CRUCIAL VIEWING
Haskell Wexler's MEDIUM COOL (American
Revival)
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 7pm
How many times have you gone somewhere expecting a massive riot?
And if you did go, did you also expect to come away with cinematic gold?
That's pretty much what Chicago native Haskell Wexler did in '68 when
he decided to shoot footage of protesters outside the Democratic National
Convention. Already an Oscar-winning cinematographer for his work on
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, he set a fictional film about the ethics
of a TV news cameraman amongst the actual chaos in the city. In MEDIUM
COOL he used what was essentially a documentary crew (operating the
camera himself), and had the actors intermingle with real protesters
and police as all hell broke loose in Chicago. Other documentary footage
was repurposed and additional narrative scenes were shot to fill in
the gaps of the superficial plot, and Wexler used these elements to
walk the line between fact and fiction while addressing the political
climate of the times. Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, Wexler
is responsible for the shooting style used in films by directors like
John Cassavetes, John Sayles, and Kelly Reichardt, who all seem to have
taken his advice: "If your film can reflect areas of life where people
feel passion, then it will have genuine drama." Wexler
in person. (1969, 111 min, 35mm) JH
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More info at filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu.
Leos
Carax's BOY MEETS GIRL (French Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Tuesday, 7pm
Denis Lavant, Neanderthal-faced acrobatic sadsack that he is, might
just be the greatest physical performer of our time (his own real competition
is Jean-Claude Van Damme); a tumbler, a sloucher, a dancer--a presence
who, like Chaplin, acts out that which the heart merely feels. Skinny
Leos Carax, director, to date, of four features films, the last one
released 11 years ago. As in a painting by Frank Auerbach one sees both
the painter, complete in all of his greatness and shortcomings, and
the history of painting, so in a movie by Carax one sees both the director
and cinema itself. In short, an intense mind sick with love and images.
The question: did Carax discover Lavant, or did he discover himself
within Lavant? In BOY MEETS GIRL, Lavant is the boy, Alex (Carax's real
first name). But Lavant isn't merely an alter ego; he is, in their three
features together (of which this is the first), perhaps the most unbridled
expression of the author's self that a director has ever found in an
actor. Mirielle Perrier plays the girl, Mirielle (after all, why fool
yourself?); she's got a mouth and eyes like Falconetti and skin and
cheekbones like Karina, and always looks either on the verge of either
crying or laughing and never anywhere in between. Their meeting--it's
more like a slow drift towards each other, through the empty spaces
of Paris and past the local characters and Bressonian models who make
up the rest of the cast. Godard conceived PIERROT LE FOU as the story
of the love at the end of the world; BOY MEETS GIRL is the story of
the infatuation at the start of a new one. (1984, 100 min, 35mm)
IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
!Kung: Ethnographic Films by John
Marshall (Documentary Revival)
White Light Cinema at The Nightingale
- Friday, 8pm
John Marshall's fifty-year visual study of the !Kung bushmen of
Namibia's Kalahari Desert is unrivaled in its length and scope, and
helped define and solidify film's role in ethnography. Contained within
his hundreds of hours of footage are the personal histories of individual
bushmen, the documentation of a now non-existent way of life, as well
as the social and economic evolution of a group of people as modern
life expanded evermore. These particular films were all shot in the
mid-to-late 1950s (edited later around the late-60s) and give an excellent
glimpse into the complicated social politics of !Kung society. In THE
MEAT FIGHT (1974) a dispute between two bands over who killed--and therefore
gets to distribute the meat from--an animal is mediated by the patriarch
of a third familial band. The film shows not only the highly structured
rules of hunting, but also the importance of conflict mediation in !Kung
society to resolve arguments and maintain civility. A RITE OF PASSAGE
(1972) documents the ritual scarification a young boy undergoes after
his first felled beast--the first step towards marriage and maturity
in society. Homosocial gameplay mixes with instruction and simulated
hunting in LION GAME (1970). The tensions resulting from an illegitimate
child form the basis of AN ARGUMENT ABOUT A MARRIAGE (1969), as we see
interventions from the outside world colliding with !Kung society. The
return of a group of bushmen from their three-year enslavement by Boer
farmers brings an unexpected surprise for the tribe, as a child was
born out of wedlock on the farm. A drama rivaling the best of Shakespearian
and Russian literature unfolds as tempers flare, threats against lives
are made, and the mother's honor gets pulled into question. The hypnotic
click-tongue !Kung dialect is edited out of sync with the image with
little narration by John Marshall, absolutely drawing in the viewer
to this complicated society. Also screening are DEBE'S TANTRUM (1972),
PLAYING WITH SCORPIONS (1972), and TUG-OF-WAR BUSHMEN (1974). (1969-74,
69 min total, 16mm) DM
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More info at www.whitelightcinema.com.
Note: This program is organized
by C-F editor Patrick Friel.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Al Adamson's CARNIVAL MAGIC (Cult
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Saturday, 11pm
The story of so many movies is often more interesting than the film
itself, but in the case of a film like Al Adamson's CARNIVAL MAGIC,
the story of its making is almost crucial to an understanding of the
film. Adamson's productions were often dirt-cheap 16mm blow-ups with
non-existent production values, marked by an air of earnestness that
has somehow allowed them endure the test of time. Most of his films
were failed horror concept films that couldn't figure out what direction
they wanted to go in. Though heavily influenced by the perceived innocence
(though, actually, subversive sleaziness) of poverty row Hollywood productions
from the 1930s and 40s, Adamson's films never seemed content with their
1960s or 70s settings. CARNIVAL MAGIC was made at the end of Adamson's
20-year career and feels like a hopeful attempt at artistic rebirth.
His only film made on the East Coast, CARNIVAL MAGIC was shot in South
Carolina and was the brainchild of a millionaire producer named Elvin
Feltner, who thought it would make him the king of the dying kiddie
matinee craze. Feltner's scrip, though intended for children, is as
bawdy as a pre-code film, with numerous sexual innuendos and puns (some
clearly intentional and others possibly accidental), while the narrative
itself flirts between childish simplicity and tackling heavier subject
matter (such as alcoholism, animal cruelty, and teenage sexuality) which
goes far above and beyond the mental scope of the pre-pubescent audience
the film was intended for. Adamson and Feltner clearly intended to make
a "great" film, and while the haphazard production leaves
numerous plot holes and contrivances, there's a very genuine sweetness
to the characters and, as ludicrous as what's going on on screen may
be, one can't help but actually give a damn about the drama. (1981,
86 minutes, archival 35mm) JR
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Akira Kurosawa's STRAY DOG and THRONE
OF BLOOD (Japanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Showtimes noted below
Like David Lean in England (and at almost the exact same time),
Akira Kurosawa didn't graduate from popular cinema so much as expand
it to epic proportions. For cinephiles ranging from Pauline Kael to
George Lucas, their careers represent the validation of filmmaking itself--a
transformation of pop culture into myth. For others, Kurosawa's ever-ballooning
grandeur simply yields a cinema of contradictions, where constant appeals
to awe nullify the modest pleasures of storytelling that made his early
work so satisfying. Coming just before RASHOMON, his breakthrough into
more serious filmmaking, STRAY DOG (1949, 122 min, 35mm; Saturday,
3pm and Tuesday, 6pm) finds Kurosawa at the peak of his craft before
reaching for even greater thematic heights. The movie is a gripping,
often intense detective story built around a rich depiction of post-war
Tokyo. Toshiro Mifune stars as the young detective Murakami, whose search
for his stolen gun takes him into the city's developing underworld.
It's a film memorable for its cramped alleyways, sweltering police stations,
and darkened clubs: With each location so essential to the story's momentum,
all take on a strong identity, making the city something of a character
itself. But there are some pressing themes beneath the style, rather
than slathered on top of it. Writing on the film's violence in his Criterion
Collection essay, Chris Fujiwara notes: "In STRAY DOG, action solves
no wider problems--only the immediate ones of recovering the gun and
catching the criminal--and yields no release. It's tangential to the
larger sphere of society, as Kurosawa stresses in the climactic sequence
by shifting our attention from the cop and the culprit to a young woman
practicing piano nearby; and even within its own sphere (of narrative
cause and effect), it is unsatisfying and inconclusive." Also playing
this week in the Film Center's Kurosawa retrospective is THRONE OF
BLOOD (1957, 105 min, 35mm; Saturday, 5:30pm and Thursday, 6pm),
a transposition of Shakespeare's Macbeth to Samurai-era Japan.
BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Robert Bresson's
AU HAZARD BALTHAZAR (French Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University),
Thursday 7pm
BALTHAZAR has long been encircled by
a cacophonous mystique of hyperbolic Godard proclamations (he even went
to the trouble of marrying its human star, Anne Wiazemsky) and unenlightened
uses of the word "transcendental." Famously, it was produced
using the profits of THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964): money that was
instantaneously and dramatically drained of its former affiliation with
grand expressiveness, vibrant color, and perpetual song. The result
is now, for better or for worse, primarily 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. But still--the myths remain,
the screenings continue, and at every one some unsuspecting naïf's
mind will undoubtedly be blown. For this is cinema's most thorough estrangement
of humanity, at the hand of its 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 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 audience, so long as
the latter is prepared to progressively teach the former its vulnerability.
This 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. (1966, 95 min, 35mm) MC
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Majid Majidi's THE SONG OF SPARROWS
(New Iranian)
Doc Films (University of Chicago)
- Thursday, 7pm
THE SONG OF SPARROWS is the most recent
feature by Majid Majidi (CHILDREN OF HEAVEN), one of Iran's most popular
filmmakers. Majidi is beloved for his combination of magical realism
and old-school sentimentality (If Mohsen Makhmalbaf is capable of invoking
the Vittorio De Sica of UMBERTO D., Majidi is more in line with the
De Sica of MIRACLE IN MILAN), and this film seems to be no exception.
Its subject is a Chaplinesque everyman (Majidi regular Mohammad Amir
Naji) who must pursue odd jobs in Tehran after getting fired from his
position on a rural ostrich farm. THE SONG OF SPARROWS is purportedly
be something a religious allegory, as Naji comes to transcend his daily
struggle after embracing the beauties of fate and the natural world.
(In a culture overrun by Christian allegories, however, it may prove
informative to observe the Muslim allegories of other nations' popular
entertainment.) When the film premiered in New York last year, Stephen
Holden wrote in the Times: "As unabashedly sentimental as
THE SONG OF SPARROWS often becomes, this simple fable of a righteous
man's relationship to his family, his community and most of all his
faith has the force of conviction. And the scenes of rural life--especially
an overhead shot of Karim carrying a blue door through a field--are
quite beautiful." (2008, 96 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Richard Linklater's ME AND ORSON
WELLES (New American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7, 9, and 11pm and Sunday,
1pm
Because Zac Efron wears his hair like Jean-Pierre Leaud, because
the film positions art as forbidden pleasure and artists as striving
for guiltlessness, because of the careful framing of sacred objects,
because of the book hidden within a book, because the geometry of the
frame resembles ANTOINE & COLETTE applied to a more traditional
structure of master-shot-medium-close-up, because of the boy in over
in his head who falls for an older woman instead of the redhead his
own age (i.e. STOLEN KISSES), because of camaraderie of the theater
(DAY FOR NIGHT + THE LAST METRO)--because of, frankly, a lot of things,
ME AND ORSON WELLES seems at first glance to be Richard Linklater's "François Truffaut movie," Truffaut's concerns filtered through
Linklater's cinephilia (his favorite film, SOME CAME RUNNING, takes
the place I CONFESS would for F.T.). This extended homage, whether deliberate
or unconscious, will automatically peg it as "minor" for even
Linklater fans, but in a minor film one often finds major ideas, and
for a director as smart as Linklater, abandoning his usual trappings
doesn't mean abandoning intelligence. On the contrary: ME AND ORSON
WELLES is felt-through and fully realized. A raw nerve runs under this
veneer of period-film clichés (Bronzed color grading? Check. Swing
soundtrack? Check. Forced insertions of period slang like "swell"
into otherwise genuine dialogue? Check.). As tied as his films are to
concrete locations (Austin, Vienna, Paris, etc.), R.L.'s plots are all
about going somewhere, and most of those film-journeys--whether SLACKER,
BEFORE SUNRISE, BEFORE SUNSET, WAKING LIFE, DAZED & CONFUSED and
even BAD NEWS BEARS--are stories of arrivals (at a location/realization/idea);
this one, on the other hand, is about a departure and a return, and
there is a clear understanding that the week Richard Samuels (Efron)
spends in the company of the Mercury actors in 1937 is all theater--it
is a romance, a comedy and a myth staged for his benefit. When in the
end, he realizes that even genius/dick/fraud/real deal Welles (Christian
McKay, who at 35 is paradoxically more convincing as 22-year-old than
18-year-old Efron is as a teenager) was just acting for him, it's not
a betrayal, but a victory. And that might just be Linklater's grand
idea about the purpose of theater: having seen and enacted falseness,
Samuels can now understand what is truly genuine. (2008, 109 min, 35mm)
IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Harold Ramis' NATIONAL LAMPOON'S
VACATION (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) -
Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
This satire of middle-American shallowness was one of John Hughes'
first successful screenplays after his stint for National Lampoon's,
and the brackish yet preening attitude of that magazine can be felt
in the trailer-trash caricatures that populate the middle of the story
and bad-taste gags like seeing an old woman strapped to the roof of
a car. Yet VACATION has become a near-classic piece of family entertainment,
thanks largely to the sincerity of Chevy Chase's lead performance and
Harold Ramis' direction ("able to alternate cartoonish stylization
with naturalistic character study, which increases the grain and impact
of the very black humor," per Dave Kehr's insightful review). It's
probably tough to watch this with fresh eyes anymore, given how many
times this has aired on network television in the last 25 years, but
this rare big-screen revival may give unexpected weight to the nation-spanning
story. (1983, 98 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Also at The Nightingale this week on Tuesday at 8pm is Homeroom Chicago's
YouTube Assembly, featuring Mike Wolf.
Also at the Film Studies Center
(University of Chicago) this week is Engaging Commodities: Crossing
Mass Culture and the Avant Garde in 1960s Japanese Film, Music and Art
Symposium, which features panels, special guests (musician Allen
Merrill and members of the band The Golden Cups), and screenings. Complete
schedule is here.
At Northwestern University on
Friday and Saturday is Medium to Medium: A Symposium on Media, Technology,
and Screen Cultures, with panel presentations and several Keynote
talks. Complete schedule is here.
Also at Doc Films (University of
Chicago) this week: Werner Herzog's MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE
YE DONE? is Saturday night and Sunday afternoon; the silent films
THE ASSASSINATION OF THE DUKE DE GUISE (1908) and QUEEN ELIZABETH (1912) are Sunday night; William Asher's
1965 film BEACH BLANKET BINGO is Monday night; and John Taylor's
early 1980's evangelical films ROCK? IT'S YOUR DECISION & TEST
OF FAITH are the late Thursday show.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: prolific director Im Kwon-taek's 100th film, BEYOND THE
YEARS (Friday and Sunday), and Lee Chung-ryoul's OLD PARTNER (Sunday and Monday) show in the Korean series; Michael Winterbottom's
new narrative film SUMMER IN GENOA and his new documentary (co-directed
with Mat Whitecross) THE SHOCK DOCTRINE (based on Naomi Klein's
book) both play for a week; local filmmaker Ron Lazzeretti's SOMETHING
BETTER SOMEWHERE ELSE screens Friday and Monday (Lazzeretti and
producer Ed Amaya in person); Debra Granik's WINTER'S BONE shows in an advance screening on Saturday, with Granik in person; and
Niko von Glasow's documentary NOBODY'S PERFECT returns for two
screenings on Tuesday and Thursday.
At the Music Box this week: Rodrigo García new drama MOTHER & CHILD opens;
the French documentary BABIES continues; Jessica Hausner's excellent
LOURDES shows in the Saturday and Sunday matinee slot, as does Nathan
Juran's 1958 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (which begins a Ray Harryhausen
series); HUMAN CENTIPEDE screens Friday at midnight and crawls
out to daily screenings as well; the other midnight films are THE
LOST BOYS (Friday and Saturday) and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE
SHOW (Saturday only); and on Friday at noon there is a free screening
and panel discussion on A FEW GOOD MEN (registration is required;
see the Music Box website for info).
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week is the annual Sonic Celluloid screening and live music event. A selection of short films will be accompanied
by Fat Worm of Error, C. Spencer Yeh, Fielded, and Illusion of Safety.
Chicago Filmmakers screens Richard
Parry's 2008 documentary SHOOTING ROBERT KING, about the titular
war photographer, on Friday at 8pm.
On Saturday at 8pm the Bank of America Cinema screens the 1927 silent Lon Chaney film MR. WU, directed by William
Nigh.
Facets Cinémathèque has a
week long run of François Ozon's new film, RICKY; and on Sunday
at 7:30pm director João Amorim and narrator and author Daniel Pinchbeck
present their documentary 2012: TIME FOR CHANGE.
Chicago Cultural Center screens Hannes Stöhr's BERLIN IS IN GERMANY on Saturday at 2pm
and Dana Nechushtan's DUNYA & DESIE on Wednesday at 6:30pm
in Cinema/Chicago's International Summer Screenings series. Both from
video.
The Portage Theater hosts Terror in the Aisles 4 on Friday with George Romero's NIGHT
OF THE LIVING DEAD at 8pm; the 2009 film [REC] 2 at 10pm; and Lucino
Fulci's ZOMBIE at midnight.
Saturday Cinema (1369 W. Chicago
Ave., 2nd Floor) continues its window display series on Saturday at
sundown (for two hours) with work by David Price and Andy Roche.
View from the sidewalk.
On Friday at 8pm, Unit 2 Studio (2014 W. Carroll Ave., Ste. C212) screens the program Changing Ecologies,
featuring Steve Zieverink's THE STATE OF ALASKA, work by Mike Morris,
Jesse Avina, Olivia Ciummo, Nick Harvey, Michael Sirianni, Eric Stewart,
Stephanie Tisza, and Chris Tourre. |
