CRUCIAL VIEWING
Max Ophüls' LOLA MONTES & THE EXILE (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Frequently cited as containing some of the greatest tracking shots in cinema history, LOLA MONTES deserves to be admired on a big screen. This new print claims to be a "definitive restoration," but the film is spectacular in any condition. Ophüls' dance-like manipulations of time and space were consistently a sight to behold, and this film—his only work in color or widescreen—added even more dimensions to his art's majesty. A director of surfaces in the best sense, Ophuls found one of his most enduring subjects in the title character: a famous 19th century courtesan who had been the mistress of both Franz Liszt and King Ludwig I of Bavaria. In his Great Movies review, Roger Ebert calls attention to the film's formalism, noting that Ophuls' decision to present Lola's life as series of circus attractions "is as successful as it is daring. Using it to supply his narrative thread, Ophüls slides through a series of flashbacks with as much ease, and psychological completeness, as Welles exhibited in CITIZEN KANE. The structure of the film is terribly artificial—flashbacks suspended from a fantasy circus—and the style itself is a highly mannered romanticism. But it works; Ophüls understands and justifies his method." (1955, 110 min, 35mm widescreen) BS
---
Also showing this week is Ophuls’ THE EXILE, his first film directed in the U.S. It’s a historical adventure starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (1947, 95 min, 35mm)
---
More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Terence Davies' OF TIME AND THE CITY & Jia Zhang-ke's 24 CITY
(New International)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
In a canny bit of synchronization, the Siskel offers a chance to catch two extraordinary new variations of the "city symphony." OF THE TIME AND THE CITY (2008, 74 min, 35 mm from digital video) is Davies' elegiac history of growing up in Liverpool, spanning the 50s to the present, mixing vintage archival material with newer location footage. "We love the place we hate, and we hate the place we love," he says early in the movie. Like Guy Maddin in MY WINNIPEG he seems both nostalgic and bitter about his hometown, typified by a montage of gutted buildings and rubble-filled lots accompanied on the soundtrack by Peggy Lee lushly crooning "The Folks Who Live on the Hill." As he's done before, he contrasts the hardscrabble working class character of Liverpool with the fantasy world of escapism embodied by Hollywood movies and the occasional summertime seaside holiday. He rhapsodizes over Gregory Peck and Dirk Bogard, connecting his adolescent fascination with the concurrent realization that he was gay. His narration, blending slightly overripe stream-of-conscious remembrances with quotes from the likes of James Joyce and Engels, is like listening to a grumpy intellectual grandfather. But the wisdom and feeling buried beneath the sarcastic sourness is somehow oddly endearing. When he gripes about The Beatles and rock & roll displacing the smoothness of pop you're almost ready to agree with him. 24 CITY (2008, 107 min, 35mm from digital video) is altogether subtler and more slippery. Initially it appears to be a straightforward, albeit gorgeously shot, documentary about Factory 420, an enormous factory which produced aeronautic and military components for decades. Now the land upon which it sits in the city center has become so valuable that the entire factory is being dismantled to make way for 24 City, a giant complex containing an industrial park and five-star hotel. Then, about an hour in, Joan Chen shows up onscreen as one of the factory workers. Suddenly the veracity of everything that came before is called into question. Were all of the interviewees actually actors? Were they performing words taken from interviews with actual factory workers, or have we only been watching hearing skillfully written monologues? That ambiguity, in a film coming out of Communist China, is fairly subversive. One of the final interviews is with a young woman who has a job as a personal shopper, going to Hong Kong every two weeks to buy things for rich ladies who "have a taste for fashion but not the energy." The point is clear: the so-called "comradeship and solidarity" of the old ways are being replaced by the selfish and materialistic ways of the new generation. RC
---
More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival
Chicago Filmmakers – Showtimes noted below
Site-specific work fills Group Show 3 (Friday, 7pm). Robert Fenz makes the US/Mexico border a frighteningly dizzying endless crack in the earth in CROSSINGS. Pierre Yves Clouin fuzzes and fractures the titular city in the playful I’M A NEW YORK BASED ARTIST. Mary Helena Clark’s AFTER WRITING is a striking film of markings in an abandoned schoolhouse. Chris Kennedy plays with the inner and outer spaces of a self-portrait in the fantastic TAPE FILM. Perhaps the most fascinating work in this show is by the local Rob Ray, with the slightly sinisterly still and mysterious CANARIES IN THE COALMINE.
---
Group Show 4 (Friday, 9pm) kicks off with four amazing animated videos by T. Marie. In the simply elegant OPTRA FIELD III-VI white lines on a black field move at a barely perceivable speed. Two abstract videos by Yoel Meranda play with horizons and perspective and digital grain and the limits of computer color respectively. ATLANTIS by Pieter Geenen is a work of nocturnal spirits lingering on the banks of the Three Gorges Reservoir. BEIRUT 2/14/05 by Alexandra Cuesta is an odd film—shot on digital video and transferred to 16mm; it becomes less about the political events depicted and more about the qualities of the medium. Simply put, David Gatten’s masterpiece FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK CASE NO. 142: ABBREVIATION FOR DEAD WINTER [DIMINISHED BY 1,794] should not be missed.
---
Group Show 5 (Saturday, 5pm) features three amazing and distinct films about location. Local Ben Russell sends another cinematic missive from Suriname (after last year’s brilliant WET SEASON) with the single-take TRYPPS #6 (MALOBI). NOTHING IS OVER NOTHING by Jonathan Schwartz is a tremendous and delicate film shot in Israel. Intimate street scenes and landscape shots fill this beautiful contemplation of an unpredictable place. Naomi Uman films her new home and surroundings—her ancestral homeland in the Ukraine—in the humbly observant hour-long UNNAMED FILM.
---
The work in Group Show 6 (Saturday 7.30pm) is the most keen and delicate of the fest. Nicky Hamlyn’s SEQUENCES + INTERRUPTIONS is a study of shifts in tone and rhythm between the camera and the paintings being filmed. Charlotte Pryce’s THE PARABLE OF THE TULIP PAINTER AND THE FLY is a gorgeous film inspired by Dutch painters. Julie Murray’s YSBRYD is a sensual and humorous observation of slugs mating on the back porch. Vincent Grenier’s LES CHAISES watches the light and shadow fall on bright red lawn chairs. Two local image makers give us dazzling and fluid works—Jake Barningham’s LAKE and Carolyn Faber’s POSTCARD #3: NIAGARA RISES.
---
Group Show 7 (Saturday 9.15pm) features a nice mix of familiar names and new artists. PARIS TIMES THREE by Carina Johnson places Paris Hilton into the structure of Bruce Conner’s “Marilyn Times Five,” Johnson creating a playful and whip-smart video work. Another remake (of sorts) is Jessie Stead’s POOR MAN’S PUCE MOMENT, which takes the soundtrack from the Kenneth Anger film and a wholly different set of colorful adornments for a wholly different feminine figure. Van McElwee’s excellent ALTERNITY flattens perspective and merges action through digital manipulation—what might just be a formal exercise has the power to creepily suggest a dehumanized world. Jim Trainor’s distinct and amazing animation style and primal imagery is on full display in THE PRESENTATION THEME. JM
---
More info at: www.chicagofilmmakers.org/onion_fest/onion2.html.
Note: this event is programmed by C-F editor Patrick Friel.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Francis Ford Coppola's TETRO (New American)
Landmark Century Centre Cinema – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Let's get one thing straight: Francis Ford Coppola has always made infuriating films. THE GODFATHER films and THE CONVERSATION are anomalies in a career filled with hysterics, personal expressionism, and creative anachronism; there isn't that great of a gulf between Coppola and Guy Maddin. If a true Coppola exists, it's a film like TETRO. A film about an unfinished work of literature (maybe a novel, maybe a memoir) that in the end gets staged as a play, made with a meter that suggests Coppola is faithfully adapting a dense novel. With the exception of Vincent Gallo (in the title role as an Italian-American living in Argentina), every actor plays a "character" in the literary sense and the film constructs itself out of the influences of not just Michael Powell (whose work plays a key role in the plot and serves as the basis for its Freudian dance scenes), but out of the illustrative tradition of pre-1970s British cinema. Every image—from the black and white HD to the symbolic color sequences—is not an expression on its own, but an attempt to express something that could've been written: an imaginary adaptation. (2009, 127 min, 35mm) IV
---
More info here.
Chan-wook Park’s LADY VENGENANCE (Contemporary South Korean)
Chicago Cultural Center – Wednesday, 6:30pm
While we wait for Park's latest, THIRST, to receive a U.S. release, we can enjoy a public screening of LADY VENGEANCE, which last played in Chicago nearly three years ago. A response of sorts to Quentin Tarantino's KILL BILL cycle, this is a flamboyant tale of revenge centered on an iconic female lead—another scorned woman who must defeat an evil man before reuniting with her daughter. Park is one of the most entertaining filmmakers working today—Like Tarantino or the P.T. Anderson of BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA, each shot is a designed as an elaborate stylistic challenge—making this screening a must-see for the uninitiated. Overall, the film gets marred by the Hollywoodism that's come to define international blockbusters in recent years (Think of it as a blood-drenched AMELIE), but Park's subsequent work—I'M A CYBORG, BUT THAT'S OK and his entry in the omnibus film THREE... EXTREMES—marked a welcome return to the brazen weirdness of his earlier films. Still, there are enough movie-movie moments in LADY VEGEANCE to get drunk on, so this free screening is likely the cheapest fun you can have all week. (2005, 112 min, DVD projection) BS
---
More info here.
John Ford’s YOUNG MISTER LINCOLN (Classic Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Wednesday, dusk (approx. 9pm)
Given John Ford's stature in world cinema, it's easy to forget that the first twenty-one years of his career were undistinguished by the standards of his later films. Certainly there were great films during that period (particularly his Will Rogers films), but it wasn't until 1939, with a trio of early masterpieces, that the core of what would define his style and thematic complexity would emerge. STAGECOACH, DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK, and, especially, YOUNG MR. LINCOLN would see the synthesis of elements that had appeared scattershot in his previous films: a sense of epic and history; an Americana tinged as much by darkness as it was by nostalgia; a growing sense of moral ambiguity; and a visual style that sets his heroes apart from those around them. Ford's characters are often dominated by space—usually in the vast expanses of the West—but even in YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, which feels more like a backwoods and courtroom chamber piece, Henry Fonda's Abe Lincoln is frequently cut off from others, through lighting, through camera movement, and through Fonda's studied posing which works to create mini-tableaux within the shot. Ford is walking a thin line between heavy-handed mythologizing and punctuating a sense of historical foreshadowing and inevitability. Of course, he succeeds and creates a tension that falls between a near-parody of the Lincoln myth and a grandeur that hints at the larger historical events to come that dwarf even Lincoln. Ford had reached a union of style and vision which itself foreshadowed things to come. (1939, 100 min, DVD projection) PF
---
More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Martin Provost’s SÉRAPHINE (New French)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
What is SÉRAPHINE? It’s shoes clicking on cobblestone, a woman pissing in a field, bed frames gently squealing, a skirt rustling in the grass, the call of the bell on a shop’s door, a cobbler’s hammer echoing up a street, the wet jangle of clean dishes, a door squeaking, the dry echo of gunshots. Unremarkable images joined to sounds so painstakingly ordinary that they take on a fervor: the daily vivid. Martin Provost's film tracks several decades in the lives of the titular outsider artist (Yolande Moreau) and the German art dealer and critic Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), but what Provost wants to bring out through his sounds and images is something invisible. Though the "artist film" has become a genre, the director refuses to treat it that way; like Maurice Pialat's VAN GOGH, the movie is interested neither in convincing us of the artist's greatness (the paintings are treated as just objects, usually only half-glimpsed, rarely dominating the frame) nor in depicting acclaim (Uhde's influence is only hinted at, and Séraphine's success is only introduced in the closing title card). Instead of the result, we have the process—feverish painting in the night, careful planning for exhibitions that never happen—and instead of success we have two lifetimes of failure. Séraphine and Uhde are equally distant, and both struggle to communicate: she through her paintings, he through his collection. Why don't they just speak? Maybe because what they hold dearest is what they have to keep secret: for Séraphine, it's the idiosyncratic Catholicism that eventually leads her to be committed; for Udhe, it's his taboo homosexuality. There's something that pairs the film with Steven Soderbergh's CHE: both directors attempt to show how what might appear like a moment in history is just the result of a thousand petty little actions. CHE's soldiers in need of food and disputes in need of being settled aren't that different from SÉRAPHINE's scrounging and waiting. If it wasn't for the length, they'd make a fine double feature. (2008, 125 min, 35mm) IV
---
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS:
Doc Films at the University of Chicago begins their summer series this week with the peculiar and hilarious 1932 comedy MILLION DOLLAR LEGS on Wednesday and Claude Chabrol’s 1958 film LE BEAU SERGE on Thursday.
Michael Curtiz’s terrific YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, with a stellar performance by James Cagney, plays Saturday at the Bank of America Cinema.
The classic matinee film at the Music Box this Saturday and Sunday is Michael Curtiz’s rousing THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, starring Errol Flynn. The midnight films are Jim Henson’s LABYRINTH (both Friday and Saturday), Alex Proyas’ KNOWING (Friday only), and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (Saturday only). O’HORTEN moves to the Saturday and Sunday matinee slot; and Serge Dvortsevoy’s TULPAN continues for another week.
Facets Cinémathèque hosts the Chicago African Diaspora Film Festival this week. In the Saturday midnight “Facets Night School” series is it Jim Henson’s LABYRINTH, with the accompanying talk by Cary Jones Elza: “David Bowie's Codpiece, or: How Girls of the 1980s Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Backlash.”
Also at the Film Center: ACCIDENTAL ARMY: THE AMAZING TRUE STORY OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK LEGION, a new documentary by John Iltis and Bruce Bendinger, plays on Saturday and Monday (directors in person at both shows); And four programs in the Indie Comedy series, with the filmmakers at many of the screenings. |
