CRUCIAL VIEWING
Béla Tarr's SÁTÁNTANGÓ (Hungarian Revival)
Film Studies
Center (University of Chicago) — Saturday, 1pm
Béla Tarr's transfixing saga of the idling state of humanity is nothing
less than a master work from a master filmmaker. Running more than seven
hours, SÁTÁNTANGÓ is a filmic event that still shatters us, seventeen
years after its release. Adapted from Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai's
1985 novel, Tarr blends allegory with tightly constructed, oppressive
reality in his depiction of an isolated farming collective as its miserable
inhabitants cope with despair. Tarr uses extremely long takes, meticulously
staged and choreographed, to tell and retell the events of two plodding
and rainy autumn days from varying characters' perspectives. SÁTÁNTANGÓ's
unforgiving, almost apocalyptically bleak setting is populated by adulterers,
drunkards, cowards, and backstabbers; people at a standstill, whirling
mirthlessly in an alcohol-fueled dance in a pub or slogging aimlessly
across the muddy compound. Tarr's mobile camera allows for languid,
shifting compositions that create rich and haunting tableaux vivants.
His precise post-sync soundtrack of resonant voices, creaking floors,
and one tortured cat's mew has the inescapable effect of drawing the
viewer deep into a heightened reality. The film evokes a sense of dread
that reminds us of our mortality, though there is also a strain of gallows
humor that is both subtle and mordant. While the people of the collective
wait for Irimias, their charlatan savior, they move six steps forward
and six steps back in a standstill tango with time and progress. This
back and forth is mimicked in the film's structure of twelve intertwined
chapters, some of which are paired through their titles. This sense
of stasis, or impossibility of progress, is also seen in the charismatic
Irimias' role in a vague bureaucracy that clearly is reminiscent of
communism, but actually feels universal. Tarr sarcastically depicts
society as a weak, ineffectual construct meant to provide structure
and purpose in a purposeless world. SÁTÁNTANGÓ is a brilliant, haunting
opus that knows more about us than we know ourselves. This rare opportunity
to see it on film should not be missed. Screened with one fifteen-minute
intermission and one hour-long break. (1994, 450 min, 35mm) BW
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More info at filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu.
Kelly Reichardt's MEEK'S CUTOFF (New American)
Music Box — 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.musicboxtheatre.com.
Wim Wenders' KINGS OF THE ROAD (West German Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Thursday, 7pm
The quintessential Wim Wenders movie—an epic fusion of cinephilia,
chic existentialism, hanging out, observations about the Americanization
of Europe, boredom, and bad-ass rock and roll. It is a road movie without
a destination—another Wenders specialty—but one with deep feeling
for transience: Robbie Müller's claim to have taken inspiration from
Walker Evans's photographs of Depression-era America is in no way pretentious.
(The slightly grainy, though rich-in-depth black-and-white photography
is so masterful that KINGS can be described as the quintessential Müller
film, too.) The movie concerns a traveling projectionist and the bourgeois
dropout who decides, on a whim, to join him on his tour of servicing
rural cinemas. Their journey lopes from one poignantly observed ghost
town to another, a perfect landscape on which to depict the men's alienation
with contemporary life. (Appropriate for a work about aimlessness, Wenders
wrote much of the film during shooting, a method that anticipates the
films of Wong-kar Wai.) The film's outlook is very much in keeping with
the political defeatism of the New German Cinema, yet it would be inaccurate
to describe KINGS OF THE ROAD as a pessimistic work. Wenders achieves
a universal melancholy here, which makes the moments of humor and innocence
that much more cathartic. Especially impressive is a scene in which
the protagonists perform a shadow play on a blank movie screen for a
group of schoolchildren in a town where they're working. It is a sweet,
impassioned reminder of why movies exist and it alone is worth the cost
of admission. (1976, 175 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
František Vláčil's
THE DEVIL'S TRAP (Czech Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 3:15pm and Wednesday, 8:30pm
While the stark medieval settings of
František Vláčil's best-known works of the 1960s (VALLEY OF THE BEES
and MARKETA LAZAROVÁ) have long discouraged his being classified as
part of the Czech New Wave, the Gene Siskel Film Center's upcoming retrospective
of his many features aims to problematize that unwarranted marginalization.
An art historian who cut his cinematic teeth in the Czechoslovak Army
film studio during the war, Vláčil's approach to period representations
is of a scholastic sincerity: if these films failed to be successfully
read as allegories of their contemporaneous political conditions, it
is because they so strongly evoke the genuine strangeness of these temporally
remote cultures. THE DEVIL'S TRAP (1961, 85 min, 35mm)—which
preceded the aforementioned films, but is set in the turn of the 18th
century, two generations after the Thirty Years' War—pits the burgeoning
geological rationalism of a family of millers against the autocratic
local regent and dogmatic, newly-arrived Jesuit priest during a devastating
Moravian drought; posed as an opposition between a proto-scientific
logic and a magical appeal to religion, the narrative can also be read
as opposing the pragmatic common sense of Freethinking to any repressive, authoritarian political body. (This secular but democratic
attitude was one that, incidentally, characterized the majority of the
Czech immigrants to Chicago's Pilsen in the late 19th century; their
highest-circulation daily newspaper, the Svornost, had an explicit
Freethinker orientation.) Vláčil in 1969 said his three loves were
"Buñuel, Bergman, and Bresson", and DEVIL'S TRAP might be
his most Bergmanesque film; but Vláčil (along with editor Miroslav
Hájek and composer Zděněc Liška) also experiments with freeze-frames,
echoing electronics, and reverb in a way that frequently resembles nothing
less than Chris Marker's LA JETÉE. Also showing this week is the more
recent, but equally rare, SERPENT'S POISON (1981, 80 min, 35mm;
Saturday, 5pm and Monday, 6pm). MC
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Mohammad Rasoulof's IRON ISLAND (Iranian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7pm
With this revival of Mohammad Rasoulof's second feature, Chicagoans
will have a chance to celebrate the most exciting film-related event
in some time: that both Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi have
managed to complete new films despite facing a twenty-year ban on working
in their own country. This is great news not only for Iran, which is
in danger of losing two of its finest artists to needless persecution,
but for all of cinema, which is now utilizing advances in digital technology
to create an exciting new form of political resistance. It's worth noting
that persecution has only served to further politicize Rasoulof's work:
His new film is purportedly about a man's difficulty procuring a visa
that would allow him to leave Iran. Until now, Rasoulof had been more
oblique in his statements; his first three films could be appreciated
entirely for their storytelling alone. So it is with IRON ISLAND, a
piece of magic realism that unfolds like a dream. The film takes place
on a decrepit oil tanker where a community of Sunni Arabs has set up
an isolated homestead: It is an allegorical conceit worthy of Nathaniel
Hawthorne. The group's leader is a proud but stern paterfamilias who
turns autocratic when younger members of the ship start taking interest
in the outside world. What seems like an open-and-shut metaphor becomes
much stranger as it progresses, concluding on a note of utter mystery.
(2005, 90 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Oscar Micheaux's WITHIN OUR GATES (Silent
American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7pm
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Charles Burnett's MY BROTHER'S WEDDING
(American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Sunday, 7pm
This week Chicagoans will be fortunate to see two of the best independent
African American movies that have ever managed to (1) be produced and
(2) be rescued from obscurity. That both films tenderly and courageously
deal with issues about a lack of racial justice and that they happen
to be made some 50 years apart—WITHIN OUR GATES was shot in 1919 and
MY BROTHER'S WEDDING in the late 70s—speaks to a continuous
situation in the American landscape in the intervening years. That both
films were "lost" for decades (GATES was long considered lost but
a print was found in Spain in the 70s; MY BROTHER'S WEDDING was only
officially released in 2007) but later returned to visibility to great
acclaim is evidence of their greatness, historical value, and the truths
they contain. While more well known for his more technically-questionable,
no less transgressive talkies, Oscar Micheaux was first and foremost
a director of silent films and WITHIN OUR GATES (1920, 79 min,
35mm) is only one of three extant movies of his from the silent period.
It's one of his most, if not the most, ambitious films still available
of his fifteen existing titles. Covering numerous characters and stories,
spanning the North and South, and confronting such unthinkably taboo
subjects for the 1910-20s such as lynching, rape, and the hidden role
that black religion played as a socio-economic tranquilizer, it will
surely alter your perceptions of history. In contrast (though very similar
to Micheaux's talkies), MY BROTHER'S WEDDING (1983/2007, 82 min,
35mm), is a less expansive production—focusing on a family living in
the ghetto of South Central Los Angeles—whose approach to depicting
racial injustices is more oblique—rather than directly confronting
them it immerses us head-under in the lives of those affected. Both
these films feature women in major roles and both directors' filmographies
are notable for their relative lack of typical male-dominated or gangster-centered
subject matter. As Paul Schrodt shrewdly notes in Slant magazine: "In
S. Torriano Berry's book The 50 Most Influential Black Films,
Charles Burnett says black cinema needs a major female director, but
in a Hollywood bent on the false theatrics of gangsta life (from Menace
II Society's inhumanity to Get Rich or Die Tryin's inanity), he may be
the closest to one we ever come. His unmistakably feminine touch pays
tribute to the bedrock of black family." While media-giants
Spike Lee and Tyler Perry publicly argue their relative mainstream-blockbusters'
cultural merits, Lee accusing Perry of "coonery-baffoonery," here
are two African America movies, virtually unknown in larger society,
whose integrity to black history, penetration through layers of cultural
lies, sensitivity to their characters' psychology, and racial clear-sightedness make
Lee and Perry seem like mere Hollywood entertainers. KH
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
The Cinematic Formula: Hollis Frampton
(Experimental Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm
Watching any one of Hollis Frampton's structuralist masterpieces takes
commitment and patience, but seeing six of them in a row? That's either
going to lead to an inspired collective mental breakthrough or the first
theater-wide brain-eye melt of the spring. Focusing on Frampton's output
from the 1960's, the highlights of this program are ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
(1966) and MANUAL OF ARMS (1969). Each film is silent and uses the hypnotic
pattern of visual repetition and textural optic variation, a mode that
would be perfected in the next decade. But if the creation of an internal
cinematic language is the goal in some of his later work, then these
two films celebrate the inclusiveness of the human gesture. In MANUAL,
various performances for the camera by 14 "actors" walk the line
between over-indulgence and rhythmic serendipity, always tripping towards
joy eventually. Body movement from one edge of the frame to the other
and an emphasis on the light/dark dichotomy of black-and-white film
emphasize each beat, and the difference between the 14 sections is like
the same note played on a different instrument. Sequential fades from
one face to another create the content of ARTIFICIAL LIGHT, and 21 repetitions
of the sequence make the form. After the first round (which is shown
upside-down), a variety of interventions are performed: negative, hand-drawn
clown makeup, still shots in sequence, a flicker of colors, and so on.
At each variation, despite the film's formulaic premise, or perhaps
because of it, an ascending tone is struck as faces emerge from the
chaos, glances are exchanged, and the power of the close-up is realized.
Also Screening: HETERODYNE (1967), PALINDROME (1969), STATES (1967),
and SURFACE TENSION (1968). (1966-69, 98 min total, 16mm) JH
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Werner Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN
DREAMS 3D (New Documentary)
River East 21 and ShowPlace ICON — Check the Chicago Reader listings for showtimes
Taking advantage of cinema's unique capabilities, Werner Herzog
once again brings us to a place few people have traveled, or can travel,
and offers us another glimpse into the wonderful and unknown. That Herzog
routinely does this has caused some to decry him as more of a showman
than a director, but for this very reason Herzog is one of cinema's
most natural talents. His ability to show us marvelous things, real
and imaginary, is without peer. In his newest return from the wild he
brings us CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, a documentary so concrete yet seemingly
so imaginary—two qualities Herzog combines like a lucid dreamer whether
he's working in fiction or non-fiction. With CAVE, Herzog gives us a
privileged look at some of the earliest examples of art made by humankind,
the paintings of animals in Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in the South of
France. Herzog is accustomed to exploration without boundaries and trespassing
at whim, however in this film Herzog and his small crew are relegated
to a narrow walkway as they navigate the cave—a limit he tries to circumvent
by placing the camera on a pole to extend beyond arm's length. This technique
falls short of capturing a desired viewpoint of a painting of a woman,
the only depiction of a human; a rare defeat for Herzog caused, no doubt,
by the privatization of the cave. Herzog tries to make up for the fact
that most of the world will never see these paintings up close by shooting
the movie in 3D, somewhat mitigating the feeling of distance from them
and creating a greater sense of awe (though the music at times can over-saturate
this sense). As if the technological gimmick and the uncanniness of
actually seeing the paintings on video wasn't enough, Herzog heights
the imaginary sense in a postscript in which he shows us some albino
alligators thriving in a nearby greenhouse-cum-jungle that gets its
warm water from a neighboring nuclear plant. Herzog's proclivity to
find and marvel at the irrational in nature is welcoming and refreshing
in an age of scientific explanation. (2010, 89 min, Digital Projection) KH
Alfred Hitchcock's MARNIE (American
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7 and 9:30pm
MARNIE may very well be Alfred Hitchcock's
most divisive film. The story of a neurotic, compulsive thief (Tippi
Hedren) blackmailed into marriage by her employer (Sean Connery), MARNIE
was maligned at the time of its release for its overt artificiality:
Hitchcock employed painted backdrops and rear projection almost amateurishly;
Hedren, never trained as an actress, was visibly uncomfortable in the
title role; Bernard Herrmann's score (his last for Hitchcock) recycled
familiar elements of his previous work. And yet these attributes contribute
to the film's singular power, which exposes the artificiality of some
of our most hallowed institutions (work, marriage, parenthood) against
the primal dread they conceal. Dave Kehr has compared this to the work
of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and it's every bit as stylized and unnerving
as such a statement would suggest. (1964, 131 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Charlie Chaplin Retrospective — Week One
Gene Siskel Film Center— Films and Showtimes listed below
When the great Henri Langlois, of the
Cinémathèque Française, was asked in the mid-70s to prepare a course
on the future of cinema, he selected only Chaplin films, because "Chaplin
is always ahead of us." It's a fact that's worth remembering from
time to time, which makes the return of this touring retrospective,
this time at the Film Center, of new prints (reported to look incredible)
most welcome. Chaplin's ability to reach audiences of all ages, classes,
and nationalities can only be explained in part by the broad appeal
of physical comedy: His art, which constructs every frame and edit around
the emotion of the characters, conveys feeling so directly that it appeals
to the sympathy of every viewer. This universal humanism speaks to a
utopian ideal within the cinema. In comparison, the recent breakthroughs
of Lucrecia Martel, Aleksandr Sokurov, Claire Denis, or Hou Hsiao-Hsien—whose
very different approaches to filmmaking are all rooted in specificity
of experience—suggest a medium going backwards. Through his immortal
Little Tramp, Chaplin humanized the plight of immigrants (THE IMMIGRANT),
farm laborers (SUNNYSIDE), the impoverished (most of his films), and—in
his most radical gesture—the Jews of Hitler's Germany (THE GREAT DICTATOR).
What other filmmaker has been more inspired by love for his fellow human
beings? And what other artist, of any medium, made this sentiment the
basis for such joy? Go to any Chaplin revival and you'll find viewers
of every stripe overcome with laughter. Even small children, who have
likely never seen a movie in black and white, sit rapt. BS
Showing This Week:
THE KID + A DOG'S LIFE (1921/1918,
87 min total, 35mm): Sunday, 3pm and Thursday, 6pm
Chaplin Shorts (1919-22, 103 min
total, 35mm): Sunday, 5pm and Tuesday, 6pm
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Uruphong Raksasad's AGRARIAN UTOPIA
(New Documentary)
Doc Films
(University of Chicago) — Monday, 9pm
Thai filmmaker Uruphong Raksasad abandoned
his life as a film editor in Bangkok in 2004 and returned to his family's
rural homestead in Terng, outside the Northern city of Chaing Rai. Once
there, he began to make films about the pastoral way of life that surrounded
him and that pervaded his childhood memories. Raksasad, however, portrays
no imaginary homelands: his films are not "back-to-the land"
fantasies à la Henry David Thoreau. Instead, they use their bucolic
surroundings to stage nuanced philosophical debates about sustainable
agriculture, modernization, and the meaning of utopia. Nowhere is this
achievement more fully realized than in Raksasad's latest film, AGRARIAN
UTOPIA. Although presented as a cinema verité portrait of two rice
growers and their families, the utopia Raksasad explores is ironic.
He rented a plot of land and hired these locals to play farmers, employing
pre-industrial farming methods that were already extinct. However, it
hardly matters whether the toil of the farmers or their conversations
is real: indeed, staging this drama only makes it seem all the more
pertinent. Thus, while the film uses its subject matter to explore the
recent clashes between the Thai government and the red shirt protesters,
AGRARIAN UTOPIA is also a microcosm for any state in a legitimation
crisis. Raksasad allows audiences to bask in the sumptuous landscape
and the seeming "authenticity" of his subjects—lush green
grasses, rain-soaked rice paddies, the crumpled faces of elderly Thai
farmers—only to shatter this ideal when it becomes clear how the products
of their labor are inextricably bound to industrial capital. For the
farmers there is ostensibly no way out, yet a kind of euphoria pervades
UTOPIA. Hesitating in the balance between hope and futility, and posing
more questions than answers, Raksasad asks us whether the utopias we
imagine are wanted or desired, or even possible, and reminds us that
everyone's idea of utopia is different. (2009, 122 min, Video Projection)
BC
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Xavier Beauvois' OF GODS AND MEN
(New French)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday, 1pm
Thin as a religious statement and muddled
as a political one, Xavier Beauvois' drama is best appreciated for what
it is: a very strong, terse B-film which delineates the inner workings
of a group (in this case, Trappist monks living in Algeria in 1996)
through abrupt shorthand, establishes its distinct personalities (including
Lambert Wilson as the reluctant leader and King of the Slouches Michael
Lonsdale as the resident doctor), and then, in the tradition of the
most hermetic Westerns of the 1950s, observes as this "group of
individuals" attempts to reach a consensus around a decision (specifically,
whether to abandon the monastery or face an uncertain fate at the hands
of local extremists). All the long takes in the world can't help Beauvois
establish a tangible connection between the monks' decision-making and
their humble Catholicism, but, then again, theology isn't exactly Beauvois'
strong suit: regardless of his high-minded intentions, OF GODS AND MEN
succeeds at more basic levels—in its portrayals of procedure rather
than "good works," ritual rather than faith (especially in
how the monks' services and singing relate to their everyday experiences),
and characters rather than ideas. A failure that is also, in its own
way, a resounding victory. (2010, 122 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (New "Complete"
Restoration)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 9pm
The now-famous story of METROPOLIS'
new restoration—nearly half an hour of footage recovered from a newly-discovered
16mm print that had been sitting in Argentina since 1928, comprising
a more or less definitive version only a few minutes shorter than the
premiere print—has eclipsed just exactly what those restored 25 minutes
do to this Introduction to Film History juggernaut/music video reference-point,
a delirious fantasy that's had the unfortunate fate of being boiled
down to its "iconic moments," muddled politics (courtesy of
an ostensibly "socialist" script by future Nazi Thea von Harbou)
and its status as the only Fritz Lang movie to not have any real people
in it (besides, of course, villain Rotwang). If previous versions (most
notably the enthrallingly ridiculous one produced by Giorgio Moroder,
which runs half the length of this one) made METROPOLIS seem more like
a von Harbou film than a Lang one, the now "complete" version
of this sprawling future fever-dream actually resembles a movie someone
as smart as dear old Fritz would make. More nuanced because it is more
excessive, the restored METROPOLIS is a film that understands (and feels
through) its artificiality—as well as the fixations with death and
female sexuality inherent in its material—instead of presenting it
as straight allegory; it's fitting that the first piece of restored
footage, arriving about seven minutes in, is a brief sequence of a man
applying make-up to a woman. Since METROPOLIS tells its story (about
a 21st century city made possible by a caste of underground-dwelling
workers) through two substitutions—the son of the city's ruler taking
the place of a worker; a vicious cyborg taking the place of a saintly
young woman—previous versions have inevitably picked the son (Gustav
Fröhlich) over the worker (Erwin Biswanger), and the cyborg over the
girl (both played by Brigitte Helm; in this case it's understandable,
because she is more interesting playing a villain). This version
restores the ample screen time devoted to 11811, the prole who trades
places with heir apparent/smirking naïf Freder, and to 11811's adventures
in upper-class decadence (especially in a scene that now seems essential—a
car filling up with flyers for a local night club, dissolving into a
montage of excesses), as well as many apocalyptic hallucinations and
black-gloved intrigues (especially so in the case of striking Lang regular
Fritz Rasp; essentially an extra in previous versions, this cut presents
him as a major character in both the realities of the plot and in Freder's
nightmares). (1926, 153 min, Digital Video) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Federico Veiroj's A USEFUL LIFE
(New Uruguayan)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Friday, 7pm
It's not surprising that A USEFUL LIFE
has been a favorite on the festival circuit among film programmers and
others of the cinephilic persuasion: its protagonist, Jorge (played
with a fine reserve by Uruguayan film critic Jorge Jellinek), has worked
tirelessly at the Cinemateca Uruguaya for 25 years. Scenes depicting
projector problems, audiences of six for Erich von Stroheim's GREED,
and a filmmaker's polite, but frustrated, inquiry into the aperture
plate that's being used (all the more painful because of his
politeness) should ring familiar to most programmers. But this insider
minutiae does not circumscribe the film in a world only accessible to
film geeks; instead, it is a means to illuminate character. The details
of Jorge's life unfold in a similar manner to the domestic rituals we
see in Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN, providing insight into hidden
aspects of personality and, perhaps, psychology. Jorge's passionate
focus on film determines his identity and defines the boundaries of
the world he lives in—a world that is slowly disappearing (did we mention
the audience of six?) and then, suddenly, is gone. The second half of
the film finds Jorge negotiating the real world, outside of the Cinematheque,
and we watch to see if he is successful moving from the shadow to the
light. Director Veiroj's second feature is unpretentious and charming;
it is imbued with a sense of love for film (conjuring tonal parallels
to many different films and filmmakers, including Manoel de Oliveira,
whom the Cinemateca is celebrating with a 100th anniversary retrospective
during the film). Over the course of the movie, this love for film opens
up to a love for life—cinema has taught Jorge to see past the screen
to the wider world around him. Preceded by Veiroj's 2004 short film
AS FOLLOWS. (2010, 67 min, 35mm) PF
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's UNCLE
BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (New Thai)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Saturday, 5:15pm and Thursday, 7:45pm
A hushed and floating aureole of a
film, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's UNCLE BOONMEE captivates and holds
us firm in some timeless stupor. The northern Thai jungle throbs patiently—with
past lives and past events, monkey ghosts and ethereality—while Boonmee
comes full circle, or doesn't. The film centers on an elderly Thai farmer,
Uncle Boonmee, who is dying of kidney disease. Fading in his farm home,
his son and wife appear as spirits (in easily one of the most affecting
family dinner scenes on film) to ease Boonmee into non-being. As in
SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY and TROPICAL MALADY, Weerasethakul's Buddhism
informs the fluidity of time and body, though here he forgoes the formal
duality of those films for something like a drifting continuum. Boonmee
laments his karma, having killed in the past either too many communists
or bugs on his tamarind farm, and later dreams of a stunted future where
images of one's past are projected until they arrive. Are we some Baudrillard-like
copy of a copy, reborn and born again—or perhaps a continual permutation
of events and memories? As in his past work, Weerasethakul lets us linger
just long enough in dense but controlled compositions. The distance
of his subjects in the frame methodically draws us deeper into his hypnotic
world where the sound of our breathing heightens anticipation. It amplifies
the pulse and hum of the darkened, textured jungle on screen. But the
frame here is also Weerasethakul's most purposeful one, leading us gently
into fabled recollection, and cunningly deep inside a haunting cave-womb.
History and spirit have a composite curiosity that envelops both Boonmee
and the viewer. Weerasethakul's latest masterwork offers as much as
one is willing to ask. (2010, 114 min, 35mm) BW
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Eye & Ear Clinic at
the School of the Art Institute (112 S. Michigan Ave., Rm. 1307) will
present a generous selection of features and shorts by Apichatpong
Weerasethakul this week to mark his honorary Ph.D from the school
(he received his MFA at SAIC in 1998). All works shown from DVD.
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Monday, 6pm: "Exquisite Corpse" program, featuring the shorts MORAKOT (EMERALD) (2007), A LETTER TO
UNCLE BOONMEE (2009), 0116643225059 (1994), and the feature MYSTERIOUS
OBJECT AT NOON (2000). Introduced by filmmaker and SAIC faculty member
Shellie Fleming.
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Tuesday, 6pm: The feature film BLISSFULLY
YOURS (2002). Introduced by SAIC grad student Blake Heo.
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Wednesday, 6pm: "Comrades in Time" program, with the short THE ANTHEM (2006) and the feature SYNDROMES
AND A CENTURY (2006). Introduced by SAIC grad student Vipash Purichanont.
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Thursday, 6pm: "Between Men" program,
with the short MOBILE MEN (2008) and the feature TROPICAL MALADY (2004).
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Friday (May 20), 2:30pm: Roundtable
with Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Introduced and moderated by filmmaker
and SAIC professor Daniel Eisenberg.
The Northwest Chicago Film Society (at the Portage Theater) screens a 35mm print of Josef von Sternberg's
1931 film DISHONORED on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Also showing is
the 1944 Frank Tashlin cartoon PLANE DAFFY.
Also at the Film Studies Center
(University of Chicago) this week is Archaeology of Immersive Media:
An Illustrated Lecture by Erkki Huhtamo on Thursday at 7pm. Huhtamo
will lecture on 19th and early 20th Century moving panoramas, focusing
on the Maréorama, a huge multi-sensory spectacle created by Hugo d'Alesi
in 1900. Reconstructed sequences from this will be accompanied on piano
by David Drazin.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center
this week: Program 3 of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Undergraduate and Graduate Film, Video, and Audio Presentations is on Friday starting at 4pm; Jacques-Remy Girerd's 2008 animated film
MIA AND THE MAGOO plays for a week; Jeff Lipsky's 2010 indie feature
TWELVE THIRTY screens Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday; and on Sunday
at 5pm there is an advance screening of the new drama THE FIRST GRADER,
with actress Naomi Harris in person.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Alejandro Iñárritu's BIUTIFUL screens Saturday night and Sunday afternoon; and Eugenio Polgovsky's
2008 Mexican documentary LOS HEREDEROS (showing with Akosua Adoma Owusu's 2007 short INTERMITTENT DELIGHT)
is on Tuesday at 9pm.
Also at the Music Box this week:
Caroline Bottaro's QUEEN TO PLAY continues; Terrence Malick's
THE THIN RED LINE is in the matinee slot (Sunday only); Clarence
Badger's 1927 Clara Bow silent IT screens Saturday at Noon, with
live organ accompaniment by Dennis Scott; and Sean S. Cunningham's 1980
FRIDAY THE 13TH and Jim Mickle's STAKE LAND are the Midnight
films on Friday and Saturday.
Chicago Filmmakers screens Willem Alkema's 2009 Dutch documentary on Sly Stone, COMING
BACK FOR MORE, on Friday at 8pm; and on Saturday the Dyke Delicious
series screens May Shorts, with a social hour at 7pm and the
films at 8pm.
On Sunday, from 3-7pm, The Charnel
House (3421 W. Fullerton Ave.) presents Technical Difficulties?:
Public Access Television (A Conceptual Funeral). The event features
clips from various public access television shows, speaking on such
by Lori Felker, Jon Satrom, Eric Fleischauer, and Ratso from Chica-go-go
(4pm) and a dance-party (5:30pm). Kid-friendly and encouraged.
Saki Records (3716 W. Fullerton
Ave.) hosts a screening of Jason Ogawa's new feature THE FUNNY THINGS
YOU DO on Friday at 8pm. Things start at 7pm with music by Th' Tarnation
Boys.
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern
University) this week is a sneak preview screening of Mike Mills new
film BEGINNERS on Friday at 4:30pm, with Mills in person.
Facets Cinémathèque continues its return run of Zachary Levy's documentary STRONGMAN Friday-Sunday only, with Levy in person at the 7pm screening on Friday.
J. Clay Tweel's 2010 documentary MAKE BELIEVE screens Monday-Thursday,
with magician and one of the subjects of the film Bill Koch in person
at several of the shows (check Facets website for details).
The Logan Square International Film
Series screens Takashi Miike's 2001 film HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (from DVD) on Tuesday at 8pm at Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N.
Milwaukee Ave.).
The Chicago Cultural Center hosts screenings of Cinema/Chicago's International Summer Screening
series with Ryûichi Inomata's 2005 Japanese film SHODO GIRLS on Saturday at 2pm; and Jang Hoon's 2008 South Korean film ROUGH
CUT on Wednesday at 6:30pm. 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 DuSable Museum screens the
documentary GOD'S GONNA TROUBLE THE WATER on Sunday at 2pm. |
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