CRUCIAL VIEWING
Orson Welles' F FOR FAKE (Documentary Revival)
Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7:30pm
One of the greatest accomplishments of Orson Welles' later period,
the documentary/essay film/metafiction F FOR FAKE exists in a category
all its own. The organizing subject is forgery, as it plays out in the
worlds of art and culture. The figures studied by the film include the
famous art forger Elmyr de Hory; Clifford Irving, a journalist infamous
for falsifying his stories; and, in some eloquent moments of autobiography,
Welles himself. The breathtaking editing design, which builds poetic
rhymes and ironies out of the various components, feels at least two
decades ahead of its time; the implications created by the juxtapositions
(often made between reality and illusion) are consistently profound.
As Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote for the Criterion Collection release, "As
Finnegans Wake was for Joyce, F FOR FAKE was for Welles a playful
repository of public history intertwined with private in-jokes as well
as duplicitous meanings, an elaborate blend of sense and nonsense that
carries us along regardless of what's actually being said. For someone
whose public and private identities became so separate that they wound
up operating routinely in separate households and sometimes on separate
continents, exposure and concealment sometimes figured as reverse sides
of the same coin, and Welles's desire to hide inside his own text here
becomes a special kind of narcissism." (1975, 87 min, 35mm)
BS
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F FOR FAKE is showing as part of
"The Powers of Display: Cinemas of Investigation, Demonstration, and
Illusion," the Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference
that takes place this Friday and Saturday.
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For conference schedule
and more information visit www.filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu.
Jacques Tourneur's
THE INCREDIBLE STRANGER (American Revival / Short)
Northwest Chicago Film Society (at
the Portage Theater) — Wednesday, 7:30pm
Okay, perhaps it's a bit perverse to
single out an eleven-minute short playing before a feature for Crucial
Viewing status, but it's not so odd when you consider that the director
is Jacques Tourneur. Rightly celebrated for his moody, atmospheric horror
films and noirs (CAT PEOPLE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, OUT OF THE PAST,
NIGHTFALL, NIGHT OF THE DEMON) and, by some, for his possibly even greater
CANYON PASSAGE and STARS IN MY CROWN, Tourneur did not just rise up
out of nowhere for his Val Lewton-produced 1940s classics; turns out
he'd been involved in film for almost twenty years before that, as an
actor, editor, assistant director, and director (in France and the U.S.),
cutting his teeth on several forgotten features and twenty shorts. And
THE INCREDIBLE STRANGER is one of those shorts, made the same year as
CAT PEOPLE. Produced by M-G-M for John Nesbitt's "Passing Parade"
series, STRANGER isn't the flat-out masterpiece that many of his later
features are, but it is a genuinely excellent (perhaps an almost-great)
film and a miniature précis of stylistic and thematic concerns that
would be more fully realized in his 1940s and 50s features. The plot
concerns a mysterious man from Chicago who moves to a small town and
holes up in the new house he had built. Tourneur creates a sense of
intrigue and suspense through some deft use of shadows and framing.
He also creates a rich sense of place and community that foreshadows
STARS IN MY CROWN in particular. For someone who never even considered
Tourneur's pre-CAT PEOPLE work, this is an exciting, almost revelatory,
discovery. One wonders what other gems his shorts filmography might
contain. (1942, 11 min, 16mm) PF
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More info at www.northwestchicagofilmsociety.org.
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The short film screens before the David O. Selznik-produced, Richard Wallace-directed 1938 comedy THE YOUNG IN HEART (90 min, 16mm).
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Jafar Panahi's THE WHITE BALLOON (Contemporary Iranian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7:30pm
Doc's current Iranian New Wave series continues with the first film
by Jafar Panahi, written in the form of playful, elliptical instructions
by his mentor, Abbas Kiarostami. Despite obvious similarities with Kiarostami's
work (a story shaped by structuring absences, spontaneous performances
from mostly non-actors), THE WHITE BALLOON proved Panahi to be his own
filmmaker—and a rather accomplished one—right off the bat. The film
transpires in real time, thereby anticipating the concentrated narratives
of much of Panahi's subsequent work (which manage to distill pervasive
cultural problems into pithy, neighborhood-set stories); also, the outspoken
little girl at the center of the film is a forerunner to the vocal,
independent-minded women of Panahi's THE CIRCLE and OFFSIDE. The plot
of THE WHITE BALLOON concerns a little girl's quest to purchase a goldfish,
central to New Year's Day festivities in Iran, over the course of a
busy afternoon. "If this sounds slight in terms of plot," Jonathan
Rosenbaum wrote in the Reader upon the film's U.S. release in
1996, "it must be added that the film as a whole can be seen as both
light and heavy—fun and easy to take as well as engrossing—though
seeing it exclusively as entertainment does it an injustice. For one
thing, the immense importance of the banknote [lent by her mother] and
the fish to Razieh is never shied away from, and part of the movie's
achievement is getting us to share enough of her viewpoint and emotions
to make these things important to us. For another thing—and this is
complexly tied up with the preceding project—THE WHITE BALLOON reinvents
time and our moment-to-moment perception of it, an accomplishment that's
anything but slight." (1995, 85 min, DVD projection) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Tony Scott's UNSTOPPABLE (New American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Saturday, 9pm
An expertly-paced, keenly-observed working-class action film. It's
really two movies running concurrently—a shit-just-keeps-getting-worse
runaway train thriller with a large cast of characters, and a low-key
drama about a grizzled old locomotive (Denzel Washington) pulling an
upstart caboose (Chris Pine)—that eventually join up around the hour
mark; Tony Scott's expressionist color and relentless intercutting conspire
to make the film's structure—which is admittedly kinda diagrammatic—appear
as seamless as possible by constantly folding space (however, without
the metaphysical overtones of, say, SPY GAME, DÉJÀ VU, MAN ON FIRE
or THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3). In other words: Tony Scott invents his
own version of Hollywood "craft" by violating every rule "craft" usually entails. (2010, 98 min, DVD projection) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING (American
Revival)
Music Box — Friday and Saturday, Midnight
Though it had been made famous already
by ROCKY, it wasn't until THE SHINING that the Steadicam yielded an
aesthetic breakthrough in movies. Garrett Brown's innovation—a gyroscope
mounted to the bottom of a camera, which allowed cinematographers to
create hand-held tracking shots that didn't record their own movement—became
in Kubrick's hands a supernatural presence. The film's justly celebrated
Steadicam shots evoke a cruel, judgmental eye that does not belong to
any human being, a perspective that's harrowing in its implications.
(GOODFELLAS, SATANTANGO, and Gus Van Sant's ELEPHANT, to name just three
examples, are inconceivable without the film's influence.) In this regard,
the horror of THE SHINING makes manifest one subtext running through
all of Kubrick's work: that humanity, for all its technical sophistication,
will never fully understand its own consciousness. Why else would Kubrick
devote nearly 150 takes to the same scene, as he did several times in
the film's epic shooting schedule? With the only exceptions being other
movies directed by Stanley Kubrick, no one moves or speaks in a film
the way they do in THE SHINING. Everything has been rehearsed past the
point of technical perfection; the behavior on screen seems the end-point
of human evolution. What keeps it all going? (To invoke another great
horror film of the era: the devil, probably.) The demons of the Overlook
Hotel may very well be a manifestation of the evil within Jack Torrance,
a recovering alcoholic who once nearly beat his four-year-old son to
death. They could be, like those Steadicam shots, an alien consciousness
here to judge the vulnerabilities of mankind. Kubrick never proffers
an explanation, which is why THE SHINING is one of the few horror films
that actually remains scary on repeated viewings. Nearly every effect
here prompts some indelible dread: the unnatural symmetry of Kubrick's
compositions; Shelly Duvall's tragic performance (which suggests that
horrible victimization is always just around the corner); and the atonal
symphonic music by Bartok, Lygeti, and Penderecki that make up the soundtrack.
(1980, 142 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
GHOSTBUSTERS (Contemporary American
Revival)
Portage Theater — Friday, 8pm
In a community-minded promotion, the
Portage Theater is collaborating with Six Corners-area businesses to
offer a free screening of the 1984 summer blockbuster GHOSTBUSTERS:
a film that once wittily inscribed a bourgeois, rationalist ideology
onto an inestimable cross-section of Generation X. Amateur occultist
Dan Aykroyd's screenplay, a contemporary updating of the corny Abbott
& Costello and Bob Hope comedy-horror features of his youth, is
sustained by an ingeniously savvy understanding of Reaganomic mythology
that makes Frederic Jameson look like Dave Barry. The titular expelled
Columbia University parapsychology postdocs get in on the ground floor
of an emerging urban economy: the containment of the psychic energy
of investment capital, sublimated into ludic, phantasmic form. Manifesting
in historic arenas of the old-money upper class (Ivy League libraries,
Upper West Side apartments, posh turn-of-the-century hotels), these
gilded ghouls rise from the grave to celebrate industrial deregulation
and income-tax cuts (Slimer in particular representing a ravenous and
futile hyperconsumption), but unsurprisingly bring chaos to the liberal,
environmentalist enclave of Manhattan. As the protagonists' success
ushers in an era of celebrity entrepreneurship (see THE SOCIAL NETWORK,
playing this week at Doc Films), the infantile collective Ghostbusters
id repeatedly transgresses the demands of a variety of old-fashioned
academic, bureaucratic, or municipal-juridical superegos to now-classic
comic effect. Like the university system it disdains, GHOSTBUSTERS is
suffused with a particular heteronormative, ascetic intellectual machismo
from start to finish. Feminine promiscuity, for example, is definitively
linked here to demonic possession, and the absurd Stay-Puft Marshmallow
Man (unleashed by the secular unconscious as a direct result of the
Ghostbusters' attempt to physically mediate between an empirical positivism
and occult theology) is defeated only through the violation of a puerile
"stream-crossing" taboo, with our heroes simultaneously jizzing
nuclear-powered laser beams into the glammy, gender-ambiguous Gozer's
icy ziggurat. A very serious diversion. Tickets available at various
Six Corners locations, including City News, 4018 N. Cicero. (1984,
105 min, 35mm) MC
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More info at www.portagetheater.org.
Paul Fierlinger's MY DOG TULIP (New
Animated Feature)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
The curmudgeonly, no-frills, improbably
carnal, and ultimately tearjerking MY DOG TULIP, held over at the Siskel
for several unusually early weekday matinees and an unusually late Sunday
show, has presumably equally appealed to free-thinking canine lovers
and to that underserved film-going population of a certain age; but
a moment's contemplation of longtime animator Paul Fierlinger's brutally
painstaking and isolating 2D computer sketching process (assisted by
his wife Sandra) barely begins to summon the irritated contempt for
humanity held by autobiographical protagonist J.R. Ackerley (Christopher
Plummer). The combination of Plummer's cranky voiceover, the postwar
British setting, and the explicit and implicit highbrow queerness manage
to simultaneously recall the underrated LOVE AND DEATH IN LONG ISLAND
as well as (in its more comic or profound moments) WITHNAIL AND I, both
of which deal with a certain sort of displaced, ardent, and literary
love affair. By visualizing the environmental decay of London and the
social life of animals with an equivalently slow-burning passion—and
by portraying an entire mammalian lifetime à la AU HASARD BALTHAZAR—the
Fierlingers' jittery linework and restrained soundtrack work wonders
on the skeptical viewer's compassion for the essentially unlikable,
unethical main character and his cryptic titular Alsatian. (2009, 83
min, 35mm) MC
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Note: Since it begins at 9am, we
are listing this event a week early.
On Friday, April 8, the symposium
Science/Film will be held at Northwestern University. Organized
by NU professor Scott Curtis, this daylong event brings together scholars
from the sciences and from film studies. More info here.
Another early mention, due to required
advance registration:
Local film instructor Therese Grisham
will be presenting a series of lectures and screenings on Italian cinema
at Sentieri Italiani beginning April 9. Advance registration
or RSVPs are required. For more information, see here.
This weekend marks the third birthday
of the invaluable venue The Nightingale (okay, we're biased -
but it's true!). To celebrate, there are two special events happening.
On Saturday at 7pm, Giant System will be showing a selection
of their music videos of Chicago-area bands. After the screening, the
space becomes a set and Giant System will film a new video of Joan
of Arc in performance. Also expect cake. On Sunday at 7pm, up the
street at Cinema Borealis (1550 N. Milwaukee Ave., 4th Floor), a rare
screening of Werner Brandt's 1979 documentary WILLIE NELSON'S 4th
OF JULY CELEBRATION will screen in 35mm.
The 27th Chicago
Latino Film Festival opens today and runs through April 14. Screenings
take place at multiple venues across the city. For the complete schedule
and more information, see here.
Abbas Kiarostami's CERTIFIED COPY
continues at the Landmark's Century Centre Cinema.
THE FRUSTRATING THURSDAY CONFICT
TRIO:
Thursday is the day of hard choices,
with three fascinating sounding events that all explore technology,
performance, and audience reception in diverse, but related, ways. Yours
truly wants to be at all of them.
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On Thursday at 7pm, the Film Studies
Center (University of Chicago) welcomes David Francis and Joss Marsh
who will present the combination lecture/performance Multi-Media
Victorian: The Magic Lantern, the Metropolis, and the Extraordinary
Ballads of George R. Sims. The presentation will include recreations
of six illustrated ballads and an early film by Sims. Live piano accompaniment
by David Drazin.
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The Conversations at the Edge
series at the Gene Siskel Film Center welcomes Botborg! (Scott
Sinclair and Joe Musgrove) on Thursday at 6pm. The duo will present
a live improvisatory performance, using a "complex array of custom
electronics, audio and video mixers, cameras and screens."
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The Chicago Film Seminar
welcomes Michelle Citron (Chair, Interdisciplinary Arts, Columbia
College) on Thursday at 6:30pm. Citron's presentation is titled "Is
this Cinema? Narrative and the Digital" and will include screenings
of her short digital narratives LEFTOVERS (2010) and MIXED GREENS (2004),
which is also an interactive work. This event is at the School of the
Art Institute (112 S. Michigan Ave., Rm. 1307).
The Museum of Contemporary Photography
(600 S. Michigan Ave.) presents Video Playlist: Heartaches and Holy
Rites on Wednesday at 6pm. Curated by Kate Bowen and David Oresick,
the show features work by Linda Montano, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby,
Paul Kos, Oliver Laric, and Kate Gilmore.
Chicago Filmmakers presents Irish filmmaker Risteard Ó Domhnaill's new documentary
THE PIPE on Friday at 8pm.
The Northwest Chicago Film Society (at the Portage Theater) screens Richard Wallace's 1938 film THE
YOUNG IN HEART on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Also screening are Jacques
Tourneur's 1942 short THE INCREDIBLE STRANGER
(see Crucial Viewing above) and another short, AT THE DOG SHOW.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Chris Kentis' 2003 film OPEN WATER screens Friday
and Tuesday, with a lecture at the Tuesday show by Jim Trainor; Kerthy
Fix and Gail O'Hara's documentary STRANGE POWERS: STEPHIN MERRITT
AND THE MAGNETIC FIELDS returns for a week long run; director Phil
Grabsky will be in person for screenings of his documentaries IN
SEARCH OF MOZART (on Saturday) and IN SEARCH OF BEETHOVEN (on Sunday); and Richard Press' new documentary BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW
YORK is on Wednesday. Also this week the Asian American Showcase
presents the films SURROGATE VALENTINE, LIVING IN SEDUCED
CIRCUMSTANCES, THE MIKADO PROJECT, BEIJING TAXI,
ONE BIG HAPA FAMILY, REDRESS REMIX, IN THE MATTER OF CHA
JUNG HEE, and the staged reading Steven: A Reading by the Silk
Road Theatre Project.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: David Fincher's THE SOCIAL NETWORK plays Friday night (no 7pm show, though) and Sunday afternoon; Merian
C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's 1927 quasi-documentary CHANG:
A DRAMA OF THE WILDERNESS is on Sunday night; a program of experimental
films by Bruce Baillie & Gunvor Nelson (including Baillie's
great QUIXOTE, TUNG, and TO PARSIFAL) is Monday; Louis Jordan and Bud
Pollard's 1947 black-cast musical LOOK OUT SISTER is on Tuesday;
Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 film THE LADY VANISHES is on Wednesday
(9:30pm show only); and Otto Brower and B. Reeves Eason's 1940 film
MEN WITH STEEL FACES (a 70 minute condensation of the 1935 Gene
Autry western/sci-fi/musical serial THE PHANTOM EMPIRE) is on Thursday
at 9:30pm. Doc Films is also one of the host venues for the Chicago
Latino Film Festival this week.
Also at the Music Box this week: Javier Fuentes-León's Peruvian film UNDERTOW and
Martin Koolhoven's WINTER IN WARTIME both open; Sidney Lumet's
1960 film THE FUGITIVE KIND plays in the Saturday and Sunday
matinee slot; and Ji-woon Kim's I SAW THE DEVIL is Friday and
Saturday at Midnight.
This week at Facets Cinémathèque:
Matt McCormick's 2010 debut feature SOME DAYS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS plays for a week; and the Saturday Midnight "Facets Night School"
selection is Shunya Ito's 1973 Japanese action film FEMALE PRISONER
SCORPION #701: BEAST STABLE, with an introduction by Katherine Rife.
Chicago History Museum screens
the documentary LOVE AND VALOR: THE INTIMATE CIVIL WAR LETTERS on Sunday at 1:30pm.
This week at the Chicago Cultural
Center: On Saturday at 2pm, it's the U.S. premiere of Augusto Contento's
film ROADS OF WATER, with producer Giancarlo Grande and soundtrack
composer Ken Vandermark in person. Following the screening, scenes from
Contento's newest film (currently In production), PARALLEX SOUNDS, will
be shown and Vandermark will perform a live acoustic set; On Sunday
at 2pm, Howard Worth's 1971 documentary RAVI SHANKAR, RAGA: A FILM
JOURNEY TO THE SOUL OF INDIA will screen; and on Wednesday at 6:30pm,
the Cinema Q series concludes with Tom Gustafson's 2008 film WERE
THE WORLD MINE, with members of the cast and crew in person.
On Friday (9pm), Saturday (9pm), and
Sunday (3pm), Access Contemporary Music presents the Sound of Silent
Film Festival at the Chopin Theater (1543 W. Division Ave.).
Live musical accompaniment to the films EYE ON CHICAGO (1920's archival
film; pre-show), SOUP (Steve Stein), FIRST KISS (Gus Van Sant), HITCLOWN
(Chris Mancini), THE BIG SHAVE (Martin Scorsese), RECONTRE UNIQUE (Manoel
de Oliveira), MERMAID (Tezuka Osamu), DANS L'OBSCURITE (Jean-Pierre
and Luc Dardenne), and THE UNEARTHENING (local filmmaker Brian Kallies).
More info here.
Saturday Cinema continues with
two new films by Aline Cautis:
escape strategies 001
& escape strategies 003. The minute-long films will be shown
continuously looped, from 8pm-Midnight on Saturdays through April 23.
View from the street: 2nd Floor window at 1369 W. Chicago Ave.
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