:: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4 - THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10 ::

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger

Gene Siskel Film Center — See showtimes below

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! (UK)

Friday, 6pm
A rebuke of materialism and the wonton acquisition of wealth, Powell and Pressburger's atmospheric romance is also a soft-sell for British wartime bonhomie. Set in the Hebrides of Scotland, a determined woman intends to meet her industrialist fiancé on the Island of Kiloran, but is held on shore by fate and bad weather. When the woman meets the Laird of Kiloran—an upstanding man on leave from active duty, unconcerned with the value of his land—her faith in upper class wealth is undermined. The film plays like a parable, with the Laird acting as the romantic lead and a model for its war-weary audience: honorable, selfless, moralistic, and satisfied with what he has. I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING! is never didactic and its precisely paced romance leads its characters gently to its theme. Complete with its own mythology of curses and legends, the film uses the island's people to mirror the woman's conflict. Gaelic is spoken casually and an affecting Scottish dance ritual celebrating a couple's enduring marriage provokes her further. Both picturesque and portentous, the Hebrides' fog gives way to gales, then to heavy seas and a massive ocean whirlpool. Through an enveloping sound design and striking photography, Powell and Pressburger's mastery of the elemental is on full display. The effect is a profound diagnosis of their audience's restlessness with war's humbleness and sacrifice, and a lyrical romance that simultaneously allows them to escape. (1945, 91 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Brian Welesko]
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Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (UK)
Friday, 8:15pm
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH was renamed STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN for its American release because Hollywood distributors feared that people wouldn’t want to see a movie with “death” in the title. And while “Stairway to Heaven” accurately reflects the film’s sense of romantic fantasy, the original name speaks to its morbidity, which is no less critical to the film’s overall power. When Jonathan Rosenbaum introduced the film several years ago, he pointed out how common it was in Great Britain for people to have lost loved ones during World War II (whether through combat or German bombings), and he proposed that the movie responded to this national trauma by confronting the inevitability of death. One might add that it attempts to resolve that trauma by offering a reassuring portrait of the afterlife. Indeed, Powell and Pressburger’s depiction of the Other World is one of the cinema’s great imaginings, an awesome vision of humankind made one with the cosmos; when experienced on a big screen, it allows one to grasp a sense of the infinite. The Archers famously shot the heaven-set sequences in three-strip Technicolor but didn’t use color dye when processing the film, resulting in a fittingly otherworldly look that the movie’s IMDB trivia page aptly describes as pearlescent; the filmmakers reserved the color dye for the earthbound sequences, which render our world so ravishing as to make you thankful to be alive. The central love story has this effect too—as the British title suggests, the film makes romantic love seem all-important, a reason for living. At the same time, A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH never feels like a work of breast-beating; the Archers’ quirky sense of humor keeps the more spectacular elements in check. The Other World’s elaborate bureaucracy is as brilliant a creation as the Other World itself, and the film’s very premise of a slip-up in Heaven has the effect of making the universe seem more human than it’s typically presented by Modern Science. Every scene contains some detail to reaffirm your faith in life’s wonderful peculiarity, whether it’s Roger Livesey supporting performance as a kooky doctor, the use of freeze frames during the ping pong game, or the Archers’ witty depiction of Anglo-American relations. (1946, 104 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s BLACK NARCISSUS (UK)
Saturday, 2pm
A deep tension is embedded in the very structure of Powell & Pressburger’s religious drama, a tale of assimilation, desire, and the limits and binding nature of faith. In their quest to build a new convent deep in a Himalayan mountain village, the nuns at the center of BLACK NARCISSUS consistently find their faith tested, their efforts to provide something holy and enlightening at odds with the inherent colonial mission at play, a last gasp of Britain’s tyrannical rule over India before gaining independence just months after the film’s initial release. Among the many treasures of Powell and Pressburger’s feature are the methods by which grand emotional gestures—jealousy, yearning, fear—find themselves thrust onto the screen; Deborah Kerr’s longing for David Farrar infecting frame after frame through flashbacks and understated glances, the sheer heat and intensity of Kathleen Byron’s furious eyes piercing through the screen, the majesty of the church bell ringing, its tones soaring through the hills alternately as a joyous cheer and a cry for help. The film is perhaps most noteworthy for its sprawling, painterly visual palette, transforming England’s Pinewood Studios into a lush, Himalayan landscape, mountain peaks almost poking their way out of the screen. The use of matte paintings to create depth and scope makes each frame painterly in its own right, with the film being justly rewarded Academy Awards for Art Direction and Cinematography, a cherry on top for a film relishing in trying to find the divine in all aspects of life. (1947, 101 mins, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's THE RED SHOES (UK)
Saturday, 4:15pm [SOLD OUT] and Thursday, 8:30pm
Powell and Pressburger were the Wes Anderson of their day, constructing dark fairy tales for adults with a museum's worth of references (both classical and private) and the most scrupulous mise-en-scene imaginable. THE RED SHOES, which remains the most beloved of their works, is a tart melodrama about a world-famous ballet company and an Impressionist dream of the beauty it creates. Besides appealing to dance aficionados, the film owes its popularity to an inspired 15-minute sequence depicting the titular ballet, a feat of Total Cinema that brings together the movie's themes and draws on all other art forms for its unique spectacle. (This is not hyperbole: Powell recruited painter Heins Heckroth for the art direction, operatic composer Brian Easdale for the score, and professional ballerina Moira Shearer for the lead; and cinematographer Jack Cardiff is famous for taking inspiration from Romantic painting and theatrical set design.) Most remarkably, all of the justly famous effects here—the slow-motion camerawork, Expressionistic sets, et cetera—bring the viewer closer to understanding the movie's heroine. That woman is a ballerina torn between the love of her composer husband and the rough demands of her profession—represented by Anton Wolbrook as a kingly choreographer. It's a simple premise rendered ornate through dense characterization (Pressburger's script accumulates psychological detail the way Powell delights in visual tricks), making THE RED SHOES one of those rare films as rich for adults as it is for children. Revered film editor and Powell's widow Thelma Schoonmaker in attendance at the Saturday screening. Please note this show is SOLD OUT, though there are still tickets available for the encore screenings on Thursday, October 10, and Saturday, October 12. (1948, 133 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s THE SMALL BACK ROOM (UK)
Saturday, 8:15pm
Sandwiched between two of Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor fantasias, THE SMALL BACK ROOM, based on the 1943 novel by Nigel Balchin and set during World War II, is firmly rooted in the relative minutiae and tense reality of a specific group critical to the war effort, the “back room” workers—scientists, engineers and other such experts who were researching and developing new technology (read: weaponry). One such expert is Sammy Rice (David Farrar). We find him at work where one Captain Stuart has come to see him, as they’ve discovered that the Germans have been airdropping some new kind of mine that they can’t figure out how to disable and that has already resulted in the death of a child. Rice is an alcoholic who has a prosthetic leg and PTSD from previous trauma; he’s romantically involved with the office secretary, Susan (Kathleen Byron). Rice is a tortured soul, self-conscious about his injury and not-so-confident in his profession, apparently, besieged as it is by bureaucratic suppression. With Susan’s help he manages to resist the siren call of the whiskey bottle, culminating in the only scene outwardly suggestive of the Archers’ whimsical imagination, wherein Rice encounters a life-sized bottle of whiskey, shot in a style reminiscent of German expressionism. It’s fortuitous when Rice, seeming to value life no more, receives a call from Stuart to go see two of those devices that had been dropped at Chesil Beach; the captain says to Rice that he’s going to have the first go at them, seeming almost jolly at the prospect. When Rice gets there, the worst has happened, but still he must attempt to deactivate the other. Though aesthetically antithetical to Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor dreamscapes—small, cramped, daunting—it nevertheless shares in the consideration of immense heed. For me this was wholly embodied in a shot toward the end of the film in which Rice, faced with death, looks up at the sky above him, seagulls circling unconcernedly. In that very moment I, too, felt as if death may have been imminent. The precariousness is disorienting, not fantastically like many of the Archers’ other films but realistically, showing us that the stuff of life is often as inconceivable as the stuff of dreams. The film wasn’t a box office success; Powell later said in his enthusiasm for the source material he overestimated public interest. While many films of the time expressed postwar malaise, it may have been that, at the end of the 40s, many weren’t ready or weren’t interested in reliving a traumatic time through such an intense story. This was the Archers’ first film back with producer Alexander Korda after a several year break; Farrar and Byron, who’s especially affecting in the film, were paired again just two years after BLACK NARCISSUS. All told, it’s impressive how the Archers were able to make a film as dark as many of the others are bright, finding inspiration in the shadows as well as the surreal. (1949, 104 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Kat Sachs]
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Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s GONE TO EARTH (UK/US)
Sunday, 12pm
With BLACK NARCISSUS (1947), the Archers famously created a Himalayan monastery entirely at Pinewood Studios; with the underrated GONE TO EARTH, they made the English countryside appear as fantastical as any movie set. The film was shot principally in the county of Shropshire, in western England on the border with Wales, and Christopher Challis’ Technicolor photography brings out the majesty of the local flora and every sunrise and sunset. Based on a 1917 novel but set 20 years earlier, the film feels at once like an age-old fairy tale and a modern allegory. The great Jennifer Jones stars as Hazel, a naive but headstrong woman who finds herself torn between two men: the new clergyman (Cyril Cusack), who loves her and wants to save her soul, and a local squire (David Farrar) who wants to possess her and with whom she shares a fiery, carnal connection. Even after Hazel marries the clergyman, the squire continues to pursue her; she proves unable to resist temptation, and, like many a protagonist of Powell and Pressburger’s filmography, she is ultimately undone by her passion. GONE TO EARTH itself came undone after it was completed, as executive producer David O. Selznick (Jones’ husband) drastically recut the film for its American release, excising about a third of Powell and Pressburger’s footage and bringing in Rouben Mamoulian to direct reshoots. This version, retitled THE WILD HEART, came out in the US in 1952 and for decades afterward was the only way to legally see the film here; thankfully, the Siskel Center will be presenting the Archers’ original vision. And what a vision it is, not only in its bold color palette, but in its Lawrentian mix of palpable eroticism and wonder toward the natural world. The filmmakers’ endearing nuttiness comes through too, primarily in the casting of beloved character actor Hugh Griffith as Hazel’s self-appointed protector. (1950, 110 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Sachs]
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Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger's THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (UK)
Sunday, 2:30pm
“Music is the most romantic of art forms because its sole subject is the infinite,” wrote the German critic and author E.T.A. Hoffmann in an essay on Beethoven. Hoffmann may have been right about music, but that hasn’t stopped artists in other media from trying to approach the infinite through the deliberate manipulation of form. The British director Michael Powell was one such artist. Beginning with BLACK NARCISSUS in 1947, Powell began to refine what he termed the “composed film,” instructing the composer of the movie’s score to write the music to key sequences before they were shot, then planning the scenes so they flowed just like the soundtrack. Narrative cinema, of course, can never achieve pure formal abstraction—the content keeps the work too grounded in concrete ideas. Still, some of the greatest passages in Powell’s work with his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger come close to abstract beauty in their irreducible fusions of color, movement, special effects, and, yes, music. The central ballet sequence of THE RED SHOES (1948) is about as close to pure cinema as you’ll find in the narrative canon; ditto much of THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, the duo’s feature-length attempt to expand on said sequence. Based on Jacques Offenbach’s opera-ballet (itself based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short stories), the film is a visual and auditory spectacle that exploits the magic of cinema to heighten the splendor of music and dance. It consists of a prologue and three tales that Hoffmann tells to a group of bar patrons during the intermission of a ballet. The first two stories are fantastical in nature, featuring marionettes that come to life, evil sorcerers, and magic tricks that fuse beautifully with the film’s special effects. The third tale is more realistic, centering on the tubercular daughter of a dead opera singer whose father has mysteriously forbidden her from singing. Hoffmann is a character in all three vignettes; in each one he looks for love, only to have his hopes dashed by black magic or tragic fate. None of the stories are as interesting as the imaginative way that the filmmakers realize them: practically every shot exults the possibilities of Technicolor, with combinations of lurid hues and/or pastels, and the camera’s movements (which often mirror those of the dancers) seductively draw one into Hoffmann’s world. In that world, time and space seem marvelously fluid, which is another way of saying that Powell and Pressburger’s filmmaking here approaches the infinite. (1951, 128 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]
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Michael Powell’s PEEPING TOM (UK)
Monday, 6pm
Michael Powell opens PEEPING TOM with a shot that reverberates through horror history as profoundly as Tod Browning’s famous framing of Dracula on the staircase. We’re thrust behind the lens of a camera—gridlines and all—following a sex worker up to her room, and we’re not just watching; we’re participating. The voyeurism leads straight to a murder, an unsettling prelude to what Powell’s film delivers: a killer’s-eye view of the world and a sharp phallus on a tripod. That chilling perspective would seep into Mario Bava’s chic fashion house murders, Dario Argento’s slick gialli, Michael Myers slaying Judith in HALLOWEEN (1978), and Pamela Voorhees carving through campers at Crystal Lake. Powell’s camera and psychologically shattered protagonist offer a grim commentary on the nature of watching and being watched. But compared to the juggernaut that was Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, released the same year, PEEPING TOM didn’t stand a chance. Powell's twisted vision wasn’t what anyone expected from the man behind the lush melodramas of THE RED SHOES (1948) or BLACK NARCISSUS (1948). This was the director who had given us the life-affirming A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946), and now here he was, showing us a world where fear is a point of obsession and thrills can be found in capturing the terror-stricken faces of the doomed. No one could have predicted that Powell—beloved for his vibrant Technicolor masterpieces—would create a character like Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm). He’s a soft-spoken introvert with a camera fetish and a childhood trauma that has turned him into a methodical killer. Mark spends his days as an assistant cameraman with a side hustle that includes photographing seedy, under-the-counter softcore smut. When he's not working, he's lurking: spying on his neighbors, reliving his homemade snuff films, or listening to abusive recordings of his father, who used him as a subject in bizarre experiments designed to study fear. It’s no wonder Mark grew into a man who needs the distance of a camera to feel anything at all, especially emotion. Powell cast himself as Mark’s tyrannical father, and his real-life son, Columba, as the young Mark, adding a personal layer of voyeurism. Powell claimed to feel guilty about traumatizing his son for the sake of a scene, but he kept the footage, further underscoring the film’s exploration of exploitation. The lines between spectator and participant blur, and the audience, complicit in the viewing of these acts of violence cannot help Mark’s victims. The UK audience in 1960 didn’t want to confront a dark level of self-reflection so the film was mercilessly panned. To make matters worse, the film was lumped into a so-called "sadist trilogy" with HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM and CIRCUS OF HORRORS, as they were all distributed by Anglo-Amalgamated and included voyeurism, disfigurement, and sadism. In the US, PEEPING TOM was released as a horror film, an art film, and even an exploitation flick, but it found no love in any camp at the time. Over the years, however, the film developed a devoted following, eventually being recognized for its technical mastery and its intricate commentary on cinema, voyeurism, and violence. Though PEEPING TOM effectively ended Powell’s career, its influence on filmmakers—from art-house directors to shameless purveyors of gore—is undeniable. Powell lived long enough to witness the film’s resurgence and see it hailed as a masterpiece, an ironic fate for a director who explored the dangers of watching too closely. (1960, 101 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Shaun Huhn]
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David Hinton's MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBURGER (UK/Documentary)
Monday, 8:15pm and Wednesday, 5:45pm
It’s hard to think of any independent filmmakers who have created more masterpieces than Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The British-born Powell and Hungarian immigrant to England Pressburger had an almost mystical creative connection that birthed such wild and wonderful dreamscapes as I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! (1945), BLACK NARCISSUS (1947), and THE RED SHOES (1948) through their production company, The Archers, influencing countless future directors. Most famously, Martin Scorsese credits THE RED SHOES with his approach to the boxing scenes in his RAGING BULL (1980), and it is Scorsese who takes us through the careers of these two men in a combination documentary/essay film that samples from their collaborations and a couple of movies that Powell made on his own, notably his career-killing PEEPING TOM (1960). Of great interest are the films the team made during World War II as their contribution to the war effort. At Pressburger’s suggestion, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943) features Deborah Kerr playing three women in the life of Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), the embodiment of the comic character of Colonel Blimp made noble through this undying love, as well as his decades-long friendship with a German officer (Anton Walbrook). In A CANTERBURY TALE (1944), using the superimposition of an airplane over the image of a bird in flight connects the spiritual seekers of Chaucer’s pilgrims with the present-day Britons trying to reawaken the peace of their green and pleasant land. The power of love dominates another wartime effort, A TALE OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946), in which the innovation of picturing the living world in color and the dead in heaven in black and white offered a vision of renewal to a scarred people. Scorsese analyzes the various thematic and technical achievements of The Archers, and compares some of them with scenes from his own films as rather egotistical examples of their influence. Archival photos and footage of the men on set and in interviews adds a bit of color to the proceedings, though little real information is given. We learn about their great and then difficult partnership J. Arthur Rank, the disastrous meddling of Hollywood studios they teamed with, and the schism that broke them up. Scant biographical information is given, though Scorsese’s reminiscences about meeting Powell and gaining his friendship and encouragement in the last years of the older man’s life (not to mention that Scorsese’s regular film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, married Powell in 1984) help to personalize the film. MADE IN ENGLAND should have a permanent berth in film schools. For the rest of us, just basking in the glorious scenes from some of their finest films is reward enough. (2024, 131 min, DCP Digital) [Marilyn Ferdinand]
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Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s 1950 film THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL (109 min, 35mm) screens Sunday at 5:15pm. More info here.

Robert Bresson's UNE FEMME DOUCE (France)

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

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 petit 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 Bresson's DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST (France)

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

It would seem likely that a film about the frustrations of a Catholic priest in provincial France made during the high period of postwar French existential hand-wringing would lose some of its appeal over the last six decades. Yet it is impossible not to be overawed by the absolute economy of means, singularity of vision, moral seriousness, and unfaltering confidence that are everywhere on display in this early Bresson masterpiece. With DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST, Bresson was first able to strip away all the elements of traditional filmmaking that he found inauthentic, ineffectual, theatrical. This meant shooting on location, restricting camera movement and contrast, casting primarily non-professional actors, and dictating minutely their every action and expression. This last gamble paid off richly with Claude Laydu, who portrays the inner turmoil of the neurasthenic unnamed priest without ever lapsing into melodrama or shallow psychologism. The plot is rather dire: the young priest arrives at a small parish in northern France, struggles with the apathy and spiritual lethargy of his parishioners, runs afoul of the local nobility, is tormented by the students of his catechism class, and suffers from an increasingly debilitating stomach ailment. But while the narrative charts the priest's physical deterioration and social isolation, the major events in this film are redemptive in the strictest sense: moments of unprepared for, unexpected, and inexplicable grace. This is an icon of a film, a demonstration of transcendence, and an act of devotion. Bresson set out to rid filmmaking of all dependence on theatrical forms. What he achieved was even more unlikely: the revivification of that ur-theatrical form, the medieval mystery play.  Screening as part of the Capturing the Real: Four by Robert Bresson series. (1951, 115 min, DCP Digital) [Peter Raccuglia]

Larry Cohen’s SPECIAL EFFECTS (US)

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

SPECIAL EFFECTS might be described as Larry Cohen’s Brian De Palma film insofar as it’s a crass, flamboyant, and self-aware pastiche of Alfred Hitchcock thrillers—it blatantly rips off the big twist of PSYCHO in the first 20 minutes, and the second half cribs from that of VERTIGO. But Cohen was always more concerned with ethics than De Palma was, and the most surprising thing about SPECIAL EFFECTS is how seriously it interrogates the moral implications of popular filmmaking. It opens with a lurid, Fulleresque sequence of photographers circling around a stripper as she performs her routine in a mock-up of the Oval Office—that’s show business, according to Cohen, a filmmaker who worked in exploitation cinema, in part, because it permitted a forthrightness about American life you can’t get away with in more respectable productions. The stripper’s routine is interrupted by a surprise appearance by her estranged husband, who’s followed her to New York City after she left him in Oklahoma with their infant son. The two have a heated reunion in the woman’s apartment (which showcases Cohen’s underrated talent as a director of actors) before she flees, seeking refuge in the loft apartment of a director she met at a party. In one of his first screen roles, Eric Bogosian plays the director, who recently got kicked out of Hollywood for wasting a $30 million budget on special effects. He plans to restart his career with an independent New York production; little does the stripper know, his plan involves murdering a random woman, filming the crime, and then making a movie about the victim’s life that climaxes with the snuff footage. When the stripper turns up dead, her husband becomes the chief suspect in her murder. He’s arrested and brought to jail (note the Hitchcockian transfer of sympathy from one innocent victim to another), only to be bailed out by the director, who wants him as a technical advisor in the movie he’s making about his late wife. The two collaborate on the casting, ultimately choosing for the lead… someone who happens to look exactly like (and is played by the same actress as) the dead woman. SPECIAL EFFECTS came out the same year as De Palma’s BODY DOUBLE, which also borrowed the doubling theme from VERTIGO; De Palma subverted his Hitchcock reference by throwing in allusions to contemporary porn, while Cohen complicates matters by casting Zoë Lund in the Kim Novak role(s). Lund (appearing her under her birth name Zoë Tamerlis) had only one major screen credit before this, as the lead in Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45 (1981), a rape-and-revenge thriller about a woman who responds to her victimization by committing mass murder. SPECIAL EFFECTS feels as much like a response to Ferrara as it does to De Palma, not only in its sympathetic view of scuzzed-out New York, but in its disarming moral seriousness. When the husband ends up playing himself alongside his dead wife’s double, the line between performance and genuine catharsis begins to blur for him—and Bogosian’s character knowingly exploits his confusion for the sake of verisimilitude for his movie. By addressing how the pursuit of emotional “truth” in cinema can become a pretense for exploitation, Cohen anticipates Ferrara’s masterpiece about filmmaking, DANGEROUS GAME (1993). Preceded by a GHOSTBUSTERS promo reel (1984, 13 min, 35mm). (1984, 106 min, 35mm) [Ben Sachs]

Cinda Firestone’s ATTICA and Madeline Anderson’s I AM SOMEBODY (US/Documentary)

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

At a time when most anything you could want to know about is available at your fingertips, one might see films like these and realize the power they had when that wasn’t so—and the power they retain as living documents of a time when knowledge of the injustices was either not widely spread or suppressed altogether. Madeline Anderson’s documentary I AM SOMEBODY (1970, 30 min, 16mm) is a concise and evocative testimony of Black hospital workers in Charlotte, South Carolina, who were on strike in 1969; the strikers numbered over 400 workers, almost all of them Black women. Anderson nimbly interweaves the personal and political, melding them so that, as they are in reality, they are the same. The filmmaker worked for news stations and as an assistant editor on Shirley Clarke’s THE COOL WORLD (1963); she subsequently became the first Black woman to join the New York’s editors union, Local 771. Her background is evident in the nimble arrangement of I AM SOMEBODY. One of the nurses, Claire Brown, narrates the film, offering an interesting duality of the Black womans’ perspective, what one sees and what one says. Anderson got the funds to make the film from Local 1199, the United Healthcare Workers East. As she told Michelle Materre in an interview, “I went to Local 1199, because they had a record of making films, and they were very enthusiastic about making this film, and gave me carte blanche. It was the first time in all my years of filmmaking that I had enough money and enough time, almost, to get a film made from the beginning. Because two weeks after finishing the film, I had my fourth child. And the story of these women was my story.” Supposedly the film was being made to show to union workers, but it’s crucial as a document of struggle, specifically as it affects Black women, and the valiant efforts they undertook to achieve equality. Thankfully, the hospital workers got what they demanded. It was a massive effort, supported by the likes of Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy, who both appear in the film, though Anderson takes care to focus more on the people most affected by the strike. Composed of newsreel footage, archival material, and on-the-ground footage of the strike, I AM SOMEBODY achieves the  integrity of its title and serves as a rallying cry for equality. Cinda Firestone’s ATTICA (1974, 80 min, 16mm) shares similarities with Anderson’s film. Both depict situations as they’re happening rather than recount them from a distance of either time or space. Like the hospital workers in I AM SOMEBODY, the prisoners in ATTICA banded together to fight for their rights, an astonishing feat considering the interpersonal tension often found in prison; the prisoners took 42 correctional officers and civilian workers hostage, forming a kind of compound in the prison yard from where they communicated their demands. Firestone doesn’t overemphasize sympathy for the prisoners or hostages, instead letting them speak for themselves. The prisoners, many of whom are Black or Latino, speak almost philosophically about their situations, and the hostages speak well of them, saying they’ve been treated nicely and some even agreeing with their demands. Eventually it shifts from progress to mayhem, as the authorities fought to retake the prison. In the chaos, 43 people died: 33 inmates and 10 hostages. One sees with their own eyes some of the indiscriminate bloodshed—police and even some of the correctional workers attacked with no impunity. Later, police unjustly claimed the prisoners killed the hostages who died during the raid in spite of clear evidence that they hadn’t. Among the archival material and newsreel footage are interviews with the inmates, some of whom are still in prison, and their families. It’s an oral history of sorts, recounting the struggle from beginning to end from their perspective. Surprisingly, Cinda Firestone was an heir to the Firestone fortune; her family cut her off after there was controversy surrounding the film, as it’s a rather scathing indictment of the system and a clarion call for prison reform. Both Anderson and Firestone’s films bear witness to struggles for freedom, carrying the impact of these events from the past into the present. Screening as part of Films by Women/Chicago '74. [Kat Sachs]

Chris Sullivan's CONSUMING SPIRITS (US/Animation)

FACETS Cinema – Sunday, 6pm

Chris Sullivan's otherworldly animation is full of tiny, odd, and potent details: the tremor of a hand, the turn of a radio dial, a bird on a tree limb. It is this world of small things that draws one in slowly. CONSUMING SPIRITS, local filmmaker and SIAC professor Chris Sullivan's decade in the making animated feature, is an Appalachian gothic with four main characters—all trapped by some problem of their own making and held together by a sad and inescapably interconnected past. It is a remarkable achievement that such a simple story isn't overwhelmed by the fractured visual world Sullivan builds. CONSUMING SPIRITS glides through stop-motion animation, pencil drawing, collage animation, and Sullivan's signature style of cutout animation, and the movement is fragile and corporeal. While all of the characters in his film are grotesquely rendered, it is hard to imagine them as lifeless pieces of paper. The film is something akin to the magical animation of Yuri Norstein—more cinematic than cartoonish. It often delivers surprising moments of translucence or a mystifying depth of field or a strange spot of light, which all seem to be more captured than constructed. It is also often ruthlessly funny and gruesome, deepening our look at these troubled characters as they attempt to deal with their individual tragedies and disappointments. CONSUMING SPIRITS is exactly as advertised—a consumption. Screening as a part of the Outside the Lines series celebrating 60 years of the Chicago International Film Festival. Sullivan in person for a post-screening Q&A. (2011, 129 min, DCP Digital) [Christy LeMaster]

Robert Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT (US)

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

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]

Lisandro Alonso's EUREKA (International)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

Boasting a relatively high octane trailer (by arthouse standards), a bona fide bit of star power in Viggo Mortensen and Chiarra Mastroianni, a small army of international co-producers and a whimsical press synopsis billing the film as the story of a bird that travels through space and time, EUREKA would initially give the impression that director Lisandro Alonso, an art brut slow cinema savant and old master of a particular strain of low-key docufiction, may have experienced some sort of quantum leap in his artistic process. Alonso made a name for himself (and by plenty of critical accounts, singlehandedly altered the entire fabric of the international arthouse) with a doggedly stoic and serene series of slow-motion character studies that later came to be known as his "Lonely Man Trilogy." Across three features (including LA LIBERTAD [2001], one of the most radical films produced this side of the millennial divide), the director decamped to various extreme locales and sent non-professional actors on arduous treks to the farthest ends of the earth, filming their travails with a documentary sensibility and the barest narrative scaffolding imaginable, all the while heaping lavish attention on the physical toll and durational aspects of their journeys. Alonso's breakthrough arrived in the form of JAUJA (2014), a delirious genre exercise that cast Viggo Mortensen as Captain Dinesen, an 1880s Danish military officer hopelessly adrift in the lunar wilds of coastal Patagonia and on a hapless quest to rescue his runaway teenage daughter, coaxing and twisting the adopted framework of John Ford's THE SEARCHERS (1956) into increasingly obtuse shapes as time and space unraveled and Dinesen's alienation from his fellow man, the landscape and cinematic genre form itself took on more and more metaphysical intensity. EUREKA picks up precisely where Alonso left off, opening on a note of seedy Western pastiche—once again starring Mortensen—that reads as an unmistakable parody of JAUJA: a tale of gunslinging frontier violence in a Mexican saloon town that is uncut Cormac McCarthy worship, all boorish violence and drunken cowboy debauchery. I've gone heavy on the exposition and light on plot particulars owing to the fact that I think that EUREKA is a film best experienced with a maximum of context and minimal knowledge of its contents, because this opening is quickly revealed to be a feint and the film unmasks itself as a sprawling triptych of loosely-connected stories, synthesizing Alonso's entire body of work into a daring and constantly-shifting new form. The film first redirects its attention to North Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, following a sleepless night in the life of a Lakota Oglala police officer (played by first-time actress Alainna Clifford) as she struggles to uphold any semblance of order, before landing deep in the Amazon jungle where Brazilian indigenous people pan for gold amidst the backdrop of the military dictatorship of the 1970s. How these spatial drifts transpire I wouldn't dare spoil, but what emerges from the haze is an oneiric and strikingly discursive rumination on American indigeneity that takes dreams as its principal subject. The imagined bedlam of the American genre picture is spun as a dream in the truest Freudian sense (an expression of a repressed desire) while nobody is given the space to dream in the real terrain of the American west, where our officer of the law burns the midnight oil and trudges from one crisis to another, staring bleary-eyed at slot machines and grappling with the dire poverty and rampant addiction wrought by the very authority she serves. The film's title hints at an epiphanic moment that never arrives, but the closing chapter at least provides some respite, granting its ensemble cast an opportunity to recant their dreams in a jungle enclave that is only just beginning to be penetrated by enterprising imperial forces. (2024, 146 min, DCP Digital) [David Whitehouse]

More Anxious Bodies (Experimental/Animation)

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

After the very popular animation shorts program Anxious Bodies that took place in the fall of 2022, Conversations at the Edge is offering more—a collection of award-winning animations that materialize shades of psychological tensions through masterful techniques and otherworldly stories. Laura Harrison’s unhinged shocker THE LINGERIE SHOW (2015, 9 min), based on a story by writer Beth Raymer, who also serves as the confessional and frantic voice for the work, churns painting, drawing, and photos into a layered dark comedy about drug abuse and promiscuity, but also about sisterly love and mental health. The result is as fabulously messy as one’s chaotic youth can get. In the stop-motion animation A BEAR NAMED JESUS (2023, 6 min) by Terril Calder, an Indigenous narrator tells an allegorical story critiquing the violence of forceful religious conversion: his mom was abducted by a group of "rabid bears," or fervent followers of a bear named Jesus, and forced to stay with the cultish group until her personhood was not recognizable to her own son anymore. Carla Melo Gampert explores the idea of tension and reconciliation in her flowy and minimalist work. LA PERRA (2023, 14 min) depicts the world of bird-people as problematic in ways similar to those of ours: neglected children, lecherous males, and too much screen time. A bird girl who grows up with a dog, her only friend, leaves her unloving mother to figure out life on her own. Spanning half a lifetime in a quarter-hour, the work jumps hoops along the capricious journey of growing up and having sex to arrive at a bittersweet ending of love, loss, and reconciliation. Visceral sensations meticulously depicted in soothing movements with clinically clean lines and a subdued, almost childish palette is the trademark of Yoriko Mizushiri’s animation. Also in the program is an older work from the ingenious Japanese animator whose eponymous work ANXIOUS BODY (2022) was shown in the 2022 program. In SNOW HUT (2014, 6 min), what looks like a kamakura-inspired doll is being sewn together. A needle pierces and stitches. The head tilts as background synth down-tunes. The coordination between image and sound is magic. NOIR-SOLEIL (2021, 20 min) by Paris-based Marie Larrivé follows a middle-age man’s reluctant journey to Naples after he was notified that recently discovered remains from the water might belong to his father, who he had long thought abandoned him—and at twelve years of age—for America. The man’s daughter comes along, for a granddad she has never met, and helps out when her dad is encumbered to resolve years of misunderstanding in his head. The film is brimming with a disquiet drenched in a de Chirico kind-of mysterious but solemn color palettes. Moody environmental scenes implicate the characters’ psychologies: a crab tearing apart its prey, a lumberjack cutting down a tree; in the background, a volcano is seen at the verge of erupting—even in the most sublime scene of Naples’s seaside sunset, rendered in a gouache wash of warm salmon pink, there’s a persistent sadness that suffocates. Cassie Shao packs bags full of dreamlike memories and shifts them through in this short animation of several minutes long. THERE WERE FOUR OF US (2019, 7 min) seems to follow the main robot-like character’s fantastical journey to heaven as they grieve for the passing of a family member. Scenes melt or transfigure into each other like portals that teleport us to different layers of dreams. Seamlessly combining various animation techniques, the work showcases liquid colors, murmuring sound, and a thoughtful arrangement of voiceover and subtitles to convey the liminal distance between raw thoughts and utterance. Jenny Jokela’s BARBEQUE (2017, 6 min) animates the subjectivity of fish incarnated in human form. Nightmarish scenes that begin with females giving birth to fish and swimming out of the fish’s mouth progresses into bodies morphing between the two species. Who's the consumer and who's the food? It's an erotic game between predator and prey. To wrap up the program, it’s amazing how much Sawako Kabuki shows in the minute-long WAAAH (2018, 1 min), about crying that associates the baby’s cry to a woman’s moan to a cat’s meow. [Nicky Ni]

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Roman Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY (US)

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

Growing up I only knew Patsy Kelly from two movies, the first being, obviously, THE NORTH AVENUE IRREGULARS, where she offers a sublime performance as the powder-faced Irish churchlady Mrs. Rafferty. The second was ROSEMARY'S BABY. I first saw it on TV, chopped up with commercials, but even so it scared the bejesus out of me. And, if only briefly, it made me scared of Patsy Kelly. Something I hated Polanski for, at least at first. If pure evil can manifest itself in the form of a doughy doofus like Laura-Louise, where does that leave us? Later of course I realized how brilliant it was to cast her in the part (over at the Criterion blog, Michael Koresky offers a wonderful appreciation). She's one of the movie's secret ingredients, alongside Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Ralph Bellamy, Elisha Cook, Jr., and all the other crinkly old timers playing Satanists. What seems like a casting stunt at first is actually part of an adept strategy of misdirection; more than perhaps any other horror movie of its time, aside from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Polanski was able to convincingly demonstrate that the banality of the everyday can act as the perfect cloak for the sinister and demonic. Screening as part of the Women's Paranoia: Cassandras and Conspiracies series. (1968, 136 min, 35mm) [Rob Christopher]

Cheryl Dunye's THE WATERMELON WOMAN (US)

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

It’s 1997 in Philadelphia, but Cheryl (Cheryl Dunye) can’t get her mind off the 1930s. An aspiring filmmaker who pays the bills by juggling various wedding gigs and shifts at a video store, Cheryl becomes fascinated by an obscure film actress named Fae Richards—also known as The Watermelon Woman—who played Black “mammy” roles throughout the ‘30s. Cheryl turns this obsession into her first real film project, a documentary that leads to a journey of finding forgotten pieces of Black lesbian history and filmmaking. At the same time, Cheryl navigates her budding relationship with a white woman, Diana (Guinevere Turner), often mirroring Richards’ rumored relationship with director Martha Page. Dunye makes it clear that THE WATERMELON WOMAN is both a Black film and a lesbian film, and that acknowledging the importance of how those identities relate to one another is integral to understanding a broader picture of queer history in America. This is not a film that cares about a white gaze—nor should it—but it is crucial viewing all the same. The dialogue is sometimes charming, sometimes awkward, and always laugh-out-loud funny, making THE WATERMELON WOMAN a breeze to watch. But there is real heart and substance in addition to all that; the yearning for a past that was never yours, a future that isn’t quite here yet, and an identity that guides how you move through the world. Screening as part of the Subversive Histories: A Snapshot of Queer Cinema series. (1997, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Cody Corrall]

Neil Marshall’s THE DESCENT (UK)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 11pm

At one point early in THE DESCENT, Beth (Alex Reid) reassures her good friend Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), who’s panicking as she moves through a tight cave path that, "The worst thing that could have happened to you has already happened." The horror of the film is found in the idea that one terrible thing actually can happen after another—that suffering a traumatic event doesn’t preclude more and more. One of the stand-out horror films of the aughts, THE DESCENT works so well in a simplistic general conceit that's grounded in a story of trauma and the emotional relationships of the women at its center. While it's a creature-feature on the surface, the film's depths reveal unique complexity of its female characters that could slot easily into melodrama—if it weren’t also so scary. The film follows a trio of thrill-seeking friends, Sarah, Beth, and Juno (Natalie Mendoza). While driving away from a whitewater rafting trip, Sarah and her husband, Paul (Oliver Milburn), and young daughter, Jessica (Molly Kayll), get into a terrible car accident; Sarah is the sole survivor. A year later, the group, joined by three other adventurous women (MyAnna Buring, Saskia Mulder, and Nora-Jane Noone), embark on a spelunking trip in the Appalachian Mountains. Expecting a manageable level of spelunk, the path collapses on them and they soon realize they’ve been led into an unknown cave system with no chance of rescue. As if the claustrophobia isn’t enough, they soon discover they aren’t alone; the cave is crawling with, well, "crawlers": clicking humanoid creatures surviving deep underground, eager to consume the women. Director Neil Marshall does an incredible job depicting the horrors of the cave, not just the crawlers—though the creature design is impressive—but the simultaneous vastness and confinement of the space. Lit by the glowing of headlamps, the red light gives way to blood and gore in growing terror; the lighting turns a greener hue later in the film, suggesting their imminent decay. With the creatures not appearing until about halfway into the film, THE DESCENT is a masterclass in building gruesome tension. The cave is also a clear metaphor for the inner life of the grieving and traumatized Sarah and her relationships, filled with fear, anxiety, and uncertainties—and jump scares. (2005, 99 min, 35mm) [Megan Fariello]

Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (US/UK)

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

A bearded man, covered in grime, hauls material into a workspace. He labors, meticulously, on what appears to be a sculpture. The endeavor has clearly taken over his life as well as his surroundings, much to the chagrin of his family, who simply don’t understand the forces at play behind his compulsion. Without context this might be describing a scene from a film about an artist, intended to depict passion for their craft. But this isn’t from that kind of film—it’s from Steven Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, a big-budget sci-fi saga centered on the plight of a blue-collar worker in Indiana who witnesses an unexplained phenomenon and becomes obsessed with pursuing the visions that follow. That includes constructing a giant model of the northeastern Wyoming landmark Devil’s Tower in his living room, which he continues after his wife and three kids leave when he starts hauling in dirt for the model through their kitchen window. And he’s not the only one attempting to articulate a persistent forethought; Jillian (Melinda Dillon), a single mother whose toddler son is later taken by the mysterious lights in the sky, draws the same image, over and over again. Before seeing this film for the first time several years ago, I hadn’t quite figured out Spielberg, often touted as a purveyor of popular entertainment. Obviously I’d seen and liked many of his films, especially as a kid, but I had a tendency toward dismissing him as I got older because I thought it possible that ubiquity and nostalgia made them seem more special than they really are. Then I saw CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and suddenly it all made sense, the ‘whys’ of my inquiry becoming ‘why nots.’ Richard Dreyfuss stars as Roy, the electrician whose life is turned upside down by an image, the image he sees of something theretofore inexplicable to him, a UFO flying overhead. He is Spielberg, an obsessive dreamer with a predilection for meticulous expression, and we, the viewers, are him, enthralled by the beauty and possibility of such obsession, one Roy becomes more and more desperate to realize. This propels the course of the film, amidst which the technicalities around the visitors’ arrival occur; this part is epitomized by Francois Truffaut as the scientist Lacombe, who’s in charge of investigating the extraterrestrial activity. (There’s a certain irony to the French director playing a scientist and the electrician being the one whose blind faith and desperation to pursue a vision leads him, only semi-metaphorically, to the mountain, but as is evidenced in Spielberg’s most recent film, THE FABLEMANS, a mix of art and science—represented by his mother and father, respectively—are what have long motivated him.) Both parts of the film, the existential and the expository, the preposterous and the proasic, meld perfectly, each propelling the other forward to a wondrous denouement. “I believe that the success of [the film] comes from Steven’s very special gift for giving plausibility to the extraordinary,” Truffaut remarked. “If you analyze [it], you will find that Spielberg has taken care in shooting all the scenes of everyday life to give them a slightly fantastic aspect, while also, as a form of balance, giving the most everyday possible quality to the scenes of fantasy.” Special effects, once an art even if now just a surrogate for imagination, are, of course, instrumental here, and Douglas Trumbull and Carlo Rambaldi’s impeccable fulfillment of Spielberg’s vision bring it fully to life, the film itself a fruit of obsessive labor. Screening as part of the Columbia Pictures in the 1970s series. (1977, 138 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Carl Theodor Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (France/Silent)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 9:30pm

Praised effusively upon its release by critics who instantly regarded it as a belated vindication for the whole art of cinema (do seek out Harry Alan Potamkin's review), THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC was also recognized as the capstone of an expiring medium. This is a proudly silent movie, one that integrates the intertitle into its rhythm better and more comprehensively than any other example I can name. (Astonishingly, rather than interrupting the flow of Dreyer's breakneck montage, the titles actually serve as graphic punctuation.) It's also a perverse one—stripped down to essentials, focusing on faces even though Dreyer's investors paid for enormous and authentic sets barely glimpsed in the finished film. When we see a man in very modern-looking glasses in the final sequences, this possible anachronism registers as something else: Dreyer and Falconetti have truly created a living Joan, larger than liturgy and beatification and indeed, larger than her own time. The film itself was not so lucky. Its original cut lost in a fire, with a subsequent recut lost in another fire, PASSION played for many years in a version cobbled together from outtakes. (Appropriately enough, an original print of the first Danish version turned up in a mental hospital in the 1980s.) With a live improvised film score by Edition Redux, a group led by saxophonist/clarinetist Ken Vandermark and featuring Erez Dessel (keyboards), Lily Finnegan (drums), and Beth McDonald (tuba/electronics). (1928, 82 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Wim Wenders' PARIS, TEXAS (Germany/France/US)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

One of the most revealing pieces of dialogue in PARIS, TEXAS occurs when, following a screening of an old family movie, the eight-year-old Hunter is getting ready for bed. Hunter had noticed the way his father Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), who’s just returned from an unexplained four-year estrangement, watched the footage of his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), who’s been absent for the same length of time. The boy explains to his adopted mother that he believes Travis still loves Jane. “But that’s not her,” he pointedly adds. “That’s only her in a movie.” A beat, as a cheeky smile forms across his face. “A long time ago. In a galaxy far, far away.” What begins as a remarkably lucid insight about the illusion of the cinematic image, and about the fantasies on which it hinges, can’t help but be capped off by a quote that then reinforces those very illusions. This is PARIS, TEXAS in a nutshell: a world of willful, even blithe mirages and images, in which all understanding of other people is mediated by the idealized myths of mass culture. Wenders is not above speaking the language of these myths, even as he meticulously dismantles them. Written by the all-American Sam Shepard and L. M. Kit Carson, the film radiates a love for the aesthetic and narrative iconography of the American West, from the wide-open tableaux of towering mesas and endless road to Travis’ rugged, archetypal masculine loner, whose quest to rescue a woman and tenuous attempts to reintegrate into society remix that of Ethan Edwards in THE SEARCHERS. Like so many other émigré artists ensorcelled and perturbed by the U.S., including compatriots like Douglas Sirk, Wenders doesn’t merely indulge in the grammar of Americana but defamiliarizes it to reveal, from an outsider’s critical distance, how truly melancholy, strange, and even menacing it can be. From Wenders’ vantage (and from the extraordinary camera of Robby Müller, who really hits the patriotic reds and blues copiously supplied by art director Kate Altman and costume designer Birgitta Bjerke), the West is no longer a grand frontier of imperialist expansion but a desiccated strip of roadside advertisements, diners, and motels. Not only is our would-be hero Travis a Man With No Name, he’s practically a Man With No Self, an icon emptied of past and presence and purpose, set to roam perpetually in the desert to which he’s withdrawn himself. He clings desperately to the idée-fixe of a measly plot of land he’s bought in Paris, which he and his parents wished was in France. Unfortunately, it’s really just in this godforsaken Southwestern dust bowl, and like Jane in that family movie, it’s nothing but an image. Travis’ illusions, and his dawning understanding of his need to atone for all the damage they’ve caused, finally lead to PARIS, TEXAS’ famous peep-show scenes, where mirrors and screens—those quintessential analogs of the cinema apparatus—give way, ironically, to piercing disillusions. In Wenders’ ambivalent but heartfelt ode to American lives dreamed and (uncertainly) lived, such revelations are a bittersweet matter of course. It’s what you do with them that counts. (1984, 145 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Paul Schrader's HARDCORE (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Sunday, 3:30pm and Wednesday, 2:45pm

Paul Schrader’s sophomore film as director, following his debut BLUE COLLAR (1978), sets the tone for the director’s own personal output of films to follow. HARDCORE follows Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott), a devoutly Calvinist father in search of his missing daughter, who happens to have found her way into the underground world of porn. Jake hires a private detective (Peter Boyle) to track down his daughter, and he finds himself completely un-ready for what information the detective might turn up. Much like the plot of TAXI DRIVER (1976), Scott takes it upon himself to venture into this seedy world and reclaim his daughter on his own, to “save her” from a reality he feels she can’t understand or endure. His search takes him to Los Angeles, where Jake finds himself at odds with a changing world, far from his Grand Rapids hometown where the more communal, small-town ways of life still reside; the journey he takes to find his daughter becomes more of a black-comedic nightmare than anything, as Jake prowls the corridors of neon-lit porn stores and brothels, pointing towards the removed sexual atmospheres of his surprise hit AMERICAN GIGOLO (1980) and the deeply underrated LIGHT SLEEPER (1992). The film was made at the end of the so-called New Hollywood generation, with Schrader being late to the directing chair; it bears many of the bitter, raw attitudes that awaited a film-world about to be consumed by the likes of STAR WARS (which receives an ominous and hilarious jab at a strip club, an in-joke of the likes we’ll probably never be able to see again). Humor looms large in a film that, on the surface, appears bleak and unforgiving. HARDCORE retains a very curious position that tries to align with and pity Jake, but also can’t help giggle at his discomfort, as in the scene where he nervously paces around a sex shop, looking at dildos while Neil Young’s “Helpless” plays on the store’s hi-fi; or where, in an attempt to locate one of his daughter’s male “co-stars,” he holds a casting call in his hotel room, confronting a group of young men so eager to be a part of something, they casually revert to exposing themselves in an effort to be wanted. It's despite these satirical barbs that the film rests on a bed of real, naked emotion, as in the scene where Jake is shown the porno his daughter has been found performing in. Scott’s father figure breaks painfully and earnestly, in a stellar series of cuts and camera positions, reinforcing the power of film to show us the disquieting howls of an unforgiving world, through the complicated mechanics of artifice. This is a film about discomfort and loneliness (something that would become trademark for Schrader) in which its characters just simply want to belong, to be a part of something, anything, resembling any notion of a comforting reality; what HARDCORE comes to depict, ultimately, is a reality where moral conviction itself is not enough to change a world at odds with certain notions of decency, it is instead a world where all one can do is stop the projector and look away. (1979, 109 min, DCP Digital) [John Dickson]

Jonas Poher Rasmussen's FLEE (Denmark/Animation/Documentary)

FACETS Cinema – Sunday, 3:30pm

Mass media has a tendency to reduce refugees to a faceless, monolithic Other; in ubiquitous images of teeming crowds spilling off lifeboats or huddled in asylum centers, a harmful narrative is perpetuated that anonymizes and dehumanizes a vast array of individuals seeking to escape myriad perilous circumstances. FLEE is a compassionate, much-needed corrective to the popular narrative, replacing xenophobic generalizations with lived specificities. The film is structured as an extended interview between former refugee Amin Nawabi and Jonas Poher Rasmussen, his close friend; crucially, this marks the first time Amin has shared his story, making FLEE a project of genuine biographical revelation. In his soft-spoken but candid words, Amin recounts his turbulent upbringing in war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1980s and his and his family’s tense, splintered attempts to find asylum in safer lands. Compounding the danger was Amin’s burgeoning awareness of his homosexuality, one of many facets of his identity he learned to suppress for the sake of survival (now out and married, his forthcoming observations about his nascent gay desire provide FLEE’s loveliest moments). Rasmussen renders both the present-day interview and the dramatic re-creations of Amin's harrowing journey in animation, a decision no doubt motivated in part by a respect for Amin’s privacy, allowing him to talk openly about his experiences without having to fear the sensationalistic exposure made possible by photography. Although the primary animation style here is more serviceable than compelling in its own right (better are the intermittent passages that take on an expressionistic, charcoal-like aesthetic), it feels beside the point to quibble. What’s more pertinent is the very use of the animated medium both to fill in for what can’t be shown and to foreground Amin’s voice, tacitly privileging his oral history over the schematics of visual re-presentation. His narration illuminates with great clarity and palpability not only the social, political, and economic conditions of his displacement, but the lingering, internalized shame and vulnerability that continue to pattern his thoughts and behavior. A stirring testimony, FLEE suggests how simply being able to tell your own story can be a radical and liberating act of agency. Screening as a part of the Outside the Lines series celebrating 60 years of the Chicago International Film Festival. (2021, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Jonathan Leithold-Patt]

Don Coscarelli's PHANTASM (US)

Alamo Drafthouse – Monday, 7pm

As brutal and disturbing a zombie film as can be found. Angus Scrimm's Tall Man, a demonic undertaker, zombie-maker, and slave-master of a hellish alternative world or dimension, is a crucial figure in modern horror iconography, an image of evil that manages impossibly to be both wholly alien and banally quotidian. Told through the eyes of Mike, an impressionable and recently-bereaved teenager, PHANTASM is a complicated, compelling, and deeply affecting meditation on the phase of our lives in which we suddenly come to understand and, perhaps, accept the inevitability of our own deaths, a mediation that features body-snatching, ethereal balls of knives, and robed killer midgets. Each moment seems slightly off-key, like the lurching rhythms of a broken calliope or a reflection cast in an antique mirror: every lens choice, every movement in the frame, every pattern of edits is built to unease and discomfit us. Truly the stuff of nightmares, Coscarelli's film is unforgettable. (1979, 90 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Brian De Palma's CARRIE (US)

Music Box Theatre – Thursday, 9:45pm

The strange CARRIE finds De Palma in a mode of perpetual discovery, movement, and defilement. In the film's now-legendary second scene, Carrie White, High School senior, cleans her thighs in the shower after P.E. class. She drops her bar of soap, and we, but not she, see it bounce off the tiles at her feet only to be replaced by a stream of blood filling her hand. After a moment, she gazes into her palm, and we see her fingers in close-up, cupped and dripping with menses. For Carrie, it is a moment of unspeakable horror—she wails like a beast for someone to help her—a horror of sudden knowledge: her body isn't what she thought it was, is in fact terrifyingly unruly where it ought most be domestic. Her blood has revealed her body to be a thing she cannot recognize, a thing we and Carrie are soon to see has a power that, like her first period, is uncontrollable, bloody in effect, and invisible in source. This moment becomes the structuring conceit for both the film's thematics and its style: nearly every shot finds space operating as on the principle of the jack-in-the-box, showing us what we expect to see but in a different place or way than it ought to be. While punishing her daughter for daring to enter sexual maturity, Carrie's religious fruitcake mother works with an antique sewing machine in a forced deep-focus composition made possible by the split-field diopter. It is a deeply uncomfortable shot, with the mother framed far to the right and a vast and preternaturally focused empty kitchen behind her. Suddenly, Carrie emerges through an unseen door into that kitchen. Two shots later, Carrie is weeping in a medium shot, but in a mirror: De Palma has faded from the woman, still at work making clothes, to her daughter's face in reflection such that Carrie's image has exactly replaced that of her mother's head. These slightly off revelations repeatedly reveal hidden filths, corruptions, or hatefulnesses we hadn't access to before: a hurtful graffito, a murderous parent, a bucket of blood. CARRIE begins and ends not in blood but in bleedings, horrifying transfers of what we keep desperately contained within our bodies at all cost, and as such it is a film that itself metaphorically bleeds, spreading though every crevice of its diegesis, mapping out the creepily familiar and labyrinthine space of monstrosity. Screening as part of the Music Box of Horrors: The Dream Child. (1976, 98 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Liu Jian's HAVE A NICE DAY (China/Animation)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 7pm

A labor of love over three years in the making, the hand-drawn HAVE A NICE DAY by independent Chinese animator Liu Jian debuted at the Berlin Film Festival in 2017 like a bracing shot in the arm. Critics praised the feature—the second installment in Liu’s planned trilogy about contemporary China, after PIERCING I (2010)—as “both a visceral thriller and astute political statement about China’s place in the modern world” (Screen Daily) and called it “the most politically trenchant and artistically fresh thing” (The Guardian) at the festival. While many have accurately discerned the incisive political dimensions of the work (including its remarkable bypassing of Chinese censorship restrictions), what’s not quite conveyed in any English-language review I’ve come across yet is just what a fantastically good time HAVE A NICE DAY is, too—how vibrant, riotous, unexpectedly humanist, and evisceratingly clever it is, reveling as it does, over the course of its breezy 77 minutes, in the pleasures of deadpan wit. Stylish, sly, and politically risky, the film strikes a chord through its combination of political subversion with genre thrills. Like the best satires, it lands as something heavy and something light all at once. One of the first figures we meet in this world is a smug gangster who pats himself on the back for correctly recognizing the Fauvist influences in a painting as he tortures a rival. In the film’s centerpiece sequence, a tense elevator ride is broken up by a spectacular karaoke fantasia, brilliantly parodying propaganda posters from the Cultural Revolution. The story’s lurid set-up echoes the influences of Hong Kong triad flicks: a low-ranking mob driver named Little Zhang foolishly steals a bag filled with $1 million RMB from his boss, with the goal of fixing his girlfriend’s tragically botched plastic surgery job. A motley crew of hitmen, bumbling local opportunists, and self-aggrandizing, would-be start-up founders (the success stories of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are nauseatingly repeated as aspirational narratives) is soon on the trail after the dough. But Liu departs from standard genre fare from there, and effectively paints a portrait of the mundane day-to-day grind, social conservatism, and greedy ambitions that animate the residents of the overlooked, underdeveloped areas of modern China. Liu’s visual style and character designs seem to fall somewhere squarely between early Mike Judge and Satoshi Kon (the depressed urban landscapes of TOKYO GODFATHERS seem like an especially useful reference point). HAVE A NICE DAY impressively and wisely matches Liu’s style of heavily-limited animation to the film’s narrative flow (whereas classic anime traditionally shoots on the 8’s, Liu frequently lingers on the same drawing over several seconds at a time; as a one-man animation team, this must be mostly due to need rather than artistic choice, but it is a style nevertheless effectively employed here) to convey the sense of tedium and banality in his portrait of rural China. These style limitations are amusingly used to illustrate the awkwardness of a tense elevator ride, to elongate the seconds two lovers spend waiting to receive a response over chat messaging apps, or to show how a hitman kills time waiting for his target to turn up by—what else?—idly playing Fruit Ninja. And is there any more perfect location for crystallizing the economic stressors and disparities in modern China than the setting of an internet café as an oasis—any more salient representation of China’s longing for the modern world it doesn’t quite have access to? The original Chinese title of the film (which it played under during its run at the Chicago International Film Festival), 好极了(hǎojíle), is a common Chinese expression of exaggerated over-exuberance (like “awesome!” or “fantastic!”); the film is now circulating in Chinese under the title 大世界 (dàshìjiè), which can be translated as “big world.” Along with “have a nice day,” these alternate titles in combination with one another convey the ironic playfulness in Liu Jian’s bright, animated portrait of a paralyzed modern wasteland. Screening as a part of the Outside the Lines series celebrating 60 years of the Chicago International Film Festival. (2017, 77 min, DCP Digital) [Tien-Tien Jong]

Satoshi Kon's PAPRIKA (Japan/Animation)

FACETS Cinema – Saturday, 5pm

PAPRIKA was Satoihi Kon's final film, and what a wonderful way to wrap up a remarkable career. Kon passed away in 2010 due to pancreatic cancer at the early age of 46, but his work has left a lasting impression on cinema, inspiring filmmakers worldwide and even garnering some copycats, to put it nicely (just Google it). In PAPRIKA, we see the culmination of themes and stylizations that occur throughout his work; it also represents a boundlessly creative approach to the anime medium. Kon often blurred the line between reality and fantasy, and in PAPRIKA he addresses the world of dreams and its position in our worldview. The titular Paprika is the dream persona of a psychologist who enters patients' dreams to help guide their rehabilitation. Things get chaotic when someone steals a device that makes Paprika's dream-hopping possible and starts to use it for nefarious purposes. PAPRIKA successfully juggles a multitude of genres—it’s a horror movie, comedy, and psychological thriller at the same time. Kon, like a few of his contemporaries, recognized the similarities between cinema and dreams. Filmmakers like David Lynch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are known for utilizing dream logic in their films, and Kon deserves to be mentioned in the same discussions about the close relationship between these two forms. In PAPRIKA, Kon recognizes that cinema has the power to manipulate and replicate dreams, and he questions the morality of cinema's ability to do so. Is it wrong to toy freely with dreams, places of purity and unbounded freedom and safe havens from the harsh reality that plagues our waking lives? Kon decides that, through cinema we can take the joy and freedom of our dreams and transplant them into our day-to-day lives for everyone to enjoy. Screening as a part of the Outside the Lines series celebrating 60 years of the Chicago International Film Festival. (2006, 90 mins, DCP Digital) [Drew Van Weelden]

Denis Villeneuve's DUNE: PART TWO (US)

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

Denis Villeneuve’s colossal 190-million-dollar cosmic magnum opus, DUNE: PART TWO, has been released in 70mm. With returning collaborators, he continues to demonstrate skills accumulated over his career thus far. Originally set for release in October 2023, the studio stalled the opening of the film until November due to the 2023 Hollywood labor strikes, then pushing further to March 1, 2024. Following the success of OPPENHEIMER's touring prints in 70mm, DUNE followed a similar marketing campaign. At first, I felt skeptical viewing the movie in this format. I assumed it was a marketing ploy, following the heels of OPPENHEIMER and an excuse to sell a higher priced ticket for a film shot digitally. After walking out of the theater as the credits rolled, I realized I was wrong. 70mm always beautifully compliments the light exposed on the subjects in the frame. The celluloid experience adds a dreamlike element to a film full of visions, nightmares, monsters, and magic. Cinematographer Greig Fraser proves his powers behind the lens and proves comfortable with the ballet between film scans and digital exposures. His work is elevated through the work of editor Joe Walker, a former musical artist who has cut for heavy hitters like Steve McQueen and Michael Mann. A frequent collaborator of Villeneuve from SICARIO on, Walker finds a smooth rhythm, making a lengthy runtime fly by. Hans Zimmer’s captivating score, pulling sounds across time and cultures has become an aural signature for this director. The creative team assembles stunning intergalactic set pieces and fills each frame with vibrant color and light to ground the viewer in each world. It is rare to have an A-list cast work so well together. Everyone gives a strong performance in this space opera. Each recognizable face in DUNE: PART TWO supplements the story like a true ensemble. As counterparts, Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya continue to prove their status, hypnotizing the theater with their charming pathos. Entering in a nightmare-like sequence, Austin Butler disappears into his role as the psychotic Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. Javier Bardem’s charisma as Stilgar adds life to each scene, with the audience anticipating his every moment of screentime. The first film of this series, DUNE (2021) remains faithful to Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, a promise to Herbert fundamentalists that they’re in good hands for the rest of Paul Atriedes’ story. As David Cronenberg has stated, "You must be unfaithful to be faithful to the source material." For this second film, Villeneuve’s script strays, showing epic battles only discussed passively by Herbert’s words. While some may take issue with these modifications to the story, I agree with Cronenberg’s assertion. For any literary work switching to screen, changes must be made to adjust to the medium of communication: the written word is a different experience than the image. Audiences should praise the director’s achievement of translating page to screen. Although this sequel does not have the slow world building of its predecessor, it has its own gravitational pull, drawing the viewer in with its immense scale, stomach dropping in all aspects. Regardless of the box office numbers, it’s important to remember the voice behind the camera, providing justice to a literary phenomenon and maintaining their own unique style of cinematic storyteller. Although the film doesn’t follow Herbert’s text religiously, anyone can experience the overwhelming potential of science fiction storytelling. Screening as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. (2024, 166 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

🎞️ 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.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Yasuzo Masumura’s 1969 film BLIND BEAST (86 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. 

⚫ Doc Films at the University of Chicago
Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 film CHALLENGERS (131 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 9:45pm, as part of the New Releases and Restorations series. 

Nathan Dorsky’s short films INGREEN, A FALL TRIP HOME, SUMMERWIND, BAGATELLE II, IN THE STONE HOUSE (1964, 1965, 1966, 1964-2016, 2012) screen Sunday, 8pm, on 16mm as part of the The Devotional Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler series.

Marguerite Duras’ 1972 film NATHALIE GRANGER (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 7pm, as part of the Echoes of Films by Women/Chicago ‘74 series.

Alfredo B. Crevenna’s 1951 film MUCHACHAS DE UNIFORME (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 7pm, as part of the Mexican Romance: Through the Heart of the Nation series. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ FACETS Cinema
Sweet Void Presents… The Video Village, two programs of short films made by Chicago-based filmmakers, takes place Friday, with Program A starting at 7pm and Program B starting at 9pm, with post-screening Q&As after each. 

Phil Tippett’s 2021 film MAD GOD (83 min, DCP Digital) screens Saturday at 9pm and Pablo Berger’s 2023 film ROBOT DREAMS (102 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday at 1pm, both as part of the Outside the Lines series celebrating 60 years of the Chicago International Film Festival.

Legendary body horror OVA series CYBERNETIC CARNAGE screens Thursday, 7pm, as part of FACETS Anime Club. Must be a FACETS Film Club member to attend. More info on all screenings here. 

⚫ ​​Film Studies Center (Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th Street)
Kevin Shaw’s 2022 documentary LET THE LITTLE LIGHT SHINE (86 min, Digital Projection) screens Friday, 7pm, in advance of Kartemquin Films: Documentaries for Democracy, a two-day conference celebrating the legendary Chicago film production house. More info here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
Shuchi Talati’s 2024 film GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS (118 min, DCP Digital) begins screening this week. See Venue website for showtimes.

John Hsu’s 2019 Taiwanese film DETENTION (102 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday, 6pm, as part of the Propaganda and Counterculture lecture series.

Matt Cascella’s 2024 film HANGDOG (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Wednesday, 8pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with Cascella, actor Desmin Borges, and writer Jen Cordery, moderated by author and screenwriter Gillian Flynn. 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.

As part of Music Box of Horrors, William Peter Blatty’s 1990 film THE EXORCIST III (110 min, 35mm) screens Sunday at 11:30am; Damien Leone’s 2024 film TERRIFIER 3 (120 min, DCP Digital Projection) screens Monday at 9:15pm; and Bernard L. Kowalski’s 1973 film SSSSSSS (99 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday at 7pm, with an introduction by Cinemajaw and an animal demonstration by the Reptile Den. 

Adrian Anderson and Patrick Gray’s 2023 film POMP & CIRCUMSTANCE (66 min, DCP Digital) screens Sunday, 7pm, with the filmmakers in person for a post-screening Q&A.

Haroula Rose’s 2024 film ALL HAPPY FAMILIES (90 min, DCP Digital) screens Monday, 6:30pm, with Rose, co-writer Coburn Ross, and producer Ian Keiser in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. 

John Biesack’s 2024 film LOVE & IRONY (113 min, DCP Digital) screens Tuesday at 7pm. Programmed and presented by Blue Whiskey Independent Film Festival. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ The Oscarbate Film Collective
Bob Kelljan’s 1971 film THE RETURN OF COUNT YORGA (97 min, Digital Projection) screens Tuesday, 9:30pm, at the Alamo Drafthouse as part of Terror Tuesdays and Gianfranco Giagni’s 1988 film THE SPIDER LABYRINTH (87 min, Digital Projection) screens Thursday at 9:45pm. 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: October 4 - October 10, 2024

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Kian Bergstrom, Rob Christopher, Cody Corrall, Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Marilyn Ferdinand, Shaun Huhn, Tien-Tien Jong, Ben Kaye, Kevin B. Lee, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Christy LeMaster, Nicky Ni, Peter Raccuglia, Drew Van Weelden, Brian Welesko, K.A. Westphal, David Whitehouse