CRUCIAL VIEWING

Josef von Sternberg's THE SCARLET EMPRESS (American Revival)  
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Sunday, 7pm 
Loosely adapted from the diary of Catherine II, Austrian-American director Josef von Sternberg's THE SCARLET EMPRESS stars his legendary muse Marlene Dietrich as Princess Sophia Frederica of Prussia, who later becomes Catherine the Great. At the beginning of the film, the innocent young princess travels to Russia to meet Empress Elizabeth (Louise Dresser) and her insane nephew Grand Duke Peter (Sam Jaffe), however during the long journey, she falls in love with her dashing envoy, Count Alexei (John Lodge). As commanded by King Frederick II, Sophia marries the Grand Duke and gives birth to a highly prized heir before she embarks on her long ascent toward the royal throne. Von Sternberg and set designers Hans Dreier and Richard Kollorsz create fearsome sets of the Imperial Palace and a Russian Orthodox Church by mixing elements of historical realism with their preferred style of German Expressionism. Adorning the rooms, Kollorsz's paintings and artist Peter Ballbusch's sculptures of grotesque, frightening creatures situate Catherine in a world overrun with the monarchy's fantasies. Von Sternberg focuses his camera on how the characters interact with a mise en scene that alternates between horror and romance; in fact, he uses it to build the character of Catherine more so than any other traditional device. THE SCARLET EMPRESS hinges on its penultimate collaboration between its filmmaker and its star. Von Sternberg and Dietrich vacillate between showing, masking, and withholding their image of Catherine the Great, and ultimately of Dietrich herself. In his essay on the film, critic Robin Wood said, "The connecting theme of all the von Sternberg/Dietrich films might be expressed as a question: How does a woman, and at what cost, assert herself within an overwhelmingly male-dominated world?" Count Alexei suggests an answer, "Yes, your Imperial Majesty, I love you, but I'm completely bewildered by your attitude towards me. However I've become accustomed to regard you as one of those extraordinary women who create their own laws of logic." Similar to the extraordinary woman she portrayed, Marlene Dietrich turned a man's world on its head. Introduced by film and art critic Fred Camper. (1934, 104 min, 35mm) CW
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

Transparent Things: Films by Mary Helena Clark (New Experimental) 
Roots & Culture (1034 N. Milwaukee Ave.) — Sunday, 7pm 
Chicago filmmaker Mary Helena Clark is an exciting young voice in contemporary American experimental film. Her works mix all manners of techniques—rayograms, animation, appropriation, her own camera—with different film stocks and video qualities to craft vital, magical collage films. While the individual components maintain a level of autonomy—their historic and emotional specificities remain evident—they are thoughtfully interwoven. BY FOOT-CANDLE LIGHT (2011) is a mysterious meditation on performance, teleportation, and "the periphery." ORPHEUS (OUTTAKES) (2012), whose ruse is in its title, riffs on Cocteau's classic with mystery guest Buster Keaton. The film is tremendously beautiful and conveys what Clark describes as "stoner existentialism in Looney Tunes tropes," like "inky black" tunnels and disembodied eyes blinking into the dark. In THE PLANT (a work still in progress), Clark's camera plays detective: hunting the exterior of Bertrand Goldberg's iconic Marina City and spying on a man pretending to be blind. She notes, "I think my earlier movies were looking for the hidden and mysterious and my newer films have a sensitivity to what's in plain sight." If you need further convincing, there have been whispers of surprises in this program, which also includes AFTER WRITING (2008), AND THE SUN FLOWERS (2008), SOUND OVER WATER (2009), WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING (2010), and EVERYTHING BUT THE ELEPHANTS, FOR A.M.M. Clark in person. (2008-12, approx. 60 min total, 16mm and Video Projection) JM
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Read Jesse Malmed's interview with Clark here.
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More info here.

Michael Mann's THIEF (American Revival)
Music Box — Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Is Michael Mann the greatest working American director? It's true that Frederick Wiseman has a greater influence over world cinema on the whole and Clint Eastwood is more nationally valuable for his ongoing critique of the American character. Yet Mann inspires greater reverence than either of them due to the sheer beauty of his approach. An artist with an acute sense of the fleeting moment, the unnatural pace of time in contemporary life, and myriad variations of artificial light (He's likened himself to a photorealist painter), Mann is simply our greatest living image-maker. Shot primarily in Chicago, THIEF builds its atmosphere around the city's proletarian feistiness; it's certainly the native Southsider's most autobiographical work. In the first of many idiosyncratic takes on realism, Mann cast actual Chicago cops to play criminals and actual former criminals as cops. In doing so, he made first steps toward the great theme of his work: the uncanny leveling of human behavior under modern professionalism. James Caan plays a successful life-long thief who wants to get married and settle down. He discovers his own humanity too late (There's always One Last Score), but there are great realizations on the way to failure. Caan considers this his best performance, and he's probably right: Several of the most important scenes are two-person conversations that reach Bergman-esque levels of intimacy and recrimination. These moments of heightened self-doubt alternate with bloody gun fights and meticulously observed crimes; unlike Howard Hawks or Anthony Mann—two of his thematic forbearers—Mann seems deeply ambivalent about the macho attitudes that tend to accompany these subjects. In lives increasingly defined by professional obligation, Mann regards the decline of traditional gender roles with serious curiosity and surprising nostalgia. (In this sense, his films have affinities with those of Tsai Ming-liang.) THIEF is the first of Mann's elegies for professional masculinity, and it's sharpened greatly by the film's harsh night photography. (1981, 122 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
              

ALSO RECOMMENDED

Richard Linklater's DAZED AND CONFUSED (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Thursday, 10pm
Usually when a movie relishes its period detail this intensely it cuts corners elsewhere, but the rare feat of DAZED AND CONFUSED is its fully inhabited nostalgia. On the last day of school in the year of the bicentennial, incoming freshmen and seniors try on their respective roles for the first time through hazing rituals and the party to end all parties. Slapstick, sadism, stoner silliness, and sentiment all have their moments, but never overwhelm. Of course we can laugh at the pants and hair absurdities of high school in 1976; the aesthetic is not so far off from That 70's Show, but the difference is that while a cool guy is cracking a dirty joke at a freshman's expense, there's room onscreen for the pathos of the freshman's subtle facial reaction. Here the collar is wide, but the heart is true. Like all Linklater movies, DAZED AND CONFUSED is in no hurry to get anywhere, because it's all right there. This generous patience pays off; every character is worth spending time with, or they wouldn't be in the movie, right? Spanning from the last day of school until the following dawn, conversations get looser and more astral as the movie progresses, allowing even the squarest kids a chance to express some truly wonderful thinky-thoughts. Throughout the night the little triumphs and scores settled aren't inflated cinematically, they remain human-sized through Linklater's even-handedness, the large number of characters, and the skill of the young performers. It's an impressive cast of familiar faces, most at the very beginning of careers, and that wave of earnest effort floats the movie, giving it a very optimistic feeling. (1993, 103 min, 35mm) JF
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

Claire Denis' 35 SHOTS OF RUM (New International)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) — Thursday, 7pm
Claire Denis is the greatest director of our time. Every new film of hers provides sufficient evidence to prove that statement. Let's take the case of 35 SHOTS OF RUM, which isn't her newest film (that would be WHITE MATERIAL), but the newest to screen in Chicago. 35 SHOTS is set, like her earlier NENETTE & BONI, in a small world, one that consists largely of a handsome, quiet train operator approaching 50 (Alex Descas, who gets better with every gray hair) and his beautiful college student daughter (Mati Diop). Crossing over their borders are three intruders: a neighbor (Gregoire Colin, almost as familiar a face in Denis' films as Descas) threatening to move away while playing out a sort of romance with the daughter; the train operator's on-and-off girlfriend (Nicole Dogue), a cab driver that he tries to keep at arm's length; and Rene (pensive Julieth Mars Toussaint), the train operator's melancholic ex-colleague. There are a few locations: two apartments in Paris, two bars, a balcony, a car, a classroom, a locker room, a train, an apartment in Hamburg. What Denis is able to make out of these elements isn't a lesson in economy, but a story of how the most mundane things (a For Sale sign, a blue door, two rice cookers, a cerulean table top, an iPod's white headphones, a bar's asparagus-colored walls, The Commodores' post-Lionel Richie hit "Nightshift") and gestures (half-hearted dancing, a kiss on the cheek, a lean, a glance) acquire meaning in our lives, and how, through that shared meaning, we come to understand one another. Denis' previous non-documentary feature, THE INTRUDER, was arguably the most revolutionary film since Tati's PLAYTIME (which screens next month at the Film Center). It rediscovered of the world by divorcing itself from consciousness. It wasn't concerned with who was experiencing what or why, or the traditional delineations of character and time. 35 SHOTS OF RUM rediscovers both character and time by showing us things that seem to lie outside both. (2008, 100 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.

Jean-Luc Godard's WEEKEND (French Revival) 
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Friday, 7, 9, and 11pm; Sunday, 1pm
The final title cards of WEEKEND announce "FIN DE CONTE. FIN DE CINEMA"—"END OF STORY. END OF CINEMA." The film did indeed mark the end of a golden period of feature films for the newly-radicalized Godard. In the years leading up to May '68 and the student movement, Godard was developing a deepening commitment to Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideology under the influence of his friend Jean-Pierre Gorin. LA CHINOISE and WEEKEND, the final films of this period, shot and released in rapid succession, saw Godard attempting to merge his developing aesthetic vision with his solidifying leftist commitments. The result in WEEKEND is as bitter and cruel to its subjects as it is conceptually thrilling. The cravenly cynical plot follows a young bourgeois woman and her husband as they rush to her mother's deathbed, not out of any sense of filial duty, but rather to ensure that her stepfather does not cut her out of the will. Misfortune and humiliation are by turns caused by and visited on the couple as they wind through country roads strewn with the corpses of crash victims, the twisted wrecks of their vehicles appear with the frequency of mileposts. One remarkable sequence follows the two as they cut through a traffic jam, passing roadside picnickers, a horse-drawn hay cart, a caravan of circus animals, and multiple bloody wrecks. (The nine-minute sequence, accompanied by constant blaring car horns, was shot on a 300-meter-long traveling platform, which comprised the total number of dolly tracks of the same model available in all of France at the time.) A merciless excoriation of the mercenary logic of bourgeois sexuality and marriage, WEEKEND is an exhilarating document of the social and political frustrations that were about to erupt so powerfully. (1967, 105 min, 35mm) PR
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (New Turkish)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Saturday, 7 and 10pm; Sunday, 3:15pm
Most criticism, both pro and con, of Ceylan's sixth feature will likely focus on the movie's first half-a formally sustained 80 minutes that ranks among the more ambitious filmmaking of recent years. This section depicts the long night and weary morning spent looking for a corpse in the countryside of western Turkey, the sort of routine police business that most other movies would acknowledge in a few shots. Ceylan and his writers turn the investigation team's banter into miniature dramas, drawing out the subtle differences between characters for humor and pathos. (One low-ranking officer—an oafish, walrus-looking type addressed mainly as "The Arab"—emerges as the blank page on which others must articulate their views.) And Ceylan's camera meditates on the extraordinary hillsides where the action unfolds in super-long shots, often making the investigation seem like the work of insects. On a formal level, these moments are some of the most impressive use of HD video yet seen in movies, with Ceylan adjusting the color so meticulously that each quadrant of the frame seems to have been lit by a different sun. The movie is as sensitive to the subtleties of light as any Vermeer painting, noting the differences in effects of dusk, twilight, moonlight, and dawn; indeed, the characters register much like the figures in painting do, as representations of facets of humanity. It's often hard to think of them in more specific terms; Ceylan's images seem to spill over into forever. ANATOLIA is a deeply spiritual work, pondering subjects like murder and forgiveness against the enormity of all existence. Some viewers will reject the movie's solemnity, but in doing so they'll overlook the warmth that's no less crucial to Ceylan's vision. There's an extraordinary sequence about an hour in, in which the team decides to break from their search and catch some sleep at a village mayor's home. Shooting in medium shots that create a sharp contrast to what's come before, Ceylan fills the scene with the minutiae of everyday life: the conversations, conducted in a distinctly Turkish form of communal kibitzing, concern repairs to the village generator and keeping tabs on the young people. It's a refuge from the eternal perspective that's shaped the movie till now, and it inspires a feeling of gratitude towards the routine comforts (work, family, hot tea) that keep us from obsessing over our place in the universe. Just as life is not one long bout of existential dread, neither is it an unbroken chain of simple pleasures; and ultimately one defines his or her humanity by reconciling these two extremes. The final hour of ANATOLIA attempts to do just that, and the movie loses none of its wonder by switching its focus to everyday life. There are no long shots here, hardly any intimations of eternity: indeed, the movie ends with an autopsy. But those early sequences still weight heavily on the action, as do the humble musings of Nusrat, the town prosecutor who takes part in the investigation. A handsome man defined by a fatherly mustache and unpretentious speech, Nusrat (or "Mr. Prosecutor," as everyone addresses him) is the movie's heart and soul, a calming figure to the more hotheaded cops and a spiritual confessor to the intellectual doctor who performs the autopsy. Clearly, he's devoted years to judging criminal behavior impartially, and his skepticism has been refined into a detached, forgiving beatitude. He may be the closest movie equivalent to Faulkner's immortal Gavin Stevens, a workaday philosopher trying as practically as he can to serve mankind. (2011, 150 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING (American Revival) 
Landmark's Century Centre Cinema — Friday and Saturday, Midnight
Though it had been made famous already by ROCKY, it wasn't until THE SHINING that the Steadicam yielded an aesthetic breakthrough in movies. Garrett Brown's innovation—a gyroscope mounted to the bottom of a camera, which allowed cinematographers to create hand-held tracking shots that didn't record their own movement—became in Kubrick's hands a supernatural presence. The film's justly celebrated Steadicam shots evoke a cruel, judgmental eye that does not belong to any human being, a perspective that's harrowing in its implications. (GOODFELLAS, SATANTANGO, and Gus Van Sant's ELEPHANT, to name just three examples, are inconceivable without the film's influence.) In this regard, the horror of THE SHINING makes manifest one subtext running through all of Kubrick's work: that humanity, for all its technical sophistication, will never fully understand its own consciousness. Why else would Kubrick devote nearly 150 takes to the same scene, as he did several times in the film's epic shooting schedule? With the only exceptions being other movies directed by Stanley Kubrick, no one moves or speaks in a film the way they do in THE SHINING. Everything has been rehearsed past the point of technical perfection; the behavior on screen seems the end-point of human evolution. What keeps it all going? (To invoke another great horror film of the era: the devil, probably.) The demons of the Overlook Hotel may very well be a manifestation of the evil within Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic who once nearly beat his four-year-old son to death. Or they could be, like those Steadicam shots, evidence of an alien consciousness here to judge the vulnerabilities of mankind. Kubrick never proffers an explanation, which is why THE SHINING is one of the few horror films that actually remains scary on repeated viewings. Nearly every effect here prompts some indelible dread: the unnatural symmetry of Kubrick's compositions; Shelly Duvall's tragic performance (which suggests that horrible victimization is always just around the corner); and the atonal symphonic music by Bartok, Lygeti, and Penderecki that make up the soundtrack. (1980, 142 min, Unconfirmed Format) BS
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More info here.

Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE (New American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7 and 9:45pm
At the beginning of Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE, a mother says, "The nuns taught us there are two ways through life—the way of nature and the way of grace." Shortly after, her son, a middle-aged architect named Jack O'Brien, remembers the death of his younger brother, R.L., at the age of nineteen. Jack then travels back to his idyllic childhood in 1950s Waco, Texas to find this brother that he lost. In a larger sense, THE TREE OF LIFE explores the nature of being, including those aspects of it neither children nor adults understand. It questions birth and death throughout the history of time, beginning with the origin of the universe, continuing through the evolution of the species, and finally to the untimely death of this one young man. Malick renders the small family at the center of the story as grand as the life of the universe itself. Why do we not see the world this way? What prevents our sense of wonder? We no longer experience life, so we turn to cinema. TREE OF LIFE appears to be a collection of memories and imaginings. It is a film of images more than of words. Malick focuses on imagery of the family and, in particular, the three boys, capturing them in close-up and only natural light. The audience often views the spontaneous unfolding of life from a child's eyes, which look up to encounter the world. Malick's camera behaves like a human being in its own right, expressing a variety of emotions in its movement. He films the world, both great and small, with such reverence that every image of it is truly beautiful. To return to the film's beginning, the mother continues, "You have to choose which one you'll follow. Grace doesn't try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. It accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it, too. Likes to lord it over them, to have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy and all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things. They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you whatever comes." THE TREE OF LIFE is a man's testament to Spirit that captures the phenomenon of being in its glory. (2011, 139 min, 35mm) CW
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

Terry Gilliam's THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS (New International) 
Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7 and 9:30pm
On a nighttime street in London, a mechanical stage unfolds. Hokey performers peddle their half-assed magic to a disinterested public; the joke, of course, is that their conjuring is real. A cheap trick mirror made of reflective plastic really does lead to a fantasy world. Dr. Parnassus, face painted white, really is a thousand years old. With his band of faithful assistants in tow, he travels around, menaced everywhere by a devil in the person of Tom Waits, who reads Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown's dialogue as if it were Shakespeare—as if phrases like "ridiculous nonsense" or "go on a cruise" were the most beautiful ever written in the English language. Leaning on Parnassus' shoulder is Lily Cole, one of Gilliam's inevitable daughters; her face makes her look like a child stretched out to adult height in a funhouse mirror. An unfinished production, a mess of ideas and a jarring mixture of tones, THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS is Terry Gilliam's most fully realized film. His imagination is as liberated as in his Monty Python animations: jellyfish float through space, ladders reach up into the sky, bobbies perform a musical number, a hunched figure with an umbrella walks on clouds as though they were stepping stones. His sentimentality is even more doomed than in THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN. He's always been too sincere to be called a Surrealist; whatever TIDELAND's faults were, it's was the work of a man with absolute faith in his feelings. Whatever IMAGINARIUM's shortcomings might be, it's the work of a man with absolute faith in himself. (2009, 122 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

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CINE-LIST: May 25 - May 31, 2012

MANAGING EDITOR / Patrick Friel

CONTRIBUTORS / Josephine Ferorelli, Jesse Malmed, Peter Raccuglia, Ben Sachs, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Candace Wirt, Darnell Witt

> Editorial Statement -> Contact