:: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28 - THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3 ::

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📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Anand Patwardhan’s JAI BHIM COMRADE (India/Documentary) & Anand Patwardhan’s REASON (VIVEK) (India/Documentary)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 6pm & Saturday, 12:30pm (Free Admission)

Anand Patwardhan is generally considered one of the most important working documentarians in India, and this makes his current visit to Chicago a major event for anyone interested in nonfiction cinema. I myself wasn’t familiar with his work until I previewed these two epics screening at Block this weekend, yet I came away from the films grateful for having experienced them; hearing the director discuss the work (and also, presumably, his heroic efforts to fight censorship in his home country) should be enlightening. Not only do JAI BHIM COMRADE (2012, 169 min, Digital Projection) and REASON (VIVEK) (2018, 159 min, DCP Digital) provide a wealth of information about India—they do so in an exciting manner that blends multiple nonfiction forms and doesn’t always proceed in chronological order. One feels immersed in the subject matter rather than simply educated about it. Patwardhan alternates between expository lessons about historical figures, profiles of regular folks, and man-on-the-street interviews; interrupts present-day events with extended historical footnotes; and incorporates TV news footage and his own personal commentary. The result of the collage-like approach is that it encourages viewers to think about issues on a societal level, to see individual lives as part of larger trends. Sadly, the social trends considered in these films are resoundingly malign: JAI BHIM COMRADE looks at the persistence of caste-based prejudice in India in the decades following the formal abolition of the caste system, and REASON considers the influence of extremist, right-wing Hinduism in Indian politics and society at large. Taken together, these documentaries issue an alarming portrait of a nation plagued by bigotry, blind faith, and the threat of mob rule. At the same time, they’re not entirely despairing; each film invokes noble figures whose influence still may be capable of inspiring social progress. The title of JAI BHIM COMRADE comes from a slogan invoking B.R. Ambedkar, the political leader who drafted the Indian Constitution that outlawed the caste system and all forms of discrimination, and one of the stirring things about the movie is how it shows the influence of Ambedkar’s thought in progressive social movements today. Likewise, the title of REASON refers to India’s growing free-thinking movement, which seeks to undermine the influence of religious-sanctioned bigotry in politics and culture. Patwardhan is clear about which side of the issues he stands on, but this comes off as brave, given that he faces persecution for doing so. Patwardhan in person for post-screening Q&As after each film. [Ben Sachs]

Youssef Chahine’s THE SPARROW (Egypt/Algeria)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)

As Youssef Chahine remains the most celebrated Middle Eastern filmmaker more than a decade after his death, any 35mm revival of his work stands as crucial viewing. THE SPARROW, one of Chahine's most explicitly political films, carries sociological importance as well as cinematic importance for its depiction of Middle Eastern society in the days around the Six Day War of 1967. It is a bitter film that focuses not on the armed conflict (or even Egyptian President Nasser's subsequent resignation) but on the cultural climate in Egypt during the war. Alia Ayman wrote for the cultural website Mada in 2014 that "Chahine portrayed the parallel temporality of regime-orchestrated theft, murder and corruption [in Egypt]. It was too much for the censorship board and everything it represented, especially in the years before the salve of the 1973 'victory.'" The censors responded to the film's pessimism by banning it for two years after it was completed; as a result, the film has never been as widely seen as the director's established masterpieces. Yet the film's gritty, downbeat vibe has aged well—indeed, the film sometimes feels like the social dramas Sidney Lumet was making in the US around the same time (e.g., SERPICO, DOG DAY AFTERNOON). The performances and mise-en-scene may be naturalistic, but the narrative form is strikingly experimental. Chahine wrote the script with celebrated Leftist writer Lotfy al-Khouly, and the story jumps unexpectedly between subplots, with numerous narrative lines left open-ended at the conclusion. "With all its overlapping subplots, the film destabilizes narrative itself and presents its viewer with glimpses, abrupt cuts," Ayman wrote. "Chahine's signature tracking shots, concise dialogue, and experimentation with thematic rather than linear editing consolidate this brilliantly constructed narrative fragmentation. There is no single story of which we await the resolution. Characters come and go, stories begin and fade and the cornerstone of the film remains untainted: corruption itself as the other face of defeat." With an introduction by Sarah Dwider, NU Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art history. (1972, 106 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Andy Warhol’s BATMAN DRACULA [Excerpt] (US/Experimental)

Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

It makes sense that Andy Warhol’s favorite superhero would have been Batman (indeed, one of his first Pop paintings was of the comic book character): the nocturnal avenger is rich, self-loathing, and wears a kinky costume. Warhol may have seen in the Batman aspects of himself and those he ghoulishly admired, with whom he was surrounded in what might be considered a type of lair. It might also make sense that he’d be drawn to Dracula, whose lifestyle wasn’t too different from that of the average Factory regular and whom Warhol may have identified with considering his own emotionally vampiric tendencies. So with the knowledge that he brought together the two characters in this unfinished 1964 feature—released even before BATMAN: THE MOVIE (1966) and thought to be lost until recently—one can begin to piece together what to expect. Or maybe not. This event centers on an extended excerpt from the film, whose content and history will be contextualized by SAIC professor Bruce Jenkins, co-author of the seminal Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: 1963-1965, and Greg Pierce, director of Film and Video at the Andy Warhol Museum in the filmmaker’s hometown of Pittsburgh. The ambitious fan film is not only unfinished, but was and still is rarely screened, having been shown only at Warhol’s exhibitions before it was rediscovered. (Of course, none of this was done with permission from DC Comics.) Underground artist and filmmaker Jack Smith appears as both characters—according to Steven Watson in his book Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties, Smith had said that this was his favorite role, and that apparently tension emerged between him and Warhol when the film was never properly released. The book also notes that the film is “[b]latantly theatrical in its style… BATMAN alluded to a story and used elaborate costumes,” qualities that anyone familiar with Warhol’s moving-image work will know were unusual for him. Still, what’s available to view online (a muddled snippet of footage set to music by the Velvet Underground) reveals that it’s all still frustratingly and deliciously abstruse; one Letterboxd reviewer who has presumably seen what will be screened during this event writes that he “somehow got the idea it was a campy proto-'66 Batman romp, with Warhol's Factory pals paying silly but recognizable tribute to the 1940s Batman serials and comic books. In reality, this is much darker and more abstract than the version that existed in my imagination, with Batman existing more as an amalgamation with Dracula than anything identifiable as the trademarked character we all know and love.” (So perhaps it’s something more akin to Robert Pattinson’s Batman from earlier this year?) All told, one can’t help but to assume this will be characteristically idiosyncratic of Warhol, even if supposedly a departure. (1964, 60 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

Orson Welles' CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (Switzerland/Spain)

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

A thoroughly thrilling experience, inspiring on every conceivable level, and one of the saddest films ever made. Orson Welles made a life-long study of Shakespeare, adapting him on stage many times and making, in MACBETH and OTHELLO, two of his best movies. As a very young man, he attempted a mammoth adaptation he called Five Kings, combining scenes from the eight history plays revolving around the War of the Roses and The Merry Wives of Windsor, a project that here, transformed from a youth's ambition to a mature artist's melancholy, forms the seed for CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, a sprawling, strange, and deeply big-hearted melodrama of love and death, honor and betrayal, cowardice and duty, profligacy and desperation. In his films he has always demonstrated a fascination with texture, with visual patterning, with the complex choreographies of incoherent human figures made possible through spaces of grotesque and labyrinthine depth. This is nowhere more apparent than here. In a series of grand kinetic dances, Welles arranges haunting specters of death, swirling amongst and engulfing the lusty, hot-blooded, and imminently life-loving commoners and nobles that populate Shakespeare's version of history. There is no-one so ignoble not to deserve the adoration of Welles's camera, or the dignity of Welles's staging. As Hal, the wastrel son of the usurper King Henry IV, Keith Baxter deserves particular note: he is as affectionate and as cruel as can be borne by one mere character, and his masterful portrayal of Hal's contradictions mirror the contradictions at the heart of the film. No one for more than a moment here is what he or she seems, no space is wholly trustworthy, and no plot truly secret, for the most serious of all games, and the most pleasurable, is that which is played with one's own life as the stake and with no hope of surviving to collect the winnings save in the songs of our loved ones. In short, this film is magic itself, a celebration of cinema as the grandest of tricks, that which alone can transform the past into the present as palpably as memory and the whole of the material world into the effervescence of poetry. The greatest film by the greatest director. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday I series, “Shakespeare Remixed.” (1966, 119 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Gus Van Sant's MALA NOCHE (US)

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

The highly erratic career of Gus Van Sant is comprised of rabid contradictions—not only between his "commercial" and "personal" projects, but between the divergent ideas of character, plot, pacing, and the modes of address deployed in each. A calculated awards season striver like MILK showed Van Sant at his most evasive—taking a heroic figure like Harvey Milk and turning the nasally, paunchy, resolutely flaming queen into a solidly monogamous, essentially de-sexualized, non-threatening gay spokesman that even Middle America can embrace. The "play nice" ethos of Van Sant's recent output is nowhere evident in the director's debut feature, MALA NOCHE. From the first frames of this low-budget regional wonder, we encounter a literally throbbing need to "drink this Mexican boy." (Fittingly, Van Sant financed this innately subversive film with his Madison Avenue ad agency earnings.) Every shot in MALA NOCHE exudes a blunt insistence upon sex right this minute—a sensibility notably absent from the well-behaved, inspirational independent features that have dominated LGBT film festivals in recent years. (MALA NOCHE isn't the kind of film where someone's conservative mother reluctantly learns to accept her child's queerness after realizing that gays know all the best showtunes.) The infrequent bursts of color are, like the rest of the movie, ecstatic and sad. Screening as part of the Music Box Staff Picks! (1985, 78 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]

Joy Davenport’s FANNIE LOU HAMER’S AMERICA (Documentary)

South Side Projections and the Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.) – Sunday, 3pm (Free Admission)

Even in still photographs—which, along with footage and audio, comprise the substance of this hour-long documentary—Fannie Lou Hamer exudes uncommon strength, a singular presence that suggests a fire burning within. Though it’s of course her words, ideas and actions that make the greatest impact, I was still enthralled by the pictures of her included in the documentary, distilling into a constant the fortitude and fierceness with which the undersung civil rights leader approached every aspect of life. Hamer was born to sharecroppers in Mississippi, the youngest of her parents’ 20 children; they later moved to Sunflower County, where she'd eventually engage in much of her activism. Filmmaker Joy Davenport provides an invaluable compendium of Hamer's life, from her dropping out of school at 12 years old to help out in the fields to the remarkable things she did as an adult, specifically with regard to voting rights and overall political equality for Black citizens. This journey began in earnest after she was fired from her job and harassed for attempting to register to vote; this spurred her to get involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, for which she became a field secretary just a few years later. Then, on the way to a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event, she was arrested and violently beaten by police. In spite of this she became even more involved in political action, including the Freedom Summer activities of 1964 (wherein her name was on the ballot for a mock election—which she won). She was also instrumental in founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a response to white Democrats' exclusion of Black people from their politics; she eventually became one of its delegates several years after traveling to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where she gave an impassioned speech that was broadcast on major news networks. The MFDP refused to compromise, however, after they were given only two seats in that year’s delegation, a slight rectified in 1968. The documentary centers on, and is strengthened by, Hamer’s own voice, as footage or audio of her giving speeches and singing account for most of its duration. This includes her famous speech “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired,” the title of which was inscribed on her tombstone after she passed away in 1977. Brilliantly edited, using archival and stock-like footage to deliberately prosaic effect (thus enabling the impact of Hamer’s oration to echo), the film itself is a striking portrait of a leader continually in motion, striving for the picture-perfect stillness of equality. Followed by a Q&A with Davenport and Hamer’s daughter, Jacqueline Hamer Flakes, moderated by Tracye Matthews, executive director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture. (2022, 60 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

Peter Bogdanovich's WHAT'S UP DOC? (US)

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

WHAT'S UP, DOC? is a screwball comedy to watch if you appreciate the fact that someone who just loves screwball comedies wound up with an opportunity to shoot a movie with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal (two of the hottest actors at the time) but had no script. What did he do? He asked two screenwriter friends to write a modern version of BRINGING UP BABY, and they didn’t do a bad job! Admittedly Babs has quite a different vibe and is a little more....sexual, shall we say, than Katharine Hepburn. And Ryan O'Neal is a little less....charming, shall we say, than Cary Grant. That's to be expected. No one can be a second Cary Grant without doing some crazy voodoo. That said, WHAT'S UP, DOC? is a delightful screwball comedy from start to finish. The plot is expertly, dizzyingly, incomprehensibly presented. There are four plaid briefcases, and they all have silly items in them. That's really all you need to know to enjoy the film. Well, I guess a few additional details might help: Howard (Ryan O'Neal) is betrothed to Eunice (Madeline Kahn, in what is, shockingly, her feature debut—she's already a comedic genius). To put it mildly, Eunice is a little bit of a wet blanket, although to be fair, Howard is an awkward geology geek with no social skills. Howard meets Judy (Barbra Streisand) in a drugstore, and Judy is instantly smitten, tracking him with frightening precision and disastrous consequences before they inevitably fall madly in love. Howard should be presenting some boring rocks to a musical geology conference in order to win an important grant. That… does not succeed. Instead, there are mix-ups, jewel thefts, secret government papers misplaced, a few gunshots, a fire in a hotel, an obligatory car chase through hilly San Francisco streets, and, of course, a delightful Cole Porter number murmured by Babs (sorry, Judy) atop a piano on the rooftop of the very hotel that she and Ryan (sorry, Howard) have been ejected from hours before. WHAT'S UP, DOC? is a comedy to watch if you really need an escape and 93 solid minutes of entertainment constructed lovingly by a critic's director. The scene under the table at the awards banquet alone makes the movie worth watching. Screening as part of Doc’s Monday series, “Wonderfully Loathsome: Screwball Romance Through the Ages.” (1972, 93 min, 35mm Digital Projection) [Alex Ensign]

Joe Dante's GREMLINS (US)

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

Filmed on backlots in homage to IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and styled after Norman Rockwell illustrations, GREMLINS creates a memorable nightmare of the wholesale destruction of its settings by the titular monsters. The movie can be genuinely scary, but it’s also a laugh riot, thanks in part to the adolescent glee that Dante and company take from laying waste to such cherished American institutions as Christmastime, Walt Disney, and suburban architecture. A product of ’60s counterculture and ’70s exploitation cinema, Dante has always maintained his outsider bona fides no matter how mainstream his productions have gotten, and one of the wonderful things about GREMLINS is how it feels like a bunch of weirdos successfully crashing the ultra-square party that was Reagan-era Hollywood. The movie’s subversive humor reaches its strongest expression in Phoebe Cates’ sickly funny Santa Claus monologue (which would have been cut from the finished film had not executive producer Steven Spielberg intervened with Warner Bros. studio bosses), but the sentiment can be found even in the premise—that inside every cuddly Spielbergian creation is a destructive monster desperate to come out. Both Dave Kehr and Jonathan Rosenbaum have likened Dante to Frank Tashlin, the Warner Bros. cartoonist who carried over the rubbery reality of Looney Tunes into his work as a director of live-action satires. Like Tashlin, Dante makes fun of his subjects with an air of gee-whiz affection. But Dante’s electrifying shifts between humor and horror show the influence of directors who came before Tashlin: James Whale, who was mixing the two genres in the early 1930s and after, as well as the pop-obsessed auteurs of the French New Wave. Indeed, GREMLINS is so rich in knowledge of film history that it requires several viewings to catch all the references Dante hides around the frames, which are as visually packed in their way as Vincente Minnelli’s. (1984, 106 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

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Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León's THE WOLF HOUSE (Chile/Animation)

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

An instant classic of experimental animation, this short Chilean feature blends folk and avant-garde traditions so fluidly that it seems to belong to no era in particular. The writer-directors, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, conjure an out-of-time feeling from the start, presenting the movie, falsely, as a piece of outsider art found in the vault of a secluded, German-speaking community in Chile’s far south. An unidentified narrator explains that this community lives according to longstanding traditions and generally ignores modern customs; however, he insists that the communards maintain a healthy relationship with the surrounding Chilean population, contrary to nasty rumors about them being standoffish. This introduction, with its tone of cultural ambassadorship, suggests that the film we’re about to see will present the community in a positive light, yet the first sly joke of THE WOLF HOUSE is that it makes the communards seem awful right away. The movie proper starts with printed text informing us that the heroine, Maria (a member of the traditionalist community), has been sentenced to 100 days of isolation because she absentmindedly let three pigs escape from the community farm. Upset with her punishment, Maria flees into the surrounding woods and runs until she finds a strange abandoned house. She decides to squat there, unaware that the house has a life of its own—and that it thrives on torturing its human guests. It quickly becomes clear that this fairy tale is an allegory by and for the communards, showing what happens to people who disobey the community and try to make it on their own; the nightmare house represents the communards’ small-minded fears of the world at large. Cociña and León realize the story with an exquisite mix of painted and stop-motion animation, moving unpredictably between the two modes or else combining them in the same shots. There’s a handmade quality to it all befitting the (fictional) rustic community that it comes from; you can see the fingertip imprints on the three-dimensional figures, which seem to be made from clay, papier mâché, and other school-room art materials. Further, the story proceeds according to a dream logic that feels like it derives from folklore. In one passage, Maria finds two pigs living in the house, then casts a spell that gives the animals human arms and legs. Later, the half-animals transform entirely into human children. In another sequence, Maria accidentally sets fire to her house during dinner; Cociña and León depict the fire by having the backgrounds gradually turn gray, as if they were coloring over them. Such rudimentary effects speak directly to the imagination because the viewer must fill in the details of the scene in his or her mind—the very place where nightmares take root. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday II series, “Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales: A Brief History of Animation.” (2018, 73 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Tony Scott's THE HUNGER (UK/US)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, 9:30pm

Long before Tony Scott was celebrated as the vulgar auteur of DEJA VU and UNSTOPPABLE, he directed THE HUNGER—the infamous midnight movie where sleep scientist Susan Sarandon trades a Big Mac and an obnoxious boyfriend for a glass of sherry and the promise of centuries of vampire sex with Catherine Deneuve. Scott's first commercial feature after a decade and half making student films and advertising spots, THE HUNGER was roundly ignored by audiences (it ranked 95th at the 1983 box office) and ferociously derided by critics. Roger Ebert called it "an agonizingly bad vampire movie ... that has been so ruthlessly overproduced that it's all flash and style and no story." (The only unabashed fans of THE HUNGER were probably horny teenagers who sought out the male-gaze-optimized sex scenes on Cinemax.) This reaction is understandable. With its propulsive but senseless editing, its portentous self-regard, its indifference to exposition, THE HUNGER aggressively imports an overwrought advertising aesthetic to cinema. It plays like a feature-length cologne commercial with soft-core flourishes. Ebert was not wrong about "all flash and style and no story." As a narrative, the failures of THE HUNGER are total, but they are radical, deliberate failures. Instead of individual shots building towards a sequence, each frame dissolves into a miasma of details that refuse assimilation into conventional storytelling rhythm. This strategy is evident from the opening scene, when Bauhaus's performance of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" is continually ruptured by silence and spatio-temporal discontinuity. The shambolic New Grammar (or Neu! Grammar?) of THE HUNGER acts as a blood-letting for classical Hollywood. (The nod to ur-vamp Lugosi isn't the only po-mo touch; between Bessie Love's grotesque cameo, the Schubert cue lifted from BARRY LYNDON, and the left-over doves and smoke machines from brother Ridley's BLADE RUNNER of the previous year, THE HUNGER is an undead edifice of allusion.) It also contains a lovely, low-key performance from David Bowie as Deneuve's deader half, grisly "make-up illusions" from Dick Smith, and an affecting, largely non-fantastic approach to its core mythology. (These vampires don't even have fangs.) If anything, this roundly-ridiculed movie has cast a long shadow over its tonier successors: Jim Jarmusch's pretentious vampire comedy ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE probably owes more to THE HUNGER and less to Marlowe than it would like to admit, and Michael Haneke's AMOUR is a bloodless, glorified remark. Too long dismissed as camp, THE HUNGER actually restores an essential aspect to Susan Sontag's original formulation of that aesthetic—this movie courts absurdity with such guile-free sincerity that it could scarcely see itself in the mirror. Screening as part of the Undead & Queer series in a double-feature with DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (see below). (1983, 97 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Rob Zombie's HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (US)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm

HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES serves as the directorial debut by Rob Zombie, the heavy metal musician arguably better known today for his forays into the world of cinema. Initially shelved by its studio out of fear for an NC-17 rating, the film was finally released to almost unanimously negative reviews; however, like many of the most beloved horror films, HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES found an audience after its initial theatrical run and outside the reach of mainstream critics. Two major points of criticism leveled at the film are its lack of plot and its excessive gore—ironically, two reasons why the film is still revered today. Horror fanatics who frequent the cinema for sadism and bright, disgusting imagery will find a lot to love, whether it’s the brutal torture and murder of now-mainstream comedians in some of the film’s leading roles or just the overall feeling of hopelessness that lingers until all the characters meet their end. With an aesthetic clearly inspired by the splatter films of the ‘70s and a sense of humor that would almost certainly send any 14-year-old boy to their school’s guidance counselor, HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES epitomizes a certain type of nihilistic, grotesque filmmaking. Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Scared Stupid series. (2003, 88 min, 35mm) [Michael Bates]

Harry Kümel’s DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (Belgium)

FACETS Cinema – Friday, 7pm

It’s almost Halloween, so it’s time again to visit the treacherous world of the lesbian predator. Belgian director Harry Kümel’s DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS recycles the tropes of lesbian vampires in this stylish horror film based on the probably slanderous story of powerful noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian countess born in the 16th century who purportedly used the blood of more than 600 murdered girls to maintain her youthful appearance. A luminous Delphine Seyrig portrays the elegant and seductive Báthory, who arrives with her companion (Andrea Rau) at a near-deserted hotel in a small town in Belgium where newlyweds Stefan (John Karlen) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) are staying after missing the mail boat to England. Immediately drawn to the beautiful Valerie, the countess books a suite next to the couple from the hotel clerk (Paul Esser) who mistakes her for the woman who stayed there 40 years before. That’s our first hint that Báthory may be an ageless vampire out to seduce another victim. Our second hint is a report of bloodless corpses in Bruges, which Stefan finds mesmerizing when he and Valerie take a day trip to the city in time to see another body hauled out of her home to a waiting ambulance. Kümel’s strongly atmospheric film depends on the charged mood it creates to gin up the dread. Karlen, perhaps best remembered as the Renfield-like character in the daytime TV series Dark Shadows, is as creepy as Seyrig is charming—both have a mean streak a century long. Kümel is coy about his film’s violence, preferring to shoot Stefan beating Valerie from a distance through a veiled window and eschewing graphic depictions of the deaths that occur with quick cuts and a bit of blood. So, too, his sex scenes are fairly short and discreet. For him, language is the vehicle of sexual excitement, as Stefan and the countess rapturously describe in detail the 16th century Elizabeth’s torture and murder of the girls whose blood she would bathe in. Rau hasn’t got much to do, and Ouimet is the usual blonde-haired target whose vulnerability is matched only by her stupidity. A strange phone call Stefan has with his mother is a weird surprise I won’t spoil, but the beating Valerie gets afterward put me in mind of a short story from Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Cinematographer Eduard van der Enden creates a beautiful color palette that emphasizes red and makes the most of the West Flanders landscape, especially during some ghoulish goings-on at a North Sea beach. Screening as part of the Undead & Queer series in a double-feature with THE HUNGER (see below). (1971, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Park Chan-wook's DECISION TO LEAVE (South Korea)

Gene Siskel Film Center and Music Box Theatre – See Venue websites for showtimes

When the 59-year-old South Korean artist Park Chan-wook sat down to write a neo-noir for the modern age, he knew he wanted to write a love story. While it may seem like a story of the detective and femme fatale descending into tragedy, there is much more at play in the drama and technique of this one-of-a-kind filmmaker. In both writing and cinematography, it’s clear that Park is experimenting with his tools in the hopes of reaching a broader audience, much like Bong Joon-ho did with PARASITE (2019). Cinematographer Ji-yong Kim creates gorgeous visuals of a colder palette and close-ups of a Sven Nykvist sensibility; Park, meanwhile, is a great defender of his actors, having known to be more upset when they aren’t nominated for international accolades than himself. He provides the groundwork for both stars here to commit to their characters. The audience falls for Tang Wei’s great performance as a suspiciously indifferent widow the same way her male counterpart does. As the investigator and her soon-to-be lover, Park Hae-il wins audiences over as a charismatic leading man. Park has always been known for extreme violence with films like OLDBOY (2003) but even he has stated in interviews this film is separate from the rest of his filmography. As a police procedural, DECISION TO LEAVE takes influence from Billy Wilder’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958). While many detective noirs have been made in the history of cinema, DECISION TO LEAVE (2022) is enthrallingly enigmatic even among Park's own filmography. He interweaves genres and an unusual love story; it’s sexy yet asexual, as scarce intimacy is shown between lovers. There are few police procedurals that successfully integrate modern technology into the storytelling, making not only scenes more relatable to adding to the greater cause of having a film speak to the modern times of communication and connection. Park’s film breathes fresh air into the detective film through its inventiveness and manages to express profound thoughts on love in the new age of social media and smartphones. (2022, 139 min, DCP Digital [at the Film Center] and 35mm [at the Music Box]) [Ray Ebarb]

F.W. Murnau's NOSFERATU (Germany/Silent)

Doc Films (at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave.) – Sunday, 7pm

Like his contemporary Jean Vigo, F.W. Murnau died far too soon. His death in an auto accident cut short the career of a great talent who was reaching new artistic milestones after his arrival in the U.S. He died having directed only three films for Hollywood (not including TABU) and, while he is celebrated among auteurists and cinephiles, his popular reputation never reached the level of other European émigrés like Fritz Lang. David Thomson writes that Murnau had an unparalleled talent for "photograph[ing] the real world and yet invest[ing] it with a variety of poetic, imaginative, and subjective qualities. The camera itself allowed audiences to experience actuality and imagination simultaneously." In the case of NOSFERATU, the result is a vampire story of startling realism. This is no fantasy, nor is it a lush period piece. This is mania, creeping fear, disease, and plague. Perhaps no film better illustrates the difference between dreams, which inhabit the margins of our world, and fantasies, which we each manufacture. Thanks to Murnau's pioneering style here and in later films, directors as diverse as Douglas Sirk and David Lynch have continued to practice a similar alchemy of melodrama, movement, desire, and fateful circumstance. With live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren. (1922, 94 min, Digital Projection) [Will Schmenner]

Olivier Assayas’ IRMA VEP (France)

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

IRMA VEP successfully takes on the influences of Truffaut, Fassbinder, and Louis Feuillade and still manages to include a lesbian subplot and address French racial attitudes in the film industry. The film takes place in an alternate reality where Maggie Cheung, playing herself, gets cast in her French feature-film remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic serial LES VAMPIRES (1915). As principal photography starts, the relationships between collaborators deteriorate and reality loosens its grip on both star and director. You might assume that the characters' problems could come off as niche; in reality, Assayas places the audience right in the middle of the chaos that is making a picture. The camera pans through the heart of production as all departments rush to get their work done on time, comparable to any busy office or dinner hour restaurant kitchen. As Assayas has mentioned in interviews, IRMA VEP specifically invokes Fassbinder's BEWARE OF A HOLY WHORE, with a short-tempered manic director in charge of a disorganized film; Jean-Pierre Léaud plays the director, slipping into an archetype previously played by Lou Castel in the self-reflexive 1971 classic. It should be noted that Fassbinder’s difficult auteur plays a difficult racist auteur in this film, as an artist frustrated that an Asian actress would be cast in a French film. Maggie Cheung, already a beloved star at this point in her career, gives a part of herself here, showing not her glamorous side, but seeming like a woman just trying to do her job well under constraints. It’s very easy to idolize stars but Cheung exemplifies the experience of many actors working in the industry, someone trying to get through the day, not get fired and maybe create some good work. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday series, “Center Stage: The Films of Maggie Cheung. (1996, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Park Chan-wook's LADY VENGEANCE (South Korea)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 9pm

Chan-wook Park’s LADY VENGEANCE is a response of sorts to Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL cycle, this is a flamboyant tale of revenge centered on an iconic female lead—another scorned woman who must defeat an evil man before reuniting with her daughter. Park is one of the most entertaining filmmakers working today—like Tarantino or the P.T. Anderson of BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA, each shot is a designed as an elaborate stylistic challenge—making this screening a must-see for the uninitiated. Overall, the film gets marred by the Hollywoodism that's come to define international blockbusters in recent years (Think of it as a blood-drenched AMELIE), but Park's subsequent work—I'M A CYBORG, BUT THAT'S OK and his entry in the omnibus film THREE... EXTREMES—marked a welcome return to the brazen weirdness of his earlier films. Still, there are enough movie-movie moments in LADY VENGEANCE to get drunk on. Screening as part of the Fringe Benefits series. (2005, 112 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Jordan Peele's GET OUT (US)

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

Between the post-racial and the colorblind, evil festers in GET OUT. Released at the beginning of 2017, no film more effectively and immediately tapped into our cultural moment or provoked more conversation throughout the year than Jordan Peele’s feature film debut (now an Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay). Its upcoming revivals at screening venues across Chicagoland suggests its breakthrough significance and continued importance as a cultural object. GET OUT is a horror story about cultural appropriation, gaslighting, and—most cleverly—the weaponization of social norms and etiquette to enforce strict hierarchies. It also followed an intriguing trend from 2017 of love stories that uneasily shift between scenes of intimacy and scenes of horror, where sentimental attachments are used to manipulate and ensnare (PHANTOM THREAD, MOTHER!, and THE SHAPE OF WATER are other titles that come to mind). GET OUT is also highly successful as a comedy (as the Golden Globes controversially categorized the film, to Peele’s dismay), and yet it is reductive to describe the movie merely in those terms. While it is irreverent, blistering, and funny in a way that frequently stings, a deep strain of melancholy runs throughout it. What story about the pernicious lasting effects of human hate could be otherwise? The film’s premise is simple but compelling: Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young photographer, goes to meet his girlfriend Rose’s parents at the Armitage family estate in the country. Chris is nervous from the start—he is black, the Armitages are white, and Rose has neglected to fill her parents in on this (to her, inconsequential; to him, crucial) detail. (Note the stroke of brilliance in casting the Armitage clan: are there any actors more recognizable as “good white liberal” indie stars than Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford?) The weekend begins for Chris with an initially warm, if awkward, welcome from the parents, followed by uncanny run-ins with the Black household help. But Chris’s visit becomes increasingly hostile as the weekend wears on, and more guests arrive at the estate for the Armitages’ annual garden party. From there, Chris is made to suffer a series of small indignities and becomes the center of an increasingly uncomfortable attention. White partygoers insist on giving him their uninvited opinions about the African-American experience, cast objectifying glances over his body, and make fetishizing remarks about his “genetic make-up.” Like another horror film from 2017, Aronofsky’s MOTHER!, horror here is brilliantly imagined at first as simply the nightmare of having to deal with people who don’t understand social cues, and grows into the danger of not seeing the right time to get out of someone’s house. If the horror in GET OUT feels stark, real, and vivid, it is because of the way the movie builds this gradually from small moments of disquieting tension. The film’s important intervention is in showing how seemingly little instances of casual racism are never really little, but rather are stepping-stones to bigger, uglier transgressions to come. Seemingly small slights, off-hand remarks, and micro-aggressions are already toxic because they pave the way for larger, suffocating patterns of dehumanization like slavery, lynching, or the mass incarceration of Black men—all of these initial thoughtless actions are already symptoms of a failure to recognize another person as fully human. “Sometimes, if there’s too many white people, I get nervous.” This decisive line of dialogue is delivered as just a whisper in the film, but it expresses an intensely personal, un-PC, and painful truth. There are many things left unsaid in GET OUT, too, but the conversations that the film has started and the contemporary racial tensions it has helped bring to light are well worth revisiting at any public screenings with different audiences. Wherever monsters and mold grow, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series, “Programmers’ Picks.” (2017, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Tien-Tien Jong]

Tomas Alfredson's LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Sweden)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 9pm

Vampire mythology has a rich history that’s been explored in a myriad of different fashions throughout film history. From horror to comedy and more, it’s a subject that’s proved to be quite malleable in cinema. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is centered on a 12-year-old boy named Oskar who’s constantly picked on by his classmates and who fantasizes about getting revenge on them. One day, some new neighbors move in next door to his apartment, including the seemingly 12-year-old girl Eli, who is actually a vampire. Set during the 1980s in a sleepy town in the suburbs of Stockholm, Oskar and Eli strike up an unlikely friendship that grows to be mutually beneficial to the two socially isolated preteens. It’s a beautifully crafted film. The cinematography features large swathes of snowy white that becomes marred with crimson red when Eli has to feed. The sound design is relatively music-free outside of a few diegetic pieces and instead forces the viewer to focus on the visceral. Its dark tone harmonizes the awkwardness of not fitting in at school, dealing with single-parent households, and the permanent reality Eli faces of having to stay 12 for the rest of her life. The romance that blooms between Oskar and Eli is innocent, sweet, and endearing, as the two become one another’s protectors at various times. Hauntingly beautiful, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is one of the finest vampire films ever made, one that soars thanks to its leads’ excellent performances, its striking imagery, and the poignant undertones. Screening as part of the “A Symphony of Horror: The Old, The New & The Unexpected” series. (2008, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Henry Selick's CORALINE (US/Animation)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 7pm

Over the last decade, the family-friendly film has been irrevocably sanitized—especially animated films intended for young audiences. No longer is the focus solely put on creating engaging plots and characters that resonates with both children and adults; rather the new normal has been to prioritize popular franchises with capitalistic success as well as big-name voice actors to bolster market appeal. But there was a time where family-friendly movies could take risks in storytelling and style, break conventions, and still be commercially successful—and Henry Selick’s CORALINE is a prime example. After moving into a dreary new town, the film’s brash and spitfire titular character (voiced by Dakota Fanning) discovers a parallel world that seems like a dream come true—one that’s exciting, full of color, and starkly contrasts her everyday. But when Coraline’s friends and family sew buttons onto their eyes and are a bit too sickly sweet for comfort, she has to face the fact that not everything is what it seems. Animation studio Laika’s whimsical stop-motion work is a standout and helped cement what would later be considered a studio standard of excellence. But what’s most remarkable about CORALINE is that it takes its young-intended audience seriously. Selick is not afraid to frighten; nor is he shy to delve into complicated topics like toxic familial relationships and how one's perception of the world drastically shifts in their adolescence. (2009, 100 min, Digital Projection) [Cody Corrall]
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Screening as part of the Family Fright Matinees double feature (presented by FACETS’ Chicago International Children's Film Festival) with Sam Fell and Chris Butler’s 2012 film PARANORMAN (92 min, DCP Digital) at 4pm.

Jean-Luc Godard's GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (France/Switzerland)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

In Jean-Luc Godard's 1996 film FOR EVER MOZART, the director poses the question, "In the 'I think, therefore I am,' is the 'I' of 'I am' no longer the same as the 'I' of 'I think' and why?" GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D seeks to answer this Cartesian inquiry with a resounding "no" by offering a philosophical meditation on the fractured nature of identity in our era of mass communication. In his astonishing first feature in 3D, the now-84-year-old Godard pointedly shows, through an almost impossibly rich tapestry of stereoscopic images and sounds, how language and technology have conspired to create barriers that separate humans not only from each other but also from themselves ("Soon everyone will need an interpreter to understand the words coming from their own mouths," is one characteristically epigrammatic line of dialogue). The film is split into three parts: "Nature" (a section demarcated by a title card reading "1"), which focuses on Josette and Gedeon (Héloïse Godet and Kamel Abdelli); "Metaphor" (a section demarcated by a title card reading "2"), which focuses on Ivitch and Marcus (Zoé Bruneau and Richard Chevallier); and a short third part (beginning with a title card reading "3D"), which introduces a third couple—Godard and his longtime collaborator Anne-Marie Mieville, who are not seen but whose voices are heard on the soundtrack. The real "star" of GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D, however, is not a human at all but rather Godard's mixed-breed dog Roxy, who is frequently depicted alone, frolicking in nature, commanding both the most screen time and serving as the subject of some of the film's most dazzling stereoscopic effects. The shots of Roxy's handsome snout in the maw of Godard and cinematographer Fabrice Aragno's homemade 3D-camera rig, which convey an overwhelming feeling of love for the animal on the part of his owner/director, are so rapturously beautiful they may make you want to cry. The film ends by juxtaposing the sounds of a dog barking with that of a baby wailing on the soundtrack, thus linking Roxy not only to nature but, implicitly, to a state of unspoiled innocence that humans possess only prior to learning to speak. Godard's poetic use of 3D in GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D, the best such use of the technology in any movie I've seen, puts this groundbreaking work in the class of his (and the cinema's) great achievements. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. Note that the Film Center will be screening the film in 2D. (2013, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Todd Field’s TÁR (US)

Music Box Theatre – 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

⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive Asian Pop-Up Cinema series continues its fifteenth season. Their in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list. Visit here for more information.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
Diana Quiñones Rivera’s 2021 documentary RESISTIMOS (61 min, Digital Projection) screens on Wednesday at 8pm, followed by bomba musicians from Segundo Ruiz Cultural Center Belvis. Presented by Soft Cage Films. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Christos Nikou’s 2020 film APPLES (91 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday, 7pm, as part of the “Top Doc: Maverdock—New Releases” series.

The re-edited version of Jacques Rivette’s 13-hour 1972 film OUT 1: NOLI ME TANGERE, OUT 1: SPECTRE, screens on Sunday, 5pm, as part of the “Jacques Rivette, New Wave Master” series. 

Zhang Yimou’s 2004 wuxia film HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (119 min, 35mm) screens on Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the “After the 5th: China and the 21st Century” series. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Shinzo Katayama’s 2022 Japanese film MISSING (123 min, Digital Projection) screens on Sunday, 1:30pm; Fruit Chan, Fung Chih-chiang and Wesley Hoi’s 2022 Hong Kong film TALES FROM THE OCCULT (111 min, Digital Projection) screens at 4:30pm; Fruit Chan, Fung Chih-chiang and Wesley Hoi’s RIGOR MORTIS (111 min, Digital Projection) screens at 6:45pm, all part of the APUC Horror Marathon, presented in partnership with Asian Pop-Up Cinema. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ The Farm on Ogden (3555 W. Ogden Ave.)
Brett A. Schwartz’s 2022 documentary RAISED UP WEST SIDE (86 min, Digital Projection) screens on Saturday at noon. Followed by a free tour of the Farm on Ogden. Free admission; RSVPs appreciated. More info here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.)
Ari Folman’s 2022 animated film WHERE IS ANNE FRANK? (99 min, DCP Digital) screens on Thursday, 7pm, with Folman in attendance. More info here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Ruben Östlund’s 2022 Palme d’Or winning film TRIANGLE OF SADNESS (147 min, DCP Digital) continues this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Ondi Timoner’s 2022 documentary LAST FLIGHT HOME (101 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 8pm, with Timoner in attendance for a post-screening discussion with Brenda Robinson (Board Chair, Film Independent). More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Jim Sharman’s 1975 cult classic ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight and Sunday and Monday at 10pm. Every screening has a shadowcast of the film (actors acting in front of the screen during the film) performed by Midnight Madness. All screenings are currently sold out. 

Presented by Massacre Video, Chester Novell Turner’s 1987 film TALES FROM THE QUADEAD ZONE (62 min, DCP Digital) screens on Friday at 11:30pm; Deepak Ramsay’s 2006 film AATMA (107 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday, 11:30pm, presented by Mondo Macabro; Brando Snider’s 1997 film CORNSHUKKER (63 min, Digital Projection) screens on Sunday, 9:30pm, presented by VHSHITFEST. All films screen as part of the Music Box of Horrors: Scared Stupid series.

Presented by First Nations Film and Video Festival, Sonia Bonspille Boileau’s 2019 film RUSTIC ORACLE screens on Tuesday at 7pm. More info on all screenings here. 

🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING

⚫ Video Data Bank
“‘Make Believe, It’s Just like the Truth Clings to It’: In Conversation with the Work of Cecilia Dougherty,” curated by Amanda Mendelsohn, is available to stream for free on VDB TV. The program includes Dougherty’s THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD (1992, 6 min); MY FAILURE TO ASSIMILATE (1995, 20 min); THE DREAM AND THE WAKING (1997, 15 min); and GONE (2001, 36 min). More info here.

CINE-LIST: October 28 - November 3, 2022

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Kian Bergstrom, Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Marilyn Ferdinand, J.R. Jones, Tien-Tien Jong, Will Schmenner, Michael Glover Smith