:: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27 - THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Sergei Parajanov's SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (USSR)

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

Sergei Parajanov's adaptation of Mykhailo Kotsibuynsky's novel is a sweeping epic, a Romeo and Juliet story about a boy and a girl from a small Ukrainian village who try to overcome the animosity of their families through love. But the film is not really about the story or its characters, but rather the wild pageant of Ukrainian village life that Parajanov and crew create through costume, landscape, and, most importantly, a unique and baroque style of camerawork. Cinematographers Yuri Ilyenko and Viktor Bestayev's camera seems totally unhinged, liable to take off running at any time, park itself miles from the action, or take on the identity of a murder weapon as it sees fit. And yet we always have the sense that the whole strange universe of the film is all around us, just out of frame. As the film goes on and the characters grow up, the profusion of technical wonders begins to slow and the story takes more of a center stage. We find ourselves in a world more D.H. Lawrence than Shakespeare, a bleak pastoral world of small farmers, bad memories, and marital frustrations (albeit hinted at with a coded Soviet prudery). But naturalism is never a priority for Parajanov or his actors, who jump back and forth between mad happiness, dull resignation, and murderous rage so quickly that it can be a little confusing. The romantic leads are wooden and stilted, but the craggy ensemble, whose expressionism and physicality borders on mime, is wonderful. Preceded by the 1964 short THE ROARING ROAD (10 min, 35mm). (1965, 97 min, 35mm) [Mojo Lorwin]

Chicago Home Movie Day (Special Event)

Chicago History Museum (1601 N. Clark St.) – Saturday, 11am – 3pm (Free Admission)

This yearly, worldwide celebration of home movies is absolutely essential viewing for anyone who cares a whit about motion picture art, history, sociology, ethnography, science, or technology. Anyone who loves the sound of a projector. Anyone who loves deep, luscious Kodachrome II stock that is as gorgeous as the day it was shot. Anyone who loves dated, faded, scratched, and bruised film—every emulsion scar a sacred glyph created by your grandfather's careless handling 60 years ago. Anyone who wants to revel in the performance of the primping and strutting families readying for their close up. Anyone who wants to see what the neighborhood looked like before you got there. So find your 100 foot reels of 16mm you just had processed from your sister's Quinceañera or your grandfather's thousands of feet of Super 8mm from your uncle's Bar Mitzvah in 1976 or that 8mm your great aunt shot from Daley Plaza in 1963 and come out for Home Movie Day. Just walk in with your films for staff and volunteers from the Chicago Film Archives and the Chicago Film Society to inspect your home movies that day! Select films will be screened throughout the day. Co-Presented by Chicago Film Archives and the Chicago Film Society. [JB Mabe]

Henri-Georges Clouzot's LES DIABOLIQUES (France)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am

After a controversial adaptation of Abbe Prevost's classic novel Manon Lescaut, simply titled MANON (1949), and the unsuccessful comedy MIQUETTE (1950), the French master Henri-Georges Clouzot returned to suspense with the international hits THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953) and LES DIABOLIQUES, becoming one of France's most celebrated directors in the 1950s. At the peak of his career, Clouzot beat out Alfred Hitchcock for the rights to adapt Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's crime novel Celle qui n'etait plus into LES DIABOLIQUES. Set in a dilapidated boarding school outside of Paris, the thriller stars Paul Meurisse as the school's cruel headmaster Michel Delassalle, Vera Clouzot as Michel's ailing wife Christina, and Simone Signoret as his alluring mistress Nicole Horner. Tormented by his frequent abuse, Nicole and Christina murder Michel in a distant village, and then they secretly return to dump him in the school's filthy swimming pool. But Clouzot's own elaborate plot does not get underway until Michel's body disappears. Prior to this film's release in 1955, the widely acclaimed THE WAGES OF FEAR first prompted critics to compare Clouzot to the Master of Suspense and to even nickname him the French Hitchcock. While Clouzot rivaled with Hitchcock for critical and commercial success, he in fact anticipated the tactics of the better-known English director. Famously acknowledged as a model for PSYCHO (1960), LES DIABOLIQUES may act as Clouzot's greatest influence upon Hitchcock, with its morbid humor, plot elements, and suspense devices. Instead of a French Hitchcock, why not an English Clouzot? Screening as part of Bride of Music Box of Horrors. (1955, 114 min, 35mm) [Candace Wirt]

Walt Disney’s FANTASIA (US/Animation)

Gene Siskel Center – Saturday and Sunday, 11am

Arguably the only movie from the Walt Disney Animation Studios that could be labeled a full-on Art Film, FANTASIA is perhaps the crowning artistic achievement of the company’s history, try as they might to continue their tightening grip on the dominant culture to this very day. A gorgeous marriage of the formal possibilities of animated filmmaking and orchestral music, Disney’s grand vision of cinematic artistry is expressed through a series of short films, each underscored by a canonical piece of classical music. Music critic Deems Taylor acts as the emcee, introducing each segment and guiding the audience through the various styles on display. We begin with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, paired with the most abstract piece of animation of the program: billowing pools of light streaming through clouds to accompany the cascading strings and bombastic horns of Leopold Stokowski’s orchestra. This is followed by the Nutcracker Suite, removed from the Christmas iconography that is familiarly attached to Tchaikovsky’s piece to instead showcase a ballet set in nature, where mushrooms, thistles, fish, and fairies are free to cavort amongst the shadows of trees and the cobwebs glittering under the moonlight. The most famous and most narrative-bound segment follows: Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, where a young apprentice (portrayed onscreen by, who else, Disney’s lovable mascot Mickey Mouse) gets caught up in the power-hungry possibilities of his master’s spell book. The rest of the segments broadly feature various creatures parading around to the whims and wants of each respective musical piece. The early days of creation, from single-celled organisms to towering dinosaurs, evolve alongside Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. A paean of Greek mythical life regales in bacchanalian activity, rejoicing amidst Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. A full array of ballerina-clad animals, from ostriches to hippos to elephants to alligators, bombard an idyllic palace setting amidst the frantic mania of Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours. The program culminates with the Devil himself in Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, where a demonic cabal rejoices in carnal delight before being blinded out by the lights of the heavens, slowly transitioning into Schubert’s Ave Maria, where beacons of light transport themselves across the hillsides. FANTASIA ends as it began, with light, color, and music intermingled poetically, the rarest of occasions where profound, adventurous artistry found room to shine within one of the most commercial entities on the planet. Screening as part of Kid Flix; tickets only $5. (1940, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Justine Triet’s ANATOMY OF A FALL (France)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Like John Cassavetes, Justine Triet makes movies that feel like they’re constantly trying to catch up with their own characters; one consistent pleasure of both of their films is never knowing how the tone will adapt to how the subjects behave. Unlike Cassavetes, who started as an actor, Triet began her career making documentaries, so it’s likely that she allows her characters such liberty because she cut her teeth on observing real people. In her fiction features, the sense of directorial fascination extends beyond what the characters do and into the worlds they inhabit—another surprising quality of Triet’s IN BED WITH VICTORIA (2016) and SIBYL (2019) is how they at first resemble bourgeois lifestyle comedies but end up having a lot to say about law and psychoanalysis, respectively. ANATOMY OF A FALL, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, also has a lot to say about the law, in addition to fiction writing and marriage; befitting a movie about a novelist, it feels novelistic in its breadth and depth. But that doesn’t mean it ever feels less than cinematic—Triet makes as many engagingly eccentric decisions behind the camera as her characters make in front of it. ANATOMY OF A FALL is noteworthy for its deliberately graceless zooms and pans, which suggest the perspective of a curious insect, and its low-angle closeups, which evoke a sense of nervous intimacy before the characters even do anything. Triet also shifts enigmatically between objective and subjective perspectives, creates chilling ellipses through editing, and covers staggering amounts of emotional territory within individual scenes. If she weren’t such an exceptional director of actors, her ambitions as a storyteller might seem show-offy; yet ANATOMY OF A FALL (like Triet’s previous two features) is worthy of Sidney Lumet in how it glues your eyes to the performances. Sandra Hüller deserves all the praise she gets for her lead performance as a successful novelist who stands trial after her husband dies in a suspicious accident, but the whole cast is mesmerizing, down to the bit players. Special mention goes to young Milo Machado Garner, who plays Hüller’s 11-year-old son and exudes an emotional maturity well beyond his years. Yet another surprise of ANATOMY OF A FALL is how much it comes to be about his character in the final act; his story vaguely recalls Ozu’s early masterpiece I WAS BORN, BUT… (1932) in its stinging evocation of the moment when we realize our parents are flawed individuals like everyone else. It speaks to the effectiveness of Triet’s maximalism that even the revelations of secondary characters carry the weight of entire separate films. (2023, 152 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Mexican Animation, American Propaganda, and the Cold War - A Showcase of Cartoons from Dibujos Animados S.A. (1952-56) (Mexico/Animation)

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

It’s not unusual that animation be used for propaganda, but it nevertheless strikes me as cartoonish, befitting of its mechanism. One might almost expect to watch a cartoon and see in it cartoon propaganda, riffing on the mode for comedic purposes. (But is a cartoon within a cartoon automatically a cartoon? Do cartoons only watch cartoons or are we to suppose it’s live action, just rendered via animation? I digress.) Animated propaganda really came to the fore during World War II, so it makes sense that it continued into the Cold War. It goes much further than that, of course, as Karl F. Cohen elaborates in a blog post for the Animation World Network about Frances Stoner Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, that “while Saunders book received many favorable reviews and most mentioned the CIA having a hand in the creation of [Joy Batchelor and John Halas’ 1955 animated film] ANIMAL FARM, the information seemed trivial compared to more sensational revelations including the CIA financing the publication of several fine art books, and their using Nelson Rockefeller and the Museum of Modern Art in New York to present art exhibits of Jackson Pollock's paintings and other abstract expressionists to counter the social realism being advanced by Moscow!” With regard to moving image, however, a few years even before Batchelor and Halas’ ANIMAL FARM, the United States Information Agency had been created, the “biggest branch of this propaganda machine,” per its director of TV and film service Alvin Snyder’s 1995 memoir, the machine in question "a full-service public relations organization, the largest in the world, about the size of the twenty biggest U.S. commercial PR firms combined. Its full-time professional staff of more than 10,000, spread out among some 150 countries, burnished America‘s image and trashed the Soviet Union 2,500 hours a week with a 'tower of babble' comprised of more than 70 languages, to the tune of over $2 billion per year.” Among the media promulgated by the USIA, moving images were one of its most prolific (between its founding in 1953 and 1999, the USIA produced or distributed, as would be later be the case with the CIA’s ANIMAL FARM, approximately twenty thousand titles around the world), expensive, and effective outlets. Twelve of those were cartoons made and distributed in Mexico. Film executive Richard K. Tompkins was contracted by the organization to lead some anti-communism film projects there, the cartoons being made under the auspices of an animation studio called Dibujos Animados S.A., which had no direct link to the USIA, making it seem as if the messages therein were those of the works’ native creators. Among those involved were Ernesto Terrazas, the head of the animation team who had previously worked on Disney’s 1944 film THE THREE CABALLEROS; a bevy of American animators acted as instructors for the Mexican staff (many of whom, the program description notes, were unaware of the shorts being intended for propagandistic purposes), including those credited as directors of the cartoon shorts. Six are featured in this program: MANOLÍN TORERO (Emery Hawkins); VICE VERSOS (Tom McDonald); MUCHO MACHO (Pat Matthews); MAÍZ PARA LAS MASAS (Matthews); PRAVDA PRADO (Gerald Ray); and VIAJE INTERPLANETARIO (Matthews), all between six and eight minutes long. Also included is Ray’s EL HOMBRE Y EL PODER (17 min), which translates to “Man and Power,” an animated documentary of sorts that explores the history of the titular entities. There’s some provocative dogma being espoused in this one, much of which, ironically, sounds more like contemporary democracy, at least as we experience it here in the United States, than communism, disguised as all-out tyranny compounded by the threat of ever-expanding nuclear capabilities. While I won’t describe each of the cartoons here, VIAJE INTERPLANETARIO stuck out to me as a particularly egregious example of the USIA’s aims, using as it does a narrative technique that one might recognize, albeit as a loose iteration, from John Carpenter’s THEY LIVE (1988). Manolin the rooster, a scientist in the short, and Burrito the donkey, a reporter, take off to outer space in Manolin’s spaceship, where they’re met by Chente the wolf, a member of the intergalactic space police, who takes them to the planet of Armando Lios the raven, a representative of that society’s communist government. (These four characters appear in all the cartoon shorts, with Manolin and Burrito always being the “good” guys and Chente and Lios the bad ones.) They’re given goggles on the planet which, when on, make it appear as if the people are healthy and prosperous. When off, a military dictatorship where citizens are subjected to hard labor is revealed, symbolic of the shorts’ overall intent to subvert communist ideology. They certainly must be seen to be believed. This is the first known public screening of the recently digitized cartoons (by the National Archives in DC; the other shorts not included in this program are still in the process of being preserved and digitized) in the US. Followed by a post-screening panel discussion moderated by Derek G. Larson (Purdue), animation researcher Dan Bashara (DePaul), film philosopher Byron Davies (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow), and philosopher Carlos Oliva Mendoza (UNAM). [Kat Sachs]

Sidney Poitier’s BUCK AND THE PREACHER (US)

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

Sidney Poitier made his directorial debut on the comic Western BUCK AND THE PREACHER when he realized the story needed to be told by a Black artist and decided, as one of the film’s producers, to fire director Joseph Sargent after one week of production. His direction is never awe-inspiring, but it’s perfectly competent—like many actors who take up directing as a second or side career, Poitier emphasizes character over everything else, and most of his shots have a purely functional quality, existing primarily to guide our enjoyment of the characterization. That said, the characters here are wonderful: the title duo derives its easygoing appeal from the real-life close friendship between Poitier (who plays Buck) and Harry Belafonte (who plays the preacher), and there is fine supporting work, as per usual, by Ruby Dee (who plays Poitier’s wife). The film came out during the height of the blaxploitation cycle, and while it offers rousing scenes of heroic Black characters taking violent revenge on racist whites, it also provides insight into the largely forgotten history of the “Exodusters,” former slaves who traveled west in the years after the Civil War to settle in Kansas. Poitier’s Buck is a wagon master who guides groups of Exodusters across the country; the difficulties of life on the trail are compounded by the constant threat of mercenaries who follow Black wagon teams and threaten—or sometimes force—the migrants into returning to work on southern plantations. (The film might be read as a revisionist take on one of John Ford’s greatest films, WAGONMASTER [1950].) Belafonte’s “Reverend” Willis Oaks Rutherford is a nervy con man with gold teeth who crosses paths with Buck and ends up becoming his partner. Their adventures are good fun to watch, but the film is ultimately quite serious about exposing the legacy of racism on the American frontier. Screening as part of the False Preachers series. (1972, 102 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Emilio Fernández’s VICTIMS OF SIN (Mexico)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 8pm

Emilio Fernández, a prolific director and screenwriter of Mexican cinema’s Golden Age, won world fame when his tragic melodrama MARIA CANDELARIA (1944) won the Palme d’Or at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. Today, that film is more famous than seen, a fate that has befallen a large number of his films. Fortunately, a new 4K digital restoration of his VICTIMS OF SIN, made with his regular collaborators, screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno and legendary cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, is making the rounds. Set among the nightclubs and red light district of Mexico City, VICTIMS OF SIN centers on the fortunes of Violeta (Ninón Sevilla), a former sex worker hired as a dancer by nightclub owner Don Gonzalo (Francisco Reiguera) upon the urging of his star singer, Rita (Cuban singer and actress Rita Montaner). Violeta is hugely popular, but her downward slide begins when she rescues and adopts a baby boy whose besotted mother (Margarita Ceballos) puts him in a garbage can on orders from Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta), her pimp and the baby’s father. To say I have never seen a film like this would be an understatement. From its beginning, when Rodolfo carefully examines his oil-flattened hair in a barber’s mirror, calculates how much he should pay the barber, dons the hat and coat that complete his zoot suit, and strolls to meet his stable of whores at Don Gonzalo’s nightclub, VICTIMS OF SIN is a nonstop entertainment that mixes comedy, melodrama, and most especially music and dance. The film is frontloaded with singing and dancing. Montaner sings as a bevy of chorus girls in swinging peasant dresses swirl on the dance floor. When Sevilla enters for her star turn in her revealing frilled skirt and frilled show pants, we get the first of many tastes of her sensual style as she moves to the orchestra’s African, Caribbean, and Cuban rhythms. “Nightingale of the Americas” Pedro Vargas, a ubiquitous presence in Mexican cinema, also offers a song from his seat in the audience that seems to foreshadow Violeta’s fortunes. This scene, which mixes Cuban and Mexican characters, shows how Cubans moved freely to Mexico to work and live—and just as freely moved back in a snit! Fernández, of course, doesn’t forsake his story for the pleasures of musical comedy. He rouses anxiety in the audience with such moments as Violeta snatching the baby from the garbage can just as workers reach its location with their garbage truck or a gang of men crossing some railroad tracks with a real train bearing down on them. One hilarious scene depicts Violeta standing with a long line of prostitutes as Santiago (Tito Junco), another pimp and nightclub owner who becomes Violeta’s common law husband, walks in front of them with a mariachi band trailing behind him. Another odd moment is when Santiago and Violeta go to a church to have their boy christened—but we never learn his name at this or any point in the movie. Figueroa’s black-and-white cinematography is, as usual, stunning and inventive, and the sets and costumes add flair and a degree of authenticity to the story. VICTIMS OF SIN races to its melodramatic conclusion, which offers Fernández’s signature sentiment—a prayer for all the unfortunates of Mexico. (1951, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Rodrigo Moreno’s THE DELINQUENTS (Argentina)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

As if acting on a dare, Rodrigo Moreno’s THE DELINQUENTS refuses to let itself be pinned down in one specific genre, letting the audience get comfortable with the characters and situation before completely launching into something entirely new. It oscillates in tone, form, and cinematic language as frequently as the decision-making of its central characters. It’s a worthy gamble for a film with such an on-the-surface breezy premise that finds itself unraveling over the course of a more-than three-hour runtime: Morán (Daniel Elías, a character actor who lives to exude Main Character Energy), sick of his menial bank treasurer job, decides to steal a huge sum of money from work. He conspires with a fellow coworker, Roman (the delightfully oafish Esteban Bigliardi), to hang onto the duffel bag of stolen goods for the entirety of Morán’s supposed three-and-a-half year prison sentence, after which the sum will be split evenly between the two. “It’s three years in prison, or twenty-five in the bank,” Morán so bluntly puts it, the immorality of working under capitalism that has brought both men to this point where saying “yes” to this proposition seems like the only reasonable choice. From here, the film divides itself up into picaresque fragments, between the workplace inanity of the bank where an investigation into the robbery puts everyone on edge, the harsh prison life that Morán must withstand, and the romantic carefree adventures that Roman finds himself entangled in. Our characters desperately yearn to journey from the urban landscape of city life to the lush backwoods, captured patiently by Moreno, deploying music with ease and style, and a romance missing from Roman and Morán’s lives, perpetually squashed by the desires of the capitalist workforce. Even when discovering the crime at hand, Roman’s boss decides not to fire him, instead ensuring him that this job will be the only thing Roman can ever think about. As he succinctly puts it, "the idea is to make your life miserable." (2023, 189 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

John Fawcett’s GINGER SNAPS (Canada)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

The werewolf has long been thematically connected to puberty and coming-of-age stories. This is most felt in the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, but modern cinema has made use of the allegory, as seen in such tonally diverse films as TEEN WOLF and THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. John Fawcett’s horror film GINGER SNAPS sits between those two films; it’s at once a teen comedy about what happens when your sister becomes a werewolf and a dark and moving examination of puberty, sexuality, and female bonds. Antisocial sisters Ginger and Brigette Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins) are incredibly close; they act out their own violent deaths much to the dismay of their parents. They obsess over death, vowing to escape their dull suburban existence or commit suicide together at 16. Their macabre bond is shaken, however, after Ginger gets her first period and is attacked by a werewolf. Ginger begins to change–into both a hideous creature and a self-possessed teenager interested in sex and boys. Simultaneously, Brigette gets increasingly concerned, worried both about the monster her sister is becoming and the ways in which Ginger is rejecting their withdrawn lifestyle. While part horror-comedy, GINGER SNAPS doesn’t stray from the violent, real-world consequences of Ginger’s transformation, complete with disturbing practical special effects. Isabelle and Perkins’ off-kilter yet sincere performances drive the film, keeping the core relationship at the heart of this wild teen tale. In its dreary suburban setting, GINGER SNAPS aptly balances a grounded reality with fantastical horror elements. It’s a cult horror film that endures because of its dark humor and serious feminist themes, intelligently observing how simultaneously funny, horrifying, and empowering it is to grow up. Screening as part of Bride of Music Box of Horrors. (2000, 108 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

Jamil Sims’ WHEN THE BEAT DROPS (US/Documentary)

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

The history of dance is a history of appropriation. From choreographer Agnes de Mille’s adaptation of square dancing for the stage musical “Oklahoma” to Twyla Tharp’s incorporation of everything from tripping on an uneven sidewalk to aerobics into her ballets and other works, dancers see no type of movement as off limits. I must admit, however, that I never saw cheerleading as a fertile source for a dance genre. Well-known choreographer Jamil Sims disabused me of my skepticism with his documentary WHEN THE BEAT DROPS. Sims dives into the underground dance scene called bucking. The almost entirely gay and Black practitioners of this style, which arose in Atlanta, use the cheerleaders of HBCUs, particularly the Jackson State University squad known as the Prancing J-Settes, as models for their choreography and judges for their competitions. Sims focuses much of his attention on Phi Phi, an Atlanta-based bucking team founded by Anthony Davis, an enormous man who nonetheless busts moves that astonish audiences. Davis, a former marching band member, escorts us through his admiration of the cheerleading squads his band accompanied to his discovery of bucking at the now-demolished Club Traxx during the repressive atmosphere of 1980s Atlanta. As Phi Phi “mother,” he directs the young dancers and organizes events, from a fundraiser for the LGBTQ community to clothing drives. The bucking competitions, which include several categories done to hip hop, house, and other music genres and attract teams from all over the South (there is one mixed-gender team from Detroit that is Phi Phi’s main rival) form the heart of the film, giving Sims a chance to profile several other bucking dancers on and off the dance floor. Co-cinematographers John Orphan and Keith Worthington generally do a good job of showcasing the dancing, keeping pace with the synchronized energy and acrobatic and expressive dance moves that give these men a chance for self-expression and paved the way to a professional dance career for at least one of them. Screening as part of the In the Club: 90s Electronic Music and Beyond series. (2018, 85 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Mervyn LeRoy's HEAT LIGHTNING (US)

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

In just a little over an hour, Mervyn LeRoy's HEAT LIGHTNING packs in a lot of pre-code drama. Aline McMahon and Ann Dvorak play two sisters who run a service station in the middle of hot southwest desert land; McMahon's Olga fixes the cars while Dvorak's Myra dreams of grand romance within the confined comfort of the station's inn-and-restaurant. When Olga's ex-flame rolls into town, their dynamic is challenged by the con's charm and Olga's wavering conviction. The inn's guests serve to move the plot along while also providing pre-code nuttiness of their own—a pair of man-eating divorcees have diamonds to steal and seductiveness to spare, adding more lewdness to a film already toeing the line between subtle and salacious. Despite the bawdy innuendo, the film is nothing short of progressive with its portrayal of strong female characters and their unashamed sexuality. The film is but a blip in LeRoy's prolific career, but one as worthy of discovery as a showcase of the film's several stars. Screening as part of the Proto-noir: The Roots of the Film Noir Movement series. (1934, 63 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Amy Holden Jones’ THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (US)

Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 8:30pm

One of the few examples of the subgenre directed and written by women, THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE stands out as one of the more solid early ‘80s slashers, even spawning a series of sequels. Written initially as a parody by feminist author Rita Mae Brown, the film ended up as a more traditional slasher; remnants of its humor remain, however, and first-time director Amy Holden Jones maintains a unique bent on the genre despite these changes. Trish (Michele Michaels) decides to host a sleepover for her girlfriends while her parents are away. Struggling with setting aside childish things, Trish also sees this get-together as a last hurrah for her and her friends—and no boys allowed. Of course, they are interrupted by boys, nosy neighbors, and a giant drill-wielding serial killer (Michael Villella) who starts taking them out one by one. Despite its seemingly standard slasher plot, THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE feels so down-to-earth, partially due to the laidback depiction of Trish and her relationships with her friends. It’s clear they’ve been friends for a long time, clear they share inside jokes and small tensions, as in any relationships; when Trish tries to invite a new girl, there’s pushback. But nothing feels overblown or forced. This is felt in the outstanding production design, too, highlighting an early ‘80s transition out of the ‘70s in fashion and home decor. An early scene of Trish throwing out some of her childhood toys and getting ready for the day in her appropriately messy room depicts a lot; as short as it is, small scenes like this throughout the film make even the side characters and their relationships feel completely lived in. It’s also an excellent, classic example of the genre, with the unclear motives of the killer making the kills even more gruesome. Screening as part of Phantoms of the Firehouse, presented by MUBI. (1982, 76 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]

Jesse Moss & Amanda McBaine’s THE MISSION (US/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

I’m surprised it took as long as it did for a documentary to be made about John Allen Chau, a Chinese-American missionary who, in 2018, was killed by the Sentinelese after traveling to North Sentinel Island (one of the Andaman Islands, an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal between the Indian subcontinent and the Indochinese peninsula) in hopes of spreading the gospel. The Sentinelese are a notoriously reclusive tribe, having long rejected contact with the outside world; though some have gotten close—Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s THE MISSION features those who’ve accomplished this—it’s generally understood that one shouldn’t venture to the island (it’s technically illegal) and, if they do, that it’ll be at their own risk. Chau not only knew this but seemed to believe that the island was Satan’s last stronghold, where the word of Christ had yet to be introduced. He also believed that only upon the total proliferation of the gospel would Christ return as promised, which was why this remote indigenous population was so attractive to him. Moss and McBaine’s documentary is a relatively straightforward recounting of Chau’s life, much of which was in service to worship and adventuring, as he was an avid outdoorsman. Chau’s father had written a long letter that a voice actor reads to narrate parts of the film, while another voice actor recites John’s diary and passages of his formal plan to infiltrate the island. Animated sequences (a tired, tired documentary trope) illustrate certain aspects of the story, while interviews and archival ephemera help to contextualize not just Chau’s mission but information about the Sentinelese in total. To me, the latter part is what’s most interesting, as Chau’s motivations seem cut from a pretty traditional cloth, though he claimed not to want to be a colonizer and mandated to himself that it must be the Sentinelese people’s choice to accept the word of God, should it get to that point. He seems earnest and well-intentioned, but one still wonders whether it was the adventure aspect that partly appealed to him or if something else was going on beneath the surface. Ultimately it’s what I learned about the Sentinelese that appealed to me the most, as their reasons for wanting to stay secluded—like disease, fear of their women and children being taken, which they knew had happened to other tribes, etc.—are extremely justified. A most affecting interviewee is another missionary (now an academic) whose own 30-year experience living among an indigenous population and failing to convert any of them caused him to question his faith and reject the idea of mission work in general. Underneath the story’s sensationalism are real considerations of religious, anthropological, and imperialistic questions; John Allen Chau’s doomed mission is just scratching the surface. (2023, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Karl Freund's THE MUMMY (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Sunday, 2:20pm

Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY is in many ways a reworking of the themes of DRACULA in a different register. Freund, who shot DRACULA, is in his directing debut (Charles Stumar, soon to shoot WEREWOLF OF LONDON, was his cinematographer). Where DRACULA cultivates the roughness of its texture, shocking us with every camera position and cut, THE MUMMY is an enterprise of early talkie virtuosity, from the stunning awakening of the monster in his tomb after thousands of years to the mesmeric connection between him and his reincarnated paramour. In his mastery of the suggestive and uncanny, Freund is unmatched, and he uses this mastery to connect horror and cinema as viscerally, though wholly differently, as Browning did in DRACULA. Here it is the idea of the projection, the phantasmatic connection between the ancient magician and his prey that allows him not merely to control her will but her sight as well that is the principal source of the Mummy's monstrosity. Indeed, he is the very epitome of the monstrous in Boris Karloff's performance, his career finest. As Ardath Bey, the resurrected Imhotep, he is an image of infinite fragility; a precisely-persisting piece of diabolical machinery so tender that it seems a single careless touch would destroy him. Freund fills his frame with Karloff's terrorized and terrorizing face and eyes, a visage that demonstrates at all times that all that remains of his existence is his asymptotically failing physicality, perpetually being transmuted into the mind of his victim/lover as vision, his power feeding on his own suspended existence like a reel of film always just about to run out. It is the greatest achievement of 1930s horror films. Screening with George Waggner's 1941 horror film THE WOLF MAN (70 min, DCP Digital). (1932, 73 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Shinya Tsukamoto's TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (Japan)

Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 7pm

Unmistakable in its bold style and nihilistic tone, TETSUO: THE IRON MAN is truly one of a kind. This low-budget feature holds an important place in the history of cyberpunk cinema, testing the limits of its own aesthetic through 16mm film, shoddy stop-motion animation, and practical body-horror effects created by taping broken electronics to the actors' bodies. The film's cult following (in spite of its nonexistent budget and DIY approach) is a testament to the idea that anyone can make a classic with the right vision and dedication; and man, did Tsukamoto have both. The film was shot over 18 grueling months with a crew that was constantly shrinking, leaving only Tsukamoto, co-cinematographer Kei Fujiwara, and a few others at the end of filming. To emphasize how small this crew was to begin with, Tsukamoto and Fujiwara also act in the film as two of the major characters, only surpassed in screen time by Tomorowo Taguchi in one of the other leading roles. The plot is very loose: a Japanese salaryman and an outcast who was struck in a mysterious car accident both face unimaginable, dreamlike horrors as they morph into monsters made out of metal and other miscellaneous machinery. What's more important to the film than what brought them to these changes is how these changes affect their views of the world. Through each of these men, we see reality quickly turning into a nightmare, whether it's in the form of senseless death, fetishized murder, or people and their surroundings turning into jagged, unappealing masses of metal. It comes as no surprise how quickly the main characters morph into the violent, mechanical creatures they seem fated to become, and in a weird way it almost feels expected that they take their misfortune out on the world around them. TETSUO: THE IRON MAN is a high-octane joyride from start to finish, and there's no other film that has quite captured its relentless, unsettling grit. Screening as part of Phantoms of the Firehouse, presented by MUBI. (1989, 67 min, Digital Projection) [Michael Bates]

Robert Wiene’s THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Germany/Silent)

Doc Films (at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave.) – Sunday, 7pm

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is the definitive German Expressionist film, one in which all the elements of the mise-en-scene (lighting, set design, costume design, makeup, props, the movement of figures within the frame, etc.) have been deliberately distorted and exaggerated for expressive purposes. The end result, a view of the world as seen through the eyes of a madman, single-handedly inaugurated Expressionism in the movies in 1920, a movement that would then go on to dominate German cinema screens for most of the rest of the decade. No mere museum piece, the influence of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is happily still very much with us today (Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND, John Carpenter's THE WARD, and Tim Burton's entire career would be unthinkable without it), and if you care at all about film history then you need to see this. Long seen only in faded, scratched and often incomplete prints, this new digital restoration—based on the original camera negative—runs 75 minutes and renders a ridiculous amount of never-before-seen detail in the film's striking visual design, including even paint brush strokes on the intentionally artificial-looking sets that surround the actors. (The first reel of the camera negative is missing so note how the image quality makes a leap around the 10-minute mark from looking merely excellent to looking as if it were shot yesterday.) (1920, 75 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]

Ira Sachs' PASSAGES (France)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7pm and Sunday, 3pm

Befitting the film’s plot—something of a love triangle between two men, husbands Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and Martin (Ben Whishaw), and a young woman, Agethe (Adèle Exarchopoulos)—the compositions in Ira Sachs’ PASSAGES are angular, the characters’ bodies individual lines that connect and disconnect seemingly at random. Much like Jacques Tati elicits comedy from architecture, Sachs, in collaboration with cinematographer Josée Deshaies, here evokes love and all its contours from the relationship between these bodies and their surroundings (which, like Tati’s film, are also in Paris). The film’s opening scene shows Tomas at work as a director; it’s the last day of shooting, and he’s directing a scene during which an actor descends from some stairs into a crowd of people in a bar. The set is almost Fassbinderian, with dark red lighting, arched entryways and decadent detailing. (As we’ll later see, this isn’t the only element of the film that recalls the great, iconoclastic German director. In general Sachs’ films are infused with his own rapt cinephilia.) Tomas gives direction to an actor on how to walk down the stairwell, instructing him how to use his body within that particular space. When I spoke with Sachs, he noted how he and Deschaies aspired to make each sequence seem almost like a diorama, with the actors situated purposefully so that the arrangements and movement within them conveyed the characters’ emotions as much as the dialogue. The lines become tangled when the cast and crew go to celebrate at the end of the shoot; when his husband, Martin, declines to dance with him at the bar, Tomas instead dances with the beautiful, young school teacher Agathe. They converge first through dance, then through sex, and eventually through love, with Tomas’ marriage to Martin falling completely by the wayside. Tomas leaves Martin and moves in with Agathe, who’s soon pregnant; he becomes bored with this newfound domesticity and also jealous of Martin’s relationship with a handsome writer, sucking his ex-husband back into his orbit as a result. The three attempt a quasi-polyamorous relationship, the outcome of which I won’t reveal here but leaves not everyone satisfied. (DESIGN FOR LIVING, this is not. Rather, as Sachs tells me, it’s more akin to Pialat’s LOULOU.) That’s because Tomas is a classic enfant terrible, the embodiment of an artist completely absorbed in his own pathos. Rogowski is vibrant as usual but also kind of treacherous; Whishaw again plays a delicate martyr, quietly absorbing his husband’s emotional brutality. Exarchopoulos, meanwhile, conveys a quiet strength that mirrors the vigor of her desire. But, even though the film’s marketing hinges on just that quality, it isn’t so much sexy as it is sexual, depicting moments of passion in a realistic manner. A lengthy sex scene between Tomas and Martin is the cause of the film’s controversial NC-17 rating, for which there’s truly no justification—I’ve seen more graphic sex scenes on television. And the most interesting thing about that scene isn’t the sex itself, but the way it’s shot, entirely from behind with no access granted to the actors’ (and thus the characters’) faces during this intimate, complicated moment. It recalls another, earlier scene where the two have a difficult conversation at their country house, with Tomas in the foreground almost completely obscuring Martin who sits behind him on the bed. The composition gives meaning to their respective sequences in a way that either complements or supersedes the dialogue (or lack thereof). Another appreciable visual element of the film is the characters’ clothing, which reflect the personality of the person who’s wearing it. Thus, Tomas’ clothes are particularly flamboyant, as seen when he wears a sheer crop top to dinner with Agathe’s parents—a conveyance of both his general nonconformity and the disrespect he feels toward their bourgeois attitudes. The characterizing impact of everything outside what the actors are saying adds a certain dynamism that elevates the rather simple concept (give or take a few subversions regarding sexuality, which is never explicitly broached) of who’s sleeping with whom to why they’re doing so and who they’re becoming in the process. Sex is the triangle, but love is the void, a mystery among absolutes; a passage into which we enter. (2023, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Errol Morris’ THE PIGEON TUNNEL (US/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

In 2011 I saw Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John le Carré’s seminal spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and hated it. I hated it so much that I went to see it three more times. Not only did I actually end up loving the film, but it inspired me—in an airport bookstore, no less—to purchase the book from which it was adapted. I was hooked. In the decade since I’ve embarked on an effort to read all his books in chronological order, a rather slow endeavor as my to-read list is already extraordinarily long (and, I suspect, if I focused too much on it I would be happy to read nothing else). So engrossed in his world and so enamored with his prose, I couldn’t help but to revere the man (born David Cornwell; John le Carré was his pen name) as much as his myths. So while I won’t go to bat for Errol Morris’ documentary THE PIGEON TUNNEL as being a great film (Orson Welles himself would suggest the filmmaker take it easy with the flamboyantly askant shots), it’s certainly edifying for anyone with an interest in le Carré, his life and his creative process. Le Carré died in 2020, so the several-hour interview between him and Morris in 2019 was his last. It’s a good note to end on, as, though not an exhaustive one, as it finds le Carré in a reflective state, looking back in a passive sort of way that one might advance when they’ve acquiesced to contentedness or at least an acceptance of what came before. The documentary was inspired by le Carré’s 2016 memoir of the same name, and the phrase is elucidated in the film. Morris deploys somber reenactments to complement le Carré’s ruminations; a particularly expressive one shows how, as a boy, Le Carré’s  family stayed in a Monte Carlo casino where he witnessed the process by which an adjacent shooting club would be facilitated with live pigeons for targets. The birds would go through a tunnel after which they’d fly into the air, either to be killed or escape back onto the roof where they were bred and housed. It’s a devastatingly apt metaphor for much of le Carré’s work and makes sense as having been the working title of many of his novels. Espionage, for le Carré, was always an exercise in futility, the search for truth as bleakly cyclical as the pigeons’ finite odyssey. Much of the film considers this through both  Le Carré’s work and his short time as an intelligence worker for MI:5 and MI:6. The rest centers on his childhood and relationship with his con-artist father, who, it would seem, inspired le Carré’s lifelong fascination with betrayal. With regard to his work, his imagination—never to be considered as truth, but not fully a “lie,” either, as le Carré ultimately questions the purported objectivity of any supposed truth—served as a rather ingenious coping mechanism through which to filter life’s bitter truths, passed along to the reader in lyrically beautiful prose. Parts of the film, like the principal interview and the reenactments, are unnecessarily dramatized, like at the beginning when le Carré’s poses the meaning-laden question “Who are you?” to Morris, the start of a thread that’s never properly pulled through to any meaningful conclusion. But if you have any admiration for or even interest in le Carré as a writer, a spy, or even just a person with an unusually colorful life, this will certainly satisfy. (2023, 92 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Godfrey Reggio & Jon Kane’s ONCE WITHIN A TIME (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 6pm and Sunday, 5:45pm

After shifting the landscape of arthouse cinema with his montage epic, KOYAANISQATSI (1982), Godfrey Reggio emerges again to share an abstract cinematic hodgepodge of stirring visuals and earnest social commentary, wrapped in an excitingly bewildering package. Working with co-director Jon Kane, and with the stamp of approval from none other than Steven Soderbergh as executive producer, Reggio’s latest is intellectually on par with his previous output—he is forever creating grand treatises on the nature of humanity and the tectonic realignment of society—though here, his visual vocabulary is as distant from anything before in his storied career, trading in documentary-style footage of the real world for elaborately fabricated theatrics and grandiose spectacle. ONCE WITHIN A TIME is a film of dynamic contrasts: the visual palette primarily uses the iconography of works from the silent film era, but uses them to address contemporary issues like climate change and smartphone addiction. It oscillates between moments of visual abstraction alongside didactic narrative storytelling. It stars relative unknowns in the majority of the roles, and also Mike Tyson shows up as a character known as “The Mentor.” The film even ends with a dual question: “What age is this; the sunset or the dawn?” Reggio leaves us to do the heavy-lifting with that question, while remaining rather blunt about the rest of his imagery, including apes smashing televisions and rejecting VR technology, a giant hourglass amid a sea of oil rigs, and emojis popping up in villainous settings. This late career iteration of Reggio is fervently grappling with the ever-changing cinematic and political landscapes that have shifted in seismic ways since his film debut more than forty years ago, resulting in a grand experimental reckoning that starts as a vibrant interpretation of the Creation Myth, before devolving into further shifting imagery, a Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life in the form of storybook theater as cinema, while remaining a desperate plea to look out for our shared humanity. It’s inspiring to see such vivid playfulness from Reggio, daring to paint on new artistic canvases, still as ever working to tackle everything that is chaotic and hopeful about the human race. And all in less than an hour, even. (2023, 52 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Charles Lamont's ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 12:45pm

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN was reputedly the favorite movie of a five-year-old Quentin Tarantino, domestic auteurism's ultimate man-child. While this supposedly humorous, reflexive pastiche of ‘30s Universal horror icons (re-played by Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr.) might be said to be an influence on Tarantino's own supposedly humorous pastiches, what the film (among others in its vein, e.g. ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY) most prominently presages is the seemingly novel genre interpolations of 1984's GHOSTBUSTERS—which effectively alternated between pure comedy and suspense/horror scenes almost entirely via the use of eerie string-section cues in the latter. But while GHOSTBUSTERS cleverly transposed the stale Gothic villains of its progenitors into a threateningly pantheistic Mesopotamian occultism (and opposed that in turn to an empiricist entrepreneurship), FRANKENSTEIN is uninterested in making said villains remotely relevant to postwar politics, and more fascinated with generating stylistic bouillabaisse from the studio's corpus of available sets and costumes. Most strikingly, the potentially whimsical psychological dichotomy of the leads is constrained by Bud Abbott's unyieldingly stern sobriety. An idealized, infallible superego if there ever was one, he perhaps represents the solemn, patriarchal voice inside Tarantino's head that manages to generate in perpetuity his form of adolescent, discriminatory rebellion. Like many of those works, this is a legitimate historical curiosity as a theatrical screening, but I wouldn't go on a date. (1948, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

 ⚫ 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 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 will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station and will run day and night through mid-March next year. More info here.  

⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Also screening as part of Phantoms of the Firehouse, presented by MUBI, are Tony Williams’ 1982 film NEXT OF KIN (89 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 7pm and James Bond III’s DEF BY TEMPTATION (95 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 9:15pm.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Ang Lee’s 1997 film THE ICE STORM (112 min, 35mm) screens Saturday, 4pm, as part of the Films of Ang Lee series.  

Lino Brocka’s 1975 masterpiece MANILA IN THE CLAWS OF LIGHT (125 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 6:30pm, as part of the Open Veins: Postcolonial Cinema of the Luso-Hispanic World series.

William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic THE EXORCIST (122 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, for Halloween.

Ang Lee’s 2007 film LUST, CAUTION (158 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 7pm, also as part of the Films of Ang Lee series. 

Roberta Findlay’s 1977 film A WOMAN’S TORMENT (84 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday, 9:30pm, as part of the Depths of the Grindhouse series. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou’s 2023 horror film TALK TO ME (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 1pm, 3pm, and 5pm. 

The Fall 2023 edition of the First Nations Film and Video Festival opens with Marie Clements’ 2022 film BONE OF CROWS (127 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7pm. 

The South African Film Festival USA debuts on Thursday, 7:30pm, with a screening of Tebogo Malope’s 2023 film RISE: THE SIYA KOLISI STORY (91 min, Digital Projection). The $50 ticket includes beer, wine and movie snacks, with all proceeds benefiting two children’s education charities, Education Without Borders (South Africa) and Kids in Need (USA). 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)
Phil Tucker’s 1953 film ROBOT MONSTER (66 min, 3D DCP) screens on Saturday at 4pm and Charles Band’s 1982 film PARASITE (85 min, 3D DCP) screens at 7pm, with with Robert Furmanek, Greg Kintz, and Jack Theakston from the 3-D Film Archive in person. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Nisha Pahuja’s 2022 film TO KILL A TIGER (125 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Harun Farocki’s 1990 film HOW TO LIVE IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY (83 min, Digital Projection), Lori Felker’s 2023 short PATIENCE (19 min, Digital Projection), and Peng Zuqiang’s 2016 short ACCORDION CLASS (19 min, Digital Projection) screen Tuesday, 6pm, as part of Daniel Eisenberg’s fall SAIC lecture series, the Times, the Chronicle, the Witness, and the Observer: Three Decades Of Film/Video Inquiry. 

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s 2021 Vietnamese film THE SOUNDS OF CANNONS FAMILIAR LIKE SAD REFRAINS (10 min, Digital Projection) and 2022 Vietnamese film UNBURIED SOUNDS OF A TROUBLED HORIZON (60 min, Digital Projection) screen Wednesday at 6pm.More info on all screenings here.  

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Susanna Fogel’s 2023 film CAT PERSON (120 min, DCP Digital) and Maeve O’Boyle’s JOAN BAEZ: I AM A NOISE (113 min, DCP Digital) continue this week, the former with limited showtimes. See Venue website for showtimes. 

Also screening as part of the Bride of Music Box of Horrors month-long series are Bruce Toscano’s 1984 film THE JAR (85 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 9:30pm and 11:45pm, co-presented by Terror Vision and with Gary Wallace in attendance for a post-screening Q&A; Mel Brooks’ 1974 film YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (106 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 11:30am, co-hosted by the Mercury Theatre, with the cast of their stage production of Young Frankenstein in attendance; and Paul Van Dan Elzen’s 1990 film PSYCHO PAUL’S FILM FESTIVAL (90 min, DCP Digital) on Monday at 6pm, co-presented by VHShitfest.

The Halloween editions of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (98 min, 35mm) take place Friday and Saturday at midnight, Monday at 9pm, and Tuesday at 10pm.

Tony Elwood’s 1990 horror film TERROR! (78 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at midnight. Programmed and Presented by the Front Row and Terror Vision.

The Arc'teryx Chicago Winter Film Tour takes place Thursday at 7:30pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Northwestern University
Not a screening but a job opportunity! Northwestern University’s Department of Radio/Television/Film seeks an outstanding Professor of Media Production specializing in narrative fiction for cinema and television, to teach narrative techniques and aesthetics to undergraduate students and graduate students in their MFA in Documentary Media program. This is an open-rank, tenure-eligible position, hiring at any appropriate rank, up to Full Professor. The school seeks a filmmaker with an established or emerging national and international reputation, who has an impact on the field with an innovative body of work directing and/or producing theatrical features and/or scripted episodic television. Additional significant experience in writing, editing, cinematography, or other cinematic crafts a plus. Application deadline is November 17. Apply 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.

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
Mark Oates and Tom Rubnitz’s 1985 video PSYKHO III THE MUSICAL (23 min) screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: October 27 - November 2, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Mojo Lorwin, JB Mabe, Michael Glover Smith, Candace Wirt