CRUCIAL VIEWING
Pretty Party:
A Farewell Screening for Jodie Mack
(Experimental Animation / Special
Event)
The Nightingale - Saturday, 8pm
Chicago animator Jodie Mack has over 2,000 ideas a day. Well, not
really, but she did recently make six short animations in the same amount
of time it takes most artists to make one. Three of these new works,
the "Unsubscribe series," see her inventively re-using scraps of
materials from her now dismantled animation studio to create buoyant
abstractions with original scores. The last in the series, UNSUBSCRIBE
NO. 3:GLITCH ENVY/MAKE MOARRR, is Mack's handmade approach to the digital
art of glitching, using her own voice to fabricate an error-laden soundtrack.
These new works premiere at The Nightingale on Saturday alongside Mack's
30-minute musical YARD WORK IS HARD WORK. Employing and sending up romantic
comedies and Hollywood musicals, YARD ambivalently debunks marital bliss
while simultaneously mourning its loss. Sadly for Chicago, Mack is relocating
to New Hampshire to work as Professor of Animation at Dartmouth. Her
colorful presence will be sorely missed. BC
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More info at nightingaletheatre.org.
John Ford's GIDEON'S DAY (British Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7 and 9:15pm
This screening constitutes a major revival, not only because of
its rarity (The last time it played in Chicago was over 10 years ago)
but because it marks a unique chapter of John Ford's monumental career.
GIDEON'S DAY was Ford's only film made in England and it was shot, like
his preceding THE WINGS OF EAGLES, in unrestrained Technicolor. It follows
the fashion of Ford's episodic films, like SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON
or DONOVAN'S REEF, lingering on character and milieu instead of pushing
ahead with narrative. It takes place over a day in the life of a Scotland
Yard detective, yet this modest structure still allows for several confrontations
with mortality (in the form of a sex-murder investigation and the death
of the hero's colleague). According to Ford biographer Joseph McBride,
the film "was something of a lark, enabling Ford to gratify his enjoyment
of suspense novels" and his desire to spend time in the United Kingdom.
McBride continues: "The director's usual mockery of the British is
transformed into poking good-natured fun at the code of politeness and
reserve Gideon and his colleagues are expected to follow in capturing
even the most loathsome criminals.... After opening in England in March
1958, GIDEON'S DAY was treated atrociously by Columbia. It was not released
in the United States until the following February, and then only as
a second feature in black-and-white prints, cut by a third and retitled
GIDEON OF SCOTLAND YARD." (Doc will be screening the original color
version.) Stanley Kubrick fans will be interested to note the early
contributions of production designer Ken Adam, who later designed the
sets for DR. STRANGELOVE and BARRY LYNDON. (1958, 118 min, archival
35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Alexander Kluge's STRONGMAN FERDINAND (German Revival)
White Light Cinema at The Nightingale - Tuesday, 8pm
Kluge, one of the more experimental directors associated with the
New German Cinema movement, turned in his most straightforward narrative
work with STRONGMAN FERDINAND, a tale about Rieche, a former police
detective hired to head up security at a factory. He is far more proficient
at matters of security than are his superiors and his constant pursuit
of absolute security earns him no friends amongst either the workers
he polices or his bosses, only his security team seems accepting of
his ways. Rieche's obstinate stance on knowing all there is to know
about security mirrors the position Kluge himself took for the 15 years
prior to this film, as he signed every manifesto and declaration that
passed by his desk, proclaiming that those in charge of the German film
industry needed to open their eyes and expand cinema beyond a mere revenue
stream to transform it into a gateway for political and artistic expression.
Never mind, of course, that the loudmouthed positions both Kluge and
Rieche embrace allows for the indulgence of a few liberties. Kluge muddies
the waters a bit when Rieche's pursuit for a perfect system begins to
erode his ability for rational action, proving the radical adage that "the most dangerous opponents of a system are its protectors." (1976,
91 min, DVD) DM
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More info at www.whitelightcinema.com and nightingaletheatre.org.
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Note: This program is organized
by Cine-File editor Patrick Friel.
D.W. Griffith's AMERICA (American
Silent Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7pm
Coming at an odd time in Griffith's career--between the sensuality
of his early 1920s films and the Expressionist leanings of 1926's THE
SORROWS OF SATAN--AMERICA is in some ways a throwback, with the director
essentially trying to make a 1919 movie in 1924. But--and with Griffith
from this period there's often a but--it's also the fullest realization
of the director's more literary influences (namely Dickens, noticeable
not only in D.W.'s characterizations and plotting, but also in his editing)
and his peculiar brand of Americanism. George Washington, who may as
well be the Archangel Gabriel, collides with a rote romance and some
confusing business about evil Indians, but the clarity of expression
obliterates whatever aspects of the plot are expressed, continuing D.W.'s
career-long use of 19th century popular art and fixations to invent
the popular art and images of the 20th. (1924, 141 min, 16mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
David Michôd's
ANIMAL KINGDOM (New Australian)
Landmark's Century Centre Cinema - Check Venue website for showtimes
This arty crime drama has been praised in some quarters as the most
exciting new Australian film in years: Recently, Film Comment selected it to screen in their New Directors/New Films series in New
York. Writing about it in their magazine, Laura Kern called it a film "teeming with haunting moments. For the entire duration the sense
of unease is relentless, the nerve-wracking sound design and the use
of slow motion impeccable. Seldom is a debut feature handled with such
assurance and intelligence... It's based on a particularly volatile
chapter in Melbourne's history--the late Seventies through the early
Nineties, when there was little distinction between cop and criminal--and
specifically on a murder-revenge case known as the Walsh Street Killings...
But while the era forms the basis for ANIMAL KINGDOM, the focus is more
intimate: the [murderous] Cody clan and their friend and business associate
Barry "Baz" Brown (Joel Edgerton), and corrupt lawyer Ezra White
(Dan Wyllie). The film begins with the arrival of Joshua, who comes
to live with his grandmother and uncles after his mother, the only female
Cody sibling, overdoses on heroin." The depraved family drama that
ensues is decidedly not for everyone's taste: Just as many find this
excessively unpleasant as edifyingly unpleasant. After a decade of Michael
Haneke's popularity, viewers should know which side they're on, but
those in favor should check this out. (2010, 112 min, 35mm widescreen)
BS
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More info here.
Douglas Sirk's SUMMER STORM (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Saturday, 7 and 9:15pm
"[George Sanders] was just right as the judge. His haughtiness
and blase attitude hiding the rootlessness of the personality... this
small judge in a small, dirty little town, behaving like the Tsar's
brother-in-law: he has to get drunk; he has to have love affairs. With guys like him and the count going round there
had to be a revolution.
"In fact you updated it to put the end after the 1917 Revolution,
didn't you?
"Yes, I did. That way I was able to use the Revolution and the post-revolutionary
period to accentuate Chekhov's approach." (Sirk on Sirk,
1972)
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Just a few months after the Film Center's Chekhov-inspired series comes
a revival of Douglas Sirk's early film (his second made in the U.S.)
based on Chekhov's novel The Hunting Party. When it was released
on DVD last year, SUMMER STORM elicited much praise--particularly for
its ensemble cast, which includes Sanders and a cast-against-type Edward
Everett Horton (the comic relief in the Astaire-and-Rogers films) exhibiting
more nuance and pathos than generally expected of them. The film also
betrays a sensibility seldom associated with American movies of the
time--in part because it was made largely by foreigners. As Dave Kehr
observed: "With [cinematography], production design, editing and music
by emigres [many of whom had worked with Fritz Lang], SUMMER STORM is
a trans-Atlantic reflection of the sort of dark, doom-laden social drama
that haunted European theaters right before the war broke out." Sirk
had directed several plays by Bertolt Brecht on the German stage, and,
as the above interview makes clear, his approach to Chekhov was as political
as it was psychological. SUMMER STORM was also, notably, an independent
production, made on a lower budget than Sirk was accustomed to; much
of the thematic legwork is done by the characterizations. Those who
only know Sirk from the operatic productions he made in the 1950s will
find here another side of this major director, as well as a major unsung
work in its own right. Note: the scheduled 35mm print has shipping
problems, so the film will be shown from DVD. Thus, Doc will be showing
it for free. (1944, 106 min, DVD projection) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Samuel Fuller's BARON OF ARIZONA (American Revival)
Bank of America Cinema - Saturday, 8pm
Sam Fuller's eccentric second feature is a talky, largely action-less
Lippert Western nearly as baroque as his 1989 nightmare-fest STREET
OF NO RETURN. Vincent Price (!) at his most feline plays James Reavis,
the 19th century conman who concocted a complicated scheme (which included,
amongst other things, becoming a monk) to lay claim to the entirety
of Arizona. Co-written by Fuller and novelist Homer Croy (provider of
the source material for Frank Borzage's Will-Rogers-as-a-country-bumpkin-on-the-Continent
movie THEY HAD TO SEE PARIS, home of cinema's most disarming Ku Klux
Klan joke), it's probably the only one of Fuller's American movies that
could conceivably be called a comedy, though it's much weirder than
that. Fuller's brings out the goofiness in Price's creepy charm, pitching
Reavis somewhere between anti-hero dreamer and mincing pedophile. The
whole thing was shot in two weeks, and it looks like it, though in the
best possible ways: Fuller and cinematographer James Wong Howe seem
to have decided to work patiently, with scenes pieced together from
carefully lit and framed shots interspersed with a lot of explanatory
narration. (1950, 97 min, 16mm) IV
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More info at www.bankofamericacinema.blogspot.com.
Dover Koshashvili's ANTON CHEKHOV'S THE DUEL (New International)
Music Box - Check Venue website for showtimes
Dover Koshashvili's LATE MARRIAGE (2001) was a true successor to
the comedy of Anton Chekhov: a film that regarded unfulfilled lives
as human comedy but etched its characters with novelistic depth, not
satirical superiority. It was also (pace Dan Savage) refreshingly
pro-sex, with nearly a third of the drama transposed across a long night
in bed between Arab-Israeli lovers. After a second film (the purportedly
Kusturica-esque GIFT FROM ABOVE [2003]) that never found U.S. distribution,
Koshashvili returns with an English-language drama--and, curiously,
the second Chekhov adaptation playing here this week. It was received
favorably when released in New York a few months ago, with Manohla Dargis
writing in the New York Times: "Once again, Mr. Koshashvili
mixes moments of bitterness and laughter with strong dramatic passages,
creating a social milieu in ANTON CHEKHOV'S THE DUEL that is believably
inhabited, consistently surprising and true-feeling in detail and sweep.
(Its most unattractive feature is that ungainly title.)... [It] unhurriedly
moves among the players in scenes that capture a mood, or serve as a
quick character sketch, or function on both counts." The story--which
suggests a subdued version of Hitchcock's UNDER CAPRICORN--concerns
the anxiety that befalls an unhappily married couple when an old friend
comes to visit them at their quasi-exile in Caucasus. If the performances
here are anything like those of LATE MARRIAGE, which attained a sort
of manic-earthy naturalism, this could be a very effective realization
of Chekhov. (2009, 95 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Pixar's TOY STORY 3 (New Animation)
Logan and additional venues
- Check Reader Movies for theaters and showtimes
As its profitable run comes to a close,
it must be finally admitted that to presume ignorance of TOY STORY 3
is to effectively admit that you hate classical Hollywood cinema: unfettered
by any coherent and/or crude ideological ambition, this film is a legitimately
relentless puree of stereotyped genres, and a rarity in that it only
gets better with the more old movies you've seen; in fact, it's quite
possible that it's a total bore for those who are actually in kindergarten.
Lifting discursive patterns, gestures, soundtrack cues, and other mise-en-scčne
from a wide variety of narrative classics, at its high midpoint TOY
STORY 3 can be comically shifting from mimicking melodrama, Westerns,
prison dramas, capers, gothic horror, and even Mexican 1940s caballero
films over the course of just a few minutes. This disturbingly informed
and reflexive scriptwriting is, however, likely conceptually overshadowed
by Pixar's flashy surface role as both the apotheosis of engineering
in aesthetic manufacture and as a fully-formed NorCal simulacral apparatus
of SoCal cinematic production: a 218,000 square-foot involute eye, a
1.5- megawatt shrine to the optics of the camera lens. Perhaps the intermittent,
clever noir homages in the screenplay are of secondary interest to the
likely fact that multiple PhDs slaved away for a year to produce a relatively
photorealistic black garbage bag for a single onscreen sequence. And
perhaps that significant history-of- technology datum should
be in turn dismissed, with a consideration of the studio's typically
dreary heteronormative politics (for a company based in the East Bay,
the repeated homophobic reaction shots to the antics of Mattel's metrosexualized
Ken (Michael Keaton) are specifically reprehensible); the inescapable
reproduction of globalized commodity fetishism underlying the trilogy's
very premise; and of the remarkable inaccessibility to humanity which
necessarily pervades any endeavor constructed primarily by hundreds
of unrefined CGI savants who have seem to have never grown out of the
idea that STAR WARS is a fundamental cornerstone of civilization. That
is to say: a movie ostensibly about growing up and leaving your toys
behind, produced by an assembly line of grown men with toys adorning
every corner of their cubes. (Preceded by DAY AND NIGHT (2010), a short
of such ornate attention to structuralist-semiotic interplay that Roland
Barthes himself would have wept tears of nerd joy.) (2010, 103min, 35mm)
MC
Mervyn LeRoy's HAROLD TEEN (Silent
American Revival)
Silent Film Society of Chicago at the Portage Theater - Friday, 8pm
Before he became Warner Bros' pointman for grit, way before he headed
MGM, Mervyn LeRoy directed this slight and fun high school comedy, made
before teen flicks could even be considered a genre and adapted from
Carl Ed's popular strip. Comic-book-faced Arthur Lake plays the title
role (something of a newspaper strip specialist, he'd eventually land
the role of Dagwood in the inexplicably long-running Blondie film series); Mary Brian, then "The Sweetest Girl in Pictures," is the love interest, but the weird and underrated character actor Lucien
Littlefield kinda steals the show as Harold's father. This was only
LeRoy's third film, and some of the stranger comedy (namely the movie-parody
sequence) is probably due to the influence of producer/Chicago cinephile
fetish object Allan Dwan. The film will be accompanied by Jay Warren
on organ. Plus pre-show music and an introduction by film historian
Ken Irwin. (1928, 80 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.silentfilmchicago.com/Festival.htm.
Lewis Milestone's THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS
(American Revival)
The Portage Theater - Wednesday, 1:30pm
A reel of childhood Gothic, complete with candelight and an old lady in glovelettes, turns noir when the characters grow up (a transformation represented by a train chugging in and then out of a tunnel -- strange love indeed). The hobo-boy crush object is now Van Heflin, slumming little rich girl Martha becomes Barbara Stanwyck and the weaselly four-eyes has grown up to have it all: he's the district attorney, he's married to Stanwyck and he's Kirk Douglas. Tucked away in the middle of the week and the middle of the day is Lewis Milestone's second best film (after HALLELUJAH, I'M A BUM, of course). Douglas, in his first film role, is boyish and gawky (he's 30, looks 20 and sounds 40); a nervy puppyishness makes his character (the pitiful, unloved husband who doesn't deserve his position) seem more sympathetic than Robert Rossen's script probably intended. The set-up for the film is proto-SOME CAME RUNNING (and, by extension, proto-Linklater), with Heflin crashing a car into a tree on his way through the hometown he left behind. More amused than annoyed (as Sinatra was in the Minnelli film), he goes around discovering what the people of Iverstown have been up to since he left 17 years ago; Stanwyck still holds a flame for Heflin, while Douglas becomes paranoid that he'll blackmail them about the childhood accident that is the source of her fortune. (1946, 116 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.portagetheater.org.
Black Harvest International Festival
of Film and Video
Gene Siskel Film Center - Ongoing
The Black Harvest festival continues
with the features INSIDE A CHANGE, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT
CHILD, NESHOBA: THE PRICE OF FREEDOM, and PRO-BLACK SHEEP, and the shorts
programs "Made in Chicago" and "Urban Visions." Check our blog http://cine-file.info/forum/ for reviews of selected programs showing this
week.
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Complete schedule at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Chicago Filmmakers
hosts animator/filmmaker/cartoonist/record aficionado/force of nature
Heather McAdams on Saturday at 8pm, with her curated show Sweet
Little 16 (MM!). The program features vintage Scopitones, music
films, trailers, commercials, and a live music set by Chris Ligon.
The Art Institute of Chicago
has rescheduled the rained out One Minute Film Festival: new
coordinates are Thursday, with work looped in Gallery 189 (Modern Wing)
from 5-8pm. The screening is part of the museum's Free night, but the
drinks are Cash Bar.
Also at the Music Box this week:
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE continues; William Wyler's 1967
THE CHILDREN'S HOUR and the new documentary STONEWALL UPRISING
are the Saturday and Sunday matinee films; there are no Friday and Saturday
midnight films this week: instead, there's live burlesque performances
each night at 10:30pm.
Also at Doc Films
(University of Chicago) this week: Victor Fleming's 1931 novelty
film AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 MINUTES WITH DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, with,
um, Douglas Fairbanks (Senior) is on Thursday at 7pm.
Also at the Portage Theater this week: Saturday, there's a quadruple feature
starting at 3pm with ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN,
MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES, THE INVISIBLE MAN, and PLAN 9
FROM OUTER SPACE.
At the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Howard Hawks' great 1940 film HIS GIRL FRIDAY is on
Saturday and Tuesday; a sneak screening of Margarethe von Trotta's new
film VISION is Sunday afternoon; Quentin Tarantino's PULP
FICTION screens Saturday and Tuesday; and two new documentaries,
Beadie Finzi's ONLY WHEN I DANCE
and Leslie Zemeckis' BEHIND THE BURLY Q, play for a week (Zemeckis
in person at Friday 8:15pm and Saturday 7:45pm shows, see website for
details).
At Facets Cinémathèque this
week is Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm's 2009 espionage thriller THE
RED MACHINE. Directors Argy and Boehm in person at all screenings.
The Chicago Cultural Center hosts Cinema/Chicago's screenings of Marco Antoniazzi's 2009 Austrian
film SMALL FISH on Saturday at 2pm and Micha Lewinsky's 2009
Swiss film WILL YOU MARRY US? on Wednesday at 6:30pm (both from
DVD); Showing in the Women's Empowerment Film Series on Sunday are the
documentaries GOING ON 13 (12pm) and TROOP 1500 (2:30pm).
Also opening at the Landmark's Century
Centre Cinema is Ruba Nadda's new international romantic drama
CAIRO TIME.
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