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📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Bob Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ (US)

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

ALL THAT JAZZ pulls off a contradictory miracle, beginning as a monument to the ego of Bob Fosse (who co-wrote and choreographed in addition to directing it; he also based the story on his own experiences from a few years earlier) and ending as a harrowing self-critique of a man who doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. If 8 ½ is its model, it winds up closer to a Broadway version of body horror: look at the late scene where Fosse’s alter ego Joe (Roy Scheider) walks through a hospital and looks at jars of brains, his head leaving a trail of blood on the wall. The film begins with very quick cuts offering a glimpse into Joe’s morning routine: he’s so spacey in the shower that he leaves a wet cigarette dangling from his lips, he constantly puts drops in his eyes, and a close-up calls our attention to his prescription bottle of Dexedrine pills. Joe struggles to mount a new musical while having a very difficult time finishing the edit of his film The Stand-Up. Each of the film’s major settings is given a different look, with Fosse often using very bright lights within the set. Like Fosse, Joe is legendary for being a difficult man who cheats on his partners, ignores his kids, consumes all the alcohol, tobacco and amphetamines he can get his hands on, and has no real friends. And he’s fine with all that, up to the point halfway through ALL THAT JAZZ when Joe suffers a heart attack and is told he’ll need surgery and months of rest. Then, the film gets progressively stranger, dramatizing Joe’s fantasy life. This is somewhat subtle at first, when brassy music lends a theatrical air to his continued smoking and womanizing in the hospital. He receives a visit from the hero of The Stand-Up, but it’s hard to be certain whether the character is supposed to be his fictional creation or the actor playing him. But the film changes styles with ease, launching very elaborate musical numbers and becoming increasingly reflexive as Joe’s physical condition worsens. The #metoo movement has led to a questioning of the myth of male “geniuses” like Fosse, and the 2019 TV series Fosse/Vernon critically examined his relationship with dancer and actor Gwen Verdon, which ended due to his adultery. By 2022 standards, ALL THAT JAZZ seems a bit too indulgent towards Joe, and Fosse’s life suggests how it’s easier for men to make art about their flaws than genuinely change them. Yet all these paradoxes are apparent in the film's exhilarating flirtation with the grave. Preceded by the trailer for Fosse’s LENNY (1974, 35mm). (1979, 123 min, 35mm) [Steve Erickson]

Michael Almereyda’s TWISTER (US)

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

Michael Almereyda’s debut feature TWISTER came out the same year as two other auspicious debuts, Hal Hartley’s THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH and Steven Soderbergh’s SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE. Those films signaled the start of a new era in American independent cinema, when quirky, dialogue-driven films made outside the studio system garnered more attention than they ever did before or have since. If UNBELIEVABLE and SEX, LIES are to indie movies what early ‘80s Smiths and R.E.M albums are to indie rock, then TWISTER is more akin to a Dead Milkmen record; it belongs square in the world of independent art because it’s too mannered, eccentric, and goofy ever to resemble mainstream entertainment. It still shares superficial qualities with the early work of Hartley and Soderbergh (along with other ‘90s heavy-hitters like Todd Solondz and Whit Stillman), primarily a certain literariness. It’s based on a novel (Oh! by Mary Robison), and the dramatic conceits reflect an arch sensibility that’s generally funnier to think about than it is to engage with directly. Harry Dean Stanton stars as a Kansas tycoon who’s made a small fortune from soda pop and mini golf courses. Suzy Amis and Crispin Glover (who appears in a pageboy haircut and delivers every line as though reciting an antiquated oratory) are his layabout grown children. Most summaries of TWISTER mention that Amis and Glover go on a quest at one point in search of their long-lost mother; however, this development occurs relatively late in the film and doesn’t generate much narrative tension. Almereyda is more interested in character and setting than in storytelling—a predilection that’s continued more or less unabated across his numerous and wildly disparate films. The heightened Middle American weirdness never crosses the line into grotesquerie (despite a cameo from none other than William S. Burroughs), making TWISTER feel at times like a cousin to David Byrne’s TRUE STORIES (1986). But where TRUE STORIES had hummable tunes, this has Glover warbling a song from his notorious album Big Problem Does Not Equal the Solution. The Solution = Let It Be over the end credits. Preceded by the 1980 Encyclopedia Britannica short THE IMPACT OF TELEVISION (20 min, 16mm). (1989, 93 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Claire Denis's BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes

BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE is lots of things at once, many of them contradictory: it's a quintessential Claire Denis film that doesn't look much like her previous work, a romantic melodrama that unfolds like a thriller, and a singularly upsetting experience that stands as one of the finest movies of 2022. It's also a potent examination of the theme of "the past coming back," which makes it a kissing cousin of such otherwise disparate films as Jacques Tourneur's OUT OF THE PAST (1947) and David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005). In all three movies, the protagonists' lives are turned upside down by the unexpected re-appearance of someone they used to know, whose return forces them not just to deal with unresolved issues but to regress into the people they used to be, whether they like it or not. In Denis's film, Sara (Juliette Binoche) is a radio host in a seemingly idyllic nine-year relationship with her live-in boyfriend, Jean (Vincent Lindon), an unemployed ex-rugby player and ex-con. A wordless six-minute introductory scene shows the lovers frolicking at the beach before returning home and making love, a bravura sequence that recalls the wordless montage that begins Eric Rohmer's A TALE OF WINTER (1992). This picturesque depiction of blissful couplehood, however, is undercut by the ominous rumble of low strings on the soundtrack, which give way to the haunting sound of minor chords being plucked on an acoustic guitar (the superb score is, of course, by the Tindersticks). Shortly afterwards, Sara spies her ex-lover—and Jean's old friend—Francois (Gregoire Colin), in the street for the first time in years, and the very sight of him causes her to convulse with emotion. As Sara and Francois resume their affair, Denis and co-screenwriter Christine Angot (on whose novel the film is based) gradually, masterfully dole out information that fleshes out the backstories of the three main characters while some narrative details remain tantalizingly vague (e.g. the reason Jean went to prison is never explained). For long stretches, the cinematic language of BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE feels more conventional than in Denis's other films, probably so she can put the focus squarely on the anguished emotions—especially in two extended verbal arguments between Sara and Jean, the Cassavettesian emotional rawness of which gives two of the world's greatest actors some of their most indelible onscreen moments. This makes all the more effective the few "poetic" touches more typical of Denis that are shrewdly sprinkled throughout the movie: the first reunion scene between Sara and Francois, for instance, is full of dreamy close-ups and sensual camera moves reminiscent of FRIDAY NIGHT (2002), although here they are fittingly played in a more sinister register. The earlier film celebrates a guilt-free one-night stand between two strangers who come together by chance; the newer one shows how desire, when intertwined with guilt and lies, can tear apart two people who ostensibly know each other well. BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE is a searing portrait of middle-aged intimacy made by a woman old and wise enough to know that love can sometimes be a motherfucker. (2022, 116 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Jules Dassin’s THE NAKED CITY (US)

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

When I was a kid, I was a fan of the first version of the TV crime show Naked City. An important element of that show was its narrator, who took viewers through the procedures of a compelling crime case each week and closed the show with this tagline: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” The template for that popular series was THE NAKED CITY, a policier directed by Jules Dassin, perhaps best known for the cracking noirs he made in Europe after he was blacklisted in the United States, including NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950) and RIFIFI (1955). Influenced by Italian neorealism, Mark Hellinger, the film’s producer and a former journalist, was convinced that a movie filmed entirely on location in New York City would thrill audiences unlike any they had yet experienced—and as the film’s voiceover narrator, he comes right out and says so. In its opening shot, an airplane flies the length of Manhattan. Cameras at ground level show people going about their daily activities as Hellinger describes their doings. They eventually land on the money shot—a blonde named Jean Dexter being murdered in her apartment. In classic fashion, a veteran cop is matched with a new member of the detective squad to solve the crime. Barry Fitzgerald as Detective Lieutenant Dan Muldoon, the man who’s seen it all but hasn’t quite gotten used to it, shows the actory colors buried under the sentimental Irish priest he played in GOING MY WAY (1944); even the few Irish ditties he sings while he’s washing up at home seem part of his character, not a page out of the Irish caricature manual. His young partner, Detective Jim Halloran (Don Taylor), is smart, good-looking, and happy pounding the pavement for leads throughout Manhattan. A short scene of character building shows him coming home to his wife (Anne Sargent), who has donned a sexy summer outfit to coax him into giving their son a whipping for crossing a busy street alone. It’s a good sparring match, entertaining, and in keeping with the day-in-the-life style of the film. As the homicide squad works the case, they turn up Dr. Stoneman (House Jameson), who wrote a prescription for the dead woman; Ruth Morrison (Dorothy Hart), a friend with whom she modeled at a dress shop; and Frank Niles (Howard Duff), a man her maid (Virginia Mullen) said came by frequently to visit Miss Dexter. They also are searching for a Mr. Henderson, described as a tall, thin, older man, possibly from Baltimore, who called on Miss Dexter and, according to the maid, gave her expensive jewelry. All of the interviewed people say they’d do anything to help capture Dexter’s killer. Eventually, it all comes down to a neat conspiracy and a man who plays the harmonica, capped by one of cinema’s most exciting chase sequences—one that may have inspired James Cagney’s run up a gas tower in WHITE HEAT just a year later. All along the way, Hellinger interjects comments about what someone might be thinking, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it, as though he were sitting in our heads and narrating our thoughts. While his narrative grounds this film solidly in the work-a-day world, it is the location shooting that really gives this film its vitality—the vitality of New York itself. This is a feature film that makes us believe that of the 8 million stories in the Naked City, this was one of them. (1948, 96 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Vincente Minnelli's THE PIRATE (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2pm

The Hollywood studio system at its giddy, most imaginative best. Vincente Minnelli and producer Arthur Freed were at the height of their creative powers when they made the film; in the years leading up to it, they created two of the boldest musicals in the Hollywood canon, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944) and YOLANDA AND THE THIEF (1945). These films, like THE PIRATE, use color and decor in such expressive ways that they may be appreciated on formal grounds alone—which is why Minnelli, despite his mastery as a storyteller, merits comparison with important avant-gardists like Kenneth Anger. Most importantly, THE PIRATE is a testament to the life-changing power of art. Gene Kelly plays a traveling musical-theater performer whose company docks on a small Caribbean island; he falls in love with Judy Garland’s character, Manuela, who has been pledged by her aunt to marry the island’s boorish mayor. Manuela fantasizes about being taken away by the famous pirate Mack the Black, and Kelly, in an effort to seduce her, pretends to be him. Kelly’s make-believe leads to genuine changes in the characters’ lives, which are expressed in wonderful song-and-dance numbers that rank among the best MGM created. (Cole Porter wrote the songs, and Kelly directed the athletic, frequently breathtaking choreography.) THE PIRATE’s production went way over budget, and it lost the studio over two million dollars; at the time of its release, it was regarded as a flop. Yet the movie has aged remarkably well, not only because of its brilliant filmmaking, but also because of its enduring message of art bettering life, a very personal theme for Minnelli, one of the cinema’s greatest aesthetes. Screening as part of the Judy Garland Summer Centennial series. (1948, 102 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Michael Glover Smith's RELATIVE (US)

The New 400 Theatre – Sunday, 3pm

In his writing on movies, both here at Cine-File and elsewhere, Michael Glover Smith has advanced an acute understanding of how the framing of performers in narrative cinema can underscore the emotions they express and how camera movement (or, put another way, the re-framing of performers in time) can develop viewers’ relationships to onscreen characters. Smith’s features as writer-director seem to grow directly out of his insights in this area—deceptively “dialogue-driven,” they express their greatest eloquence not with words but with mise-en-scène. It matters in RELATIVE whether the principal characters are together in the same shot or whether they’ve been individuated by close ups; it matters whether we can distinguish who’s in the background of a shot or whether those characters have been obscured. These things matter because the film is ultimately about the competing forces of community and individuality that shape our identities in 21st-century life and how we navigate between them almost constantly. The action in RELATIVE covers a few days before, during, and after a young man’s college graduation party on Chicago’s far north side, a celebration that draws his two older sisters from out of state and his older brother (a divorced Iraq War veteran who’s been slowly self-destructing for the past four years) out of seclusion in their parents’ basement. Smith gracefully interweaves the lives of all four siblings, their liberal Baby Boomer parents, and a handful of other characters as they come together amiably and unhurriedly, employing the time-honored scenario of the big family gathering to consider how many of us live at the dawn of the 2020s. Not surprisingly, the internet factors into things (though thankfully not too much); so too do food co-ops, queer-straight alliances, and the social normalization of weed. Yet Smith has more on his mind than enumerating aspects of the zeitgeist; RELATIVE is also concerned with the legacy of the Baby Boom generation and, more generally, how each generation honors the previous one while taking a seemingly opposite approach to life. Yasujiro Ozu is an obvious reference point for this sort of laidback family portrait, though I was reminded more of critic-turned-filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier’s A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY (1984) in the low-key sociological thrust of the drama and of the first episode of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s recently rediscovered miniseries EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY (1972-’73) in the polyphony of the extended graduation party sequence. For all its international flavor, however, RELATIVE is a local production first and foremost, reflecting its maker’s deep affection for the neighborhoods he calls home. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the PO Box Collective. Preceded by a brief introduction by PO Box Collective's Salome Chasnoff. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Smith and actress Emily Lape, moderated by critic Don Shanahan. At 5pm, Smith will lead interested audience members on an (optional) walking tour of some of the film's most prominent Rogers Park locations. (2022, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

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

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

“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. Screening as part of the Control.Alt.Delete series presented as part of Science on ScreenⓇ. (2021, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Arthur Penn's BONNIE AND CLYDE (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 5pm and Saturday, 8:30pm

Writing about Nicholas Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, Cine-File contributor Kyle A. Westphal shrewdly asserted that it “has had more lives than many auteurist causes… [it’s] a genuine popular classic sustained by an endless supply of James Dean posters, magnets, t-shirts, and tchotchkes.” Along those same lines, BONNIE AND CLYDE is equal parts myth and movie, belonging as much to popular consciousness as it does to those within the industry who’ve championed it. Fifty years later, no aspect has gone unexamined—fans and theorists alike have since diminished it to archetype, reducing nuances to aphoristic criteria or hollow fad. Directly influenced by the French New Wave (screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton greatly admired Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and they were both approached to direct before Arthur Penn, whose earlier films THE LEFT HANDED GUN and MICKEY ONE exhibited elements of the style and tone so favored by the young writers), BONNIE AND CLYDE didn’t just synthesize aspects of that movement, but helped to create a different one altogether. Even with a New Hollywood on the horizon, the film was widely misunderstood upon its release, due in part to graphic violence that audiences were unaccustomed to at the time. It defies any preconceived notions about what a criminal-lovers-on-the-run movie should be, expectations set by such precursors as Fritz Lang’s YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937) and Nicholas Ray’s THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948). Penn’s realization of the Bonnie and Clyde mythos—from a Lubitschian meet-cute to the bloody, balletic death scene—is at once judicious and grandiloquent, relishing as much in the real-world implications of their egregiously violent ways as it does in Warren Beatty’s id-laden mannerisms and Faye Dunaway’s whimsical sociopathy. In her staggering review for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael brilliantly details why the film is important and how it achieves its status as a singular work; her piece is a must-read for anyone interested in or skeptical of the film’s lasting influence on the medium. Her assessment also portends contemporary cinema, and perhaps even current events; “[i]nstead of the movie spoof, which tells the audience that it doesn’t need to feel or care, that it’s all just in fun, that ‘we are only kidding,’ BONNIE AND CLYDE disrupts us with ‘And you thought we were only kidding.’” Penn and company may owe their vision to the enfants terribles of the Nouvelle Vague, but much recent cinema is indebted to Penn’s au courant provocation. (1967, 111 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD II: DEAD BY DAWN (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight

Sam Raimi's THE EVIL DEAD broke astonishing ground in its cinematic inventiveness and willingness to go for broke in terrifying its audience. It was brutal, coarse, grimy, and fabulously scary: his preternaturally mobile camera implied—and often inhabited—overwhelming forces of evil rushing past and at his characters at all times, unseen and terrible, possessing and destroying at their whim and pleasure. EVIL DEAD II: DEAD BY DAWN finds Raimi operating in a much more complicated mode, melding the horror of the first film with an increasing interest in slapstick and gross-out comedy. Neither evincing the relentless stream of malevolence that is the first EVIL DEAD film nor the good-natured silliness of ARMY OF DARKNESS, for many viewers, this second entry in the series is the best, finding the perfect balance between stupid and startling, between eerie and icky. Less a sequel than a loose remake of the first, EVIL DEAD II brings back Bruce Campbell's Ash, the knuckle-headed zombie-slayer of uncertain destiny, now stronger, more resourceful, and more idiotic than ever. In many ways, the film resembles the tail-end entries in Universal's classic cycle, only reflecting Raimi's peculiar influences, as if it were MOE HOWARD MEETS THE LEGIONS OF THE DAMNED. In his precarious dance between absurd and terrifying, Raimi conjures a vision of the uncanny in which the line separating the living is less a heart-beat than a gasp, and for which the of the world is but the set-up to a punchline just about to be uttered. (1987, 84 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Josef von Sternberg's THE LAST COMMAND (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 8:30pm

THE LAST COMMAND, like many films by Josef von Sternberg, feels similarly outside of time—the meticulous, lavish style gives the impression of a mysterious gift handed down from a future generation. Inspired by the true story of General (nee Theodore) Lodijensky, it tells the tale of a general in the White Army who winds up “the backwash of a tortured nation,” working for peanuts as a Hollywood extra. Emil Jannings gives a tremendous performance as the general, his rich body language evolving over the course of the film to reflect every subtle change in his character’s plight. (He would win the first Academy Award for Best Actor for his work here.) That plight is one of increasing degradation, anticipating the hero’s downfall in the next Jannings-von Sternberg collaboration, THE BLUE ANGEL. LAST COMMAND may be even more cynical than the latter film, starting off in Hollywood to show the hero’s penultimate humiliation before flashing back to his glory days in the czar’s army. The Russian-set scenes (like those of von Sternberg’s THE SCARLET EMPRESS) are a dream of decadence and cruelty, using the best of Hollywood magic to conjure up an exotic, untouchable culture. Yet the film’s masterstroke comes in its final third, which takes us back to Hollywood to show the last twist of the knife in Jannings’ fate. These passages—which find the former general forced to recreate episodes from his own life as part of a Russian Revolution epic–feel positively postmodern, presenting as artificial the very moviemaking prowess that had seduced us not long before. It’s a dizzying achievement that deserves to be ranked alongside von Sternberg’s best works. (1928, 88 min, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]

Claire Denis' BEAU TRAVAIL (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

Claire Denis's BEAU TRAVAIL is a film of sweltering, oppressive heat; a sun-drenched rendering of Melville's BILLY BUDD that unfurls across the deserts of Djibouti, where a troop of French legionnaires perform a dance of drills and exercises as daily ritual. The men are soldiers, athletes, and the embodiment of physical perfection, and Denis venerates their physique with framing that recalls Leni Riefenstahl's ode to human beauty, OLYMPIA. Day in and day out, they adhere to strictly choreographed routine, their mechanized motions made downright hypnotic by the operatic overtones of Benjamin Britten. At the center of this tightly wound fever dream is Sergeant Galoup (Denis Lavant), whose own unflappable façade begins to crack upon the arrival of a new legionnaire, whose inherent beauty and goodness marks him as an object of obsession. It's here that the film's stifling (yet eloquent) discipline begins to clash with deeply repressed desire, and Galoup sets events in motion that will that will bring about his own undoing. Most notable is the unshakable denouement, where one tragic soldier at the end of his rope at last finds his ideal form of expression. Suddenly, Galoup is dancing a very different dance, and as the periodic flashes of local nightlife foreshadow, salvation may just lie in the universal escape of pop music. SAIC Professor Dan Eisenberg will lecture. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (1999, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Tristan Johnson]

Mel Stuart's WATTSTAX (US/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8pm

Nominally an archival documentary of the Wattstax Music Festival in 1972, the best sequences have nothing to do with the musicians on stage. Yes, there's Isaac Hayes, bedecked in a vest of golden chains, singing a languid version of "Theme from Shaft" to a filled Los Angeles Coliseum. And there's a fire-eyed Rufus Thomas performing "Do the Funky Chicken" before conducting the crowd back to their seats. But these performances act as a platform for a thematic distillation of black identity during the Black Power movement, seven years after the Watts Riots. Between freewheeling concert footage, Stuart (FOUR DAYS IN NOVEMBER, WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY), or more likely his black cameramen, ventured into Watts to interview its residents about their thoughts on love, the blues, language, style, and life in the neighborhood after the riots. The interviews feel as if they hit each touchstone of stereotypical black culture: a man's afro is preened in a barbershop while another discusses the power of Christ. One particularly gripping and frantically shot sequence features churchgoers brought to tears and delirious convulsions by The Emotions' rendition of "Peace Be Still." At the concert, Stuart's use of the zoom lens isolates women's curves and intricate Black Power handshakes from across the Coliseum, as if studying a new breed with a new language. All this might be unseemly were it not for WATTSTAX's purposed assertion that "Black is Beautiful." It is a refrain heard in Jesse Jackson's recitation of "I Am – Somebody" and rounded by Richard Pryor's withering, humorous critiques of the stereotypes portrayed. Screening as part of the In Concert series. (1973, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s MURINA (Croatia)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Julija (Gracija Filipović) lives in a remote cove off Croatia’s Adriatic coast with her beautiful mother and controlling father; the film’s narrative centers on the tension that rises between the three during a visit from an old friend (Cliff Curtis) of the girl’s father, who has achieved significant financial success and whom her father hopes to persuade to buy their land and build a resort. It’s difficult to believe that such an island paradise could also be a veritable aquatic prison, but so it is for Julija, in spite of her apparent affinity for the water. She’s not so much trapped by her surroundings, but by her father’s immature and dominating attitudes. His friend, Javier, shows Julija what she and her mother have been missing, namely a loving spouse and parent with the means of making their dreams come true; it’s insinuated that Javier has a romantic history with her mother, Mela. When Javier puts forth the idea of Julija one day attending Harvard, she latches onto the notion that life could be different, which intensifies her relationship with her father. She begins acting out in a way that it’s implied she hadn’t before Javier’s arrival, when she’d silently and sullenly withstood her father’s behavior, even accompanying him on daily expeditions to catch the fish that gives the film its name. As Julija, Filipović gives an arresting performance; her steely demeanor evinces volumes about the relationship she has with her parents without much needing to be said. (Filipović is something of a muse to Croatian writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović, having starred in Kusijanović’s 2017 short INTO THE BLUE; this is also the filmmaker’s debut feature, an auspicious inaugural endeavor produced in part by Martin Scorsese’s Sikelia Productions.) Kusijanović’s direction is likewise assured, especially in her decision to include numerous scenes that take place underwater. The sea is Julija’s respite and refuge, and ultimately the only place where she finds freedom when the men in her life fail her. The film’s cinematographer, Hélène Louvart, has worked on similar films wherein a body of water figures as a motif: Agnès Varda’s THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS, Eliza Hittman’s BEACH RATS, and, more recently, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s THE LOST DAUGHTER. Thus Kusijanović and Louvart’s understanding of the sea as a symbol is proffered subtly, both lending weight to Julija’s confinement and revealing to her a possible means of escape. As far as coming-of-age stories go, MURINA offers something unique in its high-stakes tension and the extent of Julija’s physical entrapment by the very thing that offers liberation (while the familial discord and her Freudian attraction to Javier are more run-of-the-mill tropes); much like the Mediterranean moray of the film’s title, the young protagonist proves to be slippery and perilous when threatened. (2021, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Sara Dosa's FIRE OF LOVE (Canada/US/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Volcanoes are some of earth’s most majestic features—they’re its literal ends, wrestling with themselves until they spew out molten rock. They’re almost impossible to photograph not-beautifully. Sara Dosa’s FIRE OF LOVE, which follows the careers of married French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, features a litany of volcano footage; it’s a feast for the eyes if nothing else. But while being about the Kraffts, the film is also predominantly by them, as it's composed largely of their original footage and photographs. It’s a paean to people whose drive to experience the world’s wonders firsthand was matched by an equally relentless drive to catalog them. Since both the scientific importance and raw beauty of their work is hard to deny, the film is mostly in a celebratory mode; it's not overly critical of what seems increasingly like a death drive in its subjects. There are shades of Alex Honnold in FREE SOLO (2018) in the Kraffts' cool acknowledgement of the calculated risk they take each time they approach the edge of the pit—they know these beasts, and for them they're no more dangerous than a busy intersection. The key difference between FIRE OF LOVE and other films about driven geniuses is that the subject here is not one, but two people, both of them ruinously committed to the volcanoes. It’s then that much scarier and more awe-inspiring to encounter the seeming lack of checks and balances between husband and wife. In this sense, there are shades of an addiction narrative here too; the couple eventually focus solely on "gray" volcanoes, those more likely to hurt people and less likely to create the psychedelic ooze people associate with the more photogenic “red” volcanoes. The Kraffts' need to discover pushes them closer and closer to the edge both literally and metaphorically, culminating in their deaths while filming eruptions in Japan in 1991. It’s a tragic end to two fulfilling and intertwined lives, but it also inspires hope that one can love anything as much as these two borderline-sociopaths loved volcanoes—and that one can live as relentlessly in pursuit of that passion. (2022, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Fernando Trueba’s 2020 Colombian film MEMORIES OF MY FATHER (136 min, Digital Projection) screens on Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.). Free admission with online registration.  More info here.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
Two films by Chicago-based director Marie Ullrich, THE ALLEY CAT (2015, 67 min, Digital Projection) and FASTER! (2010, 11 min, Digital Projection) screen on Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
The 2016 National Theatre Live production of Harold Pinter’s NO MAN’S LAND (170 min, DCP Digital) screens on Sunday at 2pm.

Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG (179 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday at 6pm as part of the Judy Garland Summer Centennial series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
The Music Box Garden Movies series continues. See Venue website for list of films screening and showtimes.

Dean Fleischer-Camp’s 2022 film MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON (89 min, DCP Digital) and Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s 2022 documentary HALLELUJAH: LEONARD COHEN, A JOURNEY, A SONG (115 min, DCP Digital) both continue this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Steve Box and Nick Park’s 2005 animated film WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT (85 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am as part of the Stop! Motion: Matinees & Midnights series.

Brad Kofman’s locally produced mockumentary ONCE UPON A TIME ON HALSTEAD (85 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 9:30pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ South Side Home Movie Project
The South Side Home Movie Project is participating in the Key/Change exhibition at the Weinberg/Newton Gallery (688 N. Milwaukee Ave.), ongoing through tomorrow. The exhibition centers on housing; per the event description, “silent home movies and idiosyncratic sculpture subsequently suggest that housing is a productive place in which intimate moments, lifelong memories, and nurturing meals are made and shared.” More info here.

🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING

⚫ Video Data Bank
“This Must Be the Space: A Video Conversation on Artist-Run and Artist-Inhabited Spaces,” curated by Emily Eddy, is available to stream for free on VDB TV. The program includes Videofreex’s ME’S AND YOUSE (1971, 4 min) and LAINESVILLE TV NEWS BUGGY (1972, 16 min); Nazli Dinçel’s UNTITLED (2016, 12 min); Glenn Belverio’s BAD GRRRLS (1993, 29 min); George Kuchar’s VERMIN OF THE VORTEX (1996, 22 min); Anne McGuire’s ALL SMILES AND SADNESS (1999, 7 min); and Tom Rubnitz’s FROM THE FILES OF THE PYRAMID COCKTAIL LOUNGE (1983, 6 min). More info here.

CINE-LIST: July 15 - July 22, 2022

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Maxwell Courtright, Steve Erickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Tristan Johnson, Michael Glover Smith, Brian Welesko