We will highlight physical screenings at the top of the list for theaters and venues that have reopened, newly regrouped in our standard Crucial Viewing and Also Recommended sections, as well as all other physical screenings, and list streaming/online screenings below.
Remember to check the venues’ websites for information on safety protocols and other procedures put in place. More and more venues are now requiring proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test. We recommend verifying those protocols before every trip to the theater. And, of course, always wear a mask.
📽️ CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL
The 28th Chicago Underground Film Festival starts Friday and goes through Sunday; it takes place at the Logan Theatre. Below are select reviews for several shorts programs and features. The festival is also being presented virtually, with programs becoming available at the same time they screen in-person. More info here.
Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney’s MAKE A DISTINCTION (US/Documentary)
Friday, 7pm; available to rent virtually here
Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney’s MAKE A DISTINCTION is a bold step into the feature form by the Chicago-based duo. Made over four (shall we say, fraught) years, the film seems to narrate the course of its own development, from exploratory survey to statement of purpose: if you’re wondering where it’s going at the start, you’ll know exactly where you stand at the end. (Spoiler alert: stolen land.) Not that things are all that vague at the jump: an electric opening montage featuring clips of Kwame Ture and Fred Hampton signals the general direction. But the following scenes, cruising the communities surrounding Kentucky’s Fort Campbell Army Base and glimpsing the travesties inflicted on the American environment by capitalism and militarism, suggest filmmakers seeking refuge in pockets of untrammeled nature—and in a familiar idiom of landscape essay film. This impression is deceptive: halfway through, the film changes course dramatically, turning its focus towards Chicago and adopting a tone of forceful and incisive analysis. Defiantly casting their 16mm camera lens on the many Dick Wolf television productions shooting around the city, the filmmakers unpack incestuous relationships linking the dramatized copaganda of shows like Chicago PD, the corrupt developers behind the Cinespace Chicago studio, and the actual CPD forces who have brutalized city residents with impunity for decades. With damning precision, MacKenzie and Mausert-Mooney lay out on-screen texts and primary documents, arguing implicitly for formal, economic, and political alternatives to the commercial film industry’s hegemony…before changing stylistic gears yet again. These shifts are abrupt, but the film’s own internal polymorphism—the confidence with which it swerves from landscape to essay film to insurrectionary botany lesson (?!)—helps us imagine what such a radical film practice might look like. The electrifying Dick Wolf sequence divides the film, much as the opening’s Fred Hampton quotation divides the people from the pigs. But MacKenzie and Mausert-Mooney don’t just ask us to pick a side, they show us how. By returning, with lucid self-awareness and burning urgency, to landscapes, figures, techniques, and themes from its first half, MAKE A DISTINCTION demonstrates how historical consciousness can orient diverse experimental tactics towards a unitary, emancipatory purpose. In other words, like all the films in this program, it’s an object lesson in political filmmaking. Screening with Africanus Okokon’s 2019 short film .SRT (9 min, Digital Projection) and Rajee Samarasinghe’s 2021 short film SHOW ME OTHER PLACES (11 min, Digital Projection). (2021, 62 min, Digital Projection) [Michael Metzger]
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Shorts 1: A Glimpse Through is Walking In
Friday, 9pm; available to rent virtually here
Most of the short films in this program involve animation, often by way of collage; the inclusion of a few shorts that don’t quite cohere to the ostensible theme makes the program itself a collage of sorts. Most of the shorts in some way also involve the natural world, and the ones that don’t serve as foils, presenting man-made phenomena against those found in nature, offering up a striking dissonance. The first two films, Markus Maicher’s INTO THE WILD (2020, 5 min, Digital Projection) and Laura Kraning’s FRACTURE (2021, 4 min, Digital Projection) mine nature for all its cinematic potential, finding elegance in the abundance of shadows and shapes and merging them together in beautifully imperfect harmony. Rachel Mayeri’s ORPHEUS IN THE ALIMENTARY CANAL (2019, 10 min, Digital Projection) is a short, animated opera that takes place in the digestive tract of the Greek goddess Eurydice, with Orpheus here attempting to save her from an upset stomach. Purporting to explore “the dissolution of individuality through the realization that our bodies are teeming with nonhuman life,” the film features an animation style that’s particularly attractive, complimenting the weirdness nicely. The latest collaboration between Jessie Mott and Steve Reinke, CONTAMINATE ME (2021, 3 min, Digital Projection) is similarly wondrous and bizarre. Chimeric, animal-like figures, illustrated by Mott, voice the caustic musings associated with Reinke’s practice; its entreaty for someone or something to ‘contaminate me’ is a bold provocation, and the fog it references is one that’s lately been enveloping us all. Another lovely animation, Nick Rohr’s SELKIE (2021, 4 min, Digital Projection) reveals a woman caught in a storm, with the fuzzy snowstorm of a television screen replaced by the sky’s torrential onslaught. Proving that Mother Nature is the ultimate dramatic diva, Jeremy Moss’ LÁCRIMAS (2021, 14 min, Digital Projection) cleverly sets stunning footage of flora and fauna to audio clips from such melodramas as Fred Zinnemann’s FROM HERE TO ETERNITY and Douglas Sirk’s WRITTEN ON THE WIND. Steve Wood’s ELECTRIC EYE (2020, 3 min, Digital Projection) is a bit of formal fun, with images stuck directly to clear 16mm film “extending into the optical audio area of the picture,” per the film’s description, which was then “edited and layered into musical arrangements, with every frame of picture accompanied by the sound it produced in the projector.” In another technological feat, Brian Zahm, in STINGER (2021, 5 min, Digital Projection), takes footage recorded with a small camera that had the ability to photograph microscopic images, of an insect sting he suffered twenty years ago in Ecuador, and makes with it a short, time-lapse-like documentary about his experience with a gruesome parasite. Chris Blue’s COUSINS (2021, 3 min, Digital Projection) is posited as “[a] meditation on the false promise of present day anti racist [sic] initiatives.” Its ambitious undertaking is opaque, made even more so by the buttressing of it by films about the beauty and horror of nature; in the reverse, and profusely explicated, Jeremy Bolen and Nina Barnett’s AND SO WE MAY FEEL ECHOS (2021, 11 min, Digital Projection) takes an essayistic approach to its contemplation on particulates, philosophizing that which is hardly even considered much less prescribed an ideology. Labeled a city symphony, Jason Younkman’s WILDERNESS DAYS (2021, 11 min, Digital Projection) is a collage of footage from summers spent in New York City. Street ephemera, such as flyers and graffiti, help to animate the already lively venture. The antithesis to most of the films before it, Laura Engelhardt’s ENTRANCE AND EXIT OF MASCHA B. (2020, 14 min, Digital Projection) details the process by which a woman becomes digitally transformed as a character in an animated tableau. The directness of how this task is achieved makes it no less uncanny, perhaps showing us a future where things that appear real will not be. [Kathleen Sachs]
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Shorts 3: Letters From Not-So-Far-Off Countries
Saturday, 4:45pm; available to rent virtually here
Like Erykah Badu did in 2003, this shorts program envisions a worldwide underground, where people make connections across borders through shared countercultural affinities. Perhaps the most prominent commonality between the makers of these works is a love of 16mm film; most of the pieces in the program were shot in this format, and all of the ones that were take a reverential stance towards the medium for its warm, lived-in quality. That affection often overlaps with a sense of nostalgia. Sunil Sanzgiri’s LETTERS FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY (2020, 18 min, Digital Projection), which closes the program, is structured around the filmmaker’s father reading aloud a letter he’s writing from Kashmir to his son in the United States. The narration touches on the social revolution that brought about the end of the caste system in India, other histories of activism in Kashmir, and various misfortunes that have befallen the Kashmiri people. To heighten the film’s message of receiving wisdom from the past, Sanzgiri frequently presents digital technology (namely computer screens showing material found online) on 16mm, which makes them feel unaccountably old. I found these shots strangely comforting. Letters from the past also factor into Julia Later and Guilherme Santos Peres’ piece LHES (2021, 10 min, Digital Projection), from Brazil. This poignant work considers the life of an apartment building in São Paolo through an associative montage of objects in the building, shots of the edifice, and old photographs; the narration comes from written correspondence by someone who lived in the building in the early 1940s. Where LHES makes the past seem mysterious and inviting, Edgar Jorge Baralt’s VENTANA (2021, 11 min, Digital Projection), which opens the program, makes the filmmaker’s memories seem alien. In this piece, Baralt presents flat-screen TVs arranged around his childhood home, presenting digital scans of photographs from his youth; the combination of past and contemporary image-making devices results in a compelling frisson. Devin Jie Allen’s BLUE DISTANCE (2021, 7 min, Digital Projection) also finds a filmmaker considering his roots. The film recounts the story of Allen’s grandmother, who came to the United States from Hong Kong and gave birth to Allen’s mother after being here only a few weeks. Allen’s mother narrates, her delivery of information giving way to touching expressions of regret about not learning more about her own mother when she had the chance. The short LIKE A MOUSE (2021, 15 min, Digital Projection), directed by Michael Holly and Mike Vonmechelen, is worried less about the past than the future. A short documentary about the unprecedented discovery of a tropical fern in an Irish national park in 2020, it spotlights the strange (yet often quite compelling) effects that climate change is producing in ecosystems around the world. Another alarming entry in the program is CABO TUNA OR THE MANAGEMENT OF THE SKY (2021, 13 min, Digital Projection), an elaborate montage by the Mexican collective Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico. When it played at the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival earlier this year, I described it as “a short essay film about the history of satellite technology in rockets and surveillance equipment, with all the footage taken from YouTube. The history lesson touches on Werner von Braun and the Nazis, the Soviet Union’s surveillance of their own citizens, and Mexican drug cartels, yet the imagery is often lighthearted or dreamlike; Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse enters into the mix, as do some vintage Mexican cartoons. This is reminiscent of Adam Curtis’ work, not only in the mélange of materials, but in the filmmakers’ ability to synthesize a wide range of historical information into a single, compelling narrative.” Rounding out the program are Dena Springer’s brief experimental animation YOU ARE HERE (2020, 3 min, Digital Projection) and Li Yongzheng’s dual-screen experimental documentary FEAST (2021, 13 min, Digital Projection), about the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang region of China. [Ben Sachs]
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Shorts 5: Light to the Flaming Sky
Saturday, 12:45pm; available to rent virtually here
A motif of ghostliness, literal and not, connects the short films in this program. Deborah Stratman’s FOR THE TIME BEING (2021, 7 min, Digital Projection) is a tribute to the late artist Nancy Holt, with whom Stratman shares a penchant for certain visual and thematic through lines. It simultaneously evokes Holt’s work, specifically in the dot formations taken from her Sun Tunnels, and calls upon her spirit to reveal itself in images of placid lakes, earth-shattering craters, and illusive symbols, all of which emphasize how “time endures, goes on, remains, persists, lasts, goes by, elapses, passes, flows, rolls on, flies, slips, slides, and glides by,” to quote Holt’s letter to Robert Smithson that gives the work its name. In Christian Serritiello’s AN APPROXIMATION OF THEIR BARBAROUS MANNERS (2021, 12 min, Digital Projection), character actor Bruce Glover, perhaps best known for his turns in Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN and as Mr. Wint in the James Bond film DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, goes missing from the set of a film shooting in Tangiers, after which the collective mindset of cast and crew gradually devolves. Putting the idea of the specter in perspective, SL Pang’s PHARMAKOSIS (2020, 13 min, Digital Projection), shot at the Art Institute of Chicago, takes the subjective viewpoint of the cameraperson, who’s filming people around the museum as they undertake various activities. Soon the subjects begin looking back at the camera, typically in shock or disgust. One might reasonably assume that the people being watched are merely responding to the digital voyeurism, but it’s soon made clear to what they’re reacting. The action of othering is made to seem like how a person might react to a supernatural apparition, taking it further than othering, into full-on erasure of the corporeal presence. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’ TONALLI (2021, 16 min, Digital Projection), the word for what ancient Nahuatl people effectively believed was the soul, is a kaleidoscopic, in-camera collage of colors and images that dance along to the music. Dwellers on the macabre will appreciate Tyler Hubby’s THE LAKE (2021, 13 min, Digital Projection); shot in eerie black and white, the film details the multitude of people who’ve lost their lives in Los Angeles’ Echo Park Lake, positioning the body of water almost as a void into which souls are drawn. Ever proficient at the micro-short, Tommy Heffron again packs a punch in IDUMEA (2021, 2 min, Digital Projection). What appears to be a mix of Halloween and holiday lights appear on screen in enigmatic configurations, with Heffron is voiceover gently singing the titular Methodist hymn, some of the words to which occasionally appear on screen. Susan Schneider, otherwise known as the Space Lady and now in her 70s, isn’t so much a ghost as she is a presence; recently rediscovered, Schneider has spent much of her life donning a winged helmet and singing along while playing a portable keyboard. Sophia Feuer’s short, experimental documentary on the outsider musician, SPACE LADY (2021, 17 min, Digital Projection), embodies the musician’s almost skittish persona. Not an overly enthusiastic homage like most music documentaries nowadays, Feuer’s film, shot beautifully on 16mm, privileges that which makes the Space Lady interesting and mysterious, allowing her to retain those sensibilities even as she’s giving straightforward details of her life. Kaichi Sato’s ...LOVEHOTEL…~THE GUIDE TO JAPANESE MIDNIGHT CULTURE~ (2021, 22 min, Digital Projection) is most explicitly about ghosts, as it finds a medium attempting to exorcise a haunted room in an hourly motel. Its narrative plot is charmingly zany, but it’s the information about Japan’s so-called midnight culture, elements of Japanese life that one might not otherwise encounter in more conventional films, that makes this intriguing as well as entertaining. Halloween may be over, but, as these films prove, spookiness holds up year round. [Kathleen Sachs]
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Jonathan Davies' TOPOLOGY OF SIRENS
Saturday, 6:45pm; available to rent virtually here
TOPOLOGY OF SIRENS is a tantalizing mystery film in the vein of early Jacques Rivette that imagines contemporary Los Angeles as a kind of giant game-board. Much like how PARIS BELONGS TO US features the search for a missing tape of "revolutionary guitar music" as a narrative jumping-off point, so too does Jonathan Davies' first movie use the discovery of mysterious micro-casette tapes inside of an antique hurdy gurdy as a catalyst for an existential detective story. I love the way TOPOLOGY OF SIRENS imbues physical objects—and the physical media that is rapidly disappearing from the world in the 21st century in particular—with a totemic significance that makes it feel incredibly modern. A lot of critics are going to liken this to the work of other filmmakers (a couple of mesmerizing scenes on a baseball field recall the ending of Antonioni's BLOW-UP in particular) but the best point of comparison I can make is with Thomas Pynchon's 2013 novel Bleeding Edge, which has a similarly haunting quality in how it "makes strange" the recent past by treating it as if it were ancient history. Featuring elegant cinematography that thankfully eschews the gritty, handheld aesthetic so prevalent in modern independent American cinema, and a minimalist drone score that blurs the line between music and atmospheric sound effects, this is an astonishingly confident debut feature. Director Jonathan Davies in person. (2021, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
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Matthew Wade’s A BLACK RIFT BEGINS TO YAWN (US)
Sunday, 7pm; available to rent virtually here
Two scientists, Lara and Laura, pondered or ponder or will ponder their former professor’s work. A BLACK RIFT BEGINS TO YAWN has no real concern with a linear timeline, even from the start. After Lara and Laura’s professor passes away, they begin to dive into his records and recordings, and their own grasp of time crumbles in their shaky hands. Wade utilizes long, drawn out fades to travel between one scene and the next; their shared real estate on the big screen unites them at one pinpoint in time. Wade also chooses to overlap scenes within the same or similar shots, suggesting our main characters have experienced and will experience this instance in time more than once. Andrei Tarkovsky described cinema as “sculpting in time” and Wade certainly understands this potential of the medium. Like musical compositions, films do not have to adhere to narrative logic, although this expectation has certainly rooted itself as the norm for mainstream moviegoing audiences. Unfortunately for Wade, breaking conventions of linear storytelling is not the only ingredient needed to make a masterwork; still, he's walking down the right path. The film has some great visuals and an interesting score, reminiscent of recent filmmakers like Panos Cosmatos or even the Safdie brothers. If you’re a fan of cosmic dread, moody scores, and daring cinematography, then this is a film for you. As a self-appointed student of Tarkovsky, I am always excited to watch something that helps me further understand what cinema is and can be, and so I will be looking forward to more of Wade’s work going forward. (2021, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
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Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke’s A MACHINE TO LIVE IN (US/Brazil/Documentary)
Sunday, 9:15pm; available to rent virtually here
The directors of A MACHINE TO LIVE IN describe the film as a “sci-fi documentary”—a clever way of highlighting the alienness of their subject, the city of Brasilia. Founded in 1960 as the new federal capital of Brazil, the city reflects mid-20th-century ideas of progress through postmodern architecture and overbearing car culture. Some of the film’s strangest and most arresting images are of buildings and expressways, which were designed to seem futuristic but now look like something from a parallel Earth. This is less a city symphony movie than the filmic equivalent of an early Kraftwerk record. And like a good Krautrock composition, MACHINE is generally hypnotic, sucking you in with its meditative shots of urban design. The film doesn’t get into Brazil’s period of military dictatorship (which began just a few years after the founding of Brasilia), though that upsetting history registers as a structuring absence, as a negative example of progress that reigned all over South America in the 1960s. What Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke do get into is plenty alarming; the film devotes time to UFO cults and conspiracy theories about the pyramids. There are moving passages, too, particularly the sections about the utopian dream of Esperanto as a universal language. It can feel refreshing to reflect on past utopian fantasies, given that much civic planning in the 21st century has less to do with striving for perfection than with protecting us for impending disasters. Maybe A MACHINE TO LIVE IN is also a supernatural documentary, depicting Brasilia as haunted by the ghosts of past idealism. (2020, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
📽️ BLACK HARVEST FILM FESTIVAL
The 27th Annual Black Harvest Film Festival starts Friday and goes through December 2; it takes place at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The opening night program is Dave Wooley and David Heilbroner’s 2021 documentary DIONNE WARWICK, DON’T MAKE ME OVER (95 min, DCP Digital), with Warwick in a live appearance via Zoom after the screening. Below are reviews of select films playing as part of the festival, with more to come in future lists. More info here.
Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam’s PRISM (Belgium)
Sunday, 1pm and Wednesday, 6pm
PRISM grapples with the idea that the camera is not an objective tool, but rather one imbued with racism as it assumes and privileges white subjects. It’s an essential conversation, and the film feels foundational in its tackling of these systemic issues in filmmaking. Interested in these questions, Belgian director An van. Dienderen collaborated with filmmakers Rosine Mbakam, who's from Cameroon, and Eléonore Yameogo, who's from Burkina Faso, to scrutinize technological aspects of cinema and explore ways to confront them. PRISM is divided into three sections, each directed by one of the filmmakers. Clips from their earlier works illuminate that these are issues and questions with which they’ve always been struggling but are now directly challenging. Even in the video call meetings between the three that structure the film illuminate the “technological discrimination” that people of color face, as Yameogo finds she must go to extreme lengths to be lit well enough for her colleagues to see her on camera. Conversations early on reveal how often incidents like this get brushed off as lighting, weather ,or somehow the fault of the subject when really cameras are standardized for white individuals. Mbakam’s section, which comprises the middle of the film, is particularly striking, mixing an artistic exploration of her personal and cultural history with frank conversations with her former white, male film school instructors. Boldly, she confronts the gatekeepers of Western filmmaking and confidently questions their complicity in “the continuation of the colonization by Western cinema of other forms of cinema.” PRISM combines theoretical and practical conversations, interviews, and film clips to successfully demonstrate the insidiousness of the problem but also ways to address it and make change. In revealing these built-in forms of racism, the filmmakers are also, as Mbakam states, “glimpsing the possible and imagining a way.” (2021, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Alice Diop’s WE (France/Documentary)
Thursday, 5:30pm
The documentary WE has plenty of insights to impart about the immigrant experience in contemporary France, but what makes it such a thrilling work is that the insights seem to emerge incidentally. It never feels as though filmmaker Alice Diop has a particular message to deliver; her movie proceeds as a series of encounters with people she meets in neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris, and she creates the impression that we’re learning about these people along with her. Sometimes Diop speaks directly to her subjects, but more often she’s content to observe them as they work, socialize, and ride the commuter line in and out of the city center. Numerous spectators have noted that the film’s fragmented structure reflects the fragmented nature of French society today (indeed, the scenes with white Parisians feel a little jarring because they’re so disconnected from much of the rest of the material); at the same time, Diop’s unobtrusive montage suggests the social bonds that connect the disparate people that make up any urban community. The various narratives add up to more than the sum of their parts—as the stories accumulate, common themes emerge (emigration, frayed family ties, alienation), and this creates the impression that the modern city exists in part to absorb various experiences and unite them. (2021, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Rodrick F. Wimberly and Senuwell Smith's THE WOODSTOCK OF HOUSE (US/Documentary)
Thursday, 8pm
Serving as a foundation for mainstream hits we love today, house music first evolved out of disco. Named after the club Warehouse, where legendary DJ Frankie Knuckles spun tracks night after night, house quickly spread around the globe and continues to influence millions. This documentary focuses on “The Woodstock of House,” which takes place at the Chosen Few DJ’s Picnic in Jackson Park—a massive event that brings in over 40,000 house fans from all over the world. The film takes us through a history of disco, then tells of disco's retreat following the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park and the subsequent creation of the house genre. Directors Rodrick F. Wimberly and Senuwell Smith show that house, with its thumping pulse and evocative flips on old favorites, is not just about having fun. The music was a response to the hatred and bigotry of the era; it promoted peace and love and sought to uplift, not unlike the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair of 1969. This pulse that beats throughout the music is something we all share on an instinctual level, and on those grounds, we can connect with one another. The interviews with important house music figures are great, and the knowledge they impart will make you appreciate this city even more. Be sure to have your weekend free though, because after the credits roll, you will want to grab your friends for a fun night out dancing. (2021, 98 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
George Loane Tucker’s TRAFFIC IN SOULS (US/Silent)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am
Recently, the United States has been experiencing another of its periodic hissy fits over waves of immigration that are disrupting the social pecking order and mobilizing some people to hop up and down on the hands of time to reverse the course of history. Nonetheless, as the saying goes, what’s old is new again. In the first decade or so of the 20th century, immigration set off a wave of concern that the pimps who were luring off-the-boat female immigrants into prostitution would start preying on the flower of white American maidenhood. George Loane Tucker’s TRAFFIC IN SOULS pretended a concern over so-called white slavery while offering audiences the titillation they craved. TRAFFIC IN SOULS was a huge hit, providing a solid foundation on which Universal Pictures was built and earning its place on the National Film Registry as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” film. The movie is equal parts overwrought melodrama, social indictment, and documentary, which makes it a fascinating film as a crowd pleaser with actual relevance. The film stratifies the worlds of respectable American society, carpetbaggers in morning suits and silk, squalid criminals, and isolated and vulnerable immigrants. The Barton family comprises an invalid inventor father (William H. Turner), responsible eldest daughter Mary (Jane Gail), and devil-may-care younger daughter Lorna (Ethel Grandin). Lorna is put in danger when she is spotted in the candy store where she and Mary work by the manager of a prostitution ring (Howard Crampton) run by the wealthy social climber William Trubus (William Welsh), who hides his activities by heading the International Purity and Reform League. Such reformist associations often were hissworthy villains in silent films, with meddlesome social workers tearing babies away from the bosoms of their destitute mothers with some frequency. Before we get to the main event—Lorna’s kidnapping and rescue—Loane Tucker offers a look at how brothels operate. The film, shot in New York City, offers location shooting at Ellis Island, the Upper West Side, and in Penn Station, where newcomers to the big city from small towns and other countries are waylaid by “helpful” procurers, like the seemingly safe “Respectable” Smith (William Burbridge), who offer to help them find their lodgings or take them to an employment service. Two Swedish girls (Flora Nason and Vera Hansey) looking like low-rent milkmaids in long-braid wigs, are separated from the brother (William Powers) who meets them at the boat and lured into the brothel by a homemade sign scribbled in English and Swedish that says, “Swedish Employment Agency.” Technology plays a large role in this film. The manager writes the daily returns on a tablet that form magically on a similar tablet in Trubus’ office, the imagination of the film’s creators prefiguring email. Trubus is unmasked for what he is by Mary, discharged from the candy store because of the immorality attached to her sister’s situation—being kidnapped is no excuse for low morals, apparently—and hired by Mrs. Trubus (Millie Liston). Mary learns the truth and brings a microphone—an early phone bug—her father has invented to eavesdrop on Trubus and his manager. We also have an early example of product placement—Edison wax cylinders are used to record the conversation the bug picks up. I quite liked the precision of the police assault on the brothel. Loane Tucker builds suspense as the police get their orders and man various positions on top of and surrounding the building. When the police storm the building, the camera work is kinetic and dizzying. The ending is one modern moviegoers will find quite familiar. Preceded Walter Wright’s 1915 short LOVE, SPEED AND THRILLS (13 min, 16mm). (1913, 75 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe’s THE BETA TEST (US)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue website for showtimes
Jordan Hines (Jim Cummings) is a young, white, shallow hustler who works for a shady talent agency uncoincidentally called APE whose business plan comprises ripping off giant agencies like CAA by making side deals with their clients. One day, he receives a purple invitation to a no-strings-attached sexual encounter, along with a reply card on which he can check off his sexual preferences. Although he is engaged to be married, the invitation jumpstarts his fantasy life, and he ends up returning the card and hooking up with his anonymous lover. Afterward, he becomes paranoid about his fiancée finding out and starts the hunt for the sender of the invitation. THE BETA TEST, which starts off like a slasher movie, switches to another horror—the lying, cheating, cutthroat subculture of alpha and wannabe alpha males. Cummings and co-director/co-screenwriter PJ McCabe, who plays Cummings’ best friend in the film, look at the effect of #MeToo on Hollywood climbers and power brokers who have had to revise their dream of becoming the next Harvey Weinstein. THE BETA TEST quite reminded me of Ben Younger’s THE BOILER ROOM (2000), which took aim at what it called “The New American Dream” of infinite greed. This film goes much farther than THE BOILER ROOM by tossing in the intrusiveness and global reach of internet data mining, as well as the much-shorter fuse social media has fostered in people from all walks of life. Incisively written and performed, THE BETA TEST makes an amusing, but appalling comment on society today. (2021, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
Of all the films directed by Sam Peckinpah, for all their dated controversy, his 1971 STRAW DOGS remains a true mass of jewel shards representing a very real, and enduring, spark of debate, where the male gaze becomes the true arbiter of violence, as Dustin Hoffman finds himself in a thicket of contention amongst a local gang of aggressive males (echoing the gangs portrayed in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY and BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA). The film begins with a couple played by Hoffman and Susan George, who are relocating from America to George’s old hometown, a Cornish village not dissimilar from the isolated towns populating Peckinpah’s westerns. The couple sees their relocation as a solution to their fraying marriage, which has been reduced to arguments and the occasional lovemaking. A group of local men, one of whom who turns out to be George’s former lover, start to play a game of masculine-chicken with the couple, provoking Hoffman’s character who wants nothing more than to work on his mysterious mathematical calculations in private; what proceeds is an ambiguous explosion of carefully stacked violence, ambiguous only in the true origins that provoke the resulting viciousness. Like Peckinpah’s breakthrough film, THE WILD BUNCH, the film opens with the presence of children playing in the setting that will set up the origins of these violent acts, where intention becomes a mystery manifesting itself through the characters’ observations of one another. The real uncertainty of the film is the little to no background given about its characters. In a perfect example of an actor’s persona used to play against itself; Hoffman’s character, while being perceived as a man of little backbone, seems to be concealing the true nature of his mathematical work, as a local parson strikes a nerve when he brings up the proliferation of nuclear weapons; Hoffman’s character also sees no problem administering “small, playful violence” towards their ill-fated housecat. His wife, who we understand early on had a lover in the town three years prior, hides the extent of that affair from her husband, and therefore the entire audience, informing the heated conversation that surrounded the film’s most “controversial scene.” As the gang of local men close in on the couple’s house, signaling the start of the exploitative-fare soon to come, films like Wes Craven’s LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT are called to mind. The final third of the film, after the attack on Hoffman’s wife, becomes a splintered assault of razor-sharp edits physically representing the inner stripping of the film’s main characters’ pretensions and artifice, resulting in maybe the most complex and thought-provoking probes on the true nature of violence and it’s aftermath. (1971, 118 min, Digital Projection) [John Dickson]
Joseph Sargent's THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (US)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm
Let's start with all the things that the 1974 version of TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE is not. Unlike A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, it's not a film that romanticizes anti-social violence; the PELHAM hoods are middle-aged, dejected men who hijack a subway train out of a fog of desperation that they themselves regard as pathetic and low. Nor is it a DIRTY HARRY or FRENCH CONNECTION, burnishing the results of warrior cops who step outside the law; Walter Matthau's police lieutenant scarcely fires a shot and spends the movie in a plaid button-up with a bright yellow tie, the squarest law enforcement figure this side of Jack Webb. PELHAM never drills too deep on sociological details, and consequently lacks the political depth and impassioned edge of THE INCIDENT, Larry Peerce's neglected subway heist thriller from seven years prior; the hostages are so generic that they're simply referred to as "The Homosexual," "The Spanish Woman," "The Hippie," "The W.A.S.P." and whatnot in the credits. If they represent a cross-section of society, circa 1974, PELHAM is not the vehicle to bring them together and reveal a common Americanism under duress; indeed, the movie is rife with ethnic slurs fired in every direction and a pervasive sense that the melting pot will boil long into the good night. So if THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE is a great movie—and it is—that's largely because it subsists on its own special sense of funk and friction, a ruthless piece of work that churns in every direction and finds garbage all around. As a time capsule of mid-'70s New York, its only rival is TAXI DRIVER; PELHAM is the more coherent satire, laser-focused on the procedural rot of Lindsay-era NYC. Though the Metropolitan Transit Authority denied PELHAM the right to film in its subway, Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting eagerly backed the project—a favor repaid with an unmistakable and deeply unflattering stand-in for Hizzoner himself, played by Lee Wallace as a meek, needy man who invokes John Lindsay's infamous complaint that he possessed the "the second toughest job in America" while sitting in bed watching a television game show. (Lindsay had been replaced by Abe Beame by the time PELHAM hit theaters, which made the movie a premature wake for a vision of New York hardly dead yet.) Despite its thundering threats and last-minute rescues, PELHAM never plays like a melodrama; instead it feels like just another day, just another damn thing, something else to muddle through and walk away from. (1974, 104 min, Digital Projection) [K.A. Westphal]
Wes Anderson's THE FRENCH DISPATCH (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
Wes Anderson's intricate compositional sensibility is on full display in THE FRENCH DISPATCH, his 10th feature film and the first to focus on the practice of journalism. Anderson lends his idiosyncratic style to a new fixation, meticulously crafting each moment as he explores another way of life. His style has lost luster for some audiences, yet this compendium of stories from a newspaper's single issue—told through three long vignettes and a travelogue—cements Anderson's storytelling as more than whimsy, his style more than schtick. His films are more than just dollhouse frames slammed together, despite protestations from detractors. His curiosity fills each scene here; one senses his love and admiration for journalism, a profession widely seen as on the brink of death. The writer-director brings together another giant cast, with Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Benicio del Toro, and Léa Seydoux standing out; the latter two appear in the most effective of the vignettes, "The Concrete Masterpiece." Following an artist prisoner, his guard, and his muse, the mini-narrative finds meaning in the ethereality of art. It finds del Toro, Seydoux, and Adrien Brody in top form. Anderson wants to amaze, educate, intrigue, and sift through an abundance of information, characters, plots, and emotions—the film is sure to reward on third, fourth, and fifth viewings. It's a treat to spend time with an artist like Anderson, a filmmaker unperturbed by box office showings and corporate intellectual properties, even though he's working with a $25 million budget and a never-ending procession of movie stars. He still finds catharsis, political meaning, and myriad themes, creating something that deepens with time, analysis, and conversation. (2021, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Frank]
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY (Japan)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
HAPPY HOUR, the intimate epic that established Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's international reputation, achieves a novelistic density through the uncommonly detailed way it plumbs the emotional lives of its quartet of lead characters. WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY, the first of two 2021 releases by the director (followed by DRIVE MY CAR), resembles a short-story collection in how it depicts three narratively unrelated vignettes that are formally separated by their own chapter headings and credit sequences. Hamaguchi proves to be equally adept at the short-film format as he was with a 5-hour-plus run time: the mini romantic dramas that comprise WHEEL are gratifying to watch as self-contained episodes, but when one contemplates how they might be linked on a thematic level, the entire project attains a profound resonance (it wasn't until the morning after my first viewing that I realized the magnitude of Hamaguchi's deceptively modest approach). The first section, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” begins with an extended Rohmerian dialogue between two female friends, one of whom regales the other about a "magical" date with a man she has fallen in love with, unaware that he is also her friend's ex-lover. It ends with a chance encounter between all three characters, punctuated by a brief but daring fantasy sequence. The title of the second section, "Door Wide Open," refers to a literature professor's policy of avoiding scandal by always keeping his office door open when meeting with students. One day he receives an unexpected visitor, a woman who is attempting to ensnare him in a trap. Or is she? The final section, "Once Again," is the best: two women who haven't seen each other in 20 years meet providentially on a train-station escalator before spending the day together and eventually realizing that neither is whom the other had thought. Hamaguchi himself has said that "coincidence and imagination" are the movie's main themes and, indeed, as the title indicates, each of the stories involves the intersection of the free will of the individual and the fickle nature of fate. But WHEEL is also about the inexorable pull of the past and how the characters' regrets over roads not taken have keenly shaped who they are. This latter aspect is the key to understanding how a film so charming on the surface can also contain such a melancholy undertow and how characters with only a small amount of screen time can seem so fascinatingly complex and believable. Hamaguchi shows the psychological underpinnings of everyday human behavior in a manner rarely seen in the movies. He knows how to pierce your heart. (2021, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
Jessica Kingdon’s ASCENSION (US/China/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 6pm
Two men in a Chinese factory are surrounded by a mountain of metal parts, their welding rigs casting a bright white light from offscreen. You begin to wonder, Are they assembling car jacks or some other piece of automobile equipment? They start to test their creation, assuring that everything is properly attached and tightened. At this point, they have stood their work upright and it appears to be some sort of metal frame for a robot or animatronic. Director Jessica Kingdon cuts to another factory where a handful of women are assembling, trimming, and lubricating giant silicone sex dolls. Surprisingly, this is not even one of the most absurd scenes in ASCENSION. Kingdon provides us with a gorgeous fly-on-the-wall-style film, bouncing around as an omniscient observer all over China. That is, until one of the subjects gets stung by an insect and the perspective is broken for a second, but that's bee-sides the point. If anything, that moment is a testament to the compassion that Kingdon brings to the subject matter. There is no doubt that China gets slammed by propaganda on the daily in our American 24-hour news cycle. While the nation's not perfect, it faces similar problems that we do domestically. Unfortunately, the majority of those problems weigh heaviest on the lower- to middle-class, something that we as Americans are all too familiar with. The film features its fair share of absurd moments, but they are not any more absurd than the “Not The Onion” headlines we see in the United States. Whether it's Amazon workers having to skip bathroom breaks, or Chinese laborers having to fabricate jiggly sex dolls, workers are pushed to their limits and demeaned around the globe. Hopefully this film gets some attention with the right crowd, and this type of passive, yet focused filmmaking could change others' worldviews for the better. (2021, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION (France)
Music Box Theatre – Check Venue websites for showtimes
Originally hacked down for American release to a schlocky—and downright absurd—ninety-minutes, POSSESSION has been restored to Zulawski's original cut, showing in a new 4K digital restoration. The added footage doesn't necessarily make the infamous tentacled-monster sex thing any less nuts, because it still is a shocking sight to behold. But its purpose is more nuanced and creepy when the film really goes off the rails. Drawing from his own divorce, Zulawski's film follows the collapse of Mark and Anna's marriage and the impossibility of Mark ever fully knowing, or possessing, his wife in love. Largely set in an apartment near the Berlin Wall, Mark is confronted with divorce and descends into severe depression. He emerges in a near-psychotic state intending to reclaim Anna and their son. He soon becomes aware of Anna's lover, but after confronting him, both men realize Anna is seeing someone—or something—else. Zulawski keeps the camera in almost constant motion, pushing in and pulling back during confrontations between Mark and Anna as their fights escalate to bloody moments that are somehow both expected and completely terrifying. In one scene, Anna grinds meat as Mark maniacally berates her. The noise of the kitchen rises with the tension and Anna, tired of the diatribe, takes an electric knife to her neck. Paired with scenes of their individual genuine tenderness toward their son, POSSESSION is filled with mirrors. Mark meets his son's school teacher, a benevolent doppelganger for his wife, and a double of Mark appears with Anna at the end. Even the setting is exploited for an otherworldly nothingness and an exactness in East and West Germany, itself perversely mirrored. The unrestrained acting—Anna thrashing hysterically could describe many scenes—adds to a heightened reality where Anna's possession is not demonic, but love can be. (1981, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
Also Screening
⚫ Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
A program of the First Nations Film and Video Festival, featuring work by the Bawaadan Collective, screens Saturday at 1pm, with festival director Ernest M. Whiteman III in attendance. Free admission; more info and RSVP here.
⚫ Chicago Humanities Festival
Under the program title "Imagining Chicago's Future: A Film Screening & Conversation," a collaboration among the Chicago Film Archives, visual artist zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o'neal, and composer Ayana Contreras, will be presented on Saturday at 2pm, at the Columbia College Chicago Student Center (754 S. Wabash Ave.). Per the event description, "o'neal has created a speculative visual representation; centering Black women’s cultural contributions to Chicago, Black lesbian experiences, and notions of belonging. The film also features a new soundtrack from Contreras." There will be a discussion after the screening. Tickets on sale here.
⚫ Doc Chicago
Doc Chicago, an annual gathering for regional documentary filmmakers, takes place through Sunday with in-person and virtual events, including a short film showcase and the co-presentation of the CUFF film A MACHINE TO LIVE IN (see review above). More info here.
⚫ Doc Films at the University of Chicago
Janicza Bravo's 2020 film ZOLA (86 min, Digital Projection) screens on Friday at 7pm and Sunday at 4pm, and Wolfgang Petersen’s 1984 children’s classic THE NEVERENDING STORY (102 min, 35mm) screens on Saturday at 7pm. More info on all films here.
⚫ Facets Cinema
The 38th Annual Chicago International Children’s Film Festival starts Friday and goes through November 14, with in-person and virtual screenings. More info here.
⚫ Humboldt Park Cinema Club (1138 N. California Ave.)
Richard Whorf’s 1946 film TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY (132 min, Digital Projection), with uncredited direction by Busby Berkeley, Henry Koster, Vincente Minnelli, and George Sidney, screens on Saturday at 7:30pm and Irving Cummings’ 1941 film THAT NIGHT IN RIO (91 min, Digital Projection) screens on Sunday at 7:30pm, both as part of a pop-up series titled “Optimism Onscreen: The Birth of Sound, The End of the Depression, and the Movie-Musical Golden Age.” Get more info and RSVP here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Edgar Wright’s 2021 film LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (116 min) continues this week, with most screenings on 35mm, except for select screenings when it will play in the small theater. E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s 2021 documentary THE RESCUE (108 min, DCP Digital) continues with three more screenings, on Friday at 2:15pm; Saturday at 7:15pm; and Sunday at 11:45am.
Additionally, Paul Schrader’s 1982 film CAT PEOPLE (118 min, 35mm) screens on Sunday at 11:30am; Malcolm Ingram’s 2021 documentary CLERK - THE KEVIN SMITH DOCUMENTARY (112 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday at 6pm, with Smith in person for a post-screening Q&A; and Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film GRAVITY (91 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday at 7pm, benefiting Chicago Public Schools Student Science Fair, Inc. More info on all films here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Todd Chandler's BULLETPROOF (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinema here
BULLETPROOF doesn't reveal anything new about the problem of American school shootings and our reaction to them, but it adopts a cool distance that makes the exploitation and fear it shows all the more infuriating. In the vein of the late Harun Farocki's films, Todd Chandler approaches the institution of school systems through a deep chill. The camera almost never moves, and BULLETPROOF uses B-roll long shots of fields and playgrounds for punctuation. The film could have been more focused—while quite a short feature, it still feels padded. But it diagnoses a problem where the threat of violence is blown out of proportion—for instance, when his class is interrupted by a shooter drill, a math teacher tells his students that they're far more likely to get hit by a car walking to the cafeteria than face gun violence at school—in order to make money and exert tighter control over students. It avoids turning the subjects into characters or explaining where the film was shot, but the one person to whom it returns is a woman who grew up in a dangerous neighborhood and now manufactures bulletproof hoodies. Inspired by an incident in her neighborhood, she set out to keep her mother safe. But her business grew from sewing a few hoodies a week herself to running a factory with the help of an investment from gun manufacturers. She justifies her business by saying that she can now donate some hoodies to poor children. It's a microcosm of the large-scale problem shown in BULLETPROOF: putting a bandage over the problem of violence instead of searching for true root causes and solutions, especially if one can make money traumatizing children and profiting from a community's fears instead. (2020, 82 min) [Steve Erickson]
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
Also Screening/Streaming
⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Michael Caplan’s 2014 documentary ALGREN (85 min) is available to rent through November 12. More info on all films here.
⚫ Music Box Theatre
Check hold-over titles here.
⚫ VDB TV
To celebrate the launch of the Hans Breder archive at the Video Data Bank, five short videos by the artist and filmmaker are available to stream for free on VDB TV. More info here.
CINE-LIST: November 5 - November 11, 2021
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // John Dickson, Steve Erickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Michael Frank, Michael Metzger, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko, K.A. Westphal