CRUCIAL VIEWING Carl Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH (Classic Revival)
Music Box – Tuesday to Thursday only (check Reader Movies for showtimes)
Carl Dreyer’s career is one of ebbs and flows, gaps and black holes. Most people know him for a handful of features he made between 1928 and 1964 (and one of those—1945’s TWO PEOPLE—is virtually unknown), but he made an equal number of features in the short span between 1920 and 1926. While THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928) and VAMPYR (1932) have maintained consistent critical regard over the years, the WWII-era DAY OF WRATH seems to have lost its place as the “late-career” masterpiece it once held in favor of the later GERTRUD. Which makes even this short-run of a new restored print particularly welcome. One of the great visionaries of cinema, he somehow managed to infuse his films with a definite style while simultaneously creating a minimal, almost austere, feeling. Their tone is always remarkable and there is always an uneasy tension at work, which provides a sense of uncertainty and power. There is a constant feeling of remove. Cine-File contributor Kalvin Henely has noted that DAY OF WRATH “feels like it was made long before cinema was invented—if you’ve ever wondered what movies might have looked like in the 1600s, Dreyer comes close to taking you there.” The story, about witch-hunts in 17th century Denmark, is a perfect vessel for Dreyer’s career-long themes of religion, passion, ecstasy, love, and faith—and the mysteries and questions they all evoke. (1943, 97 min, restored 35mm print) PF
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
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FULL BATTLE RATTLE (New Documentary)
Facets Cinémathèque – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
This may be the first Iraq documentary to garner praise for being "fabulously disorienting," but that's what J. Hoberman wrote upon its New York premiere this past July. And if his Village Voice rave review is any indication, this should be one of the more fascinating non-fiction films released this year. "A combat doc once removed from combat and twice mediated by stagecraft, FULL BATTLE RATTLE depicts simulated war in a theme-park reality. Part scripted, part improvised, the doings on a back-lot battlefield are experienced as the real thing--whether actual war movie or actual war. As suggested by its title (Army slang for 50 pounds of protective gear), FULL BATTLE RATTLE is a costume film. The set is a facsimile Iraqi village, somewhere (along with a dozen other such villages) in the National Training Center, a 1,000-square-mile chunk of the Mojave (location for countless westerns and sci-fi films), inhabited by some 1,600 role-players, mostly Iraqi refugees hired by the military and American soldiers. The latter not only play themselves but also, as coached by Hollywood actors like Carl 'Apollo Creed' Weathers, Iraqi insurgents." The film's directors, Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss, come from backgrounds as an assistant to Matthew Barney and as a Washington speechwriter, respectively. (2008, 85 min, BetaSP video) BS
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More info at www.facets.org.
Read Hoberman's full review here.
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Frank Borzage’s THE MORTAL STORM (Classic Revival)
Bank of America Cinema – Saturday, 8pm
One of Frank Borzage’s “indisputable masterpieces” (per Kent Jones’ masterful 1997 essay), THE MORTAL STORM is also one of the first Hollywood films to attack Nazism head-on, opening in the U.S. a full four months before Chaplin’s THE GREAT DICTATOR. The film chronicles a year in the life of a German professor (Frank Morgan) and his extended family, beginning as a moving portrait of family life (one of the opening scenes, of the professor receiving a career achievement award, is among the most touching in Borzage’s monumental career) and evolving into a harrowing story of how that family is destroyed by the Nazis. That the professor is Jewish but his adult stepchildren are not is one of the film’s masterstrokes, as it condemns Nazism as a crime against humanity and not merely the Jews. (It should also be noted that the filmmakers—who included two expatriate German writers, Hans Rameau and George Froeschel—took this position while the U.S. government still claimed neutrality in the European conflict.) But what makes the film endure as something more than a work of propaganda is Borzage’s bottomless feeling for human kindness, not only in his depiction of the central family, but of the love story between the professor’s stepdaughter (Margaret Sullavan) and star student (James Stewart). According to Jones, THE MORTAL STORM builds its ultimate attack on Nazism as “an enemy of love”—perhaps the greatest evil in the eyes of this great Romantic. Jones continues: “More than poverty, more than war (in the abstract), more than physical separation or even death, the phenomenon of Nazism posed a real danger to love because it threatened to overshadow and replace it with a manmade, negative paternalism. But finally even Nazism succumbs to the power of love, blown into the snowdrifts that pile up by the family home…” (1940, 100 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.cine-file.info/venues/lasalle.html.
Jones’ essay can be found here.
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ALSO RECOMMENDED
Hou Hsiao-Hsien's THREE TIMES (Contemporary Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Monday, 7pm
"Master" is the term critics use to describe filmmakers they believe share their delusion: that cinema is something that can be mastered. Enough of masters, who go in circles. For a long time there was a fear that Hou Hsiao-Hsien would become one of them. But, since the turn of the century, he has abandoned striving for being "masterful." He has branched out into new languages, new aesthetics, new generations. He has become the sort of adventurer a Fellini could never be. In THREE TIMES the first Taiwanese filmmaker to use direct sound films a silent episode (or, rather, a "mute" one), the dialogue presented via intertitles. The filmer of specific times and places, the man of distant contexts, presents a vision in which emotion traverses history and "roles" traverse "characters." Chang Chen and Shu Qi play the same two characters as three different people in three different places, all of which happen to be Taiwan, and three different times, all of which happen to be in the 20th century. It's a vivid vision of the fluidity of human experience. (2005, 135 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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Edgar Ulmer's BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER (Classic Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Sunday, 7pm
There once was a man who knew how to compose intensely using cinema's discarded debris and embarrassments: rear projection, stock footage, plywood sets, cardboard plots. Edgar Ulmer was a poet of deficiency, an artist of the low-budget. Made simultaneously with last week's paranoid THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN on the Texas State Fair Grounds, BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER is the story of a test pilot from 1960 who becomes trapped in 2024. In an underground city populated by sterile "deaf-mutes," the test pilot is imprisoned alongside a cosmonaut from 1973 and a pair of seemingly idealistic scientists from the 1990s, all of them fellow time travelers. A science fiction parable in the pulp magazine tradition and a one-act Jacobean tragedy played out against sets as vividly thin as the ones of Orson Welles' MACBETH, this is a prime introduction to Ulmer's doomed late period. (1960, 75 min, 35mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
xx Andy Warhol's IMITATION OF CHRIST (Experimental)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) – Thursday, 7pm
When most Andy Warhol films were edited, it was never abridgement, but distillation. The power of Warhol (incorrectly viewed by some as his weakness) as an organizer of filmmaking is that the ideas are so strong that they can survive in a single frame. This doesn't make the long takes redundant—instead, it reaffirms them. Every shot is sustained, not extended, and can run infinitely without compromising itself. IMITATION OF CHRIST, cut down to its current 85 minute running time from 105, which in turn was cut down from an original 8 hours, which in turn was part of the 25-hour-long ****, alternates three long color scenes—Nico reading from the titular religious text, a couple arguing in bed, and a vagrant walking the streets of San Francisco—to create Warhol's most openly (and intelligently) religious public work. (1967, 85 min, 16mm) IV
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
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Muppets, Music, and Magic - Week 4 (Retrospective)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes noted below
If the past three Sunday afternoons are any indication, the touring Jim Henson retrospective should provide the most festive screenings in town this holiday weekend, an experience children and adults can appreciate together. (Thankfully, the Film Center has made sure not to schedule any of these retro programs at the same time as POWER & PASSION: THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE ORGASM, a new documentary also playing this week.) Of particular interest of the four scheduled programs is DOG CITY & THE STORYTELLER (1987-89, appox. 90 min, BetaSP video; Friday, 4pm), episodes from lesser-known television series that Henson helped develop in the late 1980s. DOG CITY revives the world of film noir as a children’s fantasy; if childhood memories serve, it managed to capture some of the genre’s urban poetry without totally sugarcoating it. The Grimmer (in both senses of the word) series THE STORYTELLER inspired Henson to create some of his most ambitious effects to recreate Medieval folklore; while not an entire success, the series still provided an interesting showcase for Henson’s boundless curiosity in other cultures. Also screening this week are MUPPET FAIRYTALES (1971/1994, approx. 105 min, BetaSP video; Friday, 2pm & Tuesday, 6pm), a program that includes Henson’s adaptation of The Frog Prince, which abounds with the double-entendres that mark his early work; EMMET OTTER’S JUG-BAND CHRISTMAS (1977, 75 min, BetaSP video; Sunday, 2pm & Thursday, 6pm); and THE GREAT MUPPET CAPER (1981, 95 min, 35mm; Sunday, 2pm & Wednesday, 8:15pm), the Henson-directed film that pays tribute to the British humor which influenced him during his tenure of making The Muppet Show in London. Apart from the Muppets’ early Saturday Night Live appearances, this film may contain the most evidence of Henson’s cheeky side. A sample of the dialogue, between The Great Gonzo (a newspaper photographer in this film) and a tuxedoed socialite (played by Henson himself):
GONZO: Good evening, sir. Would you like me to take a picture of you and your wife there?
SOCIALITE: No, my wife is very sick.
GONZO: Then she should be home in bed.
SOCIALITE: She is home in bed.
GONZO: (embarrassed) Oh…!
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
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Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (Classic Revival)
Chicago History Museum – Thursday, 6pm
Forget CITIZEN KANE. Frank Capra's Christmas chestnut is arguably the second-most influential movie of all time, after THE WIZARD OF OZ. Why? Because its world has become our world. When politicians talk about small town America, they talk about Bedford Falls. It encapsulates our visions of the idealized American Dream (Bert the Cop, Ernie the Taxi Driver, Joe the Plumber) even as Pottersville perfectly symbolizes the greed and corruption of unfettered capitalism. As David Thomson has written, inside this movie there's a noir oozing to take over. The story's perfect balance of light and dark pointed the way towards films as disparate as DAYS OF HEAVEN, STILL LIFE and BLUE VELVET. James Stewart's George Bailey is the American Everyman: denying himself escape (shades of THE TRUMAN SHOW) in favor of family and community. Yet this weighty stuff is both enabled and camouflaged by a letter-perfect screenplay, a cast made in heaven and a genuinely touching finale. If you haven't shed a tear by the time George says, "Attaboy Clarence!" it's time to get a chest x-ray à la THE GRINCH WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS. The screening is free with a museum admission. (1947, 130 min, Video Projection) RC
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More info at www.chicagohistory.org/planavisit/upcomingevents/film.
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MORE SCREENINGS & EVENTS:
Block Cinema (Northwestern University) screens William Wyler’s 1946 classic THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (Wednesday, 7pm) in their WWII series and Maria Speth’s 2007 MADONNEN (Thursday, 8pm) in the new German cinema series.
Also showing at Doc Films this week is Juan Piquer Simón’s giallo film PIECES (Tuesday, 7pm), Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman’s AUTUMN SONATA (Wednesday, 7 and 9pm), and in the Yiddish cinema series is Edgar G. Ulmer’s YANKL DER SCHMID (THE SINGING BLACKSMITH) (Thursday, 7pm), which will be introduced by Jan Schwarz, Professor of Yiddish at the University of Chicago.
The Film Center continues its David Lean series with the 1948 Dickens adaptation OLIVER TWIST (Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm) and the rare noir MADELEINE (Saturday, 5:15pm and Monday, 6pm). Receiving weeklong runs are PASSION & POWER: THE TECHNOLOGY OF ORGASM (which is, um, a history of the electric vibrator) and KINGS OF THE EVENING, the story of an African-American man returning to his Depression-era town in Texas after being released from jail.
The Music Box has the SING-ALONG SOUND OF MUSIC Friday-Sunday this week (Let’s do the time warp… oh, sorry, wrong film). Midnight Friday and Saturday is REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA and RESERVOIR DOGS and the matinee film Saturday and Sunday is Hitchcock’s REBECCA.
The Portage seems to have become horror and monster central! Friday director Donald Glut is in person with his two films BLOOD SCARAB and DINOSAUR VALLEY GIRLS. Saturday has the triple feature of THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US, GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER, and HORROR OF DRACULA.
The Landmark Century Centre Cinema is currently playing Gus Van Sant’s biopic MILK and Danny Boyle’s SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. Opening Friday is MY NAME IS BRUCE, which is directed by Bruce Campbell and stars Bruce Campbell as Bruce Campbell (and Bruce Campbell will be in person at the 7:30 and 10:15pm shows Friday-Sunday).
The Beverly Arts Center hosts the FIRST NATIONS FILM FESTIVAL (Wednesday, 7:30pm), but there are no details on the work to be shown. |
