CRUCIAL VIEWING
Douglas Sirk's A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE (Classic Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Friday, 8pm
When someone tells you that they like Douglas Sirk, you have to ask which one they mean. Since he made his last feature almost five decades ago, there have developed at least two distinct Sirks in the heads of filmgoers. There is, most commonly, the facile Sirk, the ironic and mocking Sirk. And then there is the elusive, secret, and true Sirk, an empathetic, unironic student of Brecht. So which is the right one? The answer is mostly the second one, with a little of the first: Sirk was an earnest filmmaker intelligent enough to be critical of the world his characters lived in (or, we should say, were forced to live in) without ever being too critical of people themselves. As the famous metaphor about his work goes, the people in his films are blind and we are watching their reflection, which they of course can't see; we only have a reflection to go by, so we can't completely understand them, either. Made for Universal in 1957 on location in West Germany, A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE (Sirk's second to last feature film) is, possibly, his greatest film. Adapted from the Erich Maria Remarque novel of the same title, this Story of a Three Week Pass begins at the Eastern Front, where Wehrmacht soldiers see last year's corpses appearing in the thawing snow as "the first sign of spring," watch as condemned partisans dig their own graves and cover up their comrades' suicides so their outfit doesn't look bad. Ernst (John Gavin) is given three weeks leave and a package of food, returning to a town that at first looks like the Cinemascope version of the peace time village in Lubitsch's THE MAN I KILLED, until we see the bombed-out buildings that casually frame the landscape. There is a beautiful girl (Swiss actress Lilo Pulver) and the problem of finding Ernst's missing parents. A man calmly carries an heirloom grandfather clock down the stairs of a burning building, a boy floats a toy boat in the flooded remains of a bombed-out building: A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE is, like its title, a juxtaposition of doom and ordinary longing, an illustration of how war (and, by extension, all socio-political forces) is inescapable for ordinary people, while soldiers, as one character points out, have the benefit of retreating from it. In the end, the matter of which part is love and which is death becomes so confused that Ernst is forced to consult Remarque himself, appearing in a proto-Godardian turn as The Professor (or it's possible to say that Godard's use of public figures, including himself, is Sirkian; after all, his enthusiastic review of A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE was one of the only serious considerations of the director written before the late 1960s). This is a beautiful, ugly, complicated film and it's downright criminal that it isn't available on DVD in this country; in short, it's the definition of essential viewing. (1957, 132 min, 35mm) IV
- - -
More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Full text of Bright Light's 1977 issue on Sirk, which coincided with the first major US retrospective of his work, here.
xx
The Cinema of David Lean, Part II: Late Films (Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes noted below
Sadly, Lean is all too often characterized as an intellectual disciplinarian, akin to Kubrick, letting nothing stand in the way of the meticulous framing and editing that were his overriding preoccupations. Yet those are only elements of his aesthetic sense. Approaching his films with an open mind, it's possible to be surprised by the sheer emotional content at their center. Make no mistake, Lean's work can be every bit as sensual as anything by Bertolucci or even Antonioni. Take, for example, DR. ZHIVAGO (1965, 197 min, 35mm archival print; Sunday, 3pm and Thursday, 6:30pm). We know that something very peculiar and kinky is going on between Rod Steiger and Julie Christie. Their glances and the tones in their voices hint at something approaching S & M. Lean's (and screenwriter Robert Bolt's) genius lies in sketching in only the barest minimum of their relationship, allowing our imaginations to fill in what happens off-screen. In the onscreen department, Zhivago's ice palace is surely a sexual metaphor, and when seen in a theater not a subtle one at that. The film's ending contains the most poignant moment: When Zhivago impotently strives to catch up with Lara after glimpsing her on a street his helplessness is palpable enough to shorten your breath. Also this week are two of Lean's under seen rarities: HOBSON'S CHOICE (1954, 107 min, 35mm archival print; Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 9pm) and THE SOUND BARRIER (1952, 116 min, 35mm archival print; Saturday, 5:15pm and Monday, 6pm). The former features a boisterous yet empathetic performance by the great Charles Laughton. It's a witty satire that cheerfully lampoons middle class domestic relationships. Cine-File contributor Christy LeMaster writes that SOUND BARRIER "is an often unsubtle exploration of the early fifties' uneasy relationship with the technology ushered in by the atomic age. While highly intellectual, the movie is also almost schoolboyishly fascinated by the technology of jet propulsion. We see a detailed laboratory test of a fiery jet engine. Characters refer to the de Havilland plane manufacturer as their competition and Lean composes long flying sequences full of clear sky vistas and claustrophobic cockpit shots that play as a handbook for the TOP GUN-esque action genre films to come decades after." RC/CL
- - -
More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
xx
MATAHARIS (New Spanish)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday and Monday, 8:15pm
MATAHARIS has been selected to open the Siskel Center's Festival of New Spanish Cinema, but its Chicago premiere would be eventful in any circumstance. It's the first film in four years by actress-turned-director Icíar Bollaín, whose last, TAKE MY EYES (2003), was a minor miracle of contemporary cinema--a domestic violence drama that eschewed simple outrage in favor of a patient humanism sympathetic towards abuser and abused. MATAHARIS finds Bollaín in lighter spirits, juggling the stories of three female detectives having trouble separating their work and their love lives. According to the program summary, one story follows a woman named Inés in her undercover assignment to spy on union operatives. The premise sounds like a golden opportunity for Bollaín to show her strong feeling for female characters and working-class environments that made TAKE MY EYES so remarkable. And with cinematographer Kiko de la Rica (who brought a memorably warm look to SEX AND LUCIA) behind the camera, the film is certain to look great. Maria Vázquez, who was nominated for a Goya Award for her performance as Inés, will attend Friday night's screening. (2007, 95 min, 35mm) BS
- - -
More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
xx
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Michael Almereyda's PARADISE (work-in-progress) (Experimental)
Chicago Cinema Forum at The Nightingale – Thursday, 8pm
Director Michael Almereyda consistently works in the margins between commercial narrative, documentary, and experimental. His 1992 feature ANOTHER GIRL ANOTHER PLANET was shot with a Fisher Price Pixelvision camera; his more recent documentaries THIS SO-CALLED DISASTER (chronicling the rehearsals of a Sam Shepard play) and WILLIAM EGGLESTON IN THE REAL WORLD (about photographer Eggleston) veer more toward the essayistic and observational rather than familiar talking-head forms; his 1994 vampire film NADJA perhaps owes more to Andre Breton than Bram Stoker. Almereyda's new film, PARADISE, is an episodic "sketchbook" work in an experimental-documentary mode, showing in a nearly completed work-in-progress version. "Friends and strangers, kids and adults, are featured in roughly equal proportions, in settings split between familiar American cities - New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans - and unlikely, far-flung places: Tehran, Krakow, Seoul. The film's fragmentary nature is held in check by thematic contrasts and links - between innocence and experience; art and commerce; searching and finding." Almereyda will be in person at the screening and hopes for more of a discussion on the film, wanting audience feedback and opinions, rather than the standard Q&A. (2008, video) PF
- - -
More info at www.chicagocinemaforum.org.
x
LA LEON (New Argentinean)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Filmed in a misty, chiaroscuro-laden black and white and with a fragmentary narrative built on elusive episodes, Santiago Otheguy's LA LEON recalls both backwoods noirs such as THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and early Italian neo-realist films. The pacing is slow, paralleling the mostly quiet life of the island inhabitants of the Parana Delta. But the quietness of the film, especially in the first half, masks the emotional struggles of the two leads--the reserved, bookish Alvaro (who is gay) and the rough boat captain El Turu (who is both repelled by and fascinated with Alvaro). Otheguy continually isolates his characters with cramped framings (through doors, windows, and foliage) or in extreme long shots: while this is a small, proud community it is also a hermetic one where we don't learn much about the inner lives of the people. Inference and suggestion are the keys. LA LEON is a beautiful, at times quite lyrical, film (the cinematography is stunning), which makes the seemingly inevitable violence--hinted at by a tone of uneasiness throughout--all the more powerful. It shares some of the same subtle desperation as fellow Argentinean Lisandro Alonso's LOS MUERTOS (and uses a mostly non-professional cast, as does Alonso), but does not quite reach the same level of fevered poeticism, opting instead for more of a minimalist romanticism. (2007, 79 min, 35mm) PF
- - -
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
x
12th Annual Festival of New French Cinema
Facets Cinémathèque – Showtimes noted below
The snow's on the ground and the Fullerton Avenue curbs are submerged in sooty slush, which can only signify one event: Facets' annual exhibition of recently-produced French films that you will never see again. Always straying far from the Deneuves, Depardieus and Tautous of the art houses, and frequently verging on an alien, quotidian atmosphere missing from most Gallic entries at domestic film festivals, thirteen features -- with an impressively egalitarian representation of strong female protagonists -- that are all but guaranteed to never be distributed to the U.S. With newly-struck 35mm prints and few English-language reviews available, one can trivially simulate the experience of aimlessly wandering into Parisian multiplexes. Some of the more promising presentations include THE VANISHING POINT (CE QUE MES YEUX ONT VU) (Saturday, 5pm and Sunday, 1pm), a nerd thriller which revises the farfetched DA VINCI CODE by casting the acclaimed Sylvie Testud as an art history grad student on a dangerous quest for knowledge that endangers not her existence via the deadly Opus Dei sect, but her relationship with her thesis advisor; LA VIE D' ARTISTE (Sunday, 5pm), a light comedy for aesthetes enmeshed in the contradictions of capitalism, co-starring the divergent but brilliant dramatic talents of Emilie Duquenne (of the Dardennes classic ROSETTA) and Denys Podalydes (who stole the show in 2006 fest entry LE PONT DES ARTS); and for those seeking less intellectual fare, one could really do worse than THE MAIDEN AND THE WOLVES (LA JEUNE FILLE ET LES LOUPS) (Saturday, 1pm and Thursday, 9pm), starring Victoria's Secret model Laetitia Casta and a cast of wild dogs in what Variety touted as "some of the finest lupine thesping ever committed to celluloid." Additionally, directors Yamina Benguigui and Vincent Dietschy will be on hand for Q&As after screenings of their respective features, 9-3: THE MEMORY OF A TERRITORY (Saturday, 7pm) and DIDINE (Saturday, 9:15pm and Sunday, 3pm). MC
- - -
More info at www.facets.org.
x
Raúl Ruiz's KLIMT (New International)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Raúl Ruiz is a fascinating and sometimes maddening filmmaker. Director of over a hundred works for film and television, he is perennially interested in adapting great works of literature or art to the screen. One of his first projects was a film version of Franz Kafka's THE PENAL COLONY, and he is perhaps best known for adapting, or should one say attempting to adapt, Marcel Proust's TIME REGAINED. (It is an incredibly unwieldy text for any medium but the textual one.) Ruiz is, however, at his heart a B-movie director. One might argue that he has A-list sets and costumes, and he does. But on average he still churns out, and often writes, two to three movies a year. The results are never short of intriguing. Ruiz's KLIMT is a lush retelling of artist Gustav Klimt's life as remembered and possibly fantasized from his deathbed. Klimt's memories are infused with touches of his own painting à la Tim Burton's ED WOOD. There is an entrancing meeting between Klimt and pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès near the beginning of the film that helps inject the image, if not the soul, of the dancer Lea de Castro into Klimt's life. And throughout the film there is a playful pas-a-deux between Klimt's style as a painter and KLIMT's style as photographed and edited moving image. It is the film's strength, for true to his roots as B-movie director Ruiz is devoted to these images in a way in which he isn't to the dialogue or plot. (2006, 131 min director's cut, 35mm) WS
- - -
More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
xx
Ron Rice's THE FLOWER THIEF (Experimental)
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 8pm
Cribbing from J. Hoberman's Village Voice blurb: "A founding work of underground movies, Ron Rice's North Beach picaresque used army-surplus 16mm to document Taylor Mead's wistfully infantile antics. Unscripted and genuinely haphazard, The Flower Thief posited life as a movie. It was praised in these pages by Jonas Mekas for exhibiting "the utmost disrespect for the professional camera, plot, character conventions." And from David Curtis' Experimental Cinema: A Fifty-Year Evolution: "His [Rice's] first film The Flower Thief was shot in San Francisco, starring his and Vernon Zimmerman's discovery, Taylor Mead, who became the epitome of the underground non-actor star. Rice dedicated The Flower Thief to the 'wild man'--the anarchic comic genius of the silent movies, but it pays equal tribute to the spirit of the Beat poets in San Francisco at that time." (1960, 75 min, 16mm)
- - -
More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
xx
TROPIC THUNDER / CHRISTMAS ON MARS (New Narrative / Cult)
Doc Films – Friday, 6:30, 8:45, 11pm; Sunday, 3pm (THUNDER)
Music Box – Friday & Saturday, midnight (MARS)
In the small town of Bagaces, Costa Rica, the Ben Stiller vehicle NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM was the most popular film of 2007, playing at its one cinema for six months straight. Indeed. For at least a generation, the United States' most profitable exports have been high-tech weaponry and shallow entertainment--a bizarre state of affairs, to say the least. Stiller's TROPIC THUNDER (2008, 107 min, 35mm widescreen), which he also co-wrote and directed, comments on the situation with a parable about inept Hollywood types inadvertently fighting a guerilla army in southeast Asia. The gags are mostly scatological, but Stiller also works in a lot of scathing movie parodies. Oliver Stone and BLACK HAWK DOWN are favored targets, but the underlying subject may be the culture responsible for them, made here to seem pathologically unable to imagine combat outside of movie clichés. The reference-heavy humor results in something of a cinematic labyrinth, not unlike that of SOUTHLAND TALES, that often comes close to resembling the stuff it supposedly parodies (as per Ray Pride's accusation). Saving the movie from eating its own tail is Robert Downey, Jr.'s supporting performance. As a deeply invested piece of acting that draws inspiration from the themes of the film and takes them in stranger, unexpected directions, it's a worthy heir to achievement's like Peter Sellers' Chance the Gardener or Nicolas Cage's work in VAMPIRE'S KISS.
- - -
Another intentional cult movie of 2008 was Wayne Coyne's CHRISTMAS ON MARS (2008, 82 min, 35mm), a quasi-home movie that Coyne somehow got Warner Brothers to bankroll for eight years. It's an admitted pastiche of classic head films like ERASERHEAD and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (and just as epically private a piece of filmmaking), best enjoyed as a public experience. In fact, the movie premiered "on tour" with various music festivals this summer, projected inside a tent specially designed by Coyne himself. Not surprisingly, the sound mix (by Coyne's band The Flaming Lips and their regular producing genius Dave Fridmann) is extraordinary, with some of the incidental music ranking as the Lips' most adventurous since their 1996 album Zaireeka. That work was also intended to be experienced communally, and the strategy is obviously significant for Coyne. Both Zaireeka and CHRISTMAS ON MARS are founded on idealistic sentiments that seem ridiculous on the page (the movie, certainly, doesn't hold up to critical scrutiny) but can be nonetheless inspiring when contemplated with a sympathetic crowd. The premise? A Martian with superpowers (played by Coyne) brings Christmas joy to a lonely American space station. As silly as it sounds, it still allows for some great dreamlike images--and, again, many gorgeous sounds. BS
- - -
More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu and www.musicboxtheatre.com.
X
BEAUTY IN TROUBLE (New Czech)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Their 1999 collaboration COZY DENS (PELÍSKY) having screened at Facets this past October, the writing and directing pair of Czech auteurs Petr Jarchovský and Jan Hrebejk return to Chicago screens with their latest film, BEAUTY IN TROUBLE (KRASKA V NESNAZICH). The film's title comes from a Robert Graves poem of the same name, which begins with: "Beauty in trouble flees to the good angel / On whom she can rely / To pay her cab-fare, run a steaming bath, / Poultice her bruised eye." The poem has been translated into Czech and set to music, acting as thematic anchor for the film. BEAUTY IN TROUBLE takes place during the flooding of Prague in August of 2002, which forced fifty thousand people to evacuate the city as floodwater damaged historic cultural landmarks. Displaced by these floods, Marcela, the titular Beauty, finds herself torn between two men: Jarda, her car thief husband and father of their two children, and Evzen Benes, a wealthy businessman who offers to take care of Marcela and her kids. Marcela is forced to choose between the primal, passionate love of her husband and the secure, nurturing environment this new man provides. To which angel does Beauty ultimately flee? (2006, 110 min, 35mm) DM
- - -
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
x
Epic Journey: New Curator's Fest (Experimental / Special Event)
The Nightingale – Saturday and Sunday, 5, 7, and 9pm each day
Six different programs curated by students in the "How to Program and Curate Film and Video" class at SAIC. Okay, the shows are a class project, but, considering the lack of a budget, the large number of works from the Video Data Bank, and that this is likely the first time curating for most or all of the students, the programs look quite interesting. Generally framed around thematic positions (works on food issues, Asian-American makers, web-based art), most of the programs are anchored by well-known local, national, or international artists, including Jennifer Reeder, Jennifer Montgomery, George Kuchar, Zbigniew Rybczynski, Michael Robinson, and others, but there are also a healthy number of unknown makers--it's nice to see that there was not a reliance on the familiar. The curators, who are expected to be in person, are Casey Gibbs and John Lou; Sasha Samochina and Danielle Kramer; Mirek Choma and Tommy Heffron; Dain Oh; Holly Foster and Michael Cone; and Kevin Ronn. PF
- - -
More info at
www.nightingaletheatre.org.
x
Gus Van Sant's MILK (New Narrative)
Landmark Century & River East 21 – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
I hope you have heard and will hear a lot about MILK. I hope the talk focuses more attention on the brilliant 1984 documentary THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK, which has not been seen enough. Likewise, Harvey Milk's courageous campaign for San Francisco City supervisor and for a more honest, open, and tolerant United States ought to be remembered and celebrated, perhaps now more than ever before. What hasn't been as widely discussed is just how conventional the film is. The word "conventional" has quietly snuck its way into a wide variety of reviews that often and understandably focus on the movie's topical importance and Sean Penn's performance. For instance Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern and the Chicago Tribune's Michael Philips forgive the film it's conventionality, while Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan and The Onion AV critic Scott Tobias are two of the few who take the film to task. On one hand MILK's conventional structure isn't surprising, director Gus Van Sant has tended to either make art house pictures (think of ELEPHANT or LAST DAYS) or mainstream movies (think of GOOD WILL HUNTING). He doesn't ever seem to mix the two. But then on the other hand it is a revelation that at roughly the same time Proposition 8 passed in Harvey Milk's California the movie-going public is ready for a conventional biopic with an openly gay hero. Here is a movie that is devoid of double address. Each and every line and image in the film has the potential to denote the same thing regardless of the audience member's education or sexual preference. BROKE BACK MOUNTAIN cannot claim that. So today I stand in praise of the conventional. Today the conventional has an opportunity to have meaning and strong purpose. Bravo, MILK. (2008, 128 min, 35mm) WS
x
MORE SCREENINGS & EVENTS:
Also showing this week in the New Spanish Cinema series at the Film Center is Félix Viscarret's UNDER THE STARS (Saturday, 8pm and Tuesday, 8:15pm); and the final film in the "First Transition" series is Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece THE RULES OF THE GAME (Friday and Wednesday, 6pm; Jonathan Rosenbaum lecture on Wednesday).
James Cagney stars in Henry Hathaway's 1947 spy-flick 13 RUE MADELEINE at the Bank of America Cinema on Saturday at 8pm.
The Goethe-Institut Chicago video projects Faith Akin's IM JULI (IN JULY) on Thursday at 6pm.
Also at the Music Box this week is a single screening of the documentary AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL (Tuesday, 7:30pm); another return of REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA Friday and Saturday at midnight; and George Cukor's 1944 GASLIGHT in the Mystery matinee slot, Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am. |
