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.
🔊CINE-CAST: The Cine-File Podcast
NEW! -- EPISODE #19
With Episode #19 of the Cine-Cast, we celebrate the reopening of one of our favorite venues in Chicago, the Gene Siskel Film Center! The episode begins with a conversation between Associate Editor Ben Sachs and contributors Edo Choi, Megan Fariello, and Marilyn Ferdinand about one of the movies playing this month at the Siskel, ANNETTE. Sure to be one of our favorite films of 2021, ANNETTE marks the long-awaited collaboration between French director Leos Carax (THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE, HOLY MOTORS) and American songwriters-turned-screenwriters Ron and Russell Mael, also known as Sparks. The podcast continues with an interview between Fariello and the Siskel's new Director of Programming, Rebecca Fons. They discuss the reopening process, how film exhibition has adapted during the pandemic, and the Siskel’s exciting upcoming programming. The introductory theme is by local film composer Ben Van Vlissingen. Find out more about his work here.
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Listen to the Cine-Cast here!
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Gene Siskel Film Center Reopens (Welcome Back!)
See Venue website for showtimes
Leos Carax’s ANNETTE
The financing for Leos Carax’s ANNETTE—the French director’s sixth feature in just under 40 years—came from seven different countries, so we aren’t noting the film’s nation(s) of origin as we usually do. While this is an inevitable reflection of contemporary international film production, it also feels appropriate to this individual movie. More than any other Carax film to date, ANNETTE belongs to no country other than the Cinema, that magical land where sounds and images can override the particularities of any individual culture. It was probably easier for filmmakers to achieve that effect during the silent era than today, and indeed, silent movies remain a crucial touchstone for Carax (not for nothing does the protagonist of ANNETTE watch King Vidor’s THE CROWD at one point). This singular filmmaker has always preferred archetypes to three-dimensional characters, the better to channel universal emotions. He also has a tendency to foreground his formal experiments so they overwhelm whatever story he’s telling, and this connects him to 1920s innovators like F.W. Murnau and Jean Epstein. But Carax is more than just a stylist—he’s an autobiographical poet in the tradition of Jean Cocteau, although (like Cocteau) he tends to bury the autobiographical content of his films in visual tricks, movie references, and jokes. ANNETTE, for instance, may be Carax’s confession about his experience of fatherhood (he dedicates the movie to his daughter, Nastya, who also appears onscreen with him), yet he obfuscates this confession by portraying the main characters’ daughter as a wooden puppet. Any confession on Carax’s part is further obscured by the very personal contributions of his cowriters, Ron and Russell Mael, better known as the songwriting duo behind the long-running band Sparks. The Mael brothers also wrote the music for ANNETTE, which is (among many other things) an opera, that highly cinematic form that predates cinema itself. Most of the film’s dialogue is sung, and much of the singing circles around simple, repeated phrases, a technique the Maels have employed in numerous songs. Audiences going into ANNETTE anticipating a rock opera in the style of Sparks’ 1970s glam classics (e.g., Kimono My House, Propaganda) are sure to be disappointed; the music is decidedly in the vein of their divisive 2002 album Lil’ Beethoven, a collection of pop songs written and arranged after the fashion of symphonic and operatic compositions. There simply isn’t a lot of music that sounds like this, and it has the effect of defamiliarizing the film’s observations about such common subjects as celebrity, art, love, and family. But that seems to be the point of ANNETTE, which exists in part to remind us how strange and wonderful our world can be. (2021, 140 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Hogir Hirori’s SABAYA (Sweden)
Hogir Hirori has lived in Stockholm for more than 20 years, but his heart is never far from his homeland in the Middle East where the Kurdish people have lived for centuries, often caught up in the periodic conflicts between the Turks, Iraqis, Syrians, and other national, ethnic, and religious groups of the region. Hirori’s previous films include a documentary about a Kurdish colonel who travels the roads of Mosul disarming roadside bombs (THE DEMINER [2017]) and another about the fates of more than one million people forced to flee from ISIS fighters (THE GIRL WHO SAVED MY LIFE [2016]). His newest film, SABAYA, focuses on Yazidi Kurds, who practice an ancient religion that the Islamist State considers heretical. The Yazidi are vulnerable targets of ISIS, whom they call Daesh, who frequently conduct pogroms on Yazidi towns and kidnap girls and women to serve as sabaya (sex slaves). Dedicated to rescuing these Yazidi are dedicated members of the Yazidi Home Center. Women volunteer to infiltrate the Al-Hol refugee camp, populated by about 15,000 Daesh, to locate the kidnapped women and pass information on where they can be found to Mahmud and Shejk, two Yazidi men who execute dangerous rescues from Al-Hol. Sometimes, the traffickers get ahead of them and move the sabaya, but we see several successful rescues. We should feel happy about this result, but seeing Mahmud and his comrades pick three women out of a tent holding about 30 other women graphically illustrates the extent of the problem and the focus of the Home Center on helping only their own people. Further, Mahmud visits a prison holding Daesh men. The conditions are beastly, with large cells so packed that the men lay on the floor like sardines. Trouble deepens when Turkish President Erdogan invades Syria following former President Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. The last straw for me was the rescue of a 7-year-old girl who had been taken from her family when she was an infant and would certainly have ended up as a sabaya in a few years’ time. The actions of the rescuers are heroic and truly do matter to those they have saved, but the whole enterprise seems like sorting sand on a beach given the massive, inexorable inhumanity on display. (2021, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Matt Yoka's WHIRLYBIRD (US/Documentary)
WHIRLYBIRD, Matt Yoka's documentary feature debut, is a tale of two movies. It's a portrait of the complicated, occasionally toxic marriage between journalists Zoey Tur (then known as Bob) and Marika Gerrard; it also serves as an informal history of "newscopter" journalism in Los Angeles during the 1980s and 90s. With its plethora of manicured lawns and backyard swimming pools, LA has always been an exceptionally interesting city when seen from a bird's-eye view, and Yoka's use of archival aerial footage is frequently stunning (even in 2021, when unnecessary drone shots have become overused by filmmakers intent on showing off "production value"). Anyone who lived through this era might be surprised to realize how many familiar images from the national news were captured by Tur and Gerrard's video cameras: Michael Jackson being admitted to the hospital after suffering severe burns while filming a Pepsi ad; the riots that followed the exoneration of the police officers responsible for beating Rodney King; the infamous O.J. Simpson "white Bronco chase." In each instance, Tur and Gerrard were there first, adrenaline junkies determined to capture the latest breaking news. But the film is more arresting on the micro level, primarily as it examines Tur, who's now retired and living quietly in rural northern California. In a series of compelling interviews, she visibly wallows in regret over her hectic, often rage-filled former life, which she alternately blames on the testosterone then flowing through her body and the fact that she was physically abused as a child by her father, a person she hated but who nonetheless fears she's turned into. The way Yoka offers a subtly empathetic look at this ambitious but deeply flawed individual (and in the latter stages of the film in particular) may sneak up on you. (2021, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Morgan Neville’s ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN (US/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre — See Venue website for showtimes
As Anthony Bourdain, the subject of ROADRUNNER, says in a non-spoiler, the story of this film does not have a happy ending. It came as a shock when the charismatic celebrity chef, writer, traveler, and TV personality committed suicide in 2018. But to readers of Kitchen Confidential, the memoir that first catapulted him to fame, his one-time heroin addiction and marginal life in the restaurant industry suggested struggles under the glittering markers of success. Morgan Neville, an Oscar-winning documentarian whose films often focus on famous people (WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR [2018], KEITH RICHARDS: UNDER THE INFLUENCE [2015], BEST OF ENEMIES: BUCKLEY VS. VIDAL [2015]), lets Bourdain speak for himself through clips and outtakes from his TV shows and other archival footage. The film goes through Bourdain’s life in chronological order, highlighting his first meeting with Eric Ripert, the French chef who became one of his best friends, as well as the origins of his partnership with Lydia Tenaglia and Christopher Collins, the married couple who produced his first show, A Cook’s Tour, and its spinoffs, No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown. Interviews with Tenaglia, Collins, and other people in Bourdain’s life—including chef David Chang, producer/director Helen Cho, artist David Choe, and Bourdain’s second wife, Ottavia Busia-Bourdain—illuminate and expand on stories told in the various clips. Fans of Bourdain’s TV shows will recognize a lot of the footage; indeed, the film feels like a two-hour episode of Parts Unknown rather than a fully fleshed-out documentary, as it doesn’t go beyond its subject to consult other sources or consider the subject’s larger influence. If you don’t know anything about Bourdain, ROADRUNNER is a reasonably good introduction. If you do, you’ll recognize the film as an elaborate, if belated, celebration of his life that should have arrived shortly after his death. Letting Bourdain’s still-grieving friends dump all over actor Asia Argento (his last girlfriend) without offering her a chance to appear onscreen is a pretty low blow. Ultimately, the observations and speculations about Bourdain do not uncover the reasons for his suicide, which is an unfathomable act no matter who does it. (2021, 119 min, DCP Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Also showing at the Music Box Theatre is CatVideoFest (2021, 72 min, Digital Projection), with 10% of all ticket proceeds donated to Red Door Animal Shelter, and David Lowery’s 2020 film THE GREEN KNIGHT (126 min, DCP Projection). Check Venue website for showtimes and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
Goats and GOATS: A Jumble of Experimental Film (And Other Surprises!)
Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. – Outdoor Screening) – Wednesday, 8pm
Local filmmaker and Cine-File contributor Josh B. Mabe organized this program of experimental shorts, which features work by some of the greatest avant-garde filmmakers of all time (hence the title). The official selections are Marie Menken's NOTEBOOK (1962, 10 min, 16mm); Joyce Wieland's WATER SARK (1965, 14 min, 16mm); Storm De Hirsch's RIVER GHOST. HUDSON RIVER DIARY BOOK: IV (1973, 9 min, 16mm); and Stan Brakhage's TRAGOEDIA (1976, 35 min, 16mm). After these shorts will be a grab-bag of other titles—so stick around! Capacity is limited; RSVP here.
VHS Surprise and Delights!
Analog Rooftop Cinema at Borelli’s Pizzeria (2124 W. Lawrence Ave.) – Friday and Saturday, 9pm
This weekend’s Analog offerings are free! No titles announced, but at each screening they’ll be showing something from their VHS library.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez’s THE AMERICAN SECTOR (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
For those of us who witnessed it, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a surprise and the beginning of a sea change in the world order as we knew it. In the ensuing years, sections of the Wall were sold to interested buyers all over the world as historical artifacts and, in some cases, works of graffiti art. Co-directors Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez spent more than a year crisscrossing the United States to places where one can view pieces of the Wall. The often-random distribution of Wall sections is quite interesting. The film opens with one concrete monolith sitting isolated in the middle of a forest. Two others show up at the side of an interstate highway, apparently not even near a rest stop. Southern California has more Wall segments than any other part of the country, though no one seems to know why. More expected are the museums and other institutions that house segments and chunks, including the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, where a rather beautiful sculpture shows bronze horses in active motion trampling the Wall underfoot. I was excited to learn that a part of the wall lives inside the Brown Line’s Western ‘L’ station, which I went in and out of for years when I lived in Lincoln Square, an ethnic German neighborhood. Perhaps most fascinating is an audio recording of Stephens speaking with someone at CIA headquarters, who explains that many clearances would be needed for Stephens and Velez to film the section at Langley. The spokeswoman says that people working for the CIA wondered whether the end of the Cold War meant that the agency would be disbanded—how naïvely quaint. I’m not sure that THE AMERICAN SECTOR makes any grand statements, despite its closing words of how we are back to building walls again, but it sure is a fun ride. (2020, 69 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Rosalynde LeBlanc and Tom Hurwitz’s CAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
From out of the tragedy of the 1980s AIDS crisis in the United States were issued some incredible works of art. One of them, a dance called D-Man in the Waters (1989), emerged from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, less than a year after Zane’s death from AIDS in 1988. The piece, composed of the company’s improvisations to Felix Mendelssohn’s buoyant Octet for Strings as artfully edited and arranged by Jones, was seen by the dance world as a test of Jones’ abilities. Not only had he lost the love of his life, but he had also lost the main choreographer of the company they ran together. Could Jones make it as a choreographer on his own? Some 150 pieces later, the answer is a resounding yes, and it was obvious from the first performance of D-Man, a kinetic work that channeled the company’s sorrow, rage, and youthful resilience in the face of sickness and death in a way that transcended its moment. Or did it? With the film’s very title, co-director Rosalynde LeBlanc (an original member of the Jones/Zane company) prepares us for the challenge she issued to her dance students at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Could D-Man move a bunch of teenagers who have heard little or nothing about the AIDS era? Does the dance still have meaning? CAN YOU BRING IT provides a history of Jones and Zane, the exhilaration of sexual liberation experienced by the gay community during the 1970s, and the viral hurricane that swept so many away during the plague years. Several surviving members of the company talk movingly about those times as the film shifts focus to LeBlanc’s casting and rehearsals for the student performances of D-Man, with Jones coming in to work with the dancers and request a cast change that requires LeBlanc to work one-on-one with a freshman who entered the class without formal dance training. As we watch several iterations of portions of the dance, as performed by the original company, the current company, and the student dancers, suspense builds. What is it that the students care enough about to help them infuse their movements with meaning? I’m not sure how he did it, but award-winning co-director and cinematographer Tom Hurwitz (who has made several dance-related films) manages to get in among the dancers to an astonishing degree. The film reminded me of Michelangelo’s Four Prisoners as it mirrors the young dancers' struggle to connect with each other, trust each other, and emerge from the prison of their individuality to become a community with an urgent message to deliver to the world. (2020, 94 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Agnieszka Holland’s CHARLATAN (Czech Republic)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Handsomely wrought, Agnieszka Holland’s biopic of Czech herbalist and faith healer Jan Mikolášek continues the director’s ongoing exploration of people operating within oppressive political regimes. The renowned Mikolášek (played by lauded Czech actor Ivan Trojan), whose career spanned the mid-20th century, is a curious subject for biopic treatment; his practice of healing patients through herbal remedies, prescribed after examining their urine, doesn’t lend itself to one’s idea of compelling cinema. But because of Marek Epstein’s curious script and Holland’s disquisitive direction, the film becomes a wry study of loyalty, passion, orthodoxy, and dissent. The story is framed by Mikolášek’s arrest in the late 50s, when he was accused by the Czech communist government of deliberately poisoning two high-ranking party members. Through flashbacks, we see Mikolášek as a brusque young soldier-cum-gardener, played by Trojan’s son Josef; he becomes an herbalist after he cures his sister’s gangrenous leg using plants. The story then follows him as an older man as he sets up practice in a dilapidated mansion and helps (per his count) millions of people over the course of his career, his patients ranging from peasants to Nazis to communist party officials. It’s been speculated that Mikolášek was gay; his marriage was an unhappy one, and his assistant (here called František, played by Juraj Loj) lived with him for decades. The filmmakers indulge that idea, using the fraught relationship between Mikolášek and František to emphasize the complexity of the faith healer and his unusual engrossment with a largely unsubstantiated practice. He treated basically whomever, even if he did not agree with their politics, though he also rejected their systems (his practice, for example, was privately held, and he made a lot of money doing it, both contrary to communist ideals) and was subjected to admonishment by both the Nazis and the communists despite having treated officials in each group. Naturally, some people believed that since Mikolášek wasn’t a licensed doctor, he was in fact a charlatan, yet another reason he was targeted by the authorities. As in many of her films, most famously the 1990 tour de force EUROPA EUROPA, Holland probes the narrative convolutions with stunning aplomb, likely influenced by the circumstances under which she grew up and started making films in post-war and communist Poland. The story sometimes lags, focusing too much on the speculative relationship between Mikolášek and his assistant, but Holland makes up for it with compelling visuals that add a sense of profundity. Mikolášek was a complicated man with natural gifts; whether they were for healing or deception (of himself as well as others) is left for us to decide. (2020, 118 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
Jafar Panahi’s CRIMSON GOLD (Iran)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Abbas Kiarostami receives screenplay credit on Jafar Panahi’s fourth feature, CRIMSON GOLD, and one of the many compelling things about the film is how it plays like an inversion of Kiarostami’s TASTE OF CHERRY. That film told the story of one man’s efforts to find someone to bury him after he commits suicide; the hero’s quest, which confirms his connection to other people, is ultimately life-affirming in spite of its morbid nature. CRIMSON GOLD opens with a botched robbery that ends with the hero’s suicide, then flashes back to show the days leading up to that event; it’s a despairing journey that builds upon Panahi’s depiction of modern-day Tehran as an unforgiving hellhole that he introduced in THE CIRCLE. As in TASTE OF CHERRY, the hero’s progress is marked by three encounters, though here, the hero doesn’t initiate them. Hossain is a pizza delivery man, and the people he meets on his deliveries tend to regard him from the start as a social inferior. (Compare this with the gratitude with which the strangers regard Mr. Badii when he offers them rides in his SUV.) Each encounter reminds Hossain of his powerlessness within Iranian society, though, ironically, each one hinges on a moment of camaraderie. In the first, Hossain recognizes his customer as a military buddy from the Iran-Iraq War; the old acquaintance, embarrassed to see Hossain reduced to delivering pizzas, leaves Hossain with kind words and a handsome tip. The delivery man is unable to complete his second delivery, as the apartment building he’s supposed to enter has been surrounded by a police tactical unit, which waits in ambush for people leaving a party with illegal drinking and dancing on the second floor. The officer in charge of the unit berates Hossain for trying to enter the building, but forbids him from leaving the scene, since he could find a phone somewhere and warn the partygoers about their impending arrest. Hossain has a poignant conversation with a teenage soldier before deciding to share his undelivered pizzas with policemen lying in wait. The third key encounter of CRIMSON GOLD takes place in the high-rise condo of a rich man whose apartment has just been vacated by two female guests. Feeling spurned and lonely, the rich man invites Hossain in for dinner. He’s much nicer to Hossain than the wealthy jewelry store owner who’d condescended to him in an earlier scene; still, the apparent randomness of the rich man’s kindness—which Hossain clearly recognizes—speaks to the great, and likely insurmountable, social divide between him and Hossain. Like Kiarostami’s decision to place the hero’s death at the start of the movie, the scene in the high-rise makes Hossain’s act of desperation seem inevitable. Heightening the film’s morbid air is the ghostlike lead performance by Hossain Emadeddin, an actual pizza delivery man and an actual paranoid schizophrenic. Emaddedin’s deadpan under-reaction to practically everything borders on comical, yet it also reflects the inability of isolated, working-poor individuals to impact the system that degrades them. (2003, 96 min) [Ben Sachs]
Teona Strugar Mitevska’s GOD EXISTS, HER NAME IS PETRUNYA (North Macedonia)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
“It’s 2018, but it still feels like the Dark Ages in Macedonia,” says TV reporter Slavica (Labina Mitevska, sister of the film’s director). Slavica and her cameraman, Bojkan (Xhevdet Jashari), are in the small town of Štip to cover an unusual story—a woman named Petrunya (Zorica Nusheva) joined in a religious competition meant only for men and recovered the sought-after lucky cross tossed in the river by the town priest (Suad Begovski-Suhi). The townspeople, especially the young men who believe that Petrunya stole the cross from them, are scandalized and demand that she give it back or face dire consequences. But Petrunya broke no civil law, and the police who hold her for questioning aren’t quite sure what to do with her. The situation set up by Mitevska, who co-wrote the intelligent and perceptive screenplay with Elma Tataragic, examines the persistence of patriarchy in the modern world. Petrunya is a 32-year-old, overweight woman who lives with her supportive, but ineffectual father (Petar Mircevski) and her mother (Violeta Sapkovska), who seems to both hate Petrunya and want to keep her tied to her apron strings. A college graduate with a degree in history who has never had a job, Petrunya is humiliated when she applies for work with the manager of a garment factory (Mario Knezović). The entire set-up, with the manager sitting in a glass-walled office in the middle of a room full of women working at sewing machines, is masculine control writ large. Nusheva brings to life all of Petrunya’s frustration with her dead-end circumstances, her anger at her belittling mother, and her confusion about how to change her life—a confusion that impelled her to jump into the water to find the cross without even thinking. I had flashbacks to Jan. 6 watching the angry young men of the village mass at the police station and break through the glass door to visit their displeasure on Petrunya. They are the cross she and the other women in the film have had to bear their whole lives—one Petrunya finally realizes she doesn’t have to shoulder anymore. Inventively shot by DP Virginie Saint-Martin, the film tips into humor during the interview segments, with Slavica answering her own questions and airing her feminist viewpoint. It is during one of these interviews that we come to understand the film’s title. One of the townsmen says he doesn’t understand what the fuss is about. “What if god is a woman?” he says. What if, indeed. (2019, 100 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
John Gianvito’s HER SOCIALIST SMILE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Across the ever-shifting terrain of streaming and "content," documentaries occupy a significant amount of digital space on our TVs and computers. Outside the work of a small handful of filmmakers, the documentary style has fallen on hard times, creatively and spiritually, with directors grasping at any intelligible way to approach the form, despite the abundance of options available. Of the hundreds of titles littered across Netflix and Hulu, it would be close to a miracle to land blindly on a few, let alone one, that doesn’t resemble the next two. So, in a time of worldwide confusion, it's reassuring to see one sail past the usual mediocrity and deliver a Zen-like immediacy that's urgent but calm, angry yet thoughtful. (The film is an independent production that undoubtedly will never be on any of the streaming titans’ sites). HER SOCIALIST SMILE is the rare occasion where form and subject are wholly integrated, enveloping both into a sensuous wellspring of serious-minded agitprop. John Gianvito continues on the trajectory of his previous documentary, PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND, juxtaposing images of serene nature with a narrative centered around unjustly forgotten American figures and events. He uses the same stillness and hushed volumes of the earlier film to hypnotize viewers, forging an engagement with the material that serves the actual subject, rather than having the subject serving its makers and whatever their cagey instincts may be. Not only is this a welcome change of pace within the current trend of documentary filmmaking; it's a radical re-evaluation of the life and work of Helen Keller. Gianvito skims past the usual images and stories that usually comprise her place in the history books: her work for the blind, her relationship with Annie Sullivan and the water pump, plus that one image of her standing with Chaplin. Those clichéd short-cuts underwhelm and inexcusably ignore Keller’s most important accomplishments: her humanitarian work, helping establish the ACLU, and her passionate engagement with socialism and the plight of workers. In Keller’s time, however, she had to contend with shady figures like President Woodrow Wilson, who once celebrated her accomplishments, but turned on her the moment she publicly let slip her socialist beliefs and ideas. Keller's blindness and deafness suddenly became a tool for newspapers and politicians to discredit her ideas. No longer a hero for overcoming her disabilities, she was now portrayed as radically out of touch because of them. Wilson, who destabilized Latin America more than any other sitting U.S. President, recast individuals like Keller and Emma Goldman as enemies of the state that “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” HER SOCIALIST SMILE shares a fair amount of Keller’s writing from this period, so there's no reason to recount them here, yet her words remain staunchly clear-headed, sober, and thorough: “Are not the dominant parties managed by the ruling classes, that is, the propertied classes, solely for the profit and privilege of the few?” When Keller was asked what the most important question for a President would be, she responded, “How [do you] keep the people from finding out that they have been fooled again?” Keller also spoke to her being discredited in the press, claiming, “So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly… but when it comes to burning social or political issues, especially if I happen to be, as I so often am, on the unpopular side, the tone changes completely.” Thankfully, Gianvito doesn't lazily insert these words into a lesser documentary swarming with talking heads and bland wall-to-wall music motivated less by feeling than by their creators’ lack of trust in their audience’s emotional intelligence. Gianvito respects his audience, but he respects his subject even more. For a film covering events and characters from over 100 years ago, there isn’t another documentary around that better understands our now routinely-caricatured times. (2020, 93 min) [John Dickson]
Jeanne Leblanc’s LES NÔTRES (Canada)
Available to rent through Facets Cinématheque here
Ripping the lid off a small town to reveal its depraved underbelly has long been a strategy for social criticism, but this had lost its sting around the time AMERICAN BEAUTY won the Best Picture Oscar. Yet Jeanne Leblanc’s film goes much deeper, generating a bleak tone that presents sexual abuse as horrible but banal. The streets of Sainte-Adeline, Quebec, are almost parodically broad, green and sunny. But the town is haunted by an industrial accident which killed 13-year-old Magalie’s (Emilie Bierre) father. After she passes out during a dance rehearsal at school, a doctor’s examination reveals that she’s in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her mother (Marianne Farley) and much of the town suspect that Magalie’s best friend Manu (Leon Diasco Pellettier) is the father. She receives harassing texts on her phone. But she has actually been groomed to believe she can consent to sex with Manu’s father Jean-Marc (Paul Doucet), the town’s mayor. Leblanc’s direction keeps its distance from the actors, framing them in medium shot. LES NÔTRES runs on barely suppressed tension, giving the audience more information than the characters. For a narrative which could have set out to shock or turn into melodrama, it’s actually fairly hushed. (On the soundtrack, crickets constantly chirp, melting into Marie-Heléne L. Delorme’s dark score.) Some images would fit perfectly in IT FOLLOWS, and LES NÔTRES suggests a horror film about a girl’s coming of age with all the metaphor and allegory stripped away. Bierre brings the character to life while preserving her inner mystery. The final shot, in which Magalie stares blankly at the camera, suggests the difficult life ahead of her while retaining the film’s reticence to speak too loudly. (2020, 103 min) [Steve Erickson]
Beth B.’s LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
For those unfamiliar with Lydia Lunch, a short primer: Lunch is a prolific multidisciplanary artist and shit-stirrer who began her career in late-1970s New York. Initially known for her work in such (in)famous No Wave bands as Teenage Jesus and The Jerks, Beirut Slump, and 8-Eyed Spy and for her collaborations with filmmakers Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Vivienne Dick, and Beth B., Lunch has gone on to work with artists ranging from Nick Cave to Hubert Selby Jr. to Weasel Walter over the ensuing decades. LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER, a new collaboration with Beth B., is a film essay of sorts. It isn’t a traditional biography showcasing art from Lunch’s past; rather, the film explores the overarching themes of her work. Placing as much attention on the work she’s doing now as on her heroic years as a teenager/twentysomething, THE WAR IS NEVER OVER explores how the motivations behind Lunch’s art—her unique takes on feminist, sexual, and artistic politics—have never wavered and how they may be more relevant today than ever. The film is still filled with absolutely blistering archival footage, not to mention equally jaw-dropping contemporary performances. For fans of Lydia Lunch, this is absolutely essential; for those who have only heard her name in passing, this is the perfect overview. Like Lunch’s work, the film is direct, running barely over an hour. And every minute is worth it. (2019, 75 mins) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Read an interview with filmmaker Beth B. and the film’s subject, Lydia Lunch, on the blog here.
Jean-Paul Salomé’s MAMA WEED (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Patience Portefeux (Isabelle Huppert), a translator of Arabic who works for the Paris police, is having a difficult time making ends meet. She owes money to the Chinese manager of her apartment building as well as to the nursing facility where her mother lives. When an opportunity arises to solve her financial problems and repay the kindness of her mother’s caregiver, she unhesitatingly masquerades as Mama Weed, a Muslim drug dealer. The crime thriller films of director Jean-Paul Salomé frequently feature female protagonists and at least a few A-list actors who elevate the material. MAMA WEED, which Salomé adapted from a novel by Hannelore Cayre, benefits greatly from the presence of Huppert, who adds to her distinguished and storied career with an amusing but complex portrayal of an enigmatic woman for whom personal loyalty, even to a long-dead husband, overrides virtually all other considerations. This energetic crime film thankfully eschews violence to focus on character dynamics, but stereotyping Arabs and Chinese as criminals is a sloppy, offensive genre attitude Salomé should have avoided. (2020, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Melvin Van Peebles’ THE STORY OF A THREE-DAY PASS (France)
Available to rent through 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) [Ben Sachs]
Zaida Bergroth’s TOVE (Finland)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Coming-of-age stories are normally thought of as involving teenagers who learn the realities of adult life. In fact, we all come of age again and again as we pass through new phases of our lives. The unique coming-of-age tale director Zaida Bergroth tells in the biopic TOVE covers roughly 10 years in the life of Tove Jansson, a Finnish artist best known for her fanciful Moomin children’s books. Tove (Alma Pöysti) is 30 years old when the narrative begins in 1944. She is living at her parents’ home in Helsinki, trying to emerge as a serious artist from the long shadow of her censorious father, sculptor Viktor Jansson (Robert Enckell). When she fails to win a competitive grant to study abroad, she moves out on her own and begins her journey of self-discovery. The troll illustrations that eventually become the Moomins are introduced as mere doodles to help Tove unblock her more serious artistic impulses. It takes the encouragement of Vivica Bandler (Krista Kosonen), an upper-class theatre director with whom Tove falls deeply in love, to recognize their worth. Pöysti is engaging as the high-spirited Tove, infusing a fairly conventional biopic with energy and complexity. She is well supported by her fellow actors, particularly Kosonen. Linda Wassberg’s cinematography is warm and lush, befitting a story of creative and romantic passion. The costumes, art direction, and soundtrack laced with 1940s swing music evoke the exuberance of the post-WWII era and a certain go-for-broke attitude that Pöysti grows into. I particularly like a scene inside a lesbian club in Paris that is a riot of liberated women enjoying being themselves. TOVE offers a sumptuous and fully fleshed world that is a pleasure to visit. (2020, 103 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s War Trilogy (Japan)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
CASTING BLOSSOMS TO THE SKY
The first film in Japanese writer-director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s war trilogy is a dizzying bend of fact and fiction—to watch it is to get sucked into a whirlwind of narrative and historical information. An opening title card modestly introduces CASTING BLOSSOMS TO THE SKY as “a movie essay,” but it’s much more than that, as Obayashi integrates made-up stories so fluidly into historical accounts that the film is ultimately unclassifiable. It centers on a female reporter named Reiko (Yasuko Matsuyuki), who travels to the town of Nagaoka in central Japan at the invitation of an ex-boyfriend she hasn’t seen in almost two decades. He wants her to report on the production of a historical drama written by one of his high school students, but Reiko’s curiosity leads her—and, by extension, the filmmakers—to investigate myriad aspects of Nagaoka’s past. Principally, Reiko learns how the town became the site of a famous annual fireworks display and how Nagaoka suffered through numerous wars. Few people outside of Japan know that the U.S. Army dropped nearly 1,000 tons of bombs on Nagaoka shortly before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; while the latter events quickly overshadowed the former, the destruction of Nagaoka was so sweeping that the reconstruction of the town took years. CASTING BLOSSOMS argues that Nagaoka (and possibly all of Japan) still hasn’t recovered from the spiritual damage wrecked by WWII and the events leading up to it, but that art can serve as a palliative for lasting historical trauma. The film practically opens with a quote from the artist Kiyoshi Yamashita: “If people made pretty fireworks instead of bombs, there wouldn’t have been any wars.” This line serves as the organizing center for the centrifugal structure, which moves unpredictably between interpersonal drama, history lessons, and documentary segments. (Even the title is a play on the Japanese word for fireworks, hana-bi, which literally means “sky flowers.”) Many of the film's insights don’t become evident until after the it ends, however; Obayashi’s editing—rooted in his beginnings as an experimental filmmaker and avid fan of Jean-Luc Godard—is so rapid and at times disorienting that it’s almost hard to believe the filmmaker was in his 70s when he made this. (2012, 160 min) [Ben Sachs]
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SEVEN WEEKS
I’d seen only one of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s films before embarking on the three, two-hour-plus tomes that comprise his war trilogy. HOUSE (1977), the film I’d seen prior, is nearly a surrealist horror classic at this point; one watches it and is struck by the utter singularity of Obayashi’s kaleidoscopic vision. It’s no wonder, then, that a comparable sensibility demarcates this awe-inspiringly ambitious triptych, of which SEVEN WEEKS, based on the novel by Koji Hasegawa and crowd-funded in part by inhabitants of where it takes place, is the second entry. A series of disparate-yet-connected, narrative-based annals, the films mimic the complicated history of Japan during and after WWII through a mosaic-like approach that resembles the harshly assembled tessellations of an indomitable nation’s long-since and no-so-distant past. SEVEN WEEKS does so through the death of an elderly doctor with a penchant for painting; after his death, his family gathers to partake in a Buddhist ceremony that involves memorializing the dead every seven days over a period of 49 days in total. The surviving family members run the gamut from the doctor’s sister to several grandchildren and even a great-grandchild, a feisty young girl who imbues the film with the childlike awe that distinguishes Obayashi’s work. Also present is a beautiful, mysterious woman who is—or is at least thought to be—the doctor’s nurse. She lingers around the family as they likewise reminisce over their dearly departed’s life, the history of the region they’re in—Ashibetsu, in the Hokkaido Prefecture, a seemingly unremarkable town pervaded by tentatively recalled dreams and nightmares, as well as a now-defunct amusement park called Canadian World—and their own modest narratives. The nurse, a ghost-like figure who gently haunts the film as she does the deceased’s family, may be the young woman whom the doctor had known during the war or, more likely, the young woman’s specter; she apparently died under traumatic circumstances many years before, during an attack by the Russians. Mystifying flashbacks suggest the doctor as well as his friend were in love with the young woman. In his essay on HOUSE for the Criterion Collection, critic Chuck Stephens writes that Obayashi’s “sensibility [was] steeped in a romanticism far more Truffaut than Godard,” the latter of whom Obayashi especially admired but whose political fervor Obayashi eschewed for something more romantic. The suggestion of a love triangle and the presence of an almost sphinx-like object of attraction (though here conferred more sentimentally) recall Truffaut’s classic JULES AND JIM. The influence of the French New Wave is also felt, as in the other entries in the trilogy, through the film’s vigorous editing and the utilization of childhood and young adulthood as a metaphor for both existential growth and, ultimately, spiritual and even physical death. Obayashi examines a country beleaguered by intense ground warfare (including the use of nuclear bombs, which cloak the trilogy as the bomb’s plume does its target) and more recent ecological catastrophes as if reflecting on a traumatic childhood, the scars of which are constantly felt even if healed on the surface. The director, however, doesn’t hold back in bringing such trauma to the forefront; with a background rooted in experimental cinema and advertising, it’s what’s being seen—which in these three films is everything, as each is filled to the brim with myriad threads and throughlines—that matters. In taking one man’s life and looking back on it, Obayashi conveys not just literal history but the sense of history, which itself is a lifetime of places and their people and with which reckoning is needed for its ghosts to finally be at peace. (2014, 171 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
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HANAGATAMI
HANAGATAMI pulses with the color red. It runs from images of lipstick stains to rose petals to toy fish, but two related forms dominate this film: blood and the Japanese flag. The final part of Obayashi’s war trilogy, it takes place in the seaside town of Karatsu in the spring of 1941, as Japan prepares to amp up its military operations. Although it's based on a 1937 novella by Kazuo Don, the film describes a generation that was sacrificed to World War II. The teenage Toshihiko (Shunsuke Kobuza) moves to Karatsu, where his aunt takes care of a cousin, Kira (Keishi Nagatsuka), who suffers from tuberculosis. He quickly befriends other students as well as a few adults and becomes involved in the community; unfortunately, he's arrived at the moment when boys and men were expected to serve in the army. Even his long-haired, communist school teacher shaves his head and joins up. Obayahsi marshals an exciting array of filmmaking techniques: horizontal wipes, hand-drawn animation, obvious green-screen backdrops. From HOUSE on, his work consistently identified with youth and took delight in fantasy, generally without recourse to expensive special effects. By the time he made HANAGATAMI, Obayahi had long since given up any lingering naturalism, using colors saturated to the point of distortion to create an uncanny sterility. Drawing on Japanese theater, his films luxuriated in artificiality. But Obayashi never used style to distance the spectator from his characters, instead advancing an eccentric identification with their struggles. HANAGATAMI was the first film he made after he received a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, and he expected it to be his last one. (He lived long enough to end his body of work with LABYRINTH OF CINEMA [2019], an anguished, idealistic meditation on the same theme of Japan at war.) His presentation of characters as phantoms revived temporarily feels tempered by the director’s own impending mortality, turning this into the testament of an elderly man who outlived almost all of his peers. (2017, 169 min) [Steve Erickson]
Hong Sang-soo's THE WOMAN WHO RAN (South Korea)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The films of prolific South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo have become steadily more oriented around their female protagonists since he began working with Kim Min-hee in 2015’s RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN. This mighty director/actress combo has reached a kind of apotheosis in their seventh and latest collaboration, THE WOMAN WHO RAN, a charming dramedy about three days in the life of a woman, Gam-hee (Kim), who spends time apart from her spouse for the first time after five years of marriage. When her husband goes on a trip, Gam-hee uses the occasion to visit three of her female friends—one of whom is single, one of whom is married, and one of whom is recently divorced—and Hong subtly implies that Gam-hee’s extended dialogue with each causes her to take stock of her own marriage and life. Gam-hee also comes into contact with three annoying men—a nosy neighbor, a stalker, and a mansplainer—while visiting each friend, situations that allow Hong to create clever internal rhymes across his triptych narrative structure. Hong’s inimitable cinematographical style has long favored long takes punctuated by sudden zooms and pans, but rarely have the devices felt as purposeful as they dohere. Notice how his camera zooms, with the precision of a microscope, into a close-up of a woman’s face immediately after she issues an apology to Gam-hee during the film's final act, and how the tears in this woman's eyes would not have been visible without the zoom. This is masterful stuff. (2020, 77 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
⚫Chicago International Film Festival Summer Screenings
Summer Screenings is a free weekly film series that celebrates sports and games from around the world. This week’s selection is Margherita Ferri’s 2018 Italian film ZEN IN THE ICE RIFT (87 min). More info here.
⚫Facets Cinémathèque
Paul Sattler’s 2021 film BROKEN DIAMONDS (90 min) is available to rent through August 19.
⚫Gene Siskel Film Center
Ursula Liang’s 2021 documentary DOWN A DARK STAIRWELL (83 min) and Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s 2021 documentary TRUMAN & TENNESSEE: AN INTIMATE CONVERSATION (81 min) are available to rent through August 12.
⚫Music Box Theatre
Jeremy Elkin’s 2021 documentary ALL THE STREETS ARE SILENT (89 min) is available to rent starting this week.
Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
⚫ South of Roosevelt Shorts
Eight short films from the south side of Chicago will be showcased in an outdoor screening at Whiner Beer Company (1400 W. 46th St.) on Saturday from 7:30-9:30pm. More info here.
⚫Video Data Bank
VDB presents the online program I Wanna Be Well: Gregg Bordowitz, with two video works by the artist, activist, writer, and teacher, FAST TRIP, LONG DROP (1993, 54 min) and ONLY IDIOTS SMILE (2017, 22 min). View them here.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Chris Marker’s BERLINER BALLADE, BLUE HELMET and PRIME TIME IN THE CAMPS (France/Documentary)
Available to stream on the Metrograph’s website here through August 11 and on OVID.tv here (Subscription required for both)
The three ‘90s Chris Marker shorts premiering on OVID.tv this month take their cues from their subjects, ordinary people living through difficult, even desperate times. Marker made these works at a time when the differences between film and video were still quite pronounced. If the pale, faded look of video during that period implies a kind of marginality, BERLINER BALLADE (1990, 25 min), PRIME TIME IN THE CAMPS (1993, 27 min), and BLUE HELMET (1995, 25 min) accept it as a condition of their existence. Much more modest than better-known Marker projects like SANS SOLEIL, A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT, and THE LAST BOLSHEVIK, these shorts are based around talking-heads interviews in Academy ratio. BERLINER BALLADE documents the brief moment after the fall of eastern European communism when East Germany might have been able to exist as a leftist country with an identity separate from that of West Germany. PRIME TIME IN THE CAMPS profiles a group of six men and women from the former Yugoslavia making a TV news program for a Bosnian refugee camp. It shows an alternative to corporate media—"TV from the interior," as one person says—created by and for a specific community. (The clips of MTV that play in the background contrast with the casual clothes and demeanor of the news “anchors.”) Marker’s interests lie beyond the TV program itself. The interview subjects of PRIME TIME IN THE CAMPS speak frankly about how quickly the veneer of unity in Yugoslavia fell apart and how they were living a comfortable life one year, then fled as refugees the next. Unfortunately, the decision to dub these interviews into English comes off as faintly disrespectful, detracting from the specificity of the Bosnian experience. BLUE HELMET is radically stripped-down, barely moving away from an interview with French soldier François Crémieux about his tour of duty as a UN peacekeeper in the Bosnian city Bihac. Shot in very tight close-up, Crémieux describes learning how much his fellow soldiers’ notions about the war were guided by French stereotypes about Muslims and Slavs. His experience led him to conclude that the UN’s action "was not done to help the oppressed" and actually served Serbian aggression. This is the most focused and powerful of the three shorts, benefiting from the claustrophobic images. [Steve Erickson]
CINE-LIST: August 6 - August 12, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Glover Smith