CINE-FILE: Cine-List

Borzage’s SONG O’ MY HEART & YOUNG AMERICANS (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Showtimes noted below
Just two weeks after the Portage's welcome revival of 7TH HEAVEN, the touring UCLA Festival of Preservation brings us two more Frank Borzage films on 35 millimeter, and fairly obscure ones at that: SONG O' MY HEART (1930, 85 min, 35mm; Monday, 6pm and Thursday, 8:15pm) and YOUNG AMERICA (1932, 71 min, 35mm; Monday, 7:45pm and Wednesday, 6pm). Following the tepid Will Rogers comedy THEY HAD TO SEE PARIS, SONG O' MY HEART was Borzage's second sound feature. The assignment was an even more challenging star vehicle, as the star in question was singer (and decidedly non-actor) John McCormick, a successful tenor from the Irish stage. In the film, McCormick plays a singer who turns his back on fame so he may return to the village of his youth and raise the orphans of his childhood sweetheart. Improbable altruism also informs the story of YOUNG AMERICA, in which pharmacist Spencer Tracy and his wife assume the charge of a juvenile delinquent after they catch him breaking into their store. As we wrote of 7TH HEAVEN, Borzage's films generally sound ludicrous when synopsized (these titles are no exception), yet he remains a major filmmaker in his steadfast loyalty to the elemental power of silent cinema style. Borzage's popularity began to wane in the early 40s—roughly the time that the first generation of moviegoers raised on sound had come of age. These two films find him at the height of his commercial success, during a period when it seems, in retrospect, that anything was possible in cinema: There was still no set vocabulary for sound filmmaking and the Hays Code of Hollywood self-censorship would not be imposed until 1933. The American films of 1929 to 1932 now seem to have come from a different country—sophisticated in subject matter while retaining the innocence of early cinema, primitive in construction yet universal in their mindset. Frank Borzage was one of the great heroes of this nation, and these films should be adequate proof of his valor. BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Jacques Tourneur’s NIGHTFALL (Classic Revival)
Bank of America Cinema – Saturday, 8pm
NIGHTFALL—it’s hard to think of a better title for Jacques Tourneur’s film. It’s as perfect for him as SUNRISE is for Murnau. The titles don’t describe the films, but rather the sensation of watching them (though really isn’t that the same thing?): Murnau’s film is full of shadows, but every minute of it seems to bring you closer to some dawn; Tourneur’s is almost free of them—it looks more like a B Western than a noir—but with every reel, the world itself seems to get darker, even as the film seems to come closer and closer to daytime. Aldo Ray is a very ordinary man trying to make a normal life out of his extraordinary circumstances—he’s both wrongfully accused and on the run from the real perpetrators, neither able prove to the police that it was a pair of bank robbers that killed his best friend and not him nor convince to the bank robbers that he doesn’t have their money. That’s the tension—our tension, our doom, really, because it isn’t Ray that is tense, or even the film. Somehow, all those feelings belong to us, to the audience, and it’s that effect that makes NIGHTFALL one of Tourneur’s most essential movies. The screening will be preceded by local filmmaker Jodie Mack’s exceptional animated short, YARD WORK IS HARD WORK (2008, 29 min, 16mm), as contented in its setting as NIGHTFALL is doomed. (1957, 78 min, 35mm). IV

Ulrich Seidl's IMPORT/EXPORT (New Austrian)
Facets Cinémathèque – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Ulrich Seidl's most famous documentaries, ANIMAL LOVE (1995) and MODELS (1999), exist in a queasy pull between compassion and disdain, transpiring in meticulously framed tableaux that betray great artistry but few emotional cues. Adding to the discomfort is that his "nonfiction" films are all clearly staged, indulging the subjects' desire to be acknowledged but refusing to grant them any overt sympathy. Seidl has been accused of exploiting his subjects (and what documentarian hasn't?); but viewed without cynicism, this divinity school drop-out seems one of the living filmmakers most actively engaged with the meaning of empathy, doggedly observing lost souls no matter how repulsive the results. IMPORT/EXPORT is Seidl's second fiction feature, but it may be the first to marry his spiritual/photographic concerns with more politicized subject matter. The film takes its structure from the disparity between eastern and western Europe in the allegedly progressive E.U. As in Faulkner's If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, two stories are told in tandem to suggest a larger geography of fragmentation: In one, a nurse from the Ukraine emigrates to Austria for better career prospects but finds herself humiliated in a series of thankless jobs, culminating at a clearly real nursing home that's a model of institutional neglect. (Glenn Kenny has criticized the film for making a freak show of the senile inhabitants here, but this is actually one of the film's most realistic flourishes: Anyone with experience in social work regularly encounters such demands of compassion that readily invite disgust.) In the second, a security guard from Austria joins his loutish stepfather as he delivers vending machines to devastated portions of the former Soviet bloc, in what may be described as a picaresque journey into hell. Seidl's grand subject here is not the varied forms of exploitation that make up contemporary life (None of the film's encounters with prostitution come as much of a surprise), but the challenge of defining one's humanity amidst them. Both stories build to hard-won epiphanies that somehow transcend politics without negating the realities that came before; and considering Seidl's power as an image-maker, it would be most difficult to erase the reality onscreen. (2007, 135 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.facets.org.

It's a sad truth that independent and underground film has all but ceased to be independent and underground FILM. The unfortunate proliferation and popularization of video has caused many contemporary filmmakers to abandon the true medium of theatrical cinema: film. Unfortunately underground works have been affected the most as evidenced by less than 10% of this year's CUFF being shot in the festival's titular format. Proving, however, that not all is lost, three shot-on-film features are thankfully present, although only one will be projected from a print. The first, Steven Staso's CELLAR (2009, 87 min, 16mm on Beta SP; Saturday, 7pm) is not only the strongest of these three films, but might be the finest narrative work present in the entire festival. Chronicling the lives of three "outsiders" living and working in New York City, Stasso beautifully interweaves a fascinating stream-of-conciseness narrative with documentary-like observations of daily life in Midtown Manhattan. The result is a sometimes disorienting, sometimes alienating, but constantly gripping portrait of class and race relations in 21st century urban America. Director Staso in person. Bob Levis' 1968 counter-culture obscurity, GOLD (1968, 91 min, 35mm on DigiBeta; Saturday, 9pm and Tuesday, 8pm) follows a group of hippies questing for gold in this low budget, though fun spirited, mix of psychedelia and pseudo-western. Famed Chicago comedian Del Close is among the cast. The most challenging and maybe the most fascinating of this year's features is Alex Ross Perry's IMPOLEX (2009, 73 minutes, 35mm; Friday, 8pm). Despite being the only feature both shot and finished on film, it has all the markings of contemporary "video excess." From it's [supposedly intentionally] disjointed narrative, to its unfocused, constantly meandering, and shaky camera-work, to the frequently incomprehensible and nonsensical stream of words (I won't go as far as to call it dialogue) that occasionally emerge from the protagonist's mouth, to the minimalist everything about the film's production design, IMPOLEX is a sprawling mess that remains fascinating all the same. IMPOLEX unconvincingly takes place in the months following WWII, as an American soldier is sent out to find a German made rocket, but soon becomes emotionally attached to the phallic piece of metal he has recovered. The film runs like a catalogue of every overused device in contemporary experimental cinema, from requisite moments of "symbolism," to dream/trance scenes, to even the ever-present talking inanimate object/creature, all nicely wrapped up by a lengthy conversation between the protagonist and his former girlfriend (in which most of what our hero says is muttered so low that, at times, it can barely be understood). Nevertheless, the whole thing is made with such sarcastic sincerity (by the way, the film presents itself as a comedy) that it’s made gripping and rather riveting as an unintentional result of its shortcomings. The product is an obvious labor of love and is a must see, if only for all the wrong reasons. Director Perry in person. JR

More info and the complete schedule at www.cuff.org.

Frank Wisbar’s STRANGLER OF THE SWAMP
and Robert Florey’s THE PREVIEW MURDER MYSTERY (Classic Revival)
Sonotheque – 6:30pm
This month’s “Cinematheque Sonotheque” program is framed as a tribute to film historian, author, teacher, collector, and programmer William K. Everson who, among other things, was an early and enthusiastic advocate for B movies. B movies were shorter, cheaper, quickly made films from the major Hollywood studios or the products of smaller independent studios (frequently referred to as Poverty Row studios). This double bill features one of each. B movies as a rule were aesthetically unremarkable (there are exceptions, of course—early films by Anthony Mann or Edgar G. Ulmer’s great DETOUR), but the two films here exhibit a high degree of imagination and style. Robert Florey had one of the strangest careers in film (the 1928 avant-garde classic THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413 – A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA, the Marx Brother’s first film THE COCONUTS, the 1932 horror classic MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE) before he settled in to B movie work and then moving to television in the 50s. THE PREVIEW MURDER MYSTERY (1936, 60 min, DVD projection) is a snappy narrative set at a movie studio and Florey makes great use of the setting, incorporating a dizzying number of fascinating camera angles. His moody lighting is reminiscent of RUE MORGUE and anticipates the heavy chiarascuro of 1940s noirs. Frank Wisbar’s STRANGLER OF THE SWAMP (1946, 59 min, DVD projection) is an excellent example that much can be made from little. Hardly a masterpiece, it is none-the-less a richly atmospheric film and a model of efficiency. The story of supernatural revenge by a wrongly executed man, it is a little brother to Val Lewton’s 1940s horror classics (CAT PEOPLE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE). Wisbar collapses space through camera movement and with a fog-enshrowded set to create a palpable sense of claustrophobia and entrapment. PF
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More info at www.sonotheque.net.

Bobcat Goldthwait's WORLD'S GREATEST DAD (New Narrative)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Haphazardly lit and edited, casually sexist, and riddled with plot holes, Bobcat Goldthwait's third feature as writer-director is also some of the most personal American filmmaking to receive a national release this year. Robin Williams (mercifully understated) plays a failed novelist teaching an unpopular high school poetry class. Divorced and lacking the respect of his colleagues, he also has to contend with an antisocial teenage son who's turned into a sexual deviant. The story hinges on a plot twist too many critics have been willing to divulge; less noted is the film's pervasive sense of self-loathing and its credible depiction of quotidian failure that marks so many adult lives. Goldthwait's best stand-up comedy hovered between shock tactics and disarming vulnerability (His material about failed relationships and alcoholism cuts closer to the bone than much serious literature on the same subjects), and WORLD'S GREATEST DAD is steeped in this sensibility. It's the rare American comedy that observes personal suffering so well that it often ceases to be funny; but unlike the work of Todd Solondz (probably the closest point of reference), Goldthwait seems to be observing it from the inside out. There's remarkably little prurience here, in spite of the sick subject matter—the implication being that Goldthwait identifies with his characters' pain too deeply to laugh at them. That the film is so hurriedly put together only makes it feel more urgent: Artless in the best sense, this is may be the closest film equivalent to Daniel Johnston's Songs of Pain. (2009, 99 min, 35mm) BS

John Cassavetes’ A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (Classic Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 7:30pm (repeats next week)
For the uninitiated, the films of John Cassavetes are at best unknown and at worst unappreciated. Marked by intimacy, chaos, and frequent awkwardness, they are populated by characters who are not from the same town as Jake LaMotta or even Harry Caul. The experience of a Cassavetes film can often hit too close to home—as when someone's mood suddenly shifts from jolly to angry, or when someone else blurts out an unprovoked insult, followed by an extended uncomfortable silence. He has a knack for allowing an actor to so fully inhabit the skin of their character that even Peter Falk somehow ceases to be Columbo. One of his finest achievements is A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE. Utilizing a crew of both professionals and students from AFI—where he was serving as "filmmaker in residence"—Cassavetes draws us into the marriage of blue collar Nick Longhetti (Peter Falk) and his wife Mabel (Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes’ real-life spouse) as she struggles with an unnamed mental illness and raising their three children. If Mabel is unstable, Nick is insecure and prone to violent outbursts. Neither of them is wired quite right, but what makes Cassavetes' approach to the story remarkable is his compassion for each of these deeply flawed, but not broken, people. Moments of real love emerge from a caress or exchanged glance; Mabel's social faux-pas are seen as simply quirks of her condition; and Nick's violence towards a co-worker is dismissed as part of a bad day. These actions are not justified; they are simply accepted by the filmmaker as part of the human condition. The main setting is a small home in Los Angeles, and the camera is often a silent child in the room, watching as the parents overreact. Close-ups dominate the mise-en-scene, with skillful hand-held shots sometimes approaching a documentary look—where the focus struggles to keep up with the action. WOMAN is a film of raw emotion laid bare; perhaps it is this intensity that continues to limit a wider appreciation of his work. (1974, 155 min, 35mm) JH
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.

Ridley Scott's ALIEN & James Cameron's ALIENS (Revival)
Music Box – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
Q: How do you know when a film is old enough to be considered a classic? A: When it's been referenced, borrowed from, and/or ripped off for at least twenty years without any signs of a let up. That's certainly true for both of these films. Ridley Scott's original ALIEN (1979/2003, 116 min “director’s cut,” 35mm) engulfs us in an atmosphere so visceral it generates an intense, palpable dread. Like every great horror movie, it's scary even when nothing's happening. It was released two years after ERASERHEAD, which uses darkness and ominous sound design to similar effect. It would be a stretch to conclude any sort of direct lineage; yet, something was clearly in the air. And aliens aside, what other movie has ever brought together a cast that includes Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright and Harry Dean Stanton? In James Cameron's follow-up, ALIENS (1986, 137 min, 35mm), except for Weaver and Lance Henriksen's android, the cast is (literally) expendable. The eerie atmosphere of the first installment is reduced to, well, atmosphere. It's merely a backdrop for expertly staged, high-octane action sequences. Instead of disquieting anticipation we get direct injections of adrenalin. The approach is completely different but the result is every bit as riveting. They're best seen as two halves of a whole (and just forget the pointless sequels: ALIEN3 and ALIEN RESURRECTION). RC
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.

Experimental x 3
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Films by Roger Beebe (Experimental)
SAIC (112 S. Michigan, Rm. MC1307) – Friday, 4:30pm
The student-run Eye and Ear Clinic series presents Gainesville, FL, experimental film one-man-band (filmmaker, teacher, film festival founder and programmer, video store owner, etc.) Roger Beebe in person with an assortment of multi-projector film works. E&E writes: “Among other films, Beebe will present a retooled two-projector version of his well-known STRIP MALL TRILOGY; MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING, an elaborate three-projector meditation on Las Vegas; and the eight-projector magnum opus LAST LIGHT OF A DYING STAR. Made and projected in a variety of formats (video, 16mm, and super-8mm), the films combine found footage and Beebe's own striking imagery of American landscapes, seen through the prism of technological change.”
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More on Beebe here.
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SAIC Undergraduate Film and Video Festival 2009
Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 12pm
A program of short experimental, animated, and narrative works showcasing undergraduates at the School of the Art Institute. Beth Capper, programmer of the event and Cine-File contributor, writes: “Early explorations in any artistic medium can yield unique results, and some of the works presented in the festival are by students making their very first films. Many of these films and videos evoke the promise of things to come, while others demonstrate startling originality for such young film and video-makers.” We can vouch that there are indeed works of rich promise and works of considerable achievement.
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New Media Work by Golan Levin (Experimental/New Media)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm
Conversations kicks off its impressive fall line up with this “interactive screening and lecture” by new media artist Golan Levin. His own bio states that he “develops artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems.” Okay, that sounds heavy, but his work is also known for its whimsy and playfulness.
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More info at www.conversationsattheedge.org.

THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX (New German)
Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema – Check Reader Movies for showtimes
The Red Army Faction, brought to you by the producer of RESIDENT EVIL and FANTASTIC FOUR! Bernd Eichinger's starting a franchise—THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX is a spin-off of DOWNFALL (the two films share—besides Eichinger as screenwriter and producer—actor Bruno Ganz, cinematographer Rainer Klausmann and, even more importantly, production designer Bernd Lepel). BAADER-MEINHOF is THE INTERNATIONAL inverted. The Tykwer film found in the crisp images of a modern thriller the tangled world of politics; BAADER-MEINHOF finds in Germany’s tangled politics a crisp modern thriller. A whole lot of good opportunities tucked away in the history books: a band of policemen chasing a gunman along a silvery river; Deutschmarks crinkling like wrapping paper at Christmastime on an apartment floor; Ulrike Meinhof seated alone in her room with a desk and a typewriter, the television on. Martina Gedeck gets top billing as Meinhof: the unstable journalist-turned-figurehead is made into a crumbling moral observer. But the film’s real center—and what ultimately defines it—is Johanna Wokalek’s characterization of RAF theorist Gudrun Esselin. She’s got thick black eyeliner and a raspy voice, and looks equally good in a leather jacket or naked. Poor history makes for good entertainment. (2008, 150 min, 35mm) IV
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More info here.

Chicago International Reel Shorts Festival
Film Row Cinema at Columbia College – Friday-Sunday
Presented by Project Chicago, Reel Shorts Festival screens fourteen programs of more than 100 short films. Of special note are the “Chicago Show” on Saturday at 2:30pm and the other Chicago works scattered throughout, including Michael Smith’s AT LAST, OKEMAH! in the “Rock ‘n’ Roll” show on Sunday at 6:30pm.
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More info at www.projectchicago.com.

MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS:

Experimental filmmaker and installation artist Anthony McCall is speaking as part of “Micro-Symposium: Art/Science/Spectacle” on Saturday at 2pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The other speakers are professors Paola Bertucci and Barbara Stafford.

Local filmmaker Chris Hefner will be presenting a program of his short films and loops (both continuous throughout the night) on Saturday (starting 9pm) at Swimming Pool Project Space (2858 W. Montrose).

The matinee film Saturday and Sunday at the Music Box is the Marx Brothers’ comedy A DAY AT THE RACES; the documentary ART & COPY continues at noon only on Saturday and Sunday; the other midnight film on Friday and Saturday is JJ Abrams’ STAR TREK; and Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s STILL WALKING continues for another week.

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