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Ah, summer in Chicago! A time
to take it easy, let your cinephilic obsessions slide, go see something
big or loud or dumb (or all three) at the multiplex. But not so fast! Local programmers and venues have made those of us who love film a bit
crazy with an abundance of riches. Whether it's Doc Films usual insane
summer schedule (where nearly everything is some kind of great), the
Silent Film Society of Chicago's summer series (which starts today with
Harold Lloyd's THE FRESHMAN in 35mm), a 35mm IB Technicolor print of
Allan Dwan's SLIGHTLY SCARLET in Facets "Night School" series, rarely
shown experimental films by James Herbert at Chicago Filmmakers, Jodie
Mack's contribution to curator Alexander Stewart's always-a-blast
Zummer Tapez series at Roots & Culture, rare music film items
from filmmaker Bill Daniel's collection at the Nightingale, Alain Resnais'
latest continuing at the Music Box, Abbas Kiarostami at the Film Center,
Frank Tashlin directing Martin and Lewis at the Bank of America Cinema,
there is just no let up! So, avoid that evil skin-cancer causing sunshine
and head to the dark of the theater. Everyone is bound to find something
of interest below and to make it a little harder on you all, we're listing
a very generous selection of Crucial Viewings this week (we certainly
think they are crucial). -Editor
CRUCIAL VIEWING
Zummer Tapez: Jodie Mack (Video
Mix Tape)
Roots & Culture Gallery (1034 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
- Sunday, 8pm
Animator Jodie Mack has brightened Chicago's experimental film scene
for the last half-decade with her trademark clash of abstraction and
familiarity. Often collage based, her work exhibits a rigorous understanding
of formalist structures while sidestepping the alienation sometime affiliated
with experimental short form. Mack's world is one of vivid color, lively
music, and wordplay. Rather than obscuring the connection to cinematic
genre, Mack embraces it, creating in the process work that is visually
inventive, invested in form and still unabashedly fun. Her Zummer Tapez
program promises a transcendent mix of movie musicals, abstract animation,
internet vocal performances, all edited together at Mackspeed, which
is almost assuredly faster than most of us. Mack will also be doing
a presentation on optical toys on Thursday at Enemy (1550 N. Milwaukee)
at 7pm in the venue's Dorkbot series. (Various Years, approx. 60
min total, Various Formats) CL
Andre de Toth's
LAST OF THE COMANCHES (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago)
- Saturday, 7 and 9pm
LAST OF THE COMANCHES is more or less
an Indians-and-cavalry remake of Zoltan Korda's 1943 escape-the-Afrika-Korps
actioner SAHARA (itself another LOST PATROL variation), meaning it's
about as sublimely generic as it gets. The set-up (two groups band together
to fight off an enemy while also trying to hold on to a source of water
in a desolate landscape) has been kneaded like dough with every iteration.
One-eyed Hungarian lawyer-turned-director Andre de Toth (See! De Toth
and Cayette have more in common than just first names!) was as unlikely
a Western director as Fritz Lang, but while Lang's Westerns work because
of a tension between director and material, De Toth's are the result
of the comfortable success of an unlikely marriage. Here's a guy who
should has no business making cowboy pictures but who feels totally
at home with them. Made on the heels of his superb SPRINGFIELD RIFLE,
LAST OF THE COMANCHES is an exercise (in the best, most vigorous sense)
in Western action, with brawny pans in the battle scenes, a lead role
by the unjustly neglected Broderick Crawford (once a big name, he eventually
disappeared into the netherworld of mid-20th century TV) and some surprisingly
Michael Bay-like explosions. [Word is that this is a "drop dead gorgeous" print in excellent condition. - Ed.] (1953,
85 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Allan Dwan's SLIGHTLY SCARLET (American
Revival)
Facets Cinémathèque - Saturday,
Midnight
"A dame is a dame--there's bound
to be something you can nail her on!" It's French New Wave Influence
Week here in Chicago, with ARTISTS & MODELS (Bank of America), THE
WRONG MAN (Doc), a Billy Wilder (the Music Box), an early Joseph H.
Lewis (Doc again) and, at Facets' Night School midnight screening series,
Jean-Luc Godard favorite SLIGHTLY SCARLET, a slyly brutal picture by
the two-fisted (but never ham-fisted) Allan Dwan. Possibly Dwan's finest
late-period film (he was 71 by the time it was released), full of pulpy
nuance and subtle garishness, it's the tale of two red-haired sisters
(Arlene Dahl and Rhonda Fleming) caught in the middle of a big city
gangsters-vs.-politicians opera. Dahl is an on-the-make secretary, and
Fleming is the troubled sibling whose kleptomania recently landed her
in jail. Rarer than the color noir (and SLIGHTLY SCARLET is one--shot
in RKO "Superscope" to boot) is the noir that could only have
been shot in color, and the images strike an odd balance between DC
Comics and Francisco Goya. Dwan had an unparalleled rhythm for editing,
often the most overlooked aspect classical Hollywood films; the expressiveness
of the cutting here ("I often shoot with scissors in my eyes!" he once said), from the startling opening sequence onward, finds its
only real contemporary in the work of Samuel Fuller. This screening
is part of Facets' "Night School" series and will be introduced
by Cine-File contributor (and Doc Films Chair and Bank of America Assistant
Manager and ubiquitous projectionist) Julian Antos. (1956, 99 min,
35mm IB Technicolor print) IV
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More info at www.facets.org.
Alfred Hitchcock's THE WRONG MAN
(American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7 and 9:30pm
Alfred Hitchcock adopted a tone of stark realism to tell the true
story of a family man (Henry Fonda) falsely incarcerated because he
resembled a serial bank robber. The film spares the audience no upsetting
details--in Fonda's humiliating imprisonment, the accusations of his
former colleagues and, ultimately, his wife's (Vera Miles) going mad
from the stress of their plight. THE WRONG MAN denies the audience much
of Hitchcock's familiar playfulness (Even grace notes like Hitch's "spot
the director" cameo are omitted) in order to address his ongoing themes
of guilt and marital discord with blunt seriousness. Needless to say,
it was one of the director's least popular American releases; but for
the young film critics at Cahiers du cinema who would later spearhead the French New Wave, it was a revelation. A
27-year-old Jean-Luc Godard made it subject of his first lengthy essay,
and Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol devoted an entire section to it in
their book Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films. Their descriptions
are worth quoting at length [Note: there are spoilers], as they demonstrate
how Hitchcock's experiments with realism, rooted in a firm moral position,
made possible many of their own experiments: "The most diverse styles
blend very happily in this film, and their successive use in no way
disturbs its perfect homogeneity. We are spared many intervals (spatial
or temporal), but certain seemingly unimportant moments are evoked in
exactly the time they take in real life. This is true of the scene of
the handwriting check, or the one in which Balestrero's wife phones
the lawyer. The point of view is only seemingly subjective. Though we
see things with Balestrero's own eyes... the protagonist remains outside
us, just as he is outside himself.... The film's conclusion [in which
Balestrero is freed but his wife remains committed to an asylum] is
obviously ambiguous, but this is no hedge: the ambiguity is in things
themselves. It is characteristic of Hitchcock to show us both sides
of the coin. His work moves between two poles which, like extremes, can
meet. We have called this moment 'exchange': let us recognize that it
here finds its most noble expression in the idea of interchangeable
guilt of all mankind." (1956, 105 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Abbas Kiarostami's CLOSE-UP (Iranian Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday and Wednesday, 6pm, and Monday, 8pm
Without abandoning the poetic realism at the heart of New Iranian
Cinema--or the poetics of Iranian art in general--Abbas Kiarostami fashioned
with CLOSE-UP one of the great Modernist tricks in movie history. Upon
learning that a poor man named Hossein Sabzian had been living with
a middle-class family by pretending to be the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf,
Kiarostami set out to make a film of the story with all of the major
participants playing themselves. The premise would suggest familiar ironies
about life imitating art and vice-vera, but CLOSE-UP consistently subverts
even these expectations. The film begins at the scene of Sabzian's arrest,
but shoots it from the perspective of a cab driver dropping off a journalist
who's covering the event. And then this scene is cut short by a shift
in focus to that of a stray aerosol can rolling down the street. Throughout
CLOSE-UP, the most compelling aspects of character and place are rendered
odd by the camera's refusal to editorialize on them--though, suspiciously,
the surface tone remains one of cheery naturalism. Like the central
conman uninterested in money, everything has its reasons: they're simply
buried in the complexity of their presentation. This coy sensibility
has roots in the glorious descriptions of nature in classical Persian
poetry, but it's also a reflection of Kiarostami's unique faith in cinema. This
filmmaker became famous for open-ended movies that must be completed
by the viewer's imagination, and this film--which opens itself up to
greater suspicion with every turn--comes closest to providing a raison
d'etre for his innovations. Instead of merely following a movie obsessive's
transformation of life into cinema, CLOSE-UP sees a wave of imagination
spread out over everything it touches. (1990, 97 min, new 35mm print)
BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Soundings: Films of James Herbert (Experimental Revival)
Chicago Filmmakers - Friday, 8pm
James Herbert is certainly best known for making most of REM's music
videos in the early to mid-80s (including the classic "It's the End
of the World as We Know It"), but in the art film world he is known
for his extensive filmography that spans four decades--focusing mostly
on powerfully romantic, rigorously formal, richly tactile studies of
youthful nudes. These subjects move with unexpected rhythms caused by
the vagaries of speed in Herbert's hand-cranked projections, which would
then be re-photographed. The films in this program are taken from a
high point in Herbert's career, and will give a fantastic introduction
to those who are, sadly, unfamiliar with his work. The odd film out,
CANTICO (1982, 35 min) uses Herbert's cinematographic techniques to
evoke a medieval setting. Herbert's oft-studied subject--the nude couple--appear
in the other three films: FRONTIER (1984, 20 min), which finds a couple
arguing; PIANO (1988, 20 min); and SOUNDINGS (1986, 20 min) which contemplates
a couple as they wander though a rural landscape. (1982-86, 95 min total,
16mm) JM
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More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY (Cult Revival)
Music Box - Wednesday, 7:30pm
David Lynch loves to play in the dark. His longtime cinematographer
Frederick Elmes once remarked that "with David, my job is to determine
how dark we're talking about." There's sort-of-dark, and really-dark,
and pitch-black-dark; all of these kinds and more are put to gripping
use in LOST HIGHWAY. The most breathtaking example (perhaps echoing
a shot from THRONE OF BLOOD) is a scene that takes place in a shadowy
hallway. Avant-garde sax player and demi-protangonist Fred Madison slowly
moves from lightness to dark, appearing to slowly dissolve before our
very eyes. It's the sort of infinitely subtle visual moment that home
video just can't adequately reproduce, and LOST HIGHWAY is packed with
them. For too long this movie has overshadowed by its more-celebrated
follow-up, MULHOLLAND DR. But the fact is the two movies function as
a true diptych, exploring similar themes of doubling and identity in
ways that complement each other. To ignore LOST HIGHWAY is to discount
some of Lynch's most indelible moments: including an unforgettably disquieting
sex scene, the eerie Natalie Woodishness of a leather-clad Natasha Gregson
Wagner, a gorgeous use of This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren," Richard Pryor's out-of-left-field cameo (it was his final film), and
of course Robert Blake's unforgettable performance as the sinister Mystery
Man. A.V. Club critic Scott Tobias will introduce the film and lead
a discussion afterwards. (1997, 135 min, 35mm) RC
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Frank Tashlin's ARTISTS AND MODELS
(American Revival)
Bank of America Cinema - Saturday, 8pm
Three ARTISTS (Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin) and countless
MODELS of what 20th (and 21st) century art could be. Controlled and spastic,
intelligent and popular--we'd call it a "synthesis" if it
didn't predate the elements it combines so fluidly; ARTISTS AND MODELS
is the original, Pop before Pop, more avant-garde than the avant-garde,
a masterpiece of modernism, post-modernism, and everything that comes
after it, as durable as Shakespeare and just as silly and rich with
ideas. Advertising colors and wild noises, suave Martin running amok
and idiot Lewis charming the ladies. Martin is the talentless painter
and Lewis is his hapless roommate, who describes fantastic adventure
plots in his sleep. Their upstairs neighbors are a pair of pretty girls
who also happen to make superhero stories for a living. A brash, complicated,
bizarre, loud, intellectually rigorous, totally brainless movie about
art and commerce, friendship, sexual inadequacy, and everything in between,
with comic books, cartoon Communists, Rivettian codes, REAR WINDOW parodies,
singing, dancing, and Shirley MacLaine. Or, to put it simply: the pinnacle
of human expression, a movie against which all other movies should be
measured. (1955, 109 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at bankofamericacinema.blogspot.com.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Laurent Cantet's THE CLASS (Contemporary
French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Sunday,
3pm and Wednesday, 8pm
The French title, ENTRE LES MURS (between the walls) better suggests the clear-eyed focus of this film.
We do not leave the premises of the Parisian public middle school; the
lighting is always institutional and the camera keeps a respectful distance
from human bodies. This distance and the observant even-handedness of
the storytelling is twice as interesting when you consider that Francois
Begaudeau, who plays Monsieur Marin, an exacting literature teacher,
is the co-author (with Cantet) of the screenplay and the author of the
autobiographical novel on which the screenplay is based (as well as
of a fictional account of the life of Mick Jagger and is a former contributor
to Cahiers du Cinema). Even with this degree of creative control,
he scripts and plays himself charismatically but modestly, forgoing
STAND AND DELIVER heroic cliché. Many of the classroom power-struggles
and conflicts that arise around identity formation will be familiar
to educators and to former middle-schoolers of any nationality; the
teachers have momentary lapses of judgment, the students have endless
changes of heart. But some of the most interesting material uniquely
concerns France and Francophonie. The legacy of May '68 can be
seen in the school's daily life, as in the proceedings of the disciplinary
committee and in faculty meetings where student ambassadors are always
in attendance, but not always well-behaved. And in a keen piece of scriptwriting,
M. Marin's strident defense of formal, Academie Francaise French
to immigrant students takes a complex political turn when he describes
the student ambassadors with a word that has a second, unofficial meaning.
Cantet's HUMAN RESOURCES also plays at the Siskel this week, see More
Screenings below. (2008, 128 min, 35mm) JF
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Gary Sherman's RAW MEAT (Cult Revival)
Music Box - Friday and Saturday, Midnight
Like his 1981 film DEAD & BURIED, which sarcastically examines
the politics of "All American towns," Gary Sherman's debut
feature RAW MEAT (which was made while the director, American born,
was living in England) examines homelessness through a group of cannibalistic
nomads who hide out in the London Underground. With a cast headed by
Donald Pleasence and featuring cool mod cinematography by Alex Thompson,
as well as a sultry jazzy score, MEAT spends as much time on police
procedural as it does exploring the dangerous London subway tunnels.
Sherman has clear affections for his British settings and treats his
locations like an inquisitive tourist, which makes the film all the
more palatable to a domestic audience. And despite focusing on the homeless,
Sherman doesn't really seem to have any sympathies for them, instead
presenting them as psychotic scum. But here the film wisely opts for
black comedy instead of heavy-handed drama and even a touch of very
self-aware sarcasm, proving Sherman was very much in on all of his jokes.
Pleseance's character even mildly reflects the inspector in Hitchcock's
FRENZY (also 1972). However, RAW MEAT can be compared directly to Douglas
Hickox' sublime 1973 hybrid of slasher and black comedy, THEATRE OF
BLOOD, which also happens to feature a band of murderous homeless. Both
Sherman and Hickox intelligently restrain themselves from creating direct
parody, but manipulate audience's reactions to their "villains"
in radically different ways. Sherman's homeless are more or less mutated
cave men whereas Hickox provides a more comforting and sympathetic depiction.
In this way, RAW MEAT succeeds much more as a horror film and THEATRE
more as a melodrama. However, the result in RAW MEAT, the removal of
any sense of humanity from the "living zombies" of The Underground,
makes the audience really not care all that much (for better and worse).
Although Sherman would delve more into the character of "zombies,"
of sorts, in his 1981 masterpiece DEAD & BURIED, RAW MEAT is still
a cool and edgy piece of mod horror. Not the director's greatest film,
but a very impressive start. (1972, 87 min, new 35mm print) JR
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Joseph H. Lewis' SECRETS OF A CO-ED
(American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago)
- Thursday, 7pm
In 1942, Joseph H. Lewis was still
busy arting and Freuding up B productions (mostly Westerns; he earned
the nickname "Wagon Wheel Joe" for inserting objects into
the foreground to "improve compositions" when he'd get bored
with the action he was filming) and had only just started to get his
hands on the sort of genuinely Freudian material out of which he'd build
punchy/dreamy 70-minute works of art. Though SECRETS OF A CO-ED is still
best known for the long take in the courtroom scene (6 minutes of a
67 minute film!), it's a lot more substantial than a reputation built
on a single shot would suggest--a thorough, economical/hysterical film
greatly aided by having the sort of plot Lewis would make his own, with
more than enough sexual obsession and father issues (which, unlike Anthony
Mann's Greek-tragedies-on-horseback, are nightmarish: here's it's a
father who has a secret life as a criminal) to keep JHL busy. A movie
with a title like a stag film, raw and sometimes downright nasty. (1942,
67 min, 16mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Billy Wilder's LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON
(American Revival)
Music Box - Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Audrey Hepburn is the jeune fille whose father, Maurice Chevalier (who else in Billy Wilder's Paris, borrowed
wholesale from Lubitsch?), is a private eye specializing in trailing
cheating wives. More often than not, they're cheating on their husbands
with Gary Cooper's decaying American playboy, with whom Hepburn becomes
infatuated after seeing his image in a surveillance photograph (youth
and death, united at last!). After she overhears one of her father's
clients plotting to gun down Cooper in the hotel suite where he meets
the man's wife nightly, she decides to rescue him. Sneaking across a
balcony, she arrives at the window outside Cooper's suite, and the scene
that follows in one of the simplest and most beautiful Billy Wilder
ever directed. First there's a close-up of Hepburn's face, the expression
vaguely startled. The next shot is of Cooper and the cheating wife,
but the camera is not placed where Hepburn would be; it's not from her
point of view. Instead, it's startlingly close to the couple, who are
dancing slowly to a hired Gypsy band. The shot is only a few second
long, but it's the closest Wilder would get to any of his characters
until THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Wilder, whose camera is always
judging, is here completely without judgment. The lovers are covered
by a warm shadow, and the details of their skin and their clothing are
tactile; exact, but not caricaturistic. It's not that witty Billy is
letting his guard down--it feels more like he realizes that here, his
sarcastic stance is useless. This is something wit and cynicism can't
affect, and he lets the camera linger a little, before the next shot
comes and the comedy resumes. Like all of Wilder's romances, LOVE IN
THE AFTERNOON has been vastly underrated in favor of the showier cynical
films. Yeah, Wilder appears to be a cynic on the surface, but the joke
is on the people who believe in surfaces. It's the sort of thinking
that Wilder despised above all: people who see themselves and others
as types. The romantic Wilder is not a "secret Wilder"--it's
a persona hidden in plain sight. (1957, 130 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
On Sunday at 7pm, the Nightingale
presents filmmaker Bill Daniel in person with his program The Last
Pogo Dance Films. This collection of mostly silent "music" films
(either found or shot by Daniel), from the 1960s-80s, includes rare
footage of The Beatles, Johnny Cash, The Avengers, Sonic Youth, the
Butthole Surfers, and more. The evening will conclude with a performance
by the Blue Ribbon Glee Club.
Also at Doc Films (University
of Chicago) this week is Hans Richter's 1947 experimental feature
DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY on Wednesday.
Also at Facets Cinémathèque this week is Patrick Hoelck's 2009
drama MERCY, which plays for a week.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Jennifer Burns'
documentary on Vincent P. Falk, VINCENT: A LIFE IN COLOR, returns
for a week run. Burns and Falk in person at many of the screenings,
check the Film Center's website for details; Bryan Poyser's new film
LOVERS OF HATE plays Friday, Saturday, and Thursday; Quentin Tarantino's
KILL BILL: VOL. I and KILL BILL: VOL.
II both play Saturday and Tuesday; and Laurent Cantet's 2000 film
debut HUMAN RESOURCES screens Sunday and Monday (also see THE
CLASS above).
Also at the Music Box this week: Alain Resnais' WILD GRASS
continues (and is also in the matinee slot Saturday and Sunday); so
does THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE. The other midnight film Friday
and Saturday is [REC] 2.
The Silent Film Society of Chicago
kicks off their annual summer series with a 35mm print of Harold Lloyd's
1925 classic THE FRESHMAN on Friday at 7pm at the Portage Theater. Also at the Portage this week on Saturday is a quadruple
feature of JETSONS: THE MOVIE, THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT,
THE LAST STARFIGHTER, and IT CAME WITHOUT WARNING.
Mess Hall (6932 N. Greenwood
Ave.) screens Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE (from DVD) on Saturday
at 7pm. The event includes a discussion lead by writer Hugh Iglarsh.
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) screens Guy Ritchie's
recent film SHERLOCK HOLMES (from DVD) on Wednesday at 9pm on
the East Lawn of the Norris University Center, 1999 Campus
Drive.
The Chicago
Cultural Center continues
with Cinema/Chicago's summer series with Alexandra Leclère's 2004 French
film ME AND MY SISTER (Saturday, 2pm) and Raphael Nadjari's 2004
Israeli film STONES (Wednesday, 6:30pm). Both from DVD. Also this
week, on Friday at 7pm, is Riccardo Gabrielli's 2006 film WHEN THE
WAVES BREAK, co-presented by the International Latino Cultural Center
of Chicago.
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