CRUCIAL VIEWING
Robert Bresson's AU HASARD BALTHAZAR
(French Revival)
Film Studies Center (University
of Chicago) - Friday, 7pm
The Film Studies Center of ancien Cobb Hall teasingly screens once this film which must be seen a dozen
times. BALTHAZAR has long been encircled by a cacophonous mystique of
hyperbolic Godard proclamations (he famously married into the montage)
and unenlightened uses of the word "transcendental." It is
now, for better or for worse, solely a masterpiece for secular melancholic
cineastes and an exercise in futility for the pious Netflix user. Even
the Schubert Sonata in A Major, bringing tears to single men at Facets,
can be played by a child. That said, what a masterpiece! Cinema's most
thorough estrangement of humanity, at the hand of our most enigmatic
auteur: from Bresson's editing room, total war on the filmic conventions
of emotional identification. Love in the air?? Always cut to
an uncomprehending donkey. Point-of-view cutting between said donkey
and a caged tiger--why not? The erstwhile aspiring psychologists of
film studies deserve to be flummoxed. See also: the most alienated
dance floor brawl of all time. Despite all this, a certain sympathy
is generated between the film and its victims (the audience), so long
as the latter is prepared to progressively teach the former its vulnerability.
Like ZORNS LEMMA (see below), the deliberately supine viewer is rewarded
with a recognizable universe viewed obliquely, dispassionately, and
at a temporal distance--the mysterious theological recitations of childhood;
the wintry march of old age; and the long, relentless oppression of
'civilized' society in between, made entirely of humble gesture and
symbol. Introduced by U of C professor Tom Gunning and co-presented
by the France Chicago Center. (1966, 95 min, 35mm) MC
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More info at filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu.
Michael Haneke's THE WHITE RIBBON
(New German)
Landmark's Century Centre Cinema - Check Reader Movies for showtimes
I'll tell you this: the scene in THE WHITE RIBBON where a little boy
is told about death is better than the whole of THE PIANO TEACHER. In
fact, THE WHITE RIBBON is Haneke's best film after CODE UNKNOWN. Lars
Von Trier called THE BOSS OF IT ALL "a light comedy;" Haneke has
called this one "a film about the rise of fascism." Both are
puckish statements of intention, not descriptions of the results. It
all starts with a wire strung between two trees to trip a horse. A year
or so before World War I, in a small Protestant community, the balance
created by the ordinary cruelties of the upper class is undermined by
extraordinary cruelties by mysterious perpetrators. Everyday negligence
is responded to with planned attacks. All of these events are investigated
by a schoolteacher (played by Christian Friedel as a young man and by
the voice of Ernest Jacobi as an old one), who is the first Haneke character
who could be called a "hero" rather than a "protagonist." Haneke's camera, like Visconti's or Sirk's or Mizoguchi's or
von Sternberg's, has always held a privileged position, an ability
to either stare at what the director feels the audience would avert
their eyes from, or to see shapes, patterns, and causes that the characters
can't. There's a scene in THE WHITE RIBBON, shot in a single immobile
take, where a poor man comes to look at the corpse of his wife, who's
just been killed in a sawmill accident. Her upper body is blocked out
of view. The man, his head held low, approaches the bed she's been laid
on and, in a moment of unknowable misery, becomes obscured. It's at
this moment that Haneke relinquishes the aforementioned privilege and
it becomes clear that THE WHITE RIBBON is the most openly empathetic
film he's ever made. (2009, 137 min, 35mm) IV
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More info here.
John Ford's FORT APACHE (American
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 7pm
Though it's set firmly in the mid-19th century, John Ford's FORT
APACHE belongs as much to the post-war American cinema of self-doubt
as does William Wyler's BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES or Joseph L. Mankiewicz's
A LETTER TO THREE WIVES. Those films questioned the stability of domestic
life after World War II; FORT APACHE contemplates, more daringly, the
triumphalism of the U.S. Military itself. The time is shortly after
the Civil War and the setting is a cavalry stronghold in the middle
of forbidding Apache territory. Henry Fonda plays the Lieutenant Captain
Owen Thursday, a character out of Herman Melville, obsessed with military
order to the point of jeopardizing family relationships, professional
credibility, and, ultimately, his own life. John Wayne plays Fonda's
counterpart, an introspective leader who spends much of the film urging
him not to wage a losing battle with hostile Apache tribes. The dichotomy
between these two characters (who, in Shakespearean fashion, never descend
to mere archetypes) is as literary in conception as any of the stories
in Ford's O'Neill adaptation THE LONG VOYAGE HOME. Yet the execution,
which realizes the men's outsized values against the mythic landscapes
of the American West, is entirely cinematic. There are few sequences
in Ford as troubled as the epilogue of FORT APACHE, in which Wayne's
character reflects on the film's events and can only bring himself to
positive sentiment by lying. The preceding two hours are not without
lighter moments, but in the end it's the sense of worry that overwhelms.
Tellingly, Ford shot the film on infrared black-and-white film, a stock
developed for scientific research that registered sky blue as funereal
gray. (1948, 125 min, archival 35mm) BS
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More info at docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Hollis Frampton's ZORNS LEMMA
(Experimental Revival)
White Light Cinema at The Nightingale - Sunday, 7pm
Zorn's lemma as defined by set theory: Every partially ordered
set contains one maximal totally ordered subset. With the birth of cinema
came the emergence of a new form of communication and, although the
likes of Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Pudovkin explored the medium's
manipulative abilities, each acting as early cinematic linguists, Hollis
Frampton was certainly the most successful, if not the first, at breaking
this new language down to study its syntax and phonemes. Of Frampton's
work, no better example of this analysis exists than ZORNS LEMMA, in
which he aims to catalog cinema's inherent traits as well as dissect
filmic language into its constituent parts. The film sets in place early
a one-second pulse, used as a unit of measurement for his exercises,
as he ties together language, grammar, and conceptual visual representations.
An early American text teaching grammar and the alphabet is read over
black leader and is followed by the establishment of the film's pulse
as it cycles through the English alphabet with images of word that begin
with each letter. As this middle sequence continues, Frampton makes
visual the definition of writing: the graphic use of abstract characters
to represent phonetic elements of speech. Words representing letters
of the alphabet are eventually replaced with an image (ocean waves,
a fire, etc.), sublimating any previous representation into a purely
visual symbolic language--from now on, Frampton is telling us, we communicate
with images; we write with light. The capstone of our conversion to
a visual alphabet is a choral reading of medieval philosopher Robert
Grosseteste's "On Light," which discusses the inherently problematic
role that the nature of light plays in one's understanding of objective
reality. Considering all three sections of the film, ZORNS LEMMA posits
cinema as a new system of thought, complete with its own lexicon, capable
of shaping and defining reality by way of its manipulation of light.
This screening will be introduced live via webcam by Toronto film scholar
Michael Zryd, a panelist at the upcoming Hollis Frampton symposium at
University of Chicago, who will offer context and strategies for viewing
the film. (1970, 60 min, 16mm) DM
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More info at www.whitelightcinema.com and www.nightingaletheatre.org.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Kazan's EAST OF EDEN & SPLENDOR
IN THE GRASS (American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Showtimes noted below
The only film that brings Catherine Breillat to tears (and that's
saying something), Elia Kazan's SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961, 110 min, 35mm; Saturday, 5:15pm and Tuesday, 8pm) is as upsetting
a tale of sexual repression that such praise would suggest. Like Kazan's
previous WILD RIVER, this is a period piece in gorgeous Technicolor
about the recent past, but the film is less concerned with political
than social character. Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood play young lovers
kept apart by convention in 1920s Kansas: Following a (relatively, for
Kazan) lyrical first act, the film escalates to the stuff of opera when
the two are separated in the second half. Playwright William Inge (Picnic,
Bus Stop) wrote the script--his first original screenplay--and
it's fascinating to see his careful writing style realized by a cast
somewhat at odds with it. Inge's work demands serious rediscovery, and
his talent alone makes this revival worth seeing. Underrated in recent
years because he was never as daring as Tennessee Williams, he was just
as sensitive to the pain of passion deferred and no less personal a
writer. (SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS takes place near his own birthplace and
he was the same age as its main characters in the time the story is
set.) Also playing this week in the Film Center's Kazan series is the
director's adaptation of Steinbeck's EAST OF EDEN
(1955, 110 min, 35mm widescreen; Saturday, 3pm and Thursday, 6pm), noteworthy
for being the big-screen debut of James Dean and Kazan's first work
in CinemaScope. BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Stephane Aubier
& Vincent Patar's A TOWN CALLED PANIC (New Animation)
Music Box - Check Reader Movies for showtimes
2009 witnessed a welcome pushback against
the traditional children's movie with WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE by Spike
Jonze and Wes Anderson's THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX. Both films rely heavily
on nostalgia, using well-loved children's books for content and outmoded
techniques to create their visual worlds. The resulting films are clever
and engaging but they are films for adults that children might like.
The ingenious A TOWN CALLED PANIC also partakes in this pushback but
its real strength lies in its divergence. The zany world of this film
is a constant chaotic chase. The plot takes absurd nonsensical shifts
that resemble more a story told by a child rather than winking adult
irony. It is reinless, funny, and whimsical. Commonplace plastic toys
Horse, Cowboy, and Indian are the main characters. They are roommates
who inadvertently bring their small town to the brink of destruction
and must scramble to save it. The solution takes them to wild house
parties, an underground ocean, and arctic landscapes where mad scientists
travel in giant mechanical penguins, and back again. Grab all the children
you know who can read subtitles and run like crazy to The Music Box
before this delightful and inventive movie leaves.
(2009, 75 min, 35mm) CL
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Films by Kenneth Anger (Experimental
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Tuesday, 7pm
Kenneth Anger's dual obsessions with occult mythology and popular
culture combine in exceptional permutations throughout his work, whether
its the high-gloss, saturated Kodachrome images in SCORPIO RISING (1963)
or the esoteric mysticism of INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME (1954).
FIREWORKS (1947), his earliest extant film, is an excellent meditation
on gay male desire which tackles mythologies and cultures as well. This
screening comes almost exactly a year after a previous screening of
Anger's work at Block Cinema. Considering Anger's astrological obsessions,
one can only hope that maybe this becomes an annual event to celebrate
the cusp of Aquarius, Kenneth Anger's zodiacal sign (Coincidence?
Oh most definitely). Also screening is EAUX D'ARTIFACE (1953). (1947-1963,
98 min total, 16mm) DM
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More info at docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Margot Benacerraf's
ARAYA (Documentary Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7pm
Milestone Films has specialized in
rescuing forgotten or ignored rarities of cinema history. They take
chances that few will--really, a theatrical release of a now-obscure
1959 Venezuelan documentary about a salt marsh? Of course, the film
is not so simple or dry as that: it's a beautifully photographed and
lyrical look at the struggle for survival of a people in a barren, inhospitable
environment. Araya is a desolate peninsula in Venezuela--the only vegetation
(apart from a lone, small woods) seems to be scrub. The inhabitants
decorate grave with coral and seashells instead of flowers. The only
livelihood available is salt mining (laboriously, by hand) and fishing.
Benacerraf walks a fine line between romanticizing the people and showing
their hard life. Except for a few snatches of song, all is work--day
and night. ARAYA is reminiscent of many different artist's films:
Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's GRASS: A NATION'S BATTLE
FOR LIFE (1925), many films from the 1930s and 40s by French director
Jean Epstein; Paul Strand's THE WAVE (1936); it has been compared
to Robert Flaherty's MAN OF ARAN (1934) and Visconti's LA TERRA
TREMA (1947). Perhaps a better point of comparison is Flaherty's LOUISIANA
STORY. In both, people must get by in hostile environments and reconcile,
somehow, to advancing modernity (at the end of ARAYA we see glimpses
of the industrialized salt-mining operation that threatens the indigenous
people's way of life. Not a masterpiece, but stunning to look at,
the newly-preserved print showing at Doc should be amazing on the big
screen. Introduced by Jonathan Rosenbaum. (1959, 82 min, 35mm) PF
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More
info at docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Gerard Damiano's LET MY PUPPETS
COME (Cult/Adult Film Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 9:45pm
Gerard Damiano may be the most important
director of pornographic film ever. His 1972 film DEEP THROAT created
a sensation that almost single-handedly launched the adult entertainment
industry. He had another hit with his 1973 follow up, THE DEVIL IN MISS
JONES, and went on to direct more than 60 films through the mid '90s.
His meteoric rise is the stuff of legend, making this entry into Doc
Films' sexploitation series as intriguing as it is odd. The semi-autobiographical
tale of a company in financial distress that decides to make a porno
to stay afloat is a common premise, but having most of the roles played
by puppets is pure genius. Musical numbers abound, and intercourse is
an afterthought as foam rubber perverts crack jokes that feel like they
came from a foul-mouthed seventh grader and copulate in the most unerotic
ways. Complete with a parody of '70s commercials ("Climax watches:
they take a lickin'..."), this film really is a product of its era.
Lighthearted and at times hilarious, PUPPETS has to be seen to be believed.
(1977, 75 min, 35mm) JH
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Michelangelo Antonioni's THE PASSENGER (Italian Revival)
Museum of Contemporary Art - Thursday, 6pm
The third and final collaboration between Michelangelo Antonioni
and famed producer Carlo Ponti, THE PASSENGER is the lyrical tale of
reporter David Locke (Jack Nicholson), who swaps IDs with a dead gunrunner
during an existential crisis. Exploring his newfound identity, Locke
follows the dead man's appointment schedule. An exceptional film which
has for some unfair reason been deemed a lesser work of Antonioni's,
it transfers an emotional quality that simply must be experienced in
a theater. The film's final seven-minute shot is arguably the most
quintessential cinematic ending ever committed to celluloid, and its
majesty confirms that even lesser Antonioni is still superior cinema.
(1975, 126 min, 35mm) THE PASSENGER is showing in the current Italics film series. Other films in the series showing this week are Elio Petri's
INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION (1970, 112 min, 35mm;
Saturday and Sunday, 3pm) and Francesco Rosi's ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES (1976, 127 min, 35mm; Saturday and Sunday, 1pm) - NOTE: the times
listed on the MCA website are problematic: the 1pm film is 127 minutes
but they have CITIZEN listed at 3pm. CITIZEN will likely screen at approximately
3:15). DM
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More info here.
David Lynch's BLUE VELVET (American
Revival/Cult)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7 and 9:30pm
This is where the legend really began.
It's curious to think how Lynch's career would have developed if DUNE
(1984) had not been a box office failure, but cinema history can thank
him for not playing it safe with this rebound project. Though Lynch
had already made three features, VELVET was the first full articulation
of his core theme of the evil that lurks in small towns everywhere.
Not the outright surrealist endeavor that was ERASERHEAD, it is also
not the most accessible of narratives. Dark, violent, sexual, and reeking
of 1963 suburbia, the film is at times a noir mystery and at others
a violent thriller. Many of the visual symbols that would populate TWIN
PEAKS are introduced here, such as red curtains appearing when danger
is present, and Lynch's continued growth as a complete cinematic artist
is evident. Despite having a cast that didn't feature a legitimate star
(Dennis Hopper may be the exception, but his career was in the dumps
when he was cast...as the third choice), the film earned Lynch his second
Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, as well as praise from critics
throughout the world. It's also notable that Kyle MacLachlan (essentially
playing Dale Cooper) might never have worked again if not for his excellent
performance. Still dangerous twenty years later, the film is as gorgeous
as it is classic.
(1986, 120 min, 35mm) JH
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More info at docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Armando Iannucci's IN THE LOOP
(New British)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Friday, 7pm
"War is terrible. It's something you never want to see again
unless you absolutely have to. (Pause.) It's like France." James
Gandolfini's General says this at a rare contemplative moment in IN
THE LOOP, but the line is characteristic of the movie on the whole,
which couches humanist insight in acrid, breathlessly delivered punchlines.
Like Neil LaBute's IN THE COMPANY OF MEN or David Mamet's HOMICIDE,
this is very much a writer's movie, with the mise-en-scene and performance
style given shape by the intricacies of the dialogue. Director Armando
Iannucci and his writers (all veterans of BBC comedy) have taken as
their subject-targets the shallow bureaucrats who orchestrated the current
occupation of Iraq. The observations are more often social than political,
but the feeling for the nouveau-riche milieu runs deep enough to suggest
several directions of subtext. Glenn Kenny recently compared this to
Sidney Lumet's NETWORK in its bitterness and classical dramatic structure;
it also shares with that film an urgent sense of outrage. IN THE LOOP
is refreshingly blatant in its contempt for British politicians who
followed the Bush Administration's half-baked military schemes in the
hope it would advance their career, portraying this sell-out as a disgrace
to political credibility. (At times, it plays like a Screwball remake
of FAHRENHEIT 9/11.) If this anger ultimately limits the film from achieving
a more timeless satire, it also gives IN THE LOOP a relevance that makes
it a must-see. Iannucci's visual style is of the hand-held, pseudo-documentary
style made familiar by recent American television, but he has the sense
to edit his images along the complex rhythms of the script; as a result,
he's created the most successful Dogme 95 knock-off since the BBC version
of THE OFFICE, where the uncomfortable proximity of the camera still
implies a moral standpoint. The cast is uniformly excellent, particularly
former child-star Anna Chlumsky as an idealistic State Department aide.
(2009, 106 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS:
The Bank of America Cinema presents
Douglas Sirk's very rare 1951 film THE FIRST LEGION on Saturday
at 8pm.
On Friday (8pm), Chicago Filmmakers presents curator Mike Plante's Lunchfilm program. A collection
of shorts, each film is the artist's "payback" to Plante for lunch.
The film is supposed to be made for the amount the lunch cost and should
adhere to a set of rules (written on a napkin) hashed out during said
lunch. Films this time around include work by, among others, Bobcat
Goldthwait, Sam Green, Aza Jacobs, Martha Colburn, former Chicagoan
Braden King, and current Chicagoan Ben Russell (tentatively in person).
Co-presented by Film Culture.
Also at Doc Films (University
of Chicago) this week: Lewis Milestone's 1931 THE FRONT PAGE
on Sunday; and Jack Clayton's 1959 British drama ROOM AT THE TOP (Monday).
At Facets Cinémathèque this
week is a week run of Kevin Merz's documentary GLORIOUS EXIT;
on Monday is a single screening of Nina Baker Feinberg & Ted Schillinger's
2000 documentary on a famed Yiddish singer, ISA KREMER: THE PEOPLE'S
DIVA. Co-presented by Women's Media Group.
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week:
CARRINGTON, Christopher Hampton's 1995 drama about the painter
Dora Carrington, kicks off Block's brief series on Bloomsbury artists
(Saturday); and the Marx Brothers in DUCK SOUP is part of the
political comedies series (Thursday).
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: James Allen Smith's
documentary on the Chicago Board of Trade, FLOORED, plays for
a week in the "Stranger Than Fiction" series. Smith and two producers
are scheduled to attend several screening (see the Siskel's website
for details); Also in the "Stranger" documentary series is Geralyn
Pezanoski's film on the fate of post-Katrina pets, MINE, on
Sunday (with Pezanoski in person) and Wednesday, and NOBODY'S PERFECT,
Nico von Glasow's film about the director's search for other victims
of Thalidomide for a nude photo shoot, on Sunday and Tuesday; and Noah
Buschel's mystery drama THE MISSING PERSON plays for a week (actor
Michael Shannon in person Friday and Saturday).
Also at the Music Box this week: Terry Gilliam's THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS
continues; Julian Duvivier's 1936 French film PEPE LE
MOKO and Spike Jonze's WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE are the
matinees on Saturday and Sunday; and the documentary WHITE LIGHTIN'
(Friday), the Beatles film A HARD
DAY'S NIGHT (Friday and Saturday), and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE
SHOW (Saturday) are the midnight films.
On Saturday, beginning at 4pm, the Horror Society presents "B-Movie
Madness2" at The Portage Theater. The line up includes the
shorts THIRSTY and HYPOCHONDRIAC (writer and star Marv
Blauvelt in person) and the feature films NIGHT OF THE DEMONS
(in 35mm, with director Kevin Tenney in person), BRAIN DEAD (also
by Tenney), and INCEST DEATH SQUAD (with director Cory J. Udler
in person). |