CRUCIAL VIEWING
Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson's ABERRATION OF LIGHT: DARK CHAMBER DISCLOSURE
(Live Projector Performance)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center— Thursday, 6pm
Live projector performance can trace
its roots back to the earliest days of cinema, when projectionists would
often run films backwards for comic effect. Over the intervening years,
the practice has primarily been taken up by experimental filmmakers
and no one has been doing it longer or to greater effect than Ken Jacobs
(coming to the U of C in May). Many have followed in his imposing footsteps
and two of the most accomplished will be performing at the Conversations
at the Edge series on Thursday. Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson both
made solo films and Recoder had a number of solo live projection works
of his own before they teamed up several years ago. Since then, they
have been creating gallery installation pieces and live projector performances
of varying scales. This presentation is the second one made in collaboration
with local composer and sound artist Olivia Block. I've not seen ABERRATION
OF LIGHT, but based on their previous work (alone and together) it promises
to be a not-to-be-missed event. Their earlier performance piece with
Block, UNTITLED, was a stunning and delicate minimalist work (even in
the video documentation that I've been able to see) that used humidifiers
to fog a pane of glass, through which the projector light is passed.
ABERRATION is said to use "film loops, crystals, and hand gestures
to bend, reflect, and refract the projector's beam, recasting the theatrical
space of the cinema into a unique medium for sculpting light." Recoder
and Gibson's approach to cinema hews closer to Plato's shadows than
it does to the hyper-digital everything we can't seem to escape anymore.
It's streaming cinema of a very different kind. Luis Recoder, Sandra
Gibson, and Olivia Block in person. (2010-11, approx. 60 min, live
projector performance) PF
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More info at blogs.saic.edu/cate.
Abbas Kiarostami's TASTE OF CHERRY
(Contemporary Iranian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7:45pm
This is one of the great big-screen experiences, comparable in its
effect to L'ECLISSE or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Like those films, Abbas
Kiarostami's Palme d'Or winner confronts some of the essential questions
of existence; while Kiarostami's approach may be more modest than Antonioni's
or Kubrick's, the poetic simplicity of TASTE OF CHERRY assumes a monumental
quality when projected. The plot is structured like a fable: A calm
middle-aged man of apparently good economic standing drives around the
outskirts of Tehran. Over the course of a day, he gives a ride to three
separate hitchhikers; after engaging each in conversation, he asks if
the stranger will assist him in committing suicide. That the succession
of hitchhikers (young, older, oldest) suggests the course of the life
cycle is the only schematic aspect of the film. Each encounter contains
enough digressions to illuminate the magic unpredictability of life
itself—not only in the conversation, but also in the formal playfulness
of Kiarostami's direction. The film is rife with the two shots that,
paradoxically, form Kiarostami's artistic signature: the screen-commanding
close-up of a face in conversation, eerily separated in space from the
person he's talking to; and the cosmic long-shot of a single car driving
quixotically across a landscape. Here, both images evoke feelings of
isolation that are inextricable from human consciousness, yet the overall
tone of the film is light, even bemused. The final sequence, one of
the finest games conjured by a movie, sparked countless philosophical
bull-sessions when TASTE OF CHERRY was first released, and it remains
plenty mind-blowing today. (1997, 95 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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NOTE: Kiarostami's newest film,
CERTIFIED COPY, continues at the Landmark's Century Centre Cinema.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Chicago International Movies & Music Festival
Various Locations — Thursday, April 14-Sunday, April 17
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Douglas Freel's FIX - THE MINISTRY
MOVIE
Music Box — Thursday, 7:30 and 10:30pm
While many American cities may propose
to have less variegated and more supportive music scenes, and certain
coastal metropolises may lay claim to larger and more consistent film
industries, the density of those two communities' subcultural overlap
might genuinely reach its height here in Chicago—and this can only
be emphasized in the surprising eclecticism of the 3rd Chicago International
Music and Movies festival. CIMM's opening night events include synthesthetic
performances from North Side supergroup Wrekmeister Harmonies (ex-US
Maple, Jesus Lizard, Tortoise, Pelican) accompanying Kenneth Anger's
masterpieces SCORPIO RISING (1964) and LUCIFER RISING (1972) and divisive
locals Joan of Arc, accompanying, natch, Dreyer's PASSION OF JOAN OF
ARC (1928) all at the Wicker Park Art Center; the Joey Arias/Basil Twist
performance doc ARIAS WITH A TWIST (2010) at pansexual Lakeview nightclub
Berlin; and the world premiere of the presumably long-awaited FIX
- THE MINISTRY MOVIE, ambiguously documenting the late-90s incarnation
of Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker's pioneering Chicago pop-industrial
music act. Famously integrating thrash guitar, popular-film vocal samples,
and slapdash appropriation of biblical, Nazi, and cowboy genre elements
to vaguely allude to American political hegemony, the band's mid-period
discography (recorded at the Groupon-née-Cabrini Green-area Chicago
Trax studio) offered something for anyone willing to get down in a homosocial
Caucasian mosh pit. Director Douglas Freel provides a combination of
dreary, vulgar green-room antics; comparatively highbrow talking-heads
interviews with the likes of Jello Biafra, Trent Reznor, and a couple
ex-Warners/Sire Records execs; and requisite concert footage of various
hits from 1996's "Sphinctour." Far from fully embracing the
charismatic Jourgensen substance-abuse mythology, the film takes on
a vaguely reflexive EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP/I'M STILL HERE quality
during interviews (apparently) featuring heroin injection as well as
hang time with Timothy Leary (uncharacteristically clad in a Blackhawks
jersey); mimicking the strategy of Ministry's own success, FIX ultimately
seems thoroughly aware that a rhetoric of drug use might influence aesthetic
validity far more than drug use itself. Director
Douglas Freel, Producer Ed Bates, and Paul Barker of Ministry in person.
(2011, 95 min, BluRay) MC
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More info and complete schedule
at www.cimmfest.org.
Talking Pictures Festival (Evanston)
Various Locations — Thursday, April 14-Sunday, April 17
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Pedro Peirano and Sebastián Silva's OLD CATS
(New Chilean/US)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Thursday, 7:30pm
Evanston's Talking Pictures Festival
returns for a third year, with more than twenty programs of narrative,
documentary, experimental, and animated features and shorts. A few things
have shown in Chicago already, but the majority of the works are Chicago-area
premieres and range from local films to critically-acclaimed works from
China and Russia. Check next week's list for reviews of a selection
of the films. The festival opens on Thursday with Pedro Peirano and
Sebastián Silva's (THE MAID) new film OLD CATS. Writing on the
film's Sundance screening, critic B. Ruby Rich says: "My favorite
dramatic film came from Chile: Pedro Peirano and Sebastian Silva's
Old Cats (Gatos Viejos). A deceptively simple drama, it follows
one day in the life of an aged couple, their two cats, and their cluttered
apartment. In timeworn cinematic style, their peace is shattered by
the unwelcome arrival of their disruptive daughter and her butch lover.
A ne'er-do-well and addict, the daughter is bent on stealing the apartment
out from under them. While Isadora, the mother, struggles to hide her
encroaching dementia, her companion Enrique uses his wits to counter
the threat. Then, of course, everything goes awry. A staircase, an elevator,
a park all play key roles in the unfolding of the tale. Isadora is played
by legendary Chilean actress Bélgica Castro, age ninety; Enrique by
renowned actor Alejandro Sieveking; the scheming daughter and her sympathetic
sidekick by the same actresses who played the lady and servant in Silva's
The Maid. A masterful cast, patient camera, narrative immediacy,
and tremendous compassion all combine to make Old Cats an utter
jewel of a drama. I haven't been able to get it out of my mind." (2010,
99 min, 35mm) PF
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More info at www.talkingpicturesfestival.org.
Alfred Hitchcock's THE BIRDS (American
Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday and Tuesday, 6pm
Slavoj Žižek wrote, "In order to unravel Hitchcock's THE
BIRDS, one should first imagine the film without the birds, simply depicting
the proverbial middle-class family in the midst of an Oedipal crisis—the
attacks of the birds can only be accounted for as an outlet of the tension
underlying this Oedipal constellation, i.e., they clearly materialize
the destructive outburst of the maternal superego, one mother's jealousy
toward the young woman who tries to snatch her son from her." That
Hitchcock conceived of (and plotted) THE BIRDS as a comedy shows
his gleeful perversity. It also goes a long way towards explaining the
film's enduring fascination. Most disaster movies simply revolve around
the spectacle of things blowing up; if they make any room at all for
humor or interpersonal relationships it's usually of the throwaway or
half-hearted variety. It's just window dressing for explosions. But
in his own crafty way, Hitchcock shows us that comedy, not tragedy,
can be the best way to reveal the layers of a character while, crucially,
misdirecting the audience's attention. Using a meticulously scored soundtrack
of bird effects in lieu of traditional music cues, paired with George
Tomasini's brilliant picture editing, heightens the feeling of disquiet.
It all culminates in the stunning final shot: the superego has saturated
the entire landscape. With a lecture by Jim Trainer at the Tuesday
screening. (1963, 119 min, 35mm) RC
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Andrzej Wajda's KANAL (Polish Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 9:30pm
Andrzej Wajda's second feature and one of the first films by a Polish
director to achieve global attention, this can be viewed as a precursor
to the cinematic renaissance that would soon birth Roman Polanski and
Jerzy Skolimowski. KANAL still carries a major reputation on its own,
as part of Wajda's acclaimed "War Trilogy" and as a gripping meditation
on the moral costs of warfare. Set among Poland's resistance in the
final days of World War II, the film focuses on a group of fighters
driven literally underground (Much of the film takes place in the sewers
of Warsaw) to continue their efforts. Writing in The Onion in
2003, Scott Tobias noted that film's feeling of "eerie limbo" defines
much of its construction: "Deeply sympathetic to his characters, Wajda
appreciates their nationalist pride and determination, even as it crashes
against the demoralizing futility of their cause... [O]nce Wajda heads
into the chest-deep muck [of the sewer-set sequences], the film gains
a sad, unforgettable intensity, as it follows the horrible fate of men
and women forced into unimaginable conditions while the Germans wait
with booby traps and machine guns above." (1957, 91 min, 16mm)
BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Underground Sexuality: Films By
Ken Jacobs, Ron Rice & Barbara Rubin
(Experimental Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm
"Somehow I guess I thought that Jack Smith would survive AIDS,"
J. Hoberman wrote upon the death of the avant-garde director-performer
in 1989, "the way he survived poverty, landlords, neuroses, rip-offs,
lack of recognition, life in New York, LSD, and the exploitation of
FLAMING CREATURES. Given how little he ate, it's amazing Jack lived
as long as he did—but then virtually every one of his performances
was about the impossibility of its own coming into existence." A prolific
artist and notorious libertine, a founding figure of U.S. performance
art and underground filmmaking, Smith features prominently in two films
on this program, part of a remarkable quarter-long series on the American
avant-garde of 1960s. Ken Jacobs' BLONDE COBRA (1959-1963, 33 min, 16mm)
is a mosaic-like portrait of the ever-vibrant Smith, created primarily
from footage from two unfinished features. Characteristic of Jacobs'
work, COBRA jolts forward with bursts of old, random-seeming recordings
and an erratic editing scheme that betrays the influence of Beat poetry.
In Jacobs' own words, it's "a look in on an exploding life, on a man
of imagination suffering pre-fashionable lower East Side deprivation
and consumed with American 1950s, 40s, 30s disgust. Silly, self-pitying,
guilt-strictured and yet triumphing over the situation with style, because
he's unapologetically gifted, has a genius for courage, knows that a
state of indignity can serve to show his character in sharpest relief." CHUMLUM (1964, 26 min, 16mm), the final film by fellow experimental
artist Ron Rice, features Smith along with several Warhol superstars.
Like Smith's own FLAMING CREATURES, it contains ostentatious displays
of dress-up and gender ambiguity; its most prominent aesthetic effect,
however, is a constant, dizzying superimposition of images. Depending
on your tastes, this is said to induce either revelry or nausea. Rounding
out the program is Barbara Rubin's CHRISTMAS ON EARTH (1963, 30 min,
16mm double projection), purportedly one of the first sexually explicit
U.S. avant-garde films. It's a document of an orgy staged in a New York
apartment, and it plays considerably with superimposition as well. (1959-64,
approx. 89 min total, 16mm and 16mm double projection) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Nina Paley's SITA SINGS THE BLUES (Contemporary Animation)
Logan Square International Film Series — Sunday, 7pm
A lot of neat animated features have been breaking from the traditional
style hegemony of Disney and Pixar in the past few years. They have
tended to be beautiful but a little stupid, as in Sylvain Chomet's THE
TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE, Bill Plympton's IDIOTS AND ANGELS, and Tomm
Moore's THE SECRET OF KELLS. KELLS most closely resembles the visual
world of Nina Paley's SITA SINGS THE BLUES in its cheerfully anarchic
use of aesthetic genre, but SITA's winks and references serve to amplify
a personal narrative, while KELLS seems just to be showing off. SITA,
like Marjane Satrapi's PERSEPOLIS, moves toward the vision-density of
auteurship. As Paley mashes up Hindu mythology, the sordid tale of her
own divorce, the devastatingly sweet '20s and '30s recordings of singer
Annette Hanshaw, and a really off-kilter contemporary Indian meta-narrative
on the Ramayana, the hand-style refers to Mughal miniatures, Dr. Katz's
Squigglevision, the jointless dancing of old-timey cartoons, and Chhaya
Natak shadow puppets. Paley emerges not as the bruised and betrayed
wife in her story, but as the expansive mind in which this wholly original
vision was dreamed. Partly to avoid a copyright nightmare for her extensive
use of the Hanshaw records, and partly for broader political reasons,
Paley decided to make her film publicly owned and freely watchable/downloadable
online. This means it's one of the easiest movies to get one's hands
on, but the cost is to the image; what should be an epic joy to watch
is usually taken in through a YouTube window. Enter the Logan Square
International Film Series, a free weekly neighborhood event that is
focusing on animation this month: it's showing from DVD, but at least
it will be at a more appropriate scale than your computer screen. (2008,
82 min, DVD projection) JF
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More info here.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Experimental Film Society
(SAIC, 112 S. Michigan Ave., Rm. 1307) presents the program Dear
Diary: I Make Sad Movies on Tuesday at 4pm. Screening are CIRCLE
(Jack Chambers, 1969), TIME BEING (Gunvor Nelson, 1991), TIME'S WAKE
(ONCE REMOVED) (Vincent Grenier, 1987), and CAYUGA RUN (Storm De Hirsch,
1967).
The Nightingale
presents The City in Which: A Chicago Cine-Poem on Friday and
Saturday at 8pm. The event, described as an "expanded cinema project
based on Chicago poet Li-Young Lee's 'The City In Which I Love You,'"
features a new multi-part film, with contributions by Melika Bass, Jeremy
Bessoff, Tom Comerford, Carolyn Faber, Lori Felker, Scott Foley, Jason
Halprin, Emily Irvine, Marianna Milhorat, Kate Raney, Jerzy Rose, and
Danièle Wilmouth, will be accompanied by a live reading of Lee's poem
by co-organizer Joshua Dumas. The program will also include poetry-related
shorts by Humphrey Jennings, Stan Vanderbeek, Michael Langan, and Jennifer
Reeves.
Curated by Abbey Odunlami, the film
exhibition Tale of 2 Cities: Chicago + Detroit takes place simultaneously
in Chicago and Detroit (of course) this Friday through Sunday. Locally,
it's at the Chicago
Urban Art Society (2229
S. Halsted St.) during regular gallery hours. The opening reception
is Friday at 6pm. The work of six filmmakers from Chicago (Tom Palazzolo,
James Gallant & Vern Cummins, Ronit Bezalel, Carmine Cervi, Todd
Lillethun, and Sree Nallamothu) and six from Detroit (Jack Cronin, Brandon
Walley, Orlando Ford, Oren Goldenburg, Nicole Macdonald, and Bill Brown)
will be on view.
The Northwest Chicago Film Society
(at the Portage Theater) presents a 35mm print from the Library of Congress
of Frank Lloyd and Josef von Sternberg's 1927 film CHILDREN OF DIVORCE on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren.
The Film Studies Center (University
of Chicago) presents The State and the Digital: Digital Shorts by
Young Cuban Filmmakers - An Evening with Alina Rodríguez Abreu, Esteban
Insausti and Angélica Salvador on Friday at 7pm.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center
this week: Mike Leigh's ANOTHER YEAR plays for a week; Malcolm
Venville's HENRY'S CRIME screens on Wednesday at 6pm; and the
feature films ONE KINE DAY, SAIGON ELECTRIC, THE HOUSE
OF SUH, and MACHO LIKE ME
and the shorts programs Uprise! Part Two and Best of CFAFF:
Filipino American Shorts play in the Asian American Showcase.
Also at Doc Films
(University of Chicago): Sylvain Chomet's animated feature THE ILLUSIONIST
screens Saturday night (9pm only) and Sunday afternoon; Lotte Reiniger's
1926 animated feature THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED is Sunday
night; Andrew L. Stone's 1943 black-cast film STORMY WEATHER
(with Lena Horne and Cab Calloway) is Tuesday; and Alfred Hitchcock's
1943 film SHADOW OF A DOUBT is at 9:30pm only on Wednesday.
At the
Music Box this week: James Gunn's SUPER opens (actor Michael
Rooker in person at the Friday 7:20pm screening); Javier Fuentes-León's
UNDERTOW and Ji-woon Kim's I SAW THE DEVIL both continue;
Paul Schrader's 1978 film BLUE COLLAR is the Midnight show Friday
and Saturday; John Huston's 1964 Tennessee Williams' adaptation THE
NIGHT OF THE IGUANA plays in the Saturday and Sunday matinee slot;
Lunafest presents a program of shorts on Tuesday at 7:15pm (reception
at 6:30pm); and CIMMFest presents FIX - THE MINISTRY MOVIE on Thursday (see above).
Shamim Sarif 2008 film I CAN'T THINK
STRAIGHT screens Saturday at 8pm in the Dyke Delicious series at
Chicago Filmmakers. Social hour at 7pm. From DVD.
The film/live music event Silent
Surrealism with the Hot Club of San Francisco at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) on Friday is SOLD OUT.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Michael Sládek's 2010 dark comedy CON ARTIST for a week;
the Facets Night School film this Saturday at Midnight is Russ Meyer's
1970 cult item BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. Introduced by
Dominick Mayer. From DVD.
On Saturday at 2pm, the DuSable
Museum screens Stanley Nelson's documentary FREEDOM RIDERS.
Following the film, there will be a panel discussion with director Nelson
and Freedom Riders Genevieve Hughes Houghton, Thomas Armstrong and Dan
Stevens. Moderated by Adam Green, PhD, Professor of History, University
of Chicago.
The Chicago
Latino Film Festival continues through Thursday at various locations.
Full schedule at www.chicagolatinofilmfestival.org.
Local film instructor Therese Grisham
will be presenting a series of lectures and screenings on Italian cinema
titled Screening Italy: Italian Cinema through the Lens of History
at Sentieri Italiani beginning April 9. This Saturday is a lecture
on Italian Unification. It's at 4:30pm. More information here (call
the number listed to RSVP).
On Sunday at 6:30pm the Park Ridge
Public Library and the Silent Film Society of Chicago present the Harold
Lloyd comedy SPEEDY! in 35mm at the Pickwick Theatre in
Park Ridge. Showing with live organ accompaniment and preceded by the
Lloyd short NEVER WEAKEN. More info here.
Today (Friday), beginning at 9am, 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.
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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