Bruno Dumont’s BEYOND SATAN (France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday (3/24), 2:45pm and Wednesday (3/28), 6pm

In an unknown rural town along the coast, Guy (David Dewaele) kills Girl’s (Alexandra Lematre) stepfather who frequently abused her.  Guy goes on to perform both good and bad deeds, including a miracle that concludes the film.  With BEYOND SATAN, writer/director Bruno Dumont wants the audience to actively participate within the film.  Dumont creates the character of Guy for the viewer to interpret only through his actions; Dumont does not share the thoughts and feelings that drive him.  The camera does linger on Guy’s face and the beautiful coastal landscape at which he often stares, but each appears unreadable in its own distinct way.  Guy’s actions suggest that he is religious and possibly beyond human.  He disobeys society’s law as well as God’s law, however he may also be beyond our particular conceptions of good and evil.  In this way, Dumont encourages the viewer to speculate on the emergence of such conceptions and how they change over time.  It does appear that Guy and possibly Girl are a type of pilgrim, because they spend the majority of the film walking toward somewhere.  For Guy, his journey is to save Girl.  In an interview on the film last spring, Dumont said, “There is no God.  I am an atheist.  It is up to us to become God.  We need to be elevated, to become saints.  God alienates people from themselves.  Yes, my films are mystical, to make people feel the mystery, to inspire them to experience for themselves the miracle of existence.”  In BEYOND SATAN, the viewer can contemplate this miracle of existence and in particular how it forms (in) his or her mind.  (2011, 110 min, 35mm)

Gene Siskel Film Center

Sunday, March 25 at 2:45pm and Wednesday, March 28 at 8:15pm

GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING, directed by Corinna Belz, is a rare opportunity to witness the methodology of arguably the most prominent working painter today. The film has a languid pace that respects Richter’s meditative process, which seems at once random and exact. His newer abstract paintings are created by continually applying coats of paint to the canvas and using an oversized squeegee to smudge and scrape away at the surface to reveal the layers beneath. Richter treats his paintings as organic creatures that evolve on their own, and it’s intriguing to view the pieces at different stages of their development. Though Belz refrains from psychoanalyzing her subject, the film does give us some glimpse into Richter’s past, including his estrangement from his parents in East Germany; however, the intention of the film is spelled out in its title, and Richter is no less of an enigma at its conclusion. Known for being elusive and taciturn, and there are moments when it’s clear that Richter is perturbed by the camera’s presence. This touches on the irony of making a documentary about an artist whose work asks essential theoretical questions about photography, and by extension cinema.

Richter’s photo-paintings comment on the fallibility of the photographic medium, specifically its inability to accurately convey a scene or an event. In keeping with Susan Sontag’s writings on the subject, Richter is expressly concerned with the forces that exist outside the frame. At the same time, it’s precisely the verisimilitude of the medium that makes it so dangerous, thus Richter’s (literal) blurring of the image. This idea is illustrated to an almost absurd degree by Richter’s grey paintings, which instead of resembling a poorly developed photo become entirely “overexposed.”  Richter’s reticence throughout the film reflects a similar apprehension with the camera, a concern with the permanence of such a portrait. Interestingly, themes of memory and the passage of time are just as central to Richter’s more recent abstract paintings as his photorealistic work. It’s difficult to think of a contemporary artist whose early and late periods are so aesthetically inconsistent, yet thematically interconnected. Betz displays this diversity with handheld tracking shots that survey a series of paintings that function as a physical timeline of Richter’s work.

Richter himself did produce one film, titled VOLKER BRADKE (1966)— unsurprisingly, it is out of focus. Thankfully, GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING is not. (2011, 97 mins, HDCAM video)  -  Harrison Sherrod

GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER

Saturday, March 17, 7:00pm
Wednesday, March 21, 6:00pm

UNFORGIVABLE opens at a press conference, where an older man (André Dussollier) quotes Schopenhauer into a bank of microphones: “As I sit here, as the man my friends know, I cannot grasp the origin of my work, just as a mother cannot grasp the origin of the child in her womb.” The man, we quickly learn, is a bestselling novelist (“the king of neo-Gothic thrillers”) who is in the grip of a lengthy dry spell. He has relocated from Paris to Venice hoping for a period of productive solitude. Instead, he marries his much younger real estate agent, his daughter disappears with a drug-trafficking aristocrat, and he hires a young ex-convict to follow his wife, whom he suspects of infidelity. The plot moves with the rapidity and repertoire of the author’s chosen genre, with restlessly active camerawork capturing a rapid accumulation of events and characters. Yet, as the dense, centrifugal storylines threaten to become overwhelming, a tight thematic and symbolic weft of the film unfolds. UNFORGIVABLE takes the epigraphic Schopenhauer quote literally, spinning out the unfathomable events that precipitate the writer’s next work, and the equally unfathomable relationships among parents and children. An original and incisive treatment of the Kafkian theme of guilt and the literary work, UNFORGIVABLE takes its place among the finest of Téchiné’s films. (2011, 108 min, 35mm) PR

Jose Maria de Orbe’s AITA (Spain)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday (3/18), 5pm and Monday (3/19), 6pm

Several years ago, the Spanish artist and filmmaker Jose Maria de Orbe inherited his family’s ancestral home in the Basque country, dating back to the thirteenth century, from his father.  Working with nonprofessional actors and without a script, De Orbe focuses on the castle’s elderly caretaker, Luis Pescador, and his upkeep in addition to the caretaker’s conversations on dreaming and death with the local priest, Mikel Goneaga.  However De Orbe’s protagonist is the home itself, and he mixes fact and fiction to capture its history in his family and a larger public sphere.  Aspiring toward the depiction in the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo’s “No One Lives in the House Anymore,” De Orbe and cinematographer Jimmy Gimferrer bring the home alive again through light.  Using high definition video, they explore the nature of light as it moves through this space, questioning its source and potential meaning.  Ultimately, AITA is the filmmaker’s “tribute to light” and “legacy to [his] son.”  Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum will introduce and discuss the film at Monday’s screening. (2010, 85 min, 35mm)

GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER

Fri, Mar 16th 6pm,  Mon Mar 19th 6pm, Thu Mar 22nd 6pm

In this Béatrice Dalle vehicle scripted and directed by Patric Chiha, Dalle plays Nadia, an implausible, fashionable, Gödel-obsessed alcoholic mathematician who hangs out regularly with teen cypher Pierre (Isaïe Sultan). An obvious fan of the work of Claire Denis, Chiha adds a sub-Aronofsky understanding of advanced mathematics to this tale of unproductive cosmopolitan intimacy; one memorable late slow-motion sequence set in an imaginary, smoky club elegantly captures those momentary interactions which compose the dancefloor phenomenology. The filming locations (streets and parks of Paris; mountains of Austria) provide a scenic backdrop for the increasingly doomed Nadia’s plight. (2010, 110min, DigiBeta) MC

Jean-Marie Straub, Claire Denis and Jose Luis Guerín’s JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT 2011

GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER

Sunday, March 11, 5:00 pm
Wednesday, March 14, 6:00 pm

(France/Spain, 112 min.)

Championing the cause of digital filmmaking, the Jeonju International Film Festival has made a name for itself with its annual centerpiece, the Jeonju Digital Project, where it commissions three filmmakers to produce digital shorts to premiere at the festival. This year’s triumvirate – Claire Denis, Jean-Marie Straub, and Jose Luis Guerin – may have been the most prestigious to date. The three directors also have the greatest median age of any JDP class: 62, well above the thirty- to forty-something profile typical of past participants.

Straub’s 22 minute short An Heir is a brief adaptation of a novel by the early 20^th century writer Maurice Barres, about a young French doctor in German-occupied Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War. Interestingly, the 78-year old Straub films himself walking alongside the doctor as he talks at length about his professional and political struggles, as if Straub were his confidante. Like all of Straub’s previous films (most co-directed by his longtime collaborator, the late Danielle Huillet), it’s a work of intractable dignity, unyielding at first glance but surprisingly supple in how it shifts between modes of fiction and documentary, cinema and literary recitation.

Claire Denis’ To the Devil follows Denis and an actor to the border of French Guyana and Surinam, where Africans descended from escaped slaves have formed their own tribal community in the jungle, but are now being slowly pushed off their land since gold has been discovered. There’s not much of the sensual visuals or dreamy, associative editing that have made Denis a top-tier director; the film plays as raw anthropological research. But the premise is certainly promising for a feature replete with some of Denis’ favorite themes: life on the fringes of culture and community, the borders of human comprehension and endurance.

Easily the best of the three, Jose-Luis Guerín’s Memories of a Morning is shot entirely on the street outside his apartment window, where a musician neighbor fell to his death from the opposite building. Guerin weaves neighbor’s testimonials – heartbroken, perplexed, and somewhat fatalistic – with shots of the spot where the violinist’s body landed, returning again and again to the stark mark of absence in his community. He ultimately ends up in the man’s apartment, where traces of his depressed life remain – a volume of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, sketches, a lonely, half-finished wine glass. These phantom artifacts are cast in an afternoon glow of otherworldly beauty, as if light itself were the last word in the sum effects of our lives.

- Kevin B. Lee

Dominik Graf, Christoph Hochhausler and Christian Petzold’s THE DREILEBEN TRILOGY (Germany)

GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER

A prime contender for film(s) of the year, this German trilogy consists of three self-contained films each with a different director, interconnected by the threat of a criminal on the loose in the forest town of Dreileben. Taken all together, it amounts to a new, exciting take on the omnibus concept: the three pieces are perfectly self-sufficient, but their interplay of perspectives, both contradicting and complementary, yields an expanding universe of dramatic effects and interpretations. All screenings in HDCAM.

Christian Petzold’s BEATS BEING DEAD (DREILEBEN–ETWAS BESSERES ALS DEN TOD)

Saturday, March 10, 2:00 pm
Tuesday, March 13, 6:00 pm

Petzold’s piece is a teen dream of desire and deception cast under a Hitchcockian spell. While news of an escaped convict buzzes through town, a young hospital intern falls head over heels for an immigrant girl; their extended mating dance unleashes newfound reserves of lust, tenderness, jealousy and betrayal, all dealt with stunning swift force. Like Hitchcock, Petzold plays a meticulous game of perspective-shifting to tilt our sympathies back and forth between the two lovers until the point of irreparable damage is reached. To open this epic crime saga with a passing teenage romance is a ballsy flirtation with the frivolous. But to watch this section last brings the trilogy’s catalog of crimes squarely back home, placing sensational headline killings alongside the millions of emotional murders inflicted every day. (2011, 88 min)

Dominik Graf’s DON’T FOLLOW ME AROUND(DREILEBEN–KOMM MIR NICHT NACH)

Saturday, March 10, 3:45 pm
Wednesday, March 14, 6:15 pm

The story shifts to a female state psychologist assigned to help catch the escapee; but while staying in town with a college friend, her own past comes under scrutiny. The educated, well-to-do characters indulge in elaborately witty repartee, bourgeois mannerisms that ultimately yield to an undercurrent of jealousy and deceit. Easily the most scripted of the three entries, the swiftness of the dialogue is matched by that of the plotting, where multiple subplots swell like tide pools, offering sudden new dimensions of corruption and violence to the sleepy small town setting. Using a distinctly grainy 16 mm-like stock (the other segments are shot in crisp HD), the film’s look and feel resembles a faded photograph, as if to emulate the story’s account of memory and perception’s inherent distortions. (2011, 88 min)

Cristoph Hochhäusler’s ONE MINUTE OF DARKNESS (DREILEBEN–EINE MINUTE DUNKEL)

Saturday, March 10, 5:30 pm
Wednesday, March 14, 8:00 pm

An escaped, mentally disturbed convict roams the woods; when a retired cop joins the manhunt, he unspools disrupting discoveries about the original case. So far general sentiment has identified this as the weakest of the three (with Petzold’s film deemed the strongest), but I wonder if this judgment has something to do with its placement in the trilogy’s clean-up spot. Placed in lead-off, it’s liberated from the expectations of having to tie up the entire 270 minute affair; similarly the convict is liberated from his role as the peripheral bogeyman who haunts the main characters of the other films. What emerges is a chronicle of the modern day monster’s bittersweet interlude of freedom, a period where his thoroughly unfathomable motivations are finally free from the misapprehensions of others (including the other films). With an unsettling calm to his craft, Hochhäusler stares into the eyes of an existence orchestrated by an impenetrable mystery. (2011, 90 min)

- Kevin B. Lee

Saturday, 2pm

Béla Tarr’s starkest and most minimal feature starts by placing the story in a cryptic historical context. An unnamed narrator recounts a crucial episode in the life of Friedrich Nietzsche: after achieving enlightenment through his philosophy, the 45-year-old writer witnessed a man beating his horse; he was so overwhelmed by the sight that he stopped the man in his action, embraced the horse, and wept. Several days later, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with mental illness; he would return to the care of his mother and sisters and live the remaining ten years of his life in a near-catatonic state.

It’s worth retelling the anecdote at length because it contains more plot than anything that follows in THE TURIN HORSE. The film proceeds as a gradual shutting down, stripping itself of detail and bringing its momentum to a halt; it ends on a note of morbid finality, in silence and darkness. Is this an allegory for Nietzsche’s mental breakdown? Or does Tarr see in his breakdown an allegory for the end of civilization? Or is the film something else entirely? The direction–credited to Tarr and his wife, Ágnes Hranitzky–is careful and poker-faced; like all of Tarr’s films since DAMNATION, it’s rooted in slow, hesitant camera movements that approach every action like it were a 50-foot statue or the stuff of biblical verse.

The movie depicts an old man (possibly the one who beat that poor horse) who lives with his daughter on a small plot of land at the edge of world. They subsist on whatever they make from delivering goods with the horse-drawn cart. After their animal stops eating and refuses to walk, the two are effectively stranded; when a violent dust storm kicks up, they’re effectively shut into their little house. Each day becomes a repetition of simple, necessary acts. Dress, get water from the well, work a bit in the barn, eat a potato, drink some hooch. Over the course of five days they will be visited twice: first by a friend of the old man’s who claims the nearby townspeople have destroyed their own town and that the end of civilization is coming; secondly by a band of gypsies (or is it George Romero-esque scroungers?) who threaten to take all their water. At the end of this time they will exhaust all their resources–even fire–reaching a Job-like state of squalor; but never is the daughter’s commitment to her infirm father in doubt.

The average shot length is around five minutes. Tarr studies the minimal action and decor with exceeding fascination. The black-and-white cinematography is by Fred Kelemen, though the key player seems to be the Steadicam man, Tilman Büttner, the Herculean operator behind RUN LOLA RUN and Aleksander Sokurov’s single-take feature, RUSSIAN ARK. Büttner makes the camera skulk ghostily through the scene or else holds it in place before some elemental detail, such as the wrinkles of an old bed sheet hanging to dry. Some viewers will be hypnotized by the aesthetic; for them, it might feel as though Tarr has stopped time itself. (People who hate the movie will probably feel this way too.) The movie seems to be after an austere and irreproachable  cinematic beauty, comparable to what Robert Bresson was after in his final film, L’ARGENT; tellingly Tarr has claimed he’ll make no more films after THE TURIN HORSE. It’s premature to say whether Tarr has achieved so lofty a goal–just like it’s premature to say definitively what the movie is about. But this is certainly crucial viewing for how it utilizes the resources particular to film art–namely, the malleability of perspective and time’s passage–to create a theatrical experience like very few before it. (2011, 146 min, 35mm)

Thursday (10/13), 6:10pm

Most criticism, both pro and con, of Ceylan’s sixth feature will likely focus on the movie’s first half–a formally sustained 80 minutes that ranks among the more ambitious filmmaking of recent years. This section depicts the long night and weary morning spent looking for a corpse in the countryside of western Turkey, the sort of routine police business that most other movies would acknowledge in a few shots. Ceylan and his writers turn the investigation team’s banter into miniature dramas, drawing out the subtle differences between characters for humor and pathos. (One low-ranking officer–an oafish, walrus-looking type addressed mainly as “The Arab”–emerges as the blank page on which others must articulate their views.) And Ceylan’s camera meditates on the extraordinary hillsides where the action unfolds in super-long shots, often making the investigation seem like the work of insects. On a formal level, these moments are some of the most impressive use of HD video yet seen in movies, with Ceylan adjusting the color so meticulously that each quadrant of the frame seems to have been lit by a different sun. The movie is as sensitive to the subtleties of light as any Vermeer painting, noting the differences in effects of dusk, twilight, moonlight and dawn; indeed, the characters register much like the figures in painting do, as representations of facets of humanity. It’s often hard to think of them in more specific terms; Ceylan’s images seem to spill over into forever.

ANATOLIA is a deeply spiritual work, pondering subjects like murder and forgiveness against the enormity of all existence. Some viewers will reject the movie’s solemnity (in last week’s Chicago Reader J.R. Jones argued–and with full legitimacy–that it may put people to sleep), but in doing so they’ll overlook the warmth that’s no less crucial to Ceylan’s vision. There’s an extraordinary sequence about an hour in, in which the team decides to break from their search and catch some sleep at a village mayor’s home. Shooting in medium shots that create a sharp contrast to what’s come before, Ceylan fills the scene with the minutiae of everyday life: the conversations, conducted in a distinctly Turkish form of communal kibitzing, concern repairs to the village generator and keeping tabs on the young people. It’s a refuge from the eternal perspective that’s shaped the movie till now, and it inspires a feeling of gratitude towards the routine comforts (work, family, hot tea) that keep us from obsessing over our place in the universe.

Just as life is not one long bout of existential dread, neither is it an unbroken chain of simple pleasures; and ultimately one defines his or her humanity by reconciling these two extremes. The final hour of ANATOLIA attempts to do just that, and the movie loses none of its wonder by switching his focus to everyday life. There are no long-shots  here, hardly any intimations of eternity: indeed, the movie ends with an autopsy. But those early sequences still weight heavily on the action, as do the humble musings of Nusrat, the town prosecutor who takes part in the investigation. A handsome man defined a fatherly mustache and unpretentious speech, Nusrat (or “Mr. Prosecutor,” as everyone addresses him) is the movie’s heart and soul, a calming figure to the more hotheaded cops and a spiritual confessor to the intellectual doctor who performs the autopsy. Clearly, he’s devoted years to judging criminal behavior impartially, and his skepticism has been refined into a detached, forgiving beatitude. He may be the closest movie equivalent to Faulkner’s immortal Gavin Stevens, a workaday philosopher trying as practically as he can to serve mankind. (2011, 150 min, 35mm widescreen)

Saturday (10/15), 5pm and Sunday (10/16), 6:20pm

A 15-year-old girl obsessed with masturbation and phone sex has a life-changing year in which she experiments with hitchhiking, smoking hash, and coming on to boys: what’s not to like? Despite the potential prurience of its subject matter, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s first feature plays the material for light comedy, presenting kids as inherently curious and capable of learning from their mistakes. In fact, it develops much like any typical coming-of-age movie from the U.S.; what distinguishes it is its sexual candor, which would be impossible in an American film without some punitive moralizing to go along with it. The movie is fairly charming in its depiction of the small-town setting and some of the adult characters (the heroine’s frumpy single mother is particularly well-observed: she has hobbies that have nothing to do with parenting or her job), displaying both affection and adolescent disdain in a manner appropriate to its subject. This will likely please fans of John Hughes. (2011, 76 min)