CRUCIAL VIEWING
Jerzy Skolimowski's WALKOVER (Polish Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Monday, 3:15pm
July is looking like a banner month for the Gene Siskel Film Center,
with retrospectives devoted to the Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán
and the underrated Japanese cineaste Kaneto Shindo, local premieres
of features by Sion Sono and Martin Scorsese, and a new print of Tarkovsky's
STALKER arriving direct from Russia. Yet the most exciting program may
be the revival of Jerzy Skolimowski's first four features (which begins,
oddly, with his second). Taken as a whole, these films constitute one
of the great epic films of the 1960s, a three-hour autobiographical
poem that documents a changing political climate over an epochal four-year
period. It's also one of the most stylistically audacious films of its
era, deploying an arsenal of formal devices that includes ten-minute
tracking shots, shock cuts (often between cramped industrial rooms and
cavernous exteriors), metaphorical imagery as rich as Jean Cocteau's,
and impressive slapstick and stunts. It is a funny, unpredictable, sometimes
frightening epic, careening with a young man's enthusiasm (Skolimowski
was not yet 30 when he directed these films) and rich in social observation:
You will be hard-pressed to find a fresher movie opening in Chicago
this month, if not all year. WALKOVER is the second chapter in the story
of Skolimowski's alter ego Andrzej Leszczyc, a charming layabout who
tries and repeatedly fails to evade the culture of Communist Poland.
The circular nature of his journey suggests that of a silent-movie comedian,
as does the strange situations he finds himself in: In WALKOVER, the
loose narrative begins with Andrzej mistaken for an engineer at an important
new factory and kicks into gear when he's corralled into an amateur
boxing match. The plot is essentially a vehicle for various running
gags and surrealist conceits (including one, reminiscent of Cocteau's
ORPHEUS, about a radio that voices the characters' innermost thoughts
as abstract poetry), but it's held together by a consistent formal playfulness
that makes you eager to see how Skolimowski can keep topping himself.
(1965, 70 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Kaneto Shindo's ONIBABA (Japanese
Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 3pm and Sunday, 8pm
This week begins a long overdue retrospective of Kaneto Shindo's
films, many of which have only rarely been seen in the US. At almost
one hundred years old, with a career spanning over sixty years and forty
films (the latest just last year), Shindo is known here mostly for being
a contemporary of, well, every great Japanese filmmaker of the last
half-century. While true, he is no also-ran. Shindo's Japan is often
haunting and immediate; its elegiac locales become backdrops for fables
and ghost stories. His most widely available film, ONIBABA, rightly
leads off the ten-film series, and is showing in a new 35mm print. A
startling and macabre film, ONIBABA is a prime example of Shindo's stark
and seething oeuvre. Set during a boiling summer during the Sengoku
period, a pair of destitute women kills wayward samurai for their valuables,
selling them in order to survive. When an unsavory soldier returns with
news of the death of the younger woman's husband, sexual tension and
a power struggle overwhelm them. ONIBABA is shot in luscious, textured
black-and-white Cinemascope, and Shindo uses suzuki reeds to envelope
and isolate his characters. Keeping the camera firmly planted and surrounded
by reeds, the sky peeks through only occasionally at the top of the
frame, evoking a sense of stifling confinement and allegorical timelessness.
By stripping away all but a few huts and a stream, Shindo forces us
to focus on the characters' visceral sexual urges, jealousy, and self-interests.
Only in the latter half of the film do the horrors of human interaction
give way to a seemingly mystical thread. Yet even then, when a masked
samurai comes portentously from nowhere and exits through a pit, we
see that nothing can be taken at face value. ONIBABA offers a parable
with no easily definable lesson; perhaps the terror we feel during the
frantic and claustrophobic climax is meaning enough. Shindo's status
as a second-tier director is due for re-evaluation, as ONIBABA and the
other films showing in the retrospective clearly show a master at work.
Shindo's 1970 film LIVE TODAY, DIE TOMORROW! also screens this
week, on Saturday at 5pm and Tuesday at 6pm. The New Wave-inflected
film concerns a 19 year-old serial killer. (1964, 103 min, 35mm)
BW
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Edgar Ulmer's
THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN & BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER (American
Revivals)
Shock Theater (at the
Wicker Park Arts Center, 2215 W North Ave) — Friday, 9pm
There once was a man who knew how to
compose intensely using cinema's discarded debris and embarrassments:
rear projection, stock footage, plywood sets, cardboard plots. Edgar
Ulmer was a poet of deficiency, an artist of the low-budget. Made simultaneously
with the paranoid THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN on the Texas State Fair
Grounds, BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER is the story of a test pilot
from 1960 who becomes trapped in 2024. In an underground city populated
by sterile "deaf-mutes," the test pilot is imprisoned alongside
a cosmonaut from 1973 and a pair of seemingly idealistic scientists
from the 1990s, all of them fellow time travelers. A science fiction
parable in the pulp magazine tradition and a one-act Jacobean tragedy
played out against sets as vividly thin as the ones of Orson Welles'
MACBETH, this is a prime introduction to Ulmer's doomed late period.
(1960, 75 min, 16mm) IV
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The top half of this Ulmer double-bill
is the equally impressive and rough-hewn "fraternal twin" film to
BEYOND, THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN. It was the runt of the two:
scrawny (at just under an hour), and starved for attention (Ulmer's
daughter says it got the short-end of the already-short eleven day shoot
for both films!). A conflation of crime-drama and science-fiction (and
half-a-dozen thematic elements crammed in), it is, as Bret Wood notes,
"a remarkable exercise in cinematic thrift and reckless creativity." A mad-scientist type breaks a hardened criminal out of prison in order
to use him as a guinea pig for an invisibility experiment (plans for
world domination figure in here). But forget the plot. The meat of Ulmer
is in the style, which finds a way despite (or maybe thanks to) the
limited means he dealt with his entire career. Like the late-period
films of many great auteurs, both of these films are ones that separate
the lightweight-Ulmer fans from the hardcore devotees. Come find out
which you are. The double-bill will be introduced by local film writer
and blogger Sara Freeman. (1960, 57 min, 16mm) PF
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More info at www.nnwac.org/film/shocktheater.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Don Murray's THE CROSS AND THE SWITCHBLADE
(American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Saturday, 7 and 9pm
In 1970, American pop culture and evangelical
Christianity still shared a permeable boundary. Billy Graham was a mainstream
hero, but the hippies were mainstream too, and some of them were Christians. Like the hippies in the Jesus Movement,
THE CROSS AND THE SWITCHBLADE was almost mainstream. The story
was adapted from a best-selling autobiographical novel, and the film
starred washed-up chart-topper Pat Boone in the role of pastor David
Wilkerson, freelance evangelist and a young, then-unknown, Erik Estrada
as one of the troubled youth. Slightly later evangelical films of the
early 70s like IF FOOTMEN TIRE YOU, WHAT WILL HORSES DO? (1971, Ron
Ormond) or A THIEF IN THE NIGHT (1972, Donald Thompson) were circulated
on 16mm and shown in church basements; CROSS was released in conventional
theaters in 35mm (by a short-lived film distribution division of the
American Baptist Convention) and was advertised in local papers alongside
FIVE EASY PIECES and various skin flicks. The story of THE CROSS AND
THE SWITCHBLADE is pretty simple: A country pastor feels the call and
journeys to New York City to save the souls of Brooklyn's love-starved
teen-age gangs. It takes a while (and a lot of corny dialog) but eventually
he breaks through and there are tears of joy and hugs all around—and
everyone quits their heroin habits through the power of prayer. There's
plenty to laugh at, if that's all you want, but the cultural and historical
contexts give the film a little more weight and interest than just a
quick-camp fix. It's hard now to imagine all of the youthful stabbing
and beating and mainlining of heroin in the film going down very well
with the Baptists; or all of the earnest preaching and praying and salvation
and forgiveness going down very well with the 70s youth market. But
if you squint really closely at the whole sometimes-comical mess, it's
possible to glimpse a strangely undivided America, transformed by the
cultural progress of the 1960s and still largely untainted by the pervasive
factionalism that seems the norm these days. (1970, 106 min, 35mm)
RH
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Note: The 9pm screening will be
followed by John Schmidt's angry, metaphor-rich short SUPER CHRISTIAN
II, a polemic against superficiality in the Church. (1986, 36 min, 16mm)
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Kon Ichikawa's THE MAKIOKA SISTERS
(Japanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday and Wednesday, 6pm and Sunday, 3pm
Kon Ichikawa's six-decade career included documentaries, period
pieces, and wild, mannerist curiosities (one of which, ODD OBSESSION,
is surely familiar-sounding to patrons of a certain local video store).
Perhaps when you're done with the Film Center's current Kaneto Shindo
retrospective, you can look more fully into Ichikawa's own body of work;
in the meantime, this late-period literary adaptation, purportedly a
dream project of Ichikawa's, screens this week in a new 35mm print.
Like GONE WITH THE WIND or THE LEOPARD, it tells an epic story of a
noble family in decline as a means of contemplating a transitional period
in national history—in this case, the eras before and after World War
II. It revolves around the four daughters of a once-prosperous merchant
family, centering on the small crisis that takes hold when one refuses
to marry. Yet it's no simple domestic drama, but a film of multiple
subplots and moods. Writing about THE MAKIOKA SISTERS for the new Criterion
Collection DVD, Japanese film scholar Audie Bock notes that "throughout
the film, Ichikawa expertly layers themes that appear in meanderingly
linear form in [the original] novel. The dark elegance of the merchant
households, the leisurely pace of their comings and goings, their dressings
and bathings, their attentive servants, their pursuit of classical music,
dance, and theater provide a soothing backdrop for the turmoil of their
arguments, jealousies, and embarrassments... The open sensuality of
Ichikawa's MAKIOKA SISTERS stands out against the reticence of the novel,
where there is no suggestion of Teinosuke's yearning for his sister-in-law.
But the camera's lingering close-ups... do express the eroticism underlying
all of [author Junichiro] Tanizaki's work, and add spice to an otherwise
decorous tale. Ichikawa infuses his filmmaking with brightly contrasting
colors, fast cutting, and a variety of camera angles, recalling his
early training as a painter and animator." (1983, 140 min, 35mm)
BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Kelly Reichardt's MEEK'S CUTOFF
(New American)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
The story goes that cinematographer
Gabriel Figueroa had taken a very long time to set up the shot. He carefully
framed the furrows of the road and the mountains and the sky just so,
with plenty of clouds in the shot to lend added texture. It was gorgeous.
Finally Luis Buñuel came on the set. He took a look through the viewfinder,
then swung the camera around so it was pointing at just the road and
an empty field of dirt. The point was that Buñuel was not interested
in just creating pretty pictures for the actors to move through; to
him, human beings were the most important things in any shot, and he
wouldn't allow anything to distract from them. The importance of Reichardt's
decision to shoot MEEK'S CUTOFF in the boxy Academy ratio instead of
widescreen cannot be underestimated—it's a format that privileges the
human face over the expansive scenery. As she explained during the Sundance
screening's Q&A, "The square really helped keep me in the moment
with them." For a perfect contrast, one would have to look to Raoul
Walsh's 1930 film THE BIG TRAIL. In fact they even share a few sequences
(crossing a river, lowering the wagons, etc.); but where Walsh favors
jaw-dropping spectacle, Reichardt hones in on intimacy. It's only one
way in which she and screenwriter Jon Raymond take a hackneyed genre
and strip away the clichés. There are no gunfights, no saloons, no
cowboys, and no whorehouses in this Western. Just ordinary folks trying
to make a new life for themselves, at the mercy of an indifferent environment
and their own doubts. (2010, 104 min, 35mm) RC
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Roman Polanski's KNIFE IN THE WATER
(Polish Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Monday, 4:45pm and Wednesday, 8:45pm
While it's worth reiterating that Roman Polanski's first feature
is one of the most adept debuts in cinema—achieving a constantly escalating
sense of dread with a minimum of means—it's also worth noting that
the film owes its importance to more than beginner's luck. What's most
remarkable about KNIFE IN THE WATER is that Polanski, at only 26, introduces
in the film themes and tropes that he would build upon for the next
50 years. Set almost entirely on a yacht (which Polanski shoots ingeniously,
from practically every conceivable angle), the movie creates a claustrophobic
brand of suspense that would come to underlie all of Polanski's subsequent
work. Likewise, the ever-shifting power dynamic between its three main
characters (rooted in absurdist drama and carrying an undeniable erotic
fascination) can be felt in Polanski's films, pretty much unceasingly,
through THE GHOST WRITER. This remains Polanski's only Polish feature,
and it's indicative of his contrarian nature that the film makes no
reference to Communism nor, for that matter, to any political
orientation (though it's possible to read the movie's materialistic
central couple as a subtle critique of Poland's then-rising "Red Bourgeoisie").
This aspect of the film irked State authorities, who branded Polanski
an "individualist pessimist" (not that far from the truth, actually)
and gave him a proverbial slap on the wrist. Since Polanski was able
to start working abroad on the international success of this feature,
his troubles with the Communist state ended there. Nevertheless, a sense
of persecution colors all of his best work (including this one), the
most palpably paranoid movies outside of Alfred Hitchcock. (1962, 94
min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Local filmmaker and curator Alexander
Stewart has two events this week. On Sunday at 8pm at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center (1034 N. Milwaukee Ave.) is the
first of his popular Zummertapez series, this one featuring local
artist Paul Nudd. Nudd will show about 20 minutes of excerpts
from his own "durational grossout video abstractions" which will
be accompanied by pre-recorded narration. Following, Nudd will share
"clips of material influential to his work and sense of humor, including
home movies, artist interviews, and 'culturally significant bottom-of-the-barrel
schlock-fest horror scenes.'"
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And then on Thursday at 6pm at Columbia
College A&D Gallery (619 S. Wabash Ave.) Stewart will present
the program Slapstick Hat-Trick, which includes MOBY DICK (Guy
Ben-Ner, 2000), MOM SMASHES GUITAR (Gabe Fowler, 2001), DIALECTIC DEFINITIONS
(Dana Hodgdon, 1977), NEW IMPROVED INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY (Owen Land,
1976), GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST (Hans Richter, 1928), GARGANTUAN (John
Smith, 1992), and SELECTED WORKS: REEL 1 (William Wegman, 1970). Also
on display will be Stewart's new film installation work 4000 FRAME
THROW.
On Tuesday at 7:30pm, Transistor (5045 N. Clark St.) screens Billy Wilder's 1951 film ACE IN THE HOLE.
From DVD.
The Northwest Chicago Film Society (at the Portage Theater) screens a 35mm print of Pierre Chenal's 1951
film NATIVE SON. Also showing is a chapter from William Witney
and John English's 1939 serial DAREDEVILS OF THE RED CIRCLE and the
1961 Friz Freling cartoon THE LAST HUNGRY CAT.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: François Ozon's POTICHE plays daily for a week; and
Caroline Bottaro's QUEEN TO PLAY screens once each day (minus
Wednesday).
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Hideo Gosha's 1964 Japanese film
THREE OUTLAW SAMURAI screens Friday at 7 and 9pm; a selection of
short animated Czech films (1957-75) by Zden?k Miler and featuring
Krtek the Mole show on Wednesday at 7pm; and the two art documentaries
DE KOONING AT THE MODERN and FRANK STELLA AT THE FOGG screen
on Thursday at 7pm.
Music Box this week: a new print
of Martin Scorsese's TAXI DRIVER and Ben Sombogaart's BRIDE
FLIGHT both open; André Øvredal's TROLLHUNTER continues
daily at 5pm only (with Midnight shows on Friday and Saturday); BILL
CUNNINGHAM IN NEW YORK continues as a Saturday and Sunday matinee
only; The other weekend matinee film is Jean Negulesco's 1953 HOW
TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE; and the other Friday and Saturday Midnight
film is HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN.
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
teams up with the Norris Center to present outdoor screenings this summer.
On Wednesday, at approximately 9pm, it's Billy Wilder's SOME
LIKE IT HOT (from DVD).) The films take place on the East Lawn of
the Norris University Center (1999 Campus Dr.) In the event of rain,
films will be screened in McCormick Auditorium inside Norris Center.
At Facets Cinémathèque this
week: Zeina Durra's 2010 comedy drama THE IMPERIALISTS ARE STILL
ALIVE! receives a week run.
At the Chicago Cultural Center this week: Cinema/Chicago's summer series continues with a screening
of Yongyoot Thongkongtoon's 2009 Thai film THE BEST OF TIMES on Wednesday at 6:30pm; Benoît Pilon's 2007 Canadian film THE NECESSITIES
OF LIFE gets a repeat screening on Saturday at 2pm; Both from DVD.
Also on display at the Chicago Cultural Center
through September 18 is the exhibit Movie Mojo: Hand-Painted Posters
from Ghana.
The Logan Square International Film
Series (Comfort Station Logan Square, 2579 N. Milwaukee) screens
George Sluizer 1988 film
SPOORLOOS on Tuesday at 8pm. From DVD.
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