Cine-File continues to cover streaming and other online offerings during this time of covidity. We will list/highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, and list streaming/online screenings below. Cine-File takes no position on whether theaters should be reopening, nor on whether individuals should be attending in-person. Check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place.
CINE-FILE SELECTS: SON OF THE WHITE MARE
In partnership with film distributor Arbelos, Cine-File is presenting the exclusive Chicago virtual screening of Marcell Jankovics’ 1981 animated Hungarian feature SON OF THE WHITE MARE, in a stunning new digital restoration. The film is available here for two weeks; rental is $10, with half the proceeds going to Cine-File (funds will be used for general expenses, future programming, and to provide honoraria to our contributors).
Cine-File may be presenting additional virtual screenings (primarily new restorations of retrospective titles) if this first one proves successful.
---
Read a recent interview with Jankovics on the film, its restoration, and reception here.
---
Marcell Jankovics' SON OF THE WHITE MARE (Hungary/Animation)
SON OF THE WHITE MARE, the landmark 1981 feature by Hungarian animation prodigy Marcell Jankovics, belongs to an elite echelon of films that includes Lotte Reiniger’s THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED, Walt Disney’s FANTASIA, and Hayao Miyazaki’s SPIRITED AWAY: personal, utterly singular works by visionary artists, which nonetheless tap into something axiomatic about the life-bestowing art of film animation. Though Jankovics is venerated in Hungary with the same intensity as Disney and Miyazaki, SON OF THE WHITE MARE has never been distributed in the United States, until the Los Angeles-based distributor Arbelos Films partnered this year with the Hungarian National Film Institute to present this 4k restoration from the original camera negative. It’s a cause for celebration and an invitation to awestruck contemplation.
SON OF THE WHITE MARE is a Modernist fairy tale, a horny Hungarian creation myth, but first and foremost, it is high-calorie eye candy, a showcase for sublime orchestrations of sound, color, and movement. So great are the film’s sensory rewards that, in the first ten minutes, I found myself completely absorbed in the abstract drama of light and shadow, scarcely conscious of the mythological groundwork being laid. (I’d probably love the movie just as much if I watched it upside down by mistake.) A supreme colorist, Jankovics sends pools of bold monochrome around the frame with unlikely elegance, favoring symmetrical compositions that sometimes resemble pop-art altarpieces. His figures are big, flat masses of blue, yellow, red, and green whose contours throb with activity even while at rest. Shading and texture are reserved mostly for the backgrounds, built up with layers of supple watercolors, washes, and aerosols; pause on almost any frame, and you’ll encounter an image whose beauty, ingenuity, and material economy are harmoniously unified.
Jankovics claims to have animated a third of the film himself, and his wit and sensibility are stamped unmistakably throughout. But the distinctive aesthetics of SON OF THE WHITE MARE are not quite sui generis: beyond the immediate influences from the world of animation (Disney, the Hubleys, and, yes, THE YELLOW SUBMARINE), Jankovics draws deeply on decorative and folk-art traditions, as well as on the 20th-century geometric and chromatic innovations of the Bauhaus. This lively tug-of-war between folk and modernist styles extends to the brilliant soundtrack, where dialogues drawn from 19th-century narrative poems of László Arany are treated electronically, accompanied by sound design and a score composed entirely with synthesized sound by István Vajda. While other animated films with electronic soundtracks (like René Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET and Piotr Kamler’s CHRONOPOLIS) can feel dated today, there’s something incredibly fresh about the juxtaposition of traditional fairy-tale forms and abstract sound here.
Less contemporary-feeling is the narrative itself—a masculinist fable about three dragon-slaying human sons of a divine horse, bound together in a quest to liberate a captive princess and restore order to the world. Jankovics’ treatment of the material distills the cosmological essence of the source material, but regular flashes of phallic symbolism prove that his interest isn’t strictly spiritual per se. Playing on the proximity of the sacred and profane, SON OF THE WHITE MARE reaches back to Hungary’s pagan roots, pointedly braiding its narrative around symbols and totems such as animals, trees, and personifications of natural phenomena. While outwardly nationalistic, this animist appeal also unites Jankovics with Disney and Miyazaki, natural philosophers whose gift for bringing still frames to life has the aura of magic. Sergei Eisenstein observed, in regards to the work of Disney, “the very idea, if you will, of the animated cartoon is like a direct embodiment of the method of animism.” (More colorfully, art critic Dave Hickey called Disney “a freaking pagan cult...promoting a primitive, animist religion dedicated to investing everything with life, to animating everything from teacups to trees, from carpets to houses, from ducks to mice, with the pulse of human aspiration.”) If Jankovics is a great animator, it is not only because he is a peerless stylist and technician; it is because his gift brings him, and us, closer to this Promethean essence of the animated form.
Hungary’s pagan history seems like an unlikely subject for a state-sponsored film from a Soviet Bloc country. SON OF THE WHITE MARE was produced under the auspices of the Pannonia Film Studio, the state-run animation studio where Jankovics began working as a teenager in the early 1960s. (Pannonia produced Jankovics’ debut feature, 1973’s delightful JÁNOS VITÉSZ, which was the first feature-length Hungarian animated film, and which is also newly available from Arbelos). Like Poland and the Czech Republic, Hungary was a major exporter of prize-winning animated films to festivals around the world at this time. These works offered an appealing image of state socialism’s creative fertility, suggesting possibilities of form freed from the commercial demands that hindered many artists in the West; they also frequently belied the repressive conditions faced by artists working under Communism.
Such is the case with SON OF THE WHITE MARE. As the director explained, his original concept for the film “explored the concept of the recurring nature of time and space. But the studio manager wouldn’t allow [him] to make it because of its anti-Marxist interpretation of time! According to Marxism, time is irreversible.” Yet this instance of censorship simply goes to prove how provocative, or even revolutionary, Jankovics’ pagan symbolism might have felt at the time. Astonishingly experimental and perceptually disorienting, SON OF THE WHITE MARE has frequently been described as “psychedelic,” but I believe the term “shamanic” is more apt. After all, the practice of “taltosism,” or native shamanism, began to reemerge in Hungary in the 1980s not long after its release, significantly gaining in momentum after the collapse of Communism by the decade’s end. Might it be that Jankovics summoned an incipient pagan spirit building up in the Hungarian soul at the time? Perhaps it’s an outlandish thought, but to see SON OF THE WHITE MARE is to be reminded that great works of film art don’t just animate characters on screen—they also animate us. (1981, 86 min) [Michael Metzger]
PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Claire Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL (France)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes (also available to rent here)
Claire Denis's BEAU TRAVAIL is a film of sweltering, oppressive heat; a sun-drenched rendering of Melville's Billy Budd that unfurls across the deserts of Djibouti, where a troop of French legionnaires perform a dance of drills and exercises as daily ritual. The men are soldiers, athletes, and the embodiment of physical perfection, and Denis venerates their physique with framing that recalls Leni Riefenstahl's ode to human beauty, OLYMPIA. Day in and day out, they adhere to strictly choreographed routine, their mechanized motions made downright hypnotic by the operatic overtones of Benjamin Britten. At the center of this tightly wound fever dream is Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), whose own unflappable façade begins to crack upon the arrival of a new legionnaire, whose inherent beauty and goodness marks him as an object of obsession. It's here that the film's stifling (yet eloquent) discipline begins to clash with deeply repressed desire, and Galoup sets events in motion that will that will bring about his own undoing. Most notable is the unshakable denouement, where one tragic soldier at the end of his rope at last finds his ideal form of expression. Suddenly, Galoup is dancing a very different dance, and as the periodic flashes of local nightlife foreshadow, salvation may just lie in the universal escape of pop music. (1999, 92 min, Digital Projection) [Tristan Johnson]
Werner Herzog’s NOMAD: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BRUCE CHATWIN (UK/Documentary)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes (also available to rent here)
When British writer Bruce Chatwin died in 1989 at the untimely age of 48, I remember reading in an obituary that the cause of death was a rare fungus acquired in China or some other remote region he had visited in his search for the strangeness on planet Earth. In fact, he died of AIDS, something he was loathe to reveal. Fans might even have preferred to think of him going out as strangely as he lived, but truth was really Chatwin’s beat. The best testaments to Chatwin’s explorations are his travel books, novels, and journalism, but kindred spirit Werner Herzog also wanted to pay tribute to his friend and colleague with NOMAD: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BRUCE CHATWIN. Like the subject of Chatwin’s The Songlines, which examines the Australian Aborigines’ notion that their land was sung into being by singers across the continent, Herzog wills his friend back into being by traveling to the places where their stories converge—in Ghana, where Herzog filmed an adaptation of Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Ouidah; in Patagonia, where both were drawn for different reasons; in Wales, where a large Neolithic compound built along lay lines felt like home to Chatwin. Herzog samples from Chatwin’s own recordings of his books, including his “origin” story of finding a prehistoric skin remnant in his grandmother’s curiosity cabinet and determining to visit the site where it was found. He interviews Chatwin’s widow, his biographer, one of his female lovers, and subject-matter experts on the people and places Chatwin examined. And he excerpts from his own movies to juxtapose his own obsessions with those of the man who was like a brother to him, including an oddly disturbing courtship ritual that he says was the last thing Chatwin saw before he lapsed into a coma. Herzog’s films are never less than visually powerful, and NOMAD certainly fits in with that tradition, including a sequence in a cave full of prehistoric paintings of animals and handprints that practically namechecks Herzog’s brilliant 3D documentary CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010). The director also does his best to keep the focus on his subject, though that is sometimes a struggle for him. He fetishizes the leather rucksack that belonged to Chatwin, fantasizing that it helped keep him alive during a ferocious ice storm, only to admit that his two companions also survived without the rucksack. For both Herzog and Chatwin, strangeness and primordial magic were to be pursued and experienced wherever they occur, leading them through their parallel nomadic explorations to acts of creation. NOMAD is an essay and love letter from one seeker to another. It’s a unique expression of humanity that I think we all need now more than ever. (2019, 85 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Christopher Nolan’s TENET (US)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
Christopher Nolan has a fascination with time in nearly all of his movies, whether it’s the dilation of time as in INTERSTELLAR, the deconstruction of narrative time as in MEMENTO, or telling a story utilizing different increments of time as in DUNKIRK. TENET marks the first time in which he actually tackles time travel. The film centers on a CIA agent known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) who’s placed on a mission to stop a global terror threat that could end the world. His only hope to accomplish this task is through the use of time inversion, which essentially allows him to interact with the world around him while time flows in reverse. TENET is Nolan’s most technically accomplished film, with ornate, awe-inspiring action sequences and impressive visual effects, many of which are accomplished in camera. It’s a clear homage to many of the James Bond films and, particularly, to the grand, often-times outlandish global plots found in that franchise’s entries from the ‘90’s and ‘00’s. In fact, the entire film seems to be constructed around its grandiose moments of visual splendor. Much of the film’s exposition relies on key-conversations amongst The Protagonist and several other characters, which can be frustratingly difficult to comprehend at times due to TENET’s sound design, which prioritizes the cacophony of its action sequences and its booming score. Nevertheless, the film offers viewers many clues needed to unlock its narrative puzzle, though, like other Nolan films, it may demand multiple viewings to fully decript. (2020, 151 min, 70mm) [Kyle Cubr]
Also screening at the Music Box this week is Julius Berg’s 2020 film THE OWNERS (92 min, DCP Digital). More info (including COVID policies) at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee) presents a socially-distanced outdoor screening of John Paizs’ 1985 Canadian film CRIME WAVE (80 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info (including COVID policies) here.
The Chicago Latino Film Festival presents a socially-distanced “pop-up” screening of Hernán Finding and Oliver Kolker’s 2013 Argentinean film TANGO GLORIES (117 min, Digital Projection) at Joe's on Weed St. (940 W. Weed St.) on Tuesday at 7pm. Tickets available here.
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Hubert Sauper’s EPICENTRO (Austria/France/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
The newest documentary by Academy Award nominated filmmaker Hubert Sauper explores the contemporary world of post-colonial Cuba. Sauper spent three years living in Cuba, befriending locals and the children he has referred to as “prophetic youth,” whom he made the focal point of this film. We see how erudite these per-pubescent children really are as they educate us on the history of colonialism in Cuba and even bring up particular articles of the Platt Amendment as explanation. Sauper follows these children, at once politically indoctrinated, but equally philosophical, and counterbalances their story with a dissection of film and media itself. As a documentarian Sauper is very much aware of the dynamics of filmmaker vs. subject, and filmmaking as tourism. We see an unnamed NYC photographer taking pictures of locals and pontificating paternal about how bad they have it—pure poverty tourism. After taking the photograph of one child, the child asks for compensation. The photographer gives him a pen from New York City, and then goes on to tell about how one girl asked for money and he refused because its “an honor to be photographed” by him. Immediately we can see the line between that and Sauper’s filmmaking, the exploitation of the former and the amplification of voice of the latter. While this is an indirect delineation, it fits into the greater narrative that Sauper has been weaving about the power of the image. The term “epicentro” here refers to the city of Havana as the epicenter of not just Cuba, but American Imperialism, the Cold War, and European imperialism itself. Havana was where the Spaniards staked their flag. Cuba, the first place the Americans did. Looking through the lens of imperialism at the lens of cinema, Sauper shows how recreated images of executions and naval battles in the nascent days of cinema were sold to the US public as documentary in order to sell war and imperialism. The echoes of the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine are a theme throughout the film. EPICENTRO goes far beyond the usual documentary of modern Cuba—there are no cigars, and the old cars are referenced as a symptom of a larger situation. Here we have Cubans at the center of the film, not Cuba or Cuban politics. EPICENTRO focuses on Cubans and their history. This distinction is paramount, and makes EPICENTRO far more relevant that its peers. (2020, 108 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Tsai Ming-liang’s THE HOLE (Taiwan)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Among the myriad defining characteristics of the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang, perhaps none is as instantly evocative as the steady trickle of rain, tears, urine, and assorted other liquids that pervasively dampens his environments and characters. Water doesn’t just run across so many of the auteur’s films, it threatens to overflow them, seeping through walls and floors as the emergence of something insufficiently repressed, revealing the sometimes-stubborn boundaries of both modern Taipei and the human soul as, in fact, profoundly porous. Amazingly, in this most pluvial of filmographies, THE HOLE is possibly the drippiest of them all, or at least the one in which leakage takes on the most central metaphorical significance. Sometime just before the turn of the 21st century, a mysterious virus has taken over Taiwan, afflicting its victims with crazed, cockroach-like behavior. Despite mass evacuations and warnings that the government will shut off water in quarantined zones, a man (Lee Kang-sheng) and the woman living below him (Yang Kuei-mei) stay put in their apartments. If cabin fever weren’t enough to deal with, a botched plumbing operation has left a rubble-strewn hole in the floor separating the two units. Suddenly, these isolated strangers are made vexingly aware of their close proximity, with the cavity serving as a passageway for all manner of solids, liquids, aerosols, sounds, and, inevitably, appendages (it must be noted, however, that the prurient possibilities here are left strictly to the imagination). With echoes of the stifled would-be lovers of VIVE L’AMOUR and the psychosomatic malaise of the previous year’s THE RIVER, Tsai engages here in some of his most succinct, deadpan observations about the strange tensions of apartment dwelling and the percolating anomie of contemporary life. Yet what stands out about THE HOLE is not so much the dribbling, depopulated quasi-dystopia Tsai would hone to an acid tip with STRAY DOGS, but its surprising romanticism. At regular intervals, the film bursts into Technicolor song, with Yang’s frustrated, toilet paper-hoarding tenant lip-syncing 50s hits by Chinese chanteuse Grace Chang. Tsai figures these numbers explicitly as the woman’s fantasies, eventually bringing in her neighbor—now with pompadour—for some enchanting pas de deux. Humorously juxtaposing the bright music and dance of the fantasy with the dark, dank interiors and despondency of his end-of-the-millennium “reality,” Tsai validates a kind of movie escapism that for so long has served to inspire people in times of anxiety. Totally earnest or ironic, its insistent presence alone nevertheless reflects an impulse, a need, to believe in something better waiting on the other side. It’s yet one more element in Tsai’s cinema that punctures the dam, letting loose a flood of feeling that can hardly be contained. (1998, 90 min) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s SICILIA! (France/Italy)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Throughout their venerated partnership, the filmmaking team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet drew on work by writers as diverse as Franz Kafka, Frederich Engels, and Sophocles. Regardless of who they adapted, Straub and Huillet were faithful to their source material, often having actors deliver long passages of the original text in a declamatory manner so the language created its own music. Given their love of the spoken word, it’s possible that the duo chose to adapt Elio Vittorini’s 1941 novel Conversations in Sicily because of the title alone. SICILIA! contains plenty of conversations, but it also contains passages of silent contemplation where the directors patiently observe faces and landscapes. This dichotomy between speech and reflection generates a fascinating artistic tension. Like the Vittorini novel, SICILIA! concerns a man’s brief return to his village in Sicily after living away for 15 years. (Where the hero had been living in Milan in the book, here he’s coming home from New York City.) The narrative takes place over the course of a day where he arrives on the island, travels by train, and reunites with his mother for a home-cooked meal; each leg of his journey is punctuated by a ruminative discussion with someone he meets. The conversations touch on cultural traditions and the differences between Italy and the United States, but they’re grounded in prosaic details about eating habits, speech patterns, and the like—even the mother’s reminiscence about the hero’s impoverished childhood centers on what the family could afford to eat. Literary critics have praised Conversations in Sicily for its subtle, allegorical critique of fascist Italy and for its non-naturalistic style. On the other hand, the politics of SICILIA! are difficult to parse and the images, while gloriously lit and composed, are generally plainspoken. (The great William Lubtchansky was the principal cinematographer.) Still, Straub and Huillet render each of the hero’s encounters so tantalizing that one senses hidden meanings behind all of them; the film opens the door for a wide range of interpretations. (1999, 67 min) [Ben Sachs]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Jonás Trueba’s THE AUGUST VIRGIN (Spain)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
THE AUGUST VIRGIN announces its intentions right from the start, when Eva (Itsaso Arana) is ushered into the Madrid apartment she will live in for the first two weeks of August by its current occupant, who is leaving the city to escape the oppressive heat and settle his recently deceased mother’s estate. He tells her he is working on an article about American philosopher Stanley Cavell and the influence of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson on Cavell’s work. He explains to Eva that Cavell is best known for his book on 1930s Hollywood comedies, Pursuits of Happiness, and voices his admiration for actors like Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn who were self-possessed and strong. This opening sets the stage for Eva’s quest to discover her true self as she moves through her picturesque hometown by day and celebrates the festivals of San Cayetano, San Lorenzo, and La Paloma by night, going out with friends, having long talks about life, and wondering what it takes to really emerge into adulthood. Arana wrote the screenplay, and she hones in on the issues that matter to women in their thirties and what it looks like to let go of limitless possibilities and put some stakes in the ground. THE AUGUST VIRGIN will hit many viewers where they live; for those long past this stage of life, Eva’s struggle is a bit nostalgic and very touching. (2019, 125 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Barbara Kopple’s DESERT ONE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
In DESERT ONE, Barbara Kopple explores US-Iranian relations before, during, and after the capture of 52 Americans at the United States Embassy in Tehran and their holding as hostages for 444 days during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The documentary offers a fascinating and in-depth look at the covert extraction attempted in 1980 through a combination of archival footage, animated reenactments, and interviews with some of the hostages, members of the extraction plan (including Jimmy Carter), and some of the Iranians who played witness during the entire affair. Kopple’s storytelling approach here is methodical, candid, and thorough. She seemingly leaves no stone unturned to tell the most complete version of the narrative possible. This process not only offers an emotional connection to the parties involved but also provides thorough context to what both America and Iran were thinking at the time. The documentary also serves a s a vehicle to discuss the political discourse happening in the U.S. during the 1980 presidential election between Carter and Reagan, while providing a platform for Carter to provide a post-mortem of sorts on the event that came to define the final year of his presidency. Considering the endless saber-rattling that characterizes the present-day foreign policy between the United States and Iran, DESERT ONE shows that relative civility existed between the two countries despite obvious tensions in the late 70’s-early 80’s, and that perhaps there is a path for reconciliation one day. (2019, 108 min) [Kyle Cubr]
Daria Price's DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
There are few things in the world that give me more joy that a well-played hoax. Hoaxes, schemes, scams, swindles, or cons, I love them all. They really show you how fragile our society actually is. How so much of what we believe to be a bedrock of society is really just blind faith that what everyone else is saying or doing is actually true. But an art hoax? These might be my favorite hoaxes of all time. Art is so arbitrary already. The idea that there is a multi-billion-dollar industry that is the art world balancing on pieces of art is so fascinating. I often don’t understand how it works, and how everyone can be so sure that a painting worth $10 million actually is just that. DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION illuminates this issue by focusing on one of the greatest art hoaxes of all time, one with $80 million worth of forgeries—resulting in the closing of the oldest art gallery in NYC. The documentary investigates the scandal surrounding the Knoedler art gallery and its director, Ann Freedman. I say investigates because the film comes off very much like reportage. There’s a dryness to it that feels like a long form article in an arts magazine, or newspaper, more so than a film. We get a very standard amount of talking heads (mostly experts) and the ubiquitous partial zooms of still photos that so many modern docs have, all with a background score of mostly ignorable smooth jazz. But even with the formal elements of the film perhaps leaving something to be desired, the story itself is utterly fascinating; how the high minded, exclusive art world of NYC got tricked by an unknown Latinx art dealer and a Chinese immigrant painter is a story of hubris, deception, and self-deception. Frustratingly absent are interviews with those who pulled off the scam; we’re only left with the side of those who were had by them or eventually caught them, leaving a bit of one-sidedness to this oh-so-curious tale. Even so, we still have some of these experts tacitly admitting that which all of us on the outside of the art world wonder every day, “All of this is kinda bullshit, but that’s just the way it is.” It’s rare to have a secretive curtain pulled back by the gatekeepers themselves, especially on film. DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION satisfies if you’re at all interested the story of a great hoax, as an erudite discussion of what makes art valuable, or you just want a peek into the exclusive world of high-end NYC art dealings. (2020, 84 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Bas Devos’ GHOST TROPIC (Belgium)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
The first shot of Bas Devos’ GHOST TROPIC depicts a domestic interior, well kept despite some slight hints of untidiness; over four full minutes, nothing moves within the frame except the light, dimming as night falls. Eventually, shadows consume the screen, and a whispered voice on the soundtrack claims the space as her own, as a labor of love and a container of memories. “But if suddenly, a stranger appearing from nowhere were to enter this room,” the voice asks, “what would he see, what would he hear? And would he feel anything by being here?” Like the patience-testing shot, this question offers a muted provocation to the viewer, asking us to strain our eyes and ears to absorb the richness of quiet lives lived on the margins of Brussels. In its opening scenes, GHOST TROPIC appears so radically pared-down, and so immaculately composed, as to feel more like a photo essay than a narrative feature—a generously grainy portrait of the nocturnal life of Khadija, a middle-aged cleaning woman from North Africa. We begin to make out the warmth of the film’s subject and the chill of the night air, and gradually, a plot takes shape between cinematographer Grimm Vandekerckhove’s patinated frames: having fallen asleep on the train home, Khadija must cross the city on foot. On first glance, this Kiarostami-like narrative has an almost sub-anecdotal level of incident, leaving ample room for atmosphere, sociological insight, and characterization. But the depth of detail we discern in Khadija’s fleeting interactions with night watchmen, squatters, shopworkers, and partygoers steadily develops, and as it does, the nature of Khadija’s dilemma changes. The question is no longer how to find our own way home across a strange city, but how to make a home for one another in a more familiar one. As GHOST TROPIC examines how community forms and diverges across classes, cultures, generations, and the boundary between night and day, its deeper ambitions come into focus: the film’s spectral utopia is in fact an invisible form of decency, one that should be implicit in our day-to-day exchanges, yet which has seemingly vanished from both our social reality and our cinema. As the film’s opening monologue suggests, our capacity for compassion depends on the sensitivity of our eyes and ears. Through its perceptive, self-sacrificing heroine and its supremely intentional use of 16mm, the film both models, and solicits, an empathetic, care-giving form of looking. (2019, 85 min) [Michael Metzger]
Kris Rey’s I USED TO GO HERE (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Someone finally made it. And thank god it was Kris Rey. Up until now, nearly every film dealing with millennials have been stuck delivering the same tired avocado toast-style jokes, or have been nostalgic trips back to high school or the rosy days of the pre-2008 financial meltdown. With I USED TO GO HERE, Rey handles, with deft aplomb, what it’s like to be in your late-30s in the modern day. Gillian Jacobs plays author Kate Conklin, the writer of a rather terrible novel who is invited back to her alma mater by a former professor to give a reading. Returning to her college (the barely veiled Southern Illinois University, the actual alma mater of the writer/director, where the film was partially shot on location), Kate finds that she losing herself in a mire of self-doubt and aimlessness. All her friends back in Chicago are having babies, her fiancé has left her, and she’s been asked to take a teaching position at her old college. The idea of the Baby Boomer hating their steady corporate job and buying a sports car mid-life crisis is long dead and an impossibility for a generation who has lived through two financial crises; instead, Rey shows us what its really like for someone having an existential life crisis in 2020. Kate Conklin considers going back to early adulthood and shirking the life she once had. As an alum of SIU myself, who attended the school the same time Rey did, I absolutely understand this. In fact, I actually did this myself. I moved back to Carbondale for five years and went back to school. And I am far from the only person to have done it. Many people have written songs about the town being a black hole. It truly is a charming, bucolic, insidious place that way. Sigh. But anyway… Besides making a film that understands the realities of adult millennial weltschmerz, the manner in which Rey shows Conklin’s regression from self-assured adult to college-age ball of insecurities is masterful. I USED TO GO HERE begins as a rather straightforward dramatic comedy, replete with Girl Boss energy; but soon Rey not only plays with, but subverts, the entire style of the film until you find yourself in the back of a van full of college kids, alongside Conklin, as the film switches from thirtysomething dramedy into a by-the-book teenage college comedy film as Kate slowly befriends the college students who live in her old house, across the street from the Bed & Breakfast she’s staying at. There are absurd revenge schemes and sexual tension played for laughs. Soon, Kate gets caught up in the drama of college life, friend groups, infidelity, and sexual power dynamics. While the details of her story aren’t necessarily universal, the way she maneuvers through them definitely are. Even when the film plays the generational clichés for laughs, it does it with an honesty that is more self-reflective than cheap exploitation. Also, this is the first movie that has some straight up Millennial/Zoomer love going on, and I thoroughly appreciate that. As we reach our 40s, it’s those in their 20s that are going to be doing all the heavy lifting—culturally, socially, politically. Rey does a wonderful job of showing that, through the friendship and support this group of college kids gives. It’s genuinely heartwarming. (2020, 86 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Bert Stern and Aram Avakian’s JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
The history of motion pictures is inextricably tied to the field of photography, beginning with the motion studies of English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s and moving through the 20th and 21st centuries with such photographer/directors as Agnès Varda, Stanley Kubrick, Gordon Parks, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Frank. Bert Stern, producer/director of JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY, was, like Frank, a commercial and fashion photographer. He’s best known now for his photos of Marilyn Monroe, but in 1958 he was interested in making an experimental film during the simultaneously occurring Newport Jazz Festival and the 18th running of the America’s Cup. Perhaps he was inspired by the entry of the first experimental yachts to be allowed into the Cup competition and the eclectic mix of Dixieland, big band, cool jazz, gospel, blues, and even rock ’n roll artists slated to appear at the festival. Whatever his motivation, he and five other cameramen descended on the elite island getaway and ended up creating, with the expert editing of Aram Avakian, the progenitor of the modern concert film. Dancing reflections in harbor waters are accompanied by the staccato sax of Jimmy Giuffre, the valve trombone of Bob Brookmeyer, and the guitar of Jim Hall playing “The Train and the River” as the credits introduce the talents Stern will feature. Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson get top billing. Gerry Mulligan, Dinah Washington, Chico Hamilton, and Anita O’Day follow, and then other featured performers and a host of expert sidemen. The film warms us to its subject as it tees up preparations for the start of the America’s Cup and the day’s concert. A Dixieland band literally blows their way into town in an antique jalopy and acts as our intermittent guides through the film. The battle on the waves, seen in random geometric formations from the air, is scored with Thelonious Monk’s magnificent “Blue Monk,” making one wish there were more tunes from this jazz pioneer. I wasn’t familiar with Anita O’Day before this film, and she seems a dainty woman here in a feathered hat, frill-bottomed shift, and white gloves. She gingerly negotiates some steps in a pair of Lucite, high-heeled mules, but from then on, there is nothing timid about her ingenious, pitch-perfect renditions of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea for Two.” Perhaps my favorite act of the film is the Chico Hamilton Quintet, most memorable to cinephiles as the combo that backs Martin Milner in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957), performing the tribal-sounding, hypnotic “Blue Sands.” I was also thrilled to see Dinah Washington, a favorite singer of mine whom I’ve only known through recordings, smile her way through “All of Me.” Throughout the film, Stern’s directorial and photographic eye finds particular faces among the concertgoers—a man with a long cigar snapping his fingers, a mother and her young daughter enjoying Louis Armstrong’s banter and red-hot trumpeting, four African-American women swaying and snapping to Mahalia Jackson’s jubilant rendition of “Walk All Over God’s Heaven,” a young couple swing-dancing to Chuck Berry. These miniature portraits, as edited by Avakian, become something of a call-response between the musicians and the audience, building a feeling for the event that makes JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY more pleasurable with each viewing. Bert Stern never made another film, but that’s no cause for distress. Perfection’s hard to top. (1959, 82 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Dawn Porter's JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
It seems fitting that JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE is being released when it is. As we grapple with the racism made plain by the police killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, this film provides context for the present moment in this country’s still unfinished work for civil rights and racial equity. And while the current White House occupant until recently could not be bothered to wear a mask to help quash a global pandemic, this documentary celebrates a man who fearlessly put his body on the line for a cause greater than himself. The highlights of Lewis’ life may be familiar from obituaries and tributes: the Nashville sit-in movement, the Freedom Rides, his leadership of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the March on Washington, the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation with state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus bridge during the first Selma march. The filmmakers cover these points as well as other stories (like his childhood preaching to barnyard chickens) that Lewis himself acknowledges in the film he has told often before. Yet the filmmakers, working with Lewis, find ways to make these stories fresh, including visiting Lewis’ siblings and asking him to respond to previously unseen footage from the civil rights movement. The film covers his Congressional service, tracking one long day of constituent meetings and dropping in on a staff reunion; it also recounts the origin of the viral video of Lewis dancing in his office. Lewis does not always come off well in the film—we learn that his contentious 1986 primary election battle with former colleague Julian Bond fractured their friendship for years—and his decades-long marriage to his wife Lillian gets less attention than it should. Still, this documentary provides a well-rounded portrait of a courageous yet humble visionary who never stopped seeking justice or, in his words, making “good trouble” whether at the lunch counters of Nashville or the floor of the US House. Although Lewis himself is no longer with us, we are fortunate to still have JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE to tell his story and capture his spirit. (2020, 96 min) [Fred Tsao]
Melissa Haizlip and Sam Pollard’s MR. SOUL! (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
From 1968 through 1973, public television station WNET in New York embarked on an experiment in programming that would eventually stand as an influential cultural icon for generations of African-American artists. Soul!, a weekly one-hour talk and variety series produced by Ellis Haizlip, a Howard University-educated impresario in New York’s Black arts scene, was wholly dedicated to the talents and concerns of the Black community. Haizlip was ideally suited to elevate Black culture on TV, with his vast network of contacts, unerring radar for budding talents, and supreme belief in the value of presenting the finest that the Black civic and cultural community had to offer. Among the firsts on Soul! were the introduction of singing duo Ashford and Simpson before they had even cut their first album and the appearance of Toni Morrison reading from her first novel, The Bluest Eye. Haizlip loved dance and included performances by the Alvin Ailey Dancers and the George Faison Universal Dance Experience, among others. As MR. SOUL! highlights, there may never have been another show of any kind that was as great for poetry as Soul! was, including appearances by Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and bucking the censors by booking Last Poets to perform their works. These performances make clear the generations-long continuum of poetic expression that has sustained the Black community and from which rap arose. Political activists Kathleen Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Betty Shabazz, and Lynn Brown also showed up, and in one revealing clip, Haizlip, an out gay man, even got homophobic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to accept that gay converts to Islam were part of his flock. The musical guests were nonstop, from Stevie Wonder and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles to the Billy Taylor Trio, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Billy Preston. And Haizlip did not forget the Black diaspora in other parts of the Americas, asking African-Latino-American Felipe Luciano, a member of Last Poets and the Young Lords Party, to introduce the Afro-Cuban rhythms of Tito Puente and Willie Colon and their orchestras to Soul!’s audience. Co-directors Melissa Haizlip (Ellis Haizlip’s niece) and Sam Pollard have assembled a dizzying array of personal photos, clips from Soul!, talking-head interviews with some of the guests who appeared on the show and those who were inspired by it, as well as archival footage of the roiling times during which Soul! aired and Haizlip’s own words delivered in voiceover by actor Blair Underwood. This approach helps viewers get acquainted with Haizlip and his history, but also locates him and his work within the societal attitudes that made Soul! possible and the darkening national landscape under President Richard Nixon that spelled the show’s doom. What Soul! meant to the Black community is best summed up by African-American writer Chester Himes (A Rage in Harlem, Cotton Comes to Harlem) who, along with the vocal group The Dells, was a featured guest on a 1972 episode: “This is one of the highlights of my life to be on this sort of Black television program before a Black audience, because this is the first experience that I have had.” I knew nothing about Soul! or the estimable Ellis Haizlip before watching MR SOUL! I am so happy to have been introduced to both. (2018, 99 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Christopher Boone and Kevin Smokler’s VINYL NATION (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
Recently I’ve found an odd comfort in experimenting with low-tech electronics. I’ve been writing letters to friends old and new on an electric typewriter in attempts to be more offline. I cancelled my music streaming service in favor of an old iPod Nano and a weathered tape deck—anything that gives me a semblance of pause in an increasingly accelerated and hyper-online world. Vinyl records, naturally, seem like the next step in that journey. Christopher Boone and Kevin Smokler’s documentary VINYL NATION is a thorough examination on vinyl’s second wave and why we keep coming back to formats previously rendered obsolete. Featuring a wide array of interviewees—from music critics and historians, to DJs, musicians, and music producers—VINYL NATION chronicles the rise and fall and rise again of the record industry. It serves as a useful guide for those unfamiliar with the format's history: its origins, its popularity amongst consumers and musicians from various subgenres, how it differs from other audio formats, and how it’s adapted to a digital world. The film heralds the conception of Record Store Day—an annual consumer holiday featuring exclusive pressings and other limited-edition ephemera—as the thing that brought vinyl back into the mainstream. But sometimes the lines between how the film depicts saving a dying industry and outright glorifying capital—like Urban Outfitters’ commodification of vinyl, or the ever-Instagrammable Crosley’s—are a bit murky. Where VINYL NATION is most necessary is in its analysis of how the consumer culture of vinyl has changed. Young people, especially young women, are rapidly gravitating towards this format in large swaths, effectively changing the face of the industry. VINYL NATION is nothing if not a love letter to the community that brought a seemingly dying format back to life—and an enthusiastic look at its future. (2020, 92 min) [Cody Corrall]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Sin Cinta Previa
Sin Cinta Previa and Chuquimarca present the free online screening Tempo falacioso; Superimposiciones botánicas, featuring PAISAGENS FICCIONAIS [Fictional Landscapes] (2020, 24 min) by Luíza Bastos Lages, THE DENSITY OF BREATH (2020, 13 min) by Nancy D. Valladares, and EXPECT PEOPLE TO BE EXHAUSTED (2020, 13 min) by Chucho Ocampo. A Zoom Q&A is on Saturday, September 26 at 7:30pm; details here.
Asian Pop-Up Cinema
Beginning Thursday, Asian Pop-Up Cinema presents a series of drive-in screenings (through October 31) and online screenings (through October 10). The drive-in screenings are at the Davis Theater Drive-in at Lincoln Yards (1684 N. Throop St.). More information and ticket links at www.asianpopupcinema.org.
Gallery 400 (UIC)
Bani Abidi’s 2004 two-channel video short SHAN PIPE LEARNS THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER (8 min) is on view here https://gallery400.uic.edu/exhibitions/ through September 7.
CinéSPEAK
This Philadelphia-based venue presents a virtual screening of Chicago non-profit Full Spectrum Features’ Chicagoland Shorts Vol. 6 through September 6. Ticket information here.
Northbrook Public Library
NPL presents newly-recorded introductions to five silent films by local film accompanist Dave Drazin. Each will be available on Wednesdays in September via the library’s website (registration is required to receive a viewing link; the films being introduced are not being hosted by the library—they would need to be viewed via Kanopy, Hoopla, or other streaming services). This week, on September 9, is an introduction for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 UK film THE MANXMAN. Visit the library’s events page, select September 9, and then register for one of the two event listings.
Chicago Film Society
The Chicago Film Society currently has four 1980s snipes featuring Chicago radio icon Larry Lujack up on their Vimeo page. A more general set of snipes are also available here.
American Writers Museum
Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco’s 2020 documentary FLANNERY (97 min) is available for rent locally via the AWM here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Antoine Raimbault’s 2018 French/Belgian film CONVICTION (110 min) is available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles.
Music Box Theatre
Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
Chicago International Film Festival
Check CIFF’s website for titles currently available for rental.
Chicago Latino Film Festival
CLFF is offering a selection of features and shorts for rental. Information here.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RECOMMENDATIONS
Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s PASSING STRANGERS and FORBIDDEN LETTERS (US/Adult)
Available to rent on PinkLabel.tv here
Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. had a fondness for Frank Capra—he wrote his thesis on the director and even spoke with him for a 1971 issue of Interview magazine. I’d say this penchant comes through in the way his films evoke dual senses of idealism and melancholy with regards to queer love and the gay liberation movement. Among his better-known films is the landmark GAY USA (1978), the first feature-length documentary made by and about persons from the LBGTQIA+ community, which embodies that duality more straightforwardly but no less intriguingly; later, in 1985, he wrote and directed BUDDIES, a strikingly sensitive endeavor and the first film to address the burgeoning AIDS crisis. Around these touchstones of independent queer cinema, he made his debut feature, PASSING STRANGERS (1974, 75 min), and, several years later, FORBIDDEN LETTERS (1979, 70 min), two hardcore films that have recently been restored by Vinegar Syndrome in collaboration with The Bressan Project and which are now available to rent exclusively on Pink Label TV. Having previously seen and admired GAY USA and BUDDIES, these newly available works account for two of my choice film discoveries this summer, each exhibiting a distinct cinematic sensibility that complements the requisite intercourse. PASSING STRANGERS tells the story—yes, an actual story—of 28-year-old Tom (Robert Carnagey), who posts a personal in the Berkeley Barb that quotes Walt Whitman’s “To a Stranger,” and 18-year-old Robert (Robert Adams), who responds. (Bressan himself appears as a projectionist at a porn theater who’s friends with Tom.) One might hear ‘Walt Whitman’ and assume pretension, but that’s the beauty of the Bressan films I’ve seen: they’re wonderfully earnest, and he incorporates urbane references with heartfelt aplomb. Both PASSING STRANGERS and FORBIDDEN LETTERS utilize an epistolary approach; in the former, the two men exchange letters, which are read in voiceover and accompanied by various sexual scenarios onscreen. Some are near avant-garde in nature, as evidenced by one sequence where young Robert goes to a sex store and enters a single-occupancy viewing booth; images of Robert watching are superimposed onto images of the pornography he’s viewing. In the next scene, he masturbates while watching D.W. Griffith’s BROKEN BLOSSOMS (a first—maybe only—ever in porn?). In a later scene, Robert examines himself in a mirror, prodding at a few spots on his face, which then turns into that of a clown and then back into his own—it’s simple enough, but the almost Bergman-esque close-ups are breathtaking. This moment leads to a dream sequence in which Robert masturbates again while several naked men, including himself, jump up and down, blowing bubbles. Despite the joyous nature of the sex scenes, melancholy comes into play with Robert’s final letter to Tom before they meet; he expresses anxiety, writing, “You know more about me than anybody else, and we’ve never really met. I don’t understand you too well. You wrote that you have friends and that you’ve had lovers, and yet you said you’re not at all that happy. That blows my mind.” When the two come together in the second half of the film, Bressan switches from black and white to color, an obvious reference to THE WIZARD OF OZ. The men fly kites, have sex, and, toward the end of the film, attend a pride march in San Francisco, scenes that contain footage from Bressan’s 1972 documentary short, COMING OUT. Bressan seems to have wanted to make an artful film, a sexy film, and a political film, and he succeeds on all counts. FORBIDDEN LETTERS is more a worn-in romance, this time between the younger Larry (Robert Adams, who played Robert in the previous film) and the older Richard (Richard Locke), who's been arrested for mugging. It follows Richard’s imminent release from prison and consists of flashbacks to sexual encounters between the two or between Larry and others, ruminations on Richard’s time in prison—they have to sanitize their letters, lest anyone discover Richard is gay—and scenes with their friend, Iris (Victoria Young), a female sex worker whose long-winded assessment of their relationship is some of the most extraordinary acting I’ve seen in porn. Another of the more affecting sequences in this film merges Bressan’s desire to reflect gay life as well as the tantalizing aspects of gay sex. In voiceover, Larry talks about the first time he’d seen Richard, at a Halloween party in the Castro district, with glitter in his beard and a stunningly outfitted drag queen as his date. The footage is shot like a documentary, which imbues the scenario with a sense of realism that recalls a moment where someone might see another person and be instantly attracted to them. Like the preceding film, there are shifts in tone and style, some of the scenes shot in black and white and others in color, though here Bressan interweaves the two. He specifically uses black and white for intense sequences taking place in prison that serve as metaphors for the men’s constrained sexuality and their physical distance from one another, while flashbacks to the men at home and at play are often in color. Many of the latter sequences occur as Larry, in voiceover, reads a letter he wishes he could send to Richard, one full of love, gratefulness, and trepidation. I was as moved as I am by, say, Capra’s films, so do both auteurs’ films teem with the beautiful complexities of life in all its tricky splendor. Humorously, the end credits riff on the credits sequence from Orson Welles’ THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS—likewise, they’re an apt assertion of Bressan’s personal mode of filmmaking: “My name is Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.,” he concludes, “and I made this motion picture.” [Kathleen Sachs]
John Sayles’ CITY OF HOPE (US)
Available to stream for free on Tubi
Since his exquisite, if characteristically offbeat, GO FOR SISTERS (2013), John Sayles has been missing from American cinema. One feels his influence, however, all over series television, particularly multi-character dramas that attempt to explain the workings of a city or institution. A film like CITY OF HOPE (which is now available on Tubi along with four other Sayles features) anticipates The Wire and programs like it in its panoramic, quilt-like depiction of a fictional New Jersey municipality. Moving between police, government officials, criminals, businessmen, blue-collar types, and academics, Sayles considers the diverse make-up of any city, along with the tensions that exist between different groups. CITY OF HOPE offers what few TV shows can—namely, narrative concision and a uniform perspective. It’s remarkable how Sayles creates dozens of vivid characters in just over two hours; watching the movie is a bit like wandering a city for a few days and trying to eavesdrop on as many conversations as possible. As in all his best films, Sayles has fun creating a consistent voice for the characters based on his research into how people talk in a particular area (not for nothing did he play fawning protege to Studs Terkel in EIGHT MEN OUT); his takes on New Jersey bluster and profanity is colorful and sometimes hysterical. Jonathan Rosenbaum likened the Greek chorus-like character played by David Strathairn to something out of Clifford Odets, but much of the jivey dialogue feels Odetsian. In some of the most electrifying moments, Sayles pans away from the main action to consider people on the street shooting the breeze, their conversation adding to the film’s overall symphonic quality. The writer-director achieves a similar effect with extended tracking shots that present multiple dramatic conflicts in the same take; these sequences showcase the skill of cinematographer Robert Richardson (later a regular collaborator of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino) no less than the remarkable lighting, which seems to grant a visible aura to every person and object. The large ensemble features memorable turns from Vincent Spano (playing an older, more resigned version of his character from Sayles’ BABY, IT’S YOU), Joe Morton (who delivers the movie’s best political speech), Gina Gershon, Angela Bassett, Frankie Faison, and Sayles himself (in what’s probably his best performance). The filmmaker’s leftist politics are as obvious and ardent as ever here, but CITY OF HOPE doesn’t register foremost as a political movie. The political observations derive from a greater curiosity about how societies function. (1991, 130 min) [Ben Sachs]
Rob Christopher’s ROY'S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD'S CHICAGO (US/Documentary)
Streaming at the Dances With Films festival – Sunday, September 6, 2pm PDT (4pm Chicago)
If the name Barry Gifford rings a bell to Cine-File readers, it’s likely for his contributions to what you might call “David’s world”: David Lynch, that is. Lynch’s WILD AT HEART (1990) was an adaptation of a Gifford novel, and they co-wrote LOST HIGHWAY (1997) together. Until I saw ROY'S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD'S CHICAGO, a dreamy, immersive documentary by Cine-File contributor Rob Christopher, I was unfamiliar with his Roy stories, myself. Roy is the character Gifford invented as an alter-ego for himself as a boy/young man, a movie-loving street kid whose coming-of-age adventures Gifford has been chronicling in works of autobiographical fiction for nearly 40 years now. “Roy’s world” is a specific time and place—Chicago, mostly, in the 1950s and early ‘60s. This documentary celebrates these writings by adhering to a strict no-talking-heads policy. Christopher eschews entirely the standard on-screen interviews in favor of voice-over narratives: reminiscences from Gifford himself provide context for readings from the work. For these, Christopher and producer Michael Glover Smith (also a Cine-File contributor) scored a coup: they got Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, and Lili Taylor to read, and their distinctive timbres and tough-but-tender personas embody the texts. Gifford/Roy’s Chicago is a wintry, working-class world. His father ran an operation called Lake Shore Pharmacy, across from the old Water Tower. It was a 24-hour kind of joint, ostensibly a drug store; showgirls would drop by on their breaks and repair to the basement, where he’d administer some kind of pep shot. The people who hung around the store, including Gifford’s own family, were “not people to mess around with”; some had been gangsters during Prohibition. The film pulses with the seamy romance of the town’s jazzy nightlife, enhanced by a cool, atmospheric score by jazz vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz. Still, a young boy experienced the corruption of organized crime, and the intertwined iron fist of Richard J. Daley’s machine, as just a part of the atmosphere. Hardboiled as it was in attitude, the town nevertheless seems like it must have been a hell of a place to grow up. Gifford’s mom was from Texas, a former beauty queen, 20 years younger than his dad. The marriage didn’t stick, and her struggles—during an era when being a “divorcee” was still rather a scandal—are poignant. In fact, Gifford confides in us that one of his chief motivations for creating Roy was to remember the time he had with his mother. The story “Chicago, Illinois, 1953” recalls a humiliating incident when a shopkeeper mistook his mom, bronzed from a season under the tropical sun, for a Black woman, and refused to serve her. It is illustrated by shimmering black-and-white animated drawings. When young Roy later asks his shaking mom why she didn’t simply tell the man she was white, she replies, “It shouldn’t matter, Roy.” The story “Bad Girls,” set during the early ’60s and illustrated by rotoscoped footage from Graceland Cemetery, nicely evokes the feeling of teenage discovery, as Roy and a new female friend roam our fabled “city of neighborhoods.” Christopher’s design also includes found footage in striking black-and-white and eye-popping saturated color, and archival materials ranging from Gifford’s home movies to neighborhood newspapers. Zooming carefully into photographs from a bygone world, patiently waiting for them to reveal their secrets, Christopher encourages us to imagine the individual lives and stories spilling outside the frame. For locals, the film transforms Chicago into a fascinating palimpsest, allowing us to trace the former lives of buildings and neighborhoods behind our everyday cityscape. While the film is deliberately unhurried, its open-all-night vibe will cast a spell on anyone open to its urban jazz-noir mood. Gifford’s Roy stories work as history and as autobiography, but above all they’re a form of make-believe. It required almost an equivalent act of imagination for Christopher to conjure up a world that opens up as richly as his inspiration, but that’s what he’s done with ROY’S WORLD. I emerged from this sensory experience as if from a waking dream, blinking and momentarily disoriented, though with a heightened alertness. It was as if I’d visited a land of phantoms—but of course, these were really only the shades of men and women just like us. ROY’S WORLD made me feel as if the past never really went anywhere, if only we look closely enough. (2019, 75 min) [Scott Pfeiffer]
---
A live Q&A takes place immediately following the September 6 screening, with Christopher, Barry Gifford, and Lili Taylor.
Aida Begić’s SNOW (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Available to stream for free on YouTube here
As an avid fan of war movies, I appreciate the many excellent depictions of the warriors who take the field of battle and reveal the many conflicting actions and emotions that inform their experiences. No less worthy, though not as numerous, are tales of the home front and the lingering trauma of the grieving survivors once the fighting has stopped. The Bosnian War (1992–95), which pitted Bosnian Muslims against their Serbian neighbors, included hideous acts of ethnic cleansing that inflicted deep and lasting wounds, perpetuating the seemingly endless series of revenge wars in that strife-filled region. Wading into the pain is director Aida Begić and her magic-realist drama SNOW, winner of the Critics’ Week grand prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. SNOW, which focuses on the survivors of the tiny Bosniak town of Slavno, takes place in a time out of time. Real-life events occur, but the handful of residents (surely there must be more than 10 people in this village) who saw all their men and boys rousted from their beds one night and carted away to be slaughtered, live in a kind of limbo, wishfully thinking and dreaming that their loved ones somehow escaped unharmed or clinging to bitterness over their ruined lives. At the center of the film are Alma (a mesmerizing, soul-searing performance by Zana Marjanović), a young widow and the only woman in the film to wear the veil and modest clothing prescribed by Muslim traditions, and Ali (Benjamin Djip), a young boy who witnessed the murders and fell mute, with his hair refusing to grow. Ali lives with the only other man in the village, the elderly Dedo (Emir Hadžihafizbegović), who leads prayer sessions for the women. Alma has started a cottage industry canning fruits and vegetables and making chutneys to “feed half of Bosnia”—a dream her dead husband had. The matriarch of the village, Nana (Irena Mulamuhic), sits in her home where she weaves a very long carpet out of cloth remnants. The villagers encounter three men from the outside through the course of the film, all of whom bring the promise of change and prosperity. But it is only through a confrontation Ali has with one of them that the fate of the villagers changes. SNOW deftly mixes reality with dreamscapes, superstition, and magic in a town that seems as mythic as Brigadoon. We don’t see much of Slavno beyond a few ramshackle buildings and some house interiors. With only a handful of inhabitants, Slavno just can’t exist and provide for all of the needs these people have. Like Brigadoon, the residents of Slavno are under the influence of an enchantment—in this case, a mourning that can’t end because of the uncertainty surrounding the fate of their men and boys. When the netherworld in which Slavno exists finally comes to an end, the villagers walk across an expanse on the rug Nana has woven and floated on air to accept their passage out of their grief and anger. The color saturation in the film is vivid, intoxicating, the stuff that dreams are made of. The sound design also helps us float on this film. One of the orphan girls in the village plays with some powdered cement, pretending it is snow. When the real snow comes, the village seems ready to revive. Its residents already have. (2008, 100 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Steve Buscemi’s TREES LOUNGE (US)
Available to stream for free on Tubi and also available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, iTunes, and YouTube
Few opening shots convey a milieu as succinctly as that of Steve Buscemi’s TREES LOUNGE—a drifting, near-minute-long maneuver that follows bartender Connie (Carol Kane) at closing time as she powers down the television, turns out the lights, and kicks awake keeled-over regular Tommy (Buscemi). A marathon of heavy drinking and everyday bickering, the movie catches Tommy in a serious rough patch: newly ousted from his mechanic job; shacked up in a room above Trees Lounge, the bar he frequents; and separated from his girlfriend of eight years (Elizabeth Bracco). Tommy wiles away much of his time at “the Trees,” swilling beer and Wild Turkey, performing bar tricks, and socializing with the habitual customers and a curious, business-owning newcomer (Mark Boone Junior). Shot in and around various parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island familiar to the New York–born Buscemi, TREES LOUNGE imparts a levity that is often missing from movies about boozers. One standout scene set at the wake of bawdy ice-cream-truck operator Uncle Al (Seymour Cassel) mixes Tommy’s genuine consoling of Al’s distraught son (Kevin Corrigan) with momentary confusion over whose turn it is to do a line of cocaine. Though Buscemi gives himself the lead role, it’s arguably his direction of the surrounding cast that is most impressive—the working-class people of TREES LOUNGE at times approximate the lived-in mannerisms of a Mike Leigh ensemble. Even the characters who appear for just a couple minutes are shot through with a full scope of complications: Tommy’s father (Victor Arnold) berates his son over his history of asking for money but in the same breath slides a cigarette pack into Tommy’s shirt pocket; Crystal (Debi Mazar) gets drunk and slow dances with Tommy one night at the bar but later ignores him while placing an ice-cream order with her son in tow. Like Gary Oldman’s NIL BY MOUTH (1997), another underappreciated, alcohol-soaked directorial debut from a vitally unruly actor, TREES LOUNGE doesn’t shy away from reprehensible human behavior—including Tommy’s flirtations with the 17-year-old Debbie (Chloë Sevigny) or the volcanic parenting tactics of Debbie’s father (Daniel Baldwin). The movie begins and ends at rock bottom, suggesting nothing so easy as redemption or enlightenment. (1996, 95 min) [Danny King]
SUPPORT LOCAL THEATERS AND SERIES
As we wait for conditions to improve to allow theaters to reopen, consider various ways that you can help support independent film exhibitors in Chicago weather this difficult time. Memberships, gift cards, and/or merchandise are available from the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Music Box Theatre, and Facets. Donations can be made to non-profit venues and organizations like Chicago Filmmakers, the Chicago Film Society, South Side Projections, and many of the film festivals. Online streaming partnerships with distributors are making films available through the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Music Box Theatre, and Facets; and Facets also has a subscription-based streaming service, FacetsEdge, that includes many exclusive titles.
COVID-19 UPDATES
All independent, alternative, arthouse, grassroots, DIY, and university-based venues and several festivals have suspended operations, closed, or cancelled/postponed events until further notice. Below is the most recent information we have, which we will update as new information becomes available.
Note that venues/series marked with an asterisk (*) are currently presenting or plan to do regular or occasional “virtual” online screenings.
OPEN:
Music Box Theatre – The Music Box has reopened in a limited capacity, presenting physical, in-theater screenings and also continues to present online-only screenings*
Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) – Comfort Film is doing socially distanced outdoor film screenings. More information here.
CLOSED/POSTPONED/HIATUS:
Beverly Arts Center – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Events cancelled/postponed until furtuer notice*
Chicago Film Archives – The CFA’s annual “Media Mixer” event, previously scheduled for May, has been rescheduled for September 16
Chicago Film Society – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Chicago Filmmakers – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice*
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Screenings cancelled until further notice
Facets Cinémathèque – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
filmfront – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Gallery 400 (UIC) *
Gene Siskel Film Center – Closed until further notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)*
The Nightingale – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
The Park Ridge Classic Film Series (at the Park Ridge Public Library) – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Festivals:
Rescheduled with new dates announced:
The Gene Siskel Film Center will present a delayed online edition of the Black Harvest Film Festival from November 6-30. Information will be available at the Siskel website, www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
The Chicago Latino Film Festival – Originally scheduled for April, the Chicago Latino Film Festival will take place as a delayed online edition September 18-27. Information available at www.chicagolatinofilmfestival.org.
Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (presented by Chicago Filmmakers) has announced that the festival will take place online September 24-October 4. Information will be available at https://reelingfilmfestival.org.
Postponed with no announced plans yet:
The Cinepocalypse film festival (June) – Postponed with plans to reschedule at a future time
The Windy City Horrorama festival (April 24-26) – Cancelled; will possibly be rescheduled or reconfigured at a future date
The Chicago Critics Film Festival (May 1-7) – Postponed until further notice
The Chicago Underground Film Festival (June 10-14) – Postponed (tentatively in September)
CINE-LIST: September 4 - September 10, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Marilyn Ferdinand, Danny King, Tristan Johnson, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger, Scott Pfeiffer, Fred Tsao