CRUCIAL VIEWING

Jacques Rivette's OUT 1 (Special Event)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday & Sunday, starting at 2:30pm
In terms of its length and rarity, one could argue that viewing Rivette's thirteen hour serial is the cinemagoer's equivalent of arduously hiking the slopes of one of the world's tallest mountains. From the moment it was rejected by French state TV, to its present existance in a single circulating (unsubtitled) 16mm print, OUT 1 (1971) has eluded more cinephiles than Mount Everest has thwarted climbers. Featuring a who's who cast of French New Wave actors, writers, directors, and critics (including Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto, Michael Lonsdale, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Michelle Moretti, Bernadette Lafont, Bulle Ogier, Michel Delahaye, Jean-François Stevenin, and Eric Rohmer), in a plot partially derived from Balzac's La Comédie humaine and shot on the fly in Paris and Obade, there is nothing quite like it before or after—except perhaps Rivette's own L'AMOUR FOU (1969) and OUT 1: SPECTRE (Rivette's 1972 abridged reworking of the same material; screening in this series next month), which serve as fine companion pieces. Jonathan Rosenbaum boldly labels OUT 1, "the definitive film about 60s counterculture." Indeed, this is cinema at its most maddening, liberated, and, ultimately, mind-bending—an intense euphoria lies in store for those with the perseverance to reach its peak. There are still seven months of 2007 left, but it's safe to say that this is the Chicago film event of the year. The work will be broken into four parts over two days, and a "soft-titled" English translation will appear directly on the screen. Tickets are still available from the Film Center box-office! Full details at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

>> Read C-F contributor Gabe Klinger's detailed history of OUT 1 here.
>> Read Jonathan Rosenbaum's feature article in this week's Reader here.
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ALSO RECOMMENDED

IN VISIBLE PLACES, Parts 1 & 2 (Underground)
NWesternAve – Friday, 8:30pm / Thursday, 8:30pm
This week marks the start of NWA's month-long "In Visible Places" series, which will focus on fictional and documentary films that take their audiences to "inaccessable" locations both real and imaginary. Friday's double bill transports viewers to the impoverished neighborhoods of mid-20th century New York. The "fictionalized documentary" ON THE BOWERY (1957, 65 min, DVD), combines non-professional actors with documentary footage to create a loose guide to being "down and out" in the big city—it's a film populated with friendly swindlers and gloomy drunks, photographed in cheap bars and sweaty flophouses. BLAST OF SILENCE (1961, 77 min, DVD), Allen Barron's legendary Beat film noir, combines a bleak outlook, jazz score and beautiful location photography to create one of the highlights of the genre's late period. The series' second screening, on Thursday, will present the Hong Kong musical melodrama AIR HOSTESS (1959, 108 min, DVD), whose Utopian artificiality evokes a Westernized China that never existed. Starring the iconic Grace Chang (whose films are famously idolized by Tsai Ming-Liang) and painted in bright primary colors, the film looks as though it had been photographed in a doll house. Text adapted from NWA program. More info at NWesternAve.com.
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Tsai Ming-liang's THE WAYWARD CLOUD (Revival)
Sonotheque - Saturday, 7pm
It’s hard to believe that this is only the third Chicago screening in two years of Tsai Ming-liang’s recent feature—and that it arrives courtesy of a music club rather than a cinema. But Tsai is one of the greatest working filmmakers and any opportunity to catch his work on a large screen (so dependent as it is on nuance) is welcome indeed. And, on further reflection, Sonotheque is not so unusual a venue for his work. The Taiwanese New Wave of which Tsai is a part is as much based on reference and progressive imagination as hip-hop; it could be argued that Tsai’s films—minimal, sex-obsessed, and haunting in how they render indistinguishable spontaneous behavior from automated response—are the cinematic equivalent of Timbaland’s productions. The major difference between the two is that Tsai is a conscious poet of despair. While his films are captivating to watch, they are grounded in anxieties of the early 21st century: sexual identity crisis, alienation from earlier generations, the underlying apathy of contemporary cities. THE WAYWARD CLOUD (which could have been titled Future Sex/Love Sounds) throws video porn and viral epidemics into the mix, but there is levity throughout. Tsai’s deadpan visual humor is the modern heir to Buster Keaton’s and his bizarre musical numbers (even more affected here than they were in his 1998 masterpiece THE HOLE) amuse like a comic book Jacques Demy. (2005, 112 min, DVD projection). Further info: info@sonotheque.net / 312-226-7600.
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Robert Altman's THE LONG GOODBYE (Revival)
Music Box – Saturday & Sunday, 11:30am
Writes J. Hoberman in his recent reassessment: “THE LONG GOODBYE is the closest Hollywood ever came to making its Breathless. Seldom has artifice seemed more spontaneous. The camera is in constant motion. Everyone acts as though they're acting in a movie—none more than [Elliot] Gould… [who] turns out to be the movie's moral center, if not its Old Testament avenger, using the final minutes to metaphorically bring the whole Hollywood temple crashing down.” Yet for all of Robert Altman’s supposed irreverence—free-for-all improvisation, John Williams’ jokey score (endless variations on a movie-movie theme)—his film has its own cryptic appreciation for Hollywood lore. It was co-written by Studio Era survivor Leigh Brackett, a scriptwriter on the greatest adaptation of Raymond Chandler, Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1945). And Altman’s penchant for location shooting provides a view into Los Angeles underworld in keeping with 1940s film noir. (1974, 112 min, 35mm widescreen). More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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RUSSIAN FANTASTIK CINEMA (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes noted below
The Film Center's Russian fantasy and sci-fi comes to a close this week with a pair of films on opposing sides of the artistic spectrum. Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's science fiction novel SOLARIS (1971, 165 min, 35mm; screening Monday, 3pm & Wednesday, 6:30pm) occupies an interesting position in the legendary Russian director's oeuvre; despite winning the '72 Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, the film was disliked intensely by Lem and regarded as unsuccessful by the director himself, for failing to transcend its genre. It's a bit ironic, in light of Tarkovsky's fabled censorship problems with the Soviet government, that SOLARIS was generously funded and faced comparatively little state interference--after all, what could be more subversive in the context of the Cold War space race than a film deeply skeptical of the utopian notion (prevalent on both sides of the Iron Curtain) that leaving the earth necessarily entails a transcendence of our worldly worries, that science and technology provide the ultimate answer to the problems of humankind? The film's plot revolves around a scientist sent to a space station on a distant planet to investigate the mysterious manifestations plaguing the station's crew--manifestations that seem to be generated by the planet's uncanny ability to read the deepest fears and anxieties of the humans who have taken up residence above its glowing surface. Though superficially similar to Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, SOLARIS is both a perceptive critique of that film (which Tarkovsky called "cold and sterile") as well as a fascinating companion piece. Also playing this week as part of the series is the charmingly earnest adventure THE AMPHIBIAN MAN (1962, 95 min, 35mm; screening Friday, 6pm & Tuesday, 7:45pm), whose gee-whiz science fiction and Hardy Boys morality is the polar opposite of Tarkovsky's ambiguity and spiritual humanism. Exoticizing its Communist Cuba setting in the way only Soviets could (a naive fascination that reached its apex with I AM CUBA), this story of a young man with gills and a brilliant scientist father has, quite unsurprisingly, long been a staple of Russian television. The Film Center's program compares it to EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, but Johnny Quest is much closer to its sense of sunny, romantic do-goodery. Full details at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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THE TIN DRUM & HERCULES IN NEW YORK (Outdoor Screening)
Heaven Gallery (on the roof) – Wednesday, 8pm
The Bike-In Cinema series continues its free double-bill screenings on Heaven Gallery's roof with two films whose protagonists magically exist outside of time, their immutability a method for commenting on the changing world: Volker Schlondorff's THE TIN DRUM, an adaption of Gunter Grass's classic novel, follows a boy who decides to never grow up and instead has to watch Germany grow up around him; HERCULES IN NEW YORK stars a dubbed Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first screen role as the Greek hero running amok in the 1970s. More info at www.heavengallery.com.
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THIS WEEK AT DOC FILMS
Rounding out an especially good season of James Whale screenings in Chicago, DOC screens one of his best on Thursday. THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) fuses high literary aspirations (including “guest appearances” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Lord Byron!) and pulp storytelling with a gentility uniquely Whale’s own. Roger Ebert has included it as one of his “Great Movies,” writing, “Seen today, Whale's masterpiece is more surprising than when it was made because today's audiences are more alert to its buried hints of homosexuality, necrophilia and sacrilege.” The week is littered with a few more subversive classics: a special presentation of ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (1955), the quintessential Douglas Sirk melodrama, in which the stylization of the sets suggests the tragic phoniness of the lives therein; CRAZED FRUIT (1956), a breakthrough in Japanese filmmaking for its frank sexuality and a point-of-reference for the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s; and STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982), which subverts the Star Trek series by being watchable. Also playing: a program of silent shorts starring Gloria Swanson, a free screening of Terrence Malick’s DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978), and Louis Malle’s AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS (1987). Full schedule and details at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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THIS WEEK AT BLOCK CINEMA
This week, Block concludes its contemporary Turkish series with the Chicago premiere of THE PLAY (2005, 70 min, 35mm; screening Friday, 8pm), a film about nine peasant women who perform the liberating act of staging a play about their lives. On Thursday, WNUR (Northwestern's non-commerical radio station, 89.3fm) teams up with Block to present SONIC CELLULOID (8pm), a sound and image extravaganza that brings together the music of several local bands with the cinematic accompaniment of The Brothers Quay, Chris Welsby, Larry Guttheim, Jan Svankmejer, Phil Solomon, Charles and Ray Eames, and more. More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu and www.soniccelluloid.org.
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POISON FRIENDS (New Foreign)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Emmanuel Bourdieu, son of renowned sociologist Pierre, former philosophy professor, and writer of the 1996 hit MY SEX LIFE...OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT, returns as director in POISON FRIENDS (LES AMITIÉS MALEFIQUES) to cast another look at the Parisian intelligentsia. This time around, instead of philosophy graduate students, the drama of insecurity and Schadenfreude plays out amongst four aspiring littérateurs at the Sorbonne. Repeatedly described as "very French," presumably due to the talky sophistication of its characters, POISON FRIENDS mustn't be mistaken for mere bookish drivel spattered with references to Karl Krauss and Racine. As J. Hoberman writes, "The movie is largely unclassifiable—at once a psychological study, an exceedingly dry comedy, and a moral tale in which stories are purloined and frauds perpetrated." The film opened la Semaine de la Critique at Cannes last year, winning not only its grand prize, but also the SACD screenwriting award and the Grand Golden Rail, an honour given by a group of railway workers to the best feature in the Critics' Week. (2006, 100 min, 35mm). Full details at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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ALSO PLAYING

* Recommended by the Chicago Reader.
** Previously written up by CINE-FILE. Click title to view capsule.

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Contributors this week: Erika Balsom, Gabe Klinger, Ben Sachs, Ignatius Vishnevetsky, Ethan White, Darnell Witt

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