:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3 ::

🌈 Reeling Film Festival

Chicago Filmmakers — See showtimes below

Achillean Generations (Shorts)
Friday, 6:45pm
As suggested by the name of the program, the shorts here feature characters defined as much by strength as vulnerability. While their vulnerable positions are often marked by social or geographical dislocation, they are also the very statuses that draw them closer to their fellow man. In Nicholas Finegan’s SOME KIND OF PARADISE (2023, 21 min), distance is measured in the vast plains surrounding Tyler, a bar line-dancing instructor living in a trailer home in a remote part of Arkansas. His solitary, no-strings-attached existence is briefly ruffled when he hooks up with a Hollywood actor who’s shooting in the area, causing him to question his way of life. Finegan’s gentle subversion of traditional American Western iconography, through both his gay love story and the intimately shallow-focus cinematography, is beguiling. Another unconventional depiction of a Western setting is found in Josef Steiff’s EMERALD CITY (2024, 21 min), which uses an ultra-widescreen frame to chronicle the relationship between an orphaned Mexican-American immigrant and a prospective border patrol agent as they hitchhike through the Southwest. The slow reveal of their respective journeys is effectively matched by the hushed blossoming of their romance. A relationship is fractured by displacement in Jay Liu’s ANYWHERE THE WIND BLOWS (2024, 18 min), about a Hong Kong pro-democracy activist living in the United States as a political refugee. There, he’s visited by the ex-boyfriend he left behind, sparking classic wistful notions of "what if…?" The much older couple in Orlando Karin and Romero Rocha’s SALÓN ROJO (2023, 11 min) are also forced apart by circumstances beyond their control, as the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly ends their regular canoodling sessions at the local bathhouse. Mostly wordless, the film is suffused with both sensuality and deep melancholy. The program is rounded out by something of an outlier, Daniel Porto’s CHEMSEX (2024, 7 min), which contrasts the stateliness of the other shorts with a jolt of prickly, chaotic energy befitting the titular practice of psychotropic drug-fueled sex. As one of the stoned practitioners rambles on incoherently, his partner feasting on his nipples, the viewer might sense that vulnerability and distance aren’t so hard to overcome after all, if only for a blissed-out moment. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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Anthology on Longing (Shorts)
Saturday, 6:45pm
"Nothing fits the body so well as water." This quote opens Kevin Pohl’s FRANKIE, UNDERWATER (2023, 10 min), but it could just as well apply to all of the films in this program, which brims with imagery of oceans, pools, and tears. In Pohl’s film, water is something that both carries and transforms the pubescent protagonist, a swimmer who becomes frightened by the feelings she’s developing for her female best friend. The quick montage, dissonant soundtrack, and thread of body horror ably convey the out-of-control feeling that often attends puberty, especially for LGBTQ youth. A slightly older girl has her sexual awakening in Tusk’s RIPE! (2024, 18 min), a lushly color-saturated Mediterranean sojourn about a closeted American teen on summer vacation who falls for an out, spunky Spanish girl. Inserts of Super 8 and 16mm film add a diaristic home-movie effect to the sweet story. Traveling north to a different coastal destination, in Brittany, Pawel Thomas Larue’s LES GARÇONS DANS L’EAU (2023, 39 min) tracks the evolving romance between trans men Oscar and Malo. The film is remarkable for how it eschews any narrative incidents of transphobia or homophobia, showing Oscar and Malo as fully accepted by the former’s all-male (and pointedly macho) friend group. As the two leads, Sasha Martelli and Ottman Iram have tremendously winning chemistry. From the heartwarming to the heartbreaking, Philippe Grenier’s MUSCAT (2023, 16 min) focuses on a closeted teen boy in a Moroccan fishing village who is pressured, with apparently dire consequences, into suppressing his desire for an older foreign man. It’s a plaintive poem of longing and cultural frustration filled with stolen glances, billowing cloth, and azure waters as alluring as they are deadly. Concluding things on a note both surreal and ruminative is James Duesing’s ADULTING (2024, 8 min), an experimental animated essay film that moves through hallucinatory imagery of crazy-eyed My Little Ponys, broken eggs, and undulating figures representing the filmmaker and his former husband. Via sonorous voiceover by Thomas Douglas, Duesing muses on his thorny relationships with his late father and partner, creating a twilit reflection of queer stoicism through adversity. [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]
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For a full schedule, visit the festival websitehere. Many films are streaming virtually; see the full selectionhere.

📽️ Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival

Sweet Void Cinema — See showtimes below

Shorts Block E
Friday, 5:30pm
A most beautiful block of abstract films, analog and digital, as an ode to levity and the ethereal. PLUME (2022, 7 min) by Canadian filmmaker and avid birder Mike Rollo is an audiovisual feast of plumage and birdsong that uses a stunning visual language to call for environmental awareness. Short sequences of fast cuts of the details of the feather imprints rhyme with the whistling and warbling sounds and then disappear quickly into darkness, as though the birds are also facing a bleak future of near extinction. CLOUD FILM (2024, 10 min) by Tristan Ives is an entirely handmade film composed of rayogram frames. None is an actual image of clouds, but all resemble them. Shades of black and white flicker like how the lightning strikes illuminate the voluminous clouds of an evening thunderstorm. A flashlight inspects an empty apartment in Matt Feldman’s A MESSAGE FROM HUMBOLDT (2024, 7 min). The illuminated are collaged together through multiple exposures to form a dizzying, kaleidoscopic moving portrait of a domestic place, evoking a haunted uneasiness from the everyday. In HYMN TO DEMETER (2023, 6 min), Danielle Wakin microscopically examines an unknown creature—from the feathers to the bones, the lens shifting in and out of focus—over a spectral, ghostly sound. New York-based Jeremy Sie’s year-long project NIGHTS ON EARTH (2024, 31 min) is a volume-full journal of the night sky with accompanying sounds, five seconds a day, from the spring equinox of 2023 to that of 2024. But the sky takes up less foothold in most of the compositions than what has occupied the foreground—skyscrapers, neon lights, bright street lamps, window frames. Boisterous and illuminated cities overshadow the quiet void of the night sky. The conceptual project also collects glimpses at the filmmaker’s whereabouts throughout the year, from boroughs of New York to Miami to Mexico, notated next to the picture frame the date, exact time, and location of each clip. Somewhere on Earth in the evening, sometime between 8pm and 11pm, someone was looking up at the sky, albeit briefly. [Nicky Ni]
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Agitate: Chicago
Saturday, 6pm
This program features a group of agitators who engage in highly stylized ways to sculpt vivid lived experience against the vicissitude of the urban landscape, with a tad of melancholia. Brian Zahm cautions against feeding the pigeons in the nightmarish experimental horror DO NOT FEED THE PIGEONS (2024, 4 min), which, through a suffocating soundtrack composed of flittering taps and screechy string, depicts these seemingly clueless city birds as fatal once their murderous appetite is provoked—by a small handful of bird food. In AT THE BAMBOO GREEN (2024, 12 min), filmmaker Xiaolu Wang, who’s humorously referred to as the “little American girl” by her Chinese relatives, rides with them and an imam to visit her grandma‘s grave located at the Bamboo Green, a cemetery at the foot of the Helan Mountains in China’s Ningxia Province. Completed in one take, the film is an unfiltered record of Wang’s reencounter with a culture she was once familiar with but has grown apart from. After the iman’s mesmerizing prayers, we see Wang wiping the tombstone while chatting with her aunt and relearning all the customs of paying respect to the deceased. Tender portraits of family and friends, as Chicago native Sonnie Wooden’s perceptive camera scans and captures in GODSPEED (2019, 14 min), come together as a nuanced depiction of the city where drastically different cultures coexist but don’t cross paths. FORGETTING FRENCH #1: EIGHT YEARS FROM NADIA (2023, 6 min) by Alicia Mujynya is brimming with the little moments of motherhood, youth, and happiness. Images from home movies are laid over crumbled paper, as if they were fading like childhood memories. Submerged in indistinguishable chatters and murmurs, the film hums a loving story that commemorates kinship and affinity. Bare-bones animation A PLACE TO REST SYNCOPATED (2019, 4 min) by Oona Taper is a concerto composed of all the small and repetitive acts in life, like opening and closing the bedroom door, turning on and off the lights, and watching water dripping from the edge of the table. The singers are the sighs, the squeaky door hinges, and the leaky plinking. These snapshots of solitude and routine weave a soft and cozy song of a place only intimate to someone. The third iteration of Charles Cadkin’s continuing diary film, CAMERA ROLL 3 (2023, 4 min), spans five years between 2018 and 2022. Life before and after the pandemic are distilled into a few minutes of “flash-backs,” in which fragments of a road trip, a birthday celebration, faces of family and friends tune in and out over miscellaneous conversations heard through a scratchy radio filter. Mixing live action and 3D animation, Alice Avery’s EXIT METROPOLIS (2024, 12 min) offers a cathartic portal through which we are transported to a liminal world of isolation and self-discovery, where a hazy bone-white face confesses directly to what could be an infrared camera, eerie like a ghost. The program ends with a live piece by M. Woods. STUDIES ON THE NEGATIVE ARCHITECTURES OF THE DIGITAL SICKNESS (2024, 10 min). Oversaturated microscopic images of coronavirus morph into neurotic splatter of abstract stroboscopic colors. Supplied with live ambient noise. [Nicky Ni]
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Shorts Block F
Sunday, 1pm
This program may well have been titled “Around the World in 61 Minutes,” as the works contain images of Austria, France, Hong Kong, Iceland, Japan (if you count adhesive tape; more on this in a moment), and the good old USA. As a whole, the collection serves as a welcome reminder that cinema is truly a universal language, that any place on earth can be made fodder for beautiful formal play. reliéf RELIEF  (2023, 9 min), by Johannes Gierlinger and Mira Klug, opens the program, and it may be the most culturally specific selection. Described by the artists as “a storehouse and repository of images and history,” the piece considers Austria’s eastern border from a variety of perspectives: as a collection of landscapes, as something identifiable on maps, as a subject in painting, and, crucially, as a site that people crossed when they were fleeing the Soviet Bloc. The sense of lyricism created by the landscapes is frequently interrupted by shots of people, seen from behind, posing in such a way that it looks like they’re about to be apprehended. Mark Street’s LUNETTE (2024, 8 min) continues the program with an offbeat tribute to Paris, seen here through glasses held directly over the camera. The world obscured, we glean impressions of the locations through a mix of audio cues, peripheral detail, and guesswork; the simple but compelling device renders concrete details abstract. Another original city poem continues the program, Jolene Mok’s black-and-white 16mm AN INIMITABLE PLACE CALLED HOME (2023, 6 min), which imagines how Hong Kong looks to a sparrow. The film opens with some lovely shots of the little birds punctuated with poetic intertitles, then takes off into a quick montage of shots of the city taken from aboveground. It peaks (literally and metaphorically) with a resplendent shot from a mountaintop, scored to sparse birdsong. Sticking to southeast Asia (sort of), the program continues with Rennie Taylor’s animation TAPE-STRY (2023, 2 min), a Jodie Mack-inspired collage made with Japanese washi tape stuck directly onto 16mm film. The barrage of colors, textures, and occasional print design is a lot of fun to look at. In a rhyme with LUNETTE, Zoe Chronis’ STAFRÆNN LJÓSLEKI/DIGITAL LIGHT LEAK (2024, 3 min) also considers how a real-world wonder can be rendered abstract through the photographic process. Chronis explains that the film consists of “a MiniDV exposure recorded at Dettifoss,” Iceland’s great waterfall, which we see briefly before it is overwhelmed by a white blur. This malfunction is repeated a number of times, the actual beauty and technical glitch becoming eerily fused. The strange world of technology is revisited in James Tabbush’s BECOME GHOST NO PLUGINS (2024, 9 min), in which a CG avatar explains how to make a ghost animation using Adobe After Effects. Augmenting the sense of depersonalization, we can never hear the avatar’s voice because it’s overwhelmed by ambient noise; subtitles are necessary. Also, we only see the top of his head, never his complete face. The work gets stranger from there, ending unexpectedly in a realm of total abstraction. That conclusion sets the stage for Rachel Efruss’ NOISE STUDY 02 (2024, 3 min), which was created using video feedback from a digital camcorder, an analog video mixer, and a CRT TV, then edited using—you guessed it—Adobe After Effects. The resulting abstract blots serve as a good metaphor for how a world cluttered with technology meant to help us often appears as a disorienting mess. The program concludes with Sam Drake’s TERMINAL ISLAND (2024, 13 min), an oblique portrait of Los Angeles that begins with a shot of expressway traffic as seen reflected in the mirrored windows of a skyscraper, then proceeds to share impressions of desert, an industrial district, and more architecture. The film ends, like it begins, with a shiny surface, though the effect is decidedly more prosaic, as the surface in question is the hood of a car that’s being waxed. This transition from larger-than-life locales to something as banal as washing a car makes for a funny non sequitur, and it ends the program on a jovial note. [Ben Sachs]
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Agitate: In Discrete Space
Sunday, 2:30pm
Serendipitously inaugurating this Sunday afternoon program is Paige Taul & Olula Negre’s ON SUNDAY (2023, 5 min), a gorgeous archival collage born out of the Chicago Film Archives’ Media Mixer, the annual invitational prompt that pairs sound artists and filmmakers for an interpretive deep dive into CFA’s vaults. Blues guitar, plodding strings, industrial samples, and swelling ambiance converge across split-screen scenes of quotidian Chicago gardens and home movies to splay out an exceedingly tender history. Taul and Negre are hardly the only dynamic duo to be found here. Douwe Djikstra’s NEIGHBOUR ABDI (2022, 29 min) is a fascinating collaboration between two creatives and neighbors in the Netherlands—Dutch filmmaker Douwe and Somalian immigrant and furniture designer Abdi—who team up to convey the intense stories of Abdi’s journey surviving war, finding his way through a criminal past, and embracing creativity. Sparked by Abdi’s suggestion that Djikstra make a movie about his life, the two ambitiously employ green screen, miniature sets, costume design, and special effects to recreate traumatic and pivotal chapters in Abdi’s story as dignified reflections that go candidly behind the scenes at every turn. The program tumbles toward its abstraction with XIUHTECUHTLI (2023, 15 min) from the prolific Tehuacán collective Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. This trance-inducing invocation presents a thrashing tangle of corn husk and plant matter, illuminated in splashes of primary color. The title calls forth Xiuhtecuhtli, god of fire in the Aztec pantheon. Following in this vein is M. Woods’ NOTHINGSCAPES (AND THE INHERENT POLITICS OF TEXTURE) (2024, 13 min), a four-channel grid of textural travelogue in bloomed fish-eye and scratched-up walkthroughs. With a title that sets me up for some tension, that of seeking nothing in its colorfully processed cityscapes and landscapes while simultaneously asking me to conceptualize, I think of the basic premise of mediation: how the political act of framing allows quality and texture to be assigned to the world. Daily life moves by other means in Oona Taper’s THE TRAIN IS INVISIBLE UNTIL IT CRASHES (2023, 4 min), an animated shoutout to the persevering Chicago commuter, illustrating a litany of train delay messages as poetic vignettes. Ruptures in the breakdown of smooth functioning include familiar obstructions, power losses, and a dryly mysterious "incident," among other causes. Drawn in virtuoso fashion while riding the CTA, the animation wobbles to the rhythm of a careening rail ride. Also included in the program are haunted offerings from Michael Mersereau’s THE NIGHTMARE PROJECT: LOOPS (2024, 4 min), a surreal undertaking—the filmic reenactment of personal stories of sleep paralysis. [Elise Schierbeek]
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Memory Drum
Sunday, 5:30pm
The penultimate program of the Peripheries festival collects films that use the medium as a device for preserving, producing, and texturing memory. Using disjunctions of sound and image, shifting perspectives, and suggestive symbolism, each film employs different organizing mechanisms through which the filmmaker recollects. Ostensibly the “title” film in that it most explicitly explores both memory and drums, Alee Peoples’ HEY SWEET PEA (2023, 16 min, 16mm) is primarily an experiment in sound sync. Opening with a hi-hat that moves but never closes, we’re primed to link our eyes and ears as an actor later lip-syncs an overbearing mother’s voicemails, covering classic Mom Voicemail Territory like being concerned about the weather and being excited about going to Walmart. Other sampled sound in the film comes from A NEVERENDING STORY (1984), seeming to function as a similarly warm-yet-annoying childhood memory, material the filmmaker recreates while showing the seams that remind one that memory is an imperfect act of recreation. In Maria Inês Gonçalves’ O BANHO (2022, 8 min), the program’s wettest film, water sloshing out of bathtubs and under doorways suggests the fluidity of memories which can’t be contained and held at once; they flow in all directions, staining everything but never fully absorbed in one place. As a baby and later a toddler are washed, the bath suggests a place of returning, womb-like yet rejuvenating. By contrast, Leighton Pierce’s GLASS (1998, 7 min, 16mm), subtitled "Memories of Water #29," employs a more static position that shifts the image through a gradual change in focus, suggesting alternate views of the same memory. As the camera slowly adjusts, we look through a glass, then are lost in its distortions, before moving even further back to see the glass itself as a surface, as if our final position on memory must include an acknowledgement of memory’s tendency to warp. Maybe the most inscrutable in the program, Carl Elsaesser’s HOW TO RUN A TROTLINE (2024, 18 min) comes the closest to archival work in capturing experiences that turn into memories. Elsaesser depicts moments of motion between lightness and darkness, most evocatively by highlighting voids (a hole in a wall, an underground entrance to a gentlemen’s club) but also their inverse, like in the film’s brilliant final shot, which follows someone on a bike as they move from darkness towards and through the end of a tunnel, washing out in the light as they emerge. Elsewhere surfaces are unsure, layers reveal themselves as shots go on, as sources of light move on and off-screen. We see the remnants of traffic paint while an offscreen voice muses on "the resilience of a fading body"; faded signs and stick figures on bicycle lanes gradually disappear until they’re just bicycles, then wheels, and finally nothing. With images as evocative as these, the viewer drifts in and out of attempting to find the structuring logic, and it’s specifically this disorganization that becomes a key organizing principle, evoking the loose patchwork of thought. While each film holds its own warmth and beauty on the surface, it’s this quality that makes the full program so strong, as the viewer may be prodded to find their own paths of nostalgia, or at least return that last call from Mom. [Maxwell Courtright]
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Cloudwards: Waiting is a Dreaming
Sunday, 7pm
Many of the shots in this shorts program (curated by Cine-File contributor Elise Schierbeek) are pointed at the sky, and clouds are indeed a recurring motif, along with rain, sleep, and negative-printed film. As for waiting being akin to dreaming, that notion comes through in how many of the pieces play on the sorts of “in-between” moments that rarely get considered on film. Take, for instance, Jesse McLean’s SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW (2009, 5 min), which comes in the middle of the program. Composed of reaction shots from reality TV shows, beauty pageants and the like, the film presents multiple series of faces, organized according to particular actions and emotions: there are faces staring into space, frustrated faces, sad faces, crying faces. McLean breaks from the portraiture mode with a quick supercut of live TV broadcasts being interrupted by earthquakes. Jem Cohen’s HELIANTHUS CORNER BLUES (2013, 3 min) is another series of portraits, this one of various individuals weathering a downpour in New York City. It’s a lovely slice-of-life that’s attentive to the diverse makeup of contemporary New York, though Cohen reserves special sympathy for a bearded old man smoking a pipe, seemingly unconcerned by the rain. LIGHTNING (1976, 2 min), by Paul and Marlene Kos, is about waiting for a storm, and it’s also about the special magic of one-take cinema. I’d describe it, but that would spoil the surprise. The brilliant Chicago-based filmmaker Deborah Stratton is represented with LAIKA (2021, 5 min), presumably named after the famed Soviet astro-dog. An impressionistic and associative piece, this looks at dogs, stars, and sunlight in mirrors; it climaxes with a shot of astronauts landing at sea that’s run backward, one of numerous elegant poetic effects that Stratman pulls off in just a few minutes. The subject of space travel returns in Katharina Bayer’s ROCKET (2024, 5 min), which contemplates the tail end of a rocket in the sky for five minutes. A small pulsating constant amidst the changing color of the surrounding sky, the halo commands the spectator’s attention despite occupying such a small portion of the frame. ROCKET is preceded by Don Josephus Raphael Ebahan’s ADARNA (2017, 1 min), a negative-printed, slowed-down presentation of girls playing with toy projectiles that they launch into the sky; the commonplace beauty here stands in relief against the considerations of great technological breakthroughs. The program ends with the two longest selections, Julian Flavin’s ALL DAYS MAKE THEIR END (2023, 14 min) and Jessica Bardsley’s LIFE WITHOUT DREAMS (2022, 14 min). In the first, shots of an air mattress automatically inflating and deflating punctuate an evocative portrait of the city at night. Flavin looks at an empty office after hours, a Wing Stop just before it closes, and the DeVry University Chicago Campus in the middle of the night, often returning to the specter of a man in a biker helmet exploring the city alone. This a humorous work, though the humor is nicely integrated—it never overwhelms the general mysteriousness. The nocturnal nature of the piece sets the tone for Bardsley’s short, which reflects on the artist’s experience of insomnia. Shots of the moon, an owl, bats, and people sleeping on trains create a brooding nighttime atmosphere, which Bardsley undercuts with agonizing descriptions of what it’s like to go without sleep for extended periods. As in the Stratman piece, the filmmaker employs a variety of approaches in a short timeframe, evoking the periods of creative overdrive that sometimes occupy a sleepless mind. [Ben Sachs]
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For a full schedule, visit the Sweet Void website here.

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Shirley Clarke’s THE COOL WORLD (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6:15pm

At the center of Shirley Clarke’s harrowing yet entrancing docudrama is a gun. It doesn’t hang on the wall, as Chekhov may have had it, but rather is pursued at first, then appears suddenly and disappears just the same. The importance of this weapon—referred to as a piece by the young gang members who comprise most of the film’s characters—is marked as much by its absence as by its fleeting presence, a sort of MacGuffin that’s more potent as a symbol of power than for its cataclysmic capabilities. Based on Warren Miller’s 1959 novel and produced by renowned documentarian Frederick Wiseman several years before his own debut feature, THE COOL WORLD follows Duke (Rony Clanton), a 15-year-old member of the Royal Pythons, in his pursuit of the group’s presidency. Their current president, Blood, has become a junkie, something that a gang leader apparently can’t be. Duke is also convinced that securing a piece will further help him ascend to that spot; he idolizes another, more successful gangster with mob connections, Priest (Carl Lee), who temporarily lends him his piece and gives Duke a taste of the power he craves. He eventually makes it to president once the group has confronted Blood about his addiction, even stealing his girl, LuAnne (Yolanda Rodríguez), in the process. The next step is to avenge a fallen member’s murder at the hands of their rival gang, the Wolves, upon which Duke’s fate depends. All of this is prefaced by a scene at the very beginning of the film in which the boys take a school trip to Wall Street, where their teacher tells them they, too, can own a share of America. The irony, of course, is that opportunity is not available to them due to the systemic racism that’s hindered them from the womb. Thus, to own a gun is the thing most similar to “owning a share of America,” the only one they know. A docudrama in the fashion of Clarke’s previous film, THE CONNECTION, the cast is composed of non-actors from Harlem—some of whom were gang members themselves. Clarke and Lee were together at the time and as such, the film is a collaborative effort between them (and Wiseman, to an extent). Lee helped to direct the young non-actors, culled from the streets of Harlem, so that the way they speak in real life would translate to the screen. Clarke brought what would become her signature style: a gritty, verité aesthetic and a curious documentary-style approach to adapting the script. Clarke’s work is often likened to documentary, and there are also hints of Italian neorealism in the filmmakers' use of non-actors to play the boys, as well as filming it on location. Not surprisingly, it was produced independently, allowing for a look into a part of America that hadn’t yet been explored in Hollywood up to that point. In Black Children in Hollywood Cinema: Cast in Shadow, Debbie Olson writes that THE COOL WORLD is “a filmic anomaly within the canon of Hollywood urban Black imagery, a socially conscious look at a lived space (Black ghetto) that is often defined solely by its otherness to white suburbia.” Reality is at the forefront of Clarke's intent, making the film important not just in  cinema but also the ongoing struggle for social equality. Note, this film is not streaming or available on DVD. Screening as part of Films by Women/Chicago '74. (1963, 105 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Dorothy Arzner’s CRAIG’S WIFE (US)

Block Cinema (at Northwestern University) – Saturday, 12:30pm [Free Admission]

It’s interesting how two people watching the same movie at the same time can see it so differently. My husband thought Harriet Craig, the titular character of CRAIG’S WIFE played with understated nuance by Rosalind Russell, was a thoroughly unlikeable ice queen who married a man she didn’t love to be able to live in a beautiful house. I, on the other hand, was sympathetic to Harriet’s impoverished background of unreliable caretakers and housing insecurity that played a major role in her life choices. I wonder if audiences of the 1930s were equally divided by this brisk, but complex domestic drama fashioned by director Dorothy Arzner from a 1925 Pulitzer-prize-winning play by George Kelly. In the play and in a 1928 film adaptation, Harriet is definitely viewed as the villain for not marrying for love as her husband Walter had. While not diminishing the ardentness of Walter, played convincingly here by John Boles, nor society’s condemnation of Harriet’s transactional view of marriage as voiced by her household staff and niece (Dorothy Wilson), Arzner and screenwriter Mary C. McCall Jr. bring out the deep insecurity motivating Harriet. Her house-proud, overfastidiousness is something I saw firsthand in the behavior of my mother, who was raised in poverty during the Depression. Surveying the options open to her to keep the wolves permanently at bay, Harriet could see only marriage as a viable route, emphasizing just how limited the choices women—especially women from humble circumstances—had during this time. Her tears at learning of the death of her sister (Elisabeth Risdon) seem like true heartbreak, not the result of feeling alone and abandoned, as some reviewers have suggested. As if to put a point on the plight of women, Arzner ends the film with Harriet reaching out to her widowed next door neighbor (Billie Burke) in a moment of need, yes, but also of sisterhood. Arzner, then the lone woman in a sea of male directors in Hollywood, must have understood this moment extremely well. Screening as part of Films by Women/Chicago '74. 1936, 73 min, 35mm) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Screening as part of a double feature with Arzner’s 1940 film DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (90 min, 16mm), which starts at 3pm.

Agnes Varda's VAGABOND (France)

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

Not all who wander are lost, but it could equally be said that not all who wander wish to ever find or be found. Some are happy to be forever sans toit ni loi (the film's original French title)—without roof or law. Such is the case for Mona, the protagonist of Agnes Varda's staggeringly recusant VAGABOND. The aimless wanderer in question is played by a teenaged Sandrine Bonnaire; her greasy-haired, unwashed lack of naïveté brings a decidedly enigmatic element to the film's already elusive structure. The plot accounts for Mona's last weeks before she freezes to death in a ditch, with Varda employing a combination of narrative enactments and documentary-like interviews with those who encountered her before she died. A mysterious narrator voiced by Varda herself declares that no one claimed her body after she died, and that she seemed to emanate from the sea; Mona is then seen emerging naked from a cold ocean while two boys admire her from afar. Thus begins the film's overarching point of view, one in which the vagabond is little known and used only as a blank slate onto which her acquaintances project their own expectations and disappointments. Though it opens with Mona's death, the rest of the film is not at all hampered by the inter-film spoilers. She lived just as aimlessly as she died, and the details of her life weeks before her demise present another slate onto which viewers can project their hopes for the seemingly apathetic drifter. Varda's poetic filmmaking encourages the disconnect between the viewers and the characters, and even between the characters themselves. Slow tracking shots imitate a voyeuristic gaze and first-person interviews reveal some deceit among the fictional subjects. Even Varda's use of nonlinear structuring suggests such discord, as the confusion imitates Mona's mysteriousness. A string-heavy score betrays underlying anxiety, while music from The Doors and Les Rita Mitsouko highlight her rebellious nonchalance. The film's disarray comes together to present only one knowable fact about Mona: that no one really knew her at all. Preceded by Les Drew's 1988 short film, THE DINGLES (8 min, 35mm). (1986, 105 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Robert Bresson's UNE FEMME DOUCE (France)

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

In UNE FEMME DOUCE, his first color film, Robert Bresson's formalist rigor belies a loose, searching quality that reflects his initial contentions not only with color but a new world, post-Paris '68. His first urban film since PICKPOCKET is keenly attuned to the pulsing of city lights, the thrill of car screeches, and above all, the luminous skin of Dominique Sanda, who seems to embody the seething energy of a new generation. She's the hapless wife of a controlling pawnbroker (Guy Frangin) whose penny-pinching and numb cycles through museums and evening shows allow Bresson to blow raspberries at the petty bourgeois. However, Bresson's exacting direction of Sanda suggests a shared possessiveness between the two men; his stifling treatment triggers in Sanda electric impulses of resistance, eyes always fighting back, validating the "Bressonian model" approach like no other performance (while ironically yielding the only Bresson model to become a star professional). For the last time, Bresson employs voiceover flashback techniques that were his mainstay in the '50s, but this time no redemptive epiphany awaits. Bresson's early works may be more structurally satisfying in their self-contained perfection, but there's a ton of excitement in watching a 68-year-old modernist come to terms with the unresolved present tense of postmodern life. Screening as part of the Capturing the Real: Four by Robert Bresson series. (1969, 88 min, DCP Digital) [Kevin B. Lee]

Robert Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT (US)

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

CALIFORNIA SPLIT is ostensibly a movie about two guys getting loaded on booze and gambling, moving from bender to bender, racetrack to casino. However, over the course of the film CALIFORNIA SPLIT reveals itself to be a tale of personal sadness coupled with the longing to be accepted and liked by another human, any human who will welcome them as they are. Altman's trademark cross-dialogue denseness, captured using multiple boom mics, achieves beautifully dizzying heights, as massive blocks of dialogue are rendered barely discernible. But whatever is made ambiguous by this audio jumble is given full clarity when the characters’ veneers drop off, leaving nothing but their emotional center. In one of the movie's most remarkable scenes two prostitutes, played by Ann Prentiss and Gwen Welles, sit in a bed together after one of them has had their sexual advances rebuffed by leading man George Segal. Her friend consoles her by stroking her hair and promising that she has a great client for her to entertain instead, softly promising another, better man who will treat her kindly. The dialogue is delivered very matter-of-factly, with not a lot of conviction behind it, but it foregrounds a dream of companionship, if even for a few hours, which is the soul of this underrated film. The aforementioned scene is a wonderful representation of the film as a whole, which on paper seems like just another buddy-heist-comedy. Altman, being a wonderful subverter of genre stereotypes, delivers less of a kooky comedy of errors, and more of a Cassavetes-influenced genre hybrid, very similar to another of its miraculous ilk, Elaine May's flat-out masterful MIKEY & NICKY. Screening as part of the Columbia Pictures in the 1970s series. (1974, 108 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]

An Evening with Angelo Madsen Minax (US/Experimental)

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

In these videos the themes that stood out to me most poignantly are seeking connection and facing the void. Of course, Angelo Madsen Minax has a lot to say—and, through his images, not say, but show—about queer and trans life, often through an examination of the desire contained within. But there’s also an existential aspect that just seems to wonder, why are we here?, what does it mean to seek connection in that void? In BIGGER ON THE INSIDE (12 min, Digital Projection) Minax contemplates existence at a small cabin in the woods, where he gazes at the stars and, as per the film, pretends to be somebody else. About midway through what’s thus far a somewhat opaque collage of imagery and sound turns into a computer screen where Minax is drawing a triangle using some sort of software and explaining how the points represent the Lover, the Beloved, and Need, the latter being that which comes between them. Need bounces between the other two points, connecting them, but in a way that must be maintained to avoid losing that balance, thus suggesting the vulnerability inherent to such a connection. A text exchange toward the end between the main “character” and an anonymous person exudes this vulnerability, with each seeking a connection seemingly stronger than need. There’s a celestial aspect as well that connects it more to the universe than just the corporeal form; “I imagine my insides are a star that I am traveling through,” reads text that appears on the screen. THE SOURCE IS A HOLE (2017, 24 min, Digital Projection) is described as a treatise on transexual mourning, and, as is explained at some point in the film while Minax is getting tattooed, involves the concept of time traveling to explore memories and anticipate the future. Somewhat freewheeling in style, the narration covers a litany of memories, various sources and influences and, most importantly, personal revelation. A sudden period evokes a consideration of a hole being “stuffed,” but just temporarily, a void that can never be filled. This is one to be watched rather than read about, as it’s a dense examination of myriad tragedies meant to felt if not exactly understood. THE EDDIES (16 min, Digital Projection) finds a “death and destruction-obsessed trans man” searching for connection amidst an underground subculture in the South. Underground, literally, as the hookups seem to happen in underground spaces like tunnels beneath the city, literal voids, empty spaces filled only with secrets. At one point the man seeks out someone willing to masturbate whilst holding a gun, desire and death merging uncannily. Queen’s “Somebody to Love” is heard throughout, the earnestness of the quest for connection echoing through that song's simple question. A three-way sex ritual is described as being an ode to procreation in TWO SONS AND A RIVER OF BLOOD (2021, 11 min, Digital Projection), which was co-directed by Amber Bemak.. “Everything starts with a hole,” Madix exclaims at one point. When one of the trio miscarries, they seem to merge as one to combat grief with love. It’s a fitting end to the program, as it examines a terminus yet proposes a new beginning. Just start with the hole and therein might be the connection you seek. Followed by a conversation with the artist. [Kat Sachs]

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (UK)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 6pm

Though the film takes its name from the then-popular David Low-penned British newspaper comics character, there is no one actually named "Colonel Blimp" in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP. Naturally, then, we never even see his entire life or death, nor the death of the film’s protagonist, Clive Wynn-Candy, the closest thing to a Blimp analog present. Right off the bat, Powell and Pressburger’s cinematic epic of wartime escapades is teaching us to put more focus on mythmaking, symbology, and grand narratives more than cold, hard truth. The "real" Blimp, in cartoon form, was an outsized, walrus-faced military man seen as a satirical commentary on the steadfast old ways of the British elder military class. Powell and Pressburger’s fascinations lie in dissecting the very idea of Blimp, the aging British statesman (seen here through the eyes of the aforementioned Clive Candy through a forty-year period that encompasses two World Wars, and how the dreaded passage of time comes for us all and our youthful spirits. Will we adapt to the changing tides, or will we remain steadfast in the ways that best suited us in contexts of years gone by? That Powell and Pressburger’s feature so effortlessly whizzes through this man’s formative years with whip sharp dialogue and dialed-in performances is no small feat, but to have a film that simultaneously upholds and upends British is a daring tightrope walk of thematic bravura carried out tremendously, especially given the film’s initial release right at the tail end of the Second World War. The major coup of the film—besides the ever magnificent imagery and scope that’s signature of an Archers film, captured in glorious eye-popping Technicolor—is in the casting, with Roger Livesey playing Candy through multiple decades of his life, from young idealist to elder stick in the mud, never seeming out of place at any place in his life. Perhaps more impressive is Deborah Kerr’s triple-star turn in three separate roles as three different women who each play a major role in Candy’s life. Though their resemblance to one another is a core tenet of the film’s narrative (Surely three women throughout history can’t all look as dazzling as Kerr without being remarked upon), Kerr still manages to instill each character with a distinct presence and life, elevating what could easily be paper-doll muses for Candy into fully-fledged soulful women each making their own indelible mark on history. Amidst its gleeful pace across a nearly three-hour runtime, Powell and Pressburger inject appropriate pathos, contending with the horrors of war and rising fascism never more masterfully than in a searing monologue delivered by Anton Walbrook as a German man facing the aftermath of his family becoming indoctrinated into the ballooning Nazi party. For all its joy and triumph, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP is fully aware of the horrors of what it is to see the world change before our very eyes, and fearless enough to ask head on what we’ll do to adapt and change with it. Screening as part of the Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger series. (1943, 163 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s A CANTERBURY TALE (UK)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 8:15pm

The wartime films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are every bit as eccentric as the films they made before and after WWII, and this may explain why they’re so successful as propaganda. In their embrace of quirkiness, these movies argue that the Allied Forces (and the United Kingdom in particular) are on the winning side of history because they welcome unusual displays of human expression, as opposed to the fascists, who aspire to a culture of brutal conformism. A CANTERBURY TALE is nonconformist cinema through and through: not only are many of the characters lovable kooks, but the plot isn’t in any hurry to go anywhere (which is especially odd, given the wartime setting), and the mystery that ostensibly drives the story gets resolved a good half-hour before the film ends. It is, in short, a beautiful example of storytelling for its own sake, not unlike many of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the late 14th century. The film explicitly quotes Chaucer in its opening passages, and the tale of a modern-day pilgrimage invokes the frame narrative of Chaucer’s collection; like T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (another great poetic work written in England during WWII), it finds serenity amidst the uncertainty of war through a sense of connection with English cultural history. In a small village not far from Canterbury in 1943, three wayward souls meet: a London shopgirl who’s gone to the country to work on a government farm, a London cinema organist who’s just been conscripted into the army, and an American soldier on leave. All three want to visit Canterbury Cathedral, but they choose to stay in the village after they learn about an unidentified stranger who’s been pouring glue in women’s hair at night; working together and drawing on the locals for help, the trio determines to solve the mystery. The film’s paean to English country life is enhanced by countless charming details, from the cutaway shots to colorful individuals to the lyrical integration of the landscape into the mise-en-scène. One eccentric detail worth singling out is the casting of real-life American Army Sergeant John Sweet as the American soldier Bob Johnson (the Archers had cast Burgess Meredith in the role, but decided to replace him last-minute with an unknown); his amateurish, gee-whiz line readings help to further ground the film in historical reality, much like the shots of bombed-out buildings in Canterbury that cast a pall over the otherwise cheerful dénouement. Screening as part of the Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger series. (1944, 124 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Bridgett M. Davis’ NAKED ACTS (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Bridgett M. Davis—more than a triple threat as a writer, filmmaker, professor and curator—was inspired by Kathleen Collins to make NAKED ACTS, an auspicious, independent debut that echoes Collins’ exploration of Black art and identity. “As an emerging filmmaker in the ‘90’s, I felt I’d found a kindred spirit after chancing upon an interview with Kathleen Collins in Black Film Review,” Davis said. “She was so erudite, so passionate, so inspiring about the life of a woman artist.” Thus the main character in Davis’ film, Cicely (Jake-ann Jones), called Cece informally, is an artist, specifically an actress. But her choice to be so is in opposition to her mother, Lydia Love (Patricia DeArcy), a former Blaxploitation star who now runs a video store, where her former glory as a sex symbol is still being touted for all to see. In a pertinent flashback at the beginning of the film, we glean the toll that her mother’s career and accordant lifestyle has had on her through a subtle but heartbreaking scene that sets the stage for what’s to come. Upon visiting her mother for the first time in several years she reveals that she’s also an actress and has a part in an independent film (Davis was also inspired by the film-within-a-film aspect of Collins’ LOSING GROUND); her mother warns her of the industry’s penchant for exploiting young women, relegated as she was to exploitation films. Cece insists that hers is a more pure, artistic pursuit, though, ironically, the role—of a model for an esteemed older artist—requires nudity. Cece has recently lost a lot of weight, but the insecurities that came with her bigger body have not dissipated. As much as the film is about Cece’s artistic identity, it’s also about her corporeal self, an aspect that’s especially well-timed given recent conversations around Black peoples’ bodies and what it means to inhabit them. It’s the exploitation of her body (a fact that can be extrapolated to be about the exploitation of Black bodies in general) that prohibits her from being truly vulnerable both in her life and in her practice, the former of which is illuminated by her relationship with the film’s director (Ron Cephas Jones). His photographer sister, Diana (Renee Cox), becomes an integral part of the story, as much of her artistic work centers on taking nude photos of strong women from a distinctly female gaze. (Cox is an acclaimed feminist photographer in real life who uses her own naked body as the subject in many of her works; she was another source of inspiration for Davis.) The purported tension of the film’s story is Cece’s inability to open up and embrace real emotions in her performance; it’s actual tension is between Cece and her own body, betrayed through the abuse suggested by the flashback at the beginning but still beautiful and ultimately capable of revealing itself on her own terms. Similarly, Davis makes the film her own, despite the strength of her influences, and like Cece is both born of but yet separate from her own “mother” (Collins in this case, spiritually speaking), having embraced her own creativity in a way befitting her predecessors’ legacies and also providing inspiration for future generations. The 6pm screening on Saturday will be followed by a discussion with Davis, Maya Cade, and Camille Bacon around the film’s resurgence and the broader ethic of stewarding, safe-guarding, and serving an audience for Black women’s creative pursuits across generations. (1996, 87 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]

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CALIGULA: THE ULTIMATE CUT (US/Italy)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday and Monday, 7pm

According to one dictionary, a spectacle can be defined as either "a visually striking performance or display" or "an event or scene regarded in terms of its visual impact." Thomas Negovan's re-cut of this notorious film succeeds on both counts. Sometimes, well, spectacularly. An in-depth interview with Negovan (who bears the unwieldy credit "Producer and Re-constructionist") about his creative process is well worth your time. To sum it up: THE ULTIMATE CUT utilizes completely different takes from the 1980 version and jettisons Penthouse founder Bob Guccione's witless hardcore sex scenes, trying to approximate what scripter Gore Vidal and original director Tinto Brass might have been aiming for. Possibly—Vidal is long dead and Brass, though still alive, suffers from dementia and was not involved in the project. In any event, Negovan's version of CALIGULA is a fascinating oddity, an elephantine odyssey of soiled splendor that would be quite impossible to make from scratch today. At times, its eye-popping tableaux of assorted depravity brings to mind (heaven help me) a much more honest, less pretentious Peter Greenaway production. Yes, there's nudity and sex everywhere. But just when you think some eroticism is on offer, the film abruptly yanks it away. Which I'd like to think is by design. As the crazed emperor, Malcom McDowell is spellbinding and absolutely fearless; he viscerally (and often full frontally) captures Caligula's harrowing cruelty and madness. Dame Helen Mirren, playing his wife (and Rome's most notorious prostitute), doesn't quite have enough to do but in her finest moments, she's no shrinking violet either. And Sir John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole, in small roles, lend the proceedings a certain fractured majesty. The Music Box's big screen is the perfect venue to properly appreciate the film's screen-filling sumptuousness; it was, after all, the most expensive indie film of its time. Negovan is scheduled to attend both screenings for post-film Q&As. (1979/2023, 178 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]

Kira Muratova’s THE LONG FAREWELL (USSR)

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

“[Kira Muratova] may favor… the discontinuous edits, asynchronous sound, and avant-garde framing that characterize the films of French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard, whom she greatly admired. But Muratova’s motivations are different from Godard’s,” Jessica Kiang writes in her essay for the Criterion Collection. “She uses these devices less to discomfit the audience or disrupt their interaction with her work… and more as a kind of dazzling shorthand for the way the imagination leaps and stutters, catching and losing its drift.” Kiang’s comparison points to what makes Muratova’s films so exciting, unpredictable, and hard to synopsize. Muratova was also, like Godard, concerned with internal experience, but where Godard’s films try to convey intellectual refinement and the presentation of ideas, Muratova’s are all about the eruption of unchecked thoughts. Characters in her movies famously speak in circles, doubling back over things they’ve just said, whether they’re stuck on an idea or they’re just forced to repeat themselves because everyone around them is talking at once. Rarely does Muratova present one thing at a time—in addition to the overlapping dialogue, you have to contend with the schism between what’s happening in any given scene and the oblique perspective from which the director frames it. Watching a Muratova film may make you go a little crazy, and this, in turn, allows you to better relate to her characters, who are often going crazy themselves. Yevgeniya, the heroine of Muratova’s second solo directorial effort THE LONG FAREWELL, spends most of the movie fretting over the possibility that her only son Sasha will move away to live with his dad and leave her all alone. She’s an overbearing and self-regarding character from the start (a sample exchange between her and Sasha, during a walk in the park: “Let’s stand here in silence for a moment.” “I am silent.” “Then will you walk me to the train?”), but when she learns from one of Sasha’s friends that he’s thinking of moving away, she reacts by amplifying all her worst tendencies, turning into something of a comic monster. Muratova’s filmmaking is monstrous in its own way, with its cluttered soundtrack and abrasive cuts within and between scenes; at the same time, she never loses sight of sympathy for Yevgeniya nor does Muratova ever reduce her to a caricature. Perhaps it was this complexity that proved too much for Soviet censors, who suppressed THE LONG FAREWELL until 1987 and kept the director from working again for more than five years. Screening as part of the Echoes of Films by Women/Chicago '74 series. (1971, 97 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]

Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

A film of seminal importance, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE sits at the crux of a huge shift; it feels as if American cinema had always been moving toward it, and its wake is continually influential. It’s certainly an essential film in the horror canon with regards to many subgenres, though notably as an early example of the slasher, with Marilyn Burn’s Sally Hardesty as one of the most iconic of final girls. The film opens with Sally, her brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), and their friends as they travel through Texas to visit their late grandfather’s home. After picking up a strange and violent hitchhiker, they find the house, but they're unable to escape the savage behavior of a family of vicious cannibals residing nearby. While this plot by now feels all too familiar, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE continues to be shocking in its grotesqueness. It’s a slow film, not in pace necessarily, but in the way the violence builds, the way the characters unhurriedly move through the landscape, and the way in which director Tobe Hooper portrays the muggy weather of the open Texas countryside, everything and everyone covered in sweat and flies. The graininess of the film gives a sense of humidity. Its iconic imagery is due, in part, to its distinctive look, taking place primarily during the day with the light of Texas sun; it’s quite a beautiful film despite its extreme violence. Though, important to note, it’s not especially explicit. The power of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is how much unsettling horror Hooper implies. It feels like the film is drowning the audience in it, that slow burn contributing to the terror. This is one of the most impressive examples of American independent cinema, made in extreme conditions and on an extremely low budget. Cowritten by Hooper and Kim Henkel, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE also remains evergreen in its subtle (and not so subtle) social commentary, not just on US culture and politics in the 1970s, but in its continued reverberation fifty years later. As Hooper’s breakout feature, it was perhaps inevitably impossible to live up to its cultural impact, and his oeuvre has yet to get the same re-appreciation as horror figures like John Carpenter or George Romero. But aspects of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE show up in all his films, particularly its repulsive take on humanity grounded in bonkers humor. Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: The Dream Child. (1974, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato’s PARTY MONSTER (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, Midnight

A pair of unreliable narrators—James St. James (Seth Green) and Michael Alig (Macaulay Culkin)—verbally duke it out as they introduce us to their fabulous but true tale of murder in clubland. PARTY MONSTER instantly transports us into a world of excess, capturing the unabashed hedonism prevalent in the notorious club kid scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Within the vibrant chaos of Alig's world, the line between performance and reality blurs as the club kids don't just attend parties, they are the parties. This is highlighted when they’re asked to go on tour and respond, "We don’t do anything." Their costumes, outrageous personas, and reckless behavior collectively transform them into the spectacle, creating an underground club scene as a space where boundaries are constantly pushed, and conventional social norms are subverted or dismantled all together. There’s a duality to the film’s proceedings, a bifocal biopic that mirrors Alig’s rise and fall. On one side are the pleasures of narcissism and the other the paranoia of maximalism. Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato capture the sensory overload of clubland with rapid editing, flashing lights, pulsating music, and surreal visuals that immerse the audience into a never-ending, drug-fueled party. From fast food restaurant soirees to a party in a truck, the glitz and glamor is portrayed as a necessary vigil in the times following Andy Warhol’s death. Michael Alig saw himself as the icon’s successor. The club kids were famous for pushing limits, reveling in the grotesque and bizarre. This is captured by an aesthetic that feels equal parts music video and fever dream. The moral here is: overindulgence has its limits. As the film progresses, the endless pursuit of money, success, fame, and glamour becomes unsustainable. Alig's kaleidoscopic world begins to collapse under the weight of addiction and paranoia. What initially appears as a jubilant celebration of freedom and rebellion ultimately devolves into a harrowing nightmare of self-destruction. The tone of the film darkens alongside Alig's increasing drug use, with the vibrant colors fading to muted tones, symbolizing the fleeting ephemeral nature of the subculture. The club kids burned bright and burned out quickly. A core lesson emerging from the tumultuous club scene is continuing ideology regarding the fluidity of identity. Alig and his peers constantly reinvent themselves, embracing their freedom through elaborate costumes and makeup, effectively blurring the lines of gender, sexuality, and personal history. Alig rises to become a self-pronounced king of clubland, but devoid of empathy, he numbs himself with drugs as he struggles to cope with loss, regret, and love. He resembles a figure, like Icarus, flying too close to the sun only to try to drag his followers into the abyss with him. Culkin’s portrayal of Alig is masterfully nuanced, capturing both innocence and monstrosity, charm and profound instability. Alig’s magnetic charisma initially draws others in, but as the film progresses, his identity unravels, and his descent into addiction and dangerous behavior culminates in the murder of Angel Melendez. Culkin is unsettling, as Alig transforms into a grotesque caricature of the person he once believed he was. Opposite Alig is James St. James, who serves as narrator and participant in the madness. St. James wrote the true crime memoir Disco Bloodbath: A Fabulous but True Tale of Murder in Clubland that PARTY MONSTER is based on. As a Manhattan celebutante and the original club kid, St James offers a more cynical perspective on the proceedings. Seth Green brings humor to the role, but also provides a sobering contrast to Alig’s descent. While St. James survives the scene, Alig is consumed by it. Audiences are left to sift through the despair and violence to remember the rebellious exuberance that defined the club kid era before its quick and tragic end. Featuring a vinyl DJ set with Gaudy God before the screening (at 11:30pm). Feature preceded by Tom Rubnitz’s 1989 short film PICKLE SURPRISE (2 min, Digital Projection). (2003, 98 min, 35mm) [Shaun Huhn]

Charles Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

One of the most courageous of all films, Chaplin's satire attacked Adolph Hitler while the US government was still officially neutral towards Nazi Germany, but it's even more remarkable for recognizing the complex relationship between fascism and popular culture. Chaplin famously quipped that he had a vendetta against Hitler because he stole the Tramp's mustache, and he portrays his Hitler caricature Adenoid Hynkel as a version of his beloved Tramp turned inside out by the evils of the twentieth century. The clownish, neurotic dictator is of course motivated by delusions of grandeur (which Chaplin displays, gorgeously, in a ballet sequence where he dances with a balloon globe) but he's equally dependent on mass acceptance. Chaplin also represents the people persecuted by dictatorship; he stars in these scenes as well, playing a Jewish barber even more reminiscent of the Tramp. The scenes depicting the barber's social life in the ghetto are so deeply felt in their sympathy for European Jewish humor that THE GREAT DICTATOR could be ranked justifiably with the great Jewish films. Given his worldwide popularity, Chaplin's decision to ally his screen image so closely with the Jews had deeply radical implications, but that's no match for the openly Leftist monologue at the film's end. Following a series of tragic/farcical complications, the plot breaks away and Chaplin addresses the camera for a three-minute unbroken shot. What begins as an outcry against fascism turns into a plea for universal brotherhood, and it's audacious in how fully it manipulates the communicative nature of cinema. Writing about this scene in 1974, Jonathan Rosenbaum was rightly hyperbolic: "Seen with historical hindsight, there are few moments in film as raw and convulsive as this desperate coda. Being foolish enough to believe that he can save the world, Chaplin winds up breaking our hearts in a way that no mere artist ever could." Screening as part of the as part of the as part of the Propaganda and Counterculture lecture series. (1940, 124 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY (France)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9:15pm

TROUBLE EVERY DAY was Claire Denis’ most contentious film before BASTARDS; not surprisingly it was her goriest film to date, trading in dark, eroticized violence that can be a deal-breaker for many viewers. Vincent Gallo stars as an American doctor who travels to Paris with his innocent young wife. He says they’re on a honeymoon, but really he wants to research the rare condition with which he’s afflicted—it makes him want to drink human blood. Gallo encounters a doctor (Denis regular Alex Descas) whose wife (Beatrice Dalle) is afflicted with the same condition; Denis goes on to parallel Gallo’s story with Dalle’s, showing how terrible things might get for the American doctor. The violence is shockingly graphic, yet the narrative is characteristically vague. Is TROUBLE EVERY DAY an AIDS allegory? A Cronenbergian fable about how little we understand our own bodies? Or just a reflection of whatever nightmares Denis was having at the time? As usual for the director, Denis makes you feel vivid sensations before you understand what the film means. The associative editing, the moody cityscapes, and the evocative Tindersticks score combine to create a memorable sensory assault.  Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: The Dream Child. (2001, 101 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Paul Thomas Anderson's PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Saturday, 11:30am

Praising a big film is easy. It's enveloping, cushioning in its self-importance. Praising a small film, a movie that doesn't necessarily want to be praised, means taking a plunge. For example: PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is Paul Thomas Anderson's greatest work. This little 95-minute movie, made between two projects intended to be "epic" (MAGNOLIA and THERE WILL BE BLOOD) comes across as more epic than either—a struggle that's almost comically ordinary instead of one maximized for "meaning." It's also his most beautiful musical without being a musical; it could be a ballet, a little operetta, or a children's symphony. Plunger salesman Adam Sandler, wandering through a world of Andreas Gursky colors in a blue suit, alternately pursues and is pursued by Emily Watson, a friend of his overbearing sister. It's a romance that's not so much about finding love as being able to outrun the world for long enough to let that love become something. Screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: BIG ART FILMS series. (2002, 95 min, 35mm) [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

Gregg Araki’s NOWHERE (US)

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

In 1992, B. Ruby Rich identified a movement in independent cinema that unapologetically explored queer identities and subverted traditional norms, coining it "New Queer Cinema." This wave of films challenged conventional storytelling by embracing experimental techniques and foregrounding marginalized voices. Drawing inspiration from the irony and camp of John Waters, these films critiqued mainstream notions of masculinity, femininity, and heterosexuality. Working outside of Hollywood gave these filmmakers the freedom to address controversial themes, echoing the rebellious spirit of pioneers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Derek Jarman. Key examples of this movement include Todd Haynes' POISON and Gus Van Sant's MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (both 1991), which set the stage for the radical style of Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, which explores themes of youth alienation, queer identity, and rebellion, by mixing dark comedy, surrealism, and punk aesthetics via a transgressive journey.  In TOTALLY F**KED UP (1993), the first film of the trilogy, Araki finds his muse in the doe-eyed, sensitive, Keanu Reeves-esque James Duval. There is a rawness in its portrayal of queer youths navigating marginalization in Los Angeles. Set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, the film presents a nihilistic take on disaffected youth who reject authority and traditional values. Its fragmented, episodic narrative is reminiscent of a punk documentary, drawing parallels to THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981). The film’s sense of nihilism, pervasive throughout the trilogy, underscores the characters’ disillusionment with societal norms. Araki’s next film, THE DOOM GENERATION (1995), delves into a hyper-stylized, violent world filled with absurdity and sexual tension. It is a road movie at its core, whose interludes in convenience stores and run-down motels showcase a collapse of society occurring around our trio of anti-heroes. Araki amplifies the violence from TOTALLY F**KED UP, to reinforce the idea that the world is a hostile and meaningless arena where hedonism is the only respite. The dystopia the characters navigate is filled with grotesque representations of fast food, television, and advertising. The film’s brutal ending symbolizes society’s punishment and rejection of marginalized individuals, particularly those who defy mainstream, heteronormative values. NOWHERE, the final film of the trilogy, features a sprawling cast and a more surreal, colorful aesthetic. The film is essential viewing for the production design alone, as each set and color scheme become more visually arresting than the last. While NOWHERE includes scenes of over-the-top teen suicide brought on by Moses Helper, a televangelist played by John Ritter, the overall messages contained within the film embrace the germ of hope found inside hopelessness. James Duval is Dark Smith, who struggles to maintain a monogamous relationship with his polyamorous girlfriend Mel (Rachel True). NOWHERE follows Dark over the course of a day as he searches for love and meaning amidst a surreal landscape of drugs, alien lizards, stylized sets, soap opera melodrama, and sexual fluidity. The cast includes a who’s who of '90s exaggerated teen archetypes and dastardly authority figures played by a bevy of then-famous and future-famous stars. Araki, by design, throws these characters at us in a rapid succession of mini tragicomedies occurring too quickly to care. As alien abductions, heroin use, and sexual assault happen in the world around Dark, his focus on finding someone who will never leave him pushes him forward through the hellscape. NOWHERE culminates as the perfect epilogue to Araki’s trilogy as the emptiness that infects the characters' lives eventually leads to an aimless and futile ending. The Teen Apocalypse Trilogy is a countercultural landmark in LGBTQ+ cinema. The films are raw, confrontational, and definitively queer. They depict their gay characters without coding their queerness or forcing them into tragic narratives or token roles. Though Araki neither celebrates or offers optimism to his characters for their sexuality, he infuses punk sensibilities, anarchy, and existentialism as a rebel yell for queer youth. This is exemplified best through Dark, as he learns the only way to face the meaninglessness in the world is to confront a cockroach alien while soaked in the blood of someone you care about and scream out in anguish. Screening as part of the Subversive Histories: A Snapshot of Queer Cinema series. (1997, 83 min, DCP Digital) [Shaun Huhn]

Greta Gerwig's LADY BIRD (US)

Music Box Theatre – Sunday, 11:30am

"You stole my life!" Greta Gerwig wails at the climax of MISTRESS AMERICA, the terrific neo-screwball comedy that Gerwig wrote with Noah Baumbach. The object of her scorn is Lola Kirke, the Columbia University undergrad who pilfered Gerwig's neuroses to spice up a short story. I came out of LADY BIRD, Gerwig's solo directorial debut, and expressed much the same sentiment. It's not just that the story is set in Sacramento, the town where I grew up, or that its central character, Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), yearns to escape high school in the Operation Iraqi Freedom winter of 2003, a year before I graduated. Every single detail in this movie is right: the unnamed supermarket where Lady Bird's brother works is a dead-on replica of the tan-and-artichoke-green Raley's grocery chain in the early Bush years, before the chain was forced to gentrify and update its color scheme; the ruby red Sacramento News & Review boxes dot the sidewalk cafes, where scruffy hipsters read Howard Zinn and make exotic-for-Sactown references to Maurice Pialat; a non-religious family of Unitarian Universalists send their daughter to a Catholic school because they reflexively refuse to subject her to that purportedly gang-infested, one-time flagship Sacramento High School. (Actually, in 2002-2003, Sac High was subject to a hostile take-over from one-time NBA star, charter school entrepreneur, future mayor Kevin Johnson—but the family's very obliviousness to this debate rings true, too.) But LADY BIRD's achievement goes beyond its exacting production design and precise recall of seemingly trivial details. The rituals of Lady Bird and her mother (Laurie Metcalf)—a shopping spree at Thrift Town, a disingenuous tour of model homes—track so closely to the aspirational lower-middle-class activities that I know but which rarely wind up on screen. There's a strip mall-sized gulf between the articulate and affectionate depiction of this social strata in LADY BIRD (and Kogonada's COLUMBUS) and the gawking condescension that undergirds the misogynistic screeds of Alexander Payne. LADY BIRD is particularly smart in the way Gerwig expresses gradations of class through competing neighborhoods, accessories, and body language. Compare the belabored set piece about buying a cell phone in Richard Linklater's recent LAST FLAG FLYING, also set in 2003, with the subtle way that a phone pulled out during class stands in for pages of expository dialogue in LADY BIRD. One movie's throwaway comic relief is another's freighted shorthand. Sacramento is front and center in LADY BIRD's logline and I haven't read a single review that fails to describe Ronan as a Sacramento teenager. LADY BIRD was photographed primarily in Los Angeles, with a few days of exteriors shot in Sacramento. That hasn't stopped Sacramentans from claiming every piece of LADY BIRD that hasn't been nailed down. Thrift Town sent out an e-blast promoting the cameo from its El Camino location while Lonely Planet compiled a location guide highlighting the convenience store that Ronan visits in one short scene or the blue house where her first boyfriend lives. The Tower Theatre, which appears on screen for a second or two in a montage towards the end, has been playing LADY BIRD for twelve weeks straight and grossed over $500,000 with the picture, a new house record. But while LADY BIRD is achingly precise in its overall social geography (of course the selfish rich classmate lives in Granite Bay!), there's one detail that's been left deliberately hazy: Everyone I know from my mother to my ex-girlfriend to high school classmates with whom I haven't spoken in over a decade has an opinion about where exactly Lady Bird's house "on the wrong side of the tracks" might be found. In Gerwig's earlier FRANCES HA, her twentysomething Manhattan transplant spends a Christmas at her parents' house in Sacramento at 214 Camellia Ave—an address that doesn't quite exist, but suggests the cozy East Sac bungalow belt that many assume to be the de facto neighborhood of LADY BIRD. In 2003, anything in the city proper would've been considered déclassé, coming as it did right before the debt-financed building boom that finally reversed decades of exodus to suburban Citrus Heights and Fair Oaks. Love and attention are one and the same. It's rare to find a movie that can be subjected to this kind of loving scrutiny, but does any of it matter unless you hail from NorCal? Sure, hella. Even if you can't tell the Tower Bridge from the H Street Bridge, LADY BIRD still feels intensely rooted, evoking a rich sense of personal geography that's at once deeply specific and effortlessly universal. It's an effort to conjure the past with every piece in place, but the mystery at the center remaining exquisitely preserved. LADY BIRD is first and foremost a memory play, though Gerwig obscures that form by eschewing traditional markers like voice-over narration and present-day bookends. We sense the presence of an older, wiser Lady Bird through what's left out and what lingers just beyond our comprehension. Lady Bird appears in almost every scene, but there are a handful of moments outside her direct experience—a quietly humiliating job interview for her father, Tracy Letts, or the tender scene of her drama teacher Stephen McKinley seeking treatment for an unspoken malady—that acknowledge the emotional wholeness but ultimately inaccessibility of other people. Our parents are people, our teachers are people, and we're people, too. Someday. Screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival Presents: BIG ART FILMS series. (2017, 93 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

James Foley’s GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (US)

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

When David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross premiered in 1983, it was easy to see its parallels with Arthur Miller’s classic 1949 Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning play Death of a Salesman. Mamet’s Shelley “The Machine” Levene is heir to Willy Loman as a man whose identity is tied to his job as a salesman and whose recollections of his glory days—imaginary in Willy’s case, long past in Shelley’s—were all that kept him going. Shelley’s offers to pay John Williamson, his ineffectual manager, to get some premium leads echo Willy’s pleas to Howard, his unsympathetic employer, to keep his job by offering to take larger and larger pay cuts. Was it any wonder that the New York literary and theatre worlds would embrace Glengarry with a slew of awards? Mamet’s jaundiced look at some bottom feeders flogging land parcels of dubious worth, gleaned from his experience working in a real estate office, was released as a film in 1992. The timing was perfect to critique the ruthless, greed-is-good work environments of the 1980s. The screenplay written by Mamet includes a new character, Blake (Alec Baldwin), whose sales meeting with Williamson (Kevin Spacey), Shelley (Jack Lemmon), George Aaronow (Alan Arkin), and Dave Moss (Ed Harris)—top seller Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) skips the meeting to reel in a prospect (Jonathan Pryce) he’s plying with alcohol at a nearby Chinese restaurant—is more of an assault on their competence, their tactics, and, typical for a Mamet work, their very manhood. Best-in-class performances, especially Lemmon’s, bring Mamet’s raw dialogue to life, though his famous verbal cadences are obvious in only a few of the various mano a mano conversations that reveal character and the psychological maneuvers salespeople use to disarm their prospective customers in a false, transactional friendship. A crime links this work back to Mamet’s breakthrough play, American Buffalo, and the cinematography by Juan Ruiz Anchía favors garish, distorting colors outside of the office, drab slate inside it, and one composition that riffs on Edward Hopper’s painting, Nighthawks. Lacking are women, which Mamet has never been able to write, and the humor that was much more evident in the stage performance I saw. The dialogue clearly reveals this story to be set in Chicago, but inexplicably and irritatingly for me, Foley ends the movie by flashing on a train platform sign that reads “Sheepshead Bay,” revealing that New York was the location where the film was shot. Despite these lacks, this display of actors at the top of their game demands to be seen. A Night Owls Screening with Professors Agnes Callard and Arnold Brooks. Free for those with UCID. (1992, 100 min, Digital Projection) [Marilyn Ferdinand]

🎞️ 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 Film Archives
“What She Said: Movies and Movements on the Arts Lawn,” featuring films about writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Toni Morrison, takes place Thursday, 6pm, at the Arts Lawn (337 E. Garfield Blvd.). Free admission. More info here.

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

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Tinto Brass’ 1967 film DEADLY SWEET (104 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 8pm, as part of the Art of Murder series, curated by local programmer Stephanie "La Gialloholique" Sack, who will be introducing the film. Free admission. More info here. 

⚫ The Davis Theater
Oscarbate presents Mark Rosman’s 1982 film THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW (91 min, Digital Projection) on Sunday, 1pm, as part of the Bloody Brunch at the Davis. More info here.

⚫ Doc Films at the University of Chicago
Alfonso Arau’s 1992 film LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE (105 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Mexican Romance: Through the Heart of the Nation series. More info here. 

⚫ FACETS Cinema
The Aladerri International Film Festival takes place through Sunday. More info here.

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Ray Yeung’s 2024 film ALL SHALL BE WELL (93 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

The 2019 National Theatre Live production of Noël Coward’s NO MAN’S LAND (180 min, DCP Digital), directed by Matthew Warchus and starring Andrew Scott, screens on Saturday and Sunday at 2pm. More info on all screenings here. 

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

Alessandra Lacorazza’s 2024 film IN THE SUMMERS (95 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week and Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 film THE SUBSTANCE (140 min, DCP Digital) continues. See Venue website for showtimes.

Stephen Hillenburg and Mark Osborne’s 2004 animated film THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE (87 min, 35mm) screens Friday at midnight as part of the Animation Adventures series. Note that the screening is currently sold out. 

Kôji Shiraishi’s 2005 film NOROI: THE CURSE (115 min, 35mm) screens Wednesday, 9:30pm, as part of the Music Box of Horrors: The Dream Child. Sponsored by Shudder and co-presented by the Japanese Arts Foundation. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 W. Western Ave.)
SUPER-HORROR-RAMA! presents William Castle’s 1959 film HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (65 min, Digital Projection) on Wednesday, 7:30pm, presented in EMERGO, as part of a weekly horror gathering and screening series, with a social hour starting at 6pm, a surprise short feature at 6:30, and then trivia and giveaways at 7pm. More info here. 

⚫ Spinning Home Movies
A re-release of Spinning Home Movies #18: A Pocket Universe, scored and performed by Mykele Deville, will screen virtually on Wednesday starting at 8pm. More info here. 

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

CINE-LIST: September 27 - October 3, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, John Dickson, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Ben Kaye, Kevin B. Lee, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Nicky Ni, Elise Schierbeek, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, K.A. Westphal