:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17 - THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Edgar G. Ulmer's THE BLACK CAT (US)

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

The biggest budgeted film of his career, Edgar G. Ulmer's virtually in-name-only adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's classic story is an incredibly stylish and haunting study of the power struggle between two friends, which, accidentally or intentionally, mirrors the vicious jealousy between the film's two stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. A young American couple, traveling in Eastern Europe, gets stranded at the mysterious villa of a world-famous architect (Karloff) and his visiting friend, Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi). Soon Karloff begins to psychologically torment the doctor with dark secrets from each of their pasts. Full of clear visual allusions to both Murnau and Lang, Ulmer presents a dark portrait of post-war trauma set in a world that only looks modern, but is actually still fighting decades-old moral demons. If nothing else, THE BLACK CAT is a masterpiece of lighting, with many scenes cloaked half in darkness, allowing only fragments of the "truth" to be seen. Karloff and Lugosi's intense hatred for each other adds such a powerful undercurrent of unease to the film that one wonders if they were cast in opposing roles for just that reason. Preceded by Chuck Jones' 1950 cartoon THE HYPO-CHONDRI-CAT (35mm). (1934, 65 min, 35mm) [Joe Rubin]

Lynne Sachs x 2

Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes listed below

Lynne Sachs’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (US/Documentary)
Monday, 6pm
In Horace’s Odes, one among many texts where this sentiment endures, the Roman poet wrote, "For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer." It’s hardly an esoteric dictum, but nevertheless it’s duly reflected in experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ wholehearted documentary portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Something of a longstanding work-in-progress, the film draws from decades of footage shot by Sachs, her father, and her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (whose own 2005 film FORTY SHADES OF BLUE was inspired by the same so-called “Hugh Hefner of Park City”), plus others, documenting not just the sybaritic “hippie-businessman” patriarch, but also his numerous descendants. Sachs’ knotty chronicle reveals that her father has a total of nine children with several different women, two of whom the other siblings found out about only a few years back. (The film opens with Sachs brushing her elderly father’s hair, working out a particularly unpleasant snarl. “Sorry, dad,” she says. “There’s just one part that’s very tangly.” The irony is faint and benevolent, but present even so.) Sachs considers the enveloping imbroglio from her own perspective, but also takes into account the viewpoints of her eight siblings, her father’s ex-wives (including her own mother) and girlfriends, plus Ira’s mother, a gracefully cantankerous old woman in a certain amount of denial over her son’s wanton predilections and the role she played in his dysfunction. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO—the title an homage to Yvonne Rainer's FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO...—is comprised of footage recorded between 1965 and 2019 and shot on 8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV, and digital; the fusion of all this material (by editor Rebecca Shapass) ranks among the most astounding use of personal archives that I’ve ever seen. It all exists in a state between documentary and home-movie footage, a paradigm that aptly reflects the conflict between reality and perspective, and the uncomfortable middle-ground that bisects the two. Sachs’ work often features her family, but this feels like an apotheosis of her autobiographical predisposition, likewise a question—why do the sins of the father linger?—and an answer. Among the most affecting scenes are roundtable discussions between the siblings where they consider revelations about their father and the implications of his actions. These scenes are heartrending not for their sadness, but rather for their naked honesty; it’s not just a film about a father who, but also a film about a love that defines a family. Sachs’ filmography is centered on infinite poetic quandaries (in voice over, she explores some of them here, such as when she muses on her father’s profession as a developer in Utah: “What happens when you own a horizon?”) and this feels like a logical conclusion to a lifetime of such profound impasses, though I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to probe life and its enigmas in a similarly masterful fashion. For all the suffering on display, Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love. Followed by a post-screening conversation between Sachs and local filmmaker Lori Felker. (2020, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker’s THE WASHING SOCIETY (US Documentary)
Thursday, 6pm
Much like filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ acclaimed 2013 documentary hybrid YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, THE WASHING SOCIETY, a medium-length quasi-documentary she co-directed with performer-playwright Lizzie Olesker, penetrates the hidden worlds that exist adjacent to us. Just as in YOUR DAY Sachs explored the circumstances of immigrants living in “shift-bed” apartments in New York City’s Chinatown, she and Olesker here probe the mysterious world of urban laundromats, where workers—often immigrants or those from similarly disenfranchised groups—take on a task that’s historically been outsourced, at least in some capacity—that of washing and folding peoples’ laundry. The historical evocation is literal; the film’s title and one of its recurring motifs refer to a real organization from the 1880s called the Washing Society, which started in Atlanta and was comprised of washerwomen (most of them Black) who came together to demand higher pay and opportunities for self-regulation. A young actor, Jasmine Holloway, plays one such laundress, reading from texts written by the organization and whose presence haunts the modern-day laundromats. Soon other ‘characters,’ both real and fictitious, take their places in this mysterious realm, hidden away in plain sight. Ching Valdes-Aran and Veraalba Santa (actors who, along with Holloway, impressed me tremendously) appear as contemporary laundromat workers, representing ethnicities that tend to dominate the profession. It’s unclear at first that Valdes-Aran and Santa are performing, especially as real laundromat workers begin to appear in documentary vignettes, detailing the trials and tribulations of their physically demanding job. The stories are different, yet similar, personal to the individuals but representative of a society in which workers suffer en masse, still, from the very injustices against which the Washing Society were fighting. The actors’ scenes soon veer into more performative territory, a tactic which Sachs deployed, albeit differently, in YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT. Much like that film, the evolution of THE WASHING SOCIETY included live performances in real laundromats around New York City, some scenes of which, it would seem, are included in the film. There’s a bit of voiceover from Sachs, explaining the directors’ mission to go into many different laundromats, and from voice actors who read monologues that are tenuously connected to Valdes-Aran and Santa’s ‘characters.’ There are also visceral interludes involving accumulated lint that add another layer to the experimentation; there’s a bluntness to the filmmakers’ artistic ambitions, as with much of Sachs’ work, that makes the intentions discernible but no less effective. Sachs has previously employed egalitarian methods, such as considering the people she works with to be collaborators rather than subjects, cast, and crew. In a film about unseen labor, seeing that labor—notably in a self-referential scene toward the end in which a group of said collaborators prepare to exit a laundromat after shooting—is important. In light of what’s happening now, when so much essential labor is either coyly unseen or brazenly unacknowledged (or both), it’s crucial. Like the 1880s’ washerwoman, the victims (and, likewise, the combatants) of capitalism are ghosts that haunt us. Followed by a post-screening conversation between Sachs and Cine-File managing editor Kat Sachs. (2018, 44 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]
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Screening as part of a shorts program entitled “A Collection & a Conversation,” which includes Sachs’ short films DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, 6 min, Digital Projection); MAYA AT 24 (2021, 4 min, Digital Projection); VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, 3 min, Digital Projection) and SWERVE (2022, 7 min, Digital Projection). 

Billy Wilder's ONE, TWO, THREE (US)

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

In what amounts to boneheaded rabble-rousing, British film critic John Patterson recently wrote an article in which he scolds Andrew Sarris for reneging on his original negative assessment of Billy Wilder in The American Cinema, aka the ur-text of the auteur theory. Patterson goes on to label Wilder as a cold-hearted cynic and, what's worse, a filmmaker of "contestable quality." Though he never established a signature visual style comparable to that of a Welles or Renoir, Wilder was constantly ahead of the curve in his candid critique of American society, addressing topical, sometimes off-limits, issues central to contemporary life. In SUNSET BLVD he took on Hollywood, in THE LOST WEEKEND he dealt with alcoholism, in THE APARTMENT he skewered the corporate rat race, and in ONE, TWO, THREE he satirized Cold War attitudes. In some sense ONE, TWO, THREE could have only been made by an expat director like Wilder, an Austro-Hungarian-born Jew who fled Berlin after the rise of the Nazi Party. Taking place during the height of the Cold War, the film centers on "Mac" MacNamara (played by James Cagney), a Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin, who's entrusted with looking after his boss's floozy daughter Scarlett during her trip abroad. Unbeknownst to her guardian, Scarlett regularly crosses the border into East Berlin to cavort with a hot-blooded Bolshevik with whom she marries and conceives a child. When the couple reveals their plan to move to Moscow, it's up to MacNamara to remedy the imbroglio before his boss arrives. This screwball narrative is a pretext for Wilder to mock both American and USSR sensibilities, e.g. democracy as capitalist imperialism, communism as narrow-minded zealotry. Although the film's humor relies on one-dimensional caricatures and stereotypes, similar to its successor DR. STRANGELOVE, it must have felt razor-sharp at the time of its release. In the end, Wilder seems to suggest that the two parties aren't so different after all, and that swapping political ideologies is as easy as changing clothes (literally). And in response to Mr. Patterson's cries of misanthropy, I refer him to the philosophy espoused by MacNamara toward the end of the film: "Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and Stripe toothpaste can't be all bad." Screening as part of the Nobody’s Perfect: Billy Wilder Matinee series. (1961, 108 min, 35mm) [Harrison Sherrod]

Keisuke Kinoshita’s THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (Japan)

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

THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA is overtly theatrical, with a narrator straight out of kabuki theater as well as spotlight effects and flat, phony-looking sets that may well have been taken from a stage production. These devices come across as especially artificial, given that the movie is supposed to take place in a geographically remote village in pre-modern times. Flagrantly mocking the bucolic, classically Japanese settings, Keisuke Kinoshita expresses an anti-Japanese anger so prevalent in postwar Japanese art. At the same time, he develops an unexpected poignancy by presenting the past as artificial, much like John Ford did a few years later in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962). Both directors seem to be asking, If we acknowledge that our national myths aren’t real, can we be moved by them anyway? THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA asks another question: Can we still recognize the humanity of Japanese people even when decrying the brutality of Japanese society? Adapted from a 1956 novella by Shichirō Fukazawa, the film paints a grotesque depiction of rural Japan where life is nasty, brutish, and by custom no longer than 70 years, because that’s when people are taken to a mountain far from the village to die alone. The narrative structure is organized around the 70th year in the life of Orin, a widow who lives with her grown son Tatsuhei (himself a widower), his grown son and the son’s pregnant girlfriend. At the start of the film, the family is barely able to feed everyone when another member joins the clan: Mata, a widow who’s sent from a neighboring village to live with Tatsuhei. No one around the family seems to be living well, yet the film contradicts the conventional wisdom that says the poor stick together in times of crisis. The community is generally suspicious and cutthroat: young people even taunt the old who are about to be taken to the mountain by saying they look forward to getting larger portions of food when their elderly relatives are gone. The warm relationships that Orin has with Tatsuhei and Mata are the exceptions that prove the rule; indeed, their humanity transcends both the brutality around them and the artificiality of the production. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “Facing Life, Meeting Death.” (1958, 98 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Albert Serra’s PACIFICTION (France/Spain/Germany/Portugal)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Like Bertrand Bonello or Tsai Ming-liang, Spanish director Albert Serra seems less interested in telling stories than evoking a particular state of mind. PACIFCTION is worth seeing—and on the biggest screen possible—for this reason alone; it’s as environmental a moviegoing experience as any IMAX nature documentary. The film harkens back to the fabled era of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, L’ECLISSE, PLAYTIME, and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, when art movies created a sense of boundless possibility with every shot. However, once you figure out what PACIFICTION is about (it takes about an hour), that sense of possibility develops a fairly revolting aftertaste. For not only is Serra’s new movie a work of hit-for-the-rafters art filmmaking, it’s also something of the slow cinema WOLF OF WALL STREET. The hero is a French wheeler-dealer based in Tahiti, something of a cross between Ben Gazzara in SAINT JACK (1979) and those frighteningly hollow nationless contractors in Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. Played by Benoît Magimel in an electric performance, this guy seems so intent on making a deal with everybody he meets that he comes off as gross even before you know what he’s wrapped up in. That he enjoys a life of sleazy luxury (through his connections to the local tourism industry) and wears just two variations on the same loud suit only thicken the toxic aura around him. In his previous films STORY OF MY DEATH (2013), THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016), and LIBERTÉ (2019), Serra presented the hedonistic pleasures of aristocracies past with such museum-piece airlessness as to make them seem like rituals from an alien planet; here, he brings the same approach to a contemporary milieu, and the effect can be entrancing, funny, disgusting, or just plain dull, depending on how you look at it. Is this a movie about the cult of Donald Trump? Why not? (2022, 165 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER

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

Warning: Paul Thomas Anderson isn't going to answer your questions. And his movie will be exceedingly elegant in its refusal to answer your questions, of which you'll have many, and for which you'll either love him or despise him. It might be the most important lesson he ever learned from Robert Altman: how crucial it is to touch viewers on an "unconscious basis to where they sense something rather than intellectually know or agree to something." To further quote Altman from Hasti Sardishti's piece : "If they come there and sit in front of their sets or in the theater, and they don't go halfway with you, and don't take the material in front of them and process it through their own history, it's meaningless. If they do they might not have any idea what that was about, but they feel it was right and they know it that fits." Everything in THE MASTER, from its graceful camera movements to the occasional, frightening bursts of violence, fits. The cinematography of Mihai Malaimare Jr. is the most stunningly evocative portrayal of 50's America this side of FAR FROM HEAVEN; every image feels freshly washed. The performances are riveting too. Philip Seymour Hoffman is so mesmerizing that he could easily walk away with the movie, but he's matched by the rest of the cast. Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is a combustible mix of Brando-style mumbling and volcanic violence. He actually feels dangerous. While Amy Adams, as Dodd's tenacious and manipulative wife, is chillingly perfect. You get the sense that without her ruthless encouragement, Dodd might simply smother himself with his own words. Behind it all is Anderson's Zen-like refusal to hit all the usual plot points or tidy up his characters' messy lives. In fact, the movie's "happy" ending is actually disorienting; just as Dodd keeps his followers off balance, Anderson remains firmly ambivalent to the end. Who's ready to see it again? Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series, “Philip Seymour Hoffman: A Retrospective.” (2012, 136 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Douglas Sirk’s ALL I DESIRE (US)

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

The first of Douglas Sirk’s two collaborations with Barbara Stanwyck considers a heavy premise: Stanwyck plays Naomi Murdoch, a down-on-her-luck actress in the early aughts of the twentieth century who once abandoned her husband and their three kids to pursue  a grander, more exciting life. When she receives a letter from one of her daughters beseeching her to come to her school play, Naomi heads back to Wyoming intending to create an illusion of success so her family believes her to be a prestigious actress rather than the second-billed vaudeville trouper she is. Based on Carol Ryrie Brink's 1951 novel Stopover, the film posits Naomi as the customary Sirkian outsider, having rejected societal mores to the extent that she leaves her entire family behind. Our society has long been unable to comprehend such audacious selfishness from a mother, desertion—and any subsequent retribution—typically being the domain of fathers. Thus Sirk’s brazenly non-judgmental depiction of this woman is decidedly transgressive and unique among films of its time. “Sirk created… a cinema of outsiders,” wrote Richard Brody in a 2015 piece for the New Yorker, “idealists disguised as mercenaries or clowns, disdained as immoralists or pursued as outlaws, who are nonetheless also the source of coherence, softening morals and shifting values in order to decrease tensions, resolve conflicts, and reconcile opponents in public and private.” This is a near-exact description of Naomi, who’d once been idealistic about what the world had to offer. Her return prompts gossip among neighbors and consternation from her husband and oldest daughter; moreover, an old flame with whom Naomi had an affair is eager to reconnect. The film hints that Naomi’s original predicament—being dissatisfied with her artless life and desiring a more passionate romantic relationship—may again play out. But, as Brody asserts, Naomi instead becomes that source of softening morals and shifting values, inspiring some around her to ease their scrutiny. Her values also shift profoundly; there’s an interesting irony to the film’s resolution (following a decidedly melodramatic conflict that inserts an edge of violence into an otherwise bloodless affair), which shows how Naomi’s priorities have changed. Sirk preferred both the source material’s title and its original ending, both also darker than what he proceeded to actualize. Producer Ross Hunter insisted on the relatively happy ending, much to Sirk’s chagrin, though he later said he felt less aggrieved about it. There’s still a Sirkian quality to the denouement, the outsider refusing to conform, changing only in her heart’s desire and following that impulse, even influencing others around her to do the same. That Sirk is able to convey all this in approximately 80 minutes is an ineffaceable display of his mastery. This is considered a lesser-known Sirk, but it shouldn’t be; anyone interested in the German director and his outsider’s view on America and its social gradations will see seeds of his later, more melodramatic explorations into this supercilious nation’s tormented psyche. Screening as part of Doc’s Monday series, “Baby Face: The Films of Barbara Stanwyck.” (1953, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Damien Chazelle’s FIRST MAN (US)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Saturday, 1pm

Before it was even released to the public, FIRST MAN was dragged into a ludicrous controversy started by Republican politicians. They decried the film, which they of course hadn’t seen, as "unpatriotic" for declining to show Neil Armstrong inserting his great big American flag into the Moon. Setting aside the sheer idiocy of this pseudo-outrage, the sentiment behind it does reflect something about what we expect from biographical portraits of our most heavily vaunted heroes. Those looking for hagiography or a rose-colored view of the Space Age will not find it in FIRST MAN, and that’s for the benefit of all. As portrayed by a brooding Ryan Gosling, the Armstrong of Chazelle’s film is a closed-off cipher frozen in a state of mourning over the loss of his infant daughter Karen to cancer. There is tension between him and his wife Janet (an impeccable Claire Foy), whose own grief is compounded by a sense of gendered isolation from being stuck on the ground in suburban Houston while her husband and the other men take literal flight toward a more promising future. But is it really so promising? Bucking the nationalist grand narrative around Armstrong and the moon landing, Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer portray the Apollo program as, at best, the “moondoggle” so coined by scholar Norbert Wiener, and at worst a suicide mission. FIRST MAN masterfully employs subjective camerawork and sound design to give the audience an embodied perception of what it must have felt like for Armstrong to be hurtling through space within the claustrophobic confines of vessels that appear like rickety, glorified tin cans; one of the most astonishing sequences depicts the launch of Gemini 8 entirely from Armstrong’s perspective inside the rattling module, denying us the release and spatial omniscience of an exterior wide shot. Death is always a hair’s breadth away, and as the casualties at NASA mount, FIRST MAN questions the tenability of the whole endeavor, weighing the fiscal expenditure and the lives lost against the potential for scientific gain. At the same time, it remains resolutely locked into the emotional journey of Armstrong, culminating in a becalmed, majestically moving moment of catharsis at the Sea of Tranquility. Curiously, critics and audiences have cooled on Chazelle since he conquered awards season with 2016’s LA LA LAND, but the director has only gotten better since then, demonstrating a virtuosic command of cinematic form that is breathtaking to behold. FIRST MAN is, so far, his masterpiece, and one of the great films of the 2010s. Screening as part of the Science on Screen: Inner and Outer Space series. (2018, 141 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Jeff Tremaine’s JACKASS: THE MOVIE (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Thursday, 9:30pm

There are two ways you can come at JACKASS. The first: this is a film filled with desperate idiots who will do anything for fame and fortune, including degrading themselves as pure spectacle. A pointless parade of post-Beavis and Butthead, post-Howard Stern stupidity and baseness. A meaningless montage of violence for the sake of humor. The nadir of American entertainment. The second: JACKASS is a direct successor to the enduring Hollywood comedy of Harold Lloyd, the spectacular stunt work of Buster Keaton, the violent slapstick of the Three Stooges, the anarchic free-for-all of the Marx Brothers, and the silly chaos of the Looney Tunes. Obviously, I stand by the latter view. Because while it is simple gross-out comedy, it isn't only that. How can you not appreciate the astoundingly pure Wile E. Coyote-ness of "Rocket Skates," or the "Ain't I a stinker" vibes of “The Golf Course Airhorn.” What people seem to tend to forget when discussing this film is that while it was officially directed by Big Brother skateboard magazine editor Jeff Tremaine, it was produced, partially written and filmed by, and occasionally stars Spike Jonze—the man who 3 years prior was nominated for Best Director for BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999) and in the same year as JACKASS released the four-time Oscar-nominated ADAPTATION (2002). And that's the thing about this film: it's smarter than it wants you think it is. Honestly, it's even smarter than some of the people who star in the film think it is. The film opens with the majestic sounds of Carl Orff’s bombastic "Carmina Burana," while the second song featured is Slayer’s “hit” about Nazi war crimes, "Angel of Death." And this duality is what makes JACKASS a film absolutely worth taking seriously. Yes, I agree, watching someone get electrically shocked in the genitals is moronic humor. But that skit, "The Electric Stimulator," is also the living embodiment of artist Barbara Kruger’s aphorism of feminist postmodernism: "You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men." Seeing Dave England, naked, legs up and spread in the missionary position, surrounded by shirtless men with an electric stim pad on his taint shows how JACKASS transcends dumb hetero jock humor and enters the realm of outright gay BDSM porn. It’s interesting to see exactly how truly and unapologetically queer the JACKASS franchise truly became by the fourth film JACKASS FOREVER (2022). But am I reading too much into this? A film with absolutely no plot, no narrative, no point? A series of stunts and gag pieces, some lasting literally less than a minute? Quite possibly. Arguably, completely. But the fact that I can even possibly attach these concepts to JACKASS, can even see a possible through line to the silent comedy greats of Hollywood says something. Don’t underestimate this film. It’s pure entertainment, but it's not bereft of meaning or substance. Or maybe it is. Just please don’t try any of these stunts at home, cause these guys are definitely smarter than you are. Screening as part of Doc's Thursday II series, "Blow Up My Video: Movies Shot on Video, Shown on Film." (2002, 84 min, 35mm) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Bruce LaBruce's SAINT-NARCISSE (Canada)

FACETS Cinema – Thursday, 9pm

The mythological figure of Narcissus has long been associated with homosexuality, his love of his own reflection translated as a love of others whose bodies match his own. As the film's title lets on, SAINT-NARCISSE is not only preoccupied with this notion, but with how its queer possibilities might intersect with and subvert the sexually repressive institution of the Church. This being a film by cult queercore director Bruce LaBruce, one knows that blasphemous irreverence is in store. The setting is Quebec in 1972. Twenty-something Dominic (Félix-Antoine Duval) has never known his parents; living with his ailing grandmother, he passes the time by getting drunk and habitually taking pictures of himself. One day, he comes across a box in his grandmother’s closet containing a cache of letters addressed to him by a woman who claims to be his estranged mother. Despite foreboding warnings and premonitions (LaBruce uses a heavy hand in his smash cuts to ominous figures), Dominic sets off to the small town of Saint-Narcisse to track down a woman named Beatrice, an alleged lesbian witch living with her immortal girlfriend. If that weren’t enough, Dominic is soon drawn to an abused Trappist monk who bears his exact likeness. Things get more bewildering and knottier from there, as SAINT-NARCISSE transitions into a religious sexploitation thriller featuring autoerotic flagellation, twincest, and all manner of affronts to Catholic dogma. Somehow, none of this feels quite as outrageous as it probably should, especially coming from someone as renowned for taboo-busting as LaBruce; perhaps after all these years we’ve simply grown inured to the wonton perversion of religious iconography. SAINT-NARCISSE still has its campy fun, though, and it’s nothing if not queer in its defiance of the orthodoxies of family, love, and faith. (2020, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Preceded by FACETS Trivia at 7pm, hosted by critic, programmer and Cine-File contributor Raphael Jose Martinez and local programmer Mike Vanderbilt, as well as Martinez’s short film THE FLESHMONGERS, which will screen before SAINT-NARCISSE. More info here.

Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

One of the things that stands out about this year’s Oscar slate for Best Live Action Short Film is its diversity, with each nominee coming from a different country and representing a specific experience of identity or culture. The highlight of the field is also the longest film nominated: Alice Rohrwacher’s LE PUPILLE. Set during Christmastime at an all-girls’ Catholic boarding school in Fascist Italy, it’s a social-realist fable of youthful amenability shading into the stirrings of rebellion, as the girls learn the art of chipping away at the religious dogma of their head nun (played by one of the director’s go-to actors, her sister Alba). Lambently shot on Super 16, the film is further enlivened by some whimsical formal flourishes, including hand-written intertitles, sped-up action, and freeze-frames. A more severe form of doctrinaire oppression is found in Cyrus Neshvad’s THE RED SUITCASE, about an Iranian girl sent to Luxembourg by her father for an arranged marriage she utterly dreads. Neshvad turns the film into a kind of monster movie as the girl ducks around corners and climbs into tight spaces to evade her stalking suitor; he also makes potent use of the Luxembourg airport’s large-scale fashion advertisements, their images of commodified women underscoring the plight of the protagonist. Because Oscar likes to broadcast its social conscience, another nominee, Anders Walter and Pipaluk K. Jørgensen’s IVALU, turns on the theme of female abuse. However, that point is not the primary focus of the film, which instead honors an Inuit girl’s abiding spiritual connection with her lost sister. Soaring wide-angle shots of the Greenland wilds makes this one a visual stunner. There’s another Scandinavian nominee: Eirik Tveiten’s NIGHT RIDE. In it, a woman with dwarfism forges an unexpected alliance after she spontaneously decides to commandeer a city tram on one frigid Norwegian night. The category is rounded out by Tom Berkeley and Ross White’s AN IRISH GOODBYE, which makes an interesting counterpart to one of this year’s most nominated features, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN. Like McDonagh’s work, it’s an irreverent treatment of mortality and fraternal conflict; however, it quickly doffs its sardonic Irish edge to embrace something more earnestly life-affirming. Many will smile, and many others will feel their teeth tingling—which means it’s probably going to win. (2022, Total approx. 110 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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The Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts also screen at the Music Box Theatre; see Venue website for showtimes. The Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts screen at the Gene Siskel Film Center. See Venue website for showtimes.

John Coney's SPACE IS THE PLACE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 7:30pm

SPACE IS THE PLACE is a very odd film, written by and starring the brilliant composer slash prophet from space Sun Ra. The main plot is basically that of Sun Ra's own reinvention as an interstellar prophet: he plays Sun Ra, who finds enlightenment on another planet and returns to Earth to save his African-American brethren from a supernatural pimp-overlord, using his music to spread his message. Ra intended it as a lighthearted homage to cheap 1950s science fiction, but a lengthy subplot involving pimps and prostitutes clashed with Ra's scenes and placed it firmly in the Blaxploitation genre. Ra decided that these elements were unnecessary pandering that detracted from his message (and he was right), and for decades the film was available only in a shortened 63-minute version that stuck more closely to his vision. The suppressed footage was eventually restored for the 2003 DVD release. Genre digressions aside, SPACE IS THE PLACE is a unique creation, a foggy window into one of the most creative minds of the twentieth century: equal parts maddening and enlightening, off-putting in its sometimes-amateurish construction but hypnotizing nonetheless. Preceded by a live musical set from the Bitchin’ Bajas. Door opens at 7pm; the performance begins at 7:30pm; and the screening at 8:45pm. (1974, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]

Mati Diop's ATLANTICS (France/Senegal/Belgium)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

For her first feature film, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop has created a mystical, atmospheric love story set in Dakar, on the Atlantic coast of Senegal. The timeless, rolling ocean that figures prominently in this beautifully shot film mirrors the vast, restless love Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) and Souleiman (Traore) feel for each other. But when Souleiman and his coworkers are cheated out of four months’ wages, they feel they have no choice but to try to strike out across the ocean to seek a better life. Their fate and the fate of the women they left behind remain intertwined across time and space, with explosive results. Self-determination is a quiet theme running through ATLANTICS—not only that of Ada, whose engagement to a wealthy man offers her a tempting path away from her lover and female friends, but also that of Souleiman and the other workers who see more possibilities abroad than they do in their predictably stunted existence in Dakar. The mythic dimensions that I find so satisfying in African films, for example, Rungano Nyoni’s I AM NOT A WITCH (2017) and Alain Gomis’ TEY (2012), are used to similarly great effect in ATLANTICS. This film’s a knockout. Screening as part of professor Daniel R. Quiles’ Gore Capitalism lecture series. (2019, 106 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Jerzy Skolimowski's EO (Poland/UK/Italy)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, 7pm

In 2022, Steven Spielberg retrofitted JAWS for IMAX theaters, transforming a classic film into a towering, visceral experience. One might say that Jerzy Skolimowski did the same thing that year with Robert Bresson’s AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966); his quasi-remake EO (a prizewinner at Cannes) is a big screen experience par excellence, with large-scale imagery and booming sound design that make you feel the titular donkey’s suffering in your bones. Some might balk at Skolimowski’s decision to put his spin on Bresson’s allegorical masterpiece—which is beyond question one of the greatest films ever made—yet such an audacious move is in keeping with this major artist, who first came to prominence in the early 1960s as an acclaimed poet and a figurehead of Poland’s postwar youth culture. The director’s ‘60s work remains astounding in its freewheeling energy and inspired visual metaphors (it’s worth noting that, after Bresson, he was one of the European filmmakers that Cahiers du cinéma championed the most in that decade); this period culminated with the blunt social critique of his 1967 production HANDS UP!, which was so incendiary that it more or less got him exiled from his native country (moreover, he wasn’t able to complete the film until 1981). After that, Skolimowski made movies in several other countries (including the US) before returning to Poland in the 1990s. The handful of films he’s made since then feel less indebted to his work as poet than his work as a painter, which has occupied much of his time in the past several decades. Indeed, EO contains an abundance of striking images, and these drive the film more than the loose narrative, which follows a donkey in his travails after he leaves the circus where he’s performed. The animal’s misfortunes mirror those of contemporary Europe; the most upsetting episode is probably the one that concerns the violent activity of a thuggish group of modern-day nationalists. A late episode in the film with guest star Isabelle Huppert works in some anticlerical sentiment that feels more akin to Buñuel than Bresson, while the final episode approaches the apocalyptic feelings of Bresson’s last two features, THE DEVIL, PROBABLY (1977) and L’ARGENT (1983). It’s a grim work, to be sure, yet Skolimowski’s immersive camerawork alleviates the proceedings, reminding us (as Bresson did) how miraculous the cinematic form can be. (2022, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben 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]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva’s 1981 nonfiction essay film OUR VOICE OF EARTH, MEMORY & FUTURE (108 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 7pm, with an introduction by Felipe Gutierrez (Ph.D. in the Dept of Spanish & Portuguese at Northwestern). 

Marta Rodríguez and Jorge Silva’s two-part 1989 documentary LOVE, WOMEN & FLOWERS (1989, 53 min) screens Thursday, 7pm, with an introduction by professor Leonardo Gil Gómez (Visiting Professor in Northwestern's Department of Spanish & Portuguese). More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Martin McDonagh’s 2022 tragicomedy THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (114 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 7pm, as part of the Docshees of Idasherin: New Releases.

Eddie Wong’s 1974 short PIECES OF A DREAM (30 min, DCP Digital), Duane Kobo’s 1975 short CRUISIN’ J-TOWN (24 min, DCP Digital), and Robert A. Nakamura’s 1976 short WATARIDORI: BIRDS OF PASSAGE (37 min, DCP Digital) screen Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Asian American Media series. 

Jean Renoir’s 1956 film ELENA AND HER MEN (98 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Jean Renoir: The Grand Reality series.

Chris Marker’s 1962 short LA JETÉE (28 min, Digital Projection) and Jimmy Murakami’s 1986 animated film WHEN THE WIND BLOWS (84 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Thursday I series, Splicing of the Atom: Nuclear Taboo in Cinema. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ FACETS Cinema
The Black Italian Film Showcase takes place Saturday and Sunday. More info here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts)
“Social Engagement,” the eighth in the ten-week series that’s part of the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts 2023, screens Thursday at 7:30pm. Includes films by Edie Lynch, Linda Gibson, Shirikiana Aina, and Alile Sharon Larkin. Free admission. More info here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The National Theatre Live presentation of Fabrizio Ferri’s 2022 documentary PORTRAIT OF THE QUEEN (95 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. 

Saeed Roustayi’s 2022 Iranian film LEILA’S BROTHERS (165 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 2pm, and Sunday, 3:15pm, as part of the Annual Festival of Films from Iran. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Éric Gravel’s 2021 French film FULL TIME (88 min, DCP Digital) and Lukas Dhont’s 2022 film CLOSE (105 min, DCP Digital) continue. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Brad Kofman’s 2023 film THE BIG HUSTLE (85 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 9:45pm.

The Front Row and Secret Cinema School present Massimo Dallamano’s 1972 giallo WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (107 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at midnight. Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) also screens Saturday at midnight, with a shadowcast of the film performed by Midnight Madness. 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.

🎞️ ALSO STREAMING

Robbie Banfitch's THE OUTWATERS (US)

Available to stream on Screambox (Subscription required)

Think you’ve seen every variant on the “urbanites go to the boonies for a weekend and get attacked” horror movie? THE OUTWATERS replaces the cabin in the woods with tents in Southern California’s desert, but it does something new, offering cryptic cosmic horror. As in the far different but equally otherworldly SKINAMARINK, most of the terror of THE OUTWATERS stem from the inability to make sense of what we’re seeing and hearing. It mixes found footage horror with an experimental strain. With a tiny budget, it makes real landscapes seem utterly alien, but director Robbie Banfitch’s abrasive sound design, which would make Throbbing Gristle recoil, is its greatest triumph. The opening scene gives us the ending first, as a woman screams wordlessly on a 9-11 call and the film shows photos of four people who disappeared in 2017. The rest of the film supposedly consists of footage from their phones’ memory cards. Robbie (Banfitch), his brother Scott (Scott Schamel), musician Michelle (Michelle May) and her friend Ange (Angela Basolis) head to the Mojave Desert to make a music video for one of Michelle’s songs. Once it goes dark, the group hears odd noises in the distance like muffled explosions and gets attacked by an unseen force. Soon, the characters are stalked by an axe-wielding attacker, amidst brief glimpses of serpentine creatures, and the film becomes utterly disorienting as its sense of time loops forwards and backwards. Filming with his phone, Robbie tries to escape. The sound effects suggest a much larger catastrophe going on beyond this isolated desert. (After the credits, a brief section, told in still images, lays out a version of these events that could’ve ended up on Robbie’s Instagram feed.) The lack of interest in storytelling doesn’t always pay off—the set-up runs too long without establishing the characters’ personalities, and a last-minute dash of gruesome gore seems out of place—but I’d rather see a horror film that takes too many chances than one which lays out all its ideas. (2022, 100 min) [Steve Erickson]

CINE-LIST: February 17 - February 23, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Steve Erickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Joe Rubin, Harrison Sherrod