CRUCIAL VIEWING

Fritz Lang's WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS (Classic Revival)
Block Cinema – Friday, 8pm
Lang’s penultimate Hollywood work fits snugly into the 50s trend toward tough crime reporter films like Billy Wilder's ACE IN THE HOLE and Phil Karlson's SCANDAL SHEET, while managing to be pulpier, meaner, and more to the point. The film depicts a cynical media environment where scribes are sent on dog-eat-dog missions with the promise of prestigious editorial jobs: in this case, a hunt for the notorious "Lipstick Killer." Dave Kehr calls it "a cynical twist on Lang's famous M: the sex killer becomes the most sympathetic character... as Lang reserves his venom for the desperately competitive reporters." While Lang fans will find the world of staircases, clocks, and mirrors familiar, this radical and remarkably restrained B movie lays bare the genre’s conventions, even as the director strips away any recognizable style. Jonathan Rosenbaum will be present to introduce the screening. (1956, 110 min). More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
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Films by SAUL LEVINE (Experimental)
Experimental Film Club / Film Studies Center (U of C) – Friday, 8pm
Following this past Thursday's screening of recently restored films by Saul Levine at CATE, University of Chicago's Experimental Film Club will be hosting a presentation of lesser known, rarely shown 8mm and 16mm works by this influential small gauge experimental / political filmmaker. Avant-garde historian P. Adams Sitney writes: "Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America. With about 35 years of consistent production behind him, and no signs of fatigue, he can show us the shape of a life passionately and uncompromisingly devoted to filmmaking. His works are high-energy messages of friendship, records of sexual love and political activism, radiated by humor, prophetic anger, loneliness and even... repose." (1965-2000, 85 min). Levine will be on hand introduce the program and answer questions. More info and full program here.
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MARY ELLEN BUTE: CENTENNIAL (Classic Experimental)
Conversations at the Edge / Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm
This program celebrates the accomplishments of Mary Ellen Bute, a largely overlooked pioneer of electronic art and a key figure in early animation and abstract filmmaking, just after the 100th anniversary of her birth. Bute's simple, playful creations make adept use of technologies ranging from basic household items to then-sophisticated optical equipment, and her work compares favorably to that of contemporaries like Len Lye, Oscar Fischinger, and Hy Hirsh. This program surveys Bute's career, from her collaborations with Melville Webber and Norman McLaren to later commercial and television work. "Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies.” - Ed Halter. (1934-1953, 70 min, 16mm). More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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BAMAKO (New Foreign)
Music Box – Screening Daily, check Reader Movies for showtimes
An incredibly refreshing antidote to the cinema of individualism that dominates our culture, Abderrahmane Sissoko's BAMAKO puts the World Bank and the IMF on mock trial, letting citizens, lawyers, and judges from his native Mali voice their opinions and grievances in a humble courtyard bustling with quotidian life. The director has said, "When we live on a continent where the act of making a film is rare and difficult, we say to ourselves that we can speak in the name of others: faced with the gravity of the African situation, I felt a sense of urgency to evoke the hypocrisy of the North towards the countries of the South." Perhaps a lesson learned from his time at the VGIK film school in Moscow, Sissoko asserts the cinema's capability to think abstract concepts while resisting the personalization of conflict to construct a beautiful film that is at once intellectually engaging and emotionally moving. More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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IN THE PIT (Foreign Documentary)
Facets Cinematheque - Screening Daily, check Reader Movies for showtimes
Winner of multiple festival prizes (including the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance), this documentary by director and cinematographer Juan Carlos Rulfo focuses on a group of workers involved in the construction of a second tier to Mexico City's Periferico Freeway. Structured around a Mexican legend that the devil demands one soul for every bridge built, the film follows its subjects for two years, exploring their personal beliefs and philosophies, chronicling progress alongside tragedy, and recognizing extraordinary performances of labor that would otherwise be forgotten in the bustle of one of the world's most densely populated cities. Refraining from overt commentary, this is cinema, as Variety notes, "grounded in the conviction that audiences with their eyes wide open will draw their own conclusions." More info at www.facets.org.
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EUROPEAN UNION FILM FESTIVAL (New Foreign)
Gene Siskel Film Center
Throughout March, the Film Center will be running its 10th Annual European Union Film Festival, featuring 55 new films from 24 countries. This year's lineup includes works by some of the greatest living filmmakers as well as enticing genre cinema from all over the continent. This week's highlights:
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RED ROAD (UK)
Winner of last year's Jury Prize at Cannes, this debut feature from director Andrea Arnold examines the human presence behind the UK's ubiquitous surveillance cameras. An voyeuristic thriller set in Glasgow, RED ROAD is the first in a trilogy of films from the Advance Party project, all of which are based on characters created by Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, must be set in Scotland, and star the same actors. This initial installment expertly taps into technological paranoia of contemporary society, drawing comparisons to the work of Michael Haneke. (2006, 113 min, 35mm). Screening Friday, 6pm & Saturday, 8pm.
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INTO GREAT SILENCE (Germany)
A rigorous, mesmerizing documentary about the ascetic monastery Grande Chartreuse, located high in the French Alps; director Philip Gröning was granted special access to film, working without a crew to record the monks' daily routines. Slant magazine writes, “As Gröning’s camera acclimates to the Grande Chartreuse’s sequestered rhythms there comes with it an increasing sense of liberation… offer[ing] up some striking and unforgettable parallels between religious and artistic struggle.” (2005, 162 min, 35mm). Screening Saturday, 3pm.
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GRBAVICA: THE LAND OF MY DREAMS (Bosnia-Herzegovina)
This neorealist drama from Bosnia-Herzegovina was awarded the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin Film Festival. “Director Jasmila Zbanic’s subject is not violence itself,” writes the Village Voice, “but the way its cruel aftermath washes through the everyday lives of those who survived.” Focusing on a single mother and her teenage daughter in present-day Sarajevo, the film provides an unsentimental look at the fallout of a brutal conflict (2006, 90 min, 35mm). Screening Wednesday, 6pm.
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Addtional Highlights
A good week for comedy in the festival: Despite its prosaic title, THE WORLD IS WAITING FOR US is actually a bad-taste farce from Poland that satirizes the financial straits faced by the Capitalist generation; Belgium’s THE ICEBERG has been called a jaunt in the vein of Jacques Tati, with similar emphasis on visual invention over dialogue; and WRONG SIDE UP delivers more sophisticated bawdiness from the Czech Republic following last week’s PLEASANT MOMENTS, this time from rising cult playwright and filmmaker Petr Zelenka.
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Full program details at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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STILL PLAYING:

Jodorowsky's HOLY MOUNTAIN (Cult Revival)
Music Box – Friday & Saturday, midnight
Funded in part by John Lennon and George Harrison, this follow-up to EL TOPO sees cult icon Jodorowsky concocting a visceral, hallucinatory cinematic potion laden with religion, mysticism, sex, and violence; it's no coincidence that the director himself appears in the film as an alchemist. Arthur Magazine writes, "THE HOLY MOUNTAIN is probably the film that best represents the idea of art as an inner quest, a journey of initiation but also artifice and boundless illusion." Spiritual concerns aside, this masterpiece of 70s counterculture deserves to be seen on the big screen at midnight, and when the content is this explosively psychedelic, no substances are required to attain an altered state of consciousness. More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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ALSO RECOMMENDED

LADY SNOWBLOOD
Sonotheque - Saturday, 7:30pm
Screening in Psychotronic’s “Asian Extreme” series, this samurai revenge rampage shares a source writer (Kazuo Koike), studio (the venerable Toho)--not to mention gallons of fake blood and a laid-back-70s vibe--with the concurrently produced LONE WOLF AND CUB series. There’s loads of prenatal exposition for cult siren Meiko Kaji to slog through before the slice-and-dice; fortunately, director Toshiya Fujita transcends the plot mechanics by indulging in sumptuous imagery and ignoring chronology. Recently, LADY SNOWBLOOD has achieved retroactive infamy following Quentin Tarantino's brazen pillaging of the film for his own KILL BILL. (1973, 97 min). “Watch the slaughter, stay for dancing,” advises this techno club's website. More Info.
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Busby Berkeley's 42ND STREET (Classic Revival)
LaSalle Bank Cinema – Saturday, 8pm
Cited as the film that saved Warner Bros. from filing for bankruptcy, 42ND STREET is perhaps the best known and most successful of Berkeley's depression era musicals, though certainly not his greatest. Packed with Berkeley's brilliant and bewildering fusions of cinematics and choreography, this film definitely deserves the treatment of LaSalle's big screen. (1933, 89 min, 16mm). Accompanied by the 1935 short SYMPHONY IN BLACK, starring Duke Ellington and an uncredited, 18 year-old Billie Holliday. (10min, 16mm). Venue Information.
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SHOWGIRLS (Revival)
Music Box – Friday & Saturday, midnight
Despite the suggestion of camp afforded by its late-night "resurrection," SHOWGIRLS deserves to be taken seriously as a pastiche of backstage melodramas. By Jonathan Rosenbaum’s estimation, “one of the most vitriolic allegories about Hollywood and selling out ever made.” No matter how tawdry or clichéd the material might be, the film never adopts a tone of condescension--director Verhoeven takes his archetypes seriously so that he may better judge the culture that produced them—much like Fritz Lang's later American films or, more recently, David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. The results are deeply, but righteously cynical. (1995, 131 min, 35mm). More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Vittorio De Sica’s UMBERTO D. (Classic Revival)
Music Box – Saturday & Sunday, 11:30am
A solemn consideration of how one confronts loneliness, poverty, and death with dignity and grace. De Sica constructed the script around the extraordinary presence of retired professor Carlo Battista, who portrays a poor pensioner forced out of his home and onto the streets of Rome with only his dog for companionship. UMBERTO D. is so widely adored that viewers have seen traces of it throughout the history of cinema; Jonathan Rosenbaum, for one, has called it the missing link between Chaplin’s unadorned humanism and the highly detailed realism of Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES. (1952, 89 min, 35mm). More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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FACING PICTURES (Video Art / Lecture)
School of the Art Institute - Tuesday, 4:30pm
David Joselit is a scholar, critic, and professor at Yale University, where he chairs the History of Art department; this lecture will present a portion of his recent research on how broadcast television has affected the 20th century that concerns the history of video art. "Video has staged strategic acts of dispossession in which the moment of transformation from person to image — the moment of alienation from one’s own image — is dramatized, either in the feedback loops of 1970s video installations, or in more recent projection art where human actions are elaborately codified and scored. 'Facing Pictures' will address video art as a set of practices in which the struggle to possess images, which is fundamental to modern citizenship, is played and replayed." Location: 112 S. Michigan Ave, room 1307 (13th floor). Admission is FREE; seating is limited.
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Charles Burnett's TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm
The Film Center continues its excellent African American Auteurs series with TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) by the great Charles Burnett, whose work will be the focus of the next several weeks. Like many of Burnett's films, TO SLEEP WITH ANGER seems to emanate from a tradition of storytelling different from that of most American narratives: a belief in myth as everyday instead of epic, characters who can be both real people and archetypes and take actions that are guided by the structure of folk tales as much as psychology. It's a film that manages to simultaneously describe middle-class black life realistically and explore some of its folkloric roots. This screening will be accompanied by a lecture from film scholar Jacqueline Stewart. More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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SOUND OF SILENT FILM 2007 (Experimental / Special Event)
Chopin Theatre (1545 W Division) - Wednesday, 7:30pm
The silent film was a completely different approach to cinema, if not a separate medium altogether--and there are those out there who still practice it. This annual program brings together contemporary silent movies by local artists, accompanied by live original scores. Works by Drew Richardson, Sean Coughlin, Pierre Duran and Chris Hefner. The show is $7 / BYOB; the organizers emphasize a relaxed atmosphere. Watch the trailer here. More info here.
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THE IMMINENT FAILURE SHOW (Experimental)
Ice Capades (526 N Ashland) – Wednesday, 8pm
Filmmaker and UIC professor Ben Russell brings another of his consistently eclectic and daring experimental programs to Chicago; this show features video work by artists including Emily Vey Duke, Cooper Battersby, Fred Worden, Leif Goldberg, and more. Artists Duke, Battersby, Julia Hechtman, Eric Fleischauer, and Joe Tipre will be appearing in person. Full program description www.theicecapades.com.
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Bong Joon-ho's THE HOST (New Foreign)
Landmark Century Centre – Screening Daily, check Reader Movies for showtimes
Fifty-odd years after GODZILLA v.1.0, America’s imperial recklessness has birthed a new Asian cine-monster. THE HOST is a truly unconventional megablockbuster with a surprisingly sharp conscience, pushing the boundaries of CG technology and sci-fi absurdism, and developing insightful political subtext throughout. J. Hoberman: “Bong has no difficulty integrating the horrifying, the stooge-like, and the everyday. (In that, he's even more extreme than our own masters of sociologic shock schlock—George Romero, Larry Cohen, and Joe Dante). Just as grisly bio-horror is tricked out with cheesy effects and inappropriate music, so do spasms of naturalistic grief-coping alternate with pop-eyed slapstick.” This film has broken every box office record in its native South Korea; in our collective dreams, the U.S. top grosser would be half as good. (2007, 119 min).
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Hal Wallis's BECKET (Classic Revival)
Music Box – Screening Daily, check Reader Movies for showtimes
Producer Hal Wallis had a serious impact on American culture from the dawn of sound into the 1970s, putting together hundreds of projects intended to pack theaters--studio noirs, Elvis spectacles, Martin & Lewis vehicles, Westerns, and more. Buried in his filmography is this 1964 pet project, nominated for 12 Oscars in its time but since largely forgotten. Set outside Wallis's traditional pop culture territory, the film fictionalizes (and somewhat homoeroticizes) the relationship between St. Thomas Becket and King Henry II. As one of the last projects produced in the heyday of Hollywood historical epics, it's an invaluable document, showcasing a bold formula for commercial films that would be dead within ten years. More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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ALSO PLAYING

*Recommended by the Chicago Reader

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Contributors: Erika Balsom, Kalvin Henely, Mike King, Gabe Klinger, Ben Sachs, Ignatius Vishnevetsky, Ethan White, Darnell Witt

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