John Cassavetes' LOVE STREAMS (American
Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Friday, 7pm
John Cassavetes' final film, LOVE STREAMS, is both his most fully
realized in its portrayal of the fallacy of human connection and his
most conventional in cinematic style. Working in front of the camera
for the last time, he once again cast his wife Gena Rowlands in the
female lead—a fitting public bow for their long collaboration. They
play Robert and Sarah, a dysfunctional brother and sister—he's never
learned to love and she loves too much—who lean on each other as their
lives fall apart. LOVE STREAMS lacks anything that could be called an
exposition despite the heaviest use of non-diegetic music and the only
use of dream sequences in any of Cassavetes' work. We are dropped into
the lives of an aging, drunk, womanizing, and wealthy writer and his
clinically depressed, soon-to-be divorced sister, initially by following
them separately on parallel paths and downward trajectories. Each sibling
has a child that they make a genuine but clumsy attempt to bond with,
but ultimately they prove unfit as parents. Sarah shows up on Robert's
doorstep just as he's taking the 8 year-old son he's never met before
on a weekend bender to Las Vegas. When he returns without his son, Cassavetes
and Rowlands are left to act out the end of this tragedy. The story
is somewhat secondary here, though, as the film functions as a recap
of Cassavetes' previous directorial themes. Cassavetes' lonely artist
is colored by his own tinge of personal regret (he ad already been diagnosed
with the liver cirrhosis that would kill him five years later). His
sister, on the other hand, echoes the absurdist antics that Cassavetes
was known for as a younger man, going further and further to keep everything
cheery in the face of her own depression. Rowlands continually makes
us forget her character's mental instability only to unleash it again
like a tantrum. As his life was coming to a close, Cassavetes seemed
willing to yield a little of his standard formal difficulty in order
to be understood more clearly. What he would not yield, though, was
an insistence that Hollywood sold the public a false bill of goods regarding
love and marriage. It is through understanding the pain of life that
Cassavetes depicts on the screen that we gain greater appreciation for
the joys of our own lives off it, not the other way around. (1984, 141
min, 35mm) JH
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Radical Light: New Prints/New Preservation
(Experimental Revival)
Conversations at the Edge (at the
Gene Siskel Film Center) — Thursday, 6pm
Touring through Chicago in February,
the Radical Light series is a fantastically entertaining overview of
the Bay Area alternative film and video scene from 1945-2000. This program
focuses on new prints struck by the invaluable West Coast film institutions
Pacific Film Archive and the Academy Film Archive (did you know the
Oscars pay for preservation of avant-garde film work?!). Opening the
show is the pre-formalist travelogue A TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET (1906),
which was a major influence of later filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs and
Ernie Gehr. Bruce Baillie's classic CASTRO STREET (1966) is a poetic
document of an industrial section of San Francisco (rather than the
famous area named in the title). The recently passed Robert Nelson's
OH DEM WATERMELONS (1965) is a beloved, playful, rambling film that
will surely delight. Speaking of rambling, DUFUS! (1970) is a funky
visual blues riff by the criminally under-seen Mike Henderson. Leslie
Thornton's PEGGY AND FRED IN HELL: THE PROLOGUE (1984) is the first
in the now-legendary open-ended near-narrative quasi-apocalyptic series.
Also in this program are films by Dion Vigne (NORTH BEACH, 1958), Jane
Conger Belson Shimane (ODDS AND ENDS, 1959), Alice Anne Parker Severson
(RIVERBODY, 1970), and Scott Stark (DEGREES OF LIMITATION, 1982). The
series continues at Chicago Filmmakers on the 24th. Introduced by
Steve Anker, Radical Light series co-curator, Dean of the School of
Film/Video at CalArts, and former director of the San Francisco Cinematheque.
A book signing with Anker for the accompanying publication will follow
the screening. (1906-84, 82 min total, 16mm and 35mm) JM
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More info at blogs.saic.edu/cate.
Yılmaz Güney, Week 1 (Turkish
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — See showtimes below
One of Turkish cinema's most influential and polarizing figures, Yılmaz
Güney led a pretty damn colorful life. Following a career as a massively-popular
movie star (in such titles as THE BODIES FLOAT IN A RIVER OF A BLOOD,
MY SIGNATURE IS WRITTEN IN BLOOD, and THE BLOOD WILL FLOW LIKE WATER), Güney
shifted to writing and directing films that focused on the plight of
the socially and politically oppressed—all the while still maintaining
his gun-toting, bad-boy image. Convicted of murder in 1974, Güney spent
the next several years smuggling out his scripts and delegating directorial
duties to assistants. Then, after escaping from prison in 1981, he won
a Palme d'Or, hightailing it out of Cannes before Interpol agents could
catch up with him; after completing one more feature, he died of stomach
cancer at the age of 47. Over the course of the next two weeks, Doc
will be screening a total of eight Yılmaz Güney films, beginning with
THE BRIDE OF THE EARTH (1968, 78 min, 35mm; Saturday, 1pm) and THE
HUNGRY WOLVES (1969, 35mm, 85 min; Saturday, 5pm). These two revenge
dramas were the first films on which Güney (who also stars) had complete
creative control, and both display a keen eye for rural life and a metaphorical
use of extreme violence—something that would become a Güney trademark.
IV
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Also screening is Zeki Ökten's
THE HERD (1978, 35mm, 129 min; Thursday, 7pm). Produced from one
of Yılmaz Güney's scripts during his multiple prison sentences in
the 1970s—for crimes ranging from harboring anarchists to shooting
a judge—THE HERD won awards at the Berlin and Locarno film festivals,
and it incidentally makes AU HASARD BALTHAZAR look like a charming small-
town drama. Beginning in mountainous Southeast Turkey—with a woman
from one small tribe being traded to another in order to settle a murderous
dispute—the film follows (with many compelling ethnographic musical
interludes) the tribulations of these rural, nomadic sheepherders. Deciding
to transport and sell their sheep in the far-away city of Ankara, THE
HERD suddenly transforms into a highly politicized road movie, unremittingly
critical of capitalistic dependence. Their violent rail journey is a
confusion of siege, corruption, and prostitution; and the city's cutthroat
urbanity (in a situation reminiscent of classic noir THIEVES' HIGHWAY),
while promising trade, jobs, access to medicine, and a civilized consumerism,
instead accelerates the protagonists' descent into illness, death, and
madness. MC
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Mikio Naruse's WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS (Japanese Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm
In WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS, master director Mikio Naruse
cast his muse Hideko Takamine as Keiko Yashiro, a widow who works as
a hostess in a bar frequented by wealthy businessmen. However, Keiko
is growing too old to remain in her position. To insure some financial
security, she must marry one of her customers or open a place of her
own, but she faces repeated setbacks in pursuing either goal. Naruse
sets Keiko's story in Ginza, a district in Tokyo that features upscale
shopping and entertainment. Through this space, he renders Japan's growing
affluence afforded to and enjoyed by its businessmen and denied to Ginza's
16,000 barmaids. Naruse focuses on the details of Keiko's everyday life,
in particular her daily climb upstairs to the bar; in fact, he structures
the film upon this recurring image to distill all of Keiko's actions.
Similar to his other masterworks, WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS depicts
a woman's struggle to survive in a society that betrays her. Naruse highlights
the subtle shifts in Keiko's thoughts and feelings to create a nuanced
character study in which her sheer will is the only salvation from despair. The
last image of Keiko evokes the famous barmaid of Edouard Manet's
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere. Although this woman lived in a very
different time and place, her face expresses the struggle she shares
with Keiko. (1960, 111 min, 35mm) CW
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Oliver Laxe's YOU ARE ALL CAPTAINS
(New Spanish/Moroccan)
White Light Cinema at Cinema Borealis (1550 N. Milwaukee Ave., 4th Floor)
— Sunday, 7pm
In the vein of Robert Flaherty's choreographed ethnography NANOOK
OF THE NORTH and William Greaves' quasi-documentary SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM,
Oliver Laxe's YOU ARE ALL CAPTAINS asks essential questions about the
exploitation/objectification of foreign peoples in film, the authority
of the director, and the grey area between reality and fiction. Based
on his real life experience teaching a film workshop in Tangier, YOU
ARE ALL CAPTAINS follows Laxe, a Spaniard, as he recruits a group of
underprivileged Moroccan schoolchildren to assist him with his newest
movie. In an early scene, Laxe draws a diagram on a chalkboard explaining
how the reflection of an image becomes inverted on film. This idea operates
well as a metaphor for the film on the whole, as things are repeatedly
the opposite of what they appear to be. Laxe continually undermines
the viewer's assumptions by reveling that footage that seems natural
or improvised is in fact part of a staged, preplanned scene. When the
children are given cameras of their own, the boundaries between fiction
and documentary become further obscured. Dialog often works as a double
entendre, referencing both the film being made and the meta-film being
viewed by the audience. Discontent with Laxe's premise (one boy desperately
pleads for "just a bit of fiction"), the children abandon
the project to make their own film in the countryside. YOU ARE ALL CAPTAINS
is shot in stunning black and white and features gorgeous photography—Laxe
has a talent for capturing both the wide-eyed curiosity and the restless
boredom on the faces of his young subjects. As critic Richard Brody
states, "The movie's scale is small, its subjects are intimate,
its artistic reach is immense." (2010, 78 min, 35mm) HS
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Note: This screening is organized
by Cine-File editor Patrick Friel.
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More info here.
Bertrand Bonello's HOUSE OF PLEASURES (New French)
Gene Siskel Film Center -- Check Venue website for showtimes
One of 2011's best films finally makes its appearance in Chicago. Set almost entirely in a Parisian brothel circa 1900, Bertrand Bonello's fifth feature boasts a wildly imaginative style, employing trick shots, split screens, symbolic sequences, anachronistic rock music (including, of all songs, "Nights in White Satin"), and some truly adventurous editing; while Bonello's goals are less narrative than sensual, the result is still very compelling--and occasionally devastating--as drama, thanks in part to the uniformly-excellent ensemble cast and to Bonello's pronounced sympathy for the characters. In Bonello's eclectic vision, the brothel serves as a microcosm of both everything that was lost with the end of the 19th century, and every ugly tendency that still persists in the 21st--a place where desire and abuse don't merely co-exist, but are in fact interdependent. (2011, 122 min, HDCAM) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Kote Mikaberidze's MY GRANDMOTHER (Silent Georgian Revival)
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm
A lesser known victim of Soviet censorship, Georgian director Kote Mikaberidze's 1929 slapstick agitprop pastiche MY GRANDMOTHER (CHEMI BEBIA in Georgian, MOYA BABUSHKA in Russian) initially fails to live up to the hard sell it tends to inspire. Its lampooning of ineffectual Soviet bureaucracy was enough to get it banned for forty years and seems to be the primary draw for repertory blurb-writers, but the satire is pretty obvious and dull. The real attraction here is its deep, morbid, compelling weirdness, as it finds as much humor in suicide and despair as it does in pratfalls. Mikaberidze throws everything in his cinematic repertoire at the screen, primarily working in a sort of montage-on-speed within constructivist sets (the real heroes in this film are set designers T. Gamrekeli and Valerian Sidamon-Erstavi), with detours into stop-motion, cel animation, puppetry, freeze frames, and more. Local hero Dave Drazin will be accompanying on piano, but adventurous viewers might want to smuggle in an iPod and listen to the happily anachronistic pastiche score that the Pacific Film Archive commissioned Beth Custer to write in 2000. It's equally insane, and perhaps even more inspired than the film. Live piano accompaniment by David Drazin. Introduced by Yuri Tsivian, Chair, Cinema and Media Studies. (1929, 65 min, 35mm) MP
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More info at www.filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu.
Jean Genet's UN CHANT D'AMOUR (Experimental
Revival)
Experimental Film Society (SAIC, 112 S. Michigan Ave., Rm. 1307) — Tuesday,
4:30pm
His only cinematic work, Jean Genet's
UN CHANT D'AMOUR incorporates many of the same themes found in his plays
and novels. Initially banned due to its homoerotic content, the film
takes place in a prison, where a guard spies on the inmates as they
perform masturbatory interpretive dances. This power dynamic touches
on issues central to cinema studies including voyeurism, the gaze, and
the role of the spectator. There's a connection to be made between the
prison and the movie theater—both are dark, confining spaces that force
their inhabitants into a state of reflection. When the guard brutally
beats one of the prisoners, questions are raised about the intimate
relationship between sex and violence. Genet contrasts the prison scenes
with a pornographic dream sequence in an idyllic forest and abstract
images of nude contorted bodies. Though a rather modest film, the influence
of UN CHANT D'AMOUR has been far-reaching and can be seen particularly
in the work of Todd Haynes. (1950, 26 min, 16mm) HS
Robert Bresson's AU HASARD BALTHAZAR
& PICKPOCKET (French Revivals)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday,
3pm and Wednesday, 6pm (Balthazar) & Saturday, 5pm and Monday, 6:15pm
(Pickpocket)
The Siskel Film Center screens twice
this film which must be seen a dozen times. AU HASARD
BALTHAZAR, having long been encircled by a cacophonous mystique
of hyperbolic Godard proclamations (in addition to his marrying the
actress Anne Wiazemsky a year after its release) and unenlightened uses
of the word "transcendental." It is now, for better or for
worse, solely a masterpiece for secular melancholic cineastes and an
exercise in futility for the pious Netflix user. Even the Schubert
Sonata in A Major, bringing tears to generations of Marxist bachelors,
can be played by a child. For this is cinema's most thorough estrangement
of humanity, at the hand of our most enigmatic auteur: from Bresson's
editing room, total war on the filmic conventions of emotional identification.
Love in the air? Always cut to an uncomprehending donkey. Point-of-view
cutting between said donkey and a caged tiger—why not? The aspiring
cognitive psychologists of film studies deserve to be flummoxed. See
also: the most alienated dance floor brawl of all time. Despite all
this, a genuine sympathy is generated between AU HASARD BALTHAZAR and
its victims (the audience), so long as the latter is prepared to progressively
teach the former its vulnerability. The deliberately supine viewer is
rewarded with a recognizable universe viewed obliquely, dispassionately,
and at a temporal distance—the mysterious theological recitations of
childhood; the wintry march of old age; and the long, relentless oppression
of 'civilized' society in between, made entirely of humble gesture and
symbol. (1966, 95 min, 35mm) MC
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PICKPOCKET, a brief, existentialist
date movie (filmed in the same Parisian Summer of 1959 as BREATHLESS)
is—with its emphasis on glances, gestures, cafés, and other material
ephemera—certainly a cinephiliac classic. Constrained by a truly minimal
plot (with familiar elements from both Camus and Dostoyevsky), Bresson
produces an extraordinary quality of dreamlike estrangement via deliberately
awkward stage direction (to the usual assortment of unfamiliar non-actors);
shots of doors and other passageways that linger just a little too long
before and after the characters' entrance and exit; and (especially)
an obsessive attention to sound design which heightens the impact of
every slight movement, above a perpetually noisy background of urban
clatter. The result is a laid-back erotic thriller (ironically set to
the aristocratic Baroque compositions of Jean-Baptiste Lully) that sees
everyday life under capitalism—for a movie director, or anyone else—as
a sequence of audacious, small-scale robberies whose aggregate karmic
debt must ultimately be repaid in appalling tragedy. The "erotic"
aspect is, of course, derived from the pickpocket's perpetual state
of being: an intimate touching, with or without explicit recognition—like
two arms resting by each other in a movie theater. (1959, 75 min, 35mm)
MC
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's WORLD
ON A WIRE (German Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago)
— Saturday, 7pm
Perhaps the key stylistic flourish
in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder is an exquisite, Old Hollywood-style
tracking shot around actors who are in stasis or else performing simple
actions with mechanical precision. This strategy, which became central
to Fassbinder's cinematic language early in his career and would persist
until the end, conveys one of the director's most enduring themes: that
modern life suppresses individual emotion through a punishing, economic-based
concept of social utility. Yet these moments also reveal Fassbinder's
underlying romanticism, his belief in the freedom that could exist in
art where it could not in real life. These are among the cinema's most
crystallized expressions of cinephilia, as well as the most impassioned:
Only someone who loved movies as much as Fassbinder would feel so brutally
betrayed by the systems that made their beauty impossible in life. WORLD
ON A WIRE, the two-part film Fassbinder made for German television in
1973 and which is now circulating in a new restored print, is rife with
shots like these; the cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, was surely
the most ingenious of Fassbinder's cameramen when it came to realizing
grandiose ideas on very small budgets. (He would go on to shoot several
of Martin Scorsese's most visually impressive features, including AFTER
HOURS and GOODFELLAS.) It's one of Fassbinder's most allusive works,
incorporating science fiction, a detective story, melodramatic romance,
and even a few musical numbers. The story, appropriately, concerns fantasies
within fantasies, as a government employee working on a secret virtual
reality project discovers that his world is itself a projection. Once
aware of his life's artificiality, he attempts a doomed mission to disseminate
this knowledge, only to become a pariah hounded by the authorities.
Broadly speaking, the film follows a narrative arc identical to that
of the more realistic ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL, which Fassbinder would
make later that year. WORLD ON A WIRE can be read as epic allegory,
though much of it plays as straight-ahead genre storytelling. (As Christian
Braad Thomsen notes in his critical biography Fassbinder: The Life
and Work of a Provocative Genius, Fassbinder approached TV as a
means of connecting with a larger audience than he did through his plays
and theatrical films.) The final hour consists largely of chase scenes
and conspiratorial revelations that wouldn't be out of place in, say,
an Alan J. Pakula movie. But even here, Fassbinder makes the material
entirely his own, developing an odd, languid pace that emphasizes the
film's eerie unreality. Some have criticized the film's conclusion—incidentally,
one of the few happy endings in Fassbinder's oeuvre—as failing to resolve
the numerous themes introduced in the densely packed first half. That's
a fair criticism to level at a work by a 28-year-old filmmaker directing
at least half-a-dozen scripts a year, as Fassbinder, extraordinarily,
was doing at this time. Still, there's no denying this remarkable work
ethic also produced a feeling of urgency (as well as a tense paranoia)
that's still palpable four decades after WORLD ON A WIRE was made. No
less than any other film of his career, it illustrates the radical will
behind Fassbinder's art. As he would describe it, "[My films] developed
out of the position that the revolution should take place not on the
screen, but in life itself, and when I show things going wrong, I do
it to make people aware that this is what happens unless they change
their lives... I never try to reproduce reality, my aim is to make mechanisms
transparent, to make it obvious to people that they must change reality." (1973, 205 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Blake Edward's BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S
(American Revival)
Music Box — Sunday, 2pm
With one of the most well known plots in movie history, it is the
more insidious aspects of this romantic favorite that lend it an enduring
appeal. In the popular imagination neither Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn)
nor Paul Varjak (George Peppard) are remembered for how they pay their
rent. To face facts, each of them is a kept person, accepting money
from dates or steady lovers. Therein lies much of the appeal of these
two characters, who eventually fall in love. Neither is perfect but
they have big dreams. They use hope to get through today and to forget
the past. Emblematic of this existence is the character of Cat, Holly's
rice-paper-thin-metaphor of an orange tabby. Content when given a saucer
of milk and happy to stay for some fun, this pet demands no commitments
and wouldn't notice them anyway. As much a film about the masks we use
to face the world as it is about love (which never really comes), it's
fitting that Cat ends up being tossed from a cab into the pouring rain.
Untethered and free is fun to a point, but only in the movies do the
girl and the boy come back for a kiss, and rescue the sloppy and matted
Cat from the downpour. (1961, 115 min, unconfirmed format) JH
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Todd Haynes' I'M NOT THERE (American
Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday and Tuesday, 6pm
I've long felt locked out of Bob Dylan's enchanted garden, prevented
from entering by the quality of his voice that's a little like having
your nose hairs pulled, and by the imposing bulk of his catalog. It
always seemed I'd have to be a dogmatic digger if I was going to be
a lover of Dylan. That is, until I accepted Todd Haynes' generous invitation
of a film, I'M NOT THERE. Haynes has always bravely followed his own
idiosyncratic taste, trusting that his enthusiasm for cryptic public
figures and suffering housewives will welcome viewers to places they
wouldn't find alone. Instead of telling The Story of Bob Dylan,
Haynes uses his own mastery of the Dylan discography and biographical
trivia as a starting-off point to dream, riff, theorize, and tinker
with the mechanics of a pop-culture myth. He offers six flavors of narrative,
each its own aesthetic world, ranging from a Behind-the-Music send-up
with cameos by Julianne Moore and Kim Gordon to a baroque country-western
hallucination that conjures gruesome lyrical metaphor as reality. Ambiguous
sexuality, a bigger theme for Haynes than for Dylan, propels the film
throughout, from Cate Blanchett's stunning lothario Dylan to the girl-dog
named Henry. An interrogated character named Arthur Rimbaud (BRIGHT
STAR's Ben Wishaw) performs a list called "seven simple rules for
life in hiding," the last of which is "never create anything. It
will be misinterpreted. It will chain you and follow you for the rest
of your life. And it will never change." I'M NOT THERE is a gleeful
explosion of this grumpy outlook; Dylan's entire public life is the raw
material, but Haynes uses his own passions and fascinations to free
both Dylan and viewer from the burden of 'the truth,' and welcome them
into a bigger world.
SAIC professor Dan Eisenberg lectures at the Tuesday screening.
(2007, 135 min, 35mm) JF
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Paul Thomas Anderson's MAGNOLIA
(American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7pm and Sunday, 1pm
Paul Thomas Anderson's MAGNOLIA is a well-meaning rip-off of Robert
Altman's SHORT CUTS, which is itself based on a collection of Raymond
Carver's short stories. Though Anderson confuses the meaning of homage
with plagiarism, the film is still intriguing as a philosophical counterweight
to its prototype. Both follow an ensemble of seemingly unrelated characters
as their lives haphazardly intersect over the course of one day in Los
Angeles. This narrative structure can be found as early as 1932 in Edmund
Golding's GRAND HOTEL and inherently poses questions about fate and
happenstance. While Altman's film embraces an absurdist outlook, Anderson
rejects chance and coincidence, favoring divine intervention in the
form of magical realism. The cynicism and irresolution of SHORT CUTS
is ultimately replaced in MAGNOLIA by an epiphanic clarity and optimism.
Anderson further imitates Altman's style by employing music as a theme.
Instead of using the improvisational mode of jazz, Anderson plays with
the operatic form, splitting his film in to three separate acts. Stylistically,
Anderson works in the idiom of Scorsese and Renoir, using fluid long
takes that emphasize the interconnected nature of his characters. MAGNOLIA
is worth viewing exclusively for Tom Cruise's performance as Frank T.J.
Mackey, a misogynistic motivational speaker, whose self-help system
"Seduce and Destroy" encourages the sexual conquest of women
by any means necessary. The character is something of an alter ego for
Cruise's role as Dr. Bill Harford in EYES WIDE SHUT. (1999, 188 min,
unconfirmed format) HS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE (New American)
Music Box — Friday, 4:15 and 9:30pm;
Sunday, 7:40pm
At the beginning of Terrence Malick's
THE TREE OF LIFE, a mother says, "The nuns taught us there are two
ways through life—the way of nature and the way of grace." Shortly
after, her son, a middle-aged architect named Jack O'Brien, remembers
the death of his younger brother, R.L., at the age of nineteen. Jack
then travels back to his idyllic childhood in 1950s Waco, Texas to find
this brother that he lost. In a larger sense, THE TREE OF LIFE explores
the nature of being, including those aspects of it neither children
nor adults understand. It questions birth and death throughout the history
of time, beginning with the origin of the universe, continuing through
the evolution of the species, and finally to the untimely death of this
one young man. Malick renders the small family at the center of the
story as grand as the life of the universe itself. Why do we not see
the world this way? What prevents our sense of wonder? We no longer
experience life, so we turn to cinema. TREE OF LIFE appears to be a
collection of memories and imaginings. It is a film of images more than
of words. Malick focuses on imagery of the family and, in particular,
the three boys, capturing them in close-up and only natural light. The
audience often views the spontaneous unfolding of life from a child's
eyes, which look up to encounter the world. Malick's camera behaves
like a human being in its own right, expressing a variety of emotions
in its movement. He films the world, both great and small, with such
reverence that every image of it is truly beautiful. To return to the
film's beginning, the mother continues, "You have to choose which
one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. It accepts being
slighted, forgotten, disliked. It accepts insults and injuries. Nature
only wants to please itself, get others to please it, too. Likes to
lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy
and all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all
things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes
to a bad end. I will be true to you whatever comes." THE TREE OF LIFE
is a man's testament to Spirit that captures the phenomenon of being
in its glory. (2011, 139 min, unconfirmed format) CW
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Northwest Chicago Film Society (at the Portage Theater) screens John M. Stahl's 1932 melodrama BACK STREET (35mm) on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Also showing is Dick Lundy's 1949 Woody Woodpecker cartoon DROOLER'S DELIGHT (35mm).
Gallery 400 at
UIC (400 S. Peoria St.) presents the program All Tomorrow's Cities on Monday at 7pm. Curated by film/video makers Deborah Stratman and
Jesse McLean, the show includes CITIES OF GOLD AND MIRRORS (Cyprien
Gaillard, 2009), TRANS TRANS (TRANSFORMERS TRANSFORMED) (Bradley Eros
and Tim Geraghty, 2009), THE UNSEEN (Pavel Medvedev, 2008), VICTORY
OVER THE SUN (Michael Robinson, 2007), WE THE PEOPLE (Ben Rivers, 2004),
THE WORLD'S LARGEST SHOPPING MALL (Sam Green and Carrie Lozano, 2009),
and WORLD'S FAIR WORLD (Brian Boyce, 2002). Video projection.
The Nightingale presents the premiere of local filmmaker Will Goss' short experimental
narrative feature LAND (HD Video Projection) on Friday at 8pm.
Goss and fellow filmmaker Chris Sullivan will perform a "mini-set
of sad sad country songs" as part of the evening. Arrive early, as
this is anticipated to sell out.
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive
and Outsider Art (756 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents the panel discussion
Heaven and Hell on the Silver Screen on Thursday at 6pm. Organized
in conjunction with a mini screening series that complements the Intuit's
current "Heaven + Hell" exhibition, the panel includes Dan Rybicky,
Guest Film Curator from Columbia College, with colleagues Ron Falzone
and Zoran Samardzija, who will "explore excerpts from their favorite
depictions of heaven and/or hell as seen in film or television."
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern
University) this week: William A. Seiter's 1932 Cary Grant/Randolph
Scott film HOT SATURDAY plus Archie Gottler's 1934 short SCHOOL
FOR ROMANCE screen in the "Hot Saturdays" Pre-Code series on
Saturday (of course) at 2pm. Both 35mm.
As part of this weekend's Fluxfest
Chicago 2012 series of events, 6018 North (6018 N. Kenmore)
presents Flux-Film Matinee, a program of recent Fluxus-inspired films, showing continuously from
Noon to 4pm on Sunday. The highlight is likely to be experimental film
great Jonas Mekas' 2011 short RE: MACIUNAS AND FLUXUS. Addition work
by Chicago Fluxus Ensemble, Giovanni and Renata StradaDada, Giouse Marongiu,
DADA Machine Fluxus, Armin Agresti, Ivan Rezek, Reid Wood, Jeffrey Sass,
Neil Horsky/Urbano Project, The Kinsena's, Kommisar Hjular, Mama Baer,
Matthew Lee Knowles, and Bucholz/Touchon/Bennett. Unconfirmed format(s).
More info at imaginepeace.com/archives/16853.
The Alliance Française screens
Philippe Lioret's 2006 French film DON'T WORRY, I'M FINE (Je vais
bien, ne t'en fais pas) on Saturday at 1:30pm. The film will be
introduced by Randy Williams, past president and current board member
of Alliance Française. Unconfirmed format. On Thursday at 6:30pm, Chicago
Reader critic (and former Cine-File contributor) Ben Sachs
will introduce Les Lutins du Court Metrage, a program of award-winning
short French films. Unconfirmed format(s). More info on both programs here.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Gereon Wetzel's new documentary EL BULLI: COOKING IN PROGRESS (HDCam Video) returns for week one of a two-week run; Charles
Evans, Jr.'s 2011 documentary ADDICTION INCORPORATED (HDCam Video)
plays for a week. Director Evans in person at the Friday screening;
Benjamin Wagner and Christofer Wagner's 2010 documentary MISTER ROGERS & ME (HDCam Video) screens on Sunday at 3pm, with co-director
Christofer Wagner in person.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: John Schlesinger's 1971 drama SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY (35mm) screens
on Sunday at 7pm; Nicholas Ray's 1949 film KNOCK ON ANY DOOR (35mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm; Giulio Pertoni's 1967 Italian western
DEATH RIDES A HORSE (35mm) screens Wednesday at 7 and 9:15pm (replaces
Sergio Corbucci's originally scheduled THE MERCENARY); Martha Coolidge's
1983 film VALLEY GIRL (35mm) is on Thursday at 9:45pm; and Julian
Fellowes's 2009 kids film FROM TIME TO TIME (DVD Projection)
is on Saturday at 3pm.
Also at the Music Box this week:
a series of Oscar-Nominated Films. Showing are Asghar Farhadi's
A SEPARATION; the 2012 Academy Award Documentary Short Subject
Program (2011); Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE (see above),
Nicolas Winding Refn's DRIVE; Paul Feig's BRIDESMAIDS;
Chris Weitz's A BETTER LIFE; Michael R. Roskam's BULLHEAD,
and a Secret Screening of a nominated film previously unseen
in Chicago. Check the Music Box website for details on this and showtimes
for the films in the series. Additional films this week are James Cruze's
1921 silent Fatty Arbuckle comedy LEAP YEAR on Saturday at Noon, with live organ accompaniment by Dennis Scott;
Sidney Lumet's 1957 drama 12 ANGRY MEN on Sunday at 11:30am;
and Rob Reiner's 1987 film THE PRINCESS BRIDE on Tuesday at 7:30pm.
Unconfirmed formats on all titles.
Chicago Filmmakers presents Cheryl Dunye's 2010 film THE OWLS in their monthly Dyke
Delicious series on Saturday at 8pm (social hour at 7pm). DVD Projection.
Facets Cinémathèque screens
Adam Pesce's 2011 documentary SPLINTERS this week. Unconfirmed
format.
The Chicago History Museum screens
Leslie Zemeckis' 2010 documentary BEHIND THE BURLY Q on Sunday
at 1:30pm, with Zemeckis in person. Video Projection.
The DuSable Museum screens the
documentary TAKING ROOT: THE VISION OF WANGARI MAATHAI on Sunday
at 2pm. Video Projection.
The Sex +++ Film Series at the
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (800 S. Halsted St.) screens the 2008
documentary THE HAPPY HOOKER: PORTRAIT OF A SEXUAL REVOLUTIONARY on Tuesday at 7pm. Video Projection
The Viaduct Theatre (3111 N.
Western Ave.) presents Stephen Auerbach's new documentary BICYCLE
DREAMS: THE MOVIE, about the Race Across America (RAAM), on Thursday
at 7pm. Unconfirmed format.
Landmark's Century Centre Cinema screens The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2012 - Animated and
The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2012 - Live Action for one week
only beginning Friday. Unconfirmed formats.
Transistor (3819 N. Lincoln
Ave.) screens Preston Sturges' 1942 comedy
THE PALM BEACH STORY on Monday at 8pm. Introduced by guest curator
Gene Booth, filmmaker and editor of The Molten Rectangle. DVD
projection.
