Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity.
ONION CITY EXPERIMENTAL FILM + VIDEO FESTIVAL
The Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival, originally scheduled to take place in March, continues in an online version through June 28. The final programs will be made available on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and each will be available for viewing for several days. Visit the Onion City website for the full schedule and for information about online Q&As.
Human-Animals After All
Available for free viewing from 6/26 at 5pm to 7/1 at midnight here
This wide-ranging and overall excellent program acknowledges the amplitude of human action in the Anthropocene. Sexy, messy, fearful, and hopeful films and videos take a look at the current moment through a medley of formats and modes. It's a homey chocolate chip cookie with too much damn salt... but in a good way. Jimmy Schaus' lovely and tender HOPE DIES LAST/LOVE GONE AGAIN (2020) is a clever glistening celluloid bubble-pop travelogue touched with a bit of the Warren Sonbert sweet-sadness. Simon Liu's SIGNAL 8 (2019) is a masterful and driving flickering chunk of ominous failure with a rightly-earned climax of celebration. Dani ReStack and Sheilah ReStack's COME COYOTE (2019) is pretty much perfect. Over the past couple of years, the ReStacks have been churning out bold cinematic slaps across the face that refresh and refill and awaken. Danny Carroll's A VERSION OF THE WEST (2019) is a lovely quiet consideration of exterior and interior domestic spaces. Sophia Feuer and Tyler Macri's A BLACK HOLE IS A BLACK HOLE IN THE GROUND (2018) is an expertly well-crafted gentle documentary of kids in urban/suburban/rural settings navigating play and reality. Ben Edelberg's THEY LOOKED AT ME AND I SMILED (2019) shatters domestic and public boundaries between self and performance, collapsing the barriers into a meaningless lark. (approx 66 min total) JBM
Call the Helpline
Available for free viewing from 6/27 at 5pm to 7/1 at midnight here
“Call the Helpline,” centers the female experience in each of its component shorts, but is anchored in the explicitly physical realms of internal questions like ‘why does my head hurt?’, ‘how can there be so much blood?”, ‘what if my eyes were both here, and there, and maybe elsewhere besides?’ The program begins with Vanessa Renwick’s COLD HOLY WATER, which in its dedication explicitly links the migration of aquatic mammals to the desperate movements of human refugees. Made of appropriated oceanic footage, it features in its middle section a surprisingly moving sequence of a live dolphin birth. It is a fitting mirror with the strongest work in the lineup, Lori Felker’s SPONTANEOUS. Felker’s film possesses an exceptional-bordering-on-uncanny expression of what it feels like to have a miscarriage in this culture. There’s something unspeakable about a miscarriage, but simultaneously unremarkable; it’s a profoundly ambivalent act that the abject body undertakes without awareness from the conscious mind, and SPONTANEOUS oozes this mind-body disjunction out to the viewer. You too can miscarry, audience! It’s the magic of cinema! And that magical otherness ripples through Heeyun Choi’s short, sweet camera play BETWEEN THE EYES 2, wherein a mirror and the female gaze provide a recursive picture-within-picture view of an L.A. bedroom. There are an upsetting number of private spaces in this program: many bedrooms, a sink doing things one would rather a sink did not do, uteri. But there is a welcome diversion from the internal world in NOTES FROM THE NEIGHBOURHOOD by Laura Engelhardt. It’s not that this film ventures far—it seems to look out a window (spying on the neighbors, watching the construction)—but it’s so easy to imagine the narrator holding the vital clues to a yet undisclosed mystery, which could occur at any moment. It’s a welcome, if uneasy, space, especially after the traumas visited upon the body in Kym McDaniel’s EXIT STRATEGY #1 and Jose Luis Benavides’ LULU’S JOURNAL. Operators, one hopes, are standing by. (approx 57 min total) CM & DM
Tirtza Even’s LAND MINE
Available for free viewing from 6/28 at 11 AM to 7/1 at midnight here
LAND MINE moves so gracefully between personal essay and regional portrait that it’s difficult to pinpoint where one mode ends and the other begins. Director Tirtza Even introduces the film as a documentary about the Jerusalem apartment building where she grew up in the 1960s and 70s; as she delves into the lives of her neighbors from childhood and the building’s current residents, a partial history begins to take form of the conflict between Jewish settlers to Israel and the Palestinians they displaced. In a characteristic passage, Even presents an interview with her sister about being a child during the Six Days War of 1967, then cuts to onscreen text about how, after the war, the Israeli government created dozens of minefields in Palestinian territory that had been used previously for farmland. That isn’t the only atrocity Even considers in the film: Israel’s 1982 military aggression against Lebanon receives a fair amount of screen time, and one of the more powerful shots presents the aftermath of more recent Israeli bombing campaigns in Gaza. While national guilt is one of Even’s chief concerns, her interviewees barely address it, making it the structuring absence of most of the onscreen testimonies. (Fittingly the filmmaker has subtitled LAND MINE “The Other Side of Silence.”) What we hear is still plenty fascinating, as Even incorporates information about her literary scholar father; the Hebrew author Y. H. Brenner (whom Even’s father wrote about); and the composer Ido Shirom, who now resides in Even’s childhood home and who has written music inspired by national tragedies. The themes of coming-of-age and death intertwine when Even recounts how several men in her building died of unnatural causes over a period of several years in the 1970s—the building’s troubled history mirrors that of the region, and one comes away from the film with the feeling that one can’t talk about Israel without acknowledging some sense of loss. (2019, 85 min) BS
Listening Under the Surface
Available for free viewing from 6/28 at 3pm to 7/1 at midnight here
There’s something at once euphoric and haunting about the films in this program, which addresses representation within the world at large and within the makers’ own worlds, the two here intertwined in an attempt to break down the barriers that keep us apart. Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold’s BLACK BUS STOP (2019) takes place at the iconic Black Bus Stop on the University of Virginia campus (both filmmakers are professors there), an informal gathering spot where the university’s Black students found respite after days spent in classes where they might have been the only person of color in the room. Everson and Harold’s film, however, doesn’t explicitly acknowledge this history; instead, it pays homage to these gatherings through songs and dances performed by members of the school’s Black sororities and fraternities. The idea of an unspoken history—a concept forced upon members of disenfranchised groups whose histories are either underrepresented or altogether erased—comes through as both a joyous celebration and an urgent provocation. Everson has another film in the program, MUSIC FROM THE EDGE OF THE ALLEGHENY PLATEAU (2019); inspired by William Klein’s 1980 documentary THE LITTLE RICHARD STORY, the film features three Black musicians in Everson’s hometown of Mansfield, Ohio (located on the edge of the Allegheny Plateau), as they perform several songs. Two of the men, a singer and a piano player, perform gospel in the living room of a small suburban home, while the other raps from the back of a truck. It’s a deceptively simple work that contains multiple layers; much like BLACK BUS STOP, it requires one to earn the reward of understanding its nuance. Filmmaker Amir George describes his film OPTIMUM CONTINUUM (2018) as being “[a]n on-going barrage of blackness,” an apt characterization that embodies the near-palpable layering of film clips interspersed with footage of a young woman and a young man dancing in a park. Literal movement conveys the concept of Blackness as being “always in progress,” as per his description; much of George’s work is nothing short of pure aesthetic, the power of images keenly felt through it. Where George’s film utilizes the immediacy of its images, Suneil Sanzgiri’s AT HOME BUT NOT AT HOME (2020) relies on a sense of distance inherent to them. The film centers on Sanzgiri’s father, who was 18 years old in 1961, when India forced out the last of the Portuguese colonizers from Goa. Toward the beginning, we see Sanzgiri emailing a drone videographer in Goa about shooting footage; the ‘gimmick’ of recording what’s happening on one’s desktop here becomes significant as it conveys the modes of communication Sanzgiri explores. He also includes Skype conversations with his father as well as clips from films from India’s Parallel Cinema movement—personal communication acts in concert with a mode often used to examine sociopolitical concerns. Sky Hopinka’s LORE (2019, 10 min) is as affecting sonically as it is aesthetically; inspired by Hollis Frampton’s seminal 1971 short film (NOSTALGIA), his intimate homage involves an overhead projector on which hands are shown moving fragments of images around the translucent surface. Intercut are scenes of a band practicing, one assuming that it’s their song that can be heard amidst the spoken narration. The content of the voiceover is poetic—not necessarily indecipherable, but, like a poem, like lore, more monumental than the sum of its parts. Each work in the program can stand on its own, but as a whole it’s similarly tremendous, vast yet penetrating, taking us far and wide but also deep. (approx 51 min total) KS
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Christopher Munch’s THE 11TH GREEN (US)
Available to rent through Facets Cinematheque here
When does a conspiracy theory become historic truth? Does it even matter? THE 11TH GREEN takes us through the backrooms of The Deep State from Eisenhower to Obama, with the secrets about extraterrestrials and their technology finally coming out. We follow an investigative reporter who is writing the story about his recently deceased father, a former security liaison of Eisenhower’s. What he didn’t know, though, was that his father and friends were there for some close encounters of the wait, what the hell am I watching now? kind. During his investigation it’s revealed to him that, yes, UFOs are real, and, yes, aliens have contacted our government, and, yes, we have it on film. THE 11TH GREEN uses this fantastical scenario to discuss the ethics of nuclear warfare, humanity, and international governments. The film describes itself with opening text as “a likely factual scenario of extraordinary events.” Now, I don’t know if Obama being visited by both an ageless alien and the spirit of Dwight D. Eisenhower is either “likely factual” or even “extraordinary,” but it’s definitely weird in a way that few films these days seem to go for. It’s hard to tell if director/screenwriter Christopher Munch believes in the “facts” of the story he’s telling, or just believes that it’s a fun story to tell. To be fair, it doesn’t matter either way. Intentions be damned, THE 11TH GREEN is entertainingly bonkers. It feels like a movie out of time: a mix of hand-made xeroxed fanzine screeds, the experimental conspiracy films from Craig Baldwin, Church of the Sub-Genius pranksterism, X-Files fanfiction, and legit Cointelpro psyops. You know, the fringe ends of the 80s and 90s. Now, I’m not one to say whether or not any movie watching experience can actually be enhanced by someone ingesting weed, but I will say that THE 11TH GREEN feels like that friend of yours that definitely did, and now they want to tell you about how they connected all the dots, man. So maybe you’d like to get on their level. Or not. Either way, it’s still a wild trip. (2020, 108 min) RJM
Bora Kim’s HOUSE OF HUMMINGBIRD (South Korea)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
At one point in the luminous South Korean drama HOUSE OF HUMMINGBIRD, I was reminded of Bong Joon Ho’s phenomenally successful PARASITE (2019). The family on which HUMMINGBIRD focuses owns a rice cake store, and we see them work together to create and roll out long logs of rice dough and lay them side by side for further processing and packaging. The scene echoes in some ways in PARASITE’s opening scene of the Ki family folding pizza boxes to make ends meet, but there is a significant difference between the families and how they handle their lot in life. It may be more pleasing to audiences to root for the Kis as an underclass family whose larcenous designs on a fabulously wealthy family allow us a vicarious class reckoning. With HUMMINGBIRD, her directorial debut, Bora Kim offers us no clear us vs. them argument. What she does is provide a backdrop of economic pressure on middle- and working-class South Koreans by alluding to the land grabs and economic hegemony of foreign and upper-class elites as she bores intensely into the experiences of Eunhee (Jihu Park), the 14-year-old youngest child. The action takes place during the momentous year of 1994, when North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Il-Sung died and the Seongsu Bridge over the Han River in Seoul collapsed, killing 32 people. Eunhee’s family life is fraught—her father (Ingi Jeong) is having an affair and is harsh with Eunhee and her delinquent sister, Suhee (Bak Suyeon). Eunhee’s brother, Daehoon (Son Sangyeon), beats her and is not likely to fulfill his father’s dream of becoming a university graduate. Eunhee, starved for love, is willing to entertain any shows of affection, from a boyfriend to a lesbian classmate to her Chinese-language teacher (Saebyuk Kim). It’s likely that Bora Kim has channeled some of her adolescent experiences into the character of Eunhee, whose interactions are so personal and moving. It’s interesting that the women and girls in this film are much stronger and more stoic than the men, who break into tears at the potential loss of their loved ones. In creating her wholly believable female characters and imbuing them with full personalities and ways of relating, Kim has created a robust feminine landscape that is both edifying and deeply affecting. I particularly liked her fixation on hands and food as imagery that reinforce the feminine projects of nourishment and service. Indeed, her images are rich, well-chosen, and deeply engaged with her subjects. There was not a single moment in which I did not care what was happening to Eunhee and those around her. (2018, 138 min) MF
Shola Amoo’s THE LAST TREE (UK)
Available to rent through Facets Cinematheque here
At a time where Black representation is more crucial than ever, it’s wonderful to see a film that is a character study of a young Black man in England that is simple, straightforward, and unafraid to leave heavy-handed dramatics by the wayside. THE LAST TREE follows Femi, from his childhood as the Black foster child of white parents in the English countryside through his young adulthood in London after he returns to live with his single, African immigrant mother. Reversing the all too common trope of the POC who leaves the big city for the country and has culture shock, here we have Femi having to learn to navigate what it means to be a Black man in the city and for the first time Femi has primarily Black friends. But what makes THE LAST TREE truly great is how the subtleties of intra-racial politics are explored. There’s a wonderful moment where Femi puts his headphones on and drowns out the world by falling deeply into the pop perfection of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” only to be jarred out of it by a friend asking what he’s listening to. “Tupac,” he replies. He also has a crush on a girl, but his friends constantly make fun of her for having even darker skin than they do. We truly see Femi learn what it means to be himself, and Black, and an adult via small moments such as these. And there are plenty sprinkled throughout. Director/screenwriter Shola Amoo’s approach to his character is one of genuine care, a guiding hand, and we get the pleasure of seeing how just because someone stumbles on their path doesn’t mean they fall off it. The film shows aspects of culture that many of us here in Chicago, and the United States, are likely unfamiliar with. There are no broad strokes here, nor too fine of points; just a rich, full, lived-in story of life. (2019, 98 min) RJM
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Bill Duke’s THE KILLING FLOOR (American Revival)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
A rare American labor union drama centered on Black experience, THE KILLING FLOOR is a minor miracle of narrative history, succeeding as drama, as pedagogy, and as a model of independent, inclusive, collaborative, local, unionized filmmaking. Shot in Chicago in 1983 for PBS’s American Playhouse series—an indispensable platform for some of the best independent filmmaking of the era, and a haven for voices and stories far outside the Reagan-era mainstream—THE KILLING FLOOR tells the story of Frank Custer (Damien Leake), a Black sharecropper who travels north to work in a stockyard during World War I. Eager to improve his wages and to reunite his family in the “Promised Land” of Chicago’s flourishing south side, Custer defies the ridicule of fellow Black workers to join a scrappy, mostly-white labor union. When the war ends and white veterans begin returning to the workforce (and to zealously segregated neighborhoods), racial tensions inside the union and out boil over, resulting in the violent 1919 riot that left dozens dead and displaced thousands of mostly Black residents. Producer and co-writer Elsa Rassbach, with a perspicacity uncommon today (let alone in the 1980s), found her way into this frayed historical knot through a footnote in William Tuttle’s book on the riot—a reference to a court record of a labor dispute between Custer and “Heavy” Williams (portrayed in the film by Moses Gunn), a Black stockyard worker whose vocal distrust of white unionists helped the packing company disrupt union organizing across racial lines. Thanks largely to director Bill Duke’s handling, what could have been a binary conflict between Williams’ pessimism and Custer’s idealism becomes remarkably nuanced—after all, Custer has justifiable misgivings of his own, and the film’s central dramatic question is whether his belief in the union can withstand the corrosive racism of its membership. Duke weighs Custer’s ambivalence through performance and point of view, as demonstrated in Frank’s first visit to the Union hall. Taking in the hectic air of jubilation and multilingual speechifying, Leake’s darting eyes register the white faces and powderkeg atmosphere with both wariness and enticement, his voiceover comparing the gathering to a Southern prayer meeting. In this sequence and throughout, THE KILLING FLOOR draws on familiar tropes and narrative conventions, but lends them a charge by introducing an alienated Black gaze to typically white spaces, pointedly validating the cultural knowledge that Black southerners bring as spectators to both the union hall and the historical drama. Celebrated dramatist Leslie Lee’s screenplay further makes virtues of archetypes and blunt expository dialogue; such immediacy is critical to the film’s educational economy, which captures the riot’s myriad underlying causes—the Great Migration, the First World War, the growth of organized labor, the European diasporas, and the centuries of exploitation and disenfranchisement of African Americans—in broad yet affecting strokes. But the film is also rich in detail and atmosphere, a quality starkly revealed in this new digital restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, making its international debut just in time for the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago riots. The renewed digital clarity also exposes some rough edges, of course—that’s to be expected from an ambitious historical drama funded largely by labor unions and populated with volunteer extras (including many from the Harold Washington mayoral campaign). Seen today, that roughness reminds us that THE KILLING FLOOR wasn’t so much a product of its time as a renegade in it—and a treasure in ours. (1985, 118 min) MM
Peter Sellers’ MR. TOPAZE (UK)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Albert Topaze (Peter Sellers) is a humble, scrupulously honest teacher in a second-rate private school for boys in provincial France. He is a patsy for the attractive daughter (Billy Whitelaw) of the school’s owner (Leo McKern) who cajoles him into correcting homework for her as he implores his fellow teacher and friend (Michael Gough) to help him win her hand in marriage. Unfortunately, Topaze sticks to his principles when a baroness (Martita Hunt) wants him to change her grandson’s report card and ends up unemployed. It is then that he is recruited into running a shell company for the corrupt lover (Herbert Lom) of a stage performer (Nadia Gray). What will become of Topaze and his high moral principles? Based on a play by Marcel Pagnol, the first filmmaker elected to the Académie française, MR. TOPAZE borrows from Pagnol’s own experiences as a student in a provincial town, a schoolteacher, and the husband of an actress. Pierre Rouve’s adapted screenplay is beautifully literate, giving Sellers the opportunity to imbue his high-minded character with the intelligence that will serve him well in the latter stages of the film. In his only outing as a director, Sellers employs an exaggerated mise-en-scène to reveal character that is sheer eye candy, but largely directs his cast—including himself—to underplay their roles. Only McKern is flat-out hilarious, but Sellers indulges briefly in some of the bumbling pratfalls that will reach their height in the Pink Panther movies and Hunt’s performance of the song “I Like Money” is a sparkling highlight. This comic gem digitally restored from the only surviving 35mm print is, in its way, a coming-of-age story that has a tinge of sadness about it. Highly recommended. (1961, 97 min) MF
Hong Sang-soo’s WOMAN ON THE BEACH (South Korea)
Available for rent through Facets Cinematheque here
Just as Jean-Luc Godard described SAUVE QUI PEUT (LA VIE) as his “second first film,” so does WOMAN ON THE BEACH feel like a declaration of purpose for the second phase of Hong Sang-soo’s career. The film is markedly gentler than any of the South Korean writer-director’s previous six features, notably lacking in discomforting, graphic sex scenes or depictions of emotional abuse. That’s not to say that Hong abandoned his ongoing critique of toxic masculinity or that his characters became nicer; rather, he just started communicating his skeptical worldview under deceptive rays of sunshine. Indeed, WOMAN ON THE BEACH plays like a just-slightly acidic variation on one of Eric Rohmer’s vacation-set comedies, with lovely passages of flirtation and relaxed time-killing that reflect how people behave differently when they depart from their normal routines. The film, like many of Hong’s, is divided into two halves. In the first, a filmmaker named Kim Joong-rae takes a trip to a resort town on South Korea’s west coast with Chang-wook, his former production designer, and Moon-sook, a young female composer that the production designer has started seeing. Chang-wook thinks he’s having an extramarital affair with Moon-sook, but she’s quick to point out (in a great moment of Hongian micro-aggression) that there’s no chemistry between them; this inspires Joong-rae to make his move on the unattached woman. The director succeeds in seducing the composer but keeps his conquest secret so as not to anger the jealous Chang-wook. In the second half of the film, the three characters return to Seoul, then Joong-rae goes back to the resort town a couple days later to continue procrastinating on his latest script. He invites Moon-sook to join him, but when she doesn’t respond to his voicemail, he goes about seducing another female tourist instead. As in all his bifurcated narratives, Hong develops fascinating rhymes between the two parts of the film, showing how people without self-awareness fall into cycles of bad behavior. But for perhaps the first time in his work, the director seems to regard his antihero as a laughable fool as opposed to a malign soul. Joong-rae’s blinkered vision yields some of the funniest scenes Hong had created up till this point—the character’s poorly drawn diagram of his feelings for Moon-sook is particularly riotous. (2006, 129 min) BS
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Experimental Sound Studio
ESS’s ongoing online music series Sequesterfest includes a film component this week. The Reflection in the Puddle Is Mine includes work by Robert Stiegler, Samantha Hill and Haptic, Morton and Millie Goldsholl, Ruth Page, Larry Janiak, Helen Morrison and Sybil Shearer, Latham Zearfoss and Joel Midden. It’s on Sunday at 7pm. Presented in collaboration with Corbett vs. Dempsey and the Chicago Film Archives. Information here.
PO Box Collective
PO Box’s periodic Movie Night presents a free online selection of Experimental Shorts on Friday at 6:30pm, followed by a Q&A. Included are works by Abbéy Odunlami, Katie Wood, Allison Yasukawa, and Mikey Peterson. Visit the Facebook event page for more information and to sign up to receive the Zoom link.
Film Girl Film and Agitator Gallery
The online group screening Chicago Summer Shorts is available for free viewing from Friday at 5pm to Sunday at Midnight. There is a Zoom Q&A on Friday from 7-8pm. Included are works by Seven Okema Gunn; Layne Marie Williams; Laurie Little, Jess Mattison, and Theresa Campagna; and Tasnim Hindeyeh. More info and registration here.
Hideout Inn
A program of shorts selected by Glamhag is on Friday at 8pm. Free with a suggested donation. More info here.
Full Spectrum Features
FSF presents Chicago Cinema Exchange: Mexico City, a series of three free programs of contemporary Mexican films and accompanying Q&A sessions. The series continues through July 12. Schedule and more information here.
Gallery 400 (UIC)
Zakkiyyah Najeebah's 2017 video short DE(LIBERATE). (11 min) is on view through June 28 here.
Chicago Filmmakers
Visit here to find out about virtual screenings offered via Chicago Filmmakers here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Jeremy Hersh’s 2020 film THE SURROGATE (93 min), Peter Medak’s 2018 Cyprian documentary THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS (93 min), and Channing Godfrey Peoples’ 2020 film MISS JUNETEENTH (103 min) also stream this week. Check here for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Leslie Woodhead’s 2019 UK/US documentary ELLA FITZGERALD: JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS (90 min) and Stefano Mordini’s 2018 Italian film THE INVISIBLE WITNESS (102 min) are both available for streaming beginning this week. Check here for hold-over titles.
Music Box Theatre
Brian Welsh’s 2019 UK film BEATS (101 min) and Ina Weisse’s 2019 German film THE AUDITION (99 min) are both available for streaming beginning this week. Check here for other new and hold-over titles.
Chicago International Film Festival
Check here for titles currently available for rental from CIFF’s Virtual Cinema.
Chicago Latino Film Festival
CLFF is offering a selection of features and shorts for rental. Information here.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RECOMMENDATIONS
Avi Nesher’s THE MATCHMAKER (Israel)
Available to stream on Amazon Prime Video and for free on Hoopla and Kanopy from participating libraries with your library card
I have an antipathy toward many Holocaust films. Their apparent attempts at ennobling victims and resisters of the Nazis always seem like just the reverse to me: to riff on something director Melvin Van Peebles said about Black characters in movies, I suspect audiences just like to see someone suffer. I’m happy to report that THE MATCHMAKER by popular Israeli director Avi Nesher and based on a book by Amir Gutfreund is a wise and wonderful coming-of-age tale that comments on the misuse and misunderstanding of the Holocaust while showing us a way to live a more gentle, tolerant life. The film is told primarily in flashback by 50ish novelist Arik Burstein (Eyal Shehter), who receives surprising news that he has inherited the sizeable estate of Yankele Bride (Adir Miller), a matchmaker for whom Arik worked one summer when he was 16. Flashback to the summer of 1968. Young Arik (Tuval Shafir) and his friends are approached by Bride, who asks them if they have a brother or sister looking for love. He specializes in matching people who have some physical or mental problem that keeps them from attracting a mate. The boys decide to have it off on Bride, and Arik tells him he has a sister with webbing between her fingers. He directs Bride to his family’s apartment. Much to Arik’s surprise and his friends’ disappointment, when his father Yozi (Dov Navon) answers the door, he recognizes Bride as an old classmate from Romania—and fellow Holocaust survivor—and invites him in. When Bride learns that Arik is Yozi’s son, he offers him a job tailing prospective matches to be sure they don’t have any dark secrets that could make his clients unhappy. Yankele lives “off the map” near the waterfront where he and his neighbors feel safer flying under the radar and near a port where they can flee quickly should the need arise. He works next to a movie theatre run by dwarves and across from a bagel bakery whose front-loading, coal-fired ovens face Yankele’s glass-fronted office in painful (and obvious) reminder of what 6 million of Yankele’s fellow Jews suffered in Europe. Another painful reminder is Clara Epstein (Maya Dagan), a beautiful woman Yankele loves but can never marry because her memories have left her so deeply damaged that she cannot bear strong feelings—even love. Clara works with Yankele coaching his clients in the art of courtship and running a card gambling establishment out of her apartment. Yankele makes his money on the black market, and sees his penny-ante matchmaking business as more than a front—it is a mission to bring love back into the world. Through Yankele’s example—trying to find a mate for the beautiful dwarf Sylvia (Bat-el Papura), checking to see that his clients won’t be hurt in a bad match, treating Clara and everyone he encounters with kindness and dignity—Arik learns what being a mensch is all about and comes to love the sad, goodhearted “criminal.” One moment I particularly liked is when Arik tells Yankele that he knows it’s a good deed to try to help Sylvia. Yankele shoots back, “What? Do you think they are pets? They are people!” Yozi, too, complains to Arik about what the average Israeli thinks about Holocaust survivors. THE MATCHMAKER is a teeming and brilliantly told story with a mise-en-scène that creates a believable past while still offering a certain timelessness that befits the film’s universal theme of love. The performances are terrific, with the actors and director affording dignity to characters that might have come off as too tragic, clownish, or freakish. Indeed, this entire film seems to be a plea for understanding, that we try to stand in the other person’s shoes. In these rather bleak times, THE MATCHMAKER is a bittersweet valentine to the human race that might just renew your hope for a better tomorrow. (2010, 112 min) MF
Glenn Belverio’s ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL WITH JOAN JETT BLAKK (US)
Available to view for free on VBD TV
Fear and loathing? Not on Joan Jett Blakk’s campaign trail. In this half-hour episode of the popular New York City public access program The Brenda and Glennda Show, legendary drag queen Glennda Orgasm (Glenn Belverio) interviews one-time Chicagoan Blakk, the drag persona of artist-activist Terence Smith, who ran for president in 1992 (after running for Mayor of Chicago against Richard M. Daley in 1991) on behalf of Queer Nation. Standing in front of the Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden, Glennda and Joan stop passersby and ask them about their political views—all while encouraging them to vote for Blakk, of course. The political discourse is insightful (and at times a dismaying reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same), but it’s the hosts’ rapport that shines. The interviewees run the gamut (and are credited thusly) from ‘Little Woman with Hat’ to ‘Jerry Brown Fanatics’ to ‘Anti-Porn Womyn,’ all of whose nicknames are accurate, if duly insolent. Much of it is humorous, but there’s a stand-out section where Blakk, chatting with a particularly devout stoner, declares: “I’m the only presidential candidate who can say that I have inhaled… and I do so frequently. Over and over. Repeatedly.” (On that note, it’s been 28 years since Bill Clinton claimed otherwise. Yowza.) Steppenwolf premiered a play about Blakk’s presidential run last year called Ms. Blakk for President; I now regret having missed it, but this segment was an interesting foray into a period of both queer radical and electoral politics hitherto unbeknownst to me. For those looking to see more of Blakk after this, there’s also this video on Media Burn, shot by local filmmaker and critic Bill Stamets, in which Blakk announces her run at Ann Sather restaurant and then Berlin nightclub, the two best places to do such a thing if I may say so. It’s in this video that Blakk says, referring to Ronald Regan, “If a bad actor can be elected president, why not a good drag queen?” Why not, indeed. (1992, 29 min) KS
Barry O’Neil’s WHEN THE EARTH TREMBLED, OR THE STRENGTH OF LOVE (Silent/US)
Available for free viewing at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s Vimeo page here
Barry O’Neil’s 1913 silent film WHEN THE EARTH TREMBLED, OR THE STRENGTH OF LOVE, restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, takes a somewhat sentimental approach to its use of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as a device to elucidate its protagonists’ misfortune before a predictably satisfying happy ending. Produced by the Lubin Manufacturing Company—which was headed by cinema pioneer Siegmund Lubin, an early rival of Edison’s before he eventually joined forces with his and several other production companies to form the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC)—it was their first three-reel film after having made thousands of one- and two-reel films and was offered as part of what was known within the MPCC as the Exclusive Service, created to meet the demand for longer titles. Directed by one of Lubin’s most prodigious directors, Barry O’Neil, it also features two of the company’s top stars, Harry Myers and Ethel Clayton, as a husband and wife, Paul Girard and Dora Sims, torn apart by first a shipwreck and later the earthquake. Myers is best known for starring as the eccentric, boozy millionaire in Charlie Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS, and Clayton started out in movies at the Essanay Film Company here in Chicago. At the beginning of the film, Paul and Dora, the children of estranged business partners, meet and fall in love in Paris. Rather than join his father at his firm, Paul opts to help Dora’s father with opening a branch in Samoa. After being sent back to aid in warding off his father’s intervention, he’s presumed killed in a shipwreck; soon thereafter, the earthquake strikes, Dora’s father dies, and she and the children move away. Having survived the wreck, Paul makes it back to the States, and all are eventually reunited. The film itself is fragmented, with each development occuring in several-minute increments, and it could be said to exist purely by chance due to its surviving a vault fire that destroyed all the company’s negatives produced since its founding in 1896. Most impressive are the earthquake scenes, which feature breakaway sets that took five weeks to build and two minutes to destroy. It also includes some of Lubin’s own footage from the aftermath. (1913, 48 min) KS
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 through the Gene Siskel Film Center, 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 – See above for online offering; otherwise, spring series postponed till the fall*
Beverly Arts Center – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Events cancelled/postponed until furtuer notice*
Chicago Film Archives – The CFA’s annual “Media Mixer” event, previously scheduled for May, has been rescheduled for September 16
Chicago Film Society – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Chicago Filmmakers – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice*
Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) – Programming cancelled with no set start date
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Screenings cancelled until further notice
Facets Cinémathèque – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
filmfront – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Gallery 400 *
Gene Siskel Film Center – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)
Music Box Theatre – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)
The Nightingale – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Park Ridge Public Library) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Festivals:
The Cinepocalypse film festival (June) – Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
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 26 - July 2, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal
CONTRIBUTORS // Marilyn Ferdinand, JB Mabe, Raphael Jose Martinez, Chloe McLaren, Doug McLaren, Michael Metzger