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.
➡️ ONION CITY & CINE-FILE PRESENT:
Chloe Galibert-Laîné
Eyes Without a Place: Chloe Galibert-Laîné
Available to view Saturday and Sunday – purchase tickets here
We’re pleased to present a program with the Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival this year. Eyes Without a Place: Chloe Galibert-Laîné features three works by French experimental video essayist Chloe Galibert-Laîné: A VERY LONG EXPOSURE TIME (2020, 7 min), THE EYE WAS IN THE TOMB AND STARED AT DANEY (2017, 10 min), and BOTTLE SONGS 1-4 (2020, 77 min), which was co-made with filmmaker and former Cine-File contributor Kevin B. Lee. See below for more reviews of festival programming.
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A pre-recorded Q&A with Galibert-Laîné, Cine-File Associate Editor Kathleen Sachs, and Onion City programmer Zachary Vanes will be available on Saturday at 7:30pm. Register here.
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Prano Bailey-Bond’s CENSOR (New UK)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
If violent movies cause real-life violence, why hasn’t one of the MPA rating board’s members become a murderer yet? CENSOR takes up a similar concept to its furthest extreme—as in VIDEODROME, the entire last half may only be taking place in the head of its protagonist, Enid (Niamh Algar). The film might require some background for American viewers. It takes place at the height of the U.K.’s moral panic over “video nasties” in the early ‘80s, when the introduction of the VCR and a loophole in British movie censorship regulations meant that gory horror movies were readily accessible in their uncut form. 39 films wound up being prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, with a much longer list barred from legal distribution in video stores. Enid works for the BBFC, spending her days watching a steady diet of exploitation movies focused on violence against women. (A colleague finds artistic merit in an eyeball-gouging scene she ordered trimmed from a film, likening it to Homer and UN CHIEN ANDALOU.) Outside of work, she lives a dull, passive life haunted by the memory of her sister, who disappeared mysteriously and may have been murdered when they were both children. One day, she’s assigned to watch another horror film, director Frederick North’s DON’T GO IN THE CHURCH, and obsessively rewinds and freeze-frames an earlier North film, convinced its lead actress is her vanished sister. Director Prano Bailey-Bond doesn’t aim to recreate the period in any direct way, instead evoking an initial mindset of depression and emotional repression through costumes and sets colored pale blue and green and a numb, slightly hesitant performance by Algar. Then, CENSOR explodes with shafts of heavily stylized red and purple lighting, suggesting that Enid can enter into the world she’s been watching onscreen. The air of pastiche feels close to Peter Strickland, but CENSOR has a hallucinatory tone all its own, halfway between slasher movie and fairy tale. While it initially raises questions about the impact of a visual diet of watching women murdered and includes a post-#MeToo scene with a sleazy film producer, the film is ultimately more concerned with mood and style. Enid draws on the imagery surrounding her to express her own personal trauma, and if the result doesn’t turn out that well for her, the final scene’s sarcastic invocation of a fantasy of nuclear family life untroubled by loss is bleaker than any of the violence. (2021, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
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Also showing at the Music Box this week is Jon M. Chu’s 2021 film IN THE HEIGHTS (143 min, DCP Digital)
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More info, including Music Box ‘s COVID protocols, here.
Church Basement Cinema with Jason Coffman
Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. – Outdoor Screening) – Wednesday, 8pm [Free Admission]
Local film author, collector, and programmer Jason Coffman presents two films that were aimed at the religious market, but that seem far too intense for their intended audience: Douglas Lloyd McIntosh’s THE GIRL WHO RAN OUT OF NIGHT (1974, 53 min, 16mm) and Jim Laughlin’s RUN, JIMMY, RUN (1978, 30 min, 16mm).
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More info, including Comfort Station’s COVID protocols, here.
👀 DOC10
The Doc10 Film Festival begins on Thursday and runs through June 20. The opening night film and one other take place at the ChiTown Drive in; all others are in-person at the Davis Theatre. Check next week’s list for reviews of additional films. Complete schedule and more info here.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s SUMMER OF SOUL (US/Documentary)
ChiTown Drive In – Thursday, 8:30pm; purchase tickets here
Attended by 300,000 people, the Harlem Cultural Festival was a free concert series held in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) in the summer of 1969. Performers at the event included Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, Sly and the Family Stone, and Nina Simone. A celebration of Black music and history, the concert series and its cultural magnitude has been largely undiscussed, overshadowed by music festivals like Woodstock—which was held that same summer, one hundred miles away. The series was fully filmed, but footage remained unseen for years. Using that footage, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, in the musician’s debut feature film, directs SUMMER OF SOUL—subtitled …Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised—as part documentary and part concert film. Full performances are combined with interviews of attendees and musicians and archival material detailing the political and social climate in America at the time. Describing the specificity of Harlem as a community and the significance of the event to those participating, SUMMER OF SOUL grounds the vibrant and beautifully shot concert footage in robust context. It lets the variety of acts and musical genres and styles primarily be articulated in the outstanding stage performances and the reactions from the audience in the park. An early and incredibly effective moment in the documentary shows singer Marilyn McCoo of the 5th Dimension becoming emotional as she watches herself performing on the Harlem Cultural Festival stage; she so well expresses the significance of Black musicians playing music for a Black audience, a theme that runs throughout. SUMMER OF SOUL is an important reframing of the history of American 60s counterculture, a jubilant celebration, and a great reminder that music is not always just a reflection of challenging times but can also itself be revolutionary. (2021, 117 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]
📼 ONION CITY EXPERIMENTAL
FILM AND VIDEO FESTIVAL
The Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival, presented by Chicago Filmmakers, continues through Sunday 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 split our reviews based on when the Q&A sessions are scheduled; the first three programs were covered in last week’s list and those with Q&As this Friday-Sunday are below. The full schedule and more info are here.
Program 4: Power Ballads
Available to view until Sunday; purchase tickets here
The theme of this program draws attention to power dynamics and their expression primarily through sound—particularly music. These six films focus on how humans maintain, survive, control, and/or transform various spaces and how sound shapes those practices. AMUSIA (Grace E Mitchell, 2021, 8 min) introduces a recurring theme of structure versus nature, as striking images of desolate construction sites clash with characters dressed up for prom navigating the spaces, an industrialized hum underlying the scenes. This is directly followed by ariella tai’s moving SAFEHOUSE (2020, 12 min) which uses text from Saidiya Hartman’s work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; the book examines the intimate lives of Black woman and queer people at the turn of the 20th century. Focusing on excerpts that examine sound as a form of resistance, the film conveys a sense of safety and renewal through two characters working and resting in a lush domestic space. Through layered sound and image, SAFEHOUSE tranquilly yet powerfully processes marginalized histories and spaces. Likewise, Rhea Storr’s HERE IS THE IMAGINATION OF THE BLACK RADICAL (2020, 10 min) presents sound itself as radical, documenting preparation for the Bahamian carnival celebration of Junkanoo. The film is about Afrofuturism as much as it is about archive and preservation, examining how both are intertwined forms of resistance and identity. Other films include BUGS & BEASTS BEFORE THE LAW (Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell, 2020, 33 min), an experimental documentary about the absurd medieval practice of putting animals, insects, and even inanimate objects on trial. Evocatively scored in stereo, the film has a theatrical quality, both to suggest the severe courtroom setting and the irrational nature of the trials. Also drawing on animal imagery, I’VE BEEN AFRAID (Cecelia Condit, 2020, 7 min) is a musical, digital montage that uses gifs and emojis to explore how women navigate spaces of violence and aggression. The final short is perhaps the one that most straightforwardly fits the title of “power ballad.” Alicia Maye’s OUT OF LINE (2020, 16 min) is a brightly colored surrealist rock opera, where a woman’s public-facing persona must maintain control over embodied internal facets of her personality as they attempt a mutiny. This imaginatively constructed and at times humorous look at the inner self suggests that the trickiest spaces and voices that can be encountered are often the ones within. [Megan Fariello]
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Artist Q&A for Program 4 is on Friday, June 11 at 7:30pm; register here.
Program 5: Make a Distinction (Centerpiece) [Outdoor Screening]
Chicago Filmmakers (1326 W. Hollywood Ave.) – Friday, 9pm; tickets here
A YouTube tutorial tells me that the four pillars of object-oriented computer programming are: encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism. Though I know next to nothing about computer programming, I see no reason why these four concepts, freely interpreted, might not serve as coordinates for approaching the three films in Make A Distinction, the centerpiece program for this year’s Onion City Film Festival. Such a compass, however arbitrary, comes in handy when orienting such dense and divergent objects as Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’ COLONIAL TRANSFER (2021, 7 min), Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s THE CIRCLE (2020, 25 min), and Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney’s MAKE A DISTINCTION (2021, 62 min), which on the surface share little beyond overt political commitments and certain strategies of digital collage. I’d put COLONIAL TRANSFER forward as a work of encapsulation, offering a split-screen speed-read of Mexican cultural representations by way of archival media. Arrayed against a background of frantic code, four windows display accelerated educational films, super-8 tourist films, and Portapak footage of folkloric exhibitions. The strategy succinctly positions audiovisual archives as corrupted repositories of colonial plunder. Of course, many of us now personally harbor such entropic collections on our hard drives; in THE CIRCLE, Jibade-Khalil Huffman achieves a montage form approximating this digital cacophony. It’s easy enough to let this whorl of group performance, screen captures, YouTube rips, motion graphics, and Leslie Neilsen audio clips wash over you, especially as the number of luma-keyed superimpositions approaches a quantum state of abstraction. But across the video’s 25-minute duration, anchor points do emerge. Repeated gestures evoke both therapy and ritual, lending banal objects like slinkies and flashlights an unlikely psychic gravity; amidst it all, the question of anti-Blackness and its alternatives lingers in snatches of sound and image. Other anchors take the form of “legacy media” such as film cans, slide projectors, tape recorders, and books. If we learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that media can be therapeutic and distressing in equal measure, but THE CIRCLE reminds us that physical media objects are also, crucially, things to think with, work on, and share collectively. In this, Huffman’s piece brings to mind another recent work of Black radical cinema, Ephraim Asili’s THE INHERITANCE (2020), which shares THE CIRCLE’s orientation towards obsolete media objects as bearers of political agency—not to mention, lots of group hangouts in monochromatic dens. Out of necessity, these films unfold unpredictably, as they seek to untangle the knots of history that inhibit liberation. One could say the same about MacKenzie and Mausert-Mooney’s MAKE A DISTINCTION, a bold step into the feature form by the Chicago-based duo, making its world premiere at Onion City. Made over four (shall we say, fraught) years, the film seems to narrate the course of its own development, from exploratory survey to statement of purpose: if you’re wondering where it’s going at the start, you’ll know exactly where you stand at the end. (Spoiler alert: stolen land.) Not that things are all that vague at the jump: an electric opening montage featuring clips of Kwame Ture and Fred Hampton signals the general direction. But the following scenes, cruising the communities surrounding Kentucky’s Fort Campbell Army Base and glimpsing the travesties inflicted on the American environment by capitalism and militarism, suggest filmmakers seeking refuge in pockets of untrammeled nature—and in a familiar idiom of landscape essay film. This impression is deceptive: halfway through, the film changes course dramatically, turning its focus towards Chicago and adopting a tone of forceful and incisive analysis. Defiantly casting their 16mm camera lens on the many Dick Wolf television productions shooting around the city, the filmmakers unpack incestuous relationships linking the dramatized copaganda of shows like Chicago PD, the corrupt developers behind the Cinespace Chicago studio, and the actual CPD forces who have brutalized city residents with impunity for decades. With damning precision, MacKenzie and Mausert-Mooney lay out on-screen texts and primary documents, arguing implicitly for formal, economic, and political alternatives to the commercial film industry’s hegemony…before changing stylistic gears yet again. These shifts are abrupt, but the film’s own internal polymorphism—the confidence with which it swerves from landscape to essay film to insurrectionary botany lesson (?!)—helps us imagine what such a radical film practice might look like. The electrifying Dick Wolf sequence divides the film, much as the opening’s Fred Hampton quotation divides the people from the pigs. But MacKenzie and Mausert-Mooney don’t just ask us to pick a side, they show us how. By returning, with lucid self-awareness and burning urgency, to landscapes, figures, techniques, and themes from its first half, MAKE A DISTINCTION demonstrates how historical consciousness can orient diverse experimental tactics towards a unitary, emancipatory purpose. In other words, like all the films in this program, it’s an object lesson in political filmmaking. [Michael Metzger]
Program 6: Closure Was in the Air
Available to view until Sunday; purchase tickets here
A good way to watch Closure Was in the Air, Onion City’s sixth program, is to keep asking yourself: what unseen images haunt the ones these films are showing us? By leading with Dana Berman Duff’s A POTENTIALITY (2020, 16 min), the program primes us to do just that. Drawing on the work of artist Susan Stilton, Duff’s film begins with a graphically minimalist account of the leadup to the Holocaust, a prospect hidden in plain sight between the grainy lines of New York Times headlines from 1933. It then forsakes images entirely, and only white leader and subtitles accompany an excerpt of an opera composed by inmates of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Duff’s spartan visuals suggest that seeing is not the same as witnessing; perhaps, to be a witness is to bear in our minds the horrors we’ve already seen. PAPER BAG TEST (Trevon Jakaar Coleman, 2020, 5 min) bills itself as a “camera test,” juggling exposure and color settings in shots of nondescript alleyways in Iowa City. But it also tests the viewer’s ability to see beyond what the camera shows us: we hear an offscreen group critique of the work, a reminder that meaning is discursively constructed within and outside the frame. The film’s title, which references colorist prejudices within the African-American community, thus becomes a provocation: how can we visualize the spaces we occupy, the tools we use to picture them, and the language we use to discuss them, with an eye towards pervasive but invisible prejudice? In PASSING THROUGH (Linda Mary Montano, 2020, 5 min), we encounter blurred, dimmed, but still painfully familiar images of the militarized police response to Black Lives Matter protests last June. Offsetting these recent horrors, Montano provides a plaintive vocal performance, repeating the film’s title until there’s nothing left to do but scream. In the timbre of her voice, we hear echoes of the countless similar scenes the 79-year-old filmmaker and performance artist must have observed in her time—and a plea to end them. Adrian Garcia Gomez takes up that plea with PRIMAVERA (2020, 5 min), which too draws on Black Lives Matter protest footage, rapidly intercut with images of blooming nature to telegraph that explosive release of pent-up energy, anger, and solidarity. Compared to Gomez’s film, others in the program are more oblique: Kevin Jerome Everson’s EAST TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL (SMART) (2021, 4 min) documents a driverless car doing parking drills in the lot outside the Berlin stadium where track-and-field athlete Jesse Owens made history at the 1936 Olympic games. Characteristically understated, the film uses the black-clad car’s “blindness” to cannily play with the seen and the unseen: if Owens’ victories were a triumph of Black visibility in the face of white supremacy, today’s Olympic games are mostly a cover for host cities to sweep problems of homelessness and inequality under the rug, through a program of incarceration and displacement. Everson’s film follows another meditation on the politics of space, Ben Balcom’s NEWS FROM NOWHERE (2020, 8 min). The Milwaukee filmmaker has explored the role of public space in the utopian imaginary over a series of increasingly sophisticated 16mm films; the latest is at once his most abstract and his most crystalline. The film breaks down cleanly into a few discrete components: a contrasty series of black-and-wide shots of textiles designed by Victorian socialist William Morris; a pair of slow circular pans of a public park; and a soundtrack consisting of a poetry recitation (“Utopia” by Bernadette Meyer) and some unfussy improvised furniture music. From the justness of these elements, we might deduce a motivation towards pure formalism, as if utopia were a structural problem to be solved. But NEWS FROM NOWHERE’s greatest pleasures—its blur and grain, the informality of its music, the spontaneous interactions of its flashed frames and lens flare—are actually a little messy, pushing against the idea of utopia as something which can be designed, rather than fleetingly, perhaps accidentally unleashed. What unseen images haunt these frames? Maybe it’s the best specter of them all (communism, of course!), but maybe it’s just whatever’s your idea of a good time. Then again, if there’s a giant signifier floating over most of these films, it’s the one mercifully deflated in Julia Fish and Jesse Malmed’s pithy WHIMP (2020, 2 min). I won’t ruin the joke, but I’ll just say this—just because we don’t have to see him every day anymore, doesn’t mean he’s not still living in our heads, tax free. Also on the program: Rajee Samarasinghe’s MISERY NEXT TIME (2021, 5 min), whose stunning widescreen images hang together loosely, yet allusively, broadcasting a somber portrait of contemporary Sri Lanka to a world in equal crisis outside; and Shuruq Harb’s THE JUMP (2021, 10 minutes), another haunted and haunting film, whose intimate confrontation with an unseen figure’s suicidal leap scales up to contemplate the experience of sightlessness in an occupied country, and ultimately, in the entire cosmos. [Michael Metzger]
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Artist Q&A for Program 6 is on Saturday, June 12 at 1:30pm; register here.
Program 7: Cheat-Cheat-Lied
Available to view until Sunday; purchase tickets here
Media scholar Yuriko Furuhata observes that in the 20th century, as techniques for picturing and forecasting the weather grew more sophisticated, so too did the technologies, like air-conditioning, that allow us to control and engineer the atmospheres we inhabit. Another media scholar, Paul Roquet, points out that Japanese atmospheric design also extends, through phenomena like ambient music, to “atmospheres of the self,” allowing us to regulate our mood in response to the outside world. These concepts came to mind while watching Cheat-Cheat-Lied, a program of films that that comment on, or exemplify, our ways of calibrating the atmospheres within and outside our bubbles over the last year. James Connolly’s outlandishly-yet-accurately titled PHASING THE ELECTROMAGNETIC FLUX OF ANOTHER SHIT MOMENT, FEBRUARY 4, 2020 (2020, 6 min) adopts the evergreen strategy of hacking that most American of toxic cultural emitters, the television. In PROPITIATION OF THE SUN (2021, 5 min), Michael Campos-Quinn confronts another form of pollution, namely the smoke that engulfed Northern California during wildfire season last year. Campos-Quinn’s sfumato cinematography captures this omnipresent haze, which confounds our ability to distinguish between trees shrouded in smog and the shadows cast on bedroom walls. The film’s signature image may be that of a taped-off, plastic-covered air conditioner, suggesting that our techniques of atmospheric control may be faltering in the face of climate change. The great English filmmaker John Smith makes inspired use of atmospheric perspective in CITADEL (2020, 16 min), which skewers Boris Johnson’s cretinous efforts to dispel COVID panic in the UK last spring. His camera trained out his window, Smith weathers the quarantine capturing various impressions of his neighborhood, then edits the footage around Johnson’s keep-calm-and-carry-on-spending rhetoric, playing fog-blanket peek-a-boo with the looming capitalist Golgotha that is downtown London. (While resolutely current, the work is also an interesting inversion of his classic gothic-structuralist 1987 short, THE BLACK TOWER). Zachary Epcar’s THE CANYON (2020, 15 min) shares CITADEL’s perverse fascination with the anodyne architectures of a diseased reality. The best way I can describe THE CANYON is that it plays a bit like a horror movie that starts long after the last body has been snatched. (In this, I was reminded of Bioy Casares’ 1940 modernist sci-fi novel The Invention of Morel.) Epcar conjures a world of perfect atmospheric control—rectilinear condos housing affectless people consumed by mechanistic action. His camera movements express the futility of shifting one’s gaze in a world without depth. If one senses any desire at all beyond a yearning for the abyss, it’s in the conspiratorial buzz of insects, leering from behind walls of well-maintained foliage. Crucially, the film is also very funny, with the performances giving off more than a whiff of Kids in the Hall-style sketch comedy. It’s telling, however, that Epcar gives all the best jokes to inanimate objects. Sabine Gruffat’s MOVING OR BEING MOVED (2020, 11 min) is a motion-capture CGI ballet about domestic labor, steeped in the task-driven performance art of Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, and the irony of keeping house as virtual reality absorbs our lives. RETURN TO THE PEACH-BLOSSOM WONDERLAND (Haomin Peng, Yue Huang, Yuchao Luo, 2020, 18 min) likewise animates the little dramas of life indoors, taking the viewer on a Perec-like knight’s tour of apartment buildings and high-rises in modern China. Originally a three-screen installation, the piece uses its expanded canvas to juxtapose human vignettes with atmospheric details, employing a mix of CGI and rotoscopes skinned in dreamy black-and white watercolor. The program concludes with the genuinely bewildering -FORCE- (2020, 9 min), a collaboration by Simon Liu and Jennie MaryTai Liu. Analog footage of Hong Kong, reminiscent of other Simon Liu films, gets an outlandish remix treatment here, with motion graphics and digital effects wreaking havoc that could even cross the eyes of a seasoned signal hacker like James Connolly. Even more disorienting is the voiceover, a cracked burlesque of corporate infotainment and new-age relaxation tapes. Through obsessive chants of “rest - rest - rest - rest” and “save your energy for tomorrow!,” regimens of self-care shade insidiously into self-governance; but bullhorn injunctions like “please stop all prohibited movement” and “maintain order” also beg to be read in light of crackdowns against Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. The film concludes abruptly with the line, “within and out with!”—a call, perhaps, to burst the “atmospheres of the self” that we preoccupy ourselves maintaining, and the “atmospheres of control” that occupy us. [Michael Metzger]
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Artist Q&A for Program 7 is on Saturday, June 12 at 4:30pm; register here.
Program 8: Eyes Without a Place: Chloe Galibert-Laîné
See the top of the list
Program 9: Space Being the Operative Word Here
Available to view until Sunday; purchase tickets here
This program is a must-see on the basis of two highly imaginative and topical shorts, Joe Hambleton’s EGRESS: DREAMS OF A DOLPHIN (2020, 11 min) and Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam’s THREE MISSING LETTERS (2021, 25 min). EGRESS considers American life in 2020 through the perspective of one lonely person, whom Hambleton presents as a featureless, computer-generated figure traversing abstract landscapes. The artist presents this character’s thoughts—about interacting with others exclusively online, America’s polarized political landscape, and the rise of misinformation in news and politics—in the form of comic book-like text boxes. It’s an inspired device that renders the character’s experience (and, by extension, our own) patently unreal; Hambleton heightens this effect by referring to online influencers exclusively as “monsters” and to online news writers exclusively as “robots.” All this unreality is ultimately saddening. THREE MISSING LETTERS is also upsetting when it considers the present, but I won’t reveal how Lin and Lam do that, as the film’s flash-forward to contemporary life comprises one of its best effects. For most of its duration, the film contemplates a series of experiments in 1934 in which Indian-born aerospace engineer Stephen Smith attempted to transport mail by rocket. Per the directors, “The vessel exploded and 143 letters were scattered on the shores of Saugor Island. 140 letters were salvaged, but three were lost. Drawing on epistolary narratives set at the border between India and China, THREE MISSING LETTERS is an experimental film that speculates on the contents of these lost letters.” The imaginary letters speak to the development of rocket technology and life in India in general in the 1930s, and the filmmakers conjure up a sense of wonder about each. At the same time, the playful montage illustrates the letters with lots of mundane activities—for instance, Lin and Lam present videos of someone failing to launch a toy rocket when the fictionalized Stephen Smith recounts his own failures with rocket technology. Also of note in the program is CABO TUNA OR THE MANAGEMENT OF THE SKY (2021, 13 min), an elaborate montage by the Mexican collective Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico. It’s a short essay film about the history of satellite technology in rockets and surveillance equipment, with all the footage taken from YouTube. The history lesson touches on Werner von Braun and the Nazis, the Soviet Union’s surveillance of their own citizens, and Mexican drug cartels, yet the imagery is often lighthearted or dreamlike; Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse enters into the mix, as do some vintage Mexican cartoons. This is reminiscent of Adam Curtis’ work, not only in the mélange of materials, but in the filmmakers’ ability to synthesize a wide range of historical information into a single, compelling narrative. Surveillance footage also enters into Dana Levy’s LAST MAN (2020, 12 min), which alternates security camera shots of empty streets during the Covid-19 lockdown with scenes from two nuclear panic films of the 1960s, THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH and THE LAST MAN ON EARTH. Adonia Bouchehri’s JELLO (2020, 12 min) is another film about isolation, presenting shots of benign objects while an offscreen narrator reflects on her private, intimate rituals, some of which involve rat-shaped gelatin candies. Rounding out the program are two playful palate cleansers, Jacob Ciocci and Kent Lambert’s BE CAREFUL KYLE (2020, 2 min) and Carlos Nahuel Cerutti’s VIVANT (2021, 2 min). The first is a head-spinning rush of mixed media (whose effect is softened somewhat by the pleasant ambient music on the soundtrack); the second is a neat-looking mix of animation and live action in which hand-drawn figures appear on grainy celluloid-shot footage. [Ben Sachs]
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Artist Q&A for Program 9 is on Sunday, June 13 at 2pm; register here.
Program 10: Memory Is a Labor, Not a Luxury
Available to view until Sunday; purchase tickets here
Memory is the ultimate trickster—it furnishes knowledge and wields the impedimenta cleverly, a precarious souvenir of dubious merit. The six films in this program, aptly titled to reflect the condition’s detriment, traverse the concept of memory as both the literal abstraction it is and the virtuous prevarication it can be. Produced just 70 days into lockdown, ONCE UPON A SCREEN: EXPLOSIVE PARADOX (2020, 10 min) explores another kind of claustrophobic trauma, that of a moviegoing memory which leaves its mark. Here it’s Oliver Stone’s 1986 film PLATOON, which critic and filmmaker Kevin B. Lee recalls seeing as a kid with his family at a multiplex in San Francisco. That’s where Lee shot the video, at the liquor store that used to be a several-screen AMC. Traipsing around its grounds, Lee reminisces about the experience of seeing the film and the memories that surround it, ranging from his father’s bizarre internalization of the film’s final moments to the racist taunts his classmates would emulate on the playground. Lee prosaically explores memory in relation to film, a medium that’s already a memory of itself. A seemingly whimsical stop-action animation, Ezra Wube’s UNA FAVOLA VERA (2020, 8 min) has as its basis propaganda made and utilized during World War II, specifically as it pertains to the invasion of Ethiopia by facist Italy. The filmmaker “used images and texts from mass produced postcards, packaging, calendar booklets, books, posters and pamphlets… [s]ome of these prints were on the front covers of school notebooks, some were games that taught the geography, history, and natural resources of Ethiopia"; his renderings are colorful if not folksy, with various auditory expressions playing in concurrence. When they involve words not in English, they go unsubtitled. Occasionally artful text appears on screen, in Italian with English translations conveyed via subtitle but which are ambiguous nonetheless. The tenuous veracity of history is presented as a collective memory that’s malleable as putty in one’s hands. Stanislav "Stan" Jok recounts his memories searching for the famed donuts of the elusive Sonoran Sisters in his home state of Arizona in Renato Umali’s DITAT DEUS DONUTS (2021, 13 min), raising the question of whose memories this work details. I can't help but to wonder if Stan is fictive—and, admittedly, I did a Google search to discover nothing of the Sonoran Sisters or their renowned pastries—but maybe he isn't or maybe the memories aren’t. By virtue of being expressed in this wrly narrated and uncannily depicted odyssey, are the memories somehow real or even realer, shared by those watching it? A fleeting wisp among the gales, Erica Sheu’s PÀI-LA̍K Ē-POO (2020, 2 min) is as impactful as it is compact. Per Sheu’s description, “pài-la̍k ē-poo means Saturday afternoon in Taiwanese Holouē,” and it’s dedicated to the filmmaker’s grandmother. It’s wondrous and opaque, like the lives and memories of others whom we do not know. Juxtaposition is at the root of Morgan Quaintance’s SURVIVING YOU, ALWAYS (2021, 18 min), which considers the divine promise of psychedelic drugs in tandem with the grim reality of urban life. It’s a fuliginous collage of sorts, of memories and modes, which results in an elegiac abutment between two potential verities. Similarly, Peixuan Ouyang’s THE___________WORLD (2020, 18 min) probes a modern disconnect that brings forth the illusion of reality and the reality of illusion. Hypnagogic by way of inventive animation and droll perception, the film, like the rest in the program, is assured of its own uncertainty. [Kathleen Sachs]
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Artist Q&A for Program 10 is on Sunday, June 13 at 7:30pm; register here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Hong Sang-soo’s THE POWER OF KANGWON PROVINCE (South Korea)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Hong Sang-soo’s second feature is in some ways his first. It’s the first he scripted himself, and it introduces themes and motifs he would continue to explore in numerous subsequent movies. Like VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (2000), TALE OF CINEMA (2005), and RIGHT NOW WRONG THEN (2015), the narrative is divided into two parts, which allows the South Korean writer-director to revel in doublings and opposites—two of those key Hongian motifs. One set of opposites is city and country; the story is split between Seoul and a vacation area in the titular Kangwon Province, a mountainous region in South Korea’s northeast. Hong loves to consider characters when they’re on vacation or else away from home—see WOMAN ON THE BEACH (2006), NIGHT AND DAY (2008), IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (2012), and HOTEL BY THE RIVER (2018). It’s likely because a change of scenery inspires people to shed their inhibitions and say or do things they might not in their ordinary lives. (It’s also likely that Hong’s thematically obsessed with drunkenness for the same reason.) The first half of THE POWER OF KANGWON PROVINCE follows a 22-year-old college student named Ji-sook (Oh Yun-hong), who indulges in reckless behavior while on vacation at the mountain resort, entering into a fling with an older, married police officer (Kim Yoo-sook). The affair escalates even after Ji-sook returns to college in Seoul (the power of Kangwon Province having followed her back); but when she goes back to see him weeks later, their chemistry vanishes, and she ends the relationship. In the second half of the film, Hong picks up with unemployed college professor Sang-kwon (Baek Jong-hak), who vacations with a male friend at the same Kangwon Province resort from earlier. As Hong spins variations on scenes from the film’s first half, it gradually becomes apparent that Sang-kwon—another older, married man—has been having an affair with Ji-sook as well. And so, the film becomes, in part, a study of inadvisable (and predictably disastrous) romantic relationships, yet another theme that would recur regularly in the director’s films. Where Hong’s work after TALE OF CINEMA became sunnier, at least on the surface, POWER OF KANGWON PROVINCE is still bleak and discomforting in the manner of his early period. The graphic sex scenes are deliberately unpleasant, and the camera is often at an alienating position vis-à-vis the action, like from far away or at a skewed angle. Such modernist tactics feel in keeping with the 1990s work of other major arthouse figures like Amos Gitai, Edward Yang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, or Tsai Ming-liang. (On the other hand, the lovesick policeman seems to have stepped out of a Wong Kar-wai movie.) Yet Hong’s distinctive wry humor, which was evident from his directorial debut, THE DAY A PIG FELL INTO THE WELL (1996), makes the film look less like a product of its era than of the director’s timeless imagination. KANGWON PROVINCE features early iterations of at least two of Hong’s favorite character types: one, the charismatic yet amoral and self-destructive middle-aged man; and two, the beautiful, yet neurotic young woman unsure of what to do with her power over men. These characters may thrive in contemporary South Korean settings, but, as always with this gifted portraitist, anyone who’s spent time in the worlds of higher learning or the arts will see someone they’ve known in the onscreen behavior. (1998, 110 min) [Ben Sachs]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Roy Andersson’s ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Sweden)
Available to rent through 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 and Facets Cinémathèque here
Writing for MUBI about the influences on her debut feature, DEAD PIGS, writer-director Cathy Yan cited two films—Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE and Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA—and several contemporary photographers. These influences play out clearly in DEAD PIGS, an ambitious, multi-character narrative that’s rich in striking imagery. Like NASHVILLE and MAGNOLIA, the movie is as much about its setting (in this case, rapidly evolving Shanghai and its outskirts) as it is about the characters, and both are portrayed with a mix of sympathy and cynicism. Yan’s storytelling feels more closely aligned with Anderson’s than Altman’s: DEAD PIGS is not a hazy hang-out movie where the characters cross paths by chance (if at all), but rather a fully orchestrated affair in which people come together by destiny and grand fictional devices. Yan’s narrative machinations don’t become obvious for a while; for its first 20 or 30 minutes, DEAD PIGS hums along on the energy of the gliding camerawork and hyped-up cross-cutting, both of which convey a sense of constant activity befitting the ever-changing environment. The film largely takes place in two settings, old neighborhoods on the brink of demolition and the modern skyscrapers taking their place. Embodying the first of those settings is Candy Wang, a beauty parlor owner who refuses to leave the two-story home she was raised in, despite the fact that every other homeowner on her block has sold their property to a large-scale development firm, which has already razed all the other buildings before the movie starts. (Yan based the character on a real-life woman who helped start China’s “nailhouse” phenomenon of homeowners who refuse to leave their homes when developers attempt to demolish them.) Representing the new Shanghai is Sean, an American architect embarking on a career with the firm that wants to buy Candy’s house. A naive westerner who sees China’s wild capitalist dog race as an opportunity to make it big, Sean resembles the hero of John Maringouin’s gonzo independent production GHOSTBOX COWBOY (which premiered the same year as this), though DEAD PIGS never becomes a nightmare like Maringouin’s film does. The closest it gets is in the hideous spectacle of the title. Throughout the story, Shanghai is plagued by a disease that kills pigs by the thousands; the region’s poor pig farmers abandon the corpses in the rivers, and the image serves as a metaphor for the displaced victims of China’s avalanche-like urbanization. (2018, 122 min) [Ben Sachs]
Deborah Stratman’s KINGS OF THE SKY (US/Documentary)
Available for free on VBD TV
Legend has it that, in ancient times, a band of ghosts and demons took over a castle in what’s now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; a young hero ascended a rope fastened to the castle’s walls, with a sword in each hand for balance. From this courageous act came Dawaz, a centuries-old craft that involves crossing tightrope strung high above the ground. At the center of experimental filmmaker Deborah Stratman’s freewheeling documentary about this death-defying art is Adil Hoxur, a record-breaking Dawaz practitioner and, when the film was shot, the latest and most famous (he’s often called the King of the Sky, from which the film takes its name) descendent in a long line of stately troupers. Stratman spent four months with Hoxur and his crew, traveling around East Turkestan as they performed acrobatic feats for nervous and ecstatic onlookers. Exposition is kept to a minimum; Stratman sets the scene in a way that’s true to the experimental drift of this compact work, eschewing didacticism and instead using a vaguely ethnographic style to document Hoxur, Dawaz, and the Uyghur people, many of whom comprise Hoxur’s fanbase. Scenes of the troupe practicing, performing, engaging in silly behind-the-scenes antics, and contemplating the danger inherent to their job and their status as ethnic minorities are edited haphazardly to create an unsteady portrait that indulges the pleasure of disequilibrium its subjects cannot. Those scenes are profoundly humanizing, seeing as how one might think of the performers, almost like the legend they’re emulating, as being otherworldly. This takes on double meaning considering their status as Turkic Muslims, whose forced assimilation and large-scale internment in recent years has been likened to the Jewish Holocaust. In a way the Uyghurs take on a mythical quality—that of the far-away oppressed. Yet Stratman’s documentary grounds their experience in reality, allowing the audience to see the Uyghurs as people rather than a point of interest in the ongoing saga of China’s disconcerting geopolitics. (Apropos of nothing, this reminded me of Judy Hoffman’s Britney Spears documentary, THREE DAYS IN MEXICO, which streamed several weeks ago through the University of Chicago; both are not so much about as they are around their respective subjects, reveling in the ineffable rather than focusing on that which has already been documented about them.) Stratman incorporates footage of the troupe’s incredible acrobatics, including a harrowing scene where a performer falls while crossing a tightrope. This leads into a montage of the group showing off scars and talking about their own injuries—no less distressing are the references to unrest between the Uyghurs and the state government. KINGS OF THE SKY is more straightforward than much of Stratman’s other work, but it still contains choice experimental flourishes. In one scene, she records the hands of some female performers as they sleep, then, still holding the camera, decides to lay down herself, the ceiling coming into view. Toward the end, voiceovers of people not heretofore seen or heard in the film play over the accompanying footage. One is the almost mechanical-sounding voice of a woman detailing the economic potential of the Xinjiang region, which Stratman plays over slowed-down shots of Uyghurs dancing in celebration; the voice is almost mocking, suggesting omniscient powers-that-be machinating while the hoi polloi attempt to find joy. The other voice belongs to a man who speaks of the storied lineage and long suffering of the Uyghurs, which includes the banning of the Uyghur language and Uyghur books in the years following September 11. His narration plays over footage of a road in the night, the image duly representing a people traveling—balancing on a metaphorical tightrope of their own—in darkness. (2004, 68 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
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]
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
Facets Cinémathèque
Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo’s 2020 film SLOW MACHINE (72 min) is available for viewing beginning this week. Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
The 2021 omnibus film WHO WILL START ANOTHER FIRE is available for viewing 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. More details here.
Music Box Theatre
The D’Innocenzo Brothers' 2020 Italian film BAD TALES (98 min), Graham Shelby’s 2021 documentary CITY OF ALI (81 min), and Jonathan Gruber’s 2020 documentary UPHEAVAL: THE JOURNEY OF MENACHEM BEGIN (87 min) all are available for viewing beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
CINE-LIST: June 11 - June 17, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Josh B. Mabe, Michael Metzger, Scott Pfeiffer