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.
NOTE: The Music Box Theatre and other area theaters that had been running physical screenings have suspended them for the time being due to new city restrictions.
CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL
The Chicago Underground Film Festival continues virtually through November 22. Full schedule and more information here.
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Danielle Beverly’s DUSTY GROOVE: THE SOUND OF TRANSITION (US/Documentary)
Available to rent Friday from 7-9pm here
I’ve spent a lot of time in record stores. Too much time. And too much money. I worked at one in high school and even volunteered at, and lived in, one for some time in San Francisco—just to get the staff discount. There’s just something about a record store, and the endless flipping, that is truly intoxicating and thoroughly addictive. It’s cliché to say at this point that record stores are magical places. There have been more than enough documentaries about the “vinyl revival,” how record stores are making a comeback, and how record stores are some kind of magical community space where human interaction trumps digital algorithms. Sure. Of course. We get it. But what rarely gets put on screen, or truly dissected even in print, is how these magical community spaces function. What drives them. Who drives them. DUSTY GROOVE covers the totality of the record store experience, and existence, in a way most documentaries never take the time, or care, to do. Instead of focusing on the records themselves (though they do play a very strong supporting role) DUSTY GROOVE uses the story of the Chicago record store of same name to talk about not just the culture of records, or even collecting, but passion. This intangible feeling that propels people through the universe. In following record store co-owner, and buyer, Rick Wojcik into people’s attics, backrooms, and storage spaces we see how passion drives people’s lives, and how it connects people worldwide. From legendary jazz drummers, to compulsive collectors, to hesitant sellers, we get a glimpse into how the sausage is made behind the scenes of a record store. How a record goes from someone’s precious shelf to a store’s wall. The negotiations, the emotions—both positive and negative—how all these things factor into a record ending up in someone’s hand at the checkout counter of your local record store. We see Wojcik negotiate a buy for hundreds of thousands of dollars. We see him travel to Japan to buy, and find a record there from a Chicago record store where he used to work. We see this circular, perpetual, wheel of passion, uninterrupted. DUSTY GROOVE shows us how music brings disparate people together, if only with this one common interest. On face value, that would be enough for a good documentary. But this film’s decision to speak to those selling their records, to learn about how they acquired them, how they lived and interacted with them, why they are selling them makes it a great one. This is a robust, entertaining, and well considered documentary that anyone with a love of music, or with a passion for life itself, will absolutely enjoy. (2019, 85 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Preceded by:
Diana Darby’s BABA SURA (US/Documentary)
This short is less a documentary and more a love poem to the artistic Chicago polymath Sura Dupart. In seven quick minutes we see his overflowing talent in jazz, painting, sculpture, and speaking. It’s absolutely marvelous. With performance being the focus, and interviews with him and his friends and colleagues only there to accentuate, BABA SURA lets the talent and inspiration of its subject flow over us and into us. We’re treated to an outdoor jam session at The Sacred Keepers Garden on the south side of Chicago that is nothing less than transformative. We see the connectivity Supart brings to everyone: all the people who perform with him—how they connect with him through performance; and his audience—how we can connect with him through watching and listening to his performance. While it seems like this film was made quickly and inexpensively, it's aim is true and hits squarely in the heart. It’s a burst of love. A shock of inspiration. BABA SURA shows that if you want to tell a story, if you want to share passion, you don’t need much. You just have to do it. Both director Diana Darby and Sura DuPart make that crystal clear. (2020, 7 min) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Shorts Program 13
Available to rent Saturday from 5–7pm here
The selections in this program tend towards abstraction, whether in content or theme; as such, the most emblematic work may be AMOUR POUR UNE FEMME (2019, 9 min), a found-footage assemblage commissioned by Chicago Film Archives. Directed by Emily Eddy (current director of the Nightingale Cinema and an occasional contributor to this site) and scored by Natalie Chami, the video cycles through home movies of rock formations, children’s parties, and sex. The strange combination of subjects inspires a range of possible interpretations; watching it, you start to continue the free-association game in your mind. Dan Schneidkraut creates a similar experience with FATHERS’ DAY (2019, 11 min), beginning the short as an essay about a Colorado ghost town before switching gears to document how he spent the titular holiday with his dad. Does the filmmaker see the failed promise of the town as a metaphor for his relationship with his father? If so, why does the portrait of the older Schneidkraut seem so upbeat and relaxed? An enigmatic work. The most visually abstract pieces in the program—Rachel Nakawatase and Ryan Betschart’s THE SECOND BODY (2020, 3 min) and Jodie Mack’s WASTELAND NO. 2: HARDY, HEARTY (2019, 7 min)—are the most immediately pleasurable. SECOND BODY is a sustained burst of lights, colors, and electronic sounds; it hits you like a shot of espresso. WASTELAND NO. 2 continues Mack’s obsessions with textures and patterns, fashioning an expansive collage of ice, flowers, and leaves. The editing here is as inspired as in any of the filmmaker’s best work; the film seems to be playing hopscotch across a never-ending field of gorgeous imagery. The program concludes with Mónica de Miranda’s SOUTH CIRCLE (2019, 23 min), an experimental documentary about the experience of African emigres in Lisbon. Miranda employs split screens to consider two subjects at once (or, sometimes, the same subject from two different angles), possibly in reference to the multiplicity of perspectives within her subject. Also screening, but not available for preview is Joel Schlemowitz’s JONAS’S LOFT (2019, 6 min), a 16mm work shot in the apartment of the late, great Jonas Mekas. [Ben Sachs]
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Ben Rivers’ GHOST STRATA (UK/Experimental)
Available to rent Saturday from 9–11pm here
GHOST STRATA (2019, 46 min) is a sketchbook of ideas and impressions organized around the theme of time. Structured like a diary, it comprises twelve chapters, each devoted to a different month of 2018, apparently a busy year for filmmaker Ben Rivers. The movie contains footage Rivers shot on multiple continents, some of it drawn from the behind-the-scenes material of his other projects; the various discussions touch on astrology, history, geology, and philosophy. Through this wide range of settings and ideas, Rivers conjures up a global, even cosmic perspective that allows us to contemplate great magnitudes of time. The film’s title, explained by one longwinded geologist, refers to rock layers formed over millions of years, and the work’s eerie power might be summed up in its implicit guiding question: Will humanity last as long as it took to form one of those strata? Rivers imagines the human race in geological time, jumping from shots of actors dressed as cavemen to discussions of the ancient Greeks’ invention of the concept of time to depopulated images of post-industrial landscapes that allude to a human-less future. As one might expect from Rivers, much of the imagery is astonishingly beautiful; he’s such a master of 16mm cinematography that, at this point, he can evoke tactile memories with closeups of hands turning Tarot cards (which turn out to be a prominent motif). Despite his efforts to make a movie about time in grand, abstract terms, Rivers still thrives in small, vivid moments. GHOST STRATA draws out this irony to provocative effect. Preceded by Charles Fairbanks and Saúl Kak’s (((((/*\))))) (aka ECHOES OF THE VOLCANO) (2019, 18 min) and Jennifer Boles’ THE REVERSAL (2020, 11 min). [Ben Sachs]
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Shorts Program 14
Available to rent Sunday from 5-7pm here
The films in this program are loosely tied together, no pun intended, by themes of bondage and bondedness. In Usama Alshaibi and Talia Watrous’s THE DESIRE (2020, 7 min), a figure in a latex mask ventures through a series of natural and artificial environments, pausing for moments of surreal beauty. Unlike Alshaibi and Watrous’s mute (wander)lust, Scott Fitzpatrick’s FIFTH METACARPAL (2018, 6 min) is bracingly frank in naming its desires. Some viewers—for instance, those less familiar with Canadian age of consent laws—may be shocked by Fitzpatrick’s voiceover, which recounts the chain of events surrounding a brief fling with a younger love. But the intention behind the filmmaker’s candor is to forge a connection with those who can relate to the longing and frustration he describes. The film’s mottled Super-8 textures seem hand processed, an appropriate touch for a film that processes—emotionally and medically—a broken hand. FIFTH METACARPAL ends with a pointed apology to the artist’s mom. Danski Tang’s elegant, probing animated short UMBILICAL (2019, 7 min) is structured around more reciprocal confessions between mother and daughter. For such a short film, Tang covers an enormous amount of ground, addressing experiences of spousal abuse, abandonment, abortion, and repressive attitudes towards homosexuality in the artist’s home country of China. But every piece of dialogue and image, punctuated by silences and black screens, speaks volumes about the way parents’ experiences redound to children. That generational theme resonates in Will Klein and Tymon Brown’s CHILDREN OF THE MOON (2019, 18 min), a documentary that pairs home video footage with testimonials from individuals born into Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (“Moonies”) who later abandoned the cult. Klein and Brown’s subjects describe the challenges that come with shedding the bonds of family and belief, but the film wisely includes non-sequitur recollections and illuminating bits of banter, revealing personalities that aren’t defined solely by their trauma. In artist Jihea Han’s TEMPORARY SOLUTION FOR THE PERMANENT PROBLEMS: #1 (2019, 11 min), bondage takes the form of a full-body cocoon: the video documents a performance in which the artist is wrapped from head to toe in plastic wrap. Though extremely straightforward, the piece has a subtle humor that helps offset the panic-inducing premise…somewhat. Malic Amalya’s RUN (2019, 10 min), a highlight of the program, has no shortage of latex, chains, and gimp masks, but bondage isn’t so much the main theme; rather, it’s one of several vehicles for the film’s associative survey of American militarism. Amalya is at once referential and inventive, as he pays homage to Jack Smith’s countercultural kink while imagining new ways to animate familiar images of atomic devastation. The program concludes with Carson Parish’s BREATH CONTROL (2020, 10 min), which traces broken circuits of queer desire within the Massachusetts woods. BREATH CONTROL treats themes of violent eroticism, memory, and mourning with an aching lyricism, thanks to the filmmaker’s expressive use of sound and masterful 16mm cinematography. The film concludes with the image of an unfastened hook, dangling in the breeze—a poignant reminder that in matters of love and sex, sometimes it’s more painful to be free than to be bound. Also screening: Kurt Jolly’s GLITTER LAND (2020, 8 min), not available for preview. [Michael Metzger]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – New Reviews
Gabriel Mascaro’s DIVINE LOVE (Brazil)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
I have only vague memories of Gabriel Mascaro’s first two features, AUGUST WINDS (2014) and NEON BULL (2015), though by looking up my old reviews I see that I had a low opinion of the first and a mildly positive view of the second. In contrast, I’m not sure what I think of Mascaro’s third feature, DIVINE LOVE, but I’m confident that I won’t forget it any time soon. A peculiar mix of political allegory, science-fiction, and soft-core pornography, the film looks and feels like little else; and thanks to the droning electronic score, you may find yourself hypnotized by it. The story takes place several years in the future. Brazil is now a technologically advanced, highly bureaucratized theocracy whose state religion preaches the sanctity of life, marriage, and free love. Joana (Dira Praes) is a model citizen of this new society. Working for the state records department, she processes divorce certificates from couples about to separate and uses her position to dissuade the couples from breaking up their marriages. Joana and her husband Danilo (Julio Machado) attend couples’ therapy sessions in the evenings where they praise Jesus, then take part in group sex; their lives are centered on trying to conceive a child. Mascaro presents all this in trance-inducing long takes marked by slow camera movements and lots of neon light. The actors, for their part, maintain the director’s deadpan tone with unwaveringly solemn performances, and their commitment reflects the characters’ devotion to the order of the day. One surprising aspect of the film is that the explicit sex emerges as automated and cold—but then, this makes sense, given that Mascaro’s subject is the willingness of some people to accept nearly any form of social control. (2019, 100 min) [Ben Sachs]
Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film: Chicago Edition (Special Event)
Available for free via the Film Studies Center (UofC) on Friday at 7:30pm here
The 2019 book Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, co-edited by scholars Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field, is the jumping-off point for this presentation of short films that mix educational films with home movies and amateur documentary. Only one film was made outside of Chicago, and it is also the only one with an overt political message. FELICIA (1965, 13 min), issued by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, features and is narrated by a high school student named Felicia who lives in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Juxtaposing conditions in prosperous white communities with the rundown Watts neighborhood where homes back up to an automobile junkyard and adults seem to have given up, Felicia wonders what will happen to her and her generation. The film seems to foreshadow the 1965 Watts rebellion. In PAMELA WONG’S BIRTHDAY FOR GRANDMA (1977, 7 min), issued by the Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation, little Pamela excitedly prepares for her grandmother’s birthday celebration. She goes from shop to shop in Chinatown gathering American and Chinese foods and gifts for the party. The young girl and her preparations are charming, and her travels through Chinatown provide a nice window on a neighborhood that has changed little in 40 years. Two films from the Jean Patton Collection of the South Side Home Movie Project focus on life in the Black community. EASTER ’55 XMAS PARTY (1955, 8 min) shows a family Christmas party. Children come one by one toward the camera flashing the gifts they received. Church attendance on another day has everyone in their finery, including some men in tuxedos and top hats that made me wonder whether a wedding was taking place. When the cameraman turns the camera on himself, the pure delight of home filming is on full display. THE MILLERS (1940, 11 min) shows family groups picnicking in the woods and swimming in a lake near the Idlewild Club House. We also see a more rural Chicago, as the film includes shots of hogs on a large farm. The Miller’s Funeral Home figures prominently in this home movie, and the capture of long-ago businesses—the White Star Barber Shop & Beauty Salon and The Lincoln Stores—provides a slice of Black Chicago life in 1940. CHICAGO’S MAXWELL STREET MARKET (1978, 4 min), shot by amateur filmmaker Karl Berolzheimer, resurrects the flea market that served as a multicultural crossroads for Chicago. A spinning opening shot is odd and dizzying, but eventually the camera lights on the second-hand clothes, boxes of hardware, and other goods Black, Latino, Asian, and white Chicagoans rummaged through. A shot of a man playing a violin and a Vienna hot dog stand give a hint of the music and street food that were a large part of the Maxwell Street scene in the 1970s. The cumulative effect of these shorts is to bring one closer to everyday life, attitudes, and narrative styles of the past. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Marsha Gordon, Allyson Nadia Field, and Jacqueline Stewart, who wrote their book’s forward, lead a discussion as part of the screening.
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Held Over/Still Screening/Return Engagements (Selected)
Frederick Wiseman’s CITY HALL (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
Frederick Wiseman has always said he makes movies about institutions, but his thematic focus is much broader than that. His films are about how institutions reflect larger social structures, what values seem to guide them, and whether they uphold our collective hopes for civilization. Wiseman’s concerns lend themselves to considerations of the zeitgeist, and indeed, many of his films capture the spirit of their times in which they were made. LAW AND ORDER (1969), which features a cameo from Richard Nixon himself, speaks to America’s reactionary response to the events of 1968; ASPEN (1991), which presents a divided city of materialistic elites and blue-collar have-nots, may be the ultimate film about the Reagan-Bush era; and the multicultural panorama IN JACKSON HEIGHTS (2015) gives dramatic form to the promise of the Obama years. Now, Wiseman gives us his Trump film, CITY HALL. Characteristically coy, it features nary a conservative onscreen; even Trump’s rhetoric gets acknowledged only indirectly. Yet the movie profoundly considers Donald Trump’s poisonous impact on American culture, from his attacks on immigrants to his heartless disregard for people in need. “We don’t have leadership coming from Washington right now,” says Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh in one of the many committee meetings we see him attend in the film, and much of CITY HALL presents a community taking steps to lead itself and set a positive example for the nation. The most memorable scenes tend to present discussions among the diverse staff of the institution, with everyone making an effort to listen to people unlike themselves and confront difficult truths. A common question emerges from these encounters: How do we make our society more equitable for historically under-represented groups such as women, immigrants, ethnic minorities, disabled veterans, and the poor? In other words, how do we empower the people Trump is encouraging Americans to hate? Perhaps we can start by electing more leaders like Walsh, who honor civic responsibility and the people they’re working for. CITY HALL is one of the few Wiseman films centered on an individual person; we see Walsh all around the title location and all over the city at large, attending charity events, meeting with Latinx youth, and lecturing at a senior center about how to avoid scam artists. In one of the film’s emotional highlights, Walsh opens up to a gathering of war veterans about his decades in recovery for alcoholism, noting he knows what it’s like to need to ask for help with your problems. The Mayor isn’t especially charismatic or eloquent, but his effort to locate common experience with others is touching. CITY HALL sustains this uplifting tone for most of its running time, which makes the tonal outliers seem all the more unsettling. One sequence that appears late in the film finds an agent from city pest control stopping by the house of a sickly, 70-ish divorcé who unexpectedly starts lamenting his life’s misfortunes. The man delivers the sort of colloquial aria one finds all over Wiseman’s films, but its inclusion is mysterious. Maybe it’s another reminder that, for all the optimism on display, there are some very big rats lurking just outside our view. (2020, 275 min) [Ben Sachs]
Manoel de Oliveira’s FRANCISCA (Portugal)
Available to rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
At various points in FRANCISCA, the actors break the fourth wall to stop whatever they’re doing and look directly at the camera. It’s an audacious gesture, and only in part because it disrupts the film’s narrative flow. FRANCISCA takes place in the mid 19th century, and, for the most part, Manoel de Oliveira doesn’t let you forget it—the film advances a deliberately antiquated aesthetic, with declamatory line readings, tableau-like imagery, and extended passages where title cards summarize offscreen dramatic action. Such devices can feel alienating at first, but they have a way of luring you into the past setting. Oliveira doesn’t want to re-create the look of the 19th century, but rather invoke how people comprehended the world then. It’s significant that the film spends so much time on people writing and reading letters; Oliveira wants us to understand how the ubiquity of written expression shaped relationships and perceptions at this point in history. The director’s authoritative sense of the past informs everything about FRANCISCA, even those moments when the actors break the fourth wall. In Oliveira’s hands, the actors’ gazes into the camera suggest the 19th century looking out at us in the present. This experience is rare in cinema, as most historical films dramatize the present looking at the past, yet it defines almost all of Oliveira’s work. To watch a film like FRANCISCA is to stand in dialogue with history, not passively absorb it. The movie recounts a tragedy in the life of author Camilo Castelo Branco (whose novel Doomed Love provided the source material for another Oliveira film), when his friend José Augusto seduced and married a woman Branco had loved, the titular Francisca. For Oliveira, the relationships between these three characters reflect 19th-century (and historically Portuguese) notions of honor, passion, and domination; the film, in its grand provocation, asks us just how distant we feel from the values on display. (1981, 167 min) [Ben Sachs]
Tyler Taormina’s HAM ON RYE (US)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
HAM ON RYE, a suburban coming-of-age comedy-drama with a large ensemble cast, boldly stands out from the crowded landscape of recent American indies for its genuine narrative weirdness and singular aesthetic ambition. What seemingly begins as an end-of-high-school nostalgia trip, in the vein of AMERICAN GRAFFITI and DAZED IN CONFUSED, soon gives way to something far darker and more subversive: The movie's first half features deft cross-cutting between short, clever scenes in which dozens of teenage characters are getting dressed and prepping for a big, prom-like event, an annual rite-of-passage where kids in late adolescence are expected to congregate at a popular local delicatessen in the unnamed town where the film is set, and ultimately pair off into couples for a celebratory dance. But, as in the early work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, HAM ON RYE proves to be something of a narrative shapeshifter—the warmth and humor of the early daylight scenes are soon displaced by a second half imbued with a potent, Hopper-esque sense of nocturnal melancholy. Most of the characters from the first half disappear at the dusky half-way mark—some quite literally into thin air—only to be replaced by a new cast of more disaffected-seeming young adults. One character, Haley (Haley Bodell), who pointedly flees from the deli before the dance begins, bridges the film's two halves but it is unclear how much time elapses in between; the second half could either be taking place the same night as the first half or a couple of years later, an ambiguity that lends the movie much of its haunting and dreamlike power. What does it all mean? I think that Taormina, a first-time feature filmmaker but hardcore cinephile who is also a talented musician, intends for the narrative to function as a kind of complex metaphor for the notion of "growing up" in general and, more specifically, the way some people leave their hometowns in an attempt to fulfill ambitious destinies while others choose to sadly remain behind. But see it and decide for yourself: independent American cinema of this uncommonly poetic caliber deserves to be seen and discussed far and wide. (2019, 85 min) [Michael Glover Smith]
Luchina Fisher’s MAMA GLORIA (US/Documentary)
Available for rent through the Gene Siskel Film Center here
MAMA GLORIA is a deeply personal documentary that illuminates a larger history of transgender people of color in Chicago. Gloria Allen, now in her 70s, is an icon of the community, having started a charm school for transgender people at the Center on Halsted. The charm school inspired Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins’ Charm, and Gloria became known for her maternal support for and engaged work with transgender youth. The charismatic Gloria narrates her own story, which is filled with traumatic moments of violent abuse and loving acceptance from her family and friends, especially her mother. Allen begins by telling how her grandmother worked as a seamstress for drag performers in the early 20th century; she’s aware of how her personal history intertwines with a broader one, framing her story against historically significant moments and people, from the Civil Rights Movement and Emmett Till to the Stonewall Riots and Marsha P. Johnson. MAMA GLORIA emphasizes the power of Gloria sharing her story, not just directly with the film’s audience, as she recounts her personal history into the camera, but also with others, most compellingly with the queer youth she inspires. Gloria mentions, in a lovely scene where she shares a meal with her friends from high school, that she was voted “most friendly,” and the camera captures her welcoming nature. Gloria is also aware that her older age signifies survival, as she mentions losing so many friends; MAMA GLORIA notes that only 14% of transgender identifying adults in the U.S. are seniors. Gloria’s story is compelling not just in its engagement with history, but in its acknowledgement of contemporary struggles, as transgender rights are threatened and incidents of extreme violence against transwomen of color continue. MAMA GLORIA is an optimistic film that also recognizes there is still a lot of work to be done. (2020, 76 min) [Megan Fariello]
William Greaves’ NATIONTIME (US/Documentary)
Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here
At a time when Black Lives Matter has become a vital rallying cry for change the world over, William Greaves’ NATIONTIME (sometimes listed as NATIONTIME—GARY) asserts that Black lives are also a source of political and social change. The film documents the National Black Political Convention of 1972, when Black Americans of all walks of life convened in Gary, Indiana, to draft a platform of national unity. There are no scenes of the break-out sessions that led to the actual drafting; rather, Greaves focuses on the speeches delivered to the Convention as a whole. The opening remarks, delivered by Rev. Jesse Jackson, comprise the film’s longest and most electric sequence, as Jackson stresses the need for Black unity and a proportionally accurate representation of Black people in U.S. government and public offices. (Other prominent speakers include Dick Gregory and Imamu Amiri Baraka.) Best known today for the experimental feature SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (1968), Greaves matches Jackson’s excitement with such cinematic techniques as dynamic editing, sudden zooms, and immersive handheld camerawork. NATIONTIME exudes energy from the opening moments, apropos to the historic breakthrough of the Convention; but more importantly, it conveys the immense potential that Black political groups possess, whether through voting or direct social action. Haunting the Convention are the shocking tragedies of the 1960s (Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz, widows of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, respectively, are both key speakers), and the film suggests that the call for Black political unity in the early 1970s grew, in part, out of a sense of dissolution following the murders and arrests of too many prominent Black leaders. The Convention didn’t produce a viable platform, since the delegations could not agree on all parts of the document, yet NATIONTIME doesn’t end in a sense of failure. Indeed, a spirit of triumph prevails. Perhaps the Convention’s failure to reach consensus after a few days speaks to the remarkable richness and diversity within the Black American community, which is something worth celebrating. (1972, 80 min) [Ben Sachs]
Joyce Chopra’s SMOOTH TALK (US)
Available to rent through the Music Box Theatre here
Winner of the 1986 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film, SMOOTH TALK stars Laura Dern as Connie, a fifteen-year-old exploring her sexuality, navigating the carefree life of a teenager obsessed with boys and the terror of unwanted sexual attention. Spending the summer before her sophomore year with her friends at the beach and the mall, Connie avoids helping her parents (Mary Kay Place and Levon Helm) and is constantly negatively compared to her more obliging older sister (Elizabeth Berridge). Connie spends nights out flirting with boys, but things get dark when it becomes clear she’s being stalked by an older man (Treat Williams). Director Joyce Chopra deftly balances SMOOTH TALK’s pastel-colored 80s coming-of-age story as it teeters into horror. Williams is so completely menacing that his first quick appearance on screen—watching Connie from afar—creates a distinct shift in the film. His physicality, especially in a scene where he moves further from his parked car towards Connie alone in her house, using the titular “smooth talk” to disarm her from outside the screen door, presents an anxiety-inducing amount of threat. The dread is very much grounded in reality, however, and the film never feels exploitive or critical of Connie. Rather, SMOOTH TALK takes seriously the distinction between Connie innocently exploring her own desires and someone else aggressively forcing his upon her; it’s an overall powerful take on the coming-of-age film. Dern expresses so clearly the fluctuating excitement and unease of a teenager pushing boundaries, and her chemistry with Place conveys a convincingly fraught, yet loving, relationship between concerned mother and teenage daughter. Also noteworthy is the way the film places an everyday importance on music for Connie and those around her—James Taylor acted as music director on the film. (1985, 92 min) [Megan Fariello]
LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS – Also Screening/Streaming
Video Data Bank
The Video Data Bank continues its “Video Art and Mass Incarceration” series with a pair of 1991 documentaries by Wendy Clarke: ONE ON ONE: ARNOLD AND AHNEVA (47 min) and ONE ON ONE: RICKY AND CECELIA (29 min).
Black Harvest Film Festival
The Gene Siskel Film Center continues with an online edition of the Black Harvest Film Festival through November 30. Information and full schedule at the Siskel website here.
Chicago International Children’s Film Festival
Facets presentation of the Chicago International Film Festival as a virtual fest continues through November 22. More info and full schedule here.
Gallery 400
Shelly Bahl's 2019 video WE KNOW WHAT IS AND IS NOT (3 min) is online until November 22 here.
Facets Cinémathèque
Sacha Polak’s 2019 Dutch/UK/Belgian/Irish film DIRTY GOD (98 min) is available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Facets website for hold-over titles.
Gene Siskel Film Center
Tania Cypriano’s 2019 documentary BORN TO BE (92 min) is available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Siskel website for hold-over titles.
Music Box Theatre
Valeria Sarmiento’s 2018 French/Portuguese film THE BLACK BOOK OF FATHER DINNIS (113 min), Alexander Nanau’s 2019 Romanian film COLLECTIVE (109 min), and Shalini Kantayya’s 2020 documentary CODED BIAS (90 min) are available for streaming beginning this week. Check the Music Box website for hold-over titles.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE SCREENINGS
Ken Russell’s THE DEBUSSY FILM (UK)
Streams for free on YouTube here
In THE DEBUSSY FILM, one of several commissioned works Ken Russell did during the 1960s on famous artists, composers, and dancers for the BBC series Monitor and Omnibus, Russell experimented with images that would show up in his films WOMEN IN LOVE (1969) and THE DEVILS (1971). The films also laid the groundwork for extended examination of famous creators in feature-length biopics, such as the MUSIC LOVERS (1970), SAVAGE MESSIAH (1972), MAHLER (1974), and LISZTOMANIA (1975). In THE DEBUSSY FILM, Russell tells the story of composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918), borrowing in structure from CITIZEN KANE by offering the end of Debussy’s life first. He also adopts a narrator similar to Jedediah Leland in KANE. This narrator is the “director” of the film (Vladek Sheybal), who also plays the role of Pierre Louis, a rich photographer and one of Debussy’s benefactors. With an opening showing the cast and crew assembling, Russell signals that he intends to move freely between the period film and the present, letting the bones of the film show through the skin. Russell uses a newspaper reporter on the set to interview the director about the film as the device that first allows his narrator to state the facts of Debussy’s life. The director introduces the dramatis personae, for example, an offhand “There’s Debussy, over there” as the camera pans to Oliver Reed. Gaby Dupont, played by the Piaf-like Annette Robertson, lived with and supported Debussy for nine years as they both explored the bohemian artists’ world of Paris. They are shown in the throes of a young, carefree love—walking in the rain, chasing through a garden, with the composer’s “Gardens in the Rain” playing under the scene. We learn from Reed in voiceover, speaking as Debussy, that Debussy took up music because of French poet Paul Verlaine’s mother-in-law, who claimed to have studied with Chopin and who taught Debussy how to play piano. Then Russell moves us into the present, as we watch Robertson and Reed act out the love of Debussy and Gaby while swimming. I particularly loved the stroll Reed and Sheybal take through the Tate Museum gallery containing the paintings of Rossetti and other visual artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who inspired Debussy’s impressionistic and dreamy music. An image that would show up in the slightly different form of drown lovers in WOMEN IN LOVE occurs after Debussy’s story moves past his rejections of Gaby and Lily Texier (Penny Service), his first wife. Both women shot themselves in despair, and both survived, but Russell gives us an image of their prone, still forms in bikinis lying across rocks on shore as he walks with his new patron and future wife, the rich and artistic Madame Bardac (Isa Teller). The pair moved into the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, where he composed his titanic “La Mer.” Another arresting image shows Debussy standing on a balcony. A crane shot moves gradually from a close-up of Debussy to a distant view of him near the top of the enormous hotel edifice, literally on top of the world with his money problems behind him, a bonafide masterpiece under his belt, and his star on the international scene about to rise precipitously. The film eventually trails into Debussy’s final years, when illness and ennui sent him into seclusion to work on a piece based on Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Twelve years of tortuous work imagining Roderick Usher, with whom he completely identified, yielded only “two or three sheets of music.” Russell creates in this sequence a wonderfully evocative, short horror film. Russell’s BBC work is brilliantly original, making glaringly obvious how rare truly experimental works of the imagination are when it comes to film or television biography. (1965, 82 min) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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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.
CLOSED/POSTPONED/HIATUS:
Beverly Arts Center – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Closed until furtuer notice (see above for “virtual” online screenings)*
Chicago Film Society – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice
Chicago Filmmakers – Events cancelled/postponed until further notice*
Comfort Film (at Comfort Station) – Programming cancelled until further notice
Conversations at the Edge (at the Gene Siskel Film Center) – Will be presenting online discussions and screenings*
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)*
Music Box Theatre – The Music Box has again suspended in-person screenings; it continues to present online-only 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:
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
CINE-LIST: November 20 - November 26, 2020
MANAGING EDITOR // Patrick Friel
ASSOCIATE EDITORS // Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Michael Metzger, Harrison Sherrod, Michael Glover Smith