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🟠 BLACK HARVEST FILM FESTIVAL
AT THE GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER

The 28th Black Harvest Film Festival continues through Sunday, November 20 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Reviews of select films can be found below. There’s a virtual component to the festival as well, from Monday, November 21 through Sunday, November 27. This year's festival is dedicated to the late Sergio Mims, co-founder of the festival and its longtime co-programmer and consultant. More info on the festival here.

Jack Bomay and Sal Watts’ SOLOMON KING (US)
Friday, 9pm
Long considered lost, Jack Bomay and Sal Watts’ SOLOMON KING has recently been restored from “one of the only known complete 35mm Eastman Kodak prints,” per a title card at the beginning of the film. Though it also states that the original negative is likely gone forever, the original 35mm track negative survived, having long been stored in the closet of Sal’s widow, Belinda Burton-Watts. With these elements, the film—an independently financed production—was restored quite beautifully. Watts himself stars as King, a nightclub owner and former Green Beret and CIA operative who’s dragged back into the shadowy underworld of covert operations when a Saudi prince launches a coup. Solomon’s brother, who’d been in Saudi Arabia monitoring some oil fields that had been gifted to them both, manages to escape back to Oakland with the princess, who soon becomes the titular character’s tentative love interest. She’s later assassinated, however, sending King deeper into the intrigue to suss out the culprit, along the way encountering some funky rhythms and a few more beautiful women. According to Chloe Sylvers’ book The Fabulous Ward Brothers: The Original Macks, “Watts was a big drug lord who owned the record store Mr. Sal’s and over a two year period he created Sal/Wa Enterprises and financed [this] movie for $140,000. Sal Watts along with Jack Bomay directed the film, which was filmed in Oakland and around the Bay Area. The company also had a recording division which provided the movie’s soundtrack.” The amazing 70s fashion on display came from another one of Watts’ real-life business endeavors, Mr. Sal’s Fashion store. (I was unable to determine if that’s the same as the aforementioned record store or a different store altogether.) The film reflects its bare-bones budget yet is nevertheless compelling as a blaxploitation film that trades in a precise aesthetic to impressive effect. Preceded by  Xavier Burgin’s 2021 short film A LITTLE CLOSURE (13 min, Digital Projection) and followed by a pre-recorded interview with Belinda Burton-Watts. (1974, 110 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]
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Alain Gomis’ REWIND & PLAY (France/Documentary)
Saturday, 4pm
Jazz great Thelonious Monk arrived in Paris in mid-December 1969 to play a concert and tape a performance and interview for the TV program Jazz Portrait; more than a half century later, Alain Gomis assembles raw footage from the program to re-create Monk’s slow-burn confrontation with interviewer Henri Renaud, whose steering of the musician’s remarks is downright insulting. Renaud, who boasts on camera about having met Monk when he made his Parisian debut in 1954, questions the pianist in English and translates his words into French for viewers, a power relationship he augments by rehearsing Monk’s answers with him and posing his questions again and again until he gets the responses he wants. Sitting at the keyboard, Monk endures all this with stoic, detached amusement, but his irritation is evident when Renaud tries to walk him through a question about whether his music was “too avant-garde” for the French back then. After Renaud tries to clean up Monk’s unflattering account of the festival promoters, Monk gets fed up and bolts from the piano bench; a rough cut finds him back at the Steinway and composed enough to get through the taping, which he concludes tongue-in-cheek with “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” Before the last chord can ring out, he’s off the bench and out of frame, leaving Renaud to wrap up with an empty plaudit for Monk’s “excessively relaxed way of looking at life.” Songs performed include “Round Midnight,” “Crepuscule With Nellie,” “Epistrophy,” and “Ugly Beauty.” Preceded by Alex Mallis and Titus Kaphar's 2022 documentary short SHUT UP AND PAINT (21 min, Digital Projection). (2022, 65 min, DCP Digital) [J.R. Jones]
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Jennifer Holness’ SUBJECTS OF DESIRE (Canada/Documentary)
Sunday, 1pm and Monday, 6:15pm
As the title of Jennifer Holness’ documentary suggests, the Black women who are the focus of SUBJECTS OF DESIRE are telling their own stories about their relationships to beauty and the stereotypical roles that white society set aside for them. Framed around the 50th anniversary of the Miss Black America beauty pageant, begun in 1968 to celebrate the Black beauty that was totally absent from such contests as Miss America and Miss USA, the film offers a penetrating look at how Black women have been characterized in media of all sorts during and after slavery as nurturing, loyal Mammies, angry Sapphires, and sexually voracious Jezebels, the latter image a staple in rap music videos. (“Sex sells,” singer-songwriter India Arie proffers ruefully.) Ryann Richardson, who won the Miss Black America pageant featured in the film, explains how pageants were her way of paying for a great post-secondary education and how she was advised to look less “ethnic” if she wanted to have a chance to win the various beauty contests she entered that were not exclusive to Black contestants. Ironically, we learn that the hair-straightening products developed by Black entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker in the early 20th century helped their users feel liberated from the hair policing they previously endured and that continues in fits and starts today. Passing-for-Black pariah Rachel Dolezal is interviewed extensively. While she has been roundly condemned for her actions, particularly in the Black community, I thought that her feeling of Blackness from an early age had a certain resonance with the gender dysphoria numerous young people feel and wondered if there might be something to it that didn’t smack of appropriation. Holness brings up the issue of colorism in the Black community, and one of her interviewees says that Black men are the only ones who reject their own women in favor of a different race, a patently false and limiting statement. Nonetheless, the contestants, researchers, entertainers, and commentators interviewed in SUBJECTS OF DESIRE are encouraged to speak their truth—a truth that, despite its contradictions, needs to be heard. Director in person. (2021, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Nikyatu Jusu’s NANNY (US)
Tuesday, 5:45 pm
Figures of West African folklore feature prominently throughout NANNY. As a character remarks, they “are figures of survival and resistance for oppressed people. They challenge the dominant order, subverting through chaos, anarchy, creative energy—they refuse to be ruled by the human or the divine.” Unhurried and dreamy, NANNY is an impressively meditative first feature from director Nikyatu Jusu, a deliberately paced character study concerning displacement, found community, and motherhood. Aisha (a fantastic Anna Diop) is a Senegalese immigrant who takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy New York City family; she’s hoping to save enough money to have her young son join her in the United States. Dreams and visions of water and spiders haunt her as she navigates her position as an exploited domestic worker and immigrant. Jusu presents gorgeously constructed shots: the cold NYC apartment in which Aisha spends the bulk of her time is filled with windows and mirrors that emphasize the themes of reflection, juxtaposing the warm reds and browns of her home spaces. The horror of the film comes less from the frightening images that disturb Aisha and more from the daily challenges she faces as an immigrant mother working to reunite with her son. The couple she works for (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector) are clearly in a deteriorating marriage, which results in the neglect of their young daughter, Rose (Rose Decker), and their mistreatment of Aisha. But NANNY is not all that interested in delving into their lives much deeper than that; this is no way their story. The film never turns away from Aisha and her experiences, including the uplifting, as when she begins a new romance. It’s also interested in the wider themes of domestic work, the African diaspora, the immigrant experience, and systemic injustice in general. Followed by a virtual Q&A with the director. (2022, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Color Corrections (Experimental)

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

This program is an offshoot of the Smart Museum's current "Monochrome Multitudes" exhibit, and it is a delightful mix of humor, playful documentation, intense methodical work, and aggressive provocations all around the colorful theme. Emile Cohl's silent comedy LE PEINTRE NEO-IMPRESSIONISTE (1910) indulges in the canard about a talentless artist leaning into abstraction and art-speak shell games. As the failing painter shows off his single color canvases, he makes up absurd titles that turn into amusing animations. Yves Klein's BAS RELIEF IN A FOREST OF SPONGES (1959) is mostly a simple documentation of the artist's work, with a few cinematic flourishes tossed in for good measure. Joyce Wieland's HAND TINTING (1967) is an early jewel from the brilliant Canadian filmmaker. This film includes outtakes from a documentary Wieland was shooting of Black and white women swimming and dancing and looking concerned and occupied. The footage is dyed various colors and rhythmically repeated in a way that imbues the women's actions with some kind of mysterious eloquence and suggestive dynamism. Paul Sharits' formalist classic T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G (1968) is one of the filmmaker's most pointedly aggressive films, with hinted violence in both the onscreen action and the film’s construction, with single frame assaults and repetitive vocalizations. Another formalist classic, Hollis Frampton's LEMON (1969) is a mite more playful, with suggestive protuberances and visual trickery created with the simplest set of cinematic and edible tools. Pierre Rovere's RED LIGHT (1975) is a cameraless film created along a mathematical pattern of red dots and blue dots, with some colors corresponding to a musical tone. Fred Worden's PLOTTING THE GREY SCALE: 2 OR 3 QUICK TRAVERSES (1986) was unavailable for preview, but Worden's work is reliably retina-exploding and isn't screened nearly enough, so don't miss it. Maida Barbour's LINDA M. MONTANO’S SEVEN YEARS OF LIVING ART (1994) is a documentation of the artists' performance art related to health issues, life changes, and spending a year working on each of her seven chakras. Jeanne Liotta's exuberant LORETTA (2003) is a rayograph film with the layers of filmic imagery and female shapes piling up in an ecstatic dance. Simon Payne's NEW RATIO (2007) is a dynamic little ditty of color pulses exploring the standard cinematic ratio shapes with methodical and stimulating musicality. dn rodowick's PYRAMID (2016) explores another common fruit with mysterious formal rigor. (1910 - 2016, Approx. 76 min, Various Formats) [Josh B Mabe]

Victor Sjöström's THE WIND (US/Silent)

Chicago Film Society and the Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am

Long counted among the highest achievements of silent cinema, THE WIND's reputation has waned somewhat in the last two decades. Not released on home video since the days of laserdisc, a new generation of silent aficionados is much more likely to have seen heavily-promoted restorations of relatively trivial contemporaries like CHICAGO. Make no mistake: THE WIND is a film that's easy to love but difficult to like. Its melodrama is predictable and frequently uninvolving. The (plentiful) hick comic relief represents an incongruous lapse of judgment. THE WIND is a monument in spite of itself--not a work of pure form, but an intemperate physical artifact, an unyielding ruin. It demands a deranged commitment equal to Lillian Gish's own. Her performance is a masterwork of subtlety, literally on the verge of being blown off screen at any moment. Sjöström's skill in teasing out the natural emotional valence of a landscape reaches a peak here, though you might even find yourself rooting for the dust. (It's certainly difficult to name another Hollywood film from the era that registers such a gangly, irredeemable sketch of American incivility.) Building upon and amplifying the desert despair of GREED and WHITE GOLD, THE WIND plays like a terminal work of silent cinema, a final oasis before a thousand miles of sand. Preceded by the 1920 S&E Enterprises short COWBOY JAZZ (1920, 7 min). With live organ accompaniment by Dennis Scott. (1928, 95 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]

Joe Dante’s LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION (US) and Jean-Luc Godard’s KEEP YOUR RIGHT UP (France/Switzerland)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

At the height of a madcap chase through the Warner Bros. backlot that occurs in Joe Dante’s LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION (2003, 91 min, 35mm), Daffy Duck inadvertently crashes the set of the new Batman movie and sets off a huge accident. A quick cut from Daffy reveals the exasperated director of the production to be none other than exploitation cinema legend Roger Corman, evidently playing himself. (“This is going to cost us a lot of money,” Corman can be heard lamenting, which is how you know it’s him.) This throwaway gag is in keeping with the rapid, self-referential humor that the classic Looney Tunes pioneered; it’s also a touching homage from Dante, who came up in Hollywood in the 1970s under Corman’s patronage. BACK IN ACTION is full of moments like this, making it the rare studio IP revival that’s also a deeply personal piece of auteur cinema. Dante’s filmmaking sensibility was clearly inspired by the Looney Tunes of the 1930s through ‘60s, making BACK IN ACTION, on one level, a dive to his deepest creative roots. Perhaps it was too personal for its own good—the film was a commercial flop, and Dante, tragically, hasn’t directed another high-profile feature since. Yet it offers more than enough incidental pleasures to satisfy fans of Warner cartoons and cinema in general. Dante’s winning visual humor—which, in venerable Looney Tunes tradition, scatters funny ideas all around the frames—speaks to the plasticity of the medium, while his movie in-jokes reflect a cinephile’s giddiness at exploring film history. In this regard, Dante has a lot in common with Jean-Luc Godard, who, as a film critic, wrote adoringly of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis and who continued to pay tribute to these artists in his own work as a filmmaker. The minor feature KEEP YOUR RIGHT UP (1987, 81 min, 35mm) finds Godard at his most cartoonish, trading in broad caricatures and even slapstick. (One extended sequence set on an airplane is a tribute to Lewis’ 1983 feature CRACKING UP.) Playing a ridiculous caricature of himself, Godard stars as a doltish filmmaker who encounters a series of complications when tries to deliver a print of his latest movie to its premiere. That’s about it in terms of plot; like numerous features by Tashlin and Lewis, KEEP YOUR RIGHT UP proceeds in terms of gags rather than events. Occasionally Godard cuts away from the principal action to present documentary scenes of a French rock group called Rita Mitsouko as they work on tracks in the studio, possibly an allusion to scenes from his own Rolling Stones documentary SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL (1968). These moments serve as reminders of the palpable joys and frustrations that come with any creative process; in their legibility, they provide a foil to the obscurity of some of Godard’s other ideas here. KEEP YOUR RIGHT UP premiered the same year as the filmmaker’s KING LEAR, and it continues that movie’s lighthearted, energetic vibe. LEAR argued that artists can choose to stop making sense in order to resist commodification by their corporate overseers; it’s plausible that the nonsense of KEEP YOUR RIGHT UP carries a similar message. Screening as part of the Highs & Lows series. [Ben Sachs]

Mitchell Leisen’s TAKE A LETTER, DARLING (US)

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

One reason for the enduring appeal of many Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and early 1940s is that their sexual politics were often ahead of their time. Consider the visions of gender equality proffered by the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, the gender fluidity of George Cukor’s SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935), the evenly matched battles of the sexes in Gregory La Cava’s MY MAN GODFREY (1936) and Cukor’s THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940), and, of course, Howard Hawks’ decision to make Hildy Johnson a woman and transform The Front Page into HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940). TAKE A LETTER, DARLING is a lesser-known film from this cycle; the title and premise all but promise cheap caricatures, but it’s surprisingly nuanced, even at times subdued. Fred MacMurray stars as an idealistic painter who looks for work as a secretary when he runs out of money; Rosalind Russell, playing a variation on her role as Hildy Johnson, is the the hard-charging advertising executive who hires him after she fires four other private secretaries (all men) in short succession. Naturally, opposites attract and the two fall in love, but in a reversal of rom-com convention, it’s him who teaches her to put business aside and enjoy life more. Mitchell Leisen (a Chicago Film Society favorite) got his start in production and costume design and worked his way up to directing, much like Vincente Minnelli; like him, Leisen brought to his work in both comedy and melodrama a refined sense of characterization, resulting in a more varied emotional palette than one often finds in these genres. His long-take approach to comedy may not be on the level of Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges (both of whom Leisen worked with before they started directing their own scripts), but there are times in TAKE A LETTER, DARLING when it comes pretty close. Preceded by the 1954 Encyclopedia Britannica Films short GETTING A JOB (16 min, 16mm). (1942, 92 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Tobe Hooper’s THE FUNHOUSE (US)

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

Tobe Hooper is a favorite among us here at Cine-File—check out the episode of our podcast all about the director’s oeuvre. While it’s hard to argue that THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is anything short of revolutionary, Hooper's later work hasn’t had the same wider cultural reappraisal as someone like fellow horror icon John Carpenter. There are, however, many standouts to be found, including THE FUNHOUSE, a monster/slasher movie from 1981. Teen Amy (Elizabeth Berridge, a standout slasher lead) is excited for a night out with her new boyfriend, Buzz (Cooper Huckabee), and her two friends Liz and Ritchie (Largo Woodruff and Miles Chapin). Headed to a dodgy traveling carnival in their small town Iowa community, the group is treated to all kinds of oddities and sleaze; despite the evident unease, they still decide it would be a hoot to secretly spend the night in the carnival’s dark funhouse ride. The night of mischief turns deadly when they are forced to reckon with the carnival’s more dangerous inhabitants. THE FUNHOUSE grapples with Hooper’s most distinct themes, particularly the underbelly of late-20th century America; this is seen most prominently in the subplot about Amy’s younger brother (Shawn Caron) running away to spend time at the carnival on his own, witnessing the horrors from afar. Hooper dexterously expresses a sense of dark magic and danger in confined spaces of American culture, mixed with a classic sense of cinematic horror. But the griminess of the overarching themes is steadied by Hooper’s visuality. From the opening credits featuring animatronic figures in motion, THE FUNHOUSE is a wonder to look at, with the bright, saturated jewel-toned colors of the carnival contrasting the horrors within. For those who haven’t seen THE FUNHOUSE, it’s a ride worth taking. Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series, “Programmers’ Picks.” (1981, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Bill Duke's THE KILLING FLOOR (US)

Goethe-Institut at the Packingtown Museum (1400 W. 46th St.) – Saturday, 7pm

A rare American labor union drama centered on Black experience, THE KILLING FLOOR is a minor miracle of narrative history, succeeding as drama, as pedagogy, and as a model of independent, inclusive, collaborative, local, unionized filmmaking. Shot in Chicago in 1983 for PBS’s American Playhouse series—an indispensable platform for some of the best independent filmmaking of the era, and a haven for voices and stories far outside the Reagan-era mainstream—THE KILLING FLOOR tells the story of Frank Custer (Damien Leake), a Black sharecropper who travels north to work in a stockyard during World War I. Eager to improve his wages and to reunite his family in the “Promised Land” of Chicago’s flourishing south side, Custer defies the ridicule of fellow Black workers to join a scrappy, mostly-white labor union. When the war ends and white veterans begin returning to the workforce (and to zealously segregated neighborhoods), racial tensions inside the union and out boil over, resulting in the violent 1919 riot that left dozens dead and displaced thousands of mostly Black residents. Producer and co-writer Elsa Rassbach, with a perspicacity uncommon today (let alone in the 1980s), found her way into this frayed historical knot through a footnote in William Tuttle’s book on the riot—a reference to a court record of a labor dispute between Custer and “Heavy” Williams (portrayed in the film by Moses Gunn), a Black stockyard worker whose vocal distrust of white unionists helped the packing company disrupt union organizing across racial lines. Thanks largely to director Bill Duke’s handling, what could have been a binary conflict between Williams’ pessimism and Custer’s idealism becomes remarkably nuanced—after all, Custer has justifiable misgivings of his own, and the film’s central dramatic question is whether his belief in the union can withstand the corrosive racism of its membership. Duke weighs Custer’s ambivalence through performance and point of view, as demonstrated in Frank’s first visit to the Union hall. Taking in the hectic air of jubilation and multilingual speechifying, Leake’s darting eyes register the white faces and powderkeg atmosphere with both wariness and enticement, his voiceover comparing the gathering to a Southern prayer meeting. In this sequence and throughout, THE KILLING FLOOR draws on familiar tropes and narrative conventions, but lends them a charge by introducing an alienated Black gaze to typically white spaces, pointedly validating the cultural knowledge that Black southerners bring as spectators to both the union hall and the historical drama. Celebrated dramatist Leslie Lee’s screenplay further makes virtues of archetypes and blunt expository dialogue; such immediacy is critical to the film’s educational economy, which captures the riot’s myriad underlying causes—the Great Migration, the First World War, the growth of organized labor, the European diasporas, and the centuries of exploitation and disenfranchisement of African Americans—in broad yet affecting strokes. But the film is also rich in detail and atmosphere, a quality starkly revealed in this new digital restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, making its international debut just in time for the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Chicago riots. The renewed digital clarity also exposes some rough edges, of course—that’s to be expected from an ambitious historical drama funded largely by labor unions and populated with volunteer extras (including many from the Harold Washington mayoral campaign). Seen today, that roughness reminds us that THE KILLING FLOOR wasn’t so much a product of its time as a renegade in it—and a treasure in ours. Screening as part of a day-long symposium called "The Future of Meat." With an introduction by Dominic Pacyga, Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia College Chicago. (1985, 118 min, Digital Projection) [Michael Metzger]

Things Stolen, Things Returned: Two Films about the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation (Canada/Documentaries)

South Side Projections at the Chicago Public Library (Richard J. Daley Branch, 3400 S. Halsted) – Thursday, 6pm

The Kwakwaka'wakw are an Indigenous group located on the coast of the Pacific Northwest; the most recent census figures from 2016 estimate the tribe’s current population to be around 3,600 people. In South Side Projections’ “Things Stolen, Things Returned” program, two relatively short films document discrete but no less significant trials faced by the Kwakwaka'wakw that, thankfully, reached somewhat happy conclusions. (‘Somewhat’ only because the fact that the trials occurred at all is lamentable.) Chuck Olin’s BOX OF TREASURES (1983, 28 min, Digital Projection) documents the history of the repatriation of objects connected to the potlatch ritual of the Kwakiut’l inhabitants of British Columbia. The ceremony, which the film details at length, was inexplicably banned, starting in 1885 and lasting until 1951; in 1921, Chief Dan Cranmer held an outlawed potlatch that resulted in the arrest of 45 people and the confiscation of sacred objects connected to it. Those items were placed in a museum, confined behind the sterility of glass.  Almost sixty years later, the Kwakiut’l negotiated to get back some of the items under the condition that they were still kept in a museum, which resulted in the opening of the U’mista Cultural Centre. There, the items were kept out in the open, adorning a large, square room as if awaiting use. Interviews with Kwakiut’l people punctuate the film, most significantly those with Deborah Cranmer Webster (presumably a relation of Dan Cranmer), curator of the center. Generally it’s the prevalence of first-hand accounts that make both films so illuminating; in Barbara Cranmer’s OUR VOICES, OUR STORIES (2015, 39 min, Digital Projection), several victims of the St. Michael’s Residential School share their horrifying experiences of the cursed place being demolished. There are no words an outsider such as myself can use to properly express the appallingness of the residential school system, in which Indigenous children were taken from their homes and forced into schools with hopes of their culture being forced out of them. Such places were established in 1929 as a response to the so-called “Indian problem” in Canada; St. Michael’s lasted until 1975. The documentary is affecting in its simplicity, stories of survivors in the wake of the school’s demolition composing its substance. Both are powerful precisely because of their extraordinary subjects⁠—not the terrible things that happened but the incredible people who not only survived but set out to thrive, against all odds, in part to help preserve their indomitable culture. [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Wang Bing's BITTER MONEY (China/Documentary)

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

In an enormously illuminating interview with Film Comment, Chinese director Wang Bing confessed that “the documentary form is the most viable way for [him] to make movies in China.” He elaborated: “By following people’s everyday life, I don’t have to look for actors and direct them, I don’t have to ask a lot of people to work together for me, and I don’t have to ask permission to anybody. The ways in which the Chinese film industry limits filmmakers become invalid for me, if I shoot inexpensive movies about the real life of the people with a small crew. That’s why I keep on making documentaries: I like genuine stories, and I like to feel free.” This response is perhaps a perfect metaphor for the elegant dichotomy of Wang’s films (e.g., CRUDE OIL, THREE SISTERS, ‘TIL MADNESS DO US PART and even his narrative feature, THE DITCH), which explore China’s knotty political landscape through a rough-hewn mode of filmmaking that merges concrete realism with a distinct authorial sensibility. The stories in BITTER MONEY are indeed genuine—perhaps uncomfortably so at points—and its expression free, baring the harsh realities of its subjects’ lives as well as those of documentary filmmaking itself. In the film, Wang’s camera—which he describes as “a very small photo camera... that has the video recording option”—follows, often aggressively, a group of workers who are traveling from the rural area of Yunnan province in China to the eastern city Huzhou for the purpose of finding employment. A scene that stands out is one in which a laborer laments the small sewing workshop she currently works in and expresses longing for a similarly backbreaking factory job—this emphasizes the inherently senseless cycle of poverty faced by those in China’s lower classes. The latter part of the film focuses on the involvement of some of the workers in pyramid schemes. There’s a strange acknowledgement of the accompanying duplicity, accentuating the indurate desperation caused by such brutal circumstances. This brutality shrinks from the ideological to the domestic—in one harrowing scene, several minutes in length, a man torments his wife, who goes back to their shop and refuses to be kicked out of what’s also rightfully hers. The man later tells a friend that their fighting had intensified after buying the store, a terrible excuse on a personal level but indicative of the role capitalism can play in private spheres. It also raises questions of the filmmaker’s responsibility during such instances. Wang has no qualms about his presence being known, be it his voice echoing off-screen or one of the subjects addressing him directly, but he doesn’t intervene during this scene. I won’t pretend to have answers, nor do I assign malicious intent to Wang’s passivity, but it’s disconcerting nonetheless, both in theory and practice. Stylistically speaking, however, Wang’s aesthetics are sensitive to their environment; shots are often striking because of the terrain, not in spite of it. The film has a truly tactile feel, as both subject and viewer are aware of the roving camera. Surprisingly, BITTER MONEY won the award for Best Screenplay at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, though it's obviously not scripted. Perhaps it’s not that reality is stranger than fiction, but that it's scarier, confronting us with an appreciable realization of a frequently abstracted concept. Screening as part of Doc’s Tuesday series, “After the 5th: China and the 21st Century.” (2016, 163 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s UTAMA (Bolivia)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Water has often been central to stories about the conflict between tradition and modernity: think Elia Kazan's WILD RIVER (1960) or Jia Zhang-ke’s STILL LIFE (2008). UTAMA puts a contemporary spin on this theme: here, the problem is not an excess of floodwater, but climate change leading to a desolate landscape that makes it impossible for Bolivians to live in the countryside. It’s set in a tiny village where an indigenous elderly couple, Virginio (José Calcina) and Sisa (Luisa Quispe), tend to their flock of llamas and gather water. However, their life turns increasingly arduous, as Sisa and her neighbors trek for miles to a completely dry well and a riverbed on the verge of evaporation. Viriginio shows signs of illness, developing a hacking cough and spells of forgetfulness. Their grandson Clever (Santos Chaque) arrives to convince them to move with him to the city. UTAMA won the World Dramatic Competition at Sundance last January, and in many respects it’s a typical example of the kind of world cinema they tend to show. It’s full of artfully crafted long shots of the desert, while the story favors the preservation of rural values and honoring elderly people. However, Loayza has a background in photography; working with cinematographer Barbara Alvarez (who shot THE HEADLESS WOMAN), he depicts rural Bolivia in surprisingly bright colors. The land itself has a real presence. The film is very quiet, using only a few songs on the soundtrack and containing little dialogue (which is spoken in both Spanish and Quechua.) But the actors, all non-professionals, make a convincing family, and Calcina breathes life into a stoic male archetype. (As austere as this film is, he could be a character in a 1950s Western.) UTAMA rests a great deal on his shoulders, as his character’s physical vulnerability is used to symbolize that of the earth itself. But while the film has larger ideas on its mind, it never forgets the family drama at its center. Spectators with elderly parents are likely to see their own tensions reflected in it. (2022, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Steve Erickson]

Shaunak Sen’s ALL THAT BREATHES (India/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

In New Delhi, brothers Mohammad and Nadeem have converted their apartment into a makeshift clinic for injured black kites. Rapid industrialization has not been kind to the birds, integral parts of New Delhi’s agrarian past that are now falling from the sky due to the city’s notoriously bad air pollution. ALL THAT BREATHES is not strictly about the kites any more than it’s about rats, insects, or cows; as one quickly gleans from the title, the film is a more generous portrait of ecological interconnectedness, or as one brother puts it, our shared “community of air.” As such, Sen attunes us to the multitude of life teeming in New Delhi’s dirt, trees, skies, and urban areas, his camera and precise sound design homing in on the creatures we take for granted as our neighbors. Yet one species always remains unavoidably present: humans. As Mohammad and Nadeem carry out their work, Sen emphasizes the not-always apparent ways people have shaped and reconfigured the environment, and how other lifeforms have been forced to adapt to an increasingly deformed world. The director and his three cinematographers create numerous arresting images conveying that strange coexistence, from a millipede swimming through a puddle on some discarded commercial signage in the woods—an airplane reflected in the water—to a snail creeping past a street riot. Through television and audio clips, Sen highlights the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in India, rendering Muslims Mohammad and Nadeem as threatened as the kites they rescue. It’s a potent metaphor that also suggests how the existences of living things are bound up together, and that politics inform our environmental and social ecologies in materially irreducible ways. ALL THAT BREATHES eschews the kind of didactic messaging found in so many “issue”-focused documentaries. Instead, it provides a poetic, sensuous, and contemplative experience that’s sobering without being resigned, rooted in a human(e) perspective that centers our accountability as stewards of Earth and extends well beyond us. (2022, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Charlotte Wells’ AFTERSUN (UK/US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

There’s something about the quality of DV home-movie footage that feels particularly, singularly fragile. Maybe it’s the tendency of the image to pixelate at relatively slight movements, or the fact that the format now exists in hindsight as a consumer video relic that experienced only the briefest of heydays before being usurped by HD and smartphones. Whatever the case, writer-director Charlotte Wells employs DV to poignant effect in her debut feature. The film opens in the low-resolution format, presented as video taken by 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) of her father Calum (Paul Mescal). The pair, whom we soon learn are sharing a motel room near a resort in Turkey, are spending one last summer vacation together before Sophie heads back to live with her divorced mother in Scotland. Wells will return to the girl’s video diaries throughout, although it takes one a while to situate them in time: are they sweet documents of the present or fragmented representations of the past? What’s the difference? Such temporal indeterminacy gradually reveals itself to be central to the meaning and effects of the film, which regards memory as always a hazy refraction of the then, now, and never-quite-was, an equation that, as it so happens, finds expression in the ontology of moving images. Not unlike the work of Wells’s compatriot Lynne Ramsay, AFTERSUN comes at its characters and events from oblique angles that delay or preclude our apprehension. In visual terms, this sometimes manifests as a darkness in which figures are barely or fleetingly perceptible; at other moments, Wells composes shots using various reflective surfaces, such as when we see Sophie’s live video playing on a tube television in front of a mirror, the source of the action never glimpsed directly, just as Calum’s unspoken inner turmoil remains elusive to Sophie. Based on Wells’ relationship with her own father, who passed away when she was an adolescent, AFTERSUN both diegetically depicts the splintered, wistful process of remembrance and evokes it through a nonlinear, diaphanous formal construction. During the climax, an outsize emotional crescendo set to “Under Pressure,” the film snaps into focus as a kind of spiritual bridge from daughter to father, through which their “last dance” leaves a perpetually echoing afterimage. (2022, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

George Cukor's THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (US)

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

A quintessential example of what Stanley Cavell has termed the "comedy of remarriage," THE PHILADELPHIA STORY challenged the restrictions of the Hays Code by suggesting the possibility of polyamorous love. The narrative follows the formulaic trajectory of the genre from divorce to inevitable reunion, but the film's genius lies in its subliminal remarks on censorship via Cukor's use of off-screen space, as the characters take turns spying and eavesdropping on one another. Due to the static, two-dimensional nature of his compositions, environments often feel enclosed to both the characters (and by extension the viewers) when they're actually vulnerable to spectatorship, blurring the lines between private/public space. Though Cukor uses camera movement sparingly, he does so to great effect, providing his scenes with a humorous or startling punctuation mark; characters are constantly hiding behind columns, hovering discreetly in corners, or peeking through windows. This pattern of constant surveillance provides an amusing endnote for the film's finale when an unknown photographer snaps a photo of the wedding. The violation of the private (i.e. monogamous) sphere is emblematic of the paranoia that would later become a hallmark of 1940s film noir, but also parallels Cukor's sidestepping of uptight MPAA provisions. These themes can be situated within the broader context of marriage plot literature that deals with issues of physical and psychological boundaries in an aristocratic milieu, such and Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, as well as theoretical works like Foucault's writings on panopticism and Gaston Bachlelard's The Poetics of Space. Screening as part of Doc’s Monday series, “Wonderfully Loathsome: Screwball Romance Through the Ages.” (1940, 112 min, 35mm Digital Projection) [Harrison Sherrod]

Jacques Rivette's LA BELLE NOISEUSE (France)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 5pm

In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1977 collection of interviews and texts by Jacques Rivette, he points out in the introduction that one of the main interests of Rivette’s work is “to combine prefigured elements with relatively unpredictable and uncontrolled ones, and see what occurs. This invariably places the work in a state of perpetual suspense (and suspension) where the spectator’s uncertainties are not at all unrelated to those of the director.” There is an overarching tendency to move towards the inherent mysteriousness found in his films, but how much of that mystery is meant to create meaning and how much is meant to dispel meaning? The director’s undying thirst for capturing the process of his production, rather than solely valuing the end result, is what gives his films an aura of unpredictability. LA BELLE NOISEUSE, his first film of the 1990’s, is fully engaged with the idea of process and creation, casting eyes on two different generations of artist, while mixing elements of melodrama that fold-in on themselves and create clusters of difference at odds with their usual results. The plot deals with a young artist (David Bursztein) and his wife (Emmanuelle Béart) who go to meet an older artist (Michel Piccoli) and his wife (Jane Birken), after their shared agent (Gilles Arbona) sets up the meeting. Upon arrival, the young artist’s wife senses danger approaching, as they journey from the airy exterior of the country, to the hermetic interior of the older artist’s studio. It is here where the older artist and agent suggest that the younger artist should have his wife pose nude for the older artist, so the impotence of the older generation can find its stamina again in the young. The painting being conceived by Piccoli’s character is a work he gave up ten years ago, with the creation of the work going in a direction he’d never planned, leading to its own abandonment, much like the director’s own earlier unfinished film tetralogy (of which he only made two). As in all of Rivette’s work, a conspiracy may be in the midst. Why is this young couple even here in the first place? At the start of the film, the younger couple plays a game of false identities, harkening back to the actresses that made up the director’s 1970’s work, suggesting a mirrored effect between the older and younger couple. The young artist eventually, possibly reluctantly, tells the older artist that his wife will pose for his painting, without any consent from her (in a subplot that unapologetically calls back to Piccoli’s own character in Godard’s 1963 film CONTEMPT, which deals with the dissolution of a very similar marriage). Béart’s character angrily resents her husband, but decides to take it upon herself to go through with the modeling, engaging her own ideas and plans for what is to take place. The film simultaneously shifts the balance of power between artist and model, resulting in a very unexpected series of choices and consequences too ethereal to be anything like the melodrama we’re expecting to ensue. Parts of LA BELLE NOISEUSE recall a similar film from that same year by Godard, the masterful NOUVELLE VAGUE. Both films deal with doubles, art vs. industry, older & younger generations, ambiguous source materials, the beauty and overwhelming magnificence of nature, plus a shared reverence for those magical years of bursting creativity the two filmmakers once shared together; the dawning and subsequent twilight of that most adored of cinematic eras, the French New Wave. Yet neither film is ensconced in nostalgia the way films like Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE DREAMERS or Michel Hazanavicius’ mind-numbingly dull REDOUBTABLE are; they operate on a sea of memory loss, where the realities of a bygone era fade into the ether of the modern, their work taking new shapes and directions, while staying on the same path they set out on from the start. They hum with decades of film consumption, synthesizing their lessons and influences into work that still remains light-years ahead of all the generations that have followed. LA BELLE NOISEUSE is but one step towards a hive of creativity so alive, it could require full regression for the uninitiated, back to that blank slate where premature and interchangeable ideas about the cinema are first imprinted. To engage with what is so uniquely and seductively Rivette’s own realm of supernatural cinema, is to float into the unknown and find a surprisingly familiar world embedded in the buzzing cosmos of its hypnotic images and sounds. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “Jacques Rivette, New Wave Master.” (1991, 237 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

Bi Gan's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (China)

Doc Films at the Films Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.) – Saturday, 7pm

When Luo Hongwa (Huang Jue) sits down in a movie theater and puts on a pair of 3D glasses about 70 minutes into LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, finally triggering the title card, you know you’re in for a ride. Of course, this is already the expectation for those coming to Bi Gan’s sophomore feature aware of its buzzy 60-minute unbroken traveling shot, but it’s at this precise, narratively and phenomenologically pivotal moment that the spectator feels the real stirrings of anticipation. It’s a leveling up, an invitation to cross the threshold from the film’s splintered and largely static first section to its oneiric second, a transition that entails not only an aesthetic movement into the more immersive, tactile realm of 3D but also a somatic movement on the part of the audience. As we put on our glasses, mimicking Luo, we immure ourselves yet further into the darkened space of the theater, and by extension into his/our mental space, entering a point of no return. The ensuing long take is a virtuosic (and perhaps inevitably self-regarding) marvel of choreography, less impressive for the post-converted 3D than for its astonishing logistical feat, as the camera wends its way from a mineshaft down and through a neon-lit village, changes between character vectors, and at one point lifts off into the night sky in an edit-less switch from third- to first-person perspective. Bi Gan, who came out of the gate already rigorously exploring the capabilities of the long take with his debut KAILI BLUES, here deepens his structuralist preoccupation with onscreen time in a cyclical narrative that assumes the shape of an unending lucid dream. The moment in the theater effectively cleaves the film into two parts, although the chronology of said parts is compellingly unfixed. In the first part, Luo has returned to his hometown of Kaili following the death of his father. He is haunted by two other disappearances: that of his friend, Wildcat (Lee Hong-chi), who was killed by the gangster Zuo Hongyan (Chen Yongzhong), and most pertinently that of Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), Zuo’s kept woman and Lou’s former flame. Luo searches for Wan as he remembers their summer together, yearning after her and everything else that has been lost in the crumbling Kaili. Although this section takes place in ostensible waking reality, its scrambled timeline and frequently surreal imagery, accompanied by self-reflexive comments from Luo and Wan about the relations between movies, memories, and dreams, place it somewhere far more liminal. By the time the second part comes along, cleverly reworking the elements of the first in ways both more dreamlike and more tangible, it’s not clear if either section should be considered “real.” Like many of his noted long take forebears and influential contemporaries—Tarkovsky, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang among them—Bi is interested in how film manipulates time and reorients subjectivity, how it can induce perceptual states that challenge our naturalized temporal regimes. Bi may still need some work finding his own voice outside the shadows of those giants (a glass slowly trembling off the edge of a table and a four-minute shot of a man tearily eating an apple are especially explicit nods to two of them), but his prodigious formal invention is a gift to anyone excited by the aesthetic and technological possibilities of this ever-evolving art form. Screening off-cadence as part of Doc’s Tuesday series, “After the 5th: China and the 21st Century.” (2018, 140 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Masaaki Yuasa’s THE NIGHT IS SHORT, WALK ON GIRL (Japan/Animation)

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

The animated rom-com THE NIGHT IS SHORT, WALK ON GIRL hits many of the marks familiar in Masaaki Yuasa’s work: infatuated men bordering on pathetic, complexly interwoven threads of fate, musical sequences, and an idiosyncratic narrative logic that feels like a flow of (un)consciousness. Yet the film feels just as fresh, funny, and inspiring as any of his other masterworks. Our story is really hard to pin down; as our title suggests, a girl has a short night out and makes the most out of it, either by her own determination or merely by chance. We meet an amusing cast of characters, including an unnamed young man desperately chasing after the main character (as he attempts to turn their “coincidental” encounters into fate itself) and Don Underwear, a man who refuses to change his underwear until he can track down the lost love of his life. Yuasa takes us along for the ride as he lays out charming, seemingly random encounters that eventually come full circle to impact at least one other person. This motif in Masaaki’s work is a force that battles against the characters' self-loathing. Every action creates a butterfly effect that binds lives together irrevocably. This allows the characters to find a certain serenity, even if they don’t act on it for good, like our protagonist does in her short, yet grand night. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday II series, “Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales: A Brief History of Animation.” (2017, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

S.S. Rajamouli's RRR (India)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 2pm

వావ్! వావ్! వావ్! If you can read that, chances are you’ve already been eagerly awaiting the theatrical opening of RRR, the latest extravaganza from Telugan director S. S. Rajamouli. If you can’t, you’d better grab a ticket before the Indians who are already hip to this smash hit buy them out. This is a rare chance to see a genuine, large-scale, first-run movie event complete with built-in intermission on the big screen—not that you’ll want to take time out to visit the bathroom or concession stand. RRR is such an exciting, eye-popping, entertaining film that its 183 minutes fly by, leaving you wanting more. RRR is a product of India’s “Tollywood” film industry, centered in Hyderabad, Telangana, which has replaced Mumbia-based Bollywood as the largest center of Indian filmmaking in terms of box office. Director S. S. Rajamouli, Tollywood’s most successful director, trafficks in fantasy, Indian mythology, and period pieces. He brings all three to bear in RRR as he imagines what would happen if two of India’s real-life revolutionaries, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju, met in the late Raj period of the 1920s and forged a friendship. The film begins in a Gond tribal village, where a middle-age British woman (Allison Doody) is being sung to by a girl (Twinkle Sharma) who is applying a henna design to her hand. Well pleased with the song and design, the woman, who is the wife of the British governor (Ray Stevenson), abducts the girl to serve her at the palatial mansion where she lives. The scene ends in an act of brutal violence against the girl’s mother. Bheem (Jr NTR) is dispatched to find and return her to the village. Raju (Ram Charan), also called Ram, is a member of the British police who we first meet superhumanly capturing an Indian who has smashed a picture of King George VI during a protest of hundreds of Indians at colonial headquarters. Ram and Bheem, the latter disguised as a Muslim, meet as they work together to save a boy from a burning train that has fallen off a trestle into the river below (only one of about a dozen spectacular action sequences in RRR) and become the best of friends. Even as the film shows the joy of their burgeoning bromance, the boldly rhythmic song “Dosti” foretells trouble ahead. Ram has been charged with arresting the man sent to rescue the girl, with a crucial promotion promised to him if he succeeds. When Bheem’s identity is revealed, life will become hell on earth for both of them. The energy and imagination that Rajamouli has infused in this politically charged action-adventure is truly mind-blowing. For example, a sequence in which Bheem and those abetting his mission go into the forest to capture a (CGI) wolf is scary, exciting, and rather touching, as Bheem thanks his captive animal for his help with a scheme he has dreamed up; the payoff is too crazy-good to spoil here. While the film is not wall-to-wall music and dancing, it contains an excellent score by M.M. Keeravani I’d love to have in my CD collection and choreography by Senthil Kumar that tips a hat to Bollywood, as well as Busby Berkeley. The joyous “Naatu Naatu,” a dance number in which the friends show up the snooty Englishmen at a garden party, is a particular standout, but the somber “Komuram Bheemudo,” meant as a paean to courage and inspiration occurs during a grisly torture sequence. RRR is extremely violent and bloody, but by creating Bheem and Ram more as mythological gods than real men (Ram actually finishes the film dressed as the god Rama), the film bathes its violence in fantasy. As usual in Indian films about the Raj years, the British are heartless, sadistic bigots whose comeuppance we can’t wait to see; their end in RRR is a cataclysm on a par with the destruction of the White House in INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996). Ram Charan and especially Jr NTR are charismatic and a pleasure to spend three hours with, and the film ensures that the real men behind the ones they play are not forgotten, as their basic actions accord with real events, and Bheem’s slogan, “Water, Forest, Land,” is reiterated in the film. The final credits roll during a charming song and dance featuring images of other champions of Indian independence, including Sardar Vallabhai Patel, a prominent figure in the Indian freedom struggle who became India’s first deputy prime minister and home minister; Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh; and Tangutoori Prakasham Pantulu, an Indian jurist, political leader, social reformer, and anticolonial nationalist who served as the chief minister during the Madras presidency. This multilingual pan-Indian spectacular is a great way to kickstart your summer. Preceded by a post-screening Q&A with the director. Note: This screening is currently sold out. (2022, 183 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Park Chan-wook’s THE HANDMAIDEN (South Korea)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

Widely known for his Revenge Trilogy, which includes the seminal OLDBOY, Chan-wook Park’s films have frequently employed the use of retribution. His latest work, although less violent than some of his previous outings, finds the Korean director swimming in familiar waters. In THE HANDMAIDEN, a swindler is hired by a Japanese heiress (set to inherit an exorbitant amount of priceless books) to be her handmaiden; but she is secretly planning to steal her employer’s fortune by having the heiress committed to an insane asylum through the help of her partner, who plans to marry her. The film is divided into three parts, with each part building upon the previous as new twists and wrinkles are exposed through perspective shifts. The resulting web is complex and mischievous. The love story is equal parts passionate and perverted. Love of all kinds is explored and Park does not shy away from sensual moments. From gorgeous cherry blossom trees to rolling fog over a river, the cinematography captures everything in a large depth of field. This added clarity helps to show off what's at stake (such as the heiress's gigantic estate) as well as to provide the audience with more screen real estate in which to catch clues. THE HANDMAIDEN finds Park in peak creative form thanks to its captivating source material, dynamic cast, and beautiful undertones. Screening as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. (2016, 144 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Colin Higgins' 9 TO 5 (US)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9:45pm

Despite the fact that the feminist office satire 9 TO 5 is almost turning 40, this film feels depressingly current in its assertion that women deserve an equitable, harassment-free workplace in America. The story follows three women in an office who, through a series of mix-ups and shenanigans, including one hysterically funny scene in a hospital, kidnap their horrible male boss, holding him prisoner in his home for several weeks. While he is under house arrest, they enact a series of changes that make the workplace both more equitable and productive (flexible schedules, free daycare, etc.), attracting praise from the head of the company. Jane Fonda commissioned writer Patricia Reznick to write the screenplay for 9 TO 5 through Fonda's production company, IPC Films, which she founded to produce socially conscious and impactful films. After producing and starring in THE CHINA SYNDROME (1979), a successful drama about a cover-up at a nuclear power plant, Fonda switched gears with 9 TO 5, addressing feminist concerns following the women's liberation movement and heading into the stifling Reagan era, but doing so with a broad, silly satire to make the feminism a little more palatable to the masses. Screenwriter Reznick had originally drafted a much darker comedy, according to a 2015 interview in Rolling Stone, inspired by Charlie Chaplin's black comedy MONSIEUR VERDOUX, but Fonda and other producers worried the material was too dark to succeed at the box office. Colin Higgins, a gay filmmaker who wrote HAROLD AND MAUDE and produced the popular comedy FOUL PLAY (1976), was brought in to re-write the script and direct. Though Reznick, who wrote the treatment for Altman's 3 WOMEN (1977) and wrote the screenplay for A WEDDING (1979)—one of my favorite Altman films—was heartbroken that the screenplay was re-written, much of her original intent, including having the film star Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton in her screen debut, remained intact. The result of the rewrite and Higgins' love of the broad slapstick of Warner Brothers cartoons is the version of 9 TO 5 that became one of the highest grossing and enduring comedy films of all time. Lily Tomlin as office manager Violet Newstead smirks and rolls her eyes through endlessly frustrating office experiences, hindered by chauvinistic and incompetent men at every turn, bringing her wry timing and loose, cartoonish physicality to bear in each scene. Jane Fonda plays a trembling, hesitant woman going through a divorce and entering the workforce for the first time, recalling the persona of some of her flightier pre-feminist comedic roles in BAREFOOT IN THE PARK (1967) and BARBARELLA (1968), but updating that persona with modern-day feminist empowerment. Dolly Parton plays Doralee Rhodes, the sunny and cheerful secretary to the horrible male boss who is shunned by all the female staff as they assume she is sleeping with him, though she staunchly avoids his sexual harassment with as much southern kindness and euphemism as she can muster. Both the plot and characters of 9 TO 5 are absurd and cartoonish, and recall the silly exploits and machinations of classic screwball comedies, though the boss, Franklin Hart (played by Dabney Coleman), engenders much less sympathy than a surly Spencer Tracy or sneaky sideways-glancing Cary Grant. Coleman plays a deliciously repulsive villain whose structural faults are sadly still present today, if more subtly practiced. Parton charmed viewers both with the title track "9 to 5" over the opening credits and with her delightful persona and winking-yet-wholesome comedic style. Presented by Ramona Slick and Rated Q - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema. Enjoy pre-show drinks and a DJ set in the Music Box Lounge at 9pm. (1980, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

Hong Sang-soo’s THE NOVELIST'S FILM (South Korea)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Another year, another couple Hong Sang-soo features. THE NOVELIST'S FILM, the first of two movies Hong released in 2022 (followed by WALK UP), is also the third of his films to win a Silver Bear at the Berlinale in the past three years. In spite of the recent acclaim (or perhaps even because of it), Hong's extreme prolificity can make it easy to take each of his new features for granted. Given the similarities between so many of his movies in terms of form and content, it can also be easy to overlook what he might be doing that's new each time out. THE NOVELIST'S FILM is a witty black-and-white drama that centers on a veteran novelist, Jun-hee, who attempts to overcome writer's block by making her first short film. This continues Hong's recent trends of focusing on female characters and offering a substantial lead role to an older actress (the star is Lee Hye-young, who also played the lead in Hong's previous feature, IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE), a welcome development in his work. What's most fascinating about THE NOVELIST'S FILM, though, is the way that Hong investigates the creative process by focusing on the role that chance encounters can play in sparking artistic inspiration—and by daringly keeping the actual production of the film-within-the-film offscreen. Most of the running time is spent following Jun-hee over the course of a single day as she first meets an old acquaintance who runs a book shop, then a film director who once expressed interest in adapting one of her novels (but ultimately failed to do so) and, finally, a popular actress in semi-retirement named Kil-soo (the inevitable Kim Min-hee) with whom she shares a mutual admiration. The ending jumps ahead several months to a scene outside of a screening room where a private viewing of Jun-hee's short is being held. Although the film itself is never glimpsed, Hong provides a mysterious documentary-like coda featuring Kil-soo arranging a bouquet of flowers with another actress in a public park that seems intended to "stand in" for Jun-hee's footage. This sequence—which is partially shot in color and resembles the controversial coda to Abbas Kiarostami's TASTE OF CHERRY (1997)—is the key to THE NOVELIST'S FILM, as it contains a moment where Hong himself can be heard offscreen telling Kim, his real-life paramour, that he loves her. It's a breathtaking scene that dissolves the line between documentary and fiction and asks us to reconsider the entire project along more highly personal (perhaps even autobiographical) lines. (2022, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Amanda Kramer's PLEASE BABY PLEASE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, Midnight

Amanda Kramer’s PLEASE BABY PLEASE presents a surreally playful examination of power dynamics and gender roles; the extreme stylization of the film—an imagined version of 1950s New York—allows for characters to discuss and play out sexual fantasies in a fabricated, fictional space. Deep conversations about the roles of men and women and their relationships are surrounded by visual mischievousness: neon lighting, wipe edits, and theatrically staged sets create a sense of ease in its clear construction. PLEASE BABY PLEASE takes its themes seriously by presenting them in a setting out of time where they are completely unencumbered. While returning home to their apartment building, beatnik couple Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough) witness a vicious murder committed by a street gang, the Young Gents. Both are deeply affected; brooding Arthur is instantaneously attracted to the gang’s leader, Teddy (Karl Glusman), in his leather and mesh get-up complete with Brando-style cap, while Suze is concurrently troubled and titillated by the demonstration of masculine violence. Encouraged by an encounter with their femme fatale upstairs neighbor, Maureen (Demi Moore), Suze begins to explore her own S&M fantasies while Arthur struggles to come to terms with his masculinity. A WEST SIDE STORY-inspired musical number opens the film, and interludes continue throughout, marking shifts from scene to scene. PLEASE BABY PLEASE’s cast all commit to this earnest artifice, especially Riseborough as the catlike, curious Suze; a particular standout, as well, is comedian Cole Escola as Maureen’s friend, Billy. In its colorfully fun and mischievous vignettes, PLEASE BABY PLEASE is still a sincere scrutiny of strict cultural expectations and simultaneous celebration of the fluidity of gender and sexuality. (2022, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

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

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes (and screening format)

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 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 or 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]

🎞️ 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.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Zhang Yimou’s 2002 wuxia film HERO (99 min, DCP Digital) screens on Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the “Center Stage: The Films of Maggie Cheung” series.

Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 masterpiece STRANGE ILLUSION (87 min, 35mm) screens on Thursday, 7pm, as part of the Thursday I series, “Shakespeare Remixed.” More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
The 39th Chicago International Children’s Film Festival continues through Sunday, November 20. The festival includes a diverse array of short and feature-length films for children ages 2 through 25, with both in-person and virtual screenings. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Also screening as part of the Black Harvest Film Festival are: Gabriel Martins’ 2022 Brazilian feature MARS ONE (115 min, DCP Digital) on Friday, 4pm, and Saturday, 8:30pm; the shorts program ON THE BLOCK (Approx. 90 min, DCP Digital) on Friday, 6:30pm, and Sunday, 4pm; the shorts program FIGURES & GUARDIANS (Approx. 112 min, DCP Digital), on Saturday, 1pm; Martine Syms’ 2022 feature THE AFRICAN DESPERATE (100 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday, 6pm; Roger Ellis’ 2021 film of Nikki Lynette’s play GET OUT ALIVE (104 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday, 7pm; the shorts program CINE LADO A LADO (Approx. 103 min, DCP Digital) on Tuesday, 8:15pm; Dagmawi Adebve, Victor Alonso-Berbel and Roy Arwas’ 2021 feature VOODOO MACBETH (108 min, DCP Digital) on Wednesday, 5:30pm; Michael Schultz’s 1975 Chicago-shot classic COOLEY HIGH (107 min, 35mm) on Wednesday, 8pm; the shorts program SISTERS IN SCENE (Approx. 92 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday, 6pm; and Bhawin Suchak and Ira Mckinley’s 2022 documentary OUTTA THE MUCK (79 min, DCP Digital) on Thursday, 8:30pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Charlotte Wells’ 2022 British feature AFTERSUN (98 min, DCP Digital) opens this week.

Raja Gosnell’s 2002 film SCOOBY-DOO (86 min, 35mm) screens on Friday and Saturday at Midnight and Howard Hawks’ 1940 classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY (92 min, 35mm) screens on Sunday at 11:30am, both part of the Music Box Staff Picks! series.

Will Lovelace, Dylan Southern, and Andrew Cross’ 2022 music documentary MEET ME IN THE BATHROOM (105 min, DCP Digital) screens on Sunday at 8:30pm. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ South Side Home Movie Project
The South Side Home Movie project presents Home Movie Day at the Green Line Performing Arts Center (329 E. Garfield Blvd.) on Saturday from 1pm to 5pm. Families who recently joined the archive will share their home movies publicly for the first time. Attendees can also try out the new interactive community cataloging tools by adding their own tags and comments to the films, talk to an archivist on-site about preserving and donating family films, and sign up for a family portrait at a pop-up photo studio hosted by photographer Seed Lynn. The event also includes an all-vinyl set with DJ Raven Wright, new t-shirts and buttons, food and drink, all for free. More info 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: November 11 - November 17, 2022

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Cody Corrall, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Kalvin Henley, J.R. Jones, Gabe Klinger, Michael Glover Smith, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky