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📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Jonas Mekas 100! at the Gene Siskel Film Center
To celebrate the late Lithuanian-born filmmaker Jonas Mekas (who would have turned 100 this year), the Gene Siskel Film Center is screening eight of his films through December 11. Below are reviews of all films screening this week, save for his 1962 debut feature GUNS OF THE TREES (75 min, 35mm), which screens on Friday at 6pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with Mekas’ son, Sebastian Mekas, and a wine and “light bites” reception for all ticket holders. More info on the series here.
Jonas Mekas' THE BRIG (US/Experimental)
Saturday, 6pm
Jonas Mekas’ adaptation of Kenneth H. Brown's play The Brig is a painful but vital aesthetic experiment. Brown’s highly acclaimed work (it won three Obie awards) was based on his own experience of being sentenced to 30 days in a military prison in Japan while serving there as a marine in the 1950s. Intertitles show time passing over the course of one day in the one-room prison, but the film might as well be shot in a single take—whirlwinds of orders pass from the commanders to the prisoners, each one as angry as the last, setting a sustained tone of chaos adding the orders up to a flailing disorder. The roving camera, overlapping yelling, and rough audio mix make it hard to parse many of the specific orders and replies. The only constant is the percussive “SIR!” punctuating the soldiers’ panicked word salad. In lieu of individual characters, the audience identifies with the camera itself, trapped within the prison, free in its motion but searching each nook and cranny to find the same unceasing pain. Double lines mark the floor at the entrance to the prison’s central cage, providing yet another boundary for the soldiers. They’re forced to hop over this area each time they enter or exit the fenced area, signifying a sort of sacred quality to the boundary itself—even as each one passes it, they can never sully the imaginary line and thus never really leave. If THE BRIG has anything in common with conventional prison dramas, it smears out those qualities to a sort of ambient terror, treating both prison and the military itself as inescapable states of being. If it sounds like difficult viewing, that’s because it is. But it’s also an arguably perfect film in how it replicates the dehumanizing nature of these institutions so directly. There’s no narrative here, and Brown and Mekas don’t attempt to explore the humanity of the prisoners because the system has already stolen that from them, reducing them to cogs in a machine of subjugation. Exhausting even at a trim 68 minutes, it’s an evergreen and necessary work of concentrated anger. If you see one prison film, see this one. (1964, 68 min, 16mm) [Maxwell Courtright]
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Jonas Mekas' WALDEN (US/Experimental)
Sunday, 2pm
WALDEN is the first collection of film diaries by the legendary Jonas Mekas, shot and edited between Spring 1965 and Summer 1968. According to the Lithuanian filmmaker, poet, and founder of the Anthology Film Archives, the Film-Makers' Cooperative and Film Culture journal, most of this footage was not originally intended to be presented publicly, but was rather exercises he undertook to master the handheld 16mm Bolex camera, in order to capture images around him instantly so no moment would slip away unfilmed due of technical hesitation. Though the spontaneity of the filming often makes WALDEN feel like a home movie—which it essentially is—there is a palpable feeling of continual invention and discovery throughout. The only consistency in the style of shooting and editing is the joy of abandoning forethought for a passionate connection with the film and the people and events depicted, resulting in a gorgeous and occasionally intense piece of filmmaking. Featured in the film are: Gregory Markopoulos (preparing his film portraits), Carl Dreyer (as a subject for Mekas' portrait), the Brakhage family (in an excellent, long section), P. Adams Sitney, Tony Conrad, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, Peter Orlovsky, Tuli Kupferberg, and many, many others. (1969, 180 min, 16mm) [Josh B Mabe]
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Jonas Mekas’ REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA (UK/West Germany/Experimental)
Tuesday, 6pm
In one regard, Jonas Mekas’ film diaries seem to emerge directly from the director’s thoughts. Their sounds and images proceed much like memories do, in flashes of sensation that range from the epiphanic to the mundane and that have to accumulate before you can make sense of the perspective behind them. Cinema doesn’t get much more personal than this, not only because of Mekas’ nakedly autobiographical subject matter but because every jagged cut reflects his mercurial point of view. The second and longest section of REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA, titled “One Hundred Glimpses of Lithuania, August 1971,” epitomizes the filmmaker’s impressionistic approach; true to its title, it contains 100 short sequences that Mekas shot when he visited his native country for the first time since World War II. While there’s an immediacy and intimacy to the 16mm cinematography, the arrhythmic shot lengths constantly jar you from the action, make you hyperaware of how montage shapes your relationship to what you watch. Each shot or sequence becomes akin to a line of verse in that there’s meaning behind when every impression starts and stops; Mekas underscores the connection to poetry by numbering each “glimpse” in the second section as though it were a stanza in an epic poem. Also creating distance from the action is Mekas’ thoughtful narration, in which he reflects on the onscreen footage or experiences related to it. His words are generally bittersweet: Mekas rhapsodizes his homeland while acknowledging he can never truly return there. As the filmmaker explains in REMINISCENCES, he was interned at a German labor camp during the war and afterward became a displaced person and then an immigrant in New York. Early on in the film, Mekas admits that he’ll always consider himself a displaced person; the fragmented form assumes a certain poignancy in light of this revelation. (1972, 82 min, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Jonas Mekas' LOST, LOST, LOST (US/Experimental)
Wednesday, 6pm
Jonas Mekas' best-known film, the stunning, sprawling three-hour "diary" montage WALDEN (1969), is a collection of seasonally arranged reels from various locations in and around late-1960s New York, including observations at early Velvet Underground performances and respites at Stan Brakhage's house upstate; but these incidental avant-celebrity moments became irrelevant with respect to a greater work of historiographic meditation. Without being informed of the narrative pertinence of a particular Midtown winter's day, the viewer becomes that much more immersed in its preserved qualities, in the archaic textures and visual details that seem hopelessly lost in written histories—but which are revived in Mekas' cinephiliac romance with everyday life. His 1976 film LOST, LOST, LOST reflects, at a greater temporal distance (1949 to 1963), his personal experience as an Eastern European refugee (explored in the previous REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA). Here, his early documentations of 1950s working-class Williamsburg (which should be of utter fascination to anyone who has been there recently) and among the period's regional Lithuanian immigrant communities leads to new observations and encounters in an increasingly political early-'60s Greenwich Village. Historical artifacts in their own right for anyone interested in the domestic emergence of an artistic and cinematic counterculture, these films simultaneously function as unparalleled provocations of restrained contemplation. (1976, 180 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]
Frederick Wiseman x 2
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Frederick Wiseman’s HOSPITAL (US/Documentary)
Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm
While much of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary output comprises hours-long examinations of the institutions that make up American society, his earliest works often clock in at little more than an hour. Regardless of this relative brevity, he manages to make the most of each opportunity, using his signature fly-on-the-wall, 360-degree style. Over five weeks in 1969, Wiseman made his fourth film, HOSPITAL, for public television, for which he picked up two Primetime Emmys; these were the last major awards he ever earned for a specific film. His subject, Metropolitan Hospital Center, sits a few blocks west of the Harlem River between 97th and 99th streets. The hospital, then and now, draws its patients from New York City’s poor and immigrant populations and helps train students from New York Medical College, an arrangement that began in 1875. Wiseman takes us right into his subject (and I do mean “in”) by filming a patient being prepped and cut into by a team of surgeons, a procedure he will come back to from time to time to give us a good look at the patient’s expanding lungs and beating heart. In between, we watch medical students examine the atrophied brain of an alcoholic and a nurse gently coax an embarrassed Latino man into telling her about problems he suspects signal genital cancer. Throughout the film, Wisemans reveals sympathetic New York City cops who care in their own way for the people they bring to the hospital. They help get a patient to sit in a chair so that he can be restrained to prevent him from falling on the floor, ruminate with emergency medical technicians on the senselessness of driving a patient from one hospital to another, and escort a paranoid art student from the room where he was puking his guts out after an overdose of methedrine to the psychiatric ward. This patient, a young white Minnesotan, voices what many of the city’s immigrants and poor might be feeling, “It’s hard to make it alone in the city.” Our hearts go out to a woman who is likely watching her mother die following a heart attack, her anxiety coming out as belligerence, another ailment healthcare workers face routinely. Particularly poignant is a penniless, gay teen whose family kicked him out; the psychiatrist trying to get him emergency shelter placement is one of Wiseman’s caring souls trying to break through the impenetrable barrier of bureaucratic indifference. Wiseman said he expected to find worn-down, apathetic hospital workers churning vulnerable people through an institutional machine, but was pleasantly surprised by how caring and determined they were to do the best job possible for all of their charges. He ends HOSPITAL in a chapel, where a Spanish hymn acts as a buffer against the ceaseless motion of the city without. Preceded by Friz Freleng’s 1957 cartoon GREEDY FOR TWEETY (7 min, 16mm). (1970, 84 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Frederick Wiseman’s A COUPLE (France/US)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Frederick Wiseman turns to drama for the first time in 20 years, and though this hourlong portrait of Sophia Tolstoy, long-suffering wife of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, is destined to become a footnote in Wiseman’s brilliant career, it provides some interesting perspectives on his larger body of work. His lengthy documentaries are revered for their intensive studies of institutions and systems, and of people messily interacting; restricted here to French actor Nathalie Boutefeu in a variety of forest settings as she delivers a bitter monologue to her absent husband, Wiseman directs his penetrating gaze to the natural systems around her (boldly colorful flowers, rich spring foliage, epic cobwebs, mossy ponds). “Your power crushed my life and my personality as well,” Sophia tells the tyrannical Leo, and there’s a certain logic to Tolstoy, a writer of such metaphysical ambition, being played here by nature itself. Drawn from Sophia’s diaries, the monologue dissects the Tolstoys’ troubled marriage and family life, which centered Leo’s genius to the cruel detriment of his wife and children. Near the movie’s midpoint, Sophia gets so worked up about a fight with her husband that she grapples with a dead tree, snapping off branches; unfortunately, the tree doesn’t fight back, and in the film’s latter half, as Sophia begins to circle back on her discontents, Wiseman’s naturalistic conceit bears less fruit (so to speak). (2022, 63 min, DCP Digital) [J.R. Jones]
Joanna Hogg’s THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (US/UK)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
Joanna Hogg has described her latest film as being like a short story, and that feels appropriate. It comes after THE SOUVENIR (2019) and THE SOUVENIR: PART II (2021), which together comprise a miniature epic vis-à -vis an autobiographical coming-of-age narrative, so it follows that this abstract continuation of those stories is slighter. Slighter, but no less consequential; indeed, what the previous films conveyed about the beginning of a life lived is magnified in this haunting epode about the ending of one, and how those left behind must cope. Tilda Swinton (who also featured in the SOUVENIR films as the protagonist's mother, Rosalind) plays Julie, ostensibly a middle-aged version of the character from the preceding films played by her daughter. She also again plays Rosalind; the dual role was a bit jarring at first, but Hogg handles the conceit subtly, avoiding the shortfalls of gimmickry. (This is something that only artists like Hogg and Swinton can accomplish, with a stature of integrity and seriousness that would make their doing a stand-up comedy special a legitimate artistic endeavor.) The beginning of the film finds Julie and Rosalind traveling to a palatial hotel in the English countryside in celebration of the latter’s upcoming birthday; settled into their rooms (with little help from a sardonic receptionist played by Carly-Sophia Davies, who also appears as the waitress in the hotel restaurant where mother and daughter appear to alway be the only customers), it soon becomes apparent that Julie, still a filmmaker, is also there on a working holiday, starting to plan a film about herself and her mother. In tandem with Rosalind’s eventual revelations about her childhood experiences at the estate—the building had once been in her family, where her aunt took in relatives’ children to shelter them from bombings in London during World War II—Julie begins to hear strange noises and see strange things. The film soon turns into a rather restrained ghost story, with hints of a larger twist (an overstatement, maybe) that all is not as it seems. In keeping with Hogg’s preternatural talent and themes prevalent throughout her oeuvre, THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER is less about the hauntings of trauma and grief (as is the trend nowadays) and more about how it’s that which is not spoken that pervades us. Whether or not ghosts literally linger in the estate, they do so figuratively in the clipped, overly polite conversations between mother and daughter. The silences between conversations contain phantoms of inherent misunderstanding between the women, separated as they are by age and circumstance. The women’s reticence does not indicate a lack of affection—if anything, their love is all-consuming, just not fortified by the bond of honest communication. THE SOUVENIR explored a similar theme: can we ever really know another person? Is this a privilege that even the most privileged among us (considering the milieu of the characters in Hoggs’ films) are kept from experiencing? Perhaps it’s a truism that the only person we can ever really know is ourselves. How, then, do we make heads or tails of the inner lives of those we love? Maybe the ghost in the window isn’t just the spirit of a person lost, but of the person we never really found. Such considerations are evoked also through Hogg’s refined sense of pacing and rich visual sensibility, which lend credence to every aspect of her aesthetic, from the cinematography to the sets to the characters’ clothing. In sum, the film is an affecting genre turn as well as another entry in an indelibly auspicious oeuvre. (2022, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
Jacques Rivette’s JOAN THE MAID: THE PRISONS (France)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 5pm
One of the most enduring tales in Western civilization is that of Joan of Arc, the illiterate teenager from a small village in northeastern France who, in 1429, led a successful series of military campaigns to free French cities from English occupation, thus allowing the dauphin of France to travel safely to Reims to be crowned King Charles VII of France. Dubbed the Maid of Orléans for the first city she freed, Joan’s assaults on Paris and Compiégne were repelled, and she was captured and eventually burned at the stake as a heretic in 1431. Canonized in 1920, her story has inspired everything from works of art and literature to numerous screen adaptations—even an iconic TV series in its own right, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What has kept Joan a perennial favorite is not only the improbability of her quest and her dramatic, tragic end, but also the religious visions that propelled her into action and inspired the faith of seasoned soldiers and a would-be king to follow her lead. It seemed inevitable that French director Jacques Rivette, a man drawn to the theatrical and to stories about women, would undertake a telling of the life of this very French icon. His two-part, six-hour-long JOAN THE MAID: THE BATTLES (which screened a few weeks ago) and THE PRISONS (screening this Sunday) has received a long-awaited restoration and release by the Cohen Media Group, a huge improvement over the extant versions of the film, at least one of which cut two hours out of its running time. Rivette is a director given to patient presentation, with a reverence for the written word that shows up on screen in stagey sequences of conversation and exposition. A work like JOAN THE MAID may try the patience of some viewers, but it is precisely in the atmosphere engendered by sitting still and paying attention to the how of Joan’s story that the film is able to work its magic. Sandrine Bonnaire is an actor of unparalleled skill who can get inside the skin of characters as disparate as a homeless rebel, a middle-aged factory worker, and, yes, a saint in the making and suggest the deep waters beneath a mysterious or withdrawn façade. Rivette wants us to see Joan as a living, breathing person who laughs and feels pain, fear, and the righteous conviction of her beliefs that is characteristic of most teenagers. Bonnaire suggests somewhat imperfectly Joan’s youth primarily through her put-on swagger and her fearlessness in battle, but it is the older actor’s maturity that imbues Joan’s seriousness of purpose with the power to sway powerful men to her cause. This is not to say that we viewers are necessarily persuaded. It is not our country that is occupied by a hostile force, so we have no reason to want to believe her. In fact, once Joan sees Charles crowned, the culmination of the mission she has steadfastly heralded from the beginning of the film, we can see that she is at loose ends. Her visions no longer give her explicit instructions, and it seems likely that Joan may be just a girl who wants to live as a man. In the 15th century, invoking St. Catherine and St. Margaret may have been the only acceptable way for a transgender person to live out their true identity. On the other hand, when, as a prisoner of the English, Joan agrees to wear women’s clothing—a bargain she makes to avoid being burned—it’s pretty obvious to see the disadvantages of being a woman at the mercy of men in or out of prison. The battle sequences, a bit paltry due to budget constraints, offer an object lesson in the mechanics of siege warfare at a time when most cities were surrounded by walls. Joan watches from a high window as French and English soldiers taunt each other across a stream. They throw stones at each other, and eventually, several of the French soldiers chase the Englishmen away from the shore. This gives Joan the idea to force the English to retreat by attacking them from an island farther removed from their strongholds. Combat is personal. We see her troops use ladders to scale the city walls and engage in hand-to-hand combat. When a page is killed, Joan offers a sympathetic ear to her own distraught page. There is room in her heart for compassion, both for the occupied and the occupiers. JOAN THE MAID provides a grounded version of a story best known to many of us only in terms of her fiery martyrdom. Rivette’s humanizing chronicle brings Joan back to life without disturbing her religious mystery. Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “Jacques Rivette, New Wave Master.” (1994, 177 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Nina Menkes’ BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER (US/Documentary)
Facets Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes
When I first started writing film reviews in 2004, I did it for the love of the form, not because I was formally trained to do so. I had a lot to learn, but one thing I noticed right away was that I often didn’t see films the same way the majority of film reviewers saw them—and that seemed to have something to do with the fact that they were male and I was female. As I grew at my craft, I noticed that I also didn’t see films the way audiences saw them. This was made clearest to me when I panned the sexism of the 2013 film 1,000 TIMES GOOD NIGHT. Those who had seen it pointed out to me that the story of a female combat photographer couldn’t be sexist because the director, Erik Poppe, actually had been a combat photographer. This made absolutely no sense to me on its face, but it definitely revealed that the moviegoing public accept without question that a man’s experience is the default experience of all people. The knowledge that took me years of study and practice to acquire is now available to anyone who watches influential independent filmmaker and educator Nina Menke’s BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER. This documentary seeks to make visible the “you understood” of filmmaking—the male gaze—through film clips and interviews with female and nonbinary scholars, actors, and filmmakers, including the coiner of the term, Laura Mulvey. Menkes shows how a film vocabulary has formed and hardened into accepted practice—one that even women filmmakers use. This vocabulary includes shooting women in flat, two-dimensional light that contrasts with the three dimensions men are allowed to inhabit (THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI); shooting women as a series of body parts rather than as whole people (LOST IN TRANSLATION); standardizing sexualized images such as butt shots and slow-motion panning down a woman’s body (DIE ANOTHER DAY); using sound design in which men are recorded having conversations, but women in the same location are seen, but not heard (RAGING BULL); creating scenes in which a man forces a woman to accept his sexual advances, only to have the woman surrender to him happily and willingly (GONE WITH THE WIND). It is Menkes’ contention that these internalized norms of film construction influence how men and women behave in the real world. If women cannot be heard in a film, it’s only a short leap to silencing them in workplaces, public spaces, and relationships. If women are sexualized and give in to men’s sexual demands with pleasure in the movies no matter the circumstances, then sexually harassing and raping them in real life won’t seem so wrong. It is a fact that movies are more than mere entertainment. Men at the top of the male-dominated filmmaking food chain are trying to protect their financial interests by giving the public what they have been trained to want, but they are protecting so much more. They are protecting their right to behave however they wish toward the people they consider their inferiors. It will not be easy, but through the education that BRAINWASHED provides, we can change the conversation and make room for the voices these gatekeepers wish to silence. Note: An expanded version of this review originally ran on the Alliance of Women Film Journalists website. The first screening on Sunday will be followed by a reception and a panel discussion with Menkes and producer Maria Giese (who will be participating via Zoom) and panelists Michelle Yates, Rebecca Fons, and Ines Sommer, moderated by Michel Weldon. (2022, 107 min, DCP) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Shinya Tsukamoto's TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (Japan)
Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm
Unmistakable in its bold style and nihilistic tone, TETSUO: THE IRON MAN is truly one of a kind. This low-budget feature holds an important place in the history of cyberpunk cinema, testing the limits of its own aesthetic through 16mm film, shoddy stop-motion animation, and practical body-horror effects created by taping broken electronics to the actors' bodies. The film's cult following (in spite of its nonexistent budget and DIY approach) is a testament to the idea that anyone can make a classic with the right vision and dedication; and man, did Tsukamoto have both. The film was shot over 18 grueling months with a crew that was constantly shrinking, leaving only Tsukamoto, co-cinematographer Kei Fujiwara, and a few others at the end of filming. To emphasize how small this crew was to begin with, Tsukamoto and Fujiwara also act in the film as two of the major characters, only surpassed in screen time by Tomorowo Taguchi in one of the other leading roles. The plot is very loose: a Japanese salaryman and an outcast who was struck in a mysterious car accident both face unimaginable, dreamlike horrors as they morph into monsters made out of metal and other miscellaneous machinery. What's more important to the film than what brought them to these changes is how these changes affect their views of the world. Through each of these men, we see reality quickly turning into a nightmare, whether it's in the form of senseless death, fetishized murder, or people and their surroundings turning into jagged, unappealing masses of metal. It comes as no surprise how quickly the main characters morph into the violent, mechanical creatures they seem fated to become, and in a weird way it almost feels expected that they take their misfortune out on the world around them. TETSUO: THE IRON MAN is a high-octane joyride from start to finish, and there's no other film that has quite captured its relentless, unsettling grit. (1989, 67 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Bates]
Martika Ramirez Escobar’s LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE (Philippines)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
A charming blend of varying genres and striking visuals, LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE is a strange film in the best way possible. In a confident first feature, director Martika Ramirez Escobar pays homage to Filipino action films of the 1970s and '80s. Leonor (a revelatory Sheila Francisco) is a former scriptwriter now living with her frustrated son Rudie (Bong Carbera) and unable to pay the bills. She’s struggling to find meaning in her life, haunted, too, by the death of her other son, Ronwaldo (Anthony Falcon). When she reads an ad requesting script submissions, she returns to work, imagining a new film which focuses on a story about a young hero named Ronwaldo (Rocky Salumbides) and his love, Isabella (Rea Molina). After being struck on the head by a falling television, Leonor falls into a coma and finds herself within her own film, interacting with her characters. Rudie attempts to wake his mother by trying to get her film made while also coming to terms with their difficult relationship; Leonor meanwhile becomes a hero in her own story. The “real world” and the cinematic world of Leonor’s action film are distinguished by visual style; grainy film, dated soundtrack, and slow-moving camerawork alert the audience to the action film scenes. But as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to parse the two. The diegesis of the film is playfully always one step beyond the audience. A scene taking place on a busy sound stage depicts actors recreating a very similar moment from earlier in the film; in another, a television on the street is playing the film that Leonor is imagining. These moments emphasize the blurring between reality and fiction, which culminates in a wild finale that further complicates the film’s larger themes about the creative process. It’s all pretty fantastic, including moments when Leonor is repeating her own lines in perfect sync with her characters and when the sound of a typewriter dictates a dance break for the fictional Ronwaldo. As fictional and real melodramas mesh and become intertwined with one another, Leonor’s living script reflects and refracts her own family’s struggles. Amid the spirited cinematic storytelling, Francisco’s performance is wholly enchanting; LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE’s experimental construction and themes work so well only because it's amazing to watch her navigate these varied filmic spaces. (2022, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
Noah Baumbach’s WHITE NOISE (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Stories about families, love, death, and the pursuit of meaning are nothing new, but in the 1980s, they were subjected to postmodern scrutiny, especially in literature. Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise became and remains a sensation for its examination of all of the aforementioned subjects through the lenses of America’s rash of blended families, hyperconsumerism, religious chaos, and pop cultural studies then invading academia. Over the years, there have been thoughts of turning the book into a movie, but they were all abandoned. Noah Baumbach, a long-time fan of White Noise, has finally broken through and adapted a book that seems particularly suited to his artistic concerns. What has emerged is another of his examinations of families under stress—in this case, a mandatory evacuation, drug abuse, and an extreme fear of death—wrapped in the fetchingly bright colors of name-brand supermarket items. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig play Jack and Babette “Baba” Gladney, each trying love and marriage for a fourth time. They live in an Ohio college town with their four children, three from previous unions and one of their own. In general, Jack and Baba are blithely oblivious parents, forcing their oldest children, Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and Heinrich (Sam Nivola), to take on much of the caretaking and thinking for the family. Jack teaches Hitler Studies at the College-On-The-Hill, where the film opens. We see Jack’s friend and colleague, Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), showing clips of Hollywood car crashes to his class and instructing them that these seeming disasters are actually quite uplifting, happy sequences because they provide us with harmless excitement and spectacle—a perfect description of the types of entertainment that flourished in the ’80s. Still, Murray wishes to be considered an expert in the way Jack is about Hitler and chooses Elvis Presley as his ticket to professional renown. The scene in which he and Jack tag team a lecture about Elvis and Hitler to a growing crowd of students and faculty emphasizes the kind of celebrity worship that exploded as a secular religion during the ’80s. A collision between a tank truck and train, far from being a happy event, ignites in a huge fireball that creates an “airborne toxic event” that forces the town’s evacuation, an experience fraught with horrors. Once the danger has passed some 10 days later, Jack and Baba must confront her use of an experimental drug that is designed to take away her fear of death and the “indiscretion” that enabled her to access it. A final reckoning takes place in a seedy motel with a man (Lars Eidinger) Jack has seen before—perhaps the avatar of death Jack himself fears beyond reason—before some kind of equilibrium can be restored. In a film premised on the perceived depth of the shallow, Baumbach provides plenty of visual bread and circuses, from the endless line of evacuating cars to the endless rows of grocery shelves—even dancing in the aisles in a well-choreographed closing-credit sequence. He tips his hat to Robert Altman’s overlapping dialogue in our first meeting with the Gladneys, though the chaos of their chatter at the beginning of the film, unlike the calmer exchanges at its end, is impossible to understand. Rapidly updated information on the toxic cloud is reminiscent of the ever-changing directives surrounding the novel coronavirus, and the cloud itself reminded me of the snaking plague sent from the sky to kill Egypt’s firstborn in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956; when it obscures a Shell sign as Jack gasses up the family station wagon, it certainly feels like the shadow of death falling across him and his consumerist world. I enjoyed many of the performances, particularly the didactic earnestness of Cheadle and Barbara Sukowa as a nun whose declaration in German that she does not believe in God is like a savage slap in the face in a film meant to skim the surface. And that superficiality kept the film from complete success for me. I wish I had believed that Jack and Babette were as afraid of death as they claimed to be. A long scene in which the couple is finally straight with each other plays like a serious scene in an archly written Neil Simon comedy. This film held my attention and showed expert craftsmanship, but could have benefited from something like the anarchic Jewish humor of the Marx Brothers to highlight the absurdity of the plastic world DeLillo created. (2022, 129 min, 35mm and DCP [check individual showtimes for format]) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Robert Wise’s THE SOUND OF MUSIC (US)
Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes
Of all the epic musicals to emerge from 1960s Hollywood, THE SOUND OF MUSIC is arguably the grandest. The much-awarded film (five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Robert Wise) is based on the much-awarded stage production (five Tony awards, including Best Musical) that was the last collaboration between composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. Of the seven stage-to-screen adaptations of their works, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, shot on location in glorious 70mm Todd-AO color is the most successful transfer. Through the method Rodgers and Hammerstein invented, this film effortlessly tells the story of the real-life Von Trapp Family Singers through songs that advance the story and reveal the state of mind of its characters. The nuns foretell a different life for their lively postulant in “Maria,” Maria earns the trust of the obstinate Von Trapp children in “My Favorite Things,” and the family bids Austria good-bye in “So Long, Farewell.” In between, director Wise makes the most of Austria’s natural and built environments, a soaring opening shot of the Alps affirming the glories of the homeland lovingly proclaimed later in “Edelweiss” and snapshots of Salzburg accompanying Maria and the children as she teaches them to sing in “Do-Re-Mi.” There are wisps of another epic, GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), as Maria makes play clothes for the children out of curtains and war intrudes on a prosperous, aristocratic family. But the villains remain mostly offstage in this family film that seeks to inspire and gently provoke reflection about duty, loyalty, love, and sacrifice. Screening as a "Sing-a-Long" event. (1965, 172 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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]
Park Chan-wook's DECISION TO LEAVE (South Korea)
Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 12pm, and Sunday, 11:15am
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) [Ray Ebarb]
Ali Abassi’s HOLY SPIDER (International)
Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes
This gripping and often grueling Persian-language drama by Ali Abassi (BORDER) fictionalizes the true story of Saeed Hanei, a construction worker, family man, and religious extremist who murdered as many as 19 sex workers in the Iranian city of Masshad in 2000 and 2001. Like Hanei, Abassi’s killer (Mehdi Bajestani) tools around on a motorcycle picking up women, takes them to the family home, strangles them to death, and dumps their bodies. “My intention was not to make a serial killer movie,” Abassi has explained. “I wanted to make a movie about a serial killer society.” For a movie attacking misogyny, this offers more close-ups of women piteously choking until their eyes go dim than I’ve seen in a long time. Welcome relief from this death porn comes in the form of an invented subplot about a Tehran journalist (Zar Amir Ebrahimi in a flinty, Cannes-award-winning performance) tracking the killer and navigating her own rocky way through Iran’s religious codes. This is all pretty schlocky for an art house film, but after the Spider is apprehended the story deepens considerably as Abassi turns to the killer’s wife and son and the religious militants who rally to his defense in the streets outside the courtroom. Especially disturbing is Abassi’s treatment of the school-age son, whose shame over his father’s crimes is so intolerable that his only escape is to embrace his father’s wicked ideology. (2022, 117 min, DCP Digital) [J.R. Jones]
🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING
âš« Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Co-presented by the Goethe-Institut Chicago, “Short Export - Made in Germany 2022,” a compilation of six recent German short films, screens on Tuesday at 7pm. Free admission; beer and snacks will be provided. More info here.
âš« Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Andrea Hoyos’ 2021 Peruivan film AUTOERÓTICA (92 min, Digital Projection) screens on Saturday, 7pm, as part of the “Top Doc: Maverdock—New Releases” series. More info here.
âš« Gene Siskel Film Center
Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 film PARASITE (132 min, DCP Digital) screens on Monday, 6pm, as part of 50/50, the Siskel’s year-long series including a film from each year the theater has been open. More info here.
âš« South Side Home Movie Project
Home Movies For The Holidays: A Pop-Up Exhibition goes through Saturday, December 31 at the L1 Retail Store (319 E Garfield Blvd). Swing by to watch the home movies, sound-tracked with a new score by DJ Raven Wright, inside or from the sidewalk as part of L1’s line-up of holiday activities. More info here.
🎞️ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS –
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING
âš« Video Data Bank
TJ Cuthand's NDN Survival Trilogy, comprised of EXTRACTIONS (2019, 15 min), LESS LETHAL FETISHES (2019, 9 min) and RECLAMATION (2018, 13 min), is available to stream for free on VDB TV. More info here.
CINE-LIST: December 2 - December 8, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Michael Castelle, Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, J.R. Jones, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Josh B Mabe