:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 ::

🤘 31st Annual Chicago Underground Film Festival

All programs below screening at the Harper Theater (5238 S. Harper Ave.) except where noted

Shorts 4
Friday, 4:30pm and Sunday, 3pm
The shorts in this program explore and dramatize the often liminal sites of queer desire, whether they be physical, mental, spiritual, or some combination of them all. In Alex Matraxia’s DREAM FACTORY (2023, 7 min), a kind of thesis statement for the program, two theater patrons—credited as “James” and “Rock”—engage in a dalliance while cruising an empty cinema seemingly haunted by the ghosts of archetypal Hollywood figures. Like Tsai Ming-liang’s GOODBYE, DRAGON INN by way of Wong Kar-wai, it’s an ethereal, sensuous evocation of movie theaters as historical and phenomenological spaces for the unleashing of taboo desires. Russell Sheaffer’s DECOMP DISCO (2024, 5 min) looks at cinema from a more materialist angle. Comprised of footage from the 1978 film DISCO FEVER that had been buried in the ground by the filmmaker, the short uses the visual artifacts of celluloid decomposition in an act of reimagining and transformation. Wrik Mead does something differently transformative with BEWARE (2023, 3 min) by playing audio from the homophobic 1961 “educational” film BOYS BEWARE over pixelated, glitching images of gay pornography. Inverting the equation, it’s the audio that’s pornographic in Charles Lum and Todd Verow’s DESERT CRUISING (2023, 4 min), in which a narrator describes his myriad gay sexual trysts against negative, color-flashing images of the American Southwest. Perhaps the two shorts that form the most cohesive thematic pair are Chris Noon’s ANNIHILATION (2024, 6 min) and Mike Olenick’s PLEASE BE TENDER (2024, 22 min), both of which center on queer men attempting, in different ways, to go beyond the corporeal and social limits of their pleasure while capturing their experiences on film. The idea of exceeding boundaries is prominent in a more spatial sense in Derek A. Spencer’s PERSONALLY I FIND IT RUDE TO BE BORING (2024, 8 min), which sees rave-goers spill out into a neon-lit alley, their bustling, aleatory movements documented hypnotically by a fixed-perspective camera that moves incrementally deeper into the scene. After all the chaos, there’s a certain refreshment to be found in Angelo Madsen Minax’s ONE NIGHT AT BABES (2024, 29 min), a documentary about a dive bar in Bethel, Vermont started by two trans men. Despite the predictable pushback from some of the more conservative locals, the bar turns out to be a hit, uniting the town’s young LGBTQ folk with their elder neighbors. The short leaves us with the feeling that the margins of society can, and have, expanded propitiously to the center. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Jesse McLean’s LIGHT NEEDS (US/Experimental)
Friday, 5:30pm
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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Shorts 5
Friday, 6:30 pm and Saturday, 2:30 pm
A sometimes funny, other times tender program loosely threaded by the themes of memory making and the fleeting of time. With a mixture of exciting Chicago or Midwest premieres. THESE F**KING KIDS (2024, 9 min) by Lucky Marvel is a cinéma verité of two six-year-old half-brothers in matching attires roving around the neighborhood: the shaky close-ups intimately magnify the two lovely sh*t-talkers as they bike and swear in full snark—“Mama tried raising me better!” The same upward-tilt camera now points at the derelict modernist public sculptures in PUBLIC SURFACES (2023, 12 min) by Gillian Waldo, a quiet documentary that ponders on the efficacy of Baltimore’s “1% for Art” law. Archival photographs contrast with 16mm shots of overgrown lawns of public schools where the once commissioned artworks either fall into ruins or have long disappeared. Hilarious home video APPLICATION TO BE LARS VON TRIER’S “FEMALE GIRLFRIEND/MUSE” (2024, 16 min) by Tomi Faison is a self-reflexive response to the renowned Dogme 95 filmmaker’s odd Instagram ad published in 2023—verified but now deleted—looking for a female girlfriend/muse. The protagonist of the video, Rose, Faison’s 75-year-old cigarette-smoking and brandy-drinking neighbor, is a bad ass natural. See her steal the show. Anna Hogg’s dreamy 16mm THE ARCHIVE IS ON FIRE (2023, 10 min) flickers and swirls as if we were trapped in a state of hypnagogia. Fragmented texts twinkle as memory-images slow-burn in a wet fire. Chiming with Waldo’s PUBLIC SURFACES on the idea of how a place is a memory-house built by forces of ideology but worn out by time, film essay NO SE VE DESDE ACÁ (2024, 20 min) by Enrique Pedráza-Botero is a clashing duet of capitalism and immigration that sing all the strange contradictions that coincide the city of Miami, Florida. Also in this program but unavailable for preview is THIS FEELING OF BEING STUCK (2023, 19 min) by Isabella Escobedo. [Nicky Ni]
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Fernando Saldivia Yáñez’s BRIEF SPACE OF A TIME (Chile)
Friday, 7pm and Saturday, 7pm
The title of Fernando Saldivia Yáñez’s BRIEF SPACE OF A TIME calibrates us to a simple condition—that space and time belong to one another—and reminds us that filmmaking can be a form of dwelling, staying with, contemplating and existing alongside (for a moment). BRIEF SPACE OF A TIME assembles a documentary portrait of an intimately unfolding and unhurried day in the life of the filmmaker’s aunt and uncle, Mireya and Emardo, while they tend to home upkeep and intermingle with roving animals on their ancestral land, the Wallmapu, as indigenous Mapuche people in south-central Chile. Shots are long, suffused with tenderness and scenes of nourishment, meditating on utensils, steam, rainfall, warm meals, and yard work. The first section of the film is given over to non-human dwellers, to the breakfast time of dogs, cats, cows, chickens, sheep, and pigs alike, who go on to form a wandering refrain as recurring characters. Present with his family as a visitor, Yáñez includes himself through a slow and natural weave in and out of the diegesis and frame, as all parties quietly elaborate their fond understandings of each other. Yáñez positions his camera to accommodate a distinctive sense of composition which oscillates between clean triangulation and tightened cropping, bisecting action at the edges to suggest a universe that spills over and out of the film’s brief spaces. These slices of a world are physical, but also historical and symbolic, as when Mireya and Emardo discuss stolen land and critique stereotypes off-screen. We are presented with centered objects, too: a Mapuche flag waving against the sky, a newspaper clipping headlined by the couple’s wedding ceremony held in their own Mapudungún language, militarized police captured through the car window at the checkpointed outskirts of home. Yáñez has spoken of the work on a number of occasions as a response to dominant, essentialist portrayals of Mapuche people as either violent, exotic, or otherwise inferior—often in the context of land reclamation conflicts. I’m tempted to characterize the film as a “counterimage,” or some such agent, which it certainly is, but to merely locate the film on the flip side of a tense dichotomy would not do full justice to its sense of presence and immanence. BRIEF SPACE OF A TIME is an image of identity, territory, and love, glowing and autonomous. (2023, 89 min) [Elise Schierbeek]
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Shorts 6
Friday,7:30pm and Sunday, 12:00pm
This programming block is home to seven short films, united not so much by an overarching theme as they are by a general ethos of psychedelic excess and a textural exploration of their chosen subjects. The program opens with a suite of shorter, non-narrative trick films and resolves into a stretch of medium-length works that draw principally upon repurposed archival footage in the construction of their narratives, alternating all the while between understated black and white imagery and full-throttle outpourings of color. Till Golmbert’s hallucinatory IMAGE ME  (2022, 6 min) sets the tone for the whole affair, deconstructing the process of photographic reproduction and reconfiguring it as a series of disembodied apparitions and free-floating gestures, striking a careful tonal balance between figuration and abstraction that will ring out as a resonant frequency for the entire program. Total neon worship follows in rapid succession courtesy of Brian Zahm’s PHOTOSYNTHESIS (2023, 7 min), a film that depicts the life cycle of a seed as it develops into a flower, utilizing red and blue neon light sculptures to envision a plant’s first microscopic stirrings of life. The choice of red and blue for this number is highly deliberate—the film is intended to be viewed with ChromaDepth 3D glasses, tech which requires no special image projection, rather operating by separating various color frequencies into different planes of depth. GIROSCOPIO (2021, 8 min), a collaboration between filmmakers John Muse and Brendamaris Rodriguez, is a delightful whirling dervish of a film and an unmistakable product of early pandemic isolation. A free-wheeling orbital odyssey that uses image stabilization to spin the entire world around the camera’s axis, the film captures the malaise of bodies at rest in home quarantine, employs a dazzling variety of mirror shots and doubled figures to obliquely evoke the film’s long-distance creative origins, and suggests an environment that is spinning furiously overhead as a lofty metaphor for a world in complete pandemonium. Siegfried Fruhauf’s MARE IMBRIUM (2024, 12 min) is an inflection point for the entire program, a slow-motion piece of greyscale pointillism that draws inspiration from the full moon’s reflection on rippling water, extrapolating a rich progression of flickering white particles from that quintessentially romantic image. THE VEILED CITY (2023, 13 min) is a remarkably creative piece of work from director Natalie Cubides-Brady that sees her fashioning a future-dystopian slab of ecological horror from archival footage of London’s Great Smog of 1952. A time traveler journeys to London as part of a quest to understand the origins of the planet’s eventual environmental destruction, and the filmed material from 20th century London, here recontextualized as a cryptic transmission to a distant future, takes on an elegiac and effortlessly futuristic tenor. It’s difficult to believe that shots of young boys being herded through UV exposure corridors in order to compensate for the city’s total lack of sunlight isn’t pulled directly from a work of science fiction. On a different note, Ashim Ahluwalia’s HUM हम (WE/US) (2022, 12 min) is a loose reimagining of the Cinderella story that unfolds as a kaleidoscopic fashion runway freakout, owing in no small part to the fact that the film was conceptualized and styled by Little Shilpa, a prolific fashion designer and milliner. Zuza Banasinska’s GRANDMAMAUNTSISTERCAT (2024, 22 min) closes out the program with another lengthy excursion into the realm of archival footage, this time repurposing propaganda films produced by a Polish educational film studio to spin a loose narrative about a young girl and her matrilineal family, prodding and massaging the footage along the way to ask probing questions about folklore and mythology, men and the myth of scientific neutrality, as well as reproduction and the nature of what is handed down between generations of women. [David Whitehouse]
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Bill Plympton’s SLIDE (US/Animation)
Friday, 8:30pm and Sunday, 5pm
Even if you’ve never heard the name “Bill Plympton” before, chances are—upon initial glance—you might recognize his particular style of animation, Plympton’s decades-spanning output of outsider art infiltrating the likes of film festivals, commercials, music videos, and Simpsons couch gags. His singular brand of hand-drawn grotesquerie tends to have the feeling of still images that have taken on a life of their own, gleefully moving of their own volition. His latest feature work, a sepia-toned Western riff about a slide guitar-playing nomad wandering into the struggling small town of Sourdough Creek, contains the signatures of a typical Plymptoon: characters whose appearance changes depending on the scene (or even the frame) they’re in, childish and raunchy humor, heaps of cartoon violence, and frequent images concurrently humorous and detestable. What Plympton’s style of animated storytelling lacks in visual fluidity it more than makes up for in stylized imaginative design, characters and environments melting into each other with a lovingly scrappy artistry that’s infectious to watch. Amidst the trope-heavy plot filled with gun-toting townsfolk and crooning showgirls and money-hungry politicians lives the joy of sharing in the deranged sketchbook of a master artist, showing you images of hellbugs and rotund horses and Salvador Dali-esque dream sequences, all underscored by committed voice acting and breezy music. It’s goofy cartoon fun for the hell of it, all pouring out from the mind of one of American independent animation’s preeminent masters. The feature is preceded by the short film HOWL IF YOU LOVE ME (2023, 7 min), a fleetingly joyous piece of horror comedy directed by John R. Dilworth, best known as the creator of Courage the Cowardly Dog, yet again telegraphing his knack for eerie canine-centric animation for a charming appetizer here. (2023, 73 min) [Ben Kaye]
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Shorts 7
Friday, 9pm and Saturday, 2pm
This program is a compilation of mischievous alchemy in the form of experimental animation. The short films selected from these erudite artists cross from the film plane to virtual horizons, celebrating the ingenuity, heart, and history of underground animation. GINA KAMENTSY'S PINOCCHIO IN 70MM (2024, 3 min), the first film in the program, is an immediate stand-out; the frenetically shifting titular character serves as a vehicle for collage and directly-drawn animation, expertly contorting the dimensions of the illusory plane. The work, like others in the program, draws self-reflexively from the history of alternative animation, fashioned with a level of precision and sharpness that both resurrects and dismantles Disney spectacle. LOOKING FOR LETINE (2024, 15 min) by Paul Tarragó is the most self-aware of the works, as Tarragó interweaves the domestic with the fantastical, using his home as a creative laboratory, playfully exposing the animator’s tricks and materials while still deftly suspending reality in cinematic magic. Another highlight of the program is SING OUR SONG WHEN THE WORLD ENDS (2024, 16 min) by Tanner D. Masseth and Andrea Florens, both artists known for their work in the Chicago film scene. Masseth and Florens work with the Unreal Game Engine to create surrealist odysseys that implicitly reflect upon the uncanny valley of post-Skibidi Toilet online computer-generated meme devolution. A work of lush emptiness whose illusory grasp applies tropes of Hollywood chromogenic fantasy and the haunting void-space of video games. What becomes apparent through the program is that these somewhat democratized tools for alternative animation, both new and old, allow independent artists to challenge Hollywood spectacle. The other work in the program also plays freely with newly emerging technologies now available for free or low cost. ASTROGOLEM (2023, 6 min) by Thorsten Fleisch, for instance, is an unexpected turn through Heironymous Bosch-inspired AI hellscapes. MONOLITH (2023, 14 min) by Teresita Carson presents animations of volumetric scans and LiDar maps as techniques for auto-ethnographic research, confronting the ethics of digitization and codification as means of preserving colonized and irrevocably altered cultures and spaces. The program ends with Bruce Charles Bickford’s PROMETHEUS' GARDEN (1988/2024, 29 min), the 1988 stop-motion masterpiece that enacts the Prometheus myth in stunning, pain-staking claymation. This 2024 remaster includes a new soundtrack from over a dozen musicians, giving a new and expansive electronic sonic palette. Bickford’s underground classic is a perfect end piece for a program that showcases the formidable power of independently made animation. [M Woods]
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Shorts 8
Friday 9:30 pm and Saturday 6:30 pm
This light-hearted program is filled with farce, hilarity, and comes with a full dose of that inextinguishable spirit of underground filmmaking. Elliot Sheedy is seen performing his titular song with a straight face in the music video BACK TO SUBURBIA (2023, 5 min). Oldie TV commercials flush through his suburban background as he sings “We have nuggets.” Mr. Hoffman’s face fills the screen as he bursts into an emotional breakdown in DISCOURSE (2023, 7 min) by Will Schneider until—plot twist—his identity is unveiled in the end. Another time, our protagonist is thrown into an emotional turmoil as her car snailishly moves through the soapy storm of a car wash in the music video TENSILE (2023, 5 min) by Christopher Rejano. Song “I Couldn’t Bear It” by Theo Katsaouinis is what we hear; and I couldn’t stop laughing. Get ready to love ELEVATOR TO STARDOM (2023, 8 min) by Danny Plotnick, a low-budget-looking sketch comedy—about film school students making a film and all the trouble and fun that entails—shot on Kodak’s new Super 8 camera. Daniel Paese could possibly submit SPOTS (2024, 12 min) to Ig Nobel Prize. Taking a meticulous (un)scientific approach to pose and answer the very good question: why do skateboarders always deviate away from the skate park (just as how their culture does away from the mainstream)? The film includes an impressive skateboard lexicon and footage carefully edited in a Wes Anderson-style jumpiness. Sliding down to the memory lane as we get to USED TO BE (2024, 12 min) by Dan Schneidkraut, which records the permanent closing of Albums on the Hill (1974-2023), a record store in Boulder, Colorado, run by none other but his father. Slides of photos scrutinize the worn-out corners of the store, the watermarks on the wall, empty shelves; accompanied by a recording of chatter that can still fill the vacated space with laughter. Rob Hampton and John Morgan recount what it was like to make Super 8 home movies as teenagers growing up in the '70s in an exhilarating documentary SUPER 8 DAZE (2018, 16 min) that will ignite anyone’s buried love for cinema. Concluding the program is satirical drama RIGHTEOUS SELF (2023, 18 min), which probably parodies the health-guru type of masculine dudes who run lengthy ads before your YouTube videos and try to lure you into a pyramid scheme with their “truths.” [Nicky Ni]
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Shorts 2
Saturday, 12:30pm
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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Shorts 3
Saturday, 1pm
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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Shorts 1
Saturday, 3pm
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’ grief over Eurydice would lead him down a path of bitterness and misogyny! [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Shorts 9
Saturday, 4pm and Sunday, 12:30pm
Eight short films perform testimonies that gently span across biosocial lineages of motherhood, trauma, and activism, always orbiting the body. This orbit takes its most literal form in Danièle Wilmouth’s WHAT WENT DOWN (2024, 15 min), an expertly choreographed cinematographic vortex of middle-aged dancers as they topple and resurrect their own bodies in fits and starts under the orders of a harsh director, all the while articulating a fragmented poem about the limits of surrender, and suffering for art. Lynne Sachs’ CONTRACTIONS (2024, 12 min) makes for a complimentary experiment in its own subtle choreography, staging women in postures of anonymity around a Memphis abortion clinic in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Moving testimonies from an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist are skillfully overlaid. The film is accompanied by a companion piece, an audio collage of thoughts, hums, and testimonies from CONTRACTIONS participants, WE CONTINUE TO SPEAK (2024, 4 min). Kelly Gallagher’s RETRACING OUR STEPS (2024, 8 min) visits upon the filmmaker’s mother-in-law and her memories of the early days of the Roe v. Wade era, focusing on a singular testimony of abortion assistance and '70s feminism overtop slowmo images of feminine freedom in dotted halftones. Chi Jang Yin’s I WAS THERE (PART I) (2023, 14 min) sharpens the program’s emphasis on testimony with an experimental documentary centered on the firsthand memories of a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, collaging archival footage and government letters from the tactical preparation for the atrocity. The intimate testimony of the patient-doctor relationship is pulled apart in Lori Felker’s compelling PATIENT (2023, 20 min), a taut and twisting docudrama about the performance of need and care. In ASHES OF ROSES (2023, 11 min), Sasha Waters confesses to the guilty pleasures and lessons learned from '80s girlhood and coming-of-age, while contemplating scenes of forbidden love from The Thorn Birds television series, to culminate in an endearing revelation of middle-aged motherhood. Motherhood is approached obliquely in Deborah Stratman’s flickering OTHERHOOD (2023, 3 min) with small texts that suggest a space before beginning to write, or before language altogether, or before the self. The film composes images of becoming—a mother camel and her calf, a glimmering peacock in all its aesthetic excess, a toddler climbing. [Elise Schierbeek]
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Shorts 10
Saturday, 5pm
This program is a must-see for film enthusiasts, as all but one of the selections are screening on 16mm. The one that isn’t, Sabine Gruffat’s SOUVENIR STATUETTE (2024, 13 min), is still preoccupied with the authenticity and other values of physical media, making it thematically appropriate. This wry short considers the titular object from several perspectives—philosophical, cultural, textural—with the headier musings provided by a CG avatar. Gruffat is interested in how memory works and in how we need physical objects to assist in remembering. Bernd Lützeler’s VINTAGE WISDOM FROM THE ETHER (2023, 8 min, 16mm), on the other hand, is interested in concepts and technology that the culture is on the way to forgetting. “With the help of one of the last well-preserved television tubes, a Bolex film camera and machine learning, Lützeler was able to distill some of these echoes from the white noise through multiple exposures on 16mm film,” reads an artist statement, and on top of this old TV snow, the filmmaker integrates the flickers of words culled from “echoes of neoliberal wisdom from the ‘80s and ‘90s.” Another of the more conceptual works on the program, Vito A. Rowlands’ IMMACULATE GENERATIONS NO. 1 (2023, 11 min, 16mm), consists of “tens of thousands of individual retinal photographs from public databases” flickering at a split-second each. Scored to a repetitive phrase played on a violin, the film creates a hypnotic effect, much like Isaac Sherman’s a shifting pattern (2023, 6 min). Sherman’s film is comprised of black leader interrupted by flickers of flower imagery; it’s cool to see the afterimages on the black screen. Flowers are also a motif in Josh Weissbach’s ZERO WOODS OF THE WILD PLACE (2023, 13 min, 16mm), along with insects and plants; these are made to seem jarring in juxtaposition with the non-sequitur choices on the soundtrack, such as what sound like calls to 911 and someone slurping through a straw. The film peaks with an unexpected shot of a roof blowing off a house. In THE CONCRETE RIVER (2023, 16 min, 16mm), Nora Sweeney uses 16mm photography to add a sense of grit to her subject, the Los Angeles River, “a 51-mile waterway largely channelized with concrete that cuts through various neighborhoods of Greater Los Angeles,” per the artist. The film is a series of affectionate, impressionistic portraits of various individuals and groups, ranging from a teenage skateboarding couple to Mexican horse trainers to birders to old men playing backgammon. It’s calm and accepting where some of the other selections are more provocative, like the opening selection, Jesse Lerner’s MANIFESTO (2023, 11 min, 16mm), whose soundtrack consists of three filmmakers reading from their manifestos about how cinema can evolve. The imagery is culled from stock footage, old educational films, and the like, creating the impression that cinema is a junkyard for people to come together and play around in. [Ben Sachs]
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Jodi Wille’s WELCOME SPACE BROTHERS (US/Documentary) and Caitlin Mae Burke & Scott Cummings’ REALM OF SATAN (US/Documentary)
Saturday, 6pm (SPACE) and Friday, 5pm (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. Please 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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Nelly Danssen’s HEAD OVER HEELS (Netherlands/Experimental)
Sunday, 1pm
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]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Crucemos al Otro Lado

Music Box Theatre – See below for showtimes

Issa López's TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID (Mexico)
Saturday, 6:45pm
After ten-year-old Estrella accidentally summons the ghost of her murdered mother using a piece of magical wishing chalk her teacher gave her as their class huddled on the ground during a shootout—no, wait. Let me back up. Mexican director Issa López is a huge success in her native land but is mostly unknown in the US. This is likely going to change with the critical and popular reception of her third feature, TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID, which has garnered several festival awards and enthusiastic tweets from horror luminaries including Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro (the latter is producing Lopez’s next film). Those two are good touchstones for an understanding of approximately what you’re getting into with this film, a story of the bonds of childhood friendship tested by horrific human and supernatural events. Set against the very real horrors of the drug wars in Mexico, which have orphaned tens of thousands of children, the film follows a group of orphans—Lost Boys (and a girl) who never grow up because their parents have been murdered—on the run from drug dealers and vengeful ghosts through a hellish Neverland of industrial decay. The film careens between whimsy (graffiti that comes alive), gotcha moments punctuated by instrumental blasts, moments of wonder (the kids exploring an abandoned luxury apartment complex), and both mundane and supernatural threats as the gang members close in and the wishes of the undead become clearer. Narrative and thematic cohesion aren’t prominently featured on the menu, but there are frights aplenty, perhaps the biggest of which is that apart from the supernatural elements, the film probably doesn’t stray too far from reality for some kids. (2017, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]
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Luis Buñuel’s LOS OLVIDADOS (Mexico)
Sunday, 2pm
Writing about Luis Buñuel’s documentary LAND WITHOUT BREAD (1933), André Bazin once argued that the point of the film wasn’t to show that humanity was debased, but rather, that humanity could become so debased and that this reflected the inherent unpredictability of our species. Buñuel’s Mexican masterpiece LOS OLVIDADOS teaches a similar lesson in its portrait of juvenile delinquents in Mexico City. Perhaps the most pitiless film ever made about childhood, it presents its young protagonists as violent, impulsive, and deceitful and doing the most shocking things. Buñuel creates sequences that burn themselves into your memory: the attack on the blind street musician, the robbery of the paraplegic (during which the young assailants steal the cart the man had used to push himself around), Jaibo’s murder of the former friend he thought had betrayed him to the police. This may be one of the least surreal films in Buñuel’s canon, yet what makes it so powerful as a realist statement lies in the director’s surrealist preoccupation with the perverse. Beginning with a voice-over introduction explaining that every modern city contains its blighted underbelly, LOS OLVIDADOS goes on to explore how blighted life can be. Buñuel is most attentive to detail, studying the precocious manner of the film’s delinquent boys and how it inures them to criminality. His mise-en-scène, a sort-of minimalist squalor, is memorable as well. The cinematography is by Gabriel Figueroa, one of the most respected cameramen in the history of Mexican cinema; the movie brilliantly undercuts its documentary-style realism with subtle stylization. (“It’s real life, only more so” is how Dave Kehr described it.) Buñuel sometimes cuts away from the delinquents to look at animals (perhaps the film’s most overt reminder of the director’s surrealist pedigree), and his approach to delinquency might be described as zoological. He’s interested in the tribalism, survival instincts, and mating habits of his characters; to realize that societies create conditions in which human beings can be studied like animals is deeply unsettling. (1950, 80 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]
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In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, the Music Box presents this week-long series, programmed by Salvador Salazar, that embraces films both made in Mexico as well as those made by Mexican-American filmmakers, illuminating each filmmaker’s perspective of their culture through the blending of multiple genres, including magical realism, animated comedy, coming of age, and action. See the full series lineup here.

Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Despite its massive popularity and canonization as the classic film, VERTIGO remains one of the most insidious, disturbing movies of all time, particularly as it relates to the tortuous labyrinth of the psyche. Out of all the films in the Hitchcock oeuvre, VERTIGO resonates with the most Freudian overtones. Indeed, there exists a strong thematic thread between the two men: both are essentially concerned with peeling back the facade of normalcy to reveal something perverse lurking underneath. As with psychoanalysis, nothing is as it seems in VERTIGO. The story—about Scottie (James Stewart), a former detective being lured out of retirement to investigate the suspicious activities of Madeleine (Kim Novak), his friend's wife—is a pretense for an exploration into the (male) creation of fantasies, a subject that's integral to how we experience movies on the whole. From the very beginning of the film it's almost as if Scottie is subconsciously aware that Madeleine is an unattainable illusion. When he gazes at her in the flower shop, it feels as if the two are situated in different realms of reality. Even when Scottie and Madeleine are at their most intimate, he's kept at a distance by the enigma of her femininity. It's precisely because of this Delphic quality that Madeleine is elevated to the status of fantasy object after her death. In fact, her death only enhances her desirability, the notion that sex/Eros and death/Thanatos are intimately intertwined being one of Freud's most groundbreaking theories (though partial credit should be given to Sabina Spielrein, as David Cronenberg's A DANGEROUS METHOD suggests). Scottie's transformation of Judy into Madeleine in the second half of the film suggests that male desire hinges on the alignment of fantasy and reality; however, Judy is complicit in her metamorphosis from her true self into a fantasy object, evoking John Berger's supposition that "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." The famous silhouette shot of Judy in the hotel room emphasizes the bipartite nature of the female psyche—a woman might love you, but she'll simultaneously take part in a nefarious murder plot at your expense. In the end, Judy/Madeleine is anything but a certified copy—she's tainted, corrupt, and cheapened. VERTIGO suggests that one cannot (re)create something that never truly existed in the first place. As Slavoj Zizek puts it: "We have a perfect name for fantasy realized. It's called nightmare." (1958, 128 min, 70mm) [Harrison Sherrod]

Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Warning: Paul Thomas Anderson isn't going to answer your questions. And his movie will be exceedingly elegant in its refusal to answer your questions, of which you'll have many, and for which you'll either love him or despise him. It might be the most important lesson he ever learned from Robert Altman: how crucial it is to touch viewers on an "unconscious basis to where they sense something rather than intellectually know or agree to something." To further quote Altman from Hasti Sardishti's piece : "If they come there and sit in front of their sets or in the theater, and they don't go halfway with you, and don't take the material in front of them and process it through their own history, it's meaningless. If they do they might not have any idea what that was about, but they feel it was right and they know it that fits." Everything in THE MASTER, from its graceful camera movements to the occasional, frightening bursts of violence, fits. The cinematography of Mihai Malaimare Jr. is the most stunningly evocative portrayal of 50's America this side of FAR FROM HEAVEN; every image feels freshly washed. The performances are riveting too. Philip Seymour Hoffman is so mesmerizing that he could easily walk away with the movie, but he's matched by the rest of the cast. Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is a combustible mix of Brando-style mumbling and volcanic violence. He actually feels dangerous. While Amy Adams, as Dodd's tenacious and manipulative wife, is chillingly perfect. You get the sense that without her ruthless encouragement, Dodd might simply smother himself with his own words. Behind it all is Anderson's Zen-like refusal to hit all the usual plot points or tidy up his characters' messy lives. In fact, the movie's "happy" ending is actually disorienting; just as Dodd keeps his followers off balance, Anderson remains firmly ambivalent to the end. Who's ready to see it again? (2012, 136 min, 70mm) [Rob Christopher]

Mohammad Reza Aslani’s CHESS OF THE WIND (Iran)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

It’s the stuff of cinema legend. After screening just a few times (some sources say once, others three) in its native Iran, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s debut feature, CHESS OF THE WIND, was later banned as the Iranian Revolution began to foment, though it was lambasted even before then for its daring thematic and aesthetic aims. The film elements were lost when its production company was shut down amidst the revolution, and low-grade VHS copies of the film became prized possessions among cinephiles, a whisper network of its storied virtues reaching movie lovers far and wide. Only just recently, in 2014, Aslani’s son discovered the film’s negative in an antique shop in Tehran, and this set into motion the events that culminated with the restoration of what should be considered a masterpiece of Iran’s pre-revolution New Wave. Set in the early 20th century during the final years of the Qajar dynasty, it’s a gothic chamber drama of sorts with a Tell-Tale Heart vibe that’ll keep you on edge. The story centers on a well-to-do family whose matriarch has just died; her daughter, confined to a wheelchair, battles her evil stepfather for control of the large Tehran estate to which she believes she is the rightful heir. The stepfather has two nephews, one of whom wants to marry the heiress; the household staff, including the woman’s young handmaiden, loom as silent spectators to the dysfunctional family. The woman eventually strikes her stepfather with a heavy metal ball attached to a small, handheld staff. She, the suitor, and her handmaiden hide the body under a large glass jug, resolving to destroy it with acid. After this, the woman slowly goes mad, haunted as she is by the ghost of her stepfather (who, somehow, is still being spotted all around Tehran), just as menacing in death as in life. Elegantly subtle and frustratingly sly, the beguiling narrative still takes second fiddle to the film’s alluring aesthetic. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s use of natural light in BARRY LYNDON, the scenes are illuminated only by what would have existed during the time it takes place, including complex arrangements of flicking candlelight. Aslani and his cinematographer Houshang Baharlou also tinted the last two reels of the film yellow and green to evoke tactics used in silent cinema. These are techniques I hadn’t seen combined as such before and have found difficult to describe since; when I first saw the film, virtually, during the 2020 New York Film Festival (under the title THE CHESS GAME OF THE WIND), I was so enraptured by how it looked that I found it difficult to keep up with the poetic, elliptical narrative, a signature of great Iranian cinema. It’s simultaneously colorful yet muted, combining traditional Persian decor with an atmospheric overtone that sets any potential cheeriness at odds against Aslani’s prescribed gloom. The tinting isn’t just a novelty, indicating in certain sequences that all isn’t as it seems, the proverbial beating of a thought-buried heart. The look of the film was inspired by a variety of sources, including Iranian artist Mahmoud Khan, Johannes Vermeer and Georges de La Tour—filmically speaking, Aslani utilized theories deployed by such masters as Robert Bresson and Luchino Visconti with regards to how he directed the actors, most of whom came from the stage. Notable among the cast is Shohreh Aghdashloo, in a very early role, who plays the handmaiden and would later be nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG. Aslani intended for the machinations of his upper-class characters in the film to remark upon the machinations of his country’s leftist radicals to undermine one another in the face of rising conservative forces. This is worth seeing several times in order to discover all of its myriad layers, from the sublimely beautiful presentation to a slyly subversive undercurrent. Presented by Mississippi Records and preceded by a 20-minute live performance by TAYF, a nonbinary/women/queer-led group playing music from the SWANA region. (1976, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

King Hu’s RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN (Hong Kong/Taiwan)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am

In the late 1970s, the great wuxia filmmaker King Hu went to South Korea to shoot two widescreen features in tandem, LEGEND OF THE MOUNTAIN and RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN (both released in 1979). While LEGEND incorporates supernatural elements into the director’s brand of period spectacle, RAINING is more of a traditional Hu production, rooted in intrigue, double-crosses, and martial arts lore. The film takes place at a large Buddhist temple during the Ming Dynasty and intertwines multiple sets of characters. There’s the noble abbot of the temple and various followers and underlings, some of whom are scheming to take his place when he dies. There’s the wily Esquire Wen, who arrives with the barely concealed intention of stealing a treasured old prayer scroll that belongs to the temple; he’s accompanied by two cunning thieves posing as his servants, White Fox and Gold Lock. And then there’s the stern General Wang and his entourage, also guests of the temple and who also want to steal the scroll. RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN has fewer action set pieces than Hu’s classics COME DRINK WITH ME (1966), DRAGON INN (1967), and A TOUCH OF ZEN (1971), which probably explains why it isn’t as popular as any of those movies. Yet it generates a remarkable amount of tension with just conniving, thieving, and absconding; moreover, when the film does erupt with martial arts action in the final 20 minutes, the choreography is as stunning as anything else Hu ever did. The rest of RAINING is so suspenseful, in fact, that it feels like an action film even when relatively little is happening. Much of this has to do with Hu’s skillful montage (he’s also credited as the film’s editor), which creates a constant sense of forward movement; also crucial to the film’s hypnotic power are Hu’s breathtaking widescreen vistas of the compound and surrounding woods, which find beauty in nature as well as classical Chinese architecture (Hu is also credited as the film’s art director). Needless to say, this will look incredible on a big screen. Screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: BIG ART FILMS series. (1979, 122 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Shinji Sômai's MOVING (Japan)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 3pm and Sunday, 1pm

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi (and a good number of Japanese critics) all consider Shinji Sômai the most important Japanese filmmaker of the 1980s and ‘90s, though he still doesn’t have much of a reputation outside his home country two decades after his death. Case in point, almost none of his 13 features are available in the US, which means this belated American release of MOVING constitutes a major event. MOVING is filmmaking of the highest order: innovative, surprising, beguiling, and, yes, moving. It’s one of those rare movies—like MURIEL (1963), A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1976), POSSESSION (1981), or L’INTRUS (2004)—that seems to be discovering itself, and cinema, as it goes along, devising new approaches to storytelling in response to how its volatile characters engage with the world. The film begins as a naturalistic drama about the impact of a couple’s separation on their preadolescent daughter, a headstrong fifth-grader named Renko. But as Renko, or Ren, grapples with the dissolution of her family (as well as her subsequent problems at school, where her parents’ separation makes her a target for bullying), her behavior becomes increasingly unpredictable and reckless—and so too does the story. Gradually everyone around Ren starts behaving impulsively too, as though her tumultuous inner life were being made manifest in the real world; to shake things up more, Sômai frequently makes shocking advances in time, which raise more questions than they answer about the consequences of the characters’ actions. And just when you think MOVING couldn’t get more ambiguous, it starts to become unclear whether what we’re watching is a dream. Per Kurosawa (who served as assistant director on Sômai’s first two features), Sômai favored narratives that progress from order to chaos, and MOVING certainly fits that description. At the same time, Sômai is always in complete control over his art as a filmmaker, trading in impassive long takes that Kurosawa has likened to those of Theo Angelopoulos and Edward Yang. The formal mastery exists in constant tension with the characters’ out-of-control lives, with each one rendering the other strange. It wouldn’t work at all if the actors weren’t up to snuff, and the cast here is extraordinary; everyone seems like a relatable person even when they do things they themselves can’t explain. Tomoko Tabata, who plays Ren, deserves special mention, exhibiting a complexity and mysteriousness that would be astonishing in a performer of any age. (1993, 125 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

📽️ ALSO RECOMMENDED

Alan J. Pakula’s ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm

The paranoid work of art makes terrible demands on us. The world, it says, is built with you in mind, and malevolently so, with a double existence to everything, a public face, which exists to fool you—exactly you—and a private one, which isn't really private at all, but known widely to everyone but you, the dupe and victim of deception. It is the scary flip-side to Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye, a cinema that could reveal the world as it really was, erased of all ideology and mystification, that would let us take control of our lives and society and be our own masters. Paranoid cinema also tells us that the world as it is is different than the world as we believe it to be, but so we can better understand the degree to which we will never be free from the inescapability of the forces that have us in their thrall. Vertov and Alan J. Pakula, director of the high water mark of paranoid cinema, ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, share few surface similarities in terms of style, but Vertov’s philosophy of technological vision, his theories of how cinema could show us reality, could have privileged access to the actual that we with our fleshy limitations could not have, and thus how movies could be tools for revealing that which pernicious forces wanted kept concealed, is a powerful tool for understanding Pakula’s magnificent and troubling works of the 70s and 80s. In this film, which chronicles the fall of Nixon’s regime after the Watergate burglary, Pakula constructs a web of dizzying shots that interfere not just with one another but even, crucially in the deeply moving final image, with themselves, producing dialectical frissons that, while horrifying Vertov with their fictionality, encompass more than almost any other filmmaker I can think of the ideal cinema he imagined. Spaces in Pakula’s hands turn ghastly, haunted. Performances fight each other for dominance—notably Hoffmann and Redford, each of whom seems unable to be in the same shot together without attempting to consume the other with capital-T Technique. Secrets become physical, hoarded, liabilities that weigh us down with their sad, precious inertia. Pakula brilliantly uses his zoom lens and split diopter to continually show a space and then disrupt that space, show us one projection of the world only to then undermine that projection. Like De Palma, whose debt to this filmmaker has yet to be sufficiently examined, Pakula capitalizes on various changing optical distortions to make his film a network of half-glimpsed secrets, of tantalizingly concealed truths always noticed just when they're being lost. Vertov wanted to use cinema to emancipate the world from its political and economic masters; Pakula’s film uses it to show how duped we've always already been by the forces of power. As Woodward and Bernstein trace the unraveling strands of the vast Presidential conspiracy they've stumbled across, their efforts are undone and neutralized not merely by the conspiracy’s members but by Pakula’s moving evocations of a Washington, DC that is horribly legible, deeply logical, but whose truths are inaccessible to us, and whose methods and intentions are directed at subverting and perverting everything we hold dear. Screening as part of the Democracy at Risk series, presented by the League of Women Voters. (1976, 138 min, 35mm) [Kian Bergstrom]

Matt Barats’ CASH COW (US/Documentary)

Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) – Wednesday, 8pm [Free Admission]

We all did a lot of really weird shit during the pandemic. For example, I briefly but very seriously considered starting Letterboxd accounts for my cats so that I could write movie reviews from their perspectives. Why, exactly? Well, why not? In fact, for many the pandemic was a period of relatively unrestrained creative pursuit, especially (and unfortunately) if they found themselves unemployed as a result. In his micro-budget docu-comedy, writer-director Matt Barats plays a character based on himself, an out-of-work actor who, while waiting for a Domino’s Pizza commercial he was in—a so-called “cash cow” that would produce a payout big enough to get him through another season of unemployment—to air, travels around the east coast and midwest tracking down various Mormon landmarks, from the birthplace of Joseph Smith in Sharon, Vermont, to where Smith was killed in Carthage, Illinois. The Domino’s part is real (not only is it real, I worked on a Domino’s account at the same time he made the commercial and remember the new product for which he made the advertisement; coincidentally, he also starred in a Grubhub commercial at the same time I worked there many, many years ago, too), but the rest is plotted, a mockumentary of sorts resembling those earnest documentaries wherein a down-on-their-luck subjects manages to learn something about themselves whilst endeavoring to learn about something else. But the comedy is particularly droll, and as such, having not read up on it prior, I wasn’t clued in to this partly being constructed until he takes a call, with an actor friend who’s thriving during the pandemic, that’s clearly staged. As the downcast actor travels from place to place, he illuminates the history of Joseph Smith and the infancy of Mormonism, which he refers to as that most American of religions. And, you know what, it’s true. I’m mostly familiar with Mormonism by way of popular culture—Big Love, The Book of Mormon, and, just recently, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives—so this rather straightforward recounting of its leader’s origin is jarring at times, to say the least. (All religions are made up, in my humble opinion, but this one feels, like, embarrassingly fictitious.) In connecting his character’s situation and Smith’s life, Barats charts the nature of success in America—seemingly random and often completely fake. The latter part is considered in Barat’s character’s burgeoning insistence that his playing a delivery driver in a commercial where the customers are real is chicanery. He then gets a job as a delivery driver for Domino’s and drinks the Kool Aid, so to speak, seeing the job as something bigger than himself that he can become invested in. Barats doesn’t probe too deeply into any one conceit, leaving it relatively open-ended in terms of what one might take away from his quirky pandemic project. Its humor is undeniable (I especially like how random turns of phrases appear as interstitials in old-timey, silent-film font), but what’s the, you know, point? Is it about feelings of despondency during the pandemic? The absolutely insanity that is the founding (and, honestly, continuation of) the Mormon church? The cheapness of commercial advertising and the degradation of myriad artistic practice through it? Regardless of what it is, it works either way. (2023, 99 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

Zach Clark’s THE BECOMERS (US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

As far as independent sci-fi features go, Zach Clark’s THE BECOMERS emerges as one of the more notable recent entries, due in part to its open-heartedness and humor. The film—a quirky sort of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978) for the COVID era—is loosely strung along by an overarching voiceover supplied by Russel Mael—of art-rock band Sparks fame—chronicling the story of two alien lovers thrown into peril when their planet falls prey to climate crisis and fascistic dictatorship. How lucky they are to find a change of pace with their new home planet: our own planet Earth. Mael’s soothing narration fills in the dramaturgical gaps as we watch the present-day journey of these extraterrestrial lovebirds gruesomely hopping from body to body, hoping to find each other amidst the sprawling Chicago suburbs. Clark’s feature walks the tightrope of addressing contemporary political and social ills (right-leaning conspiratorial thinking, COVID-conscious living, climate doomerism) while wrapping said issues in a genre-heavy package that lets its grander emotional and thematic aspirations shine without coming off as didactic or retrograde. It’s to Clark’s credit—along with his ensemble—that even as this alien couple body-hops, their respective personalities remain intact, a testament to the tight-knit fusion of strong, empathetic performances and writing. Clark revels in eye-popping colorful production design, practical gore effects (a character that appears right near the film’s ending is a remarkable display of practical low-fi puppetry), and an intimate, heart-on-its-sleeve brand of performance, all swirling together to telegraph something altogether gross, bizarre, and loving. Clark and other cast and crew in person at select screenings; see venue website for that information as well. (2024, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Make it a Double: Queer Complexities

FACETS Cinema – See titles and showtimes below

Andrew Haigh’s ALL OF US STRANGERS (UK)
Friday, 7pm
Despite the highly collaborative nature of filmmaking, what we see in a movie represents, first and foremost, an exercise of the writer’s craft made visible. Thus, my view of Andrew Haigh’s ALL OF US STRANGERS, adapted by the director from Japanese author Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, is colored by the choice by both men to have their main character make his living as a screenwriter. When we meet their protagonist, Adam (Andrew Scott), he is in his apartment on the 27nd floor of a nondescript building somewhere in London. He is trying to write a script on his laptop, but nothing is coming. He lowers the screen, looks through a few old photos, and goes to grab some leftovers when a fire alarm sounds. Clearly well practiced at high-rise evacuation procedures, he heads down to the street and crosses the road to look up at the building. He sees someone looking back at him from another apartment. Returning home after the false alarm, Adam gets a visit from the figure he saw at the window. Harry (Paul Mescal), apparently the only other tenant in the building, offers him a slug of whiskey from his half-empty bottle and a chance to hang out or possibly hook up for sex. Adam begs off, but the connection has been made. The next time Harry comes to Adam’s door, he is invited in for oral sex. Adam is an older gay man who lived in the shadow of AIDS and has been celibate out of fear. Harry’s arrival reawakens Adam’s interest not only in sex, but also in companionship and the possibility of love. We learn through a conversation he has with Harry that Adam’s parents were killed in a car crash when he was eleven and that he is trying to write about them. To that end, he travels by train to Croydon, in South London, to the home in which he was raised. To his astonishment, he finds his parents living in the home, looking exactly as they did the year of their deaths. So begins a series of visits between the three of them during which Adam’s career, sexuality, and the manner of his parents’ death—they know they died—are discussed. Yamada’s novel carries on his culture’s time-honored tradition of ghost stories and was made into the 1988 horror film THE DISINCARNATES by director Nobuhiko Obayashi. While most such Japanese stories take for granted the existence of ghosts and advance in a conventional horror/eerie fashion, Western takes on hauntings like ALL OF US STRANGERS tend to the psychological. Even before we get to Croydon, we can perceive the film’s otherworldly patina. It’s hard to believe that a large apartment building like the one Adam and Harry inhabit would be so empty. At the same time, the environment Haigh creates goes beyond a simple haunting. If we remember that in Jungian psychology, the house is the symbol of the self, then it would appear that Adam is not at home with himself. And who set off the fire alarm? Perhaps an obviously lonely Harry to see some of his neighbors. It also is possible that it was an internal trigger by Adam himself signaling that some neglected part of his psyche is ready to be tended to. Director Andrew Haigh is upfront about how personal ALL OF US STRANGERS is to him. Haigh envisaged Adam as something of an alter ego, a middle-age gay man and screenwriter. He cast Jamie Bell and Claire Foy as Adam’s parents because they reminded him of his parents, and he filmed the scenes between these characters at the actual home in which he was raised. Thus, the ghosts he conjures exist as avatars of remembrance, psychological need, and emotional honesty. Foy and Bell completely inhabit the roles of caring parents caught in time and trying to give Adam what he needs. They seem so natural in their affection and actions, making the homecoming scenes both comfortable and impossibly poignant. As lovers, Scott and Mescal are exceptionally good, their chemistry and understanding of the dynamics of falling in love fully realized in their performances. Haigh’s variation on Yamada’s title underlines that, in a sense, we are all strangers, imprisoned in the only mind we can hear. Reaching out requires some courage and boundless amounts of empathy for others and ourselves. ALL OF US STRANGERS has a surprising ending that blends our experience of real lives and feelings brought to the screen and the strange prerogatives of writers to do with their characters what they will. (2023, 105 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Ira Sachs' PASSAGES (France)
Friday, 9pm
Befitting the film’s plot—something of a love triangle between two men, husbands Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and Martin (Ben Whishaw), and a young woman, Agethe (Adèle Exarchopoulos)—the compositions in Ira Sachs’ PASSAGES are angular, the characters’ bodies individual lines that connect and disconnect seemingly at random. Much like Jacques Tati elicits comedy from architecture, Sachs, in collaboration with cinematographer Josée Deshaies, here evokes love and all its contours from the relationship between these bodies and their surroundings (which, like Tati’s film, are also in Paris). The film’s opening scene shows Tomas at work as a director; it’s the last day of shooting, and he’s directing a scene during which an actor descends from some stairs into a crowd of people in a bar. The set is almost Fassbinderian, with dark red lighting, arched entryways and decadent detailing. (As we’ll later see, this isn’t the only element of the film that recalls the great, iconoclastic German director. In general Sachs’ films are infused with his own rapt cinephilia.) Tomas gives direction to an actor on how to walk down the stairwell, instructing him how to use his body within that particular space. When I spoke with Sachs, he noted how he and Deschaies aspired to make each sequence seem almost like a diorama, with the actors situated purposefully so that the arrangements and movement within them conveyed the characters’ emotions as much as the dialogue. The lines become tangled when the cast and crew go to celebrate at the end of the shoot; when his husband, Martin, declines to dance with him at the bar, Tomas instead dances with the beautiful, young school teacher Agathe. They converge first through dance, then through sex, and eventually through love, with Tomas’ marriage to Martin falling completely by the wayside. Tomas leaves Martin and moves in with Agathe, who’s soon pregnant; he becomes bored with this newfound domesticity and also jealous of Martin’s relationship with a handsome writer, sucking his ex-husband back into his orbit as a result. The three attempt a quasi-polyamorous relationship, the outcome of which I won’t reveal here but leaves not everyone satisfied. (DESIGN FOR LIVING, this is not. Rather, as Sachs tells me, it’s more akin to Pialat’s LOULOU.) That’s because Tomas is a classic enfant terrible, the embodiment of an artist completely absorbed in his own pathos. Rogowski is vibrant as usual but also kind of treacherous; Whishaw again plays a delicate martyr, quietly absorbing his husband’s emotional brutality. Exarchopoulos, meanwhile, conveys a quiet strength that mirrors the vigor of her desire. But even though the film’s marketing hinges on just that quality, it isn’t so much sexy as it is sexual, depicting moments of passion in a realistic manner. A lengthy sex scene between Tomas and Martin is the cause of the film’s controversial NC-17 rating, for which there’s truly no justification—I’ve seen more graphic sex scenes on television. And the most interesting thing about that scene isn’t the sex itself, but the way it’s shot, entirely from behind with no access granted to the actors’ (and thus the characters’) faces during this intimate, complicated moment. It recalls another, earlier scene where the two have a difficult conversation at their country house, with Tomas in the foreground almost completely obscuring Martin who sits behind him on the bed. The composition gives meaning to their respective sequences in a way that either complements or supersedes the dialogue (or lack thereof). Another appreciable visual element of the film is the characters’ clothing, which reflect the personality of the person who’s wearing it. Thus, Tomas’ clothes are particularly flamboyant, as seen when he wears a sheer crop top to dinner with Agathe’s parents—a conveyance of both his general nonconformity and the disrespect he feels toward their bourgeois attitudes. The characterizing impact of everything outside what the actors are saying adds a certain dynamism that elevates the rather simple concept (give or take a few subversions regarding sexuality, which is never explicitly broached) of who’s sleeping with whom to why they’re doing so and who they’re becoming in the process. Sex is the triangle, but love is the void, a mystery among absolutes; a passage into which we enter. (2023, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Julie Dash's DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (US)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am

The narrator of Julie Dash's DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST is more than just a character in the film, but a symbolic representation of the film's message. The unborn child who tells the story of the Peazant family in their last days before migrating north is as much a reflection of the past as she is of the future; all that has come before her is as inherent to the family as the very blood within their veins, and it's that history which will propel them along the trying and changing times. The Peazant family are inhabitants of the southern Sea Islands and members of its Gullah culture, having preserved the identity of their African heritage in the face of slavery and post-war oppression. Before the move, the matriarch of the Peazant family contemplates her native beliefs while the family's younger members overcome their personal struggles. Rape and prostitution have afflicted several female members of the family, and the scorn from both society and their own clan present the unique obstacle of African American women within an already disparaged race. Dash uses magical realism not only in the story, but also as a filmmaking device that is reflective of the characters' culture. It was the first feature-length film by an African-American woman to receive theatrical release, and its historical context and female-oriented storyline set it apart from both other films of the time and other films put out by fellow members of the L.A. Rebellion. Screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: BIG ART FILMS series. (1991, 112 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

FRIDAY THE 13TH Marathon (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 12pm - Saturday, 2:30am

In 1979, Sean S. Cunningham advertised FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980, 95 min, DCP Digital) in Variety with only a title and raised $550,000. The film, written by Victor Miller, follows teens reopening a cursed summer camp, all murdered by an unknown assailant until the last survivor, Alice Hardy (Adrienne King), faces the killer. The film grossed $60 million, sparking a legendary franchise with 12 films, including a remake and a crossover with Freddy Krueger, video games, novels, and a planned A24 series nearly 45 years later. The film's standout elements include Barry Abrams’ point-of-view cinematography, which keeps the killer's identity hidden, and Harry Manfredini’s iconic score. Tom Savini’s special effects are memorable, especially in Kevin Bacon's death scene. Paramount's gamble paid off, leading to FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II (1981, 87 min, Digital Projection) Directed by Steve Miner, PART 2 brings Jason Voorhees into the spotlight as the vengeful killer. Set five years later in 1984, the sequel ups the body count and introduces Ginny Field (Amy Steel), one of the slasher genres’ iconic final girls, as film scholar Carol J. Clover notes. Ginny is praised for using psychology to outwit Jason. Miner directed PART 2 and PART 3 back-to-back. FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III (1982, 95 min, DCP Digital) was filmed in 3D, and what the film may lack in character development, it makes up for in hokey 3D effects, an earworm of a disco score, and Jason picking up his iconic mask. The formula is fully established: Jason is indestructible, the featured teens are cannon fodder, and the kills are increasingly inventive. With its 3D outing, with eyeballs and pitchforks flying at the audience, the franchise becomes the equivalent of an amusement park ride pretending to be a movie. FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984, 91 min, DCP Digital) begins at Higgins Haven—the locale for PART 3—as paramedics cart Jason's body back to Wessex County Medical Center. Jason revives and kills everyone he encounters on the way back to Crystal Lake. Joseph Zito’s direction gives the film a meaner streak, the kills are nastier, and Corey Feldman pops up as Tommy Jarvis, a horror-loving kid who’s basically a stand-in for the film’s own makeup artist, Tom Savini—who wanted to return to destroy Jason. When it was decided to continue making more films, Tommy became the central figure of what is unofficially the Tommy Jarvis trilogy that ends with PART 6. This time, the partying teens each have moments of development, the stand-out being Crispin Glover as an awkward self-doubting teenager who just wants to dance. FRIDAY THE 13TH PART V: A NEW BEGINNING (1985, 92 min, Digital Projection) focuses on Tommy Jarvis and his healing journey from the trauma of his past. Tommy begins to see hallucinations of Jason while a new murder spree begins around the halfway home he’s been transferred to. A NEW BEGINNING represents a transitional phase in the series, an attempt to push the narrative beyond Jason Voorhees but one that ultimately solidified his importance to the franchise’s identity. The film was panned by horror fans for its lack of Jason, just like HALLOWEEN 3 which was criticized for having no Michael Myers. Both films have gained a cult following for their efforts at something new. FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI: JASON LIVES (1986, 86 min, DCP Digital) revives Jason Voorhees in a Frankenstein-inspired homage. The film concludes the Tommy Jarvis trilogy, with Tommy (now played by Thom Mathews of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD) accidentally resurrecting Jason while attempting to overcome his trauma. Mathews' portrayal became iconic; he even reprised the role in the fan film NEVER HIKE ALONE. Set years after THE FINAL CHAPTER, Crystal Lake is renamed Forest Glenn to erase its dark history, but Jason returns. JASON LIVES includes meta elements, action scenes, moments of breaking the fourth wall, and remains a fan favorite, directly influencing later films such as SCREAM. FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD (1988, 88 min, Digital Projection) was intended to be Carrie White versus Jason Vorhees, a divisive decision. THE NEW BLOOD has been embraced within queer film theory due to it containing many LGBTQ+ actors, which may have been why there is a lack of chemistry between its proposed heterosexual couples. Special effects artist John Carl Beuchler directed the film with elaborate kills, which the MPAA had him reduce to cutaways. Kane Hodder makes his debut as Jason in his first of four outings in the mask. Most of the film acts as fodder leading up to the big showdown between Tina the telekinetic teen and Jason, which does not disappoint. The last of the original Paramount films, FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN (1989, 100 min, Digital Projection), resulted in a lackluster box office return, which helped the company make the decision to sell the Jason Voorhees character to New Line Cinema. JASON TAKES MANHATTAN was an ambitious but flawed entry that struggled with budget constraints and overpromising on its premise. Despite its shortcomings, the film’s memorable moments—particularly Jason stalking through Times Square—remain as iconic as Crispin Glover asking for a corkscrew in THE FINAL CHAPTER. In the 90s it was a rite of passage, promoted by shows like USA's Up All Nite and Monstervision to marathon the first eight films on Friday the 13th. From the favorites of the series to the least loved, each film contains enough fun for any horror fan. [Shaun Huhn]

Francis Ford Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (US)

Davis Theater – See Venue website for showtimes

If Francis Ford Coppola only made films between 1972 and 1979, he would still be considered one of the greatest American directors of the second half of the twentieth century. And THE CONVERSATION would still be (arguably) his crown jewel. Made in between his landmark first two GODFATHER films, THE CONVERSATION still stands as Coppola's most fully realized project of his heroic era. Conceived in the ‘60s but not realized until the richly paranoid Watergate era, there’s a prescience to this film that made it hit harder on its release than Coppola could have imagined. THE CONVERSATION, loosely inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), is about San Francisco surveillance expert Harry Caul. An incredibly taught, genuinely terrifying paranoid thriller, it revolves around a job Caul takes on to record a couple’s mid-day conversation in a busy public downtown square. Caul is the kind of guy who takes a job but doesn't ask questions. He’s into the work, the technology, how to get the job done, not who's hiring him and why. Unfortunately, the realities of wiretapping and surveillance don't lend themselves to such clean-cut separations; also, Caul’s Catholic guilt begins to eat away at him and affect his work. This is a masterful mystery thriller that goes deep into the American psyche of paranoia that was so prevalent at the time it was made. But it holds an even more interesting view on privacy and surveillance culture in our present times, when we live in a world with no expectation of privacy. Once there was a time when a man like Caul, who made sound recordings of people who never expected it, was a rarefied expert. Now, we happily turn the cameras on ourselves, and everyone behind us is collateral surveillance damage. The irony of THE CONVERSATION lies in the fact that, while its main character snoops on people for a living, he tries to maintain as private a life as possible. He goes so far as to not even have a phone in his house, using only public payphones to communicate when not face-to-face. This makes the ending of the film ever more delicious. Just as Caul inadvertently captured a conversation with implications beyond what he expected, the film itself inadvertently anticipated the zeitgeist of 1974. It was released just a few months before President Richard Nixon’s resignation, an event bound up in wiretaps and surveillance. To Coppola’s shock, some of the actual equipment and techniques used in the film were used by the Nixon administration. Because of this, Coppola had to deny any real-world influence by pointing out that the film had been written before Nixon was in office and completed before his paranoid transgressions were made public. But besides the strange real-world coincidences and the weaving, mysterious plot, THE CONVERSATION is one of the most technically inspired films ever made. The sound editing here is beyond brilliant. In our age of YouTube clickbait-oriented “film criticism,” the term masterclass gets thrown about to the point of it being near meaningless. But when confronted with what may be the pinnacle of sound design in film, I’d say it's actually appropriate in this case. The sound was created by Walter Murch, who would later be the first person ever to be credited as sound designer on a film (for APOCALYPSE NOW). It is no exaggeration to say that sound itself not only plays a key role in this film; it's actually a character. Perhaps the main character. Seeing this film on a new 35mm print will only show off how insanely ahead of its time and, yes, masterful it really is. In our world of doorbell cameras, red light cameras, ATM cameras, ShotSpotter, and those super creepy Facebook recommendations that seem to come just minutes after you mentioned to a friend how you were thinking of maybe getting some Thai food later, THE CONVERSATION distills our still deep-seated paranoia of being watched (even if now we know we are) into a powerful, timeless, piece of art. Featuring an introduction from Coppola, exclusive to theaters. (1974, 113 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Raphael Jose Martinez]

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

Alliance Francaise (54 W. Chicago Ave.) – Wednesday, 6:30pm

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

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]

Jonathan Demme's STOP MAKING SENSE (US/Documentary)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight

In nearly every shot, STOP MAKING SENSE makes the case that Jonathan Demme was the greatest director of musical performance in American cinema. It isn't difficult to convey the joy of making music, but Demme's attention to the interplay between musicians (and, in some inspired moments, between the musicians and their crew) conveys the imagination, hard work, and camaraderie behind any good song.  And, needless to say, the songs here are very, very good. By this point (the performances are culled from three concerts from 1983), Talking Heads were the headiest American band to achieve their degree of success, and they made the most of it, doubling their line-up to include back-up singers and a few instrumentalists from the golden years of George Clinton's Funkadelic. It's never openly acknowledged that the five new members are Black and the Heads are white; the sheer creativity of the music, which fuses everything from soul to traditional African rhythms to then-advanced electronic effects, is fully utopian in its spirit. (1984, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

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
Lili Horvát’s 2015 Hungarian film THE WEDNESDAY CHILD (94 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.), with a post-screening discussion hosted by Cine-File managing editor Kat Sachs. Free admission with registration. More info here. 

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Wei Shujun’s 2023 film ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS (101 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 5:30pm and 7:30pm and Sunday at 3:30pm and 5:30pm. 

Full Spectrum Features presents CAFE FOCUS in the FACETS Lounge on Sunday at 2pm. Cafe Focus is a monthly coworking pop-up for Chicago filmmakers and film workers of all backgrounds and experience levels. More infoon all screenings and events here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
A new 4K digital restoration of Sohrab Shahid Saless’ 1975 film FAR FROM HOME (91 min, DCP Digital) and Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon’s 2023 film THE FALLING STAR (98 min, DCP Digital) begin screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

Joe Winston’s 2021 documentary PUNCH 9 FOR HAROLD WASHINGTON (103 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 6pm, as part of the Democracy at Risk series, presented by the League of Women Voters of Chicago.

Pamela Yates and Paco de Onis’ 2024 documentary BORDERLAND | THE LINE WITHIN (110 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 5:45pm, followed by a post-screening Q&A with Yates and de Onis.

Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan’s 1941 Chinese animated film PRINCESS IRON FAN (73 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the Propaganda and Counterculture lecture series.

Conversations at the Edge presents an Evening with Tomek Popakul, including three of his short films, on Thursday at 6pm. More info on all screenings here. 

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

Michael Duignan’s 2023 film THE PARAGON (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday and Saturday at 11:30pm.

Dan Savage’s 2024 HUMP! Part Two screens Saturday at 7pm and 9:30pm. 

Jon Silver’s 2024 film THE PREMIERE (81 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 7pm, followed by a post-screening Q&A with Silver. 

The Chicago Film Society presents Chris + Heather's 16mm Big Screen Blowout on Tuesday at 7pm. Chris and Heather will appear live on stage to introduce the films and attempt to explain themselves. Free for Music Box members. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Reeling24 - The 42nd Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival
Anthony Schatteman’s 2024 film YOUNG HEARTS (97 min, DCP Digital) opens Reeling on Thursday, 7pm, at the Music Box Theatre. More info here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 W. Western Ave.)
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents Richard Attenborough’s 1978 film MAGIC (107 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday, 7:30pm, as part of a weekly horror gathering and screening series, with a social hour starting at 6pm and trivia, giveaways and a surprise short feature at 7pm. More info here. 

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
On Friday, as part of Peripheries 2024, M. Woods’ 2024 film BODY PROP (75 min) screens Friday at 7pm and COIN CEILLEIL (2023, 100 min), an omnibus remake of Chris Marker's SAN SOLEIL, at 8:45pm. 

On Thursday, also as part of Peripheries 2024, a public reception will take place at 6pm and AGITATE 21C presents: THE NON-EVENT, with short films by Aldo Tambellini (with a live sound performance by M. Woods), Nazli Dincel, Karissa Hahn, and Jason Halprin will screen at 7:30pm. 

Tone Glow presents “You Wouldn’t Steal a Movie,” including ten short films (nine on 16mm) which, according to the screening description, “​​present a slew of different ideas and modes within the overarching umbrella of ‘found-footage,’”, on Saturday at 7pm. 

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 13 - September 19, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Raphael Jose Martinez, Nicky Ni, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Elise Schierbeek, Harrison Sherrod, David Whitehouse, M Woods