CRUCIAL VIEWING
Mariano Pensotti's CINEASTAS (FILMMAKERS) (Film-Related Live Theater)
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago - Thursday, February 26 through Mar 1 (Check Venue website for performance times)
As the death knell for celluloid continues to ring, debates persist over what counts as cinema. Many purists (with whom this writer expresses solidarity) will profess that the medium hinges on the infallible ontology of the photographic image, but as Jean-Luc Godard recently reminded us with GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3-D, part of what sets cinema apart from other art forms is that is boasts its own grammar, syntax, and vocabulary (irrespective of format). CINEASTAS (FILMMAKERS), a "filmic drama" by Argentine avant-garde theatre virtuoso Mariano Pensotti, plays with the language of cinema by translating techniques like flashback, montage, cross-cutting, and voice-over for the stage. A meta meditation on filmmaking, the play centers on several groups of film crews colliding in Buenos Aires. Using a two-level stage often illuminated with contrasting colors (picture a giant Mark Rothko painting), film shoots play out on the bottom, while personal dramas transpire on the top. Similar to Godard's TOUT VA BIEN, which employs a similar dollhouse-style aesthetic, CINEASTAS straddles the line between life and art, theatre and cinema. The performance is in Spanish with English subtitles. (2014, approx 105 min, Live Theater Performance) HS
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More info at www.mcachicago.org.
Tomm Moore's SONG OF THE SEA (New Animation)
Music Box Theatre - Check venue website for showtimes
Since the release of Walt Disney's 1937 masterpiece SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS as one of the first animated feature length films, animation has come a long way. From cut-outs to cel shading to stop motion to CGI, the medium has evolved greatly. In this current era, traditional animation techniques are now eschewed for CGI due to its stylistic appearance, rapid production, and overall flexibility. Tomm Moore's SONG OF THE SEA is a throwback to the hand drawn Golden Age of Animation of Disney and others. An Irish folk tale that has a timeless feel and would fit well in any era, it is one of the most visually stunning animated films ever made. To be frank, gorgeous is an understatement for how breathtaking this movie is to behold. Every cel is a labor of love. Full of eye-popping spiral, circular, and fractal images, Moore's film is one to be experienced on the big screen in order to completely absorb his intoxicating efforts. Hayao Miyazaki, famous for MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO and SPIRITED AWAY among many others, is indisputably the greatest living master of hand drawn animation, and his influences are on full display in Moore's film with a couple slight nods to boot. After his previous 2009 work, THE SECRET OF KELLS, Moore has improved upon his skills in every way, from his refined characters to his rich and vibrant storytelling to his graceful art design. Moore is staking a claim as the next great animation auteur with SONG. If and when Miyazaki decides to retire for good and actually means it, audiences can rest assured that the torch is being passed into capable hands. One can only hope that his career is just as long and prosperous. (2014, 93 min, DCP Digital) KC
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.org.
Göran Hugo Olsson's CONCERNING VIOLENCE (New Documentary)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 3:15pm, Tuesday, 8pm, Thursday, 8:15pm
The structure of CONCERNING VIOLENCE is simple enough. After a straightforward introduction given by world-renowned cultural theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the film is divided into nine "chapters" in which Swedish director Göran Hugo Olsson combines newly discovered archival footage with text from Frantz Fanon's 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. The text appears on screen and is also narrated by singer Lauryn Hill, giving it a spoken word effect that highlights the passionate lyricism of Fanon's discourse. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Olsson said that three of his influences for the film were Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW, "the use of graphics in Jean-Luc Godard's films," and the music video for Prince's Sign o' the Times, the combination of which is a perfect summation of the film's intended effect. The 16mm footage being used with Fanon's text was found in the Swedish Television archives, and as per Olsson, "Sweden's unique position, as being officially neutral but also materially supportive of the [African National Congress], made it possible for filmmakers and journalists to create unique and stunning images from this time when history was at a pivotal point." The result of the film's unencumbered formalism and its use of archival footage shot from a specific point of view is a new "take" on Fanon's treatise, which is one that simultaneously educates and reminds the audience of its importance. (2014, 78 min, DCP Digital) KS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
John Akomfrah's THE STUART HALL PROJECT (Contemporary Documentary)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Thursday, 7pm (Free Admission)
John Akomfrah's 2009 film THE NINE MUSES is structured similarly to Homer's epic poem The Odyssey, and the subject of his latest feature-length essay film, THE STUART HALL PROJECT, cites the work, along with Joyce's Ulysses, as inspiration for his intellectual pursuits. A shared passion for the epic poem is just one among the many similarities shared by Akomfrah and the subject of the latter film, Jamaican-born cultural theorist and famed public intellectual Stuart Hall. Akomfrah uses a similar epic-like structure to depict both Hall's life and career and the primary focuses of Hall's cultural studies through artfully assembled archival footage. Barring a few establishing shots, the film is comprised solely of said footage, including many of Hall's television and radio appearances. What little narrative linearity exists in the film is set to the sounds of Miles Davis, whose music is beloved by Akomfrah and Hall alike. Much like Davis, Akomfrah relies on improvisation to cull together his visual melodies. Ironically, his use of Davis' music as a marker for time adds significant structural meaning to the two free-flowing art forms that Akomfrah is using to depict the temporality of Hall's personal and professional lives. In 2012, Akomfrah exhibited a multi-layered installation called "The Unfinished Conversation," also about Hall. Akomfrah has said that the exhibition was about how the audience views Hall, while this latest film is about how Hall views his audience--the world at large. Hall passed away on February 10, 2014, but the journey he forged is one of those that's best never completed, and Akomfrah makes no effort to do so. (2013, 103 min, DCP Digital) KS
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Daniel Nearing's HOGTOWN (New American)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, Monday, and Wednesday, 8pm and Saturday, 8:15pm
The pleasures of Daniel Nearing's 2010 film CHICAGO HEIGHTS (now known as LAST SOUL ON A SUMMER NIGHT) were many, but primary among them was its inspired re-imagining of the central concept of the source material--Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio--in a radically different medium. Through high-contrast black and white cinematography, scenes that flickered and disappeared like transient memories, and the conceit of having his characters speak their interior monologues as well as the words of an omniscient narrator, Nearing accomplished something that was both resolutely literary and resolutely cinematic, "faithful" to the source material (if that's your thing) but an entirely new creation. His follow-up feature, HOGTOWN, is a sprawling expansion of the palette and themes of the earlier film into a story that's ostensibly about a black detective's search for a missing white man in the months surrounding the race riots of 1919. But from its Dickensian opening monologue, HOGTOWN announces that it's about bigger things--indeed, the history of race relations in Chicago for the past hundred-odd years, the history of nonwhite Chicago demanding justice from white Chicago. Thus Sanghoon Lee's camera captures a Chicago that's mostly that of the 21st century, from its iconic skyline to the economic devastation in many black and Latino neighborhoods--and thus Nearing's theme of a black man searching for his own human dignity resonates still, reinforced by the murders of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and so many others. The stylistic flourishes that characterized CHICAGO HEIGHTS are elaborated on here: characters voice their motivations in both the first and third person, as dialog and as voiceover; floating blocks of text double as subtitles and intertitles while becoming part of the visual landscape. Traditional scene structure is nearly nonexistent; the film is composed predominantly of very brief vignettes, sometimes single shots, that are gone before we can really digest them. "Remember this" is the refrain, but the film constantly reminds us of the deficiencies of memory. Nearing's style is personal, cerebral, and demanding of a great deal of attention, even patience, but it's worth the investment. Director Daniel Nearing in person at all screenings, and cast and crew members in person at select screenings. (2014, 113 min, DCP Digital) MWP
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Thom Andersen's LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (Documentary/Essay Film Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Friday, 6:30pm and Tuesday, 6pm
With his sweeping cine-essay LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, film teacher cum director Thom Andersen showed us how Hollywood slandered its local geography, including its economic and racial hills and valleys. He employed countless clips of major motion pictures filmed in "the most photographed city in the world" like a reader would use underlines, highlights, and scribbles. Essentially, we are given the teacher's notes. We learn that Hollywood teaches us that those who live in L.A. live on the beach or on top of hills; that you always drive, even if you're going to your neighbor's house; that non-whites are threatening and live on the fringes of civilized society. Then, we learn that this is all a lie. That the "real" people of L.A. walk. They are not white. They don't live in luxury. Their numbers are greater than their on-screen counterparts. They even have movies to show for it: BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, KILLER OF SHEEP, THE EXILES. Today the story continues, except now whites are second to Latinos in population numbers, there is a black president, and economic status has replaced skin color as being the major point of contention. The film not only encourages you to continue this history in your head, but to broaden that history. SAIC Professor Daniel Eisenberg lectures at the Tuesday screening. (2003, 169 min, DCP Digital; New Digital Remaster) KH
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Jean-Luc Godard's WEEKEND (French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm
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.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Eric Saks' CREOSOTE & James Herbert's CANTICO (Experimental Revival)
Chicago Filmmakers at Loyola University (Damen Student Union Cinema, 6511 N. Sheridan Rd.) - Sunday, 7pm (Free Admission)
Eric Saks' 1997 video CREOSOTE is a striking evocation of loss, memory, and religious themes, and perhaps even more resonant now than when it came out. It's a cryptic, elusive work about a young Scout who goes missing in the desert ten years earlier. Bones are discovered, confirmed as the boy's. But what happened? Saks' experimental narrative fills in the story--sort of. The tale seems straightforward, but Saks' narrative construction and visual style opens the work up to uncertainty. The events of the video are doubly presented: as on-screen text and via voice-over narration; but they don't always match, sometimes off only in minor syntax, but at other times more substantially. Similarly, Saks' visuals are dense and layered (lots of superimposition) and float from style to style--live images, animated still photos, other forms of animation, miniature sets. It's a work that is difficult to "see" and, by implication, difficult to "know." It's a hallucinatory work, a mysterious and mystical one that is beautiful in its collage-like black and white imagery and mesmerizing in its incantatory tone. It's a lo-fi work (Saks only has it available on VHS!) that anticipated the onslaught of digital glut and the increasing difficulty in discerning meaning in the online dead-zone. A ghost cinema returned to haunt us anew. Showing with Athens, Georgia experimental filmmaker James Herbert's 1982 film CANTICO (35 min, 16mm). (1997, 42 min, VHS Projection) PF
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More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
Alfred Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7, 9, and 11pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
Adapted by Frederick Knott from his play of the same name, DIAL M FOR MURDER stars an exceptional Ray Milland as Tony Wendice, a retired tennis pro who decides to murder his wife, Margot (Grace Kelly), after he finds out she is cheating on him. Similar to LIFEBOAT (1944), ROPE (1948), and REAR WINDOW (1954), Hitchcock contains the drama of the film in a single set--the cramped living room of Tony and Margot's London apartment. Enclosing the few characters and their audience in this unhappy couple's living room, Hitchcock creates the film's suspense through our inherent claustrophobia. The small room often forces the characters close together; Hitchcock captures their faces in close-ups, revealing how they look at each other and how much those looks betray. Sometimes they purposely turn their backs to others and/or to the camera in fear of being caught. No one can escape from this room and the interrogation of gazes inside it. While Hitchcock's camera focuses on Tony, Margot, and the supporting characters, it gives equal attention to the couple's things, particularly a key, letter, and telephone. The film and its murder plot hinge on these objects, and Hitchcock fills them with dread; he shoots them in close-ups similar to those that frame his actors' faces. Sometimes the characters see the objects, but often they are not so lucky; Tony and Margot's knowledge of the very small, but complex world in which they live rests in their very things. In his wondrous HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (1988-1998), Godard described Hitchcock as a poete maudit whose life's work pivoted on the role of the object. Through objects, which override the conventions of narrative and logic, Hitchcock became "the greatest creator of forms of the twentieth century...it is forms which tell us, finally, what there is at the bottom of things." DIAL M FOR MURDER is a great investigation into the prison of claustrophobia and the objects such fear leaves in its wake. (1954, 105 min, 35mm) CW
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Ana Lily Amirpour's A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (New American)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Venue website for showtimes
Distributor Kino/Lorber has cannily but misleadingly marketed A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT as the "first Iranian vampire western." The film's writer/director, Ana Lily Amirpour, was born in London to Iranian parents and raised in America; it was shot in Bakersfield, California (standing in for a fictional Iranian ghost town named "Bad City"); the cast consists almost entirely of Persian-American actors speaking Farsi; and, aside from a stray spaghetti-western-inflected song or two on the diegetic-heavy soundtrack, the movie bears almost no relationship whatsoever to the western genre. It would be more accurate to describe this stylishly crafted, auspicious debut feature as an adult version of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN--a poignant love story about the coming together of two lonely souls, one of whom just happens to be a vampire. The fact that the titular bloodsucker is a hijab-wearing young woman (the excellent Sheila Vand) who only preys on "bad men" has drawn both political and feminist allegorical readings from critics, although this is arguably giving too much credit to a film whose substance is primarily to be found in its surface pleasures. Still, what a surface. Amirpour and director of photography Lyle Vincent weave a potent alchemical magic with their high-contrast black-and-white cinematography--Amirpour's almost exclusive focus on nighttime exteriors in weird industrial locations (i.e., Bakersfield's oil refineries, factories, and railroad yards) recalls the nightmarish atmosphere of her hero David Lynch's ERASERHEAD but, combined with her impeccable taste in pop-music cues, creates a dreamy/druggy vibe that is both entrancing and wholly her own. It's probably too early to tell whether the movie's weaker second half is the result of Amirpour's failure to build narrative momentum or a byproduct of the fact that her true talents may lie outside the realm of traditional storytelling altogether; A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT's single best moment is a non-sequitur involving a drag-queen dancing with a balloon. In this startling non-narrative sequence, the charm of the choreography between performer and balloon is almost perfectly matched by the charm of the choreography between camera and performer. (2014, 99 min, DCP Digital) MGS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Jennifer Kent's THE BABADOOK (New Australian)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Saturday, 7 and 9pm and Sunday, 3:45pm
The modern horror film, as a whole, seems to have been divided into two distinct groups. On one hand, there are the CGI driven, jump-scare saturated exploits that most movie studios pump out purely for cheap thrills and a quick buck, and on the other, and much more rarely, there are those that entrust in strong storytelling, a building of tension, and promoting a sense of dread until the audience can barely stand it anymore without peeking through their fingers. THE BABADOOK falls into the latter of these categories. "If it's in a look. Or in a book. You can't get rid of the Babadook." These are the beginning lines of the demonic children's storybook, Mister Babadook, presented in Jennifer Kent's horrifying film. As unsettling as David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE and as claustrophobic as Roman Polanski's REPULSION, Kent's directorial feature debut is a much needed adrenaline shot to the arm of the horror genre; a film that owes more to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Mario Bava, and Dario Argento than to the recent trend towards torture porn. Relying on a monochromatic color scheme that ranges from ashen white to ghastly black, Kent creates an ever present sense of terror as a widowed mother and her son are forced to confront and battle the malevolent and mysterious Babadook in a slow descent into psychological torment. (2014, 94 min, DCP Digital) KC
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Cine-File contributor Michael Glover Smith has co-authored a new book with Adam Selzer on the early years of filmmaking in Chicago: Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry. The Official Book Release Party is at Transistor Chicago (3441 N. Broadway) on Saturday at 8pm. It will include a talk, book signing, and the screening of four Chicago-made silent short films, AN AWFUL SKATE: OR, THE HOBO ON ROLLERS (1907 Ben Turpin comedy directed by Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson), THE ROLLER SKATE CRAZE (1907, Selig Company), FROM THE SUBMERGED (1912, Theodore Wharton), and HIS NEW JOB (1915, Charles Chaplin), which will be live-scored by Labratio Hamslap on the saxophone. Digital Projection. Free admission.
The Conversations at the Edge series at the Gene Siskel Film Center presents Rebecca Baron: Detour de Force, with Baron in person, on Thursday at 6pm. Baron screens DETOUR DE FORCE (2014) along with selections from her collaborative series with Douglas Goodwin, LOSSLESS. (2008-14, approx. 70 min total, DCP and Digital Projection)
Gallery 400 (400 S. Peoria, UIC) screens David France's 2012 documentary HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE (110 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Tuesday at 6pm. Followed by a discussion. Free admission.
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) presents the conceptual not-screening event Cinema by Other Means: New Words on Saturday at 8pm. Image-makers Lyra Hill, Andy Roche, Claire Arctander, Blair Bogin, Andrew Rosinski will do readings and/or performances and/or something else instead; and on Wednesday at 7pm, it's Other Provocations: A Benefit for Joe Gibbons, The Nightingale's iteration of around-the-country benefit screenings of work by experimental filmmaker Joe Gibbons, whose risk-taking performative blending or his real life and his art life (which often transgresses the law in different ways) has caught up with him as he was arrested earlier this year for bank robbery (which his was videotaping, of course). Admission is donation-based, and all monies will be donated to a fund set up to aid Gibbons with legal fees and living costs.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents Black Radical Imagination, curated by Erin Christovale and Amir George, on Sunday at 5pm. Screening are Terence Nance's SWIMMING IN YOUR SKIN AGAIN (2015, 25 min), Mati Diop's ATLANTIQUES (2009, 15 min), and Loretta Fahrenholz's DITCH PLAINS (2013, 29 min). Digital and Video Projection; and on Tuesday at 6pm, local filmmaker Adebukola Bodunrin and local chamber music group Fifth House present a live multi-media performance inspired by Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). Free admission with museum admission (free admission for Illinois residents on Tuesdays).
The Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) screens Kenny Young's 2014 documentary THEY DON'T GIVE A DAMN: THE STORY OF THE FAILED CHICAGO PROJECTS (105 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 7pm at the Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.). Followed by a panel discussion with the source book's author Dr. Dorothy Appiah, director Young and other of the filmmakers, Audrey Petty (University of Illinois), and moderated by U of C professor Jacqueline Stewart. Free admission.
The screening series The Spectacle presents a show on Wednesday at 7pm at Columbia College (Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash Ave., 8th Floor). The all-local lineup includes TACOS DE LENGUA by Ross Kenyon, MENDING PINOCCHIO by Alicia Estes, MAY GOD FORGIVE by Jeff Simpson, WEDGIE by Taylor Russ, WAKE UP by Erin Babbin, BEADS II by Andrew Rosinski, EZ OUT by Jacob Toarmina, MEN WORKING by Serena Fath, and CHERRY TIME by Dorian Electra and Weston Getto Allen. Approx. 68 min total. Digital Projection - Unconfirmed Format). Free admission.
Black World Cinema at the Studio Movie Grill Chatham 14 (210 W. 87th St.) presents New Voices New Visions - Sci-Fi & Horror Shorts on Thursday at 7pm. Screening are DANGER WORD (Luchina Fisher, 2014), TOUCH (Shola Amoo, 2013), ROBOTS OF BRIXTON (Kibwe Tavares, 2011), PUMZI KENYA (Wanuri Kahiu, 2009), EXO (Christopher Adams and Hana "Blaq" Mitchell, 2014), BAR STAR CITY (Trailer) (Ytasha L. Womack, 2015), TELESCOPE (no info listed), AFRONAUTS (Cristina De Middel, 2014), THE SIM (no director listed, 2014), THE ABANDON (Keith Josef Adkins, 2012), and CROSSOVER (no director listed, 2012). Approx. 90 min total. Video Projection - Unconfirmed Formats. http://blackworldcinema.net/blog/
Black Cinema House (7200 S. Kimbark Ave.) screens Darren Grant's 2002 film DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN (116 min, DVD Projection) on Friday at 7pm. Free admission, but limited seating: RSVP at www.blackcinemahouse.org.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: the multi-director (Jean-Luc-Godard, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, etc.) 1967 documentary/essay/agitprop film FAR FROM VIETNAM (115 min, DCP Digital; New Restoration) is on Saturday at 5pm and Monday at 6pm; Daniel Nearing's 2009 film CHICAGO HEIGHTS (67 min, HDCam Video) is on Saturday at 6:30pm, with Nearing and various cast and crew members in person; and Payman Haghani's 2013 Iranian film 316 (72 min, DCP Digital) is on Saturday at 5pm and Sunday at 2pm.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (121 min, 35mm) is on Sunday at 7pm; Jacques Doillon's 2003 film RAJA (112 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 7pm; Adam McKay's 2004 film ANCHORMAN: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY (94 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm; Federico Fellini's 1976 film CASANOVA (185 min, 35mm) is on Wednesday at 7pm; Frank Darabont's 1994 film THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (142 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 7pm; and Michael Lindsay-Hogg's 1977 film NASTY HABITS (96 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 10pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's 2014 film TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (95 min) continues; Andrey Zvyagintsev's 2014 Russian film LEVIATHAN (140 min) continues with screenings at 7pm only on Friday-Monday and Wednesday; Victor Heerman's 1930 Marx Brothers' comedy ANIMAL CRACKERS (97 min, 35mm) is on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30am; The 2015 Oscar Nominated Documentary Shorts screen this weekend (Program A is on Saturday at 11:30am; Program B is on Saturday at 1:15pm); Lance Edmands' 2013 film BLUEBIRD (90 min) is on Tuesday at 7:30pm in the New York Film Critics series; Tsuneo Kobayashi's 2013 Japanese animation THE LAST: NARUTO THE MOVIE (1120 min) is at 5:30pm Friday-Sunday and at Midnight on Saturday and Sunday; Tommy Wiseau's 2003 film THE ROOM (99 min, 35mm) is on Friday at Midnight; and Jim Sharman's 1975 film THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (100 min, 35mm) is on Saturday at Midnight. Unconfirmed formats except where noted.
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: Thomas Allen Harris' 2014 documentary THROUGH A LENS DARKLY (92 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 7pm, with Deborah Willis, who wrote the book it's inspired by, in person. Free admission; and on Saturday at 2pm, Athina Rachel Tsangari's 2012 film THE CAPSULE (35 min, DCP) screens, with Tsangari in person. Also showing is her 2013 short 24 FRAMES PER CENTURY (3 min). Free admission.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Denis Côté's 2014 documentary JOY OF MAN'S DESIRING (70 min, Unconfirmed Format) for a week's run.
Chicago Filmmakers presents An Evening with Lesbian Filmmakers: Chicago's Own TelloFilms on Saturday at 4pm at Doc Films (University of Chicago).
The Chicago Cultural Center screens Llewellyn Smith's 2014 documentary AMERICAN DENIAL (Unconfirmed Running Time, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Saturday at 2pm. Free admission.
The Italian Cultural Institute (500 N. Michigan Ave.) screens Edoardo Winspeare's 2014 film QUIET BLISS (127 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Tuesday at 6pm. Free admission.
The Goethe-Institut Chicago (150 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 200) screens Peter Heller's 2012 documentary SWEET POISON - AID AS BUSINESS (92 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Thursday at 6pm. Free admission, but RSVP required: email info@chicago.goethe.org or call (312) 263-0472.
ONGOING FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer's HD video installation Muster (Rushes) (2012). On view February 21 to July 26.
David Weinberg Photography (300 W. Superior St., Suite 203) continues the exhibition Try Youth As Youth, which includes an installation version of Tirtza Even's NATURAL LIFE, plus work by Steve Davis, Steve Liss, and Richard Ross. Runs through May 8.
Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) continues Kate McQuillen's multi-media installation Old Flame through February 22. The installation is viewable only from the outside of the building, through the windows.
Threewalls (119 N. Peoria St., Suite 2C) continues Jaime Davidovich: Outreach 1974-1984 through March 21. The exhibition, which features video and television work by the Argentinean artist, is comprised of three programs of work, which will rotate over the course of the show; check http://three-walls.org for the schedule.
Melika Bass' solo exhibition The Latest Sun Is Sinking Fast, an immersive multi-channel video and sound installation, continues through April 19 at the Hyde Park Art Center.
Gallery 400 (400 S. Peoria, UIC) continues the exhibition Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen through March 14.
Anri Sala's 2003 digital video installation Mixed Behavior (8 min loop) runs through March 1 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
UPDATES/CLOSURES
Chicago Public Library screenings: Due to the frequency of late-additions (past our deadlines) and to their frequent inability (due to licensing restrictions) of publicly listing the titles of films they are screening, we will no longer be listing specific CPL screenings. Check their website for any films that may be showing.
The Patio Theater and the Portage Theater calendars have been confusing and constantly shifting--adding and removing events with little notice--and reportedly have been unexpectedly closed for scheduled events. We will no longer attempt to list any screenings there.
The Northbrook Public Library film series is on hiatus during renovations at the library. Expected completion is Spring 2015.
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.
