:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3 - THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9 ::

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📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Ernst Lubitsch’s FORBIDDEN PARADISE (US/Silent)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

One of two restorations of silent films made in Hollywood by Ernst Lubitsch that were recently undertaken by the Museum of Modern Art (the other being ROSITA, for which the film’s star, Mary Pickford, specifically brought Lubitsch here from Germany), FORBIDDEN PARADISE is the fourth film he made stateside and the third he made in 1924 alone. The previous year saw the release of the last film he did in Germany with Pola Negri, the Polish actress whom he’d helped catapult to stardom with their large-scale historical sagas. Negri had come to Hollywood several years prior, making her the first European actress to be “imported” by a studio. Unfortunately, she didn’t land as smoothly as some of her contemporaries; perhaps it was surmised that reuniting with Lubitsch, on loan to Famous-Lasky Players (now Paramount) from Warner Bros., would be a mutually satisfying endeavor. And for all intents and purposes it was, this previously hard-to-see gem (per MoMA, the print is the most complete version to be exhibited since the film’s initial release) deliciously invoking the witty sophistication that Lubitsch would articulate more explicitly in his later sound films. Negri stars as an approximation of Russia’s Catherine the Great; the rural setting is deliberately ambiguous, not clearly indicative of either a specific time period or place. (It’s strongly implied that it could be Russia, as the script is based on Edward Sheldon’s 1922 play The Czarina, which was in turn adapted from a Hungarian novel, the country of Lubitsch’s preferred source material). To that end it’s a predecessor of films like Sofia Coppola’s MARIE ANTOINETTE, wherein anachronisms (like modern costuming and settings) become wry cinematic motifs. Negri’s Catherine is a veritable man-eater who, in the film’s opening sequences, displays her independence by cutting her hair into a French bob upon the arrival of that country’s ambassador. But it’s a young soldier, Alexei (Rod La Rocque)—the fiance of her lady-in-waiting (Pauline Starke)—who catches her eye after he rushes to warn her of an impending revolution. Catherine and Alexei begin an affair, which ends in disaster when Alexei realizes that she’s been intimately acquainted with a great many of her royal guards (indicated by way of a military decoration she bestows on her lovers). He then joins the revolution, whose leader is largely motivated by his disgust with the queen’s womanhood and apparent promiscuity. I got worried by this development, which entwines the idea of revolution with such flagrant slut-shaming. But I should never have doubted Lubitsch, because, of course, the pursuit of pleasure was never something upon which he casted judgment. Overseeing everything is Catherine’s “fixer,” played to perfection by the ever-reliable Adolphe Menjou; he reveals the revolution for what it really is (in one of the film’s most cynical but Lubitschian scenes, the harshness of reality rendered as a playful antic), making a fool of Alexei for his impetuously vindictive ways. Politics is always a precarious thing in Lubitsch’s films, second—maybe even third or fourth—to sex. To him that’s the only war worth fighting and the only one worth fighting for. Here that inclination emerges in the form of a loose satire, as would later be more fully realized in films like NINOTCHKA (1939). Some scenes are still missing, but this restoration is certainly a treat; an interesting piece of trivia is that Clark Gable appears, uncredited, in his second onscreen role as one of Catherine’s guards. The film was also remade in the sound era as A ROYAL SCANDAL (1945), which Otto Preminger ended up directing after Lubitsch fell ill. We always hear about the Lubitsch touch—something apparently missing from this later version—but now I’m convinced as to there being a Lubitsch ending, exhibited most characteristically here, in which everyone is given a second chance for love, happiness, and the uninhibited pursuit of pleasure. With live piano accompaniment by David Drazin. (1924, 80 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Billy Wilder's ACE IN THE HOLE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 1:45pm, and Saturday & Sunday, 11:30am

Billy Wilder's films often carry with them an underlying contempt for the hostility of society, but his 1951 follow-up to SUNSET BLVD.—itself part noir and part fraught elegy for obsolesced silent film stars—finds his disgust in full flourish. ACE IN THE HOLE, alternatively released as THE BIG CARNIVAL by a skittish Paramount, features a menacing Kirk Douglas as a down-and-out newspaper reporter banished to Albuquerque intent on reviving his career. Stumbling upon a local trapped in a collapsed silver mine, the reporter seizes on the chance to create and prolong a media circus, keeping the story alive while the victim be damned. A wrenching and all-too-accurate portrayal of vulture media, ACE IN THE HOLE strikes a raw nerve. Dusky and textured mine walls contrast with the severe lighting outside, suggesting the states of mind of victim and voyeur. The reporter, opportunistic and self-interested, floats between the spaces as Kirk Douglas's angular features are used to great effect: jagged and inscrutable in the shadows of the mine, jutting out with confidence among the frenzy. Wilder later called the film "the runt of my litter" in response to audiences' tepid reaction. But by downplaying it, Wilder actually underscores the central role contempt and cynicism play in his films. Perhaps Wilder's most honest work, ACE IN THE HOLE might be a breath of fresh air if it didn't knock the wind out. Screening as part of the Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder Matinee series. (1951, 111 min, 35mm) [Brian Welesko]

Expanded Practices
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) – Friday, 7:30pm [Free Admission]

This screening of experimental and animated films by Black women kicks off with a series of charming, playful, and educational animations by Carol Munday Lawrence centered on nguzo saba, or the seven principles of unity. TIGER AND THE BIG WIND (1972) focuses on unity, MUDOPE AND THE FLOOD (1975) responsibility, FINDING THE GREEN STONE (1980) purpose, and NOEL'S LEMONADE STAND (1982) highlights cooperative economics. These films are bold and loose in their visual style, affectionate and instructive in their intent, and chock full of lively imagination. Ayoka Chenzira’s HAIR PIECE: A FILM FOR NAPPY HEADED PEOPLE (1984) is a quirky satire of Eurocentric beauty standards and the complications and delights of Black female hair. O. Funmilayo Makarah’s DEFINE (1988) is a performance art piece wrestling between cultural identity and the dominant culture. Makarah’s L.A. IN MY MIND (2006) is a roving collection of Los Angles sights and sounds with clip-art text in fonts gaudy enough to match the billboards that clog the landscape. It brings to mind Le Tigre's song "Hot Topic" as a funky recitation of delights invokes everything from Charles Burnett to doughnuts. Zeinabu irene Davis’s A PERIOD PIECE (1991) is an absurdist old-school rap about the needless embarrassments of menstruation replete with tampon mics, big sunglasses, and digital blood splatter. Alile Sharon Larkin's DREADLOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS (1991) reimagines the fairy tale, but this time with cheese grits, undeniably the best possible version of porridge. Barbara McCullough’s WATER RITUAL #1: AN URBAN RITE OF PURIFICATION (1979) was the film I'm most excited to see but was not previewable, so instead I'll rely on Jacqueline Stewart's summation: "Made in collaboration with performer Yolanda Vidato, WATER RITUAL #1 examines Black women’s ongoing struggle for spiritual and psychological space through improvisational, symbolic acts... Structured as an Africanist ritual for Barbara McCullough’s 'participant-viewers,' the film addresses how conditions of poverty, exploitation and anger render the Los Angeles landscape not as the fabled promised land for Black migrants, but as both cause and emblem of Black desolation." Finally is a series of five extraordinary miniature films from the mid 1970s by Zora Lathan documenting her life, making sly political jabs, and experimenting with form in playful and dynamic ways. They are amazing, brief bursts of life, and I cannot wait to see them on the big screen. (Total Approx. 113 min, 16mm and 35mm and Digital Projection) [Josh B Mabe]

Argento 1970s

Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes listed below

Dario Argento's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (Italy)
Friday, 8:30pm
The origins of giallo date as far back as 1929, when the publishing company Il Giallo Mondadori began publishing pulpy crime novels. “Giallo” being the Italian word for “yellow”, the covers of these books were yellow, with illustrations of murder. Readers would try to figure out which character was the murderer before the novel’s main characters. Over the next few decades, these publications (written by authors such as Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace) became extremely popular in Italy and abroad. By the early 1960s, director Mario Bava made films such as THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1963) and BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964). With the latter particularly, he began using cinematic techniques like camera movement, vibrant colors, shadows, and costuming the killer in all black and leather gloves, which became the standard for the genre. Bava, along with Pier Palo Pasolini, pushed the boundaries of the Italian film censors (in effect from 1913 until 2021) so the barbarian gusto of THE BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and the giallo style could flourish. Debate over Argento beginning the genre with this first film or Bava with THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH has been a point of contention for horror fans and cinephiles for years. Argento builds on tracks Bava laid by bringing the visceral-brutality-as-theatrical-spectacle into the stratosphere, bringing the giallo genre into a realm of savage pageantry. The narrative is secondary to operatically violent murder sequences, making it something like a gory opera (not surprisingly, Argento would later make a film called OPERA, in 1987). Upon release, BIRD was a massive success. Argento was given the label "the Italian Hitchcock," partially a result of the film’s marketing: “Remember PSYCHO? There are scenes with that kind of impact! Worth seeing!” The film begins with Sam, an American, witnesses an attempted murder in Rome. The police suspect a notorious serial killer as the culprit. As he begins his own investigation, Sam puts his and his girlfriend’s life in danger to solve the mystery. The legendary Ennio Morricone wrote the score, which augments the visual experience of the great Vittorio Storaro's photography. These two masters create the perfect nightmare under the guidance of the then-30-year-old director. With this picture and his many to follow, Argento would change the world of cinema for the half century to come. In just five years after the release of BIRD, over 100 giallo films were made. Later on, his work would play a major role in the development of De Palma, Tarantino, Carpenter, and Del Toro, to name a few. (1970, 98 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ray Ebarb]
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Dario Argento’s THE CAT O’ NINE TAILS (Italy)
Saturday 8:30pm 
Hot on the heels of the international smash hit THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970), Argento intended THE CAT O’ NINE TAILS (1971) as a sequel. During the writing process, he instead made the choice to go in an entirely different direction with this ambitious whodunnit. CAT became a part of the director’s "animal trilogy," to be followed by FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (1971). In retrospect, Argento openly disapproves of his second film, specifying it having too many "American moments." Critics and giallo fans disagree with the auteur, citing CAT as one of his masterpieces. The story revolves around a break-in at an Italian medical institution. One of the doctors knows the culprit and plans to blackmail them but is pushed in front of a moving train before succeeding. A photographer captures the murder, and before the photo can be blown up, the photographer is murdered. Only reporter Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) can crack the case with the assistance of a retired blind man, Franco “Cookie” Arnò (Karl Malden). It’s important to make the distinction between CAT taking influence from classic thrillers as opposed to relying on genre clichés. In writing and execution, Argento takes and expands on past work the way any virtuous artist would. The train murder sequence captured on a random photographer is a direct reference to Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966). The poisoned milk sequence refers to Hitchcock’s SUSPICION (1941). The narrative itself, nine suspects being killed off one creative way at a time calls back to the classic Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None. Regardless of the inspiration, Argento coaxes the best talent out of his collaborators. Both American actors, Franciscus and Malden give charming performances as an unlikely duo trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. Rejoined by the brilliant Ennio Morricone to create a truly unsettling experience, Dario Argento finds a way to build on the genre he sculpted. (1971, 112 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ray Ebarb]
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Dario Argento's FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (Italy)
Sunday, 6pm
If you’ve never seen a Dario Argento film, your reaction to the astonishing reveal of what the title of this one means may determine how you feel about the rest of his work. Roberto (Michael Brandon), the drummer in a Deep Purple-meets-ELP rock band, is chased into an empty theater by a menacing stranger. The stranger pulls out a knife, and in an attempt to defend himself, Roberto accidentally stabs him. The situation is made stranger by the presence of a masked figure taking photos; soon, Roberto receives them as blackmail material. Because he believes he’s committed manslaughter, he refuses to go to the police, and he doesn’t get honest with his wife Nina (Mimsy Farmer) till the blackmailer invades their home. Their maid Amelia (Marisa Fabrissi) discovers the killer’s identity, which leads to her murder in a nighttime park. After overhearing an anecdote about an execution in Saudi Arabia, he suffers from horrible dreams about it every night. FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET jumbles tones eccentrically, with comedy and sex jostling against far darker material. (It’s a much crueler film than its humor would suggest.) Jokes about porn getting delivered to the wrong address and Roberto mistakenly beating his mailman with a pipe feel out of place next to the set pieces in which several characters are slowly stalked (not least by the first-person gaze of the camera) till their eventual murders. Argento’s ability to suggest a malevolent presence simply by his choice of framing and camera movements is unparalleled, and the film is loaded with unusual imagery, like the POV inside an acoustic guitar as it’s strummed and a tracking shot down phone lines as Amelia makes a call. At their best, Argento’s films make considerations like believable narratives and three-dimensional characters seem hopelessly middlebrow; their ability to bring nightmares to life in vivid sight and sound is far more important. Maitland McDonagh, author of the Argento study Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds, has argued that his work pursues an aesthetic closer to the art films of the ‘60s and ‘70s than to more conventional horror. Certainly, FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET is preoccupied with the difficulty of understanding our own experience, a theme evident in Argento’s very first feature, THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, and often connected to the dangers of passive voyeurism. However, FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET is a warm-up for the director’s stunning run from DEEP RED (1975) to OPERA (1987). (1971, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]
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Dario Argento's DEEP RED (Italy)
Wednesday, 8:30pm
Dario Argento’s seminal giallo, both for its style and the great structural contributions it made to the genre, DEEP RED stars David Hemmings as a British composer in Rome who starts investigating the murder he accidentally witnesses. In doing this, he discovers he may be in line as the killer's next victim. DEEP RED solidifies Argento’s love of classical forms such as painting and classical music, but it’s also one of the first true slasher films. (Note, however, that the gore on display here is substantive, not exploitative.) Argento’s particular affinity for painting is strongest in this film: one can’t help but note the striking similarity between the bar outside the first victim’s apartment complex and Hopper’s Nighthawks; more important, paintings turn out to hold clues to the killer’s identity and motive. It might not be fair to call DEEP RED the best giallo ever made, but it would be an understatement to call it anything less than the most important. (1975, 98 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Joe Rubin]
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Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA (Italy)
Thursday, 8:30pm
Dario Argento is one of Italy's greatest living artists, and SUSPIRIA is one of his greatest achievements in both storytelling and visual design. Jessica Harper plays Suzy, a dance student who becomes embroiled in a plot by her ballet school's faculty (revealed to be witches) to unleash the forces of hell onto the world. The first in Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy (the subsequent features are 1980's INFERNO and 2008's MOTHER OF TEARS), SUSPIRIA may not be the director's most complex or visually stunning work, but it's perhaps the crux of Argento's canon, the film that firmly established him as an auteur worthy of international discussion and analysis. Loved by genre fans for its excessive violence and pulsating score by the rock group Goblin, SUSPIRIA is as much a testament to Argento's love for classical art, which can also be seen in 1987's OPERA and 1995's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. Argento's genius is to set these films, all of them bloody and relatively sleazy, in the world of "high" art. By doing so, he not only satirizes the pompous nature of "connoisseurs" who dismiss cinema—particular genre films—as a "lower" form, but also recontextualizes these "higher" forms to fit in the realm of "commercial" work. (1977, 92 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Joe Rubin]
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Also screening as part of the Argento 1970s series is his 1973 film THE FIVE DAYS (122 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) on Monday at 6pm. More info here.

Jean Renoir’s LA BÊTE HUMAINE (France)

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

I’m almost halfway through Jean Renoir’s autobiography, aptly titled My Life and My Films, and I can say one thing for certain: he adamantly disliked overwrought psychologizing and staid literary adaptations. All that said, Jean Gabin certainly made an odd choice when he asked Renoir to adapt Émile Zola’s La Bête Humaine, a classic novel that’s undoubtedly psychological given Zola’s naturalist leanings. Gabin stars as Lantier, a tormented train engineer who prefers machinery to people, in part because of inexplicable spells during which he becomes violent toward women. He gets embroiled in a crime committed by a coworker and his wife; the stationmaster, Roubaud, kills his wife’s former lover after he learns of their past affair. Lantier and the wife, Séverine (Simone Simon), fall in love and conspire to kill her husband. It reads as being especially nefarious, and certainly psychological, but Renoir holds true to his style and doesn’t burden the film with inquiry. Rather, he extracts the poetry from Zola’s text and translates it as poetic realism instead of any variation of actual realism. “I had an idea in my head,” he said, “that the realistic, or naturalistic, side of Zola is not all that important, that Zola was above all, a poet, a great poet. So it was consequently necessary to try to locate in his style the elements which would allow me to render that poetry on the screen.” It’s also considered a precursor to film noir in how spirit takes precedence over substance. The origins of the project may have contributed to that; Gabin had wanted to fulfill a lifelong dream of driving a train on screen, an almost primitive desire that lends itself to the unyielding inertia of both the machine and its master. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday series, “Jean Renoir: The Grand Reality.” (1938, 100 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Mitchell Leisen’s DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY (US)

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

A phrase that’s common among my in-laws is "I love you to death." I’m not exactly sure what the derivation of that phrase is, though I guess it means "love unto either of our deaths," but it always makes me shudder. I can’t help picturing one of them hugging the life out of me. And that, my friends, is the premise of Mitchell Leisen’s DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY. Adapted from a play by Italian dramatist Alberto Casella, the film imagines what it might be like to be Death—feared by mortals, alone, noncorporeal—and gives the Reaper the chance to experience three days as a flesh-and-blood man to get inside the heads of human beings, so to speak, to understand why they cling so desperately to life. As the film opens, two cars carrying rich Italian aristocrats are careening along a mountain road toward the palatial villa of Duke Lambert (Sir Guy Standing). Grazia (Evelyn Venable), the fragile, young fiancée of Corrado (Kent Taylor), senses a cold presence and sees a shadow following the car in which she is riding. She urges Corrado to speed away from it, narrowly missing hitting a flower vendor’s cart and almost going off the cliff. Alas, the shadow obscures Lambert’s vision, and he rams the cart, though nobody is hurt. Once the group reaches the villa, Lambert insists that Grazia and her mother (Kathleen Howard) stay the night. One by one, members of the group go to bed, until Lambert is alone in his study. Then, a shadowy figure approaches him, announcing himself as Death. The specter has decided to take a three-day holiday at the villa. He poses as Prince Sirki, an acquaintance who was expected at the villa. Death assures an uncertain Lambert that Sirki will not show up that night—or ever. When next we see Death, he is sporting a medal-bedecked uniform, a monocle, an indeterminate accent, and the unmistakable profile of Frederic March. March’s portrayal is a comic gem as Death experiences the pleasures of the flesh for the first time while engaging in double entendres about encountering mortals engaging in these delights. For example, his enjoyment of wine calls to mind the drunks he "encountered." His toggling between being a peculiarly naïve person and an all-powerful force adds drama to the proceedings, and his desire to be seen by one of the women vying for his affections is terror-inducing. DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY was released on the cusp of Production Code enforcement, and it’s easy to see where the film might have been scaled back. When Death’s two romantic rivals (Gail Patrick and Katharine Alexander) ready themselves to dine with him, they merely examine each other’s clothes rather than loll about in their underwear. Yet, we witness Death carrying on a conversation with one of the women whose entire back, exposed by her to-the-waist backless dress, gets a good deal of screen time; the film also obliquely suggests that Grazia and Death have sex, a scene made explicit in Martin Brest’s 1998 remake, MEET JOE BLACK. The literate screenplay by adapters Maxwell Anderson and Gladys Lehman is a pleasure, and Lambert’s villa is a riot of overdone tackiness that mimics on a much lower budget the set DEATH’s art director, Hans Dreier, created for THE SCARLET EMPRESS (1934). DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY ends pretty much as one would expect of a Mitchell Leisen romance, but that conclusion should make for lively after-viewing discussion. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “Facing Life, Meeting Death.” (1934, 79 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Paz Encina’s EAMI (Paraguay/Experimental)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]

The Chaco region of western Paraguay has long been home to the indigenous Ayoreo-Totobiegosode people, but now these tribes are being chased off their land due to deforestation. EAMI is director Paz Encina’s lament for this unfortunate historical development, which she made in cooperation with a number of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode. The film is neither a narrative feature nor a documentary, though it contains aspects of both. Deliberately lacking in contextual information for viewers unfamiliar with the subject matter, the film is an immersive experience into the sights and sounds of the Chaco environment. It centers on an indigenous girl named Eami who must summon wisdom beyond her years in order to make sense of having to leave the only home she’s ever known. Per the filmmaker’s notes, eami means both “forest” and “world” in the Ayoreo language, and this provides a clue to Encina’s larger meanings. It’s a helpful clue, as the experience of watching EAMI is more sensual than cerebral—it’s a movie where the appearance of footsteps on white sand and the sounds of wind rustling through trees are just as important as the impact these sensations make on humans. Through the integration of tribal creation myths on the soundtrack and various dignified faces in the decoupage, Encina creates a portrait of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode as a people for whom individual identity is generally subsumed by tradition and respect for the natural world. It’s rare to see a film about indigenous people that attempts to recreate their perspective as opposed to being simply about their perspective. EAMI brings a much-needed empathy to the ethnographic form, and it produces some striking imagery in the process. Encina will appear for a post-screening discussion with Natalia Brizuela, Associate Professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley. (2022, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Sergei Bondarchuk's WAR AND PEACE (USSR)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 11am

The most expensive film ever made, Sergei Bondarchuk's multi-hour 70mm adaptation of Tolstoy's epic novel is also easily the weariest-looking. Shot over the course of many years with record-breaking numbers of actors and extras, it's a film that seems to take its toll on its creators as we watch: director/star Bondarchuk visibly ages from scene to scene, and certain sequences, developed and rehearsed during the film's long gestation, have an exhausting quality. But rather than holding audiences at bay, this latter attribute lends an immense weight to the film's scenario, most notably during the lengthy and meticulously choreographed battle sequences. Screening as part of the Settle In series. (1967, 453 min, DCP Digital) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles' BACURAU (Brazil)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s three features to date—NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (2012), AQUARIUS (2016), and now BACURAU (co-directed by Juliano Dornelles)—are all blatantly ambitious in their narratives and aesthetics, with complex plot structures and expansive widescreen imagery. But where his first two films (both novelistic in feel) suggested he was something of a Brazilian Arnaud Desplechin, the no-less-commanding BACURAU takes its cues from the American genre movies of George Romero and John Carpenter. The Carpenter influence is more overt, and not only in the powerful widescreen compositions; BACURAU employs Carpenter’s signature font for its credits, and it even uses a piece of music written by the horror master. But the film’s underlying concerns—namely, how societies are made and broken—are distinctly Romero-esque, and it’s this panoramic vision that makes the film feel epic even when the action and dialogue are stripped-down. It’s best not to reveal too much of the plot, as one of the chief pleasures of the film lies in how you gradually put together the fictional world that Mendonça Filho and Dornelles have imagined from the clues that they give you. Suffice it to say, though, the influence of genre cinema doesn’t become fully apparent until the second half of BACURAU; for almost the entire first hour, the film generally wades in its environment, introducing character after character and fleshing out what life might be like in an isolated, northern Brazilian village during a dystopian future “a few years from now.” These passages advance a bifocal vision, dramatizing individual lives and the collective spirit of the community with comparable pungency. (The rural setting notwithstanding, you may be reminded of the social portraiture of NEIGHBORING SOUNDS.) Sonia Braga, the star of AQUARIUS, returns as the town doctor, who’s a sweetheart when she’s sober and a terror when she’s drunk; her performance is the film’s showcase, but every community member gets a few distinctive moments apiece. Mendonça Filho and Dornelles also bring lots of flavor to their characterization of the North American visitors who start to arrive in the title village near the end of the first half of the movie. The malign presence of these characters can be read as a metaphor for the ravages of international capitalism on Brazil, but the film derives its raw power from the sheer dread of its violence. Screening as part of professor Daniel R. Quiles’ Gore Capitalism lecture series. (2019, 131 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman's NEPTUNE FROST (US/Rwanda)

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

“The movie has a plot that defies common sense,” wrote Roger Ebert upon revisiting Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS some years back, “but its very discontinuity is a strength.” I watched Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s NEPTUNE FROST the night before I left on a trip to Berlin; the film came to mind as I read informational placards at an exhibit about Lang’s visionary achievement at the Deutsche Kinemathek’s Museum für Film und Fernsehen. Much like METROPOLIS, Williams and Uzeyman’s inspired Afrofuturist disquisition addresses a contemporary moment from so far into the future (spiritually if not in actuality; it's not made clear when it takes place) that solutions of the present look positively prehistoric by comparison. It’s the current juncture that the filmmakers interrogate through a meticulously constructed albeit intriguingly opaque narrative, rapidly confronting all means of social issues in such a way that defies "common sense" and is all the better for it. The film centers on two characters—Neptune (Elvis Ngabo/Cheryl Isheja), an intersex runaway who miraculously transitions from male to female toward the beginning of the film, and Matalusa (Bertrand "Kaya Free" Ninteretse), a coltan miner spurred by the death of his younger brother—and the impact their eventual coupling has on the remote Burundi hideaway where a radical cyberpunk hacker collective later endeavors to seek retribution from an unjust world. In summary it sounds cohesive enough, but in practice Williams (a multi-hyphenate talent who wrote the film’s script) wastes no opportunity in adding layer after layer to an already dense political mythology; the persistent refrain of the phrase “unanimous goldmine” used as a greeting is just one example. NEPTUNE FROST is also a musical, with memorable, politically charged songs written by Williams and performed as outré set pieces reminiscent of the cannily exuberant numbers in Bruno Dumont’s two Joan of Arc films. The costumes and production design are similarly memorable; both were created by Rwandan artist Cedric Mizero, who utilized recycled materials and what might otherwise be termed trash to create an out-of-this world, but still decidedly of this world, DIY milieu. Rwandan actress and filmmaker Uzeyman, who looked to shooting in her home country due to Burundi being too unstable, is also the film’s cinematographer, responsible for the nimbleness with which beautiful African landscapes and hacker dance parties both evince a similar halcyon beauty. NEPTUNE FROST is part of a larger project, titled MartyrLoserKing after the hacker collective; there’s reportedly more to come, a few more albums and even a graphic novel. The sheer ambition of its intent and the sublimity of its realization, marked by that brazen discontinuity, are what set it and others of its ilk—those films ahead of their time yet still very much of their time—definitively apart. (2021, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Brandon Cronenberg's INFINITY POOL (Canada)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Due to the multifaceted nature of the director and his undeniable influence on horror cinema, there’s maybe no term more overused and misunderstood in criticism as "Cronenbergian." Further complicating this is the fact that the Don of body horror’s son, Brandon, is slowly carving out his own adjacent but equally expansive lane. Following the premiere of the uncut version at Sundance, the younger Cronenberg's newest film INFINITY POOL is now in Chicago in an edited but (presumably) no less intense form. It opens on James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) who are away at a resort on the fictional remote island of Latoka, ostensibly so James can find inspiration for his next book. Shy and feeling emasculated due to his writer’s block, he’s ripe for manipulation when he meets Gabi (Mia Goth), a fan of the one book he’s written so far. Gabi’s an actress who specializes in commercial acting where she plays the type of people who fail miserably at everyday tasks, eventually being saved by the company’s product. There’s an undeniable chemistry between them, something confirmed when Gabi jacks off James in secret while at a beach outside the resort. But when James accidentally kills a local with Gabi’s husband’s car driving back, he’s let in on a unique tradition on the island: for a price, you can have a clone made to serve your sentence (death by execution, always) for you. From here, James descends into Gabi’s community of swingers stuck outside of time, living life with no consequences as they revel in seeing versions of themselves be repeatedly murdered. Fans of Cronenberg’s last film POSSESSOR (2020) will find a lot to love here, as the director continues his interests in the deadening effects of violence and contemporary consumption. He’s in class-critique mode here, where half the horror lies in just how quickly morality goes out the window when you have a lot of money. James is a pathetic man; he’s not especially interesting for a writer, and we discover later that his only book to date was eviscerated by critics. His access to this class comes only via his wife, and to her via her wealthy father (in what may be a wink at Brandon’s own nepo-baby status). Like so many dangerous men, James doesn’t have an identity of his own, his entitlement cut with the nagging awareness of how small he really is. It’s with this dynamic that Goth especially shines as a horror villain whose scariest quality is her controlled submission to James, dragging him down in the muck with her but convincing him it’s his idea. Her words to James echo the self-help jargon of pick-up artists and men’s rights activists, insisting that primal violence is the order of life and that James’ value as a man relies on his capacity for rage. In a bit of a surprise, these dialogues are the strongest part of the film and show that Cronenberg is making a habit of this more character-based work, allowing gross and all-too-recognizable psychological detail to drive the horror. Similar to Christopher Abbot’s layered acting in POSSESSOR, Skarsgård gives a range-y performance that’s alternately ferocious and sniveling, grounding the film’s critique of masculinity as often both. Throw a rock and you’ll probably hit someone commenting on this film’s over-the-top violence. But this may mislead viewers, just as discussions of Cronenberg Sr.’s films tend to wrongly suggest that they all have the same gross-out consistency as, say, THE FLY. While his debt to his father is clear, young Cronenberg is a bit more conventional with his viscera, mostly preferring shooting- and stabbing-based gore to the bizarre prosthetics associated with his father. Still, the visceral effect lingers after the film’s close, due more to the upsetting context of the violence than the actual onscreen imagery. The film’s ick factor (and much of its humor) derives from the fact that this is all, ultimately, fine. The rich will always self-victimize, and personal growth is a non-starter when you can just pay your way out of trouble. The film is certainly a Bad Time, but one that adopts a controlled mean-spiritedness in its pitch-black satire that can feel righteous as much as upsetting. We could all certainly stand to see more rich people die violently at the movies. (2023, 117 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight

High concept and low class, John Carpenter's 1981 sci-fi/action film premises itself on a paranoid endgame scenario: what if crime just keeps going up? Carpenter settles on the conservative trajectory of 400 percent and cedes Manhattan to the most violent criminals, turning it into an island prison and letting it go to ruin. Only the most hardened offenders are sentenced there—new prisoners are given the option of cremation before arrival—making it a particularly bad place for the President (Donald Pleasance) to crash-land. Charged with fishing him out within 22 hours, the police commissioner (Lee Van Cleef) offers a full pardon to incoming convict 'Snake' Plissken (Kurt Russell), a former Special Forces operative-turned-criminal—but only if he can successfully recover the President. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is a wild ride that is at times clever and at other times surprisingly dull. Most interesting is not the search-and-rescue but the creative depiction of a ruined New York and its ad hoc city-life, circumscribed by extreme danger. An old acquaintance, Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine), watches an all-convict Broadway production before making his way uptown with Molotov cocktails at the ready. Shot mostly in darkness, Carpenter succeeds in creating a closed-off atmosphere that is both somehow dingy and futuristic. These touches, along with several solid performances, breathe life into the rote barrel fire-pocked landscape, and Snake himself. (1981, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Claude Barras' MY LIFE AS A ZUCCHINI (Switzerland/France/Animation)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday and Sunday, 11am

It’s become something of a cliché to remark that animation is not just for kids. What once seemed like a necessary reminder to those whose knowledge of the medium stopped at Disney and Saturday morning cartoons now feels rather quaint in a media landscape populated by South Park, BoJack Horseman, Studio Ghibli, and any number of works that wield the animated form as art. Yet even those accustomed to the endlessly varied permutations the medium can take might briefly be stunned when, minutes into MY LIFE AS A ZUCCHINI, the child protagonist accidentally pushes his mother down the stairs to her death. It’s an early warning that the film is going to be tackling some heavy topics, and an assurance that it won’t be slathering them in the sugary syrup that dilutes so many kid-centered flicks, animated or otherwise. Now parentless (we glean that the father had earlier left the family), the boy, named Icare, is taken to a kindly police officer, and transferred to an orphanage among a group of other children who, for often even more disconcerting reasons, have been left behind by their caretakers. Icare has trouble fitting in at first, especially as the brunt of the designated bully’s hostilities, but with the introduction of new and vulnerable girl Camille, the shared adversity of the group becomes a powerful bonding agent. Bringing up everything from drug abuse to suicide and incarceration, MY LIFE AS A ZUCCHINI must negotiate a tricky balance between the frankness and seriousness such subjects require, and the emotional accessibility they need to be understood by a potentially young audience. That the film mostly pulls this off is largely thanks to writer Céline Sciamma, who continues to demonstrate a natural sensitivity for the ways underserved or otherwise neglected kids learn to cope with their circumstances. The stop-motion animation style, too, keeps the film from being either too sentimental or morose, with its cheery colors tempered by gangly, downtrodden-looking figures, whose crimson noses and ears make them seem as if they’re in the midst of a perpetual cold. Even in its brevity, MY LIFE AS A ZUCCHINI moves deeply as a clear-eyed and empathetic portrait of childhood adversity, exhibiting an honesty and approachability that should resonate with viewers of all ages. (2016, 66 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Jafar Panahi’s NO BEARS (Iran)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6pm and Monday, 8:15pm

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 – Friday, 3:45pm; Sunday, 1:45pm; and Wednesday, 6pm

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]

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]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Merawi Gerima’s 2020 film RESIDUE (90 min, Digital Projection) screens on Thursday, 7pm, with the filmmaker in person. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Martin Brest’s 1992 film SCENT OF A WOMAN (157 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the Philip Seymour Hoffman: A Retrospective series. 

Lewis Milestone’s 1946 film THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS (116 min, 35mm) screens Monday, 7pm, as part of the Baby Face: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck series. 

Dai Sil Kim-Gibson and Christine Choy’s 1993 documentary SA-I-GU (41 min, Digital Projection) and Marlon Fuentes’ 1995 docudrama BONTOC EULOGY (56 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Asian American Media series. 

Ishirō Honda’s 1954 monster-movie classic GODZILLA (96 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Thursday I series, Splicing of the Atom: Nuclear Taboo in Cinema. 

Lars von Trier’s 2000 musical drama DANCER IN THE DARK (140 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
“ELECTRIC VISIONS: Chicago's Groundbreaking Video and Computer Art” screens Thursday, 6pm, as part of the Conversations at the Edge Spring 2023 series. Followed by a post-screening discussion with artists Jamie Fenton, Copper Giloth, and Jane Veeder. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Lukas Dhont’s 2022 film CLOSE (105 min, DCP Digital) opens this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Mye Hoang’s 2022 documentary CAT DADDIES (89 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday and Sunday at 11:45am. 

Josh Roush’s 2022 film WRONG REASONS (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 4:30pm. Featuring a remote introduction from filmmaker Kevin Smith and a post-screening Q&A with Josh Roush and producer/actor Liv Roush.

Mark Waters’ 2003 comedy FREAKY FRIDAY (97 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm, preceded by a 15-minute live improv set by Smoochers. 

WBEZ Chicago presents Mortified Live on Thursday at 8pm. More info on all screenings and events here. 

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

🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING

⚫ 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: February 3 - February 9, 2022

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Steve Erickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, J.R. Jones, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Josh B Mabe, Joe Rubin, Michael Glover Smith, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Brian Welesko