CRUCIAL VIEWING
The Chicago Underground Film Festival
At the Logan Theatre – Wednesday-Sunday (June 1-5)
The Chicago Underground Film Festival opens on Wednesday and continues through June 5 at the Logan Theatre, with after parties and exhibitions at additional venues. CUFF was scheduled to honor experimental filmmaker and musician Tony Conrad this year before his passing in April. The festival will still remember the legacy of the artist with their Opening Night film, TONY CONRAD: COMPLETELY IN PRESENT (Tyler Hubby, 2016, 98 min; Wednesday, 8pm), and the following after party, which includes a performance of Conrad’s Amplified Drone Strings by Jim Becker (violin), MV Carbon (cello), and Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello). Also, on Thursday at 8:30pm, the festival presents The Magician: Tony Conrad, a selection of Conrad’s film and video work from 1966-2011, including his seminal 1966 flicker film THE FLICKER (though, sadly, all the film work is showing digitally, albeit in copies Conrad approved). Also part of the Opening Night after party is a live 16mm projector performance by Bruce McClure, whose work is, usually, a minimalist light and sound supernova—propulsive, blinding, deafening, and exhilarating. A visceral experience that cuts to the core. The shorts program Two of Wands is on Thursday at 6:30pm. See our reviews of new features by Ben Rivers and Anna Billier, which are showing on Thursday, immediately below. See next week’s list for info on the Friday-Sunday programs. PF
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Ben Rivers’ THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS (British Experimental)
Thursday, 7pm
The films of Ben Rivers are exciting reminders that the cinema is still a young medium, combining elements of narrative, experimental, and documentary filmmaking to tantalizing, unnamable results. At the same time, they feel plucked from an earlier time, as Rivers’ uncanny 16mm photography creates the impression that the films were shot years, even decades ago. THE SKY TREMBLES AND THE EARTH IS AFRAID AND THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS, the writer-director-cinematographer-editor’s second proper feature, feels particularly unstuck in time. Not only does it look like it was made in the past, but the ritualistic behavior it features invokes art from the premodern era. The movie begins as an atmospheric making-of documentary, following Spanish director Oliver Laxe as he works on a new film in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Rivers renders the settings positively alien and presents intimate details in such a way that they seem larger-than-life. (The film should be breathtaking on a big screen.) Moody sound design and music add greatly to the experience, transforming the powerful images into full-blown, explorable environments. One never gets acclimated to these spaces, in part because Rivers keeps the onscreen action mysterious throughout. About one-third of the way through, THE SKY TREMBLES switches course and makes a turn into the realm of fiction, as Laxe embarks on a strange journey with some native Moroccans he encounters during his shoot. His experience—part-dream, part-nightmare—serves as a metaphor for cinema’s power to take us to frightening new places. (2016, 95 min, 35mm) BS
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Anna Biller’s THE LOVE WITCH (New American)
Thursday, 9pm
THE LOVE WITCH is a remarkably dense pastiche, recreating elements of American melodramas, sexploitation comedies, and low-budget horror films from the 60s and early 70s with loving care and deadpan assurance. Writer-director Anna Biller (who also designed the sets and costumes) invokes Radley Metzger, Elizabeth Taylor vehicles like BUTTERFIELD 8, Stephanie Rothman’s THE VELVET VAMPIRE, George Romero’s SEASON OF THE WITCH, and likely many other cult films and filmmakers. The mise-en-scene is striking and loud, at times verging on Kenneth Anger levels of expressiveness; the sex is lurid and silly, the politics blunt and sincere; and Biller demonstrates such command over tone that even the odd pauses in the dialogue feel carefully considered. The heroine, Elaine, is a California witch living a life of leisure and looking for a man to love. While she manages to lures a number of men to her bed—employing a combination of sexual allure, magic spells, and burlesque dancing—she never lands on a lasting relationship. Part of the problem is that Elaine’s magic turns her lovers into pathetic devotees; another is that Elaine’s lovers keep dying on her. The lovers’ demises represent grotesque exaggerations of the ways in which women can feel disappointed by men; these scenes communicate a certain raw honesty that used to exist commonly in disreputable genres when filmmakers were given a high degree of creative freedom. THE LOVE WITCH is a tribute to that era and a provocation for ours, calling into question the expectations that women have of men, and vice-versa. (2016, 120 min, DCP Digital) BS
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Full schedule and more info at www.cuff.org.
Terence Davies’ SUNSET SONG (New British)
Music Box Theatre - Check Venue website for showtimes
2016 is the year of Terence vs. Terrence. Or, perhaps less confusingly, Davies vs. Malick. Both are titans of modern cinema with conspicuously long gaps in their recent filmography, and both are releasing not one, but two films this year alone. The first pairing of these films, however, couldn't be more different—or decisive. Malick's KNIGHT OF CUPS is almost a parody of his mature style, while Davies' SUNSET SONG is the fulfillment of an ever-evolving aesthetic. But to simplify the distinction, one might also say that the former film is conspicuously sexist, while the latter is ardently feminist. Malick seems to view women as mere chapter titles in a book about virile existentialism (a.k.a. pure fantasy), whereas Davies positions his female protagonist as the author of her own story. Adapted from the classic Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibson, SUNSET SONG is about a young woman, Chris Guthrie—who's unexpectedly played to perfection by one-time It Girl Agyness Deyn—as she comes of age before, during, and after World War I. Davies has been nursing this project for years (he almost made it after THE HOUSE OF MIRTH, but met inexplicable resistance from the UK Film Council), and it necessarily invites a dialogue with his other work. The figure of the tyrannical patriarch links SUNSET SONG to Davies’s 1988 breakthrough, DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES, but he’s working in a different mode here: the narrative development is more conventional, the musical digressions are less frequent, and the trademark Davies patina has given way to a bucolic grandeur. (The exteriors were shot on 65mm, while the interiors were recorded digitally; the lack of 70mm prints of SUNSET SONG is one of the scandals of the age.) “There are lovely things in the world,” laments Deyn’s Guthrie, “lovely that do not endure … and the lovelier for that.” It’s a measure of restraint that Davies, hitherto a poet of memory and reverie, leans so heavily on the tangible here; he clings to solid objects as if they were on the verge of fading away. (2015, 135 min, DCP Digital) KS/KAW
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Yasujir? Ozu’s LATE AUTUMN (Japanese Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Wednesday, 7 and 9:30pm
In his review of LATE AUTUMN for the Chicago Reader, critic Fred Camper said, “I'm not the world's biggest [Yasujir?] Ozu fan, but this late work is one of his finest.” If that endorsement isn’t enough to make you want to see it, then I don’t know what is. In all seriousness, and stated as an avid Ozu fan, Camper’s assertion is correct. A reimagining of his earlier film LATE SPRING—Ozu’s first with Setsuko Hara, who also stars in LATE AUTUMN—it’s about three middle-aged men who conspire to marry off their friend’s widow so that her daughter also feels free to marry. (LATE SPRING was about a widowed father, and Hara played the daughter role; the differences largely end there.) At times, the film almost feels dramatic, specifically when one of the older men’s lies make the daughter angry with her mother. But in traditional Ozu style, whatever tension exists is neither resolved nor even fully realized. “A director can really show what he wants without resorting to an appeal to the emotions,” he once said. “I want to make people feel without resorting to drama.” LATE AUTUMN is a fine example of this precisely because of its benign bait-and-switch; just as the aforementioned climax fades into smallness, so too does the presumed conclusion. Ozu defies convention as masterfully as he adheres to it, and this late work shows that better than anyone he could tell it. (1960, 128 min, 35mm) KS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Radu Jude's AFERIM! (New Romanian)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
Radu Jude's first two features, THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD (2009) and EVERYBODY IN OUR FAMILY (2012), are dark comedies about familial discomfort that really get under the viewer's skin. Shot in the rigorous, long-take style of the Romanian New Wave, these films evoke intense feelings of claustrophobia and social embarrassment while at the same time mining these feelings for laughs. AFERIM!, Jude's third feature, is even more intense than his previous work, although the style is somewhat different, rooted in expansive widescreen frames and a cosmic perspective on the brutality of man. The film takes place in southern Romanian backwaters in 1835, though it may as well be sometime in the Middle Ages. Most people live in squalor, ignorance is rampant, and the powerful wield their power like barbarous lords. A vain constable and his idiotic grown son are charged with capturing a runaway gypsy slave; Jude follows them on their quest, developing something like a premodern road movie in the process. The immersive settings and black-and-white widescreen cinematography evoke eastern European period epics of the 60s like ANDREI ROUBLEV, MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS, and Vlacil's MARKETA LAZAROVA and THE VALLEY OF THE BEES, while, as Jesse Cataldo noted on Slant, the gallows humor and incessant brutality recalls Aleksei German's HARD TO BE A GOD. Jude's staging of crowd is impressive, as is his poetic, aphorism-rich dialogue. (2015, 108 min, DCP Digital) BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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Jean Negulesco’s THE BEST OF EVERYTHING (American Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Sunday, 7pm
Jean Negulesco’s reputation is forever marked among a great many cinephiles by Andrew Sarris’ dismissal of his CinemaScope work as “completely worthless,” and this period would seem to embody the critic Jaime N. Christley’s recent thoughts on CinemaScope’s detrimental impact on pacing and structure—that swank American movies lost much of their snap, vigor, and hardiness of image. Though late Negulesco may have fallen into the soup of decor and languor—there is an endless list of household chores one would want to tackle before sitting through THE RAINS OF RANCHIPUR again—THE BEST OF EVERYTHING goes through its paces with a measure of style and honesty. Taken from Rona Jaffe’s splashy bestseller about three young women wending their way through the world of Manhattan book publishing, it’s a “women’s picture” right down to its cursive hot pink credit font and string-heavy (and architecturally striking) overture of a sea of put-together-on-a-budget worker bees streaming out of the subways and into Midtown streets. Some might dismiss it as a soap, with its ravishing Connecticut bedrooms and tastefully distressed bohemias, but it has a feeling for the small and large humiliations of working life and the duplicity of men. It’s a movie of its time, perched between the old school and the New Freedoms: Hope Lange’s Caroline is a quick, capable study on the job, but has to endure lectures on career and femininity from walking forehead Stephen Boyd; abortion is forthrightly mentioned, then dispensed with in a flick of a censor’s wrist; a freewheeling character ends up damned to a crazed end, trapped in corny, fright-night dutch angles. The heartbreaks and betrayals come on cue, but it’s not as much of a bill of goods as you might think. Lange and Diane Baker are bright lights, and Joan Crawford’s supporting turn is beyond expert in its wit and imperiousness. With a loose and natural Louis Jourdan, Robert Evans as a rich bastard, and Brian Aherne as a lech-and-a-half named “Shalimar” who won’t stop talking about Eugene O’Neill. (1957, 121 min, DCP Digital) JG
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Desiree Akhavan’s APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR (Contemporary American)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday 7 and 9pm and Sunday 1:30pm
Desiree Akhavan’s debut feature is the kind of film that is often referred to as “remarkably assured,” and it is certainly that, and much more: it’s exquisitely paced, worked-out, personal, and desperately funny. It’s a movie you take to heart and want to urge on friends like an obscure small press book. The cold open has a visual gag that draws you into its prickly vibe instantly, and it never lets up; its scene-by-scene juggling of tone and tension is often sublime. Akhavan herself plays Shirin, an Iranian-American bisexual left depressed after a breakup with her girlfriend and navigating her dis-ease about coming out to her family. Her encounters with every genus of Brooklynite—every alt-comedian, investment banker, and Occupy Chelsea visual artists—are delicious and come armed with a writerly shiv, but never slip into the cartoonish. The diversions into melancholy and even despair aren’t lurched into, slopped on, as happens in most indie comedies; its reach never exceeds its grasp and its grasp is ambitious. (There’s a sex scene that’s the truest and saddest in recent memory.) If Akhavan has to wait much longer to make a follow-up due to the vagaries of shortsighted financiers, it would be a damned shame; she’s a keeper. (The fine cinematography is by Chris Teague, who also shot THE MEND and OBVIOUS CHILD; he’s a keeper, too.) (2014, 86 min, DCP Digital) JG
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Matteo Garrone's TALE OF TALES (New Italian)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Check Venue website for showtimes
Like last year's WILD TALES, Matteo Garrone's TALE OF TALES is a film that revels in the art of storytelling, weaving together the parallels of four narratives that are unified in their extreme outlandishness. Unlike the accelerated pace of that film, however, Garrone's vision is intentionally meandering and dreamlike, hesitating on images such as Salma Hayek feasting on a sea creature's heart in an ivory chamber or an eccentric king's fatherly pride over a gigantic flea. These illustrations of royalty mingling with the grotesque inform Garrone's argument that madness caused by institution--a theme not far removed from his 2008 crime saga GOMORRAH. And yet, it is crucial to note that Garrone dedicates the film to his children, tellingly stating where his heart as a storyteller truly lies. If TALE OF TALES is not intended for young audiences, it shares much in common with the work of Guillermo del Toro in the way that it imaginatively evokes a youthful fascination with fantastical creatures and the otherworldly. Spinning a complex narrative involving strange twists of fate and tragedies amongst the ruling class, TALE OF TALES plays like a particularly macabre episode of Game of Thrones, with a cast including Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones, and John C. Reilly clearly amused by the challenge. (2015, 125 min, DCP Digital) EF
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg's WEINER (New Documentary)
Music Box Theatre - Check Venue website for showtimes
Has their been an American political figure in the past fifty years with a more cartoonishly inept sexual scandal than Anthony Weiner? By now his debauchery is well known to the general populous, but what about the person behind the public servant's mask he wears? WEINER seeks to answer these questions. Shot in the period following his resignation from Congress after the first wave of his sexting scandal, WEINER was destined to document his triumphant return to the political landscape as he ran for mayor of New York in 2013. Of course this didn't happen, due to a second wave of scandal that hit during the campaign. The film has a Web 2.0 aesthetic as it covers his journey towards mayorship, and presents it in the style of an Internet video, like Facebook or YouTube would, related videos included. Weiner is humanized in a way that was rarely, if ever, seen during his latest political foray. The strain forced on his relationship with his wife, Huma Abedin, following his lapses is particularly fascinating. Co-director Josh Kriegman ponders aloud to Weiner, "Why did you let me film this?" amid the climax. What started as a potential political propaganda piece slowly devolves into a witch-hunt as a man becomes a social pariah and is forced to face his previous transgressions. The film paints Weiner as a man filled with altruistic fervor, one feeling true remorse for his past and who seeks a second chance. In the end, WEINER is truly riveting and engrossing. Straddling the line between tabloid piece and memoir, it gives depth to a man who's primarily known to most Americans as a sexual despot. (2016, 96 min, DCP Digital) KC
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Jim Jarmusch's STRANGER THAN PARADISE (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm
Who is Jim Jarmusch? For many, it's a troubling question. Jarmusch is a director that everyone seems to know. It's been an accepted truth that there is a "Jarmusch style" and that his films are "all about the same things." Like most accepted truths, it's total bullshit. Jarmusch might be liked by those who think his movies are uncomplicated and low-key, but he is admired by those that realize that they are complicated and adventurous: that Jarmusch is no more "outsiders" than Melville was "crime," no more "stillness" than Ophüls was "movement," no more dialogue than Chaplin was "silence." To think of him as a traditionalist denies how much new cinema and culture his films have embraced over the years. To say that Jarmusch is "consistent" denies how much ground he's managed to cover in the last 30 years. "Jarmusch" (the omnivorous Jarmusch, the idea that exists apart from the director) begins not with PERMANENT VACATION, but with his second film, STRANGER THAN PARADISE, and its discovery of something that seems both new and completely obvious: a rigid and physical non-time, the concrete quality life takes on when you have nowhere to go and don't own a wristwatch. Without a goal, everything becomes important; walking down a street without a particular destination, you notice every building. STRANGER THAN PARADISE has an economy; the film is put together like a wedding banquet during a food shortage, every ingredient carefully rationed. It is edited together out of shot-scenes and take-moments where nothing seems to happen because things are constantly happening: every time John Lurie's razor makes it down his neck during a shave, every time he shuffles the cards, Eszter Balint takes a drag from one of her cigarettes or Richard Edson shrugs, it's an event. Introduced by film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum; showing as part of the three-part “National Society of Film Critics Presents” series. (1984, 95 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Alex Cox's REPO MAN (American Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight
Before he made Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen into the punk rock Romeo and Juliet (and incurred Johnny Rotten's lasting wrath in the process), British director Alex Cox directed this cult classic comedy about an LA punk turned car repossessor. Emilio Estevez is convincingly apathetic as the title character in his first starring role, but it's the other repo men who steal the show (particularly Harry Dean Stanton and Sy Richardson) with their grizzled looks, erratic behavior, and desperation to impart wisdom. The first half of the film has some really authentic moments, some nice surreal touches, and some great music (including a hilarious cameo by The Circle Jerks as the washed up nightclub band). The second half devolves into a more typical everything-but-the-kitchen-sink 80s romp which either is your thing or isn't, complete with the paranormal HAZMAT team from E.T. and dull witted machine gun toting mohawk sporting bad guys in the Bebop and Rocksteady mold. (1984, 92 min, 35mm) ML
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Howard Hawks' BRINGING UP BABY (American Revival)
The Northwest Chicago Film Society (at Northeastern Illinois University, The Auditorium, Building E., 3701 W. Bryn Mawr Ave.) – Tuesday, 7:30pm
A box-office flop when it was released in 1938, Howard Hawks' screwball comedy has since gained classic status. Cary Grant takes a nerdy turn as David Huxley, a klutzy paleontologist reluctantly wooed by flaky socialite Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn). The baby is, of course, a pet leopard that unwittingly brings the two together. As is typical of the genre, the pair is mismatched, the banter is rapid-fire and full of double entendres, and the plot leads to a variety of slapstick situations in WASPy locales (the Connecticut countryside). Stanley Cavell likens the structure to a "comedy of equality" in its refusal to exclusively identify either of its leads as the hero or the "active partner" in quest. There's some truth to that sense of romantic parity, but more simply, what we have here is a kooky woman relentlessly pursuing a straight-laced man. Call it the anti-KNOCKED UP. Here, love equals the triumph of the quirky and childlike over the proper and adult. Also of note: reputedly, Grant's ad-libbed line, "I just went gay all of a sudden!," is among the first filmic usages of the word in a homosexual context. Preceded by Friz Freleng’s 1950 cartoon THE LION’S BUSY (7 min, IB Technicolor 35mm print). (1938, 102 min, 35mm) MS
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More info at www.northwestchicagofilmsociety.org.
Ingmar Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL (Swedish Revival)
Music Box Theatre - Saturday and Sunday, 11:30am
Whenever I revisit THE SEVENTH SEAL, what hits me hardest isn’t the heavy symbolism or the theological discourse, but rather the material involving the traveling players. Along with the romance in SUMMER WITH MONIKA, these passages epitomize the earthiness and sensuality that course through the first decade or so of Ingmar Bergman’s filmmaking career, communicating not just fascination with but also enthusiastic love for other people. The middle-aged actor and his young wife are bright, hearty, and endearing characters; the cheery way they go about life and work provides a sharp contrast to the angst and spiritual suffering of Max von Sydow’s knight. They also serve to illuminate just what von Sydow is suffering for—that is, some feeling of contentment with being alive. The actors’ pleasure in raising a child feels timeless, no less than the knight’s struggle to understand his purpose on earth, and these recognizable experiences make the medieval setting feel intimate and knowable. (Not for nothing is THE SEVENTH SEAL one of the most popular of medieval films.) As for the stuff involving chess and Death, it’s been parodied so often as to lose some of its aesthetic power, but the questions the film raises about mortality remain ever relevant. (1957, 96 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Luchino Visconti's ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (Italian Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 4:45pm and Monday, 6:30pm
Even if he claimed to be a lifelong Communist, Count Luchino Visconti di Modrone remains cinema's definitive aristocrat. He co-invented neo-realism but abandoned it for the filmic equivalent of neoclassicism. His films about the poor are decorated with a baroque poverty (see: LE NOTTI BIANCHI): the attention to detail of someone trying to depict a culture they can't quite understand. Visconti's merits are the same as his flaws; these very tendencies could bring out the best and worst (DEATH IN VENICE) in him. What tended to do him in was tastefulness, and thankfully ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS is tasteless and the better--and freer—for it; it has neither the tastefulness of being short (it's almost three hours long), nor the tastefulness of being melancholic (its "ugly" unsentimentality is more aching than DEATH IN VENICE's longing), nor even the tastefulness to restrain Visconti's decadent fetishization of impoverished toughness. Cine-File contributor Ben Sachs once said that showing people at work was one of the most subversive things a film could do. Visconti's approach to indicating that his characters are poor is to show their threadbare clothes and harsh living conditions; he never understood that the worst thing about being working class isn't having few possessions, but the working itself. Still, what he sets out to do in ROCOO AND HIS BROTHERS is subversive in its odd, aristocratic way: to create a beggar's opera. (1960, 177 min, DCP Digital; New Restoration) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Jean-Pierre Melville's ARMY OF SHADOWS (French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3pm and Thursday, 6pm
Originally released in 1969 and poorly received, Melville's emotionally devastating film about the French Resistance has vaunted itself into film canon territory after its reevaluation and international revival in 2006. The film's intricate plot follows a band of resistance fighters struggling to survive their inexorable demise from Nazi occupation and themselves—sacrificing their humanity in the process. Anthony Lane marveled at Melville's ability to "render that fatalism not as a grind but as a source of tremulous suspense." The resisters seek to undermine the occupation while defending—sometimes harrowingly—against capture, torture, and execution. Just as frequently, however, they are quietly self-policing traitors and potential weak links with the same paranoia and brutality as the Gestapo. Filmed in color, ARMY OF SHADOWS appears almost gray, and its aesthetic stands in contrast to Melville's stylized gangster films. It is not completely removed from his oeuvre, borrowing from their pacing and quiet tone. In ARMY OF SHADOWS, there are no battles or spectacular acts of sabotage; only subversive attacks on a seemingly ever-present Nazi network. But more importantly, the paranoia the resistance fighters experience as infighting and self-protection becomes its own pervasive enemy, embodying, as Baudrillard wrote of modes of resistance, cockroaches teeming in the interstices. Melville, who served in the French Resistance, shows the heartbreaking futility of the struggle when one is attacked from both outside and in. (1969, 140 min, DCP Digital; New Restoration) BW
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Mia Hansen-Løve's EDEN (Contemporary French)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
It is a remarkable (albeit Francophilic) fact that one of the world's greatest living filmmakers—Claire Denis—and one of the world's greatest up-and-coming filmmakers—Mia Hansen-Løve—are, more-or-less, serious aficionados of club music, a relentless, ecstatic, and sometimes melancholic variety of genres which, to be honest, is poorly matched to many other emotions conventionally provoked by cinema. But like her protagonists in EDEN, Hansen-Løve has thrown caution to the wind and built an epic 21-year audiovisual mixtape around the prolonged young-adulthood of her brother, Sven Løve, a Parisian DJ whose social circle was obsessed with the soulful, vocals-heavy style of the 1980s-era Paradise Garage nightclub in New York (located around the corner from Film Forum). Her staging thrives in the events' thresholds--in those tunnels and stairways of echoing (and frequently Chicago-manufactured) basslines, spaces sometimes more memorable than the parties themselves—for those were the corporeal and mundane passages through which an apolitical generation in Europe and England found a temporary transcendence. But radically, EDEN's story is told less through plot and dialogue than in the gospel-influenced lyrics of the wall-to-wall soundtrack, stylistically constrained to express love, heartbreak, isolation, and communion. The addresser and addressee of these songs, once representing a choir speaking to god, comes to represent the voice of a lover to another; or from dancer to anonymous dancer; or from the DJ to the dance floor. "Follow me, where we can be free"; "Let's get close, closer than close"; "I'm trying to hold on to your love"; "One more time, one more time, one more time, one more time." (2014, 131 min, DCP Digital) MC
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Deniz Gamze Ergüven's MUSTANG (New French)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Saturday, 7 and 9pm and Sunday, 3:30pm
Five orphaned teenage sisters have just finished their day at school at the beginning of summer and spend the afternoon innocently playing at the beach with some boys. Their interactions are witnessed by a concerned neighbor who views their actions as salacious. Upon returning home, they are punished by their grandmother and uncle who brand them as 'whores.' The girls' home becomes more and more prison-like as they are subjugated to training from their elder relatives so that they all can be arranged for marriage. MUSTANG is a coming of age tale about repression and loss of innocence. Deniz Gamze Ergüven's film plays out like criminals being transferred from a minimum-security prison to a medium-security prison and finally to a maximum-security one. Being forced to wear "shit-colored dresses," having bars installed on the windows, and adding higher walls to the perimeter of the house--the girls literally become prisoners in their own home. The symbolism is not subtle, but is effective in demonstrating Ergüven's point of what happens when freedom is stripped. The five female leads have a dynamic chemistry on screen that makes it feel like they really are sisters, aided by their naturalistic dialogue. Themes of sexual awakening and purity are deftly explored as Ergüven avoids the explicit and relies instead on implied off-camera scenes. It's rare to find a film willing to address these subjects as they pertain to women of these ages. Ergüven's change of tone from light-hearted sisterly moments to the morose is impressive given some of the heavier subject material covered in the film's second half. Reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, MUSTANG is a bold directorial feature debut on the transition from adolescence to womanhood. (2015, 97 min, DCP Digital) KC
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Mel Brooks' BLAZING SADDLES (American Revival)
The Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) – Wednesday, 1 and 7:30pm [Free Admission]
Is there any other director alive who's mastered the spoof film as an art film like Mel Brooks has? A black man named Bart (Cleavon Little) is appointed sheriff of Rock Ridge under the guise that the entire town will be so displeased that they'll all pack up and move away so that the devious Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman) can snatch their land to become rich. Brooks' essential western-comedy BLAZING SADDLES is rife with parody in every scene. Whether it's a group of railroad workers tricking their overseers into singing ridiculous renditions of Southern spirituals or the entire production of BLAZING SADDLES itself spilling across the Warner Brothers lot and into a Dom DeLuise-directed musical, the film's comedic style is a blending of satire, misdirection, and the eccentric. Brooks' take on racial tensions is the key theme in the film. Bart is stereotypically cool and suave while the townspeople are moronic and racist. Through Bugs Bunny-esque hijinks, Bart is able to sway the citizens to his side. Humor is Brooks' way of bringing opposing sides together. While 1970s racial biases are present (Brooks' scene dressed as a Native American Chief comes to mind), BLAZING SADDLES is very deliberately self-conscious of its era. A few subtle jabs are taken at Hollywood, and the shot that zooms out to show the studio is pure genius. BLAZING SADDLES' legacy is long lasting and its lesson on how to do parody in film is rarely matched. (1974, 93 min, 35mm) KC
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More info at www.northbrook.info/events/film.
Perry Henzell's THE HARDER THEY COME (Jamaican Revival)
Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm
Too often dismissed as "that Jimmy Cliff film," it might be overlooked that this 1972 slum-gangster flick cum star-vehicle was the first feature to be made in Jamaica by Jamaicans, and is a heck of a smart story. Loosely based on the true story of Rhygin, a '50s era outlaw folk hero, alongside elements taken from Cliff's own life, the film mixes pop and politics to capture the emerging identity of the post-colonial Caribbean nation and the structural struggles that its people faced. Violent and self-reflexive, the scenes of destitute poverty in the Kingston slums stand in contrast to the pockets of wealth where Ivan (Jimmy Cliff) begs for work upon his arrival from the country. Finding no opportunities, the plight of many in the third world is captured as Cliff digs through the garbage at Kingston's landfill alongside real people who were scavenging for their daily subsistence. He turns to a preacher in the ghetto for help, and is offered employment, but not respect. This affords the subplot containing high-energy scenes of a poor Baptist congregation, its choir singing and dancing with palpable emotion so real it's hard to discern the actors from the extras. Wearing out his welcome with the preacher, Ivan leaves and gets the chance to cut a record, only to find out that he has to sign away the rights if he wants it released. His exploitation almost complete, he takes a job trafficking marijuana, and becomes an outlaw. Just as his song is starting to get radio play, he shoots a cop and as he goes on the lamb. He tries to flee the country, but the film hurtles towards a finale where the hero will be gunned down before he can escape the cycle of poverty for a shot in the US. The movie also features a soundtrack that's a who's who of the Reggae world (sans Bob Marley) and served as a primary vehicle for the worldwide popularization the music. A fitting film for an art that was itself a social and political movement. Though not particularly well received upon its release, THE HARDER THEY COME has aged well, and remains a benchmark in post-colonial cinema. Showing as part of the periodic “Sound Opinions” series. (1972, 120 min, Unconfirmed Format) JH
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) presents AFA Highlights from Charlotte Moorman's Avant Garde Festivals on Friday at 7pm, with Anthology Film Archives’ archivist John Klacsmann in person. Screening are: Robert Breer’s BLAZES (1961, 3 min, 35mm blow up), Francis Lee’s LE BIJOU (1943, 7 min), David Brooks’ LETTER TO DH IN PARIS (1967, 4 min), Hollis Frampton’s SURFACE TENSION (1968, 10 min), Piero Heliczer’s JOAN OF ARC (1967, 12 min), Storm De Hirsh’s CHARLOTTE MOORMAN'S AVANT-GARDE FESITVAL #9 (1972, 10 min), Amy Greenfield’s ENCOUNTER (1968, 10 min, Digital File), and Jud Yalkut and Nam June Paik’s VIDEOTAPE STUDY NO. 3 (1967-69, 4 min). All 16mm except where noted; and the audio-only work LISTEN, my heart, to the whispers of the world ... is on Thursday at 7pm. This curated work is described as a “collection of audio compositions reflecting on the soundscape of the Indian subcontinent.” Free admission.
The Arts Club of Chicago (201 East Ontario St.) screens Sharon Lockhart’s film RUDZIENKO () on Thursday at 6:30pm. Introduced by local filmmaker Melika Bass. Free admission. The screening is in conjunction with Lockhart’s show currently on display at the Arts Club; RUDZIENKO is included in that as a two channel video installation (see INSTALLATIONS below).
The Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) screens Harun Farocki's four-part experimental documentary PARALLEL I-IV (2012-14, 43 min, Digital Projection) on Friday at 7pm. The screening takes place at the Logan Center for the Arts (915 E. 60th St.). Free admission.
Black World Cinema screens Menelik Shabazz’s 2015 film LOOKING FOR LOVE (117 min, Video Projection – Unconfirmed Format) on Thursday at 7pm at the Chatham 14 Theaters (210 W. 87th St.). http://blackworldcinema.net/blog/
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Julie Delpy’s 2015 French film LOLO (99 min, DCP Digital) plays for a week; Matt Sobel’s 2015 film TAKE ME TO THE RIVER (84 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday at 8:30pm, Sunday at 5:30pm and Wednesday at 8:15pm; and Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1959 film TWO MEN IN MANHATTAN (84 min, DCP Digital; New Restoration) is on Saturday at 5:45pm and Tuesday at 6pm.
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: Michael Ramova’s 2015 film PANTEON WOODS (75 min, Blu-Ray Projection) is on Saturday at 5pm; Roberto Gavaldón’s 1960 Mexican film MACARIO (91 min, 35mm) is on Tuesday at 7pm; and Martin McDonagh’s 2008 film IN BRUGES (107 min, 35mm) is on Thursday at 9:45pm.
Also at the Music Box Theatre this week: Jeremy Saulnier's 2016 film GREEN ROOM (94 min, DCP Digital) is on Friday and Saturday at 10:45pm; and Ben Wheatley's 2015 film HIGH-RISE (119 min, DCP Digital) is on Sunday at 11:30am.
Facets Cinémathèque plays Sebastian Ko’s 2015 German film WE MONSTERS (95 min, Unconfirmed Format) for a week-long run; and Ciro Guerra’s 2015 Colombian/Argentinean/Venezuelan film EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (125 min, Unconfirmed Format) plays Saturday-Thursday.
Chicago Cultural Center hosts the Cinema/Chicago screening of Andrzej Jakimowski’s 2007 Polish film TRICKS (95 min, Video Projection – Unconfirmed Format) on Wednesday at 6:30pm. Free admission.
ONGOING FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
The exhibition Kartemquin Films: 50 Years of Democracy Through Documentary is on view at Expo 72 (72 E. Randolph St.) through August 20. The exhibit will include film stills, documents, cameras, and other material related to the organization’s history, and new items will be added through the show’s run. More info and a list of scheduled gallery talks at www.ktq50.org/exhibit.
The Arts Club of Chicago (201 East Ontario St.) presents the exhibition Sharon Lockhart Rudzienko though August 13. The show includes Lockhart’s newest film RUDZIENKO (2016, two channel video installation), along with related photographic work.
Scottish artist Luke Fowler has an exhibition of work at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium (5701 S. Woodlawn Ave.). The show runs through July 1. Included are Fowler’s 2016 film FOR CHRISTIAN and his 2009 film series TENEMENT FILMS.
The Art Institute of Chicago presents Dennis Oppenheim: Projections through June 12. On view are three slide-projection works: 2000’ SHADOW PROJECTION (1972), GROUND GEL #2 (1972), and POLARITIES (1972).
