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đ˝ď¸ CRUCIAL VIEWING
Jonas Mekasâ PARADISE NOT YET LOST (OONAâS THIRD YEAR) (US/Experimental) and Steven Spielbergâs THE FABELMANS (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center (OONA) â Friday, 8:15pm
Various Multiplexes (FABLEMANS) â See Venue websites for showtimes
In a fruitful coincidence, Chicagoans have the opportunity this weekend to see two nakedly personal masterworks by two titans of American cinema, both in the format in which they were intended to be seen. Jonas Mekasâ PARADISE NOT YET LOST (OONAâS THIRD YEAR) (1979, 96 min, 16mm) will screen at the Siskel Center on 16mm, the same gauge as the film Mekas put in his trusty Bolex, while Steven Spielbergâs THE FABELMANS (2022, 150 min, DCP Digital) is still screening in multiplexes, those secular shrines to motion picture entertainment generally of the sort with which Spielberg was once synonymous. These are very similar films, straight down to their near-interchangeable titles. Spielbergâs largely autobiographical bildungsroman ends with the directorâs stand-in, Sammy Fabelman, entering the paradise of the Hollywood studio system after having experienced dislocation, antisemitism, and his parentsâ messy divorce. As for Jonas Mekas, what was he if not a âfable man,â an individual uprooted by war and displacement who found rebirth by capturing everything he experienced on camera? Mekasâ diary films blur the line between home movies and avant-gardism, as the subject matter concerns his direct experience and the form employs rapid cutting and asynchronous sound to render that experience directly. PARADISE NOT YET LOST was inspired by the early development of the filmmakerâs daughter Oona; Mekas dedicated the movie to her, calling it âa romanticâs guide to the essential values of life.â The onscreen action shows Mekas and family experiencing one blissful moment after another (visiting friends, meeting distant family members, traveling), and the presence of the camera seems to commemorate each one, make it that much more special. In turn, the film becomes an intimate connection between filmmaker and spectatorâwhich, per THE FABELMANS, is a power inherent in all movies. One of the through lines of Spielbergâs film is that cinema not only serves as a bond between auteur and audience; it has the potential to serve as a secret between them. (The most opulent gift a filmmaker has given the Freudians since the heyday of Bertolucci, THE FABELMANS argues that the ideal spectator is always the filmmakerâs mother.) This association of pleasure with guilt and responsibility makes Spielbergâs film, which he wrote with Tony Kushner (the most valuable collaborator heâs had after Janusz Kaminski), feel supremely Jewish, in spite of the fact that itâs also a film about Jewsâ assimilation into American society. Itâs complicated. I canât explain how Spielberg makes the gentile actors Paul Dano and Michelle Williams, who play Sammyâs parents, seem acceptable, even lovable as Jews; it has something to do with how all the little details of the world they inhabit speak to a socially aspirational mid-century Jewish-American mentality. (For me, the movie inspired visceral memories of the homes of elderly relatives I visited as a boy.) Sammyâs interest in filmmaking as a technical process he can master parallels his fatherâs interest in early computing systems; the folkloric quality of a son inheriting his fatherâs scholasticism is one of the most Jewish things about THE FABELMANS. In the movieâs third act, Spielberg and Kushner hone in on another truth any Jew can confirm: that antisemites donât care what you or your parents look like; their ignorance makes them hate you as they hate all Jews. Thanks to Spielbergâs extraordinarily rich visual language, heâs able to deliver dark observations about both cinema and secular Jewish life in a manner thatâs never less than breathtaking. Spielberg has described the film as being like therapy in that it forced him to relive some of his most painful memories; he even makes the connection early in the film, when Sammyâs mother lets him recreate a train wreck on film so he stops having nightmares about them. Yet in rendering those memories through cinematic means (and howâitâs the sort of film where every lighting cue, prop, and focal length tells you something about the characters or their creator), he ends up revealing the psychological complexes behind a range of cinematic devices, including many he all but created. Why has Spielberg always shot his most personal films in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1 (this one included)? Because, as the first scene of THE FABELMANS explains, this is the most appropriate ratio for presenting a middle-class Jewish-American kitchen circa 1952. The filmâs formal and thematic concerns coalesce in an audacious set piece that suggests something out of Michael Powellâs PEEPING TOM (another film with which THE FABELMANS has a lot in common), an unholy communion between a young man and his mother that only cinema could have made possible. [Ben Sachs]
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Also screening as part of the Jonas Mekas 100! series at the Gene Siskel Film Center are his 2000 âmasterpiece of nothing,â AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY (288 min, 16mm), on Saturday at 5pm, and his 2005 film A LETTER FROM GREENPOINT (80 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at 5pm. More info on the series here.
Bob Rafelsonâs STAY HUNGRY (US)
Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) â Wednesday, 7:30pm
A link between the New American Cinema of the 1970s and the blockbuster cinema of the 1980s and beyond, Bob Rafelsonâs comic drama STAY HUNGRY evokes his FIVE EASY PIECES with its story of an orphaned Alabama steel heir, played by Jeff Bridges, seeking authenticity with a ragtag crew of bodybuilders at a Birmingham gym, but it also introduced moviegoers to Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose charismatic performance as a gentle Austrian weightlifter elevates the film. Sally Field costars as a woman working at the gym who leaves the bodybuilder for the heir but calls out the latter for his arrogance after he tries to show them off at a society party. Shooting on location in Birmingham, Rafelson captures not only local color (particularly a rural hoedown where Schwarzenegger is welcomed into a band of fiddlers) but also the rigid class lines in Dixie; this is a Hollywood production, but it draws on the peculiar energy of 70s regional filmmaking. Rafelson began to slide professionally after this, but of course Schwarzenegger ascended into the entertainment stratosphere. He would never have another role this fascinating or endearingâuntil he became governor of California, that is. Preceded by the 1936 Fleischer Studios short VIM, VIGOR, AND VITALIKY (7 min, 16mm). (1976, 102 min, 35mm) [J.R. Jones]
Sean Bakerâs Fabulous Christmas Double Bill
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Pedro AlmodĂłvar's ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Spain)
Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre â Monday, 7pm
In ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, Pedro Almodovar uses widescreen in a manner similar to Cukor and other such early masters of color-and-âScope melodrama as Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli, using widescreen to show off the lushness of his production design and augment the presence of his actors. MOTHER was the movie that cemented Almodovarâs international reputation as a modern master, and for obvious reasons. The mix of comedy and melodrama feels natural and confident (not provocative or intentionally jarring, as it was in the directorâs early films), and it offers numerous life lessons that make you feel good. Like the melodramas of Sirk, Cukor, and Minnelli, itâs also an actorsâ showcase, featuring at least a dozen roles that allow the actors inhabiting them to shine. Not for nothing did Almodovar dedicate the film to three major actresses (Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, and Romy Schneider); MOTHER celebrates not just actresses, but assertive, highly present women in general. (1999, 101 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Screening with Bakerâs 2015 film TANGERINE (88 min) on a newly struck 35mm print.
Eliza Hittman's NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (US)
Gene Siskel Film Center â Monday, 6pm
It becomes evident early on in NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS, a film about a young woman seeking an abortion, that weâre not going to see or hear from the man who contributed to the unwanted pregnancy. Itâs a conspicuous absence that bespeaks Hittmanâs straightforwardly feminist attitude and approach, in which the denial of even the possibility of a male-controlled narrative necessarily returns focus and agency to the young woman, whose subjective experience take precedence above all else. The girl is Autumn (newcomer Sidney Flanigan), a diffident seventeen-year-old in rural Pennsylvania. Things are not great for her: at home, her deadbeat stepfather only shows affection for the dog, while on her supermarket shift she and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) are subjected to ritual workplace harassment. One day, wondering if sheâs pregnant, Autumn visits a local clinic and is given an over-the-counter drugstore test (one among many details in the film indicating the sorry state of healthcare in the US). It comes back positive. Discovering that Pennsylvania disallows women under eighteen from getting an abortion without parental consent, Autumn embarks to New York City with Skylar, aiming to have the procedure done with Planned Parenthood. Working in her preferred mode of muted urban realism, Hittman avoids the myriad obvious, didactic dimensions this material mightâve taken on under a different writer-director. This means a narrative devoid of polemics, one that respects Autumnâs journey as the private one she experiences, rather than as the public political lightning rod it becomes in the eyes of a fanatical, patriarchal society. Hittman trusts that itâs enough to simply observe all the mundane socioeconomic and gender barriers Autumnâs forced to endureâsomething she does with a numbed impassivity suggesting how naturalized such factors areâto understand how stacked the deck is against womenâs bodily autonomies. Yet NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS doesnât advance a sense of hopelessness, and doesnât, despite its success in capturing vexing bureaucracy and dour milieus, wish to condemn American social welfare as totally broken. Instead, it upholds the necessity of the systems that do work, and betrays a faith in the ability of both collective and individual action to pull through. In the shattering scene that gives the film its title, Autumn is prompted to respond to questions about her sexual past. Flanigan goes from forthcoming to paralyzed with emotion across one viscerally impactful take, her eyes downcast as she tries to hold back tears. She doesnât have to answer, not to the counselor or to us. Itâs her choice. (2020, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
Jerzy Skolimowskiâs EO (Poland/UK/Italy)
Gene Siskel Film Center â See Venue website for showtimes
In 2022, Steven Spielberg retrofitted JAWS for IMAX theaters, transforming a classic film into a towering, visceral experience. One might say that Jerzy Skolimowski did the same thing that year with Robert Bressonâs AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966); his quasi-remake EO (a prizewinner at Cannes) is a big screen experience par excellence, with large-scale imagery and booming sound design that make you feel the titular donkeyâs suffering in your bones. Some might balk at Skolimowskiâs decision to put his spin on Bressonâs allegorical masterpieceâwhich is beyond question one of the greatest films ever madeâyet such an audacious move is in keeping with this major artist, who first came to prominence in the early 1960s as an acclaimed poet and a figurehead of Polandâs postwar youth culture. The directorâs â60s work remains astounding in its freewheeling energy and inspired visual metaphors (itâs worth noting that, after Bresson, he was one of the European filmmakers that Cahiers du cinĂŠma championed the most in that decade); this period culminated with the blunt social critique of his 1967 production HANDS UP!, which was so incendiary that it more or less got him exiled from his native country (moreover, he wasnât able to complete the film until 1981). After that, Skolimowski made movies in several other countries (including the US) before returning to Poland in the 1990s. The handful of films heâs made since then feel less indebted to his work as poet than his work as a painter, which has occupied much of his time in the past several decades. Indeed, EO contains an abundance of striking images, and these drive the film more than the loose narrative, which follows a donkey in his travails after he leaves the circus where heâs performed. The animalâs misfortunes mirror those of contemporary Europe; the most upsetting episode is probably the one that concerns the violent activity of a thuggish group of modern-day nationalists. A late episode in the film with guest star Isabelle Huppert works in some anticlerical sentiment that feels more akin to BuĂąuel than Bresson, while the final episode approaches the apocalyptic feelings of Bressonâs last two features, THE DEVIL, PROBABLY (1977) and LâARGENT (1983). Itâs a grim work, to be sure, yet Skolimowskiâs immersive camerawork alleviates the proceedings, reminding us (as Bresson did) how miraculous the cinematic form can be. (2022, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
Alternative Christmas Features
Music Box Theatre â See Venue website for showtimes
Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (UK)
Tuesday, 4pm and 7:30pm
It took more than a decadeâs remove from its initial release for many to finally begin to understand Kubrick's final film, which is set in a facsimile of contemporary New York but heeds closely to the psychology and sexual mores of the 1924 novella on which it is based. This discrepancy sparked incurious outrage in 1999âparticularly among writers in the New York Times, who actually seemed offended by the lack of realismâbut it's come to resonate as one of the deepest mysteries of the director's monumental career. For Martin Scorsese, who placed the film in his top five for the entire decade, it's about New York as it appears in a dream. "And as with all dreams," he wrote, "you never know precisely when you've entered it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off. Things appear to happen as if they were preordained, sometimes in a strange rhythm from which it's impossible to escape. Audiences really had no preparation for a dream movie that didn't announce itself as such, without the usual signalsâhovering mists, people appearing and disappearing at will or floating off the ground. Like Rossellini's VOYAGE IN ITALY, another film severely misunderstood in its time, EYES WIDE SHUT takes a couple on a harrowing journey, at the end of which they're left clinging to each other. Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And they both end tentatively, yet hopefully. Honestly." Kubrick arrived at this combination of mystery and exposure through singular working methods unlikely to be repeated in a major studio film. In one of the longest shoots in movie history, Kubrick spent weeks on individual scenes, running actors through conversations until they were no longer conscious of performing. He had pursued this sort of marathon process beforeâmost notably on THE SHINING and FULL METAL JACKETâbut never on material so explicitly psychological. As a result, even superstars like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (giving their finest performances as a wealthy married couple) seem unfamiliar and strangely vulnerable. But EYES WIDE SHUT is only truly unsettling on contemplation: on the surface, it's one of Kubrick's funniest (with some of the most eccentric supporting performances in anything he made after THE KILLING) and most luminous, capturing the allure of Manhattan in winter with remarkably simple lighting arrangements. (1999, 159 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Tim Burton's EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (US)
Wednesday, 4:30pm and 9:40pm and Thursday, 7pm
After the success of BATMAN, Tim Burton was able to pull out all the stops for this personal take on teenage suburban isolation and got twice the budget that was originally planned. The title character is based on drawings Burton made while growing up in Burbank, where he struggled to keep friends and often retreated into painting and stop-motion animation. This contemporary fairy tale vacillates between elements that would be right at home in a Universal horror film and a stylized set of pastel tract homes, emphasizing Burton's mixed feelings about the American middle class. Johnny Depp's portrayal of the meek and scarred Edward is among his finest performances, notable for his character's economy of dialogue and cautious demeanor. The incomplete construction of a deceased inventor (played by Vincent Price), Edward stands in for every adolescent who would rather be left alone to make art than conform in order to make friends. Dianne Wiest is wonderful as the Avon Lady who finds Edward in the abandoned mansion on a hill and takes him home to join the cookie cutter enclave below. Frightened by his outward appearance but seeing the gentle prince underneath, her motherly efforts to integrate him into the conservative town are doomed from the start. But there is magic in both of their hearts, and eye-candy galore for us. (1990, 105 min, 35mm) [Jason Halprin]
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Tim Burtonâs BATMAN RETURNS (US)
Wednesday, 7pm and Thursday 4:20pm
No one else captures the nostalgic kitsch and dark melancholy of Christmastime with perfect balance like Tim Burton. His first feature after one of his other Christmas classics, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990), BATMAN RETURNS shifts the gloomy holiday cheer from the suburbs to Gotham City. The constructed sets and detailed production design have produced some of the most iconic images in a career filled with memorable visuals. The story involves Gotham industrial businessman Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) teaming up with twisted crime lord Penguin (Danny DeVito), whoâs searching for his origins. Superhero vigilante Batman (Michael Keaton) is out to stop them, but everyoneâs plans are complicated by Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), Shreckâs meek secretary who seeks revenge against her boss as the formidable, whip-brandishing, latex-wearing Catwoman. It's hard to argue that this isnât Pfeifferâs movie, as the submissive cat lady violently transforms into the dominant Catwoman, one of the great cinematic femme fatales. Her early scenes, set in her baby pink apartment, where Selina talks to herself to cope with the loneliness of her life are unexpectedly moving, so much so that her story looms over the other characterâs. Through her, the film presents complex themes about duality and female sexuality. She also helps to make the film more noir than anything else, despite its titular superhero; like its conflicted approach to the holiday season, BATMAN RETURNS is funny and morbid, beautiful and grotesque, ridiculous and sincereâone of Burtonâs best. (1992, 126 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]
The 39th Annual Music Box Christmas Sing-A-Long & Double Feature
Music Box Theatre â See Venue website for showtimes
Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (US)
Like Steven Spielberg today, Frank Capra was associated more with reassuring, patriotic sentiment than with actually making movies; but just beneath the Americana, his films contain a near-schizophrenic mix of idealism and resentment. In this quality, as well as his tendency to drag charismatic heroes through grueling tests of faith, it wouldn't be a stretch to compare Capra with Lars von Trier. There's plenty to merit the comparison in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE alone: The film is a two-hour tour of an honest man's failure and bottled-up resentment, softened only intermittently by scenes of domestic contentment. Even before the nightmarish Pottersville episode (shot in foreboding shadows more reminiscent of film noir than Americana), Bedford Falls is shown as vulnerable to the plagues of recession, family dysfunction, and alcoholism. All of these ills weigh heavy on the soul of George Bailey, a small-town Everyman given tragic complexity by James Stewart, who considered the performance his best. Drawing on the unacknowledged rage within ordinary people that he would later exploit for Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart renders Bailey as complicated as Capra himselfâa child and ultimate victim of the American Dream. It's because the film's despair feels so authentic that its iconic ending feels as cathartic as it does: After being saved from his suicide attempt (which frames the entire film), Stewart is returned to the simple pleasures of family and friends, made to seem a warm oasis in a great metaphysical void. (1946, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Michael Curtiz's WHITE CHRISTMAS (US)
Critics agree that Mark Sandrich's HOLIDAY INN (1942), the first musical comedy to feature Bing Crosby, an inn, and Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," is a better film than this partial remake. Yet it turns out that it's revivals of this Technicolor, VistaVision version that people look forward to this time of year. WHITE CHRISTMAS incorporates the history of its own title song, which, while it would go on to become perhaps history's largest-seller, actually seemed a flop at first. Music historians Dave Marsh and Steve Propes note, "What saved 'White Christmas' were requests made by GIs to Armed Forces Radio around the world. Soldiers away from home, many of them in the South Pacific or North Africa, uncertain of whether they'd ever again see family and friends, let alone a snowfall, responded passionately to Berlin's understated evocation of the mythic romance of Christmas Past." This history is folded into the opening scene: it's Christmas Eve, 1944, somewhere on a World War II battlefield, and Crosby sings the song to fellow troops amidst some very fake rubble, as bombs explode in the background. The movie's got Crosby and Danny Kaye as music-and-lyrics team Wallace and Davis, and Vera-Ellen and Rosemary Clooney as sister act the Haynes. They're a treat to watch even just sitting around a railroad passenger car singing "Snow," bound for Pine Tree, Vermont, where the inn turns out to be run by ex-General Waverly (Dean Jagger). When people gather for a screening of this movie, I doubt they worry that it may not rank with Michael Curtiz's best work (CASABLANCA, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE). They come to mark the change of years together. If there's a season for nestling in the warmth of nostalgia, it's this one. Plus, there's the camp appeal of Crosby and Kaye doing "Sisters." (1954, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]
đ˝ď¸ ALSO RECOMMENDED
Reid Davenportâs I DIDNâT SEE YOU THERE (US/Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center â Friday, 6pm
One day in the Oakland, California, neighborhood where disabled director Reid Davenport lives, a red-and-yellow circus tent was erected. Circuses are an entertainment from a bygone era, yet they live on both in modified form and as shorthand for such modern concepts as political inclusiveness (âbig tentâ), mayhem (âthree-ring circusâ), and blockbusters (âtentpoleâ films). This big top that confronted Davenport in his daily life was a source of great irritation as a reminder of the freak shows that were an integral means of getting people to come out to the circus. In his first feature-length documentary, Davenport decided to give audiences a front-row seat on what itâs like to see the world from a wheelchair. Equipped with a new camera better suited to shooting from his motorized âlegs,â the director goes about his business in a city where he was forced to settle to have access to public transportation and nearby conveniences that were not available in his hometown of Bethel, Connecticutâironically, the birthplace of circus impresario P.T. Barnum, whose bronze statue we see when Davenport goes home to visit his family. Many people know and say hello to Davenport when he is out and about, but others are casually blind to how they interfere with his ability to get around. One group unloads their car at the curb ramp, causing him to wait until they move. In one intense scene, an electrical cord is strung in front of the ramp Davenport uses to get to his front door. He barely contains his anger and unleashes it with one long âFUUUUUUCCCCKâ when he gets indoors. But the film is not entirely about his invisibility to the able-bodied. It is also about what he sees that those of us who donât navigate a wheelchair never doâthe abstract movement of pavement underneath his speeding wheels, the geometric wallpaper of a chain link fence he captures as he rides down the street. I DIDNâT SEE YOU THERE does what all great films doâprovide a unique vision of our world that helps us understand the variety of human experience. Director in attendance. (2022, 76 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Mark Waters' MEAN GIRLS (US)
Music Box Theatre â Thursday, 9:45pm
Set just a short drive away in nearby Evanston, the highly quotable MEAN GIRLS is a satirical look at the awkward, cliquish, hormone-crazed minefield that is high school. Sixteen-year-old fish out of water Cady Heron (Lindsey Lohan) moves to Illinois after spending the previous 12 years in Africa with her parents, who were on a zoological research study. Upon her arrival, she enrolls at North Shore High School and quickly learns that making new friends is nothing like it was halfway across the world. During her first math class, taught by the affable but down on her luck Ms. Norbury (Tina Fey), Cady makes friends with social outcasts Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damien (Daniel Franzese), who teach her about navigating the school's social hierarchy. At lunch, Cady is approached by The Plastics to join their group. Consisting of queen bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams), Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), and Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried), The Plastics are North Shore's equivalent of teen royalty and have very strict rules on how to dress and act. As Cady becomes friendlier with them, Janis and Damien fear she will become one of them. They decide to have her pretend to join the group as a joke and destroy them from within as revenge for all the victimizing they have done. As time progresses, Cady slowly goes from pretending to be Plastic to actually becoming Plastic and risks losing her only true friends. The backstabbing intensifies and secrets are revealed, and the whole school is turned upside down. This film is a perfect look at teenage cliques and the damaging effects they can have on everyone, school staff included. A cult classic with a lasting legacy largely thanks to Fey's well-written script, MEAN GIRLS is a painfully accurate representation of how fun and cruel high school can truly be. 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. (2004, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
Nina Menkesâ BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER (US/Documentary)
Facets Cinema â Saturday and Sunday, 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 didnât see films the same way the majority of film reviewers saw themâand 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 didnât 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 couldnât 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 manâs 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 Menkeâs BRAINWASHED: SEX-CAMERA-POWER. This documentary seeks to make visible the âyou understoodâ of filmmakingâthe male gazeâthrough 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 practiceâone 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 womanâs 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 Menkesâ 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, itâs only a short leap to silencing them in workplaces, public spaces, and relationships. If women are sexualized and give in to menâs sexual demands with pleasure in the movies no matter the circumstances, then sexually harassing and raping them in real life wonât 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. (2022, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Frederick Wisemanâs A COUPLE (France/US)
Gene Siskel Film Center â 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 Wisemanâs 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). âYour power crushed my life and my personality as well,â Sophia tells the tyrannical Leo, and thereâs a certain logic to Tolstoy, a writer of such metaphysical ambition, being played here by nature itself. Drawn from Sophiaâs diaries, the monologue dissects the Tolstoysâ troubled marriage and family life, which centered Leoâs genius to the cruel detriment of his wife and children. Near the movieâs 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 doesnât fight back, and in the filmâs latter half, as Sophia begins to circle back on her discontents, Wisemanâs naturalistic conceit bears less fruit (so to speak). (2022, 63 min, DCP Digital) [J.R. Jones]
Joanna Hoggâs THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER (US/UK)
Gene Siskel Film Center â 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-Ă -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 real-life daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne. 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 latterâs 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 as in the earlier films, is also there on a working holiday, starting to plan a film about herself and her mother. In tandem with Rosalindâs eventual revelations about her childhood experiences at the estateâthe building had once been in her family, where her aunt took in relativesâ children to shelter them from the bombings in London during World War IIâJulie 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 Hoggâs 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 itâs 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 womenâs reticence does not indicate a lack of affectionâif 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 Hoggsâ films) are kept from experiencing? Perhaps itâs 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 isnât just the spirit of a person lost, but of the person we never really found. Such considerations are evoked also through Hoggâs 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 charactersâ 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]
Martika Ramirez Escobarâs LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE (Philippines)
Music Box Theatre â Saturday, 11:15am and Monday, 4:30pm
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. Sheâs 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 âreal worldâ and the cinematic world of Leonorâs 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 filmâs larger themes about the creative process. Itâs 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, Leonorâs living script reflects and refracts her own familyâs struggles. Amid the spirited cinematic storytelling, Franciscoâs performance is wholly enchanting; LEONOR WILL NEVER DIEâs 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 Baumbachâs WHITE NOISE (US)
Music Box Theatre â 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 DeLilloâs 1985 novel White Noise became and remains a sensation for its examination of all of the aforementioned subjects through the lenses of Americaâs 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 stressâin this case, a mandatory evacuation, drug abuse, and an extreme fear of deathâwrapped in the fetchingly bright colors of name-brand supermarket items. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig play Jack and Babette âBabaâ 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 Jackâs 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 spectacleâa perfect description of the types of entertainment that flourished in the â80s. 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 â80s. A collision between a tank truck and train, far from being a happy event, ignites in a huge fireball that creates an âairborne toxic eventâ that forces the townâs 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 âindiscretionâ that enabled her to access it. A final reckoning takes place in a seedy motel with a man (Lars Eidinger) Jack has seen beforeâperhaps the avatar of death Jack himself fears beyond reasonâbefore 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 shelvesâeven dancing in the aisles in a well-choreographed closing-credit sequence. He tips his hat to Robert Altmanâs 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 Egyptâs 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, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Charlotte Wellsâ AFTERSUN (UK/US)
Music Box Theatre â See Venue website for showtimes
Thereâs something about the quality of DV home-movie footage that feels particularly, singularly fragile. Maybe itâs 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 girlâs 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? Whatâs 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 Wellsâs 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 Sophieâs live video playing on a tube television in front of a mirror, the source of the action never glimpsed directly, just as Calumâs unspoken inner turmoil remains elusive to Sophie. Based on Wellsâ 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 âUnder Pressure,â the film snaps into focus as a kind of spiritual bridge from daughter to father, through which their âlast danceâ leaves a perpetually echoing afterimage. (2022, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
đď¸ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS â
ALSO SCREENING
⍠FACETS Cinema
Charles E. Sellier, Jr.âs 1984 slasher film SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (85 min, DCP Digital) and RenĂŠ Manzorâs 1989 French horror film DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS (92 min, DCP Digital) screen on Friday at 7pm and 9pm, respectively, as part of the Naughty List double feature. More info here.
⍠Gene Siskel Film Center
Brian Hensonâs 1992 film THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL (85 min, 35mm) screens on Saturday and Sunday at 11am as part of the Film Centerâs monthly Kid Flix series.
âDigging Deeper into Movies,â a lecture series presented by the Chicago International Film Festival, takes place on Thursday at 5pm. Northwestern professor and critic Nick Davis will present a lecture around EO, playing this week at the Film Center. Free and open to the public, complimentary tickets can be secured through the Chicago International Film Festival here. More info on all screenings and events here.
⍠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 L1âs line-up of holiday activities. More info here.
đď¸ LOCAL ONLINE SCREENINGS â
ALSO SCREENING/STREAMING
⍠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 9 - December 15, 2022
MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs
CONTRIBUTORS // Kyle Cubr, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, J.R. Jones, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Scott Pfeiffer