CRUCIAL VIEWING
Films by Joyce Wieland & Bruce Baillie (Avant-Garde)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Showtimes noted below
Doc's continuing slate of experimental classics is an essential primer on the best the genre has to offer. This week features two somewhat lesser known artists, but don't mistake Joyce Wieland and Bruce Baillie for B-list avant-garders—their collective work stands squarely alongside the Brakhages, the Angers, and the Warhols. And the specific films playing show them at their very best. Wieland's work frequently evinced a political edge that her once-husband Michael Snow just as frequently eschewed and REASON OVER PASSION (1969, 80 min, 16mm; Wednesday, 8pm) is no exception. Part road-movie, part structural film, part lyrical essay, part treatise on Canadian politics—it is a staggering work and one of the unquestionable masterpieces of Canadian cinema. Also screening is an unannounced bonus film—Wieland and Snow's DRIPPING WATER (1969, 11 min, 16mm). The films of Bruce Baillie (Thursday, 8pm) often demonstrate a similar facility with political themes, but their greatness lies in different areas. Baillie is one of the superb colorists of film (on a par with Douglas Sirk) as seen in the amazingly, mind-bendingly gorgeous CASTRO STREET (1966), ALL MY LIFE (1966), and, especially, VALENTIN DE LAS SIERRAS (1968). But, more importantly, Baillie was a profound excavator of the soul of 1960s America. A natural mythmaker, Baillie both cuts to the heart-of-darkness of the national psyche and celebrates the potential of the national spirit in his magisterial MASS FOR THE DAKOTA SIOUX (1964). Here Baillie stands apart from the modernists, formalists, and parodists that were his avant-garde contemporaries and aligns more with the great 19th century dissectors of a uniquely American identity—Melville, Hawthorne, Cooper, and Whitman. A lone original voice crying out amidst the rote din of a turbulent decade. (Eight films: 1960-1968, 95 min TRT, 16mm). PF
- - -
More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
x
Manoel de Oliveira’s DOOMED LOVE (Retrospective)
Film Center – Saturday, 2:45pm (entire film); Tuesday, 6pm (Part I only) & Wednesday, 6pm (Part II only)
The much-admired but rarely revived DOOMED LOVE is certainly the piece de la resistance of the Film Center’s Manoel de Oliveira series and one of the year’s most significant screenings as well. Like Jacques Rivette’s OUT 1 (1971)—the Film Center’s most exciting revival of 2007—DOOMED LOVE was shot on 16mm for European television, rejected for broadcast, then blown up to 35mm for festival screenings that secured Oliveira’s place as a major filmmaker. The film is based on an epic 19th century novel by Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, about separated lovers who choose to live out their lives in confinement, and its towering reputation comes from Oliveira’s equally committed fidelity to the source material. Like many epics of its time, Branco’s novel devotes much space to its characters’ interior lives; the film’s narration recites many of these passages verbatim, thereby challenging perceived wisdom about what is and is not cinematic. Writing about it in 1981, Jonathan Rosenbaum opined, “DOOMED LOVE is a veritable workshop of ideas about the incestuous relationship between novels and movies, and the diverse possibilities of literary adaptation. Most of the so-called avant-garde aspects of the film derive directly from this meditation and problem… [i.e.,] means for expressing an otherwise inaccessible content…. At the center of [Oliveira’s adaptation] is a dialectic between the seen and the imagined, the perceived and the unperceived… Intricate dovetailings of narration and dialogue produce some elegant displacements and overlaps in and on the soundtrack; the collision of the two narrative elements, far from dismantling the scene[s], gives [them] a kind of layered density.” Though such a description makes it sound like a formalist experiment, the film is still attenuated (albeit subtly) to the emotional richness of its epic love story. Our editor Darnell Witt recently saw the film at a New York screening, and he commented: “Unserialized, uninterrupted and blown up to 35mm DOOMED LOVE is immense and immersive… More than helping us appreciate [Oliveira’s] humor and imagery, the theatrical experience enables us to feel the full weight of the doomed lovers' separation—whether we are sharing the cell with the male protagonist during his years-long prison internment, or observing the female lead's noble (and tragically futile) attempt to make the most of her life in a convent… The film asks its audience to embrace a similar degree of restraint by sitting through such a long, emotionally muted picture. As such, we’re left feeling intellectually elevated rather than simply emotionally manipulated.” (1978, 265 min, 35mm). BS
- - -
More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
x
70mm Extravaganza (Classic Revival)
Music Box – Showtimes noted below
As the theatrical experience increasingly transforms from the way to see movies to a single option among many, such cinematic singularities as seeing a 70mm film have become less of a moviegoer's experience and more of a cinephile's curiosity. A quick browse on YouTube brings up numerous videos that almost constitute a new fetish genre: There's everything from loading the film into a camera, just lettin' her run FAR AND AWAY, and watching OKLAHOMA in MN, to running the stuff through a projector in someone's house. Apart from the proliferation of 70mm's new cousin IMAX, movies just aren't made this big anymore. Though Terrence Malick shot some 70mm scenes for THE NEW WORLD (2005), the last movie to be entirely shot in the outdated format is Kenneth Branagh's 1996 HAMLET (which has its own YouTube video). The problem with this dinosaur—it has been around since the beginning of cinema—is that it costs too much. But sometimes you get what you pay for. Chicago-based projectionist and theater designer par excellence James Bond (he designed the Film Center and operates the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival) notes that watching LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1963, 216 min; Sunday, 2:30 & 7:30pm) in 70mm over 35mm means being able to make out grains of sand in the desert. In fact, Mr. Bond considers having seen LAWRENCE in its intended format to be the best moviegoing experience of his life so far. It's arguably 70mm's shining achievement, making incredible use of our big, wide world under David Lean's direction, through the lens of cinematographer Freddie Young. But the Music Box isn't stopping there: three equally distinct visions will be projected in glorious detail over the next week. First up is TRON (1982, 96 min; Saturday, 2:30, 4:50, 7:10, 9:30pm & Wednesday, 3:30pm), Disney's first foray into computer-generated special effects—a cutting edge movie whose story and effects ironically forshadow the age of new media and the diminished role of cinema as the dominant moving image medium. Next up: Alfred Hitchcock's essential masterpiece VERTIGO (1958, 128 min; Monday & Tuesday, 5:15 & 8pm), a movie that inspired Chris Marker to ask in a written essay, "Do those who [don't know VERTIGO by heart] deserve anything at all?" Sam Peckinpah closes the series with his ultra-violent, myth-shattering Western THE WILD BUNCH (1969, 134 min, Wednesday & Thursday, 6 & 9pm). Though the Music Box's facilities don't have anything on yesteryear's purpose-built 70mm theaters, such as the closed McClurg Court Cinemas, this series marks a film-going experience unparalleled in an age when seeing things the way their makers intended has become unlikely and, all too often, a topic of indifference or even annoyance. KH
- - -
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
xx
Rare Features by D. W. Griffith (Classic Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Showtimes noted below
After Griffith's artistic ascent in the 1910s and early '20s, the rest of his career seemed to play out like one of his own films: a Southern gentleman of decidedly Victorian sensibility finds himself increasing irrelevant in the modern Jazz age. Despite the occasional critical or box office success, he never seemed to find his footing again. ISN'T LIFE WONDERFUL? (1924, 120 min, 16mm; Friday, 7pm and 9:30pm) is considered by some to be Griffith's last great film. Tellingly, he shot this story of Polish immigrants in devastated post-war Europe in Germany, where it fit nicely into the then burgeoning zeitgeist of the New Objectivity of G.W. Pabst and other upcoming realist filmmakers. Griffith's final film, THE STRUGGLE (1931, 87 min, archival 35mm; Saturday, 7pm only—the 9pm show is cancelled), was a critical and popular flop, derided as cornball (camp avant-la-lettre). But hindsight tells a different, if still not commonly accepted, tale: THE STRUGGLE, it turns out, is quite a great film. Yes, it's stagy; yes, Zita Johann is no Lillian Gish; yes, narrative logic sometimes goes out the window (literally, in one scene). But still... There is a subtle elegance at play here. Much of the film is in long shot (it looks more like an early sound film circa 1928/29 instead of 1931) and has a distinctly theatrical air. Which makes Griffith's uncharacteristically reserved use of camera movement, close-ups, and editing all the more powerful. A Prohibition-era story of a man and his battle with drink, Griffith presents us a morality tale (set in the poor and working-class city of his earlier shorts) rather than a glamorization of the voguish flapper-and-gangster-set. While this return to familiar terrain allowed him to turn out one last, quiet, masterpiece the world around him would have none of it—not when they could have the snap and sass of Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell. The struggle indeed. PF
- - -
More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
x
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS (New French)
Landmark Century Cinema – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Catherine Breillat is a wildly transgressive contemporary artist—a
filmmaker and novelist whose naturalistic explorations of
violent female sexuality tend to scandalize the sensibilities of conservative
audiences and feminist critics alike. Her latest—a shockingly
restrained costume drama (relatively speaking), adapted from a romantic
nineteenth-century novel by Jules Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly—is an aberration in her otherwise
brazen, taboo-maximalist career, and yet its affront to good taste and common decency is no less egregious. THE LAST MISTRESS is ostensibly the story of a
gentleman's dilemma (can our protagonist swear off his libertine past
for the sake of a dignified, aristocratic future?), but Breillat
manages to subvert the source novel's moralistic focus without
breaking a single genre convention. Her secret weapon is Asia Argento,
a performer whose own wildly deranged charisma has never found a more
worthy or convincing platform than this film's eponymous figure.
Erratic, exhibitionist sociopath though she may be, Argento's "La
Vellini" is an awe-inspiring force of nature, unwavering in her
convictions and strangely heroic in her unabashed pursuit of
pleasure—a potent foil to her fickle, baby-faced lover (the crux of Barbey d’Aurevilly's text; mere eye candy in Breillat's gaze), who remains
unknowable to his audience because his self-awareness is only skin deep. Tuning into powerful, psycho-sexual wavelengths of a fictional seductress, which could scarcely have been accessed by her (male) literary creator, Breillat
and Argento—this pair of cinematic soul mates—have crafted a
captivating depiction of unruly female desire, as wonderfully provocative in a contemporary
context as its antecedent came across in d’Aurevilly's day. (2007, 104 min, 35mm) DW
- - -
More info (including trailer) at www.ifcfilms.com.
xx
Cecil B. DeMille's UNION PACIFIC (Classic Revival)
Bank of America Cinema – Saturday, 8pm
The construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s is given the robust, spectacular Cecil B. DeMille treatment in this big-budget historical epic. The director, aptly described by the New York Times as the "P.T. Barnum of the movies—a showman extraordinary," was in the midst of a prolific and profitable Paramount Studios period in which costume dramas became his specialty. UNION PACIFIC (1939) mostly falls in line with the rest. Train robberies, mountain wrecks, buffalo stampedes, and Indian battles. Millions of dollars spent in production and millions more gained at the box office. Much like the ambitious railroad itself, the film wholly endorses a heroic American vision of progress and profit and renders any criticism absent or impotent. It depicts a nation largely united, flexing its muscles and waving the flag as the empire stretches out against the land. There are a few villains, to be sure: striking workers, Indians fighting displacement, and shady politicians. But they're valiantly put down by rail cop Jeff Butler (Joel McCrea), love interest Mollie Monahan (Barbara Stanwyck), and her fellow suitor Dick Allen (Robert Preston). It's perhaps no surprise that DeMille went on to become one of Hollywood's leading anti-Communist crusaders in the 1950s, while directing his two last, and most celebrated, films, THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952), and THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956). (1939, 133 min, 16mm) MS
- - -
Venue info at www.cine-file.info/venues/lasalle.html.
xx MANHATTAN MELODRAMA (Classic Revival)
Portage Theater – Sunday, 4pm
Priming the Northwest side for the nostalgic attitude necessary to contend with Michael Mann's PUBLIC ENEMIES next summer, the Portage screens—nearly 74 years to the sweltering July day—the last movie Midwestern bandit John Dillinger saw before being gunned down by FBI agents outside the newly air-conditioned Biograph theater. Could one imagine, in this event, a more poetic miscegenation of Hollywood narrative and sensational materiality? Positioned at the cusp of Prohibition repeal, Hays Code enforcement, and New Deal reform, MANHATTAN MELODRAMA's Cain-and-Abel opposition of bookish lawmaker Jim Wade (William Powell) and suave mobster Blackie Gallagher (Clark Gable) demonstrates the impossibility of removing the figure of the gangster from the national consciousness. Powell's character, standing in for FDR, marries "Eleanor" (Myrna Loy) on his rise to governing prominence; Gable serves as both his criminal foil and loyal admirer—a purely cinematic contradiction: the outlaw advocate of state reform. The film's novel fraternal framework of childhood companions emerging as public enemies (later redeployed in moralist anti-gangster melodramas DEAD END and ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES) had a notable return in the recession of the early 1990s with Warner Brothers' incoherent anti-gangster-revival NEW JACK CITY and the prescient leftist tragicomedy SNEAKERS, which brilliantly displaced the omnipotent mobster and his weaponry onto the startup CEO (Ben Kingsley) armed with an omniscient cryptographic technology. In an act of anachronistic historical reverence, the Portage will be charging 25 cents for this screening. (1934, 93 min) MC
- - -
More info at www.portagetheater.org.
xx
Zummer Tapez 08: Andy Roche (Experimental)
Roots & Culture Gallery (1034 N Milwaukee Ave) – Saturday, 8pm
Roots & Culture's inspired "Zummer Tapez" series invites artists to make "video mixtapes" featuring excerpts of their own moving image work juxtaposed with found footage clips and work by other artists, in order to create "a more social and entertaining artist talk." Saturday night's show features a tape by Andy Roche: "Roche has staked out unique territory for documentary work, encompassing fragments of New Age culture, left-of-center Catholic politics, the personalities of off-kilter artists, and the psychedelic spirit of the Midwest. For this tape, Roche is delving deep into his collection of classic psych, New Age, b-movie, home-movie, music-video, community-access and underground material. Be ready for the alchemical magic of the mix tape to transform these forgotten and lost fragments into an hour of cosmic transcendence." Admission is FREE, but donations are accepted.
- - -
More info at
www.rootsandculturecac.org.
xx
Orson Welles's CITIZEN KANE (Classic Revival)
Music Box (Matinee Series) – Saturday & Sunday 11:30 am, Wednesday 12:30 pm
What’s left to say about CITIZEN KANE? These days, it’s difficult to imagine anyone sitting down to watch it without first being warned that they are about to view The Greatest Film of All Time, an accolade so frequently affixed that it should by now count as a subtitle. Yet it remains a master class in aesthetic design in which all the production elements (bustling staging, overlapping dialogue, choose-your-own-adventure plotting, lighting so chiaroscuro that most of the shadows fall on the ceiling, editing so fluid it is better described as rhythm) work together so seamlessly as to seem impossible without one another. Famously the first and last studio project the boy wonder had final cut on, this boasts an unusually tidy rise-and-fall narrative for Welles; if his later, compromised studio films (THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, LADY FROM SHANGHAI, TOUCH OF EVIL) ultimately prove more rewarding, it is perhaps because their Rosebuds are obscured and their mysteries preserved. (1941, 119 min, 35mm) MK
- - -
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
xx
Fred & Ginger: Classic Astaire-Rogers Musicals of the '30s (Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes noted below
This week the Film Center brings us three Astaire and Rogers features, and the concentration of these screenings (on Sunday there will two in succession) may be an inspired bit of programming: Here is one of the most addictively watchable strands of American movies, works that remain synonymous with grace, wit, and romantic charm even 70 years after their first release. No explanation is needed as to why Dennis Potter and Herbert Ross borrowed images from FOLLOW THE FLEET (1936, 110 min, 35mm; Sunday, 3pm & Thursday, 8:15pm) for their revisionist masterpiece PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981). The musical numbers of an Astaire and Rogers picture appeal to universal longing—for child-like astonishment as well as adult romance—in a way that few mainstream movies have done since the Depression. The film also concocts dream-like sequences out of naval iconography which wouldn’t be out of place in a pre-Stalinist Soviet fantasy—which only goes to show how universal certain sentiments were for movie audiences in the 1930s. Also playing this week: The seminal SWING TIME (1936, 103 min, 35mm; Friday, 6pm & Wednesday, 8:30pm), directed by a young George Stevens (later of SHANE and GIANT), and CAREFREE (1938, 83 min, 35mm; Sunday, 5:15pm & Monday, 6pm), the duo’s final screen partnership. The latter film is more of a screwball comedy than a musical—Astaire and Rogers were hardly speaking at the time and they were only made to perform four dance numbers together—but it’s hardly a departure for them. Still underrated in the Astaire-Rogers canon is the films’ clever wordplay, which exhibit as much joy of language as the contemporaneous writings of Dylan Thomas and William Carlos Williams. BS
- - -
More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
x
SOYLENT GREEN (Cult Revival)
Block Cinema (Outdoor Summer Series) – Wednesday, 9pm
By now we all know what SOYLENT GREEN (1973) is made of: run-down, cheap-looking studio sets; sweaty, anonymous supporting actors; a hazy brown visual palette that seems to fog the celluloid; and an assortment of tightly-knotted scarves and other outdated fashions aggressively worn by Charlton Heston at his most macho. It may be the butt of jokes thanks to an SNL sketch, but its relentless claustrophobia holds up surprisingly well compared to other '70s dystopian visions (especially LOGAN'S RUN, which just seems campy now). The future will probably be more like the past than we usually care to admit. Its depiction of an overheated, overcrowded world populated by rigidly segregated classes (ranging from the rich to human "furniture") still holds a grungy, no-nonsense, 100% analog fascination that most recent dystopian films, with their slick and polished surfaces, can't match. What's often overlooked is Edward G. Robinson's performance, which was his last. It has a weary wistfulness that's distilled into a perfect poignancy in his last scene, when a genuine peace shines on his face for both the first and the last time. (1973, 97 minutes, projected DVD) RC
- - -
More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/block-cinema.
xx
BATMAN: THE MOVIE (Cult Revival)
Music Box – Saturday, midnight
In case the lines are too long to see THE DARK KNIGHT in Chicago this weekend, the Music Box presents an alternative way to get your batfix. This 1966 take on Batman is bright, colorful, and campy to the point that one of its only night scenes depicts a long, awkward date between Bruce Wayne and hilarious Russian stereotype "Miss Kitka" (who is, of course, Catwoman in disguise). At its best it's a clever parody; the rest of the time it's an excuse to watch Adam West run around in tights. Expect lots of props with the prefix "bat" ("Robin, hand down the shark repellent Batspray!"), plenty of jumps in logic ("That shark was pulling my leg… the Joker!"), and more than a handful of Robin's holy interjections ("Holy Sardines!"). POW! (1966, 105 min) CS
- - -
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
xx
MORE SCREENINGS & EVENTS:
Friday at 9:30pm, Humboldt artspace Old Gold (2022 North Humboldt Blvd.) presents "Seajon & Friends," an outdoor screening of animated work on video. Artists featured: Christa Donner & Andrew Yang,
Eric Fleischauer,
Norman McClaren,
Jesse McManus,
George Monteleone,
Huong Ngo,
Todd Simeone,
Wladyslaw Starewicz,
Alexander Stewart & Peter Miller,
and Siebren Versteeg & Deborah Johnson. Curated by Kat Parker.
The Film Center screens Visconti's posthumously released final film THE INNOCENT: "Operatic, elegant, and erotic, THE INNOCENT is based on an 1892 novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio about a hypocritical aristocrat (Giannini) who thoughtlessly cheats on his beautiful young wife until he discovers that she is having an affair with another man." Check Reader Movies for showtimes.
The Silent Film Society's 2008 Silent Summer Film Festival kicks off this Friday, 8pm at the Portage Theater with Harold Lloyd's 1928 comedy SPEEDY. The West End Jazz band will play tunes beginning at 7pm. Extended runs at the Music Box: Werner Herzog's acclaimed Antarctic adventure ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (previous coverage here) and Dario Argento's most violent outing to date, MOTHER OF TEARS (previous coverage here). Check Reader Movies for showtimes. In place of their previously scheduled weekly feature, Facets will be screening a pair of music documentaries: YOUSSOU N'DOUR: RETURN TO GORÉE, a "musical road movie" following Senegalese singer N'Dour, and MARIA BETHÂNIA: MUSIC IS PERFUME, a portrait of the famous Brazilian songstress. Check Reader Movies for showtimes.
The Film Center pays tribute to recently deceased actor/playwright/filmmaker and neurological disorder advocate Ben Byer with a screening of his lone documentary INDESTRUCTIBLE, a stirring chronicle of his hard-fought battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. Producer (and sister to the artist) Rebeccah Rush and editor Tim Baron will appear at all screenings. Check Reader Movies for showtimes. |
