:: FRIDAY, APRIL 5 - THURSDAY, APRIL 11 ::

🧅 ONION CITY EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL

Chicago Filmmakers – See below for showtimes

Light Bath (Shorts/Experimental)
Friday, 7pm
The main themes running through this program include community, collectivity, memory, and the environment around us. The opening work, Adam Cohen’s LEANED BACK (2023, 19 min), emphasizes the construction of communal love for bicycles in Chicago’s segregated neighborhoods. The more computer-generated films nurture their own form of humanity. Alice Brygo's ARDENT OTHER (2022, 16 min) takes a group of people on the street and regenerates them in a vacuum. The film seems transfixed on their visages and body language, allowing the audience to explore each individual with omnipotence. Per Bifrost's HYPNOSUGGESTION (2023, 8 min) dives into memory, albeit through technological singularity. Although this science fiction piece focuses on computer consciousness, the memories generated come from the human experience, connecting both past and future. Even the antithesis of this, forgotten moments, plays a central role in TT Takemoto's LION IN THE WIND (2023, 5 min), which features a decomposing image of a martial artist performing windmills. Whether ecological or the people in the everyday, the program feels like an acknowledgement of our surroundings. Charles Cadkin’s SUPERFUND (2023, 3 min) shows us the nature of West Chicago’s Rare Earths Facility, Kress Creek and Reed-Keppler Park in a vivid flash of cuts and color, a medium’s exploration of mother nature. In opposition, Jose Benavides’ ANTI SOCIAL STUDIES (2023, 15 min) depicts urban decay; it's almost a sad ballad for a city in disrepair. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’ THE WINGED STONE (2023, 9 min) reminds us of the purity of nature and memory. There is a handmade quality to all the films, many of which were shot on 16mm or 35mm. Federica Foglia's GLITTER FOR GIRLS (2023, 4 min) doesn’t even use actual visuals as an approach; it’s a direct collage to the film itself, redefining the use of the medium’s tools. [Ray Ebarb]
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The Wisdom Tooth (Shorts/Experimental)
Saturday, 3pm
Family ties and self-definition are the two main themes running through this shorts program, and they complement each other naturally. After all, a person can’t feel truly comfortable as part of a family until they feel accepted for who they are, and vice versa. Augustina Aranda’s SAY SOMETHING (2023, 10 min) comes closest to stating this message explicitly, as it contains an encounter between the filmmaker and her father in which the former confronts the latter for not being a more supportive parent. This conversation is illustrated with quick, pencil-stroke animation, while the sections in which Aranda speaks lovingly about her father, a Paraguayan immigrant to the US, are illustrated with camcorder footage he shot over the past several decades. The different media interact provocatively, resulting in a mosaic that’s visually and emotionally complex. in the interval (2022, 24 min), aeryka hollis o’neil’s meditation on Black transgender identity, also employs a range of media, from present-day Zoom conversations to archival footage of Nina Simone performing. The variety of formats feels appropriate, given the range of considerations at hand; the work explores such topics as rifts within the transgender community, hate crimes committed against trans people, and representations of different groups of people in media. Likewise, the discourse ranges from academic to casual, which reflects the panoply of voices around these issues. In Alex Lo and Sebastian Smith’s sebastian_1 (2024, 14 min), the eponymous subject must deal with multiple perspectives about himself. Sebastian is a young man in Toronto who documents himself as he’s being treated for an unspecified mental illness; the work is a briskly assembled collage of footage he self-recorded in which he talks about his condition, how it’s discussed in the medical literature, and how he feels about all this. It concludes with Sebastian putting on lipstick and getting ready for a night on the town, suggesting that he—and not his condition or his psychiatrists—are in control of his life. Invigorating in a different way is Anna Kipervaser’s Бабушка Галя и Дедушка Аркадий // GRANDMA GALYA AND GRANDPA ARKADIY (2023, 5 min), a brief portrait of an elderly Ukrainian couple as they make funny faces and play with fabric. Composed of short, sprightly takes, it conveys feelings of love eternally renewed over many years. Rounding out the program are two short animated works: Prapat Jiwarangsan’s PARASITE FAMILY (2022, 5 min) and Jordan Wong’s I WOULD’VE BEEN HAPPY (2023, 9 min). In the former, the filmmaker manipulates old film negatives through techniques both analog and digital, climaxing with images that morph into one another with the aid of AI technology. Per Jiwarangsan, these images are significant for being “faces [that] represent a certain kind of family that is parasitic on Thai society, the kind of families and institutions that absorb wealth and power, gradually evolving into a new species of monsters.” These anonymous faces are transformed into a kind of spectacle, however, suggesting that art has the power to transform the malign into the beautiful. Wong’s intricately animated short employs “coded pictographs and schematic abstractions applied onto glazed ceramic tiles and quilted cyanotype fabric” to illustrate a testimony by the filmmaker’s mother about how miserable she was in her marriage to Wong’s father. The mother’s painful memories and daring honesty clash constructively with the imaginative imagery, a clever representation of how involved is the process of healing from trauma. Also in the program is Camila de Lucas’ MAPA DENTAL (DENTAL MAP) (2023, 5 min). [Ben Sachs]
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From Women, For Everyone (Shorts/Experimental)
Saturday, 5pm
This program begins with two pieces that address the horrific reality of America post Roe v. Wade. The first, Ruth Hayes’ HEMORRHAGE (2023, 4 min), is a brief animated work that communicates anger and condemnation at the Supreme Court justices who overturned this essential decision. Over newspaper articles about the Court, Hayes imposes images of coat hangers, some of them dripping with blood. The message is not subtle, but it needs to be delivered loud and clear: the justices who trampled on the right to a safe abortion have blood on their hands, as more women will turn to unsafe practices when denied safe ones. The second work, Lynne Sachs’ CONTRACTIONS (2024, 12 min), also considers risky methods of terminating pregnancies when one of the abortion doctors interviewed on the soundtrack relates some of the more heartbreaking questions she’s been asked by patients. This piece is principally concerned with how anti-abortion crusaders have terrorized doctors and people seeking abortions, resulting in an upsetting portrait of misogyny in this country; the film also spotlights the heroism of abortion doctors and women who have helped others procure safe abortions at great risk. Sachs (no relation) returns throughout CONTRACTIONS to images of groups of women in the parking lot of a women’s health clinic in Tennessee, always with their backs to the camera. These are powerful images: the women are on the one hand depersonalized and, on the other, standing in solidarity. Korean filmmaker Chaerin Im’s animated piece I AM A HORSE (2022, 8 min) reflects on a different kind of solidarity and a different kind of struggle, taking inspiration from the predictive birth dreams, or tae-mong that Im’s mother had when pregnant with her and her twin sister. The ink drawings that depict these dreams are beautiful and imaginative, though a concluding title card undercuts their charm with the information that the tae-mong tradition is rooted in gender stereotypes and notions of female subservience. The tone of the program starts to brighten with Deborah Stratman’s OTHERHOOD (2023, 3 min), a characteristically rich collage that combines poetry, aphorisms, evocative nature sounds, and gorgeous natural imagery. It culminates with a triumphant call for self-definition that’s all the more poignant in light of the preceding pieces. Zuza Banasińska’s GRANDMAMAUNTSISTERCAT (2024, 23 min) takes the program in a decidedly whimsical direction. Made up of shots from old Polish educational films, the piece is narrated by a little girl who speaks of her birth, her place in her family, and matriarchal traditions in eastern European culture. The footage is largely taken from science films; in this new, reappropriated context, it seems like the stuff of science fiction. Next on the program is FIRST AID–TEST SERIES 1 (2022, 9 min), a German work directed by Maria Anna Dewes and Myriam Thyes, an odd collection of shots, mostly of arms and legs, in what appears to be some kind of factory, performing arcane actions. Showing body parts without the context of whole bodies (and with the context of industrial space instead), the filmmakers defamiliarize intimate parts of ourselves. The program concludes with the Canadian short LEGS (2023, 15 min), directed by Jennifer Still, Christine Fellows, and Chantal Mierau. In this work, Still reads a poem she wrote on the soundtrack while the images alternate between illustrating the text literally and responding to it on a more abstract level. Again, body parts are defamiliarized, this time through such poetic images as an empty swimming pool and panty hose being filled with sheet cake. The text is lovely, addressing female identity in a manner that feels awestruck and hopeful, marking a moving finish to a strong, provocative program. [Ben Sachs]
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Nocturnal Cacophony (Shorts/Experimental)
Saturday, 9pm
The "nocturnal" in this program’s films refers less to the actual nighttime and more to the loneliness of that time, as well as the worlds we inhabit when completely alone—the films we make in our heads or see on the backs of our eyelids. Leading the program is Maxime Martinot’s THE FILM YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE (2023, 11 min), a sort of thought experiment in this vein, collecting the text from several dozen audience warning title cards from films ranging from PICKPOCKET to JOKER. In isolation, the cards produce anticipation for films almost certainly more provocative than the ones that really exist, though the imagined version is what tends to drive discourse anyway. For the viewer, this exercise is a sort of mind-palace-workout, priming them for the unfixed mental terrain of the rest of the program. Many of the films are fantasies of the self, like the beguiling freak narrator of Joseph Wilcox’s NOBODY WANTS TO FIX THINGS ANYMORE (2023, 4 min) who fancies himself a sort of vigilante handyman, developing an obsession with a particular rock used to prop up a city bench. Others are more explicitly pathetic, like the animated blob of a man who trolls the internet for meaning in Luis Grané’s NOWHERE STREAM (2023, 7 min) or the titular pseudo-cop who patrols empty mall parking lots in Tanner Masseth’s PORTRAIT 001: SECURITY GUARD (2023, 12 min). Elsewhere, these reveries are free of people, like the astringent images of watch ads and airline lobbies that make up Michael Bucuzzo’s STRESS EATING TIME (2023, 10 min). But the program’s strongest material focuses on the tension between an individual and their fantasy, like Philip Thompson’s LIVING REALITY (2024, 16 min). Starring Thompson himself as Theo, the sole Black friend in the sitcom friend group, the film is a sort of longform anti-comedy where Theo constantly finds himself out of the conversation-and-laugh-track rhythm of those around him, whose disinterest in Theo’s life aims to uphold both a racial and formal status quo. It’s a film of stark contrasts, with Thompson nailing the production details of a cheesy '90s sitcom only to undercut them with stark images of Theo’s own depressed state outside of the group, calling into question the reality of the character and whether his projected friend group is its own sort of pathology. This potential structure is hinted at in Ross Meckfessel’s new film SPARK FROM A FALLING STAR (2023, 21 min) as well. The main human form we see in the film is a man asleep at the wheel of his car in an empty parking lot, both early and late in the film. What comes between is a series of typically Meckfesselian, gorgeous-but-inscrutable images that focus mostly on city spaces but always with some slight abstraction at play. At night, the cityscapes are reduced to points of light, reduced by invisibility but extended by the light’s halos so that the architecture becomes a potent mix of seen and imagined. During the day, Meckfessel shoots crowds through layers of glass floors or warped in mirrored walls, always with some mediating mechanism. It’s not clear whether this is a sort of intentional self-reference, a notoriously obscure filmmaker presenting a man whose own dreams seem out of reach for both him and the audience. But it’s the film in the program that perhaps best captures the "nocturnal cacophony" felt when you zone out, receding into yourself until everything around you changes. [Maxwell Courtright]
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The Life That I Was Living (Shorts/Experimental)
Sunday, 3pm
The title of the first film in this program, I WAS THERE (2023, 14 min), could be said to represent its theme. Each of the six shorts establishes a particular and rather personal viewpoint that places both its participants and viewers at a certain place and time, a specificity from which the broadness of universal truths emanates. Chi Jang Yin’s film mainly assumes the perspective of a Japanese doctor who witnessed the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima after attending to a patient away from the hospital where he worked and where all but three people were killed by the bomb. Where his sporadic narration evinces one perspective, the images on screen show various facets of the American military apparatus, conveyed through archival pictures and footage and, most damningly, written records that illuminate our country’s thinking behind the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. It might be lazy to evoke OPPENHEIMER (though Yin has been researching the Manhattan Project and discourse surrounding it for the past decade), but this nevertheless brings to mind the debates around that film; the title is something of a response through its evocation of a singular, human presence in the face of such atrocity. Oona Taper’s THIS TRAIN IS INVISIBLE UNTIL IT CRASHES (2023, 4 min) is decidedly lighter, composed of drawings made while Taper was on Chicago’s rapid transit system and featuring interpretations of common phrases related to delays that can be heard while riding on it, such as “signal problems” and “an incident.” People watching this in Chicago will certainly think “I was there” on hearing them, again relating to the idea of a dual specificity between creator and viewer that transcends exactitude and in this case becomes a series of poetic ruminations. Shot on a 16mm Bolex, Shawn Antoine II’s FOR THOSE THAT LIVED THERE (2023, 6 min) is a ghostly portrait of the former Cabrini-Green Public Housing Projects and the gentrified community that emerged in its wake. “A product of bad politics, failed policy, and official neglect,” says the voice of a broadcast journalist above the haunting images, “it exists unseen except by those who live there,” this being the quip from which the film takes its name. Here the specific person whose viewpoint is invoked remains unseen (the plight of migrants to the city is also considered), thus becoming a stand-in for a communal reckoning with forces outside of its control. I won’t pretend to understand Raine Yung’s I CAN NO LONGER SEE (2023, 8 min), but I appreciate the visual mayhem nonetheless. Technically a series of short experimental films rolled into one, the combined effort results in an opaque self-portrait that shows way, way more than it tells. Daniel Baker-Wells’ THE PRINCESS AND THE PEACOCK (2024, 14 min) is, ironically, a rather straightforward conjuration (at least in terms of how it conveys information about its subject; visually, it’s a trip) of alternative-lifestyle freak show performers in the FLINTA (femme, lesbian, Intersex, non-binary, trans, a-gender) community. The candidness of the filmmaking allows for the subject, Mona, a 22-year-old trans woman from France who’s living in Berlin, where she does a freak show-type performance involving needles and peacock feathers, to properly take center stage and communicate the significance of her community and what she practices therein. Conversely, Laurentia Genske’s CUANDO LLEGUE LA NEBLINA (WHEN THE FOG COMES) (2023, 24 min) uses various modes (photos, animation and audio) to tell the stories of four people with different relationships to the city of Tijuana along the Mexican-American border. The array of stylings befits the concept of multiple perspectives speaking to similar, albeit still different, lived experiences, as do all the films in this illuminating program. [Kat Sachs]
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Chica Barbosa & Fernanda Pessoa’s SWING AND SWAY (Brazil)
Sunday, 5pm
Much ink has been spilled over the power of cinema to connect us with our fellow theatergoers, but what of the power of movies—specifically making our own movies—​to connect us with each other one on one? That's what filmmakers (and real-life friends) Chica Barbosa and Fernanda Pessoa explore in their nakedly earnest film essay SWING AND SWAY, a collection of video diaries pinging back and forth and chronicling two separate-but-linked lives connected through separate-but-linked catastrophes. It’s April 2020, and as Chica adjusts to her new life in Los Angeles, Fernanda remains back home in São Paulo, where the pair's friendship is further tested by a world barely holding itself together amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. To stave off even further encroaching modes of isolation, Barbosa and Pessoa, two friends linked by artistry, decide to spend the next year communicating solely through video letters, each inspired by a different experimental female filmmaker, all within three-week-spans. The result—​taking inspiration from the likes of Cheryl Dunye, Carolee Schneeman, Marjorie Keller, Chick Strand, and a host of other cinematic voices—​becomes a collage of internal thoughts literalized, bodies and buildings and nature colliding artfully into each other, as the dual realities of would-be dictators Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro become a despairing unifying tie between two friends working to stay afloat amidst a work aiming to drown them. Through interviews, confessionals, stop-motion sequences, and image-layering, Barbosa and Pessoa successfully create a bond through filmmaking that brings them closer and closer to each other—​thematically, emotionally, and artistically—​especially at a time when such proximity seemed near impossible. Preceded by Steve Reinke’s 2023 short SUNDOWN (8 min). (2023, 82 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Community Drag Theater (The Work of Tom Rubnitz) (Shorts/Experimental)
Sunday, 7 pm
The films made throughout the 1980s by Tom Rubnitz reflect both a spirited humor about and a criticism of the ways in which the media hid and contributed to the alienation and harm of the queer community during that time. Born in Chicago, Rubnitz was a staple of the New York City club culture in the '80s; his underground films illuminate and capture the unique people and spaces that make up this significant moment in queer history. THE MOTHER SHOW (1981, 4 min) was made in collaboration with Barbara Lipp and Tom Koken. The narrator wears a plastic doll’s head in place of her own as she monologues in a high-pitched voice about her mother and her childhood. The humor comes from her averageness, her discussion of standard midcentury interior design and fashion as she frolics amongst fields and forests. It’s a smart, condensed parody of dreamy girlhood as she falls and farts her way through the scenes asking things like, "Mom, what’s a boner?" and concluding with the bland statement, "Mom, you’re my mother to me." HUSTLE WITH MY MUSCLE (1986, 4 min) is a music video featuring artist John Sex, containing a series of shots of suggestive objects (bananas, sausages, snakes), and combined with a focus on dance and movement. It is a parody of the MTV aesthetic while also proposing liberation can be found in excess. FROM THE FILES OF THE PYRAMID COCKTAIL LOUNGE (1983, 6 min) captures the aesthetic, artistry, and joy found in this key location from NYC’s queer club scene in the early '80s, with a focus on drag performance. Similarly, DRAG QUEEN MARATHON (1986, 5 min) features drag queens (including Lady Bunny) spending their day out and about in NYC, jubilantly gallivanting around Central Park and the Guggenheim, drawing curious crowds as they go. CHICKEN ELAINE (1983, 1 min) lampoons television cooking shows and commercials, calling the recipe “easy and fancy.” MADE FOR TV (1984, 15 min) is an even more dark and frivolous look at television and consumerism. Featuring NYC actress and performance artist Ann Magnuson, it’s a satirical look at daytime television—​commercials, talk shows, new reports—​and women’s limited roles within that space (Magnuson plays every character seen on screen, increasingly incorporating their daily struggles). The film continually flips through channels, keeps adding on new sequences until it becomes a frenzied montage. LISTEN TO THIS (1992, 15 min) features artist David Wojnarowicz in a prolonged talking head monologue. He begins by discussing the way television constantly flips between providing fear and hope for viewers, creating a uniform culture that alienates those that do not fit in. This film is a directly darker take on telecommunication, as Wojnarowicz moves into a more personal discussion of death and the ongoing AIDS crisis. Bringing in his own experience and those of his friends (both Rubnitz and Wojnarowicz passed away from complications due to AIDS in 1992), he wishes that culture allowed for a more honest examination of life and death, moving away from distraction to acknowledgment. He holds the media—​and government—​​directly responsible for hiding information about and perpetrating false information about HIV/AIDS, ragefully pointing out their complicity in the deaths of many. This final short is a testament to both Rubnitz and Wojnarowicz as significant queer artists and their meaningful work as AIDS activists. Presented in partnership with Nightingale Projects. [Megan Fariello]
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The competition shorts programs will be available to stream virtually from Monday through Sunday, April 14. Note that some shorts included may not be available to stream. [We Don't Know Yet] What A Cinema Can Do: A Night Of Live Sound And Moving Image,  a live performance program adjacent to the festival exploring “expanded cinema” in an attempt to put cinematic art to the tasks of resistance, rupture, and reconfiguration of mediatic experience, per the event description, takes place Friday, 8pm, at Public Works (2141 W. North Ave.), and Left Handed Memories: The Films of Shellie Fleming (1991-1999, 80 min, 16mm) screens Saturday, 7pm, at Chicago Filmmakers. The latter is presented in partnership with the Chicago Film Society. More info on the festival here.

📽️ Crucial Viewing

James Benning’s EL VALLEY CENTRO (US/Experimental)

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

The first film in James Benning’s California Trilogy, EL VALLEY CENTRO comprises 35 shots of central California, many of them concerning environments spawned by commercial agriculture and few of them containing people; each portrait is two and a half minutes long and shot from a stationary camera. The results are hypnotic in the typical Benning manner, evoking both grandeur and reflective calm, though per the filmmaker, EL VALLEY CENTRO is also more explicitly political than anything he’d made previously. Some of the more memorable shots address the sheer unnaturalness of factory farming, presenting monstrous machines as they manipulate the Earth; other important moments feature the outside of a prison and an oil fire. Conversely, none of the shots feels particularly disturbing as it unfolds—perhaps the spectacle of a world defined by machines and generally deprived of people (who are almost always in long shot when they do appear) just feels like something out of a storybook. Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing on the film in late 1999 (just before it had its world premiere at Cinema Borealis), likened it to Joseph Cornell’s boxes in that the contents are clearly demarcated and organized yet “teeming with fantasy and magic.” When you see Benning’s shot of the entryway to the town of Modesto lighting up at sundown, you can see what Rosenbaum means. The film concludes with a series of credits that categorize each shot in terms of what it depicted, where it occurred, and, whenever possible, who owns the land. Per Benning, this strategy (which occurs in all three parts of the California Trilogy) is meant to play with viewers’ memories and force them to recontextualize everything they’ve just seen. For as fleeting as is much of the content of EL VALLEY CENTRO, the credits ensure that the film stays with you for a long time. Screening as part of the series, An Artist of Intimate Intent: James Benning. (1999, 87 min, 16mm) [Ben Sachs]

Bob Fosse's CABARET (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 7pm and Saturday, 8:30pm

CABARET starts off with a bang—it’s got one of the best opening sequences in the New Hollywood canon. Bob Fosse synthesizes a stunning range of influences: the ironic, modernist songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht; the circus-like atmospherics of Federico Fellini; the immersive camerawork and editing of direct-cinema documentaries (Fosse conveys the high of performing like few other directors); and the richly detailed yet subtly melancholy depiction of a past era à la Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST and Luchino Visconti’s films from THE LEOPARD on. And all this is in the service of reviving the Hollywood musical, one of the greatest of popular genres. Fosse’s choreography is astonishing in its forthright eroticism; the dance numbers draw out the film’s themes of sexual liberation and exploitation in a way the conversations can only suggest. The subsequent musical numbers sustain the energy of the introduction, and they comment on the drama in a Greek chorus-like fashion. The story follows the relationship between Brian (Michael York), a closeted gay British writer who moves to Berlin in 1931, and Sally (Liza Minnelli), an American expat who performs at the titular club. They fall in love, but the relationship, like the liberated Weimar era, can’t last. Brian says he can’t adjust to Sally’s libertine ways, but really he can’t respect her for the moral compromises she makes for show business. It’s still remarkable that a serious, two-hour consideration of sexual revolution under the Weimar Republic could get released with a PG rating. I wonder how many kids learned about threesomes, cross dressing, and queer-positive attitudes from CABARET. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography (for Geoffrey Unsworth, who also shot 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and Polanski’s TESS). Screening as part of the Board Picks series. (1972, 124 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Shu Lea Cheang's FRESH KILL (US)

Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

Looser and more underground than Hal Hartley’s early features but less outré than what Jon Moritsugu was making around the same time, FRESH KILL remains an agreeable example of post-Jarmuschian cool. It takes place on Staten Island and features almost no white characters; the principal exception is a woman who’s raising a Black daughter with an Indian-American woman and whose mother is also Black. She works at a trendy sushi bar where the other staff members are Latinx and Chinese, and practically everyone she knows loves to rant about how corporate culture is destroying the world. The ramshackle plot has something to do with a toxic waste spill and subsequent corporate cover-up, but FRESH KILL is best appreciated as a collection of wry, literate moments held together by a hip, multicultural ambience. If the film feels indebted to STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984) and DOWN BY LAW (1986) in its understated humor and deliberate compositional style, it also anticipates GHOST DOG (2000) in its utopian racial politics. The depiction of nascent internet culture is fascinating too, reflecting another utopian dream of the 1990s that didn’t play out as many people hoped. (1994, 78 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Cheang’s 2023 film UKI (86 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday at 6pm. 

Alice Rohrwacher’s LA CHIMERA (Italy/France/Switzerland)

Gene Siskel Film Center and the Music Box Theatre –​ See Venue websites for showtimes

For Arthur, there’s little that separates the living from the dead. Played by a steely, towering Josh O’Connor, most often seen sidling through scenes donning a detritus-laden white linen suit, he spends his days wandering about with his merry band of "tombaroli," pilfering the tombs hidden beneath their feet across Italy, raiding a myriad of resting places for long-lost Etruscan treasures that, in their eyes, aren’t doing the dead any good just sitting about. Arthur’s mind wanders about, too, to his long-lost love Beniamina, a figure seen in flickers, dreamlike, perhaps also sitting in that nebulous zone between what we know is gone but what we wish was still here. Indeed, our first glimpse of Arthur is of him riding a train back home after the end of his prison sentence, his own resurrection back into the land of the "living." Alice Rohrwacher’s film tends to navigate various planes of existence, often changing aspect ratios, film stocks, even genres; the story curves through tropes found in heist thrillers, comedies, and romances, employing techniques found within the realms of silent film, experimental essay, and documentary filmmaking. Her collage of storytelling ends up falling somewhere—​spiritually and thematically—​between a fairy tale and a ghost story, weighing the love of the present with the love of that which is long past, of building your life in deference to death, of weighing one’s soul against the thrill of unearthing objects not meant for human eyes. Arthur himself is gifted with an otherworldly spirit of divining, of knowing in his very soul where these underground treasures lie, with Rohrwacher’s camera literally performing revolutions to find Arthur in another visual plane, familiar yet upside-down. What a gift to find a film so brimming with passion, humor, and otherworldly desire brimming from every frame for those curious enough to pull on the threads Rohrwacher leaves lying before us. Perhaps a glimmer of light will shine through after all that digging. (2023, 130 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Triple Threat! A 3D Series

Music Box Theatre – See below for showtimes

Martin Scorsese's HUGO (US)
Saturday, 12pm and Thursday, 4pm
When HUGO was released over a decade ago, it already felt like an anachronism, a movie with a screw loose: here was a $150-million Georges Méliès biopic that stood alongside the first THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA movies, the second iteration of FOOTLOOSE, the third TRANSFORMERS and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY installments, and the fourth MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE entry on the Paramount Pictures release slate. Who knew that a Caldecott Medal conferred instant bankability and IP cred upon its source material, a recent YA novel by Brian Selznick? If ever a project exemplified folie de grandeur, surely it was HUGO. When the final product—a movie as ornate, ridiculous, and delicate as a Fabergé egg—was released over Thanksgiving weekend, it was received in hushed tones. It was the first Martin Scorsese picture for the whole family, a deceptively subdued advancement in stereoscopic photography, a moving tribute to a cinema pioneer, and a slab of homework masquerading as fun for kids who would never sit still for over two hours anyway. With its lightly sketched subplots and supporting characters, its plot-stopping flights of visual fancy, its densely imagined milieu, and its technical novelty, HUGO also played like a movie not long for this world: an impossibly precious, reserved-seat roadshow that would soon be edited down for general audiences, only to be reconstructed decades later by The Film Foundation. Luckily, we still have HUGO, largely intact and no less strange than it first appeared. (Seeing it in 2D is still quite enjoyable, but the snouts of Sacha Baron Cohen and various pooches are funnier in 3D. Either version ranks among Scorsese's very finest works.) The inherent sentimentality of the material—the familial longing of orphans, the veneration of old books and movies, the triumphant restoration of an artist in winter—dominates the proceedings, but HUGO is a darker work than immediately evident. After all, when the story begins Hugo Cabret's only friend is a broken-down, dead-eyed automaton that can't even deliver the message it's been programmed to impart. There's much talk of magic and dreams in the text, much emphasis on cinema as something wondrous and unruly, but HUGO has a coldly rationalist heart, content to compare a disabled war veteran to a machine that might reclaim its social value with a quick tune-up. This is a movie with grease and oil in its veins, with the notion that we're fabricated by our creator with just enough parts to get by. This fanciful invention of cinema emphasizes the nuts-and-bolts aspect above all, with a Maltese Cross casually re-purposed from an obsolete automaton to fashion a projector's intermittent movement. At a time when cinema itself was increasingly slipping into digital simulacrum, HUGO argues for a particular interpretation of the mechanical past, one that values the causality, functionality, and coherence of the machine world. It venerates tinkering and understanding yourself through the systems surrounding you. HUGO professes a moving belief in the purposefulness of things—and people, too. (2011, 126 min, 3D DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]
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Tony Scott's TOP GUN (US)
Saturday, 4pm
The five men sit in the locker room, their toned torsos still damp from their showers. Around each of their waists, a thin, white towel is tightly wrapped, under so much tension it must hurt to breathe, let alone walk. Pendulous, pneumatic bulges sway tantalizingly beneath the cloth. Hollywood arches his back against the wall, stroking his chest, pulling at his dog tags. Iceman leans against a post, jutting his pectorals out as far as he can. Maverick struts through the room, surveying the parade of flesh available to his delighted eye. “It’s not your flying,” Iceman tells him, sweat beading slightly on his forehead and the bridge of his nose. His mouth hangs open, just a hair, before he continues, “it’s your attitude.” As he continues, Maverick bends forward, hanging over Goose, presenting his rear to Iceman. Goose’s head partially obscures the stenciled text, making it seem as though it says MAN OF THE DAY rather than PLAN. “The enemy’s dangerous,” Iceman tells Maverick, “but right now, you’re worse than the enemy. You’re dangerous and foolish.” Iceman, back in close-up, clenches his jaw, his face shaking back and forth in frustration. “You may not like the guys flying with you.” Hollywood looks down toward Iceman’s crotch. “They may not like you,” Iceman says, “but whose side are you on?” Maverick, in profile, faces Goose in the foreground and Wolfman in the background, torn between his need and his desire: will he stay loyal to his partner or, like Wolfman, be submissive to another pilot?  Whose side is he on? He’s going to have to choose which man to be with, and what kind of man he’s going to be. Disgusted, Iceman and Hollywood cross each other’s paths as they leave, their rippling flesh and, in Hollywood’s case, powerful upper thighs, heaving as they go. Defeated, Maverick shows Goose his bare left leg, all the way up to his crotch, but Goose stoically refuses to rise to the bait. He, too, has had his heart broken by his naïf of a pilot, but no more. “At least Viper got Iceman before he got us. We still got a shot at it,’” he says, the hopelessness and betrayal in his face belying the words that come out of his mouth. Maverick gazes regretfully after Iceman, muttering, “That was stupid.  I know better than that.” Back to a two-shot, Maverick concludes, “That will never happen again,” pounding his fist in the air. Goose rises, caresses Maverick’s shoulder, and walks away. “I know,” he says, “I know.” Finally, Maverick slumps, listless and deflated, onto the bench. It says something about Tony Scott that the movie he made in which Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon have sex is only his second-queerest melodrama. (1986, 110 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]
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Lee Unkrich's TOY STORY 3 (US/Animation)
Sunday, 11:15 am and Tuesday, 9:30pm
It must be admitted that to presume ignorance of TOY STORY 3 is to effectively admit that you hate classical Hollywood cinema: unfettered by any coherent and/or crude ideological ambition, this film is a legitimately relentless puree of stereotyped genres, and a rarity in that it only gets better with the more old movies you've seen; in fact, it's quite possible that it's a total bore for those who are actually in kindergarten. Lifting discursive patterns, gestures, soundtrack cues, and other mise-en-scène from a wide variety of narrative classics, at its high midpoint TOY STORY 3 can be comically shifting from mimicking melodrama, Westerns, prison dramas, capers, gothic horror, and even Mexican 1940s caballero films over the course of just a few minutes. This disturbingly informed and reflexive scriptwriting is, however, likely conceptually overshadowed by Pixar's flashy surface role as both the apotheosis of engineering in aesthetic manufacture and as a fully-formed NorCal simulacral apparatus of SoCal cinematic production: a 218,000 square-foot involute eye, a 1.5- megawatt shrine to the optics of the camera lens. Perhaps the intermittent, clever noir homages in the screenplay are of secondary interest to the likely fact that multiple PhDs slaved away for a year to produce a relatively photorealistic black garbage bag for a single onscreen sequence. And perhaps that significant history-of- technology datum should be in turn dismissed, with a consideration of the studio's typically dreary heteronormative politics (for a company based in the East Bay, the repeated homophobic reaction shots to the antics of Mattel's metrosexualized Ken (Michael Keaton) are specifically reprehensible); the inescapable reproduction of globalized commodity fetishism underlying the trilogy's very premise; and of the remarkable inaccessibility to humanity which necessarily pervades any endeavor constructed primarily by hundreds of unrefined CGI savants who have seem to have never grown out of the idea that STAR WARS is a fundamental cornerstone of civilization. That is to say: a movie ostensibly about growing up and leaving your toys behind, produced by an assembly line of grown men with toys adorning every corner of their cubes. (2010, 103 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Michael Castelle]
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Alfred Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER (US)
Sunday, 2:30pm and Wednesday, 4pm
Adapted by Frederick Knott from his play of the same name, DIAL M FOR MURDER stars an exceptional Ray Milland as Tony Wendice, a retired tennis pro who decides to murder his wife, Margot (Grace Kelly), after he finds out she is cheating on him. Similar to LIFEBOAT (1944), ROPE (1948), and REAR WINDOW (1954), Hitchcock contains the drama of the film in a single set--the cramped living room of Tony and Margot's London apartment. Enclosing the few characters and their audience in this unhappy couple's living room, Hitchcock creates the film's suspense through our inherent claustrophobia. The small room often forces the characters close together; Hitchcock captures their faces in close-ups, revealing how they look at each other and how much those looks betray. Sometimes they purposely turn their backs to others and/or to the camera in fear of being caught. No one can escape from this room and the interrogation of gazes inside it. While Hitchcock's camera focuses on Tony, Margot, and the supporting characters, it gives equal attention to the couple's things, particularly a key, letter, and telephone. The film and its murder plot hinge on these objects, and Hitchcock fills them with dread; he shoots them in close-ups similar to those that frame his actors' faces. Sometimes the characters see the objects, but often they are not so lucky; Tony and Margot's knowledge of the very small, but complex world in which they live rests in their very things. In his wondrous HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (1988-1998), Godard described Hitchcock as a poete maudit whose life's work pivoted on the role of the object. Through objects, which override the conventions of narrative and logic, Hitchcock became "the greatest creator of forms of the twentieth century... it is forms which tell us, finally, what there is at the bottom of things." DIAL M FOR MURDER is a great investigation into the prison of claustrophobia and the objects such fear leaves in its wake. (1954, 105 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Candace Wirt]
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Jack Arnold's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (US)
Sunday, 5:30pm
In Jack Arnold’s 3D monster feature CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, a group of plucky scientists journeys deep into an Amazonian cul-de-sac in search of a fossil, definitive proof of an aquatic hominoid from the Devonian Period. (Why a hominoid would be from the Devonian of all times is a mystery too deep to plumb.) They find instead that the species they seek is still alive, and it lives in lovesick solitude in a cave at the base of a serene lagoon. Narratively, CREATURE is a great plodding beast, lurching from one plot point to the next with all the dexterity of a half-man/half-fish out of water. But once in the lagoon, the film becomes a feast for the eyes, a series of languorous plays of depth, movement, and cross-species eroticism that is genuinely scary, and deeply disturbing. The film's 3D effects on land are often limited to cheap, but effective, shock effects—the creature approaching the lenses, his claw raking our eyeballs, and so on—but the uncannily unrealistic effects of 3D cinema become the very subject matter as the monster propels himself easily, strangely, through a primeval seascape. As the scientists close in on the Gill-Man, threatening to capture it, or kill it, the film literalizes its theme of humanity versus nature, making the advancement of learning a process that can only succeed at the expense of the world it studies. The wild, in the person of the creature, its libidinous needs created by the presence of a woman amongst the scientists, must either capture and rape her or be destroyed in the attempt. In CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, the only response possible to the evil we bring on nature is to finish the job of destroying it before it takes revenge upon us. (1954, 79 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]
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Bi Gan's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (China)
Monday, 7pm
When Luo Hongwa (Huang Jue) sits down in a movie theater and puts on a pair of 3D glasses about 70 minutes into LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, finally triggering the title card, you know you’re in for a ride. Of course, this is already the expectation for those coming to Bi Gan’s sophomore feature aware of its buzzy 60-minute unbroken traveling shot, but it’s at this precise, narratively and phenomenologically pivotal moment that the spectator feels the real stirrings of anticipation. It’s a leveling up, an invitation to cross the threshold from the film’s splintered and largely static first section to its oneiric second, a transition that entails not only an aesthetic movement into the more immersive, tactile realm of 3D but also a somatic movement on the part of the audience. As we put on our glasses, mimicking Luo, we immure ourselves yet further into the darkened space of the theater, and by extension into his/our mental space, entering a point of no return. The ensuing long take is a virtuosic (and perhaps inevitably self-regarding) marvel of choreography, less impressive for the post-converted 3D than for its astonishing logistical feat, as the camera wends its way from a mineshaft down and through a neon-lit village, changes between character vectors, and at one point lifts off into the night sky in an edit-less switch from third- to first-person perspective. Bi Gan, who came out of the gate already rigorously exploring the capabilities of the long take with his debut KAILI BLUES, here deepens his structuralist preoccupation with onscreen time in a cyclical narrative that assumes the shape of an unending lucid dream. The moment in the theater effectively cleaves the film into two parts, although the chronology of said parts is compellingly unfixed. In the first part, Luo has returned to his hometown of Kaili following the death of his father. He is haunted by two other disappearances: that of his friend, Wildcat (Lee Hong-chi), who was killed by the gangster Zuo Hongyan (Chen Yongzhong), and most pertinently that of Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), Zuo’s kept woman and Lou’s former flame. Luo searches for Wan as he remembers their summer together, yearning after her and everything else that has been lost in the crumbling Kaili. Although this section takes place in ostensible waking reality, its scrambled timeline and frequently surreal imagery, accompanied by self-reflexive comments from Luo and Wan about the relations between movies, memories, and dreams, place it somewhere far more liminal. By the time the second part comes along, cleverly reworking the elements of the first in ways both more dreamlike and more tangible, it’s not clear if either section should be considered “real.” Like many of his noted long take forebears and influential contemporaries—Tarkovsky, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang among them—Bi is interested in how film manipulates time and reorients subjectivity, how it can induce perceptual states that challenge our naturalized temporal regimes. Bi may still need some work finding his own voice outside the shadows of those giants (a glass slowly trembling off the edge of a table and a four-minute shot of a man tearily eating an apple are especially explicit nods to two of them), but his prodigious formal invention is a gift to anyone excited by the aesthetic and technological possibilities of this ever-evolving art form. (2018, 140 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Jean-Luc Godard's GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D (France/Switzerland)
Thursday, 7pm
In Jean-Luc Godard's 1996 film FOR EVER MOZART, the director poses the question, "In the 'I think, therefore I am,' is the 'I' of 'I am' no longer the same as the 'I' of 'I think' and why?" GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D seeks to answer this Cartesian inquiry with a resounding "no" by offering a philosophical meditation on the fractured nature of identity in our era of mass communication. In his astonishing first feature in 3D, the 84-year-old Godard pointedly shows, through an almost impossibly rich tapestry of stereoscopic images and sounds, how language and technology have conspired to create barriers that separate humans not only from each other but also from themselves ("Soon everyone will need an interpreter to understand the words coming from their own mouths," is one characteristically epigrammatic line of dialogue.) The film is split into three parts: "Nature" (a section demarcated by a title card reading "1"), which focuses on Josette and Gedeon (Héloïse Godet and Kamel Abdelli); "Metaphor" (a section demarcated by a title card reading "2"), which focuses on Ivitch and Marcus (Zoé Bruneau and Richard Chevallier); and a short third part (beginning with a title card reading "3D"), which introduces a third couple—Godard and his longtime collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville, who are not seen but whose voices are heard on the soundtrack. The real "star" of GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D, however, is not a human at all but rather Godard's mixed-breed dog Roxy, who is frequently depicted alone, frolicking in nature, commanding both the most screen time and serving as the subject of some of the film's most dazzling stereoscopic effects. The shots of Roxy's handsome snout in the maw of Godard and cinematographer Fabrice Aragno's homemade 3D-camera rig, which convey an overwhelming feeling of love for the animal on the part of his owner/director, are so rapturously beautiful they may make you want to cry. The film ends by juxtaposing the sounds of a dog barking with that of a baby wailing on the soundtrack, thus linking Roxy not only to nature but, implicitly, to a state of unspoiled innocence that humans possess only prior to learning to speak. Godard's poetic use of 3D in GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D, the best such use of the technology in any movie I've seen, puts this groundbreaking work in the class of his (and the cinema's) great achievements. (2014, 70 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Michael Glover Smith]
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Also screening as part of the Triple Threat! series are André De Toth’s 1953 film HOUSE OF WAX (88 min, 3D DCP Digital), which screens Friday at 4:15pm and Wednesday at 7:15pm; Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film GRAVITY (91 min, 3D DCP Digital) on Friday at 7pm and Monday at 4:15pm; Ridley Scott’s 2012 film PROMETHEUS (124 min, 3D DCP Digital) on Friday at 10:15pm, co-presented by Metal Movie Nights (the party kicks off at 8:30pm with Metal Vinyl Weekend spinning records and summoning spirits in the Music Box Lounge, then the Metal Movie Night pre-show of classic trailers and metal videos starts at 10pm); Tony Scott’s 1986 film TOP GUN (110 min, 3D DCP Digital) on Saturday at 4pm; Jeff Tremaine’s 2010 film JACKASS 3-D (100 min, 3D DCP Digital) on Saturday at 7:30pm; Kevin Greutert’s 2010 film SAW 3D (90 min, 3D DCP Digital) on Saturday at 10:30pm, presented by Music Box of Horrors; and Joseph Kosinski’s 2010 film TRON: LEGACY (125 min, 3D DCP Digital) on Sunday at 8:30pm. More info on the series here. 

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Bill Gunn's PERSONAL PROBLEMS (US)

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

A major influence on the subsequent generation of Black independent filmmakers, Bill Gunn may be best known today as the screenwriter of Hal Ashby’s satirical THE LANDLORD and as the writer-director of the subversive horror film GANJA AND HESS. But PERSONAL PROBLEMS shows that Gunn was also adept at chamber drama—the movie conveys keen psychological insight and showcases several powerful performances. Imagined as an “experimental soap opera” and shot on 3/4-inch videotape, PROBLEMS achieves the intimacy of television while advancing a cinematic sweep; it develops such a comprehensive sense of black life in Harlem circa 1980 that it seems like a crucial document of its time. Author Ishmael Reed developed the story, but Gunn fleshed it out through improvisations with his remarkable cast. As Dave Kehr wrote of A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, it feels not made, but found, with Gunn capturing the messiness of life as it’s lived. The principal character is a middle-aged emergency room nurse named Johnnie Mae Brown (Vertamae Grosvenor). A southern transplant to New York, she’s a complicated figure, motivated to do good in the world but incapable of maintaining order in her personal life. Johnnie Mae argues constantly with her husband and her father-in-law (who lives with the couple in their cramped apartment) and recklessly cheats on her spouse. Gunn doesn’t editorialize on her actions, but rather embraces the character’s contradictions and establishes a rich social context that allows viewers to understand her motivations. Frequently he stops the narrative to have characters discuss their pasts and political concerns, giving PROBLEMS the feel of a case study. The title notwithstanding, the characters’ problems are social as well as personal, as Gunn shows how their feelings about social mobility, race relations, and the American political landscape impact their behavior. The movie raises more questions about the characters than it can possibly resolve, which is exactly the point—it’s a work intended to make you more curious about the world you inhabit. Screening as part of Apparitions: An Assemblage of Black Independent Films. (1980-81, 165 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Kenji Mizoguchi's UGETSU (Japan)

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

Some films are so brilliant that they appear more elementary than they actually are, the depth of their magnificence unwinding naturally rather than with obscure aesthetic and plotting mechanisms that must be parsed out and ascribed meaning. This applies to many of Kenji Mizoguchi’s films, the best of which explore life’s cruel ironies through obvious means and from there develop into cinematic aphorisms that expose inexorable truths. Set, like many of the director’s greatest works, in the past—in this case, Japan's Azuchi–Momoyama period (1568–1600), marred by decades of civil war—UGETSU centers on two peasant couples caught in the midst of ongoing battle. Genjūrō (Masayuki Mori) is a farmer and potter who begins making a lot of money by selling his wares to enemy combatants; his wife, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka, who worked with Mizoguchi for 17 years and was also the second Japanese woman to direct films), is more concerned with the sanctity of their domestic life, which they share with a young son. Genjūrō's brother, Tōbei (Eitaro Ozawa), yearns to be a samurai much to the chagrin of his wife, Ohama (Mitsuko Mito). (All the actors were regular collaborators with Mizoguchi, Ozu, Kurosawa, and other luminaries of Japanese cinema.) Miyagi is separated from the group when the others, having been warned by a man in a boat on the same river they’re crossing, decide it’s too dangerous for her to go along on their trip to sell more pottery. Ohama is later separated from Tōbei when he goes to join up with the samurai; later she is attacked by a group of soldiers, after which she beings working in a brothel. Meanwhile a mysterious woman and her attendant approach Genjūrō at the market, and he becomes entranced by her ethereal beauty, eventually going to the stately manor where she lives. The woman is Lady Wasaka (Machiko Kyō, donned in white makeup to resemble a Noh mask), whom Genjūrō is enticed to marry, enjoying the relative luxury of her noble accommodations. Based on two stories from Ueda Akinari’s eponymous 1776 collection (and derived in part from Guy de Maupassant's 1883 short story "How He Got the Legion of Honor”), an important work of kwaidan literature—the genre roughly described as being ghost stories and which were popular during the Edo Period—the film assumes more supernatural elements as it progresses; Mizoguchi moves seamlessly into these, aided by the elegant “scroll shots” for which he’s famous. The ghosts are not evil entities but rather the spirits of women defeated by life and love, yet still aspiring to find happiness even after death. The story’s relative simplicity—insofar as it explores the ravages of war and the suffering of women, two enduring themes in general, with the latter being especially important to Mizoguchi as both a person and an artist—is made more dynamic by Kazuo Miyagawa’s striking cinematography. As Richard Brody notes in a 2014 essay for the New Yorker, “Mizoguchi is both Japan’s John Ford, with his emphasis on history and legend, and its Max Ophüls, with the grandly operatic resonances of his highly stylized images.” Indeed, as Mizoguchi merges the solemnity and splendor of filmmaking, he reveals the same about life as well. Screening as part of the series Kinuyo Tanaka, Actress and Auteur. (1953, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Mike Cheslik’s HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 9:30pm

A largely silent film that draws on Looney Tunes aesthetics as well as video game logic, HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS balances slapstick, sight gags, and sound effects with a genuinely arresting visual aesthetic, combining live action with animated elements. While all the features are familiar, together they create an imaginative modern approach and clever take on cinematic comedy. Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who also co-wrote the film) is a popular applejack salesman, but when he loses his business in an explosion, he’s forced to find a way to survive in the snowy Midwestern wilderness. Desperate to find food, Kayak must learn the ways of a northern fur trapper, receiving help from some locals, though mostly struggling on his own to succeed; his goal to earn better equipment—and ultimately the hand of a local merchant’s daughter—​by selling pelts is where HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS draws on a video game style, including recognizable sound cues, animations of how many pelts earn him which tools, and Kayak’s sneaking into the beavers’ hideout; it all adds to the uniqueness of the film’s storytelling. The cunning animals themselves are an annoying barrier to Kayak’s success. Larger creatures (such as the titular beavers) are performed by actors in mascot costumes, but director and effects designer Mike Cheslik also rounds out the animal residents with animation, puppets, and stuffed animals—​which themselves are filled with stuffing guts; there’s a constant concurrence of the adorable, the gross, and cartoonish violence. Shot in black and white in both Wisconsin and Michigan, the film also looks striking, the backdrop of the forest landscape grounding the silly antics that ensue. Due its silent nature, the jaunty score by Chris Ryan is also an important driving force in the film, demonstrated in its first few moments with a catchy theme song about Kayak’s popular applejack. (2022, 108 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Ben Kolak’s CAT CITY (US/Documentary)

Third Space (716 W. Addison St.) – Thursday, 6pm [Free Admission]

When I see a cat on the street, my first thought is “Aw!” My second thought is “I love you.” And my third thought is “I must take you home.” Nowhere in this thought process do I consider anything about that cat’s place within a complicated urban ecosystem; beyond the big eyes, antennae-like ears, long whiskers, soft fur, little feet—I’m getting carried away—are considerations far larger than the incessant cuteness of just one of nature’s most glorious creatures. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never stop loving cats of all types, sizes and environments, but there’s something to be said about fully understanding the nuances of Chicago’s feral cat population. Ben Kolak’s documentary does a good job addressing the issue from all sides, starting with a progressive 2007 ordinance that allows people to care for feral cats by becoming caretakers and encouraging ‘TNR’: trapping, neutering, and releasing them back on the streets. While an interviewee in the film observes that animal advocacy is often a plight of affluent white women, Kolak turns this assumption on its head and focuses instead on people from marginalized communities, such as a woman with physical disabilities who’s made taking care of cats her vocation and various community members from the city’s South and West sides. They’re all cat colony caretakers, who have gone through the process of becoming registered with the city to care for cat populations in their neighborhoods, taking on the responsibility of providing food and water as well as vaccinating, undertaking the TNR process, and providing medical care as needed. In a way, the cat communities and the human communities that care for them reflect one another, showing how vulnerable populations work together from other communities to survive. Tension comes into play when Kolak introduces the birding community, first highlighting some problems specific to birds (like birds colliding into skyscraper windows) and then the impact that the outdoor cat population, technically an invasive species, has on them. Some go as far as to think that feral cats should be exterminated in order to protect the bird population; the average person is likely to come out of this with more questions than answers, the inherent enigma of nature just as perplexing when applied to urban ecosystems. The film takes a KEDI-like approach in featuring many of the cats as characters, with names like Topcat, Diego, Frida, Hip-Hop, and Princess, a charming quality that emphasizes the human-like complexity of the animals’ dynamics amongst themselves and with humans. The footage of the cats and birds is impressive, and the graphics used to convey facts and map out locations across Chicago where these people and animals live are tasteful. All told, it’s an edifying journey for cat lovers, nature lovers, and city dwellers alike, with plenty to amuse and ponder. (2023, 79 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

Steve De Jarnatt's MIRACLE MILE (US)

Rewind Room at Color Club Tavern (4146 N.  Elston Ave.) – Monday, 7pm

Boy meets girl—at Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits, as one does. Boy and girl fall fast in love. Boy and girl arrange to meet after girl's late-night work shift at Johnie’s Coffee Shop. Boy sleeps through his alarm and girl goes home. Boy wakes up and goes to the restaurant, only to find that girl has, understandably, left and gone to bed. Boy calls girl from a payphone and leaves a message on her machine. Boy then intercepts a call to said payphone in which a distraught soldier, having dialed the wrong number, reveals that nuclear weapons are heading toward Los Angeles, set to arrive in little over an hour. A simple tale of young love and impending atomic catastrophe, Steve De Jarnatt's cult classic MIRACLE MILE follows the boy, trombone-playing Harry (Anthony Edwards, from TOP GUN and E.R.), and the girl, mullet-wearing Julie (Oscar-winner Mare Winningham, who pulls it off), as they attempt to flee the menacing blast. During this time they encounter various local eccentrics, ranging from a mysterious diner customer (who facilitates a group exodus to Antarctica) to a purveyor of stolen stereos (who accidentally sets two cops on fire and delivers one of the film's genuinely poetic moments) to a queer bodybuilder who agrees to fly the helicopter that will supposedly take Harry and Julie to safety. Famously, De Jarnatt's script was in development for almost ten years, its history rivaling the film's tangled plot: Named by American Film magazine one of the 10 Best Unproduced Scripts of 1983, De Jarnatt first pitched it to Warner Bros., who kept it in production for a few years, at one point even considering it as the basis for the Twilight Zone movie, though De Jarnatt had bought it back with the money he made co-writing Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas' STRANGE BREW. The film's soundtrack is by German electronic band Tangerine Dream; the ambient drone beautifully typifies the onscreen action in an Angelo Badalamenti kind of way. I didn’t know much about the film before I viewed it, but I was struck to discover how earnestly its fans admire this seemingly minor effort, despite multiple scenes that are almost campy. That fans so ardently admire the film endears me to it even more, as does its dated aesthetic—who isn't a sucker for neon lighting and lycra workout clothes, especially when worn by people at a fabulous gym where Harry goes in the early hours of the morning in an attempt to find a helicopter pilot? Sadly, but perhaps appropriately, its elegiac ending tampers the speciousness. Boy meets girl; boy and girl fall in love; boy and girl are ultimately destroyed by the folly of man. It's a tale as old as the times in which we live. (1988, 87 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

Radu Jude’s DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (Romania)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD is completely unhinged with an overwhelming sense of immediacy; it also feels impressively controlled in its chaos. It’s humorous, in large part due to its main performance, but also wholly serious. It’s generally a biting political satire of the current state of things, but it focuses on the struggle of everyday people, the horrors of modern technology, and the damaging effects of work culture. Overworked and suffering from lack of sleep, Angela (a compelling Ilinca Manolache) is a PA working on a multinational corporation’s video about work safety; her task is to drive around Bucharest interviewing potential participants. She spends most of her time in her car—she also works for Uber on the side—and Jude parallels this with moments from ANGELA MOVES ON, a 1981 film by Romanian director Lucian Bratu. The earlier film is about a taxi driver also named Angela (Dorina Lazar), also driving the streets of Bucharest. It’s an interesting internal comparison, but it becomes profound when Bratu’s Angela, played by the same actress, shows up as a relative of one of the current Angela’s participants; their interaction makes for the sincerest and most illuminating moments of the film. It's also the most striking example of how DO NOT EXPECT travels across time, challenging the audience’s ideas about fiction, non-fiction, and the filmmaking processes in general. Current Angela also creates TikToks as an Andrew Tate-inspired persona using an AI filter, streaming the crudest of material from her phone; the streams are presented in full color, while our dystopian present is in black and white. She’s also not afraid to question the state of things around her, shining a light on how those in power place the blame for any injustices on the workers, leaving them to deal with the fallout of unsafe work conditions. DO NOT EXPECT ends with a nearly 40-minute uninterrupted shot of the filming of the work safety promotional video. It’s impossible to fully flesh out everything this film presents, just as it contains so many instances of screens within screens, stories within stories, reflected and refracted, asking “to what end?” (2023, 163 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Alfonso Cuarón’s CHILDREN OF MEN (UK/US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Rarely is a movie at once upsetting and invigorating, yet Alfonso Cuarón’s CHILDREN OF MEN manages to embrace that paradox for pretty much its entire running time. The film imagines a dystopian near-future where no children have been born for 18 years. Humanity is in its death throes, and late capitalism has entered a hideous, extreme state, with pockets of extreme wealth surrounded by abject misery all over the world. The planet on display is all the more horrifying for looking so similar to the one we already inhabit, the filmmakers exaggerating, but only just so, present-day images of inequality, environmental devastation, and social unrest. (Slavoj Zizek has provocatively described the movie as a sequel to Cuarón’s Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN in its skeptical portrait of class relations.) It’s also a fully realized world, designed in such remarkable detail that one gets a sense of what life is like for people across different social classes and in most areas of experience. The innovation doesn’t stop there. Throughout CHILDREN OF MEN Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki execute extraordinary mobile long-takes that cover multiple complicated actions and narrative developments; the music selections are thoughtful and jarring; and Michael Caine delivers one of his best latter-day performances as a dope-smoking political cartoonist who serves as one of the movie’s few figures of sanity. All told, it’s one of the supreme achievements of studio filmmaking in the first decade of the 21st century. Screening as part of Shawn Michelle Smith and Oliver Sann’s Cli-Fi lecture series. (2006, 109 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Michael Haneke's FUNNY GAMES (Austria)

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

If you’ve heard of Michael Haneke’s polarizing experiment FUNNY GAMES, it’s likely in the context of how shocking or unpleasant it is, which is likely because that’s all it was designed to do. Haneke shows his hand early in the film when, in the film’s opening scene when Georg (Ulrich Mühe) and Anna’s (Susanne Lothar) charming guessing game about the classical music they listen to on their drive to their vacation home is suddenly replaced on the soundtrack by Naked City’s grindcore. It’s the first sign that Haneke is working on a fine formal level to destabilize the viewer, but only without straying too far from the respectability of a name like John Zorn’s. The film’s two eventual home invaders, Paul (Arno Frisch) and Peter (Frank Giering), are similarly mannered psychopaths, their first meeting with the family feeling like a cringe comedy play on THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962) before the film settling into its more protracted stretch of misery. Even while playing out their torture scenarios at feature-length, the captors can’t help but get academic and loop the audience in by breaking the fourth wall to explain that their motives are largely narrative-driven, and are the audience’s fault. Haneke (and by extension his mouthpiece assailants) is conversant in horror and thriller tropes, and while he himself has referred to the project as "pointless," its purpose is to turn the masses’ desire for violence back on itself. With a little distance from the project now, it’s a fair question to ask where Haneke himself, a maker of frequently violent (but never pleasant) films is meant to fit into this equation and what the purpose is of watching a film that basically negates its own existence by punishing its viewer for participation in a mass demand for violent entertainment. The film still endures as a landmark of transgressive cinema probably because its reputation baits the opposite of what it really ends up being. People primed for the intensity of endless psychological torture aren’t granted that release when every injury and death is calculated for maximum anticlimax. The film is maybe best understood as a sort-of exquisite Rube Goldberg machine geared to disappoint. Ticket holders will be able to see CACHÉ as well. Screening as part of the Programmer’s Picks series. (1997, 109 min, Digital Projection) [Maxwell Courtright]

Michael Haneke’s CACHÉ (France)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Sunday, 1pm

In Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke's CACHE, an unidentified person films aspects of the daily lives of a married Parisian couple, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), without their knowledge. This person sends the videotapes to the couple, who interpret them as "a campaign of terror." Before long, the tapes lead Georges back to the massacre of two hundred Algerians in Paris in 1961 and to his short relationship with one of its indirect victims. CACHÉ centers not only on the unknown filmmaker, but also, and more importantly, on the unknown image. In addition to the series of tapes that structure the film, such images include news footage, public television programs, photographs, drawings, memories, dreams, and the film itself. In watching CACHÉ, the viewer does not always know when he sees a tape in contrast to Haneke's film. (Although, in fact, he can see both.) For instance, both the real filmmaker (Haneke) and his anonymous fictional filmmaker shoot in high-definition video. Often, a television set does not frame a tape, but Haneke's camera occasionally pulls back to reveal Georges and Anne watching it on their TV. Due to the frequent lack of framing and other devices, the viewer questions who captures what and why. With CACHÉ, Haneke constructs a film in which we distrust him, and ultimately ourselves. Does an image hide its meaning from us? For Haneke, we must find what we hide from ourselves to see the world around us. Ticket holders for FUNNY GAMES will be able to see CACHÉ as well. Screening as part of the Programmer’s Picks series. (2005, 117 min, 35mm) [Candace Wirt]

David Lynch's ERASERHEAD (US)

Doc Films (at the University of Chicago) – Friday, 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. Screening as part of the Inside Outsider Cinema series. (1977, 89 min, DCP Digital) [Anne Orchier]

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

FACETS Cinema – See Venue website for showtimes

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 most 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. (2023, 135 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

🎞️ 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.

⚫ Block Cinema (at Northwestern University)
FOUR MORE YEARS (1972, 60 min, Digital Projection), a documentary by the Top Value Television collective, screens Friday at 7pm. Followed by a post-screening discussion with videomaker Tom Weinberg and professor Heather Hendershot of Northwestern University’s School of Communication and Medill School of Journalism.

Asian Pop-Up Cinema will again present two screenings at the Block this week: Irfana Majumdar’s 2021 Indian film SHANKAR’S FAIRIES (93 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday at 5:30pm, and Da Fei’s 2021 Chinese film THE COFFIN PAINTER (95 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 5:30pm. More info about all screenings here.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation 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 Latino Film Festival
The 40th Chicago Latino Film Festival opens Thursday with a special presentation screening of Alonso Alvarez-Barreda’s 2023 Mexican film THE WINGWALKER (127 min, DCP Digital) at the Davis Theatre (4614 N. Lincoln Ave.) at 6:15pm. A special reception cocktail party will follow at the DANK HAUS (4740 N. Western Ave.). More info here.

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

⚫ Cinema Across Borders
The work of Argentine-German filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch screens Saturday, 4pm, at the Damen Student Center (Gentile Arena, 6511 N. Sheridan Rd.) on the Loyola University Chicago Campus, with editor-curator Florencia Incarbone in person. 

On Monday at 7pm, at 25 East Pearson, Room 710, Loyola’s LUC School of Communication will host Güliz Saglam of Turkey and her video activist work documenting migrants and women protesting Erdogan's anti-domestic violence actions.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station
Miranda July’s 2005 film ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (91 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday at 8pm. A Film Programmer Mentorship screening, programmed by Elise Schierbeek. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films (at the University of Chicago)
Laura Citarella’s 2023 Argentine film TRENQUE LAUQUEN (260 min, DCP Digital), which was named the best film of last year by Cahiers du cinema and by Cine-File’s Michael Glover Smith, receives its Chicago premiere on Saturday at 3pm.

Antonio Campos’ 2012 film SIMON KILLER (105 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday at 7pm as part of the series Americans in Paris: After the Dance.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1980 film KAGEMUSHA (180 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday at 7pm as part of the Programmers’ Picks series.

Kenneth Anger’s 1966 experimental classic INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME (38 min, 16mm) screens on a double bill with Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1963 horror film BLOOD FEAST (67 min, 35mm) on Thursday at 9:30pm as part of the Inside Outsider Cinema series. More info about all screenings here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s 2023 British film FEMME (99 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Steven Summers’ five-part documentary WAR MOVIE: THE AMERICAN BATTLE IN CINEMA screens Saturday (Episode 1 - The Camera and the Gun: 1900–1938 [57 min] and Episode 2 - The Good War: 1939–1949 [62 min]) and Sunday (Episode 3 - The Shifting Tide: 1950–1975 [62 min]; Episode 4 - Into the Jungle: 1976–2000 [65 min]; and Episode 5 - Brave New World: 2001–2020 [60 min]) starting at 1pm. There are 10-minute intermissions between episodes. On Saturday, the program will conclude with discussion between Summer and film archivist and historian Annette Bochenek, and on Sunday with a discussion between Summer and film critic and scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum. 

Michael Fiore’s 2024 documentary VESELKA: THE RAINBOW ON THE CORNER AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD (106 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday at 7:45pm. Fiore in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Goethe-Institut Chicago
Nora Fingscheidt’s 2019 film SYSTEM CRASHER (125 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday at 6pm. Advanced registration is required; please bring a photo ID for check-in. Please note that this event will take place in the Michigan Room, on the 3rd Floor of 150 N. Michigan Ave., in the same building as the Goethe-Institut Chicago. More info here.

⚫ Music Box Theatre
Luc Besson’s 1997 film THE FIFTH ELEMENT (127 min, DCP Digital) screens Thursday at 9:45pm. Presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick. With pre-show drinks and a DJ in Music Box Lounge at 9pm and a drag performance in the Main Theater at 9:45pm with the film screening to follow. More info here.

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

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
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: April 5 - April 11, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Michael Castelle, Maxwell Courtright, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Ben Kaye, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Anne Orchier, Michael Glover Smith, K.A. Westphal, Candace Wirt