CRUCIAL VIEWING
Max Ophüls' LA SIGNORA DI TUTTI
(Italian Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Friday 7pm
Block out-Docs Doc this week with the second entry in its "Revivals
and Rediscoveries" series, which, supposedly/hopefully, will be
an ongoing thing and which--for us non-Evanstonians--is well worth the
Purple Line fare or the gas money. The film in question is LA SIGNORA
DI TUTTI, a.k.a. EVERYBODY'S WOMAN, and if you don't know the film,
then you might know the director, Max Ophüls; and if you know the director,
then you might also know how hard it is to see any of his pre-1950 films,
whether in 35mm or on DVD, in this country. LA SIGNORA DI TUTTI, rarity
of rarities, is Ophüls' only Italian production and possibly the greatest
out of all the ones he made before coming to America in 1941. This tragic
comedy follows a movie star re-experiencing her rise to fame while under
anesthesia following a suicide attempt. A shy, beautiful girl who gets
blamed for everything men project on to her, she is introduced getting
kicked out of school after a teacher who'd once made a pass at her decides
to leave his family. Maybe because he directed some of the most intense
dramas in the history of movies, Ophüls is immensely underrated as
a comedy director, even though many of the tools he'd use to make those
(often very funny) dramatic films--a perfect sense of rhythm (for scenes,
performers, camera movements) and a gift for dramatic irony--could just
as easily be used to make great comedies. That LA SIGNORA DI TUTTI begins
with a Rene Clair-like shot of a record player might at first suggests
that it's a work of good comic imitation, but it's innovation through-and-through,
the sort of film-jokes only good old Max could make, as in the case
of the tracking shot that passes through the walls of a hotel suite
as a producer arrives at closed door upon closed door, always convinced
that his actress is on the other side. (1934, 97 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Opening Night Program - Onion City
Experimental Film and Video Festival
Gene Siskel Film Center - Thursday, 8pm
Once again, local experimental film enthusiasts can rejoice; this
weeks sees the opening of the 22nd Onion City Experimental Film and
Video Festival. Curated by Cine-File's own Patrick Friel, it is one of
the most respected experimental fests in the country. Global in it's
scope, Onion City provides what is often the only Chicago screening
of many works. This year's Opening Night program includes lots of heavy
hitters from the experimental genre. Apichatpong Weerasethakul explores
memory in a rural Thai village in A LETTER TO UNCLE BOONMEE. TREES OF
SYNTAX, LEAVES OF AXIS by Daïchi Saïto is a sumptuous treat for both
the eyes and the ears as it is composed of hand-processed 35mm with
an arresting violin score by Malcolm Goldstein. Michael Robinson pushes
further into narrative structure with his haunting IF THERE BE THORNS.
Sharon Lockhart captures a distanced view of play and playgrounds in
Lodz, Poland in PODWORKA. Using found footage, animation, and a boatload
of ironic humor. Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby get the laughs in
BEAUTY WITHOUT PITY. A longtime presentation by Chicago Filmmakers, Onion
City is definitely one of the city's cultural gems. Onion City continues
through June 20; check next week's list for the remainder of the festival.
(2008-2010, approx. 110 min total, various formats) CL
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More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org/onion_fest.
Note: The Onion City festival is
programmed by C-F editor Patrick Friel.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Champion Fishermen: Films by Jason
Halprin and JB Mabe
(New Experimental)
Chicago Filmmakers - Friday, 8pm
Jason Halprin and Josh Mabe, both transplants to the city but now
firmly entrenched in the experimental film scene here, will share their
recent work in a two-man, mostly silent screening at Chicago Filmmakers.
Both makers practice in a mostly lyrical vein and work almost exclusively
in celluloid. Halprin will show pieces from his long-running Super-8
diary project and some earlier 16mm work. Interested in the fragments,
movements, and rhythms of everyday places and events, Halprin's film
often ask the audience to zero in on the hundreds of variations created
in the smallest moment. The home-movie feel of his super-8 works create
warm, inviting, brief meditations on familiar picturesque places. Mabe
will be presenting his featurette-length 16mm film, THE DEVIL AND THEMSELVES.
Captivated by texture and light, Mabe eschews representational imagery
almost entirely to fill the screen with experiments in color and depth.
Mabe's film is more minimalist, it's length allowing for a more leisurely
contemplation of his images and editing rhythms. Halprin and Mabe have
shared sensibilities in their work, but the results are different and
complementary when seen together. (2004-2010, 75 min, Super-8mm and
16mm) CL
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More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
A/V Geeks Present: S Is for Sissy
(Educational Film Revival/Camp)
The Nightingale at Cinema Borealis
(1550 N. Milwaukee Ave., 4th Fl.) - Sunday, 8pm
Orphan films--those ownerless and uncared for works often left to
deteriorate in basements and attics, or literally to be thrown away--have
been steadily inciting a revolution in the preservation world, demanding
to be seen and heard. The recognition of these works as an integral
part of our visual histor(ies) is partially thanks to the efforts of
folks like Skip Elsheimer, who has been saving and screening (both in
public and online) educational and instructional films collected from
school and government auctions (and any other place he can find them)
for more than a decade with his project the A.V. Geeks. This week Elsheimer
comes to Chicago with a curated program of instructional films, setting
the sissies among us on a path to manliness--which most likely does
not involve personal hygiene. Boys who play with dolls or listen too
much to their mothers are in for it. Works screened include NEUROTIC
BEHAVIOR - A PSYCHODYNAMIC VIEW (1973), which examines how Peter's toilet
regime affects his prowess with the ladies and FEARS OF CHILDREN (1951),
where overbearing parents are chastised for creating wimpy offspring.
(1951-1985, unknown run time, 16mm) BC
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More info at www.nightingaletheatre.org.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's MICMACS (New
French)
Landmark's Century Centre Cinema - Check Venue website for showtimes
Critics have been calling Jean-Pierre Jeunet's (THE CITY OF LOST
CHILDREN, AMELIE) latest "more of the same," but it's actually
something of a breakthrough for the world-famous entertainer: Inherent
in every scene is a deep concern for the contemporary world all but
absent from his previous work. MICMACS is quite blatant in its rage
at the international munitions industry, which it depicts unambiguously
as a monster. But because this monster is quite real, the film has a
more pungent aftertaste than any he's made since LOST CHILDREN, if not
DELICATESSEN. All of the director's recognizable quirks--storybook framing,
retro-futurist decor, winsomely naive heroes--seem in this context like
defense mechanisms against a world turned brutal and mechanized. Comedian
Dany Boon (in a performance styled after Chaplin's Little Tramp) plays
Bazil, a tender soul who lost his father to a land mine and, because
of a convoluted accident, has to go through adulthood with a bullet
lodged in his brain. Searching for the root of his misfortune, he discovers
that his home town is the base of two powerful munitions makers--as
well as a gang of misfits who will help him take revenge on them. The
gang should be familiar to fans of comic books or Jeunet's first two
films: There's a girl who can perform complex math in her head, a beautiful
lady contortionist, an old man who makes Rube Goldberg-style inventions
out of garbage, et cetera. But their adventures are consistently surprising,
especially in the wealth of details that attend each step of the action. The
production design is so intricate that you start to take it for granted
after a while (It's likely a film that rewards multiple viewings), especially
when the tempo is operating at Chuck Jones intensity so much of the
time. But just beneath the surface-qualities is a rather moving plea
for peace. Even the characters' vengeance is non-violent, which suggests
less cartoonishness on Jeunet's part than an evolved moral sensibility.
(2009, 105 min, 35mm widescreen) BS
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More info here.
Michael Haneke's THE WHITE RIBBON
(New German)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check
Venue website 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 at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Michel Hazanavicius' OSS 117: LOST
IN RIO (New French)
Music Box - Check Venue website for showtimes
Jean Dujardin and his village-idiot-grin return in the second movie
in Michel Hazanavicius' re-launching of the once-popular OSS 117 series.
The conceit is pretty simple: to re-frame a mid-20th century espionage
thriller franchise (which involved 8 films and over 200 books, the first
90 written by creator Jean Bruce--who, appropriately enough, died in
a Jaguar crash) as a comedy. But what separates the new OSS 117 movies
from their obvious American counterparts, the Austin Powers movies--besides
the fact that they're better directed and less indulgent towards their
star--is that where the Austin Powers movies grow out of a sort of fondness
or sweetness, the jokes in OSS 117 are all bile. This is not an "affectionate
parody." And while the central joke of the Powers movies was the
agent's out-datedness in the modern world, the OSS 117 movies are set
in the 1960s (more specifically, the cinema of the 1960s, recreated
with jarring set/location mismatches and rear-projected car chases).
The joke is no longer the reductive "the world has changed," but the more incendiary idea that the world of those films never actually
existed--that there was never a right time to present these sorts of
characters as heroes. The dialogue given to Dujardin is the subtext
of spy movies literally stated: Agent 117 blurts out misogynist, racist,
and imperialist gibberish (LOST IN RIO, which teams him with Mossad
agents, also mines his unconscious anti-Semitism), and most of the other
characters are his straight-men (the notable exceptions: an equally
horrifying CIA agent and an ex-Nazi who surreally delivers Shylock's
trial speech from The Merchant of Venice as a plea for sympathy--"Hath
not a Nazi eyes?"), forced to either politely react to his jackassery
or fix his blunders. Dujardin himself is more or less The Rock plus
Terry Crews--a handsome leading man who knows exactly how ridiculous
and useless his handsomeness is, playing a character convinced that
God made the world for people like him. (2009, 101 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Frederic Mermoud's ACCOMPLICES (New
French)
Facets Cinémathèque - Check Venue website for showtimes
Frederic Mermoud's ACCOMPLICES intercuts a Gilbert Melki/Emmanuelle
Devos policier in gray and brown with a mild case of l'amour fou in red and gold. Two sets of partners (the film's English title when it played festivals), one set professional,
the other romantic and criminal. The result is something like an unusually
arty episode of LAW & ORDER: SVU (complete with hustlers), but anyone
familiar with the SVU formula knows that that's not as bad as it sounds.
The film's strengths lie in Devos--her relationship with her partner
is actually more interesting that the crime they're investigating, and
not merely the kind of "character development" window-dressing
you usually find in these kinds of mid-budget thrillers--and unlike
most actresses cast as police officers, her half-maternal/half-resolved
face actually makes her look like a cop. (2009, 95 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.facets.org.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Hungry Brain (2319 W. Belmont Avenue) hosts a screening of films by Brandon Wetherbee of local podcast You, Me, Them, Everybody Monday night at 9pm. The screening includes the premiere of Wetherbee's THE SHUFFLE, with an original score by Daniel Knox. The event is 21+.
Also at the Music Box this week: the new "complete" restoration of Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS continues; Nathan Juran's 1964 adventure FIRST MEN IN THE MOON is in the Saturday and Sunday matinee slot (as is METROPOLIS); and the
weekend midnight films are HUMAN CENTIPEDE (Friday and Saturday),
DEMOLITION MAN (Friday only), and THE ROOM (Saturday only).
Bank of America Cinema screens Busby Berkeley's 1942 film FOR ME AND MY GAL on Saturday at 8pm.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: the Akira Kurosawa retrospective continues with DODES'KA-DEN (Friday and Saturday), SANJURO (Saturday and Thursday), and KAGEMUSHA (Sunday and Tuesday);
the documentary WINNEBAGO MAN has a sneak preview in the "Just for Laughs" series on Wednesday,
with director Ben Steinbauer in person; and the new narrative DADDY
LONGLEGS plays for a week, with directors Josh and Benny Safdie
in person at all shows Friday and Saturday.
Also at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema this week: Neil Jordan's ONDINE opens. THE GIRL
WITH THE GOLDEN TATTOO and EXIT THOUGH THE GIFT SHOP both
continue.
Also at Facets Cinémathèque this week: Sergio Corbucci's 1966 spaghetti western
DJANGO is in the spotlight at midnight Saturday in Facets' Night
School series, with a talk by Michele Zaladonis.
The Chicago Cultural Center continues to host Cinema/Chicago's summer series with Kang Hyung-chul's
2008 Korean film SCANDAL MAKERS (Saturday, 2pm) and Krzysztof Czajka's 2009 Polish documentary BYE,
BYE GDR! TO LIBERTY VIA WARSAW (Wednesday, 6:30pm; repeats next Saturday). Both from DVD.
Also at Chicago Filmmakers this
week: the Dyke Delicious series concludes for the year with a
retro program of shorts on Saturday. Social hour at 7pm, screening at
8pm. |
