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6th Annual Chicago International
Film Festival: An Introduction
AMC River East 21 - October 7-21
The films aside, the Chicago International Film Festival is something
of a sociological spectacle in which part of the fascination is in seeing
how unsuspecting audiences respond to a film transpiring outside their
comfort zone. When Brillante Mendoza's SERBIS played two years ago,
for instance, most of the sold-out audience I sat with consisted of
large Filipino families. They'd come, of course, because it was one
of the only Filipino movies to play in Chicago all year; almost all
of them left the theater scandalized by the movie's sexual content--and
also on a subconscious level, I'd venture, by its subversive take on
traditional family values. How refreshing it was, to see a "provocative" art movie leave an audience genuinely provoked!
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CIFF offers moments like this every year. They're generally unremarked
on, though. Film writers necessarily write preview pieces and not mid-stream
or post-fest commentary and impressions. They also generally prefer
to focus on the better-known titles and complain about there being so
few of them. (It's a familiar gripe at this point, but a quick glance
at the New York Film Festival's selections gives a sense of how much
our own festival has been deprived. A few of the most shocking omissions:
CIFF regular Manoel de Oliveira's THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA, and
OKI'S MOVIE and HAHAHA, this year's prolific output by SAIC grad Hong
Sang-soo.) But this doesn't seem like the right complaint to lodge,
or the right place to lodge it: For one thing, this isn't our lodge.
But if Chicago cinephiles are willing to put aside their sense of entitlement
(and, believe me, it's just as hard for us), the festival offers plenty
of surprises. I would recommend checking out something you've never
heard of before buying tickets for the more enticing stuff--which, given
the festival's recent history, is probably sold out already, anyway.
While there are sure to be duds, there are also likely to be unexpected
discoveries (see our blog for a rave write-up on POSTCARD TO DADDY for
one)--and good or bad, it will likely provide some insight into what's
happening in another country or in the mind of another aesthete. Nothing
wrong with playing ball once in a while. BS
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Check our blog over the course of
the festival for reviews from our contributors.
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Complete festival schedule here.
CRUCIAL VIEWING
Anthony Mann's REIGN OF TERROR (American
Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday and Tuesday, 6pm
If you're ever wondered what would happen if you combined lurid camp
and a profound work of art--and don't feel like watching SHOWGIRLS--there's
Anthony Mann's intensely weird reworking of the French Revolution as
a film noir horrorshow, REIGN OF TERROR (appropriately, considering
the Verhoeven comparison, it's also known as THE BLACK BOOK). Made on
Poverty Row, this B costume drama eschews the conventions of historical
spectacle in favor of nearly abstract backgrounds and harsh low-angle
close-ups, inventing a world dominated by monstrous faces; pretty much
everyone looks 100 feet tall. The action of the ludicrous plot is expanded
upon to such a degree by Mann and cinematographer John Alton's shadow-crisscrossed
images that the aesthetics of the film nearly become an Eisensteinian
statement about political history in and of themselves--but not before
the inevitable Expressionist breakdown, where the actors cease to be
characters and become silent-movie primal urges amidst a burning Paris
and then, like werewolves, turn back into characters for the jokey final
scene. Essential viewing. James Naremore lectures at the Tuesday
screening. (1949, 89 min, archival 35mm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Internal Systems: Films by Coleen
Fitzgibbon (Experimental Revival)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center - Thursday,
6pm
When structuralist filmmaking works, its like watching performance
art. You are often intrigued and confused, unsure of whether or not
you liked it, only able to intelligently speculate on the artists' intentions
at a later date. The work of Coleen Fitzgibbon does that too, but in
a warmer way. Where Vito Acconci's video work makes you anxious, Fitzgibbon's
RESTORING APPEARANCES TO ORDER IN TWELVE MINUTES (1975, 12 min) delivers
calm like a cup of chamomile. The camera holds a static close-up as
she scrubs a well-used utility sink throughout, clearing up every drop
of paint from the labor of art making. She also tries her hand at found
image manipulation in FOUND FILM FLASHES (1974, 3 min), stuttering and
blinking her way through what appears to be an interview. The subject
never gets to blurt out his story, as the sound skips back and forth
and the images slow down in the projector gate. The result is alternating
squelch and mind's-eye view, and works to subvert any concrete meaning
outside the film itself. The bulk of the program is taken up with INTERNAL
SYSTEM (1974, 45 min), an ambitious work of abstract film. The entire
frame is taken up with monochromatic color, subtly shifting in hue and
saturation and brightness, breaking down the projected image into the
barest components of light. Shape, line, texture, and depth are eliminated,
leaving only shifts from red to green to blue, broken by clouds of black,
and distinguishable only by the change in speed. ALSO SCREENING: FM/TRCS
(1974, 11 min) Fitzgibbon in person. (1974-75, 71 min total,
16mm) JH
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More info at www.conversationsattheedge.org.
Music Box Massacre 6 (Special Event)
Music Box - Saturday and Sunday
(Showtimes noted below)
The Music Box Theatre presents its
6th annual "Massacre" movie marathon with what might be its
strongest lineup in years. The screenings begin with Rupert Julian's
1925 adaptation of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (Saturday, Noon)
starring Lon Chaney in one of his most acclaimed performances. Following
OPERA is a rare 35mm showing of the Lugosi/Karloff starring vehicle
THE RAVEN (Saturday, 1:30pm), a solid mid-30s horror programmer
that really makes the most of its briskly paced 61 minutes. Then it's
the much-loved Universal horror classic THE WOLF MAN (Saturday,
2:45pm), featuring Lon Chaney, Jr. and Claude Rains. Dramatically switching
moods, the next film is George Romero's brilliant meditation on suburbia
and the boredom of marriage, JACK'S WIFE (Saturday, 4:15pm) (billed
under its re-issue title, HUNGRY WIVES). While not as glossy as Romero's
zombie films, JACK'S WIFE is a truly unsettling fairytale focusing on
the darker side of the "All-American family." Star Jan White
will be appearing for a Q&A session after the film. Following Romero's
highly intellectual examination of American living comes Steven Chiodo's
light and silly KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE (Saturday, 6:15pm), one of the best late 80s horror comedies. Chiodo
will also be present after the screening for a Q&A. Then it's David
Cronenberg's tale of sexual disease, RABID (Saturday, 8pm). Easily
one of the most overlooked of Cronenberg's early works, RABID solidifies
its director's fascination with mysterious holes and long protuberances.
Frank Henelotter's self-aware horror send-up of creature-feature classics,
BASKET CASE (Saturday, 10:15pm), comes next, with a Q&A from
star Kevin Van Hentenryck after the film, followed by Mary Lambert's
ridiculous Stephen King adaptation, PET SEMATARY (Sunday, 12:30am).
Then things get serious again with Tobe Hooper's cool early 80s teens-trapped-in-the-carnival
slasher, THE FUNHOUSE (Sunday, 2:30am). Then it's on to Lucio
Fulci's absurdly violent HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (Sunday, 4:15am).
Finally, the jewel of the evening arrives: Douglas Hickox' razor sharp-witted
THEATRE OF BLOOD (Sunday, 5:45am), starring the incredible Vincent
Price in what is assuredly the role he was born to play. Portraying
jilted Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart, Price cleverly offs members
of "The Critic's Circle," who denied him a best actor award
he felt he deserved, in the manner of his last season of Shakespeare
plays. Somehow Hickox took a potentially incredibly obnoxious script
and turned it into a masterpiece of quick-witted black comedy, sprinkled
with stylized violence and brilliant performances from all involved.
In what could have been only a silly, one-dimensional role, Price brings
an astounding amount of depth and humanity to Lionheart, making his
ridiculous revenge scheme almost believable and surprisingly sympathetic.
Price vacillates from manic-depressive killer to silly trickster, proving
that he was a far more capable and versatile actor than he was ever
really given credit for being. A crucial set piece that cannot be overlooked
is a scene in which Lionheart decapitates a surly critic while he sleeps
in his bed with his wife. The sheer brilliance of every aspect of this
scene alone, from Price's exaggerated facial expressions to the sly
undertone to the comedy to the ridiculously melodramatic accompanying
piano score, solidifies THEATRE OF BLOOD as a truly unheralded masterpiece
of British comedy cinema. Rounding out the night is a restored print
of Hitchcock's PSYCHO (Sunday, 7:45am) and, finally, a screening
of Tom Holland's 80s horror favorite, FRIGHT NIGHT (Sunday, 10am).
JR
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Howard Hawks' GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES &
Frank Tashlin's THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Venue website for
showtimes
(1) Because everything ties together, I'll invoke SHOWGIRLS again (see
REIGN OF TERROR above), by quoting Jacques Rivette's description of
the Verhoeven film, which could just as easily be about GENTLEMEN
PREFER BLONDES (1951, 91 min, 35mm): "It's about surviving
in a world of assholes." (2) In THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT (1956, 99 min, 35mm), Jayne Mansfield's audacious bust and vastly-underrated
acting talents are cast against Tom Ewell, the most impotent-looking
leading man in film history--an actor whose bad posture makes his whole
body look flaccid. (3) Therefore it's established that the two films
of Film Center's week-long "Busty Bombshells" double-bill,
so old-school auteurist it could only be the work of programmer Marty
Rubin, contrast more then they complement each other. On the one hand
we have women coyly playing with materialism trying to overcome a one-dimensional
universe (GENTLEMEN), and on the other there's male sexual inadequacy
in the face of feminine brassiness, rock music, and everything else
reckless and energetic in the world (GIRL). There's also Howard Hawks
and Frank Tashlin at their crassest, Marilyn Monroe and Mansfield at
their best--plus color, cleavage, comedy, and cynicism, all extravagant
in these two odes to different sides of a very particular brand of sexual
politics. IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Raoul Walsh's THE BIG TRAIL
(American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm
In his first starring role, the slim, young John Wayne (just 23 years
old!) is conventionally handsome, almost Elvis-like. The physical characteristics
of the Duke's future tough-guy image (a swaggering walk, a careening
feline voice) conspire against the youth's slighter build, making him
into a gawky pretty-boy with a comically over-pronounced drawl. He's
also not yet a great actor, a little too community theater; he hasn't
yet learned how to give words weight, only how to make them sound good.
But the lead's shortcomings don't drag THE BIG TRAIL down; instead,
they just become part of the fabric of this strange Oregon Trail Western.
One of the earliest Hollywood films to be shot in widescreen, it has
a certain anachronistic quality, looking equally 1920s and 1950s (or,
even more accurately, like the kind of movie a Silent Era director would
make given mid-century technology) while sounding firmly early 30s,
the crisp 70mm images contrasting with the muddy mono early-talkie soundtrack.
Fox's ad copy of the time billed this as "the most important picture
ever produced," and though that's a pretty big exaggeration, there's
a lot to be said for a film that marries a story of frontier adventure
with an adventure to the frontier of aesthetics. Even in an era marked
by unmatched inventiveness (the dawn of sound), THE BIG TRAIL stands
out; the film speaks a language entirely its own, one with strong emphases
on scale and dioramic depth, put to beautiful use in an early scene
where Wayne shows off his considerable knife-throwing skills amidst
a tableau vivant of onlookers. (1930, 120 min, archival 35mm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Yasujiro Ozu's PASSING FANCY (Silent
Japanese Revival)
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) - Friday, 8pm
The famed cellist Lori Goldston will be present to perform a new
score to one of Yasujiro Ozu's greatest silent films, which makes this
screening doubly enticing. The film is an episodic story about a working-class
widower's relationship with his young son; and in spite of the mawkishness
that summary may suggest, the film is an enlivening mixture of comedy
and tragedy--a flawless Japanese variation on Chaplin's THE KID. Describing
the film on her Strictly Film School website, Acquarello had this to say: "The opening sequence of live
entertainment at the local town hall comically illustrates the carefree
existence, but seemingly inescapable poverty that surrounds Kihachi
and his sharp-witted, but undisciplined son Tomio (Tomio Aoki): an inadvertently
misplaced, empty wallet works its way around the room as each presumptuous
finder retrieves, checks for content, then discards the object before
Kihachi exchanges the larger wallet with his own, smaller one, initiating
a new chain of ill-intentioned finders as Kihachi's wallet inevitably
makes it way back to the original site of the lost item. Chronicling
the quotidian of Kihachi's daily life as he alternately tries to dodge
the responsibilities of work, win the affections of an out-of-work young
woman named Harue (Nobuko Fushimi) who has been taken in by his widowed
neighbor Otomo (Choko Lida), and teach his far more learned and responsible
son important life lessons, Ozu's portrait of the working class is affectionately
rooted in the inviolable bonds between parent and child and the collective
strength of human community." New score composed by Lori Goldston
and performed live by Goldston (cello),
Phil Gelb (shakuhachi - bamboo flute), and Greg Campbell (drum set,
percussion and horn). (1933, 100 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu.
Comedic Video Art: Visual Poetics
and Songs about Dogs (Experimental)
Hopscotch Cinema at the Nightingale - Sunday, 7pm
This trifecta of video makers could work as a primer on the lighter
side of video art, from the 70s to now. The most famous artist in the
show, William Wegman, is known for using his pet Weimaraner (named Man
Ray) as a lead actor. Man Ray is often a patient prop, and occasionally
annoyed as Wegman dresses him up in a series of ridiculous costumes
and narrates a stream of jokes, some better than others. If it's possible
for a dog to "ham it up," Man Ray is the all time champion of canine
kitsch. A full-time ad man, Neil Ira Needleman was once described as
"Woody Allen's funny gay brother." He makes sweet, witty video pieces,
often full of self-mockery about his creative process. Suffice it to
say his cat makes appearances, and often is a harsh critique of Neil's
work. Chad Knutson, the youngest of the bunch is less a product of the
video age, and more a phenomenon of the YouTube generation. He points
the camera at himself, and half rants, half sings to us. Almost like
stand-up comedy without any buildup, his videos are short, variable,
and occasionally brilliant. (1978-2010, 70 min total, video) JH
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More info at www.nightingaletheatre.com.
Luchino Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (Italian Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Friday, 7pm
Even if he claimed to be a lifelong Communist, Count Luchino Visconti
di Modrone remains cinema's definitive aristocrat. He co-invented neo-realism
but abandoned it for the filmic equivalent of neoclassicism. His films
about the poor are decorated with a baroque poverty (see: LE NOTTI BIANCHI):
the attention to detail of someone trying to depict a culture they can't
quite understand. Visconti's merits are the same as his flaws; these
very tendencies could bring out the best and worst (DEATH IN VENICE)
in him. What tended to do him in was tastefulness, and thankfully ROCCO
AND HIS BROTHERS is tasteless and the better--and freer--for it; it
has neither the tastefulness of being short (it's almost three hours
long), nor the tastefulness of being melancholic (its "ugly"
unsentimentality is more aching than DEATH IN VENICE's longing), nor
even the tastefulness to restrain Visconti's decadent fetishization
of impoverished toughness. Cine-File contributor Ben Sachs once said
that showing people at work was one of the most subversive things a
film could do. Visconti's approach to indicating that his characters
are poor is to show their threadbare clothes and harsh living conditions;
he never understood that the worst thing about being working class isn't
having few possessions, but the working itself. Still, what he sets
out to do in ROCOO AND HIS BROTHERS is subversive in its odd, aristocratic
way: to create a beggar's opera. (1960, 177 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Charles Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP
(American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
- Thursday, 7pm
For a film that has received abundant
accolades over the years and is consistently hailed as a masterpiece
by a wide variety of critics, KILLER OF SHEEP is remarkably strange.
At once beautiful, contemplative and anguishing, its lingering greatness
is hard to place. Shot on 16mm in stunning black and white, Burnett's
story unfolds in Watts, an economically depressed black neighborhood
of Los Angeles, and focuses on one of its residents, Stan (played by
Henry Sanders, who would become a successful character actor on television).
The title is somewhat literal, since Stan works in a slaughterhouse,
but Burnett offers only oblique connections between the character's
job and the effects it may or may not have on his psyche, family and
surroundings. Our protagonist insists that he is not poor, yet we watch
in sorrow as he struggles to realize the most modest of dreams. Sanders'
unforgettable million-mile stare--whether in his kitchen or on the killing
floor--makes his character's loneliness utterly chilling. J. Hoberman
calls the film an "urban pastoral" of persisting relevance;
indeed, the Watts of KILLER OF SHEEP bears a nuanced resemblance to
many ghettos of the present. Watching it, one has the feeling that these
images will remain lodged in the collective consciousness for years
to come. (1977, 83 min, 35mm) GK
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Ashby, Kolak and Prokopas's SCRAPPERS (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Venue website for showtimes
SCRAPPERS, which won both Best Documentary
Feature and the Audience awards at the 2010 Chicago Underground Film
Festival, is the definitive record of a vast underground culture. Who
drives those spray-painted trucks with high walls full of battered appliances,
and what happens to the things they collect? The first feature-length
documentary by Brian Ashby, Ben Kolak and Courtney Prokopas, SCRAPPERS
travels with two hardworking men and their families through three years
of life at the margins of fickle, consumer-driven industry. The patient
and curious camera reveals a Chicago of informal economies, not just
ins and outs of collecting scrap metal, but bargains with neighbors
through car windows and child-care arrangements made when everybody
works and no one has money. Like their subjects, the filmmakers are
quick on their toes and have their eyes wide open to the luck of circumstance;
their captured goods range from the tenderly human to the violently
mechanized. We notice every cat that wanders through the frame and peek
into every pot cooking on a stove. The familiar aspect of Chicago's
alleyways is rendered uncanny with gliding, truck's-eye-view camera
work. Long wordless sequences of cars being compressed and copper being
turned from cables to dust are buoyed by Chicago percussionist Frank
Rosaly's optimistic workday funk score (performed on found metal objects).
With the exception of a handful of well-placed inter-titles, SCRAPPERS
lets the subjects and images do all the telling of both the personal
stories about making ends meet and the big political story about a crashing
economy and the crashing price of metals. They are the same and different
stories at once; the connections are deep and plain. Documentaries rarely
balance deep involvement with such a light touch. The result is essential. Q&A with the directors follows Friday and Thursday's screenings.
(2009, 90 min, HDCam) JF
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Shane Black's KISS KISS BANG BANG
(Contemporary American Revival)
Music Box - Thursday, 7:30pm
Shane Black's gimmicky, giddy directorial debut Frankensteins together
a mid-period action movie and WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? into a
lot of smartly-executed dumb fun. Robert Downey, Jr. (in what could
be called "the Tony Randall role") plays a New York thief
who stumbles into a Hollywood satire and in the process of getting whisked
off to LA gets entangled in a thriller plot that involves his childhood
crush (Michelle Monaghan) and hard-boiled private eye Gay Perry (Val
Kilmer). Black has a grating tendency to "cynically" mock
his own crowd-pleasing plot mechanics (before, of course, indulging
in them), but he makes up for it with a strong command of formal gags,
including Downey's self-aware narration, which would seem post-modern
if it wasn't so firmly rooted in the cartoon humor of the 1950s. Presented
in conjunction with the ongoing New Cult Cannon series at the AV Club,
the film will be introduced by Scott Tobias; however, a better introduction
might be the Film Center's GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES/THE GIRL CAN'T HELP
IT double feature. (2005, 102 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Satyajit Ray's PATHER PANCHALI (Indian
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 7pm
Perhaps the most acclaimed Bengali film, Satyajit Ray's first film
PATHER PANCHALI has acquired an additional mythic status due to the
difficulties of its production. The story of a Brahmin family living
in intense poverty, PATHER PANCHALI ("Song of the Little Road")
was shot over the course of five years with a cast of non-actors, a
crew with almost no film experience, and with Ray in an almost constant
struggle to find funding. The film follows the family's children, sister
Durga and little brother Apu, who live out the episodes of their childhood
in wide-eyed innocence. Together they chase after the candyman and imitate
the extravagances of a traveling theater company. The film's atmosphere
becomes increasingly claustrophobic, however, and much of this is owed
to the cinematography of first-timer Subrata Mitra. As the family struggles
to find income, the jungle creeps in on all sides into their decaying
rural manor. The images are bleak but profoundly beautiful. Despite
his struggles, Ray was desperate not to compromise the film: for the
exhilarating sequence when Apu and Durga discover a train, perhaps the
film's most famous image, Ray believed he could only shoot in a week-long
sliver of spring when the region's white flax flowers were in bloom.
PANCHALI has been a cited as a considerable influence by later directors
such as Terrence Malick, Abbas Kiarostami and Wes Anderson (remember
the overhead shot of a baby swinging in its cradle in THE DARJEELING
LIMITED? Ripped straight out of Satyajit Ray). A classic story of loss
and renewal in bitter circumstances, PATHER PANCHALI remains a landmark
of international (and for the matter, independently produced) cinema.
(1955, 115 min, 35mm) LN
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Pixar's TOY STORY 3 (New Animation)
Doc Films (University of Chicago)
- Friday, 6, 8:30 and 11pm and Sunday, 1pm
It must be admitted that to presume
ignorance of TOY STORY 3 is to effectively admit that you hate classical
Hollywood cinema: unfettered by any coherent and/or crude ideological
ambition, this film is a legitimately relentless puree of stereotyped
genres, and a rarity in that it only gets better with the more old movies
you've seen; in fact, it's quite possible that it's a total bore for
those who are actually in kindergarten. Lifting discursive patterns,
gestures, soundtrack cues, and other mise-en-scène from a wide variety
of narrative classics, at its high midpoint TOY STORY 3 can be comically
shifting from mimicking melodrama, Westerns, prison dramas, capers,
gothic horror, and even Mexican 1940s caballero films over the course
of just a few minutes. This disturbingly informed and reflexive scriptwriting
is, however, likely conceptually overshadowed by Pixar's flashy surface
role as both the apotheosis of engineering in aesthetic manufacture
and as a fully-formed NorCal simulacral apparatus of SoCal cinematic
production: a 218,000 square-foot involute eye, a 1.5- megawatt shrine
to the optics of the camera lens. Perhaps the intermittent, clever noir
homages in the screenplay are of secondary interest to the likely fact
that multiple PhDs slaved away for a year to produce a relatively photorealistic
black garbage bag for a single onscreen sequence. And perhaps that
significant history-of- technology datum should be in turn dismissed,
with a consideration of the studio's typically dreary heteronormative
politics (for a company based in the East Bay, the repeated homophobic
reaction shots to the antics of Mattel's metrosexualized Ken (Michael
Keaton) are specifically reprehensible); the inescapable reproduction
of globalized commodity fetishism underlying the trilogy's very premise;
and of the remarkable inaccessibility to humanity which necessarily
pervades any endeavor constructed primarily by hundreds of unrefined
CGI savants who have seem to have never grown out of the idea that STAR
WARS is a fundamental cornerstone of civilization. That is to say: a
movie ostensibly about growing up and leaving your toys behind, produced
by an assembly line of grown men with toys adorning every corner of
their cubes. (2010, 103min, 35mm) MC
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
On Wednesday at 7pm, the Green Lantern
Gallery (2542 W. Chicago Ave.) hosts the first of three programs
of recent experimental films and videos curated by Jesse McLean and
Eric Fleischauer. Titled Mere Mystery, the screening features
work by Lori Felker, Mary Helena Clark, Jack Cronin, Olivia Ciummo,
Michael Robinson, Warren Cockerham, Alee Peoples, Keith Tassick, and
Scott Wolniak.
Also at the Nightingale this
week: on Saturday at 8pm, animator Bruce Bickford will be in person
to present his recent claymation featurette, CAS'L'.
On Saturday Bank of America Cinema presents Charles David's 1945 film LADY ON A TRAIN.
On Friday at 8pm Chicago Filmmakers presents their Citywide Film Showcase, which spotlights local
student work from several schools and universities.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Raoul Walsh's classic 1941 Humphrey Bogart film HIGH SIERRA
screens Saturday and Monday; Mohammad Rasoulof's new Iranian film
THE WHITE MEADOWS is on Saturday and Sunday; and on Sunday at
3:15pm is a special advance screening of Lixin Fan's 2009 Canadian/Chinese
drama LAST TRAIN HOME.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: on Saturday
night and Sunday afternoon (3:15pm) it's Charles Vidor's 1946 Rita Hayworth
classic GILDA; on Sunday, D.W. Griffith's 1913 feature JUDITH
OF BETHULIA screens; Monday night is Frank Perry's 1971 revisionist
western 'DOC'; the Stan Brakhage series continues on Tuesday
with the very rarely shown 1984 feature TORTURED DUST; in the
Wednesday night Stanley Kubrick series it's his 1962 Nabokov adaptation
LOLITA; and the late show Thursday is Thomas Casey's 1971 horror
film SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS.
Also at the Music Box this week: Alfred Hitchcock's classic
PSYCHO opens; Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's HOWL continues;
Gaspar Noé's ENTER THE VOID is held over in the Saturday and
Sunday matinee slot only; the Sound Opinion series, hosted by music
critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, presents Alan Parker's 1980 film
PINK FLOYD'S THE WALL on Tuesday at 7:30pm; and the midnight film Friday
and Saturday is Trey Parker's TEAM AMERICA with the F/X duo the
Chiodo Brothers in person for an on-stage discussion/Q&A with
The Onion's Scott Tobias and Nathan Rabin.
This week at Facets Cinémathèque: Rebecca Richman Cohen's new
documentary about a war crimes trial in Sierra Leone, WAR DON DON,
screens this week. Cohen in person at the 7 and 9pm screenings on Friday
and Saturday; in Facets Night School series (renamed Fright school this
month) on Friday at midnight Susan Doll introduces Herk Harvey's class
independent horror film CARNIVAL OF SOULS and on Saturday at
midnight Katherine Rife introduces H. Tjut Djalil's 1981 Indonesian
horror film MYSTICS IN BALI.
Local animator Lilli Carré's 16mm animation THE JITTERS screens
on Saturdays, through October 30, between 8-10m as part of the Saturday
Cinema series. It's rear-projected in the second floor window at
1369 W. Chicago Avenue: stand out on the sidewalk to watch.
On Tuesday and Wednesday at 7pm (reception
at 6pm), the Chicago Cultural Center and Hedwig Dances present
the two-program Dance for the Camera Festival 2010, featuring
new and old dance-related films.
On Friday at 6:30pm, Mess Hall
(6932 N. Glenwood Ave.) premieres a new seven-minute documentary on
the Chicago Books to Women in Prison project, directed by Madsen
Minax. The evening includes refreshments, Q&A, and a "book packing
party."
On Sunday at 3pm, the Chicago International
Movies and Music Festival presents Reel Jazz!, a program
of short films (on 16mm) featuring Cab Calloway, Gene Krupa, Fats Waller,
Betty Boop, Count Basie, Fred Anderson, Louis Armstrong, and Wingy Manone,
the one-armed trumpeter. It's at HyPa Gallery, 5226 S. Harper Ave.
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THE WOLF MAN
