CRUCIAL VIEWING
Nouveau Before It Was New:
The Avant-Garde Cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet (Retrospective)
Facets Cinémathèque – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Generally speaking, a film is designed to be viewed in a single sitting, uninterrupted, whereas a novel is usually read over a long period of time, the reader putting it down and picking it up again any number of times. This may seem like a banal observation. But when it comes to a figure like Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose prose is as intricate and dense as an overripe jungle, it makes all the difference. Reading one of his books can be an endurance test, even when you have plenty of time at your disposal to chew over his words. So what is it like to watch one of his films? Few can say: the titles in Facet's series have seldom been shown since their initial release. Even if Robbe-Grillet had ended his filmmaking career after completing the screenplay for LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961, 94 min, 35mm), he still would have earned a place in cinema history. Its hypnotic repetitions and unique "characterless" characters have been endlessly debated (and ripped off). Two years later he made his directorial debut with L'IMMORTELLE (1963, 100 min, 35mm). Its plot description recalls Antonioni: in Istanbul a man has a brief affair with a woman who then vanishes, and he takes it upon himself to search for her in the city's mazelike streets. But the darkness and brutality of Robbe-Grillet's obsessions surpassed Antonioni's, and as it became easier to finance and exhibit more explicit films the tone of his work grew ever more sordid. In TRANS-EUROP EXPRESS (1966, 105 min, 35mm) Robbe-Grillet himself plays an author whose preoccupations with gangsters, drugs, and bondage begin to physically manifest themselves during a claustrophobic train journey. And the remaining films in the lineup, THE MAN WHO LIES (1968, 95 min, 35mm) and EDEN AND AFTERWARDS (1971, 93 min, 35mm), are both labeled in Facets' program "No one under 18 will be admitted!" The former recalls Kafka with its castle setting but throws in plenty of sex, both hetero and otherwise, while the latter, his first color production, is described as "de Sade meets Lewis Carroll." This intriguing and timely series, given Robbe-Grillet's death earlier this year, is made up of new prints courtesy of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. RC
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More info at www.facets.org.
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Isaac Julien's DEREK / Films by Derek Jarman (New Doc / Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
In Godard's films of the late 1960s, we had the cinema of emotions making way for the cinema of ideas. In Derek Jarman's two major biographical works, CARAVAGGIO (1986, 90 min, 35mm) and WITTGENSTEIN (1993, 70 min, 35mm), we had a cinema of ideas portrayed through a sensibility of pure emotion. Neither film is concerned with the narrative of its subject's life; what Jarman does is introduce us to an artist and a thinker and remind us that all artists are also thinkers (by focusing on the social, religious, and erotic implications behind Caravaggio's images) and that all thinkers are in some ways artists (by focusing on the artist-biography tropes of Wittgenstein's process and the way events in his life impacted his development). Anachronistic, antagonistic, irreverent but always relevant, the films' simultaneous (but not contradictory) desires to explain the importance of two very different historical figures, and to explore Jarman's own personal aesthetics, reminds us that every biography is also an autobiography. The third Jarman film in the series is his final film, the autobiographical BLUE (1993, 76 min, 35mm), which serves as a nice first-person parallel to the thematic concerns of his artist/thinker biographies. It's a film with only one image—the color blue—and is completely impossible to look away from. Few films have made an image feel so essential, and even fewer an image so ordinary. Attempting to replicate his own experiences as he was dying of AIDS, the by-then blind Jarman weaves together music, the voices of his close friends, and quotations, stories, and recollections. There are bits of drama, comedy, tragedy, and poetry. It's like sitting in on someone else's memory. Also screening as part of this small retrospective is noted British filmmaker Isaac Julien's documentary on Jarman, DEREK (2007, 76 min, DigiBeta), which centers on recollections of the late director by his frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton (who appears in CARAVAGGIO and BLUE). IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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ALSO RECOMMENDED
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (Classic Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) – Wednesday, 7pm
“It stands as very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain,” Dave Kehr lauded in his original Chicago Reader capsule; and though his assertion may read as cavalier, the seemingly endless imagination of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger regularly inspires hyperbole. Infusing their personalities into the whole of film production in a manner seldom seen before the ascendancy of Stanley Kubrick, Powell and Pressburger maximized every aspect of moviemaking to guide their audience fancifully through time and space. The sensation of their work would be akin to a grown-up variation on Walt Disney’s if Powell and Pressburger were not so keen to the pull of responsibility and the mires of human emotion. Thus, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP floats through 40 years of the British Empire—from the beginning of the twentieth century to the dawn of WWII—as if it were the dream-life of a nation. The film’s hero, Clive Wynne-Candy, is a quintessential British officer, so stalwart in his idea of nobility that he seems the same man at 30 as he does at 70—which is exactly the point of Powell and Pressburger’s ornate flashback structure. The lively early Technicolor photography (helmed, at least partially, by the great Jack Cardiff, in one of his first film assignments) is extraordinary as well. (1943, 163 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
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New and Old Avant-Garde x 4 (Experimental)
Showtimes noted below
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Films by Robert Schaller – The Nightingale
Colorado-based filmmaker Robert Schaller is a tinkerer—he is as much interested in the mechanics of filmmaking (the actual mechanical devices, the optics, the film emulsion, etc.) as he is in what ends up on screen. He is notorious for devising ever-strange means of recording an image (and may bring some objects for show-and-tell) and, given that the program (Saturday, 8pm) features several multi-projector works, of presenting those images as well. Given the complexity of what he does, this may be your only chance to see his work for some time. Schaller in person.
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Jim Trainor's THE FETISHIST – Gene Siskel Film Center
Showing as part of the Siskel's Abject Expressionism series, curated by Bruce Jenkins, THE FETISHIST (1997, 38 min, 16mm; Monday, 7:45pm) would have made an ideal double bill with the earlier entry SWOON. Both are about Chicago killers, but where Kalin's film appropriates the shimmering romantic look of early Hollywood and places it in a queer context, Jim Trainor eschews "prettiness" altogether. His simple, almost crude, line animation gives his film a visceral power that brims with dread and, strangely, wonder. A truly great work of contemporary animation. Showing with Paul Chan's RE:THE_OPERATION and an excerpt from Chris Sullivan's work-in-progress CONSUMING SPIRITS. Trainor and Sullivan in person.
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15 Years of CUFF – Conversations at the Edge (Film Center)
Conversations puts the spotlight on the Chicago Underground Film Festival with an excellent program of locally-made shorts from the fest's history (Thursday, 6pm). The highlight may well be Jennifer Reeder's raunchy girl-power short CLIT-O-MATIC: THE ADVENTURES OF WHITE TRASH GIRL (1995), but the show also features Animal Charm's quirky and wonderful STUFFING (1998), Ben Russell's mesmerizing experimental concert film BLACK AND WHITE TRYPPS #3 (2007), Jon Leone's amazing backyard-wrestling doc RECEIVER (2001), and outstanding work by James Fotopoulos, Jim Finn, Dara Greenwald, Kent Lambert, and others. Several filmmakers in person.
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Andy Warhol's KISS & COUCH Doc Films (University of Chicago)
Doc begins its semester-long series of Andy Warhol films by going straight for the sex. Well, KISS (1963-64) isn't sex so much. But it is one of Warhol's key early works and a fascinating translation of the serial images in his paintings translated to film: a series of couples, um, kiss. Beyond its formal structure, it's also a beautiful work of portraiture—one of many that will be included in the series. COUCH (1964), on the other hand, is very much about sex. All kinds. And sometimes explicit. It, too, functions as portraiture, but rather than the medium shots and close-ups of KISS, it is presented in long-shot "tableaux"—harkening back to Victorian-era cabinet photographs to some degree, but, you know, the "dirty" ones that schoolboys secreted. (Thursday, 9pm) PF
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See venue links for more info.
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Carl Dreyer's VAMPYR (Classic Revival w/ Lecture)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 6:15pm & Wednesday, 6pm
It may seem a little odd that one of the great "horror" films of cinema was directed by Carl Dreyer. But considering that the vampire legend has less to do with horror and more with a fear of the uncanny and the threat of losing one's soul to an eternal limbo, then things start to clear up. Dreyer was profoundly interested in exalted states—religious and otherwise. And his VAMPYR (1932, 70 min, 35mm) both continues to explore these shadowy realms of the human psyche (and how they intersect with the world around, slipping easily from one to the other) and looks forward to the similarly tenuous and mysterious mental and emotional states of his later films. It's not that great a leap from Joan of Arc's religious visions to the hallucinatory dreamscape of VAMPYR to the marital ennui of GERTRUD. Unlike Murnau's NOSFERATU, which owes much to 19th century imaginings of the grotesque, and Tod Browning's DRACULA, which, oddly enough, plays up the sexual underpinnings of the vampire tales, Dreyer's film is Romantic allegory—at its core it's a film about salvation. Dreyer's first sound film benefits greatly from silent film visual language—iris shots, double exposures, expressionistic lighting, claustrophobic set design, and a fluid, incredibly mobile use of camera movement. Somehow it is an entirely graceful film and languid. It feels not like a film of a dream, but a film which is a dream. Jonathan Rosenbaum lectures at the Wednesday screening. PF
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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François Truffaut x 3 (Classic Revival)
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THE 400 BLOWS & JULES AND JIM / SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER
Film Center (Showtimes noted below) / Music Box (Check Reader Movies)
It is only appropriate that the director of perhaps the best-known film about a ménage à trois, François Truffaut, has three movies playing this week. A central member of the nouvelle vague, Truffaut contributed first to the movement with his ardent and direct articles for Cahiers du cinema. His first feature, THE 400 BLOWS (1959, 99 min, 35mm; Saturday, 5pm and Tuesday, 6pm), is still one of the best introductions to the French New Wave, not least for its amazing freshness—still in effect nearly fifty years later—and for Antoine Doinel's unsentimental performance. The fine folks at Janus Films have struck a new print of Truffaut's second feature SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (1960, 92 min, 35mm). A romp through a variety of genres and moods, SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (of the three in this trois) best embodies the playful qualities of the nouvelle vague, especially their love of pastiche. JULES AND JIM, as you guessed or already knew, is the film that goes from Tinkers to Evans to Chance. Truffaut's third film, the influence of Jean Renoir peaking through, JULES AND JIM (1961, 104 min, 35mm; Saturday, 3pm and Thursday, 8:15pm) celebrates a time past (France around the First World War), which after all was Truffaut's way. He, more than any other member of the French New Wave, wished himself into the past with his movies, revering classic Hollywood. WS
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See venue links for more info.
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Also Playing at Doc Films
Of the six programs that comprise DOC’s fall calendar, none shows a greater devotion to film history than the Thursday night series of Yiddish-language cinema. As Orson Welles noted, Yiddish theater was one of the most direct precursors to the movies, as it developed outside the influence of any one nation, working in a global language all its own. Appropriately, the first film in the series, EAST AND WEST (1923, 85 min; Thursday, 7pm), stars one of the major stars of Yiddish theater, Molly Picon. Though best known today for her role as Yente in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, Picon was a versatile stage actress who sang and danced in Vaudeville revues and, by the 1930s, was renowned for her dramatic performances as well. While EAST AND WEST is in the vein of the prior category (a culture-clash comedy about an American flapper’s misadventures in a Polish village), the film should be a valuable history lesson nonetheless. Another, very different attempt at universalism can be found in Jim Jarmusch’s MYSTERY TRAIN (1989, 110 min; Monday, 7pm), a three-part comedy centered around a seedy Memphis hotel. The eclectic cast (a Jarmusch specialty) speaks English, Japanese, and Italian, but the whole thing rolls along with the director’s generous, understated humor. Also screening this week: Ingmar Bergman’s often-revived but never equaled THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957, 96 min; Wednesday, 7 & 9pm), whose rustic recreation of Medieval Europe deserves to be seen projected; and Dario Argento’s BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1969, 98 min; Tuesday, 7pm), the first entry in DOC’s semester-long series of Giallo titles. BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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Sergei Eisenstein's THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 3pm
If you haven't seen THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925, 80 min, 35mm, with live musical accompaniment), see it. It is as good as they say. The chest-thumping propaganda, the unabashedly enthusiastic cutting, Hell, the energy alone packed into the film can carry you away. Granted Sergei Eisenstein's exact place in film history might be the subject of current debate. But that debate is only caused by the soaring heights of his reputation: the BFI used to list him as the first part of a trilogy, in which Eisenstein gave film its theoretical basis, D.W. Griffith its alphabet, and Charlie Chaplin its humanity. Watching POTEMKIN it is difficult not to see Eisenstein's sweeping influence, and thankfully it is equally hard not to enjoy the immediate experience of a thrilling film. WS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
xx L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (Contemporary Revival)
Music Box – Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Like some of the other best films about Los Angeles (CHINATOWN, LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, BOYZ 'N THE HOOD), L.A. CONFIDENTIAL is strong on conviction and tells a story of the area's underbelly that is, to use a phrase from Danny DeVito's writer in the film, "hush hush." Looking back, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL neatly fits into the long line of film-noirish masterpieces that came before it, from DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) to THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) to BLADE RUNNER (1982). It seems to confirm the idea that to make a great movie about L.A. you have to make people believe that it's full of skeletons in the closet. And it does the job well. Directed by Curtis Hanson (8 MILE) and written by James Ellroy (THE BLACK DAHLIA), it also follows the lineage of the great director/great writer combo that preceded it: BillyWilder/James M. Cain, Ridley Scott/Philip K. Dick, Robert Altman/Raymond Chandler (or the director/writer duo Joel and Ethan Coen with THE BIG LEBOWSKI—see below). It's a masterfully done production that we have been and will be hearing about for years to come. (1997, 138 minutes, 35mm) KH
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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Joel and Ethan Coen's THE BIG LEBOWSKI (Contemporary Revival)
Music Box – Friday and Saturday, Midnight
Dude, people love this movie—and with good reason. THE BIG LEBOWSKI is what so few modern comedies are: legitimately good. Between all the "dudes" and "fucks," it's easy to miss some of the underlying themes of the film; but beyond its oft-quoted dialogue and obsessive fan base, THE BIG LEBOWSKI is an LA noir for the modern age. It's also a gigantic metaphor for the Gulf War, a true testament to the time in which it is set, and eerily prophetic to watch today. A Bush is in office, we're in a recession, and we're fighting a fatuous war in the Middle East, so boy is this film still relevant. Don't forget, though, that it's also hilarious. Fix yourself a White Russian, folks. Let's see what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass. (1998, 117 min, 35mm) CS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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The high-brows working in low-brow genre films hold rein with the Music Box's midnight films this week. The Coen Brothers chew hard on comedy with THE BIG LEBOWSKI (see above), while feminist author Rita Mae Brown (yes, really) scripts the teen-slasher flick SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982). Perhaps there's a Virginia Woolf-Three Stooges film yet to be discovered?
Block Cinema presents a very different war film alongside THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (see above), with Robert Aldrich's rarely screened ATTACK! (1961) showing Friday at 8pm. Where Powell and Pressberger are gin and tonic, Aldrich is straight whiskey. The Berlin School series features contemporary German films which are virtually unknown in the U.S. Showing on Thursday at 7:30pm is YELLA (2007) by Christian Petzold, which is described as a disturbing take on European capitalism inspired by the cult film CARNIVAL OF SOULS.
Local filmmaker David E. Simpson's documentary MILKING THE RHINO has a run this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center. An inside look at how ancient traditions are intersecting with a growing environmental awareness in Africa, RHINO follows two tribes as they begin to conservation and sustainability.
The Portage Theater hosts the Chicago Horror Film Festival this weekend—three days of non-stop neo-shlock, featuring such recent titles as DARK REEL, WHEELCHAIR WEREWOLF, BONNIE & CLYDE VS. DRACULA, EVILUTION and PUMPKIN HELL. They'll also be screening the highly acclaimed new documentary SPINE TINGLER: THE WILLIAM CASTLE STORY and offering themed activities like a Zombie Pin-Up Contest. Schedule and full details here.
Local filmmakers Hart Ginsburg and Dave Schmudde will make an appearance at Chicago Filmmakers this Saturday at 8pm, to present their 2006 movie AIJO, a "mysterious rollercoaster journey with the filmmaker searching for the meaning of love; from the subway in Tokyo to a beach in Chicago."
A Mexican bandit takes his cues from the Chicago gangsters he sees in Hollywood films in Bank of America Cinema's weekend revival of Rouben Mamoulian's THE GAY DESPERADO (1936). Screening Saturday, 8pm.
Opening this week at Landmark Century Center:
Irish actor Stuart Townsend makes his directorial debut with BATTLE IN SEATTLE, a drama about the 1999 WTO protests. Critics have generally agreed that while the political issues are well represented here, they're ultimately undermined by pervasive melodrama and one-dimensional characters. CHOKE, the second Chuck Palahniuk novel to make it to the big screen (the first being FIGHT CLUB), premieres this week. First-timer Clark Gregg directs Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston in a dark comedy about a sex addict who works in colonial Williamsburg. THE DUCHESS stars Kiera Knightly as the title character, a spry young British royal in the late 1700s stuck in a listless marriage. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times likens it to "period-lifestyle pornography" in that it asks the audience to simultaneously pity the heroine's confinement and fantasize about her lavish world. MS
The Decibelle Festival presents the new documentary THE GITS, part rock-n-roll history and part murder mystery, Friday at 7:30pm at The Nightingale and Saturday, 7:30pm at the Green Lantern.
Kartemquin Films holds a fundraiser for their new documentary TYPEFACE (directed by Justine Nagan) at AV-aerie (Friday, 8pm). Excerpts from the film will be shown, there will be an auction of original hand-printed movie posters, and hors d'oeuvres and cocktails will be served. It's $20 at the door, but, hey, it's a fundraiser. Details here.
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