CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2009

The Chicago International Film Festival opened yesterday and continues through October 22. Cine-File will be blogging on the festival and including links to coverage by our contributors on other sites.

CRUCIAL VIEWING

Hollis Frampton's SOLARIUMAGELANI (Experimental)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center - Thursday, 6pm
The opening salvo in Hollis Frampton's gradual citywide takeover of Chicago's arthouses ("Critical Mass: Re-Viewing Hollis Frampton," see link below) is, fittingly, one of the opening movements of his storied and sadly uncompleted Magellan Cycle. SUMMER SOLSTICE is a pastoral scene infamously depicting nothing but dairy cows in a field. Frampton builds from his ruminant subjects an exercise in composition--purposeful yet surreptitious in nature, it invites the sort of glass-eyed, nonplussed behavior reminiscent of the film's subject. As we watch the fragmented non-actions of cattle in a field, we are perhaps unknowingly set up for Frampton's next move with AUTUMNAL EQUINOX. With this second film, we are shown the workings of a slaughterhouse in all of its bloody, eviscerated reality. Despite the location, we are not given any Upton Sinclair moments; this is the slaughterhouse as example of light, texture, and color. Frampton trains his lens on the grotesque transformation of an object into its constituent, unrecognizable parts, documenting the various corporeal hues that separate each organ from another. Light and its properties are again explored in WINTER SOLSTICE, this time in the confines of a steel mill. The molten sparks flying from poured steel are transformed into a golden spray reminiscent of Oskar Fischinger's abstracted geometric animation. Outside of an obsession with composition and lighting, the films are tied together through their editing structure, which uses colored leader as punctuation between shots--drawing attention to the individual unit of a shot, further deconstructing filmic techniques. Frampton scholar and SAIC professor Bruce Jenkins will be speaking at the screening and signing copies of his new book of Frampton's writings. (1974, 95 min total, 16mm) DM
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More info at www.conversationsattheedge.org and www.hollisframpton-criticalmass.com.

Michael Mann's MANHUNTER (Contemporary Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Monday, 7pm
A turning point in the career of Michael Mann--the film in which ambiance takes on equal importance to the detailed observation of professional ritual--MANHUNTER marks the beginning of this curious director's ongoing fusion of Howard Hawks and Stan Brakhage. Though its story of an FBI agent's pursuit of a demonic serial killer is suspenseful enough and the cast contains stellar turns by Joan Allen, Dennis Farina, and Brian Cox, among others, you may find that your strongest memories of the film are in Mann's eerie use of florescent light or an unfurnished suburban home. Much commercial art of the 1980s was built on the fetishization of material excess, often in the form of designer decor or ultra-modern lighting schemes that make commodities out of any subject: In retrospect, many key films of the decade act as subversions of this aesthetic by making material wealth seem either unreal (e.g., Nicolas Roeg's EUREKA, Alain Resnais' MELO) or a thin veneer for existential dread (e.g., Scorsese's AFTER HOURS, Edward Yang's TAIPEI STORY). MANHUNTER definitely belongs to the latter category, although a supermarket confrontation between the main character and his son unexpectedly evokes the work of William Klein. The film's surfaces wouldn't be so compelling, though, if they didn't find counterpoint in Mann's great conflict--the professional's sacrifice of his humanity in the perfection of his craft. (1986, 119 min, 35mm widescreen) BS
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More info at docfilms.uchicago.edu. 

Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA (Classic/Cult Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Dario Argento is one of Italy's greatest living artists, and his 1977 SUSPIRIA is one of his greatest achievements in both storytelling and visual design. Jessica Harper plays Suzy, a dance student who becomes embroiled in a plot by her ballet school's faculty (revealed to be witches) to unleash the forces of hell onto the world. The first in Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy (the subsequent features are 1980's INFERNO and 2008's MOTHER OF TEARS), SUSPIRIA may not be the director's most complex or visually stunning work, but it's perhaps the crux of Argento's canon, the film that firmly established him as an auteur worthy of international discussion and analysis. Loved by genre fans for its excessive violence and pulsating score by the rock group Goblin, SUSPIRIA is as much a testament to Argento's love for classical art, which can also be seen in 1987's OPERA and 1995's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME. Argento's genius is to set these films, all of them bloody and relatively sleazy, in the world of "high" art. By doing so, he not only satirizes the pompous nature of "connoisseurs" who dismiss cinema--particular genre films--as a "lower" form, but also recontextualize these "higher" forms to fit in the realm of "commercial" work. This screening of the film is extra-special, as the print being shown is in IB Technicolor, far superior to the fading, muddy colors of the theatrical prints that have been in circulation. This print of SUSPIRIA will look just as vibrant now as it did 32 years ago. (1977, 92 minutes, Archival 35mm) JR
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Nicholas Ray's IN A LONELY PLACE (Classic Revival)
Music Box - Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Let's set aside for a moment the convention that IN A LONELY PLACE is another of Nicholas Ray's sub-rosa memoirs, charting the decline of his marriage to Gloria Grahame; that the apartment complex Bogart and Grahame's LONELY lovers live in is a replica of one of Ray's own early Hollywood residences; that screenwriter Dixon Steele (Bogart) is in some way a stand-in for Ray's own Hollywood disaffection: an "abnormal" man isolated among jocular thieves and pretty louts. What's up on the screen is enough to satisfy us without resorting to biographical criticism: that is, a film whose wit, maturity, and bruised romanticism defy us to subdue or deconstruct them. LONELY is the most perfect sort of romance: one that shows the lover revealed as a "tyrannical detective" (Bogart is Spade even when he isn't); one that squeezes out a little of our own optimism as we watch suspicion roast our heroes alive. It is the most perfect sort of mystery: one that succeeds in making its own solution entirely irrelevant before it's revealed. Finally, it is the most perfect sort of noir: one that isn't. The tropes are here, but LONELY is as much about the impossible hope of shoehorning real and immutable suffering into a Hollywood film circa 1950 as about the gruesome deaths of hat-check girls or the fatality of character. They don't make 'em like this anymore--and, like the man says, they never really did. If anyone's counting, LONELY may be the best Bogart movie ever made, and it certainly contains his best performance. More to the point, it is one of the great American sound films: turning star-power and genre both into deadly weapons for getting under our skin. See it.  (1950, 94 min, New 35mm) JD
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.

ALSO RECOMMENDED

Films by Robert Todd (Documentary/Experimental)
The Nightingale - Friday, 10pm
Boston based filmmaker Robert Todd is one of the most prolific and precise celluloid artists working today. Many of his films begin as documents and, through careful manipulation of lens, light, and editorial timing, transcend their subject matter to become existential metaphors. Two such black and white films, ROSE (2008, 9 min, 16mm) and QUIVER (2008, 10 min, 16mm), utilize film grain to translate the physical texture of objects to the eyes. The camera's eye is more akin to a finger as extreme close-ups combine with rack-focus, gently brushing the surface to reveal the internal. Similar in approach is QUALITIES OF STONE (2006, 11 min, 16mm), a color film that combines imagery of the organic and inorganic to contemplate life and death, artificial and natural. Tactile poetry for the eyes. Also screening are FLOWERGIRLS (2004, 14 min, 16mm), HAPPY PEPPY SPARKY DOG (2002, 3 min, 16mm), BLISS (2006, 5 min, 16mm), and others TBA. JH
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More info at www.nightingaletheatre.org.

Majid Majidi's THE SONG OF SPARROWS & Khosro Masoumi's WIND BLOWS IN THE MEADOW (New Iranian)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Showtimes noted below
Continuing the Film Center's month-long series of Iranian cinema is THE SONG OF SPARROWS (2008, 96 min, 35mm; week-long run, check Reader Movies for showtimes), the latest feature by Majid Majidi (CHILDREN OF HEAVEN), one of Iran's most popular filmmakers.  Majidi is beloved for his combination of magical realism and old-school sentimentality (If Mohsen Makhmalbaf is capable of invoking the Vittorio De Sica of UMBERTO D., Majidi is more in line with the De Sica of MIRACLE IN MILAN), and this film seems to be no exception. Its subject is a Chaplinesque everyman (Majidi regular Mohammad Amir Naji) who must pursue odd jobs in Tehran after getting fired from his position on a rural ostrich farm. THE SONG OF SPARROWS is purportedly be something a religious allegory, as Naji comes to transcend his daily struggle after embracing the beauties of fate and the natural world. (In a culture overrun by Christian allegories, however, it may prove informative to observe the Muslim allegories of other nations' popular entertainment.) When the film premiered in New York in April, Stephen Holden wrote in the Times: "As unabashedly sentimental as THE SONG OF SPARROWS often becomes, this simple fable of a righteous man's relationship to his family, his community and most of all his faith has the force of conviction. And the scenes of rural life--especially an overhead shot of Karim carrying a blue door through a field--are quite beautiful."  Also playing this week is WIND BLOWS IN THE MEADOW (2008, 91 min, 35mm; Saturday, 8pm and Sunday, 3pm), a pastoral drama from veteran filmmaker Khosro Masoumi. The film is set in the snowy villages of northern Iran, an evocative backdrop for the melodramatic story of arranged marriage, doomed love, and tragic fate. BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Everything Is Terrible (Special Event)
Music Box - Friday, 10:30pm
If Carl Jung's theories of a collective unconscious are correct in any regard, it can best be seen at work in popular culture. Our collective pop memory-bank has created a fertile land from which seemingly endless permutations of pastiche, critique, and recontextualization are reaped. In this postmodern world, we have developed a recursive eye for cultural detritus. Case in point: the internet collective Everything Is Terrible have been for several years now mining the VHS bins throughout the nation's thrift stores in search of forgotten kitsch to reconsider. The group's slogan, "If everything is terrible, then nothing is," points to a logic far and away from the current trend of ironic distanciation, displaying a genuine enjoyment of pop culture's margins. Their love of all things fringe and strange will be on full display at their Music Box showcase. Opening the evening will be the Rockcats, Chicago's very own band of musical cats, with more oddities and surprises in store. The centerpiece of the event will be EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE: THE MOVIE, a recently edited compilation of EIT's favorite treasures from our A/V wasteland, after which there will be a screening of the surreal gem SEVEN LUCKY NINJA KIDS (1989). Those in attendance may witness a fog machine, strobe lights, and the familiar warmth of tapping into our collective memory. (2009, approx. 120 min total, video and cats) DM
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.

Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz' MESSIAH OF EVIL (Classic/Cult Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 9pm
Perhaps the greatest American zombie film not directed by George Romero, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's MESSIAH OF EVIL is a fine example of a genre/art film hybrid. Photographed with haunting lyricism, MESSIAH is as much an allegory about the downfall of 60s counterculture as it is an apocalyptic fable. A young woman travels to a remote California coastal town to visit her father, only to find him missing and the town deserted save for two hippie squatters who have taken up residence in her father's mansion. Gradually, she learns that the townspeople have become pseudo-zombies awaiting the return of a mysterious shaman who is supposed to rise from the Pacific Ocean. Although somewhat convoluted as narrative, the film is visually arresting, a testament to the aesthetic heights that could be reached by so-called exploitation films. The 'Scope cinematography by Stephen Katz captures the loneliness of the ghost-town setting with barren landscape shots in which actors are reduced to helpless ants on the open plane. The short scenes which bookend the film (Reportedly added by the producer, who deemed the film's original ending too much of a downer) present the movie as some sort of delusion, perhaps the result of a bad acid trip resulting in insanity, and they add to the dream-like nature of the work. The no-name cast is consistently (intentionally?) monotone, but this adds to the blurring of the line between the supposedly "normal" humans and the mindless zombies. And a chilling scene in a supermarket anticipates the parallel between zombies and American consumers made by Romero five years late in his masterpiece DAWN OF THE DEAD. Although Huyck and Katz went on to achieve moderate commercial success by writing the script for AMERICAN GRAFFITI (whose director, George Lucas, would produce their 1986 flop, HOWARD THE DUCK), they never created anything as profound as this minor, yet riveting, work. (1972, 88 min, Archival 35mm) JR
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More info at docfilms.uchicago.edu.

Rouben Mamoulian's SILK STOCKINGS (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 6pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Rouben Mamoulian gets a bad rap. What gives? We dismissed him, were embarrassed by him, and now we've almost forgotten him. First, of course, we called him an "empty stylist"--as if such a thing exists. "Style," the old saying goes, "is inseparable from human expression." For Mamoulian, it wasn't just style, but technique, that was inseparable from the impulse to express: getting a new lens, a new piece of equipment, a new process for getting color or recording sound was like discovering a new chord or new color. It's appropriate, then, that a Mamoulian should be revived while a new Soderbergh is playing in town--the two are a good pair; they often seem to think alike. But of course there's more to a Mamoulian film than just Mamoulian himself, and in SILK STOCKINGS there's more than even the novelty of a remake of Lubitsch's NINOTCHKA (which, unfortunately, is the reason it's being screened) --there's the trio Cyd Charisse, Fred Astaire and Cinemascope; all three were made for each other. (1957, 117 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Kathryn Bigelow's NEAR DARK & POINT BREAK (Contemp. Revival)
Portage Theater - Thursday, 7:30pm (Dark) and 9:30pm (Break)
As a director Kathryn Bigelow exists in that strange place where she is respected by her peers and critics, enjoys a cult following of movie buffs, but has yet to gain mainstream name recognition. A woman who is best known for her work in the traditionally masculine genres of Action, Sci-Fi, and Horror, she consistently makes good films that don't earn quite enough at the box office. Her 2009 feature, THE HURT LOCKER, a story about the members of a US army bomb squad in Iraq that has won numerous awards at film festivals worldwide, has sparked a renewed interest in her earlier work and a chance to reassess her importance as a contemporary auteur. In NEAR DARK (1987, 94 min, 35mm), which Bigelow also co-scripted, tropes of the Western genre are combined with a Vampire story, set on the late 1980s Great Plains. From the opening scene of Caleb, our Oklahoma farm boy protagonist, driving to town in his beat-up truck for a night of beer and girls, to the final battle between humans and the undead, there is rarely a plot twist. Instead, Bigelow sets a scene and lets our expectations of the genre do the rest. Outside of Caleb and the Vamp who turns him, there is a minimum of character development and explanation. The word "Vampire" is never used in the film, and when our hero gets up on his horse for the first time, we know the good guys will win. At the core, Caleb's human family is pitted against the outcast Vampire family that takes him in, and Bigelow continues this theme in her 1991 studio debut, POINT BREAK (1991, 120 min, 35mm). Southern California has suffered a string of bank robberies, and a rookie FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) follows his veteran partner's hunch that the criminals are also surfers. Reeves goes undercover to infiltrate the gang, led by Patrick Swayze, and falls in love with their thrill-seeking lifestyle and Swayze's live for the moment philosophy. Reeves is finally accepted as one of the boys, and when his cover is blown he is forced to make a choice between the lost-boys family of surfers and his responsibility as a lawman. Featuring extended sequences of surfing and skydiving, POINT BREAK uses these narrative asides to increase the suspense of its crime genre core. Again, extended explanations of the two worlds are never provided, giving the story the economy of convention to explore itself. JH
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More info at www.portagetheater.org.

Jim Jarmusch's STRANGER THAN PARADISE (Contemporary Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Tuesday, 7pm
Who is Jim Jarmusch? For many, it's a troubling question. Jarmusch is a director that everyone seems to know. It's been an accepted truth that there is a "Jarmusch style" and that his films are "all about the same things." Like most accepted truths, it's total bullshit. Jarmusch might be liked by those who think his movies are uncomplicated and low-key, but he is admired by those that realize that they are complicated and adventurous: that Jarmusch is no more "outsiders" than Melville was "crime," no more "stillness" than Ophüls was "movement," no more dialogue than Chaplin was "silence." To think of him as a traditionalist denies how much new cinema and culture his films have embraced over the years. To say that Jarmusch is "consistent" denies how much ground he's managed to cover in the last 30 years. "Jarmusch" (the omnivorous Jarmusch, the idea that exists apart from the director) begins not with PERMANENT VACATION, but with his second film, STRANGER THAN PARADISE, and its discovery of something that seems both new and completely obvious: a rigid and physical non-time, the concrete quality life takes on when you have nowhere to go and don't own a wristwatch. Without a goal, everything becomes important; walking down a street without a particular destination, you notice every building. STRANGER THAN PARADISE has an economy; the film is put together like a wedding banquet during a food shortage, every ingredient carefully rationed. It is edited together out of shot-scenes and take-moments where nothing seems to happen because things are constantly happening: every time John Lurie's razor makes it down his neck during a shave, every time he shuffles the cards, Eszter Balint takes a drag from one of her cigarettes or Richard Edson shrugs, it's an event. (1984, 95 min, archival 35mm) IV
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More info at docfilms.uchicago.edu.

MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS

Also this weekend at The Nightingale, video artist Evan Meaney will present a lecture and screening titled "Gathering Pixels: The Ceibas Cycle & The Appreciation of a Migratory Archive" on Saturday at 8pm.

The student-run Eye & Ear Clinic series at the School of the Art Institute presents a program of faculty member Gregg Bordowitz's A CLOUD IN TROUSERS (1995) and FAST TRIP, LONG DROP (1993) on Monday at 6pm. The screening is in the Flaxman Theater (room MC1307) at 112 S. Michigan Ave.

This Saturday (8pm) at the Bank of America Cinema is David Lean's 1948 classic OLIVER TWIST.

Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Frank Capra's 1930 film LADIES OF LEISURE (Sunday); François Truffaut's classic JULES AND JIM (Wednesday); and Stuart Walker's 1933 rarity WHITE WOMAN (Thursday).

At Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: Ramesh Sippy's 1975 film SHOLAY in the Bachchan series (Friday); NU professor Domietta Torlasco's short ANTIGONE'S NOIR (Wednesday), with Torlasco in person; Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic DIABOLIQUE (Wednesday); and Joseph H. Lewis' great 1955 noir THE BIG COMBO (Thursday).

At Facets Cinémathèque this week is the new documentary TRUCKER, for a week long run; the Facets' "Night School" programs at midnight are Terence Fisher's 1957 THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (with a talk by Phil Morehart) on Friday and Lucio Fulci's 1979 ZOMBIE (with a talk by Patrick Ogle). Both showing from DVD.

The Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago screens the feature film MY BEST GIRL and selected Biograph shorts in "A Centenary Celebration of Mary Pickford on the Screen." The Friday (7pm) program includes an Introduction by Elizabeth Binggeli, Postdoctoral instructor in the departments of English Language and Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College, and live piano accompaniment by David Drazin.

Chicago Filmmakers presents the Citywide Film Showcase on Saturday at 8pm. The program features fifteen short works by students from SAIC, Columbia College, DePaul, Illinois Institute of Art, UIC, and Truman College. Co-Presented by Amir George/The Film Culture.

Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week is the new documentary on barbershop quartets AMERICAN HARMONY for a week long run.

Also at Portage Theater this week in the Wednesday (1:30pm) matinee slot is the 1946 Ava Gardner film WHISTLE STOP (video projection).

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CINE-LIST: October 9 – October 15, 2009

MANAGING EDITOR / Patrick Friel

CONTRIBUTORS / Jeremy M. Davies, Jason Halprin, Christy LeMaster, Doug McLaren, Joe Rubin, Ben Sachs, Ignatius Vishnevetsky, Darnell Witt

> Editorial Statement -> Contact