:: FRIDAY, JANUARY 27 - THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2 ::

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🎉 YEAR-END LISTS

Here at Cine-File we like to wait until the year actually ends to publish our “best-of” lists, which abide by whatever rules the contributor chooses. View them on our blog.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Adaptation and Beyond
Creating a Different Image: Black Women’s Filmmaking of the 1970s - 90s

Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm

Liz White's OTHELLO, the centerpiece of the fifth program in the ongoing Black women’s filmmaking series, is crucial viewing, but don’t just take our word for it—scholar Philip Kolin declares Liz White’s OTHELLO to be “a significant but inaccessible cultural icon.” As with many such icons, it’s largely defined by its ‘firsts’ and ‘onlies’: per Kolin, it was “the first film to employ an all-black cast, crew, cinematographer, and director,” as well as the only film adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy to be directed by a Black woman and the first to star a Black man, the incomparable Yaphet Kotto in his first major film role. The film premiered in 1980 but was shot over four years starting in 1962; White, a longtime theatre worker who’d worn many hats over the course of her career, directed the play in 1960 and shot the film version at her own repertory theater company, Shearer Summer Theater, in Martha’s Vineyard, partly at the Shearer estate, which, according to scholar Peter Donaldson’s comprehensive article on the film for the 1987 edition of Shakespeare Quarterly, “had belonged to White’s grandfather, a former slave” and which “had for generations served as a resort for blacks when they were excluded elsewhere.” With regards to its source material, the Shakespeare play whose title character is a Moor, White took a revisionist approach with an even more provocative slant. In her film all the characters are Black, but according to Kolin, “Kotto’s Othello [is] a dark-skinned African dressed in flowing robes while Iago and the Venetians were presented as lighter, urban American Blacks.” Donaldson specifies that Othello is “a young, passionate, and emotionally sensitive African, while the rest of the cast, all New Yorkers and lighter in color, sustain a tone of urban American sophistication”; he elaborates that White “takes ethnic pride and the cultural pro-Africanism of the 1960s as her point of departure.” Furthermore, scholar Courtney Lehmann asserts that, “[s]imultaneously… the film focuses on the treatment of women in Othello, linking their struggle—or lack thereof—to the double displacement of Black women within the burgeoning civil rights movement,” and that “White’s musical offers a ‘countersentence’... that chronicles the historical process whereby women… become the vanishing mediators of social ‘progress.’” (To wit, Lehmann begins her essay by explaining that the film “is not a musical in the traditional sense of the term since… the on-screen characters do not perform the music that we hear on the soundtrack”; rather, it’s “White’s attempt to graft the musical form onto the narrative content of Shakespeare’s play [that] encodes the director’s subaltern perspective.”) The film was shot in color by documentary filmmaker Charles Dorkins, though according to Donaldson, “[m]uch of the film was shot after midnight: rich brown skin tones contrasting with the impenetrable blackness of the background.” Speaking of contrasts, any cinephile worth his or her weight in celluloid is likely thinking of Welles, both as a thespian and a filmmaker, but while such comparisons are unavoidable, it seems that White is approaching the material from a perspective then (and perhaps still) unrealized in cinema. Donaldson says it best: “Liz White’s OTHELLO is an altered version, to be sure (though her changes are less extensive than those… Welles [made] in MACBETH), but it is a rich mix of identification and repulsion. The film’s historical subtext, its concern with Black ambivalence toward the African heritage, works finally to enrich the psychological and family dynamics of the play, foregrounding such issues as the fragility of self-esteem, the uneasy containment of masculine rage in marriage, and the dependence of that containment on adequate connection between men. Perhaps the central insight of this fine film, and the principal use to which its cultural contrasts are put, concerns the precarious grounding of human selfhood in the mirror reflection of a kindred but alien Other.” Preceded by Julie Dash's 1977 short film DIARY OF AN AFRICAN NUN and Anita W. Addison's 1976 short film EVA'S MAN. (Total Approx. 139 min, DCP Digital and 16mm) [Kat Sachs]

Margot Benacerraf’s ARAYA (Venezuela/Documentary)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm

The poetic documentary ARAYA seems to exist outside of time, and not only because it presents rituals that had been in place for hundreds of years when it was made. The towering images have more in common with Romantic paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries than they do with most of cinema; filmed without sound (though with music and narration added later), they exude a purity that feels as pre-modern as the onscreen activity. The film takes its title from the Araya Peninsula, a remote area off the northeast coast of Venezuela where, at the time of filming, people mostly had one of two jobs, fishing or working in the local salt marshes. Director Margot Benacerraf and cinematographer Giuseppe Nisoli (who, remarkably, comprised the entire shooting crew) grant dignity to the working-poor subjects through their heroic compositions, which seem to flow naturally out of the breathtaking landscape shots; at the same time, the film bluntly acknowledges that these people’s lives are all but defined by hardship. At least one sequence—like that of a nine-year-old boy starting the grueling job he will likely perform for the rest of his life—rivals Buñuel’s LAND WITHOUT BREAD (1933) in its pitilessness. Yet where Buñuel’s film culminated in a message of anticlerical outrage, ARAYA is more nuanced and ambiguous in its perspective; it’s a work where imagery takes precedence over meaning, not the other way around. The film shared the International Critics Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival with Alain Resnais’ HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, another trailblazing black-and-white masterpiece that brought a certain modernist poetic sensibility to international art cinema. In the 21st century, both films feel more relevant than ever; ARAYA seems to have anticipated the experimental ethnographic cinema of Ben Russell, to name a prominent example. (1959, 82 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

King Vidor’s STELLA DALLAS (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm

The ending of King Vidor’s STELLA DALLAS is an emotional tribute to cinematic spectatorship. Stella (an illuminous Barbara Stanwyck) gathers with a crowd on the street, peering through a large window into the home of her ex-husband, which frames her daughter’s wedding ceremony inside; her eyes fill with tears as she expresses both happiness and sorrow, having selflessly given up a relationship with her daughter to give her a better life, relegating herself to simply a spectator in this important event. The visual connection between the audience and Stella is staggering, and many have pointed out the power of this mirrored moment, especially for how it complicates the legacy of the women’s film genre. Film scholar Linda Williams writes of STELLA DALLAS, “I would argue that [it] is a progressive film not because it defies both unity and closure, but because the definitive closure of its ending produces no parallel unity in its spectator. And because the film has constructed its spectator in a female subject position locked into a primary identification with another female subject, it is possible for this spectator… to impose her own radical feminist reading on the film.” It’s the quintessential maternal drama, wrought with emotion, driven effortlessly by Stanwyck’s performance. Her Stella is complex, with a constant tension between allowing herself to have what she wants and sacrificing everything. Stella, determined to make it out of her lower-class home, marries the wealthy Stephen Dallas (John Boles), and they quickly have a child, Laurel (Anne Shirley). Stella’s ostentatious nature and inability to fit in with the upper-class crowd drives a wedge between her and Stephen. Laurel's well-being, however, becomes her priority. As Laurel grows up, a series of embarrassing incidents occur surrounding how the world sees her mother—as a tacky, crude woman; Stella realizes her daughter may be better off without her. The ending is cinematic melodrama at its finest, but only made so by the film in its entirety, brilliantly paced with tension and heartbreak as Stella comes to realize her fate. It’s easy to identify with Stanwyck’s Stella, as we ultimately find ourselves staring through the frame at another frame, spectators of her poignant spectating. Screening as part of Doc’s Monday series, “Baby Face: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck.” (1937, 106 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

Lucio Fulci’s A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN (Italy)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

Long before Lucio Fulci was tediously known as "the godfather of gore," he was unofficially known as "the godfather of Franco and Ciccio," a pair of comedians who were essentially Italy’s Martin & Lewis. Usually in their movies, the comedic duo found themselves caught up in situations involving war, bank robberies, atomic bombs, and sexy spies. Fulci wasn’t the only notable Italian filmmaker to have provided his impeccable craft to this lowbrow fare: Sergio Corbucci did a few, along with Mario Bava and even Vittorio de Sica. It was normal in Italy to offer up your more-than-qualified talents to the trends of the day, and whatever those were, they were pumped out ad nauseam. Having nearly avoided the peplum genre, or the sword-and-sandal craze brought about by the success of HERCULES (1958), Fulci found himself starting his career with these middling comedies. He was able to catch the spaghetti western train at full steam with the underrated MASSACRE TIME (1966), his grandest cinematic statement up to that point. Three years later, he would get to exercise his strengths properly with ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER, a dazzling display of filmmaking that must have found an admirer in Brian De Palma, whose cinematic trickery is foreshadowed in every frame of this 1969 erotic thriller. Fulci came even closer to cementing his style with the fantastic BEATRICE CENCI, but it wouldn’t be until 2 years later that he came into his own with A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN, maybe the most shining example of the oft-debated giallo genre. This is the film that matched the sensational heights of Dario Argento’s supremely successful debut feature, BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (made the previous year), after scores of stale imitators began pouring out like fake blood from a well-timed squib. Densely plotted and sensuously hallucinatory in its depiction of pitch-black fantasy, A LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN centers on Carol, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer/politician (played by genre starlet Florinda Balkan), who fears her husband is having an affair with his secretary. Not only is her suspicion making her waver between her jealousy and excitement, she's having dreams about her neighbor (played by another of the genre’s mainstays, Anita Strindberg), who likes to host LSD-aided orgies in her swank apartment. As Carol's repressed sexual desire builds, her dreams become even more erotic as they start to veer into nightmare territory. She awakens from one sweat-and-blood-soaked reverie to discover that her kinky neighbor has been murdered. Soon, Scotland Yard fingers her for the murder as they discover her diary depicting, in vivid detail, her sexually charged nocturnes. Carol becomes suspect number one, which makes her start to suspect that maybe she had been at the orgy after all. It's also possible she's being framed by two other participants in the horny bacchanal, who may be committing murders modeled off ones described in her diary. As her mind races to solve the mystery, she's pursued by phantasmagoric figures through dreamlike labyrinths: one involving a show-stopping chase through London’s Alexandra Palace, and another involving a group of disemboweled dogs in a sanitarium. The bloody canine prosthetics were so convincing that Fulci and his effects guy, Carlo Rimbaldi, were dragged to court and forced to prove those were indeed fake dogs; Rimbaldi would go on to create the iconic xenomorph-head effects for Ridley Scott’s ALIEN as well as E.T. for Steven Spielberg. Along with a perfectly stone-cold score by Ennio Morricone, there's the camera work of Luigi Kuveiller, a cinematographer known at the time for his work with Elio Petri, and who would go on to shoot DEEP RED for Argento, AVANTI! for Billy Wilder, and eventually THE NEW YORK RIPPER (1982) which saw him re-teaming with Fulci a decade later. With this dream team of collaborators, Fulci had come a long way from his Franco and Ciccio days. The filmmaker could now embark on the journey that would cement him as one of cinema’s leading genre masters. Every surreal touch in his later masterworks, every strange and unexplained happening that would emerge from his gloomy and shadow-drenched rooms, can be traced back to LIZARD, a wondrous highlight of the giallo genre and cinema itself. Screening as part of the January Giallo 2023 series, co-presented by Music Box of Horrors and Cinematic Void. (1971, 95 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]

Jean-Luc Godard's WEEKEND (France)

Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm

The final title cards of WEEKEND announce "FIN DE CONTE. FIN DE CINEMA"—"END OF STORY. END OF CINEMA." The film did indeed mark the end of a golden period of feature films for the newly-radicalized Godard. In the years leading up to May '68 and the student movement, Godard was developing a deepening commitment to Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideology under the influence of his friend Jean-Pierre Gorin. LA CHINOISE and WEEKEND, the final films of this period, shot and released in rapid succession, saw Godard attempting to merge his developing aesthetic vision with his solidifying leftist commitments. The result in WEEKEND is as bitter and cruel to its subjects as it is conceptually thrilling. The cravenly cynical plot follows a young bourgeois woman and her husband as they rush to her mother's deathbed, not out of any sense of filial duty, but rather to ensure that her stepfather does not cut her out of the will. Misfortune and humiliation are by turns caused by and visited on the couple as they wind through country roads strewn with the corpses of crash victims, the twisted wrecks of their vehicles appear with the frequency of mileposts. One remarkable sequence follows the two as they cut through a traffic jam, passing roadside picnickers, a horse-drawn hay cart, a caravan of circus animals, and multiple bloody wrecks. (The nine-minute sequence, accompanied by constant blaring car horns, was shot on a 300-meter-long traveling platform, which comprised the total number of dolly tracks of the same model available in all of France at the time.) A merciless excoriation of the mercenary logic of bourgeois sexuality and marriage, WEEKEND is an exhilarating document of the social and political frustrations that were about to erupt so powerfully. Preceded by the 1982 Insurance Institute for Highway Safety short FACES IN CRASHES (10 min, 35mm). (1967, 105 min, 35mm) [Peter Raccuglia]

Billy Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am

Drenched in cynicism, Billy Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD ranks up there with Robert Altman's THE PLAYER and David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DR. as one of the best critiques of Hollywood's toxic narcissism and cruelty. The last collaboration between Wilder and screenwriter Charles Brackett, SUNSET BOULEVARD centers on Norma Desmond (played with maniacal intensity by Gloria Swanson), a forgotten silent star who spends her days cooped up in her gothic tomb/mansion, obsessing over her glory days and penning the script which will launch her revival. By chance she encounters Joe Gillis, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter. Their working relationship mutates into a strange sexual dynamic, with Gillis eager to escape; however, he ultimately finds himself contaminated by the greed and disillusionment of Hollywood. Wilder enlisted the help of master cinematographer John F. Seitz, who also photographed DOUBLE INDEMNITY, to lend the film a chiaroscuro, noir-ish look. This is notable during one of the film's most memorable scenes, in which an entranced Desmond watches her celluloid self on the movie screen, the light from the projector flickering over her face creating a kind of literal fusion of reality and fantasy. Look for a cameo from silent film icon Buster Keaton (referred to by Gillis as a "waxwork"), as well as Cecil B. DeMille playing himself. Screening as part of the Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder Matinee series. (1950, 110 min, 35mm) [Harrison Sherrod]

John Carpenter's THEY LIVE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight

Blatant in its critique of Ronald Reagan's proto-fascism, THEY LIVE also delivers an affectionate view of working-class Los Angeles that mirrors its sincere appreciation of disreputable pop culture. Casting pro wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper as the leader of a working-class insurgency is one of the most audacious choices of John Carpenter's long career, and it may be the most crystallized expression of the director's politics. Carpenter's skepticism towards contemporary life is rooted less in ideology than in a loyalty to old-fashioned genre storytelling, whose handmade qualities have been endangered by the automated culture of the corporate age. THEY LIVE famously depicts the corporate network of banks, TV stations, and multinational businesses as a secret extraterrestrial plot; and while this makes for an effective sci-fi premise, it's executed too often as camp to make for effective political filmmaking. (Far more resonant are Carpenter's images of shantytowns comprised of former factory workers--a subtle reference to the collective miseries of Depression-era cinema in an era obsessed with individual success.) But then, Carpenter never aspired to be George Romero: His virtues lie elsewhere, in eccentric character touches, dynamic action sequences, and a consistently inventive use of the 'Scope frame. It should be noted that Carpenter was one of the few Hollywood filmmakers who insisted on shooting in widescreen throughout the VHS era, when most mainstream movies were shot in narrower ratios to be ready, like lambs to the slaughter, for panning and scanning. (1988, 93 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Charles Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 6pm

One of the most courageous of all films, Chaplin's satire attacked Adolph Hitler while the US government was still officially neutral towards Nazi Germany, but it's even more remarkable for recognizing the complex relationship between fascism and popular culture. Chaplin famously quipped that he had a vendetta against Hitler because he stole the Tramp's mustache, and he portrays his Hitler caricature Adenoid Hynkel as a version of his beloved Tramp turned inside out by the evils of the twentieth century. The clownish, neurotic dictator is of course motivated by delusions of grandeur (which Chaplin displays, gorgeously, in a ballet sequence where he dances with a balloon globe) but he's equally dependent on mass acceptance. Chaplin also represents the people persecuted by dictatorship; he stars in these scenes as well, playing a Jewish barber even more reminiscent of the Tramp. The scenes depicting the barber's social life in the ghetto are so deeply felt in their sympathy for European Jewish humor that THE GREAT DICTATOR could be ranked justifiably with the great Jewish films. Given his worldwide popularity, Chaplin's decision to ally his screen image so closely with the Jews had deeply radical implications, but that's no match for the openly Leftist monologue at the film's end. Following a series of tragic/farcical complications, the plot breaks away and Chaplin addresses the camera for a three-minute unbroken shot. What begins as an outcry against fascism turns into a plea for human brotherhood, and it's audacious in how fully it manipulates the communicative nature of cinema. Writing about this scene in 1974, Jonathan Rosenbaum was rightly hyperbolic: "Seen with historical hindsight, there are few moments in film as raw and convulsive as this desperate coda. Being foolish enough to believe that he can save the world, Chaplin winds up breaking our hearts in a way that no mere artist ever could." Screening as part of a Toast to Jean. After a remarkable 23-year tenure, Gene Siskel Film Center Executive Director Jean de St. Aubin is leaving the organization in February.  Followed by a post-screening reception with champagne, pretzels (Jean’s favorite), and more. (1940, 124 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's MEMORIA (International)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 4:45pm

I generally don’t like to talk about presentation and distribution when reviewing films because it’s generally a secondary, or even tertiary, aspect of the film that merits no discussion. Yet I feel that here these things not only need to be addressed, but they're so crucial to MEMORIA that they need to be mentioned at the top. For those who don't know, this film was originally released as a kind-of roadshow museum piece. The plan was for MEMORIA to have a single print circulate through the US as a “never-ending” release; it would be available to see at only one city at a time. This idea was met with both intrigue and ridicule, though I would fully recommend that people see this in the theater—after all, the entire distribution system is intended to create a viewing experience that's unique to each screening. At the same time, there's a cynical side to me that wonders whether the whole thing was a P.T. Barnum-esque grift to get eyes on the kind of slow cinema that 99% of moviegoers wouldn't usually care about. After only two January stops on its “never-ending release,” the distributor, Neon, pulled the plug on this high art concept and decided in April that MEMORIA would have a standard multi-city, multi-screen release. Was this a kowtow to public perception of elitism? A tacit admission of failure? Or simply the re-evaluation of the desire to get MEMORIA in front of as many eyes as possible? I can’t say and won’t speculate. All this being said, I’ll let people decide for themselves what they think of the plan and simply move on to the film itself as a story, not as artifact or performance. In MEMORIA, we have Weerasethakul’s methodically meditative take on slow cinema that's so much warmer than many other filmmakers in this style. Tilda Swinton, naturally, gives a spectacular performance. As a Scottish emigre living in Colombia, Swinton's Jessica finds herself slowly questioning her sanity; it seems that she is the only person who can hear a loud, booming sound. In an attempt to explain the sound, she calls on a sound engineer, Hernán, to artificially recreate it. The two manage to approximate it, but when Jessica goes to see Hernán afterward, no one at the sound lab seems to have heard of him. Between this and her straining relationship with her sister, Jessica leaves the city for the countryside where she meets a quiet fisherman that also happens to be named Hernán. From there, things get weird. For such a slowly paced film, Weerasethakul took a giant risk taken by making so much of it sound-based. With Jessica’s mystery boom being the engine of the story, much of MEMORIA revolves purely around sound, or the lack thereof. As in such movies as THE CONVERSATION (1974) and SOUND OF METAL (2019), sound plays a character itself. There are more than a few scenes where sound is practically the only thing that moves. The frame will be stock-still, actors looking almost artificially frozen, and the sound design carries the story. It’s a simple idea but executed brilliantly. With this in mind, I can see why the distributor wanted to have this be approached as a heightened theatrical experience. The wind, the sound of memories, birdsong—all these things begin to overwhelm you as the movie progresses. Eventually, all you really have left is sound and you have no choice but to give in fully to it. It really is a beautiful thing. MEMORIA commands submission to one’s ears in a way that film rarely does. People talk about the immersive quality of action films, as if the average person has ever found themselves anywhere near an actual explosion, as opposed to a film like that draws you in so totally with your senses, seducing the eyes and ears as opposed to pummeling them relentlessly. You’ll find yourself lured in without recognizing that it happened. To find yourself in a dark room, slowly getting lost in another world is what any good movie should do. And this film does it far better than most. Knowing the story of this film, and the weird hype it’s created, it’s so satisfying to see that MEMORIA lives up to all its accolades. (2021, 136 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Michael Glover Smith's RELATIVE (US)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, 7pm

In his writing on movies, both here at Cine-File and elsewhere, Michael Glover Smith has advanced an acute understanding of how the framing of performers in narrative cinema can underscore the emotions they express and how camera movement (or, put another way, the re-framing of performers in time) can develop viewers’ relationships to onscreen characters. Smith’s features as writer-director seem to grow directly out of his insights in this area—deceptively “dialogue-driven,” they express their greatest eloquence not with words but with mise-en-scène. It matters in RELATIVE whether the principal characters are together in the same shot or whether they’ve been individuated by close ups; it matters whether we can distinguish who’s in the background of a shot or whether those characters have been obscured. These things matter because the film is ultimately about the competing forces of community and individuality that shape our identities in 21st-century life and how we navigate between them almost constantly. The action in RELATIVE covers a few days before, during, and after a young man’s college graduation party on Chicago’s far north side, a celebration that draws his two older sisters from out of state and his older brother (a divorced Iraq War veteran who’s been slowly self-destructing for the past four years) out of seclusion in their parents’ basement. Smith gracefully interweaves the lives of all four siblings, their liberal Baby Boomer parents, and a handful of other characters as they come together amiably and unhurriedly, employing the time-honored scenario of the big family gathering to consider how many of us live at the dawn of the 2020s. Not surprisingly, the internet factors into things (though thankfully not too much); so too do food co-ops, queer-straight alliances, and the social normalization of weed. Yet Smith has more on his mind than enumerating aspects of the zeitgeist; RELATIVE is also concerned with the legacy of the Baby Boom generation and, more generally, how each generation honors the previous one while taking a seemingly opposite approach to life. Yasujiro Ozu is an obvious reference point for this sort of laidback family portrait, though I was reminded more of critic-turned-filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier’s A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY (1984) in the low-key sociological thrust of the drama and of the first episode of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s recently rediscovered miniseries EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY (1972-’73) in the polyphony of the extended graduation party sequence. For all its international flavor, however, RELATIVE is a local production first and foremost, reflecting its maker’s deep affection for the neighborhoods he calls home. Smith and editor Eric Marsh will take part in a post-screening discussion moderated by filmmaker and DePaul professor Lori Felker. (2022, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Masaaki Yuasa’s INU-OH (Japan/Animation)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 6:15pm

To what extent will we go to tell our stories, and why? Those are the central questions of Masaaki Yuasa’s INU-OH, the newest animated film from one of the medium’s best. In this foray, Yuasa fuses glam rock and 14th-century Japan, with its Noh dancers and biwa players. At times feeling more like a concert film than anime, INU-OH quickly pulls you into its narrative and keeps you captivated. Yuasa's experimental visuals have eased up since the rotoscoping of MIND GAME (2004), and the director has only become more refined. That’s not to say that INU-OH doesn’t deviate from contemporary anime standards; at one point, he uses an impressionistic style to give viewers a sense of how our blind protagonist Tomona might experience the world. But mostly, Yuasa's experimentation of late comes into play through his storytelling, as we’ve seen with his series PING PONG: THE ANIMATION and DEVILMAN CRYBABY. In INU-OH we are presented with disjointed and mysterious plot threads, some that only really get their depth through exposition delivered to us through the multitude of songs. After the first third of the movie, we shift into a string of great rock ballads that tell tales of lost soldiers and fallen clans. There was talk of Yuasa retiring a few years back, but hopefully INU-OH isn’t the last of his work, as he constantly proves to be one of the most unique anime directors and a contemporary best. Screening as part of the Docshees of Idasherin: New Releases series. (2021, 98 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

Abbas Kiarostami's TASTE OF CHERRY (Iran)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm

This is one of the great big-screen experiences, comparable in its effect to L'ECLISSE or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Like those films, Abbas Kiarostami's Palme d'Or winner confronts some of the essential questions of existence; while Kiarostami's approach may be more modest than Antonioni's or Kubrick's, the poetic simplicity of TASTE OF CHERRY assumes a monumental quality when projected. The plot is structured like a fable: A calm middle-aged man of apparently good economic standing drives around the outskirts of Tehran. Over the course of a day, he gives a ride to three separate hitchhikers; after engaging each in conversation, he asks if the stranger will assist him in committing suicide. That the succession of hitchhikers (young, older, oldest) suggests the course of the life cycle is the only schematic aspect of the film. Each encounter contains enough digressions to illuminate the magic unpredictability of life itself—not only in the conversation, but also in the formal playfulness of Kiarostami's direction. The film is rife with the two shots that, paradoxically, form Kiarostami's artistic signature: the screen-commanding close-up of a face in conversation, eerily separated in space from the person he's talking to; and the cosmic long-shot of a single car driving quixotically across a landscape. Here, both images evoke feelings of isolation that are inextricable from human consciousness, yet the overall tone of the film is light, even bemused. The final sequence, one of the finest games conjured by a movie, sparked countless philosophical bull sessions when TASTE OF CHERRY was first released, and it remains plenty mind-blowing today. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “Facing Life, Meeting Death.” (1997, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty’s THE ATOMIC CAFÉ (US/Documentary)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm

During World War II and beyond, United States propaganda took many forms: from Disney and Warner Bros cartoons to radio ads and more. Covering the 1940’s and 1950’s, THE ATOMIC CAFÉ splices various media forms of propaganda to create a well-crafted, and far funnier than it should be, look at United States nuclear bomb usage. The film covers topics such as atom bomb usage in Japan during World War II, the Bikini Atoll tests, the advent of the “Red Scare” when the U.S.S.R. developed nuclear technology, and various U.S. armed forces training films. On top of all of this, throw in music from various artists including Bill Haley and the Comets concerning fallout shelters and anti-communist sentiments and what emerges is a clear picture that the propaganda was all meant to quell fears that the U.S. was ever in any real kind of danger from an atomic threat. Intermixed with these segments are pseudo-news segments that show the effects U.S. blasts have had on other places, and a dark hypocrisy can be seen. THE ATOMIC CAFÉ is essentially a nearly 90-minute montage that pokes fun at the paranoia, bigotry, and traditional American-values that the United States government and Atomic Energy Commission. The assembled pieces act as a time capsule of classic Americana that makes for enthralling viewing. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday I series, “Splicing of the Atom: Nuclear Taboo in Cinema.” (1982, 86 mins, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Jean Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION (France)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm

In the spring of 1937, master director Jean Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION premiered in his country to general acclaim. However, when the Nazis invaded only three years later, Joseph Goebbels declared the film to be "Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1." He seized the original negative, which finally resurfaced over fifty years later in a pile of boxes that traveled from Moscow to the Cinematheque de Toulouse. Renoir adapted GRAND ILLUSION from his friend Major Pinsard's reminiscences as a pilot during World War I. In the beginning of the film, Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) captures Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and his lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin) and transfers them to a prisoner of war camp. At the camp, Boeldieu, Marechal, and their friends while away the time by gardening, playing cards, and performing theater. They also dig a tunnel to escape and return to the front. But, before succeeding, the Germans transfer them to von Rauffenstein's fortress, where they devise a new plan for escape. Although the rules are strict within the camps, the soldiers treat the prisoners quite well and, amazingly, a true camaraderie develops between them. This French filmmaker depicts the German soldiers—especially von Rauffenstein—and citizens as humane. It begs the question: Why did Renoir create this image of the German people in the face of Nazism? Why did he make this film? In watching GRAND ILLUSION, the viewer reflects on its title and the any number of things to which it alludes. The film remains known today for its expression of man's humanity, but is such possible in war? For me, the grand illusion is our humanity, which we have yet to realize. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday series, “Jean Renoir: The Grand Reality.” (1937, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]

Jordan Peele's US (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Coming fresh off of the success of his breakout debut feature, GET OUT (2017), Jordan Peele's US is the rare contemporary film outside the superhero metaverse that found its way into the zeitgeist well before its release. GET OUT was a film that instantly became a cultural touchstone; between rappers, comedians, and other entertainers referencing the "sunken place" (a kind of purgatory where the film's African-American leads are held as the white antagonists take control of their bodies) and the larger conversation the film sparked around cultural appropriation and racial politics, making an appropriate follow-up seemed like a monumental hill for Peele to climb. Intentionally or not, Peele was also carrying the torch for a reinvented brand of horror the internet would call "elevated," much to the dismay of film critics and directors working in the genre. This extra level of pressure and hype would undoubtedly pose a struggle for some filmmakers, but not Jordan Peele. When the trailer for US dropped in December 2018, the "elevated horror" message boards and subreddits were instantly overflowing with theories on not only where the terrifying look-alikes depicted in the trailer had come from, but what their presence would mean in terms of the film's greater cultural significance. US tells the story of a family—and society at large—who must confront underdeveloped doppelgangers of themselves who rise up from the underground to take what they see as their rightful place in the world. Culminating in a face-off between a mother and her clone, both stunningly portrayed by Lupita Nyang'o, the audience finds out her family was much more involved in the precipitating tragedy than they had originally thought. With US, Peele proved to the world that his creativity wasn't limited, and that his air-tight concepts and gut-wrenching twists are only the pillars on which great story-telling and direction are supported. Between an incredible cast, made up of accoladed heavy hitters like Elizabeth Moss and blockbuster favorites like Winston Duke, and Peele's signature in-depth world building, which reaches far beyond the countryside depicted in GET OUT, US is the type of film that draws you into its horror and forces you to see it in yourself. Screening as part of professor Daniel R. Quiles’ Gore Capitalism lecture series. (2019, 121 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Bates]

Jafar Panahi’s NO BEARS (Iran)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

There’s a scene in Jafar Panahi’s NO BEARS where the director, playing himself, speaks with an elderly woman in a courtyard. It’s a long shot, so visible in the frame are two cats that accompany the woman as she approaches Panahi. The cats meow, loudly and indifferent to those around them, providing for a brief sense of levity. But even before they appeared on screen, I had been thinking how Panahi reminds me of a cat: generally he’s unflappable, patient, and metaphorically crouched in wait, while other times he’s loud and heedless. Of course, Panahi isn’t those latter qualities in any literal sense. But it’s inarguable that his messages have been heard around the world and that his subversive body of work has sometimes been viewed as heedless, as evidenced by his arrest, along with multiple other Iranian filmmakers, in 2010 and again last year, after which he was condemned to serve the six-year length of his initial sentence. (He was released after two months in 2010.) In between the first and second arrest, Panahi had been forbidden, infamously, from leaving Iran and making films, even though he continued doing the latter in secret and while largely confined to his home. These facts account for some of the plot of NO BEARS. In it, Panahi takes a room in a village near the Turkish border and directs his latest film remotely, communicating with the cast and crew (who are shooting in Turkey) via his digital devices. It would seem that Panahi gets along well with the residents of his remote village hideaway; he frequently takes photos of them and even has his host filming local ceremonies. But, as is often the case in Iranian cinema, not all is as it appears. The filmmaker becomes embroiled in a familial conflict, as he’s alleged to have taken a picture of a young couple forbidden to be together. Panahi insists he didn’t take such a photo, but this assertion comes with its own issues. With regards to the film that he is shooting, it’s soon made clear that the story concerns a real-life scenario about a married couple attempting to flee Iran with stolen passports. Tension mounts as the film progresses and reveals more about Panahi’s role in the various quandaries and his own possible attemptions at crossing the border. What stands out amidst the uncertainty is a bold self-reflexivity from which several abstracted dilemmas arise. Panahi implicates himself as an artist who’s frequently exploited the suffering of others—does the presence of his camera, or the nobility of his artistic intentions, absolve him of potential harm? “Cinema is the truth 24 times a second,” Godard famously asserted, and Panahi might be questioning that here, contesting the professed implacability of a camera’s gaze. Considering Panahi’s situation, it’s a genuinely brave examination; it speaks to a broader, more philosophical consideration of art and its impact on those represented in it. The film’s title comes from a man Panahi encounters in the village, who cautions him from traversing a certain path, claiming that there are bears on it. The same man later refutes his own guidance, insisting there are, in fact, no bears. Should we proceed with caution in life, as if there may be bears on the journey? Or should we forge ahead, heedless of the risk? Ultimately in Panahi’s latest masterpiece, there are some cats, no bears, and many, many such questions. (2022, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Alice Diop’s SAINT OMER (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alice Diop (whose non-fiction work I am not familiar with) made her narrative feature debut with this complex and beautiful character study about two women of Senegalese descent living in contemporary France. Pregnant Rama (Kayije Kagame), a successful novelist and professor of literature, attends the trial of—and becomes obsessed with—Laurence (Guslagie Malanga), a college student of limited means who stands accused of murder after abandoning her baby on a beach at night. The film, which daringly asks viewers to sympathize with a character who has committed a monstrous crime, is based on the true story of Fabienne Kamou, who was arrested for infanticide in 2013 and whose 2016 trial Diop attended. The dialogue is based in part on transcripts from Kamou’s real-life trial, which lends the extended courtroom scenes a rare verisimilitude, but what really impresses here is Diop’s mise-en-scène. Diop shoots Laurence from a different camera angle during each day of the trial, although she never deviates from this angle within each individual scene, lending a near-Bressonian formal rigor to the proceedings. While the technique of shot/reverse shot editing has become synonymous with lazy filmmaking in the modern era (because of how it often removes creativity from the process of shot selection, turning dialogue scenes into simple ping-pong matches), Diop imbues this technique with a fresh relevance: she refuses to show reverse angles when viewers are most likely to expect them, a strategy that eventually pays emotionally devastating dividends during a climactic exchange of glances where one character smiles while another silently weeps. Diop’s final masterstroke is to end the film before the verdict is reached, an unusual touch that recalls the denouement of Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Diop is wise enough to know that hearing a judge proclaim “Guilty” or “Not guilty” would put viewers in the position of agreeing or disagreeing with the judgment, when her real interests have lain elsewhere all along. As Jonathan Rosenbaum remarked on his website, the director has generated enough questions by the end in order “to make a verdict seem either impossible or superfluous.” (2022, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s BROKER (South Korea)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda puts the “human” back in human trafficking with this quiet, gently comic road movie about the little family that forms around two men who sell abandoned infants on the black market. In South Korea some charities maintain “baby boxes” where reluctant mothers can anonymously abandon their newborns; Dong-soo (Gang Dong-won), a young volunteer working the night shift at a Christian church in Busan, swipes the occasional baby thus left and, with the help of his friend Ha (Song Kang-ho), brokers its sale to some eager married couple. Kore-eda works overtime to sentimentalize this criminal enterprise: Dong-soo steals only those infants whose mothers have included notes promising to come back for them, because he knows such a promise condemns a child to grow up in an orphanage, as he did. (Of course, all he needs to do to spare a child this fate is to destroy the note.) Caught red-handed by Moon So-young (Lee Ji-eun), a young sex worker who dropped her baby to the church, the men are forced to cut her in on the sale and bring her along as they drive from town to town vetting prospective parents. Completing the crooks' nuclear family is a wisecracking seven-year-old urchin who's stowed away on their van during a stop at Dong-soo’s old orphanage, and Kore-eda adds another poignant stroke in the form of a lonely police detective (Bae Doona) closing in on the traffickers. (2022, 109 min, DCP Digital) [J.R. Jones]

Todd Field’s TÁR (US)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday and Sunday; see Venue website for showtimes

Writer-director Todd Field (IN THE BEDROOM, LITTLE CHILDREN) returns to the screen after a 14-year absence with this towering drama about a lionized classical music composer-conductor (Cate Blanchett, in a role written for her) whose brutal control of the people in her professional orbit comes back to haunt and finally destroy her. Lydia Tár is a former protégé of Leonard Bernstein, and like her mentor she has won popular stardom through her talent for precisely articulating the emotional force of music; her own emotional life is one of praise and privilege, and her power as an international celebrity and longtime conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic extends to her domestic partnership with one of its players (Nina Hoss) and their school-age daughter. When Tár stands at the podium, trying to get her arms around the violence of Mahler’s Fifth, Field shoots Blanchett from a low angle so extreme you feel as if you’re craning up a cliff. But like so many celebrities intoxicated by adoration, Tár has developed an appetite for it, and her romantic attraction to young women in her orchestra pulls her along a trajectory that many men have traveled before her. Her 21st-century fall from grace is terrifying in its speed and steepness, yet as the final scene reveals, Tár must always submit to the music’s power, just as so many others have submitted to hers. (2022, 158 min, DCP Digital) [J.R. Jones]

Béla Tarr's SÁTÁNTANGÓ (Hungary) – SOLD OUT!

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 11am

Béla Tarr's transfixing saga of the idling state of humanity is nothing less than a master work from a master filmmaker. Running more than seven hours, SÁTÁNTANGÓ is a filmic event that still shatters us nearly three decades after its release. Adapted from Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai's 1985 novel, the film blends allegory with tightly constructed, oppressive reality in his depiction of an isolated farming collective as its miserable inhabitants cope with despair. Tarr uses extremely long takes, meticulously staged and choreographed, to tell and retell the events of two plodding and rainy autumn days from varying characters' perspectives. SÁTÁNTANGÓ's unforgiving, almost apocalyptically bleak setting is populated by adulterers, drunkards, cowards, and backstabbers; people at a standstill, whirling mirthlessly in an alcohol-fueled dance in a pub or slogging aimlessly across the muddy compound. Tarr's mobile camera allows for languid, shifting compositions that create rich and haunting tableaux vivants. His precise post-sync soundtrack of resonant voices, creaking floors, and one tortured cat's mew has the inescapable effect of drawing the viewer deep into a heightened reality. The film evokes a sense of dread that reminds us of our mortality, though there is also a strain of gallows humor that is both subtle and mordant. While the people of the collective wait for Irimias, their charlatan savior, they move six steps forward and six steps back in a standstill tango with time and progress. This back and forth is mimicked in the film's structure of twelve intertwined chapters, some of which are paired through their titles. This sense of stasis, or impossibility of progress, is also seen in the charismatic Irimias' role in a vague bureaucracy that clearly is reminiscent of communism, but actually feels universal. Tarr sarcastically depicts society as a weak, ineffectual construct meant to provide structure and purpose in a purposeless world. SÁTÁNTANGÓ is a brilliant, haunting opus that knows more about us than we know ourselves. This rare opportunity to see it on the big screen should not be missed. Screening as part of the Settle In series. Please note this screening is sold out. (1994, 439 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Brian Welesko]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Bill Forsyth’s 1983 Scottish film LOCAL HERO (111 min, 35mm) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Crude Aesthetics: Oil on Film series. More info here.

⚫ DANK Haus German American Cultural Center
James Fotopoulos' 2018 film TWO GIRLS (100 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 7:30pm, at DANK Haus (4740 N. Western Ave., Brauhaus Room, 2nd Floor.) More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Francis Lawrence’s 2013 film THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (156 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Philip Seymour Hoffman: A Retrospective series.

Curtis Choy’s 1983 documentary FALL OF THE I-HOTEL (58 min, Digital Projection) and Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s 2022 documentary FREE CHOL SOO LEE (83 min, DCP Digital) screen Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Asian American Media series.

John Wintergate’s 1982 horror film BOARDINGHOUSE (88 min, 35mm) screens  Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Thursday II series, Blow Up My Video: Movies Shot on Video, Shown on Film. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Chase Joynt’s 2022 film FRAMING AGNES (75 min, DCP Digital) opens this week. See Venue website for showtimes. The 6:15pm screening on Thursday will feature a post-screening Q&A with Joynt, producer Samantha Curley, and FRAMING AGNES Research Designer Kristen Schilt, moderated by Ema Abdelhadi (Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago). 

The 2011 National Theatre Live production of Danny Boyle’s FRANKENSTEIN (130 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 2pm.

The Midwest Film Festival’s Best of The Midwest Awards Winners Showcase screens on Monday at 6:30pm, with a networking reception and filmmaker Q&A. 

Zara Katz and Lisa Riordan Seville’s 2022 documentary A WOMAN ON THE OUTSIDE (85 min, Digital Projection) screens on Wednesday at 6pm, with the directors, subject Kristal Bush, and Raqueal Poullums, program manager of READI Chicago, scheduled to attend. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Brandon Cronenberg’s 2023 horror film INFINITY POOL (116 min, DCP Digital) opens and Lyle Edward Ball’s 2022 horror film SKINAMARINK (100 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Matt Skerritt’s 2017 documentary ANGST screens on Monday at 7pm. Programmed and presented by the Lakeview Roscoe Chamber of Commerce, with a post-screening panel discussion and Q&A. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Otherness Archive and Solidarity Cinema
The release party for Henry Hanson's 2022 short film BROS BEFORE takes place on Saturday, 7:30pm, at the Open Books Warehouse (905 W. 19th St.). Includes a total of eight short films; doors open at 7pm, and there will be karaoke at 8:30pm. It’s pay-what-you-want admission. Bring books to donate. More info here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema
Find information on this Humboldt Park microcinema including its screening and workshop schedule, here.

🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING

⚫ Media City Film Festival
The Media City Film Festival and Cousin Collective present THOUSANDSUNS CINEMA, 60+ films by Indigenous artists from Turtle Island and around the world, available to stream for free through Monday. More info here.

⚫ Video Data Bank
TJ Cuthand's NDN Survival Trilogy, comprised of EXTRACTIONS (2019, 15 min), LESS LETHAL FETISHES (2019, 9 min) and RECLAMATION (2018, 13 min), is available to stream for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: January 27 - February 2, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Raphael Jose Martinez, J.R. Jones, Harrison Sherrod, Michael Glover Smith, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko, Candace Wirt