turns to The Devil Finds Work, his earthy, shattering essay about growing up a child of the movies. Baldwin understood cinema as "the American looking glass," and he wrote with such lucidity, and such painful honesty, about what he saw reflected there, about himself, race, and his country. "To encounter oneself is to encounter the other," he wrote, "and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and, if I can respect this, both of us can live." Viewer identification is complex: as a youngster whose heroes were white, who rooted for Gary Cooper, it came as a huge shock for him to realize "the Indians were you"—and these heroes aimed to kill you off, too. Peck has called his film an essay on images, a "musical and visual kaleidoscope" of fiery blues, lobotomized mass media, classic Hollywood, TV news, reality TV, and advertisements. He causes a government propaganda film from 1960 about U.S. life, all baseball games and amusement parks, to collide with the Watts uprising; a Doris Day movie meets lynched bodies. The point is not even that one is reality and the other is not. It's that these two realities were never forced to confront each other—and they must, because one comes at the other's expense. When Baldwin speaks of the "death of the heart," of our privileged apathy, of an infantile America, an unthinking and cruel place, he could be speaking of the Trump era. He feared for the future of a country increasingly unable to distinguish between illusion, dream, and reality. "Neither of us, truly, can live without the other," he wrote. "For, I have seen the devil...[I]t is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself." Let this movie inspire today's young dissenters, and let James Baldwin be our model of oppositional, critical thinking as we raise our angry voices against Donald Trump and everything he stands for. (2016, 95 min) SP
Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin’s LA 92 (US/Documentary)
Free on YouTube; also available on Netflix and for rent on Amazon Prime, Microsoft, Google Play, and Vudu
Violent demonstrations dogged my formative years. I was barely a teenager sitting in the safety of my parents’ basement in suburban Chicago when the police riot against demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—famous for Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “shoot to kill” comment—was unfolding on TV before my terror-stricken eyes. This was the second riot in the city that year; the first followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April. Before that the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles, sparked by an altercation between police and a black motorist, branded me with a dim memory. There were other protests and battles to come, but nothing slashed more of a scar on the United States than the L.A. riot of 1992: 63 people dead, 2,383 injured, more than 12,000 arrested, and property damage estimated at more than $1 billion. The enraged African-American residents of Los Angeles declared their intentions with the chant “No Justice, No Peace” and turned their city into a war zone, a fact that becomes starkly clear in Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin’s epic and vital LA 92. Lindsay and Martin, working entirely with archival footage and a minimum of intertitles, set the stage by beginning their film in 1965 with the riot in Watts and news commentary about cause and effect. They move on to video of the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent trial of the four police officers who inflicted more than 50 blows on him, breaking several bones and requiring King to undergo reconstructive surgery on his face. The already-lit fuse reached the powder keg when a jury in Simi Valley, an overwhelmingly white suburb where the trial took place, acquitted the cops on all but one minor count. South Central L.A. became a no-go zone for white people, as rioters pelted cars and attacked their frightened white drivers. Famously, long-haired trucker Reginald Denny was dragged from his vehicle and nearly killed—and it was all captured by helicopter cams. It’s quite something to watch as more than 900 fires light the city with a terrible beauty; see the fury unleashed against the perceived enemies, particularly Koreans whose businesses in the area were targeted for looting and destruction; and note that police and firefighters were nowhere to be found to serve and protect those caught in the crossfire. It’s just as frightening to see the smug looks on the defendants’ faces as they claim to have feared for their lives, knowing the fix was in despite irrefutable video evidence of their guilt. Most infuriating is the belligerence of LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, whose paramilitary style of policing encouraged impunity in his officers. It’s heartbreaking to see Rodney King step before a microphone and utter his famous plea, “Can we all get along? Can we, can we get along?” It’s 2020, and we still have no answer. (2017, 114 min) MF
Shirley Clarke's PORTRAIT OF JASON (US/Documentary)
Available on Amazon Prime, Criterion and other platforms
In 1966, Jason Holliday was a 33-year-old black gigolo and aspiring nightclub headliner, a man of tremendous physical presence and sensuality. Shirley Clarke's fascinating documentary, made over the course of a grueling alcohol-fueled and drug-addled twelve-hour shoot, presents him as a loquacious, charismatic, self-described 'male bitch' projecting a stunning immediacy, as though every aspect of his life, his feelings, his tragedies and achievements is open to us without reservation, and he seemingly has nothing but desire to reveal to the camera the entirety of his history. Clarke filmed him in her apartment with a minimal crew and two 16mm cameras as he reminisced, drank, smoked joints the size of my thigh, and in general ripped into everyone and everything in his life with candor and glee. But the very first words spoken are to reveal that 'Jason Holliday' was not his real name, that he was born instead Aaron Payne, and a mere four minutes into the movie, Holliday announces his ambition in life: 'What I really want to do is what I'm doing now, is to perform.' And so, from the very start, PORTRAIT OF JASON is insistent that we remember all we see here is illusion and fakery. Performance is the major theme of Clarke's film: the performances of Holliday himself, both of the celebrities he impersonates at various points and, more deeply, of the Holliday persona itself; the stories Holliday tells of his employers, friends, lovers, and enemies, all in various crises of identity; the ambiguous presences of the off-screen Clarke and collaborator Carl Lee, whose voices are heard but whose faces are never seen; and that of the film itself, which has been crafted in the most artificial and patently alienating manner. Filled with jarring, out-of-focus compositions, perpetually mobile camerawork, zooming, panning, capturing and losing Holliday's face, PORTRAIT is a film of unparalleled artifice: there's not a moment that doesn't call attention to itself as constructed, as at least somewhat false, as deliberately foreign. Lauren Rabinovitz has claimed that Holliday's work in the film is done 'in order to make himself an object of art,' arguing that the film has two mutually-contradictory end-games in mind, both to endorse and enable Holliday's transmutation of the raw material of his existence into beauty and at the same time to reveal that very transformation to be founded on nothing but an elaborate network of fictions and deceit. His 'self-aware expertise at playing the victim and at manipulating his position,' she writes, 'puts in doubt his role as the unassuming object of the camera's gaze.' Indeed, there's nothing unassuming at all about Holliday. Within the film, he's a figure of almost purely unadulterated assumption: playing with our assumptions about what life as a gay black hustler would mean, playing with the conventions of the documentary form that lead us to assume his stories, his tears, his soul-bearing is all real. The film is incredibly moving throughout, a masterpiece of affective manipulation, and just as strongly is an elaborate self-critique, continually stressing at every turn that nothing we see is unadorned, no story we hear can be trusted, no sob not at the same time a back-handed chuckle. Has Holliday been lying all along? And would that really diminish the power of his words? The central triumph of the film is that it shows truth as something strange to itself, a side-effect of the narratives we concoct to make sense of our lives and a consequence of the incessant self-doubt that at every second threatens to collapse all those narratives into despair. (1967, 105 min) KB
Spike Lee’s 3 BROTHERS (US)
Available to watch on Spike Lee’s Twitter account here
Spike Lee’s first quarantine short film, the coronavirus-themed NEW YORK NEW YORK, was a joyous love letter to the director's hometown in which he depicted iconic NYC locations mostly absent of people, set to Frank Sinatra’s famous 1979 recording of the song of the same name. His second, 3 BROTHERS, arriving just weeks later, is a simple but devastating 95-second piece of agitprop: Lee intercuts the climactic scene of his 1989 masterpiece DO THE RIGHT THING—the murder of Radio Raheem at the hands of the police—with cell-phone footage captured by witnesses to the similar real-life murders of Eric Garner in 2014 and George Floyd in 2020. Clips from all three sources are linked by image (matching cuts of the cops placing their victims in illegal chokeholds) as well as sound (the refrain “I can’t breathe!” spoken by both Garner and Floyd). 3 BROTHERS ends by juxtaposing shots of each victim’s lifeless body while a bystander in the video of Floyd’s murder can be heard admonishing the cops, “You just really killed that man, bro!” The only onscreen text is a rhetorical question, “When Will History Stop Repeating Itself?," that appears in crimson letters over a black screen at the film’s beginning. DO THE RIGHT THING, which ended with Samuel L. Jackson's disc-jockey character reminding his radio station's listeners (and, by extension, the movie's viewers) to vote in an upcoming election, should not have remained this relevant 31 fucking years after its initial release. Watching this brief, gut-wrenching snuff film of a coda ought to infuriate anyone with a heart and a brain, and serves as a similar call to action. (2020, 2 min) MGS
ADDITIONAL LINKS/RESOURCES
Our friends at The Nightingale are streaming the Videofreex’s 1969 video interview FRED HAMPTON: BLACK PANTHERS IN CHICAGO (23 min). Additionally, they have a lengthy list of places that you can make donations to and they are offering passes to the Nightingale for individuals who make donations to ten of the organizations (any amount).
The Criterion Channel has lifted their paywall on a broad selection of films by Black directors and films that are Black-centric.
Milestone is currently offering Charles Burnett’s great 1978 film KILLER OF SHEEP for free on its streaming page.
Howard Alk’s great 1971 Chicago-made documentary THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON (89 min) is officially available on Amazon Prime (or, um, you could just Google it).
Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis' 2017 documentary WHOSE STREETS? (103 min) is available to rent via the Wilmette Theatre here.
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Josephine Decker’s SHIRLEY (US)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque, the Gene Siskel Film Center, and the Chicago International Film Festival
There’s something quite sinister about the relationship between a writer and her muse. In the most extreme examples, a writer has an inherent desire to control the narrative, and to manipulate it and those inside in the pursuit of artistic perfection, no matter the cost. Based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel of the same name, Josephine Decker’s SHIRLEY examines that push and pull through acclaimed horror novelist Shirley Jackson (Elizabeth Moss) and her newest source of inspiration. In the hopes of becoming a professor, Fred (Logan Lerman) and his newly pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young) move to a quaint college town in Vermont and are offered to stay with Shirley and her professor husband Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) in exchange for performing household duties as Shirley attempts to fight a miserable case of writer's block. Moss embodies the neuroticism of a tortured writer and the less-than-glamorous writer’s process: she’s oft bedridden, smoking cigarettes, and day drinking, and refuses to have a clean house as it’s a sign of “mental inferiority.” She’s crass and void of a filter—often egged on by her philandering husband—but she finds herself transfixed with Rose, who bears a strong resemblance both to her younger self and to her subject. The two find themselves in a toxic but mesmerizing relationship bound by obsession, power, and the embers of what will soon be Shirley’s masterpiece, a mysterious story of a young woman who went missing at the college. As the narrative unfolds, the lines between fiction, fantasy, and reality are blurred, if not destroyed completely. Moss and Stuhlbarg’s performances are showstopping—ranging over a striking spectrum from muted passivity to explosive chaos—and are reminiscent of gripping theater. Sarah Gubbins’ screenplay is sharp and steeped in a haunting realism, masterfully paired with a lucid score from Tamar-kali (who also lent her ear to Kitty Green’s THE ASSISTANT and many of the films of Dee Rees). And as a director, Decker has taken the freshman experimental sensibilities of MADELINE’S MADELINE and refined them, appropriately lending themselves to a hearty work that is hard to forget. (2019, 107 min) CC
Abel Ferrara’s TOMMASO (US/Italy)
Available to rent via the Gene Siskel Film Center here
There’s a scene in Abel Ferrara’s TOMMASO where Willem Dafoe’s title character (a version of Ferrara himself) is being driven home by one of his fellow AA members after a meeting. (Like all the characters excluding Dafoe's, the AA member is played by a non-actor.) Tommaso discusses the frustrations of domestic life with his wife and child (who are played by Ferrara's wife and daughter), which he's struggled with over the course of the film. The real-life AA member responds to Dafoe about the rage he (Tommaso) keeps inside himself, but while addressing Tommaso, the non-actor mistakenly says "him," then quickly changes it to “you." So, the non-actor mistakenly addresses the real-life Tommaso (Ferrara) rather than the actor portraying him (Dafoe). There's a good reason why Ferrara would leave this mistake in; it reflects Ferrara's delicate balance, in which the reality of the shoot clashes with the auto-fiction being presented. This clashing is inevitable, the natural result of two forces making contact with one another. As revealing as this small moment is, the line flub is hardly the merger between onscreen and offscreen realities. Throughout the film, the Tommaso character finds himself butting up against people like his wife, but also with other characters like drunks yelling on the street. Ferrara presents these situations in a much less melodramatic manner than he once portrayed Harvey Keitel (another stand-in for the director) fighting again with Ferrara’s real-life then-wife Nancy Ferrara in DANGEROUS GAME. That film's opening scene of an ominous, silent family dinner—of domesticity on the verge of breaking forever—has become less threatening. Every time Tommaso and his much-younger wife get into it, Ferrara places his character in the realm of his own imagination, where he works on gestating or unrealized film projects rather than confronting his own anger. At the worst moments of his fights with his wife, what we see from Tommaso’s perspective doesn’t appear to be his actual reality; in dealing with his problems, what he imagines are the dark fantasies that have created memorable scenes like those found in DANGEROUS GAME, NEW ROSE HOTEL, BAD LIEUTENANT, THE ADDICTION, and other Ferrara films. Unlike those, TOMMASO isn't tied to any discernible genre; it's closer to the smaller scale, but almost universally enlarged, human-relationship dramas of Philippe Garrel. Though seemingly less tethered to the post-New Wave realism of Garrel, Ferrara does love (like the French director) to render his protagonist's inner phantasmagoric reveries onscreen, whether he's imagining the ghosts of revolutionary figures traversing modern urban landscapes or Christ-like martyrs propped up outside of airports. Ferrara goes so far as to indulge in a scene from a story he has long wanted to bring to the screen, Mikhail Bolgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which looks like something out of Welles’ THE TRIAL. He also shows the pre-planning stages of his upcoming, long-in-the-works film, SIBERIA. Of course, the director's past is also present, with Tommaso mentioning the shooting of 1997’s THE BLACKOUT in Miami as a flagpole moment in the director’s drug-addled history, one of the times when his need for sober clarity broke through. More than anything, TOMMASO brings to mind Ferrara’s 4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH, in which another man struggling with his past did all he could to stay present as the future races towards him in the form of a world-destroying cosmic force. Make no mistake, Ferrara has always sought to merge the everyday with the cosmic, and with TOMMASO, he gets closer than ever before. Domestic life, as in the opening moments of Ferrara's PASOLINI (which found the titular filmmaker reading and drinking coffee in his living room), seems to float along the camera’s gliding path throughout the interior, reaching levels of subtle sublimation. Ferrara has proved that he's grown more attuned to the harmonies of daily life, which he allows to reverberate into long stretches of modulating sound; this is represented by the bells ringing out over the opening of TOMMASO, which operate as some sort of tuning-fork that help adjust the audience to the film's frequencies. At a time when most people are searching for something to take their minds off the current state of the world (We’ve all seen the headline that reads something like “[INSERT OLDER HOLLYWOOD MOVIE… Is A Dumb, Fun Distraction”), TOMMASO offers something more necessary: the work of a filmmaker long obsessed with squaring death now obsessed with improving life, struggling along the way, but not stopping. Tommaso has a nagging fear that his wife will cuck him with another man (a Ferrara trope if there ever was one); he perceives her youthful independence as standing in opposition to his role in their relationship. They fight over small issues like not making enough pasta or not waiting for the other while they run into an espresso shop, or even one being horny and the other not. These make-up identifiable moments in the life of a couple living together, yet when the trouble hits, the worst it gets is in Tommaso's head; life rarely gets as bad as his own mind can make it out to be. Tommaso distracts himself with his imagination, but his distractions aren’t there to dull reality, but rather to imbue it all with a sense of purpose and meaning, allowing private thoughts to turn life into works of art. (2020, 115 min) JD
Hong Sang-soo’s YOURSELF AND YOURS (Korea)
Available to rent via the Gene Siskel Film Center here
YOURSELF AND YOURS finds Hong Sang-soo at his most enigmatic. Known for his slice-of-life and realistic approach in his films, YOURSELF AND YOURS firmly establishes itself as an outlier when compared to other films in his prolific oeuvre. Youngsoo (Kim Yu-Hyuk) finds himself at odds with his girlfriend, the hard-drinking Minjung (Lee Yoo-Young), who’s managed to work herself down to only five drinks a day. The two face a breakup and its aftereffects when Youngsoo accuses her of flirting and drinking with strange men at bars despite her abject denial. Meanwhile, Minjung, or rather, a character claiming to be her twin sister or someone else entirely, spends her time seeing various men who take to her fancy while she visits various establishments throughout town. The film immediately draws comparisons to Hitchcock’s VERTIGO and Buñuel’s THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE. Who is the character Lee plays in these instances? A charming, lying drunk who only wishes to live her life as she pleases without outside bother, or an all too familiar person that is not only recognizable to many of the men in the city but who is also possibly an entirely different person depending on who she speaks to? YOURSELF AND YOURS does not take this matter likely. In fact, it places many of its characters under a proverbial microscope and intense scrutiny, with its prolific use of zoom close-ups during periods of monologue as a pseudo-accusational technique. Does the audience believe that character’s words or is it just part of the greater mystery for them to ponder? For a movie that took four years to finally receive distribution in the United States, it only begs the question what other mysteries Hong Sang-soo has in store for his fans. (2016, 86 min) KC
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements
Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León’s THE WOLF HOUSE (Chile/Animation)
Available for rent via Facets Cinémathèque
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
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
A free online screening of NU Doc Media Thesis Showcase: Doppler Effect – Part 1 is on Thursday at 7pm. More information on this program of new student documentaries and an RSVP link here.
DePaul's School of Cinematic Arts
A free online screening of the DePaul Experimental Film Showcase is on Saturday from 3-6pm. More information on this program of student experimental work and a streaming link here.
Gallery 400 (UIC)
Fawzia Mirza and Ryan Logan’s 2011 short THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS (3 min) streams through June 8.
Asian Pop-Up Cinema presents a free online Mini-Focus: Taiwan Cinema from June 5-12. Each film/program plays one day only, from 2-10pm. This week’s films are: John Hsu’s DETENTION (105 min) on Friday; a shorts program (75 min total) is on Monday; Sylvia Chang’s MURMUR OF THE HEARTS (119 min) is on Tuesday; Chen Meijun’s THE GANGSTER’S DAUGHTER (105 min) is on Wednesday; and Cheng Wei Hao’s WHO KILLED COCK ROBIN (117 min) is on Thursday. Information and film links here.
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) also streams this week.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Daniel Traub’s 2019 US/Italian documentary URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD: INTO HER OWN (57 min) and Mounia Meddour’s 2019 Algerian/French film PAPICHA (108 min) also stream this week.
Music Box Theatre
Phillip Borsos’ 1982 Canadian film THE GREY FOX (92 min) streams 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
Lewis Klahr’s CIRCUMSTANTIAL PLEASURES (US/Experimental)
Available to stream for free at the Wexner Arts Center website here
For the most part, Lewis Klahr’s films speak to conflicting feelings about the past. His collage animations—which draw on pictures and texts from old magazines, books, and other print sources—suggest glimpses into the cultural subconscious, where familiar fantasies intermingle with nightmares. CIRCUMSTANTIAL PLEASURES continues Klahr’s investigation of the American dream life, but for once, the focus is on the present. Made between 2012 and 2019, this cycle of six short films reflects the zeitgeist with its imagery (photos of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and other actors on the world political stage recur in a few pieces) and music (which is generally discordant and anxiety-inducing). A sense of dread predominates, befitting the spirit of the times, and this enables Klahr to make banal objects seem menacing. Some of the most striking moments of CIRCUMSTANTIAL PLEASURES play out against the security patterns you find on the insides of envelopes; in Klahr’s hands, the patterns become symbols of how information is routinely denied to society at large or else delivered to us in scrambled form. (By contrast, the more easily parsable images—like the little sculpture of the Statue of Liberty with its head cut off—are among the less compelling.) The final, eponymous short in the program (which is also the longest) brings together the various motifs brilliantly; like the best of Klahr’s work, it vacillates between mundanity and abstraction. This piece is scored to “SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter),” an epic track from Scott Walker’s 2012 album Bish Bosch; Klahr lets Walker’s vast sonic palette (replete with extended silences) fill out the images, granting them a doom one rarely finds in the filmmaker’s work. (2012-19, 65 min) BS
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Klahr will take part in an online discussion about the work on Friday at 7pm. Admission is free, but RSVP is required.
Cristi Puiu’s STUFF AND DOUGH (Romania)
Available to rent from the Making Waves Romanian Film Festival here
THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (2005) and AURORA (2010), Cristi Puiu’s second and third directorial efforts, are two of the supreme achievements of the Romanian New Wave; each one is a formally audacious epic that confronts contemporary social ills with cutting humor and hyperrealist detail. STUFF AND DOUGH, Puiu’s first feature, is nothing to sneeze at either; not only does it introduce themes and formal predilections that the writer-director would expand upon in subsequent films, it demonstrates how to generate maximum suspense on a minimal budget. The story centers on Ovidiu, a young man who lives with his parents in a small town and has few prospects in life. At the start of the movie, a local crime boss recruits Ovidiu to run an errand for him: deliver a package of unspecified stuff to a business associate in Bucharest (about four hours away), then come home. The hero promptly screws up his covert mission by inviting along his friend Vali, who in turn brings his girlfriend Betty. For a while, STUFF AND DOUGH simply hangs out with these characters as they drive along the Romanian interstate and the script (which Puiu wrote with Razvan Radulescu) toys out various insights about social disadvantage, male camaraderie, and being young. The camera never leaves the characters’ van, and this aesthetic decision creates a sense of physical entrapment that heightens one’s sense of the characters’ temporal entrapment (Ovidiu has promised the gangster that he’d be home by evening). The film feels tense even before the protagonists cross the path of some people in a red SUV possessed by serious road rage, and for the sake of your ability to be surprised by STUFF AND DOUGH, it’s probably best to stop describing the plot here. Suffice it to say, what first appears to be a low-rent comedy of manners mutates into something with very dire consequences. Puiu’s knack for documentary-style realism is already in full flower; between the vivid settings and the intimate, spontaneous-seeming camerawork, one feels immersed in the film from the very first shot. One of the strongest debuts in 21st-century cinema. (2001, 90 min) BS
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: June 5 - June 11, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Christy LeMaster, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger, Scott Pfeiffer, Michael Glover Smith