:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 ::

🤘 CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

This year marks the 30th edition of the Chicago Underground Film Festival, which continues through Sunday at the Harper Theater (5238 S. Harper Ave.) in Hyde Park. Some filmmakers, cast and crew in attendance. For a complete schedule (including afterparties), ticketing and more info, visit the festival website here.

CUFF Shorts 7: Insightful Misreadings
Friday, 4:30pm and Sunday, 8pm
The anxieties, pleasures, and idiosyncrasies of the Information Age are reflected in this program of films born from our hyper-mediated digital culture. Taking us back to the nascent days of Web 2.0, Haydon Mayer’s “(ಥ﹏ಥ) ✧_MY PARENTS ARE CIA PSY0PS_!!!* ಠ_ಠ” (2023, 10 min) is a screenlife nostalgia trip through garish early-2000s Flash-animated webpages and pop-up virus alerts. Playing out on the computer of a kid whose parents are heard fighting in another room, the piece simultaneously evokes a wistfulness for a Millennial’s formative Internet experiences and the uncanniness of extinct digital forms. Michael William West’s THE DREAM MACHINE (2022, 9 min) casts its gaze back further, drawing on surrealist and structural film traditions in its portrayal of a woman’s psychological unraveling. With its strobe effects, multiple exposures, and superimpositions, it suggests, in the context of this program, how movies have always been about technological mediation. Just like dreams, movies occur largely in our minds; Tommy Heffron’s JUST ANOTHER VIRGO MOON NIGHT… (2022, 3 min) offers a wry analogy by comparing our irrational, surely Internet-influenced thoughts to “bad cinema.” Some would assign that label to Gregg Perkins’s purposely stilted THE LUCKY (2023, 8 min), which was scripted by the AI text generator ChatGPT and edited according to a computer algorithm. But the film, about two people seemingly stranded atop a mountain deciding if they should return to a party, attains a winning Beckettian absurdism as the actors deadpan ChatGPT’s curious non-sequiturs. As concerns grow over the evolution of AI, so too does paranoia around the surveillance state, the subject of two of the program’s films. In Tanner D. Masseth’s SURVEILLANCE FILM (2023, 15 min), the filmmaker attempts to find the location of a public surveillance camera he has accessed online—and which he discovers is very close to where he lives. Masseth finds a kind of awe and comfort in the surfeit of images of the world, while his efforts to capture and be captured by the mystery camera betray a longing to be seen amid the noise. Like SURVEILLANCE FILM, Charles Dillon Ward’s RETIRE.AI (2022, 6 min) is composed of found footage from public surveillance cameras, except this time, the narrator is not human but machine, specifically a retired virtual assistant that has gained sentience. Both of the surveillance-themed films evoke the incomprehensible excess of the world—what Kant called the “mathematical sublime.” That concept is exploited in a mass-media context in Michael Flemming’s SHOWTIME! (2022, 14 minutes), which begins as a hyperkinetic supercut of violent film clips before expanding to include TV commercials, news broadcasts, social media videos, and other moving images absorbed into the endless, undifferentiated flow of information we call “content.” If SHOWTIME! insists on the insidiousness of such flattened, desensitizing spectacle, Jeppe Lange’s ABYSS (2022, 13 min) finds beauty in the chaos. Composed of 10,000 still images, each one chosen by Google AI software for its resemblance to the image before it, the film is an aesthetic marvel of graphic matches and unexpected, rhizomatic associations between textures, shapes, and colors. Sure, the AI inevitably offers up that Internet cornerstone, pornography, but it mostly indexes an awe-inspiring breadth, a veritable archive of Earth as curated by a machine. Or, as Lange himself describes it: “a primal chaos before the creation of an artificial consciousness.” [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Shorts 8: Veil of Uncertainty
Friday, 5:30pm and Saturday, 6pm
“Veil of Uncertainty” guarantees tension and unsettling disturbances. The experimental shorts in this program measure the weight of time and the burdens of history without falling into complete pessimism. There are films about urban anxiety. Laura Kraning pairs flashing close-ups of rusty surfaces with the screeches of the New York Central rail line in DE-COMPOSITION (2023, 3 min). Pablo Mazzolo masterfully alters the urban and natural landscapes in the Windsor-Detroit border region in THE NEWEST OLDS (2022, 14 min), a sophisticatedly processed film in which the concept of a metropolitan city undulates between nostalgia and fantasy. There are films that poke into collective uncertainties from history remote or recent. Sara Sowell parses the military-entertainment complex from an unusual perspective in SPECTRUM SPREAD (2022, 3 min). Actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr’s frozen beauty crystalized by Hollywood is superimposed on footage of a mushroom cloud; images are suspended in delayed and echoey sound scores. The discontent with technology haunts the viewer like a friendly ghost. Charlotte Pryce chills the viewer with enchantingly beautiful images and weeping sound in AND SO IT CAME ABOUT (A TALE OF CONSEQUENTIAL DORMANCY) (2023, 13 min) to retell the myth of Persephone as an allegory for the global latent chaos caused by the pandemic. Ludivine Large-Bessette’s stunning and rhythmic dance film FOLLICULAR IMAGES (2022, 18 min) is equal parts choreographed movement, music, and poetry, tying together imaginations stemming from the social connotations of women’s hair. The hair is seduction is fragility is resilience, so does the film convey. There are also introspective ones about self and family. Rajee Samarasinghe weaves together scenes charged with symbolism and personal significance—a photograph of a family member’s funeral, pomegranate seeds drooping from a watery mouth, and monochromatic, looming landscapes in LOTUS-EYED GIRL (2023, 6 min) to conjure a thrilling film about love, loss and longing. In LESSER CHOICES (2022, 8 min), filmmaker Courtney Stephens records her mother telling a harrowing story of securing an illegal abortion in Mexico City in the 1960s. The bleak reality in which women lived at the time—and, in certain places, continue to live—stands in steep contrast to the faded home-movie footage of what akin to be the record of happy memories baked in the sun. Also in the program: ECLIPSIS (2022, 16 min) by Tania Hernández Velasco. [Nicky Ni]
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Shorts 9: Echoes of Nature
Friday, 7pm
Often the most exciting part of attending a screening of short films isn't following along with the curated theme, but discovering perhaps unintended thematic and aesthetic similarities shared amongst a swath of singular artistic voices. Case in point: this selection of shorts under the umbrella title of "Echoes of Nature" varies widely in length, format, and expression, but all collaborate in their dissection of our relationship with nature itself. There is a sense for these filmmakers that the most tangible elements of our world are the ones most worthy of reckoning with on an artistic level, that to commune with nature through cinema is as noble a mission as can be. We get experiential cinema like manuela de laborde’s FICCIONES (2021, 22 min), vividly bringing us into the up-close world of plant life through a chorus of Super-8 cameras; Anna Kipervaser’s WITH THE TIDE, WITH THE TIDE (2022, 3 min) capturing dazzling footage of horses amidst a pastoral sea of blue; and Malic Amalya’s LIVING LESSONS IN THE MUSEUM OF ORDER (2023, 21 min) crafting a masterclass in parallel storytelling by combining footage taken at Alcatraz with clips of whales in captivity at SeaWorld. But there’s also a playful sense of formal experimentation emerging amongst these filmmakers; between Josh Weissbach’s THIS IS HOW I FELT (2022, 1 min) distilling an anxiety-ridden 24-hour period into 1 minute of film, Cine-File contributor Josh B Mabe’s WEAKEN THE WATER (2022, 10 min) creating a dizzying journey between wilderness and civilization, Scott Stark’s MUSIC IN THE AIR (2022, 15 min) vaulting us into a dual-projector display interlacing two reels of found footage to provide harmony and discord all in one, and Stephen Wardell’s BLACK HOLE SPACE DEBT, OR A BASIC GUIDE TO SYNCING SOUND AND IMAGE (2022, 14 min) showcasing a film reel punctured with holes to create sound that becomes tangled with a narrative about a supposed future exploration to Mars. The evening is perhaps best summed up by Alix Blevins’ object permanence (2022, 1 min), a short-but-sweet magic act of a film, where the things most tangible to us disappear one by one, until a moment of surprise where, perhaps, a piece of joy will emerge before us. [Ben Kaye]
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James N. Kienitz Wilkins's STILL FILM (US) 
Friday, 7:30pm and Saturday, 12:30pm
Premiering at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in early 2023, STILL FILM feels right at home in a gallery, the focus on the artistry of still imagery and circuitous, alienating conversation ripe for an audience of museum-goers dipping into a darkened back room for five minutes in between wandering hallways packed with inanimate objects. How joyous then to catch it in a cinematic context, "trapped" with all 72 minutes of a slideshow of photography from decades of film history, taken from press packages and promotional materials. Think of it as a Hollywood-sponsored riff on Chris Marker’s LA JETÉE (1962)—something Kienitz Wilkins conveniently points out to us in just in case the reference went over our heads—underscored by a fictional legal deposition that shifts between interrogation and philosophical lecture. The fact that all four "characters" of the piece are voiced by Kienitz Wilkins with no discernible vocal shifts makes the attempt to follow along with the proceedings even more disorienting, your mind trapped between who is the lawyer, who is the witness, and why the voice off screen is talking about going to see 1990’s DICK TRACY at the same moment there’s a still image from WATERWORLD (1995) being displayed. That dissonance between subject matter and visual presentation is a neat element of tonal variety, but when photos from INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996) emerge upon discussions of deranged Hollywood conspiracy theories, that’s when the sense of a darkly comic thesis statement begins to emerge. The endless quick patter of Kienitz Wilkins’ speech paired with the nostalgic discovery of seeing behind-the-scenes footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger holding a prop head in TOTAL RECALL (1990) or Spike Lee directing Damon Wayans in BAMBOOZLED (2000) keeps you on your toes about where this might be going, before reaching an inevitable conclusion about the terrifying and tightening grip that the movies have on all of us. And with such a cavalcade of arresting imagery before us, it’s hard not to see why. This screening is preceded by Chris Larson’s STILLNESS OF LABOR (2023, 8 min), which in its own exciting way acts as a short antithesis to STILL FILM; Larson’s camera constantly moves us through a cinematic simulacrum of a garment factory, the power of the moving image navigating us through a fake world that might as well be our own before we reach a chilling conclusion. (2023, 72 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Nisha Platzer’s BACK HOME (Canada/Documentary)
Friday, 8:30pm and Sunday, 4:30pm
Nisha Platzer’s cinematic memoir considers the repercussions of her brother Josh’s suicide two decades after the fact, and while any film about bereavement would almost have to be sad at some point, what’s special about BACK HOME is how unsentimentally life-affirming it is. The movie spans a period of roughly five years, beginning when Platzer starts experiencing persistent severe pain that requires her to go back to her family home in Vancouver for the first time since childhood to seek treatment. She comes to heal in more ways than one when she reconnects with her brother’s old friends (who were all around 16 when he ended his life) and reconciles with the past she’d been trying to escape all through adulthood. As a filmmaker, Platzer moves unpredictably between experimental passages (including some shot on Super 8mm) and more traditional cinema verité sequences, resulting in a work that often feels like an entry into a person’s private thoughts. Despite the interiority of a lot of it, the film culminates at the party Platzer throws for all the people who were once essential to her brother’s life and have now become an important part of hers. Naturally, everyone shares positive stories about Josh, but it’s surprising how most of the participants also speak of how he continues to impact their lives. What emerges from BACK HOME is a portrait of what successful grieving looks like: Platzer confronts the factors that contributed to Josh’s depression and isolation (including her own parents), then honors his memory by trying to lead a life he may have admired. The film’s inclusion in an underground film festival speaks less to its aesthetic than to how serious conversations about mental illness remain marginalized in our society. (2022, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Elisa Levine & Gabriel Miller’s SWEETHEART DEAL (US/Documentary)
Friday, 9pm and Sunday, 3pm
Be advised that SWEETHEART DEAL may be too upsetting for some viewers. It contains onscreen heroin use, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, and images of fresh scars from violence and drug addiction. The film never acclimates you to the subject matter, either—Elisa Levine and Gabriel Miller don’t adopt a detached perspective that numbs you to what’s on screen, but rather an intimate, concerned one that renders each new trauma as painful as the last. It’s this discernible empathy that makes SWEETHEART DEAL worth grappling with; the film rewards courageous viewers by providing insight into the humanity of others. Levine and Miller shot it over several years, and you see the results of their dedication in the remarkable candor of the participants and, more importantly, in the thorough understanding of their day-to-day lives that informs the narrative structure. At first, the movie centers on Elliott, a 60-ish former cop who’s reinvented himself as “the Mayor of Aurora Avenue,” parking his RV along the stretch of Seattle road that’s infamous for being the city’s center for streetwalkers and offering meals, a place to crash, and a shoulder to cry on for the roughly 100 sex workers who do business around there. The film spirals outward as it follows four sex workers who rely a lot on Elliott, all of them women who are addicted to heroin. Some of them entered into sex work to pay for heroin, while others became sex workers because they fell on hard times, then used heroin to cope with their degradation. These differences don’t become apparent until we’ve gotten to know the subjects; when they’re introduced, they’ve all been living in the same cycle of addiction for some time, and one of the lessons of SWEETHEART DEAL is that addiction and sex work are like poverty in that they have a way of making people equal. Where does Elliott stand in all this? He knows he can’t change the system that pushes so many Americans to the margins of society, and so he tries to offer succor however he can. Sometimes this means giving a woman a place to stay when she’s trying to quit drugs; sometimes it means helping other women get drugs to inure themselves after an especially torturous day. I won’t reveal the true motivation behind Elliott’s actions, which isn't revealed until about halfway through the movie; suffice to say that the revelation may be the most painful part of the whole thing. That the film spans another few years after this happens is a testament to Levine and Miller’s heroic commitment to their subjects. (2022, 99 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Katlin Schneider’s MELOMANIAC (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 12pm
Aadam Jacobs, driven by a desire to document, recorded the concerts he went to. This isn’t completely unheard of, but it’s an uncommon dedication nevertheless, exacerbated by the fact that for almost two decades he went to concerts almost every night. Katlin Schneider’s MELOMANIC centers on Jacobs, his massive archive, and his indelible presence within the Chicago music scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when he’d attend shows with a heavy deck and discernible microphones situated awkwardly in the small clubs he frequented. The film is as much a love letter to those spaces as it is to Jacobs, as many of those interviewed either currently own music spaces (Joe Shanahan from the Metro, Tim Tuten from the Hideout), previously owned them (Julia Adams and Susan Tweedy from Lounge Ax), or booked acts for them (Mark Greenberg for Lounge Ax, Matt Rucins for Schubas/Lincoln Hall). They describe an extremely vibrant scene, made all the better by its being in Chicago, where, as opposed to New York and Los Angeles, it’s truly a community in every sense of the word. And any community worth its salt has people like Jacobs in it, the obsessives and oddballs who set a high bar for what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself and who, through such dedication, manage to become singular presences like those they idolize. Fittingly, the film also spotlights members of bands whom Jacobs not just recorded but became friends with. Rick Rizzo and Janet Beveridge Bean from Eleventh Day Dream are prominently featured, as are members of the band Trenchmouth, which included comedian Fred Armisen, who speaks highly of Jacobs and his endeavor, describing it as something like outside art. Jacobs briefly had his own record label, and put out some of the band’s singles on it. Jon Langford from the Mekons extols the quality of Jacobs’ recordings, another thing that set him apart from run-of-the-mill bootleggers; some of his recordings have been used by the bands themselves, such as Sonic Youth, whose 1987 live album Hold That Tiger was recorded by Jacobs. It’s not all positive, as the ramifications of illegal recording are touched upon—Jacobs was banned from the Metro for six years after recording a show without permission—and his occasional entitlement over being let into shows for free are mentioned. In terms of the documentary itself, it’s definitely rough and ready, and I would have liked to know more about Jacobs’ life outside of his recording activity. (One does learn that the chairs still in use at the Metro were originally purchased from Jacobs’ mother.) But for anyone who loves music, loves archivism, loves community, or just loves Chicago, this brisk valentine for a man who loves all of those things and seeks to preserve them is a love letter onto which you will gladly sign your name. (2023, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Shorts 2: Metamorphosis Now
Saturday, 1pm
This program presents experimental shorts that deviate, transgress, mutate and shapeshift. GROWING UP ABSURD (2023, 15 min) delves into the memories surrounding College F (known colloquially as the Tolstoy College), a somewhat short-lived anarchist educational community that operated under the University of Buffalo. Overlaying 16mm footage of a deserted university campus with audio interviews from key members part of Tolstoy College, Ben Balcom prompts us to envision the radical presence of pedagogical revolutionaries who redefined college education. Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu opens the Pandora's box of most precious childhood memories in IN LITTLENESS (2022, 8 min), combining two 8mm film strips and presenting them on 16mm. Two consecutive frames are juxtaposed with another pair; the passing of time is measured by ephemeral images woven into a dazzling fabric of light and movements. Yanbin Zhao also nods to history by tributing a dreamy, elastic and mesmerizing black-and-white short, TRAIN SONG (2022, 3 min), to thousands of Chinese migrant workers who labored on the Southern Pacific Railroad during the second half of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Louise Bourque conjures eerie and ghostly sensations through abstracting images from her family archive. In BYE BYE NOW (2022, 10 min), the materiality of the scratched and stained surface of the film is paired with drony noises akin to a projector running or acoustic feedback. Specters from the past say “Hi!” A similar disturbance is built up in Richard Wiebe’s THE END (2022, 5 min). Tension is high when uncomfortable sounds—from a hissing radio to the howling wind—churn the soothing images of nature; a natural disaster is looming, and so is the end of the world. Leonardo Pirondi records a VR gamer’s uncanny intrusions into cozy virtual environments on 16mm in WELCOME HOME (SEJA BEM-VINDO AO LAR) (2023, 4 min). A pair of visualized hands, the perfect desiring machine, move around exaggeratingly spacious rooms with luxurious interiors and mind-blowing views, as though everything was at the fingertips. NE CORRIDOR (2022, 7 min) is on the verge of becoming total abstraction. It possesses latent violence and arousing energy that filmmaker Joshua Gen Solondz conjures through collaging spliced film strips with splashes of magenta, azure, and salmon pink. Also in the program: BONEFACE EXHIBITION D 1 (2022, 9 min) by Robert C. Banks and 2CENT/10COIL (2023, 10 min) by Monteith P. Mccollum. [Nicky Ni]
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Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor’s SATAN WANTS YOU (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 2:30pm
Until recently, I would have said that to believe what went on during the satanic ritual abuse insanity that swept North America during the 1980s, you’d have to have been there. However, we’re living in the age of Pizzagate, QAnon, and the cult of personality surrounding some of our politicians, so perhaps the events recounted in Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor’s comprehensive documentary SATAN WANTS YOU won’t seem completely beyond the pale. The film focuses on what podcaster Sarah Marshall calls in the film the “ground zero of satanic panic”: Michelle Remembers, a book cowritten by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Pazder, that details her supposed abuse by a satanic cult when she was 5 years old. The book was a best seller, catapulting Smith and Pazder to stardom and fueling a financial bonanza for mental health professionals who got into the burgeoning repressed memory business. The sensational revelations in Michelle Remembers attracted media outlets, which boosted the hysteria by booking Smith, Pazder, and a host of other “survivors” on talk shows hosted by tabloid personalities such as Sally Jessy Raphael, Maury Povich, and especially Geraldo Rivera, who ran a three-hour special on the subject. Families were torn apart, a couple of high-profile prosecutions of day care owners resulted in decades-long sentences based on the testimony of children who were coached by their therapists, and maternity wards redoubled their security to ensure infants were not taken to be ritually sacrificed and eaten. Eventually, saner minds prevailed, and the fever broke. Adams and Horlor interview members of Smith’s and Pazder’s families, a former FBI investigator, a member of the Church of Satan, and a journalist who worked to uncover the Catholic Church’s collusion in promoting the idea of satanic ritual abuse—an irony if ever there was one. This film leaves no stone unturned, and would be a cautionary tale if we weren’t already repeating the same mistakes. (2023, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Otto Buj's DOPE, HOOKERS, AND PAVEMENT: THE REAL AND IMAGINED HISTORY OF DETROIT HARDCORE
Saturday, 4pm and Sunday, 2:30pm
In 1978 the anarchist punk band Crass declared "Punk is dead" in a song of the same name. In the prophetic year 1984 (the same year Crass broke up), Dr. Egon Spengler solemnly stated that "print is dead" in GHOSTBUSTERS. In 2019 the overlap in that Venn diagram, the one-time "punk rock bible" Maximum Rocknroll, ceased printing. But the legendary legacy of its DIY approach to both punk and print culture, especially its "scene reports" (where anyone could mail in a write-up of their local scene for publication), lives on in all the hyper-local punk documentaries made since AMERICAN HARDCORE (2006) came out and everyone got butthurt that their scene wasn't properly represented. You can now learn all about Chicago's scene via YOU WEREN'T THERE (2008) or the Bay Area's with TURN IT AROUND (2017). The Minneapolis PBS affiliate aired a whole MINNESOTA HARDCORE series in 2022. Even Tulsa, OK has OIL CAPITAL UNDERGROUND (2018). Though often soaked in middle-aged nostalgia, this new micro-genre of the rock doc that I've dubbed "Scene Zines" are still some of the most honest historiographical conversations about art and music culture being made. They're the 21st-century equivalent of the newsprint smudged MRR scene reports of the '80s-'00s. Some of them, like TURN IT AROUND, are slick because they have Green Day as producers—aka the offset printed zine. The Tulsa one? Just some guy with a camera, no real sense of lighting or sound, but a desire to make sure that his scene is recognized—aka the zine scammed during the overnight Kinko's shift. DOPE, HOOKERS, AND PAVEMENT falls squarely in the middle. It's well made, with great intentions, and is executed better than many of its contemporaries. Perfect for a doc on the original Detroit hardcore punk scene, whose bands like Negative Approach have achieved a kind of cult status that is hard to even explain. But I'll try. NA's first record is one of the 50 most expensive records ever sold on the record collecting site Discogs, placed just below an edition of Springsteen's Born to Run. Yet Springsteen plays arenas while I saw Negative Approach earlier this month at a bar with a capacity of about 100. DOPE, HOOKERS, AND PAVEMENT works because it feels like the Detroit hardcore records of that era. It's workman-like. Rough around the edges. But the end result punches well above its financial weight. Larger-than-life figures like NA's John Brannon and the Meatmen's always entertaining (or infuriating) Tesco Vee are featured. There's some illuminating info about the massive influence of Windsor, Canada, on the scene. Most importantly the film features previously unknown, and the only known, film footage of the almost mythological venue The Freezer, featuring Bored Youth. Things like this are what make Scene Zines invaluable depositories of sub/countercultural folk history. While there is a little bit of "the stage diver doth protest too much" in DOPE, HOOKERS, AND PAVEMENT when it comes to all the men talking about the lack of women in the scene (in a film where a woman doesn't speak on screen for 40 minutes but lifelong Washington D.C. resident Ian MacKaye gets what feels like half of that) or why the scene was mostly white despite centering around a very Black neighborhood, nitpicking a film like this is missing the punker for the pit. My only true complaint: they kept playing Negative Approach's "Ready to Fight" but cut it off just before the build-up explodes. Weak shit, man. Prove you've got an IQ over 32 and catch this. Or don't. See ya in the celluloid pit. (2021, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Clyde Peterson’s EVEN HELL HAS ITS HEROES (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 4:30pm and Sunday, 4pm
It is no secret that for many artists who blew up and became megastars like Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, there have existed people in their midst who were equally talented, brilliant, and troubled. In the case of this film, it's the founder of the band Earth, Dylan Carlson. The band’s droning ambient music is the backbone of the film, accompanied alongside tracks from various collaborators and confidants from over the years. Viewers are lulled into a trancelike state as the music slowly pulls you into its orbit. Quite the contrast to the many Seattle grunge bands that are far more recognizable to the average layman. What is surprising here is the range of the sounds that are provided. At one point, trombone player Steve Moore is seen playing his instrument in the wilderness, the tune a mystical blend of hope and sorrow (the music here weirdly reminds me of the video game Disco Elysium, a comparison that somehow seems apt placed next to the scene painted of the Seattle of old). These working-class, counterculture, self-described redneck artists don’t seem that different from a lot of the folks here in the Midwest as they wrestle with the desire to be creative, fight against drug addiction, and ultimately yearn to be free of the 9-to-5 milieu. For some, this meant slinging heroin and cruising the city. For others, the natural outlet was music, and what they played wasn’t confined to the expectations of others. Director Clyde Peterson paints an interesting picture of Dylan Carlson, a complicated man who makes music that could seem basic on the surface, yet on deeper inspection reflects the  complications of its creator. Carlson, who has battled his own heroin addiction and struggled with the death of his roommate and best friend Kurt Cobain, gives an honest insight into his life through his words and his music. On screen, we’re guided along by a variety of B-roll that’s textured to fit the era. While confusing at first, we rarely see the multitude of voices speaking on screen, ultimately the voices become one with the music and the detached visuals only seem to make more sense as you’re sucked into the logic that this documentary operates with. EVEN HELL HAS ITS HEROES is a film not only for die hard Earth fans and Seattle grunge aficionados, but for anyone willing to get lost in a true audiovisual experience. (2023, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]
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Dan Hacker & Fred Hickler’s JAN TERRI: NO RULES (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 8:30pm and Sunday, 6pm
It was 2006. The internet was still a thing that existed in a specific place in your house. Like an oven. I was living in Milwaukee in a squalid punk house named after a Futurama reference and for the six of us living in what I’m pretty sure was legally a three-bedroom house, the internet was either in a closet in a bedroom or on the floor in a bedroom. Two spots. Total humblebrag. It was annoying to use and you did so alone. YouTube had existed for a year. It's now, arguably, the largest single purveyor of video content in the world, but at the time it was still this amorphous thing. Like, why would I watch stuff on the internet, you know, like some kind of nerd? And where was this stuff even coming from? Well, we were nerds (remember that Futurama thing I mentioned?) and to us YouTube was the coolest fucking thing ever. All of a sudden you could see stuff like then-rare studio footage of the Temptations recording "My Girl" (the first thing I ever saw on YouTube). Our friends went all in. We had "YouTube parties" where we would share the weirdest and coolest stuff we had found. The kind of lost media that was once traded on multi-generation VHS dubs of diminishing quality was now available at our fingertips. And Jan Terri was there for us at almost the very beginning. The punks could not get enough of her! This was some real shit! But she remained an internet mystery. Uploaded under the title “Worst music video ever” (it’s absolutely not), the DIY-as-hell 1993 video for her song "Losing You" was the kind of thing the internet was invented for. It’s kinda bad but kinda actually great. You wonder if it’s a joke because you can’t believe this person thought this would be a hit. But you can tell it’s definitely not a joke. It immediately became a weird cult hit and currently has 5.8M views. Fast forward to 2023 and we’re finally getting answers to the mystery. JAN TERRI: NO RULES is a very simple, meat and potatoes affair. Just like Jan. But the respect and unbridled fandom and love of the film feels like this project is an attempt to put her in the pantheon of great Chicago outsider artists such as Henry Darger, Vivian Maier, and, of course, Wesley Willis. And I feel the goal is met. We learn about her upbringing in the working-class, "connected" suburb of Melrose Park. We meet the women who supported her and starred in her videos. We learn about her unofficial fan club formed by employees from the defunct Chicagoland record store chain Rose Records, how they helped get Jan a slot opening for Marilyn Manson at the 5000-person capacity Aragon Ballroom. We see how she's finally found her audience in an incredibly wholesome, organic, and non-ironic way. There’s footage of her headlining a Chicago rock club about 10 years ago. Jan’s story is a weird one, for sure, with some moments of genuine shock, but it's a feel-good story. And a very Chicago story. It’s about putting in the work because that’s just what you gotta do. It don't matter what other people say 'cause it ain’t their business anyway. While this film is definitely for the Terri-heads already out there, I do think that it just might win her some new converts. And if even if it doesn’t, I bet she don't care. And that's why we’ve loved Jan from the beginning, 'cause there ain’t no rules. And even if there were, The Wild One would have broken them all. (2023, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Raphael Jose Martinez]
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Shorts 3: Hyperbolic Dreams
Saturday, 9pm
It may seem from the first four shorts in this program that the overall theme is sex. In Chris Noon’s HUNGER (2022, 3 min), split screen is used to clever, sometimes kaleidoscopic effect, with a singular performer at times appearing to engage in intimacy with themselves on the other side of the screen. The cinematography is grainy and overexposed, tactile elements that evince an air of guilelessness, like a home movie or a student film. This makes its themes of longing and isolation all the more poignant, as if the film is something very private upon which we’ve stumbled. One might say the same about Adam Sekuler’s REALLY GOOD FRIENDS (2023, 10 min) in that it centers on something very private to those whom it’s about. At the beginning an older woman, Mary, enters a hotel—one might presume she’s on vacation or something of the sort, an internal bias emerging at the fore. It turns out she’s meeting her married lover, whose sexual proclivities are of the decidedly un-vanilla variety. As Mary lays out her accouterments, she tells in voiceover of the relationship she has with this man, describing a connection between two people who understand each other's uncommon needs. Sekuler, whose previous films TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS (2017) and 36 HOURS (2019) were CUFF standouts, always reveres his subjects with a deference toward their idiosyncrasies and an eye for what makes them and their situations worthy of cinema. His pacing in particular is considered, conveying the ineffability of his viewpoint. More unlikely sexual encounters take place in Enrique Pedráza Botero and Faye Tsakas’s ALPHA KINGS (2023, 15 min), about a group of young, professedly straight men who do sex work for both men and women as alpha-male versions of themselves (something akin to a dominatrix, it would seem). More about labor than sexuality, the film explores the nuances of the work at hand; more about economic gain than survival, it also delves into a candid realization that this type of 'unskilled' labor is often more lucrative than other, more traditional paths. T. Arthur Cottam (PORNOGRAPHIC APATHETIC, FILTHY FOOD) spoofs short-form video tutorials in JELQING FOR GAINS (2023, 6 min), wherein a woman advises on how to jelq, an exercise that supposedly facilitates penis enlargement. Its sole performer, Jessica Amal Rice, carries the absurd premise; sadly, she passed away from cancer just before the film was finished. With Frédéric Moffet’s GODDESS OF SPEED (2023, 8 min) the program deviates into films that aren’t necessarily about sex, veering more into the hyperbole referenced in the program’s title. Moffet doesn’t necessarily overstate the truth in his film, however, so much as he reimagines one of Andy Warhol’s lost movies, DANCE MOVIE, starring dancer (and, in the film, roller-skater) Fred Herko. The second film in the program to utilize split screen, in obvious reference to Warhol’s own fondness for the technique, it features a stand-in for Herko performing his own one-footed roller skating routine. Text overlays provide context for the homage, drawing heavily from Bruce Jenkins’ research on Warhol and his supposedly lost film. Again Moffet succeeds in appropriating and further abstracting existing (or here, non-existing) media, using ghostly detritus to convey a sense of yearning and desire. Macon Reed’s THE DEATH SPA EXPERIENCE (2022, 8 min) is a spoof on mortality, an extreme bit of comic reprieve much like JELQING, while Michael U. Olowu’s GRILLZ & MIRRORS (2023, 4 min) takes to its logical extreme the titular oral accessory, evocative à la a Hype Williams music video. Similarly hypnotic are the next two films, Jacob Kessler’s 2940 N CAMPBELL (2022, 4 min, Digital Projection) and Senem Pirler and Monica Duncan’s CONFESSIONS OF A TRANSMISSION LINE (2022, 7 min). In the former an underground party continues (CUFF, anyone?) despite the powers that be trying to stop it. Images become abstracted with the acceleration of the partygoers’ uncaring. An unintentional theme of this program may be the split screen, as the latter film is the third to utilize it. The film “explore[s] the audiovisual process of feedback as a spiritual practice in relation to Camp and queer potentiality using real-time signal processing tools,” per the artists’ statement, a concept more suited to being appreciated visually and sonically than textually. The images certainly are alluring, like vaporwave by way of Nam June Paik; if that isn’t hyperbolic, then I don’t know what is. Also in the program: Yony Leyser’s CHOKEHOLE: DRAG WRESTLERS DO DEUTSCHLAND (2023, 23 min). [Kat Sachs]
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Shorts 5: (Re)Constructed Realities
Sunday, 2pm
This program skews toward the experimental side of underground filmmaking, with some pieces, like Jim Fetterley’s BUTTERFLY IN THE SKY (2022, 14 min) and Chris Shields’ CHANNELS (2021, 10 min), that approach total abstraction. The former is an unbroken take of the artist playing with analog video synthesis and making pretty, shifting blocks of color. Fetterley draws the work into more familiar (and familial) territory by incorporating his 85-year-old mother’s response to the video art on the soundtrack. Her layperson’s interpretation provides an endearing, human counterpart to the digital imagery. In CHANNELS, Shields records himself channel surfing on a motel TV with a broken iPhone 6, thereby defamiliarizing a common experience through an unlikely technological intervention. I couldn’t make out anything that was on the TV, but I found it fascinating to look at all the same. RED HOUSE (2022, 3 min), a short work by Canadian animator Barry Doupé, employs outmoded computer animation software to depict a character that’s constantly changing form between a person and a house. Like everything by this singular animator, the eccentric sensibility is so endearing that it’s hard to watch without grinning. This program begins with a couple of explicitly humorous works: Padrick Ritch’s (de)VICE GRIP (2022, 3 min) and Alexei Dmitriev’s STOCK (2022, 5 min). The first of these features a woman reading the terms of service of an unidentified social media application over frenetically edited city footage. The narration reflects our dystopian moment, with the agreement entitling the corporation to basically invade users’ privacy in the act of tracking their data; the footage, however, is invigorating, showing a vibrant city in full swing. The second piece recycles stock footage to comic effect, stretching out a joke for five minutes to make the most of it. On the other hand, Charlotte Hong’s highly imaginative SMRT PIECE (2022, 4 min) is wonderfully complex, presenting a triptych of frames that present video footage and rapidly flashing drawings from the filmmaker’s sketchbook. The audio, of a conversation between two young women, is remarkable for its breadth and candor. The Taiwanese short FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO (2022, 13 min), directed by Wu Chia-Yun, illustrates ideas from Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” via onscreen text and actors performing obscure actions. Wu achieves some effective compositions with postmodern architecture, making the film an interesting environment to explore. In the closing work, I THOUGHT THE WORLD OF YOU (2022, 17 min), Canadian filmmaker Kurt Walker spins an elusive story about a recording artist named Lewis who releases a record in the early 1980s and subsequently disappears. Walker crafts a jarring mix of short, silent scenes and random social media posts from the early 2010s; the movie hints at its story but never tells it straight out, conjuring up a sense of mystery and dry humor. Shot on grainy black-and-white film, I THOUGHT THE WORLD OF YOU looks distinctive too, making for a memorable pseudo-narrative in the surrealist tradition. Also in the program: Bryan Boyce’s IMAGE TO TEXT TO IMAGE (2022, 3 min) and Sarah Lasley’s WELCOME TO THE ENCLAVE (2022, 12 min). [Ben Sachs]
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Sean Fahey’s FOR KICKS (US/Documentary)
Sunday, 5pm and 8:30pm
Sometimes I see people going about their daily lives and wonder what more they’ve got going on. And in a place like Chicago, especially, it could be any number of interesting things. Never would I walk by someone, however, or see them on transit and think, hey, maybe they were a major (relatively speaking) martial arts movie star in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But as this documentary affirms, there’s at least one Chicagoan about whom it would be possible to say that. Sean Fahey’s FOR KICKS centers on semi-retired security guard Eugene Thomas, who, at 23 years old, moved to Taiwan on a whim and from there embarked on a short-lived but fruitful career in martial arts movies. Fahey traces the progression of Thomas’ tae kwon do practice and his rise in these films, his particular niche being “ninjasploitation,” while concurrently examining the role of other Black martial arts practitioners who also appeared in these and films of similar genres (e.g., Brucesploitation). Ron Van Clief, for example, is one such figure, and he appears as an interviewee; others who are discussed include Jim Kelly (who starred opposite Bruce Lee in ENTER THE DRAGON) and Carl Scott (the “Soul Brother of Kung Fu”). Other interviewees include Toby Russell (son of filmmaker Ken Russell), also an actor who featured with Thomas in Robert Tai’s SHAOLIN DOLEMITE, which starred Rudy Ray Moore, and local filmmaker and all-around brilliant film thinker Floyd Webb. Webb in particular helps to contextualize the proliferation of Black martial artists in such films. “You go where you’re welcome,” he says. “Outside of this country, Black culture is a commodity. Black culture is an attractant. Black culture is core American culture because America really has no culture without African-American culture.” Academic Bryant Murakami is similarly invaluable in positioning these types of films—the aforementioned exploitation films as well as Blaxploitation—in the context of cinema history and the exhibition landscape of the era in which they were released. Of course, clips from the films are instrumental in illuminating this information; Fahey does a good job packing a lot into a relatively compact running time. It sometimes strays but ultimately comes back to Thomas, whose life back in Chicago and additional passions, such as jazz, round out a rich, if unexpected, journey. Preceded by Dave Steck’s FORTY SECOND WAITING 60 (2022, 1 min), Ella Harmon’s COO-COO (2022, 3 min), and Gillian Waldo’s SIT WHERE THE LIGHT CORRUPTS YOUR FACE (2022, 8 min). (2023, 67 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Shorts 6: Oscillating Perspectives
Sunday, 6:30pm
I was able to preview only half of this program, but the four pieces I did watch were all poignant works that successfully balanced personal and formal concerns; I can comfortably recommend this on their strengths alone. Reminiscent of Jodie Mack’s great featurette DUSTY STACKS OF MOM, Gina Kamentsky’s FOOT PRINT SHOP (2022, 4 min) employs stop-motion animation to make it appear that a print shop is operating on its own and churning out lots of pictures of feet. On the soundtrack, the filmmaker’s mother talks about a variety of subjects related to feet and sounds like she’s having a jolly old time helping her daughter make art. Less cheerful but no less fascinating is Silvestar Kolbas’ THE FILM FACTORY (2022, 15 min), which consists of photographs of a shuttered factory that used to belong to Croatia’s Fotokemika Company; the images were all taken on expired film that was produced (presumably some time ago) at the factory in question. Like much of Bill Morrison’s work, the film invites us to get lost in the textures of photochemical decay, and the images fit the subject matter like a glove. More wonderful textures abound in Rhea Storr’s THROUGH A SHIMMERING PRISM, WE MADE A WAY (2022, 18 min), as it was shot on black and white Super 8mm, though Storr has a lot on her mind besides swell cinematography. A poetic meditation on the African diaspora, the film interweaves impressionistic shots of London and Nassau and three voices reflecting on personal and social experience. It’s heady stuff but grounded in sharp observations, both visually and in terms of the narration. Greg Jenkins’ MOTOR MOTOR BLUE (2023, 15 min) is similarly complex in its mix of onscreen text and location shots, this time in the Appalachian Mountains. The work begins in an underground cave and ends in a natural history museum; between these bookends are reflections on the death of Jenkins’ uncle, a sequence about auto racing, and some particularly beautiful shots of clouds. Also in the program: Elizabeth M. Webb’s PROXIMITY STUDY (SIGHT LINES) (2022, 6 min), Nicci Haynes’ THE COST (2021, 3 min), Martin Mulcahy’s STRAPHANGER (2020, 7 min), and Mark Street’s CLEAR ICE FERN (2023, 12 min). [Ben Sachs]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Ousmane Sembène Centennial

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Ousmane Sembène's BLACK GIRL (Senegal)
Saturday, 3:15pm
Frequently cited as the greatest African filmmaker, Sembene was also a strike leader and novelist before working in cinema. His decision to begin making films grew out of his progressive politics, as he felt he could reach a larger audience with movies than with literature, especially in his native Senegal. Sembene's style was fittingly accessible, sometimes to the point of transparency: he often depicted controversial social issues in terms of everyday life, taking pleasure in human behavior and allowing larger themes to emerge organically from the characters' experiences. This is certainly true of his first feature, BLACK GIRL (LA NOIRE DE...), which broaches the subject of African labor in Europe by regarding the servant girl of the title as she accompanies her employers as they return to France to live. The film is based on one of Sembene's early stories; it exemplifies the concentration and eye for detail best associated with short fiction. Screening with Sembene’s 1963 short BOROM SARRET (20 min, DCP Digital). (1966, 65 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Ousmane Sembène's MANDABI (Senegal)
Sunday, 1pm
By the time Ousmane Sembène directed his second feature at the age of 45, he was already a legend. Sembène had been a war veteran, a labor organizer, the author of several book-length works of fiction, and the first sub-Saharan African to release a feature film. One might expect a movie by such an accomplished individual working at the height of his renown to display a certain grandeur or sweeping perspective, yet the greatness of MANDABI (as with most of Sembène’s films) lies in its humility. The story unfolds so plainly that it could be understood by a child, while the imagery, however bright and engaging, tends to be organized around such basics as character and locale. In short, MANDABI feels like a folktale; and like many folktales, the apparent simplicity serves as a conduit to deep wisdom. Dieng, the film’s put-upon hero, is an unemployed, but big-talking man who lives on the outskirts of Dakar with his two wives and seven children. Near the start of the story, Dieng receives a money order from a nephew living in Paris (in a bittersweet montage, Sembène illustrates what the young man has had to do to earn the money), who asks his uncle to cash the order, set aside most of the money, and keep some for himself. Dieng sees this windfall as a chance to pay off his debts, but cashing the money order (or mandabi in Wolof) opens up all sorts of new problems. He learns he lacks the proper documentation required for any banking transaction—and that acquiring this documentation means tangling with an especially messy local bureaucracy. Dieng also finds himself besieged by strangers and acquaintances coming out of the woodwork and asking for loans. But the biggest setback of all comes in the form of a “New African” businessman who promises to help Dieng solve his problems. Sembène characterizes the businessman with the same bitter, satirical sensibility he’d later flesh out in his novel Xala (and his film adaptation of it), but for the most part, the writer-director reserves his anger for institutions rather than individuals. MANDABI condemns the societal factors that keep people in poverty while maintaining, against all odds, an ingratiatingly cheery tone. When seen from the proper perspective, Sembène asserts, injustice is nonsensical enough to seem funny. (1968, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Ousmane Sembène’s EMITAÏ (Senegal)
Monday, 6pm
It isn’t clear until 15 or 20 minutes into EMITAÏ that the film takes place during World War II. Prior to that, Ousmane Sembène presents, with characteristic bluntness, the pursuit and round-up of a group of men in the Senegalese countryside. With the introduction of some white, French-speaking characters do we realize that the men were being hunted down to be forcibly conscripted into the French Army under the order of Marshal Pétain. The atemporality of the early scenes adds to their impact, suggesting that atrocities like this can be found at any point in Senegalese history. Unfortunately, the atrocities don’t end there. After the initial round-up, the wives and sisters of the conscripted men are taken hostage by the French soldiers, who demand that the remaining tribesmen of their village give over obscene amounts of rice to the French war effort in exchange for the women’s return. The rest of the film focuses on the older tribesmen as they navigate their impossible dilemma, though Sembène also returns occasionally to the white Frenchmen in order to assert his views of French colonial policy. At one point, the film dramatizes the transfer of power from Pétain to Charles de Gaulle with the shot of one soldier stapling a propagandistic poster of the new leader over a poster of the old one in the village center where the colonialists display information—the gesture, so brusque as to seem almost comic, has a similar effect as the atemporal pre-credits sequence. Sembène acknowledges the march of history more seriously in the film’s most stunning sequence, when the tribesmen summon their gods to ask for help in their crisis. Emitaï, the god of air and war, refuses aid. When asked why, he explains curtly, “Because you have stopped believing in us.” With this sequence, EMITAÏ transcends its function as a history lesson (although it succeeds smashingly in that respect) to deliver a haunting critique of the whole of modernity. Sembène counters the film’s pessimism with an opening dedication to the militants of Africa, which casts the action in a more positive light by reminding viewers of the people who have heroically fought back against the injustices of colonialism. (1971, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Ousmane Sembène’s XALA (Senegal)
Tuesday, 6pm
One of the most punk rock movies ever made, XALA can kick the ass of pretty much any satire not directed by Paul Verhoeven since the end of the Cold War. Its anger is righteous, persuasive, and direct; like many a great punk recording, its power is heightened, not diminished, by its unadorned aesthetic, which makes the message seem unpretentious and true. That Sembène clearly drew inspiration from folklore gives his anger a timeless quality as well, as if he were summoning forces from the past to strengthen his curse on the present. The main character of XALA is also the villain of the story, which is a deliciously protracted saga of his downfall and humiliation. A stand-in for profiteering post-colonial politicians all over Africa, El Hadji Abdoukader Beye (his overstuffed name was surely intentional) is a money-grubbing businessman who has secured a position in Senegal’s new government. By the time the story begins, he and his fellow cabinet members have received untold sums in bribes from French elites in exchange for allowing European business interests to continue calling the shots in Senegal. El Hadji’s lifestyle is as ostentatious as his corruption, and he revels in both. In a characteristic early scene, he callously passes a group of homeless people outside his office, tosses a handful of coins at them, then stays just long enough to watch them fight over the pittance. The film takes a turn on the night of El Hadji’s marriage to his third wife, when he discovers that someone has cursed him with xala, a Wolof term meaning temporary impotence. The ensuing narrative follows our protagonist’s increasingly desperate efforts to revoke the curse; El Hadji becomes so obsessed with curing his impotence, in fact, that he doesn’t realize he’s under investigation for his crimes or that his marriages are falling apart. All this unfolds in a cheerful tone and bright colors, as though there were nothing more wonderful than watching this piece of shit get what’s coming to him. It’s worth noting that XALA has a hero as well as a villain, but per the radical cinematic tradition to which Sembène belongs, that hero is not an individual but rather the collective will of the People. Sembène personifies this through a variety of lovingly observed supporting characters, from El Hadji’s fed-up wives and kids to the beggars he encounters all over Dakar. Appropriately, it is the People who get to have XALA’s last word—or, rather, its final, unforgettable sounds. (1975, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Ousmane Sembène's CEDDO (Senegal)
Wednesday, 8:30pm
There’s more than meets the eye to Ousmane Sembène’s CEDDO—much, much more. What at first might appear to be a standard historical epic about the director’s homeland is actually a nuanced depiction of pre-colonial Senegal and a faint commentary on the misconceptions of both pre- and post-colonial Senegal that exist in most outsiders’ minds. In his Cahiers du Cinéma review of the film, Serge Daney began his discerning assessment by noting that “[b]y habit and laziness, racism too, whites always thought that emancipated and decolonized black Africa would give birth to a dancing and singing cinema of liberation… [t]he result of this… is that the Western specialists of the young African cinema, too preoccupied with defending it through political solidarity or misguided charity, have failed to grasp its real value and originality: the oral tradition, storytelling.” Ironically, then, the film’s complexity lies in its modesty, its ties to the very sort of customs that the ceddo (the “people of refusal,” referring to the Wolof villagers who reject the imposition of monotheistic religions, namely Islam and Christianity, onto them) are fighting to maintain. Reputedly set in the 17th century (though the era in which it takes place is ambiguous, with some sources claiming it takes place in the 18th or even 19th century), CEDDO begins with the kidnapping of a young princess, Dior Hocine, whose father has recently come under the thumb of white interlopers and an aggressive imam. The ceddo have taken her in protest against their ruler and his court’s conversion to Islam; back in the village, some brave citizens appeal to the king by way of impassioned monologues. Concurrently, several members of her father’s court, among whom there’s a disagreement about which of them is the rightful heir to the throne, attempt to save the princess from where she’s being held, though eventually they’re killed by the unrelenting ceddo. Having been expelled from the council by the imam, the ceddo prepare an attack but are preempted by the imam and his supporters, after which it’s revealed that the king has died—allegedly due to a snake bite, though murder is implied—and the imam has taken power, soon converting the ceddo to Islam and preparing to trade them as slaves. The film’s ending (which I won’t spoil here) involves the princess, who heretofore has been shown in almost dream-like sequences far and away from the hecticness of the central action back in the village. It’s an extraordinary, almost mythical conclusion to what’s preceded it, the stuff of cinema that eschews analysis. That a female character, specifically an elite figure who may have come to realize that her own oppression as a woman is linked with her people’s oppression at the hands of colonialism’s forebears, is responsible for such a pivotal moment underlines Sembène’s subversive aims. Overall, CEDDO transforms a classic filmic mode, historical recreation, by way of subtle transgressions, including the use of fantasy sequences and the folklorish compression of epochs into days (in the film) and hours (as we, the viewers, watch it). The film’s Third Cinema aesthetics complement the accordant ideologies, utilizing everything from the natural influence of the landscapes and the bodies that inhabit them to traditional costumes and hair styling; it’s a stunning film in both its aesthetic and philosophy. Funnily, the film was banned in Senegal because Sembène had spelled CEDDO with two d’s instead of just one. In relation to that which is being opposed, a film wherein, as Daney loosely observes, people say what they mean and mean what they say, there’s probably more than meets the eye to that, too. Also of note is the film’s score by Cameroonian musician Manu Dibango, who passed away from COVID in March 2020. (1977, 120 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Ousmane Sembène's GUELWAAR (Senegal)
Thursday, 6pm
The complexities of people and politics are often one and the same, as much as we would like to believe that both have the potential for ideological purity. It’s the former which affects the latter, of course, a fact that Ousmane Sembène seemed to understand more than most. His films are at once holistically radical yet steeped in contradictions inherent to humanity; in exhibiting both he shows us our limitations and our potential, inviting viewers to confront and potentially realize their capabilities in facilitating change of society’s great ills, those that supersede any sort of reductive binary. “We are neither all good nor all evil,” Sembène said in a 1995 interview. “Everybody takes what they want and nobody cares about anybody else. In Africa we are not better or worse than people elsewhere. But there is no virtue in misery and poverty.” This wisdom is on display in much of his work, yet GUELWAAR might represent the epitome of his discernment. The film is loosely based on a true story of two bodies being mixed up at a mortuary, resulting in one being buried in the other’s grave; it also taps into the larger resentment by some of its people toward Africa’s dependence on international aid. The film’s title refers to the nickname of one of the deceased, a Christian patriarch whose body gets buried in an Islamic cemetery by mistake. Guelwaar’s family represents an array of personalities and social standings, from a son who’s denounced his heritage and gone to live in Paris to his long-suffering wife who, in one of the film’s pivotal moments, takes off her mourning veil and then takes her dead husband to task for a lifetime of hardship. Indeed the women of the film represent the more insidious repercussions of societal and religious hypocrisy: Guelwaar’s daughter, for instance, supports the family by doing sex work in nearby Dakar. When a friend of hers shows up to the funeral (delayed though it is by the missing body), the priest approaches her to chastise her for a risque outfit; she speaks of how her sex work supports her family, including her father’s religious pilgrimages. Religious strain extends past the family as the tension between the Christian and Muslim communities escalates amid the latter’s refusal to dig up the grave where Guelwaar has mistakenly been interred. A policeman sees this dilemma through, butting heads with Guelwaar’s expatriate son in the process, representing opposing perspectives: one with pride in being Senegalese despite its flaws and the other who’s adopted a colonialist mindset because of them. Flashbacks bring Guelwaar back to life, and they’re largely focused on his political convictions. He’s outspoken against international aid, which he believes enables a dependent mindset; this ultimately portends his demise at a rally celebrating the delivery of such supplies, where his outspokenness—articulated in Wolof instead of French, the language divide a recurring motif throughout—galvanizes the crowd and thus threatens the facade of peace that national and foreign aristocrats are cultivating. In spite of Sembène’s preference for complexity, the film wraps up rather neatly, assured in its embrace of nuance and convinced of its political disposition. (1992, 114 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Mitchell Leisen's MIDNIGHT (US)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am

Billy Wilder once said, "I was inspired to become a director by a cockroach." Considering his well-documented feelings about Mitchell Leisen, one might think that he was using the word pejoratively in reference to the director for whom he wrote both MIDNIGHT and HOLD BACK THE DAWN. But it's a fact rather than a slur; after Leisen cut a scene from the latter film where Charles Boyer was to deliver a speech to a cockroach, Wilder vowed never to let another director butcher his words. (Wilder still admired Lubitsch, of course, but one could argue that an artist's detractors are as important as his influences. Leisen reportedly inspired Preston Sturges in the same way.) Their first collaboration, MIDNIGHT, is an indelible mix of four artists' temperaments: it's a combination of Wilder and Charles Brackett's tight, often cynical, writing; Lubitsch's influence on them; and Leisen's ability to orchestrate extraordinary talent. In this way, Leisen is one of those auteurs who's only as good as the sum of his parts—"Lightly Likable" as Andrew Sarris categorized him in The American Cinema. MIDNIGHT is heavily likable, a delightful comedy that features Claudette Colbert in her Paramount prime. She plays Eve Peabody, an American Cinderella who ends up in Paris with only the gold lame dress on her back. She meets cute with taxi driver Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), then flees to keep herself from falling in love; in screwball fashion, he then launches an exhaustive search for her. In the meantime, Eve crashes a high society party and meets the aristocrat Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore), his wife, and her lover. The lover falls for Eve, and Georges conspires with her to remove the Don Juan from his marriage. No sooner than Tibor finds her, he poses as her "husband," a baron, only for them to "divorce" as quickly as they fall in love. Though Wilder considered Leisen a Lubitsch rip-off, the film has an air of "low-class" elegance that's a far cry from Lubitsch's steady sophistication. Tibor and Eve are members of the underclass, and their aristocratic counterparts serve only to bring them together. It also contains Wilder's signature psychologizing; Tibor is, unexpectedly, a fan of Freud. Perhaps it's not a Lubitsch or a Wilder film outright, but it's something in between that's just as satisfying. Screening as part of Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder Matinees Part 2. (1939, 94 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Kathleen Collins' LOSING GROUND (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6pm

"There's nothing wrong with telling stories." So says one artist when another expresses envy over his ability to work instinctively as opposed to narratively. Director Kathleen Collins' LOSING GROUND is composed of various such oppositions that manifest themselves through Victor (played by GANJA & HESS director Bill Gunn) and his wife, Sara (Seret Scott), a professor of philosophy. He's artistic; she's logical. This is the jumping off point from which other dichotomies—male versus female, creativity versus intellectualism, abstraction versus specificity—are explored. With regards to race, which is a de facto theme owing to its being one of the first fictional features to be directed by a black woman, the film shows rather than tells; many suspect that it was neglected upon its release because it portrays Black characters as well-to-do professionals instead of as victims or thugs. (In response to being asked if minority filmmakers have a duty to address their respective struggles, Collins said, "I think you have an even greater obligation to deal with your own obsessions.") Though LOSING GROUND isn't exactly autobiographical, Collins herself was a professor, and the name of the film comes from one of her own short story collections. Sara's almost obsessive study of aesthetic experience both parallels the aforementioned oppositions and prompts the changes that occur over the course of the narrative. "Essentially it's that change is a rather volatile process in the human psyche," Collins said in an interview with James Briggs Murray for Black Visions. "And, that real change usually requires some release of fantasy energy." This last part refers to the dance-centric film-within-a-film that Sara acts in at the behest of one of her students, which she does in an attempt to achieve the same creative ecstasy as her husband and actress mother. (The meta-film also mirrors the central drama of the narrative.) Overall, the film is an astute meditation on a great many things: the academic experience, the aesthetic experience, the Black experience, and Sara's experience as a woman. Collins was also a person of varied interests; in addition to teaching, writing, and making films, she was also a playwright and an activist. Collins once remarked, "I'm interested in solving certain questions, such as: How do you do an interesting narrative film?" LOSING GROUND is an exceptional solution to that dilemma. There's nothing wrong with telling stories, indeed. Preceded by Iman Uqdah Hameen's 1987 short UNSPOKEN CONVERSATION (24 min, DCP Digital). Screening as part of the Sojourner Truth Festival. (1982, 86 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
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Also screening as part of the Sojourner Truth Festival are the Memory Tracks short film program on Friday at 8:30pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with filmmakers Portia Cobb and Sophia Nahli Allison; the Kid Flix: Sojourner Truth shorts program on Saturday and Sunday at 11am; the Afrofuturism shorts program on Saturday at 8:30pm; Zeinabu irene Davis’ 1999 film COMPENSATION (92 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 6pm, with Zeinabu irene Davis, Portia Cobb and associate producer Yvonne Welbon in person; a Tribute to Jessie Maple, featuring an excerpt from Welbon’s 2003 documentary SISTERS IN CINEMA (10 min, Digital Projection) and Maple’s 1981 film WILL (70 min, Digital Projection), on Sunday at 3pm, with an introduction by Welbon; and the Tribute to Mentors & Artists shorts program on Sunday at 5:15pm. More info on all screenings here.

Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (Hungary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday and Thursday, 8pm

For a generation of American moviegoers, WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES was the gateway to the world of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, and what an introduction it was. Here was a work of awe-inspiring long-take cinema à la Andrei Tarkovsky and Miklos Jancsó that also had roots in the absurdist theater of Samuel Beckett; likewise, the film’s perspective straddled folklore and modernity in a way that made it seem eerily timeless. What most American moviegoers didn’t know when WERCKMEISTER played the festival circuit and then got passed around as bootleg cassettes in the early 2000s was that Tarr and Hranitzky had been honing the film’s aesthetic for more than a decade, as their two previous features, DAMNATION (1988) and SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994), both reveled in exquisite black-and-white cinematography, grungy rural settings, slow pacing, and even slower camera movements. Yet those films, as masterful as they are, didn’t arrive with the same urgency as this one. Jonathan Rosenbaum described WERCKMEISTER as an “account of ethnic cleansing (in spirit if not in letter),” and the film indeed feels haunted by the atrocities that took place in the Balkans just a few years earlier. The parable-like story concerns a small town that’s visited by a mysterious circus that promises two major attractions: the stuffed carcass of the world’s largest whale and a rumored-about foreign prince who never materializes. The specter of the new and unknown spurs something ugly in this backwater hamlet, and a sense of dread festers until terrible things begin to happen. Most of this unfolds from the perspective of a childlike man who doesn’t fully comprehend everything around him, and this enhances the film’s sense of dumbstruck wonder. As usual in Tarr and Hranitzky’s work, the plot frequently takes a backseat to the spectacle of time passing and accumulating; it demands the sort of concentration that is almost impossible to attain outside a theater. (2000, 145 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

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

Alliance Francaise (810 N. Dearborn St.) – Wednesday, 6:30pm

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,” said 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 her seminal 1975 film JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, which she made when she was just 25 years old, I still believe that her 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 that depicts 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 comprised 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 “[i]n most movies you have crashes or accidents or things out of the ordinary, so the viewer is distracted from his own life…[T]his film is about his own life.” A friend once remarked to me that their standard 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 by both 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…[s]he 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.” Followed by a post-screening discussion with Nick Davis, Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at Northwestern University. Screening as part of the Cherchez la Femme series. (1975, 201 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

William K. Howard’s THE POWER AND THE GLORY (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am

When Preston Sturges sat down to write the first feature film of his to be made, he had a rich—literally and figuratively—portfolio of experiences from which to draw. Born in Chicago, moved to France at age 2 by his flamboyant mother, returned to Chicago to spend some of his formative years with his rich stepfather, and married and abandoned by Eleanor Post Hutton, granddaughter of cereal mogul C.W. Post, Sturges lived the life he packed into THE POWER AND THE GLORY. For the story of illiterate track inspector Tom Garner (Spencer Tracy) who rises to become the most powerful railroad tycoon in the United States, Sturges drew on the stories Post Hutton told him about her grandfather and used her narrative style to create the flashback structure by which Henry (Ralph Morgan), the narrator and lifelong friend of Garner, traces important events in both their lives. He also used his own suicidal thoughts after Post Hutton dumped him to bring the film to a tragic end. It’s easy to see Garner as a monster who sent troops to murder 400 striking railroad workers and threw over his wife of 30 years (Colleen Moore) for a younger woman (Helen Vinson), but the story is told from Henry’s adoring point of view. The film is rather lackluster, though seeing Colleen Moore, my favorite silent film star, give a fine performance in a talkie was a real treat for me. Notable is the fact that Orson Welles reportedly watched the film ad nauseum to understand its structure so that he could apply it to CITIZEN KANE (1941). With an introduction and post-film Q&A and book signing by Kathleen Rooney, Distinguished Writer in Residence at DePaul University. (1933, 80 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

George Miller's BABE: PIG IN THE CITY (Australia) and Martin Scorsese's AFTER HOURS (US)

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

Maligned upon release by nearly everyone outside of Chicago's own Siskel, Ebert, and Pat Graham, George Miller's $90M perfectionist talking-animal masterpiece BABE: PIG IN THE CITY (1998, 97 min, DCP Digital) returns to our comparatively welcoming megapolis. Now, nobody knows what happens in the first BABE, so the titular plucky sheep-herding pig begins this tour-de-force sequel a returning conquering hero of something-or-other, before tragedy strikes; and in Miller's fantastic worldview, tragedy can only occur repeatedly, in the form of elaborate, set-clearing Rube Goldberg catastrophes. Our heroic pinkness becomes an undocumented refugee among many, abused by CBP and housed in an imaginary hypercity's zoophilic sanctuary, and in the subsequent 90 minutes of bold, painterly compositions, LOTR cinematographer Andrew Lesnie works magic alongside a literal army of animal trainers (over seventy are credited). The resulting CGI-assisted supporting performances—memorably the orangutan, duck, and pit bull terrier—far outrank many contemporaneous human thespians; their dubbed dialogue is a simultaneously poetic and illiterate slang-filled tenement argot, as if the Dead End Kids, Vito Corleone, and Blanche DuBois were all in hiding at the Chelsea Hotel, if the Chelsea Hotel was on the Bowery, and if the Bowery was in Venice, and if the Bowery-née-Chelsea-Hotel-on-Venice was constructed from scratch on the nascent Fox Sydney backlot. (The music, by contrast, is a 1950s Parisian daydream, sung by the rue de Belleville's finest castrati mice.) But BABE: PIG IN THE CITY also deserves to be seen on the big screen, in part because of its large-scale PLAYTIME-meets-STARSHIP TROOPERS satirization of both the technocratic dullness and hedonistic excess of monochromatic, globalized modernity, and in part because belly laughter and uncontrollable sobbing are more fun in public. What is clear today is how much is owed to this supposed "failure" of a film by the far more financially successful (and geographically accurate) FINDING NEMO/DORY, where a cornucopia of damaged fauna also attempt to collaboratively extricate themselves from Pacific-coastal urbanity. But with all due respect to Pixar, it's clear which production team will be first against the wall. [Michael Castelle]
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AFTER HOURS (1985, 97 min, DCP Digital) conveys, like nothing else in the director’s body of work, the sheer joy that Martin Scorsese derives from making movies. It’s funny, playful, and invigorating, with a style that positively whooshes you through the action. Working with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (best known at the time for his run of films with Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Scorsese executes breathtaking camera movements indoors and outdoors alike, creating a sense of furious activity that betrays the film’s limited playing space. Most of it takes place in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo, where Griffin Dunne’s lonely office drone goes to meet the alluring woman (Patricia Arquette) whom he picked up at a cafe. Searching for easy sex, Paul winds up in a nightmare. His long night consists of one misadventure after another, as he gets bounced around the neighborhood (and into other parts of the borough) like a pinball; the story culminates with Dunne getting mistaken for a wanted criminal and hunted down by an angry mob. As twisty and as witty as Scorsese’s direction, Joseph Minion’s script (originally written for an NYU screenwriting class taught by Dusan Makavejev) operates under a calculated illogic that many have compared to the writing of Franz Kafka. And like a Kafka protagonist, Dunne has the misfortune of living in a universe that just doesn’t like him; his bad luck seems almost cosmic in nature. Adding to his misfortune, almost everyone Dunne meets is some kind of kook, and the colorful supporting cast plays those kooks for all they’re worth. Of special mention are Teri Garr, who plays a flaky artist, and John Heard, who reveals a deep reservoir of angst in his brief turn as a bartender. [Ben Sachs]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

 ⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive and inimitable Asian Pop-Up Cinema series continues its seventeenth season this weekend. Their in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list; visit here for more information.

⚫ Celluloid Chicago
Film Party (1997 - 2022, total approx. 120 min, 16mm), the first program of this year’s edition of Celluloid Chicago, screens Thursday, 8pm, at Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.). More info here. 

⚫ 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, called 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 minutes, 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. 

⚫ CHIRP Music Film Festival
CHIRP Radio 107.1FM presents its inaugural music film festival, featuring eleven music-related films, through Sunday at the Davis Theater. More info here. 

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Christoffer Sandle’s 2022 Swedish film SO DAMN EASY GOING (91 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.). Free admission. Register and find more info here.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
My Neighborhood: Chicago Films from the Center Cinema Co-Op screens Wednesday at 8pm. Programmed by Cine-File contributor Josh B Mabe. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s 2023 film THEATER CAMP (94 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, Saturday and Sunday. See Venue website for showtimes. More info here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Claire Simon’s 2023 documentary OUR BODY (168 min, DCP Digital) begins this week. See Venue website for showtimes. More info here.  

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Music Box Garden Movies continue. See Venue website for films and showtimes. 

Charlotte Regan’s 2023 film SCRAPPER (84 min, DCP Digital) begins and Babak Jalali’s 2023 film FREMONT (91 min, DCP Digital) continues this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Andrew Fox Smith’s 2023 visual/musical collage IN DREAMS (115 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday at 4:30pm. From 4:30pm to 5:45pm there will be live music by Whatever. and Reckless Darling, the musicians who composed the IN DREAMS score. There will also be art pop-ups by local Chicago artists before the screening. Doors close to commence film screening at 5:45pm. Event ends at 6:30pm. Programmed and presented by Mia Asuncion and Sanna Evans.

A new 4K DCP Digital Restoration of Alejandro Amenábar’s 2001 film THE OTHERS (104 min) screens this week. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Mario Van Peebles’ 1991 film NEW JACK CITY (100 min, 35mm) screens Friday and Saturday at midnight and F. Gary Gray’s 1995 film FRIDAY (91 min, 35mm) screens Sunday at 7pm, with an introduction from Troy Pryor, founder of Creative Cypher, both as part of the Fresh Films: A Celebration of 50 Years of Hip Hop series. More info on all screenings and events here. 

⚫ Reeling 2023
Reeling 2023, the 41st Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, a production of Chicago Filmmakers, starts on Thursday with Andy Vallentine’s 2022 film THE MATTACHINE FAMILY (98 min, DCP Digital), 7pm, at the Music Box Theatre. There’s also a reception in the Music Box garden starting at 6pm. More info here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 N. Western Ave.)
The Sideshow Gelato shop presents Sideshow Sinema!, during which they will screen films connected to the shop theme, every Thursday. More info here.

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.

CINE-LIST: September 15 - September 21, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Castelle, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Raphael Jose Martinez, Nicky Ni, Drew Van Weelden