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:: Friday, JAN. 15 - Thursday, JAN. 21 ::

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
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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
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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).

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CINE-LIST: January 15 - 21, 2010

MANAGING EDITOR / Patrick Friel

CONTRIBUTORS / Michael Castelle, Jason Halprin, Christy LeMaster, Doug McLaren, Ben Sachs, Ignatius Vishnevetsky, Darnell Witt

> Editorial Statement -> Contact