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
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
Music Box Theatre
See Venue website for showtimes (unless otherwise noted)
Pablo Larraín’s EMA (Chile)
EMA is an immersive aesthetic experience in the vein of certain films by Jean-Luc Godard, Wong Kar-wai, or Claire Denis, where to watch it is to get swept up in a swirl of ideas, formal devices, movement, and music. The movie raises provocative questions about love, art, and sexual politics, but you may find it difficult to reckon with them until after it’s over. Pablo Larraín creates the impression that the film is discovering its identity as it goes along, that it’s capable of changing its shape on a whim. You don’t watch it so much as chase after it. EMA is a classical work in that the form mirrors the content: the title character (played by Mariana Di Girolamo in a larger-than-life performance) spends the film in an existential free-fall, and Larraín’s unpredictable filmmaking feels driven by her unpredictable behavior. The film begins with a spectacular passage that introduces the contemporary dance troupe Ema belongs to before it introduces her character fully. Larraín interweaves dance and bits of drama brilliantly, cutting between different kinds of camera movement and multiple choreographed routines. Nicolas Jaar’s electronic score is constant for almost the first 15 minutes; as it does later on in EMA, it guides the flow of the action, making it seem trancelike. Only after the music stops does Larraín reveal the cause of Ema’s unrest: she and her choreographer husband (Gael García Bernal) recently changed their mind about raising an adopted boy after he set fire to their apartment. Ema still loves the boy despite having rejected him; her obsession baffles her husband, and their marriage quickly breaks down along with their creative partnership. Ema responds to the chaos in her life through dance, setting things on fire, and sex, lots of sex, seducing every principal character and is shown making love to them all in a ravishing montage that manages to top the one at the start of the film. Larraín’s depictions of sex are at once frank and highly aestheticized; they also give way to allegorical readings. Is Ema’s sexual quest selfish or is it, like Terrence Stamp’s in Pasolini’s TEOREMA, some magical process by which she radically transforms everyone around her? Could it be both? (2019, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Jacques Deray’s LA PISCINE (France)
Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
The 4K restoration of Jacques Deray’s French thriller could not have come at a better time. In a twist that would have certainly pleased the likes of Will H. Hays, there has been a growing resurgence in online discourse of puritanical, anti-sex attitudes towards film, especially (and confusingly) among young people. It’s not uncommon to log onto Twitter and see the regurgitation of the same stale takes: sex scenes are unnecessary, problematic, or inherently abusive; they don’t move the plot forward; et cetera. LA PISCINE argues—and rightfully so—that sex and pleasure are inseparable from cinema. Two lovers, Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider), enjoy a steamy vacation in their friend’s St. Tropez villa. But when Marianne’s former lover decides to join them, bringing along his 18-year-old daughter, the various intersections of attraction and tension amongst the four characters simmer—until they boil over into something much more sinister. It's a slow burn as far as erotic thrillers go, but the accumulation of seemingly small moments sets the film into a satisfying overdrive: the nonchalant non sequiturs, the bodies constantly dripping in sweat, the eyes that scan the room for the next beat, the hands always caressing a lit cigarette. LA PISCINE is unapologetically horny and sinister; Delon and Schneider craft a welcome cocktail of summer scandal that can evoke a heatwave in a cold theater. And the film’s climax, not unlike the film itself, is less of an explosion and more of a test of endurance. (1969, 123 mins, DCP Digital) [Cody Corrall]
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Ira Deutchman’s SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF (US/Documentary)
Sunday, 11:15am
Most of those of us who are devoted to arthouse films and the venues that show them have no idea how they came to be in the first place. SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF provides the kind of entertaining history lesson that cinephiles like us need to learn—the story of Donald Rugoff, founder of Cinema 5, the New York City movie chain and distribution company that began the arthouse cinema movement and spawned such companies as Miramax, New Line Cinema, and New Yorker Films. Director Ira Deutchman—who worked for Cinema 5 until he was laid off when Rugoff closed down the distribution arm of the financially distressed company—hadn’t thought about his former boss until his name came up at a Gotham Awards ceremony. Distressed to hear that Rugoff had died penniless and was consigned to a pauper’s grave, Deutchman searched out the truth about the impresario’s last years. Deutchman keeps the excursions into his investigation short, preferring to take a deep dive into Rugoff’s life and cinephilia. The number of major directors who first played the United States in one of Rugoff’s exquisitely designed theatres is legion: Jean-Luc Godard, Costa-Gavras, Francois Truffaut, Lina Wertmüller. Indeed, Rugoff’s campaign to promote Z (1969) led to an unheard-of number of Oscar nominations and awards for a foreign film. Wertmüller, who is interviewed in the film, was courted by many distributors, but chose to sell SWEPT AWAY (1974) to Rugoff. In turn, he made her reputation in the United States. The film discusses his marketing ideas, which ranged from having employees promote MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) by walking through Midtown Manhattan wearing chain mail to running ingenious ads in the newspapers. When a Cinema 5 employee said the ad for Robert Downey Sr.’s PUTNEY SWOPE (1969) was better than the movie, he was told in no uncertain terms never to repeat that statement again. Deutchman succeeds in his quest to track Rugoff down to his final resting place on Martha’s Vineyard, but the real show is the incredible film culture he resurrects—one that will make cinephiles nostalgic for a time when a movie opening was an exciting event every single week. (2019, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Also showing at the Music Box Theatre is David Lowery’s 2020 film THE GREEN KNIGHT (126 min, DCP Digital). Check Venue website for showtimes and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
Gene Siskel Film Center
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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Federico Fellini's I VITELLONI (Italy)
Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 6:30pm
According to history Federico Fellini's second feature, I VITELLONI, should never have existed. After the commercial failure of THE WHITE SHEIK Fellini and co-writer Tullio Pinelli approached producer Luigi Rovere with an early draft of LA STRADA. Intimidated by the liminal nature of its genre, Rovere quickly handed it off to fellow professor/producer Lorenzo Pegoraro. Also bothered by its lack of commercial appeal Pegoraro encouraged the young screenwriters to pen a comedy. And thus Fellini, Pinelli, and longtime collaborator Ennio Flaiano pooled their childhood experiences and birthed I VITELLONI. Met with immediate acclaim, the film follows a group of idle youths in provincial Italy through a series loosely stitched together episodes and adventures. These vitellonis (a cross between the Italian for beef and veal meaning roughly an immature loafer) spend their days plotting hijacks and chasing skirts. Shenanigans include an extravagant masquerade ball, an interrupted beauty pageant, and actor Albert Sordi's drag tango. No doubt influenced by its neorealist predecessors (who found interest in seemingly innocuous small events), I VITELLONI's profound originality lies in its negation of the norms of storytelling, an attribute often derided as immature and naive. But these disparate stories reveal the characters not through dramatic evolution but gestures and attitude--a wry joke, particular gait, or hairstyle. What's crafted is an image behind traditional "psychological cinema"; what Andre Bazin has aptly called a "mode of being". For a film that never should have been I VITELLONI is astonishing in its daring and a must-see for any Fellini fan. As André Bazin has noted, "everything was already contained in I VITELLONI and set out there with magisterial genius." (1953, 104 min, DCP Digital) Camden G. Bauchner
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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]
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Federico Fellini’s THE WHITE SHEIK (Italy)
Sunday, 12:30pm
A newly married, provincial couple arrives in Rome for their honeymoon and to meet members of the groom’s extended family. Unknown to the “master of the house,” who has set a rigid agenda for their first day in the Eternal City, his bride has been corresponding with the White Sheik, her idol from the photo magazines called fumetti that were all the rage in Italy. She sneaks off to meet him and is swept into the cadre of photographers, actors, and costumers who set off to create the Sheik’s latest adventure on a beach far from Rome. In this, Federico Fellini’s first solo outing as a director, the Italian showman of the screen sets out many of the elements that will distinguish his ingenious body of work. His years working for the humor magazine Marc'Aurelio and his lifelong avocation as a caricaturist made him the perfect person to take this simple premise and fashion a comic gem. Brunella Bovo and Leopoldo Trieste, as Wanda and Ivan Cavalli, are perfect provincials in the big city, where their fantasies and moral rectitude are blown to bits by the events that overtake them. Wanda’s encounters with the magazine crew offer the three-ring circus so iconic in many Fellini movies. I especially loved her first meeting with the Sheik, aka Fernando Rivoli (a beautifully foppish Alberto Sordi). He is shown swinging on a swing suspended between trees high above her head. The obvious distortion of his position in the air perfectly expresses the adoration Wanda feels for him, paving the way for his future advances on her as he casts her as an Arabian girl in the fumetto shoot, the better to get her into a skimpy outfit. For his part, Trieste, once a serious playwright, was encouraged by Fellini to bring out his inner clown and to widen his eyes to create his distinctive trademark as a comic actor. When the couple are reunited, instead of performing the prepared dialogue, Fellini told them to snivel loudly, thus creating a wordlessly hilarious moment. While Wanda declares repeatedly to Ivan that, despite appearances, she is still pure and innocent, we have no doubt that the city has knocked the umlaut off their naïveté. Watch for a short scene in which Giulietta Masina makes her first appearance as the prostitute Cabiria. (1952, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s CRESTONE (US)
Analog Rooftop Cinema at Borelli’s Pizzeria (2124 W. Lawrence Ave. – Outdoor Screenings) – Friday, 9pm
Aspects of this peculiar documentary hybrid, about a group of Soundcloud rappers living in a remote desert hideout, evoke motifs commonly found in sci-fi films. Arid landscapes, neon colors, and a score laden with the mysteries of the universe—all this fits with the notion one gets that this group of people are aliens among us, not naturally of this earth and having found in it a place suitable for their not-of-our-world predilections. Filmmaker Marnie Ellen Hertzler documents in this hybrid curio several young men, some of whom she knew in high school, who’ve taken to the desert in Crestone, Colorado, where they’ve formed a collective called Deadgod, releasing their struggle rapper anthems into the void; they also grow weed. Hertzler, visiting them for the summer, decided to make a film about their unique living arrangements, which include residing in veritable squalor with limited access to food and water. In stark contrast to their humble abode are the devices with which they frequently interact, despite claiming to revile the impact of technology on our society. (Other reviews of the film mention the mens’ utopian ideals and claim their surroundings to be post-apocalyptic; these similarities are evident to me, too, but I maintain the group’s status as extraterrestrials, if only in the sense that they’re certainly being extra when it comes to being terrestrial.) They record music, post it online, and make videos for social media; they’re even equipped with a drone, VR headset, and a full tattoo set-up, which they utilize without impunity. Furthermore they have a crowdfunding profile, where the group’s de facto leader, Sloppy, appears in a video decrying the contemporary mode of being. “You don’t even get the chance to be a human,” he says of the modern-day world, an observation apropos of an alien, albeit one who might consider himself more a human than the rest of us, observing people in our now-natural habitat. To that end it’s Hertzler who’s come from the outside world with her natural biases and prejudices (however gentle) in tow. This isn’t a knock against Hertzler, who in fact documents the group with exquisite tenderness and brings to the film a perspective needed to illuminate their genial oddity. She gives them the benefit of the doubt, assuming their intentions to be in earnest, even if sometimes problematic and often, unintentionally, hypocritical. In a pivotal moment, Hertzler documents the men as they passively observe an emergency alert on their TV warning of nearby wildfires. She, the resident interloper, panics, while the group merely shrugs, seemingly unfazed by the nearby catastrophe. It’s here that her attitude toward them shifts, not maliciously, but perceptibly enough for viewers to pick up on her frustration with their childish utopia. Some elements of the film are supposedly fictional, though it’s difficult to say what’s real and what’s not, so unreal does all of it seem. Concocted for sure are two segments wherein the rappers perform their music, the scenes like stand-alone music videos inserted within the narrative. To be frank, there’s much about this film I’d dislike (its arthouse trappings, including the one aforementioned, are undeniable) if it weren’t for the purported sincerity of its subjects and the broad-minded engrossment of its maker. (2021, 73 min, Digital Projection) [Kathleen Sachs]
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Also screening at Analog: Cheryl Dunn's 2021 documentary MOMENTS LIKE THIS NEVER LAST (96 min, Digital Projection), about artist Dash Snow, on Saturday at 9pm. Tickets cost $20 cash, which includes a drink.
Released and Abandoned: Forgotten Oddities of the Home Video Era presents: CHAINS (1989)
Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. – Outdoor Screening) – Wednesday, 8pm
Per the event description, “Two couples miss their exit on a Chicago expressway and take the next exit and end up in a war zone of a neighborhood. They give a ride to someone that is looking to get out of the area but turns out he is from a rival gang and the Chains, the territory controlling gang, is after him. Soon it becomes a race to survive the night, running from the gangs, hiding in old factories and doing whatever it takes to survive.” 1989, 90 min, Digital Projection. Capacity is limited; RSVP here.
Jonathan Cuartas’ MY HEART CAN'T BEAT UNLESS YOU TELL IT TO (US)
Festival Faves by FACETS at Lincoln Yard’s Movies on the Lawn (1665 N. Ada St. – Outdoor Screening) – Thursday, 8:45pm
2020, 90 min, Digital Projection. See Facets website for more details; purchase tickets here.
A Concrete Cloud
The Nightingale Cinema at the Parking Lot of Hyde Park Art Center (5020 S. Cornell Ave. – Outdoor Screening) – Thursday, 8pm [Free]
The program includes work by Stephanie Barber, Mike Stoltz and Alee Peoples, Jose Luis Benavides, Sky Hopinka, Annelies Kamen, Heehyun Choi, Keaton Fox, Breanne Trammell and Henry Hills. 1988-2021, approximately 90 minutes, Digital Projection. More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
I Wanna Be Well: Gregg Bordowitz (Experimental/US)
Available to stream for free on VBD TV until 8/19
Made during a particularly harrowing point in the videomaker’s life (according to the VDB’s website, it came to fruition several years after he was diagnosed with HIV, and during its production a friend was diagnosed with cancer and his grandparents were killed in a car accident), Gregg Bordowitz’s FAST TRIP, LONG DRIP (1993, 54 min) is a convergence of modes and ideas that coheres insomuch as the disparate elements intersect to form a wholly idiosyncratic tome. Within its first several minutes alone, the video spans a clever (albeit fabricated) newscast, deftly curated archival footage over which klezmer music plays (Bordowitz having made his Judaism a core component of his practice), and the first appearance of the artist himself, in a t-shirt and tighty-whities with a thermometer in his mouth. The combination aptly represents what’s to come, a coalescence of history—via archival material and primary documentation of then-current events, which would later become the stuff of bygone times—tongue-in-cheek facsimiles of mass media and various real-life scenarios, and autobiographical components. A multidisciplinary artist, writer, and teacher, who’s currently the director of SAIC's Low-Residency MFA Program, Bordowitz is a Queens-born, queer man living with AIDS. Much of his work centers on the AIDS crisis, which, as he declared in a banner that adorned a main hallway in Chicago’s Art Institute during the 2019 exhibit Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well, is “still beginning.” Literally and metaphorically—Bordowitz’s ideology applies not just to the AIDS crisis of yore and yonder, but to myriad crises currently plaguing humanity, many of which result in or pertain to peoples' unwellness. As someone who was born the year Bordowitz was diagnosed with HIV, I felt that nothing I encountered in FAST TRIP or any of his other work feels dated. Instead it conveys an urgent message from the past about the future, simultaneously warning us of things to come and folding us into an empathetic embrace, even when segments of this particular video veer into mordancy and even outrage. As Bordowitz is quoted in the text accompanying this video, “I was tired of pretending for the sake of others that I would survive. I became preoccupied with the burdens that sick people bear on behalf of those around them who are well. I wanted to get a handle on despair and put it out there as a political problem to be recognized and discussed.” Choice segments include the cold open, in which artist and ACT UP activist Bob Huff plays a newscaster encouraging panic about the epidemic (“Yeah, I know,” he says, “I’m the news guy. I’m supposed to bring you to the edge of worry and not beyond.”), a frank and touching discussion between Bordowitz and his mother and stepfather about his sexuality and diagnosis, and a few irreverent faux-PSAs (one including performance artist Andrea Fraser); elements of the work also function as a documentary of sorts, as it includes footage of Bordowitz and other activists as they attempt to affect change. In the work’s through line, Bordowitz appears as Alter Allesman, a guest on a fictional talk show called Thriving With AIDS, hosted by one of the several characters played by Huff. His dour alter ego confronts the host, who seems to yearn for Allesman’s misery. Bordowitz’s doubling of himself as another so-called “real person”—yet also as another character within the scope of the overall work—appearing on a talk show speaks to his unyielding interest in the images society puts forth that depict the ill and disabled. The multifunctionality of this video work expresses the complexity of the crisis, one which didn’t and still doesn’t fit neatly into any one box, just as Bordowtiz’s work breaks free from the constraints of labels and exemplification. The other video in this program—which has been put up in concurrence with the I Wanna Be Well exhibit’s run at MoMA PS1 in New York City—is a 2017 lecture called ONLY IDIOTS SMILE (22 min). Performed on the top floor of the New Museum, Bordowitz turns the hallowed space into a comedy club of sorts, delivering an inspired allocution oriented around his Jewish identity. Bordowitz has said he’s long been inspired by the feminist practice of viewing the personal as political; at the same time, he’s also said he doesn’t intend to personalize his practice to the point of excluding others involved within the larger ideology by which he’s driven. By learning more about Bordowitz, a storyteller whose ability extends beyond his film and video making, we learn more about an era of our collective history and the beauty that coexists with its struggles. [Kathleen Sachs]
Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN (Poland)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here and the Music Box Theatre here
A Ukrainian masseur arrives in Warsaw and uses his (possibly magical) powers of suggestion to convince a steely bureaucrat to approve his work visa. This opening scene—with its almost humorous, vaguely Cronenbergian vibe—sets the stage for everything that follows in NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN, a magic realist drama with hints of allegory and social satire. Writer-director Małgorzata Szumowska and writer-director-cinematographer Michał Englert advance a poker-faced perspective, declining to provide authorial comment on the strange turn of events; like Cronenberg, they suspend the illusion that they didn’t create this fantasy, but are rather uncovering some dark secret that already exists in the world. Following the puzzling introduction, Szumowska and Englert jump forward in time to when their hero, Zhenia, has become hot property in a gated community outside the city. His wealthy clients can’t get enough of his touch; they eagerly strip for his massages and just as eagerly confess their personal secrets to him, even though he remains a closed book. The plot feels indebted to Pasolini’s TEOREMA, with Zhenia standing in for Terence Stamp’s mysterious stranger and massages taking the place of actual sex. But while NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN considers the longing for transcendence within a cloistered, upper-class milieu, it’s too wrapped up in the political reality of contemporary eastern Europe to feel derivative of Pasolini. As Guy Lodge noted in Variety, Zhenia’s mysterious otherness has a lot to do with his being Ukrainian: to his clients, who aspire to be like western Europeans, Zhenia represents an eastern culture they’d prefer to keep alien. (The filmmakers also raise the possibility that the hero gained his supernatural powers from growing up near Chernobyl.) Whatever it all means, the movie sustains fascination with its beguiling tone and striking widescreen compositions. (2020, 116 min) [Ben Sachs]
Mariam Ghani’s WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED (US/Afghanistan/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Now that Afghanistan is once again in a state of crisis, the local premiere of WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED provides welcome insight into that nation’s contentious modern history. The title refers explicitly to five films begun in Afghanistan between 1978 and 1991 and which were never completed due to government interference. Yet the title also hints at the unfinished nation-building efforts during this period by multiple organizations in Afghanistan: the Soviet Union, the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (which staged a coup in April 1978), and the mujahideen fighters of the 1980s. Mariam Ghani deftly interweaves the cinematic history lessons with the political ones, creating a portrait that seems towering despite the short running time. WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED recounts the enthusiasm felt by Afghan filmmakers at the time of heightened Soviet intervention into the national culture. As one interviewee notes, the Soviets recognized cinema’s power to indoctrinate audiences in the political outlook they hoped to spread, and they lavishly financed Afghan cinema in the hope of convincing viewers to embrace a pro-Communist worldview. Ghani expresses her skepticism of this project from the start, however, with an early title card that succinctly reads, “These movies imagine an ideal Afghan Communist Republic that only exists on film.” Her critical view of the Soviet Union carries over to her portrayals of the other political bodies, which seem just as blatant as the Soviets in their aim to use cinema as a political tool. (The various groups also seem to share in the view that history must be written in blood.) Even in the short clips presented, it’s clear who are the heroes and villains of the unfinished films, yet Ghani is careful not to disparage the artists who made them. WHAT WE LEFT UNFINISHED is highly sympathetic in its depictions of the actors and directors employed by the state film agency. They come across as creative individuals in spite of the state-serving messages they were forced to propagate. (2019, 71 min) [Ben Sachs]
🎞️ 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]
Jonathan Wysocki’s DRAMARAMA (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
On the last day of summer in 1994, a group of theater-obsessed friends gather to celebrate the end of high school by dressing up as their favorite Victorian literary figures, drinking Martinelli’s, and daring each other to give the middle finger on camera—not the typical exploits of a teen movie. In Jonathan Wysocki’s coming-of-age film, DRAMARAMA, Gene (Nick Pugliese) is pulling away from his friends, struggling to come out to them, and questioning the Christian upbringing that has tied them all together. Leader of the group, Rose (Anna Grace Barlow), is leaving for NYU and hosts a murder mystery slumber party for Gene and their group of friends (Nico Greetham, Danielle Kay, and Megan Suri) to say goodbye. At first, the atmosphere is frenzied, as the group revel in Rose’s planned evening of games, filled with literary and theatrical references. The night is interrupted by the appearance of J.D. (Zak Henri), the pizza deliveryman and friend of Gene’s, who also happens to be a recent high school dropout. J.D. immediately brings a more familiar vibe to the gathering, spiking the Martinelli’s with liquor and explaining why dropping out was the best decision he ever made. Despite leaving soon after, his presence haunts the rest of the evening, as the group faces their sheltered upbringing. It is easy to see why Gene gravitates more towards the open-minded J.D. than his current friends, who ridicule the idea of sex before marriage and play games that highlight their homophobia. In between the moments of bickering and tension, writer and director Wysocki also scatters in sincere fun, as the group quotes Mel Brooks films and dance to They Might Be Giants—an earnest portrayal of wavering friendships on the verge of profound change. While the group is well cast, Pugliese gives an especially touching performance, demonstrating the simultaneous love Gene has for his friends and the complete fear of their rejection should he come out to them. Danielle Kay, as the slightly wilder member of the group, Ally, also stands out, particularly as she anchors the emotional moments towards the end of the film. The promise of a traditional boisterous high school party hangs over the film, but ultimately DRAMARAMA is about the dynamics of the group—J.D. is the only outsider seen onscreen—and both how comforting high school friendships can be and knowing when it is time to let them go. (2020, 91 min) [Megan Fariello]
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]
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 Yun Tae Choi’s 2018 South Korean film BASEBALL GIRL (105 min). More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinémathèque
Paul Sattler’s 2021 film BROKEN DIAMONDS (90 min) is available to rent through August 19. More info here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Lou Jeunet’s 2021 French film CURIOSA (102 min) is available to rent starting this week.
More info and hold-over titles here, plus the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Guillaume Brac’s TREASURE ISLAND (France/Documentary)
Available to stream on MUBI.com (Subscription required)
TREASURE ISLAND is a rarity these days: a politically resonant documentary made with wit and subtlety. The title refers to a private water park near Paris; in the opening scene, children try to negotiate their way in but get turned away for being too young. If one detects an allegory about immigration here, the rest of the film confirms it. Like Frederick Wiseman, Brac is fascinated by institutions. (The summer hangout is a thread through most of his work, whether short or feature-length, documentary or narrative.) His sensibility is too nuanced to pass judgment on this park, but he brings out darker undertones nonetheless. TREASURE ISLAND is filled with beautifully framed long shots, and the subjects’ speech is edited onto shots in which they’re too distant to be seen. Brac finds personal stories within the larger context of the park: a 72-year-old man who insists he spent a platonic holiday there with a 20-year-old woman, an Afghan couple’s struggles to learn the French language and assimilate into their new home. The park benefits greatly from immigrants’ labor, and the reasons why many of those immigrants wound up in France are often horrifying. (One of the nighttime workers was a political prisoner in Guinea, Brac reveals.) TREASURE ISLAND balances a desire to show teenagers’ summertime pleasure with concern for the exploitation underneath it all (a recurring thread is a meeting of the businessmen running the park), and Brac employs transitions from bright morning to night as an underlying structure. In the end, another day will come around, and children will still want to sneak in. (2018, 97 min) [Steve Erickson]
Fred Walton’s WHEN A STRANGER CALLS BACK (US)
Available to stream on Amazon Prime Video (Subscription required) and for free on Tubi
Fred Walton’s frightening 1993 follow-up to WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (1979) echoes the earlier movie’s general narrative structure, starting with a bravura 20-minute-plus prologue in which a jaded high-schooler babysitting a well-heeled couple’s children gets terrorized by an unseen man. Walton renews his startling command of suspense and spatial orientation, establishing the makeup of the house (the sleeping kids upstairs, the telephone adjacent to the front door) and doling out seemingly mundane details (e.g., a gold doorknob) before Julia (Jill Schoelen) has her studies interrupted by a pleading stranger on the porch who claims to be having car trouble. Schoelen navigates her character’s essentially real-time behavior with amazing specificity, her nervous fidgeting and raspy vocal inflections charting an excruciating progression from typical adolescent annoyance to utter desperation. To a more powerful extent than its notorious predecessor, the made-for-television WHEN A STRANGER CALLS BACK foregrounds the debilitating ripple effects of trauma that women can face while going about the most banal tasks. Five years after the events of the prologue, Julia goes to college, living near campus in a triple-bolted, third-story apartment that she keeps sparsely furnished. She immediately scans her shelves and countertops upon coming home each day, making sure nothing is out of place. Jill Johnson (Carol Kane), the Jameson-clutching babysitter from the ’70s original, now works as a counselor at the university’s dean of women’s office and has the peace of mind of knowing her long-ago attacker is dead—but even she resides in a high-ceilinged apartment with an open layout and few narrow corridors. Julia volunteers at a crisis center hotline; Jill leads self-defense classes and accompanies Julia in purchasing a gun. Aside from Kane’s fabulous entrance—Jill strides confidently out of an elevator to commandeer an interview room from a cabal of smug, male police officers—the character’s survival smarts and go-it-alone intensity are presented not with triumph but with grim necessity. The returning presence of private investigator John Clifford (Charles Durning) helps uncover clues about the chillingly shape-shifting villain (Gene Lythgow), but Walton largely de-emphasizes this detective work in favor of observing Julia and Jill’s painstaking attempts to achieve some semblance of security. Through the heart-rending performances of Schoelen and Kane, this schlocky-sounding sequel turns into a devastating portrait of women courageously steeling themselves for whatever’s around the corner. (1993, 94 min) [Danny King]
CINE-LIST: August 13 - August 19, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Camden G. Bauchner, Cody Corrall, John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Danny King, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Glover Smith