CRUCIAL VIEWING

Robert Wise's THE SET-UP (American Revival/Special Event)
Music Box Theatre - Sunday, Noon
Yes: it unfolds in "real time." But that's only one of the remarkable things about this film. Clockface cutaways aside, this is a doggedly human-level story about prisons. Borderline seedy hotels, nondescript hotel bars, drab and dirty streets, smelly locker rooms, and vast arenas that somehow still seem confining. As if Antonioni had made a boxing movie. In many films of its ilk, the artificiality of THE SET-UP's blatantly soundstage-bound settings would make the narrative feel fake. But here, perhaps in part because of the pointed restrictions of the "real time" structure, Wise creates a palpable feeling of claustrophobia. The ceilings always feel too low, the rooms too small. No matter where he is, Stoker is hemmed in on all sides, a captive not only of the ring but also of all the people in his life and their unceasing demands on him. A former boxer himself, Robert Ryan magnificently depicts Stoker's battered dignity as well as (ending aside) his doomed future. The film's bleakness was unmatched until Rod Serling riffed on the plot for his own TV drama REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT. The adapted feature film's performance by Anthony Quinn was undeniably inspired by Ryan's here. A post-screening discussion will feature Matthew Hoffman of Park Ridge Classic Film; Lisa Ryan, the actor's daughter; and J.R. Jones, film editor for the Chicago Reader and author of the new biography The Lives of Robert Ryan. Copies of Jones' book will be available for sale. (1949, 72 min, 35mm) RC
---
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.org.

Joanna Arnow's I HATE MYSELF :) and BAD AT DANCING (New Experimental/Documentary)
Beguiled Cinema and The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) - Sunday, 7pm
Director Joanna Arnow begins I HATE MYSELF :) (2013, 56 min, Digital Projection) by interviewing her parents on the front steps of their home. Her mother, exasperated over the premise (or is it promise?) of her daughter's film diary pleads to the camera, "Do you see Michael Moore making a film about his personal life?" The answer, which hardly seems relevant to a director like Arnow, is of course not--although the mind reels at a hatted Moore plaintively asking lovers in handheld interviews: 'Why don't you love me?' and 'Do you have sex with me because I'm pretty?' The ostensible question I HATE MYSELF :) seeks to answer--although a grander agenda addressing issues of shame, personal agency, white liberal guilt, and relationship dynamics reveals itself as the doc unfolds--is whether Arnow's boyfriend James is a good person to be dating. Of course in order for such an onanistic premise to sustain a 56-minute feature, James must be a particularly confounding brand of difficult. Enter James Browning Kepple, a boozy open-mic poet/provocateur and a walking anti-commercial for OkCupid. Kepple is a spiritual cross between Andy Kaufman, Lester Bangs, and a YouTube comment board; a generous description which no doubt would bring an impish smile to his face. Kepple is frequently filmed holding forth in a local Harlem dive on matters related to freedom of speech, whether or not Jews control the media, and whether white folks should be able to use the N-word. James Browning Kepple owns a fedora. Lest you think I'm being cruel, the doc demands that we recoil at Kepple. The premise of Arnow's work depends on Kepple fulfilling the premise of his. At first we marvel that this boor has managed to impose himself on Arnow, the mild-mannered victim. But as the doc progresses and the artifice of Arnow's process begins to intrude, it becomes clear that she is in surgical control over the proceedings. By the end of I HATE MYSELF :), it's clear one of Arnow's parting pleas to Kepple, "Please, you promised me, you said you would help me make an end to my film," isn't an appeal for mutual "I love yous," but rather a dare and this couple's special brand of foreplay. Arnow's more recent short, BAD AT DANCING (2015, 11 min, Digital Projection) won a Silver Bear Jury Prize at this year's Berlinale and trades in the hand-held doc aesthetic for a more sleek and scripted black-and-white one. It also seems like a logical continuation of I HATE MYSELF :) as Arnow plays a more affectless, adrift version of herself to great comic effect. Joanna is a boundary-less 20-something; a listless character who's something of a send-up of the coming of age protagonist grappling with what it all means. She compulsively interrupts her roommate and her roommate's boyfriend (Eleanora Pienta and Keith Poulson) mid-coitus and violates any number of other social norms to deadpan lines such as, "I lost my creativity, my sexuality, and my sense of humor all at exactly the same time, and I don't know what to do." It's this sense of humor and audacity that distinguishes Arnow's cinema, and while often painful to watch it's honesty and intelligence make it impossible to ignore. Skype Q&A with Arnow after the screening. JS
---
More info at www.nightingalecinema.org.

Hippies Doing Things and Other Treasures from the Back Room (Experimental Revival)
Chicago Filmmakers and Comfort Film at Comfort Station Logan Square (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.) - Wednesday, 7pm (Free Admission)
This expertly-culled collection of shorts from the archives at Chicago Filmmakers is a grab bag of nudie reels, agit-prop, and pseudo-narrative weirdness made roughly between 1968 and 1976. The highlights of the program are three shorts made by Thomas Baum, today a very successful screenwriter, and Dennis Lo, both then working in advertising for NBC. THE CATMAN IN HIS OWN RECOLLECTION OF THE PRIMAL SCENE begins with a comic scene of personal grooming as two people preen themselves elaborately prior to sex. The woman is shot dispassionately, the man salaciously, including an off-putting close up of his undulating penis only barely restrained by thin, white briefs. After a title announcing "25 years later," the titular Catman screeches to a crowd, in howling, aching stutters, about how as a small child he watched his parents making love, all while the film re-enacts the Catman's story with the adult actor playing the infant's role. It is a disturbing, terrible thing to see, the past portrayed as a jocular romp only to be revisited as trauma. In KANSAS CITY GORK, a double amputee with grotesque hooks for hands is admitted to a hospital for gas pains only to be seduced, perhaps only in his own imagination, by his nurse. The close-ups of his hooks fondling her breasts in congress with the intricate use of an X-ray machine makes its tone gloriously ambiguous. COME DANCE WITH ME clearly takes inspiration from Bruce Conner's great BREAKAWAY. To the strains of "Paperback Writer," Baum and Lo choreograph a dense montage of found footage, pictures of celebrities, speeding city traffic, and frenetic nightclub dancers. The film is colorful, terrifying, and wonderful, a mysterious blend of alarming and arousing that asks what kind of power the written word can have in a world dominated by rhythm, image, and stardom. In marked contrast to the Baum & Lo shorts, UNCLE, by Kiku Tara, from 1976, is a quiet, stop-motion meditation on personal history and family, filled with cut-outs from Chinese-language newspapers, hand-colored and animated. Lovely and hypnotic in its rhythms, UNCLE movingly explores the filmmaker's own genealogy, transmuted into mythic terms. An untitled film from the same year, by Linda Sen, a painter in Woodridge, is a remarkable, beautiful short composed of multiple superimposed layers of flowers, clouds, and forests in snow. The images play off one another in counterpoint, producing violent collisions of meaning, color, and shape. Sen has scratched the film throughout, hand-manipulating it post-photographically to produce alienating hints of lightning, of auras, of life bleeding through the murky overlays. Finally, RAGA DOLL, unsigned, is a dance film of luscious gracelessness, challenging and deliberately drained of eroticism. Extreme close-ups of a naked woman's wildly dancing body, with changing patterns of color projected upon it, are rapidly cut together to a percussive, thumping soundtrack, interrupted constantly by electronically-generated tones, bleeps and bloops that disrupt and interfere with any passive pleasure that such imagery might normally evoke. The explosions of color and the sensuality of the woman's movements are so at odds with the music that the film seems at first a mistake, but its expert strangeness is surely no accident. Also screening in the program are DANCING LIGHTS, an abstract film by Dan Schneider, TSCHIKAGO, an anti-Daley political agitation, and THE VIBRANT NUDE, by H. J. Roman, a work of artful smut. (Circa 1968-76, approx. 90 min total, 16mm) KB
---
More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.

Buster Keaton Shorts (Silent American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Friday, 7pm
In 1920, after appearing in fourteen shorts under the direction of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Buster Keaton was given his own production unit by Arbuckle's producer, Joseph M. Schneck. His first independent production with such newfound freedom was THE HIGH SIGN (1920/21, 21 min, 35mm), a film that he tried to disown upon its completion but has since found a smattering of ardent admirers (among them Jim Jarmusch and this critic). More than the other two films in the program, THE HIGH SIGN follows a concerted narrative logic that's virtually free of frustrating non-sequiturs. (Ironically enough, Keaton was dissatisfied with the film because Arbuckle loved it, causing Keaton to wonder if it was too heavy on gags and scant on plot.) The film opens with this poetic pronouncement: "Our Hero came from Nowhere--he wasn't going Anywhere and got kicked off Somewhere." Keaton's Hero then begins working at a shooting gallery only to end up being pursued for employment by both a villainous gang and their target. Despite his reservations over the film, the plot flows smoothly and is actually quite realistic in the context of Keaton's oft-surreal alternate universe. That's not to say realism is necessary in this world, but one could argue that the comedy of Keaton's ill-fated everyman is more effective when the premise is even vaguely believable. NEIGHBORS (1920, 18 min, 35mm) has a Romeo-and-Juliet construct that takes advantage of the star-crossed lovers as a means for hijinks rather than heartache. In addition to starring Virginia Fox in the first of many collaborations with Keaton, it also stars his father and features The Flying Escalantes, a group of acrobats who assist with the film's zany stunts. COPS (1922, 18 min, 35mm) is similar to THE HIGH SIGN with carelessness and criminal intent being seemingly one and the same. After he's rejected by his would-be wife, Keaton tries to better his luck by buying a pile of furniture and selling it on the street. Of course, nothing is what it seems, and he soon finds himself being pursued by an entire police force after he uses an errant bomb to light a cigarette. Many refer to the film as being Kafkaesque in nature, and some even speculate that it was a response to Arbuckle's infamous legal woes. Regardless of the film's intent, its chase scenes are veritable examples of movie magic. All three two-reelers were co-directed by Edward F. Cline, whom Keaton worked with on most of his famed '20s shorts. Live accompaniment by Jay Warren. KS
---
More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.

Orson Welles' MACBETH (American Revival) 
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7 and 9pm
The story behind the filming of Orson Welles' MACBETH could be a theatrical drama (or perhaps a farce) in and of itself; shot in just twenty-three days with cheap rented costumes and sets leftover from studio westerns, it should be more Ed Wood than Shakespeare. But the end result only hardly reveals the haphazard production, and the residual chaos adds an ambience that solidifies it as being "a perfect cross between Wuthering Heights and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN." Having previously mounted a production of the Scottish Play at just twenty years old (his famed Voodoo Macbeth), Welles took as many liberties with the film version as he did on stage, except instead of casting it with all African-American actors, he opted to change some of the key elements that make Macbeth a revered paradigm. While such edits would typically be ascribed to artistic license, Welles is perhaps the only director of whom it could be said that any deliberate changes were likely made from a place of artistic equality. It's ambitious in both vision and execution, but while Welles had much of the former, he had little with which to succeed at the latter. The version being shown is the UCLA Film & Television Archive restoration from 1980, complete with affected Scottish accents and another two reels that Republic Pictures had Welles cut for the 1950 re-release. (1948, 107 min, Restored Archival 35mm Print) KS
---
More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

ALSO RECOMMENDED

Jessica Hausner's AMOUR FOU (New German)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Check Venue website for showtimes
Most period films try to convince us that the past was just like the present: that people in earlier eras had the same feelings, the same hopes and fears, the same ideas about romance and spirituality that we do today--only they expressed those things while wearing different-looking clothing amid different-looking settings. Austrian writer/director Jessica Hausner (LOURDES) takes the opposite approach in the thrilling AMOUR FOU, positing early-18th century Berlin as a landscape as unfamiliar as that of futuristic science fiction. The film centers on Heinrich Von Kleist (Christian Friedel), a young German poet and dramatist, and his quest to find a suitable woman to accompany him in a suicide pact. After being rebuffed by his cousin Marie (Sandra Huller), he turns his attentions to Henriette (Birte Schnoeink), a friend's wife who believes she is dying of a terminal illness. The real-life Kleist authored THE MARQUIS VON O, Eric Rohmer's film adaptation of which would appear to provide Hausner's primary cinematic model here: her camera is always static and the performers deliver their monotone lines reading while frequently remaining perfectly still. These tableaux-like shots, which feature broad planes of color and exquisite natural lighting, are astonishing in their painterly beauty, but it is ultimately the way Hausner's mise-en-scene combines with her sharp original screenplay that immerses viewers in her compelling vision of the Romantic Age: ancient political debates among aristocratic characters (about taxation for all, and the dangerous influence of French-style democracy on Germany) in the most meticulously art-directed interiors imaginable make this portrait of a vanished way of life feel both compelling as social commentary as well as wonderfully, aesthetically strange. (2014, 96 min, DCP Digital) MGS
---
More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Hayao Miyazaki's THE WIND RISES (Japanese Animation Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 6pm
Legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki brought down the curtain on an estimable career when he announced that THE WIND RISES, a biopic of aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi and his first film aimed squarely at an adult audience, would also be his last. As seen by Miyazaki, Jiro's life plays out against a moving backdrop of 20th century Japanese history, including such key events as the 1923 Kanto earthquake, the tuberculosis epidemic (represented by Jiro's doomed romance with his sickly wife Nahoko) and, of course, World War II. This latter aspect engendered controversy when some among the left in Japan condemned Miyazaki's refusal to condemn Jiro for designing fighter planes during the war (though the fact that the film simultaneously alienated Japanese conservatives for being "anti-Japanese" is surely an indication that he was doing something right). Miyazaki instead chooses to portray Jiro as an apolitical dreamer caught in the jaws of history; the way the character's fantasy life is placed on the same plane as reality--as evidenced by his repeated encounters with his hero, a famous Italian engineer--results in something mature, beautiful and profound, and adds up to a kind of self-portrait on the part of the director. Also, if you want to know why good old-fashioned hand-drawn animation is aesthetically superior to its digital counterpart, look no further than here: the painstaking work required to produce Miyazaki's breathtaking 2-D images lends the film a human touch--and consequently a sense of warmth--that the digital behemoths of Hollywood cannot match. Everything about THE WIND RISES feels handcrafted and deeply satisfying--like a good craft beer. Note: the version screening at the Siskel Center will feature the original Japanese dialogue with English subtitles. (2013, 126 min, DCP Digital) MGS
---
More info at www. www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Carl Th. Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (Silent French Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Thursday, 7pm
Praised effusively upon its release by critics who instantly regarded it as a belated vindication for the whole art of cinema (do seek out Harry Alan Potamkin's review), THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC was also recognized as the capstone of an expiring medium. This is a proudly silent movie, one that integrates the intertitle into its rhythm better and more comprehensively than any other example I can name. (Astonishingly, rather than interrupting the flow of Dreyer's breakneck montage, the titles actually serve as graphic punctuation.) It's also a perverse one--stripped down to essentials, focusing on faces even though Dreyer's investors paid for enormous and authentic sets barely glimpsed in the finished film. When we see a man in very modern-looking glasses in the final sequences, this possible anachronism registers as something else: Dreyer and Falconetti have truly created a living Joan, larger than liturgy and beatification and indeed, larger than her own time. The film itself was not so lucky. Its original cut lost in a fire, with a subsequent recut lost in another fire, PASSION played for many years in a version cobbled together from outtakes. (Appropriately enough, an original print of the first Danish version turned up in a mental hospital in the 1980s.) Now cited by Sight and Sound as one of the ten greatest films ever made, it may be difficult to treat PASSION as the radical film that it is. Live musical accompaniment by David Drazin. (1928, 82 min, 35mm) KAW
---
More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.

Max Ophuls' LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre - Saturday, Noon
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN deserves to be considered alongside Max Ophuls' final French masterpieces (LA RONDE through LOLA MONTES), with which it shares extended tracking shots, romantic nostalgia for turn-of-the-century Europe, and a profound understanding of human affairs. The film takes its title and structure from a letter received by an aging concert pianist/playboy that recounts a bourgeois girl's lifelong infatuation with him; in an inspired Ophulsian irony, he hardly remembers their one-night fling from years before. In the words of Judy Bloch, "Lisa's life is like the carnival ride that takes the couple, on their only night together, through the countries of Europe, a fantasy of movement that is really a circular stasis, propelled by a bemused pedaler/director." This may be so, but to characterize Ophuls as simply bemused fails to capture the full power of his art: Few filmmakers have been able to suggest such genuine euphoria amidst obvious recreation. (Vincente Minnelli is another.) No matter how compromised Ophuls' characters are revealed to be, the sheer beauty of his form--which can suggest both architecture and choreography--always finds value in their passion. (1948, 90 min, 16mm) BS
---
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.

Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT (American/British Revival) 
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 7 and 10pm and Sunday, 1:30pm
More than a decade removed from its initial release we're finally beginning to understand Kubrick's final film, which is set in a facsimile of contemporary New York but heeding closely to the psychology and sexual mores of the 1924 novella on which it is based. This discrepancy sparked incurious outrage in 1999--particularly among writers in the New York Times, who actually seemed offended by the lack of realism--but it's come to resonate as one of the deepest mysteries of the director's monumental career. For Martin Scorsese, who placed the film in his top five for the entire decade, it's about New York as it appears in a dream. "And as with all dreams," he wrote, "you never know precisely when you've entered it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off. Things appear to happen as if they were preordained, sometimes in a strange rhythm from which it's impossible to escape. Audiences really had no preparation for a dream movie that didn't announce itself as such, without the usual signals--hovering mists, people appearing and disappearing at will or floating off the ground. Like Rossellini's VOYAGE IN ITALY, another film severely misunderstood in its time, EYES WIDE SHUT takes a couple on a harrowing journey, at the end of which they're left clinging to each other. Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And they both end tentatively, yet hopefully. Honestly." Kubrick arrived at this combination of mystery and exposure through singular working methods unlikely to be repeated in a major film. Reportedly the longest shoot in movie history, Kubrick spent weeks on individual scenes, running actors through conversations until they were no longer conscious of performing. He had pursued this sort of marathon process before--most notably on THE SHINING and FULL METAL JACKET--but never on material so explicitly psychological. As a result, even superstars like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (giving their finest performances as a wealthy married couple) seem unfamiliar and strangely vulnerable. But EYES WIDE SHUT is only truly unsettling on contemplation: on the surface, it's one of Kubrick's funniest (with some of the most eccentric supporting performances in anything he made after THE KILLING) and most luminous, capturing the allure of Manhattan in winter with remarkably simple lighting arrangements. (1999, 159 min, 35mm) BS
---
More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (New Belgian)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Saturday, 7 and 9pm and Sunday, 4:30pm
The most masterful film of 2014 was also the quietest. The Dardenne Brother's latest is a characteristically nuanced portrait of a young mother recovering from a bout of severe depression. Steadily regaining her strength and ready to return to work, Sandra (Marion Cotillard) is told that to keep her job she must convince her coworkers to vote to save her and lose their bonus. It seems an act of supreme cruelty that a woman who can barely bring herself to get out of bed should be forced to persuade others to sacrifice so that she can return to life, and her greatest battle is not to convince her coworkers but to summon the strength to try. Her campaign provides a window into the lives of the men and women she works with. We see their homes, their families, their weekend lives. They're a diverse group, but they occupy the same economic position--not dire, but precarious. Their reactions are telling--guilt, anger, reluctant yeses and apologetic nos. There may be a right choice--solidarity over self interest, but the Dardennes resist easy moralizing, and their main indictment seems to be of the system which forces such a choice. It's hard to imagine any other director with a soft enough touch to keep the material from edging into melodrama, but its that restraint and precision which makes the film so effective. Their control is matched by that of Cotillard whose performance as Sandra is powerful without overpowering. "But they're right. I don't exist. I'm nothing. Nothing at all" Sandra says to her husband before collapsing on the floor. It's hard to read without cringing, but in Cotillard's hands it feels honest, real (unnervingly so.) So much rests upon Cotillard's performance. She is so fragile, so often on the verge of tears, that her moments of triumph, however small or short lived, are truly moving. TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT is a film that does so many things so well and so quietly. It's at once a study of depression, of family dynamics, of community and of an inhumane and exploitative economic system. But perhaps most excitingly, it's a convincing work of realism that's much more hopeful than it is grim. (2014, 96 min, DCP Digital) EJC
---
More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.

John MacLean's SLOW WEST (New British)
Music Box Theatre - Check Venue website for showtimes
While early reviews have been positive for this auspicious debut by Scottish musician-turned-filmmaker John MacLean (who set the film in 19th-century America but shot it in New Zealand), most have also erroneously described it as an "absurdist" or "psychedelic" western, with some even likening it to Jim Jarmusch's DEAD MAN. Despite a few revisionist elements, SLOW WEST is more or less a classic western by a writer/director who clearly has a thorough knowledge of--and love for--the genre's history and conventions; the plot follows a 16-year-old Scottish kid named Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as he traverses the American west in search of his heart's desire, a beautiful lass named Rose (Caren Pistorious) who was forced to flee her home country along with her father (John McCann) after a tragic event for which Jay feels responsible. Along the way, Jay teams up with Silas (Michael Fassbender, doing a credible Clint Eastwood impersonation complete with half-smoked cheroot permanently wedged in the corner of his mouth), a gunslinger who agrees to accompany Jay through hostile territory in exchange for money. What Silas knows and Jay doesn't, however, is that there are also bounties on the heads of Rose and her father, and Jay is leading Silas directly to them. SLOW WEST is dark, violent, claustrophobic, and pessimistic but these qualities are also thankfully leavened by MacLean's singular gift for humorous sight gags--such as the moment Jay and Silas stumble across the corpse of a man who died chopping down a tree, Jay's innovative method of drying soaking-wet clothes or, best of all, a flashback sequence involving an outlaw criticizing his partner for being jealous of his "wanted" poster. MacLean's preference for visual articulation even extends to a lovely grace note in the film's final scene where a character nails a horseshoe to a living-room wall--a symbolic image that captures the notion of the "settling of the west" as succinctly and cleverly as George O'Brien's use of a wagon wheel as ornamentation on the gate of his new home at the end of John Ford's silent masterpiece THREE BAD MEN. (2015, 84 min, DCP Digital) MGS
---
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.org.

MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS

South Side Projections presents Stop Making Nonsense: Japanese Surrealist Films on Thursday at 7pm at Co-Prosperity Sphere (3219 S. Morgan). Screening are Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's COMPLEXE (1964, 15 min, 16mm), Motoharu Jonouchi's POU POU (1960, 22 min, 16mm), Takahiko Iimura's AI [LOVE] (1962, 10 min, 16mm), and Nobuhiko Ôbayashi and Kazutomo Fujino's AN EATER (1963, 24 min, 16mm). Free admission.

The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) and the Chicago Film Archives present In Search Of... on Saturday at 7pm. The program features three episodes of the television series In Search Of..., hosted by Leonard Nimoy. Showing are UFOS (1976, 24 min, 16mm), THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE (1976, 24 min, 16mm), and LIFE AFTER DEATH (1976, 24 min, Digital Projection).

The Museum of Contemporary Photography (600 S. Michigan Ave.) presents Video Playlist: Rashayla Marie Brown on Wednesday at 6pm, with Brown in person. The event includes "photographs, video and performance featuring a new installment of [Brown's] ongoing series The Unholy Trinity of Me, Myself, and I." Free admission.

The Spertus Institute (610 S. Michigan Ave.) screens Joseph Green and Konrad Tom's 1938 Yiddish film MAMELE (97 min, Digital Projection - Unconfirmed Format; New Restoration) on Sunday at 2pm. Followed by a talk by Lisa Rivo of The National Center for Jewish Film.

Black World Cinema at SMG Chatham 14 (210 W. 87th St.) presents African Metropolis: Six Stories from Six African Cities (2013, 92 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Thursday at 7pm. Screening are HOMECOMING (Jim Chuchu) THE CAVE (Ahmed Ghoneimy), THE LINE-UP (Folasakin Iwajomo), L'AUTRE FEMME (THE OTHER WOMAN) (Marie Ka) TO REPEL GHOSTS (Philippe Lacote), and BEREA (Vincent Moloi).

YC (2733 W. Hirsch St.) presents an "unofficial secret screening" of Punctuation Films' 2015 local feature MEATHEAD GOES HOG WILD (106 min, Digital Projection) on Thursday at 9pm.

Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Maxime Giroux's 2014 film FELIX AND MEIRA (105 min, DCP Digital) and Yann Demange's 2014 film '71 (99 min, DCP Digital) both play for a week; Eric Rohmer's 1976 film THE MARQUISE OF O (102 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 5:15pm and Wednesday at 6:15pm; and Mami Sunada's 2013 documentary THE KINGDOM OF DREAMS AND MADNESS (118 min, DCP Digital) screens on Saturday at 5:30pm and Thursday at 6pm.

Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Frank Tashlin's 1962 film IT'S ONLY MONEY (83 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 7pm; Stanley Kramer's 1965 film SHIP OF FOOLS (149 min, 35mm) is on Monday at 7pm; Frederick Wiseman's 2001 documentary DOMESTIC VIOLENCE (196 min, 16mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm; Umberto Lenzi's 1976 film ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY WEAPON (95 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 7pm; and Bill Wheatley's 2011 film KILL LIST (95 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 9:15pm.

Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Thomas Cailley's 2014 film LOVE AT FIRST FLIGHT (98 min) and Peter Coggan's 2015 film FISHING NAKED (98 min) both open; Albert Maysles' 2014 documentary IRIS (83 min) continues; Shira Piven's 2014 film WELCOME TO ME (105 min) screens Friday-Sunday at 3:20pm only; Brent E. Huffman's 2014 Kartemquin Films-produced documentary SAVING MES AYNAK (60 min) is on Tuesday at 7:30pm; and Tom Six's 2015 film THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE III (FINAL SEQUENCE) (102 min) and Noel Marshall's 1981 film ROAR (102 min, Digital Projection - Unconfirmed Format) are on Friday and Saturday at Midnight. Unconfirmed Formats, except where noted.

Facets Cinémathèque plays Ingo Haeb's 2014 German film THE CHAMBERMAID (90 min, Unconfirmed Format) for a week's run.

Park Ridge Classic Film Series at the Park Ridge Public Library (20 S. Prospect Ave., Park Ridge) screens Irving Rapper's 1941 film ONE FOOT IN HEAVEN (108 min, Video Projection - Unconfirmed Format) on Thursday at 7pm. Free admission.

The Chicago Cultural Center screens the documentary WILLIE DIXON: I AM THE BLUES (no details available) on Thursday at 6pm. Free admission.

 

ONGOING FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATIONS

 

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. Screenings resume in mid-June.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will be resuming screenings in July.