:: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17 - THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 23 ::

📽️ Crucial Viewing

Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Saturday, 12:30pm (Program 1) and 3pm (Program 2) [Free Admission]

It’s that exciting time of the year when Eyeworks comes back to Block Cinema with a feast of stimulating animations freshly made or selected from the archives. The first of the two programs might as well be called “Animation Mystics.” Cheng-Hsu Chung glues together episodes of mental meanderings in THE RUBBINGS OF TRAJECTORIES (2022, 4 min). Echoey and poetic voiceover contrasts with the elastic metamorphoses of cityscapes depicted in dazzling, saturated colors. RAISE AN ANIMATION (2023, 7 min) by Jiaxin Lydia Wang is a touching ode to both the laborious process of animation-making and memory—in both the technical and emotional sense. After a technical failure, an animator finds herself swimming in the sea of the computer’s memory to salvage, from the checkered sea floor, dead parts to gradually re-animate, in various styles including stop-motion, a fantastical world that comes through and carries her away. In Stefan Gruber’s BOILER ROOM MYSTICS (2023, 22 min), we follow a timid narrator as he recounts a high-school memory of seeking spirituality—and almost losing himself along the way—in the school’s boiler room and conversing with the janitor. Sparsely but vividly, spirits, ghosts, and energy come to life through Gruber’s colored pencils marks. Elsewhere, pencil-drawn shapes wiggle in Edwin Rostron’s geometrical symphony HELP DESK (2023, 4 min) that hearkens to a student’s doodle on the back of the exam blue book. Jesi Jordan contemplates connecting with nature through making and performing with humanoid sculptures made of Oaxacan clay, lava rocks, cactus husks, eggs and water. In CONCRETE SHAPE (2023, 5 min), an animation with live action, it’s hard to tell whether she was the creator of her muddy doppelgängers or was a forest spirit who had emerged from them. This program also features THE STORY OF SREBRENICA (1996, 23 min), a short story from an anthology THE FILMS OF NANNY LYNN, described as some mysterious bootleg animation made on Amiga in the 90s when it was “discovered,” on a VHS tape, a few years ago and stirred some internet interest. Lynn Ochberg is “Nanny Lynn,” and she made the series amidst the Bosnian War (the Srebrenica massacre took place in 1995) in part with her grandchildren in mind. Her educational fairy tale turns out to be deeply experimental and perplexing in nature. The story, in which a young girl, raised by a wolf, goes through a journey of understanding herself as different and later struggling to “parent” a dinosaur she time-travels to rescue, reveals the innocent trauma a generation who has grown up in a broken world would pass to the next. All of the above-mentioned shorts are being projected digitally. Showing on 16mm are: Harry Smith’s moving collage of jaunty cut-outs, NO. 11, MIRROR ANIMATIONS (1956, 4 min); the recently preserved (thanks to the collaborative effort of Yale Film Archive and Academy Film Archive) IMPASSE (1978, 10 min), by Caroline and Frank Mouris, which was made by painstakingly orchestrating millions of Avery labels of different color, shapes and sizes; and a rare print of Mike Jittlov's famed THE WIZARD OF SPEED AND TIME (1979, 3 min). All films screening digitally unless otherwise noted. Festival curators Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré in person. [Nicky Ni]
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Journeying seems to be at the heart of the second program in this year’s Eyeworks. First comes a rather humorous journey into the unknown, that here being experimental animation itself. Winner of the 1963 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, producer Ernest Pintoff and comedian Mel Brooks’ THE CRITIC (4 min) is based on something Brooks experienced in real life while watching a Norman McLaren short; he overheard an older gentleman mumbling to himself, disgruntled over the film having no plot. Thus THE CRITIC features Brooks improvising to animation resembling McLaren’s, expressing irritation over the experimentality of it all. To fly is to traverse a significant distance while still being confined in a small space. Lauren Kelley’s PROTOTYPICAL OPPRESSION/OBSESSION (2009, 5 min) features dolls (these Barbies are flight attendants) working on a plane. A tense dynamic between a trainee and a veteran attendant results in a sky-high blowout; the uncanniness of the stop-motion animation of the dolls compounds the strain. I was surprised to see that Arius Ziaee’s TOWER (2023, 8 min) was made so recently, as the subject matter and hand-drawn animation style reminded me of movies I watched in elementary school that were lovingly preserved on worn-out VHS tapes. The premise is simple: “A Hermit traverses an abandoned landscape.” The hermit is small and adorable, eclipsed by the expansive panorama, a smorgasbord of aesthetically gratifying visuals in some kind of fantasy land. A pointed exploration of space also feels present in some of these films. Tala Madani’s SHIT MOM ANIMATION (2021, 8 min) features the titular shit mom, rendered as a smudgy, poop-like presence, as she ambles throughout a pristine living space, smearing shit everywhere in the process. It’s a simple but effective and entertaining conceit. Sabine Gruffat’s MOVING OR BEING MOVED (2021, 11 min) asks, “What happens to movement when it is divorced from affect and feeling? What happens to dance without embodiment? How does mood and emotion influence movement?” Gruffat addresses these inquiries via a video game-style of animation, frequently layered over real-life footage of a woman performing domestic labor. “The everyday performance of [it] is teleported into a surreal game world where an emotionally responsive AI chatbot provides no answers,” says the film’s description. The intentional incoherence at times certainly complements the uselessness of a chatbot. Adrian Flury’s ARREST IN FLIGHT (2021, 8 min) is a veritable funhouse of frenetic imagery. Its basis, “the non-obvious character of movement when transferred to an alien object thus endowed with the life derived from the movement’s true to life source,” per Flury’s website, has a BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER feel in seeing these objects anthropomorphized, except with a primary color, pop-art vibe. The interpersonal dynamics of personal space are explored in Jordan Wong’s I WOULD’VE BEEN HAPPY (2023, 9 min), wherein the filmmaker creates a literal map to make sense of domestic strife. The intricate animation, working in tandem with voiceovers detailing memories of the family’s intimate spaces, services the complexity of upheaval. The longest of the works, James Mercer and Yifan Jiang’s VACATION (2022, 25 min) purports to follow a student taking a road trip home from college. With animation that resembles what one might create in Microsoft Paint, it certainly puts the trip in “road trip,” as the protagonist encounters one uncanny situation after another following a volcano eruption that results in him having to make a home on a beach with furniture that’s swept ashore. This is to say nothing of the animal companions he meets along the way. Maybe this program isn’t so much about journeys as it is about having a trip. All films screening digitally unless otherwise noted. Festival curators Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré in person. [Kat Sachs]

Stanley Kubrick’s PATHS OF GLORY (US)
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Alexander Payne’s THE HOLDOVERS (US)

(PATHS OF GLORY) Chicago Film Society at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Wednesday, 7:30pm // (THE HOLDOVERS) Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

In a fruitful coincidence, the Chicago Film Society is presenting an on-celluloid revival of Stanley Kubrick’s PATHS OF GLORY (1957, 88 min, 35mm) during the third week of the Music Box’s mostly on-celluloid run of Alexander Payne’s latest feature THE HOLDOVERS (2023, 133 min, 35mm or DCP Digital [see venue website for format listings]). These movies have a lot in common in their particulars: both are anti-war films made by American directors who exhibit deep fascination with actors and a fierce sense of dramatic irony. As importantly, the presentation of both movies invites us to exult in the splendor of 35mm film, particularly with regards to how it portrays the effects of natural light. Kubrick, who started taking pictures for Look Magazine as a teenager, may have been more invested in this splendor than any other director in movie history. Practically every scene of every Kubrick film save SPARTACUS (1960) owes a lot of its emotional resonance to how it’s lit—there’s always something eerie, poignant, or ironic going on in the lighting that the characters can’t see or bring themselves to say. Naturally, all of Kubrick’s work is richer when experienced on celluloid, and PATHS OF GLORY, with its inspired backlighting and frequent placement of light sources within the frame, is sure to look especially good. In this movie, Kubrick defamiliarizes WWI by making it seem somehow too real, not only through the lighting (which feels characteristically painterly and random) but through the director’s innovative practice of shooting many takes to sculpt performances that exude the confidence and inexplicable knowingness we associate with people in dreams. Like the director’s later features DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) and FULL METAL JACKET (1987), PATHS OF GLORY considers war as a system that dehumanizes soldiers and enables leaders to feel like gods. STRANGELOVE focuses on the leaders in this scenario and JACKET on the soldiers, while PATHS OF GLORY alternates between the obscenity of life in the trenches with the greater obscenity of smug generals enjoying lavish meals in a chateau. The central dichotomy is so damning of military leadership (and of the 19th-century sorts of ideas about war that WWI exposed as absurd) that Kirk Douglas’ climactic eruptions of moral outrage feel almost redundant. Still, it’s nice to see Adolphe Menjou on the business end of that outrage for a few minutes. THE HOLDOVERS, which also considers the unforgivable gap between the people who buy their way out of wars and the people who are left to fight them, has a similar climax, when one of the main characters realizes the full extent of the role he’s played in systematic injustice and pleads to a superior on behalf of young lives at stake. It goes without saying that Alexander Payne is no Stanley Kubrick—however good this scene is, it still gratifies certain emotional expectations made familiar by other American movies. At the same time, the specter of mass death hangs very close above THE HOLDOVERS, which is set in the last days of 1970 and very much concerned with the impact of the Vietnam War on American life. It may be a low-key, character-driven comedy, but the jokes don’t deflect from the seriousness of what’s at stake. As in the somber comedies that Hal Ashby and Michael Ritchie were starting to make around the time THE HOLDOVERS takes place (or the dispirited comedies that started being made in Czechoslovakia about a decade before), humor becomes a tool for confronting the hard realities of a miserable nation. The film's tone is enhanced by the exacting characterizations—no character comes off as likable until we get to know them, and even then, their flaws frequently shine through their virtues. Paul Giamatti, one of America's best working actors, tempers his lead performance as a petty, dictatorial prep school teacher with currents of self-hatred, aching vulnerability, and genuine wisdom; he also exhibits the graciousness to let costars Da'Vine Joy Randolph and newcomer Dominic Sessa take the spotlight whenever possible. Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld visually invoke New Hollywood dramedies by using post-production trickery to make THE HOLDOVERS (which was shot on an ARRI Alexa Mini) look like it’s playing on a slightly beaten-up print; when you see the movie on film, the trick is not only convincing but gorgeous. Still, this isn’t a beautiful movie because celluloid is beautiful; it’s because Payne and company are using film to suggest what it might have been like to watch THE HOLDOVERS at the time it unfolds. Paul Thomas Anderson has described his last several films as akin to time travel in how he meticulously recreates past eras then explores them as though visiting real places. Here is a movie that allows the audience to do something similar. [Ben Sachs]

Kidlat Tahimik's PERFUMED NIGHTMARE (The Philippines)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 6:30pm [Free Admission]

When PERFUMED NIGHTMARE appeared on the scene in 1977, winning three awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, it announced a vital new voice in international cinema—Filipino director, writer, and actor Kidlat Tahimik. Tahimik was recognized in 2018 as a National Artist of the Philippines, the state’s highest honor for artists, but he was just a 35-year-old man who had had experiences in and outside his native country when he picked up a camera and created the greatly fictionalized version of his own story that is PERFUMED NIGHTMARE. A character named Kidlat Tahimik introduces us in voiceover to the small jungle village in which he was born and lives. He makes special note of the fact that there is only one bridge by which people enter and leave the village, filming activities on the bridge, such as parades and funeral processions, and charting his growth by pulling increasingly larger vehicles on a rope to that bridge. As a grown man, Kidlat drives a jeepney, a taxi made from the parts of discarded military jeeps, noting that the villagers throw nothing away. He longs for more, however, as he listens to Voice of America broadcasts and becomes so obsessed with space travel that he forms a Werner von Braun Fan Club. When he leaves his village to work in Paris, however, his initial excitement about moving walkways, stone buildings that are 500 years old, and the plethora of bridges of all kinds transforms into horror at the excess of the modern world. Tahimik is associated with the Third Cinema movement for his criticism of neocolonialism, but he approaches his subject with a humorous, affectionate touch. The American businessman who takes Kidlat away from his village is stereotyped as both a bubble-gum vendor and a blue jeans manufacturer. Kidlat’s enthusiasm for flight leads him to give free rides to the richest woman in the village in exchange for her descriptions of what it was like to fly on an airplane. Wisdom comes from a craftsman with a large butterfly tattooed across his chest and the bemused voice of the Virgin Mary, to whom Kidlat prays. In a paean to the death of personal craftsmanship, he films the last handmade copper “onion” dome being placed on a church in von Braun’s homeland of Germany, incidentally sneaking in a storyline of a pregnant German woman played by his wife, Katarina. Special kudos are due to sound editor Billie Zöckler, who manipulates ambient sounds, voiceovers, vintage VOA broadcasts, and Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk speech to great effect. PERFUMED NIGHTMARE is an exuberant ethnographic film (unsurprisingly issued by Les Blank Films) with the underlying theme of the human need for freedom and preservation in an increasingly homogenized, throwaway world. This one is not to be missed. Screening as part of the Open Veins: Postcolonial Cinema of the Luso-Hispanic World series. (1977, 93 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Andrew Davis’ STONY ISLAND (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8pm

THE FUGITIVE (1993) is often considered to be the most authentically “Chicago” of all Hollywood movies. If this is so, then it’s due to the fact that its director, Andrew Davis, emulated his own first feature, STONY ISLAND. The shots Davis and now-renowned cinematographer Tak Fujimoto came up with for the earlier film made on the Chicago streets where Davis was raised epitomize a rough, girder-clad city where segregation was undercut by the fluidity offered by the L system. Davis, who wrote the screenplay with Chicago-bred Tamara Hoffs, tells the story of his own brother, Richard, then a 19-year-old guitarist and now the founder and a member of the Chicago Catz cover band. Richard plays Richie Bloom, who, like himself, is the last white guy living in the Stony Island neighborhood on the city’s South Side. The film opens on a cold winter day in downstate Illinois, where Richie is roused from the arms of his girlfriend, Lucie (Susanna Hoffs), by his best friend, Kevin (Edward Stoney Robinson). They head for Chicago, where Richie intends to get serious about making music. With the help of veteran saxophonist Percy Price (Gene Barge), the Stony Island Band comes together and eventually books a career-making gig at the Burning Spear, then a real nightclub at State and West Garfield Blvd. The independent, low-budget feature was released to great critical acclaim, but mishandling by its distributor, which slated it for the blaxploitation audience and renamed it MY MAN FROM STONY ISLAND, sank it. However, the powerhouse talent involved in its creation, many at the beginning of illustrious careers, ensured that STONY ISLAND would find itself among the pantheon of the best musical films and especially those made in and about Chicago. Barge, who played with the likes of Ray Charles and Natalie Cole, acted what he does in real life—bring disparate musicians together and form them into a cohesive band, doing it here right before our eyes with the music recorded as it was made in front of the cameras. Larry Ball, Tennyson Stephens, and Donnell Hagen were all working musicians. Back-up singer Windy Barnes was joined by Rae Dawn Chong, the latter making her movie debut and contributing an original song to the soundtrack. Amusingly, George Englund Jr., who plays a dirt-poor sax player/window washer from Appalachia, grew up rich in Bel Air as the son of Cloris Leachman. Perhaps most wonderful was Ronnie Barron, a collaborator with and model for Dr. John, who plays Percy’s white relative from New Orleans and who steals the show with his soulful singing and keyboard work. Nathan Davis, a veteran actor well known to Chicago theatergoers, plays a funeral director who has a father’s indulgence for a messy comic scene his son, the director, staged. And making his screen debut is Chicago actor to the world Dennis Franz as a pet store owner and backroom dealmaker. STONY ISLAND has many disparate delights for fans of soul, jazz, fusion, Tower of Power, and a Chicago that no longer exists. For this Chicago native and jazz lover, seeing the exterior of the Jazz Showcase at the Happy Medium advertising a show that I actually saw was a real kick. Davis in attendance. (1978, 95 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Wang Bing’s YOUTH (SPRING) (China/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Chinese documentarian Wang Bing shot over 2,500 hours of footage for his latest film, YOUTH (SPRING), compared to only—only—300 hours for his 2002 masterpiece (and directorial debut) WEST OF THE TRACKS, which clocks in at over nine hours. YOUTH, however, is purportedly the first in a trilogy following the same cast of characters that may be just as long but won’t exceed more than ten hours in length, per Wang. Considering such a scope, one is then prompted to consider not just what is happening in any given scene, but why it was chosen from such a breadth of footage. Frederick Wiseman’s films inspire similar consideration, yet in dealing primarily with institutions, a logical pattern usually emerges. Wang’s films, however, when concerned with such sprawling subjects, are generally more fitful, even feeling loose and unfocused. Yet it’s with studied intent that Wang employs his deceptively haphazard approach, one that particularly befits the subject of his latest film. Shot between 2014 and 2019, YOUTH centers on young migrant workers from rural provinces around China who go to work in Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in the Zhejiang province (where Wang also shot his 2016 film BITTER MONEY; the initial footage he shot there became that film, which has a similar premise but focuses less explicitly on young people), producing children’s clothes at run-down, privately owned sweatshops. There are over 18,000 such shops in this area, and they employ around 300,000 migrant workers; Wang communicates all this in a single interstitial at the end of the film. During the three-and-a-half hours before that, however, the only information we’re given outright is the name of the specific worker being featured, their age (most are in their teens and early-to-mid twenties, some in their thirties), and the province they came from, as well as the name and address of whatever workshop they’re in. (Ironically, several are located on Happiness Road.) Otherwise we’re thrust into their day-to-day lives, slowly becoming familiar with the long hours they spend in the workshops, hunched over sewing machines; we also get to know their “personal lives,” if one can call such living that, in the attached dormitories, no more than cinder block structures crammed with small beds and littered with trash. Aside from discussions with bosses over pay, no one involved comments on the injustice of these conditions. Instead we mostly see the young people acting as young people do, lazing around, scrolling on their phones, socializing, and, of course, flirting. Some are married, others dating. Toward the beginning we see a 20-year-old woman who’s pregnant; she, her co-worker and boyfriend, her family, and even the workshop bosses discuss a potential abortion. Wang dangles the suggestion of a potential narrative throughline and just as provocatively drops it unceremoniously. “When you concentrate the action and importance on one character, you feel you’re getting a 360-degree view of their life, but it’s an illusion; there are all kinds of things you don’t see,” Wang said in an interview with Dennis Lim for Film Comment. “I use a piecemeal approach because I think that’s how things are: dispersed and fragmented.” From the disjunction emerges, paradoxically, a clearer picture of a distinct socioeconomic landscape. As for an emotional terrain, few things are more opaque than the embryonic philosophies of young people; at times this feels akin to a Maurice Pialat film, the indecorum of youth resulting in “immediate emotion and irrepressible impulse, of the vital force of the moment,” as Richard Brody wrote in a 2015 essay on the French filmmaker. Wang balances this with a pragmatism that, again like Pialat’s films, negates any movement toward sentimentality. “There’s also something specific to China: in the mid-20th century, during the revolutionary fervor, especially in art, there was an enormous overuse of the word and the idea of youth, to represent a revolutionary spirit,” Wang said in the aforementioned Film Comment interview. “I wanted to reclaim it from that use and that meaning. The fact is that this sector relies very heavily on this production force—the physical labor of young people.” It would seem that Wang’s editing process (which he undertakes with others; he’s not credited as an editor in the film) is more instinctive and perhaps even reactive than it is strategic, out of which a most honest representation of these young peoples’ lives—personally, professionally, and politically—emerges. (2023, 215 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Paul B. Preciado's ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY (France/Documentary)

Gene Siskel Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Despite what one might glean from the title, ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY provides fairly scant details about Paul B. Preciado’s own life, though—in theory— that’s entirely by design. The film opens with Preciado even exclaiming to us that no biography is necessary, as “fucking Virginia Woolf wrote my biography in 1928.” Perhaps a more appropriate title might be “Orlando, Our Political Biography,” Preciado’s simultaneously academic and artistic cinematic outing exploring the ways in which Virginia Woolf’s totemic 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography has acted as a makeshift blueprint for the experiences of many trans and genderqueer people the world over. Woolf’s fantastical and timeless work provides a daring and aesthetically delightful springboard for Preciado’s genre-bursting mix of fiction and non-fiction, adaptation and dissertation, poetry and, indeed, autobiography. In relaying the bare bones of Woolf’s story of a young male aristocrat in the 1500’s gifted with seemingly eternal youth who, halfway through his life, seamlessly becomes a woman, Preciado tackles the ways in which Woolf’s text is both right on target and miles from the mark of the experience of gender transition. An amiable cast of trans and non-binary performers don the title of Orlando as they inhabit a character built from the bones of Woolf’s text as well as their own lives, entangling their experience with that of the remarkable literary figure. Alongside the formal elasticity (this is a film about shattering binaries, remember), Preciado builds a film steeped in both reality and artifice, with scenes taking place in found spaces (doctors’ offices, city sidewalks, idyllic countrysides) and stylized constructed environments (snowy forests, ship decks, waiting rooms-turned-discotheques), all hammered home with gleeful anachronism, throwing references to 16th century court life and digital harassment into the same scene, and often the same breath. As far as artistic didacticism goes, you can’t beat a cinematic delivery like this one; eclectic production design mixed with heart-wrenching appeals for understanding and humanity, mixed with a healthy dose of dramaturgical and political reckoning with the legacy of trans history and the future of trans youth around the planet. “We all have a bit of Orlando in us,” Preciado tells us in voiceover, a political plea steeped in artistic exploration, that perhaps you recognize one of the many Orlando’s up onscreen. After all, like Woolf’s eponymous character, they’ve been here for a long time, and they’re not going anywhere any time soon. (2023, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Nabwana I.G.G.'s BAD BLACK (Uganda)

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

Imagine you have $200 in your hand. Imagine what sorts of art supplies you could buy with that, what the ceiling on your production could be with that much capital. For Nabwana I.G.G., the prolific auteur from Wakaliga, Uganda, there is no ceiling. Each of those dollars can be squeezed for maximum pain and power, creating home-grown action epics that have the aesthetics of home movies but 100x more passion and creativity. In each of Nabwana’s “Wakaliwood” films, family and friends come together to use their ingenuity and amateur (but completely convincing) martial arts skills to create elaborate crime stories, complete with narration from a VJ (video joker) who splits the difference between a MST3K host and grime MC. BAD BLACK is one of the most well-known of these films, whose plot threads are more complicated than is worth laying out here, but in summary: a homeless youth (the titular Bad Black) kills her abusive gang leader and grows up to lead a gang of her own, eventually stealing from a visiting American doctor, who then has to be trained in the art of combat by a different tough youth to steal his treasured dog-tag back. Much more happens beyond that, but as with any Wakaliwood film, the action and comedy speak louder than any plot detail (The VJ even admits at one point being confused by the plot, “and [he’s] Ugandan”). Nabwana and his actors are well-versed in Eastern and Western action trends alike, mostly boiling the film’s fight scenes down to the money shots of sweet kicks and machine-gun sprays, which lends a fun self-conscious intertextuality to BAD BLACK, the VJ likening characters to Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, and even deeper cuts like stuntwoman Zoë Bell. Beyond the hyperkinetic bodies, VJ Emmie is the real star of the show, each of his ad-libs accentuating the watermelon-punch sound effects to make the scenes crackle with pure excitement. Listening to him is like hearing the Lil B’s and Soulja Boys of yore lace a 192kbps Datpiff mixtape with unchecked id; no budget, no problem. It certainly makes it easier to process the film’s heavy content (tons of bloody shooting, child peril, some birth trauma, possible incest) when a rollicking comedian shouts something like “this doctor needs borders” every 20 seconds. This is the key to what makes Wakaliwood films work: they’re great less for their gnarliness than for their reveling in the artifice of action itself. They’re communal labors of love, where all audiences can share the palpable onscreen excitement, knowing that we, too, might one day be supa action stars. (2016, 68 min, DCP Digital) [Maxwell Courtright]

Liliana Cavani’s THE NIGHT PORTER (Italy/France)

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

It is axiomatic, especially in film, that Nazis are deviants in body and soul. While this assertion certainly has some basis in truth, it simplifies the complexity of the human psyche and physical urges to which we are all subject. THE NIGHT PORTER, realized by still-working Italian screenwriter and director Liliana Cavani, traffics in all the tropes of Nazi deviance and cowardice but delves deeper into the roots of the sadomasochistic relationship at its center. Max (Dirk Bogarde), a night porter at Vienna’s Hotel Oper, is a harsh boss to his underlings and reluctant fixer for resident guest Countess Stein (Isa Miranda). One day, an American conductor, in Vienna to lead The Magic Flute, walks in with his elegant wife, Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), in tow. When Max and Lucia lock eyes, a horrible spark that was lit during World War II is reignited. Lucia, a young concentration camp prisoner, became the plaything of Max, an SS officer. He trained her in sexual exhibitionism, which she shows off in a memorable scene in a Weimar-style cabaret in the officers’ section of the camp (ironic, as the Nazis were supposedly trying to stamp out the degeneracy of the Weimar Republic), and beat and raped her regularly. Lucia gives up her glamorous, respectable life to return rapturously to her tormentor, who says he loves “his little girl.” Today, we might liken Lucia’s actions to the fear and low self-esteem of an abused spouse, but in the ’60s and ’70s, the rapture of sadomasochism was very definitely in vogue, from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975) and Nagisa Ôshima’s IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976) to the film THE NIGHT PORTER most reminds me of, Luchino Visconti’s THE DAMNED (1969). Max trained Lucia to be his perfect girl as only a Nazi can, and given that he probably took her virginity, she imprinted on him as the loving “protector” she needed in a place where there was no solace or safety. A side plot of a group of Nazis trying to bury their past and a superfluous (but lovely) solo rehearsal and performance in a nude-colored thong by ballet dancer Amedeo Amodio as co-conspirator Bert serve as little but icing on the film’s perversion. In addition, the horrors of the camps are reduced to a scene of nude people being registered in and acting as a stylized audience to some of the activities of their Nazi captors. Although THE NIGHT PORTER is pretty tame by today’s standards, the blockade to near-starvation of Lucia and Max by the cabal who want to “file” her as a dangerous witness to their deeds is pretty harrowing. Screening as part of the Amour Fou series. (1974, 118 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Joseph Losey's THE SERVANT (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 3:15pm and Tuesday, 6:15pm

THE SERVANT was the first theatrical film that Harold Pinter wrote, and if you didn’t know it was adapted from a novella by Robin Maugham, you might think it was his first original screenplay too. Not only is the terse, ambiguous dialogue unmistakably Pinteresque; the story, about a well-to-do layabout who’s gradually undermined by his mysterious manservant, feels like something straight out of the Nobel Laureate’s imagination. Much like Pinter’s stage plays The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party, and The Homecoming, the film circles around themes of role-playing, class dynamics, and interpersonal subterfuge, evading any definitive reading while somehow remaining emotionally direct at all times. Joseph Losey first brought Maugham’s book to Pinter’s attention, though it was Michael Anderson (originally slated to direct the movie) who commissioned Pinter to write the adaptation. Without maligning the film that Anderson might have made, the one Losey delivered is so elegant that it’s hard to imagine anyone topping it. Losey’s detached viewpoint heightens the ambiguities of Pinter’s script, while his sinuous camera movements provide a brilliant visual analogue to the crystalline dialogue. For these reasons, the film is as much Losey’s as it is Pinter’s; indeed, the director requested that Pinter make significant rewrites before shooting, confirming the collaborative nature of the project from start to finish. (However contentious the rewriting process may have been, the men stayed friends until Losey’s death, going on to collaborate on two more features, ACCIDENT and THE GO-BETWEEN.) And then there’s the cast. Dirk Bogarde gives one of his greatest performances as the title character—his brittle charm makes him an ideal conduit for Pinter’s themes—and James Fox, in his first screen role, is a superb foil as the beguiled employer. Playing Bogarde’s “sister,” Sarah Miles is appropriately enticing and suspicious; her character is responsible for some of the story’s biggest turns, but she fills out the role so well that she carries the developments and then some. Creepy, tantalizing, and darkly funny, THE SERVANT stands as one of the key British films of the 1960s—one of the few movies from the country to hold its own with the work Michelangelo Antonioni was making in Italy around the same time. (1963, 116 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's MILLENNIUM MAMBO (Taiwan)

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

After its premiere at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao-Hsien cut MILLENNIUM MAMBO by about 15 minutes, excising much of the subplot in which the young heroine, Vicky (Shu Qi), travels to northern Japan on a whim. This passage makes a great impression in the subsequent version, even though—or perhaps because—it seems so fleeting. The heroine registers the change in landscape enough to comment on it in her narration, but she doesn’t internalize it; maybe it’s a result of having felt so transient for so long. In any case, the Japanese visit doesn’t interrupt the film’s hypnotic flow, which is tied to both Vicky’s experience (as a passive, drug-addled raver in turn-of-the-millennium Taipei) and the techno music that drives the soundtrack. Hou’s perspective feels detached in MILLENNIUM MAMBO, despite the fact that he shoots much of the action in medium shot and frequently moves the camera to observe people in motion. That he and screenwriter Chu T’ien-wen have Vicky narrate the story from ten years in the future heightens one’s sense of distance. Adding a layer of mystery to the story, Vicky doesn’t divulge what she’s doing in 2011; one simply gathers that she’s a different person at this point and that she views her young adulthood with feelings of loss. Her experience as a young adult is certainly lamentable: a high school dropout, she moves to Taipei with her boyfriend Hao-Hao to immerse herself in the city’s rave scene. Hao-Hao is often high and abusive, driving Vicky to flee their tiny apartment and take solace with an older gangster named Jack (who may care for her, but doesn’t try to convince her to leave her boyfriend for good). She returns to Hao-Hao a few times, however, drawn to him by some mutual self-annihilating impulse. That impulse provides the film with its dark heart—it’s a movie about the desire to lose yourself and the emotional baggage you still can’t get rid of in the process. (2001, 101 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

John Hughes’ PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

Even in John Hughes’ first directorial deviation from the world of teenage angst he had explored so effortlessly in works like SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984), THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985), and FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF (1986), he still found himself rooted in worlds of childish chaos, albeit of the grown adult variety. There’s nothing too complex about the formula that keeps the wheels on PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES spinning throughout its hour-and-a-half runtime, but Hughes’ traditional penchant for balancing whip-sharp dialogue with meaningful emotional stakes pays off in dividends here, especially when combined with a contagious dose of Looney Tunes-inspired antics. The set-up is simple enough: it’s two days until Thanksgiving, and a combination of inclement weather, less-than-savory personalities, and good old dumb luck leaves tight-ass Neal Page (Steve Martin) and blabbermouth Del Griffith (John Candy) inextricably tied together as they try to head home to Chicago in time for the holiday. Pitting two forces of opposite yet undeniably panicked energy at each other—Martin’s droll, angry straight man versus Candy’s chummy good-natured buffoonery—is comedic dynamite that never fails to deliver, as this devilish twosome barrel along across motel rooms, diners, train cars, and cold highways, their fading sense of sanity ever loosening with their grasp. Each set piece tops the last, building up to a delirious climax with Del driving a rental car towards impending death where, ever so briefly, he literally becomes the Devil in the eyes of his beleaguered travel companion. Though the canon of Thanksgiving Cinema isn’t nearly as heralded as those found within the Halloween and Christmas seasons, Hughes' tale of opposite personalities learning to find kinship with each other holds a deserved spot in any comedy lover’s November watch list. Co-presented by the Second City Film School. (1987, 93 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Sofia Coppola’s PRISCILLA (US)

Multiple Venues – See Venue websites for showtimes

In 1959, rock ‘n’ roll icon Elvis Presley was perhaps the most famous person in the world. It was in that year, during his military service in West Germany, that the 24-year-old superstar met 14-year-old Army brat Priscilla Beaulieu and began courting her. After several visits to Graceland after his discharge, Priscilla would move to Graceland permanently in 1963 and marry Elvis in 1967. The marriage produced a daughter, Lisa Marie, and was dissolved in 1973. It is this period in Priscilla Presley’s life, adapted for the screen from her 1985 autobiography Elvis and Me, that forms Sofia Coppola’s latest entry on the dynamics of fame that confuse the lives of those who are caught up in it, particularly the lives of women who suffer under male domination. Coppola emphasizes Priscilla’s innocence at the beginning, putting her in a ribbon choker from which a silver heart dangles, a subliminal cry for love. The approach of one of Elvis’ Army buddies, who invites her to a party Elvis is throwing, looks like a grown man offering a child some candy. Indeed he is, but her homesickness, excitement about meeting Presley, and the promise of responsible chaperoning eventually overcome her parents’ objections. Coppola handles the romance tentatively, suggesting its creepiness while giving plausibility to the underpinnings of the relationship: the pair’s feelings of disruption and their mutual need for love. The rest of the film proceeds in an episodic way, which works not only to telescope the yearslong action, sometimes to a confusing extent, but also to emphasize the lack of coherent forward movement in Priscilla’s undramatic life. She’s not allowed to get a job to fill her empty hours waiting for Elvis to return to Graceland from wherever he’s working. She’s not allowed to have sex with him until he decides the moment is right, even though the fan magazines are filled with his romantic escapades. She can’t even play outside with the puppy he got her because it would attract attention from the fans who flock at the compound gates. Cailee Spaeny is as good as the buzz surrounding her award-winning performance has made her out to be. She very believably moves from ninth-grader to adult woman, getting increasingly frustrated and frightened by Elvis’ erratic behavior once his drug use is firmly entrenched. Jacob Elordi adopts Elvis’ vocal mannerisms and posture to such a degree that I came to accept him as the man he plays. Coppola focuses on the pair intensely in most scenes, somewhat undercutting the feeling that Priscilla was often alone. She also is far too discreet about Priscilla’s intimate life, from failing to shoot Elvis and Priscilla having sex for the first time to barely suggesting her affair with her martial arts instructor (perhaps concessions to Priscilla Presley, her executive producer). The period detail in PRISCILLA is precise, as is the recreation of attitudes under which women suffered, and her mix of camera stocks to suggest home movies and news footage adds a nice touch. Coppola’s signature use of needle drops throughout the film are fun, if a bit obvious, such as Dolly Parton singing “I Will Always Love You” as Priscilla drives away to a different life. PRISCILLA does not rank with the best of Sofia Coppola’s work, but her meticulous mise-en-scène and excellent direction of actors are sharper than ever. (2023, 113 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

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]

🎞️ 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.

⚫  FACETS Cinema
The 40th Annual Chicago International Children's Film Festival continues through Sunday, with screenings at FACETS Cinema and AMC NEWCITY 14. More info on all screenings and related events here.

⚫  Film Studies Center (at the Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago)
Mrinal Sen’s 1984 feature KANDHAR (106 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 7pm, as part of the three-day conference The Guerrilla Fighter: Mrinal Sen and the Legacies of Radical Cinema. The conference continues all day Saturday at Cobb Hall, Room 307. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 cult classic THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) screens Friday, 9pm and 11:45pm, with Wiseau in person for a pre-screening Q&A.

Josh Tickell and Rebecca Tickell’s 2023 documentary COMMON GROUND (105 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 8pm. Followed by a post-screening panel with the filmmakers, James Beard Award winning chef Rick Bayless, urban farming pioneer and author of The Good Food Revolution Will Allen, and Jim Slama, Naturally Chicago Managing Director and creator of the Locally Made program to encourage retailers to sell and promote local food. Pre-screening VIP reception tickets are also available.

Toby Amies’ 2023 documentary IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING: KING CRIMSON AT 50 (86 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 4:45pm.

Jenn Wexler’s 2023 horror film THE SACRIFICE GAME (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm. Co-presented by Music Box of Horrors and Shudder. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Northwestern University
Traces of Resistance: Short Film and Video Art Screening takes place Friday, 6pm, at Annie May Swift Hall (1920 Campus Dr.). Inspired by graffiti, the screening centers short, experimental and documentary films that question the world around us. Featured artists include Peter Kuttner, Mark Street, American Artist, Kym McDaniel, and more. More info here. 

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.

⚫ School of the Art Institute
Another job opportunity—actually two! The Department of  Film, Video, New Media and Animation (FVNMA) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is conducting a double search—two tenure-track positions hiring concurrently this year. They are jointly listed for artists with an expertise in "experimental film and video." The priority application deadline is January 8, 2024. More information about the role and how to 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 more information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its larger screening and workshop schedule, here.

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
As VDB welcomes the Eiko & Koma and Eiko Otake collections, they are presenting a three-month series of programs that highlight representative works from them. Eiko & Koma (1976-2012, Total approx. 45 min) screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: November 17 - November 23, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Maxwell Courtright, Marilyn Ferdinand, Ben Kaye, Nicky Ni