CRUCIAL VIEWING
Max Ophuls' CAUGHT and THE RECKLESS MOMENT (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Showtimes noted below
Max Ophuls made two films with James Mason, who may have been the director's ideal leading man in Hollywood: Few actors were more capable of marrying romanticism and wry detachment. In CAUGHT (1949, 88 min, 35mm; Friday, 6pm and Saturday, 4:45pm), Mason plays an embittered idealist working as a doctor in an impoverished city neighborhood. He's the man Barbara Bel Geddes hides out with after she flees the psychotic millionaire she married—but this being an Ophuls film, romantic satisfaction is not arrived at easily. For one thing, there's the vengeful husband lurking in the shadows; also, the doctor, though noble in his deeds, is a strict and cynical man, difficult to warm to. Though CAUGHT could be classified as film noir, its paranoid image of marriage makes it a direct descendent of the Gothic novel as well. (Nineteenth, rather than twentieth, century art usually provides more useful points of reference when discussing Ophuls, whose society-encompassing tracking shots feel like the closest filmic analogue to Balzac's prose or Delacroix's paintings.) The second Mason-Ophuls collaboration, made the same year, was THE RECKLESS MOMENT (1949, 82 min, 35mm; Saturday, 3pm and Tuesday, 6pm). Again, Ophuls took advantage of the Hollywood melodrama to expand and distort his usual theme of impossible romance—working in an Expressionist vein, so to speak, where the rest of his late films are Impressionist. THE RECKLESS MOMENT has Mason playing a blackmailer who ends up in an impassioned relationship with the woman he's blackmailing, a housewife whose family has gotten her into trouble. BS
---
More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival
Presented by Chicago Filmmakers – June 16-20, Showtimes noted below
The wonderful, exciting thing about experimental film and video is that, despite detractors’ beliefs to the contrary, it is a wide field, open to numerous interpretations and investigations. Nowhere is the gamut more apparent than at a film festival, the primary venue for most contemporary work. Whether it’s the brooding winter landscapes of ELEMENTs (Julie Murray, 2008) and NIGHT SIDE (Rebecca Meyers, 2008), the cutout animation of Lewis Klahr’s FALSE AGING (2008), or the frenetic, pulsing work of optical-printing master Pat O’Neill (HORIZONTAL BOUNDARIES, 2008), the Opening Night Program (Gene Siskel Film Center; Tuesday, 8pm) for Onion City promises to hold something for everyone. Ernie Gehr uses colored photographs from turn-of-the-century New York City to create a strobing investigation into the history that great city in NEW YORK LANTERN (2008). Local experimental musicians White/Light will be on deck to accompany the abstract, computer-generated animation DE TIJD (Bart Vegter, 2008). Two films that were not shown during the springtime retrospective of Bruce Connor, COSMIC RAY (1961) and PERMIAN STRATA (1969), will be screening. Even the godfather of art-house cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, has a minor masterpiece showing: UNE CATASTROPHE (2008). DM
---
Before the group shows begin, Onion City offers PONYTAIL (2008, 92 min, video; The Nightingale, Wednesday, 7pm) a feature length animation from Barry Doupé. You may have seen Doupé’s work at Conversations at the Edge last year or at the OC fest in 2007—if you have, you’ll likely never forget it. Doupé’s films are some of the damnedest, intriguing, cryptic, and beguiling messes you’ll ever see. According to the artist (and you’ll have to take his word for it), this work “follows several inflicted characters and recounts the ways in which they find resolve. A series of entropic scenarios held together by an attraction to failure and its spectacle describe the characters’ malfunction — their inability to fulfill personal desire.” It should also be mentioned that his work is fun and funny as hell—if you let it be. JM
---
The three works in Group Show 1 (The Nightingale; Thursday, 7pm) rotate (sometimes literally) around mediated images. Ken Jacobs’ THE SCENIC ROUTE (2008) uses his now-familiar method of twisting and strobing found images on footage from the 1933 film THE BARBARIAN. Unlike his other similar work, which attacked visual perception and politics, this work seems much gentler and melodically hypnotic. Katy Woods’ DISTANT THINGS (2006) flips and scans through thousands of microfilmed images, occasionally stopping to focus and admire. Duncan Campbell’s BERNADETTE (2008) takes the (relatively) straightforward political route with his images of Northern Irish Republican political activist Bernadette Devlin. Mixing media and points of view throughout, he creates an excellent celebratory portrait of this committed woman. Group Show 2 (The Nightingale; Thursday, 9pm) gives you a nice big dose of the old eyewash. Jim O’Rourke’s fantastic musical collaboration with videomaker Makino Takashi gives us the rhythmically beautiful nature-piece THE SEASONS (2008). Dominique Furgé’s SPIRIT (2005) plays with shape, color, and movement over a cut-up soundtrack featuring Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. The always eye-enchanting Kerry Laitala gives us another light dance with the 3D video CHROMATIC COCKTAIL (2009). Finally, newly local Joe Grimm premiers a double 16mm live projector performance called DIRTY GOGGLES OF PERCEPTION (LEFT AND RIGHT) (2009) that promises “a monolithic light/noise blast that goes literally to the limits of the senses and beyond them, provoking a confrontation with that ultimate unattainable reality: The World of Things In Themselves.” This show should be a ruckus fine time. JM
---
More info at: www.chicagofilmmakers.org/onion_fest/onion2.html.
Note: this event is programmed by C-F editor Patrick Friel.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Sergey Dvortsevoy's TULPAN (New Kazakhstani)
Music Box - Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Is it the influence of VGIK? Maybe. Moscow's legendary film school seems the likely culprit for Sergey Dvortsevoy's "sensibility," that sense of observation and organization that links him to Abderrahmane Sissako, who graduated the year before Dvortsevoy enrolled. It's a way of thinking more than an approach, this concept of an image as the "filming" of a thing or event rather than something independent and plastic. This idea of the director as a person who makes gestures—as, ultimately, an artist. Not a photographer (a person who captures and then exhibits an image), but something like a sculptor. Dvortsevoy's work up until TULPAN has been documentary and often set at the twilight border between contentment and isolation: his IN THE DARK was 40 minutes in the world of a blind knitter and BREAD DAY followed the mechanics of bread distribution in a community of destitute pensioners. TULPAN's actors seem happier than Dvortsevoy's documentary subjects; maybe that's because they're even more isolated, living not just in the shadow of a happier life, but in a world entirely their own. (2008, 100 min, 35mm) IV
---
More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS:
Chicago Filmmakers’ monthly Dyke Delicious series finishes its season with the 1998 documentary ALMA, with director Ruth Leitman in person, on Saturday.
Nearing the end of its A-Z series, the Bank of America Cinema screens Roger Corman’s X: THE X-MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES on Saturday.
Facets Cinémathèque hosts the Human Rights Watch Traveling Film Festival this week. On Saturday at midnight the “Facets Night School” series screens William Greaves’ fascinating 1968 film SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE, with Amy Boyd’s accompanying talk “The Making of a ‘Feature-length We-don't-know-what’or: How the American New Wave Birthed the Documentary Hybrid.”
Also at the Film Center this week: two design-based documentaries, MILTON GLASER: TO INFORM AND DELIGHT and REM KOOLHAAS: A KIND OF ARCHITECT, receive week long runs; THE FORCE AMONG US, about Star Wars fans of all types, plays Friday; the Sundance hit AFGHAN STAR gets a sneak-peak showing on Saturday; the local documentary LEFT FIELD shows Sunday and Monday; and five programs in the Indie Comedy series screen throughout the week.
Also at the Music Box this week: O’HORTEN is held over and EVERY LITTLE STEP continues in the matinee slot (Saturday and Sunday). The other matinee film this weekend is Michael Curtiz’s Errol Flynn adventure CAPTAIN BLOOD. The Midnight films this Friday and Saturday are the Jim Henson-David Bowie fantasy LABYRINTH and Alex Proyas’ KNOWING.
On Wednesday at the Chicago Cultural Center is George Dorobantu’s 2008 Romanian film ELEVATOR, showing in conjunction with Cinema/Chicago.
The Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema holds over Olivier Assayas’ acclaimed SUMMER HOURS for another week.
|
