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:: Friday, OCT. 24 - Thursday, OCT. 30 ::

CRUCIAL VIEWING

Josef von Sternberg's THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Friday, 7pm

Oftentimes, Hollywood's vogue for a particular author is understandable--questionable, perhaps, but not irrational. When a movie is adapted from a work by Lloyd C. Douglas or John Grisham or William Shakespeare, everyone involved--the studio heads, the filmmakers, the audience--has a pretty good idea of what they've ordered up. But what about John Colton, the gay playwright whose outré exercises in lascivious bad taste are almost totally forgotten today? His 1925 play The Shanghai Gesture, set in a brothel run by one Mother Goddamn, sure doesn't sound like a safe return on investment, especially at a time when the outer limits of screen content were staunchly policed by the Legion of Decency and dozens of idiosyncratic local censorship boards across America. And yet every studio tried to bring The Shanghai Gesture to the screen in the early years of talking pictures--some thirty treatments were rejected by the Hays Office. That the movie was finally made at all is remarkable; that it was made by this disreputable band of émigrés, ingénues, and has-beens is downright cosmic. Director Josef von Sternberg hadn't generated substantial box office in the decade since SHANGHAI EXPRESS. Producer and Hungarian expat Arnold Pressburger had no track in America. Russian émigré Boris Leven could claim only a handful of art direction credits. Cinematographer Paul Ivano, who once worked under Erich von Stroheim, had eked out a living in the 1930s shooting Poverty Row quickies. (Early reports of contributions from writer James M. Cain and composer Hans Eisler came to nothing. Incongruously, Eisler was replaced by the man who compiled and adapted American folk ballads for Ford's STAGECOACH.) The cast was a similar mix: stars on their way up (Gene Tierney as not-so-coincidentally-named Poppy) and down (Walter Huston as her beleaguered pop), actors who never made the break (GONE WITH THE WIND also-ran Ona Munson as the Medusa-haired Mother Gin Sling, RULES OF THE GAME refugee Marcel Dalio in a cameo) and actors best known for playing near-naked, cave-dwelling troglodytes (Victor Mature as the be-fezzed Doctor Omar). In other words, this is a film about desperate, unaccountable perverts with no place to go, made by people who could instinctively identify with their predicament. The content is apparently much toned-down from the play, but it hardly matters: the coyness and misdirection only serves to abstract, and thereby heighten, the air of kink. It's a testament to the oneiric and irrational thrall of THE SHANGHAI GESTURE that it readily withstood "creative re-creation" in a 1951 Surrealist Group roundtable dedicated to the "irrational enlargement" of their favored film object. (Question: "What is Poppy's perversion?" Selected Answers: "Clasping an octopus between stocking and thigh." "Purposeless masturbation.") Two Academy Awards nominations in craft categories notwithstanding, THE SHANGHAI GESTURE met an acid reception during its original release. (For Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, it was "so utterly and lavishly pretentious, so persistently opaque and so very badly acted in every leading role but one that its single redeeming feature is that it finally becomes laughable." In other words, a very deranged recommendation.) The film was thus an obvious candidate for Henri Langlois' Festival du Film Maudit in 1949 and a palpable hothouse influence on Sternberg acolyte Jack Smith's FLAMING CREATURES. Its spirit--simultaneously ineffable and wiseass, aroused and bored, heavy and free--is best summed up by Mature's proto-punk exchange with Tierney: "You said Doctor Omar. Doctor of what?" "Doctor of nothing." Introduced by Henri Langlois biographer Glenn Myrent. (1941, 91 min, Archival 35mm Print) KAW
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.


Nagisa Oshima's EMPIRE OF PASSION (Japanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 6pm and Saturday, 3pm

Nagisa Oshima's career is notable for its stylistic randomness. One might see some of his early films, such as DEATH BY HANGING (1968), DIARY OF A SHINJUKU THIEF (1969), and MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM (1970), and wonder if the man who made those could possibly have been responsible for something as visually resplendent as his 1978 film EMPIRE OF PASSION. Not surprisingly, Oshima is most consistent in his inconsistency; though groupings of his films share overarching themes and even some aesthetic similarities, he seemingly used each new film to reinvent himself as an artist and intellectual. He made no pretense of being a dependable auteur, with his work progressively questioning the very themes he seemed so dogmatic about in films made just a few years prior. PASSION is arguably the best example of this regeneration, as Oshima not only challenges popular conception of its companion piece, IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976), but also some aesthetic choices that had been the only persistent motifs of his previous work. Loosely based on a true story recounted in a biography of Japanese writer Takashi Nagatsuka by Itoko Nakamura (which she sent to Oshima with a note that read, "I'm certain that the director of IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES will understand: even in this dark period of Japanese history, the era of the Meiji, love did exist") and combined with fragments of a screenplay Oshima had been working on at the time, it's about a married, nearly-middle-aged woman and mother of two, Seki, who becomes embroiled in an affair with a soldier returning to their humble country village after fighting in the Sino-Japanese War. (The soldier is Toyoji and he's played by Tatsuya Fuji, the same actor who infamously starred as Kichi in SENSES.) It soon becomes something of a ghost story after Seki and Toyoji murder her husband; his ghost appears not as a vengeful spirit, but instead as the ghost of a man who was reluctant to forgo human comforts upon death. Ghost stories have a significant place in Japanese culture, but Oshima's ghost differs in its benign motives. As Oshima is quoted as saying in Tony Rayns' essay for the film's Criterion release, "[T]he ghost in EMPIRE OF PASSION is a farmer's idea of a ghost, not a samurai's." Oshima dealt with a somewhat similar motif in SENSES, as Sada Abe becomes demon-like in her escalating eroticism. Seki is also demon-like in that she seemingly doesn't age and has a mystifying effect on the younger man. However, in regards to the relationship between the films, their similarities are mostly executed through polar opposition; in the former, it's the man who's adulterous, the woman in the latter. The couple of the first film copulates without shame, while Seki and Toyoji are consumed by guilt and fear of consequence. The most outright difference is aesthetic, and it's this disparity that has received the most critical and commercial backlash. The film's French producer, Anatole Dauman, broke ties with Oshima after he discovered that Oshima had decided not to make PASSION a hard-core sex film as he did SENSES, while critics were confused by its earnest lushness. As Oshima was continually rebelling against traditional Japanese culture, he had once banned the color green from his films, claiming that it was too calming an influence and thus antithetical to his revolutionary ideals. PASSION is about nature and its many forms, and Oshima uses the environment to frame the passion and neuroses of his protagonists. The settings in SENSES are confined and artificial by design, while PASSION is sprawling and organic. Ultimately, though, the romantic relationships in the two films are the same. As Oshima said in an interview for a 1978 issue of Positif, "Just as in IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, the story is about a man and a woman who do not hesitate in aligning their daily existence with their deepest sexual urges. Nowadays, nothing interests me quite as much as approaching the various forms that love can take with people who can only be saved by that love." (1978, 106 min, 35mm) KS
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Nagisa Oshima's DEATH BY HANGING (Japanese Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 5pm and Wednesday, 7:45pm

A Korean prisoner is sentenced to death but, even after multiple attempts, no one is able to actually end his life. To complicate things further, the prisoner claims to have lost his memory; now his executioners have the challenge of making him remember his crime so they can hang him in good conscience. Such is the set-up of Nagisa Oshima's DEATH BY HANGING, one of the supreme achievements by this great provocateur of Japanese cinema. Starting with this surreal premise, Oshima dutifully follows its logic until he creates a world unlike that of any other in his career. The film reaches its peak in one lengthy sequence where the executioners--who include lawyers, politicians, and police--are forced to reenact scenes from the prisoner's impoverished upbringing so as to explain the roots of his criminal behavior. Oshima's satire here is remarkably comprehensive, touching on capital punishment, political corruption, and institutionalized racism (In the 1960s, Korean immigrants were still considered second-class citizens by much of Japan), though what may be more astonishing is how he maintains such a high degree of formal invention throughout. It may the only other comedy of the 60s comparable to Kubrick's DR STRANGELOVE, but that only hints at the greatness of this singular masterpiece. (1968, 117 min, New 35mm Print) BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.


Akira Kurosawa's THRONE OF BLOOD (Japanese Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7 and 9:15pm

Emerging, vanishing, reappearing. The horsemen gallop around in the fog, utterly lost. Nothing can be seen except for the horses, a patch of ground with a few weeds, and the steam coming from the horses' mouths. Lady Washizu vanishes as she steps into a dark room; then, soundlessly, she reappears holding a jar of saki. (And doesn't that scene bear an uncanny resemblance to the sequence in LOST HIGHWAY when Fred Madison is swallowed up by the darkened hallway?) Kurosawa uses ramparts, fog, and darkness to create an atmosphere that's both austere and spooky, helping make THRONE OF BLOOD arguably the most effective screen adaptation of Macbeth ever. The machinery of fate, its main theme, is one Kurosawa would explore again in THE BAD SLEEP WELL. Aside from its stunning black & white cinematography so much of the film's power derives from the story's slow buildup to violence, which brilliantly explodes in the famous "death by arrows" scene at the end. You can practically feel each thwack. (1957, 110 min, 35mm) RC
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.


ALSO RECOMMENDED

Errol Morris's STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (Contemporary Documentary) Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 7pm
In the early 2000s, Errol Morris turned his Interrotron (a video intermediary device he uses to interview his subjects) from people on the fringes of American society toward those whose names and likenesses are burned into our recent historical memory by violence and infamy. In 2003's FOG OF WAR, Morris thrust his shrill voice out from behind the camera at one of the Vietnam War's principal architects, Robert McNamara. Yet, even as he asks pointed questions on behalf of three generations of embittered Americans, he continually highlights his subject's best intentions and deeply human regret, demanding that his audience observe as much moral complexity and ideological ambiguity as evil in the character of the former Secretary of Defense. While Morris is often criticized for his use of lavishly cinematic re-enactments (or "impressions," as he calls them) and sweeping musical scores, his bold stylistic break with the verité tradition has arguably paved the way for the popular rise of nonfiction film in recent years. SOP may be the film most suited to his trademark approach: here, Morris revisits the infamous 2003 photos from the Abu Ghraib prison, interviewing the "few bad apples" held responsible for the abhorrent acts depicted therein and revealing hidden nuances of the military environment that helped to produce them. In providing a jarring, complex picture of what's happening outside the frame of these shocking images, seen out of context all around the world, Morris does not excuse the acts of the guilty, but widens the circle of responsibility all the way to the top. (2008, 118 min, 35mm) CL
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.


Satyajit Ray's PATHER PANCHALI (Indian Revival) Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Monday, 7pm
Perhaps the most acclaimed Bengali film, Satyajit Ray's first film PATHER PANCHALI has acquired an additional mythic status due to the difficulties of its production. The story of a Brahmin family living in intense poverty, PATHER PANCHALI ("Song of the Little Road") was shot over the course of five years with a cast of non-actors, a crew with almost no film experience, and with Ray in an almost constant struggle to find funding. The film follows the family's children, sister Durga and little brother Apu, who live out the episodes of their childhood in wide-eyed innocence. Together they chase after the candyman, or imitate the extravagances of a traveling theater company. The film's atmosphere becomes increasingly claustrophobic however, and much of this is owed to the cinematography of first-timer Subrata Mitra. As the family struggles to find income, the jungle creeps in on all sides into their decaying rural manor. The images are bleak but profoundly beautiful. Despite his struggles, Ray was desperate not to compromise the film: For the exhilarating sequence when Apu and Durga discover the train, perhaps the film's most famous image, Ray believed he could only shoot in a week-long sliver of spring when the region's white flax flowers were in bloom. PANCHALI has been a cited as a considerable influence by later directors such as Terrence Malick, Abbas Kiarostami and Wes Anderson--(Remember the overhead shot of a baby swinging in its cradle in THE DARJEELING LIMITED? Ripped straight out of Satyajit Ray). A classic story of loss and renewal in bitter circumstances, PATHER PANCHALI remains a landmark of international (and for the matter, independently produced) cinema. (1955, 115 min, 35mm) LN
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.


Rene Laloux's FANTASTIC PLANET (French Animation Revival)  Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
In this Dali-esque animation, based on the Cold War-era novel Oms en Serie (1957) by Stefan Wul, the earth is ruled by the "Draags," a giant race of blue neutered technocrats with a passion for meditation. Domestic humans known as "Oms" are the "little animals you stroke between meditations" while wild humans/Oms are hunted like cockroaches. The surreal and perilous world of FANTASTIC PLANET (originally LA PLANETE SAUVAGE) is rendered in beautiful (very 70s) cut out stop motion. Highlights include a glow-orgy induced by an aphrodisiac communion wafer and a cackling anthropomorphized Venus flytrap. The soundtrack is a near-constant synth jam that oscillates from moody and spacey to raunchy porn funk. The film was begun in Czechoslovakia but finished in France for political reasons, and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union looms over the story. Themes of repression, rebellion, and the dangers of technocracy permeate FANTASTIC PLANET. The film seems to suggest that excessive rationality can make the ruling class blind to its cruelty, but also that solidarity can flourish in the midst of persecution and degradation. (1973, 72 min, 35mm) ML
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.


John Hughes' THE BREAKFAST CLUB (Contemporary American Revival)   Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7, 9, and 11pm and Sunday, 1pm
For people of a certain age, Anthony Michael Hall's voiceover that bookends this film will forever define the only roles everyone at their high school had to play: a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. And for the brat packers who formed our ensemble cast, these labels would stick with them for the rest of their careers. Watching this film makes you recall a time when Molly Ringwald (the princess) was the Emma Stone of her day, and Emilio Estevez (the athlete) was the Zach Ephron. Both were young and cute, with girl/boy-next-door good looks, and it seemed that their careers could last forever. Hall was so good as the pressure-cooked nerd who couldn't get an A in shop class that he would spend then next decade-plus trying to show his range. Ally Sheedy (the basket case) is the exception that proves the rule, as she was able to lose that label as soon as the credits rolled. Our criminal, played by the now shaggy Judd Nelson, defined cool rebellion for the better part of a decade and is surely the highlight of the film. As John Bender, he insulted the school principal right to his face ("Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?"), hid dope in his locker (and in AMH's underwear), saw through everyone's bullshit and called them out on it, and got to make out with the prom queen. John Bender was also full of some real malice, and had the cigarette burns on his arm to show us why. Ultimately, he forced a bonding ritual on his fellow high school students, and seemed to be the life of the party. He was the hero of the film, but what is left out of the diegesis may be Hughes' most important comment of all. We know that Bender's triumphant fist pump to close the movie ("Don't you...forget about me!") is the high point of his life. At best he is destined for a crappy job in a bleak suburb, stuck in a loveless marriage with kids he can't stand. At worst he's drunk and alone, recounting how he blew his last best chance with that pretty little rich girl. Easily John Hughes' most mature effort up to that point, the film encapsulated the social structure of the white, middle-class, suburban high school experience of the 1980s. It celebrated the characters and the institutional halls they roamed, but also paid respect to their anxieties and problems, and never implied that these weren't the best years of their lives. (1985, 97 min, 35mm) JH
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.


MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS

The Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema opens on Thursday and runs through November 9 at AMC Northbrook Court (in Northbrook), with additional screenings at the Music Box (see below) on October 30 and November 6. Full schedule and more info at http://israelifilmchi.org.

From Friday through November 2, Facets presents the Chicago International Children's Film Festival. Complete details at www.cicff.org.

The Englewood International Film Festival opened October 23 and runs through Sunday. Complete details at www.eiff.org.

South Side Projections, in collaboration with Co-Prosperity Sphere (3219 S. Morgan Ave.) and co-presented by Chicago Cinema Society, present Fatal Frame: Avant-Garde Horror on 16mm on Thursday at 7pm. Screening are James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber's 1928 THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (13 min), Peggy Ahwesh's 1998 NOCTURNE (30 min), Curtis Harrington's 1949 ON THE EDGE (6 min), Maya Deren's 1943 THE WITCH'S CRADLE (12 min), and Victor Faccinto's 1978 BOOK OF THE DEAD (16 min). All 16mm.

The Conversations at the Edge series at the Gene Siskel Film Center presents Anda Korsts' Video Metropolis on Thursday at 6pm. The program will feature solo and collaborative work by video activist and maker Anda Korsts and will be followed by a roundtable with documentary filmmaker Judy Hoffman, Media Burn Archive Founder Tom Weinberg, and Executive Director Sara Chapman.

At The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) this week: the Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour is on Friday at 8pm, with festival Program Director David Dinnell in person; screening are fourteen films (all in 16mm); and on Monday at 7pm, filmmaker David Finkelstein presents his 2013 experimental feature SUGGESTIVE GESTURES (75 min, Unconfirmed Format), which is showing with two short works by Thorne Brandt and Jesse Malmed.

Chicago Filmmakers presents Fictional Distance, a program of animated short films, on Saturday at 8pm at Chicago Filmmakers (5243 N. Clark St.) and on Wednesday at 6:30pm at Columbia College Chicago's Hokin Hall (623 S. Wabash, Room 109). The program (1952-89, approx. 60 min total, 16mm) is curated by Erik Summerville and includes work by Skip Battaglia, Tony White, Norman McLaren, and others.

SAIC's Eye & Ear Clinic student group presents local filmmaker Joe Swanberg in person on Tuesday at 6pm to screen and discuss his work (work showing is not listed). It's at SAIC's MacLean Building (112 S. Michigan Ave., Room 1307). Free admission.

The Film Studies Center (Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., University of Chicago) screens Lav Diaz's 2013 Filipino film NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY (250 min, DCP Digital) on Friday at 6pm.

Chicago History Museum hosts a screening and panel discussion event titled "Chicago School Reform: Then and Now" on Tuesday at 7pm. The event features the first installment ("Chicago Schools: The Worst In The Nation?") of Kartemquin Films' new six-part documentary series The School Project and will be followed by a panel discussion hosted by journalist Carol Marin on the topic of school reform. Free admission, but RSVP required; register here: http://chicagohistory.org/planavisit/upcomingevents/the-school-project.

Park Ridge Classic Film series presents Rowland V. Lee's 1939 film SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (99 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Thursday at 7:30pm at the Pickwick Theatre (5 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge), with actor Donnie Dunagan in person. http://parkridgeclassicfilm.com

Black Cinema House (7200 S. Kimbark Ave.) screens Robert Downey, Sr.'s 1969 film PUTNEY SWOPE (85 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Sunday at 4pm. Introduced by comedian Wyatt Cenac. Free admission, but limited seating; RSVP at www.blackcinemahouse.org.

Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Lina Plioplyte's 2014 documentary ADVANCED STYLE (72 min, DCP Digital) and Doug Prey's 2013 documentary LEVITATED MASS (88 min, DCP Digital) both play for a week; Seth McClellan's 2014 film CREATIVE WRITING (67 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 8pm, Sunday at 5:30pm, and Thursday at 8:15pm, with McClellan and select cast and crew members in person at all three screenings; Steven Spielberg's 1979 film 1941 (118 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at 5pm and Tuesday at 6pm, with a lecture by Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Tuesday screening; Paola di Florio and Lisa Leeman's 2014 documentary AWAKE: THE LIFE OF YOGANANDA (87 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 7:45pm (sold out), Sunday at Noon (tickets still available as of this writing), and Wednesday at 7:30pm (sold out); and Sebastian Schipper's 1999 German film ABSOLUTE GIGANTEN (80 min, Archival 35mm Print) is on Sunday at 4:45pm and Monday at 7:45pm.

Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Janaki Vishwanathan's 2011 documentary OM OBAMA (Unconfirmed Running Time, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) is on Saturday at 3pm, with Vishwanathan in person; Dean DeBlois' 2014 animated film HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 (105 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at 7 and 9:15pm and Sunday at 3:15pm; Joseph Seiden's 1939 Yiddish film MOTL THE OPERATOR (88 min, 35mm; Free admission) is on Sunday at 7pm; John Guillermin's 1978 film DEATH ON THE NILE (140 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm; and John Landis' 1985 film INTO THE NIGHT (115 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 9:30pm.

At the Music Box Theatre this week: Alex Ross Perry's 2014 film LISTEN UP PHILIP (108 min) opens, with actor Jason Schwartzman in person at the 6 and 8:30pm Friday screenings; Alan Hicks' 2014 documentary KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON (84 min) and Nadav Schirman's 2014 documentary THE GREEN PRINCE (95 min) both continue; Avi Nesher's 2004 film TURN LEFT AT THE END OF THE WORLD (108 min; Thursday, 7pm) and his 2007 film THE SECRETS (127 min; Thursday, 9:30pm) screen as part of the Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema, with Nesher in person; and Jim Sharman's 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) and John Carpenter's 1978 film HALLOWEEN (91 min) are on Friday and Saturday at Midnight. Unconfirmed Formats except where noted.

Retrospective titles at the Logan Theatre this week: Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film THE SHINING (144 min) is on Friday-Monday at 10:30pm, and on Saturday at 11pm; Henry Selick's 2009 animated film CORALINE (100 min) is on Saturday and Sunday at Noon; Bill Melendez's 1966 animated TV special IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN (25 min) is on Sunday at 3pm as a free screening; John Carpenter's 1978 film HALLOWEEN (91 min) is on Sunday at 5pm and Thursday at 8 and 10:30pm; Sam Raimi's 1992 film ARMY OF DARKNESS (81 min) is on Monday-Wednesday at 11pm; Bernard Rose's 1992 film CANDYMAN (99 min) is on Tuesday and Wednesday at 10:30pm; and EVIL DEAD is on Thursday at 11pm, though it's not clear if it's the 1981 or 2013 version. All Digital Projection - Unconfirmed Formats.

Alliance Française (54 W. Chicago Ave.) screens Max Linder's 1922 silent comedy THE THREE MUST-GET-THERES (approx. 58 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Wednesday at 6:30pm, with live jazz accompaniment by The Bridge.

The Art Institute of Chicago (Price Auditorium) screens Fritz Lang's 1931 film M (99 min, DVD Projection) on Thursday at 6pm.

Films at Chicago Public Library locations this week: the Near North Branch (310 W. Division St.) screens Brian Helgeland's 2014 film 42: THE JACKIE ROBINSON STORY (128 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Saturday at 2pm; and Kenneth Branagh's 2011 film THOR (115 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Wednesday at 5:30pm.

The Italian Cultural Institute (500 N. Michigan Ave.) screens Dino Risi's 1966 film OPERATION SAN GENNARO (106 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Tuesday at 6pm.

The Whistler (2421 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents the Odd Obsession Foreign Film Series and Dance Party Ting on Saturday at 7pm (film) and 9pm (DJ). The film screening (Video Projection) is not listed.

The Logan Square International Film Series at Comfort Station in Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.), in collaboration with Daily Grindhouse present a double feature of a Heavy-Metal Movies Trailer Show (approx. 50 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format), featuring trailers of films covered in Mike "McBeardo" McPadden's book Heavy-Metal Movies, with McPadden in person; followed by Beverly Sebastian's 1989 film ROCKTOBER BLOOD (93 min, DVD Projection). It's all on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Free admission.

The Portage Theater presents Tom Berninger's 2013 documentary MISTAKEN FOR STRANGERS (75 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Friday at 8pm. Free admission; and Kevin Pang and Mark Helenowski's 2014 documentary FOR GRACE (Unconfirmed Running Time, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Sunday at 7pm.

 

ONGOING FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATIONS

Chicago Artists Coalition (217 N. Carpenter St.) presents HATCH Projects: No-Fi, a group exhibition featuring Lori Felker, Jesse Seay, and Sebura&Gartelmann. Curated by Erin Toale. The show includes video work by Felker. Opening Reception on Friday from 6-9pm. The show runs through November 13.

Bruce Nauman's 1987 four channel video installation Clown Torture (60 min loop) has been extended at the Art Institute of Chicago through October 26.

The Art Institute of Chicago presents Lucy McKenzie and Richard Kern's 2014 single channel video The Girl Who Followed Marple (10 min loop) beginning Thursday and running through January 18.

I Am Logan Square (2644 ½ N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents a show of horror movie posters from the collection of the Logan Theater through November 14.

 

UPDATES/CLOSURES

The Northbrook Public Library film series is on hiatus during renovations at the library. Expected completion is Spring 2015.

The Portage Theatre has resumed occasional screenings (from Blu-Ray/DVD only we believe).

As of July 2014 the Patio Theater is up for sale.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society is again on hiatus for their weekly series, with the closing of the Patio Theater. They plan to do occasional screenings as opportunities arise.

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CINE-LIST: October 24 - October 30, 2014

MANAGING EDITOR /
Patrick Friel

CONTRIBUTORS / Rob Christopher, Jason Halprin, Christy LeMaster, Mojo Lorwin, Liam Neff, Ben Sachs, Kathleen Sachs, Kyle A. Westphal, Darnell Witt

> Editorial Statement -> Contact