CRUCIAL VIEWING
Camper / Brakhage (Avant-Garde)
Caro d'Offay Gallery (2204 W North Ave)
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Films by Stan Brakhage – Friday, 9:30pm
In conjunction with the current gallery show of his work, local film and art critic Fred Camper will be screening and discussing eight films by legendary experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Any chance to see Brakhage is welcome, but when accompanied by a talk by one of the foremost experts on avant-garde film and, uniquely, in the context of Camper's own art work, this is a rare opportunity. The films selected are all great and range from the canonical MOTHLIGHT (1963) to two of Brakhage's most stunning hand-painted films—CHARTRES SERIES (1994) and STATELY MANSIONS DID DECREE (1999). The highlights, though, are two lesser-known films: THE PROCESS (1972) verges on the structural with its use of negative images and minimal color fields; CREATION (1979) is an achingly beautiful and dynamic landscape film of the arctic north. While the films alone are worth attending, arrive early to view Camper's work, which is itself quite remarkable. (1963-1999, 71 min TRT, 16mm) *Film still courtesy of the estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper.
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Gallery Exhibition of Art Work by Fred Camper – Running through August 1
Photography is stasis—a moment or object frozen in time. Although the works on display in Fred Camper's exhibition are putatively photographs, the artist prefers not to think of them that way and it's easy to understand why. Camper presents his work in a serialized form, aiming to evoke feelings of movement and dimensionality. The images in a given piece are intended to be seen in context with the images following or surrounding them. The eye moves from one to the next, building meaning and insight along the way (in fact one series is titled "Accretions"). Camper is relying on an active viewer in much the same way Brakhage did—the individual frames (in Camper's art or Brakhage's films) may be beautiful on their own, but it is the cumulative effect as they are looked at across time where their meaning and power lie. The most effective works in the show, though, hijack the eye altogether. In "Permutations 4: The Tower, All Views 13" the viewer is compelled, almost against her will, to look at different areas of each frame following a flock of birds in flight. In the minimal "Colors" series, the gradual transitions of one color to the next come to life as one begins to see phantom ellipses, diagonals, and rectilinear shapes—all vying for attention. PF
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More info at www.carodoffaygallery.com and www.fredcamper.com.
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Charles Chaplin's MONSIEUR VERDOUX (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
One of the most sublime missteps in the history of cinema gets an always-welcome revival this week in a reportedly gorgeous new print—though to call it a misstep is to subscribe to a version of said history that leaves no room for the glorious centaurs Chaplin's post-war, post-Tramp talkie period loosed on the (mainly disinterested) world. Such a view would take it as read that Chaplin's first role after abandoning his beloved mustache and bowler oughtn't to have been a remorseless mass murderer—let alone a mass murderer in a melo-slapstick-satire so sincerely anti-war and anti-capital that all its highly compartmentalized and contradictory attempts to amuse, edify, and/or move us are drowned out in the end by the sound of its auteur's own awkward cri de coeur—but, really, what use is such wisdom? Admittedly, Chaplin is no Brecht: his murder-equals-capitalism-equals-war-equals-murder statement is powerful not due to its novelty or the brilliance of its rhetoric, but entirely for reasons of context: this is Chaplin, for God's sake, dispatching dowagers with charm and wit. Certainly too, the peculiarities of the film's construction (as often lyrical as stage-bound, as often deft as amateurish), plus its Sternbergian mishmash of acting styles and accents, can together easily wrong-foot the inattentive viewer come expecting a homogeneous and cannily constructed Chaplin entertainment. The glory of VERDOUX, however—and all of CC's sound work—is in the ways it refuses to be just that: intent on creating its own vocabulary from the castoffs of early film grammar (your Hitchcocks and Langs and Fords be damned), VERDOUX manages the trick of being gauche and magical all at once. That is, VERDOUX is a continuation of the THE GREAT DICTATOR's first fragmentation of Chaplin's poetics; and it points the way to LIMELIGHT's almost inscrutable, outsider grace. The joys of the Tramp films wash away utterly in the light of VERDOUX's impossible disregard for the verities and expectations associated with genre—and narrative itself. It contains Chaplin's greatest performance, and may very well be his finest work. (1947, 124 min, 35mm) JD
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More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
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Guy Maddin's MY WINNIPEG (New Release)
Music Box (Matinee Series) – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Like Todd Haynes's I'M NOT THERE, Guy Maddin's essay on his hometown attempts to capture the essence of its subject by honoring its mythology, as wells as inventing a few choice legends of its own. But where Haynes is schematic, Maddin is, as always, intensely personal, staging reenactments of traumatic childhood incidents (starring DETOUR's Ann Savage as his mother!) and mourning the corporate-sponsored destruction of his favorite haunts with righteous anger. Perversely, this densely layered dreamscape is being billed as a documentary, but considering the prevalence of fog machines, somnambulists, and tongue-in-cheek sexual hangups, it is more likely a conclusion to the autobiographical trilogy Maddin began with the COWARDS BEND THE KNEE and BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!. Like those, this follows the esoteric, free-floating whims of Maddin's particular brand of MOS cinema—ever since HEART OF THE WORLD, his visuals have had an impulsive spontaneity that Maddin has been straining to replicate to in his audio tracks, recently assembling a formidable rotating cast of narrators for BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!, and here reputedly improvising the rambling, evocative voiceover in a sort of aural equivalent of automatic writing. If Maddin's pipes lack the theatrical gravitas of, say, Crispin Glover or Isabella Rossellini, the intimacy, humor, and imagination afforded by this gambit more than makes up for it, uncovering the ecstatic truth Werner Herzog has lately been scouring the globe for (Antarctica's up next in ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, coming to the Music Box July 11) on his first try, and right in his own backyard. (2007, 80 min, 35mm) MK
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Visconti: Week 2 (Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes noted below
In last week's inaugural write-up of the Siskel's ongoing Visconti retrospective, C-F contributor Ignatius Vishnevetsky lay a most terrible charge against the good Count: namely, that of tastefulness. There can be few Visconti fans out in the world so blindly partial to his oeuvre as to deny the basic truth of this; by the same token, however, there may be few things quite so fascinatingly grotesque as the sight of so tasteful a gentleman, so fond of the graceful gesture, of nuance and artifice, banging his head against the wall of his own limits and preconceptions in a desperate attempt to break out and away from the prison of his excellent manners (and mannerism). SALO it's not, but THE DAMNED (1969, 156 min, 35mm; Saturday, 7:30pm & Tuesday, 6:30pm) is what, for Visconti, passes for a decadent, depraved, nihilistic film (its German title, GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG, is rather more appropriate: Dave Kehr quite rightly tagged the film as an attempt to portray the "Nazi era as a tattered Wagnerian opera"—not that its ambitions in this respect are particularly subtle), and the carelessness with which it throws itself at its object makes for discomfiting, and vertiginous, viewing. If DESPAIR was Fassbinder's Visconti film, then here is Visconti's Fassbinder—and note that the marvelous Dirk Bogarde waltzes through both these peculiar career culs-de-sac-cum-highpoints (though for Ingrid Thulin into the bargain, THE DAMNED is your only man). Also showing is the little seen and otherwise unavailable SANDRA (1965, 105 min, 35mm; Sunday, 3pm & Wednesday, 8pm), which in its orchidaceous atmosphere of picturesque decadence, sordid family secrets, classical allusions, and pretensions to naughtiness (Nazis! Incest! Claudia Cardinale!) seems a dry (or not-so-dry) run for THE DAMNED's cavorting funhouse of ugly. All in all, it would be hard to think of a better way to spend the countdown to Independence Day and the murderous heat to follow than to steep a little in the dark with Visconti's hopeful monsters. JD
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More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
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ALSO RECOMMENDED
Mark L. Lester's COMMANDO (Contemporary Revival)
Music Box Theater – Friday & Saturday, midnight; Wednesday, 2:40pm
A retired army operative's daughter is kidnapped. He brawls his way through airports, malls, motels and streets until he arrives, covered in weapons, on the tropical island where she's being held. COMMANDO is the definitive Arnold Schwarzenegger film. The Terminator and Conan the Barbarian are characters; in COMMANDO, there is no character—only Schwarzenegger's alien screen persona. Acting replaced with actions. Steven Seagal plays perfect heroes, Sylvester Stallone troubled ones, Jean-Claude Van Damme cocky ones. Schwarzenegger doesn't play heroes at all; he plays forces. He approaches every one-liner with indifference. He makes passion irrelevant and transforms his inertness into inertia. With him, there's nothing human about the human body. Directed by Mark L. Lester (EXTREME JUSTICE, CLASS OF 1984), COMMANDO belongs to the first generation of "home video" Hollywood films: movies meant to be seen with groups of friends, to be rewound, paused, talked through. Seeing it in a 35mm print with a theater audience is seeing it naked. (1985, 90 min, 35mm). IV
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Vincente Minnelli’s MEET ME IN ST LOUIS (Classic Revival)
Music Box (Matinee Series) – Saturday & Sunday, 11:30am; Wednesday, 12:30pm
MEET ME IN ST LOUIS has achieved iconic status for its musical numbers and Judy Garland’s radiant performance, but Minnelli’s inspired direction makes it an all-but inexhaustible film. The richly detailed mise-en-scène—the result of Minnelli’s long tenure as a high-profile art director—and multi-dimensional vision of American nostalgia give the movie a different timbre nearly every time you see it: The past never felt so vibrant and yet so distant. Working with an episodic structure (drawn liberally from Sally Benson’s memoir), Minnelli follows the Smith family over the course of a year, finding significance in incidental and major episodes alike. What emerges is an impressionistic portrait of turn-of-the-century America, drawn with impassioned, colorful observation reminiscent of Minnelli’s hero Vincent Van Gogh. (His meticulous camera movements, while comparable to Max Ophuls’, feel inspired also by Van Gogh’s brush strokes.) Of course, the film wouldn’t be so beloved if it were simply a formal achievement. The Smith family exhibits a dynamic that’s never less than recognizable, anticipating Minnelli’s burgeoning fascination with psychology that would bear fruit in his later masterpieces THE COBWEB and SOME CAME RUNNING. (1944, 113 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Chicago Filmmakers Open Screening (Community Event)
Chicago Filmmakers – Saturday, 7pm
A time-honored exercise in cinematic democracy, Chicago Filmmakers' famous "Open Screening" accepts a wide variety of formats (BetaSP, Mini-DV, DVD, VHS, and 16mm) and subjects (anything non-pornographic). All you have to do is bring your movie and be civil towards others' work. Chicago Filmmakers asks that films be under 15 minutes, but they're willing to accommodate any length. The event also happens to be FREE!
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More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
X Howard Hawks's BRINGING UP BABY (Classic Revival)
Bank of America Cinema – Saturday, 8pm
A box-office flop when it was released in 1938, Howard Hawks's screwball comedy has since gained classic status. Cary Grant takes a nerdy turn as David Huxley, a klutzy paleontologist reluctantly wooed by flaky socialite Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn). The baby is, of course, a pet leopard that unwittingly brings the two together. As is typical of the genre, the pair is mismatched, the banter is rapid-fire and full of double entendres, and the plot leads to a variety of slapstick situations in WASPy locales (the Connecticut countryside). Stanley Cavell likens the structure to a "comedy of equality" in its refusal to exclusively identify either of its leads as the hero or the "active partner" in quest. There's some truth to that sense of romantic parity, but more simply, what we have here is a kooky woman relentlessly pursuing a straight-laced man. Call it the anti-KNOCKED UP. Here, love equals the triumph of the quirky and childlike over the proper and adult. Also of note: reputedly, Grant's ad-libbed line, "I just went gay all of a sudden!," is among the first filmic usages of the word in a homosexual context. (1938, 102 min, 16mm). MS
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Venue info at www.cine-file.info/venues/lasalle.html.
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Doc's Summer Revivals
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Showtimes noted below
Over the summer Doc Films is unburdened by the regimented structure of their regular screening series and free to program a mishmash of great movies. The first week of their Summer '08 program offers a trio of oft-neglected films by legendary directors, none of which are available on video! First up, THE MASTER OF THE HOUSE (1925, 110 min, 16mm; Friday, 7pm & 9:30pm) is a humanist comedy from the likes of Carl Theodor Dreyer—an antidote to those countless lists of essential films that pigeonhole Dreyer as the glowering, religion-obsessed director of THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARK and DAY OF WRATH. Over the weekend, Doc provides an opportunity to experience Marco Ferreri’s vision of a world gloriously mired in the culture shock of the 1960s. This is the man that said, “The values that once existed no longer exist… My films are reactions translated into images.” DILLINGER IS DEAD (1969, 90 min, 35mm; Saturday, 7pm & 9pm)—in which Michel Piccoli spends a bored night at home, acting and re-enacting his suicide, seducing the maid, and preparing himself a luscious meal—ought to be understood in that context. Finally, Raoul Walsh's THE BOWERY (1933, 93 min, 35mm) screens Thursday at 8pm. If the action film is going the way of the Hollywood musical, take a step back and experience action not as set-pieces but as the fearsome inevitability of one image after another. Few Hollywood directors embody this tradition as well as Raoul Walsh, even when he was waxing both eloquent and vulgar on the rise of two rough-and-tumble businessmen. This is not your typical action fare. WS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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Jonas Mekas's LOST, LOST, LOST (Avant-Garde)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Wednesday 8pm
One of the most stunning films screened last summer at Doc was Jonas Mekas's sprawling 3-hour "diary" montage WALDEN (1969), a collection of seasonally arranged reels from various locations in and around late-1960s New York, including observations at early Velvet Underground performances and respites at Stan Brakhage's house upstate; but these incidental avant-celebrity moments became irrelevant with respect to a greater work of historiographic meditation. Without being informed of the narrative pertinence of a particular Midtown winter's day, the viewer becomes that much more immersed in its preserved qualities, in the archaic textures and visual details that seem hopelessly lost in written histories—but which are revived in Mekas's cinephiliac romance with everyday life. This week brings an archival print of LOST, LOST, LOST (1975, 16mm), which reflects, at a greater temporal distance (1949 to 1963), his personal experience as an Eastern European refugee (explored in the previous REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA (1972)). Here, his early documentations of 1950s working-class Williamsburg (which should be of utter fascination to anyone who has been there recently) and among the period's regional Lithuanian immigrant communities leads to new observations and encounters in an increasingly political early-'60s Greenwich Village. Historical artifacts in their own right for anyone interested in the domestic emergence of an artistic and cinematic counterculture, these films simultaneously function as unparalleled provocations of restrained contemplation. This is the first screening in what is effectively a series of 1960s-era experimental film at Doc this summer (including works by Bruce Baillie, Joyce Wieland, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, and Peter Kubelka) and can serve as an introduction of sorts: as his own cinematic diaries often reveal, Mekas's inspiration and friendship thoroughly circumscribed the community of early "visionary film". MC
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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Dario Argento's MOTHER OF TEARS (Contemporary Horror)
Music Box Theater – Wednesday & Thursday, 9:40pm
Dario Argento has outdone himself with the third and final installment in his "Three Mothers Trilogy." What MOTHER OF TEARS does best is play with and heighten horror movie clichés, particularly when it comes to the absurdly exaggerated performances of its actors. In an era where even the bloodiest deaths are brief and full of fast edits, the death scenes in MOTHER are excruciatingly long and drawn out. The witty comments that pepper the film are more awkward and out-of-place than those in any 1970s B-movie. Dario's daughter, Asia Argento, plays Sarah Mandy, the protagonist who is physically and mentally tortured for the entire duration of the film. One can't help but wonder if Sarah's journey through this film is something of a metaphor for Asia's relationship with her father. It's tortuous and awkward, but ultimately rather fun. This is the kind of film that horror buffs will truly appreciate, though there's plenty of blood, boobs, and bibles to keep the whole family entertained. (2007, 98 min, 35mm) Also screening this week: Argento's DEEP RED (1976, 126 min; Friday & Saturday, midnight). CS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Milos Forman: The Formative Years (Czech Classic)
Facets Cinémathèque – Showtimes noted below
Before embarking on his second career as a relatively style-less Hollywood filmmaker, Milos Forman made four dry, sexy, seemingly effortless comedies that served to popularize the Czech New Wave of the 1960s. In comparison to his contemporaries, Forman was not as formally radical as Vera Chitylova or as emotionally tart as Ivan Passer (who co-wrote three of the four films screened in this series), but perhaps more socially perceptive—and emotionally accessible—than either. In some ways, Forman acted as the spokesman of his movement as Francois Truffaut put a smiling face on the French New Wave. And indeed, Truffaut felt a deep kinship with Forman—procuring him a Western European audience and even helping his immediate family flee Czechoslovakia during the Soviet invasion of 1968 (which saw the widespread arrests of intellectuals and their families). Forman's bitter, though still humanist satires are not only great entertainment but important historical records of the brief period of self-interrogation before that terrible watershed. BS
Facets schedule for this mini-retrospective is as follows:
COMPETITION (1963, 77 min, 35mm) – Saturday, 3pm
BLACK PETER (1964, 85 min, 35mm) – Sunday, 3pm
LOVES OF A BLONDE (1965, 88 min, 35mm) – Fri., 7pm; Sat., 5, 7 & 9pm; Mon. & Tues., 7 & 9pm
THE FIREMEN'S BALL (1967, 73 min) – Fri., 9pm; Sun., 5, 7, & 9pm; Wed.& Thurs., 7 & 9pm
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Full details at www.facets.org.
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Retrospectives at the Gene Siskel Film Center
As its month-long focus on the films of Luchino Visconti enters its second week (see coverage above), the Film Center wraps up two equally fascinating retrospectives—Dark Corners:
Film Noir from the Fox Archive and Romanian Cinema Rising—with some of the boldest and best known films in each category.
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Preminger's LAURA & FALLEN ANGEL (Dark Corners) – Showtimes noted below
LAURA (1944, 88 min, 35mm; Friday, 6pm & Saturday, 3pm) is one of those films, like THE WIZARD OF OZ and CASABLANCA, seemingly ill-conceived (several hands worked on the screenplay) and ill-fated during production (two sets of both cinematographers and directors) that somehow emerge fully-formed and as perfect as a movie can ever be. It all starts with David Raksin's seductive theme music. Preminger uses it as an anchor for the central mystery, which merely lures us into contemplations of perversity amid the lushly-decorated interiors where the bulk of the action takes place. The dream settings that are the apartments of Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker are worlds as self-contained as the White Lodge and the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks. Little wonder then that David Lynch borrowed several character names for his series. Repeat viewings of LAURA only enhance the mystery: Is Waldo gay? Did Waldo and Shelby once have an affair? And the brilliant dialog detaches itself further from the action. "He's no good, but he's what I want," says Mrs. Treadwell. People live one life with their bodies and another in their words. The characters' behavior functions according to a weird, unknowable logic. In FALLEN ANGEL (1945, 98 min, 35mm; Saturday, 4:45pm & Wednesday, 6pm) Preminger takes it one step further: because Dana Andrews is essentially a con man, until the last twenty minutes we can never be sure when he's being genuine or when he's only pretending to be genuine. LAURA unfolds in the rarefied world of cocktail receptions (just count the drinks), whereas FALLEN ANGEL is centered at Pop's Eats, a waterfront diner (just count the cups of coffee). The latter is missing the gauzy loveliness of Gene Tierney, but in its place are the mousy, sincere Alice Faye and the sultry, babyish Linda Darnell. Watch Faye drink her first scotch ("It tastes like soap") and Darnell nibble distractedly on a danish. They can't match the elegant cocktail poetry of Vincent Price mixing up a batch in LAURA, but they have their own seedy charms. RC
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Romanian Cinema Rising – Showtimes noted below
The Film Center concludes its two-month series of Romanian films past and present with two recent Cannes Festival prizewinners. At this point, little needs to be added to the global accolades that greeted Cristian Mungiu’s 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DAYS (2007, 113 min, 35mm; Sunday, 5:15pm & Thursday, 6pm), a harrowing drama about two college girls’ attempt to procure an illegal abortion in the last days of totalitarian Romania. Working in CinemaScope with long takes that demand the most of his gifted cast, Mungiu makes palpable a sense of terror usually described only in political terms. When the movie won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the award was generally considered a celebration of contemporary Romanian cinema as a whole—certainly one of the most exciting national film movements of our time. CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ (2007, 155 min, 35mm; Friday, 7:45pm & Monday, 6:30pm), which also won a prize at that festival, seems to have no fewer admirers (despite not gaining US distribution). An epic comedy about the arrival of NATO troops in a small town on the Kosovo border, the film has been praised for its mixture of political incisiveness and infectious, cynical humor. BS
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More info at www.siskelflimcenter.org.
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