CRUCIAL VIEWING
Aleksandr Sokurov’s ALEXANDRA (New Russian)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Russia's contemporary master Aleksandr Sokurov has crafted a heartbreaking and beautiful film on freedom and constraint in ALEXANDRA. The story is slight: an elderly Russian woman visits her army officer grandson at his post in Chechnya. Sokurov, a master of near dream-like states that infuse a gritty reality, inhabits this tenuous space with characters who seem to be continually searching—the film is full of gentle looks and harsh glances, unashamed staring and benign voyeurism—and seeking answers to unspoken questions. But Sokurov, with his claustrophobic framing, camerawork that fragments or obscures the image, and characters enveloped in darkness or lost in their surroundings, continually frustrates any enlightenment. There is no resolution or transcendence here—this is a war film where the killing is all happening on the inside. It is a quiet, glorious film of desperation. (2007, 91 min, 35mm) PF
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ALSO PLAYING THIS WEEK: The Film Center presents a well-timed, week-long run of Sokurov's previous film, ELEGY OF LIFE, an homage to Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Full coverage below.
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Summer Revivals at Doc Films (Classic Revival & Avant-Garde)
University of Chicago's legendary revival house offers another extraordinary week of rarely screened gems by some of cinema's greatest artists—three of them (the Mizoguchi, Ozu and Rainer) unavailable for home viewing.
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Yasujiro Ozu's FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE – Friday, 7pm & 9:30pm
Yasujiro Ozu is intimidating—his body of work especially so. He made fifty-three films in thirty-six years; only thirty-three survived, many of them among the greatest ever made. Perhaps the term variations on a theme is overused, but Ozu's focus, discipline, and mastery outstrips even Ford and Hitchcock. Classical music has Bach; classical cinema has Ozu. His movies are startlingly simple—they are dramas, in his words, "about people like you and me." The theme is the territory between modernity and tradition; said more fundamentally, it is the tension between what we have and what we want. His pacing is as natural as the seasons, and to some, just as slow. FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE is a later Ozu. A wife is bored with her business executive husband, a niece rebuffs arranged marriage. Although it is Japan fifty-years-ago, it is a world you will recognize. (1952, 116 min, 35mm) WS
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Satyajit Ray's CHARULATA – Saturday, 7pm & 9:30pm
Satyajit Ray was destined to have been involved in the arts in some way. He was born into a profoundly artistic family and trained as an artist, working initially in commercial advertising and book illustration. Not only was he born into an auspicious family, he was born at the right time as well. A trip to Europe in 1950 planted the idea of making a neorealist film. It would be a self-taught director, leading a largely self-taught crew. That same year RASHOMON opened the West's eyes to Asian film. In 1956, Ray's first feature PATHER PANCHALI debuted at Cannes and garnered immense praise. All of this would be unmemorable if Ray himself weren't so talented, creating beautiful shots with the resources at hand. Nine years into his new career, Ray directed CHARULATA, the story of a successful publisher and his neglected wife. One of his favorites, Ray thought of CHARULATA as "the one with the fewest flaws." (1965, 124 min, 35mm) WS
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Kenji Mizoguchi's UTAMARO AND HIS FIVE WOMEN – Wednesday, 8pm
Two Sokurovs are screening in Chicago this week (one at the Music Box, one at the Film Center) while Doc presents Kenji Mizoguchi's most Sokurovian film: UTAMARO AND HIS FIVE WOMEN, a journey into national history that is, of course, the director's journey into himself.
Kitagawa Utamaro is both one of Japan's greatest printmakers and Mizoguchi's double—from the woodblock to the film print. Another Russian filmmaker comes to mind: Andrei Tarkovsky, whose ANDREI RUBLEV presents a similarly holistic biography. (1947, 106 min, 35mm) IV
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Yvonne Rainer's KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES – Thursday, 8pm
KRISTINA TALKING PICTURES is avant-gardist Yvonne Rainer's third film. Like the two before it, LIVES OF PERFORMERS and FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO..., it is disjointed and collage-like in structure, an outgrowth of Rainer's earlier dance routines: "There was no narrative in dance [although] sometimes I incorporated story-fragments from various sources, some of which were autobiographical. [My] first three films grew out of earlier versions combining live performance with slide and film projections, and I always thought of those versions as an interim project on the way to making the finished film." Despite her admitted influence from the mother of the American avant-garde (and fellow dancer-cum-filmmaker), Maya Deren, Rainer's cinema feels more European in ethos—more Godardian, to be exact. She also shares cinematographer Babbette Mangolte with experimental feminist Chantal Akerman, a filmmaker whom you could say was cut from a similar cloth. With that combination, it's hard to lose. (1976, 90 min, 16mm) KH
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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Sergei Paradjanov's THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3:15pm & Thursday, 6pm
In 1968 director Sergei Paradjanov made one of the most artistically uncompromised and unique expressions in the history of cinema with THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES. Upon submitting it for Soviet approval, his movie was promptly taken away and re-cut while he was served jail time for its transgressions. The charges: "secretism," "decadent aestheticism," perpetuation of an "excessive cult of the past," and "latent anti-Sovietism." Though his five-year jail sentence and artistic hijacking are, of course, deplorable, it's hard to not agree with the charges. Paradjanov made an iconoclastic movie, celebrating the life of an Armenian poet, and breaking from the style of social realism. Instead of following the party line, he created an ode to pre-Soviet culture: The film is defiantly arcane; it rhapsodizes on the rituals, dress, customs, and poetry of a place and time very few audience members will be familiar with. It doesn't explain either, it just shows. Through use of gorgeous, Byzantine tableaux and cryptic excerpts of poetry (seen as text, and spoken as in an incantation), Paradjanov gives us a tantalizing glimpse into his occult world of beauty and hugger-mugger. The film, in a similar style to that of Pier Paolo Pasolini, moves through cuts rather than camera movements. His frames are filled with mystery: every person, place or thing is purposely positioned, even when that purpose isn't entirely clear. Spoken words are replaced by body movements as the means of communication: every gesture, turn, rhythm and pulse whispers something to you. Though highly visual, POMEGRANATES seems to be striving more for the invisible. The visible manifestations of this can be seen in the wind that blows through pages of hundreds on books, the "invisible" strings that hold and twirl props, in the small holes in the fabric that one character seems to be reading. For all of its attention to the details of of the material world, it shows things that cannot be said. It speaks to the mind, soul and imagination. (1969, 88 min, 35mm) KH
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ALSO PLAYING THIS WEEK: THE FIRST LAD (1958, 86 min, 35mm; Saturday, 5pm & Sunday, 3:15pm), one of Paradjanov's early films, made under the guidance of his mentor Alexander Dovzhenko.
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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Bank of America Cinema – Saturday, 8pm
Given John Ford's stature in world cinema, it's easy to forget that the first twenty-one years of his career were undistinguished by the standards of his later films. Certainly there were great films during that period (particularly his Will Rogers films), but it wasn't until 1939, with a trio of early masterpieces, that the core of what would define his style and thematic complexity would emerge. STAGECOACH, DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK, and, especially, YOUNG MR. LINCOLN would see the synthesis of elements that had appeared scattershot in his previous films: a sense of epic and history; an Americana tinged as much by darkness as it was by nostalgia; a growing sense of moral ambiguity; and a visual style that sets his heroes apart from those around them. Ford's characters are often dominated by space—usually in the vast expanses of the West—but even in YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, which feels more like a backwoods and courtroom chamber piece, Henry Fonda's Abe Lincoln is frequently cut off from others, through lighting, through camera movement, and through Fonda's studied posing which works to create mini-tableaux within the shot. Ford is walking a thin line between heavy-handed mythologizing and punctuating a sense of historical foreshadowing and inevitability. Of course, he succeeds and creates a tension that falls between a near-parody of the Lincoln myth and a grandeur that hints at the larger historical events to come that dwarf even Lincoln. Ford had reached a union of style and vision which itself foreshadowed things to come. (1939, 100 min, 35mm) PF
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More info at www.cine-file.info/venues/lasalle.html.
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ALSO RECOMMENDED
FROWNLAND (New American)
Facets Cinémathèque – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Upon the New York City premiere of veteran projectionist Ronald Bronstein's bewildering, self-distributed debut feature, Scott Foundas proclaimed, "FROWNLAND announces that underground cinema is alive and well." That the film, in spite of its "demented brilliance," could not find a major backer is no surprise; as Foundas explains, "even the most risk-taking of independent distributors tend to shy away from movies whose core audience would appear to consist of shut-ins, sadists, and manic depressives, and which are guaranteed to offend (or wig out) the remotely well-adjusted. Bringing us face-to-face and much too close for comfort with a stuttering, snot-nosed, compulsively forehead-rubbing twentysomething Brooklynite named Keith (played with freakish intensity by an actor named Dore Mann), FROWNLAND is either a primal scream issued from a potentially dangerous mind, a wildly original work of outsider art, a doctoral thesis on how not to make friends and influence people, or all (or none) of the above. Only this much is certain: It's been a while since something this gonzo turned up at a theater near you." Filled with homage and steeped in the history of midnight movies, FROWNLAND stands beside ALEXANDRA as a must-see premiere for Chicago cinephiles. (2007, 106 min, 35mm)
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Full details at www.facets.org.
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Aleksandr Sokurov’s ELEGY OF LIFE (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Aleksandr Sokurov is as essential today as Roberto Rossellini was forty years ago. The legacy of auteurism has made too many contemporary directors conscious of the idea that great filmmakers have "styles"; they work hard to define their own through technique, not realizing that true style is the unconscious extension of a particular world-view. But Sokurov's concern isn't style—it's history and culture, and this "disregard for cinema" is what makes his work consistently vigorous. It's a great week when two very different Sokurov films premiere at two very different theaters: ALEXANDRA, at the operatic Music Box, and ELEGY OF LIFE: ROSTROPOVICH VISHNEVSKAYA at the laboratory-like Gene Siskel Film Center. Reconsidering Sokurov's DIALOGUES WITH SOLZHENITSYN just days after its subject's death, one is astounded that the film now feels haunted, not by Solzhenitsyn's ghost but by his life—his words and actions seem to be bearing down on us. ELEGY OF LIFE, completed and screened before the death of its own "subject," the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (husband of ALEXANDRA star Galina Vishnevskaya), is haunted by an entire generation. Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya, and Boris Yelstin (who makes a brief appearance) represent an ideal of courage and deserved praise to Sokurov. This is the brightly lit lobby to the grand theatre of RUSSIAN ARK and ALEXANDRA, where we see the actors without their make-up, walking infirmly with their canes. (2006, 101 min, DigiBeta) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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Terrence Malick's DAYS OF HEAVEN (Classic Revival)
Music Box – Saturday & Sunday, 11:30am, Wednesday, 12:30pm
Drenched in warm, natural light and filled with an air of beautiful mystery, this story of migrant farm workers in the early 20th century established Malick as perhaps the leading auteur in American film. He promptly moved to France and didn't make another film for twenty years. The two years he spent editing DAYS OF HEAVEN may have tired him out, but they were certainly worth it. A teenage girl narrates the tale of a love triangle that develops between her brother Bill (Richard Gere), his lover Abby (Brooke Adams), and a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard). As in Malick's three other films, the characters play a secondary role to the expansive vistas that frame them (in this case, it's mostly the shimmering wheat fields of Alberta, Canada, standing in for the Texas Panhandle). Their lives, and the wonders and tragedies they experience, play out across the wide frames, rendering them smaller, but all the more heartbreaking. Photographed by Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler (who was miffed about not receiving sufficient credit), the film won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Cinematography. (1978, 94 min, 35mm) MS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (Cult Revival)
Portage Theater – Saturday, 8:30pm
One of the joys of B horror movies is that they swerve drunkenly across the line separating horror and comedy. And these films are often drunk on sheer enthusiasm, too excited about making a movie to hide it. THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) doesn't stop there. It also trolls the murky and not-too-deep waters of sexuality, echoing themes of KING KONG but with the benefit of less money and more achingly obvious dialogue. If you give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their thinly veiled metaphors, for 1954, THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON has a refreshingly frank and interesting engagement with sex. The creature is after all the legendary man-fish from the Amazon's Eden-like black lagoon. (1954, 79 min, 35mm) WS
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More info at www.portagetheater.org.
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David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB (Cult Revival)
Music Box – Saturday & Sunday, midnight
Viewed without the constraints of political interpretation, David Fincher’s FIGHT CLUB is one of the rare great films to come out of contemporary Hollywood—rare because it puts the regular luxuries of the blockbuster studio film at the service of provocative satire and a bottomless imagination. (On first release, its only real precedent was Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL.) It’s also the rare film adaptation that actually improves upon its source material, imbuing Chuck Palahnuik’s glib, sub-Vonnegut prose with a near-Joycean level of cross-references, allusions, and puns. The wealth of detail helped the film attract a devoted cult following, which made it one of the first true successes of the DVD era, but the density of Fincher’s framing and sound design is best appreciated in a theater. Never arbitrary, Fincher’s carefully assembled aesthetic overload captures perfectly the anxiety of the so-called Information Age even when the film’s sociopolitical stance becomes muddled. As for that critical knot, tied either out of naivety or cynicism (and which Robin Wood attempts, fairly brilliantly, to untangle in his introduction to Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond), it manages to make the film linger in the mind regardless of one’s interpretation. For what it’s worth, this writer has overheard lengthy conversations about the moral costs of consumerism at nearly every screening of FIGHT CLUB he’s attended. (1999, 139 min, 35mm widescreen) BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (Cult Revival)
Music Box – Saturday & Sunday, midnight
If you saw this film during its first VHS release; if you saw it at just the right age; if you ate Cap'n Crunch while watching this film on Saturday mornings, over and over again; if you know who Large Marge, Crazy Larry and Francis Buxton are; then you know that PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, Tim Burton's first feature, remains his most emotionally-honest and just plain funnest movie. Its plot is a skeleton upon which, in best silent comedy fashion, vignettes stuffed with gags are draped. The end result is an unlikely fusion of BICYCLE THEIVES and PORKY IN WACKYLAND, Buñuel on laughing gas, Raymond-Scott-by-way-of-Danny-Elfman and Rube-Goldberg-meets-Ronald-Reagan. It's also the most quotable comedy since YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN: I know you are, but what am I? (1985, 90 min, 35mm) RC
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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MORE SCREENINGS & EVENTS:
The Film Center starts week two of the 14th Annual Black Harvest Film & Video Festival with a full schedule of features and shorts including the star-studded doc portrait of hip-hop giants, PUBLIC ENEMY: WELCOME TO THE TERRORDOME (2007,100 min; Friday, 8:15pm & Wednesday, 8:30pm). 'BAMA GIRL (2008, 72 min, Friday & Tuesday, 6:15pm), another new doc, follows African-American student, Jessica Joyce Thomas as she competes for the title of Homecoming Queen at University of Alabama—a school hesitant to let go of its racist traditions. THE PARTY LINE (2006, 88 min; Saturday, 8:15pm & Thursday, 8:30pm) is a romantic comedy shot on location in Southside Chicago about one man's doomed Valentine's Day (rumored to include a cameo by dirty avant-dance starlet Peaches). One girls chases stardom from her hometown in Gary, Indiana all the way to Vegas in THE BALLAD OF SADIE HAWKINS (2007,70 min; Sunday, 5pm & Tuesday, 8:15pm). Ilya Chaiken directs her second critical success in LIBERTY KID (2007, 93 min, Monday, 6pm & Wednesday, 6:15pm), a subtle drama about the changing circumstances of two NYC co-workers after 9/11. Also on bill for this week is a program of shorts called BEING A WOMAN (2007-8, 94 min, Monday, 8:15 pm & Thursday 6:15 pm), focusing on a diverse set of stories about African-American women. Check website for accompanying workshops and events. CL
A classic example of historical revisionism's cinematic transformation into popular holy writ, the courtroom verbal eviscerations of William Jennings Bryan ("Matthew Harrison Brady" (Frederic March)) at the hands of Darwin-toting agnostic Clarence Darrow ("Henry Drummond" (Spencer Tracy)) in INHERIT THE WIND (1960, 128 min, DVD projection; screening Wednesday, 8:30pm) have been long-indistinguishable from "the Scopes Monkey trial"; forgotten are the historical details (including Bryan's more cogent arguments about the political implications of evolutionary logic). Who cares? Not the intellectuals at Northwestern, who are on summer vacation. Held outdoors on the Norris University Center East Lawn. Details here. MC |
FROWNLAND 
