CRUCIAL VIEWING
Jacques Tati's PLAYTIME and PARADE
(French Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center
- Showtimes noted below
Jacques Tati's psycho-geographical treatise par excellence, PLAYTIME, begins
in a pedagogical mode: for the first hour, working entirely in and around
a multimillion-dollar parody of contemporary skyscrapers constructed
in the outskirts of Paris, he teaches the viewer a new way to watch
a film. The primary use of long shots and deep focus suggests a Bazinian
spectatorial freedom, but the meticulously dubbed, panlingual audio
is constantly in close-up: from the cacophony of American tourists to
the analog buzzing of an office intercom, from the crash of Mr. Hulot's
umbrella to the comic deformation of a squeaky leather chair. By the
time we reach a long sequence set outside an apartment with soundproof
glass, we have learned that the ear can lead the eye as often as the
reverse. And none too soon, for the next 40 minutes--detailing the opening
night of the posh "Royal Garden" restaurant and its progressively
chaotic, visually and aurally exhausting demolition at the unconscious
hands of a repressed, consuming tourist society--is what Jonathan Rosenbaum
calls "one of the most staggering accomplishments on film." Here,
Tati inscribes an intricate, painterly progression on his enormous canvas:
from a restrictive, rigid grammar of straight lines and orthogonal angles
to the continuous sweeps of French curves, expressed most directly in
the movement of his characters' bodies--progressively intoxicated and
compelled not just by alcohol and the increasingly frantic music but
by an inevitable collective camaraderie--as they travel through an overplanned
and overheating environment that, in a series of destructive sight gags,
has lost its organizational power to constrain human desire. Once a
disastrous critical flop, PLAYTIME is an odd and striking masterpiece
of urban studies that absolutely must be seen on the big screen. (1967,
124 min, 35mm; Saturday, 3pm and Wednesday, 6pm) MC
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No one will ever have to make a documentary
about Jacques Tati; he already did it himself with PARADE, his
last feature-length work. PARADE feels like a biography conceived by
Claude Lanzmann and Roberto Rossellini: a movie about Tati's life and
films that doesn't feature either. Instead, we watch a circus performance
organized and emceed by Tati in 1974, interspersed with (but not interrupted
by) staged bits involving audience members that recall Tati's late films
while seeming to suggest the beginning of a new cinema: intimate, all-encompassing,
sympathetic, popular. For Tati, the bravest thing a performer could
do was to nullify the gap that exists between the audience and the screen;
PARADE accomplishes exactly that. Though it was primarily shot on analog
video (and originally shown on television), it's a theatrical experience
on par with PLAYTIME--a film that demands to be seen with an audience.
(1974, 85 min, 35mm; Saturday, 5:30pm and Monday, 6pm) IV
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Films by Stuart Sherman (Experimental
Revival)
Hopscotch Cinema at The Nightingale - Sunday, 7pm
Stuart Sherman, perhaps best known
for his performative art "spectacles"--playlets performed on tabletops
involving the dramatic relationships of inanimate objects--made numerous
bite-sized films that exhibit the missing link between East Coast and
West Coast experimental aesthetics of the 1970s. Clearly a product of
the New York art scene, Sherman infuses structuralist film tropes with
a playfulness found only on the Left Coast. Case in point: in EATING
(1986), the film slowly pans out from a shot of Sherman's open mouth
as the names of exotic foods are read aloud. This eventually breaks
into shots of restaurant facades as people in voice-over discuss the
depicted establishments, reminiscent of Robert Nelson cum Owen Land.
With GOLF FILM (1982), a golf ball is shot into the air and transformed
into the bouncing ball for a sing-a-long. These sorts of miniature suites
provide much to mull over intellectually without ever losing a sense
of humor--a wonderful and increasingly rare treat in experimental film.
The brevity and variety of his work fortunately allows for this screening
to include 25 of his films, shown on video (the only means of distribution
for his work these days), as well as Brian Frye's film portrait of Sherman,
ROBERT BECK IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN NYC (2002). John Matturi,
Sherman expert and curator, will introduce the screening live via webcam.
(1977-86/2002, 53 min total, video/16mm) DM
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More info at nightingaletheatre.org.
Visitors - Films by Hong Sang-soo,
Naomi Kawase, and Lav Diaz
(New International)
White Light Cinema at the Gene Siskel Film Center
- Wednesday, 8:30pm
Every year, the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea commissions
three directors to each make a short film on digital video all relating
to a single theme. Last year's theme was the visit. As each director
is allotted the same amount of money (about $40,000), every one of them
reveals their values in how they spend it. Each director must decide
which elements are most important and which can be reduced. What's worth
more--actors or equipment? Locations or schedules? The first film, by
Hong Sang-soo, is set in Jeonju. Titled, somewhat ironically, LOST
IN THE MOUNTAINS, it follows a struggling writer (Yumi Jung) who
decides on a whim to visit the city where she once lived. As the other
three major character are introduced--the writer's best friend and her
two ex-boyfriends, one of whom was once her professor--the visit becomes
a social game where the pieces are love motels, cell phone calls, restaurant
tabs, lies, and endless excuses. When the film's final confrontation
occurs--with all four, now paired up, outside of a restaurant in the
city's shady motel district--they are saved, as Hong's characters often
are, by their pettiness. Honesty would destroy their lives. Hong's film
has several major characters and uses multiple locations. It's shot
on what appears to be a prosumer camcorder. Naomi Kawase has obviously
used her budget to rent a much better camera and secure what was probably
a more relaxed shooting schedule. If Hong makes patient films about
impulse, Kawase makes impulsive films about patience. Her segment,
KOMA, follows the simple story of a young man fulfilling his Korean
grandfather's dying wish by returning a ceremonial scroll to a family
in rural Japan. Someone who has seen two or more Hong films knows when
to expect what; someone who's seen two or more Kawases expects to be
surprised, to suddenly see close-ups, to have the camera move in a way
they didn't think it would--as if the image is constantly trying to
find its footing in its attempt to relay a moment of reality. The final,
and best, film, which will be shown in its longer "director's cut" version, is Lav Diaz's BUTTERFLIES HAVE NO MEMORIES. It would
be foolish to call Diaz ambitious--what he aspires to do never exceeds
his abilities or resources. It's just that he is able to do so much.
Give him a cell phone and $20, and he could probably figure out how
to make a movie. Give him $40,000 and what he returns with is not a
short, but an hour-long feature. Shooting with an ordinary camcorder
and acting as his own cameraman and editor, Diaz has made the destination,
rather than the visit, his subject: a Filipino town destroyed and then
abandoned by the mining industry. A town robbed of dignity is a town
robbed of scruples, and his film shows us a group of friends and former
colleagues who hatch a plan to kidnap a leggy visitor. (2009, 123 min,
Digibeta and Mini-DV) IV
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More info at www.whitelightcinema.com and www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Note: This program is organized
by C-F editor Patrick Friel.
Kira Muratova's CHEKHOV'S MOTIFS
(Contemporary Russian Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center - Sunday, 4:45pm and Monday, 7:45pm
Kira Muratova's surrealistic, darkly comic CHEKHOV'S MOTIFS has
little of the serenity associated with Anton Chekhov's plays. The tone
is often frantic, the dialogue shrill, the performances buffoonish.
But in its own way, the film honors the underlying satire of Chekhov's
writing, which targeted the pettiness behind so many bourgeois lives.
Muratova likes to have characters repeat passages of dialogue several
times in a row, so that scenes play out as if on a broken record. It's
a unique way of depicting lives in stasis (a favorite subject of Chekhov's),
and viewers may find it hilarious or exasperating--or both--depending
on their mood. In any case, the movie is extraordinary to behold. Shot
on black-and-white film in fluid long-takes reminiscent of Bela Tarr,
it's a rhapsodically bleak work, difficult to take one's eyes away from
no matter how frustrating it can be to listen to. The plot draws from
two Chekhov short stories--about a peasant boy leaving home and a corrupt
land owner's lavish wedding--without much effort to make them cohere,
moving instead from one narrative to the other with the enigmatic drift
of a dream. Luis Bunuel may be a good point of reference, too, but Muratova
is too original a filmmaker for direct comparisons. Her combinations
of fantasy and grim realism are completely unpredictable--one of the
idiosyncratic triumphs of contemporary movies. CHEKHOV'S MOTIFS is screening
as part of the Film Center's ongoing Celebrating Chekhov series;
on Sunday, it will be paired with a more traditional Chekhov adaptation,
the New Wave-ish THE LADY WITH THE DOG
(1960, 89 min, 35mm; Sunday, 3pm and Thursday, 8:15pm), which Jonathan
Rosenbaum considers the best representation of the author's detailed
portraiture. It should be especially fascinating in contrast with Muratova's
revisionist masterpiece. (2002, 120 min, DVCAM video) BS
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
Shirley Clarke's
THE COOL WORLD (American Revival)
Block Cinema (Northwestern University)
- Friday, 7pm
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Films by Shirley Clarke (Experimental
Revival)
Doc Films (University of Chicago)
- Tuesday, 7pm
"There's no question that my career
would have been different if I was a man," said Shirley Clarke
in an interview from 1993. Unfortunately, Clarke's name is still relatively
obscure despite her incredible contribution to the New American cinema
of the 60s, with films that teeter between reality and fiction, and
rival John Cassavetes and direct cinema makers like the Maysles and
Frederick Wiseman. Clarke was also a central figure, now forgotten,
in the New York early video movement where she ran workshops in her
Chelsea Hotel loft, the participants of which were called THE TEEPEE
VIDEOSPACE TROUPE (1970-78). However, it is doubtful that there is no
Shirley Clarke Criterion release because of misogyny. Clarke, who died
in 1997, sold the rights to many of her films, and these rights are
scattered. THE COOL WORLD (1964, 105 min, 16mm) is owned by Wiseman's
company, Zipporah (he produced the film). This week sees two university
screenings of Clarke's work in Chicago (with a follow up screening in
March of her cinematic rendition of Jack Gelber's play THE CONNECTION
(1962)). THE COOL WORLD, which screens Friday at Block Cinema, is an
unflinching semi-narrative set in Harlem's slums following African-American
teenagers embroiled in gang violence. Clarke's use of non-actors, themselves
living in the situations in which the film finds them, undoubtedly influenced
filmmakers like Larry Clark, although she manages to capture her "characters" without it feeling exploitative. More than anything, THE COOL WORLD
appears motivated by a profound desire to portray the injustices of
racist America as a call to action, as well as to humanize her subjects
and portray the complexities of their lives. Following Friday's screening
is a screening on Tuesday at University of Chicago's Doc Films of Clarke's
experimental short dance films (1954-60, 67 min total, 16mm).
Clarke started out as a dancer and, as a result, her early explorations
with filmmaking see her rendering movement to film though experimentation
with editing, light, sound, and gesture. BRIDGES-GO-ROUND (1958), the
best known, was commissioned for the Brussels World's Fair and demonstrates
Clarke's desire to "make a dance film without dancers" through
collecting and compiling images of bridges from Manhattan and forcing
them into a flirtatious dance. Given how difficult Clarke's films are
to see, both screenings are unmissable. BC
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More info at www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu and www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
Fritz Lang's WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS
(American Revival)
Music Box - Saturday & Sunday, 11:30am
Fritz Lang's paranoia was always more far-reaching than Alfred Hitchcock's.
Where Hitchcock tapped into personal notions of guilt and vulnerability
(both the audience's and his own), Lang's betrayals register on a cultural
level. The horror of his films never fails to imply social order collapsing,
no matter if he was working in fantasy (SPIES), message movie (FURY,
BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT), or melodrama (SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR, THE
BLUE GARDENIA). On the surface, WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS is a breezy suspense
story about beat reporters competing to catch an anonymous murderer-rapist;
but their pursuit of the criminal becomes so ruthless that it seems
monstrous itself. As in M, Lang asks the viewer to contemplate some unsettling
questions about vigilantism; that he achieves this as effectively in
a low-budget noir as he did in an unabashed art film is just
one facet of his mastery. The film switches perspective between characters
as effortlessly as the earlier film did. Each one appears victim and
victimizer in turn, and yet this elevated perspective doesn't impede
the film's breathless momentum. The cast, maybe the best Lang had on
an American film, greatly contributes to the film's impact, filled with
some of Hollywood's best enunciators of cynical dialogue: Thomas Mitchell,
Ida Lupino, Dana Andrews, and Vincent Price. (1956, 100 min, 35mm)
BS
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More info at www.musicboxtheatre.com.
Films by Adele Friedman (New Experimental)
Chicago Filmmakers - Friday, 8pm
Since the 1970s, local experimental
filmmaker Adele Friedman has been creating a body of work that displays
a unique vision. Her films, nearly all of which are silent (as is the
case with the work in this show), rely on a camera point-of-view that
seems disembodied, sentient on its own without a filmmaker's guiding
hand. There is an inquisitiveness, a curiosity, and, at times, a sense
of boredom or impatience marked by sudden shifts in what is being filmed.
Of course it is Friedman's inquisitiveness, curiosity, and (perhaps)
boredom at play, but her floating, unfixed camera work, which fluidly
glides over her subjects and spaces, feels less personal than it does
taxonomic. The viewer has the sense that it is they who are looking
themselves, directly, rather than through Friedman's eyes and lens.
This program features portrait films and "dreamscapes," both of
which are visual explorations of friends and family in their surroundings.
Friedman's camerawork, her attention to small details of objects, furniture,
and architecture, and her use of a wide-angle lens all combine to give
a slightly disorienting edge to her films. She, and we, must find a
way, establish some kind of orientation, among these people and places.
There is a subtle attempt to re-inscribe a way of looking at the world,
which, while not a radical one like Stan Brakhage's, is an evocative
and distinctive one. Friedman's eye gives all things, people and spaces,
the ornate and the mundane, equal weight--finding visual pleasure and
emotional resonance in everything. Nine films are showing, including
the local premiere of PAULINE AND PATRICK, LE MARAIS, PARIS (2008) and
the world premiere of NORTHPORT (2010). Friedman in person. (1983-2010,
approx. 90 min total, 16mm) PF
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More info at www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
Videos by Steven
Summers (New Experimental)
Roots & Culture Gallery (1034 N. Milwaukee Ave.) - Saturday, 7pm
Steven Summers work revels in its simplicity. His performance background
shines through most of his work with its focus on human gesture and
dialogue. Often using his family and friend as subjects, Summers builds
a tension between the stillness of the camera and the emotional gravity
that camera is trained on. The camera is often locked down or is moving
in a nearly imperceptible slow-pan. The life comes from the camera's
often-pointed perspective as intermediary between Summers and those
close to him. The work in this program covers the last decade-plus of
Summers' work and shows its development from performance driven video
documentation to a more cinematic aesthetic. (1999-2010, 52 min total,
video) CL
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More info at www.rootsandculturecac.org.
Videos by Moyra Davey (New Experimental)
Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center - Thursday,
6pm
New Yorker Moyra Davey transforms the act of simple observation
into intellectual journey. Her work, often heady and language-driven,
focuses sharply on the realm of the everyday. When Davey turns to the
camera to speak one can't help but notice how much she departs from
the overwrought confessionals embedded in contemporary reality TV. FIFTY
MINUTES is Davey's video remembrance of her psychoanalysis using her
home as a backdrop. Children wander in and out of the scene and quiet
camera studies of ordinary objects punctuate the narrative. Davey talks
to the viewer as if they are already a part of this domestic world--maybe
a close friend or a neighbor. In MY NECROPOLIS, Davey uses the memorial
statuary of intellectual giants to steer an exploration of a passage
written by Walter Benjamin. Both pieces require full intelligent engagement
from the audience by creating an experience that is more about the mind
of the viewer than Davey's insights. (2006-2009, 90 min total, multiple
formats) CL
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More info at www.conversationsattheedge.org.
Jane Campion's BRIGHT STAR (New International)
Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Friday, 6:30, 9, & 11:30pm and
Sunday, 1pm
Jane Campion returns to feature-length film after six fallow years
with a work, at first glance. most unlike its perverse and steamy predecessor,
IN THE CUT. BRIGHT STAR may be her sweetest and simplest film, but it
gives up none of the ground she's gained in mapping people's private
motivations. These two works are apposite in Campion's world, making
clear that regardless of whether her characters have sex, or whether
she depicts it, her interest is in the knotty impulses of desire and
fear, not strictly in where they lead. One striking feature that sets
BRIGHT STAR apart from IN THE CUT (and earlier films like SWEETIE and
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY) is the clarity of both characters' desire; as
Fanny Brawne and the poet John Keats grow to love each other we don't
lose sight of her petty vanities or his meek submission to the will
of his friends, but we can also see that their love is tender and direct.
Campion's attunement to history accounts for some of this; in England
in the early 19th century social manners had nowhere near the repressive
intensity they would fifty years later under Victoria. Keats and the
Brawnes are bound to their circumstances by money worries in an uncertain
economy, but Fanny's dresses are uncorseted: she makes many of her own
intimate decisions, and propriety is only one consideration. Both young
lovers speak and move freely through the charmed time they spend together.
BRIGHT STAR's world and language are plausible, but more than that they
are intoxicating. When the final letter inevitably arrives, Fanny's
loud, desolate sobs shake you awake and give you a real moment of grief.
(2009, 119 min, 35mm) JF
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Jia Zhang-ke's 24 CITY (New International)
Doc Films (University of Chicago)
- Saturday, 7 and 9:30pm and Sunday, 3:45pm
24 CITY is a subtle and slippery
work. Initially it appears to be a straightforward, albeit gorgeously
shot, documentary about Factory 420, an enormous factory which produced
aeronautic and military components for decades. Now the land upon which
it sits in the city center has become so valuable that the entire factory
is being dismantled to make way for 24 City, a giant complex containing
an industrial park and five-star hotel. Then, about an hour in, Joan
Chen shows up onscreen as one of the factory workers. Suddenly the veracity
of everything that came before is called into question. Were all of
the interviewees actually actors? Were they performing words taken from
interviews with actual factory workers, or have we only been watching
hearing skillfully written monologues? That ambiguity, in a film coming
out of Communist China, is fairly subversive. One of the final interviews
is with a young woman who has a job as a personal shopper, going to
Hong Kong every two weeks to buy things for rich ladies who "have
a taste for fashion but not the energy." The point is clear: the
so-called "comradeship and solidarity" of the old ways are
being replaced by the selfish and materialistic ways of the new generation.
(2008, 107 min, 35mm) RC
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Films by Al Jarnow (Experimental/Animation
Revival)
Gene Siskel Film Center -
Friday and Saturday, 8pm
If you are of a certain age, you've
likely seen some of animator Al Jarnow's work: in the 1970s and 80s
he made more than 100 short spots for Public Television children's programs,
including Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact. This program,
presented in conjunction with local CD label Numero Group's DVD release
of Jarnow's work, screens a handful of these clips, along with several
of Jarnow's contemporaneous experimental animations. Apart from his
commission work, Jarnow was part of a resurgence of experimental and
independent animation in the U.S. beginning in the 1960s. Following
in the steps of pioneers a generation before (Robert Breer, Harry Smith,
the Whitney Brothers, etc.), these new filmmakers generally worked in
looser, more accessible modes, ranging from cartoon and representational
styles (Sally Cruikshank, George Griffin, Suzan Pitt) to geometric explorations.
Jarnow's personal work falls into this later style. Along with Larry
Cuba, Paul Glabicki, and others, he was interested more in the perceptual
transformations on the screen rather than the structures and possibilities
of film form itself, as was the case for Breer, et al. While these artists
never reached the greatness or profundity of some of their predecessors,
their work is still often fascinating and an important chapter in animation
history. Many of Jarnow's films use shifting and rotating cubes and
grids--variational possibilities of hard-edge forms--but the best work
on the program is a more fluid exploration of transforming perspectives:
AUTOSONG uses differing and morphing perspectives of a car traveling
along a barren road. Fifteen of Jarnow's shorts will screen, along with
a new documentary about him. (1968-1984/2010; approx 90 min total, Digibeta)
PF
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
George Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD
(American Revival)
Facets Cinémathèque - Saturday,
Midnight
The 1980s were undoubtedly the worst decade for American cinema,
not only because Hollywood studios resigned themselves almost exclusively
to making products instead of films, but because even the best filmmakers
of this time failed to acknowledge the Totalitarian implications of
the Reagan era. Compared to the number of anti-war films made during
the Vietnam years--or, for that matter, the eloquent anti-Thatcher films
that defined contemporaneous British filmmaking (Dennis Potter's BLADE
ON THE FEATHER, Stephen Frears' SAMMY AND ROSIE GET LAID, Derek Jarman's
THE LAST OF ENGLAND, nearly anything by Mike Leigh or Alan Clarke)--the
American cinema had become all but disengaged from the political realities
of the time. True, the work of Jonathan Demme and Alan Rudolph alluded
to Reagan's decimation of the working class; but few films dared to
confront the utter selfishness motivating neo-conservative politics
or, most damnably, Reagan's genocidal agenda in Latin America. (Tellingly,
the two American films most up-front about these things--Nicolas Roeg's
EUREKA and Alex Cox's WALKER--were directed by Englishmen.) Apart from
John Carpenter's THEY LIVE, the most notable exception to these trends
was George Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD. Romero was, and remains, the nation's
greatest political filmmaker and this bald-faced allegory about the
corruption of the American military is one of his most heroic efforts.
Again making the most of a low budget, Romero sets much of the film
in an underground military bunker, depicting the zombie pandemic largely
by suggestion. In the absence of violent spectacle, Romero dramatizes
the makeshift dictatorship formed by military personnel and its effects
on the other refugees. As in his previous DAWN OF THE DEAD, this is
more horrific on an intellectual level than a visceral one, but no less
resounding for it. Showing in Facets' "Night School" series, with a talk by Patrick Ogle. (1985, 105
min, Video) BS
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More info at www.facet.org.
Charles Chaplin's MONSIEUR VERDOUX
(American Revival)
Bank of America Cinema - Saturday,
8pm
One of the most sublime missteps in
the history of cinema gets an always-welcome revival this week in a
reportedly gorgeous new print--though to call it a misstep is to subscribe
to a version of said history that leaves no room for the glorious centaurs
Chaplin's post-war, post-Tramp talkie period loosed on the (mainly disinterested)
world. Such a view would take it as read that Chaplin's first role after
abandoning his beloved mustache and bowler oughtn't to have been a remorseless
mass murderer--let alone a mass murderer in a melo-slapstick-satire
so sincerely anti-war and anti-capital that all its highly compartmentalized
and contradictory attempts to amuse, edify, and/or move us are drowned
out in the end by the sound of its auteur's own awkward cri de coeur--but,
really, what use is such wisdom? Admittedly, Chaplin is no Brecht: his
murder-equals-capitalism-equals-war-equals-murder statement is powerful
not due to its novelty or the brilliance of its rhetoric, but entirely
for reasons of context: this is Chaplin, for God's sake, dispatching
dowagers with charm and wit. Certainly too, the peculiarities of the
film's construction (as often lyrical as stage-bound, as often deft
as amateurish), plus its Sternbergian mishmash of acting styles and
accents, can together easily wrong-foot the inattentive viewer come
expecting a homogeneous and cannily constructed Chaplin entertainment.
The glory of VERDOUX, however--and all of CC's sound work--is in the
ways it refuses to be just that: intent on creating its own vocabulary
from the castoffs of early film grammar (your Hitchcocks and Langs and
Fords be damned), VERDOUX manages the trick of being gauche and magical
all at once. That is, VERDOUX is a continuation of THE GREAT DICTATOR's
first fragmentation of Chaplin's poetics; and it points the way to LIMELIGHT's
almost inscrutable, outsider grace. The joys of the Tramp films wash
away utterly in the light of VERDOUX's impossible disregard for the
verities and expectations associated with genre--and narrative itself.
It contains Chaplin's greatest performance, and may very well be his
finest work. (1947, 124 min, 35mm) JD
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More info at www.bankofamericacinema.blogspot.com.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
Also at Block Cinema (Northwestern University) this week: on
Saturday at 2pm is the program Love Letters and Live Wires: Highlights
from the GPS Film Unit, featuring eight 1930s films by Norman McLaren,
Len Lye, Basil Wright, and others; on Thursday is Milos Forman's 1967
Czech comedy THE FIREMAN'S BALL.
Also at The Nightingale this week: On Saturday at 7pm students
from SAIC show off new work in the appropriately titled program New
New New: Editing Aesthetics and on Tuesday at 8pm Homeroom presents
local digital media maven Jon Satrom hosting the latest edition of the
YouTube Assembly, subtitled "On Cats and Data Bending."
Also at Doc Films (University of Chicago) this week: on Sunday
is Mel Ferrer's 1950 film VENDETTA in the Howard Hughes series;
Monday in the British film series is Silvio Narizzano's 1966 GEORGY
GIRL at 7pm and at 9:30pm is African-American filmmaking pioneer
Oscar Micheaux's 1920 film WITHIN OUR GATES; on Wednesday is
David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY; the early Thursday show is John Ford's
1959 Civil War film THE HORSE SOLDIERS and the late show Thursday
is Andy Milligan's 1973 adult film FLESHPOT ON 42ND STREET.
At the Landmark's Century Centre Cinema beginning Friday
are two shows of Oscar Nominated Short Films, one of animation
and one of live action.
Also at Facets Cinémathèque this week is Andrew Lang's 2009 documentary SONS OF CUBA, which
follows three child-boxers-in-training.
At the Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) this week:
Friday at 5pm Salomé Skvirsky presents the lecture "Quilombo and
Utopia: The Aesthetic of Labor in Brazilian Documentary"; and
on Saturday at 8pm U of C radio station WHPK hosts Pictures and Sounds,
featuring film and video with live accompaniment by Mist, Dog Lady,
Trauma y Nate Wooley, and Brett Naucke.
Also at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week: Frank Capra's
AMERICAN MADNESS screens Friday and Tuesday, with a lecture by Virginia
Wright Wexman at the Tuesday show; Mitchell Lichtenstein's indie comedy
HAPPY TEARS plays for a week; and Iosif Kheifitz's 1960 Soviet film
THE LADY WITH THE DOG screens Sunday and Thursday in the Chekhov
series.
Also at the Music Box this week: the German/Israeli crime drama
AJAMI, directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani and Best Foreign
Language Film Academy Award nominee, opens on Friday; Andrea Arnold's
FISH TANK and Terry Gilliam's THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS
are both held over; FISH TANK also plays in the Saturday and Sunday
matinee slot; and CLIFFHANGER (Friday), THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE
SHOW (Saturday), and MYSTERY TEAM (Friday and Saturday) are
the weekend midnight films. More midnight madness on Thursday (!) with
Philipp Stölzl's NORTH FACE and Patrick Alessandrin's DISTRICT
13: ULTIMATUM.
Director Keith Maitland's documentary about four blind high school students,
THE EYES OF ME, screens Saturday at 2pm at the Chicago Cultural Center.
The The Portage Theater screens
the 1937 James Cagney film SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT in their Wednesday
matinee series (1:30pm).
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