CRUCIAL VIEWING
Maren Ade's EVERYONE ELSE (New German)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday and Monday, 8pm and Wednesday, 6pm
Chris and Gitti, a sensitive couple with little discernible ambition,
come apart during a lazy vacation in Sardinia, though their dissolution
isn't the result of violent flare-ups so much as personal insecurities
and deep-seated passive-aggression. In synopsis, Maren Ade's second feature
sounds like the sort of low-budget relationship drama we've come so
accustomed to forgetting in recent years; and, indeed, its opening stretches
look out over a great pitfall of solipsism. But EVERYONE ELSE displays
rare patience and its insights are well worth waiting for. It becomes
apparent, for instance, that this seemingly aimless film is actually
moving at a pace unique to its main characters--who, like many newly-serious
couples, operate on their own time, governed in part by libido but just
as much by curiosity, a willingness to drop everything for the revelation
of a lover's secret, a shared discovery, a new inside joke. (It should
be noted that Ade is as deliberate in her handling of time as Bela Tarr.)
It's also revealed that what appeared to be the filmmakers' solipsism
is actually the characters' denial of certain hard realities; and, in
fact, this revelation becomes the driving force of the entire film.
Chris and Gitti are well aware of the middle-class lifestyle they're
trying to escape--It's the source of the film's title--as well as darker
philosophic issues most everyone spends adult life trying to avoid.
The film contains several monologues of self-examination reminiscent
of Ingmar Bergman's chamber dramas, probably the closest point-of-reference
for Ade's psychological examination, and the leads respond to the material
with performances of uncommon complexity. Needless to say, this sort
of filmmaking is an acquired taste (It requires that you see universal
angst even in these thirty-something fuck-ups), but Ade and her cast
are so thorough in their characterizations that even irritated viewers
should be impressed with their perceptiveness; those receptive to their
mission should find this downright unsettling. Once the couple's happiness
is proven to be unsustainable, EVERYONE ELSE proceeds with the anxious
tension of a horror movie. Every revelation of character carries a sense
of unspoken threat, a nervousness that's in no way diminished by the
sexiness of the leads or the edenic palette of Bernhard Keller's 35mm
photography. (2009, 119 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Frank Borzage's I'VE ALWAYS LOVED YOU (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7 and 9pm
If one subscribes to the popular (if anything about the permanently unfashionable Borzage can be called "popular") notion of Frank Borzage as a "transcendental romantic," then I'VE ALWAYS LOVED YOU is the most Borzagean title imaginable: a sentence that includes the personal aspect of love (the "I" and "YOU" are specific individuals) while simultaneously painting love as something beyond time or space (it could be said, then, that THE LAST MISTRESS, also screening in town this week, is both Borzagean and anti-Borzagean: the story of a flawed, debilitating relationship that transcends everything). But as with all great directors, nothing is that simple about Borzage. The one thing that is certainly "transcended" in I'VE ALWAYS LOVED YOU is the Liberace-like production design (who exactly owns a gold-plated piano?), but if the film seems to be set in some kind of dream/nightmare universe with a palette as expressively garish as the one Tashlin used in CINDERFELLA (special emphasis on electric indigo and fuchsia)--a place where women wear Mountain Dew-colored dresses and no room is complete without Doric columns--it is also firmly grounded in it. The two forces at the film's center (love and art), the two obsessions shared by its rival pianist couple, do not so much cross the boundaries of space as become space itself. When the film cuts between them, or when it is taken over by one of the many musical interludes, it's not emotion passing over the world, but the earthly being shaped in accordance with human desire. (1944, 117 min, archival 35mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Satyajit Ray's NAYAK (Indian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday 7pm
Satyajit Ray's famous realism is more literary than pictorial/dramatic, and it manifests itself in the fact that he takes his goddamn time. Robin Wood once rightly called Ray the best director of children, but he also happens to be the best director of the infirm elderly, and the only director in whose cinema they don't seem out of place. Part of that may be that Ray's directing is defined by patience towards his subjects; if it takes a while for someone to stand up, he can wait. The easy thing to say is that Ray made 2 1/2 hour "70-minute films," devoting images, ideas, and details (location, characterization, custom) to the sorts of plots even the most concerned filmmakers wouldn't think warranted the running time (the oft-repeated story is that François Truffaut walked out of PATHER PANCHALI's world premiere). But that only makes his films sound bloated, when in fact they're lean, and it's possible that no other filmmaker hinted better at the complexity of the world without ever pointing it out. Ray's a "problem filmmaker," not a "solution filmmaker," and, like all of his best films, NAYAK uses its excess of scenes to complicate what should be a simple story. A train ride undertaken by a famous actor is the launching point for a profusion of dreams, flashbacks, conversations, social miniatures, and interviews through which a group of what at first appear to be one-dimensional characters (the Actor, the Nosy Reporter, the Fan, the Old Crank Who Steals the Show, etc.) become part of a larger framework that explores the way the past shapes present selves. #1 Satyajit Ray superfan Wes Anderson would lift NAYAK's setting and part of its structure (as well as its sensitivity to the traumas of its "privileged" characters) for THE DARJEELING LIMITED, a movie that also abounds with visual references to this film. (1966, 130 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Catherine Breillat's THE LAST MISTRESS (French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday 6pm, Sunday 3pm and Wednesday 8:15pm
Georges Bataille: "Paradoxically, intimacy is violence, and it is destruction, because it is not compatible with the positing of the separate individual." Giovanna Mezzogiorno's descent into madness in the second half of VINCERE takes that line as a suggestion, but the relationship that accepts it as a rule is the one between THE LAST MISTRESS' Ryno and Vellini, which begins as l'amour fou and then plunges into oblivion. It's the first half of the 19th century; Ryno, played by Fu'ad Aït Aattou (Louis Garrel's self-importance + Ashton Kutcher's smugness), is a handsome fop set to marry a wholesome girl from a wealthy family. However, he has a bad reputation, and one evening he sits down with his bride's grandmother to tell the story of the last ten years of his life in an attempt to prove that he's changed his ways. That account is largely the story of his all-consuming, sometimes abusive, eventually insane affair with Vellini (Asia Argento), professional mistress, woman of ill repute, and the love of his life, whether he accepts it or not. An enticing enigma, Vellini, like those characters in Godard's early films that base their entire lives on movie-images, has a head full of paintings, and contorts herself into the shape of an inviting Goya or a tragic Fuseli for the men around her. And it's here that we return to that Bataille line and the paradox of Ryno and Vellini's relationship, which revolves around the two constantly switching places as to which one is incapable of imagining the other as anything but an extension of themselves (as, in essence, an image). Whenever Ryno breaks free (or thinks he has), Vellini is there like a ghost to drag him back into Hell. Argento--with that gap between her teeth and those too-broad shoulders and that deep voice)--is almost as scary as Beatrice Dalle here, and looks a good fifteen years older than the boyish Aattou (in reality, it's only 5); her performance, one of the greatest of the last twenty or so years, is a catalogue of leans, saunters, careful turns of the neck and shoulders that explode into feral fits. You can never tell whether she's going to fuck Aattou or stab him (sometimes it's both). Catherine Breillat's reputation may be that of a "provocateur," but her real vitality as a director/screenwriter lies in the best (or maybe the only good) kind of academicism: she's a subtext-miner and analyst. That's why her two best films, which also happen to be her two most recent ones, are both adaptations of well-established works: BLUEBEARD (which screened at this year's EU Fest) and this one. Breillat may not have much pure imagination (ANATOMY OF HELL, FAT GIRL and ROMANCE all seem to be self-conscious texts in search of a plot), but she has something almost as good: an imaginative intelligence. That's more or less THE LAST MISTRESS in a nutshell: a masterwork of imaginative intelligence, of counter-point, as much on Argento's part as on Breillat's. (2007, 104 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Note: The Film Center's screenings of Breillat's SEX IS COMEDY have been canceled.
Leontine Sagan's MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM (German Revival)
Center on Halsted (3656 N Halsted) - Friday, 7pm
The story of a fourteen year old girl's relationship to both her teacher and her headmistress at a traditional German boarding school, Leontine Sagan's MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM is a film marked both by controversy and multiple stages of critical assessment. Although popular in Europe upon release in 1931, the film was banned both in the US (to be released only after significant cuts) and by Goebbels following the Nazi assumption of power. It was not shown again in Germany until a 1977 television broadcast, while screenings at New York and Chicago women's film festivals in the mid-70s generated a significant reevaluation of the film, heralding it as a landmark of queer cinema, with some suggesting that it may be the first film with an openly lesbian storyline. In his seminal survey of Weimar cinema, From Caligari To Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer reads the film as a progressive response to the rising tide of fascism that was to overtake Germany in 1933. Despite its abstention from the expressionism that dominated the 1920s, Kracauer sees MADCHEN, along with films like DOCTOR MABUSE and THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI, as exploring ideas of despotism and rebellion, with the tyrants of their story lines as nothing less than prefigurations of Hitler. MADCHEN's anti-fascism dominates much of the early commentary on the film, which sees it as a critique of the authoritarianism of the Prussian school system and an exploration of the emotional ramifications of life under dictatorship. However, such a reading obscures the film's palpable lesbian cadence. As B. Ruby Rich has written, " ... most important to the film's reputation through the years has been its significance as an anti-authoritarian and prophetically anti-fascist film....In emphasizing the film's progressive stance in relation to the Nazi assumption of power, however, film historians have tended to overlook, minimize, or trivialize the film's central concern with love between women... One of the few films to have an inherently gay sensibility, it is also one of the most central to establishing a history of lesbian cinema." (1931, 87 min, DVD). EB
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More info at www.centeronhalsted.org.
Screening will be introduced by UIC Germanic Studies professor Sara Hall.
Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (Italian
Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Venue website for showtimes
For many, the greatest film about filmmaking and Federico Fellini's
finest hour. 8 1/2 is a work of such grandeur that it demands to be
seen on a big screen--if nothing else but for the Chagall-esque final
images, a celebration of the "carnival of life" as dreamt
by a passionate artist on a massive oceanside set for a film that will
never be made. It's also a film that demands to be heard in a
theater, as the music of Nino Rota (Fellini's frequent collaborator)
is rarely less than ravishing. "Fellini's camera is endlessly delighting.
His actors often seem to be dancing rather than simply walking... [and
Rota's] music brought a lift and subtle rhythm to their movements,"
wrote Roger Ebert in his "Great Movies" review, a deft formal
analysis of a director often accused of groundless style. But if there's
a movie defensible for groundless style, it's 8 1/2, a portrait of a
film director's vibrant inner life as a mosaic of memories, dreams,
sex fantasies, and ever-surprising images. Marcello Mastroianni, at
the height of his star power, managed to make an iconic performance
by standing in for Fellini, but the whole cast is ultimately dwarfed
by the scope of Fellini's imagination. To again quote Ebert's review:
"Few directors make better use of space. One of his favorite techniques
is to focus on a moving group in the background and track with them
past foreground faces that slide in and out of frame. He also likes
to establish a scene with a master shot, which then becomes a closeup
when a character stands up into frame to greet us. Another technique
is to follow his characters as they walk, photographing them in three-quarter
profile, as they turn back toward the camera. And he likes to begin
dance sequences with one partner smiling invitingly toward the camera
before the other partner joins in the dance. All of these moves are brought
together in his characteristic parades. Inspired by a childhood love
of the circus, Fellini used parades in all his films--not structured
parades but informal ones, people moving together toward a common goal
or to the same music, some in the foreground, some farther away... I
have seen 8 1/2 over and over again, and my appreciation only deepens.
It does what is almost impossible: Fellini is a magician who discusses,
reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us
with them." (1963, 138 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Robert Flaherty's MAN OF ARAN (International Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7pm
Robert Flaherty may not have actually invented the documentary, but he invented Werner Herzog, and as is often the case, the original is better than the copy. Bouregois fantasies of marginalization, all of Flaherty's best films are morally problematic (if not outright reprehensible), and yet every one of them is an enduring work of art, redeemed by what could be called Flaherty's unconscious poetic urge. Flaherty tries to convey the ethnographic fact of his subjects but fails, and in his romanticism is instead guided to a greater basic truth . Flaherty's early fixation with human hardship reaches its apex with MAN OF ARAN, in which the director arranges a villageful of poor Irishmen into fictional families, anachronistic pageants and staged "actualities" (the shark-hunting at the center of the film's most famous sequences hadn't been practiced since the 19th century) that create striking metaphors for his own sense of human smallness. Inauthentic and totally true. (1934, 76 min, 16mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Fred Niblo's
BEN-HUR: A TALE OF THE CHRIST (Silent American Revival)
Silent Film Society of Chicago at the Portage Theater - Friday, 8pm
Based on Lew Wallace's novel of the
same title, Fred Niblo's 1925 silent film was a sensational hit in many
aspects. As the trailer--which is as elaborate as the film itself--boasts,
it hired 15,000 extras for the spectacular battle scenes and the climactic
chariot race. Ramon Novarro plays Judah Ben-Hur, a young wealthy Jewish
man who is arrested by his childhood friend Messala (played by Francis
Bushman). Now a powerful Roman commander, Messala sends Ben-Hur's mother
and sister to jail and confiscates their family possessions. Ben-Hur
is sentenced to be a galley slave and on his way to a Roman warship,
he is unknowingly touched by the hand of the Christ. During a battle
with pirates, Ben-Hur rescues a Roman admiral, Arrius. The admiral adopts
Ben-Hur as a son and he grows up as an excellent chariot racer, believing
that his family is dead. Ben-Hur gets his revenge on Messala by
defeating him in a chariot race and leaving him fatally injured. With
his last breath, Messala tells Ben-Hur that his mother and sister are
not dead but living in a village of lepers. Having been converted to
Christianity, Ben-Hur's mother and sister are cured of their leprosy
at the crucifixion of the Christ. Following the novel's structure, the
film of BEN-HUR parallels the story of Judah Ben-Hur and the contemporaneous
life of Christ, switching back and forth between scenes of each and
bringing them together at times. With its four million dollar budget
BEN-HUR is the most expensive silent film ever made. The grand scale
of this elaborate production is beautifully captured with excellent
camera work. It is hard to remember this is pre-CGI, as the sea battle and the chariot race scenes
are lengthy (over ten minutes) and spectacular. Fatal accidents among
the racers were captured and later led to new safety rules. To someone
who is not a silent film connoisseur, the acting is unexpectedly smooth
and subtle. The film includes selected scenes (such as the Nativity
scene) in two-strip Technicolor, which at the time of its release was
considered in poor taste. For many modern audiences who might be more
familiar with the 1959 remake (starring Charlton Heston), Niblo's BEN-HUR
is certainly, as its advertising claimed, "The Picture Every Christian
Must See"--and perhaps non-Christians as well. Jay Warren provides
live organ accompaniment. (1927, 143 min, 35mm) HB
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More info at www.silentfilmchicago.com/Festival.htm.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Kartemquin Films is holding
a fundraiser for local filmmaker Usama Alshaibi's in-progress
documentary AMERICAN ARAB on Thursday from 6-9pm at The Stan Mansion
in Logan Square. Complete details here.
Bank of America Cinema screens Andre de Toth's acclaimed 1944 film NONE SHALL ESCAPE on Saturday at 8pm.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Richard Blackburn's little known 1973 horror-suspense film LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL screens Saturday.
At Facets Cinémathèque this week: Neil Jordan's new film ONDINE plays for a week;
note that the scheduled screening of
REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS in the Facets Night School series on Saturday
has been cancelled.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Ana Sofia Joanes' new documentary
FRESH plays for a week; Quentin Tarantino's JACKIE BROWN
screens Saturday and Tuesday; Robert Rodriguez's ONCE UPON A TIME
IN MEXICO is on Saturday and Monday; and Alina Szpak's new drama
PLAYER screens on Saturday and Thursday (showing with Aleksandra
Hodowany's short LAST DANCE). Filmmakers in person.
Chicago Filmmakers screens Yael Hersonski's 2009 documentary
A FILM UNFINISHED on Sunday at 3pm. The film, which investigates
the historical reality of an hour long uncompleted Nazi propaganda movie,
will be introduced by UIC history professor Dr. Richard Levy. Co-presented
by Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies.
At the Music Box this week: Michael Paul Stephenson's documentary
BEST WORST MOVIE opens. It's about the film TROLL 2. Director Stephenson
and actor George Hardy in person at the 9:45pm show Friday; and, what
are the chances (?), it happens that Claudio Fragasso's 1990 film
TROLL 2 is showing Friday and Saturday at midnight; the other midnight
program is Spike and Mike's New Generation Animation, which also
has additional showings Friday-Sunday only (including the weekend matinee
slots); Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio's new documentary CROPSEY
plays Monday-Thursday; the other matinee program this Saturday and Sunday
is Silly Silent Slapstick Shorts, which features five early Harold
Lloyd comedies with live organ accompaniment; also, THE GIRL WHO
PLAYED WITH FIRE continues.
Chicago Cultural Center hosts Cinema/Chicago's presentation of Raphael
Nadjari's 2004 Israeli film STONES on Saturday at 2pm and Ricardo
Darín's 2007 Argentinean film THE SIGNAL on Wednesday at 6:30pm.
Both from DVD.
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) screens THE BREAKFAST
CLUB (from DVD) on Wednesday at 9pm on the East Lawn of the Norris University Center, 1999 Campus Drive. |
