CRUCIAL VIEWING
Fritz Lang's RANCHO NOTORIOUS (Classic Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Friday, 8pm
One of Fritz Lang’s most astounding films, the beautifully primitive RANCHO NOTORIOUS (1952) is a kissing cousin of his late masterpieces THE INDIAN TOMB and THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR (both 1959)—films whose takes on established cinematic mythologies are so wildly divergent that they seem irreverently blasphemous. Narrated with cowboy songs, staged on theatrical sets in front of expressionistic backdrops, RANCHO NOTORIOUS is dream-like with its many jagged, irreconcilable elements. Marlene Dietrich’s mysterious accent, the film’s title (designated at the last minute by the studio and completely unrelated to the plot), its vibrant Technicolor palette, and the Wellesian flashback structure of its opening scenes stick in your mind like a strange joke. (89 min, 35mm). Screening details at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
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Douglas Sirk's SHOCKPROOF (Classic Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Wednesday, 7pm & 9pm
Sam Fuller, beat crime reporter, pulp novelist, and future filmmaker, also wrote half a dozen screenplays before signing on as a corporal in the U.S. Army at the break of WWII. Returning from his tour of duty, the budding auteur penned a ferocious whodunit called "The Lovers", eventually re-written, re-titled "Shockproof", and assigned to German émigré director Douglas Sirk by Columbia Pictures. In 1949, the year of SHOCKPROOF's release and the start of Hollywood's massive decline, Fuller and Sirk's hysterical depiction of a shell-shocked post-war America presented daunting challenges to studio marketers adjusting to a changing public. Despite its tinkering, Columbia was unsatisfied with their final product--a stylish but confused noir-melodrama--dumping it in bottom-tier markets and burying it soon after it flopped. But in retrospect, this child of two subversive giants who would be among the most successful directors of the 50s is a fascinating showcase of riveting B-movie mechanics and complex mise-en-scène. The opportunity to see this film, finally circulating in a gorgeous 35mm print more than 50 years since its completion, is a rare privilege. More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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EBRAHIM GOLESTAN: Lion of Iranian Cinema (Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center / Block Cinema– Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Exploring a major gap in Western awareness of Iranian film history, the Film Center hosts an unprecedented retrospective of short and feature films by the influential though largely unknown Ebrahim Golestan. As a young man, Golestan founded Iran's first artist-led film studio, eventually directing and producing an impressive body of work that prefigured many of the formal, aesthetic, and thematic qualities of Iran's second New Wave, as ushered in by celebrated contemporary masters like Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami. The series starts with a deceptively whimsical comic satire--THE SECRET OF THE TREASURE OF THE JINN VALLEY (1972, 118 min, 35mm; screening Fri, 7:30pm & Mon, 7:45pm). It continues with a program of four early documentaries (1961-1965, 95 min, 35mm; screening Sat, 3pm & Wed, 8:15pm) including three commissioned by the Iran Oil Company and another funded and subsequently banned by Iran's Culture Ministry, which demonstrate Golestan’s "unique talent for transforming films intended as educational short subjects into poetic and sometimes ironic reflections on history, labor, and the forces of nature." The highlight is undoubtedly the striking 1965 masterpiece THE BRICK AND THE MIRROR (124 min, 35mm; screening Sat, 7:45pm & Thurs, 6pm): "Moody realism conveys a stark poetry in this tale of a cab driver stuck with an abandoned baby in his back seat. Moral quandaries and social fears vie with eroticism when the driver and a lonely woman spend the night with the baby as the phantom facsimile of a family. The film’s finale, set in an orphanage, is a stunning, haunting piece of social realism that was to send ripples of influence through the next four decades of Iranian cinema." (Quotes from Film Center program). Golestan himself will be appearing to answer questions at the Friday and weekend screenings of his work, and attending a Golestan symposium led by accomplished Chicago academics Tom Gunning (U of C) and Hamid Naficy (Northwestern), taking place Sunday, 1:30-4:30pm at Block Cinema. The symposium will include presentations of rare short films, including Forugh Farrokhzad's THE HOUSE IS BLACK ("the greatest of all Iranian films" in Jonathan Rosenbaum's estimation). Be sure to read Rosenbaum's long review of Golestan's work in this week's Reader. More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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ALTMAN-ESQUE: Films by Robert Altman (Retrospective)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
The Music Box pays tribute to the recently departed director with ten films ranging from the canonized to the obscure. Though detractors have faulted Robert Altman for his easy caricatures and lack of unifying theme, neither quality contradicts one critic’s estimation that he was the Walt Whitman of cinema. Like the great American poet, Altman was an iconoclast fascinated by American society and its inherent diversity, grounded in good humor and prone to wild, rambling observations. Whitman’s groundbreaking run-on stanzas found their cinematic equivalent in Altman’s playful zoom shots and predilection for improvisation (his documentary application of 24-track sound in CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974), a cinematic first, would have pleased Whitman as well). The results are sometimes grating, but never lazy; even when he aspired to do nothing more than dance around the culture’s idiosyncrasies, he was never less than entertaining. His ambitions reached their peak in NASHVILLE (1975), the film that rewrote the GRAND HOTEL formula for post-Vietnam War society, complete with political skepticism and off-the-cuff pop songs. Altman's other 70s films are all worth watching, particularly his collaborations with Elliot Gould—an odd, neurotic presence who became an icon thanks to M*A*S*H (1970) and THE LONG GOODBYE (1974)—and the peerless Shelley Duvall. View the complete schedule at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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STILL SHOWING:
Two by Verhoeven: BLACK BOOK + STARSHIP TROOPERS
Music Box – Screening Daily & Friday, midnight, respectively; check showtimes
“I’d like to make a film critiquing the United States’ military-industrial complex, but I realize I already did that in STARSHIP TROOPERS,” Paul Verhoeven quipped not long after September 11, 2001, virtually ensuring his exile from American filmmaking. It’s a loss to Hollywood, however, that Verhoeven (ROBOCOP, TOTAL RECALL, SHOWGIRLS) has returned to his native Netherlands; he is simply one of the most intelligent and entertaining filmmakers alive. Though critical of conventional morality and all forms of hegemony—his current WWII thriller BLACK BOOK dares to condemn Holland’s resistance fighters as fervently as it does the Nazis—he is also a master of popular storytelling technique. His acute deployment of sex, violence, and intrigue is forever watchable, and enables him to dissect mechanics of popular culture from within. BLACK BOOK may be enjoying a more positive critical reception than Verhoeven’s subversive masterpieces of the 90s because it plays on generic/political tropes more than 60 years old. But like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (with which it shares rich verisimilitude and a pornographic imagination), it boldly depicts 1945 as the start of everything frightening in the world today. More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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ALSO RECOMMENDED
Preston Sturges' LADY EVE (Classic Revival)
Music Box – Sunday, 11:30am
An unusually sedate offering from Preston Sturges, this irrepressible romance suggests a path not taken for the typically madcap writer/director, who never treated human emotions with such genuine sensitivity and grace again - but he also never had such natural romantic leads to work with. Typecast to perfection as a brassy con artist and her timid mark, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda elevate their opposites-attract shtick to intimate poetry, lovingly photographed in extra-long takes. This being vintage Sturges, it’s also wet-your-pants hilarious, endlessly quotable and overrun with his trademark blustering old fogeys (Charles Coburn, Eugene Palette, William Demarest). (1941, 97 min, 35mm). More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Sam Fuller's FIXED BAYONETTES (Classic Revival)
LaSalle Bank Cinema – Saturday, 8pm
Never one to beat around the bush, U.S. Army vet Samuel Fuller generates a powerful sense of battlefield unease right from the start in FIXED BAYONETS! One of the most brilliantly direct opening sequences in war film history features an anonymous military jeep emerging from the jungle, hitting a land mine, and exploding. Obliterated along with it is the sense of false security that stereotypical establishing usually convey--announcing his film in this way is one of Fuller’s most eloquent demonstrations of righteous disregard for cinematic convention while in search of larger truths (experiential, in this instance). It only gets better - that is, messier and even less predictable - from there. Fred Camper: “Fuller evokes the full horror of war, the randomness of death in battle. His narrative and visual choices support that theme: raw and open-ended, they're utterly lacking the comfortable conclusions and simple moralizing of most war movies.” (1951, 92 min). Venue Information.
x AFRICAN TRAVELING SHORTS (New Foreign)
Facets Cinematheque – Saturday & Sunday, 1pm
Facets' AFRICAN TRAVELING FILM FESTIVAL continues with a program of award-winning short films: OUSMANE (Senegal/France, 2006, 15 min) follows a 7 year old begger on the streets of Dakar, who writes a letter to Santa Claus; YOU, WAGUIH (Egypt/France, 2005, 28 min) depicts a screenwriter's relationship to his son filtered through reflections on his father's political life; MY LOST HOME (Morroco/France, 2001, 19 min) explores the history of relations between Morocco and France from the perspective of a Moroccan immigrant who moved to France as a boy in 1970; and in WHOLE: A TRINITY OF BEING (South Africa, 2004, 16 min), a wheelchair-bound artist turns her camera on herself to create a trio of experimental videos dealing with love, sexuality, visibility, voice, and survival. Text adapted from Facets program notes. More info at www.facets.org.
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SCI-FI SPECTACULAR (Special Event)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
In collaboration with the Movie Side Film Festival, the Music Box hosts a 14 hour marathon of sci-fi classics, starting Saturday at noon with the recently restored version of Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (1927) and ending in the early hours of Sunday morning with Paul Verhoeven's brilliant blockbusting satire STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997). Other features: Robert Wise's timeless THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) alongside the visually stunning and wonderfully absurd FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956); evocative, formally inventive early shorts by Chris Marker (LA JETÉE (1962)) and George Lucas (ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH THX 1138 4EB (1967)), two filmmakers on opposite ends of the artistic spectrum; stylish, dystopian action thrillers MAD MAX (1979) and TERMINATOR (1984); 2005's instant cult classic, SERENITY; along with programs of rare, classic Warner Brothers shorts and local shorts. Peripheral pleasures include live music, merch booths, a discussion by film writer Foster Hirsch, and a scheduled appearance by actress Patricia Neal. More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
x RUSSIAN FANTASTIK CINEMA (Classic Revival)
Gene
Siskel Film Center – Check Reader
Movies for showtimes
The Soviet Union's astounding tradition of science fiction should hardly be surprising, given the government's futurist-tinged, utopian party line and initial push for technological development. But the writers’ aspirations were equally informed by the bland reality of Soviet life, giving even the brightest Soviet fantasies a bitter aftertaste. The Film Center hosts a month-long series of Soviet science fiction and fantasy films, focusing largely on commercially successful Russian-language efforts but providing a wonderful primer on a national genre cinema largely unknown in the West. RUSLAN AND LUDMILLA (Sunday, 3:15 pm) is the last and most ambitious film made by Aleskandr Ptushko, whose approach was always closer to that of a storybook illustrator than a filmmaker; this film, an adaptation of a Pushkin poem, is a perfect example . Running nearly three hours, the film is a catalogue of fantasies and fancies, combining Ptushko’s Soviet earnestness with the dark subtext of Russian fairy tales. The film is joined his week by two films whose release dates roughly bookend the Space Race: 1959’s THE HEAVENS CALL (Monday, 6pm & Thursday, 8:30pm), a visually striking classic in which cosmonauts must rescue a group of Americans who have crash-landed on an asteroid, and 1981’s fantastical cult classic TO THE STARS BY HARD WAYS (Saturday, 5:30pm & Tuesday, 8pm). Full details
at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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CAFÉ SETAREH (New Foreign)
Facets Cinematheque – Screening Daily, check Reader Movies for showtimes
Facets' main feature this week is a visually striking, critically-acclaimed exploration of challenges faced by middle class women in modern Tehran. The story follows three women—a strong matriarch, a young, romantic bachelorette, and a middle-aged woman in love with a younger man—depicting their attempts to reconcile personal desires with the social obligations and prescribed moral codes they unconsciously adhere to. (dir. Saman Moghadam, Iran, 2005, 102 min, 35mm). More info at www.facets.org.
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ALSO PLAYING AT DOC FILMS
This week, the programmers at DOC offer two masterpieces of Japanese cinema. On Tuesday, documentarian Kazuo Hara will present a screening of his bizarre and occasionally frightening THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON (1987). The film follows Kenzo Okuzaki, insane war veteran and would-be assassin of Emperor Hirohito, as he bombards an unsuspecting public with stories of war experiences in New Guinea. Thursday’s screening of Yasujiro Ozu’s OHAYO (1959), is more serene—though no less skeptical—take on post-war Japan, utilizing ravishing color and a child’s perspective to question the ethics of the nation’s middle-class. Also playing: a program of shorts starring Keystone Films starlet Mabel Normand; Boris Karloff in Universal Pictures’ THE MUMMY (1932); and the little-known war drama ACTION IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC (1943), featuring Humphrey Bogart and Ruth Gordon. Full schedule and details at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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ALSO PLAYING AT BLOCK CINEMA
Block continues its Contemporary Turkish Cinema series with an over-the-top, whimsical comedy, ICE CREAM, I SCREAM (DONDURMAN GAYMAK) (2006, 100 min, 35mm; screening Wednesday, 8pm), Turkey's submission for Academy Award consideration in 2006. The next installment in their wonder-filled Childhood series, THE TIN DRUM (1979, 142 min, 16mm; screening Thursday, 8pm) is a moody, allegorical tale from West Germany that actually succeeded in grabbing Oscar's attention. This formally extravagant adaptation of the classic Gunter Grass novel, set in 1930s Danzig, depicts a young boy who rebels against the world of adults by pounding madly and endlessly on his tin drum. Also showing: a nature film documenting animal migration patterns, AMAZING CREATURES (Thursday, 3:30pm). Synopses and more info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
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