CRUCIAL VIEWING
Andrei Ujica's THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU
(New Romanian)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
Two months after the local premiere of Cristi Puiu's AURORA, Chicago
gets to see Romanian cinema's other
three-hour formalist experiment of 2010. AUTOBIOGRAPHY is “a true
film-object,” J. Hoberman wrote in one of his enthusiastic write-ups
last year, “[an] unexplicated assemblage of official newsreels that
earns its title by presenting the Romanian dictator's image as he wanted
it seen not only at home but on the world stage.” The Ceausescu dictatorship
of 1965 to 1989, one of the most repressive in the entire Soviet Bloc,
brought Romania untold injustice and economic devastation. One can sense
the lasting memory of this period in the recent masterpieces of Romanian
cinema—films that create palpable feelings of confinement, surveillance,
and desperation. The so-called Romanian New Wave has been noteworthy
not only for its willingness to confront painful experience, but for
maintaining a certain gallows humor in doing so. Surely, the nation's
intellects learned much about bitter irony during the Ceausescu years,
when the man who transformed their nation into a third-world police
state paraded himself before the world as a classy champion of progress.
Tellingly, this epic collage is constructed from footage of Ceausescu's
speeches, public appearances, and meetings with foreign officials, yet
it contains very little discussion of actual politics. To quote Hoberman
again, “Andrei Ujica's film is a monument to delusion, a celluloid
Potemkin Village, and a grotesque psychodrama with mass deception and
megalomania pushed past the absurd.” (2010, 180 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Frank Borzage's LITTLE MAN, WHAT
NOW? (American Revival)
Northwest Chicago Film Society (at
the Portage Theater) — Wednesday, 7:30pm
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Oscar Micheaux's UNDERWORLD (American
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7pm
Frank Borzage was the great romantic
of cinema (rivaled only, perhaps, by Leo McCarey) whose images glow
with an almost ethereal light; Oscar Micheaux was a would-be social
commentator and storyteller whose hardscrabble and gritty all-black-cast
race films transcend their unbelievably bad technical qualities and
“acting” to become (accidentally) quasi-experimental modernist investigations
of film form. Both are great, for obviously different reasons, and their
films excite me like few others. Borzage's LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW?
(1934, 98 min, 35mm) is the story of a young married couple in Germany,
struggling in the post-WWI economy to make ends meet. Borzage combines
the intense romanticism of these two lovebirds with the harsh realities
of the world around—a pattern seen in many of his films. Micheaux's
UNDERWORLD (1937, unconfirmed run time, 16mm) is about a young man
newly-graduated from a southern university who comes to Chicago and
finds himself entangled with shady friends, a disreputable woman, and
a murder. That's enough plot. What I really want to talk about are the
close-ups, which are extraordinary moments in each of the films. In
LITTLE MAN, they are reserved primarily for Margaret Sullavan, the young
wife. Borzage uses soft, radiant lighting that emphasizes her beauty;
but the close-ups of Sullavan also serve to situate her as the emotional
and moral center of the film. Borzage develops her character in a more
profound way than Douglass Montgomery's husband through her close-ups.
It's subtle, but more effective for it. Joe McElhaney writes that Borzage's
close-ups “often seem suspended above the direct unfolding of the
action, assuming a form of portraiture of infinitesimal movement specific
to the cinema.” They are tiny moments out of time, but integral to
the film's success as a harmonious whole. Not so the close-ups in UNDERWORLD.
Micheaux's narratives jump in fits and starts, leaving holes and illogical
connections. The films are a series of ruptures and the complete lack
of technical skill compounds them. The cut-aways to close-ups in UNDERWORLD
serve no purpose. They are ill-timed, too brief, and awkwardly constructed—usually
from “wrong” angles or camera positions and with mis-matched lighting
and sound. But they are electric. They jolt the viewer and disrupt any
sense of narrative grounding Micheaux may have achieved. They make no
sense—seemingly only there because films are “supposed” to have
them. They're a convention of Continuity Editing, right? But here, instead
of seamlessly drawing one deeper into the filmic illusion, they shatter
what little there was of it in the first place. Micheaux inadvertently
breaks the spell, performing the kind of formal/materialist interventions
one expects from Yvonne Rainer or Raul Ruiz or late-60's Godard instead.
PF
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LITTLE MAN screens with Robert Clampett's
1944 cartoon TICK TOCK TUCKERED and a 1934 newsreel.
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More info at northwestchicagofilmsociety.org and docfilms.uchicago.edu.
František Vláčil's THE WHITE DOVE
and VALLEY OF THE BEES
(Czech Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Showtimes noted below
When THE WHITE DOVE (Saturday, 5pm and Tuesday, 6pm)
played at the Venice Film Festival in 1961, it was decried by the Italian
Left as a "non-political fantasy," one of the first in a long
line of Czech films from that decade to be criticized by the Western
European film community for its lack of explicit revolutionary content.
While the Italians may not have warmed to this poetic interpretation
of life on opposite sides of the Cold War, Vláčil's first feature-length
film quickly cemented his position within the Czech New Wave as its
preeminent formal master. It also established his trademark aesthetic
and political sensibilities, both of which can be characterized as strange,
solemn, and precise—a relentless attack on dogmatism and expression
of humanist ideals through lyrical forms. In the hands of a filmmaker
lacking such a clear set of visual and political priorities, THE WHITE
DOVE could have been a straightforward allegory with an uplifting message:
two young (and of course, innocent) children who inhabit different political
realities are united through a universal symbol of peace, the titular
white dove. Vláčil's film calmly resists this kind of universalizing
and symbolic reading with its disconcerting sense of proportions and
dark undertones; the parallel narrative is ultimately disjointed, and
the innocent, universal figures of childhood are often lonely and frightened.
This sense of fear and isolation is sometimes offset (and sometimes
heightened) by cinematographer Jan Čuřik's (VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF
WONDERS) playful and surrealistic sensibilities. The careful balance
of whimsy against critique may have been what allowed some to read it
as "non-political fantasy," but it's also what set the stage
for a career defined by the exquisite execution of complex principles
and ideals. (1960, 76 min, 35mm)
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Vláčíl spent a sizable portion of the 1960s trying to recreate the
13th century, a process that nearly drove him insane, but yielded two
stunning medieval epics that defined his career. The two films, MARKETA
LAZAROVÁ and VALLEY OF THE BEES (Saturday, 3pm and Thursday,
8:30pm), were released back-to-back and share many of the same props
and costumes, all of which were excruciatingly prepared in as authentic
a manner as possible. But beyond sharing the same historical setting
and visual vocabulary, VALLEY OF THE BEES departs significantly from
the sprawling, pagan, and polymorphous perverse world of its sibling
film, charting the life of a young Teutonic Knight. It's a glimpse into
a highly codified world of law, order, and religious zealotry, where
the slightest transgression is met with brutal violence and expulsion.
The film begins with an example of this volatile social dynamic, as
Ondřej plays a practical joke on his father and his young bride at
their wedding, and is promptly beaten and then banished. This scene
quickly establishes Vláčíl's fascination with fear as the dominant
human emotion and his studied sense of humor, which allows him to examine
the capricious reaction against Ondřej's joke alongside the original,
subversive intent of that joke. The rest of the film recounts Ondřej's
life in terms of two defining relationships, the first with a fellow
Knight and the second with his stepmother. Both episodes feature scenes
of repressed sexual desire against a landscape of rigid, unforgiving
forms—natural in the first, architectural in the second, and legal
and social throughout—and a detailed catalog of how all attempts to
break with the dominant order end in violence. (1967, 97 min, 35 mm)
AO
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Huang Weikai's DISORDER (New Chinese
Documentary)
White Light Cinema at the Nightingale — Friday, 8pm
Part cinema verité, part city symphony, part essay on humans living
in an urban reality, and part celebration of digital egalitarianism,
Huang's film is surprisingly cohesive and concise in it's focus. Casting
the city of Guangzhou (the least famous city of 10 million people in
the world) as the dominant manipulator of human behavior, the filmmaker
allows the viewer to make connections between the chaotic behavior of
a scam artist pretending to be hit by a car, a group of men swimming
in protest of an oppressive government, a black market dealer of bear
paws and frozen anteaters, and countless other actual occurrences that
are at once absurd and commonplace. Compiled from what is purported
to be over 1000 hours of footage shot by amateur videographers, DISORDER
is a seesaw between anxiety and gleeful wonderment. The sequences are
bridged by asynchronous sound, bleeding from one event to the next,
and the most common through-line is a never-ending parade of apathetic
authority figures. “It will lead to paperwork, we have bigger problems”
would be an apt alternate title for this modern masterpiece, if that
didn't sidestep the greater argument being made here. By shedding light
on the magnificent number of situations people get into for which there
is no logical resolution, Huang renders these occurrences mundane. The
man seeking relief from a health inspector for the roach in his meal
is just as crazy as the man threatening to jump of a bridge unless the
police help him get relief (from what we never really know). Life as
a system of orderly events is not just an illusion, but is the most
illogical thought of all. (2010, 58 min, Video) JH
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More info at www.whitelightcinema.com.
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Note: This screening is organized
by C-F editor Patrick Friel.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Jafar Panahi's OFFSIDE (Contemporary
Iranian Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 7pm
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Maryam Keshavarz's CIRCUMSTANCE
(New Iranian/International)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Wednesday, 7:30pm
The last feature completed by Jafar Panahi before he was banned
(unsuccessfully) from making movies in his native Iran,
OFFSIDE is an improbably joyous movie on the subject of institutionalized
chauvinism. Bucking the temptation to lapse into despair, OFFSIDE is
an exciting, upbeat, and often very funny movie about women's resilience
in the face of persecution. The film takes place outside a sports arena
in Tehran, where a group of young women (unable to attend sporting events
under current Iranian law) have disguised themselves as men in order
to sneak into a major soccer game. None of the characters manages to
make it inside—in fact, they all end up getting detained by security—but
they exhibit such enthusiasm and camaraderie that you might leave the
theater feeling victorious anyway. In formal terms, the film can be
read as a continuation of Panahi's THE CIRCLE, which also confronted
Iranian chauvinism with a concentrated time frame and ambitious long
takes. (Notably, both films progress from day to night, suggesting a
descent into hopelessness.) Yet the tone is a complete reversal of Panahi's
earlier masterpiece, not only in its overall buoyancy but in its handling
of suspense: Playing on the excitement of the off-screen soccer game,
Panahi makes the women's persecution seem less like an inevitable tragedy
and more like an opponent than can be overcome. (2006, 93 min, 35mm)
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This revival of OFFSIDE is especially welcome in light of this week's
special advance screening of CIRCUMSTANCE, a prize-winner at
this year's Sundance Film Festival. The debut feature of Maryam Keshavarz
is also about young women acting in defiance of Iran's social code.
It is a lesbian romance between two teenage girls from middle-class
Tehran families—and which was made, for reasons of political necessity,
in Lebanon. Wesley Morris, writing for the Boston Globe,
called the movie “a cheap erotic provocation with political wrapping”
(as though that were a demerit), though he praised the daring of its
politics. Manhola Dargis, writing in the New York Times,
was far more optimistic in her assessment: “It's how Ms. Keshavarz
blends the love story with a portrait of liberal Iranians struggling
against fundamentalism in their homes and out in the world—the brother
of one of the girls has recently found God, with a vengeance—which
gives the movie its power.” In any case, this screening is free and
Keshavarz is scheduled to attend, so you have plenty of motivation
to go and judge for yourself. (2011, 107 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at docfilms.uchicago.edu and blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
Out of the Vault 2011: Family Firsts:
3 Tales of Immigration
(Documentary Revival)
Chicago Film Archives at the Chicago
Cultural Center — Tuesday, 6:30pm
The three films in this documentary
program cover different decades, different cultures (Mexican, Greek,
Chinese-Vietnamese), and different styles (anthropological verite, docu-narrative,
and home movie), but they are all tied by their focus on the varying
ways immigrant communities and families interact with their new homes
(Chicago and Deerfield, Illinois). The program was built around the
CFA's new preservation of MI RAZA: PORTRAIT OF A FAMILY (1972)
by Susan Stechnij. Shot as a university anthropological project, it
documents three generations in the Mexican-American Navarro family,
who lived in the Pilsen neighborhood. Instead of the traditional anthropological
film distance and “objective” observation, MI RAZA features a more
intimate style with the handheld camera moving among its subjects, capturing
fragments and glimpses of the Navarro family's life rather than aiming
for a more totalizing understanding. It's a synecdochal approach, inferring
larger meaning and insight from disparate elements. Perhaps it's not
as scientifically valuable, but it presents a decidedly human and resonant
look at a family maintaining cultural traditions and beliefs in the
midst of the city. Also showing are KALI NIKTA, SOCRATES (GOOD NIGHT,
SOCRATES) (1962) by Stuart Hagmann and Maria Moraites and THE
DO FAMILY: NEW AMERICANS FOR THE '80s (1980) by John Sanner. (1962-80,
approx. 81 min total, Video Projection) PF
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More info at www.chicagofilmarchives.org/calendar.html.
Richard Press's BILL CUNNINGHAM
NEW YORK (New Documentary)
Music Box — Check Venue website for showtimes
Like some kook in a kids' book, New York Times photographer Bill
Cunningham lives in a closet-sized space in Carnegie Hall. An affable
enigma in a blue smock, an effortless workaholic, a perpetually friendly
man who appears to have no interior life, he has no bathroom and no kitchen,
sleeps on a cot stacked on two milk crates and hasn't listened to music
in years. "It's not what I think, it's what I see," he says, and
Richard Press' documentary does its best to follow that credo. In a
sense, Press transposes the approach Cunningham himself uses for his
popular “On the Street” column—which the photographer creates by
compulsively photographing every interesting person he sees and then
discerning fashion trends from his contact sheets—by largely avoiding
speculation about his somewhat mysterious subject and instead focusing
on what patterns and ideas can be gleaned from constantly filming him.
It's interesting, entertaining, and, by design, significantly more revealing
about the value of work in a person's life than it is about Cunningham
himself. (2010, 90 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Terrence Malick's THE NEW WORLD
(US/UK Contemporary Revival)
Music Box — Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
There's something awfully Germanic
about THE NEW WORLD, which (to unsurprisingly mixed reviews) posed "the
story of our land" as an unconsummated, tragic love affair between
an ingenuous, skeptical intelligence (Q'orianka Kilcher) and a weary,
unsatisfied transience (Colin Farrell). Its admittedly transcendent
powers should, at the outset, be seen as primarily reliant on its three
entire repetitions of the dizzying, ecstatic Prelude to Das Rheingold—an
infamous, proto-minimalist superposition of arpeggiated E-flat major
triads that came to Richard Wagner as an oneiric vision in 1854. THE
NEW WORLD uses it (along with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23) as a sort
of affective amplifier, around which Emmanuel Lubezki's simultaneously
weightless and terrestrial natural-light Steadicam cinematography is
artfully arranged. Malick here uniquely stresses an architectural, ecological,
and sonic realism: his Jamestown is (correctly) a shitty, jury-rigged
mudpit of starving illiterates, gnawing on boiled leather belts, and
it is surrounded by an outstanding and perpetual Virginia-swamp room
tone of crickets, songbirds, and thunderstorms. But this is at the expense
of any anthropological, musical, or indeed "historical" realism:
the Powhatan culture is mostly improvised; the soundtrack blatantly
Teutonic; and the invented, poetic voiceovers, anachronistic. That Malick,
a former Heidegger scholar, should repurpose the weapons of a phenomenal
naturalism and a nationalist Romanticism for this luscious anti-Enlightenment
polemic (in which all of England is merely a shitty-mudpit writ large,
paved with stones, cathedrals, and gardens) should not be surprising; and
that it all played poorly in Peoria, even less so. (2005, 135 min, 35mm)
MC
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Ben Kolak's SCHIZCAGO (New American)
The Building Stage (412 N. Carpenter St.) — Friday and Saturday, 10pm
Chicago filmmaker Ben Kolak's directorial debut is so crazy it just
might work. Appropriately enough, it has three working titles, even
on the eve of its Chicago premier: SCHIZOCOOL, SCHIZCAGO and AMERICAN
QUALITY AND FREEDOM. The film follows a pack of cute, indolent twenty-somethings
through a summer in the city as they hustle drugs and money from medical
researchers, Craigslist perverts, corporate suits, and the military.
They more-than-comfortably survive as parasites of the behemoths of
late capitalism. Their jaded slang is made of buzzwords, catch-phrases
and technical jargon, gesturing at big ideas they don't have the will
or the need to grasp. And yet Kolak and Rachel Wolther's script is deathly
funny; sharp-witted, slapstick, or absurdist, whatever the moment requires.
Alex Inglizian's sound design is also slyly hilarious, adding an under-layer
of disorientation and parody to improbable scenarios. We see a lot of
microphones poking out of garments or into the frame, and sometimes
the acting is awkward in the 'Ma, I'm on the TeeVee!' kind of way. And
yet the look of the film is authentic, this human artifice backdropped
by the muraled overpasses, grated bridges and chemical sunrises that
feel like home to anyone who's ever ridden down Archer avenue at the
end of a long, weird night. SCHIZCAGO maintains a steady awareness of
Haskell Wexler's MEDIUM COOL, but there's a big, important difference;
in the four decades that have passed, righteous anger has withered into
consumer effrontery. SCHIZCAGO is the philosophical mayhem that follows
from asking a generation that has everything 'what more could you wish
for?' (2011, 89 min, HD Video) JF
Emir Kusturica's BLACK CAT, WHITE
CAT
(Contemporary Yugoslav / International Revival)
Logan Square International Film Series (The Comfort Station,
2579 N Milwaukee Ave)
Tuesday 8pm
As delirious and expansively upbeat as his war allegory Underground
is tragic, Kusturica's farce BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT
is now inexplicably obscure. Difficult to find on DVD despite critical
adoration, an opportunity to see it on the (relatively) big screen should
be regarded as a rare treat indeed. As in much of his work, big colorful
images—the wilder the better—capture the viewer's imagination until
the zany plot kicks in. Like early Herzog, animal behaviors abound—subtle
commentary on human action. Here, action involves three generations of
two families of Romany swindlers, their slapdash exotic settlement on
the Danube, a vanished train, young love, true love, brotherly love,
and a performer who may just be able to pull a nail out of a board with
her ponderous ass. Any plot summary invites such detours, as in life.
But here goes: Matko's shady business deal with Dadan, local coke-addled
gangster, goes awry, courtesy of Dadan, who demands a marriage between
his tiny sister Afrodita and Zare, Matko's son, in order to settle accounts. Unfortunately,
Afrodita demands to wait for the man of her dreams, and Zare has just
fallen madly in love with the charming Ida, tempestuous waitress and
scooter girl. The ensuing wedding is the centerpiece around which surreality
and sweetness revolve. Making sure everything turns out okay in the
end are old cronies Grga and Zarije. Srdjan Todorovic stands out among
the grotesques as Dadan, a-twitch with mirth and self-regard, not to
mention piles of cocaine. Even his eyebrows dance. Branka Katic is also
earthy and eccentric as the lovely Ida. Somehow all the frenetic nuttiness
adds up to something nearly profound, and awfully convincing, about
the kindness of the universe. Even if, climactically, a hog finishes
devouring an automobile, and villains set dead grandfathers to cool
under ice blocks in the attic (the better not to disrupt the wedding),
Kusturica dazzles us with a love of life that persists for days afterwards.
(1998, 135 min, DVD Projection) VS
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More info here.
Charlie Chaplin's THE GREAT
DICTATOR & THE CIRCUS
(American Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center — Showtimes noted below
One of the most courageous films ever made, Chaplin's satire attacked
Adolph Hitler while the US government was still officially neutral towards
Nazi Germany, but it's even more remarkable for its understanding of
the complex relationship between Fascism and popular culture. Chaplin
famously quipped that he first hated Hitler for stealing the Tramp's
mustache, and he portrays his Hitler caricature Adenoid Hynkel as the
Tramp turned inside out by the evils of the twentieth century. The clownish,
neurotic dictator is motivated not only by delusions of grandeur (which
Chaplin displays, gorgeously, in a ballet sequence where he dances with
a balloon globe) but also by an insatiable need for popular acceptance.
Chaplin also plays a victim of the dictatorship, a Jewish barber who's
even more reminiscent of the Tramp. The scenes depicting the barber's
social life in the Jewish ghetto are so deeply felt in their Old World
humor that THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940, 124 min, 35mm; Sunday, 4:45pm
and Thursday, 6pm) could be ranked justifiably with the great Jewish
films. Given his worldwide popularity, Chaplin's decision to ally his
screen image so closely with the Jews had deeply radical implications,
but that's no match for the openly Leftist monologue at the film's end.
Following a series of impossible complications, the plot breaks away
and Chaplin addresses the camera for a three-minute unbroken shot. What
begins as an outcry against Fascism turns into a plea for universal
brotherhood, and it's audacious in how fully it manipulates the communicative
nature of cinema. Writing about this scene in 1974, Jonathan Rosenbaum
was justly in awe of its impact: "Seen with historical hindsight,
there are few moments in film as raw and convulsive as this desperate
coda. Being foolish enough to believe that he can save the world, Chaplin
winds up breaking our hearts in a way that no mere artist ever could."
Also playing this week is THE CIRCUS (1928, 72 min, 35mm; Sunday,
3pm and Tuesday, 6:15pm), Chaplin's last purely silent film, and the
feature containing his most spectacular stunt work. BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Alfred Hitchcock's FRENZY (British
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago)
— Wednesday, 7 and 9:15pm
On the surface, much of Hitchcock's
penultimate film feels like well-worn territory, featuring both a serial
killer passing for an Average Joe and a wrongly accused man on the run
from the law. FRENZY is also a homecoming of sorts, as it marks a final
return to Hitchcock's native England, and finds its central location
in the fruit and vegetable market of Covent Garden, where Hitchcock's
father worked as a vendor throughout his childhood. However, any sense
of comfort or familiarity ends here, as the film quickly descends into
exceedingly dark territory, not only in terms of the graphic rape and
murder scene that dominates most conversations about it, but also the
comparatively grimy atmosphere that permeates the entire film, such
as the recurring scenes of highly unappetizing French cuisine, the relative
dowdiness of protagonists and victims alike, and other details of working
class verisimilitude that are notably absent from most of Hitchcock's
other films. Even Hitchcock's treatment of the Neck-tie Murderer's motives
and methods feels unfamiliar; instead of reveling in Freudian melodrama,
the killer's Oedipal motives are legible to the point of being irrelevant
and ornamental, with his weapon of choice serving as a catch-all metaphor
for both sexual deviance and dysfunction. It's not necessarily that
Hitchcock has abandoned this style of psychological investigation, just
a gesture towards the fact that he's outgrown it and had begun to replace
it with an eye forensic detail and pathology that will be familiar to
anyone well-versed in the procedural crime dramas of contemporary television.
Truffaut said that FRENZY felt like a "young man's film,"
meaning to praise its sense of formal innovation and creative camera
work, but he could just as easily have been referring to the sense of
curiosity and openness to experimentation that's actually a mark of
artistic and personal maturity. (1972, 116 min, 35mm) AO
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Sidney Lumet's THE VERDICT (American
Revival)
Music Box — Friday, Noon
Bluntly stated, the two greatest movies in the "lawyer on the
skids decides to take a case in a last-ditch attempt to redeem himself"
genre are ANATOMY OF A MURDER and THE VERDICT. Whereas the former is
leavened with a wry sense of humor, thanks to Jimmy Stewart's hem-hawing,
Eve Arden's wisecracks, and Lee Remick's lazy sex kitten, THE VERDICT
is most often chilly and cerebral. And no less fascinating for it. Every
character is a "type," a mere cog in the story's machine.
The story's contrivances are such a pleasure to experience because,
as usual, Lumet assembled such a perfect cast. Jack Warden's gruffness,
Charlotte Rampling's icy sensuality, Milo O'Shea's Irish pragmatism,
and of course Paul Newman's expertly calibrated weariness are all wonderfully
balanced against each other. But James Mason is the film's secret weapon.
No one else could have played such a ruthless and rapacious lawyer with
such mysterious dignity and grace—he steals every scene he's in. THE
VERDICT is screening as part of “Movies On Trial,” a film series
worth 1.5 hours of Continuing Legal Education credit, which includes
a panel discussion featuring Peter V. Baugher (Schopf & Weiss LLP),
The Hon. Rebecca R. Pallmeyer (Northern District of Illinois), Joseph
J. Duffy (Stetler, Duffy & Rotert, Ltd) and Patricia B. Holmes (Schiff
Hardin LLP). This event is free and open to the public, but reservations
are required. To RSVP send an e-mail to moviesontrial@sw.com. (1982, 129 min, Video Projection) RC
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
On Friday at 9pm at Enemy (1550
N. Milwaukee), filmmaker Lori Felker will present a new live
projector performance work, one that emphasizes sound, to mark the release
of a new 7” record. Both the record and performance are titled “Light
Makes Music.”
At the Film Studies Center (University
of Chicago) this week: On Thursday at 5pm, it's Comedy for Export:
A Chinese Shadowplay Goes to Paris
New Faculty Lecture by Xinyu Dong;
and on Friday at 7pm grad student Emily Jones screens her new 40-minute
experimental video blinder.
Also at The Nightingale this
week: On Saturday at 6pm, it's The View from Jackson and Loomis:
New Video Work from Whitney Young High School. This program of new
student work is co-presented by Homeroom Chicago and curated by Whitney
Young foreign exchange student Yiyang Hou. The program includes: FADE
by Moriah Martinez, SPEAK TO ME by Lauren Cheung and Jacovic Rodriguez,
THE HISTORY OF LOVE by Gillian Asque, Courtney Evans, & James Bobbitt,
CARLESS by Sam Redmond, BONY LEGS by Roseann Frech, Devin Jankovich,
Joanna Preston, & Rebecca Sconza, EXPERIMENTAL GENIUS by Lief Novak,
STEREOTYPES by Lauren Cheung, and ASHES OF THE WHALE by Yiyang Hou.
The Eye & Ear Clinic at
the School of the Art Institute (112 S. Michigan Ave., Rm. 1307) concludes
its series of features and shorts by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
(marking his honorary PhD from the school; he received his MFA at SAIC
in 1998) with a Roundtable discussion on Friday at 2:30pm. Introduced
and moderated by filmmaker and SAIC professor Daniel Eisenberg. Apichatpong
Weerasethakul in person.
Calles y Suenos (1901 S Carpenter
St.) presents the program Whose world is this?/The world is yours
on Friday at 7pm. The show is curated by Fereshteh Toosi and includes
MAZE & LABYRINTH by Hyeon Jung Kim, HEAVY SKIRT by Leang Seckon,
WONDER STRANGER by Via Tania & Michelle Ruiz, 1700% PROJECT: MISTAKEN
FOR MUSLIM by Anida Yoeu Ali & Masahiro Sugano, TO PERSIA by Yasi
Ghanbari, and DON'T SHOOT THE MESSENGER by Anne Elizabeth Moore. Artists
and curators in person.
Sentieri (5430 N. Broadway)
continues it's Italian film screening and lecture series, Screening
Italy: Italian Cinema through the Lens of History, by Therese
Grisham with a talk on “The Post-World War II Landscape“ on
Friday at 6:30pm. Call (773) 275-5325 to inquire about registration.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center
this week, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel's 2010 documentary LOUDER THAN
A BOMB returns for an encore weeklong run. The filmmakers and selected
poets will be in person at various screenings over the week; check the
Siskel website for details.
Also at Doc Films
(University of Chicago) this week: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's UNCLE
BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES is Friday night and Sunday
afternoon; Scott Cooper's CRAZY HEART is Saturday night and Sunday
afternoon; Roland West's 1930 “old dark house” horror/mystery (and
pioneering widescreen film, which was released in 35mm and 65mm!)
THE BAT WHISPERS is Sunday night; the experimental film program
The Aesthetics of the Apparatus: Paul Sharits and Owen Land is Monday;
and the late film (9pm) Thursday is Ted Post's 1970 BENEATH THE PLANET
OF THE APES.
Also at the Music Box this week:
Kelly Reichardt's MEEK'S CUTOFF continues; and the Midnight films
are THE ROOM (Friday only), THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW
(Saturday only), and STAKE LAND (Friday and Saturday).
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern
University) this week: Vivien Bittencourt and Vincent Katz's 2006 documentary
KIKI SMITH: SQUATTING THE PALACE is on Saturday at 2pm; and Pioneers:
New Festival Shorts is on Friday at 7pm and features WE'RE LEAVING
by Zachary Treitz, ALL FLOWERS IN TIME by Jonathan Caouette, PIONEER
by David Lowery, THE WIND IS BLOWING ON MY STREET by Saba Riazi, and
GOD OF LOVE by NU alum Luke Matheny.
At Facets Cinémathèque this
week is Leanne Pooley's 2009 New Zealand documentary THE TOPP TWINS,
about “the world's only yodeling, lesbian, country-and-western-singing
twins.”
Also at the Chicago Cultural Center
this week: The new documentary WELCOME TO SHELBYVILLE screens
on Saturday at 2pm; and the Cinema/Chicago summer series continues on
Wednesday at 6:30pm with Florian Gaag's 2006 German film WHOLETRAIN.
Both from DVD.
Also on display at the Chicago Cultural
Center through September 18 is the exhibit Movie Mojo: Hand-Painted
Posters from Ghana.
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