:: FRIDAY, MARCH 22 - THURSDAY, MARCH 28 ::

📽️ Crucial Viewing

Frank Borzage's HUMORESQUE (US/Silent)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am

Golden-age Hollywood’s greatest romantic filmmaker, Frank Borzage directed more than a hundred movies in less than half a century. A prolific maker of melodramas and a master at depicting the beauty of the human spirit (he also won the first Best Director Oscar for 7TH HEAVEN [1929]), Borzage is nearly forgotten by contemporary audiences. HUMORESQUE is essential in the career of this pioneer, marking his first successful feature for Cosmopolitan Productions, the film studio owned by William Randolph Hearst. Adapted by Frances Marion from a Fannie Hurst short story, the film opens in a New York Jewish ghetto. Only a boy, Leon Kantor desires to play the violin and plays in the street with his neighborhood crush, Gina.  Believing her son to be gifted, his mother hands Leon his older sibling’s old violin as a hand-me-down. When the child's genius is confirmed, the film cuts to a grown Leon; his skill and determination have allowed him to move his family out of the ghetto and gain wealth and notoriety for his playing. To make matters brighter, he marries his childhood sweetheart. All celebration comes to a halt when Leon receives a draft card. The US has entered WWI, and Leon goes off to fight. Returning from the war, our hero sustains an arm injury. It remains unclear whether Leon will play the violin again, bringing anguish to his soul and potential financial ruin to his family. In the climax, Leon tells Gina to leave him, telling her she cannot love a "useless cripple" without a career. After she faints from the blow, Leon carries her to a house servant. When holding his wife, he realizes he can use his arm. He plays his violin, a sound heard by his loved ones. As they rush into the room to embrace the rehabilitated master, the film ends. HUMORESQUE is the quintessential ghetto film of the Lower East Side as a state of mind. As Patricia Erens writes in The Jew in American Cinema, “The film possesses the basic elements of a Yiddish narrative: 'pathos,' 'humor,' and 'humanity.' In addition to revitalizing Ghetto Films, HUMORESQUE adds two new themes—​‘making it’ in America and the power of mother love.” While it’s true that Borzage grew up in an impoverished immigrant family with thirteen siblings, neither he nor Marion Frances were Jewish. Instead, both gave a voice to the Jewish-American experience in the early twentieth century as dictated by a writer of the faith, Fannie Hurst. They bring to the screen Hurst’s broad street views and intimate glimpses as well as a people’s customs, habits, ways of living, and variety of character. Within a short time, the audience feels pulled into these characters' day-to-day lives. While some aspects of Judaism may have become lost due to production code, intertitles in Yiddish continue to see the light of day. "Humoresque" is the piece that Leon plays on several occasions, and his mother compares it to life itself: “Crying to hide its laughing and laughing to hide its crying.” As Leon's first great success, the title even suggests a small chamber drama, an astute young director only warming up, ready to fill theaters with tears through his vision. Still, love as the purpose of life runs through all Borzage films. An early project in a lustrous career, HUMORESQUE paints an image of familial love and hope. From the prayers of an abject mother to a wife’s concern for her husband’s mental health, a sense of hope in dire moments drives the film home. Through love and hope, Leon lifts himself out of despair to play his song once again. Preceded by Fred Guiol’s 1928 short film THE BOY FRIEND (20 min, 35mm). With live musical accompaniment by Dave Drazin. (1920, 75 min, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]

Lizzie Borden's REGROUPING (US/Experimental) and BORN IN FLAMES (US)

Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm (REGROUPING) and 8:30pm (FLAMES) [Borden in person at both screenings]

Long unavailable, Lizzie Borden’s REGROUPING looks today like an essential document of second wave feminism, if not ‘70s leftist politics in general. The film considers what life—and, by extension, art—might be like in the absence of patriarchal authority. The subject is a women’s collective in New York that meets to discuss such concepts as self-definition and female empowerment; the participants (who include artists Barbara Kruger and Joan Jonas and future filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, credited here as Kathy) also serve as an emotional and professional support network for each other. Borden structures the film after the spirit of the collective: the movie seems to be constantly finding itself, proceeding associatively through short fragments; on the asynchronous soundtrack, arguments naturally give way to counter-arguments and ideas come together in synthesis. REGROUPING conveys the excitement of collective activity, of people who may not have lots in common coming together over common goals. While each member makes an impression, Borden’s mosaic-like montage forces you to consider the group as one entity. It doesn’t necessarily matter which woman has which particular insight into female experience or systems of power—it’s clear that everyone benefits from these revelations. Like many a leftist collective, the group strives to be leaderless, and Borden responds to this aspect of her subject too, ceding control of the movie (or at least trying to) by incorporating the members’ responses to the filmmaking project into the finished film. Despite these efforts at a more democratic cinema, REGROUPING charts a path to defeat: by the end of the movie, the participants have given up on the collective and on Borden. They remain illuminating in their comments, however, proving that the discussions they’ve had and the relationships they’ve formed have bettered their lives on the whole. (1976, 75 min, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]
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With a concept, style, and politics that are still radical and relevant, Lizzie Borden's 1983 film gets a revival screening that is always timely. Railing against the patriarchal and racist structures that remained in even the most progressive corners of American Society after the '60s and '70s, Borden thrusts us into a feature-length narrative of critique. Borden is able to place her ideology front and center, but also let the story sneak up around it. Embracing the gritty look of both 16mm film and the more battered parts of New York City in the early '80s, and combining them with an objective camera, she uses her low budget as a storytelling asset. The world in which the anarchist movement dubbed the Women's Army carries out its counterrevolutionary campaign of pirate radio and direct action is rendered complete through a skillful combination of narrative and documentary modes. Artificial news clips about the progress of the current Socialist government and covert operations of the Women's Army's are mixed with observational shots of unemployed men and women on the streets, and we are constantly reminded of the underlying allegory. Other fictional scenes feel like we're watching the unedited negotiations between rival factions in a civil war as shot by an embedded cameraperson. When the pirate radio DJ—who acts as the film's voiceover—declares that the true nature of socialism is constant revolution, it seems a natural reinforcement of the film's message, rather than a didactic add-on. (1983, 80 min, 35mm) [Jason Halprin]

Luther Price's NEW UTOPIA and LIGHT FRACTURE (US/Experimental)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Thursday, 7pm

Structural films rarely have the visceral effect that Luther Price’s do. His source footage leans towards the profane and violent, and whatever the material lacks in that regard he makes up for with aggressive edits and extra texture lent by blood and spit. Price took a unique route to filmmaking, studying sculpture in the early '80s but turning to film as his chosen medium after surviving a gunshot in Nicaragua in 1985. Working originally with Super 8 film, Price’s compositions grew in complexity over his career as he worked with 16mm and eventually 35mm for still-image slideshows. It’s the latter work that provides the occasion for this Block screening, with two collections of the 35mm slides (NEW UTOPIA and LIGHT FRACTURE, both 2017) releasing in book form this winter from Visual Studies Workshop. This format feels like a logical endpoint for Price, for whom sculpture always informed film work, as seen in the two 8mm films chosen to accompany the slide pieces: JELLYFISH SANDWICH (1994, 17 min,) and CLOWN (1990-2002, 13 min). JELLYFISH SANDWICH in particular takes on a three-dimensional quality with its loops, taking footage of American football and wartime explosions and jumbling them up, running clips backwards, forwards, and upside-down as if we’re seeing something from all angles. It’s dazzling but static, always returning to the metaphorical line of scrimmage before the next cycle of bombast. This dense, jittery style is typical for Price’s motion-films, but the comparatively minimal and performance-based CLOWN still has a sort of self-awareness as a physically constructed piece. As the subjects of the film stare out at the camera in clown costumes, little else happens, and their attempts to fill screen time with silly gestures feel increasingly desperate. It’s somewhere on the continuum between Warhol’s BLOW JOB and Korine’s TRASH HUMPERS, a reflective object that demands audiences consider the purpose of portraiture itself. This is what all Price’s films do in some way: demand. It’s why his late work gave up motion entirely, so that audiences may slow down and feel the weight of his labor on screen. For a man who put so much of himself into his films (literally), it’s the least we can do. With an introduction by Visual Studies Workshop curator Tara Merenda Nelson. [Maxwell Courtright]

James Benning’s LANDSCAPE SUICIDE (US/Experimental)

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

Violence is a through line in James Benning’s films; more than that, one might say it’s within the very landscapes he’s noted for representing. The definition of landscape that most intrigued me in relation to Benning’s practice is as follows: “[A] portion of territory that can be viewed at one time from one place.” Benning’s focus on singular acts and perpetrators of violence renders them landscapes in and of themselves, his perspective serving as the place from which these instances or persons are viewed. The first half of LANDSCAPE SUICIDE centers on Bernadette Protti, a teenage girl who in 1984 stabbed her classmate Kirsten Costas to death; they lived in Orinda, a suburb of San Francisco, where Costas’ family was affluent and Protti’s less so. The majority of this section consists of a reenactment of Protti’s questioning by police, although the interviewer is never seen (Benning recorded him from another room, creating aural incongruity). The actress playing Protti recites the girl’s real-life words with no emotional inflection, thus creating a distancing effect. The details of Protti’s crime are laid bare, with certain elements coming to the fore. The economic disparity between the two girls emerges as a suggested impetus for Protti’s actions, even if she herself doesn’t explicitly recognize this as the reason, instead focusing on Costas’ perception of her as being ‘weird.’ The second half of the film centers on Ed Gein, a decidedly different kind of killer, whose violence was more egregious. The reenactment of his questioning is also affectedly monotone, thereby intensifying the abhorrence of what he did, behavior now enshrined in popular culture as the apotheosis of derangement. Each reenactment is flanked by sequences that further accentuate the symmetry between the two parts, befitting the structuralist mode with which Benning is often associated; they aren’t in the exact order, however, adding a sense of disconcertment appropriate for the subject matter. The film opens with a woman hitting tennis balls two at a time, forty times in total—is this to say, with the information soon to be presented, that the ball will be in our court, for us to render judgment? Both parts are also preceded by the date of the crime in question, shots of places from where the killers lived—Gein was active around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin—and a word. For Protti, it was pain, for Gein, place. Benning has remarked on the impact that location may have played on each murderer, the affluence of where Protti lived in comparison to her more impoverished status causing the pain, and the remoteness of Plainfield being the landscape against which his rather creative form of brutality was set. There’s no separating the crimes from where they took place, and there’s no separating those places from issues respective to the US, evoking the probe of Americana that's similarly a through line in Benning's oeuvre: social inequity and rural ennui. Benning’s film isn’t true crime, per se, as it’s less about the how and why and more about the where, the atrocities and the locales inextricable. In isolating the two crimes and presenting them in relation to one another, Benning produces a broad examination of the intricate interplay between individual psyche and geographical context. Screening as part of the series, An Artist of Intimate Intent: James Benning. (1986, 95 min, 16mm) [Kat Sachs]

G.W. Pabst's PANDORA'S BOX (Germany/Silent)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Whether Louise Brooks is a great actress or not has never been a settled question. Her generally acclaimed turns for Pabst in PANDORA'S BOX and DIARY OF A LOST GIRL are anomalous blips in a career bookended by fluff. And even those performances have their detractors. Witness Mordaunt Hall's 1929 review of PANDORA in the New York Times: "Miss Brooks is attractive and she moves her head and eyes at the proper moment, but whether she is endeavoring to express joy, woe, anger or satisfaction it is often difficult to decide." Brooks' face has since been immortalized by a single iconic still from PANDORA'S BOX, as she stares coldly into the distance while removing her veil, and damned if anyone knows quite what she's getting at. It's joy, woe, anger, and satisfaction, but whether she's being honest with us or not is questionable. Is it great acting? Probably. Brooks, if only because we've become used to flirtatious mannerisms and stray, lustful glances, seems ancient, but she doesn't look a day over eighteen (even if she feels it) and who else could drive these two hours of highfalutin' melodrama and remain sympathetic? There are few movies that rely so much on one actress as PANDORA'S BOX, and she, in turn, relied (unsuccessfully) on the film to boost her stock in Hollywood. The German Aesthetic exchanges superficialities with a pretty American face, and Pabst and Brooks are so hopelessly infatuated with one another that the film attains a certain honesty and beauty that's only found in great acting and great filmmaking, sleazy as it is. (1929, 141 min, New DCP Digital Restoration) [Julian Antos]

Cinema Morricone

Music Box Theatre – See below for showtimes

Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (US/Italy/France)
Friday, 7pm
Four years after Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up debuted on the London stage, J. M. Barrie appended an epilogue. Wendy Darling has grown up, married, and had a daughter of her own; Peter Pan returns to Wendy's childhood bedroom and fails to comprehend that any time has passed since his last visit. Wendy recounts their past exploits and shows Peter her life in the present, but he doesn't understand. The underlying concept is sharpened: he is not simply the boy who wouldn't grow up, but the boy who couldn't, blind to time's passage, immune to its symptoms. Hauntingly, he does not feel time, does not feel the world turning beneath his feet, a boy in perpetual motion who nevertheless remains static. The cycle will never end, Barrie writes, so long as children remain "gay and innocent and heartless." Sergio Leone's long-gestating epic ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA is apparently based on a forgotten gangster memoir (Harry Grey's The Hoods), but that Barrie line may as well be its epigram. Although it is filled with scenes of appalling physical and sexual violence, Leone's film often plays like a boy's adventure in Never Never Land, a swashbuckling knave's tale, complete with pirates and warring tribes and lives laid to rest in the briny deep. (At one point, a gangster urchin thumbs through a more literary boy's saga, Jack London's Martin Eden, while on the commode.) But beyond its rollicking tone and sense of adolescent daring-do, the connection to Barrie runs deeper. ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA is a fairy tale about David "Noodles" Aaronson (played by Robert De Niro as both a young and old man, and by Scott Tiler as a child), the hood who wouldn't grow up. The poetry of Leone's vision is rooted in Noodles' inability to feel time, his shambolic effort to make sense of the shards he finds in train station lockers, television broadcasts, and long-forgotten peepholes. He's perpetually floating in an opium haze, stuck in a cycle of guilt, betrayal, and redemption that may, in the end, be only a literal pipe dream. ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA is plausibly constructed as a flashback, a flashforward, a speculative dream, an astral projection, a crackpot copout, a suspended moment of indecision—all of the above, all at once. There are other innovations brought to bear upon the gangster genre here—a lewd, anti-romantic realism, a half-hearted Jewish angle, a quarter-hearted nod towards organized crime's connection to organized labor—but the overweening achievement of Leone's yarn is its radical freedom in sloshing and ambling through time. Famously, Leone's nearly four-hour original cut was manhandled by producer Arnon Milchan and the moneymen at the Ladd Company, trimmed by ninety minutes and re-assembled in thuddingly chronological order, robbing the film of its major aesthetic strategy. (The shortened American release version appears, fittingly, lost to time, though Roger Ebert, who saw both versions in 1984, described the telephone ringing endlessly in the opening reel of Leone's version and only once in Milchan's.) Those of us who love ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA remain bowled over by its transitions no matter how many times we see them, particularly the moment when 35 years are elided with a hidden cut, a Robert Indiana-inspired painting, and a Muzak version of Lennon and McCartney. To revisit Leone's masterwork is to be struck by how few such moments exist in the film—it jumps around, but often stays in a given period (1922, 1933, 1968) for 20 or 30 minutes at a stretch; the 1922 scenes are, in fact, a discrete section, told from beginning to end without interruption or diversion. Yet the pleasure of temporal collision and disorientation looms large over the film, elevating and obfuscating the story of a nasty, simple man who does little to earn our empathy. (It is fitting, too, that a 12-year-old Jennifer Connelly thoroughly upstages De Niro, James Woods, Joe Pesci, Elizabeth McGovern, and Treat Williams, stealing the film with two-and-a-half scenes and an unnerving recitation of The Song of Solomon.) Shortly after the belated Stateside release of Leone's original cut, Michael Sragow imbued Noodles's saga with meaning in a memorable review in the Boston Phoenix, suggesting that he "learns that everyone's life is, in part, a work of fiction, a reordering of the past to make the present livable." Perhaps, but to do that, Noodles would first need to distinguish between the two. (1984, 229 min, 35mm) [K.A. Westphal]
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John Carpenter’s THE THING (US)
Friday, Midnight and Wednesday, 9:15pm
John Carpenter has always been a minimalist when it comes to framing, using his preferred format of widescreen to create a pronounced sense of negative space and, with it, a pronounced sense of dread. Similarly, he tends to sculpt performances that are understated and direct, much as they are in the work of his favorite director, Howard Hawks. THE THING is a remake of Hawks’ foray into sci-fi horror, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), and one can sense Carpenter’s reverence for the original in his Hawksian depiction of the professional community that makes up the principal characters. Yet where Hawks’ film was a portrait of heroism, showing how a group of scientists bands together to fight off a hostile extraterrestrial life form, Carpenter’s is a pessimistic work that shows a community coming apart in the midst of an alien invasion. (It’s widely suspected that the film was a commercial flop on first release because it came out only a few months after E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL, which presented a much rosier view of human-alien relations; Carpenter’s pessimism just wasn’t welcome at the time.) That breakdown is presented in exquisite, gory detail: Rob Bottin’s special make-up effects are some of the most lauded of their kind in movie history, depicting people and animals as they mutate into hideous half-alien creatures. This was Carpenter’s first major studio film, and he took full advantage of the resources available to him. In addition to the first-rate effects, THE THING features a brilliant mix of studio sets and location shooting (with British Columbia standing in for Antarctica) and an appropriately chilling Ennio Morricone score. (1982, 109 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (Italy)
Saturday, 12pm
More than most directors, Sergio Leone knew two extremely important things about cinema: the grosser and more bodily the thing, the more that can be done with it on screen; and that nothing is more beautiful than the disconnect between the abject and the pure. Leone was one of the great masters at orchestrating a genuinely kinetic experience in his films, creating an indefinitely suspended sensation that every aspect of the depicted world was in the process of being discovered, and discovered to be both baser and more harmonious than we ever imagined before. Structured as a series of punchline-less jokes, FISTFUL creates intricate patterns of triangular conflict that are perpetually and violently shrinking, played out in the vastness of a single eye-twitch or lip-lick, each existing solely to be brutally unresolved by the entry of yet another figure into the frame, the rhythm, the aggression. While its reluctance to grant any sense of the heroic, or even the dastardly, to its characters and the languid luxury it takes in the rituals of death convinced many upon its release that it was at best a nihilistic formal exercise and at worst an amoral propaganda piece, FISTFUL is instead comedy of the highest order, a film that discovers and transmits a fundamental exuberance and exhilaration within every cut, track, costume, and sound, as though the fact that cinema exists and can do these things is reason enough for joy. (It is.) It's not for nothing that the central organizing image from FISTFUL is a deliriously filthy pair of Clint Eastwood eyeballs in perfect Techniscope composition, for those two eyes, shot between those two sprockets, are about to detonate. (1964, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]
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Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Italy)
Saturday, 5pm and Thursday, 3:30pm
Sergio Leone is to the "spaghetti western," a popular subgenre of American-set westerns made in Europe in the 60s and 70s, what Jean-Pierre Melville is to the French crime film: Leone, like Melville, made outrageously entertaining movies that reflected a punch-drunk love for American genre fare, the conventions of which he inflated to a near-operatic scale after refracting them through his own unique cultural sensibility. And THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY remains the high point of both Leone's career and the spaghetti western in general. It's the third and most ambitious installment of a trilogy (preceded by 1964's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and 1965's FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, both of which also feature Clint Eastwood in his career-defining "Man with No Name" persona) but this Hollywood co-production works perfectly as a stand-alone feature. The plot concerns the misadventures of the title trio (filled out by Lee Van Cleef as the heavy and Eli Wallach, the true heart of the film, as the Mexican bandit Tuco), all of whom are in search of $200,000 in buried gold coins. That these events unfold against the backdrop of a borderline-Surrealist, European's-eye-view of the American Civil War somehow feels ineffably right: Leone's exuberant visual style combines with Ennio Morricone's legendarily innovative score to lend THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY a singular tone that is at once comical, cartoonish, and, in Dave Kehr's astute phrase, "inexplicably moving." (1966, 161 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
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Pedro Almodóvar's TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! (Spain)
Saturday, 8:45pm
One of the sexiest films ever made about Stockholm Syndrome, Pedro Almodóvar described his eighth feature as, “Lots of skin, a large helping of irreverent humor, and very little money, of course.” The film genesis came during the shooting WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF BREAKDOWN (1988). Production spent an excessive amount of money building a set of a penthouse. “I told my producer-brother, Agustín: ‘I’d like to make a movie à la [Roger] Corman that could occur entirely on Pepa’s penthouse set. Maybe then we can justify the huge expense.’ ‘Let’s go for it!’ he said.” With the instinct to make two films for the price of one, the seed snowballed into a film that Miramax would go on to defend over an X rating in the United States. The film follows a young man, Ricky (Antonio Banderas), recently released from a mental institution. His mission is simple: find the former porn star, Marina (Victoria Abril), whom he slept with the one time he escaped the ward. Eventually, he finds the girl. Bounding and holding her against her will, they shack up in her apartment. The next step, wait until she sees him for who he truly is and fall in love with him. To the chagrin of the audience and the damsel in distress, she develops feelings. In an unexpected climax, the two drive off into the sunset singing songs. The color and vibrancy of the set and costume design adds an electricity to the picture. In her second collaboration with the director, Victoria Abril gives a charming performance as the salacious ingénue trying to escape the captor she falls in love with. In his sexual prime, Banderas gives notes of a sultry Norman Bates. Like a lot of Almodóvar’s work, TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! is controversial in its material but more so in its delivery of the material. Ricky and Marina’s relationship explores fantasy, and their performances almost feel intentionally distant, like the movie is one big exercise in foreplay. Regardless of whether or not Almodóvar directs his actors to treat their scenario like role play, the picture as a whole fits in the lineage of Spanish surrealism, a descendent of Luis Buñuel. (1989, 111 min, 35mm) [Ray Ebarb]
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Gillo Pontecorvo's THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (Italy/Algeria)
Sunday, 4:45pm
One of political cinema's enduring masterpieces, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS is also a world-historical document, an essential piece in the puzzle of a violent and hopeful time. No film before or since has conveyed the drama of insurrection with such intensity or precision. Depicting the bloody clash for Algerian independence waged against French colonial powers in the late 1950s, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS is defined by dualities, beginning with the central spatial dichotomy between the “European City” and the Casbah, which serve as the film’s primary locations. The use of these real locations, like the stark, hand-held cinematography, show director Gillo Pontecorvo absorbing the techniques of Neorealism, but his masterful control of suspense and emotion owes just as much to the clockwork thrillers of Hitchcock and Lang. Like the latter's M, the film is also a study in the diverging methodologies of the underground and the police, with a particular interest in organizations of power and technologies of surveillance, detection, and terror. BATTLE OF ALGIERS is legendarily detailed and unflinching representation of the violence committed by both French colonial and Algerian radical forces, which has made the film an invaluable primer on guerrilla warfare to Black Panthers and Pentagon pencil-pushers alike. Indeed, with alternating scenes of reciprocal bloodshed, Pontecorvo proves himself as expert an architect of ethical complexity as of narrative tension. But his even-handedness is hard to mistake for pure ambivalence—the film’s heart undoubtedly lies with the revolutionary spirit of the Algerian people. For one, the FLN freedom fighters are much more sharply individuated than the French occupiers, with the crucial exception of Colonel Mathieu, the focused and methodical leader of the French counterinsurgency. Himself a composite of several historical figures, Mathieu often serves as a mouthpiece to rationalize the brutality of their repression effort; Pontecorvo contrasts his chilling detachment with scenes stressing the emotional and physical impact of the anti-colonial struggle on the Algerians. In a sense, the question of the film’s political sympathies may ultimately be a question of the viewer’s inclination towards empathy. If you receive the film as the dispassionate exercise in pseudo-reportage it’s often characterized as, you may take more from its overtures to impartiality; if you experience THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS as the gripping, devastating, and ultimately rousing work of art I think it is, you’ll know which side it's on. (1966, 121 min, 35mm) [Michael Metzger]
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Dario Argento's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (Italy)
Sunday, 7:30pm
The origins of giallo date as far back as 1929, when the publishing company Il Giallo Mondadori began publishing pulpy crime novels. “Giallo” being the Italian word for “yellow”, the covers of these books were yellow, with illustrations of murder. Readers would try to figure out which character was the murderer before the novel’s main characters. Over the next few decades, these publications (written by authors such as Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace) became extremely popular in Italy and abroad. By the early 1960s, director Mario Bava made films such as THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1963) and BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964). With the latter particularly, he began using cinematic techniques like camera movement, vibrant colors, shadows, and costuming the killer in all black and leather gloves, which became the standard for the genre. Bava, along with Pier Palo Pasolini, pushed the boundaries of the Italian film censors (in effect from 1913 until 2021) so the barbarian gusto of THE BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and the giallo style could flourish. Debate over Argento beginning the genre with this first film or Bava with THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH has been a point of contention for horror fans and cinephiles for years. Argento builds on tracks Bava laid by bringing the visceral-brutality-as-theatrical-spectacle into the stratosphere, bringing the giallo genre into a realm of savage pageantry. The narrative is secondary to operatically violent murder sequences, making it something like a gory opera (not surprisingly, Argento would later make a film called OPERA, in 1987). Upon release, BIRD was a massive success. Argento was given the label "the Italian Hitchcock," partially a result of the film’s marketing: “Remember PSYCHO? There are scenes with that kind of impact! Worth seeing!” The film begins with Sam, an American, witnesses an attempted murder in Rome. The police suspect a notorious serial killer as the culprit. As he begins his own investigation, Sam puts his and his girlfriend’s life in danger to solve the mystery. The legendary Ennio Morricone wrote the score, which augments the visual experience of the great Vittorio Storaro's photography. These two masters create the perfect nightmare under the guidance of the then-30-year-old director. With this picture and his many to follow, Argento would change the world of cinema for the half century to come. In just five years after the release of BIRD, over 100 giallo films were made. Later on, his work would play a major role in the development of De Palma, Tarantino, Carpenter, and Del Toro, to name a few. (1970, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]
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Giuliano Montaldo’s MACHINE GUN McCAIN (Italy)
Monday, 7pm
One can’t see a cast including John Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands and not be curious. Fans of the trio will be interested to know that Italian filmmaker Giuliano Montaldo’s MACHINE GUN McCAIN was their first collaboration, before they’d go on to cement themselves in independent cinema history as paragons of the craft, owing to their combined efforts in Cassavetes’ directorial oeuvre. Neither Montaldo nor Cassavetes, however, were especially passionate about McCAIN, which was based on a 1961 novel Candyleg by Ovid Demaris; the former made his prior film GRAND SLAM (1967) and this only so as to establish himself in order to pursue more personal, socially oriented projects (he would next make SACCO & VANZETTI [1971], his critical breakout) and the latter just wanted the money to fund his own productions. Regardless, it was one of the 26 films in competition at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival; I'm uncertain if it was worthy of this distinction, but the cast alone makes it an enjoyable, if aimlessly nihilistic watch. Falk plays a gangster who, after being assigned to lead the Mafia's West Coast operations, seeks to secure a partial stake in a new Las Vegas casino. When he finds out that the casino is in fact owned by the Mafia and he won’t be getting a piece of the pie, he arranges for a convicted bank robber, Hank McCain (Cassavetes), to be pardoned and released from prison so he can lead a heist of the casino. What prompts Falk’s gangster to pursue wealth through such a circuitous route? No clue. There’s hardly any exposition in the film—we don’t know why McCain is estranged from his son, who’s conscripted to get his father involved; why McCain decides randomly to marry Irene (Britt Ekland), a woman he meets in a bar soon after his release; or even why the gangster’s doing this in the first place. The characters don’t seem to care, so why should we? It shouldn’t be a surprise that this poorly explained plan soon begins to unravel, leading to a reunion between McCain and his one-time moll, Rosemary (Rowlands); the two had once been known as the Machine Gun Lovers, that being their weapon of choice. I’m sure being married to Cassavetes was difficult, but the part where he reunites with Rosemary is exquisite, their chemistry and affection palpable. The exteriors were shot on location in the US, but the interiors were filmed in Rome. According to Cassavetes, Rowlands asked for a villa for their stay in lieu of a salary. He also said: “Peter and I killed ourselves trying to make the picture good for ourselves. Gena just walked in, did her job, did three wonderful scenes, and then the picture came out and the critics were ‘Oh God, if there’d only been more of Gena!’” Amen. Ennio Morricone’s score is frenetic and synthy, much like I imagine Cassavetes would sound if he were an instrument. (1969, 95 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
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Sergio Corbucci’s THE MERCENARY (Italy/Spain/US)
Monday, 9:15pm and Tuesday, 4:30pm
Franco Nero stars as the title character, a Polish fighter-for-hire who joins up with a group of Mexican revolutionaries in the early 1910s and teaches them a thing or two about waging war. Tony Musante plays the leader of the revolutionaries, and Jack Palance plays another roving killer who’s always making things difficult for the heroes. (Palance’s character is named Curly—was he the inspiration for the actor’s Oscar-winning turn in CITY SLICKERS [1991]?) THE MERCENARY offers good, amoral fun after the fashion of much of Sergio Corbucci's work, with all the gunfights, torture, and shifting loyalties you’d expect from a late-‘60s spaghetti Western. Arguably the second-best director of this subgenre after Sergio Leone, Corbucci delivers these pleasures with reckless aplomb; the film has the infectious, sloppy energy of a camp-wide food fight. Corbucci’s direction is marked by skittish zooms and jolting edits, both of which make the violence seem more chaotic than it already is. But while the violence has a jarring immediacy, the historical settings never quite feel real, which seems to be the point. If American Westerns were about confronting the nation’s past in terms of myth, then spaghetti Westerns were myths about these myths, elaborating on the iconography and motifs of their US counterparts until they seemed fantastical. Interestingly, THE MERCENARY began its life in the realm of a different kind of myth-making. The first draft of the script was based heavily on Bertolt Brecht’s one-act play The Exception and the Rule and was intended to be Gillo Pontecorvo’s follow-up to THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. Pontecorvo dropped out when the script was revised to become more of a Western—though elements of the Brecht-inspired draft made their way into what became the director’s third feature, BURN! (1969)—and producer Alberto Grimaldi replaced him with Corbucci. (1968, 111 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Brian De Palma's THE UNTOUCHABLES (US)
Tuesday, 7pm
For the most part, De Palma's career has moved between the very personal, deeply self-reflexive, and politically agitational films which he has largely written himself (the major exceptions here are the astonishing late ‘70s pair OBSESSION and THE FURY) and the impersonal, formalist exercises in genre and narrative construction for which he has mainly been a hired director for the projects of others. These journeyman pieces tend to be opportunities for him to explore tensions and structures in the creation and manipulation of space, of rhythm, of imagery that are more daring and extreme than what is found in his more organically built films. Depending on the very conventional, very unproblematic scripts and Hollywood-standard casting developed through the studio processes has allowed him to be more wildly and dangerously experimental in many ways in his direction, knowing that his competent and star-powered actors and predictable, predigested dialogue and story patterns will be reliably intelligible to a mainstream audience no matter what devious or disruptive visual strategies he might deploy around them. THE UNTOUCHABLES is one of De Palma's most extraordinary deviations from the norms of cinematic narrative, though its propulsive, fascistic screenplay by David Mamet and wooden, aw-shucks central performance by Kevin Costner do wonders in disguising that. De Palma creates a Prohibition-era Chicago that is drunk on violence and corruption, in which the vileness of the city's degradation and humiliation by Al Capone's rule of terror seeps up from the streets like a miasma, distorting the world as though the very atmosphere was drunk, as though the city buildings themselves were insane.  He shoots in disconcerting, narratively-unmotivated wide angles, and makes his camera weave in eldritch patterns through corridors, through shootouts, through windows and off the edges of rooftops, creating a kind of evil-eyed counterpoint to the staid and simplistically heroic tale of white hats battling black hats that the movie's ostensibly telling. As the film progresses, the incoherence between the deeply sane, self-satisfied, and respectably inoffensive Hollywood half and the mad, self-critical, and cartoonish De Palma half reaches a breaking point in the justifiably lauded sequence in which Costner's Eliot Ness attempts to capture Al Capone's bookkeeper amidst a firefight in Union Station. Any pretense of realism is abandoned as De Palma teleports characters from one end of the station to another, has gunshots propel victims multiple yards through plate glass walls, dilates time well past its breaking point, and does this all as part of a grand upstaging of himself by building the shootout around a short moment lifted and perverted from Eisenstein's BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. While others of his films are more accomplished and powerful and disturbing—there is nothing here to rival, for instance, the anti-patriotism of BLOW OUT and its vision of America as a machine for turning the deaths of the poor into capital, or the distressingly insoluble problems of free-floating personal identity, determinism, and illusory mental states that are at the heart of FEMME FATALE's double roles and unreliable narration—but the constraints provided by the crutches of so much prima facie normalcy come with their own radical freedoms. This is top-notch B-grade De Palma. (1987, 119 min., 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]
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Richard Fleischer’s RED SONJA (US/Netherlands/Italy)
Tuesday, 9:30pm and Wednesday, 4:30pm
Richard Fleischer’s widescreen compositions are handsome in the way you’d say a horse is handsome: sturdy, grand, impressively earthy. There’s also a horselike beauty to Fleischer’s art in general, which is distinguished by its workmanship and versatility. He may have been adept at trotting (THE HAPPY TIME [1950], DOCTOR DOOLITTLE [1967]), but he was at his finest when attempting feats of strength and/or speed (ARMORED CAR ROBBERY [1950], VIOLENT SATURDAY [1955], THE VIKINGS [1958], THE BOSTON STRANGLER [1968], THE NEW CENTURIONS [1972] and many more). If Fleischer has never inspired an especially large following among auteurists, that may because his oeuvre contains few if any thematic through lines; however, it’s remarkably consistent in its visual style, the films shot in ‘Scope in particular. Employing closeups less frequently than other Hollywood directors of his era, Fleischer privileged the spaces his characters inhabited, which tend to be immersive and dynamic—you rarely look at a Fleischer shot so much as wander around it. How many other American directors have consistently gotten so much out of their production designers? Individual mileage may vary with regards to Fleischer’s fantasy films (FANTASTIC VOYAGE [1966], SOYLENT GREEN [1973], RED SONJA [1985]), but there’s no denying their value as aesthetic objects. Each contains at least a few moments of pop sublimity that channel the excitement people must have felt when widescreen formats were new and there was something inherently spectacular about a frame that was two and one-thirds times wider than it was tall. It’s endearing that Fleischer could preserve this enthusiasm as late as 1985, and this is what gives RED SONJA its musty appeal. The director’s penultimate feature before his retirement at the end of the 1980s, the film feels a bit like cozying up with Bad Breath Grandpa and letting him read you a bedtime story. The film was made to capitalize on the success of CONAN THE BARBARIAN and its sequel, CONAN THE DESTROYER (which Fleischer also directed); like those movies, it’s based on a character created by Robert E. Howard and features Arnold Schwarzenegger, quasi-medieval settings, and lots of swordplay. Some of the narrative elements come off as rote—the likely result of having been used in so many other sword-and-sorcery films—but they never feel belabored. At 89 minutes, RED SONJA doesn’t overstay its welcome, and considering it was scored by Ennio Morricone and shot by the great Giuseppe Rotunno (whose resumé includes THE LEOPARD, ALL THAT JAZZ, and multiple Fellini films), it’s actually pretty engaging. (1985, 89 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Terrence Malick's DAYS OF HEAVEN (US)
Wednesday, 7pm
Who would have predicted that DAYS OF HEAVEN would be the most influential American film of the early 21st century? A number of movies would be almost impossible without its influence—THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD, THERE WILL BE BLOOD (which tipped its hat by employing DAYS' ingenious production designer, Jack Fisk), most of the work of David Gordon Green—that Malick's unprecedented approach has come to seem almost familiar. But seen in a theater, DAYS OF HEAVEN is forever new. Malick's poetic sensibility, which combined an absurdist fascination with the banal with an awestruck view of open landscapes, renders the past era of pre-Dust Bowl Heartland America a gorgeous, alien environment. The film is structured around his lyrical observations, jutting forward through asymmetrical sequences like a modernist poem. More than one set piece (including the locust infestation and the bizarre entry of a flying circus troupe) has become a little classic in itself; it's easy to forget the primal romantic tragedy, which Newcity critic Ray Pride once likened to a Biblical fable, that gives the movie its towering structure. It is this feeling for eternal narratives—rooted, perhaps, in Malick's study of philosophy—that distinguishes the film from any of its successors, which could never replicate Malick's spiritual orientation.(1978, 95 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Giuseppe Tornatore’s ENNIO (Italy/Documentary)
Thursday, 7:15pm
By the time composer Ennio Morricone died on July 6, 2020, at the age of 91, he had amassed a body of work it would take mere mortals three lifetimes to achieve. IMDb lists contributions he made to 533 films scores, including those from his enduring creative partnership with former classmate Sergio Leone. He also wrote more than 100 classical works and won a boatload of awards from around the world, including an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007. Triumphantly, he went on to earn his first competitive Oscar for THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015), a full-blown symphony that was his “revenge” on the Westerns that started his career in film. Director Giuseppe Tornatore, who was blessed with a luminous Morricone score for his film CINEMA PARADISO (1988), set himself the very difficult task of trying to survey a life jam-packed with genius works and experiences within a reasonable running time. On the whole, I think he succeeds in showcasing some of the best of Morricone’s work, as well as his formative life experiences and his struggles to accept his destiny as a film composer. We learn of the musician father who made his son give up ideas of becoming a lawyer to follow in his footsteps as a trumpeter. We learn how much Morricone’s wife of 64 years, Maria Travia, contributed to his career. We learn how he chose his mentor, Goffredo Petrassi, and how Morricone was a lifelong creator and supporter of experimental music from which he learned to use sounds as well as musical notes to create his scores. There are clips of the famous films most of us know, as well as lesser-known Italian films for which he created interesting scores that drew on his deep knowledge of classical and folkloric music. There is a very moving montage of film clips from the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center interspersed with Morricone conducting his searing “Voci dal silenzio.” And there are many, many talking heads (Bruce Springsteen, Bernardo Bertolucci, Liliana Cavani, and Pat Metheny among them) talking about his music and process, and offering laudatory blurbs that could have been dispensed with to either shorten the running time or add in more information. Most illuminating of all are the interviews with Morricone himself talking about his ideas and methods in a way that even a non-musician like myself could understand. There have been many great film scorers, but there was never one as ground-breaking and singular as Morricone. (2021, 156 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Also screening are Sergio Leone’s 1965 film FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (132 min, DCP Digital) on Saturday at 2:15pm and Guiseppe Tornatore’s 1988 film CINEMA PARADISO (123 min, DCP Digital) on Sunday at 2pm and Monday at 4pm. More info on the series here.

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Elem Klimov's COME AND SEE (Belarus/USSR)

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

The horrors and atrocities of World War II have long been considered in film, and Elim Klimov’s COME AND SEE is one of their most harrowing depictions. Set in 1943, the narrative follows Floyra (Aleksey Kravchenko in his captivating debut role), a young Belarusian boy who’s eager to join the Soviet army in fighting off the invading German forces after he finds an old rifle buried in the sand from some unnamed battle. Floyra’s youthful exuberance, innocence, and hopefulness are soon painstakingly stripped from him bit by bit as the realities of the war are witnessed firsthand. Klimov’s film is not for the weak of heart; it’s extremely unflinching in its presentation of the brutality of conflict. Outright war-games are eschewed; instead, Klimov uses a series of motifs representing an unrelenting descent into inhumanity, and the erosion of Floyra’s spirit. Individual struggles of various characters are juxtaposed as each face their own personal hells and tragedies. Much of the film’s visceral power is due to its phenomenal use of practical effects and sound design, which place the viewer directly in the carnage. This creates a disorienting sense of place at times—compounding the utter confusion and chaos the characters must endure. The only sliver of comfort and familiarity the film provides is through its use of Mozart in its sparse score, but which becomes lost in the general cacophony. COME AND SEE is staunchly anti-war in tone. It is a film both so hauntingly beautiful yet so resolutely bleak that it will stay with its viewers long after. Screening as part of the Programmer’s Picks series. (1985, 142 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

Kasi Lemmons' EVE'S BAYOU (US)

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

As far as Hollywood accolades are concerned, this writer couldn’t care less; however, when Roger Ebert exclaimed, “If it is not nominated for Academy Awards, then the academy is not paying attention” at the end of his review for EVE’S BAYOU, he raised an interesting point—this is a film whose quality resides in the blindspot of many. Kasi Lemmons’ directorial debut is heavily concerned with memory and race. Set in 1962, the story revolves around Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett) and her Creole-American family in an affluent Louisiana community. On the surface, her family is idyllic, they live in a mansion, her father (Samuel L. Jackson) is a doctor, and they come from a lineage of French nobles. One day, Eve witnesses her father cheating on her mother, and the family’s picturesque facade starts to show cracks. Eve’s sister, who has a very close relationship with her father, informs Eve that what she thought she saw was misunderstood and the idea of memory being flawed is raised and remains as the film’s central theme. The film’s narrative unfolds as a series of memories whose reliability is left questionable; shades of RASHOMON are felt as stories are recounted by multiple characters. Eve must navigate her coming of age while coming to terms with her family’s shortcomings. The cinematography is warm and bright, yet harbors nefarious undertones with its dark shadows, furthering the film’s desire for the audience to determine what is respectable or not. EVE’S BAYOU relies on its characters’ perspectives to tell a story that is dreamlike and open to multiple interpretations. Screening as part of Apparitions: An Assemblage of Black Independent Films. (1997, 109 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

Jacques Rivette's PARIS BELONGS TO US (France)

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

The official inaugural nouvelle vague movie in some parallel dimension (but rather more obscure in ours) is not BREATHLESS but this first feature by Jacques Rivette, co-written by Jean Gruault (who also worked with Truffaut, Godard, and Resnais) and shot by Charles Bitsch (an oft-uncredited assistant director for Godard) sporadically between 1957 and 1960, with an outrageously large and varied cast (including Godard himself, with a brief, amusing cameo as a outdoor-café layabout). The general vibe is a mix of noir paranoia and bohemian inconsequentialness, as the naïve young protagonist Anne (Betty Schneider) explores the literary and dramaturgical subcultures of her brother Pierre's arty acquaintances (including the blacklisted expatriate American writer "Philip Kaufman," not played by Philip Kaufman) while simultaneously trying to solve a rather dubious mystery involving the death of a young Spanish guitarist. The pace is slow and reflective, and the consistent, jarring currents of global conspiracy in this otherwise-recognizable underground of writers, students, and aesthetes reminds the viewer just how equally conspiratorial even the most conventional Hollywood B-movie plots could be, with their molls, murderers, and mad scientists. Highly recommended to anyone interested in observing cinéphiles becoming cinéastes. Screening as part of the Americans in Paris: After the Dance series. (1960, 141 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]

Jess Franco’s DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN (Spain)

The Davis Theater – Thursday, 7pm

Given his prolific career, it’s no surprise that DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN was Jess Franco’s second film to feature the vampire, the first being 1969’s COUNT DRACULA, starring Christopher Lee; the character is evoked, notably in alternative titles, throughout Franco’s career. DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN, which stars Howard Vernon as Dracula and Dennis Price as Dr. Frankenstein, is wildly abstract for a film about two very familiar literary characters. The first fifteen minutes are arresting: with almost no dialogue, it feels like an expressionist silent film. Franco focuses on the setting, with inexplicable point of view shots and hazy close ups. Sound effects like a bat at the window (a repeated, disturbing noise throughout), combined with the arresting imagery—a colorful mural, a rooster, a foggy hillside, the townsfolk gathered in mesmerized curiosity—​all contribute to a film that is more about creating ambiance and feeling than plot. It continues without much dialogue, featuring homages to classic Universal monster movies alongside Franco’s signature eroticism as Frankenstein attempts to use Dracula and his powers for his own experiments. It often feels like an experimental film that provides an avant-garde depiction of recognizable figures and tropes. Prominently featured as well is what has become my favorite repeating Franco visual: a tortured yet fully made-up woman lying in a bed as she both grapples internally and externally with the horrors that surround her. It’s an image that sums up the way Franco so fluidly moves between visceral imagery and the way it cleverly reflects the interiors of his mostly silent characters. Presented by Oscarbate and Severin Films. A special beer tasting at Sojourn Restaurant, courtesy of Half Acre, starts at 5pm. (1972, 85 min, Digital Projection) [Megan Fariello]

Spike Jonze’s WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (Germany/US/Australia)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday and Sunday, 11am

Maurice Sendak was never one to talk down to children. Across his remarkable bibliography, full of grand, fantastical illustrations and adventurous, playful narratives, he refused to pander to his younger readers or attempt to flatten the realities of the world around them. “If it’s true, you tell them,” he uttered to director Spike Jonze in a tell-all HBO documentary. Jonze clearly took that to heart in constructing his own adaptation of the late author’s most beloved and renowned work, Where the Wild Things Are. On its surface, the average incurious parent may deem Jonze’s film far too melancholy and distressing for younger audiences, its somber vibes and moody atmospheres perhaps less inviting to families at the multiplex deciding whether to see this or CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS (2009). But the deep-seated truths essential to the artistic success of WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE ring painfully true, bursting out from the journey of Max (an exuberant and vulnerable Max Records), a young boy navigating a minefield of emotional exploration, struggling with his own energetic bursts of play that aren’t always seen as welcome in a world built for adults. His burst of animalistic struggle against his overly stressed-out mother (Catherine Keener) causes him to run away from home and venture off on a dinky sailboat to the land of the Wild Things. The beasts themselves are a production marvel, combining exquisite gigantic puppet suits with detailed CGI facial characterization in a merit-worthy marriage of practical and digital effects. These earth-tone beasts (brought to life by voice talents including James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, and Forest Whitaker) embody the visual tactility of Sendak’s original drawings, each horn and scale and claw both frightening and inviting in equal measure. As Max’s friendship with these Wild Things blossoms (all under the guise of Max becoming their new king), the beasts reveal themselves to be as emotionally complex as the humans he was running away from, using the language of kid logic to reckon with betrayal, heartbreak, distress, and loneliness. That Max—​a tiny boy in a ragged wolf costume—​begins to see himself in the wretched, destructive, emotionally volatile outbursts of Gandolfini’s Carol, is a sign of self-reflexive reckoning and acceptance rarely seen in American children’s media. It might have been easy enough to adapt Sendak’s work to the screen in the most literal sense, a simple story of a child hanging out with an ensemble of delightfully-designed monsters. But Jonze’s understanding of the earnest and honest truth of youthful sadness is what makes his film stand out, favoring honesty and earnestness over trite distraction. Pop songs are traded in for Karen O and Carter Burwell tunes, bright colors and pop culture references exchanged for expansive patches of nature and heart-to-heart conversations. Jonze and Sendak want nothing more than for kids to feel wild, on their own terms. Screening as part of the Kid Flix series. Preceded by a short media-literacy introduction by Film Center staff. (2009, 104 min, 35mm) [Ben Kaye]

Jim Jarmusch's ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Tuesday, 7:30pm

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE continues Jim Jarmusch's habit of ruminating on familiar topics at a glacial pace with a witty character study and touching love story that just happens to be about two vampires who may or may not have birthed all of humanity. Tom Hiddleston plays Adam, a musical genius and tinkerer with a deep love for antiquated instruments and technologies. Unfortunately, Adam is mired in the throes of a deep depression and can only seem to compose funeral music of late. Sensing something is amiss, Eve (played by Tilda Swinton with her offhandedly strange and serene otherworldliness) calls Adam from her book-laden apartment in Tangier, Morocco. After a brief and tender conversation, she resolves to pay a visit and cheer him up, although she loathes traveling. Eve prepares herself for a night flight to Detroit, where Adam lives in a dilapidated Victorian home. Like most Jarmusch films, the plot meanders in an unhurried fashion and remains peripheral at best. The viewer's enjoyment of ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE relies instead on lovingly and carefully crafted aesthetics, niche jokes and references, and maddeningly cool characters. The film lingers on numerous elements of the mise-en-scène that characterize the abode of each vampire, the treasures that they hoard over centuries, and their vintage wardrobes, indicating that the vampires are as maximalist in their aesthetics as Jarmusch is minimalist in his narratives. The soundtrack, composed mostly of Jarmusch's band SQÜRL, also features key songs like "Funnel of Love" by Wanda Jackson and an arresting scene with Lebanese singer/songwriter Yasmine Hamdan provides waves of sonic pleasure and engrossing atmosphere. Monologues and asides in honor of Nikola Tesla, Christopher Marlowe (who, by the way, is also a vampire and may or may not have penned all of Shakespeare's works), Franz Schubert, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others provide waves of allusive pleasure. And small-but-mighty roles played by John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright, Mia Wasikowska, and Anton Yelchin round out the humorous and morbid character study, dosing us with delightfully comedic and soberly tragic asides in a careful rhythm that maintains a lighter and perversely more optimistic tone than one would expect for a vampire movie. One special pleasure in viewing ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, indeed, is the joy of observing ways in which Jarmusch adheres to generic conventions around vampires (crossing thresholds, sleeping during the day, drinking blood) and deviates from generic conventions (sucking blood "is so 15th century"), or creates new vampiric rituals of his own. In this way, he upends the genre of vampire movies in the same way that STRANGER THAN PARADISE and DOWN BY LAW subvert road trip films and GHOST DOG and DEAD MAN reimagine narratives of an alienated, lone wolf protagonist. ONLY LOVERS may be one of Jarmusch's slighter films, but it is (for a 10,000-year-old love story about the undead) oddly enough, one of his most accessible and optimistic. Come for the moody soundtrack; stick around for affectionate, knowing banter that makes you believe that true love can last an eternity. (2013, 123 min, DCP Digital) [Alex Ensign]

David Wain’s WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER (US)

FACETS Cinema – Thursday, 9pm

Based on the director's personal experiences at Jewish summer camps, David Wain’s WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER draws from '80s summer-camp comedies like MEATBALLS and summer-camp horror like SLEEPAWAY CAMP to portray a crash course in expertly interweaving modern humor and silliness. Wain co-wrote WET HOT with Michael Showalter, with whom Wain worked as part of the '90s comedy sketch team The State, a group represented by members of the large ensemble cast (Showalter, Joe Lo Truglio, and Ken Marino). Taking place over the last full day of camp in the summer of 1981, the film follows the counselors and staff of Camp Firewood as they navigate love, sex, stressful theatrical productions, and astrophysics. The cast includes Janene Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, Paul Rudd, and Bradley Cooper, to name just a few of the many familiar faces (H. Jon Benjamin provides a familiar voice). WET HOT grounds moments of pure absurdity, overacting (Rudd’s performance stands out here), and fantasy with some of true sincerity; a friend of mine mentioned this movie as representing the cinematic representation closest to his own summer camp experiences. Wain parodies familiar 1980s film tropes in outrageous ways, including an incredible take on '80s montages, as camp cook and Vietnam vet Gene (Christopher Meloni) teaches counselor Coop (Showalter),how to dance for an audition for the camp’s talent show. The montage is set to an original song that perfectly mimics the inspirational rock songs of the period. The entire soundtrack is spot on—​for me, Jefferson Starship's "Jane" is synonymous with the film. While not a critical or financial success upon release, partially due to its distribution, WET HOT found its audience on cable and home video. It had two spin-off Netflix series in 2015 and 2017 with the original cast returning, one a prequel set on the first day of camp and the other catching up with the gang ten years later. (2001, 92 min, Blu-ray Projection) [Megan Fariello]
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Preceded by FACETS Trivia at 7pm, hosted by critic, programmer, and Cine-File contributor Raphael Jose Martinez.

Kenji Mizoguchi's SANSHO THE BAILIFF (Japan)

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

An epic of lost innocence about a good-hearted family whose members are separated and sold into prostitution and slavery, SANSHO THE BAILIFF is Kenji Mizoguchi’s most emotionally exacting and profoundly haunting achievement. Set in eleventh-century Japan, but shot through with tensions and crises of identity specific to the post-occupation period, SANSHO uses an old story, “one of the world’s great folk tales, full of grief,” to work through postwar Japan’s reluctant recognition of its own crimes committed against humanity during WWII, alongside its accelerating adoption of Western democratic values. The title character of the film, a corrupt bailiff with direct ties to the imperial government, is a figure we only rarely glimpse on-screen, and yet whose amoral, predatory worldview is fully, oppressively realized in nearly every frame; he is the character who stands in for the merciless social world and its relations. Politics is central to the story of SANSHO, and the film invokes human rights as well as the very real, difficult struggle to actually achieve it in the world. If the film’s insistent refrain—“Without mercy, man is like a beast... Men are created equal. Everyone is entitled to happiness”—sounds acutely anachronistic to the eleventh century, it is because Mizoguchi’s much more likely referent was the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which this dialogue could almost have been lifted from directly). But I think the most compelling anachronism in SANSHO remains legendary composer Fumio Hayasaka’s unforgettably strange, untidy, lingering score, which disruptively pairs Western orchestral elements with Japanese period instruments, creating some striking atonalities and modernist effects. The sound mix in SANSHO is a special realm where elements of the supernatural, ineffable, and transcendent enter, sometimes imperceptibly, into the otherwise punishing realism of Mizoguchi’s image. Continuing his experiments (begun in his 1950 and 1953 scores for Kurosawa’s RASHOMON and Mizoguchi’s UGETSU) in transposing Japanese theater music to Western symphonic orchestration, Hayasaka’s score for SANSHO disruptively pairs traditional instruments such as the komabue (a bamboo flute traditional to Japanese court music) and the staccato plucking of a biwa (a short-necked fretted lute) with ethereal celeste glissandos, harp arpeggios, and other Western elements. The finished effect that we hear is rarely of a harmonic, hierarchical system, but rather of a kind of parallel scoring, as if the film had been scored by Hayasaka not once but twice, with East and West refusing to meet—the instruments from the two traditions are as if exiled to separate tracks, often seemingly unaware of each other and working at cross-purposes, creating a dissonance that is only (partially) resolved by the film’s final shot. The strangeness of this scoring suits the allegorical dimension of SANSHO tremendously, always seeming to gesture to an ethical realm that exists apart from the densely physical world in which our characters suffer. The clash of musical traditions is ambitious and hair-raising, but Mizoguchi’s film leaves room too for the grand emotional power that builds in the desperation of a mother’s voice, calling her children home. Screening as part of the series Kinuyo Tanaka, Actress and Auteur. (1954, 125 min, DCP Digital) [Tien-Tien Jong]

Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL (UK)

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

Terry Gilliam and Sam Lowry—two impossible dreamers haplessly lashing out against the powers that be—are the twin heroes of BRAZIL, one behind the camera and the other before it. The behind-the-scenes narrative of this dystopian masterpiece has attained mythic status, with Gilliam locked in heated battle against Universal over their insistence on a more audience-friendly cut of the film, all while the fate of put-upon office drone Lowry (played with beleaguered bafflement by Jonathan Pryce) hangs in the balance. In fairness, it's not hard to see how a studio would look askance at the film before them. Gilliam takes his budget and constructs what is essentially just a child's blanket fort on the largest scale imaginable; a bureaucratic quagmire built of tubes and cardboard, at times dangerously close to coming apart at the seams. It's a world where instability is constantly threatening to undermine the tightly wound internal logic that governs everything, where loose cogs in the machine like Sam Lowry become threats simply because the system isn't wired to accommodate them. Under these conditions, there's a very thin line between getting imaginative and getting mad, so it's little wonder Gilliam followed a similar path to his protagonist. BRAZIL, among the most fantastically dark and detail-rich science fiction flicks ever, was—and remains—a visionary work worth fighting for. Screening as part of the Programmer’s Picks series. (1985, 131 min, 35mm) [Tristan Johnson]

David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 4pm

Viewed without the constraints of political interpretation, David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB is one of the rare great films to come out of contemporary Hollywood—rare because it puts the regular luxuries of the blockbuster studio film at the service of provocative satire and a bottomless imagination. (On first release, its only real precedent was Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL.) It's also the rare film adaptation that actually improves upon its source material, imbuing Chuck Palahnuik's glib, sub-Vonnegut prose with a near-Joycean level of cross-references, allusions, and puns. The wealth of detail helped the film attract a devoted cult following, which made it one of the first true successes of the DVD era, but the density of Fincher's framing and sound design is best appreciated in a theater. Never arbitrary, Fincher's carefully assembled aesthetic overload captures perfectly the anxiety of the so-called Information Age even when the film's sociopolitical stance becomes muddled. As for that critical knot, tied either out of naivety or cynicism (and which Robin Wood attempts, fairly brilliantly, to untangle in his introduction to Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond), it manages to make the film linger in the mind regardless of one's interpretation. Screening as part of the Board Picks series. Friday screening followed by a Q&A with Professor Maria Belodubrovskaya, Cinema and Media Studies Dept. (1999, 139 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s UTAMA (Bolivia/Uruguay/France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Beautifully lensed by Uruguayan cinematographer Bárbara Alvarez, whose credits include Lucrecia Martel’s THE HEADLESS WOMAN, the rich cinematography of Bolivian filmmaker Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s feature debut positions his native country’s arid Andean plateau, the Altiplano, as a place of splendor and trepidation, irrevocably torn between the two as the global climate crisis threatens the wondrous landscape. (A real-life example of this occurred in 2015 when Lake Poopó, the second largest in the country, dried up completely.) Non-professional actors José Calcina and Luisa Quispe play Virginio and Sisa, an elderly married couple in actuality as in the film. Finding them was difficult, as Loayza Grisi needed Quechua people, South American Indians living in the Andean highlands, who spoke Quechua and Spanish. Whatever circumstances led him to this couple were fortuitous, as their rugged faces and infectious smiles mirror the formidable yet prepossessing landscape. The couple is shown to be hardworking—Virginio is a llama herder—and in love as ever; the biggest problem facing them is the lack of water in their area. Their grandson drops in for a surprise visit, revealing the strained relationship between Virginio and his son and grandson, who reside in the city. He’s come to tell his grandparents that his partner is pregnant, though he stays with them for a while, coming to earn the respect of his irascible grandfather through his hard work in spite of the old man’s temperament. The lack of water, however, and Virginio’s persistent, barking cough threaten their otherwise idyllic way of life. While there are many scenes of silent contemplation and fixed shots of stunning landscapes, the film avoids the uniformity of the standard festival film by investing so much in its characters’ inner lives, evident in the leads’ strong, controlled performances. Ultimately the family story eclipses any presumptions about climate change, an effective way of underlining what’s otherwise subtly implied. The film’s title translates to “our home,” and the strength and simplicity of this proclamation is reflected in the beautiful images and story. Screening as part of Shawn Michelle Smith and Oliver Sann’s Cli-Fi lecture series. (2022, 87 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Tran Anh Hung's THE TASTE OF THINGS (France/Belgium)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Saturday, 4pm and 7pm

Tran Anh Hung’s seventh feature, THE TASTE OF THINGS, has a lot in common with his first, THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA (1993), despite the fact that the newer film takes place in late 19th-century France and the earlier one took place in 1950s Vietnam. Both are hermetic movies (sometimes even comfortingly so), with most of the action restricted to the main character’s home/workplace; this walled-in quality makes the drama feel insulated from any larger historical forces that exist beyond the frame. In GREEN PAPAYA, the Vietnam War provides an obvious structuring absence (the film ends just a few years before the United States started sending “military advisors” to the country), while in TASTE the looming threat seems to be the entire range of political, social, and industrial upheavals that came with the dawn of the 20th century. In neither film, however, does the exterior threat eclipse the onscreen narrative, as Tran’s exquisite mise-en-scène (which was already superb in GREEN PAPAYA and has gotten lovelier over time) lures you further and further inward. Though these are quiet films, they’re rarely still; when there isn’t movement within the frame, Tran creates it through subtle pans and tracking shots. His style is most rapturous when he’s depicting domestic rituals, particularly cooking, as he presents seemingly routine activities as whirlpools of little events. Most of the first act of TASTE OF THINGS concerns the creation of a gourmet meal, and Tran renders the process so enveloping that you may wish the entire movie was about the characters preparing food. Yet these early scenes—which, like those of GREEN PAPAYA, feature a tween girl as an audience identification figure—exhibit a progressively rich sense of character; through cooking rituals, stray lines of dialogue, and impeccable body language, the principal characters come into focus. Dodin (Benoît Magimel) is a renowned restaurateur, and Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) is his head chef of 20 years. Their relationship is warm and mutually supportive, but it is chiefly professional. Only when the film leaves the kitchen does Tran slowly reveal that Dodin has pined for Eugénie for years and wishes for her to marry him… but to frame things that way runs the risk of making TASTE OF THINGS sound like a genteel love story when it definitely is not. Often Tran seems less interested in telling a story than in achieving a Zen-like state through recreating the atmosphere around a gourmand’s kitchen 140 years ago. However soothing it is to watch the film, there’s something a little unnerving about how Tran deploys movie magic to resurrect a dead way of life; but then, the filmmaker acknowledges this, lets it shadow the movie’s sense of mystery throughout. The final passages are no less elusive than the opening ones, presenting the characters as they go through multiple changes of heart while severely downplaying (if not completely eliding) the internal developments that make these changes possible. Tran’s faith in images over explanations points to why he’s a great filmmaker, and TASTE OF THINGS finds him at the height of his powers. Screening as part of the New Release (+ More) series. (2023, 135 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

David Lynch's ERASERHEAD (US)

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

"It's my PHILADELPHIA STORY. It just doesn't have Jimmy Stewart in it." In Lynch's debut feature, a man and a woman conceive a monstrous child somewhere in between suburban alienation and industrial rot, a mostly conventional situation with the most grotesque punchline. Watching ERASERHEAD now feels like wandering through a nightmare more than ever, due in part to its central conceit and the expected barrage of disturbing events and images that it entails—distended faces, animal carcasses, etc.—but even the film's few familiar features add to this dreamlike quality. For example, most of ERASERHEAD takes place in an apartment building whose lobby is recognizable as the Other Place from TWIN PEAKS, and its checkerboard floors trigger a series of half-conscious connections, the common dream trope of a location playing the role of another location. But for every fact we know about the film's production, we're equally uncertain about what it is we're actually looking at, including the creature-child itself, whose uncertain origins have inspired theories that claim it as everything from a cow fetus to an elaborate puppet. Then, amidst this uncertainty, the film's most destabilizing quality emerges: its sweetness. As the father, Jack Nance has a constant wide-eyed, beleaguered stare that is almost as infantile as the creature-child that he tends to, ambivalently at first and then urgently as soon as he sees it in distress. It's effectively moving for the same reason that it's effectively dreamlike, with conscious logic and psychological realism applied to unreal conditions. But because Lynch's mind doesn't seem to format in the conditional or hypothetical, this aspect of unreality is always underlined as literal, so that the scenario of a largely silent father figure demonstrating real concern over his freak spawn is never played as what would happen but what is happening, shifting the focus onto affect and away from conditions. The silhouette of Nance's head has become a visual shorthand for the film, and is also emblematic in many ways of this oddly bound logic; its shape is both inexplicable and inevitable, and the only place is could possibly make sense is on the floor of a pencil factory, which is exactly where it ends up. Preceded by Willard Maas' 1966 short film WILD TURKEYS (12 min, 16mm). Screening as part of the Inside Outsider Cinema series. (1977, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Anne Orchier]

Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes’ LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL (US/United Arab Emirates/Australia)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Television has traditionally been a more participatory medium than film—​more urgent and invasive. GHOSTWATCH, the 1992 BBC special that scarred a generation through a convincingly staged televised haunting investigation, captured this so effectively within the genre of horror. Its influence on the found footage genre is massive, something now more associated with film. LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL ties both together as a film about a found-footage television program. A voiceover opening complete with documentary footage explains the rise of Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a late-night talk show host whose show, Night Owls, began in the early 70s—​coinciding with a rise in a cultural obsession with the occult. At first competing well with the likes of Carson, Delroy never quite finds the same success even after years on the air. He resorts to more sensational guests and material and is devastated by the tragic loss of his wife (Georgina Haig). Desperate to please the sponsors with better ratings, he puts together a Halloween show that relies on increasingly dramatically spooky guests: a psychic (Fayassi Bazzi), a magician turned skeptic (Ian Bliss), and a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) and the subject of her recent book, a teenager (Ingrid Torelli) she claims is possessed by a demon. LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL is a depiction of the found master tape footage from the live taping of that 1977 Halloween episode. What’s most impressive about the film is its commitment to the aesthetic, not just the grainy video footage, but its overall earth-toned aesthetics. Even the practical special effects remain true to the period. It’s also a great showcase for Dastmalchian, who’s mostly seen in supporting roles; he brings a nervous energy to the performance that is both convincing and foreboding. The horror of it all will feel familiar, but LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL brings up interesting ideas about format, highlighting the difference between engaging with television versus film by engaging with both. It also illuminates a shifting media landscape: while this kind of visceral, analog televisual experience is no longer accessible, can it be found dispersed in contemporary digital media? (2023, 93 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Amanda McBaine & Jesse Moss’ GIRLS STATE (US/Documentary)

Doc10 at the Gene Siskel Film Center —​ Wednesday, 7pm

In BOYS STATE (2020), directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss explored the enlightening and entertaining world of the Austin, Texas, chapter of the Boys State Summer Program, where teenagers spend a week exploring the aches, pains, and triumphs of the American political process. Four years later, they return with GIRLS STATE, the flip side of the binary coin of youth-based summer political exploration, this time heading north to a Missouri-based chapter of the program. Here, young women will take part in building their own political bodies, running for positions like Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice in their makeshift government, hoping to put their political prowess to the test among like-minded teenagers. Early on, a wrinkle appears in the framework of the documentary: this will be the first summer where the Missouri Boys State and Girls State programs will occur simultaneously on the same shared campus. Thus, McBaine and Moss’ sequel doc finds itself—​both literally and artistically—​cast in the shadow of its masculine counterpart, a result that creates an undeniably exciting friction. How can GIRLS STATE—​the film and the program—​​exist on its own terms when it's inextricably tied with BOYS STATE? It doesn’t help that the previous film, operating in its own spotlight, crafted itself around a magnanimous chronicling of young would-be politicians campaigning for the Governor chair, presenting a pint-sized microcosm of the calamity of contemporary U.S. politics. Here, the Girls State Governor race becomes one of many subplots, alongside the socially progressive Nisha’s quest to bring abortions rights issues to the forefront of the week’s court proceedings (the film was shot just weeks before the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade), and the firm and forthright Tochi campaigning for Attorney General and navigating being one of the only Black attendees of the program. The Gubernatorial race still gets its moment in the spotlight, with young Faith’s liberally-minded, issues-based campaign speech overshadowed by the “feminist manifesto” rallying cry of the powerhouse Cecilia. But the film chooses to focus its climax on Emily (a failed gubernatorial candidate) and her attempt at exposing the stark inequalities between the two gendered camps (especially Boys State’s increased resources and funding in relation to Girls State), further enshrining the bond between the text and metatext on display, and bringing to the forefront how, even in the context of this documentary series, misogynist systems maintain their stranglehold on the culture. Beyond these comparisons though, the joy of both of McBaine and Moss' documentaries remains in their simultaneous far distance and close proximity to the world of U.S. politics; they each exist in their week-long campus bubbles, yet both films were serendipitously released in presidential election years. The decisions and choices made in these programs won’t make any difference in the grander scheme of the country, but the bright-eyed, hopeful young people hoping to get a taste of the world of politics most certainly will. Followed by an in-person Q&A with McBaine and Moss. (2024, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

George A. Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 8pm

George Romero would go on to make better films than NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD—movies that suggest the unlikely fusion of Mark Twain’s all-American satire, Michael Powell’s fanciful curiosity, and John Cassavetes’ intimate, handmade aesthetic within the confines of the horror genre. But his debut is still an object lesson in independent filmmaking: Rather than cover up his distance from Hollywood (budgetary and geographical), Romero embraces it. The resulting film boasts a sharp sense of location—the suburbs and rural areas outlying Pittsburgh—and an understanding that the banal makes the horror all the more scary when it arrives. Much has been written about the radical implications of casting a black actor to play the heroic, gun-toting lead in 1968, though Romero (one of the few popular US filmmakers so consistently open about his radical politics) claims to have no political motivation in this decision. More focused is the film’s pointed anger at middle-class conformity, which gives the film its enduring bitter rage. Followed by a reading from Adam Charles Hart’s new book Raising the Dead and conversation between him and author Daniel Kraus (Whalefall, The Living Dead). Books available at checkout online or at the box office. (1968, 96 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Wim Wenders' PERFECT DAYS (Japan/Germany)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

There is peace to be found in routine. That’s what Hirayama—and perhaps director Wim Wenders—would have you believe. Exquisitely brought to life by Koji Yakusho, Hirayama, an employee of the "Tokyo Toilet," guides us day by day through Wenders’ latest fiction endeavor, a leisurely diary of a film. The world of PERFECT DAYS follows its own internalized rhythms, lulling the audience into a network of patterns in navigating Hirayama’s days, perfect or otherwise, that unwind before us. The sun will always rise in a purple-orange sky, a can of coffee will always pop out of the vending machine, the plants will always get their morning mists of water, the leaves will always be brushed to the side, the public toilets spread throughout Tokyo will always receive Hirayama’s careful and rigorous cleaning, and the day will always end with dreams. Hirayama’s dreams—at least as Wenders shares them with us—are always in black-and-white, layered fragments of the day, coated in leaves and shadows, an abstracted reset of the film’s internal clock. Days blend into each other in a way that feels intricate yet inevitable, with the most glaring piece of conflict arising more than halfway through the runtime, Hirayama’s niece having run away from a life of affluence and loneliness. She prefers her uncle's life, which she sees as simple and noble. But unbeknown to most around him, Hirayama’s life is an iceberg, the solid routine of the day hiding depths of passion and loneliness underneath. There is constant reflection on his past, especially upon the mass of cassette tapes he has collected over the years and refuses to part with, there is the yearning towards the future with his voracious consumption of literature. But where does that leave the Hirayama of the present? In one moment of conversation (one of the few times Hirayama feigns to utter dialogue in the entire film), he offers up that "the world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected, some are not." In a moment of potent vulnerability near the film’s end, Yakusho offers up a rare moment of the bottom of the iceberg peeking out, the tough exterior of Hirayama breaking apart ever so briefly, as the sun rises on yet another day. Just like every other day, and still brand new. (2023, 123 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Jonathan Glazer's THE ZONE OF INTEREST (US/UK/Poland)

FACETS Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes

The term “the zone of interest,” the designation the Nazis applied to the Auschwitz extermination camp and adjacent areas, might as well apply to the robust activity surrounding this ultimate human evil by artists and the larger cultural community. The late British writer Martin Amis used the term for his 2014 novel, and now we have director/screenwriter Jonathan Glazer’s very loose adaptation of Amis’ book as a major motion picture. Whereas Amis focused on personal relationships between pseudonymous and fictional versions of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and an SS officer, Glazer chose an observational approach to the historical Höss family, imagining what living in a villa directly abutting Auschwitz might have been like for them and those who worked for them. Filmed at Auschwitz primarily in an accurate reconstruction of the villa the Höss family occupied, Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal eschewed conventional shooting techniques. They instead operated static, hidden cameras that could be manipulated remotely, and used natural light whenever possible. They also had no interest in giving us the usual horror show. Instead, Glazer leaned on Johnnie Burn’s sound design of gunfire, screams, and dogs, and only what camp structures could be seen from the Höss villa, to evoke the Holocaust. For example, the Höss family is hosting a children’s party in the vast garden of which Hedwig is so proud. As the children play, a cloud of steam moves in a line across the top of the camp wall—yet another train transporting victims to the slaughter. What Glazer concentrated on what he thought mattered to Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller)—career success and the good life—and if they had to live near and work in a human abattoir, well, that was the price of admission. Höss was reportedly a cold-blooded, hands-on killer early in his career, but Christian Friedel didn’t play this side of his character. Here, Rudolf seems like a loving father who reads to his daughters at night, is a good companion to his wife, and is well regarded by his fellow SS officers. His deeper depravity comes though chillingly during a late-night phone call with Hedwig. He eagerly shares his excitement that the deportation of up to 700,000 Hungarian Jews for extermination and slave selection will bear the name Operation Höss. Sandra Hüller as Hedwig projects a prosaic personality motivated by greed and social position. She seems like a Mother Courage pushing heedlessly through every circumstance to get what she wants, and is convinced that their living arrangement is doing nothing to harm her “strong, healthy, happy” children, despite the film’s ample evidence to the contrary. Little is known about the real Hedwig Höss, so this depiction seems like another example of demonizing mothers for fun and profit and the only questionable choice in an almost flawless movie. The remarkable score by Mica Levi is a haunting mélange of electronic and choral music. Glazer uses her score sparingly, however, in attempts to foreground the murdered at moments when we may be lulled by the mundane screen action. (I highly recommend you watch through the credits to listen to her audaciously beautiful score in its fullness.) In the end, a final, puzzling scene takes place largely in the present. I’ll leave its meaning to your own interpretation, but the familiar bourgeois lives Glazer has shown offers us a chance to reflect on our own unknowing callousness in the face of the suffering others endure for our convenience. (2023, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

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

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation 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 March 15, 2026. More info here.

⚫ Chicago Film Society
Fran Rubel Kuzui's 1988 film TOKYO POP (99 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 7:30pm, at Northeastern Illinois University (The Auditorium, Building E, 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.). Preceded by Martin Barry's 1990 short film JUKE-BAR (10 min, 35mm). More info here. 

⚫ Chicago Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Cord Jefferson’s 2023 film AMERICAN FICTION (117 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 5pm; Sunday at 3:30pm; and Thursday at 6:30pm.

Full Spectrum Features presents CAFE FOCUS in the FACETS Lounge on Sunday at 1pm. Cafe Focus is a monthly coworking pop-up for Chicago filmmakers and film workers of all backgrounds and experience levels.

Open Space Arts/Pride Film Fest presents Florent Gouëlou’s 2022 French film THREE NIGHTS A WEEK (103 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday at 7pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Pat Hartley and Dick Fontaine’s 1982 documentary I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE (92 min, DCP Digital), Neo Sora’s 2023 documentary RYUICHI SAKAMOTO | OPUS (103 min, DCP Digital) and Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s 2023 British film FEMME (99 min, DCP Digital) begin screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

The 2024 National Theatre Live production of James Graham’s Dear England (170 min, DCP Digital), directed by Rupert Goold and starring Joseph Fiennes, screens Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave., Michigan Room, 3rd. Fl.)
Anne Berrini’s 2013 documentary URSULA MAMOK: MOVEMENTS (80 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 6pm. Free admission. Advanced registration is required, and please bring a photo ID for check-in. More info.

⚫ Green Line Performing Arts Center (329 E. Garfield Blvd.)
“South Side Seventies: Video Screening and Conversation,” a special screening of a collection of rarely-seen videos from the 1970s, which were made by and about the residents of the South Side, screens Friday at 7pm. Followed by a post-screening discussion with Anton Seals (Grow Greater Englewood), Denise Zaccardi (Community TV Network) and Sarah Chapman (Media Burn), moderated by AE Stevenson (UChicago Department of Cinema and Media Studies). More info here.

⚫ Haitian American Museum of Chicago (4410 N. Clark St.)
Mark Mamalakis’ 198 film THE ART OF HAITI (28 min, Digital Projection) screens Saturday at 11am. Suggested $5 donation. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
The Film Girl Film Festival has two screenings this weekend: Asmae El Moudir’s 2024 film THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES (111 min, DCP Digital), preceded by the short MÅNGATA (15 min), on Saturday at 4:30pm and a Chicago Shorts Block on Sunday at 7pm. The Film Girl Film Festival opening night party in the Music Box Lounge takes place after the Saturday screening; admittance to the party is free.

Stacey and Michael's Showcase of Shorts VI screens Thursday at 7pm. More info on all screenings 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
Beyond the Dust: Colonial Legacy in the Desert, programmed by Martí Madaula Esquirol, 2023 - 2024 Graduate Curatorial Fellow at the Video Data Bank, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA candidate in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, screens for free on VDB TV. Includes short works by More info here.

CINE-LIST: March 22 - March 28, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Maxwell Courtright, Kyle Cubr, Ray Ebarb, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Jason Halprin, Tristan Johnson, Tien-Tien Jong, Ben Kaye, Michael Metzger, Anne Orchier, Michael Glover Smith, K.A. Westphal