CRUCIAL VIEWING
Rare Avant-Garde Masterpieces on the Subject of Painting (Avant-Garde)
The Nightingale at Cinema Borealis (1550 N Milwaukee Ave) – Sunday, 8:30pm
Given that Nightingale co-programmer (and Cine-File contributor) Josh Mabe had not seen the two films on the program when he selected them, there is some accidental serendipity at work—the pairing is rather brilliant. The show is billed as works about painting but, really, these films are quite definitely about film. Jack Chambers is best know for his lone feature, THE HART OF LONDON, which is one of the greatest films ever. Period. But his amazing R-34 (1967, 26 min, 16mm) proves that his rarely seen short films are also worth seeking out. Nominally a portrait of the painter and collagist Greg Curnoe, the film begins in a somewhat traditional documentary mode. But Chambers quickly moves to the remarkable associative editing of HART, giving us not simply a look at his subject but veering off to provide a powerful and visceral sense of the creative process itself. French filmmaker Guy Fihman is completely unknown in the West, and based on his great film ULTRAROUGE-INFRAVIOLET (1974, 31 min, 16mm) it's a shame. Fihman uses only one image, a photo reproduction of Pissarro's painting Les toits rouge, and then transitions through over 20,000 changing color variations of it. Mostly meditative and lyrical, Fihman shocks when he suddenly cuts to an all white screen. At other times there is a strange undercurrent of violence and horror in the unexpected mutability of the image. Beauty always has a dark side. Note: This screening has moved from its originally announced venue to Cinema Borealis (1550 N Milwaukee Ave), with its famously excellent projection facilities, and the screening time has changed from 8pm to 8:30pm. PF
- - -
More info at www.nightingaletheatre.org.
x
Luchino Visconti’s LUDWIG (Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm
In 2002, Olivier Assayas selected LUDWIG as one of the 10 greatest films of all time, thereby admitting the great influence Luchino Visconti has on his work, if not the whole of his generation of French filmmakers (Arnaud Desplechin, Leos Carax, Claire Denis, et al.). Assayas and his compatriots are remarkable for a seemingly exhaustless attention to physical detail that never overwhelms their sense of storytelling, but rather makes each new film an immersion in its particular environment. Perhaps contemporary cinephiles underrate Visconti’s art because he worked mainly in period films—the most bourgeois of genres, since it often reduces the past into a collector’s item. But as the big-screen revivals at the Film Center’s retrospective demonstrate, these films bring the past to life with opulence, wonder, and an idiosyncratic sense of sexual relations. Those who have missed out on the series so far are highly encouraged to check out this final screening, as LUDWIG is hard to come by on DVD and even harder to see in a theater. The film, which is Visconti’s longest, is an operatic biography of the Bavarian king in the tradition of Wagner—who, perhaps appropriately, appears as a character. (1972, 235 min, 35mm) BS
- - -
More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
x
Andy Warhol's CAMP & The Films of Peter Kubelka (Avant-Garde)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Showtimes noted below
On the surface, Andy Warhol's CAMP (1965, 67 min, 16mm; Saturday, 7 & 9pm) and the films of Peter Kubelka (Thursday, 8pm) would seem to have little in common. However, both Warhol and Kubelka were artists who pared their films down to the bare elements of cinema and then built back up to create vastly different but equally enduring works of genius. Warhol's silents were extended provocations on the nature of time in film, and not as austere as descriptions would lead one to believe. His sound films continued this, but also operated at the extremes of cinematic inarticulateness, and yet managed to say more about the nature of film than most of the heralded new generation of filmmakers of the 1960's. Despite his pretenses to the contrary, Warhol's anti-style was deliberate and knowing. In CAMP, he has his usual fun with the New York intelligentsia, providing a fascinating and lively show to contrast the dry tell of Susan Sontag's then-new essay on the subject. If Warhol's films demonstrated a deep, although deceptive, understanding of film through their inarticulateness, Kubelka's demonstrated an even profounder understanding of film though his absolute articulateness. Kubelka's cinema is about two basic elements: sound-image relationships and, most centrally, the cut. With only seven short films, he has created one of the most essential bodies of work in all of cinema and they are all primarily about the complex potentialities of editing. Four of the films in the program, his "African safari" film UNSERE AFRIKAREISE (1966), the minimal "flicker" film ARNULF RAINER (1960), the metric "dance" film ADEBAR (1957), and most of all his brilliant re-working of a commissioned beer commercial SCHWECHATER (1958), are masterpieces of the highest order. (Six films: 1955-1977, 60 min TRT, 16mm). PF
- - -
More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
x
The Films of Manoel de Oliveira: Final Week (Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Described in the Film Center’s program notes as “the latest of de Oliveira’s cryptic fables,” CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, THE ENIGMA (2007, 70 min, 35mm; Sunday, 3pm & Thursday, 6:15pm) is a documentary of sorts, in which the director and his wife travel across Europe and the Caribbean to better understand the famous explorer. In the film, de Oliveira claims his mission is to prove that Columbus was not Italian, but Portuguese—a bizarre gambit similar to the one John Malkovich’s professor wages in de Oliveira’s THE CONVENT (1996) when he tries to locate the Portuguese origins of Shakespeare—but those familiar with the filmmaker’s Socratic approach should assume he’s after other revelations. De Oliveira’s recent interview with Cineaste magazine may provide a few clues: “CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS is a melancholy film, because it has this nostalgia for what I think was the golden age of mankind, when there was this reaching out, not in order to enslave, to dominate, since this was not the real intent, but rather to exchange… [N]ow it’s the opposite, it’s no longer the state that reigns to extend wealth. It’s like we’re going back to the Crusades, which is horrible…” Also screening this week is INQUIETUDE (1998, 110 min, 35mm; Friday, 8pm & Tuesday, 6pm), the film Jonathan Rosenbaum has singled out as the pinnacle of de Oliveira’s late period. Writing about the film on the occasion of its Chicago premiere, Rosenbaum had this to say: “[W]hile his modernist and aristocratic sensibility is steeped in the 19th century, there's nothing old-fashioned about de Oliveira’s work. For INQUIETUDE he daringly combines a one-act play (Prista Monteiro’s The Immortals) and two stories (Antonio Patricio's “Suzy” and Agustina Bessa-Luis’s “The Mother of the River”) into a single narrative: the characters in “Suzy” attend a performance of the play, and one of them recounts to another “The Mother of the River.” The theme of existential identity links the three works, and de Oliveira's stately, reflective style fuses them into a seamless and luminous visual poem… Though The Immortals ponders the issues of old age, de Oliveira refuses the conventional pose of the old master looking back on his life and career with equanimity. INQUIETUDE, a masterpiece with irreverent wit, ironic bite, and anger over the vagaries of self-definition, has the decanted authority of Carl Dreyer’s GERTURD and the imaginative splendor of The Arabian Nights.” This rarely screened work—also unavailable on DVD—marks the culmination of the Film Center’s all-too-brief retrospective, certainly one of the moviegoing events of 2008. As for what moviegoers can take away from such an event, perhaps we should defer again to de Oliveira (again from the Cineaste interview): “[My films] aim to give us time to think, bit by bit… The steady shot brings us to another state, to see, as in Da Vinci’s ‘Annunciation’… I stimulate internality. Somebody said that the present is eternal, but the present is immobile. It’s just like the images in celluloid, every single one is still and we only see movement with a succession of them. So that’s what the present is, only a succession of images, one second that’s here and then it’s gone.” BS
- - -
More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
x
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Franz Osten's A THROW OF THE DICE (Silent Classic)
Jay Pritzker Pavilion (Millenium Park) – Wednesday, 8pm (FREE)
The silent film score is one the most abstract forms of film criticism. In its finest incarnations, the composer becomes a tour guide, using the music to point out what he or she sees within the images. Accompaniment is commentary. Composer Nitin Sawnhey wants us to see the opulence of Franz Osten's A THROW OF THE DICE, which he's compared to the films of Cecil B. DeMille and Charlie Chaplin. In silence, we can certainly see the DeMille; perhaps his score will help us to see the Chaplin.
Early Bollywood's token German, Franz Osten made a trilogy of mythological films in the late Silent Era, of which A THROW OF THE DICE is the second, before helping found the Hindi-language sound film industry as one of the original contract directors of the pioneering Bombay Talkies studio. DICE is presented here in a newly restored print accompanied by the Grant Park Orchestra performing Sawnhey's original score. The screening is FREE.
(1929, 74 min, 35mm) IV
- - -
More info at www.millenniumpark.org/parkevents.
x
ALSO PLAYING AT DOC FILMS (Classic Revival)
- - -
PIERROT LE FOU – Friday 7pm & 9:30pm
There is thankfully no definition for greatness. Writing that something is "great" or "beautiful" is like pointing to a city on a globe. Even explaining that greatness isn't terribly different from a travelogue full of photographs. If such labels were accurate, works would be useless. One could tell you the story of PIERROT LE FOU (1965, 110 min, 35mm), but it would do you little good: a Girl and a Gun, and wherever the former goes, there's someone who loves her following, and whose ever hands the latter falls into, there's a hundred reasons to use it. One could tell you about Jean-Luc Godard, the 1960s, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Raoul Coutard. Still nothing. Who was it that wrote that it was after seeing CITIZEN KANE that he discovered the Director and could think of no better way for others to discover the same? PIERROT LE FOU's audiences discover the Thinker, and they discover him or her within themselves. Anyone who sees it—regardless of whether they just pick up a new release at Blockbuster once a month or sit in the front row of the Siskel on weekdays—becomes, if only for the minute after movie ends or on the bus ride home, a film critic. (1965, 110 min, 35mm). IV
- - -
TRAGEDY ON THE STREET – Wednesday, 8pm
At the same time that Franz Osten's A THROW OF THE DICE screens for a movie-palace sized crowd with an orchestra accompanying (see coverage above), Doc Films presents an equally obscure silent film by a German director—Bruno Rahn's TRAGEDY OF THE STREET (1927), about a prostitute past her prime—without so much as a piano playing Satie. The Grant Park screening is free and extravagant; the Doc show modestly staged and priced. But extravagance can be constraining, and simplicity is often liberating. Doc, considering the consistency of its programming this season, remains the better bet. (1927, 79 min, 16mm) IV
- - -
More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
x Parvez Sharma's A JIHAD FOR LOVE (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Staking its claim as the first feature documentary to explore homosexuality in Islamic culture, Parvez Sharma's debut premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2007, and comes to Chicago after a four-week run at the IFC Center in New York. The Muslim gay filmmaker (born and raised in India; graduate of American University in D.C.) spent five years traveling to twelve Muslim countries, interviewing queer men and women who struggle to reconcile their religion with their sexual orientation. Sharma asserts that his film is less about people coming out as gay and more about them coming out as Muslims and reclaiming the religion as their own. The film has engendered controversy on dual fronts, with claims that it is an affront to Islam, and counter-claims that it is not critical enough. But the film is only partly an attack on theocratic societies that restrict sexual freedoms: it also confronts Western tendencies to homogenize the Muslim world. Sharma shows that a tremendous variety exists in treatment and attitude towards homosexuality, from discussing the death penalties for gays in South Africa, Iran, and Afghanistan, to depicting gay couples walking in public in Turkey and India. Still, the film's recurrent need to blur the faces of interview subjects to avoid recognition is indicative of the severity of the struggle. Sandi Dubowski, the director of TREMBLING BEFORE G-D (2001), which explored the lives of homosexual Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, served as a producer and advisor on the film. Sharma and Dubowski will be present at certain screenings for audience discussions. (2007, 81 min, video). MS
- - -
More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
x
Astaire & Rogers: DAMSEL IN DISTRESS and ROBERTA (Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes noted below
The Hollywood musical's origins in—and conflicts with—the
European fairy-tale operettas of the 19th century were never more
apparent than in films like the appropriately-titled DAMSEL IN DISTRESS (1937, 98 min, 35mm;
screening Friday, 6pm & Monday, 8:15pm), set in and around an English countryside castle; and ROBERTA (1935, 106 min, 35mm, screening Sunday, 4:30pm & Wednesday, 6pm), set in a combined world of Parisian high fashion and former Russian princesses. The romantic threat hereby posed by overseas aristocrats
to touring Midwestern artists would seem unnecessarily exaggerated,
but Astaire's sister and longtime performing partner Adele in fact
ended her career in 1932 to marry a certain Lord Charles Cavendish—and in the sequence of Astaire-and-Rogers dances in ROBERTA, we
observe a fraternal-libidinal negotiation that parallels the dialectic
of courtly Continental formality and independent American
spontaneity. Ginger Rogers' absence from DAMSEL (and romantic
substitute Joan Fontaine's dancing incapacity) is widely considered a
fatal flaw, but serves to set the stage for a mind-boggling phantasmic
rupture: as Astaire illogically pursues this woman who cannot dance
(while physically constrained in a Tunnel-of-Love amusement park
ride), the film detours deep into the musico-physiological
unconscious: a deliriously choreographed ten-minute bricolage of
treadmills, slides, giant turntables, rotating cylinders, and funhouse
mirrors. It's completely absurd—necessarily, to allow the audience to
accept an Astaire-Fontaine marriage—and unavailable on DVD. Fred
teases Ginger in the ROBERTA number "I Won't Dance" that "my heart
won't let my feet do things they should do," but his id means business. MC
- - -
More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
x
ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED & DESIRED (New Documentary)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
"I would like to be judged for my work, and not for my life," Roman Polanski once said. Never follow a director's instructions. Marina Zenovich certainly didn't. Polanski's filmography is an arrhythmic tangle. His biography is an airplane novel—one part cheap uplift, two parts true crime—and Zenovich focuses exclusively on his infamous trial on statutory rape charges and his flight from the United States following his conviction. The film did very well in festivals earlier this year. Reportedly the ending has been changed since that run. (2008, 35mm, 99 min) IV
- - -
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com/midnight.
xx
Li Yu's LOST IN BEIJING (Contemporary Chinese)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
U.S. coverage of the upcoming Olympics is likely to celebrate China's capitalist transformation while bemoaning its environmental problems and authoritarian tendencies (this film, in fact, was banned in China due to sex scenes). But it will mostly ignore the huge class conflicts and inequalities that have accompanied this economic growth, or address the millions who were displaced in order to make room for Olympic venues and beautification efforts (Chicago 2016 supporters should take note). While Li Yu's urban melodrama does not quite take up the mantle of the Chinese underclass, it does reveal a Beijing you're unlikely to see through NBC cameras: A frenzied metropolis experiencing the highs and lows of a new capitalist world order in which money is the dominant factor, and those who have it exert power over those who don't. In her third feature, Li tells the somewhat improbable story of a poor window washer who sees his wife, a masseuse, being raped by her wealthy boss. Blackmail, revenge, and lots of sex follow suit. Critics have generally concluded that the plot strains credibility, largely undermining the social critique and leading to moments of unintentional comedy. Ultimately, it's the images of Beijing that stand out. From the gleaming skyscrapers and parlors of mass consumption, to the teeming masses and the seedy underbelly, they reflect a society in transition, full of ambition and disparity. (2007, 112 min, 35mm) MS
- - -
More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
x
David Lynch's ERASERHEAD (Cult Revival)
Music Box – Saturday & Sunday, midnight
Henry, a meek printer, finds himself cornered into fatherhood amidst a bleak urban landscape. Really: it's a comedy. David Lynch's dream of "dark and troubling things" was the most spectacular debut film of its kind since Buñuel sliced an eyeball in UN CHIEN ANDALOU. And like that film, even when it's been seen several times and thereby "decoded," its motifs and symbols defy fixed explanations. If the film doesn't quite elucidate itself, it certainly serves as a Rosetta stone for Lynch's work as a whole, presenting his core obsessions in embryonic form (a wholly appropriate metaphor, considering the story). These include electricity, industrial noise, factories, motor oil, the angelic chanteuse figure, zig-zag flooring, and dust particles. A midnight screening is truly the best way to see it; even on Lynch's meticulously restored DVD edition, the blacks just aren't dark enough. Furthermore, the movie's astonishingly dense sound design can only be fully appreciated in a theatre. (1977, 89 min, 35mm) RC
- - -
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com/midnight.
xx MORE SCREENINGS & EVENTS:
The Silent Film Society's 2008 Silent Summer Film Festival continues at the Portage Theater with CHILDREN OF DIVORCE (1927), starring Clara Bow (Friday, 8pm). Also playing at the Portage: schlock horror pic THE BLIND AND THE DEAD (Sunday, noon) and a Sunday night double-feature of GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER and FORBIDDEN PLANET (starting at 7:45pm).
Bank of America Cinema presents the original 3:10 TO YUMA (1957) this Saturday at 8pm. Also playing at the Music Box: Paul Newman's career-defining performance as an early-'60s antihero in HUD; continued screenings of MOTHER OF TEARS, Dario Argento's most violent outing to date (previous coverage here); and a weeklong run of MY FATHER MY LORD, a film by Israel filmmaker David Volach inspired by the first episode of Kieslowski's DECALOGUE. Check Reader Movies for showtimes. Facets feature of the week: PRAYING WITH LIOR, a documentary about the spirituality of a young Jewish child with Down Syndrome. The film has garnered many "Best Documentary" awards at Jewish Film Fests around the country. Check Reader Movies for showtimes.
Wednesday at dusk (around 9pm), Northwestern University's Block Cinema hosts a FREE outdoor screening of THE SIMPSONS MOVIE. Check out their entire summer schedule here.
|
ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED & DESIRED 
