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: JÁNOS VITÉZ
Marcell Jankovics' JÁNOS VITÉZ (Hungary/Animation)
In partnership with film distributor Arbelos, Cine-File is presenting the exclusive Chicago virtual screening of Marcell Jankovics’ 1973 animated Hungarian feature JÁNOS VITÉZ, in a stunning new digital restoration, as a follow-up to our presentation of Jankovics’ SON OF THE WHITE MARE (1981). The film is available here through Thursday, September 24; 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).
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Marcell Jankovics' JÁNOS VITÉZ (Hungary/Animation)
In 1845, Hungarian poet and revolutionary Sándor Petőfi wrote an epic poem and, nearly 130 years later, director Marcell Jankovics adapted this poem into the country’s first animated feature film, JÁNOS VITÉZ. Titled JOHNNY CORNCOB in English, the film speeds through its story, following a young shepherd in love with a local woman, who is overworked and under-loved. After losing his flock, the shepherd gets run out of his village, embarking on a journey through distant lands. He joins an army, fights in battle, saves a princess, becomes rich, conquers the giants, and sails to the edge of the world. Influenced heavily by the 1968 animated film YELLOW SUBMARINE, Jankovics' debut looks psychedelic, injecting bright, warm colors, and constantly shifting shapes and imagery. The filmmaker shows a willingness to experiment with the surreal, as he opts for graphics that awe and confuse, rather than help to tell a linear story. At times, JÁNOS VITÉZ feels like a modern music video, using its characters to form the surroundings they inhabit, tingeing every person the hero comes across in different colors, simply to contrast him with the rest of the exhaustive, evil, violent world. Jankovics’ film keeps you engaged with a quick runtime, striking animation, creative scenery and transitions, and a sense that these images mean more than meets the eye. It’s a story fueled by love, by loss, and by the fragility of life. In a film mostly void of dialogue, JÁNOS VITÉZ finds its director looking at Hungarian traditions, commenting on status and wealth, and providing a compelling and oft-interesting, if weird, view of a tale as old as time: a person scouring the world looking for his long-lost love. (1973, 74 min) [Michael Frank]
PHYSICAL SCREENINGS
Jon Stevenson’s RENT-A-PAL (New US)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
Written, directed, edited, and produced by Jon Stevenson, RENT-A-PAL is about as complete a vision of a single person as any film could possibly be. And what a completely creepy vision that is. Stevenson offers us some wonderful low-budget indie horror fare, served chillingly cold. In a past time this probably would have been a black and white, 16mm affair; but thanks to the democratization of filmmaking technology we have a glorious color film with amazing sound design. The simplicity of RENT-A-PAL is what makes it enjoyable. From the beginning we understand the world of the film. David is a socially awkward adult living with his mother as her caretaker. Largely isolated due to this lifestyle—he doesn’t need a job because her social security is enough for the two to subsist—he’s turned to the wonderfully weird world of video dating. I’m glad to see this phenomenon be the crux of the narrative because it is absolutely replete with possibilities for the horror genre. Nowadays it’s absolutely normal to meet complete strangers from the internet. We get in their cars, we have them bring us our food, we flirt with them and go to their homes. But back in the 1990s, when this film takes place, it was still seen as somewhat odd, and a tad bit sad and desperate, to go that route. It was the last gasp of losers and malcreants—and RENT-A-PAL shows it. Desperate for any kind of connection, David ends up with a VHS tape he finds at the video dating service’s office called “Rent-A-Pal.” Based on an actual videotape “Rent-A-Friend” from the ‘80s, this “Rent-A-Pal” tape offers an interactive hangout with a man named Andy. It’s innocent enough, although kind of sad. Over time though, David starts to interact with Andy in a way that questions the very fabric of reality. Andy’s conversations with David appear to be changing each viewing. Stevenson gives us an unnerving psychodrama, not unlike VIDEODROME, where the confluence of media and psyche are called into question. When a potential romantic interest finally responds to David’s dating video he has to decide between a real woman and his video friend Andy. The pacing of this film is tight, and I can see why Stevenson wanted to not only direct it but edit it himself. It’s masterfully put together, with no detail left unnoticed. The sound design is especially well done, with the sounds of magnetic tape distortion becoming almost another character at times. And not to sound too nostalgic, but I sincerely hope this gets one of those limited-edition VHS collector releases that have been hitting the market over the past few years. As clean as the production is, this film demands to been seen on the format it plays with. It’s a glorious meta-tribute to strange, dark side of VHS. (2020, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
Justine Triet's SIBYL (New French)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes (also available to rent here)
SIBYL is going to infuriate viewers who go to films to gain insight into the reasoning behind people’s behavior, and delight viewers who get off on puzzling out the logic that guides the construction of a work of art. The interplay between these two processes—the bad judgment that promises to tear lives and careers apart, the erratic impulses that improbably guide artists towards successful creation—is vividly, even ludicrously dramatized in Justine Triet’s film, which follows an established psychotherapist, Sibyl (Virginie Efira), as she abandons her practice to return to creative writing. Unable to extricate herself from Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos), one of her needier clients, Sibyl begins surreptitiously recording their sessions, drawing on her patient’s drama for her own writing. Triet’s go-for-baroque plotting finds room to explore her heroine’s fraught relationships with her underemployed sister, AA group, son, partner, her other patients, and her own therapist, while multiple flashbacks peer into Sibyl’s reawakened memories of a passionate love affair gone sour. And that’s before things go fully meta, as Margot’s crisis—she’s an actress, pregnant from an affair with her co-star, and unable to decide whether to keep or terminate the pregnancy—gradually ensnares Sibyl as well. Once the therapist is called to help her patient make it through a tense film shoot on—get this—the volcanic island of Stromboli, the film’s lower-key comic elements erupt, thanks especially to the welcome midway addition of TONI ERDMANN’s Sandra Hüller as the disconcertingly pragmatic film director whose partner has been fooling around with Margot. The willful improbability of the second act will throw viewers for a loop, but it’s entirely in keeping with a film about the pleasures of breaking rules and taking license as a woman and as an artist. In this, I was reminded of two other recent films which contemplate female empowerment by dramatizing the pitfalls of the creative process, Greta Gerwig’s LITTLE WOMEN and Céline Sciamma’s PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN ON FIRE; like those films, SIBYL proposes that the social boundaries of acceptable behavior for women are inextricably linked to the boundaries of how art should or shouldn’t be composed. In all three films, narrative unfolds towards the fulfillment of creative desire, defiantly leaving a trail of broken rules behind—SIBYL just breaks more than the rest. (2019, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Metzger]
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]
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More info on the in-person Music Box screenings (including COVID policies) at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
CHICAGO LATINO FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago Latino Film Festival will be taking place virtually this year, with online screenings from September 18 - 27. The full schedule and additional information are here. Selected films available this week are reviewed below.
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Pablo Larraín’s EMA (Chile)
Available to rent Friday, September 18 through Sunday, September 20
EMA is as 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) [Ben Sachs]
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Leticia Tonos Paniagua’s JUANITA (Dominican Republic)
Available to rent Friday, September 18 through Monday, September 21
Charming but never cloying, Leticia Tonos Paniagua’s third feature is the rare movie comedy where the situational humor gives way to genuine wisdom. The themes of growth and transformation are life-affirming, but more importantly they feel hard-won—the film acknowledges rough truths and avoids easy sentiment. Still, it’s hard not to feel good while watching JUANITA; the sympathetic, well-rounded characterizations and vibrant mise-en-scene conjure up a warm, sensuous world where people are essentially good and there’s always time to dance or eat sumptuous food. The film begins in rural Spain, where the title character—a middle-aged, undocumented Dominican immigrant—is running away from some bad trouble. She finds refuge on the farm of 65-year-old bachelor Mariano, and within no time the dissimilar strangers fall in love. Cut to three months later: Juanita decides to move back to the Dominican Republic, Mariano in tow, to reclaim her house. The older gentleman, however shy, seems game about starting a new life in a new country… that is, until he learns that not only does Juanita have an eight-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son, but they all have to live with her ex-husband and his mother. The premise might suggest a cutesy sitcom, but Tonos Paniagua is too smart a filmmaker for that. For one thing, every character is deeply flawed, not least the winning heroine, whose quirky, impulsive behavior betrays the tendency to evade responsibility. Moreover, the film offers a tough, realistic depiction of economic strife: Juanita’s family face money problems, and her neighborhood is blighted by crime. That the Dominican Republic still seems like a glorious place to live in spite of all this speaks to Tonos Paniagua’s gifts as a director. Juanita’s community seems brimming with color and activity. A short scene following Mariano as he goes shopping at an open-air market is a little symphony of sensations (you can practically smell and taste the food). Passages like these reinforce the film’s message that to live is to change; Tonos Paniagua encourages us to be alive to each moment and find new experiences wherever we go. The chief pleasure of JUANITA lies in watching the characters evolve over the film’s jam-packed 96 minutes—the narrative complications keep coming until the last scene. (2018, 96 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Luis Alberto Restrepo’s NOBODY’S FRIEND (Colombia)
Available to rent Monday, September 21 through Wednesday, September 23
“Colombian Psycho” could be an alternate title for this harrowing drama, which follows a well-to-do serial killer from childhood to his capture as an adult. A title card at the beginning promises a social portrait of crime-ridden Medellín, informing viewers that in the late 20th century, the city was known as the crime capital of the world due to rampant murder, robbery, and cartel activity. But rather than take a street-level approach to social ills, the story considers Medellín’s elite, which is shown to be just as lawless as its criminal class. An early flashback to the antihero’s childhood finds a grade-school-aged Julían stealing a pistol, then shooting another boy to death—the episode suggests that, in a climate of lawlessness, even children are capable of evil. Julían spends the rest of his childhood away from Colombia (his wealthy heiress mother sends him to school in the United States), but returns as a young man to reclaim his position in the high society of Medellín. Quickly asserting himself as the leader of his group of friends, Julían bullies everyone around him to get what he wants. He also starts mixing with gang members after he gets into hard drugs. Julían’s monstrous behavior only gets worse as NOBODY’S FRIEND proceeds; at times, it feels less like a case study than a flat-out horror movie. Director Luis Alberto Restrepo maintains an easy naturalism with his cast, creating a realistic context for Julían’s actions. As such, the film’s violence hits especially hard: you flinch from it as you would in real life. Juan Pablo Urrego, who plays Julían, resists doing the charismatic psychopath act. The character is never remotely likable, and it’s clear that others hang out with him only because he’s rich. Julían exploits his status to get away with murder—as in a Chabrol film, the wealthy characters refrain from turning in one of their own because they don’t want to disrupt their cushy lifestyle. In a revealing development, the antihero also exploits the Medellín’s chaotic situation, knowing that in a city rife with unsolved murders, the police are so overtaxed they may not have the resources to catch him. To the film’s credit, this turn doesn’t come off as cynical, but as genuinely upsetting. NOBODY’S FRIEND maintains a strong moral perspective even when it trades in sordidness; Julían represents the worst of Colombian society, and the film looks at him, appropriately, with shame. (2019, 109 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Marlén Viñayo’s CACHADA (El Salvador/Documentary)
Available to rent Tuesday, September 22 through Thursday, September 24
Among society’s seemingly intractable problems is the grinding cycle of violence—a woeful legacy passed down from one generation to the next, often in poverty-plagued areas where hopelessness gives birth to fury. There have, of course, been attempts to stanch the violence with variations on Freud’s talking cure. One such attempt is the subject of Marlén Viñayo’s moving, unflinching documentary CACHADA. The hope of the title, which translates as “opportunity,” rests among five women who live in an impoverished section of an unnamed El Salvadoran city and work as street vendors. The women—Evelyn Chileno, Ruth H. Vega, Magdalena Henríquez, Wendy Henríquez, and Magaly Lemus—are all single mothers who have been battered and raped by various men in their lives, some from as early as five years of age. All are involved in a development workshop led by actress Egly Larreynaga that will result in a scripted play based on their lives that they will perform for the community. This form of creative therapy for traumatized women has resulted in some dynamic works of art, including Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976) and Heather Ross’ 2009 documentary GIRLS ON THE WALL. CACHADA carries on in that tradition, as Viñayo follows these damaged women for more than a year as they rip open their psychic wounds, take responsibility for passing the violence they suffered onto their children, and support each other with abundant love as they relive and begin to heal the pain. She also captures their work and home lives, especially their interactions with their children, and it is truly infuriating to see complex human beings who have hopes and dreams like anyone else living in crumbling houses and barely getting by. Nonetheless, it is inspiring to these women face their lives bravely and honestly as they travel through the play development process. CACHADA affirms that even small acts of healing have the potential to ripple far beyond themselves if we allow ourselves the opportunity to hope. (2019, 82 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Bahman Tavoosi’s THE NAMES OF THE FLOWERS (Bolivia)
Available to rent Thursday, September 24 through Saturday, September 26
On October 8, 1967, Che Guevara was captured by CIA-backed Bolivian special forces as he was organizing a revolutionary army in a rugged region of Bolivia. He was taken to the nearby village of La Higuera, populated mainly by indigenous Guaraní, and interrogated at a rundown schoolhouse several hours before being murdered the next day. In between, he met with a 22-year-old schoolteacher named Julia Cortez. Although there are records of what passed between them, director Bahman Tavoosi has created a mythical exchange of soup and poetry that forms the bones THE NAMES OF THE FLOWERS. An old woman (Bárbara Cameo de Flores) who claims she was that schoolteacher walks each day to the schoolhouse with a tureen of soup and a vase containing two massive flowers. A mentally challenged man (José Luis Garibaldi Durán) follows her bearing a framed photo of her as a young woman. They set the three items up in the school like an altar. It is assumed that this ritual and her story bring her some income from curious tourists, though none are ever seen to visit her. As the 50th anniversary of Che’s death approaches and, with it, government-sanctioned festivities in La Higuera, an army colonel (Sergio Wilson Tapia Echalar) and several other officials come to town to clamp down on illegitimate tourist activities. They specifically want to check the old woman’s story out, as there have been other women who claim to have served Che. THE NAMES OF THE FLOWERS explores the quest for a truth that is less important than the power of myth to make a few lives a little better. Perhaps the old woman was an opportunist at first, but after so many years, her devotions have taken on religious proportions that give her purpose. By contrast, the government’s punitive attempts to find the “real” schoolteacher are kind of head-scratching, not to mention hypocritical, considering that their predecessors tried to stage Che’s execution as the result of a nonexistent battle. Beautifully framed with rich color saturation in Bolivia’s high country, THE NAMES OF THE FLOWERS is a thought-provoking and pleasurable experience. (2019, 79 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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João Nicolau’s TECHNOBOSS (Portugal)
Available to rent Thursday, September 24 through Saturday, September 26
Why make a musical comedy about a laidback 60-something divorcé who installs security systems for a living? That’s the question behind TECHNOBOSS, and writer-director-editor João Nicolau’s refusal to provide a satisfying answer (other than maybe “Why not?”) serves as its central joke. The movie trades in conceptual humor—indeed, it might be funnier to think about than it is to watch. It’s a musical in which no one sings well, and the action is so minimal and deadpan that the most exciting episode has to take place offscreen. Nicolau’s comedy may be arch, but it isn’t flippant. TECHNOBOSS advances a generous worldview, treating all the characters with sympathy and finding interest in what might appear like dull, white-collar drudgery. Yes, Luís Rovisco sells and installs security systems, but he likes his job; he gets to drive all over the Iberian Peninsula and meet different people. He’s also about to retire, which means he doesn’t have to work very hard either. This character makes for good company, especially as he’s portrayed by Miguel Lobo Antunes, a noted Portuguese arts administrator making his acting debut. Antunes throws himself into the part despite his limitations as a performer; much of the movie’s charm stems from his endearing amateurishness. Nicolau compliments the lead performance with numerous homespun devices: a few scenes in which Luís drives to an appointment are clearly staged in a parked car with a moving, painted backdrop behind it; in other scenes, Nicolau forgoes settings entirely and presents the action with the actors and a few props in a dark room; and the music, which ranges from synth pop to heavy metal, is all plainly lo-fi. The songs are also quite catchy; the title song (about the trademarked security system Luís installs) was in my head for days after I watched this. (2019, 112 min) [Ben Sachs]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Video Art and Mass Incarceration—Part One (Experimental)
Available for free on VDB TV until September 30
The four video works in this program are collectively a summation and individually revelations; the brutality of the United States prison system is on trial here, the videomakers its judges, and we, the viewers, its jury. The first video, Annie Goldson and Chris Bratton’s THE DEATHROW NOTEBOOKS (1992, 13 min), is a provocation that’s unequivocal in its aim to evince the unembellished horrors of both our judicial system and the prison-industrial complex. It’s centered on a candid interview with Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist and revolutionary who at the time was on death row in Pennsylvania for killing a cop (he’s now serving a life sentence), and whose trial was rife with injustice. The video is split into sections about Abu-Jamal’s youth activism, his involvement with the Black Panthers, his observations on the racial injustices exercised against the Philadelphia-based MOVE organization (a back-to-nature organization targeted for their radical politics), and his trial and subsequent conviction. Footage of the interview—intercut with archival footage related to the topics Abu-Jamal is discussing, as well as expository title cards that further explain nuances related to the subject matter—often hones in on Abu-Jamal’s cuffed hands. The device is simple, but effective; the videomakers show incarceration for what it is—the confinement of a body, too often a body of color, and the restriction of movement, physical and otherwise. The next video, Harun Farocki’s I THOUGHT I WAS SEEING CONVICTS (2000, 25 min), taking its name from a line uttered by Ingrid Bergman’s character in Roberto Rossellini's EUROPA ‘51, elaborates on prison as a space in which these bodies are circumscribed. A two-channel video installation presented here as a single-channel video, with the frames overlapping, its essence is bound in correlation and contradiction. Using surveillance footage from a maximum-security prison in Corcoran, California (obtained through a FOIA request made by a civil rights group), Farocki takes a Foucauldian approach to the dehumanizing effects of the prison system and networks that mirror it in civilian life, such as supermarkets and factories. The video argues that all of these structures are predicated on the control of bodies within their spaces. Images themselves, as taken by surveillance apparatuses, are implicated; footage of inmates in a prison yard segues to a visual layout on which guards document the immates' identities and affiliations within the prison, allowing them to maintain control of its inhabitants from a measured distance. Both subtitles and a German woman’s voice narrate what’s on-screen—“Whoever controls the technical means is considered powerful,” she says. About the prisoners: “They have almost nothing: only their bodies and membership in a gang.” In his signature, rigid style, Farocki lays bare prisons as the logical conclusion of a passive surveillance state in which bodies are placed in an unwinnable battle against the mechanization of apathy. Lawrence Andrews’ AND THEY CAME RIDING INTO TOWN ON BLACK AND SILVER HORSES (1992, 30 min) explores ways in which representations of people of color perpetuate stereotypes of them as being criminals. Divided into verses seemingly out of order, the video alternates between elegiac and documentary approaches; some verses are opaque, others more forthright. The documentary sequences feature interviews with a law enforcement officer who trains other officers on how to handle guns; a police sketch artist who speaks to the difficulties witnesses experience when describing suspects; and, most importantly, Black men who have been wrongfully accused of crimes they didn’t commit. Andrews presents tortuous media representation and the criminal justice system as maddeningly discordant contrivances that stupefy the public into passing judgment on these people before they’re ever even on trial—sometimes before they're even arrested. Lastly, in SPACE GHOST (2007, 25 min), Laurie Jo Reynolds connects the experience of imprisonment to that of astronauts in space, using media about both to illustrate the uncanny similarities. In between visual representations of this metaphor, phone calls between Reynolds and her inmate brother can be heard; the conversations are mostly benign, with her brother ruminating on such topics as eggs, the magazines he likes, and the television shows they’re both watching. During the conversation about eggs, the two discuss the inhumane processes used in raising livestock, the parallel between people in prison and animals in cages unbroached but all too obvious. “Why do things seem like they’re just getting worse and worse?” asks Reynolds’ brother, heartbreakingly, when talking about the animals. “All kinds of stuff, you didn’t think it could get any worse… and then there’s more things that are just worse.” Many of us might be asking the same thing. [Kathleen 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]
Hubert Sauper’s EPICENTRO (Austria/France/Documentary)
Available streaming 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]
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]
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]
Bob Hercules’ MIKVA! DEMOCRACY IS A VERB (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Tikkun olam—heal the world. This Jewish concept is almost an unconscious command to many Jews, but especially those who came up during the Depression and World War II. One of those Jews was Abner Mikva, a Milwaukee-born, Chicago-based attorney, Democratic politician, and legislator who eventually was confirmed to a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals, only to resign to become White House counsel to President Bill Clinton. He taught law at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, where he developed a close relationship with Barack Obama. In addition, he and his wife Zoe started the Mikva Challenge, a civic leadership program for young people that gives them not only the civics lessons they were denied in school, but also a chance to work to bring about change through the political process. By all measures, Mikva lived up to the credo of tikkun olam, and it would do for all of us to be reminded of how much good can come out of the political process. Bob Hercules’ documentary MIKVA! DEMOCRACY IS A VERB provides a pointed overview of Mikva’s background, accomplishments, and beliefs through archival footage, interviews with such politicos as Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, strategist David Axelrod, and former FCC chair Newton Minow, as well as Mikva’s children and grandchildren. Mikva was a thorn in the side of Richard J. Daley and his Democratic machine, and they repeatedly tried to knock him out of politics by redrawing the lines of his congressional district. After a court challenge to this redistricting and one unsuccessful race, Mikva served the 10th Congressional District, to the north of Chicago, for several productive years. The documentary affirms how he became an effective legislator who won friends on both sides of the aisles. We also learn the sobering fact that Mikva was fighting for gun control back in the 1970s and that the NRA spent $1 million in a campaign against him—an object lesson in how long guns have been at the center of our national debates and our worst tragedies. What heartens me about seeing this concise, informative documentary is how inspired young people are by his lessons and legacy, just as I was when I worked on his unsuccessful 1972 congressional race. I kept the faith and was rewarded by his wonderful lifetime of service. I look forward to seeing the great things today’s youth have in store for us in part due to Mikva’s legacy. (2020, 58 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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]
Howard Alk’s THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON (US/Documentary)
Available for free via Chicago Film Archives and UCLA Film & Television Archive here – Thursday, 7pm CT
While many documentaries can be said literally to ‘document’ history, very few actually capture that hefty substance as it is happening. Examples that come to mind are the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin’s GIMME SHELTER and, more recently, Laura Poitras’ CITIZENFOUR and RISK. In the former, the filmmakers caught the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter while filming the Altamont Free Concert; in the latter, Poitras depicts real-time revelations from and about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Howard Alk’s THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON is another, one with a germane timelessness, its underlying themes urgent as ever. Originally intended as a more straightforward examination of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and its chairman Fred Hampton, THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON, produced by the Chicago Film Group, evolved into something much more pressing and investigative after Hampton was killed during an early morning raid while the project was underway. It’s effective as it details both the Black Panther ideology (which includes forward-thinking social and education programs, as well as cooperation with other minority groups) and the events surrounding Hampton’s horrific death; the dichotomy created by the unfortunate circumstances is a compelling one. In this way, it was a much-needed antithesis to conservative accounts touted at the time, specifically that which appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune—to quote Howard Zinn from his seminal A People's History of the United States, "the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction… that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission." In his review of the film for the New York Times, A.H. Weiler opened with the declaration that “[h]istory is, or should be, recorded after exhaustive contemplation.” Who says? THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON was ahead of its time in its propinquity, reflecting history as a stimulus that demands immediate response. (Weiler eventually concedes this, but let’s consider his lede at face value anyway.) The footage of a prostrate Hampton covered in blood after being dragged off the bed he’d been sleeping in just moments before is much more affecting than the FBI reenactments, after-the-fact representations that strip away the situation’s exigency. Fred Hampton was murdered, and this film demands its viewers bear witness to that in such a way that is, sadly, just as relevant now as it was then. (1971, 88 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
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Following the screening, Dr. Jakobi Williams, author of From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics, will lead a conversation with panelists Black Panther Party member Henry "Poison" Gaddis; Black Panther Party member and Executive Director of Hope and a Home, Lynn French; and attorney and founding partner of the People's Law Office, Flint Taylor.
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]
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
Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (presented by Chicago Filmmakers) will present a virtual festival online beginning Thursday and running through October 4. Schedule and more info here. Look for selected reviews next week.
Block Cinema (Northwestern Univ.)
Block presents an online screening and discussion entitled Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project: Picturing "The Long Term" on Thursday at 7pm. The screening will include works produced as part of the PNAP. More information and an RSVP link here.
Media Burn Archive
Video artist Nancy Buchanan screens and discusses a selection of her works (1979-2008) in an online presentation on Thursday at 7pm. Registration and more info here.
Gallery 400 (UIC)
Guy Ben-Ner’s 2012 video FOREIGN NAMES (5 min) is available online through September 28 here.
Renaissance Society (UofC)
The Renaissance Society presents two videos online in conjunction with their current show Nine Lives. Streaming here through November 15 are: Marwa Arsanios’ 2014 video HAVE YOU EVER KILLED A BEAR? OR BECOMING JAMILA (26 min) and Tamar Guimarães’ 2018 video O ENSAIO [THE REHEARSAL] (51 min).
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
The MCA presents the shorts program The (Im)possibilities of Moving Freely on Sunday at Noon, with work by Elia Suleiman, Bani Abidi, and Steffani Jemison. More info and RSVP link here.
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
Asian Pop-Up Cinema is presenting 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 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 23, is an introduction for John Robertson’s 1920 film DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. Visit the library’s events page, select September 23, 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
Roger Michell’s 2019 US/UK film BLACKBIRD (97 min), Tod Lending’s 2020 documentary SAUL & RUBY'S HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR BAND (81 min), and Itay Tal’s 2019 Israeli film GOD OF THE PIANO (80 min) are available for streaming beginning this week.
Music Box Theatre
John Hyams’ 2020 film ALONE (98 min), Rémi Anfosso’s 2020 documentary A CHEF’S VOYAGE (90 min), and Masayuki Kojima’s 2020 Japanese animated film MADE IN ABYSS: DAWN OF THE DEEP SOUL (113 min) are available for streaming beginning this week.
Chicago International Film Festival
Check CIFF’s website for titles currently available for rental.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RECOMMENDATIONS
Milwaukee Underground Film Festival – Program 2
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Film Department – Program 2 is available free September 22 - 29 here
“Versions of Visions” offers a controlled burn, with nine films that escalate from cloistered domestic ennui to zero-percent-contained dread along a path that mirrors the multi-front calamity of the year to date. Irish filmmaker Michael Higgins’ HUNG, DRAWN, AND QUARTERED (2018) kicks things off with a pixilated pageant of visually clever set-ups, staged for the delectation of a single Super8 roll of color negative. Higgins’ toy-mangling experiments remind me of early underground works like Ken Jacobs’ LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS, while anticipating the agitated quest for diversion that defines life under quarantine (complete with a coda of handwashing). Next up is Zachary Epcar’s epochal BILLY (2019), the program’s lodestone. For better or worse, its poised formalism can only be seen through the distorted glass of its cursed timeliness. Before it was to appear in March’s postponed Onion City Film Festival, I suggested it “augur[ed] an era of social distancing, defined by the menace of the unseen intruder and its convenient doppelganger, the delivery guy: a world under self-quarantine.” BILLY certainly chimes that bell here, but housebound despair isn’t the only resonating note: I’m struck by Epcar’s inversion of action and still life, how he casts heroic raspberries, intrepid K-cups, stoic glass bricks, and hapless flowers to perish tragically within an atmosphere of stale human boredom. It’s well paired with Kimberly Burleigh’s JEALOUSY (2020), a 3d-animated study of spaces described in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s landmark 1957 anti-humanist “new novel” La Jalousie. One thinks the French author-filmmaker would have loved CGI cinema, the only kind that can be made without shadows. As a specialist in deadpan smut like 1968’s TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS, he might also have delighted by Stephen Wardell’s anodyne porn parody, SUBURBAN VERSIONS. Droll scenes of bedroom-window solicitation notwithstanding, there’s actually more tilt-shift-filter than titillation here. But the film’s rehearsal of queer desire against its immaculate model-home interiors feels poignant, and I’m fascinated by its kink for stucco. The erotics of window-gazing are also at the center of Carl Elsaesser’s ITINERARY OF SURFACES (2020), a highlight of the program. The objects of Elsaesser’s blurry gaze are domestic, familiar, unexceptional: an unmade bed, an illuminated globe, a window looking out onto a lake, a ceiling fan. But each shot and transition in ITINERARY betrays some intimate trickery, like a magician practicing his craft for an audience of one. A chain of optical puzzles, the film might play as cryptic, if not for the moans and throbs of Björk’s “Pagan Poetry,” casting all this sleight-of-hand under the sign of exquisitely horny melancholy. ARE YOU MY MOTHER (Jack Furtado, 2018) and I WAS BORN OUT LIKE A FISH (Tyler Macri, 2019) both assess generational trauma through voice-over and analog film footage. In Furtado’s film, whispered laments imbue stuttering loops of found home movies with an obsessional gaze; Macri, on the other hand, uses lovely, intermittently queasy Kodak cinematography to contrast a harrowing story of family abuse, recounted in a recorded phone call. These mounting domestic tensions explode outwards in the program’s final two films, each a cadaster of catastrophe in its own way. EARTH HAD ISSUES LOADING… (2020), by Leonardo Pirondi, goes looking for cracks in our “perfect and autosufficient ecosystem,” finding plenty among the oil derricks, transformer stations, and hillside wildfires of Los Angeles, all captured in infernally vivid 16mm. If the iconography of Southern California eco-devastation feels overexposed at this point, the closing film, Emily Drummer’s FIELD RESISTANCE (2019), casts a speculative eye on more distinctly Midwestern terrain. The title suggests a contest of forces playing out across the landscapes of Iowa, where Drummer films biological specimens that defy apparatuses of human management. Like her contemporaries Jessica Sarah Rinland and Jumana Manna, Drummer is a filmmaker-researcher, drawn to peculiar zones of adaptation between technology and flora in a changing climate. She’s also got an incredible ear: the soundtrack, designed by Drummer and Philip Rabalais and mixed by Alex Inglizian of the Experimental Sound Studio, crackles with ingenuity. Since you’ll be watching at home, you might as well break out your nice headphones. (2018-20, approx. 69 min total) [Michael Metzger]
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The festival is presenting one program per week for six weeks, through October 27. Each program premieres as a livestream at 5pm on Tuesday, and then will be available online for one week (select titles may not be included after the livestream, per filmmaker agreements).
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
Most independent, alternative, arthouse, grassroots, DIY, and university-based venues and several festivals continue to have suspended operations, are closed, or have 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 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) – Will be presenting online discussions and screenings in October
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.
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 18 - September 24, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger