:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 ::

🕵️ Noir City: Chicago 2024

Music Box Theatre – See showtimes below

Tay Garnett's THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (US)
Friday, 6pm
Following DOUBLE INDEMNITY and MILDRED PIERCE, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE was the final installment in a haphazard trilogy of James M. Cain adaptations made by three different studios and directors between 1944 and 1946. It's the smuttiest of the three, and if Stanwyck and McMurray made a cameo or two (and it were directed by Billy Wilder), it would be the most worthwhile, but there's certainly nothing here to complain about. Every Cain adaptation pops off the screen and sticks to the viewer like bubblegum (which probably says more about studio heads than it does Cain) and few things are as enjoyable as watching them unfold. One can't help but think that Lana Turner working today would set an entire generation of hard-edged dramatic actresses on their heels. John Garfield plays the love interest who gets involved with Turner's schemes for murder and insurance fraud. (1946, 113 min, 35mm) [Julian Antos]
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Luchino Visconti's OSSESSIONE (Italy)
Friday, 9:45pm
Leave it to Luchino Visconti to capture perfectly the mood in Mussolini’s Italy as its fascist government was headed toward oblivion and a feeling of defeat and waste was settling over the Italian population. His interpretation of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, number two of five film versions, offers up a steaming plate of lust, greed, betrayal, and murder that was transgressive in its own time. OSSESSIONE begins as a wheat-bearing truck stops at a roadside trattoria to gas up and dislodge Gino Costa (Massimo Girotti), a filthy, but handsome tramp who hitched a ride in the flatbed. He charms a meal out of Giovanna Bragana (Carla Calamai, a late replacement for the pregnant Anna Magnani), the beautiful, young wife of the trattoria owner, Giuseppe Bragana (Juan de Landa), a fat, old man who treats her like a servant and possession. The attraction between Gino and Giovanna is as strong as her hatred of her husband, but their tryst seems to be going nowhere, and they part company. When their paths cross again, fate moves them toward a murderous and tragic end. OSSESSIONE is unambiguous about what love makes permissible, signaling the fate that awaits the adulterous murderers when an account of a man shot dead by a cuckolded husband reaches the patrons of the trattoria near the beginning of the film. Even Visconti’s camera blocking when the couple first meets, Gino’s body obscuring all but Giovanna’s legs, lets us know who will be erased by the end of the film. Visconti also inserts the suggestion of a gay subtext with a carnival worker nicknamed The Spaniard (Elio Marcuzzo). Nonetheless, in its own way, OSSESSIONE offered a carefree escape for ordinary Italians through Visconti’s Neorealist approach to filming his story on the Italian streets of Ancona, a lively place where people go to vacation, enjoy street fairs and carnival rides, and gather together communally to eat, drink, and participate in contests and games. The entire scene in Ancona, and later, in the Bragana trattoria, where Giovanna has increased business tremendously by introducing music and dancing to the restaurant, show the sweet life in the midst of tremendous hardship and sorrow, thus lifting the film to a more complex and affecting level. The film was banned after Mussolini’s son rejected it as not reflecting the reality of the Italian people, and Visconti was forced to turn over all prints and negatives for destruction. We only have this valuable document of wartime Italian filmmaking, as well as Visconti’s pungent directorial debut, because Visconti held back one negative. (1943, 140 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Carol Reed's ODD MAN OUT (UK)
Saturday, 2:15pm
It seems improbable at this late date that Carol Reed should still need rescuing from his own accomplishments with erstwhile screenwriter Graham Greene—namely, THE FALLEN IDOL (1948), THE THIRD MAN (1949), and OUR MAN IN HAVANA (1959)—but due in part to the undeniable deliciousness of this trio, and the fact that they are the only Reed films to generally see revival, the rest of his oeuvre typically gets dismissed on the strength of lukewarm reviews and career summaries that highlight the unevenness of his overall output. As such, it is all the more imperative to treasure the occasional screening of that ugly duckling of Reed's visible (at least insofar as home video) corpus, 1947's ODD MAN OUT: a work of unvarnished Catholic pessimism about the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, and almost as discomfiting a mixture of religious allegory, poetic realism, and hard-boiled thriller as Frank Borzage's loopy STRANGE CARGO (1940)—albeit never crossing the line into outright fantasy, and with a profoundly hopeless cosmology by comparison. "I know no other film which conveys such utter despair," wrote documentary editor and novelist Dai Vaughan in his excellent BFI monograph on ODD MAN, and it's true that there are few films—with or without allegorical baggage—to treat their protagonists (in this case, James Mason, though often subsumed by the rest of Reed's superb ensemble) with so casual a fatalism. This odd and portentous hybrid will never go down as easy as the Greenes, but that's all the more reason to pay attention and give it, and Reed, their due. (1947, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Jeremy M. Davies]
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Emilio Fernández's VICTIMS OF SIN (Mexico)
Saturday, 5pm
Emilio Fernández, a prolific director and screenwriter of Mexican cinema’s Golden Age, won world fame when his tragic melodrama MARIA CANDELARIA (1944) won the Palme d’Or at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. Today, that film is more famous than seen, a fate that has befallen a large number of his films. Fortunately, a new 4K digital restoration of his VICTIMS OF SIN, made with his regular collaborators, screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno and legendary cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, is making the rounds. Set among the nightclubs and red light district of Mexico City, VICTIMS OF SIN centers on the fortunes of Violeta (Ninón Sevilla), a former sex worker hired as a dancer by nightclub owner Don Gonzalo (Francisco Reiguera) upon the urging of his star singer, Rita (Cuban singer and actress Rita Montaner). Violeta is hugely popular, but her downward slide begins when she rescues and adopts a baby boy whose besotted mother (Margarita Ceballos) puts him in a garbage can on orders from Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta), her pimp and the baby’s father. To say I have never seen a film like this would be an understatement. From its beginning, when Rodolfo carefully examines his oil-flattened hair in a barber’s mirror, calculates how much he should pay the barber, dons the hat and coat that complete his zoot suit, and strolls to meet his stable of whores at Don Gonzalo’s nightclub, VICTIMS OF SIN is a nonstop entertainment that mixes comedy, melodrama, and most especially music and dance. The film is frontloaded with singing and dancing. Montaner sings as a bevy of chorus girls in swinging peasant dresses swirl on the dance floor. When Sevilla enters for her star turn in her revealing frilled skirt and frilled show pants, we get the first of many tastes of her sensual style as she moves to the orchestra’s African, Caribbean, and Cuban rhythms. “Nightingale of the Americas” Pedro Vargas, a ubiquitous presence in Mexican cinema, also offers a song from his seat in the audience that seems to foreshadow Violeta’s fortunes. This scene, which mixes Cuban and Mexican characters, shows how Cubans moved freely to Mexico to work and live—and just as freely moved back in a snit! Fernández, of course, doesn’t forsake his story for the pleasures of musical comedy. He rouses anxiety in the audience with such moments as Violeta snatching the baby from the garbage can just as workers reach its location with their garbage truck or a gang of men crossing some railroad tracks with a real train bearing down on them. One hilarious scene depicts Violeta standing with a long line of prostitutes as Santiago (Tito Junco), another pimp and nightclub owner who becomes Violeta’s common law husband, walks in front of them with a mariachi band trailing behind him. Another odd moment is when Santiago and Violeta go to a church to have their boy christened—but we never learn his name at this or any point in the movie. Figueroa’s black-and-white cinematography is, as usual, stunning and inventive, and the sets and costumes add flair and a degree of authenticity to the story. VICTIMS OF SIN races to its melodramatic conclusion, which offers Fernández’s signature sentiment—a prayer for all the unfortunates of Mexico. (1951, 84 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Ted Tetzlaff’s THE WINDOW (US)
Saturday, 7:15pm
Straightforward but all the more affecting for it, Ted Tetzlaff’s THE WINDOW epitomizes one of the most enduring of Aesop’s Fables, the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Bobby Driscoll, graciously on loan “by special arrangement with Walt Disney,” stars as Tommy, a young boy living in New York’s Lower East Side who’s known around the neighborhood for telling tall tales. One night, while sleeping on a neighbor’s fire escape, he actually does witness something that would have previously composed one of his elaborate lies, as he watches a neighboring couple (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman) murder a drunk sailor from whom they were trying to steal. He tells his parents (Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale) and even the police, but no one believes him. When the murderous couple catches on that Tommy knows something—due to his mother’s insistence that he apologize to them for storytelling—they undertake to silence the boy, with still no one buying into his claims that they’re now out to get him. Based on a magazine story by Cornell Woolrich (whose work was the basis of film adaptations by the likes of Jacques Tourneur, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Alfred Hitchcock), the concise narrative allows for maximum tension, the relatively compact film similar to a short story with the agile but thoughtful pacing. One begins to feel both Tommy’s frustration and the imminence of the threat toward him; it’s real nail-biting stuff, impressively enacted by Driscoll, the trajectory of whom’s life sadly did not match the potential of his talent. Lauded for his roles in such live-action Disney films as SONG OF THE SOUTH (though, yikes), SO DEAR TO MY HEART, and TREASURE ISLAND, as well as for providing the voice and animation model of Peter Pan for the 1952 Disney classic, he would later struggle with substance abuse and passed away at just 31 years of age, his body having been discovered in an abandoned East Village tenement building. (Notably, Driscoll did turn to making art in his late 20s and spent some time as part of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene.) Putting a child at the center of such a story is a crucial factor to the scenario’s Kafkaesque despondency (though of course Aesop wasn’t thinking of it as such). The specific non-genre is also appropriate for it; “[n]oir, which is so often about powerlessness, is the perfect vehicle for this story,” writes Jake Hinkson in an article on the subject. Directed by Ted Tetzlaff, a cinematographer-turned-filmmaker, it was made in 1947 and shelved for two years by RKO. The studio had many reasons for their lack of faith but were ultimately proven to have been misguided when it became a critical and commercial success upon its eventual release. Driscoll was even given an Academy Juvenile Award for his performance in this and SO DEAR TO MY HEART. Much like Tommy’s parents, RKO shouldn’t have had any doubt. (1949, 73 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]
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Yoshitarô Nomura’s ZERO FOCUS (Japan)
Sunday, 2pm
New bride Teiko Uhara (Yoshiko Kuga) becomes concerned when her husband, Kenichi (Kôji Nanbara), fails to return to their home in Tokyo and his job at an ad agency from a trip to wrap up things at a branch office in Kanazawa, a small city on Japan’s cold, cliff-laden western coast. Uhara’s company and the police join Teiko and, later, his brother (Kô Nishimura) in the search, with fatal consequences. Yoshitarô Nomura, a prolific director and pioneer in Japanese film noir, based eight of his films, including ZERO FOCUS, on novels by detective fiction writer Seichô Matsumoto. The film includes minimal voiceover, murder, and dark secrets—all noir staples—but leans on the audience’s interest in following the clues to solve the mystery of Kenichi’s disappearance. The exposition-heavy drama is almost devoid of action, the motivation for murder seems thin, and the story so intricate that it is difficult to follow. Still, the movement of the characters around the country offers some interesting landscapes and opportunities for evocative shots by cinematographer Takashi Kawamata. (1961, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Lewis Gilbert's CAST A DARK SHADOW (UK)
Sunday, 4:15pm
Upon overhearing that his elderly wife, Monica (Mona Washbourne), will be leaving her entire fortune to him in her will, the slick Edward "Teddy" Bare (Dirk Bogarde) murders her and makes it look like an accident. Unbeknownst to him, the will has not been updated, and he only receives her house while the remaining fortune goes to her sister, Dora. In order to pay for his lavish lifestyle, Teddy must resort to his cunning, old ways and find a new wealthy wife to support him. Lewis Gilbert's film has a bluntly dark and conniving tone. More thriller than noir, there's an unnerving quality in Bogarde's performance. His Oedipal tendencies are truly apparent right from the start—referring to both of his wives as "mother" and displaying a constant need to be comforted. Teddy's character may well have influenced Anthony Perkins in PSYCHO some five years later, as both characters share similar murderous intents and overly-attached relationships to maternal figures. Worth mentioning is Margaret Lockwood as Teddy's second wife, Freda, whose cold, calculated demeanor counters all of Teddy's cunning ruses to obtain her wealth. CAST A DARK SHADOW more than lives up to its title. (1955, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
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Jean-Pierre Melville’s LE SAMOURAÏ (France)
Sunday, 8:45pm
Has anyone ever looked as effortlessly cool on camera as Alain Delon does in LE SAMOURAÏ? Perhaps a trivial question to toss out there, but it’s what kept ringing through my mind while wandering the slick, despairing halls of Melville’s estimable work that sits comfortably underneath the umbrellas of both the film noir genre and the French New Wave movement. Delon, as the titular “samurai” Jef Costello (more akin to a hitman than anything), presents a steely “cool guy” exterior to navigate and mask his self-constructed world of solitude, a life built to support a man who cannot exist beyond the parameters of the missions to which he’s assigned. What’s left is a tiny apartment with some lifeless curtains, blank walls, and a twittering bird—a cage within a cage —making up the home of a man living amidst a bustling Paris that might as well regard him as a stranger. It’s a life that’s intentionally simple but depressingly complex, his scant acquaintances being his would-be love interest (Nathalie Dolan) who serves as a human alibi more than anything, and his poker buddies who fill the air with smoke and mumblings in lieu of anything resembling friendship. He’s got his killer work down to a T, which only makes things more disastrous when a recent job ends in him getting pulled in by the police as a potential subject. A game of cat-and-mouse begins with an ever-belligerent police inspector (François Périer), and the carefully constructed veneer of anonymity Costello has built up is slowly teetering towards collapse. Melville’s particular brand of existential humor and reckoning mixes well with the trappings of the noir genre, alongside a stunning sense of visual pacing and dynamism that's underscored by François de Roubaix's hypnotic jazz score. It all ends with Costello crawling towards a fate dripping with naturally menacing irony; the moment he finds something to finally break him out of his own cage, it’s all too late. (1967, 105 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Jules Dassin's BRUTE FORCE (US)
Monday, 7pm
Time is of the essence in Jules Dassin's BRUTE FORCE. Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster in an early role) and his maudlin band of misfits frequently refer to it; as prisoners, they have both too much and too little, yet their focus isn't on this trite contradiction but rather exact measures of said essence. "What time is it?" Collins asks twice during the film, just minutes before violent conflict. Dassin's prison noir doesn't dwell on long sentences or seemingly longer days; instead, it relies on the vitality of the moment to anchor its "metaphoric frisson," as critic Michael Atkinson calls it in his essay for the film's Criterion release. The atmosphere is certainly reflective of its time, when freshly cemented postwar ideology was fomenting a new kind of political unease. There are many references to fascism, both historical and fictional; a brutally ambitious guard is clearly meant to represent, or at least imitate, Nazism, and the drainpipe where prisoners are sent to work is Kafkaesque in its contextual ambiguity. Dassin would experience similar absolutism—he was blacklisted several years later—though whatever radicalism he was participating in while making BRUTE FORCE apparently didn't endear him to it. He later referred to the film as a "really dumb picture" and remembers saying, "but all these prisoners are such nice sweet guys—they're all so lovely—what are they doing in jail!" (Sarcasm aside, he has a point. This black-and-white, baddies-and-goodies approach somewhat undermines its convictions.) Still, the emotional depth eclipses both these amateurish failings and the noirish futility, and it certainly delivers a message, however unintentional it may be. (1947, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Roy Ward Baker’s INFERNO (US)
Tuesday, 7pm
Considered one of the very best examples of the 3D golden era of the early '50s—​and the only one produced by 20th Century Fox—​INFERNO is also an illustration of how to effectively combine trending technology with storytelling. The film was shot in Technicolor and features stereophonic sound, and these devices also highlight the duality within the film itself. After breaking his leg out in the Mojave Desert, wealthy industrialist Donald Whitley Carson III (Robert Ryan) is abandoned by his wife, Gerry (Rhonda Fleming, living up to her “Queen of Technicolor” moniker) and her lover, mining man Joe Duncan (William Lundigan). Banking that he’ll succumb to the elements—​or commit suicide—​and the police’s search for the missing millionaire will quickly be called off, Gerry and Joe take advantage of Carson’s lavish lifestyle. The scheming couple’s anxious scenes of conversation are dotted with pops of color, focused on Gerry’s costuming and makeup and the extravagant sets, emphasizing INFERNO’s stunning Technicolor. In contrast, Carson’s scenes in the desert are more earth-toned, including a voiceover of the industrialist’s inner monologue as he endures both for survival and revenge. INFERNO is indeed as much a survival film as it is a film noir, additionally reflecting the idea of two pieces coming together to make a whole; the crosscutting from Carson’s plight to Gerry and Joe’s living in his mansion increases in frequency and cleverness as the film progresses. Eventually, two sides of the story merge back together, culminating in a truly impressive fire sequence, which gives INFERNO its title. (1953, 83 min, 3D DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Hugo Fregonese’s BLACK TUESDAY (US)
Tuesday, 9:15pm
A one-time news reporter, Sydney Boehm signed a handful of noir masterpieces during his tenure as a Hollywood screenwriter, including Anthony Mann’s SIDE STREET (1949), Fritz Lang’s THE BIG HEAT (1953), Richard Fleischer’s VIOLENT SATURDAY (1955), and this overlooked prison break picture, which stars Edward G. Robinson as the nastiest gangster he ever played. Vincent Canelli (Robinson) is on death row when the film starts, and his impulsive, violent behavior gives you a good idea as to how he got there. Aggressive with prison guards and bullying toward everyone else, Canelli is frightening even when he’s behind bars; after he’s sprung from custody while on his way to the electric chair (!), his path of destruction suggests that of a tsunami. Most of BLACK TUESDAY takes place after Canelli takes part in a prison break and leaves jail with several hostages in tow. The film may be short, but every second is filled with tension—given Canelli’s recklessness, you never know from moment to moment what he’ll do to the hostages, especially when the law catches up with him. Like the other Boehm-scripted movies mentioned above, BLACK TUESDAY is still shocking in its violence, not because of how graphic it is, but because of how maliciously it’s delivered. Boehm’s villains simply have no sense of morality, and this makes them among the most terrifying in cinema. The amoral world of the film is rendered especially stark by Stanley Cortez’s inky cinematography, which he accomplished just one year before his career-best work in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, while Hugo Fregonese maintains a brisk pace and a chilling, humorless tone. Fregonese is another classic “subject for further research”: a tri-continental director who began his career in Argentina, came to Hollywood after making another successful prison drama (HARDLY A CRIMINAL [1949], which screens as part of Noir City on Monday at 9:15pm), helmed various genre movies in the US and Europe, then returned to his native country to finish his career. (1954, 80 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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Jacques Becker's LE TROU (France)
Wednesday, 9:15pm
“My friend, Jacques Becker, has filmed a detailed account of a true story. Mine.” The opening words uttered by Roland (Jean Keraudy) at the beginning of LE TROU set the stage for a film steeped in authenticity and realism. Based on the 1947 Le Stanté Prison Escape, LE TROU is centered on four inmates, Roland, Manu, Monsignor, and Geo, sharing a cell when one day a fifth inmate, Gaspard, is added to the bunch. After some initial banter with their new bunkmate, the quartet think highly enough of Gaspard to reveal their ultimate plan: to dig through the cement floor of their cell, through the basement of the prison, and into the sewer system that will connect them to their freedom in the streets of Paris. The way in which Becker films this plan is a masterwork of suspense, ingenuity, and pure filmmaking. One particular scene features a nearly four-minute unbroken shot of the men alternating turns at busting through the floor using a piece of one of their bed frames while another keeps a lookout at the peephole using a makeshift periscope made from a shard of mirror affixed to a toothbrush. Brows furrow, sweat pours, and rubble piles as progress is made, and Becker’s camera catches the action in agonizing real time while the specter of being caught by guards looms ever larger. Becker opted to use first time actors as the principal characters because, he said, “I desired the same sense of naturalism which Vittorio De Sica obtained so perfectly from his amateur players in [BICYCLE THIEVES].” Indeed, this effect is achieved and goes even further with his casting of Keraudy, who himself took part in the 1947 escape. Much of LE TROU is filmed in medium to closeup shots to heighten the claustrophobic feelings of the cramped quarters of the cell and small tunnels the men have built. Becker also opts to use only diegetic sound to focus the audience’s attention on the moment, letting the sounds of the room create their own unnerving score. Alas, Becker died just weeks before the film’s release and never got to realize the wonder of what would be his final masterpiece. LE TROU blends brotherhood, man’s struggle to be free, and pure filmmaking into one of the finest escape films ever made. (1960, 131 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]
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Rudolph Maté’s UNION STATION (US)
Thursday, 7pm
The same year that William Holden and Nancy Olsen co-starred in Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BOULEVARD they co-starred in another of the four collaborations they made together overall. Rudolph Maté’s UNION STATION is a pert noir centering on Chicago’s own bustling train station (though it was filmed at Union Station in Los Angeles), where Lt. William Calhoun (Holden) is head of security. A secretary, Joyce (Olsen), reports some suspicious figures she saw on the train who, it turns out, have kidnapped the blind daughter of her wealthy employer. The kidnappers make contact with the man, and from there the train station is used as ground zero for their extortive operation. The devil is in the details with this one, as the twists and turns bring Calhoun, with the help of Olsen, closer to finding the girl and nabbing the bad guys. Last year’s CALL NORTHSIDE 777 united audiences during Noir City with its wry disdain for Chicago’s police force; while this isn’t so galvanizing, it doesn’t necessarily paint them in a great light. The girl’s father is distrustful of their involvement, and in one scene, the cops openly threaten to murdering a suspect and make his death look like an accident in order to compel him to divulge information. (Irish character actor Barry Fitzgerald stars as the police inspector; his apparent winsomeness adds a discomfiting quality.) Another grueling set piece involves a suspect being stampeded by a bunch of cows. In general the film’s action is relatively mild until it’s not, as the main suspect, who had worked at the train station, eventually reveals himself to be a particularly cold-blooded figure. Maté was a Polish-Hungarian filmmaker who started out as a cinematographer; he worked on such films as THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, VAMPYR, STELLA DALLAS, and FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, among many others. This film doesn’t necessarily reflect his superior cinematographic eye, nor is the direction especially inspired. Still, it serves its purpose in moving along screenwriter Sydney Boehm’s brisk and engaging narrative. Unlike CALL NORTHSIDE 777 there’s nothing of the real Chicago to recognize in appreciation, but the facsimile of corrupt cops and unruly cows are good enough. (1950, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Youssef Chahine’s CAIRO STATION (Egypt)
Thursday, 9:15pm
Much of the visual grammar that we equate with film noir is situated in American and European environments: seedy back alleys of towering cities, nightclubs and cafes filled with steely-eyed detectives and bombshell femme fatales. But Youssef Chahine’s transliteration of the seedy intertwining narratives of the genre fits effortlessly into his Egyptian setting, the train station in Cairo becoming a metropolis of buzzing activity, filled to the brim with an array of larger-than-life characters bursting with desire, frustration, joy, lust, and ultimately, danger. Chahine stars as Qinawi, a newspaper salesboy whose sexual frustrations border on the obsessive when he becomes fixated on a local soft-drink peddler, Hanuma (the radiant and fiery Hind Rostom). This boiling pot of unrequited desire simmers underneath the parallel plots of a woman’s rights march crossing through the station, alongside the laborers at the train station desperately planning an effort to unionize, led by the human charisma machine Abu Siri (heartthrob Farid Shawqy), who not so coincidentally is engaged to Hanuma. These overt thematic tentpoles of women’s liberation and workers' rights were revolutionary topics to tackle in Egyptian cinema at the time, all presenting a rich tapestry for what is altogether a stellar work of atmospheric, ensemble-based filmmaking, using the power and horror of the male gaze to craft what can be seen as an essential entry in the film noir canon. (1958, 77 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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See full schedule here.

🤘 31st Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival

Harper Theater (5238 S. Harper Ave.) – See showtimes below

Nelly Danssen’s HEAD OVER HEELS (Netherlands/Experimental)
Thursday, 4:30 pm
Presented as “a homage to the bimbo way of life,” HEAD OVER HEELS follows the day in the life of Nelly Danssen, as she leaves the Playboy Mansion in search of oat milk lattes for her gaggle of friends who are holed up in the LA landmark. There are, however, a lot of distractions out there, and Nelly herself ponders her own identity, its pitfalls but mostly its power. Nelly’s unfocused journey itself feels like a video game side quest, reflected in the use of Grand Theft Auto footage of a Nelly avatar wandering LA. HEAD OVER HEELS also includes behind the scenes footage of the making of the film itself, allowing for both the constructed/deconstructed presentation of the bimbo that Nelly as a character presents, as well as how she is treated out in the world—particularly by men; in one striking scene, Nelly sits silently in the backseat of a car while a male driver rambles on, trying to philosophize and justify his own rampant misogyny. Intertitles of a 3D rendering of Nelly provide the theses of the film, reflecting philosophically on gender and sexuality, focusing primarily on Freudian analysis and the dichotomy of the Madonna-whore complex. Captioned dialogue is also used to hilarious effect throughout the film. Images and audio of famous bimbos like Pamela Anderson and reality star Lala Kent are also featured, reflecting a long cultural history of the archetype. The film also celebrates education in all its forms, from academic to sex, suggesting overall—rightly so and with true sincerity—that there is a fine line between scholarly philosophy and the musings of the bimbo. Screening with Raymond Knudsen's PREP (2023, 14 min), Jenny Stark's WHERE MY ROAD ENDS, YOURS BEGINS (2023, 3 min), and Chris Fleming Staples' TIME TO RELAX (2024, 15 min). (2023, 47 min) [Megan Fariello]
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Shorts 1
Thursday, 5pm
This exceptional selection of short films begins with a five-minute piece that would be appropriate to show before every CUFF screening: Steve Wood’s PROJECTOR AND AUDIENCE CALIBRATION FILM (2023, 5 min). Harkening back to an era of widespread celluloid projection, Wood takes an archival test film designed to help projectionists calibrate their equipment and reimagines the instructions as a way to calibrate one’s audience to appreciate a film. The psychedelia of his images, the acceleration of his pulsing music and voiceovers, and the interpolation of shadow images of women dancers certainly calibrated my mind to give into the dreamy nowness of it all. LES BÊTES (2024, 12 min), from Michael Granberry, is a devilishly clever claymation reminiscent of the work of Ladislas Starevich that turns the tables on some 18th-century aristocrats who trap delightful denizens of the natural world for their cruel amusement. Sadly for them, a demonic rabbit arises from the carnage and unleashes the wrath of nature against them. Any resemblance to the omnivorous Anthropocene in which we now live is purely intentional. If anyone is still confused about how global warming happens, HART OF THE WOOD “WAYS OF THE PLANT” (2023, 30 min) provides one of the most straightforward explanations of carbon capture and release available. Centered at the UNESCO-recognized Saltwells National Nature Reserve, Benjamin Wigley and the other members of the multidisciplinary Hart of the Wood artist collective mix shamanic figures, microscopic images of leaf pores, and documentary clips of blacksmiths forging chains to investigate the human dependence on the natural resources of this unique part of England. Italian director Mataro da Vergato’s long-evolving experiment creating the video performance of Agnolo Poliziano’s 1480 play Fabula di Orfeo is the ingenious combination of animation tableaux and live-action performers that is ORPHEI FABULAE (2023, 39 min). The actors move from frame to frame in a colorful slide show that amuses—the accumulation of animals moving into one frame is hilarious—and surprises. Little did I know that Orpheus’s loss of Eurydice would make him angry with her and all women and dedicate his life to loving only men! [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Shorts 2
Thursday, 5:30pm
The disintegration of physical media comes to represent that of a friendship between two women in Sloan Klusendorf’s THE WHITE & THE RED (2024, 5 min). The short film was shot digitally, then “converted to VHS five times over to create a visual degradation,” per its description. The nuances of the microplot and the overall effect of its form make for an uncanny sensation, turning human conflict and the loss of a medium’s physicality into a mind-melding treatise on impermanence. Similarly uncanny is Kelly Sears’ THE LOST SEASON (2023, 6 min), which shows a purported world in which winter will never arrive again. To capture the Earth’s last winter, a group of camera operators are hired by a streaming company to document it, a voice tells us, while slightly manipulated imagery of wintry landscapes and screens made to look like how something similar might appear on a YouTube-type site realize this dystopian but ever-increasingly potential scenario might happen. When the southern coast begins to be swallowed up, the operators are again asked to film. Rejecting the commodification of climate catastrophe, they nobly decline. There has been much media created about what might happen if artificial intelligence were to gain sentience, a prospect that’s becoming all the more relevant. Usama Alshaibi considers it rather dreamily in TESTIMONY (2023, 7 min), in which the ghostly presence considers its limitations and desires to be free. Behind this monologue are images rendered by older forms of technology, a conscious decision by Alshaibi to move away from the current ones. Most striking are the images of ballerinas, credited as Natalia Makarova and Anna Pavlova from film made in 1907, representing the corporeal form the AI laments not being able to inhabit. Tuğçe Evirgen Özmen renders literal the concept of self-reflection in BLOSSOM OF CHOICE (2024, 8 min). Like TESTIMONY before it, this is more about the disenthrallment of one’s ego from one’s self. It’s less romantic as a result, but it’s spookier and engages horror-adjacent imagery to aptly reflect the terror of such a prospect, though in an elevated and often aesthetically pleasing manner. The description for William Zimmer’s ANOTHER FUCKIN’ WAR (1970, 9 min) notes that the filmmaker is now 91 years old; he wasn’t in 1970, of course, but it’s nevertheless still “important to [him] that this film still be seen. The era may have changed, but the concerns have not.” A subversive commentary on the Vietnam war, its combination of original and archival footage, the latter of facets surrounding the military industrial complex, appear evergreen in retrospect. As someone who has worked in a call center I appreciated the sentiment of Ella Harmon’s HOW MAY I HELP YOU (2023, 15 min), composed of three vignettes centering on the profession. In one a woman is harassed by a man calling in and demanding she call him a bad boy and whose boss won’t allow her to hang up (this is a real thing); in another, conveyed from the perspective of the man calling in, the fleeting connection established between the two parties is reflected thoughtfully. Finally, in the last one, a worker at a call center for an insurance company deals with the helplessness of trying to assist the helpless, in this case a mother who can’t afford medication for her child. Scripted from real conversations, these vignettes suggest that the whole of humanity might be experienced in the most hapless of industries. Rounding out the program is Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin’s NEAREST NEIGHBOR (2023, 20 min) connects some birds’ ability to mimic humans to technology’s ability seemingly to do the same while mimicking birds in the process. This may be the uncanniest of all, positing as it does a circular paradigm of understanding among conscious (and aspiringly conscious) beings. Also screening are Charles Dillon Ward’s BURN IN (2024, 2 min) and Saif Alsaegh’s THE MOTHERFUCKER’S BIRTHDAY (2024, 6 min). [Kat Sachs]
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Jodi Wille’s WELCOME SPACE BROTHERS (US/Documentary) and Scott Cummings’ REALM OF SATAN (US/Documentary)
Thursday, 6:30pm (SPACE) and Thursday, 7:30pm (SATAN)
Not quite a religion, not quite a cult, the New Age group that is Unarius represents one of those niche engrossments that inspires the question, “If it’s not hurting anybody, why worry?” Not that I thought I would, but in this day and age, one hears about such groups and might immediately assume the worst, as it’s the bad kinds that are often in the news and given the documentary treatment. But Jodi Wille is not just a filmmaker in this space, having previously made THE SOURCE FAMILY (2012) about the titular Hollywood commune from the 1970s; she’s personally invested in American subculture, with extensive experience in publishing books on these subjects. I discovered all this after watching WELCOME SPACE BROTHERS (2023, 100 min), and it helped to explain why the film resonated with me—namely that the subject was being approached thoughtfully and in a studied manner, rather than in the haphazard way that many documentaries are made nowadays, seemingly in a race to see which can get on Netflix or Hulu the fastest. Wille’s open-mindedness and even affection for the group in question, Unarius (which is an unlikely acronym standing for UNiversal Articulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science), is evident, guiding one along an unusual, and ultimately benign, journey to what is, in essence, a unique sort of self discovery for its participants. At the forefront of Unarias was Ruth E. Norman, also known as Uriel, who co-founded the group with her husband in the mid-1950s. Just as she was at the forefront of Unarius, so too is she in Wille’s documentary. But just as much of the archival material used in the film features Norman, most notably made up in outrageous costumes as the Archangel Unarias, little is expounded upon about her actual beliefs. This makes her seem at once guileless and enigmatic; the only controversy surrounding her and Unarius at large seems to have been her claims that aliens, the so-called Space Brothers, would land on Earth on a specific date. That didn’t happen, of course, but other than that, it seems to be a rather harmless belief system that purports that souls are immortal and that past-life therapy (and the imminent arrival of the Space Brothers?) can assist in them becoming more spiritually enlightened. The film features interviewees who were or currently are part of Unarius, and no one has anything significantly bad to say about it; in fact, two of those who had left still subscribe to the organization’s beliefs in some way. The group’s camp factor—epitomized by XANADU-esque films that were broadcast on public television, garnering a cult following of their own—seems to have been a point of attraction rather than something of which its members were embarrassed by, either during or after those endeavors. There’s irony in outsiders’ appreciation of the group’s creative legacy, but the members’ interest in producing singular creative expressions of their beliefs was earnest. A cinephile can’t help but be endeared, as what is cinema if not the immortalizing of souls, to continue on and exist in many more lifetimes? Scott Cummings’ short film BUFFALO JUGGALOS premiered at CUFF in 2014; I wrote about it that it was “an ecstatic and richly aesthetic portrait” of its subject. The latter is still true of his debut feature, REALM OF SATAN (2024, 80 min), though it’s not exactly ecstatic. What remains even truer is that which is similar to Wille, an earnest fascination with misunderstood and often maligned subcultures. As in his previous short, Cummings again works in staged tableaux, with members of the Church of Satan positioned against various domestic backdrops. There’s little in the way of dialogue and even less in exposition. Per an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Cummings said, “It was more about creating a mystery. The whole idea was that we live in this world where you have nonstop access to all the information you want. Being able to give somebody this experience of mystery is like a gift. It’s much more interesting than revealing. Evoking, not explaining, you know?” Mise-en-scene befits mystery here, with the Satanists’ surroundings adding to the overall intrigue while providing clues as to their particular flavor of practice. “One of the gifts that they always brought was that they have these fantastic spaces,” Cummings said. “One of the core beliefs of Satanism, which is also part of the film, is this idea of total environment. It’s a magical concept that you build the world that you want to live in, not the world as it exists.” There are also magical elements involved in the filmmaking itself, a mix of sporadic practical and CGI effects—and some more manual tricks executed by one of the subjects—that imbue it even more so with a mystical element. The film can be redundant at times, but that may be the point, to normalize, if not the lifestyle, then simply the presence of it. This is something Ruth Norman also understood, the power of the image to help blur the lines between the wondrous and the realistic. Note: The Thursday screening of WELCOME SPACE BROTHERS is SOLD OUT. There are still tickets available for a second screening on Saturday, September 14. [Kat Sachs]
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Shorts 3
Thursday, 7pm
This vibrant sextet of outré short films each fulfills the promise—or perhaps, threat—of the power of the moving image as a propagandistic delivery tool. Meaning—or the lack thereof—found within cinema is explored to great effect across the program, more often than not, in the form of shuffling, strobe-like disorientation, most evident in Jacob Gilbert Ciocci & David Andrew Wightman’s MUSICAL TELEVISION (2024, 9 min), a barrage of images seemingly resting inside a child’s musical toy, displaying the rise and fall of sound and image as entertainment, in their description, "not a random system, but a chaotic system." A flurrying display of footage scoured from across television, the internet, and home video pummels the audience to the point of near-confusion, before ultimately settling on "well, maybe the chaos is the point." This technique of rapid interpretive imagery continues; some self-constructed, as in the stop-motion frenzy of the music video of SHOCK TO THE BODY (2022, 5 min), and some unwittingly manifested, as in the gastrointestinal mélange of Markus Maicher’s THE ACT OF NOT SEEING WITH ONE’S OWN EYES (2023, 8 mins), where internal organs start to miraculously begin to look less like anatomy and more like Stan Brakhage outtakes. Those searching for more concrete meaning bursting from interpretative images will find a bridge of sorts in Elijah Valter’s IBEX REBIRTH (2024, 14 min), one of two dystopian shorts in the group, here presupposing digital dreams of natural landscapes. This makes it a great companion with Ian Haig’s WORM PORNOGRAPHY (2024, 34 mis), whose title is less descriptive than it is thematically evocative, presenting a slow decay into how a mass parasitic worm force can so easily take over a society. Amidst these works, the short with the most undeniable entertainment value, while refusing to sacrifice artistic intrigue and political complexity, would be Talia Shea Levin’s MAKE ME A PIZZA (2024, 13 min), starting off as a pastiche of home video pornography before descending into Marxist interrogations of worth and value in the form of a transaction of pizza. Pleasure is explored in its many forms: food, sex, redistribution of wealth, all wrapped in a package that’s irreverent and bursting with proletarian flavor. As ever, the medium is the message. [Ben Kaye]
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Jesse McLean’s LIGHT NEEDS (US/Experimental)
Thursday, 9pm
LIGHT NEEDS is Jesse McLean’s first feature-length work, and it’s sure to satisfy fans of her shorter pieces while introducing her idiosyncratic worldview to new audiences. McLean’s wry sense of humor comes through in the concept of film—which is a meditation on people’s relationships with their houseplants—but it’s also there in her quirky visual compositions and in her deceptively casual plotting. LIGHT NEEDS moves between short documentary profiles of individuals who tend to plants as a vocation—from an older couple exhibit their bonsai trees at international competitions to the groundskeeper at the Golda Meir Library at UW Milwaukee, who uses his small budget to put up trees all around the facility—to ordinary folks who just keep a lot of plants in their homes. (In most of these segments, McLean refrains from showing faces, preferring to present her subjects’ backs, hands, and arms; such shots recall Robert Bresson at his most lighthearted.) Interspersed with the short subjects are interludes in which McLean presents shots of plants, sometimes with aphoristic titles overlaid (e.g., “What does photosynthesis feel like?”). Gradually, the aphorisms get replaced with McLean’s imaginings of what plants might say if they could talk; these unusual feats of empathy stand in compelling contrast with the various monologues, which tend to be more introspective, with the subjects musing on what plants mean to them. LIGHT NEEDS climaxes with a dialogue between the many houseplants of an anonymous living room when there are no humans present. The wittiest passage of the film, this sequence finds the plants kvetching about people, particularly their need to categorize everything, before lamenting their fate of having been uprooted from their natural environments and made to live indoors. It’s an unexpectedly minor-key conclusion to an otherwise upbeat experience, and it speaks to the breadth of McLean’s tonal range. Screening with Sheri Wills’ 2023 short iris (9 min) and Virginia L. Montgomery’s 2023 short BELLA LUNA (4 min). (2023, 74 min) [Ben Sachs]
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Please note that the opening night film, Ruth Leitman’s 2023 documentary NO ONE ASKED YOU (100 min), screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Wednesday, 8pm, is SOLD OUT. All films screening digitally unless otherwise noted. Many filmmakers in attendance for post-screening Q&As. For a full schedule, including several afterparties, visit the festival website here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Jacques Tati’s MON ONCLE (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 2pm

Jacques Tati introduced his alter ego Monsieur Hulot to audiences in 1953 with MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY. In this film, Hulot’s curiosity and lack of spatial awareness lead to comical disruptions at a small vacation resort. Tati drew on elements from silent film, mime, vaudeville, and variety shows, and while these influences are evident in MONSIEUR HULOT’S HOLIDAY, they are more refined in his subsequent film, MON ONCLE. Like his character, Tati himself felt out of place in the modern world. He left his affluent Russian family to join the Bohemian and artistic circles of France. Although a sense of joie de vivre is present in all of Tati’s work, a thematic shift occurs between HOLIDAY and MON ONCLE. Once again, Hulot is out of his element, but this time, the challenge lies in navigating modern life rather than simply relaxing. In MON ONCLE, as well as in PLAYTIME and TRAFFIC, Tati satirizes modern living with increasing sophistication, blending slapstick comedy with deeper social commentary. The chaos surrounding Hulot is meticulously crafted by Tati, the perfectionist filmmaker. MON ONCLE immerses the audience in "Tati World," a place characterized by absurdities and social hierarchies. Hulot, the charmingly hapless hero, becomes a symbol of resistance against the relentless march of postwar modernity. His frequent misunderstandings of gadgets and his inability to follow convoluted instructions reflect a world that is evolving too quickly to remain human. The sleek, impersonal architecture, the cold efficiency of machines, and the empty promises of consumerism all stand as his adversaries. The title sequence of MON ONCLE sets the tone for the film. The credits are presented as physical signs against a backdrop of modern office buildings, the names are presented in a sterile, formal typeset. Then, Tati cuts to the title, MON ONCLE, casually scribbled on a brick wall. This transition highlights the stark contrast between the old world, where Hulot feels at ease, and the newly reconstructed France, obsessed with status and convenience gadgets. Through Hulot’s innocent antics, Tati demonstrates that these gadgets are neither convenient nor necessary. Hulot’s nephew is caught between the old and new worlds. His father wants him to embrace modernity and even attempts to secure a job for Hulot, the nephew’s hero, hoping it leads Hulot toward an accepted social status. Yet, Hulot is unemployable, causing a series of mishaps at his brother-in-law’s workplace. Tati frequently shows that status is ultimately meaningless. His satire of the impersonality, tedium, and sterility of modern life is fully displayed through Hulot’s sister and her husband, who pride themselves on their pristine yard and collection of ultra-modern gadgets. One recurring gag features the water fountain at the front of their home, a garish steel marlin that spits water only when guests of perceived status arrive but is quickly turned off for others like Hulot. In MON ONCLE, Hulot represents the everyman—or perhaps the no one—defined more by his ability to incite chaos than by any personal history. The film’s minimalist plot and its critique of Western civilization earned it the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, an irony that likely gave Jacques Tati a deep sense of satisfaction. Screening as part of the Remembering David Bordwell series. (1958, 116 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]

Kenji Mizoguchi’s STREET OF SHAME (Japan)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 4:30pm

STREET OF SHAME, Kenji Mizoguchi’s final film, was released just a few months before the passage of the Prostitution Prevention Law, which outlawed sex work in Japan. While STREET’s popularity is widely credited with having inspired the nation to support the law, the movie suggests that its passage was all but inevitable by early 1956; discussions about the possibility of the law being passed cast a shadow over the story, implying that the characters’ way of life is coming to an end. Even without those conversations, though, this would be one of the most pessimistic depictions of sex work in cinema, as it portrays the career as a financial dead end in addition to being morally degrading. The women of the Dreamland geisha house (the film’s principal location) are constantly worrying about money, and most of them are trapped in debt to the house’s owners. Further, they all have personal problems that are only exacerbated by their work. One character, who came to the Dreamland to support her unemployed husband and their infant, must fight the will to commit suicide on a near-daily basis; another, who has been a geisha for decades to raise her son, must now contend with the son’s contempt and desire to disown her. Mizoguchi juggles these stories along with several others, frequently bringing them together in his trademark long shots that present all the major characters at once. Indeed, the formal mastery is so impressive that it sometimes overrides the pervasive despair—Mizoguchi’s congested frames evoke a bustling world where the moment is always being pushed to its crisis. Yet the despair is rarely out of view. Mizoguchi was raised in abject poverty, and his older sister was sold into sex work when he was still a child; these formative experiences gave rise to a fatalistic worldview that colors much of his cinematic output. STREET OF SHAME marks a fitting end to his career in that it forcefully reiterates his themes of female suffering and self-sacrifice and ties them to the historical moment.  Screening as part of the Remembering David Bordwell series. (1956, 86 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Yasujiro Ozu's I WAS BORN, BUT... (Japan/Silent)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6pm

Yasujiro Ozu was only 29 years old when he directed I WAS BORN, BUT... More remarkable is that he had nearly 30 features to his credit at this point. As a result, the film embodies a breezy, youthful quality (of both the filmmaker and the Japanese studio system, which put even the productivity of early Hollywood to shame) while advancing a sophisticated understanding of film style. Those who know Ozu solely from his subdued postwar movies will be surprised by how lively this is. Though the subject matter is Ozu's favored realm of middle-class family life, he approaches it with some out-and-out sarcasm and tracking shots as ambitious as those in contemporaneous movies like King Vidor's THE CROWD and Mizoguchi's SISTERS OF THE GION. Jonathan Rosenbaum has written of the film: "Though regarded in Japan mainly as a conservative director, Ozu was a trenchant social critic throughout his career, and the devastating understanding of social context that he shows here is full of radical implications." Just as radical is the film's undifferentiated depiction of children and adults, which suggests a utopian approach to family dynamics. Screening as part of the Remembering David Bordwell series. (1932, 100 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Stanley Donen’s SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am

As a kid, I found the title SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS a hilarious one, and I caught bits and pieces of it on cable over the years. When I eventually watched the film in its entirety, I found it lived up to its excessive name. This is also reflected in its troubled production: filmed at MGM during BRIGADOON, this was brushed aside as the lesser of the two films. Not based on a previous theatrical production, this Stanley Donen-directed musical comes from a short story which in turn was based on the Roman legend of the Rape (or Abduction/Kidnapping) of the Sabine women; if you want a good Wikipedia deep-dive, the historicity of this story and the correct terminology to use is hotly contested. SEVEN BRIDES turns this harrowing tale in a fun romp that surprisingly works through its cheerful tone, both narratively and visually. Adam (Howard Keel) is the eldest of—you guessed it—seven brothers, living in the wilderness of the Oregon Territory. On a sojourn into the closest town to find a wife he meets Milly (Jane Powell), marries her, and returns with her to his backwoods brothers on their farm. Milly makes it her mission to tame these bros, and they all attend a barn raising. This is the highlight scene of the film, featuring Michael Kidd’s kinetic choreography and the dazzling acrobatics of Russ Tamblyn as one of the brothers. Shot in gorgeous CinemaScope, SEVEN BRIDES is worth watching if only for the barn raising scene. The brothers meet six women, and later decide to abduct them back to their farm, much to Milly and the women’s horror. Trapped at the farm over winter, however, things gradually turn romantic, despite a truly terrible start. Also, look out for Julie Newmar as Dorcas, one the brides. She is completely out of place; even in this artifice-filled period musical, her face and mannerisms are just too iconic to be contained. (1954, 102 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

Dziga Vertov's ENTHUSIASM: SYMPHONY OF THE DONBAS (USSR)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

Hot on the heels of his magnum opus MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929), Dziga Vertov traveled to the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine to shoot the Soviet Union's first-ever sound film, ENTHUSIASM: SYMPHONY OF THE DONBAS. Whereas the aforementioned feature is a universal appeal for worker solidarity that aimed for a global awakening of class consciousness, thus firmly placing it in the artistic tradition of Soviet films produced under Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP), ENTHUSIASM instead emerges as a direct work of Stalinist agitprop, produced to celebrate the pivotal role that the Donbas region, a resource-rich region which even today houses an estimated reserve of nearly 100 billion tons of coal, would play in Stalin's first Five-Year Plan to industrialize the USSR. While not nearly as frenetic as MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, ENTHUSIASM is nonetheless a breakneck and blistering barrage of images, utilizing many of the same multiple exposure tricks and kaleidoscopic split-screen duplications that lend such an indelible visual character to Vertov's masterpiece. ENTHUSIASM is a grim labor parable that unfolds with remarkable linearity for the work of someone as legendarily averse to narrative as Vertov. Drunken peasants under the soporific influence of Christianity are swept up in the fervor of an encroaching industrial revolution, churches are summarily toppled, and the people of the Donbas take to the mines as newly anointed heroes of the Stalinist project. The film amounts to nothing less than a call for a total assault against the Earth itself, framing the emergent mining proletariat of the Donbas as "fighters on the frontline of fire." The narrator continues morbidly: "It is about glory. It is about honor. It is about courage and heroism." The comparatively tamer visual approach that Vertov employed with this film can no doubt be attributed to the radical integration of sound into his artistic process. Using novel portable sound recording equipment for the first time in Soviet film history, Vertov "storm[ed] the sounds of the Donbas" and sought to assemble not a straightforward diegetic documentary accompaniment, but rather a "complex interaction of sound with image" to use a few turns of phrase from his own body of writing. The soundscape of the film is pure proto-ERASERHEAD (1977) sludge; an asynchronous machine symphony of military marches and sweeping orchestral movements that bleed seamlessly into brittle sheets of industrial drone and bursts of machinic cacophony. Battle hymns soundtrack the traffic of minecarts and dazzling depictions of metallurgic action, while dense collages of train horns and factory emissions provide a wry accompaniment to footage of parade marches and assemblies. It is nigh-impossible to watch ENTHUSIASM without succumbing to the crushing weight of the terrible history it portends. Only two years later, the Donbas region would be the site of mass Ukrainian peasant death due to the imposition of Stalin's Holomodor, a forced famine that claimed the lives of an estimated 4 million Ukrainians between 1931 and 1934. The mines featured in the film, which became a way of life and, for better or for worse, a heroic calling for residents of the Donbas, are now in utter disarray. Power outages stemming from a 2014 occupation of the region by Russian-backed paramilitary organizations caused widespread flooding of the mines, resulting in rampant water pollution throughout the region, as well as the dispersion of mining practices to illegal shallow coal pits which are decimating the Ukrainian landscape. In the spirit of this decidedly musical experiment and in order to capture something of the essence of this wonderful, terrible film, I'll close with a song lyric that I have been unable to shake from my mind since finishing the film: "The trumpet scatters its awful sound / Over the graves of all lands / Summoning all before the throne / Death and mankind shall be stunned / When nature arises / To give account before the judge." Screening as part of the Propaganda and Counterculture lecture series. (1930, 67 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]

Howard Hawks' HIS GIRL FRIDAY (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 2:30pm

"Walter, you're wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way." This line, tossed out by Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) to her ex-husband, Walter Burns (Cary Grant), is just one of the many iconic lines that pepper the rapid-fire dialogue in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, one of the best screwball comedies and an exemplary film in Howard Hawks' body of work. HIS GIRL FRIDAY, a remake of former Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s THE FRONT PAGE (1931), is barely a romance in the traditional sense, but very much a love letter to the morally ambiguous profession of newspaper journalism. The story begins with Hildy announcing to Walter that she is leaving the newspaper business to marry a normal guy: a slow-talking, dependable, and chivalrous insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy). Bruce is clearly the opposite of Walter (a slimy, fast-talking rascal), and as soon as Walter takes Bruce's measure, he realizes he can win Hildy back to the newspaper (and incidentally, to himself) with some creative scheming. Hilarity ensues as Hildy takes the bait and screws up everything in her plans to get married the next day by chasing a dramatic story, saving a life, and exposing some uniquely Chicago-style corrupt politicians. HIS GIRL FRIDAY differs from THE FRONT PAGE by switching the gender of Hildy Johnson to remake the plot into a screwball comedy, and enables Hawks to sculpt one of his "Hawksian women" with Russell's character. Russell excels as her side-talking, eye-rolling, slapstick character, and it's easy to revel in just how acerbic Hildy and Walter act with each other with their one-upping one-liners. Russell, in fact, was so worried about having enough good lines that she hired her own personal writer to help her think of good lines to ad-lib. Hawks encouraged spontaneity, ad-libbing, and simultaneous dialogue on set, so the characters not only speak more quickly than any other film in history (an average of 240 words per minute!), but they talk over each other constantly. (This was a nightmare for the sound techs to manage, incidentally, and required some innovation.) The result is marvelous, and inspired many filmmakers to follow, including Robert Altman, who made overlapping dialogue one of the trademarks of his own auteur style. Strong women, ad-libbing, breaking the fourth wall, exploring moral ambiguity, and embracing "loathsome" characters make HIS GIRL FRIDAY a delight to watch and a wonderful introduction to tropes of Hawks' film style that run through BRINGING UP BABY, THE BIG SLEEP, RIO BRAVO, and many others. Screening as part of the Remembering David Bordwell series. (1940, 92 min, 35mm) [Alex Ensign]

Mitchell Leisen’s PRACTICALLY YOURS (US)

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

Norman Krasna was a prolific playwright and screenwriter whose work is rife with strange contrivances, or at least it seems that way based on the films I’ve seen with which he was associated: Fritz Lang’s FURY (1936) and YOU AND ME (1938), Garson Kanin’s BACHELOR MOTHER (1939), Alfred Hitchcock’s MR. & MRS. SMITH (1941), and Stanley Donen’s INDISCREET (1958). These films share a common implausibility, which generally results in characters having to hide some awful secret from everyone around them or having to pretend to be someone else, though the circumstances of each film are convoluted in their own unique way. The setup of PRACTICALLY YOURS is especially knotty: Fred MacMurray plays an Air Force pilot who, at the start of the picture, thinks he’s going to die on a bombing mission; he radios his base and gives a farewell speech about the things that make life worth living, such as his love for his dear dog Piggy. This speech gets broadcast all over America, where everyone thinks MacMurray is talking about a girl named Peggy… including a coworker at his old job (Claudette Colbert) who happens to be named Peggy and who thinks she’s the girl in question. When MacMurray miraculously survives and gets found at sea a few days later, he’s brought home to New York, where he must carry on a sham romance with Peggy so it can be extensively documented and used to promote the War Effort. What emerges is a cynical comedy about American mass media, comparable to William A. Wellman’s NOTHING SACRED (1937) but riskier in a sense because it satirizes the war effort while World War II was still underway. The film is charming enough on the surface, however, thanks to Mitchell Leisen’s characteristically buoyant direction and the easygoing chemistry between MacMurray and Colbert, appearing together onscreen for the fifth time. Leisen would ultimately direct MacMurray nine times over his career and Colbert four; needless to say, he knows how to play to these actors’ strengths. Preceded by True Boardman’s 1954 short film THE ATOM GOES TO SEA (12 min, 35mm). (1944, 88 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

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Jazmin Jones’ SEEKING MAVIS BEACON (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

“IS SHE REAL TO YOU?” So reads the pink and red flier for a missing woman hotline run by two self-proclaimed e-girl detectives. The woman in question is “Mavis Beacon,” the smiling Black woman who graced covers of the 1980s promotional rollout for what would become the #1 educational software product of all time, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The e-girls in question are filmmaker Jazmin Jones and poet-programmer and doula Olivia McKayla Ross, two young artists cleverly and relentlessly seeking Mavis Beacon in a hybrid documentary that performs a rich archival tapestry of digital subjectivities and tech histories. The filmmaker hunts down cyberfeminists and techies for conversational interviews along an adventurous road to discovering the heart and soul of Mavis Beacon, a decidedly imaginary figure. Yet Mavis Beacon is certainly real, and real to me–—to answer the main question here—as I wouldn’t be typing this write-up so swiftly without her. I have fond late-aughts memories of training on the gamified typing program during an era in which I was forbidden to play video games. The computer program’s tutorly avatar is a mirage of Black womanhood, brought into sharp relief by three white, male software developers, her name derived from Mavis Staples and her likeness borrowed from a Haitian emigree and retired fashion model named Renée L'Espérance, whose lore cites her acrylic nails as having been anywhere from three to six inches, hardly conducive with a keyboard (or at least according to one of the aforementioned developers). The Mavis Beacon character took eventual shape as an animated digital figure, guiding and encouraging her pupils and predating the assistive pocket fembots we rely on today. Ultimately, Jones and Ross strive to make contact with Renée, the reclusive, totally offline real woman behind Mavis, and on the way they tap into the insights of a host of technologists, media theorists, healers, artists and friends. As cultural theorist Mandy Harris Williams expresses at one point in the film, in consideration of “digital style” and the rhythm of acrylics on keyboards, “Black women have a tremendous frenzy, a brainstorm to process.” Jones and Ross externalize this brainstorm in a tricked out cyberlair furnished by colorful couches, a plethora of monitors, collaged moodboards, and a central Mavis Beacon evidence map, all erected in a storage locker rented free of charge from some kindly tech bros, laying a staging ground for conspiratorial research à la the time-traveling engineers of PRIMER (2004). And time travel they will, mining online forums, Facebook groups, home video, political and cinematic histories, as well as all-timer and esoteric memes alike from the depths of Black online culture. Fragments of research are presented as elegant, animated desktop capture to deftly weave a web of connections that brackets incisive discussions of Blackness and AI, Black women’s roles in social reproduction, and the ethics of rendering subjects, including those elaborated through documentary film. Jones employs deep fakes and fabricated ephemera in order to imagine Mavis Beacon’s world otherwise, a world in which she was “given her flowers” by the likes of Obama, Oprah, and the general masses. Five minutes into the film we’re given a clue to all the mystery, telling us this will be one of those fine slippages between truth and fiction, with an on-screen flash of wisdom from Cheryl Dunye: “Sometimes you have to make your own history.” And how could the film not be filtered through Dunye’s THE WATERMELON WOMAN (1996), that lodestar of The New Queer Cinema which dreams at the edges of disputed Black histories, invents and explodes a female iconography with so much play and love? (2024, 102 min, DCP Digital) [Elise Schierbeek]

Christopher Petit’s RADIO ON (UK)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday and Wednesday, 12:30pm

There may be no better way to get a sense of the disaffected youth of pre-Thatcher England than by watching Christopher Petit’s feature film debut, RADIO ON. London-born Petit was 30 years old when he set out to explore the shabby, gray environs between his hometown and Bristol through the eyes and ears of his protagonist, a radio jock played by David Beames, in a road movie inspired by the likes of TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971) and the aesthetics of Robert Bresson, Roberto Rossellini, and especially Wim Wenders. With the help of Team Wenders—Wim as associate producer, Martin Schäfer as cinematographer, and frequent Wenders actress (and former wife) Lisa Kreuzer in a principal role—Petit fashions a loose narrative that unfolds in the beginning with cryptic images and few words. Underscored by David Bowie’s “Heroes/Helden,” a handheld camera captures the interior of an apartment, revealing a mostly hidden person in a bathtub and then scouring every corner until it returns to the bathroom. Cut to Robert cuing up LPs at his radio gig. A listener has requested “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” but he says, “Here’s something better,” and plays Bowie’s “Always Crashing in the Same Car.” When we are introduced to his domestic arrangement, a dark-haired woman (Sue Jones-Davies) watching three TVs scurries away from him. Soon, we learn from a terse phone call that his brother has died and that the woman is leaving him. He hops in his Rover, a car that importantly for one scene must sometimes be hand-cranked from the front to start, puts in a Kraftwerk cassette he just received in the mail from his brother, and starts on his way. The characters he meets—a scary Army deserter (Andrew Byatt), a gas station attendant obsessed with Eddie Cochran (Sting, singing “Three Steps to Heaven” quite nicely), the woman (Sandy Radcliffe) in whose apartment his brother died, two German women (Kreuzer and Katja Kersten)—reflect anger and loss to match Robert’s own. Building signs, advertising, movie marquees, gas stations, and odd, flyover roads emphasize Petit’s own fixation on cars and media, giving us a landscape that seems as vacuous, ephemeral, and restless as the taciturn, passive Robert, who is in the habit of starting a song on a turntable, radio, or cassette player and then simply walking away. This film’s oddly hypnotic spell dissipates a bit when he and one of the German women go on a mission to find her daughter, but as he rides a train back to London to the strains of Kraftwerk’s “Ohm Sweet Ohm,” we suddenly realize that we are being awakened from our meditation. Screening as part of Alamo Time Capsule 1984 film series. (1979, 104 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

Michael Mann's HEAT (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 5pm

By 1995, Michael Mann was already one of the most formally accomplished directors of modern Hollywood. His TV series Miami Vice brought a new style to the police procedure genre: streamlined, fixated on technological detail, and coolly—even inhumanly—detached from its characters. His previous theatrical features, MANHUNTER and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, married these qualities to a rich visual language that drew from centuries of American painting. But HEAT was a new breakthrough: the introduction of a relentlessly inquisitive film style, willing to sacrifice focus and even spatial orientation in order to capture the most stimulating detail of any given moment. (It was perhaps the first pointillist action movie.) Mann's gifts as a visual artist would be superficial, though, if he weren't so thoroughly educated in his subject matter. The obsessiveness of Al Pacino's Lt. Vincent Hanna in arresting a master thief was inspired by one of Mann's friends in the Chicago Police Department; and equally important to the film's power is the near-documentary explication of almost every bit of surveillance equipment and artillery we see. (As in his later COLLATERAL [2003] and MIAMI VICE [2006], Mann had much of the cast undergo professional weapons training before production.) Mann's eternal subject is the shark-like grace of the career professional; this film conveys, in an epic accumulation of detail, the challenge of keeping up with him. It also reflects on the professional's struggle in keeping up with himself. Pacino's Hanna and Robert De Niro's Neil McCauley (Hanna's criminal doppelgänger) are similar cases of middle-aged regret, worn down by decades of living by professional code, but Mann never paints them schematically. This isn't a film about the futility of law and order, but the codependence between law and crime. It's also an awe-inspiring portrait of contemporary Los Angeles, as striking a postmodern (in the architectural sense) piece of art as any of Antonioni's '60s films. Screening as part of the Remembering David Bordwell series. (1995, 171 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER (USSR)

Alamo Drafthouse – Saturday, 12:30pm and Monday, 12:15pm

Loosely based on the Soviet novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Tarkovsky's STALKER creates a decrepit industrial world where a mysterious Zone is sealed off by the government. The Zone, rumored to be of alien origin, is navigable by guides known as Stalkers. The Stalker of the title leads a writer and a scientist through the surrounding detritus into the oneiric Zone—an allegorical stand-in for nothing less than life itself—on a spiritual quest for a room that grants one's deepest subconscious wish. Tarkovsky composes his scenes to obscure the surroundings and tightly controls the audience's view through long, choreographed takes. Shots run long and are cut seamlessly. Coupled with non-localized sounds and a methodical synth score, sequences in the film beckon the audience into its illusion of continuous action while heightening the sense of time passing. The use of nondiegetic sounds subtly reminds us that this may be a subjective world established for the Stalker's mystical purpose. Where sci-fi films tend to overstate humanity's limitless imagination of the universe, Tarkovsky reappropriates the genre's trappings to suggest the cosmos' deepest truths are in one's own mind. STALKER posits—perhaps frighteningly—that, in this exploration of the self, there is something that knows more about us than we know ourselves. The writer and scientist, both at their spiritual and intellectual nadir, hope the room will renew their métier; the Stalker's purpose, as stated by Tarkovsky, is to "impose on them the idea of hope." But STALKER is a rich and continually inspiring work not for this (or any other) fixed meaning but rather for its resistance to any one single interpretation. Screening as part of Alamo Time Capsule 1984 film series. (1979, 163 min, DCP Digital) [Brian Welesko]

Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBIE (Italy/US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7pm

Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBIE, also known as ZOMBI 2 or ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS, stands as a pivotal entry in the history of zombie cinema as well as the history of practical effects in film, representing the Italian horror tradition at its most extreme. Released in the wake of George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, ZOMBIE was marketed as an unofficial sequel to capitalize on the success of Romero’s film, though the two are vastly different, thematically and stylistically. While Romero’s work is noted for its allegorical treatment of consumerism and societal decay in the mid-to-late 1970s, Fulci’s ZOMBIE emphasizes spectacle, visceral horror, and grotesque violence. The plot of ZOMBIE is minimal and functions largely as a framework for Fulci’s thrilling visual set pieces. The film follows Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow), who travels to the Caribbean island of Matul to search for her missing father. She is accompanied by a journalist, Peter West (Ian McCulloch), and two other travelers. Upon arriving, they discover that the island is overrun by the undead, resurrected through a mysterious curse or plague. While the narrative works to get our characters to the island of the zombies, it is clear the emphasis of the film is on its elaborate scenes of gore and violence rather than story or character development. Fulci’s treatment of zombies contrasts sharply with Romero’s more metaphorical approach. In ZOMBIE, the undead are less a symbol of societal collapse and more akin to body horror by emphasizing physical decay. The zombies are often depicted in extreme close-up, revealing their rotting flesh, featureless faces, and worm-infested bodies. These images emphasize the grotesque and decomposing flesh as something straight out of Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject. The boundaries between life and death, self and other, are dissolved. Fulci’s zombies embodying death in its most tangible form. The film’s most famous scenes highlight Fulci’s fixation on physical destruction and bodily invasion. The zombie versus shark sequence exemplifies the film’s disregard for realism in favor of visual absurdity. While the scene may initially appear comical due to its implausibility, it is emblematic of Fulci’s desire to shock and provoke. More unsettling is the infamous eye-gouging scene, where the anticipation for gore is palpable. Fulci’s camera lingers on the violence, drawing out the moment in excruciating detail. This emphasis on prolonged suffering sets Fulci apart from other horror directors, as he refused to cut away from a violent scene, forcing the viewer to confront it in its entirety. Each horrific set piece was designed to elicit maximum shock value as the use of practical effects and makeup enhanced the realism of the gore, contributing to the film’s enduring reputation as one of the most gruesome entries in the zombie genre. The film was banned in several countries during the "video nasties" era of the 1980s, further contributing to its notoriety. Over time, critical reappraisal has positioned ZOMBIE as an essential entry in the Italian horror canon, alongside works of Dario Argento and Mario Bava. The film remains a significant, if polarizing, landmark within the horror genre. Its emphasis on bodily destruction and grotesque imagery distinguishes it from its contemporaries, positioning it as a key text in the evolution of zombie cinema. While its narrative may be minimal, the film’s visual and thematic excess has ensured its lasting influence and status as a cult classic. Screening as part of Alamo Time Capsule 1984 film series. (1979, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Ted Wilde's SPEEDY (US/Silent)

Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Ln.) – Wednesday, 2pm and 7pm

Harold Lloyd is most widely celebrated for his work in SAFETY LAST and THE FRESHMAN; however, his performance as the titular character in Ted Wilde's SPEEDY is just as comical and inspired. Speedy just can't seem to hold down a job. One day he's a soda jerk and the next day he's a taxi driver. He'll also do anything for his girlfriend. Wilde allows Lloyd's comic everyman persona to shine through, and also demonstrates a talented eye for location photography. In particular, the scenes taking place at Coney Island have beautiful shot composition as each frame is brimming with vitality from the foreground to the background. Whether the Speedy and his girl are riding a ride or playing carnival games, Wilde captures an enchanting date out at the pier with tact and grace. Much of the film deals with the dichotomy between the fast-paced lifestyle of 1920's New York and the antiquities of years past. Chief among these are motor cars/taxis and the horse-drawn streetcar owned by Pop Dillon—Speedy's soon to be father-in-law. After taking Babe Ruth as a taxi passenger and dropping him off at Yankee Stadium, Speedy decides to attend the game himself and is promptly fired when his boss happens to be seated right in front of him in the stands. He decides to take over for Pop as the streetcar driver. At this point, the theme of big business versus ‘the little guy' comes to a crescendo—a theme that continues to resonate, more so than ever today. The climactic sequence in which the business' gangsters duke it out in the streets with the old-time trade shop owners is truly hysterical. Lloyd's charismatic performance makes it easy to see why he was one of Hollywood's biggest stars during the silent film era. (1928, 85 min, DCP Digital) [Kyle Cubr]

Mike Cheslik’s HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30pm

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]

Nathan Silver’s BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

The very first sound you hear in Nathan Silver’s BETWEEN THE TEMPLES is a shofar, the ram’s horn traditionally used during Jewish high holidays, blaring underneath production company logos popping up on screen to shake us alert before we even get to the first frame; the distraught face of one Benjamin Gottlieb (a tremendous Jason Schwartzman). As the spiritually and emotionally lost cantor at the local synagogue, Schwartzman is at the height of his powers as a performer, expertly navigating high-stakes comic set pieces with appropriate dramatic stakes, his religious and emotional states in equal modes of distress. The one thing that can potentially shake Ben loose is the sudden reemergence of his grade school music teacher, Carla Kessler (the divine Carol Kane), here seeking a late-in-life bat mitzvah (traditionally reserved for those in their early teen years) as a means of spiritual and personal realignment. To support the naturally comedic oddball circumstances of the premise, Silver and cinematographer Sean Price Williams create a frenetic visual vocabulary, iris shots honing in on important details, horrifically close-up faces and hands cluttering up the frame, and even moments of narrative and visual mysticism to terrify us even more. The film is undeniably a successful comic tale, most notably in its specificity of Jewish lore and minutiae: Ben accidentally eating a non-kosher burger, him kissing his yarmulke after it has fallen on the floor, the sense memory of hearing the tunes of davening (prayer) sung at synagogue. To speak frankly here, part of what I’ve found so wonderful about my own Judaism is the ways in which the quest for a “correct” answer about anything ultimately becomes futile, the very act of questioning and not-knowing of life being a reward in itself. To this end, the hand grenade of an emotional truth that eventually detonates in the final third of Silver’s feature may read as either false or unmotivated or perhaps even just plain wrong for many viewers, but for me it came off as nothing short of that very same eager spirit of not having the answers to solve one’s life, and here, desperately clutching to the only joyful things in your life through the only means you know how. In its best moments, Silver’s work is altogether beautiful and messy in concurrence—​as Jewish a descriptor as I can come up with—​and a loving reminder that no matter where we are in life, it’s never too late to have your own coming-of-age story. (2024, 111 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

🎞️ ALSO SCREENING

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with 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 Public Library
View all screenings taking place at Chicago Public Library branches here.

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Lucía Puenzo’s 2023 Argentine film ELECTROPHILIA (90 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.). Free admission. 

“Going Places: Chicago Short Films” screens Wednesday, 7pm, also at the Chicago Cultural Center. Free admission. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
On Thursday, FACETS’ Anime Club presents a members-only double feature of two mecha films from the same series at 7 and 9pm. Preceded by an introduction by longtime Anime Club member Ralphie Serpico. Free and exclusive to FACETS Film Club members. Presented in partnership with Chicago’s first manga store, Goblin Market. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Robin Campillo’s 2023 film RED ISLAND (117 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Another Mystery Movie Monday screening takes place Monday at 6pm. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ Goethe Institut (150 N. Michigan Ave.)
Tom Tykwer’s 1998 film RUN LOLA RUN (88 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 6pm, as part of the 70 Years of German Films series. Free and open to the public, please register in advance and bring photo ID for check-in. More info on all screenings here. 

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

Josh Kahn’s 2024 film DEVONTE (33 min, DCP Digital) begins and Michael Duignan’s 2023 film THE PARAGON (83 min, DCP Digital) continues screening this week. See Venue website for films and showtimes. More info on all screenings here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 W. Western Ave.)
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1970 film THE WIZARD OF GORE (95 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday, 7pm, as part of a weekly horror gathering and screening series, with a social hour starting at 6pm. More info here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Episodes 1-5 of Christopher Jason Bell’s 2023 series MISS ME YET, described as being “a look back at the presidency of George W. Bush and the impact he had on everyday life using exclusively archival footage,” screen Friday starting at 7pm; episodes 6-9 Saturday at 6pm; and episode 10, also on Saturday, at 9pm. Followed by post-screening Q&As. Part one moderated by Daniel Gorman and parts two and three moderated by Eric Marsh. 

Tone Glow presents Dirk De Bruyn’s 1987 film HOMECOMINGS (98 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday at 7pm. Preceded by de Bruyn’s FRAMES (1986). 

Find more information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its full screening and workshop schedule, here.

🎞️ ONLINE SCREENINGS/EVENTS

⚫ VDB TV
Saif Alsaegh: Bittersweet Landscape, a program of three short films by Alsaegh, screens for free on VDB TV. More info here.

CINE-LIST: September 6 - September 12, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Julian Antos, Kyle Cubr, Jeremy M. Davies, Alex Ensign, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Elise Schierbeek, Brian Welesko, David Whitehouse