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.
📽️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Music Box Theatre
See Venue website for all showtimes
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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Hayao Miyazki’s LUPIN III: THE CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO (Japan/Animation)
Saturday & Sunday, 11:30am, and Wednesday, 7:15pm
The first theatrical feature for which the great Hayao Miyazaki received directorial credit, THE CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO grew out of Miyazaki’s work on the Lupin III TV series (1971-72), an animated spin-off of Monkey Punch’s hugely popular manga series, which in turn was inspired by the Arsène Lupin stories by French author Maurice Leblanc. Given how far into global popular culture the film’s roots extend, it’s remarkable how much it feels like a Miyazaki work proper. The glorious set pieces demonstrate the director’s distinctive talents for building and sustaining suspense (tellingly, Steven Spielberg has long expressed admiration for them), while the winning humor reflects his good-natured humanism. In fact, Miyazaki received some flak for softening the edges on the character of career thief Arsène Lupin, who was typically portrayed as a cynical rogue but in this film emerges as a rake with a heart of gold. Yet the focus of CAGLIOSTRO isn’t really on Lupin (or Wolf, as he’s called here), but rather on the intricate settings and narrative twists, which conjure up an imaginary version of Europe to get lost in. Western culture is full of fantastical visions of the East; Miyazaki’s fantastical visions of the West (which arguably reach their apotheosis in HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE) provide fascinating counterparts to the Orientalist tradition. CAGLIOSTRO begins in medias res, as Lupin and his sidekick flee a casino on the Riviera in a car full of stolen money, the police following closely behind. During a rousing chase along mountain roads, the hero realizes the stolen money is counterfeit. He deduces that the phony bills were made in the small, fictional country of Cagliostro, then decides to head there and take advantage of the counterfeit printing presses. Lupin’s travels lead him to the title location, an immaculately designed fortress on the water marked by towering edifices, narrow spires, and lots of secret passages. Once inside, he encounters a princess who’s being forced to marry a devious count (one of the few purely evil characters in Miyazaki’s filmography); this news awakens the chivalrous hero in Lupin, and he plots to stop the wedding while seeking the castle’s fabled treasure. Naturally, he succeeds on both counts, but as Miyazaki has shown throughout his career, great storytelling has little to do with whether the outcome is surprising and much more to do with the emotional significance granted to every object, complication, and bit of characterization. (1979, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Also showing at the Music Box Theatre are Neill Blomkamp’s 2021 film DEMONIC (105 min, DCP Digital), David Lowery’s 2020 film THE GREEN KNIGHT (126 min, DCP Digital), and CatVideoFest (72 min, Digital Projection) on Tuesday at 7:15pm. Check Venue website for all showtimes and the Music Box Garden Series line-up.
Gene Siskel Film Center
See Venue website for all 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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Julie Dash's DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (American Revival)
Saturday, 7pm
The narrator of Julie Dash's DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST is more than just a character in the story—she’s a symbolic representation of the film itself. The unborn child who tells the tale of the Peazant family in their last days before migrating north is as much a reflection of the past as she is of the future; all that has come before her is as intrinsic as the blood in her relative’s veins, and it's that history which propels them along trying and changing times. The Peazant family are inhabitants of the southern Sea Islands and members of its Gullah culture, having preserved the identity of their African heritage in spite of institutional slavery and post-war oppression. Before the move, the matriarch of the Peazant family contemplates her native beliefs while the family's younger members overcome their personal struggles. Rape and prostitution afflict several of them, and the scorn from both society and their own clan presents the unique obstacle of African-American women within an already disparaged race. Dash also brilliantly uses magical realism as a filmmaking device that’s reflective of the characters' ethereal culture. It was the first feature-length film by an African-American woman to receive theatrical release, and its historical context and female-oriented storyline set it apart from other films of the time and other films put out by fellow members of the L.A. Rebellion. (1991, 112 min, DCP Digital) [Kathleen Sachs]
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Part of the Chicago Favorites series, with an introduction from Chaz Ebert.
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Braden King’s THE EVENING HOUR (US)
Set in a small Appalachian town, THE EVENING HOUR straddles the line between devastating and understated in its depiction of the opioid crisis, examining a community of people who are hooked, were hooked, or get others hooked. Cole Freeman (Philip Ettinger, in a lived-in performance) is one of the latter, caring for the old and needy while giving out their unused prescription medication to addicts around the city. Braden King moves the film at a methodical, almost wearisome pace, following Cole as he becomes the one person who can save nearly everyone around him. Lili Taylor and Tess Harper, in supporting roles, certainly help King’s cause, as the professionals surrounding the younger, less experienced performers in the cast; they can fill up a room when given only a few lines. THE EVENING HOUR is a pressing film, given the constantly swirling stories about the opioid epidemic. The gorgeous landscapes stand in stark contrast with the ravaged town, unable to escape its addictions. The film also deserves a watch for the performances alone. (2021, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Frank]
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Cine-File Associate Editor Kat Sachs and contributor Rob Christopher will moderate post-screening Q&As with King after the Friday, 6:30pm screening and Saturday, 3:30pm, respectively.
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Federico Fellini’s LA STRADA (Italy)
Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 6:30pm
Featuring one of the most expressively iconic performances in cinema history, LA STRADA is a visually lyrical character study. Director Federico Fellini’s approach to the film straddles the neorealism style of post-World War II Italian cinema and his later, more surrealist works like LA DOLCE VITA (1960) and 8 ½ (1963). LA STRADA tells the story of Gelsomina (the remarkable Giulietta Masina), a childlike young woman who’s purchased from her mother by the cruel Zampanò (Anthony Quinn), a traveling strongman performer. He trains her to entertain crowds as a clown and play music as he performs his act. Despite Gelsomina’s eagerness to learn and to please, Zampanò is an abusive caretaker. The film follows their travels on the road, as they eventually join up with a circus that includes high-wire performer, Il Matto (Richard Baseheart), who relentlessly teases Zampanò. The two men’s rivalry leads to tragedy for the sensitive Gelsomina. LA STRADA combines a sense of fantasy—with the circus setting and musical performances—with the harsh reality that Gelsomina is forced to navigate. It is heartbreaking to watch her enthusiasm waver as she faces the challenges of life on the road with Zampanò. The cinematography is impressively affecting throughout, concentrating on emotional beats rather than story, and supporting the outstanding performances; THE GODFATHER composer Nino Rota adds to this with his moving score. LA STRADA, however, most fully belongs to Giulietta Masina whose face, both in and out of clown makeup, is incredibly expressive, bringing poignancy to every scene. She is extraordinary to watch, and it is near impossible not to be moved by her performance. (1954, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Federico Fellini's I VITELLONI (Italy)
Sunday, 12pm
According to history Federico Fellini's second feature, I VITELLONI, should have never 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 of loosely stitched-together episodes and adventures. These vitellonis (a cross between the Italian for beef and veal and 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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Also showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center is Ashley O’Shay’s 2021 documentary UNAPOLOGETIC (86 min, DCP Digital), with filmmakers and subjects appearing in person at several screenings. Check Venue website for all showtimes.
Robert Wiene's THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Germany/Silent)
Comfort Film at Elastic Arts (3429 W. Diversey Ave.) – Wednesday, 8pm [Free]
This classic film begins with a young man named Francis (Friedrich Feher) telling the story of the eerie Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) to his friend. One day, Caligari (similar to Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse) arrives in the small town of Holstenwall to present his somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who sleeps in a coffin-like cabinet, at their fair. When the fair ends, the first in a series of mysterious crimes occurs with the murder of the town clerk, and Francis determines to find the culprit. Not only is THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI the first feature horror film, but also it is the earliest key example in cinema of German Expressionism, deeply influential in the development of film noir. Designed by the exceptionally talented Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Rohrig, the film's studio sets, comprised of painted canvas backdrops, distort one's sense of space to heighten the fear and anxiety experienced by both the characters and audience. Wiene favors the iris shot in capturing the actors and their exaggerated actions, but he uses rectangles and diamonds in addition to circles, mirroring the fundamental shapes seen in the fantastical sets and costumes; these same shapes or combinations thereof appear in the images that the intertitles are set against. Also, the sets inform the stylization of acting, particularly by Krauss and Veidt who previously worked in Expressionist theater. In The Haunted Screen, film critic and historian Lotte Eisner perfectly described the greatness of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI and the first films of Richard Oswald, "These works blithely married a morbid Freudianism and an Expressionistic exaltation to the romantic fantasies of Hoffmann and Eichendorff, and to the tortured soul of contemporary Germany seemed, with their overtones of death, horror and nightmare, the reflection of its own grimacing image, offering a kind of release." (1920, 80 min, Digital Projection) [Candace Wirt]
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Part of Comfort Film’s occasional “Silent Films and Loud Music” series. Capacity is limited; RSVP here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Quentin Reynaud's FINAL SET (France)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theater here
It seems that boxing has been the subject of more substantial narrative films than any other sport. This makes it all the more surprising that tennis, which has been concisely and accurately described as "boxing from a distance," has been the subject of so few. The best tennis movies have been documentaries centered on Roland Garros (the tournament more colloquially known as the French Open), such as William Klein's eye-opening behind-the-scenes account THE FRENCH (1982) or Julien Faraut's JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION (2018), a quirky portrait of the great American player's French Open campaign in 1984. Tennis fans should therefore make it a point to catch FINAL SET, a fiction film set at Roland Garros that was made by someone who clearly knows and loves the sport. This isn't to say that FINAL SET is without conventional aspects. It's a familiar underdog story in many respects: the story focuses on an aging French player, curiously named Thomas Edison (Alex Lutz), who makes a final bid for glory by attempting to qualify for his country's most prestigious tournament, in spite of the fact that his best years are behind him. Edison's most formidable obstacles aren't physical (e.g., the chronic blisters on his racquet hand or his thrice surgically-repaired knee); rather, they come in the form of opposition from his wife (a terrific Ana Girardot), who sees his waning days on tour as a money-losing proposition, and from his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas, doing her best in a stereotypical domineering-mommy part), who publicly chastises him for not being mentally tough enough. To his credit, writer-director Quentin Reynaud is never guilty of dumbing down the logistics of the game in order to appeal to a broader audience. Instead, he allows 20 minutes of real-time match play, a thrillingly shot and edited sequence, to serve as the film's climax; and Lutz, in addition to turning in a compelling performance as an athlete raging against the dying of the light, is also a genuinely fine tennis player himself, utterly convincing as a pro (something that can't be said about, say, Kirsten Dunst in WIMBLEDON or Shia LaBeouf in BORG VS. MCENROE). (2021, 105 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
🎞️ 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]
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]
Ira Deutchman’s SEARCHING FOR MR. RUGOFF (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
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) [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]
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 (daughter of the recently deposed Afghan president Mohammad Ashraf 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]
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 Daniel Gordon’s 2019 Australian film THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM (105 min), featuring a conversation with Gordon on the streaming platform. More info here.
⚫ Facets Cinémathèque
Timothy Covell’s 2021 film BLOOD CONSCIOUS (81 min) is available to rent starting this week through September 2.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Heinz Brinkmann’s 2019 documentary USEDOM (95 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.
🎞️ ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s OUR HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY (Germany)
Available for rent through Vimeo here
Perhaps more people have heard of or read about Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s experimental, stage-bound OUR HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY than have seen it. Among film critics, its daunting seven-and-a-half-hour length and expository style have led to “helpful” suggestions that it could be cut by, say, four hours for a more taut and incisive presentation. As anyone with even a passing acquaintance with German culture (e.g., Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Richard Wagner’s operas, Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA [1938], the TV series Tartort [1970–present]) knows, nothing says German like excessive length. Therefore, I say that if you can’t take die wärme get out of die küche. Syberberg doesn’t appear to have been particularly interested in entertaining his audience. Seeing the danger of fascist backsliding among his German contemporaries, he chose a multimedia exploration of the rise and fall of the Third Reich that exposes Adolf Hitler as a mere human being who, much like Machiavelli, figured out a way to ascend legally to the highest government position in Germany’s rather young democracy and impose his grandiose agenda. The film is broken into four parts: 1) The Grail - From the Cosmic Ash-Tree to the Goethe Oak of Buchenwald; 2) A German Dream... Until the End of the World; 3) The End of a Winter’s Tale and the Final Victory of Progress; and 4) We Children of Hell Recall the Age of the Grail. You can tell by these titles that Syberberg is interested in the mythic and psychological aspects of Nazism, which he emphasizes by liberally scoring the film with musical quotes from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In these discrete parts, he puts us inside the hopes, dreams, and delusions that created a critical mass primed for Nazism in Germany and the mechanics and manipulations that saw it flower—the cult of personality that arose around Hitler, the propaganda surrounding the tenets of Aryanism, the development of the Final Solution, and the wreckage and opportunism that followed the fall of Hitler’s regime. Each section examines particular aspects of Nazism, like the cult of personality; this part uses direct quotes from the nonfiction recollections of Hitler’s valet and his adjutant about the minutiae of Hitler’s daily routine and personal piques as though the Führer was a rock star whose adoring fans wanted to know anything and everything about their idol. Part 3 shifts focus from Hitler to Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, who ruminates (while getting a belly massage!) on the need for the sensitive Germans who abhorred what they were doing to the Jews to see the mass murders as necessary to bring about the utopia of an Aryan world. Keeping one foot in reality, Syberberg draws from radio broadcasts by Goebbels and other top Nazi officials, as well as news in English. Almost poignantly, he plays the last broadcast of the German Armed Forces, which touts victories at several locations, but acknowledges obliquely the surrender that will take place the next day. Syberberg also employs puppets and rear projection in sometimes difficult-to-parse ways; for Part 4, in which one of his actors reads the unfilmed parts of the script for almost the entire section, rear projections seem to be there just to give audiences something to look at. In the end, Syberberg deploys his daughter, Amelie, to roam through the detritus of the Third Reich carrying a toy dog with Hitler’s face, his warning about future generations who hold onto the comfort of a man whose promise is still to be kept. It is impossible to watch this film in 2021 and not see how Donald Trump, an avid student of Hitler’s speeches and techniques, awakened the terrible dream that, like Siegfried’s dragon, is always lurking below the surface, waiting to set the world on fire. (1978, 442 minutes) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s THE VIEWING BOOTH (USA/Israel/Documentary)
Available to stream through BBC Reel here
Near the end of THE VIEWING BOOTH, the film's subject, Maia Levy, says, “Sometimes when you question your beliefs and come up with better answers, they reinforce your beliefs even more.” This brief, stripped-down documentary sets Levy in front of highly charged videos of Israeli soldiers’ interactions with Arabs and presents her reactions. Made in Philadelphia when Israeli director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz was teaching at Temple University, the film began as a project where Alexandrowicz recorded seven college students watching selections from a bank of 40 videos. Twenty were made by the Israeli human rights organization B’tseleme, the others by the IDF and conservative Israeli YouTube channels. The results demonstrate how easily critical thinking can lead to conservative outcomes and reinforce confirmation bias. Faced with Israeli soldiers breaking into a house and terrorizing children for no stated reason, Maia compares the footage to reality shows like Jersey Shore and the Real Housewives series. Her reaction brings to mind queer-theory scholar Eve Kovofsky Sedgwick’s idea that when state violence becomes visible, a battle of interpretative methods and conclusions arises, rather than a path to one simple truth. Watching videos that suggest uncomfortable facts about Israeli power, Maia shuts down the possibility that they are indeed telling the truth, raising criticisms of editing and camera positions that might be perfectly reasonable but end up giving more credence to her suspicions of Arabs and leftist Israelis. (She’s even more suspicious of a video showing soldiers giving cheese to grateful Arab children.) Given how short this film is, I wished that it had included the entire video she watches, but THE VIEWING BOOTH only shows fragments of her viewing, with roughly a third of it consisting of close-ups of her face. (Obviously, the film offers a partial vision of Maia’s experience in that booth, and she herself points out the subjectivity of the way she’s photographed.) Alexandrowicz made THE VIEWING BOOTH after reaching a point of ethical and political crisis about the making and reception of his first two films, THE INNER TOUR and THE LAW IN THESE PARTS, but the film suggests something much larger about the notion of shared truth collapsing into incoherence and hostility, as material reality becomes fictionalized merely by being filmed. (2019, 71 min) [Steve Erickson]
CINE-LIST: August 20 - August 26, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Camden G. Bauchner, John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Michael Glover Smith, Candace Wirt