Matthew Barney’s THE CREMASTER CYCLE & DE LAMA LAMINA
Music Box – Friday-Thursday, September 3-9, Check Venue website for showtimes

It has been about six years since artist Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER CYCLE has been available and it is being given a new release this year before it, we assume, goes back into mothballs for a while. It has never been released on DVD and Barney claims that it never will be (though bootlegs of at least some of the parts can be found), so if you are curious, here’s your last opportunity for a while.

THE CREMASTER CYCLE is nothing if not a curiosity. It is a divisive work; its admirers prone to great hyperbole (“The most important American artist of his generation” says Michael Kimmelman, New York Times Magazine) and its detractors seriously befuddled by the praise and attention and serious regard it generates. Below is an explication by Cine-File contributor Josephine Ferorelli. Additional pro or con posts may appear this week as well. – Ed.

—–

Despite the fact that it is opaque, pompous, and very, very long, Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER CYCLE continues to be screened and draw crowds. With its current weeklong run at the Music Box, you may want to see it if you haven’t already. Or you might not, since the cycle comes in at around 400 minutes you will never get back. I saw it when it last screened at Doc Films in 2004, and I’m still on the fence. Herewith, an overview from a paper I wrote to help make an informed decision, and possibly save you some time.

Matthew Barney studies the body, and how it struggles to change. He has devised a system of three internal types of human energy: Situation, Condition, and Production. Situation, Nancy Spector writes, is the state in which “the energy is unorganized and essentially useless, but definitely ripe with potential” (The Cremaster Cycle, p. 5).
The first film in the series is an elaborate, Busby-Berkeley style enactment of the tenuous time before a human zygote/fetus becomes one sex or the other. The entire cast is female, just as in that stage of development, a fetus is considered to be female by default. Dancers on a football field create formations that are controlled by twin bombshells in parallel womb/blimps. The formations are alternately Barney’s invented symbols and actual diagrams of cells splitting and gonads forming. The dancers wear sexy makeup and flash their architectural underwear, but they seem oddly neutered.

Despite the fact that these films are perforce an enormous collaborative effort, Barney is clearly occupying the auteur’s position; it’s his mythology, he directs and stars as most of the major characters, and despite the disparate settings and unconnected characters, there is a unified style of presentation. Throughout the five films, there is an underlying sense that we are in the same world, rather than five separate ones. The camera always moves at the same pace, stays at the same distances, and frames scenes in similar ways. The light is always cool and medical. The colors are vivid, even the neutrals. There is no suggestion of different viewpoints or viewers (or even much brain activity in characters); it’s Barney’s omniscient third person who is in charge of what you see and how. He also subjects himself to real and imagined tests of physical endurance. The viewer is intended to believe the myth, and Barney marks a clear boundary between himself and the audience with the brutal grandeur of the visual world, and with his astonishing budget, courtesy of Barbara Gladstone, the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, and Hugo Boss’s biannual cash prize for the advancement of contemporary art.

The real and imagined brutality of Barney’s work predates and permeates the CREMASTER CYCLE. His personal history as an athlete figures in here, as the first movie is set on a football field in his hometown of Boise, and the third movie climaxes with him in a series of physical challenges, a kind of live-action Cliffs Notes to the whole work. In an earlier performance piece called Anal Sadistic Warrior Barney penetrated himself, climbed around the walls of a gallery, and filmed it. In CREMASTER 3, Barney’s character, the Entered Apprentice, undergoes a savage beating, and an equally savage subsequent visit to the doctor’s office. In CREMASTER 4 he has anodes attached to his testicles, which are then pulled by a moving vehicle. In both the third and fifth film, he climbs to great heights unassisted. In the fourth, he tap-dances to the point of collapse (albeit collapse through a hole in the floor). In Barney’s philosophy, the second kind of physical energy after Situation is Condition, which according to Nancy Spector is “a visceral ‘disciplinary funnel’ that processes the body’s crude energy”(CC. p. 6). The Entered Apprentice’s beating is the disciplinary funnel through which he is ultimately able to become a full Mason. The hole he makes in the floor by dancing is the funnel through which he, the gonad, descends.

Despite the fact that most of the characters represent aspects of human sexual anatomy and development, all of the characters in each movie have non-standard, non-gendered genitals. These fairly alarming nubs and vestiges are a literal representation of the more abstract intersex state that the movies are inventing. Barney doesn’t care about development as a means to an end as much as he is interested in the tension between the will to develop and the forces that try and prevent it. Any act of physical exertion is a fight against inertia, and an effort to push the body further than it naturally would go. In Barney’s world, Spector writes that “form cannot materialize or mutate unless it struggles against resistance in the process”(CC. p. 4). Barney’s sculptures stand as a record of the struggle; they do not on their own tell the story, they are only artifacts.

The sculptures are often limp, formless gobs of Vaseline or strange objects that seems stranded without the context of the movies. Barney claims that “for me it is critical that all of these forms come together as one piece. The films, the sculpture, the photographs, the books. And the museum is the place for that to happen¨ (Tate Magazine, Issue 2, Interview by Hans-Ulrich Obrist), but anyone who has not seen the films, which can be hard to come by, even in museums, will have a hard time making heads or tails of the sculptures.

This is an interesting phenomenon when one considers the third stage of Barney’s energetic schema, which is Production. It is at this stage that the body makes the funneled force “manifest in the world via anal and oral channels” (Spector, CC, p. 6). And it is this stage that Barney is interested in bypassing, or short-circuiting. In the CREMASTER CYCLE, says Barney, “Production ‘was an anal or oral output that would be bypassed by connecting those two orifices and making a circular system” (Tate interview). As long as nothing is externally produced, the body can stay in its asexual limbo, and the fantastic world of CREMASTER CYCLE can continue its precarious existence.

In a way, the existence of the sculptures signals the end of the movies’ solipsistic mythology, by breaching the closed system. What could it possibly mean about the films if they represent struggles whose finished product is a heap of petroleum jelly?

But even as the movies go so far afield from any meaning-making that the viewer struggles to stay engaged, Barney makes a few sly art-historical allusions, particularly in CREMASTER 3. The richest and most apt reference is to Marcel Duchamp. On the first floor of the Chrysler building there is a Masonic bar, where Barney’s Entered Apprentice goes to try and have a beer. The bar at which he sits bears the distinctive curve of Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal. The bar is the stage for a preposterous comedy of errors as the bartender tries in vain to pour the apprentice a glass of beer. In this scene, the bar is a closed system out from which beer cannot come. The fact that the beer is trapped in the urinal is a hilarious short-circuiting of two orifices. The fact, too, that Duchamp is contained and concealed within Barney’s system is evidence of his ambition’s huge scale. – Josephine Ferorelli

In our year-end coverage of 2009, we failed to mention one film that provoked some of the lengthiest conversation among our writers—THE BOX, Richard Kelly’s first studio feature. While several of us at Cine-File championed Kelly’s last film, SOUTHLAND TALES (2007-8), his latest did not elicit so much as a blurb here during its brief Chicago run. It did, however, provoke an extended email exchange between myself and fellow contributor Mike King, which touched on everything from Kelly’s contentious filmography to our own place in U.S. pop culture. Below is an edited version of our exchange. – Ben Sachs

*****

Ben,
Just walked out of Mr. Kelly’s latest and I have to know what you think…. Are you still on board with this guy?

For my money, I’d say THE BOX elaborates on all of Kelly’s worst impulses while exhibiting little of the heady, if misguided, ambition that made SOUTHLAND TALES at least an interesting failure. The new one is only fascinating in that he seems to be shooting for popular cinema yet misses the mark so widely, and that Warner Brothers actually gave it a theatrical release instead of sending it straight to DVD. There is, however, idle entertainment to be found in some ominous shots of a Steenbeck and the ebbs of Cameron Diaz’s fake southern accent…

Let me know what you think,
– Mike

Mike,
I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you by saying I enjoyed THE BOX a whole lot. I won’t defend it as a warped reflection of American culture a la SOUTHLAND TALES—though the third-act revelation that its American characters have been doomed by their lack of altruism had a certain resonance after a week of masochistically following the Copenhagen talks and what seems like their inevitable railroading by corporate interests. I wouldn’t call the movie profound, either—but then, I’ve always found Kelly’s metaphysics risible and his sense of sympathy as adolescent as it is sincere. (Still, I’ve got to admire Kelly’s audacity of interpreting No Exit as a predecessor to The Twilight Zone, a conflation of high and low culture as brazenly weird as anything in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.) I can only be honest with my immediate response to the film: I was entertained.

I don’t want to use that term pejoratively; the movie entertained me more than most others this year. I should note that I saw THE BOX with a couple of my bandmates, comic book fanatics who have taught me to appreciate the work of contemporary comics writers. I doubt I’d appreciate Kelly’s movies as much as I do if it weren’t for their influence: I think no other filmmaker is more aligned with the tone, imagination, and overall moral grounding of recent comics than he is; and I think the disconnect many of Kelly’s detractors feel from his work has something to do with an unfamiliarity with writers like Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, and Brian K. Vaughn.

There’s a key difference between these writers—who continue to write for mainstream superhero series even after writing more experimental fare—and someone like Alan Moore, a self-conscious postmodernist who uses comic conventions, in part, to critique them. There is no overt sense of critique in Morrison, Ellis, and Vaughn, who began writing in the wake of Moore’s success. Their work seems to exist in a middle territory interested neither in perpetuating old myths nor tearing them down. They seem to genuinely love comics and want to leave their fantasies intact. Their process of revision is in acknowledging the ways comics interact with the individual imaginations of those who read them: The cultural fantasies are expanded by commingling with more personal fantasies or, in many cases, full-blown leaps into the surreal. (A high-point for this sort of thing: Morrison’s indescribable, Burroughs-esque The F.I.L.T.H.) In letting so much personal observation into comics, these writers often graze the reality of contemporary politics, yet it would be a mistake to think of their work as allegory. The ventures into real life serve mainly to expand the territory of the fantasy.

I think this is where the problems begin in serious discussions of Kelly. No matter how personal they get, they are not about real life. As in the comics authors I keep mentioning, the authorial stamp is in the imagination with which the tales are spun out. I admit that it was tough for me to appreciate this kind of authorship. It seemed to deny morality, verisimilitude, or anything we associate with grown-up art. But I came to make my peace with modern comics anyway. Presuming they aren’t boring or far-right in their implications (and I can’t get into Frank Miller for both of these reasons), I’ve learned to loosen up and appreciate the details.

And I’m consistently satisfied with Kelly’s details, no less in THE BOX than either of his other movies: The canny imitation of early-Spielberg cinematography in the name of something far weirder than anything Spielberg’s ever imagined; the fetishization of 70s NASA technology; the dashes of odd humor (as in the scene where James Marsden’s put on the hot seat at the wedding rehearsal and then fumbles his way out of it); the old B-movie pleasure of seeing normal-looking actors play out the dignity of small men and women; the Bunuelian detail of a middle-class Virginia audience attending a production of No Exit at the local opera house (!); the smooth tracking shots (always the ace up Kelly’s sleeve) that can turn any scene into a waking dream. Then there’s the shot of Cameron Diaz espied through a window, “Bell Bottom Blues” overwhelming the soundtrack, dancing comfortably for the first time since receiving a prosthetic foot—such a prosaic image of a man’s happiness, but all the more touching for it.

I’m impressed that Kelly threw so many narrative curveballs into a major studio feature—if for no other reason than to keep things interesting. But flitting around the absurdities is a rather personal response to a universal question: What is the foundation of a moral life? It’s an abstract question, brought into focus by the abstract nature of Kelly’s prodigious imagination.

Stay in touch,
– Ben

Ben,
I’m happy to hear you got so much out of THE BOX, though I still can’t say I’m on board. Comics—new or old, mainstream or not—are one of my many blind spots, so while I can’t appreciate Kelly (or anyone else) through that prism, I suspect you may be on to something there. I’m hardly interested in convincing you not to like something you clearly dug, so I’ll stick to a few observations:

An appreciative catalogue of minor details is a common feature of the positive notices of THE BOX that I’ve encountered. That’s all well and good, but what surprises me is they all seem to ignore great swaths of the movie: the central gamble, the sub-BODY SNATCHERS hoo-ha that follows in its wake, and the sister’s wedding—all of which are afforded far more screen time. You take the middle-class couple attending No Exit as a Bunuelian touch. Maybe, but would you say the same for the husband (who we’re told can barely make ends meet) tooling around in a Corvette or the wife acting like a total stranger at her sister’s wedding? Sure, I’m nitpicking, but I wonder if you aren’t cherry-picking. For me, the haphazard accumulation of inconsistencies looks less like Bunuel than something not-so-hot. But as with SOUTHLAND TALES, what surprises me most about THE BOX might be the nature of my own negative reaction. Normally, I wouldn’t be caught dead complaining about contradictions or irrelevant digressions—hell, those are attributes I cherish in the films of Guy Maddin—but for some reason, I couldn’t get into this at all.

Much of this has to do with all the footnotes that emerge once Cameron Diaz pushes the button. A million bucks and a lifetime of guilt (the agreed-upon consequence) suddenly turns into zombies, nosebleeds, and a deaf/blind son. I suppose one could argue it’s a critique of how powerful entities (banks, countries, whatever) fuck people around, rewriting the rules long after the dotted line’s been signed; perhaps it’s a prime example of the “authorial stamp” in the comics you described. But couldn’t it also be sloppy writing?

Funny you should mention Kelly in the context of comic-style escapist entertainment (which I don’t think he necessarily considers his films). The closest I’ve gotten to that kind of stuff is the TV show Lost, which I assume you wouldn’t place on par with the authors you mentioned (nor would I try to convince you it is). Nevertheless, it has been good preparation for Kelly’s recent work in that it’s been an incredibly frustrating narrative experience: Here is another sci-fi mystery that takes its ability to address Big Questions far too seriously, unveils man after man behind the curtain, and delves into character details that seem Significant but never add up to much. With Lost, the disconnects are often rooted in external factors: A character will get killed because the actor playing her got a DUI, and suddenly all that time we’ve spent pondering her significance becomes irrelevant. Kelly’s last two have similar symptoms, but it’s his own Big Questions that get away from him rather than his characters. In fact, when an editor did get between him and his vision on DONNIE DARKO, I’d say it resulted in a far better film. I suspect the same editor could’ve carved something better and more enigmatic out of THE BOX.
– Mike

Dear Mike,
I don’t know how seriously Kelly takes his own ponderings. (This would be a good question to ask him, if we ever get the chance!) A lot in his movies suggests that he doesn’t—the silly musical numbers in his first two films, for instance—and I find his work more enjoyable when I follow that hunch.

I haven’t seen a minute of Lost; but then, I haven’t seen any of the ambitious series that are supposed to convert old-school cinephiles like us to television. I often get the sense I’m sitting out on a big part of The Culture; at the same time, the 30-odd hours I’d spend catching up with The Wire could also afford 10 Frederick Wiseman films (or nearly 100 Hal Roach shorts, for that matter). I guess I just like my high culture high and my low culture low. When it comes to popular literature (an increasingly tenuous concept in our dark age of Jodi Picoult), I’d sooner consult the latest Vertigo Comics slate than the New York Times bestseller list; and when it comes to TV, I’m more interested in Adult Swim than HBO. I think I’ve developed this persuasion through my tenure in subcultures born around art cinema and underground rock. And since I find these cultures so valuable and life-affirming, I’ve tried, off and on, to exchange with other subcultures similar to my own. I don’t think I’ll ever find common ground with the gaming community, but I’m fascinated by comic book collectors, hip-hop DJs, and social service advocates. I think we’ve got a lot in common.

Kelly seems interested in uniting different subcultures, too—namely, sci-fi nerds and the cine-poetry descendants of Max Ophuls. The results shouldn’t work—and for a lot of people, they plainly don’t—but I’m consistently disarmed by the attempt. Much more than, say, Christopher Nolan’s (who strikes me as wanting to please too many people at once) or Sam Raimi’s (a more winning director, but so in love with low culture as to occasionally come off as loutish).

I agree with your sentiments about Kelly’s storytelling. He’s like a child in that he gets so wrapped up in his own imagination that he loses sight of how to bring his ideas together. I often felt watching THE BOX that he wrote the entire thing in one or two sittings, then refused to amend it because that would tarnish the spirit that allowed him to write it at all. No, this isn’t a model of “good” writing, but I find the results far more entertaining than the typical Hollywood sci-fi or suspense that Kelly was expected to deliver. (Incidentally, SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGEANCE was written by Park Chanwook and his team over a whirlwind two or three days, and that may explain why it’s my favorite of Park’s films.) It’s not a question of quality so much as a difference in kind: Where the logical inconsistencies of a BOURNE movie (or SYRIANA, which strikes me as its fatuous, Big Question-asking equivalent) seem the result of wanting to seem mature while obliging the staples of the action genre, Kelly’s inconsistencies seem like the by-product of an id running on all cylinders. So, while the BODY SNATCHERS business seems to come out of nowhere and lead nowhere, it does allow for some remarkable set pieces: the De Palma-esque use of the Virginia State Library, Frank Langella’s late admission of his own vulnerability (a tricky scene that this great actor pulls off with touching integrity), and, best of all, the motel pool turned into an alien teleportal. Ignatius [Vishnevetsky, another Cine-File contributor] singled out this image as the essence of Kelly’s imagination—something so mundane becoming the locus of all sorts of weird premises.

I find all this encouraging. Even when talented postmodernists like De Palma, the Coen Brothers, and Guy Maddin (who I’m not all that crazy about, sorry) are at their best, I get a feeling that their work is always in response to other images—images whose influence on the culture is so pervasive that a new artist’s only obligation is to recombine them in interesting ways. Kelly, for better or for worse, is taking inspiration from other fantasies to spin off into his own.
– Ben

Ben,
What’s curious about Kelly is that even as his films have become bogged down with rabbit-hole exposition, they remain incomprehensible. The supernatural goings-on in THE BOX are no clearer to me than in DONNIE DARKO, despite the fact that Kelly devotes significantly more screen time to explaining them. I’m not sure if the confusion is intentional or not—as you say, THE BOX feels as if written in one night (though I’m not sure whether his id is running on all cylinders; that phrase is tailor-made for Guy Maddin)—but it is consistent with SOUTHLAND TALES, though in that film the ADD storytelling seems more germane. At any rate, I’ve got no problem with publishing first drafts: My beef is with all the exposition. You brought up the BOURNE films in a different context, but what I like about them is their inversion of the action movie formula. There’s almost no exposition until the end, when it is most irrelevant. I didn’t go for THE BOX’s big set pieces like you did, because even they were intruded upon by characters’ attempt to provide context for them. It’s remarkable that Kelly can have so much exposition and not really explain anything, but I still find it a drag to endure.

For me, the crucial break in Kelly’s work occurred when he made the supernatural elements of his films diegetic, which coincided with a shift from eerily anticipating national anxieties to trying to address them directly. The ambiguity of DONNIE DARKO seems to have granted him more confidence to let the odd moments (like those you catalogued in THE BOX) speak for themselves and not require an explanation. But if nothing else, you and other critics have convinced me that Kelly is a filmmaker who routinely inspires smart writing from smart people, which is more than I can say about most directors.

If you’re thinking of taking the plunge into TV, I’d hardly recommend Lost. I mainly got into it because I felt a similar urge to check in with The Culture, and a curiosity about how non-comic TV works, not having ever watched any myself. To that end, it’s served its purpose admirably—something I can shoot the shit about with near strangers, like the local sports team. It’s also a lot of fun in a FLASH GORDON kind of way. I’m with you in that I’m more interested in Adult Swim than HBO. In fact, my favorite moment in any Kelly film—the SUV porn-commercial that occurs early in SOUTHLAND TALES—seems straight out of Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job!. Still, I think you’d be better off with the 100 Hal Roach shorts, since you seem like the type to actually do it.
– Mike

CINE-FILE’S BEST OF 2009 LISTS

Our contributors (active, dormant, and former) were invited to submit any kind of list or lists they chose. Here’s what we got.

*****

JULIAN ANTOS

Newer:

24 CITY (Jia Zhang-ke, 2008) Gene Siskel Film Center
IMPORT/EXPORT (Ulrich Seidl, 2007) Facets
JULIA (Erick Zonca, 2008)
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Tomas Alfredson, 2008) Gene Siskel Film Center
YOU, THE LIVING (Roy Andersson, 2007) Facets

Older:

BIGGER THAN LIFE (Nicholas Ray, 1956) Gene Siskel Film Center/Music Box
THE BOWERY (Raoul Walsh, 1933) Bank of America Cinema
BRIGHTON ROCK (John Boulting, 1947) Gene Siskel Film Center
THE CRAZIES (George A. Romero, 1973) Doc Films
CROSSROADS (Bruce Conner, 1976) Gene Siskel Film Center
DAY OF WRATH (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1943) Gene Siskel Film Center/Doc Films
PRIVILEGE (Peter Watkins, 1967) Doc Films
QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN (Ron Rice, 1982) Doc Films
LA RONDE (Max Ophuls, 1950) Gene Siskel Film Center
THE TALL T (Budd Boetticher, 1957) Bank of America Cinema

**********

BETH CAPPER

Best of 2009 (in theaters)

1. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE UNDERNEATH (Jane Arden, 1972) BFI, London
2. GAEA GIRLS (Kim Longinotto, 2000) Nightingale
3. D’EST (Chantal Akerman, 1993) University of Chicago Film Studies Center
4. JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (Chantal Akerman, 1975) Gene Siskel Film Center
5. SOFT FICTION (Chick Strand, 1979) Conversations at the Edge series at Gene Siskel Film Center
6. SOMEWHERE ONLY WE KNOW (Jesse Mclean, 2009) various venues
7. THE BEACHES OF AGNES (Agnes Varda, 2009) Music Box Theatre
8. TREELESS MOUNTAIN (So Yong Kim, 2008) Gene Siskel Film Center
9. CROSSROADS (Bruce Conner, 1976) Conversations at the Edge series at Gene Siskel Film Center
10. BERNADETTE (Duncan Campbell, 2008) Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival

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ROB CHRISTOPHER

The actual year a movie was “made” is in many ways becoming less and less relevant. Theatrical distribution can be glacial. Just look at Francois Ozon’s ANGEL: It was completed in 2007 but won’t get a proper US release until 2010. On the other hand, online streaming can mean that films unseen for decades are suddenly watchable with the click of a mouse. Any movie you see for the first time is a new movie. So I’m steadfastly refusing to limit my “best of” list to movies that happened to be made in 2009. Here are the movies I watched for the first time this year that I loved the most:

BIGGER THAN LIFE (Nicholas Ray, 1956)
BILLY BUDD (Peter Ustinov, 1962)
CHE (Steven Soderbergh, 2008)
THE CLASS (Laurent Cantet, 2008)
DAYTIME DRINKING (Young-Seok Noh, 2008)
FEAR ME NOT (Kristian Levring, 2008)
THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)
THE HEADLESS WOMAN (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (Thom Andersen, 2003)
MOON (Duncan Jones, 2009)
MOTHER (Joon-ho Bong, 2009)
THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA (Sophie Fiennes, 2006)
POLICE, ADJECTIVE (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)
THE ROAD (John Hillcoat, 2009)

**********

KALVIN HENELY (Our Los Angeles correspondent)

Top 10 Movies Released in 2009:

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)
SPREAD (David MacKenzie, 2009)
TWO LOVERS (James Gray, 2009)
STAR TREK (J. J. Abrams, 2009)
MOTHER (Bong Joon Ho, 2009)
PONYO (Hayao Miyazaki, 2009)
INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
THE LIMITS OF CONTROL (Jim Jarmusch, 2009)
PUBLIC ENEMIES (Michael Mann, 2009)
GOODBYE SOLO (Ramin Bahrani, 2009)

Favorite movies that weren’t yet released this year:

NE CHANGE RIEN (Pedro Costa, 2009)
TRASH HUMPERS (Harmonie Korine, 2009)
UN LAC (Phillipe Grandrieux, 2009)

Favorite theatrical rereleases:

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
THE SALVATION HUNTERS (Josef von Sternberg, 1925)
THE MAN WHO ENVIED WOMEN (Yvonne Rainer, 1985)

**********

MIKE KING (Our Madison, Wisconsin correspondent)

Top 5 recent features that, for whatever reason, have not yet made it to Chicago:

1. OUR BELOVED MONTH OF AUGUST (Miguel Gomes, 2008)
2. EXTRAORDINARY STORIES (Mariano Llinás, 2008)
3. NE CHANGE RIEN (Pedro Costa, 2009)
4. SWEETGRASS (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2009)
5. EVERYONE ELSE (Maren Ade, 2009)

**********

JOSH MABE

My top ten favorite cinematic hosts and their offerings that were new-to-my-eyes in Chicago, 2009 (in no good order and with a few silly notes):

1. Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival:
NOTHING IS OVER NOTHING (Jonathan Schwartz, 2008) - the best new film-on-film I saw this year
WHEN WORLDS COLLUDE (Fred Worden, 2008) - almost as brilliantly skull-cracking as his other video masterpiece EVERYDAY BAD DREAM
ALTERNITY (Van McElwee, 2008)
THE PARABLE OF THE TULIP PAINTER AND THE FLY (Charlotte Pryce, 2008)

2 and 3. The Nightingale & White Light Cinema:
UTAH (Kyle Canterbury, 2009) - such a gorgeous video; a masterpiece and a look in a new direction for a great young artist
WHITE HEART (Daniel Barnett, 1975) - belligerent and beautiful

4. Doc Films:
SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD, SECTION 4 (Stan Brakhage, 1970) - the best old film-on-film I saw this year; all the sections were brilliant, of course, but Section 4 really did something amazing

5. Chicago Underground Film Festival:
TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI) (Ben Russell, 2009)
HONORABLE MENTION & THE CITIZENS (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2009)

6. Conversations at the Edge:
SUMMER SOLSTICE (Hollis Frampton, 1974)

7. Chicago Filmmakers:
DIALOGUES (Owen Land, 2009) - confusing and a little sad; but probably also great… maybe
LIGHT SPEED (Karen Johannesen, 2007)

8 and 9. University of Chicago’s Film Studies Center & The Experimental
Film Club:
NO SIR, ORISON! (Owen Land, 1975)

10. Bank of America Cinema:
VERBOTEN! (Sam Fuller, 1958)

**********

DOUG McLAREN

2009 was a busy, frightful year for me. Between starting a new job, becoming addicted to bubblegum and garbage (cinematically speaking, at least), and an uncanny ability to forget about screenings until their showtimes, I managed to see few films this year. A tragedy, when one considers the great number of excellent films to have been screened in Chicago this past year. As such, I’m splitting my list in two - what I wish I saw and what I did see.

THE YEAR THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN:

SILENT LIGHT (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)
SUMMER HOURS (Olivier Assayas, 2008)
CHE (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)
D’EST (Chantal Akerman, 1993)
JULIA (Erick Zonca, 2008)
PRIVILEGE (Peter Watkins, 1967)
LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY (Ben Russell, 2009)
LORNA’S SILENCE (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2008)
MOON (Duncan Jones, 2009)
DIALOGUES (Owen Land, 2009)
JE T’AIME, JE T’AIME (Alain Resnais, 1968)
THE KEEP (Michael Mann, 1983)
THE HUMAN CONDITION (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-61)
WENDY & LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
BIGGER THAN LIFE (Nicholas Ray, 1956)

THE YEAR THAT WAS:

PIE PELLICANE JESU DOMINAE* (Bruce McClure, 2009)
ANTICHRIST (Lars Von Trier, 2009)
THE HURT LOCKER (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)
I LOVE YOU, MAN (John Hamburg, 2009)
ADVENTURELAND (Greg Mottola, 2009)
UNDERWORLD USA (Samuel Fuller, 1961)
THE TIME MACHINE (Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat, 2009)
PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (Albert Lewin, 1951)
BERNADETTE (Duncan Campbell, 2008)
LIGHT SPEED (Karen Johannesen, 2007)
CHROMATIC COCKTAIL (Kerry Laitala, 2009)

**********

LIAM NEFF

Top 5 Newish 2009

YOU, THE LIVING (Roy Andersson, 2007)
ANTICHRIST (Lars von Trier, 2009)
LORNA’S SILENCE (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2008)
LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY (Ben Russell, 2009)
LA DANSE (Frederick Wiseman, 2009)

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JOE RUBIN

TOP 10 NEW RELEASES:

A SERIOUS MAN (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009)
THE BEACHES OF AGNES (Agnes Varda, 2009)
THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)
IMPORT/EXPORT (Ulrich Seidl, 2007)
INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
LA DANCE (Frederick Wiseman, 2009)
THE LIMITS OF CONTROL (Jim Jarmusch, 2009)
PRECIOUS (Lee Daniels, 2009)
SPREAD (David Mackenzie, 2009)
TWO LOVERS (James Gray, 2008)

TOP 10 REP SCREENINGS (compiled based on rarity and quality, but more so rarity):

THE CRAZIES (George Romero, 1973) Doc Films
DAY OF WRATH (Carl Dryer, 1927) Doc Films
JOHNNY GUITAR (Nicholas Ray, 1954) Music Box
MARNIE (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) Music Box
MESSIAH OF EVIL (Willard Huyck/Gloria Katz, 1973) Doc Films
PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (Frank Perry, 1972) Doc Films
PRIVILEGE (Peter Watkins, 1967) Doc Films
SING A SONG OF SEX (Nagisa Oshima, 1967) Gene Siskel Film Center
SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (Fritz Lang, 1947) Gene Siskel Film Center
TEOREMA (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968) Gene Siskel Film Center

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BEN SACHS

Best New Chicago Releases of 2009

Domestic:

1. SPREAD (David Mackenzie, 2009)
2. THE LIMITS OF CONTROL (Jim Jarmusch, 2009)
3. TWO LOVERS (James Gray, 2008)
4. LA DANSE (Frederick Wiseman, 2009)
5. CHE / THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE / THE INFORMANT! (tie) (Steven Soderbergh, 2008-2009)
6. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
7. LET EACH ONE GO WHERE HE MAY (Ben Russell, 2009)
8. CHELSEA ON THE ROCKS (Abel Ferrara, 2008)
9. CORALINE (Henry Selick, 2009)
10. THE MERRY GENTLEMAN (Michael Keaton, 2009)

Foreign:

1. SILENT LIGHT (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)
2. SING A SONG OF SEX [a.k.a. A TREATISE ON JAPANESE BAWDY SONGS] (Nagisa Oshima, 1967)
3. SERBIS (Brillante Mendoza, 2008)
4. BURMA VJ (Anders Ostergaard, 2008)
5. THE HEADLESS WOMAN (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
6. SUMMER HOURS (Olivier Assayas, 2008) and LORNA’S SILENCE (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2008) (tie)
7. SPARROW (Johnnie To, 2008)
8. IMPORT/EXPORT (Ulrich Seidl, 2007)
9. PONYO (Hayao Miyazaki, 2008)
10. YOU, THE LIVING (Roy Andersson, 2007)

As this first decade of the century closes, I’m shocked when I realize how rapidly digital technology became omnipresent in our lives. This goes well beyond reliance on computers, which evolved, in my lifetime, from luxury to commonplace item to virtual necessity—to an ever-present wall of text messages, mp3 players, public TV screens and up-to-the-minute headlines. Living in a modern city, few things feel as exotic now as an hour of uninterrupted thought: The noise was always there, but every day there are new diversions to contend with, many of them purchased under the impression they’d make life simpler. These aren’t novel observations, but I wonder if we’ve done anything to really counter the wave of distraction. Thanks to Facebook and web forums, the nonstop progress of the Information Age shapes even our most personal concept of ourselves.

In this climate, I find the movies to be a form of resistance as much as an art. The cinema is one of the few places left where you’re told to turn off your cell phone, making even the lousiest movie a satisfying experience if seen in a theater. But movies are also refuge from the pace of the digital age (with the exception of those that contribute to it, of course), allowing us to simply observe life without the obligation to assimilate it as information. It’s for this reason that most of the movies listed here are either slow-paced or old-fashioned.

I don’t want to come across as praising movies because they’re good for you. Cinema remains the most valuable of modern media because its first obligation is to astonish, and every film on these lists succeeded in that regard. (Analyses comparing movies to TV shows and, increasingly, web videos are invariably denigrating.) While most of my favorites employed longer takes, often it was so that their subjects could regain mystery and wonder. This was certainly true of the films by Reygadas, Russell, Tarantino, Andersson, and Wiseman (probably the greatest living practitioner of this approach), all of which rewarded the patient spectator with fully realized environments to explore. The Jarmusch and the Seidl likened the spectator’s curiosity to political awareness, but no film made the connection as heartbreakingly real as BURMA VJ. On one level an important document of life under dictatorship, Ostergaard’s film was also a vital argument for the responsibility of images in the 21st century—and not only images made out of necessity (the webcasts made in secret by Burmese reporters), but also those made in solemn reflection (Ostergaard’s finished product, beautiful, sincere, and addressed to the viewer’s humanity).

SPREAD and TWO LOVERS (and THE MERRY GENTLEMAN, to a lesser extent) managed to evoke the 50s melodrama in their own idiom, deepening modern experience with a sense of buried tradition. But these movies—directed by two of the greatest English-language filmmakers working today—operated with such vitality that it was easy to overlook their sense of history. For Mackenzie and Gray every emotion, no matter how shameful or immature, can seem valuable if presented with the vibrancy of how it felt on first articulation. (This is also true of the new films by Assayas and the Dardennes, among the greatest French-language filmmakers working today.) If I rank SPREAD higher than any other release of 2009 it’s because of Mackenzie’s particular alchemy as a filmmaker, his ability to detect the complexity of human behavior in the most genre-bound or seemingly pornographic material, his balance of psychological insight and the visually beautiful.

As always, Chicago was host to many valuable experimental and revival screenings (thanks in part to the labors of my colleagues at this site). Special mention should be paid to Doc Films’ Taiwanese New Wave series and Bank of America’s revival of the unavailable I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE, but no series gave me more to reflect on than the touring Nagisa Oshima retrospective that came to the Film Center at the beginning of the year. Oshima remains controversial in his willingness to breach images of racism, sexism and brutality in the service of confronting national taboos: Indeed, SING A SONG OF SEX provoked the most heated post-film discussions of anything I saw this year. Our historical distance from the Vietnam War and our cultural distance from Japanese prejudice may have weakened the movie’s impact as allegory for U.S. audiences, but its stunning reach of the culture (from politics to advertising to architecture) was unrivaled by any other release of 2009.

Did the movies still offer a form of escape? Of course they did. PONYO and SPARROW were some of the most entertaining movies I’ve ever seen, and THE HEADLESS WOMAN and CHELSEA ON THE ROCKS were satisfyingly escapist in the sheer singularity of their auteurs. But even these films gave shape to contemporary experience (Tellingly, all four are to some extent about vanishing cultures), and at their best elevated it to a level of beauty untouched by progress. This was an exceptional year for moviegoing.

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IGNATIUS VISHNEVETSKY

Top 20:

Local screenings, theatrical releases, and national runs of new films, not counting screenings at this year’s Chicago International Film Festival.

1. TWO LOVERS (James Gray, 2008)
2. PUBLIC ENEMIES (Michael Mann, 2009)
3. SPREAD (David Mackenzie, 2009)
4. SPARROW (Johnnie To, 2008)
5. NIGHTWATCHING (Peter Greenaway, 2007)
6. ARMORED (Nimrod Antal, 2009)
7. GOODBYE SOLO (Ramin Bahrani, 2009)
8. THE INFORMANT! (Steven Soderbergh, 2009)
9. 24 CITY (Jia Zhang-ke, 2008)
10. MUNYURANGABO (Lee Isaac Chung, 2007)

11. THE LIMITS OF CONTROL (Jim Jarmusch, 2009)
12. THE INTERNATIONAL (Tom Tykwer, 2009)
13. FIGHTING (Dito Montiel, 2009)
14. CHELSEA ON THE ROCKS (Abel Ferrara, 2008)
15. SUMMER HOURS (Olivier Assayas, 2008)
16. INVICTUS (Clint Eastwood, 2009)
17. TOKYO SONATA (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)
18. THE FRONTIER OF DAWN (Philippe Garrel, 2008)
19. THE MERRY GENTLEMAN (Michael Keaton, 2008)
20. DUPLICITY (Tony Gilroy, 2009)

[Editor’s note: below is a significantly longer review of Frederick Wiseman’s new film for the week of 11/20/09 from contributor Ben Sachs]

Frederick Wiseman’s LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET (Documentary)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes

America’s greatest living filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, is also the most misunderstood. Often perceived, even by admirers, as formless or “objective,” he is in fact a canny formalist, the U.S. filmmaker closest in orientation to Jacques Rivette. Like Rivette, Wiseman favors long, drawn-out scenes interspersed with short sequences of mundane activity, adjusting the pace of movies so they approach that of daily life. In doing so, he’s opened up the moviegoing experience to encompass all experience: Coming out of a Wiseman documentary, life itself seems a great, ongoing film. When I interviewed Wiseman in 2003, he said the artist who’d influenced him most was Samuel Beckett—a surprise for anyone who thinks he’s simply a chronicler of institutions. Wiseman’s films are well known for refusing to provide any context for their images; this often has the Beckett-like effect of implying an inherent unknowability of human behavior. Little has been written about Wiseman’s distancing effects, which require the viewer’s intelligence for their impact (As in Warhol’s films, casual behavior seems increasingly unnatural the longer we look at it); but this is an understandable mistake when so many movies employ a visual shorthand, encouraging viewers not to watch closely at all.

In spite of receiving a relatively wide release for a Wiseman film (LA DANSE plays for a full week at the Music Box, whereas his last, STATE LEGISLATURE, screened only once at Chicago Filmmakers), LA DANSE may not convert many newcomers to his greatness. Its subject matter suggests a dry, tony appreciation of high culture—along the lines of the Phil Grabsky movies that get NPR licking its chops—and the minimal ad campaign hasn’t done much to challenge this notion. Wiseman satisfies these expectations in the first ten minutes of LA DANSE, with some perfectly framed images of group rehearsals that dutifully evoke Claude Renoir. After that, however, it becomes as unsettled as anything else he’s made. No dance is shown developed from inception to performance; Wiseman cuts between multiple groups in rehearsal (and rarely in chronological order), emphasizing the overall character of the Opera Ballet’s work. Interspersed as well are scenes in the administrative offices that recall the capitalist bent of Altman’s THE COMPANY and some singular images that belong to Wiseman alone—a baguette-cutting machine in the ballet’s cafeteria, an old brass pot used by a costume-shop seamstress as a dying kiln.

By the middle of the film, the accumulation of detail threatens to amount to little more than a demystification of seemingly immaculate art. (One should note, however, the sympathetic attention paid to skilled laborers employed at the Opera Ballet—a subtly radical statement about art’s egalitarian nature that brings to mind another recent documentary, Ben Niles’ extraordinary NOTE BY NOTE.) But, as in a Rivette film, something shifts in the final hour, giving this rich movie another, unexpected, dimension. Wiseman inserts a candid remark from the company’s artistic director: “The retirement age here is 40, but that’s 25 years before the nation grants retirement pay.” The imagination considers for a moment the disappointment a dancer must feel upon leaving the ballet, resigned for the next three decades to subsist at a second-choice day job. Wiseman interrupts this thought to return to a dance in rehearsal, more bittersweet than any we’ve yet seen in the film because we’re fully aware of the transience of its beauty. Everything in LA DANSE has a cosmic tinge to it now; the choreography revels in its own movement because it knows it cannot be preserved. We are in Samuel Beckett territory.

The film continues in this vein up through the wordless climax, one of the most audacious sequences in Wiseman’s career. It would be unfair to hint at its content; let it be said that it conveys the great mystery of culture—how it materialized out of the functions of civilization, how it’s been preserved over centuries, even millennia—with a minimum of shots and not a trace of self-importance. As to be expected with this most workman-like of directors, there isn’t an air of reverence about the film, either—but that’s not to say it isn’t one of the most beautiful released this year. Wiseman deserves to be ranked with Ford, Ozu, and Godard as one of the effortless great frame-composers in cinema. Nearly every image of his work illustrates (in perfect harmony, with only the essential details) relationships between individual, environment, and action. In LA DANSE, Wiseman applies his skill to the abstract, the immemorial, without ever sacrificing his ability to see the world as if for the first time. (2009, 159 min, BlueRay projection) BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.

Police work, taken as a whole, is boredom. Every now and then you make an arrest, but mostly there’s a lot of planning, bureaucracy, paperwork, procrastination. So maybe what Corneliu Porumboiu intends with POLICE, ADJECTIVE is to put all other films that’d dare to call themselves “procedurals” to shame; this is “police work” in the same sense that Pialat’s VAN GOGH is “art.” You remove the insecurity that drives a filmmaker to want to be “exciting,” and what you’re left with is a bunch of dour policemen shooting the shit and standing on street corners for hours at a time.

But there is, however, a peculiar excitement to Porumboiu’s film. What has been cut out, besides the usual business of crime or arrests, is the division between the subjects and the audience. There is an odd sensation to the film, as if we’re looking at the same things the characters are looking at and are experiencing the world the same way. Nearly every scene is constructed around this principle: before Dragos Bucur’s Cristi launches into his now-infamous dissection of the lyrics to Mirabela Dauer’s “Nu Te Parasesc Iubire,” the song is heard all the way through twice; when he reports that nothing happened during his stake-out, it’s only after we spend a good fifteen minutes watching that nothing happen; the ridiculousness of his boss asking his secretary to fetch a dictionary in the climax becomes even more obvious when we have to wait for several minutes for her to come back so that the conversation can be resumed.

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