:: FRIDAY, MARCH 31 - THURSDAY, APRIL 6 ::

🧅 ONION CITY EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL

The 33rd edition of Onion City is now underway, having begun Thursday, March 30, with the local premiere of Deborah Stratman’s LAST THINGS at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Screenings take place this weekend at Chicago Filmmakers (1326 W. Hollywood Ave.) in Edgewater and at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) in Logan Square. Beginning Monday and running through Sunday, April 9, the program About Life screens three times daily at Mana Contemporary (2233 S. Throop St.) in Pilsen. All of the competition programs are available to stream through April 9 as well. Note that no exhibition formats are listed; we assume most, if not all, are being projected digitally. For more info, visit the festival website here.

Machine Perspectives
Chicago Filmmakers – Friday, 7pm
With “Machine Perspectives,” the Onion City programmers find a productive sweet-spot between the navel-gazing of films about cameras and the nebulousness of work about technology. Each film looks, in its own way, at the intimate connections between humans and machines, in terms of both the Frankensteinian creations we’ve made and the ways we’ve changed ourselves. On the Frankenstein tip, Stéphanie Lagarde’s MINIMAL SWAY WHILE STARTING MY WAY UP (2021, 15 min) anchors the program with an elevator’s interior monologue. Footage both real and animated taken from moving elevators makes up most of the material; the omniscient elevator moves out into space and miles into the earth, with technology paving the way both for the physical motion and the augmented, imagined versions of the same. Other bot-personas on the program include the sinister and ever-expanding terms of service agreement in (DE)VICE GRIP (2022, 3 min), and Kita, a chipper VJ rendered in blocky 3D animation in SOLILOQUY (2021, 7 min). They’re a study in contrasts: Kita is a benevolent cultural guide that seeks to teach us about ourselves, while the service agreement seeks to extract as much humanity as it can for itself. Between them and the more neutral and transient elevator, the machines of this program are all responsive to their purpose, extensions of the human impulses that built them. The other half of the program has more transhuman concerns. Avant-garde luminary Christopher Harris uses his Google Earth-set miniature DREAMS UNDER CONFINEMENT (2020, 2 min) to rapidly map out Chicago, all while highlighting the topographical black hole of the Cook County jail. Cameras and the technology we’ve invented to expand them have brought our vision to almost-omniscient levels, Harris suggests, but not enough to extend humanity to the most disenfranchised. Lisa McCarty’s SEEING SPACECRAFT EARTH (2021, 6 min) works as a sort of inverse, using NASA archives to consider the reported “overview effect” that astronauts get upon seeing Earth from space. The omniscience here is saved for a select few, and even the version of earth we get is visibly reconstructed and incomplete. The acts of seeing and speculating are further intertwined in Leonardo Pirondi’s VISION OF PARADISE (2022, 16 min), a wide-ranging essay film centering on the mythical Atlantic island of Brasil. Pirondi, like Lagarde, uses mixed methods and threads of narrative in the film, discussing a group of Brazilian explorers who went on a fruitless journey to discover the island along with reflections on the observer effect and computer simulations. He links these cross-centuries developments as part of the same history, that of people trying to find or create a utopia and spoiling it the closer they get. The associated “effects” of tech-assisted perception have changed our understanding of reality in deep ways, but it wouldn’t be a program of experimental films without at least one solipsistic work about the tech that allows us to see 24 frames per second in the first place. Less political and more psychotronic, Ramey Newell & Niccolò Bigagli’s INTERFERENCE PATTERN (2022, 9 min) rounds out the program as a reflection on perception itself. Quotations play on the audio track from physicists and experimental mainstays like Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren as they wax about the granular details of image-making and seeing, with the images playing like a highlight reel celebrating the ways film can sculpt with points of light. It’s a sentiment that many fans of this type of work will doubtless be familiar with already, but it feels especially comforting on a program with some ambivalence about technology’s effects. If we’re careful, film can change our perception for the better. [Maxwell Courtright]
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The Land Folds
Chicago Filmmakers – Friday, 9pm
The longer of the two pieces in this program, Fred Schimdt-Arenales’ COMMITTEE OF SIX (2022, 40 min), is a must-see for Chicago history aficionados. It considers the south side’s shameful legacy of redlining, with much of the dialogue taken directly from minutes of committee meetings of the “Urban Renewal Program” of 1955, which effectively launched the gentrification—and segregation—of Hyde Park. Schmidt-Arenales structures the re-enactment around lines from the minutes that most explicitly convey the racism inherent in the rhetoric of organizing communities by economic class. Despite what one might expect from that description, the committee isn’t played by a bunch of old white men, but rather a diverse group made up of (per the artist’s notes) “performers, academics, residents, and activists,” who vary in gender, race, and age; the nontraditional casting adds a layer of meaning to the already interesting proceedings. Between the reenactments, Schmidt-Arenales interweaves scenes of the cast reflecting on the text and discussing what it means in light of current affairs, both in Chicago and the United States at large. The film’s methods recall those of Peter Watkins’ LA COMMUNE (PARIS 1871) (2000), but it plays out in distinct Chicago-ese. In its thematic concerns, COMMITTEE OF SIX pairs nicely with A FIELD GUIDE TO COASTAL FORTIFICATIONS (2023, 24 min), which considers various constructions built on the coast of the San Francisco Bay over the past few hundred years. Tijana Petrović employs various devices, from onscreen text to archival footage, to reflect the changing nature of history, while the winsome narrator places us at a cool, philosophical remove from the events she describes. The history lesson is organized around physical structures: the encampments built centuries ago by Native Americans, the fortress-like walls erected by the first white settlers, the bunkers developed during the Cold War. It’s these last structures that get the most screen time, and Petrović explains their dramatic irony thusly: “As symbols of military might, the bunkers were tasked with protecting the coast from ‘perceived threats.' Constructed, reconstructed and updated over time, these structures stood and waited for the enemy that never came.” The film delivers this sort of existentialist poetry for most of its duration, and the mood of sweet despair can be surprisingly endearing. [Ben Sachs]
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Late Night (For the Night Owls)
Comfort Station – Friday, 10pm
In Alisa Berger’s RETRODREAMING (2022, 17 min), a woman’s voice describes a failed experiment to create dreams in the minds of test subjects. The manufactured dreams were intended to evoke the subjects’ memories of their Japanese hometowns, but the algorithm went rogue, birthing images and effects that seemed to belong neither exclusively to the dreamer nor the machine. Such a formulation could very well describe the sensory phenomena of film spectatorship, especially in films that experiment as rigorously with form and perception as the ones included in this program. Many are kinetic, audiovisually overwhelming works of abstraction, like HC Gilje’s RIFT (HD) (2017, 6 min), which consists of a ceaseless horizontal movement across icy blue lines and flickering shapes, its speed escalating in accordance with a percussive soundtrack. The hallucinatory effects of the film are irreducible to language. Similarly hypnotic are Lindsey Arturo’s GLITCH WALL (1 min), an EDM-scored scherzo evoking old CRT visual phenomena; Luis Carlos Rodríguez’s ABSTRART 23 (2022, 5 min), which features shifting liquid blobs arranged in a grid pattern; and Onyou Oh’s PYROTECHNICS (2021, 11 min), a tripartite journey through increasingly psychedelic and stroboscopic imagery, also with a pulsing club beat. The remaining two films in the program take place within the realm of representation, but still emphasize intense perceptual a/effects. Kalil Haddad’s THE TAKING OF JORDAN (ALL AMERICAN BOY) (2022, 7 min), which concerns the tragic fates of young men involved in sex work and gay porn, uses edited archival footage, jarring sounds, and true-crime captions to create an unnerving portrait of bodily exploitation. In contrast, Patrick Müller’s INTO THE REALM OF THE NIGHT (2022, 5 min) is a mellow city symphony charting the transition from day to night in Copenhagen, Denmark. Shot on black-and-white 8 mm stock and employing multiple exposures, the film glitters with the myriad lights of the city, suspending us between the materiality of the urban environment and its phantom glow, waking life and cinematic dream. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Sipping Solitude
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 3pm
The COVID-19 pandemic is the reality the filmmakers of the “Sipping Solitude” program confront as they try to make sense of the loneliness, loss, and boredom of their forced isolation. Alice Avery’s FUNTOWN JOURNEY INTO THE LIVING LAND (2023, 12 min) uses psychedelic animation and live action to explore the journey of a being who has been separated from the world in which they belong by a malevolent creature who wishes to take them back in time. The film overlays its images with large text that both explicates and complicates an ultimately joyful return. In BIGGER ON THE INSIDE (2022, 12 min), director Angelo Madsen Minax teases that our interior lives and virtual connections can bring an ecstasy that exploring the cosmos and natural environment can’t approximate. Shots of snow-covered expanses and a man looking at the night sky through a telescope alternating with abstract images and a YouTube tutorial on the nature of desire foreground the sexting of the barely glimpsed protagonist and the object of their affection. In AND SO IT CAME ABOUT (A TALE OF CONSEQUENTIAL DORMANCY) (2022, 12 min), Charlotte Pryce narrates a folk tale of a healer who works to free a girl from an enchantment that draws her into the woods beyond the village common. Images of nature in all its beauty and savagery recall the pandemic period during which the film was made and provide a cautionary lesson about meddling in affairs beyond ordinary human capacity. CONDUIT (2022, 5 min), a mesmerizing animated short by Lynn Kim, contemplates a solitary runner who moves through different states of being as traditional Korean music powers his stride. In the end, he loses a bit of himself, as he must, through this kinetic ritual. In SOME TROPICS OF CANCER (2022, 10 min), T.J. Blanco mourns the loss of their father to cancer with a metaphysical contemplation of the eternal and a down-to-earth reckoning with the damage human beings do to the earth in their acquisitiveness. Their voiceover narration is poetic, and their kaleidoscopic images mix with signposts of their father’s life and death, ending with the only footage that exists of him. Rachel Ferber’s JOKES ON EVERY WRAPPER (2021, 11 min) seems to have been born from the boredom of sheltering in place. Green screen projections—green everything, for that matter—reference her home projects, including trying to make butter, that seem to have been abject failures. She likens her busy work with the riddles and jokes on the wrappers of Laffy Taffys, but with no end to her isolation in sight, the final joke cannot be written. Om, as a word, represents the sound of the divine, and sound is an important element of Yanbin Zhao’s OM (2022, 13 min). Zhao, who lives in Los Angeles, intersperses news coverage of the pandemic with video phone calls with his grandfather in China. He films and records the sounds of the natural environment, devoid of human beings (though not of their detritus), and conjures the Buddha in image and language. Dead leaves, cut flowers, and algae blooms stand in for the devastation occurring outside his isolated suburb. [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Suspended Masses
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 5pm
As it explores the nebulousness of being, the “Suspended Masses” program is aptly titled. These expeditions into states of emotional ambiguity proceed loosely, with no clear questions and thus no clear answers. Kishino Takagishi’s THE EDGE OF A HOLE (2022, 18 min) embodies this diffused conviction. Three people ruminate on different experiences pertaining to the gift of life and the reality of death. They do this casually, even languidly, the general atmosphere of each intertwined vignette similar to that of a film by Lynne Sachs or Apichatpong Weerasethakul; the insights and meditations are captured in such a way that simple thought is transformed into curious wisdom. The filmmaker notes that the subjects “are haunted by an evolutionary ghost,” a concept obliquely expressed through their stories about family members: their mothers, their kids. Deceptively modest, Takagishi’s film conveys a world of thought and experience in its brief runtime. Along these lines, to lose someone is to be left only with fragments, memories and ephemera marooned in the physical realm. Alexis McCrimmon’s HERON 1954-2022 (2022, 4 min) is a tribute to a loved one who passed away due to an accidental opioid overdose. It’s a bleary homage with rhapsodic images, some of which were transformed experimentally, while others—such as a beautifully staged arrangement of items special to the deceased person—evince an emotional significance via their staticness. It’s a stunning eulogy for what looks to have been a beautiful life. There’s the banality of evil, then there’s the occasional banality of living through evil. In the case of Saif Alsaegh’s BEZUNA (2022, 8 min), this occurs in the experience of fleeing an active war zone. A wry voiceover details what items not to bring when leaving home, while later split-screens provide a seeming neutral background over which a woman describes the cat (and later her plethora of kittens) who hung around her house in Baghdad. A rather mundane logistic, what to pack, what to do with the animals around your home that you’ve come to begrudgingly appreciate; but when positioned in the context of wartime, these can become the most important questions of all. So much experimental film is about the images. It’s also about sound, too, of course, but in Italian filmmaker Chiara Caterina’s L’INCANTO [ENCHANTMENT] (2021, 20 min), it’s the elliptical voice-overs that one is compelled to follow, an assortment of recordings of women speaking about subjects that somehow pertain, even if indirectly, to death. One of the voices belongs to Donatella Colasanti, a victim of a crime (she and a friend were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and tortured by three men; her friend, sadly, died) in the 1970s that was then considered one of the worst in modern Italian history. Another of the women was accused of murdering four people. Between these extremes are three other women who provide their unique perspectives on life and death. The accompanying imagery is seemingly random, though at times it aligns with whatever the woman is saying. When one woman talks about a ghost, the footage—often made to look like a film strip—is of an eerie house; when Colasanti discusses her attack, a ripped Italian flag blows in the wind. The womens’ voices are themselves suspended masses, echoes reverberating across the ages, telling, like all of the films, beautiful and tragic tales as old as time. [Kat Sachs]
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Mediating Desires
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 8pm
“A lonely doodler forges an intense emotional bond with a horse.” Whatever expectations I had of Allison Radomski’s I HEART HORSE (2022, 6 min) when reading this description were certainly exceeded. A horse, indeed, is “hearted” in this visual and sonic deluge of appreciation for the majestic creature. Images of horses in all shapes and forms—grainy film footage, crude drawings, the word horse written over and over, sometimes a combination of these modes—and an incredibly catchy song are combined to create a veritable testament to the omniscient singer’s adoration of them. The concept of horse girls is evoked, naturally, and that’s where depth is among the fun and froth; its seeming ingenuousness renders palpably the intensity of this obsession and what it says about girlhood and desire, this latter sensation being at the heart (no pun intended) of the program. Sam Taffel’s LOOKING FOR LOVE (2022, 11 min) is an examination of how this concept intersects with media representation. The description notes how the disparate sketches “investigate… the materiality of image-producing devices [and how it] activates practices of personal memory and longing.” I need not investigate further; from the second an audio clip from the finale of Bob Fosse’s ALL THAT JAZZ sounded, I was enthralled, memories from my past evoked and a sense of longing—in this case for that film’s singular exquisiteness—activated. A sequence wherein a bright blue bob appears to be giving a monologue about looking for love is oddly emotional, though abstractions like this temper any potential obviousness in Taffel’s premise. Desire is often as much about what isn’t realized as about what is. In Iran, after the 1979 revolution, cinematic depictions of men and women touching were forbidden. In NAZARBAZI (2022, 19 min), a word that means the play of glances, filmmaker Maryam Tafakory edits together scenes from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema in which a sense of desire or longing is conveyed through everything but physical contact. Touch can be forbidden, but not looking and lingering. Sporadic interstitials show poetic text (credited at the end to the likes of famed Iranian poets Forugh Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou, as well as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida), fitting not just because of the importance of poetry in Iran, but also as it mirrors the evasive longing of lovers—specifically women, whose desire was really the thing being regulated—unable to touch. Something of a palate cleanser, Zhen Li’s FUR (2022, 7 min) is a short animated film that, through a rough-hewn illustration style, depicts “a crush gone moldy.” It’s bizarre and surrealistic, and thus a perfect way to represent the inherent peculiarity of attraction. Also screening is Marius Packbier and Aïlien Reyns’ SKIN PLEASURE (2022, 36 min), which, per the film’s description, is “a video essay that investigates the different functions of the skin in relation to the reception of internet pornography.” [Kat Sachs]
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High Points of Our Intimacy
Chicago Filmmakers – Sunday, 3pm
“High Points of Our Intimacy” is, as the title suggests, about intimacy, specifically as an extension of memory, something that memorializes moments in time and stretches it to infinity. Most crucially for this type of work, each selection uses its particular filmic interventions to explore intimacy in a way unique to its form. Gülce Besen Dilek’s animation KOLAJ (2022, 8 min) uses dichromatic drawings to portray the varied faces we see on one another day to day. As the short’s protagonist moves through her neighborhood, we see her perception of faces shift, some lending their identities to be “read” more easily than others, some growing increasingly ornate and abstract with their distinguishing lines. Intimacy, says Dilek, is a process, relying on ongoing learning as our self-concept and perceptions shift. Dilek’s bouncy style keeps the film from being weighed down by these complex themes, lacing his simple 2D style with fluid linework that emulates A SCANNER DARKLY’s scramble suits to a more charming, lo-fi effect. STRING THERAPY (2022, 16 min) keeps up this playful energy, staging a couples therapy appointment between the members of filmmaking duo Considered to be Allies (Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen and Margaux Parillaud) moderated by a fleshy mouth-like protrusion from a chair. As the two artists explain their symbiotic, twin-like connection, they become literally entwined as endless hair sprouts out of holes in their stomachs, the two strands braiding and entering the mouth of their therapist-flesh-chair, which grows gradually. Body-horror-inflected as it is, this alternately silly and visceral short seems like a genuine stab at reflecting on a uniquely co-dependent creative relationship, like Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye’s stuck in Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The duo, like Dilek, has expertly used their medium to create the terms upon which they want to reflect on intimacy. Through fleet drawings and practical creature FX, they’ve all created in filmic reality the emotional worlds where their intimacy exists. The program’s masterwork, Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s MOUNE Ô (2022, 17 min), applies these flights of fancy directly to the archive to reclaim a complicated piece of Guyanese history. Jean-Baptiste appropriates video from a parade in Guyana following the shooting and release of the 1990 French film JEAN GALMOT, ADVENTURER, a valorizing account of the French explorer who began living in Guyana in the early 20th century. In the onscreen text, the filmmaker’s blistering reflections play out and clarify, in the face of ruthless imperialist pollution, the need for a project exactly like this one, which can highlight the national talent and pride even within colonialist projects like JEAN GALMOT. This is a filmmaker using the medium to reconfigure affinities across time and strengthen a sort of one-way intimacy that can read between the lines of exploitative work. The footage is edited in a hopscotch fashion, jumping two frames forward and one frame back, drawing out each moment of joy to its breaking point and making sure that each moment of grainy video is given its due. In a program devoted to intimacy, the film demands maybe the most intimate relationship with its viewers, pulling your eyes over each jerking pixel. Also screening in the program, but unavailable for preview, is Jingyuan Luo’s THE YELLOW GHOST (2022, 18 min). [Maxwell Courtright]
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Enchanted Environments
Chicago Filmmakers – Sunday, 5pm
This program scrutinizes human interactions and their effect on the environment, as filmmakers highlight the way we tend to see nature as fragmented. We consume and change things; nature that we perceive as relatively slow-paced starts to move too fast, forced to keep up with our hasty human stride. These films examine the ways in which we tend to collapse nature, flatten the space between the air and the earth, and suggest ways to find community within these now variegated environments—technological and natural. Dave Rodriguez’s PICTURE A FOREST (2022, 4 min) captures a wooded landscape through strobed images. The trees become pixelated, suggesting an encroachment of technology into the environment as unintelligible, robotic-sounding voices shout over the distorting trees. Everything becomes more and more warped until the simple images of trees become unrecognizable. In OUR NON-UNDERSTANDING OF EVERYTHING 02 (2022-23, 15 min), filmmakers eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) focus, too, on the derezzing of nature. They center on a body of water in a wooded area and the creatures that reside there; dazzling pixelated colored discs seem to intrude rather than illuminate, suggesting the reflective mirrors of modern technology—this is solidified by the appearance of smartphones floating amongst the trees and the shift from nature to a cityscape with its pixelated, irradiated windows. In Erin Weisgerber’s DANS LES CIEUX ET SUR LA TERRE (2022, 12 min), the filmmaker takes us through Montreal, the camera interested in the stone architecture of the stoic buildings. Impressively shot, the camera moves from black and white to overlays of color with strobic effects, bringing energy and movement to still buildings and spaces. The effects also create a kaleidoscopic texture, as nature, art, and architecture combine. In LANGUAGE UNKNOWN (2022, 6 min), Janelle VanderKelen creates images of detached human body parts—eyes, an ear, a tongue—as they sensorially explore nature within the domestic space. Set within a house, the film explores not just nature, but the representation of nature. It suggests that nature is rebelling against the idea that it exists only for the pleasure of humans as it dominates the small pieces of the human body. Animated shapes of colorful coagulated landscape planets are featured in Diane Christiansen’s SPECK (2022, 3 min). As an anthropomorphic hand runs around the shapes, they begin to be infested by industry—smokestacks and cell towers—until it seems there is no space left. In Kelly Sears’ PHASE II (2022, 6 min), a voiceover explains that sonic weapons are being used to drive out people from the city to make ways for high-rise development. Large, imposing amplifiers dot seemingly bricolage-collaged images of the cityscape. Finally, Yannick Mosimann’s SUNSPOTS (2022, 9 min), shot in 16mm, graphically layers shots of the sun over landscapes. Sounds of crackling burning, suggesting heat, play over the entire film. Some of these sounds are in fact solar oscillations from NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The sensory experience of nature is often highlighted in these films, and SUNSPOTS especially suggests a connection between the natural spaces of earth and those much further away. Also screening in the program, but unavailable for preview, are Oona Taper’s THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER (2023, 8 min) and Wen Pey Lim’s LDN 51.5072N 0.1276W (2022, 3 min). [Megan Fariello]
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About Life
Mana Contemporary – Monday - Thursday, 2pm, 4pm & 6pm
The works in this program showcase the personal, even confessional, side of experimental cinema. In all of them, the filmmakers proceed from the questions, “Who am I? Where do I belong?” In AS/IS (2022, 11 min), Natasha Woods starts with family, placing herself in a chain with other women and girls she loves: her grandmother, her mother, her sisters, and her sisters’ daughters. The film presents short portraits of each subject, shot on 16mm without sync sound, pairing shots of mundane behavior with reflections from the onscreen subject about family, femininity, and personal aspirations. The language is generally prosaic and the tone is understated, yet what emerges is sunny, even celebratory. THE SKY’S IN THERE (2022, 11 min), the latest from noted experimental duo Dani Leventhal ReStack and Sheila Wilson ReStack, explores similar themes to AS/IS and it places a comparable emphasis on the mundane. But the ReStacks are filmmakers in hyperdrive, editing disparate footage together in a rapid flow that feels attuned to our internet-driven times. In THE SKY’S IN THERE, the ReStacks give us impressions of their day-to-day life, which involves spending time with their daughter, hanging out around the house and yard, having sex, and watching other movies. Sometimes the filmmakers employ a dance-y, bass-heavy beat on the soundtrack that invokes a flashy online popup ad, and it serves as a funny counterpart to the decidedly un-flashy stuff that’s happening on screen most of the time. There’s a similar wry humor at play in WHY DO ANTS GO BACK TO THEIR NESTS? (2022, 12 min), which begins (after a faux-bombastic introduction) with director Alex Lo confessing to the camera that he’s currently digging a hole between Toronto and Hong Kong. This promises a film about Lo’s identity as a Hong Kong-born individual currently living in Canada, but WHY DO ANTS is more a collection of impressions and formal shenanigans than it is a fully formed consideration of anything in particular. One characteristic sequence finds Lo cutting together various shots with the camera spinning around over a free jazz freakout; Lo follows this up on the soundtrack with the pithy observation, “There’s nothing photogenic about Toronto. When I leave, I’ll remember people as landscapes.” Like WHY DO ANTS, Sarah Ballard’s THERE, WHERE SHE IS NOT (2022, 7 min) offers a mélange of images and filmic textures as it circulates around a central idea, in this case the life of actress Frances Farmer. Most of the soundtrack comes from an episode of This Is Your Life on which Farmer appeared, and Ballard samples enough of the episode to create a sense of how difficult Farmer’s life was. The misty black-and-white imagery feels appropriate to the subject matter. In contrast to the domestic scenes offered by the four shorts discussed above, Amina Maher’s WHERE THE FRIEND’S HOME? (2022, 11 min) and Fernanda Pessoa’s SOLIDARITY (2022, 9 min) operate on a consciously political scale. Provocatively named after the Kiarostami masterpiece, Maher’s short finds the filmmaker talking with a friend about notions of gender, queerness, and personal expression. Maher, who’s a transgender woman, seems comfortable discussing subjects that might make some people uncomfortable, but it speaks to the trust she has with her friend that she’s able to speak so openly. In the upsetting final minutes, Maher goes shopping on streets of Berlin and has to suffer casual abuse from transphobic passersby; the sequence is a sad reminder that not everyone you meet will want to be your friend. SOLIDARITY, on the other hand, is a tribute to strangers coming together. Shot on Super-8 during Brazil’s anti-Bolsonaro protests of 2021, it’s a rousing political film about the countless people it takes to make a movement. Pessoa took a cue from a Joyce Wieland film, also called SOLIDARITY (1973), that focuses on people’s feet; in this film, the emphasis is on hands. By not showing faces, Pessoa underscores the collective humanity that brought people out on the streets during a pandemic to protest an evil government. Also screening in the program, but unavailable for preview, is Yup Nakayama’s LOOKING FOR LOVE (AND JOB) (2021, 19 min). [Ben Sachs]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Queer in Color Double Feature

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Friday, 7pm [Free Admission]

Film theorist Richard Dyer writes that camp “is a way of prising the form of something away from its content, of reveling in the style while dismissing the content as trivial.” I would argue that the use of color in these films is not simply dismissing content, but turning form into content, illuminating everything under the surface that exists beyond content.
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Kenneth Anger’s PUCE MOMENT (US/Experimental)
PUCE MOMENT feels completely out of time; visually it suggests the 1920s, the soundtrack, the 60s. Despite these references, it’s also incredibly contemporary. Anger originally set it to Verdi, but re-released the film with a psychedelic rock by Jonathan Halper. The short film opens with a series of bright beaded flapper dresses presented in front of the camera, focusing on the sheer material and colors. The final dress reveals actress Yvonne Marquis, in gorgeously bold makeup, as she revels in her choice of garment, almost worshiping it as she puts it on. She moves around her space, which is filled with more material and objects, the camera taking its time to show it all; it also focuses on Marquis’ clear enjoyment of her things, her clothes, and her space before she eventually leaves her house in the Hollywood Hills. It's a beautiful piece, emphasizing not just extravagance, but self-actualization through materiality, particularly clothing. Fashion is fantasy, allowing for transformation both within and outside the domestic space. It can also be disruptive, not simply indulgent, but subversive in its superfluousness. PUCE MOMENT is a playful and sincere engagement with the metamorphic potential of aesthetic extravagance. (1949, 6 min, 16mm)
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Lewis Allen’s DESERT FURY (US)
DESERT FURY is a gaudy Technicolor dream; its color is so saturated and vivid that it almost looks animated at times, the desert landscape portrayed in vivid purples and greens. The film, directed by Lewis Allen (best known for the classic ghost story THE UNINVITED [1944]), is unmistakably queer cinema in both its extravagant camp aesthetic as well as its explicit narrative. Paula Haller (film noir stalwart Lizabeth Scott) has returned to her desert hometown of Chuckawalla after dropping out of finishing school. She and her overbearing mother, Fritzi (Mary Astor), who owns the local saloon and casino, The Purple Sage, have never been accepted by the locals, though Fritzi has made surreptitious connections with those in power. At the same time, gangster Eddie Bendix (John Hodiak) has arrived back in Chuckawalla, accompanied by his unambiguously devoted henchman, Johnny Ryan (Wendell Corey); Bendix had previously fled the town having been accused of murdering his wife. Paula takes a romantic interest in the shadowy Bendix, but he and her mother have a past, and Fritzi isn’t too keen on their relationship. This is all complicated by Tom (Burt Lancaster in one of his earliest film roles), a local lawman in love with Paula. Of course, the past eventually catches up with them all, complete with a final car chase. There’s an unmistakable homoeroticism at the heart of the film. It’s suggested in the domineering nature of Fritzi and Paula’s relationship, but it’s particularly overt in the relationship between Bendix and Johnny; the latter scoffs at the idea of having his own desires, telling Paula, “Why would there be some of me apart from Eddie?” With the mother/daughter relationship set next to a crime story, DESERT FURY combines melodrama and noir in excess, emphasized by a sweeping score by Miklós Rózsa; it’s pure immoderateness in color and emotion, driven by the main performance of Scott as Paula, who is uncertain how she feels about everyone around her (her mother, Bendix, and Tom), silently and dramatically wanders around her ornately decorated room more than once. It’s an odd coming of age story, as Paula notes in an early stand out one-liner: “I’m a big girl now; I’m allowed to play with matches.” (1947, 96 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

Howard Hawks' TWENTIETH CENTURY (US)

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

Howard Hawks is usually credited with having a hand in the invention and/or popularization of the screwball comedy, but more important, within his own oeuvre, is the fact that he shepherded the "genre" from TWENTIETH CENTURY to a burnished modernity six years later in HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940). Whereas HIS GIRL, with its subtle but nonetheless present heart of darkness (corruption, obsession, madness, murder), seems very much of its and our time, TWENTIETH CENTURY, by comparison, has a foot—like the New York-Chicago passenger train that it's named after—in the nineteenth: in blackout sketches and quack entrepreneurial optimism. Far from making TWENTIETH CENTURY a relic, however, this quality of being out of time makes its every rediscovery a pleasure: viewing it lets us breathe an air more foreign and surprising than HIS GIRL's, which has, by so becoming so definitively the "face" of sophisticated screwball, turned invisible, entered into our language. TWENTIETH's pop-eyed frenzy is clear and brittle by comparison: Carole Lombard and John Barrymore spar with operatic desperation, not urbane restraint. Since Hawks's comedies tend to get revived with a certain regularity, it's difficult to imagine that there are many fans left who know this side of his work mainly from BRINGING UP BABY (1938) and HIS GIRL, but in case there are any holdouts, here is a golden opportunity. Screening as part of the Carole Lombard x3 series. (1934, 91 min, 35mm) [Jeremy M. Davies]

Medical Projections: Surgery, Disease, Physiology, and Health in Early Cinema (1892-1909) (Silent/Shorts)

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

Curated by Cine-File editor emeritus Patrick Friel in conjunction with the exhibition “The Heart’s Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto” (which was itself curated by Cine-File contributor Michael Metzger), the “Medical Projections: Surgery, Disease, Physiology, and Health in Early Cinema (1892-1909)” screening is a bevy of aesculapian curios, put together by the only person who could possibly do so. All in all there are 16 films in the program, some not even one minute long. EDISON KINETOSCOPIC RECORD OF A SNEEZE [a.k.a. FRED OTT'S SNEEZE] (1894, 1 min) is an interesting film in that it was never intended as a film at all; it was reanimated using still photographs—taken to accompany an article in Harper’s Weekly—in 1953, after which film historians erroneously started saying that it had originally been exhibited. It’s a collaboration through time, one might say, the images taken by W.K.L. Dickson, Thomas Edison’s assistant and the person appointed to realize the device that would later become the kinetoscope; the man sneezing is Fred Ott, a machinist for Edison, now the star of what’s thought to be the second “motion picture” granted a copyright (though, per the Library of Congress, “the 45 frames it contains were sent in for copyright as a still picture”). Another first, the FIRST X-RAY CINEMATOGRAPH FILM EVER TAKEN, SHOWN BY DR. MACINTYRE AT THE LONDON ROYAL SOCIETY (1897, 13 sec), contains in part an X-ray of a frog's knee, which will be shown at the screening. It’s functionality we today take for granted, but the doctor/filmmaker, John Macintyre, used this curiosity to promote the new technology and later established the first radiology ward in Glasgow. If you’re looking for more fun with X-rays and bones, then you’ll get it with G.A. Smith’s X-RAYS (1897, 1 min) and THE MERRY SKELETON (1897, 1 min). The latter was made by an unknown director, though some sources cite it as being Louis Lumière. Surgery is represented in the program via several short films. AMPUTATION OF THE LOWER LEG (1903, 3 min) consists of footage of German doctor Ernst von Bergmann amputating someone’s lower leg. LA SÉPARATION DES SŒURS SIAMOISES (1902, 4 min), filmed by French cinematographer Clément Maurice, depicts famed Parisian doctor Eugène-Louis Doyen—himself interested in photography and cinematography—as he works to separate conjoined twins, thought to be the first time this procedure was performed successfully. TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY SURGERY (1900, 2 min) is a humorous short depicting two doctors as they amputate and then replace a person’s leg from a large jug labeled “Exchange Pieces.” A sign hangs up top their room that says “PLEASE DO NOT CRY.” Notable about this film is that it’s thought to have been directed by pioneering filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché. Based on the work of hers I’ve seen, I’d say it’s definitely a possibility. A short selection from Italian neurologist Camillo Negro's Neuropathological Films (1906-1908, 7 min) is beautifully shot by cinematographer Roberto Omegna, who also wrote and photographed the 1908 silent short THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII. Some of the films are rather ghoulish, though still interesting as filmic and medical artifacts. Walter G. Chase’s EPILEPTIC SEIZURES 1-8 (1905, 22 min), filmed against a dark background, shows men and women, one at a time, as they have seizures. THE MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL - A BOY WITH A SEIZURE (1907, 1 min), shot by Peter Elfelt, is similar in nature. Elfelt also shot DR. CLOD-HANSEN (1909, 1 min), a physical study of fit men in various states of activity. That accounts also for a few of the films and selections not covered here, including Selected Chronophotographic Films (1892 - 1900, 5 min), made by Étienne-Jules Marey and associates. Per the program’s description, “[t]he use of film as a tool to study human motion and physiology began in the 1890s with the chronophotographic films of… Marey,” who’s also the primary inspiration beyond Robleto’s exhibition. The program itself is a fascinating survey of this type of film from the late-19th and early-20th centuries, illuminating not just cinema history but a history of study that spawned the medical treatment and technology we enjoy nowadays. With introduction and commentary by Friel. (1892 - 1909​​, total approx. 55 min, Multiple formats) [Kat Sachs]

F.W. Murnau's SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (US/Silent)

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

One of the most imaginative films ever made and probably the greatest ever made about love, but that makes it sound like homework. Murnau's SUNRISE is as much a discovery now as it was in 1927, if not a greater one, since it's no longer common for serious films to believe in universal experience. (As Lucy Fischer noted in her excellent BFI Classics book, the film's subtitle implies that the feelings of men and women are essentially the same.) Murnau's compassion for the central couple seems ever-expanding: their every emotion seems to trigger some new stylistic innovation. The movie's first major passage—depicting the Woman from the City's attempt to seduce the farmer (George O'Brien) away from his wife (Janet Gaynor, adequately filling the role of the Eternal Feminine)—mixes naturalism and expressionism to bring the characters' inner lives vibrantly to life. Murnau famously instructed O'Brien to put lead weights in his shoes during these scenes; there is no mistaking the man's guilt. This section climaxes with a collage of superimposed images—several of them intentionally distended—that illustrates the woman's lure of "Come to... THE CITY!" It is a thrilling effect, principally because it requires the viewer's imagination to complete it: as one's eyes dart around the frame, trying to take it all in, the scene appears luxurious or terrifying depending on where they fall. (Directors of effects-driven spectacles still have a lot to learn from Murnau.) The orchestration of detail is one of the film's many allusions to symphonic music, the most obvious being its three-movement structure, wherein key motifs of the first section (the farm-on-the-lake setting, the theme of love in peril) are contradicted in the second and brought to resolution in the last. The second movement, which could bring any viewer to swoon, may be the film's crowning achievement. It takes place in one of the most beautiful cities in cinema, a setting brought into being by the couple's re-avowal of their love. Here, Murnau's effects (which include a funny freeze-frame at a portrait studio and some great suspense involving a drunken runaway piglet) invite the viewer to share in the characters' joy, reflecting their spontaneity and their astonishment. For all the marvels of the filmmaking, though, the film's transcendental power never seems to be for its own sake. It is Murnau's response to the universal capacity for feeling (and not just romance—but generosity and loyalty and courage) that drove him to create a monumental new art form using the greatest attributes of all the others. Screening as part of Doc’s Friday series, “Sight & Sound: The Greatest?” (1927, 94 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Stanley Kubrick's FEAR AND DESIRE (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 8pm

For decades, FEAR AND DESIRE was known only as Stanley Kubrick's suppressed film: embarrassed by its amateurish faults and pretensions, he pulled it from distribution, and the few prints that existed were exhibited against his will, rarely and even furtively. In my youth, Kubrickophile as I was, I had to content myself with a bootleg VHS dupe, so many generations removed from whatever illicit scan produced it that its images glowed, and its soundtrack was little more than a permanent, serpentine hiss. There was no telling what secrets lurked within that impenetrable lacquer of static and NTSC bloodbath. Seeing it now in this beautiful restoration, produced by the Library of Congress, it is clear that Kubrick's first feature wears its influences too much on its sleeves. Often, this clumsy effort, made for too little money and without a single professional crewmember, reads like half-baked Vsevolod Pudovkin, served over a bed of Samuel Fuller, with a watered-down T. S. Eliot dressing. The cuts are severe, alienating, disruptive, confusing and jarring the narrative flow like hiccups. The wartime allegory is forced, the soldiers are a group of penny-ante philosophers, and the drama smothered in atmosphere. The script is laden, wet with languorous monologues dragged out of the post-synchronized voices. And yet, there is more to love here than in many of Kubrick's other early films. The photography, honed by Kubrick's years as a photojournalist, is exquisite, and its roughness and silly, over-ambitious grasps at meaning-with-a-capital-M read less as the work of hapless wannabes, mumblecoring their way to an affected cultural relevance, than as the earnest and terrified work of a filmmaker on borrowed time, going-for-broke on what could be his only chance to make his mark. Kubrick threw everything he had into FEAR AND DESIRE, and much of what stuck ended up tracing forward through to his mature works: the awkward, vicious sexual madness of Paul Mazursky's character as he attempts to seduce his prisoner; the rapid-fire, awful night-time attack on a pair of enemy soldiers just trying to eat their dinner; Frank Silvera's great performance, groaning with the weight of his need to matter to the world. After another, and somewhat more accomplished, self-financed film, Kubrick would enter Hollywood, making a series of increasingly slick and soulless films with James B. Harris and Kirk Douglas, films with infinitely more subtlety and considerably less interest than this, and with the release of DR. STRANGELOVE, he would suddenly emerge as perhaps the finest director of his generation. FEAR AND DESIRE is far from a great film, but its flaws are more telling and moving than the empty successes of the Harris/Douglas productions, showing a Kubrick already fascinated by the power of careful composition and expert control over the timing of images and motion, of the brilliant use of unexpected transitions and visual juxtapositions. Kubrick's first feature makes a grand promise, one his career cashed out in spades. Preceded by Kubrick's 1951 short DAY OF THE FIGHT (16 min, 16mm). Screening as part of Doc’s Sunday series, “The Decisive Moment: Photographers Turned Filmmakers.” (1953, 62 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Stanley Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (US/UK)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 8:30pm

There’s an old saying that Americans have never had a knack for satirical comedy. DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB not only busts this myth; it achieves a groundbreaking level of glorious pandemonium that only Kubrick could produce and only Peter Sellers could perform. It remains timeless in a world frightened by macho warmongers, nuclear armament, and the advancement of weapon technology. In 1961, the Soviet Union attempted to expand into Berlin’s Western Bloc, NATO territory. At the time, the stated nuclear policy of the United States and NATO were that any military aggression by the Soviet Union would justify the Americans initiating a nuclear exchange. In retrospect, many Washington advisors allegedly knew how dangerous the policy was and warned a young President Kennedy to never follow the protocol under any circumstances; to do so would cost millions of casualties. Some of Kennedy’s top advisors went on the record stating it was a miracle nuclear weapons were never deployed, whether on purpose, through a glitch, or because of any one man’s stupidity. Concerned by the escalating nuclear arms race and possibility of World War III, Stanley Kubrick went to work. Reading over 70 books on nuclear weapons and nuclear agreements, the then-35-year-old director fell in love with Peter George’s novel Red Alert: a serious dramatization of a military hiccup leading to the nuclear apocalypse. After musing over the story, Kubrick decided to make this contemporary existential anxiety into an absurd comedy. In the film, B-52s planes fly around Soviet airspace armed with hydrogen bombs, ready to deploy within 2 hours of notice. After suffering a psychotic break, General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) puts an army base on red alert, taking the British Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers) as a hostage. Confiscating all means of communication, Ripper forces the captain to issue “Wing Attack Plan R” for bombers flying just outside Soviet airspace. When this news reaches Washington’s higher authority, there’s a War Room meeting called for the President (also played by Sellers), his advisors, a Soviet diplomat (Peter Bull), and former Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove (played by Sellers as well). The clock ticks as the men in power flounder in a Kafkaesque screwball nightmare. In his only farce, Kubrick captures some of the greatest comedic performances ever put on film. In addition to Sellers, there's George C. Scott as the eccentric General Buck Turgidson and Hayden as the brooding psychotic General Ripper. While all listed actors give a level of comic physicality that rival Chaplin’s Tramp, Sellers steals the show as the title character (in fact, other actors break character by laughing during his scenes). Kubrick gives the actor all the space he needs (of which there’s never enough) to deliver an unforgettable performance. There’s an unwritten rule in theater that if you’re having fun, your audience will too. Despite the subject matter, the viewer can tell it was a blast making this picture. There’s a deleted scene involving a pie fight in the War Room between international foes. It didn’t make the final cut because the joy from the actors was visible in the daily rushes. Although endlessly entertaining, STRANGELOVE is bitingly critical of American postwar policy, and it laughs at the incompetence of a system intended to protect. The existence of Strangelove as a character epitomizes American hypocrisy, as he's a former Nazi hired by the American government to assist against the Soviets (Strangelove would have been one of the more than 1600 Nazi scientists who took part in the real-life US military action, Operation Paperclip). At the core, all Kubrick films have a pessimistic view of humanity and the future of the world. DR. STRANGELOVE seems the most thinly veiled in its pessimism and yet has influenced generations of filmmakers; the Coen Brothers watch the film during preproduction of every project. Kubrick regards structures of power as something ugly. He emphasizes bloodlust with phallic imagery: guns, warheads, and cigars. These men are convinced that the size of brute force equates to the size of their member. Alone in Kubrick’s filmography, STRANGELOVE stares into the abyss of existential panic and chuckles. Screening as part of the All in a Day’s Work series. (1964, 95 min, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]

Jim Jarmusch’s NIGHT ON EARTH (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 8:15pm and Wednesday, 6pm

The phrase cinematic universe has become ubiquitous over the past decade, and while it’s mostly used in relation to comic book franchises and the myriad of ways they’re exploited for every penny, it’s nonetheless an interesting concept that embodies the way in which cinema—and its makers—can create worlds that are at once corporeal and transcendental. Jim Jarmusch is just one among a number of auteurs whose films seem to exist not only in their own world, but also on their own timeline—one can consider Jarmusch’s oeuvre and feel as if the plots of all his films are happening concurrently, even if they’re continents and eras apart. This concept is most explicit in his vignette and anthology films: MYSTERY TRAIN (1989), NIGHT ON EARTH (1991) and COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (2004). Where MYSTERY TRAIN features three sets of characters whose separate storylines unknowingly bring them to the same Memphis hotel, NIGHT ON EARTH takes place at the same time across five different cities around the world. In a 1992 interview with Sight and Sound, Jarmusch affirmed that he “still cling[s] to that need to order things in a classical way,” and that “the crossing time zones, being on the planet at the same time and the sun going down at the beginning and coming up at the end helped give...an overall form.” (COFFEE AND CIGARETTES is a little different in that its wholly separate vignettes are connected thematically by conversational and aesthetic motifs. One might also recognize Jarmusch’s 2013 film ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE as a culmination of this desire to defy any sublunary inclinations.) Jarmusch didn’t intend to follow MYSTERY TRAIN with a similarly episodic film; he wrote NIGHT ON EARTH “very fast, out of frustration” after another project centering on a single character got the kibosh. This urgency is felt through both the film’s structure and its tone—each vignette is about a taxi ride, varying in haste but still connected by an appropriately poetic inquietude. The first and last parts are my favorite: the first, set in LA and starring a young Winona Ryder as an irascible cabbie and a maturing Gena Rowlands as a slick casting agent (some of the film’s other stars include Giancarlo Esposito, Rosie Perez, Béatrice Dalle, and Roberto Benigni), reflects an assuring contentedness that oppugns any unease, and the last, set in Helsinki, about a cab driver whose sad story puts things into perspective for his discontented passengers, adds a sense of finality to an otherwise discrete, albeit winsome, construction. In spite of its perhaps unintentional incongruity, it still reflects Jarmusch’s unwavering commitment to and passion for the aforementioned “classical way,” which he uses to inform a distinct vision for each film. (Along these lines, Thom Andersen wrote in his essay for the film’s Criterion release that “[a]fter his first few films, it seems that critics, and maybe even some ordinary fans, started to take Jarmusch films for granted, in the same way that an older generation of critics and fans took Howard Hawks films for granted. The pleasures they offered were evident, but predictable. With Hawks, critics have come to value these pleasures more highly and to appreciate the variations he worked on recurring themes. Maybe Jarmusch’s day will come also.”) If you’re resolved to spending a night on earth—which, all told, no one would blame you for sitting one or 1,374 out—do so in Jarmusch’s world. Frederick Elmes’ ingenious cinematography and original music by Tom Waits should sweeten the deal. Screening as part of the All in a Day’s Work series. (1991, 128 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Sidney Lumet's DOG DAY AFTERNOON (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 6:30pm and Thursday, 8:30pm

In DOG DAY AFTERNOON, Sidney Lumet exploited his theatrical background to electrifying effect, building consistent dramatic tension from the essential mise-en-scene of a few stark locations and ramped-up performances. AFTERNOON has been justly canonized for Al Pacino's star turn, a product of genuine exhaustion and second-wind adrenaline. (Pacino nearly turned the film down because it began shooting immediately after the epic schedule for THE GODFATHER PART II had wrapped); yet it's only one bright spark among a uniformly wired cast. Going against his usual loyalty to the written word, Lumet encouraged his actors to improvise after rehearsing Frank Pierson's script for seven weeks. The process yielded a unique performance style—which was, on the whole, perhaps Lumet's greatest contribution to movies—that combined the specific, spontaneous gestures of film acting with the internalized characterizations common to stage drama. The film depicts an infamous Brooklyn bank robbery of 1972, committed by a married man who wanted to raise the money for his male lover's sex change operation. The botched robbery devolved into a highly publicized hostage standoff, and under Lumet's direction, the events play out as a series of escalating, acutely realized crises. Thanks to the extended rehearsal period, everyone on screen seems confident in their daily business—be it running a bank or negotiating for the FBI—yet the demands of improvisation make everyone visibly, and convincingly, nervous. The film generates great suspense as well as comedy (note the scene where John Cazale's ad lib about Wyoming nearly makes Pacino crack up), often at the same time, as in Pacino's impassioned and ultimately exhausting phone conversation with his lover (Chris Sarandon). It's also worth noting that the exterior shots present some exciting snapshots of New York in the mid-70s and that the film's sexual politics don't feel at all dated. Screening as part of the All in a Day’s Work series. (1975, 125 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Rob Christopher’s ROY'S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD'S CHICAGO (US/Documentary)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Sunday, 11am

If the name Barry Gifford rings a bell to Cine-File readers, it’s likely for his contributions to what you might call “David’s world”: David Lynch, that is. Lynch’s WILD AT HEART (1990) was an adaptation of a Gifford novel, and they co-wrote LOST HIGHWAY (1997) together. Until I saw ROY'S WORLD: BARRY GIFFORD'S CHICAGO, a dreamy, immersive documentary by Cine-File contributor Rob Christopher, I was unfamiliar with his Roy stories, myself. Roy is the character Gifford invented as an alter-ego for himself as a boy/young man, a movie-loving street kid whose coming-of-age adventures Gifford has been chronicling in works of autobiographical fiction for nearly 40 years now. “Roy’s world” is a specific time and place—Chicago, mostly, in the 1950s and early ‘60s. This documentary celebrates these writings by adhering to a strict no-talking-heads policy. Christopher eschews entirely the standard on-screen interviews in favor of voice-over narratives: reminiscences from Gifford himself provide context for readings from the work. For these, Christopher and producer Michael Glover Smith (also a Cine-File contributor) scored a coup: they got Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, and Lili Taylor to read, and their distinctive timbres and tough-but-tender personas embody the texts. Gifford/Roy’s Chicago is a wintry, working-class world. His father ran an operation called Lake Shore Pharmacy, across from the old Water Tower. It was a 24-hour kind of joint, ostensibly a drug store; showgirls would drop by on their breaks and repair to the basement, where he’d administer some kind of pep shot. The people who hung around the store, including Gifford’s own family, were “not people to mess around with”; some had been gangsters during Prohibition. The film pulses with the seamy romance of the town’s jazzy nightlife, enhanced by a cool, atmospheric score by jazz vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz. Still, a young boy experienced the corruption of organized crime, and the intertwined iron fist of Richard J. Daley’s machine, as just a part of the atmosphere. Hardboiled as it was in attitude, the town nevertheless seems like it must have been a hell of a place to grow up. Gifford’s mom was from Texas, a former beauty queen, 20 years younger than his dad. The marriage didn’t stick, and her struggles—during an era when being a “divorcee” was still rather a scandal—are poignant. In fact, Gifford confides in us that one of his chief motivations for creating Roy was to remember the time he had with his mother. The story “Chicago, Illinois, 1953” recalls a humiliating incident when a shopkeeper mistook his mom, bronzed from a season under the tropical sun, for a Black woman, and refused to serve her. It is illustrated by shimmering black-and-white animated drawings. When young Roy later asks his shaking mom why she didn’t simply tell the man she was white, she replies, “It shouldn’t matter, Roy.” The story “Bad Girls,” set during the early ’60s and illustrated by rotoscoped footage from Graceland Cemetery, nicely evokes the feeling of teenage discovery, as Roy and a new female friend roam our fabled “city of neighborhoods.” Christopher’s design also includes found footage in striking black-and-white and eye-popping saturated color, and archival materials ranging from Gifford’s home movies to neighborhood newspapers. Zooming carefully into photographs from a bygone world, patiently waiting for them to reveal their secrets, Christopher encourages us to imagine the individual lives and stories spilling outside the frame. For locals, the film transforms Chicago into a fascinating palimpsest, allowing us to trace the former lives of buildings and neighborhoods behind our everyday cityscape. While the film is deliberately unhurried, its open-all-night vibe will cast a spell on anyone open to its urban jazz-noir mood. Gifford’s Roy stories work as history and as autobiography, but above all they’re a form of make-believe. It required almost an equivalent act of imagination for Christopher to conjure up a world that opens up as richly as his inspiration, but that’s what he’s done with ROY’S WORLD. I emerged from this sensory experience as if from a waking dream, blinking and momentarily disoriented, though with a heightened alertness. It was as if I’d visited a land of phantoms—but of course, these were really only the shades of men and women just like us. ROY’S WORLD made me feel as if the past never really went anywhere, if only we look closely enough. (2019, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Scott Pfeiffer]

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Guillermo del Toro's PAN'S LABYRINTH (Mexico/Spain)

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

Once upon a time, long before he was cursed by some all-powerful demon to make only overblown and unnecessary remakes of others’ movies, Guillermo del Toro channeled his boundless love for all things oozing, fantastic, and macabre into his own allegorical fairy tales. This story of a young girl who escapes into an underworld of fairies, fauns, and, most memorably, the Pale Man, with his detachable eyeballs that must be fastened into his palms for him to see, draws on folk traditions from all over the globe, as well as the artwork of Francisco Goya and Arthur Rackham, but combines all the disparate influences into a unified vision. Most of del Toro’s work dwells in a cut-and-dry moral universe—no matter how elaborate the make-up, effects, or sets, the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. What sets PAN’S LABYRINTH apart is the understandable longing to escape into fantasy to block out the twin horrors of Franco’s Spain and the prospect of life with a hateful step-parent. However deep the girl dives into realms of magic and make-believe, what awaits when she resurfaces is no happily ever after. Rewatching del Toro’s crowning achievement 16 years after its release made me hope wholeheartedly that one day soon the spell will be lifted and he’ll be able to make something even half as memorable as this, rather than continuing to raid the dusty corners of Hollywood storage lockers for old monsters to reanimate. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday I series, “The Three Amigos.” (2006, 119 min, 35mm) [Dmitry Samarov]

Alain Resnais' MURIEL, OR THE TIME OF RETURN (France)

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

Alain Resnais' radical politics were as integral to his art as his psychological insights and love of comic books. A member of the same Left Bank creative circle as Chris Marker and Marguerite Duras, Resnais was among the first major artists to call public attention to the Holocaust (in NIGHT AND FOG), the atrocities of atomic war (in HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR), and Franco's persecution of dissidents (in LA GUERRE EST FINIE). His third feature, MURIEL, confronted France's brutal history in Algeria, using a melodramatic premise as an entryway into the difficult truths of French colonialism. Set in Boulogne, the film centers on a middle-aged antiques dealer, Hélène (Delphine Seyrig, in one of her greatest performances), who lives with her grown stepson Bernard. One day Hélène receives a visit from an old lover, Alphonse, who arrives with a mysterious woman he claims to be his niece. Bernard and Alphonse have both spent time in Algiers—Bernard as a soldier, Alphonse as a cafe owner—and both seem haunted by their experience there. Resnais and screenwriter Jean Cayrol (a noted intellectual and concentration camp survivor who also wrote the narration for NIGHT AND FOG) withhold the nature of the characters’ traumas until very late in the film, telling the story out of order so as to avoid confronting those traumas until they absolutely have to. The modernist structure isn’t a coy trick, but rather a poignant reflection of the characters’ repressive memories—which in turn reflect the avoidance strategies of French society at large with regards to colonialist history. (Resnais’ radical experiments with montage never feel more thematically purposeful than they do here.) Resnais, Cayrol, and Seyrig aren’t the only major artists associated with this monumental work: Sacha Vierny (one of the director’s key collaborators in the first half of his career) is the cinematographer, and the noted modernist composer Hans Werner Henze wrote the score, his first for a feature film. Both men add layers of distance between the viewer and the characters’ traumas—Vierny with his mysterious camera movements, Henze with his atonal melodies—yet their work is also ruminative and beautiful, heightening the film’s considerable intellectual power. Screening as part of Doc’s Wednesday series, “Delphine Seyrig, More Than a Muse.” (1963, 116 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Hong Sang-soo’s WALK UP (South Korea)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Speaking about Hong Sang-soo’s fifth feature WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (2004) in the mid-2000s, Martin Scorsese asserted that one of the gifts of Hong’s films lies in how they pare away narrative events to consider simply “a way of being.” Two dozen features later, that remains true of Hong’s work, if not truer now than it was then. The relatively recent GRASS (2018) was virtually plot-free, and in THE NOVELIST’S FILM (2022), Hong cheekily divulged nothing about the titular project, focusing instead on the events that lead to its creation. Yet the way of being presented in these films is distinctly different than that of Hong’s early work—it’s calmer, more reflective, and often wistful. Gone are the resentment and passive-aggressive anger that fueled the first dozen or so Hong movies; in their place are contemplation and a sense of acceptance. This may be a reflection of how Hong has aged or it may derive from his ever-growing comfort in making films, which seems to come to him as naturally as breathing. In any case, a movie like WALK UP (Hong’s second feature of 2022) unfolds so gently and mellifluously that you may not recognize the sadness at its core until after it ends. Set in just one location, it observes a filmmaker (Hong regular Kwon Haehyo) as he moves into an apartment building in Seoul and settles in over time; he develops a sort-of friendship with his landlady, enters into a sort-of romance with the restauratrice who occupies the second floor, and occasionally considers retiring from cinema. As usual, Hong dramatizes the relationships through low-key scenes of hanging out and drinking (in a new twist for the writer-director, the characters’ preferred drink is neither soju nor beer, but rather wine), allowing their unspoken feelings to steer the course of their encounters. Hong also obscures how much time passes between scenes—it could be weeks, months, or years—and this forces viewers to guess based on how much the characters have changed. It would be a mischaracterization to reduce WALK UP to a guessing game, however; by eliminating interstitial events from the narrative, Hong attunes the audience to the everyday moments in which people reveal their true natures. (2022, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Quentin Dupieux’s SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING (France)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Silliness and dumbness have been unfairly maligned for too long. And I'm here to say that enough is enough! Let us celebrate when a robot rolls itself off a pier into a lake to commit suicide! To the barricades we must go to fight in support of the woman who puts on a sensory deprivation helmet only to realize that everyone she knows is actually insufferable! When she takes violent action, so must we! We are all happy idiots mangling themselves in machinery without complaint! We must all raise our stupid banners on high! Enough of this moronic oppression! Quentin Dupieux has made a career of letting others do the heavy lifting of finding deep meaning and philosophical erudition while standing off to the side and pointing out the poignancy of the truly absurd. His cleverness in SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING lies in taking a love of low-budget genre practical effects (puppet creatures, Japanese tokusatsu superhero-style battles, rubber monsters) and using the visual language of empty trash culture, this visual comfort food of empty calories, to give us something that we may not need but crave. Sometimes all we want is relief from the madness that is our world, and oftentimes that doesn't come in the smartest ways. Smoking kills, but feels great in the moment. It's dumb, but it works. Maybe that's the metaphor the film's title is trying to convey? Honestly, I dunno. But I also don't think it really matters. And that's kind of the point. This is a perfectly tight anthology at 80 minutes, because Dupieux understands that a good, dumb gag is always best in brevity. A mix of literal campfire stories and idiotic parables, SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING is a delightful balance of no-budget sci-fi, horror, and the blackest, most absurd comedy imaginable. Dupieux effortlessly shows us yet again that a clever eye, and even more clever imagination, can create the kind of movie that stretches every dollar in the budget into something that feels bigger and better than it should. And that's all the more delicious in SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING, which is an absolutely inspired "fuck you" to the current state of mainstream Hollywood. "Oh, all you want is a mindlessly entertaining superhero movie? Well, okay, here you go. Good luck finding one dumber than this." (2022, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

Agnès Varda's CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 2pm and Tuesday, 5pm

Cléo, a stupid and prodigiously influenced rising pop singer, believes she is dying of stomach cancer, a fear that overwhelms her for the majority of the film's real-time running time and which functions as the movie's primary organizing device. The opening scene features Cléo at a tarot reading (the only scene in color), setting up a kind of aesthetic thesis statement on Varda's part: all of existence, in this work, is intimately orchestrated, choreographed, and meaningful, but, crucially, only for this one moment. The fortune-teller is no mere character but a marker for a structural division that cleaves the entirety of the film. The first two-thirds of it are intensely kinetic--mirrors everywhere, setting up bizarre pseudo-split screens, jump cuts unmotivated by plot or psychological concerns, self-reflexive insertions within the narrative (a song performance, a silent film)--and an effect of this is to make the film's constructed nature unmistakable. As Cléo leaves the tarot reader's apartment, for instance, her footsteps are in perfect synchrony with the nondiegetic music we hear, and in a remarkable move Varda repeats the same shot of her descending stairs multiple times in a row, drawing her film into the orbits of such hyper-controlled avant-garde artworks as Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and Murphy and Léger's 1924 film BALLET MÉCHANIQUE. But after a puzzling encounter with a friend who works as a nude model for sculpture students, Cléo enters a wooded park for the first time and meets a soldier on leave about to return to Algeria. Up until now, the film has been a city-bound labyrinth, filled with confusing and grotesque people, buildings, and images. But in the park and in the company of Antoine (the two share an almost instant connection) the film veers into romance. In a series of lyrical long takes and graceful, unobtrusive stagings, Antoine accompanies her to the hospital where test results await her, findings that she knows may well condemn her to death. And here Varda pulls her most brilliant structural play, for just as Cléo begins to contemplate what the doctor's words mean to her future, the film ends, half an hour early. CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 thus turns its protagonist's melodramas into the stuff of deepest power, for the ending is not conclusion but a demand that each of us in the audience supply the missing minutes of Cléo's life. Indeed, the final five minutes reveal the formal virtuosity of the preceding scenes to have actually been ruminations on the roles of fate, love, and death, and turn Cléo's silly up-and-coming singer into a chanteuse of modernist melancholy. The ideal screening of this masterpiece would keep the lights low and theatre doors shut two quarter hours after the projectors were silenced, forcing the viewers to dwell in the same tenuous uncertainties that Cléo, freed now from her celluloid prison, no longer needs concern herself with. Screening as part of the All in a Day’s Work series. (1961, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Fred Zinnemann’s HIGH NOON (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday 6pm

Reportedly Ronald Reagan’s favorite film, HIGH NOON marks a critical moment in the history of Hollywood cinema. The story begins with the wedding of the newly retired Marshal, Will Kane (Gary Cooper), to Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly). As they prepare to leave from the wedding to ride off into the sunset, word arrives that the outlaw Frank Miller, whom Kane arrested, has finished his prison term and is returning to town on the noon train. His wife, a pacifist, begs him to leave with her, but he quips that Miller’s gang would hunt them down wherever they’d go. She makes an ultimatum that she will leave forever on the noon train with or without her newlywed. He makes rounds amongst old friends and townspeople to find deputies to fight his foe, but no one enlists. Finally, Miller’s gang arrives in town and our hero is forced to face the long-awaited villain alone. Based on John W. Cunningham’s short story "The Tin Star," HIGH NOON took 28 days to shoot and was set to a final budget of a little over $800,000. Austrian-born director Fred Zinnemann has a filmography of characters’ standing alone in the face of adversity. Kane embodies the experiences of a director like Zinnemann, who pushed back against the standards expected of Hollywood directors at the time. Known to sketch, annotate shot lists and perform extensive research for projects, Zinnemann wanted to direct on his own terms and experiment with new approaches to filmmaking. Carl Foreman, a former member of the American Communist party, wrote the script. During production, he was summoned during production to testify for HUAC and refused to name names. Any affiliate of the Communist Party faced being blacklisted and didn’t have a prayer for working in Hollywood again. Recounting the experience, Foreman stated he was on his way to directing his own picture. Despite their ideological differences, Gary Cooper (Hollywood Conservative and member of MPAPIA) became very close with Foreman. When producer Stanley Kramer wanted to fire Foreman for the revelations on his communist ties, he told the producer, “If Foreman goes, Cooper goes,” before storming out. Cooper won an Oscar for his portrayal of Kane, but his health and career were not in a good place at the time; the studio first offered the role to Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Montgomery Cliff, Gregory Peck, and Charlton Heston. Although seen by conservatives as a condemnation of McCarthyism, the story of HIGH NOON says nothing regarding Communism. It works as almost a Western version of the Everyman play. As “a simple Western”, it can be appropriated to any context. Some audiences interpreted it as a comment on the ongoing Korean War. Even the Soviet state didn’t even like the film for its emphasis on the individual saving the day. Howard Hawks disliked the film so much that it partly motivated him to make RIO BRAVO (1959). Regardless, you can’t aim higher in terms of tight, intense filmmaking. Zinnemann’s compositions, photographed by Floyd Crosby, passively push the audience into the emotions of Kane and the other characters. Dimitri Tiomkin’s musical score pounds on awaiting the inevitable trial our hero will have to face. Like a locomotive, HIGH NOON moves at a set anxiety inducing pace to its climax. Screening as part of the All in a Day’s Work series. (1952, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (Belgium)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 4pm

I used to think that Chantal Akerman’s films had more in common with Yasujirō Ozu’s than even those of his most devout disciples. Her use of still, waist-level medium shots (similar to Ozu’s signature “tatami shots,” intended to mimic the perspective of someone kneeling on a tatami mat), stylized settings hyper-respective to her cultural background, and a seemingly detached tone that cloaks rich subtext all recall Ozu’s invariant oeuvre. After rewatching JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, which she made when she was just 25 years old, I still believe that Akerman’s work exhibits these aspects but to antithetical effect. Where Ozu reveals the calm within chaos, Akerman inveigles chaos out of the calm, and there’s perhaps no better example of this than her 201-minute tour de force depicting three days in the life of its title character, a middle-aged mother played to perfection by the solemn, red-haired Delphine Seyrig. Most of the film is composed of superlative long takes in which Jeanne does her daily chores, intercut by brief expositional conversations with her 16-year-old son and oblique references to her “job” as a rather apathetic prostitute. Though it evokes experimental cinema in how it ingeniously uses a simple concept to confront the illusion of that simplicity, it’s also a brilliant depiction of real life as narrative; in a 2009 interview with the New York Times, Akerman observed that “in most movies you have crashes or accidents or things out of the ordinary, so the viewer is distracted from his own life…this film is about his own life.” A friend once remarked to me that their response when asked by a filmmaker to provide feedback about a film they didn’t like was to say that it gave them space to think about that very subject. Ironically, the same is true about the masterwork that is JEANNE DIELMAN. The long takes are simultaneously hypnotic and freeing, producing a sensation that’s almost as mindless as the tasks themselves. Akerman’s depiction of these chores, which are certainly banal even if rendered extraordinary by Babette Mangolte’s lens, is often regarded as a feminist interpretation, a label that Akerman rejects. Indeed, she’s said in several interviews that the seemingly monotonous routines were lovingly inspired both by childhood memories of her mother and Jewish ritual; in the aforementioned interview, she also said that “Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious…she didn’t want to have one free hour because she didn’t know how to fill that hour,” which speaks less to the mundanity of the tasks at hand and more to Jeanne’s general discontent. At the risk of spoiling the film for anyone still unfamiliar with its abrupt ending, the duration doesn’t so much emphasize the monotony as it provides context around the downturn of both character and tone. It doesn’t show three days in a life, but rather the day before the day that cracks start to appear in the foundation, and then the day that it finally crumbles to the ground, out of which something altogether new and different is formed. (On a tangential note, the ending reminds me of these lines from Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust-adjacent poem “Lady Lazarus”: “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.” In 1986, Akerman directed an adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s off-Broadway play Letters Home, based on Plath’s letters to her mother. So much to unpack there.) Only the late filmmaker’s second feature, JEANNE DIELMAN is almost daunting in its command of the medium—perhaps the only label that can rightfully be attached to it is masterpiece. Encore screening as part of Doc’s “Delphine Seyrig, More Than a Muse” series. (1975, 201 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Alex Heller's THE YEAR BETWEEN (US)

FACETS Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes

Who knew a missing tube of shortcake-scented Chapstick could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Clemence (writer-director Alex Heller, in a bone-dry comic turn) accuses her entirely innocent college roommate of pilfering said item from her disaster area of a living space. College isn’t working out for Clemence. In the next scene, her weary but warmhearted mother, Sherri (J.Smith Cameron), is driving her daughter back to their small-town Illinois home. A kind elderly psychiatrist diagnoses Clemence with bipolar disorder and puts her on a regimen of meds to try to regulate her erratic behavior. It’s clear that neither her parents nor her two younger, “normal” siblings—still in high school and living at home—know quite how to deal with Clemence, who wonders aloud to a therapist whether she just has a bad personality. It would be hard to argue with her, considering the trail of destruction she leaves in her wake everywhere she goes. She's a powerful person who passes her days in a rage because she's unable to channel that power. But when her family must for once grapple with a crisis that has nothing to do with Clemence, she surprises everyone by rising to the occasion rather than falling back into the caustic misery which is her resting state. This is a surprisingly funny movie in view of the very serious mental health issues at play. Heller either knows the conditions she pokes fun at firsthand or has remarkable insight. No matter how selfish and bullying Clemence’s behavior becomes, she’s never a caricature. Her friends and family hate her and love her because she’s impossible, but they don’t give up on her, and that makes the moment she gets her head above water that much more moving. The Friday screening is followed by a post-screening Q&A with Heller. (2022, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]

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

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 4:15pm

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 the All in a Day’s Work series. (2017, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

Elena Lopéz Riera’s EL AGUA (Spain)

Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 6pm

Elena Lopéz Riera is a visual artist and filmmaker whose self-described artistic mission is “to transgress the boundaries between learned, transmitted and repeated notions, such as masculine and feminine, belief and skepticism, reality and fantasy, documentary and fiction, through moving images.” EL AGUA, her first feature film, dives into the daily life and folklore of her hometown, Orihuela, a small town in southeastern Spain that has experienced devastating flooding of the Segura River, which flows through it, for hundreds of years. The film centers on 17-year-old Ana (Luna Pamiés), who is being romanced by José (Alberto Olmo), the son of a lemon grower (Pascual Valero) who is trying to get him to get serious about his future. Ana and her all-female family are considered cursed, though no one can say how or why, and Ana seems to believe that she destined to be claimed by the river, which is said to fall in love with a woman every so often; interviews with real women of the town reveal the well-known story of a bride who was drawn to the Segura on the day of her wedding and swallowed up by the waters. The majority of the film, which is quite documentary in nature, shows the kind of restless boredom that residents of small, economically depressed towns deal with by drinking, smoking, and fantasizing about relationships, both real and mythic. The film’s slow pace builds to the point that we, like the Orihuelans, start to will the torrential rains to fall. Screening as part of the Chicago European Union Film Festival, for which this is the last screening. (2022, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Jasmila Žbanić’s QUO VADIS, AIDA? (Bosnia & Herzegovina)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

How does one depict real-world atrocity, convey the scope and gravity of events that largely defy representation? One narrative approach is to center the experiences of a single character, through whose intimate perspective we can even begin to comprehend the human-scale toll of the unconscionable. This is the strategy of Jasmila Žbanić’s QUO VADIS, AIDA?, a wrenching, almost real-time procedural-style account of events leading up to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which over 8,000 Bosniak Muslim boys and men were murdered by Bosnian Serb soldiers. The film focuses on the titular Aida (Jasna Đuričić), a former grade school teacher and a translator for the UN in the designated “safe area” of Srebrenica. When the Army of Republika Srpska invades the town in July of 1995, thousands of Bosnians make their way to a UN base run by a Dutch Protection Force unit; many are allowed inside, but most are forced to stay behind the gates, sweltering in the sun. Although Aida is able to use her credentials to get her husband and two young adult sons inside, their security is increasingly precarious. Soon, after negotiations are made on the basis that the Army of Republika Srpska will peacefully transfer the refugees, Bosnian Serb soldiers begin loading people onto buses. Women, men, and children are separated. Aida, leveraging her insider position, unleashes her ferocious mama bear to do her damndest to make sure her boys are not taken. Amidst the roiling chaos (the huge crowd shots are orchestrated by Žbanić and cinematographer Christine A. Maier with a lucid sense of movement and scale), a recurring image is of Aida, with her blue jacket and laminated tag, racing indefatigably through the halls, trying to stop both military terrorists and the alleged allies of UN bureaucracy from enabling genocide. QUO VADIS, AIDA? is blunt in its condemnation of the deadly inaction (and explicitly deadly action) of the UN, whose ineffectual Dutchbat guards all but handed over Srebrenica to the Bosnian Serb forces. In the face of this heinous institutional and moral failure, Đuričić turns Aida from a harried but steadfast pragmatist into an apoplectic supernova; one can palpably feel her exasperation and fierce maternal instinct enlarge her diminutive figure, taking it to the verge of explosion. In her fury, sorrow, and hard-bitten resilience, she provides an unforgettable face to an unfathomable historical chapter. Screening as part of SAIC professor Daniel R. Quiles’ Gore Capitalism lecture series. (2020, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

John Carpenter's THE THING (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

John Carpenter has always been a minimalist when it comes to framing, using his preferred format of widescreen to create a pronounced sense of negative space and, with it, a pronounced sense of dread. Similarly, he tends to sculpt performances that are understated and direct, much as they are in the work of his favorite director, Howard Hawks. THE THING is a remake of Hawks’ foray into sci-fi horror, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), and one can sense Carpenter’s reverence for the original in his Hawksian depiction of the professional community that makes up the principal characters. Yet where Hawks’ film was a portrait of heroism, showing how a group of scientists bands together to fight off a hostile extraterrestrial life form, Carpenter’s is a pessimistic work that shows a community coming apart in the midst of an alien invasion. (It’s widely suspected that the film was a commercial flop on first release because it came out only a few months after E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, which presented a much rosier view of human-alien relations; Carpenter’s pessimism just wasn’t welcome at the time.) That breakdown is presented in exquisite, gory detail: Rob Bottin’s special make-up effects are some of the most lauded of their kind in movie history, depicting people and animals as they mutate into hideous half-alien creatures. This was Carpenter’s first major studio film, and he took full advantage of the resources available to him. In addition to the first-rate effects, THE THING features a brilliant mix of studio sets and location shooting (with British Columbia standing in for Antarctica) and an appropriately chilling Ennio Morricone score. Programmed and presented by the Abhorrent Cinema; hosted by Chicago cabaret artist and film buff Noah Grey and accompanied by an opening act of genre-inspired burlesque numbers from a roster of guest performers. (1982, 109 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

David Cronenberg's CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (Canada)

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

David Cronenberg is the most phenomenological of directors. I never feel more aware of being human, more embodied than while watching his films. This is certainly spurred on by his visual body horror, but it’s also found in his fascinating themes about what it means to exist—about consciousness being firmly grounded in the corporeal and whether technology amplifies or obstructs that experience. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is this Cronenberg at his best, with themes from his previous films coalescing and evolving into something new. Particularly reminiscent of his last true body horror, eXistenZ (1999), where video game consoles are essentially external organs, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE imagines technology as textured and tangible, beautiful and grotesque; with a lot to admire in the film, the viscerally stunning design of the futuristic technologies stands out. It's set in a dystopian future where humans are mutating so they no longer feel pain, surgeries are performed on the streets and new government agencies like the National Organ Registry are founded. Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, an enthusiastic and awkward assistant at that agency, is the highlight in a film of striking and funny performances. But the protagonist here is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen). He and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are well-known performance artists, sensually using Saul’s body— primarily the unique organs he can grow—as their canvas. They find themselves at the center of a secretive conflict about humanity’s future —will these strange new mutations be stopped or is there a leaning into the evolution? The plot draws heavily on neo-noir, as Saul covertly slinks through the city, trying to uncover secret factions at work. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is overall claustrophobic; this dilapidated future is rich with dark corners, shadows, and crumbling structures. At one point a character speaks of the interior of the body as "outer space," suggesting the external world is empty compared to what’s going on inside. The science-fiction world of CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is completely realized, but expertly reveals only so much of its secrets, leaving one with the disappointment that it must end and an eagerness to revisit all of Cronenberg’s work. Screening as part of Doc’s Thursday II series, “Skin Under Skin: A Retrospective of David Cronenberg.” (2022, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

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

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation now playing at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, known as we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video, which has a runtime of approximately 48 min, will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station. The video will run day and night through mid-March next year. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films
Damien Chazelle's 2022 film BABYLON (189 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday, 4pm and 8pm, as part of the Dóc: New Releases series.

Joe Wright’s 2005 film PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (127 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, in honor of Emily Cheng’s BA thesis on re-reading and the feminine gaze in Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Wright’s adaptation. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago)
The shorts program “PORTA MAGGIORE and Other Works” screens Friday, 7pm, with filmmaker Marco G. Ferrari in person.

“Heart of the Matter: Documentary Production Student Films,” featuring three documentaries that exhibit work made by University of Chicago students during lecturer Marco G. Ferrari’s Documentary Production two-quarter sequence class, screens Saturday at 7pm. Filmmakers in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Spike Lee’s 2002 film 25TH HOUR (135 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 8:30pm. Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 film LA NOTTE (122 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) screens Monday, 6pm, and Thursday, 6:15pm. Both are part of the All in a Day’s Work series. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Mark Jenkin’s 2023 horror film ENYS MEN (96 min, DCP Digital) opens and Vasilis Katsoupis’ 2023 film INSIDE (105 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.

Keenen Ivory Wayans’ 2004 film WHITE CHICKS (109 min, 35mm) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight. 

Music Box Bingo takes place on Thursday, 7pm, in the Music Box Lounge. Hosted by Gaudy God and Uncle Aunt. Free to participate. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ The New 400
In support of the New 400 Theater, which is facing a potential closure, the Silent Film Society of Chicago and Terror in the Aisles present F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent horror classic NOSFERATU (81 min, Digital Projection) on Monday, 7:30pm and 9:30pm, with live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren. Note that the 7:30pm screening is sold out, but tickets for the 9:30pm screening are still available. More info here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.

CINE-LIST: March 31 - April 6, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Maxwell Courtright, Jeremy M. Davies, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Scott Pfeiffer, Dmitry Samarov, Drew Van Weelden