CRUCIAL VIEWING
Manoel de Oliveira's I'M GOING
HOME (Contemporary French Revival)
Doc
Films (University
of Chicago) — Sunday, 7pm
Two months after the Chicago
premiere of THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA, Doc Films revives another
Manoel de Oliveira work on the subject of death—one that may be even
more inviting and serene. I'M GOING HOME is Oliveira's most accessible
film to date (though it's no less thoughtful than any of his allusion-dense
masterpieces), a simple story inflected by some of the most urgent philosophical
concerns. Michel Piccoli plays an elderly stage actor who loses his
wife and children in a car accident; the film depicts his cautious return
to the world of the living. Oliveira was 93 when he made this, so it's
not surprising that I'M GOING HOME should feel so authentic in its depiction
of loss, even though this depiction is rather oblique. Oliveira focuses
on the simple facts of Piccoli's experience—acting in plays, sitting
at his favorite cafe in Paris, spending time with his grandson (his
last living relative)—working in beautifully precise frames that direct
one's imagination to what's not being shown. As Jonathan Rosenbaum put it
in his Chicago Reader review, the film is "the kind of quiet
masterpiece that fully registers only after you've seen it—a profound
meditation on bereavement and other kinds of loss (including losing
one's way) as well as on everyday life and things right under our noses
that we accept as 'other', including old age and art and different cultures."
As in much of Oliveira's recent work, the film considers the human costs
of modernity, namely a loss of connection to history—most pointedly
in a very funny subplot concerning a misguided film adaptation of Ulysess (directed
by an American filmmaker played by John Malkovich) that the Piccoli
character has the bad fortune to get involved in. (2001, 90 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
François Truffaut's THE SOFT
SKIN (French Revival)
Gene
Siskel Film Center —
check venue website for showtimes
Following the success of JULES AND
JIM, Truffaut returned immediately to the love triangle theme in THE
SOFT SKIN. But whereas JULES AND JIM was, in the director's words, "an
idealization of love in the sense where the privileged characters lived
privileged moments," THE SOFT SKIN is set in "the universe
of Simenon, the most everyday universe there is." Truffaut based
the film on a newspaper article detailing the murder of an adulterer
by his jilted wife in a Parisian cafe—a Simenonian scenario, to be
sure—but he carefully avoids lapsing into the sordid or the sentimental.
Most of the film follows an affair between Pierre Lachenay (Jean Desailly),
an internationally renowned Balzac scholar, and Nicole (Françoise Dorleac),
a much younger airline stewardess. The dialogue is for the most part
intentionally banal and Desailly's Lachenay is largely unsympathetic
and childish, but over this "most everyday universe" Truffaut
and cinematographer Raoul Coutard create a memorably oneiric visual
record of the precipitous rise and fall of an affair. Though THE SOFT
SKIN opened to negative reviews and a disinterested public, it has since
been recognized as a powerful and tightly controlled examination of
bourgeois sex, marriage, and love, in the tradition of Lachenay's beloved
Balzac (whose La peau
de chagrin stands behind La peau douce
in a kind of melodramatic, Orientalist counterpoint). Perhaps no other
film better illustrates Truffaut's contention that “[t]he couple situation
does not work and there are no other solutions.” (1964, 113 min, 35mm) PR
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More info at www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
ALSO RECOMMENDED
The Hypnagogic Empiric: Films
by George Monteleone (New Experimental)
Roots & Culture Gallery (1034 N. Milwaukee Ave.) - Sunday, 8pm
Stuttering half-lighted images, exposure
nestled in exposure, George
Monteleone's collection of short experimental
films show a curious
mind feeling about its surroundings.
The idiosyncratic recognition of
our environment, and how it is processed
and experienced, informs
Monteleone's work, and the camera becomes
an extension of sense
perception. In FENESTRA, the world
from a room's windows is run and re-run over itself, elaborating on
an experience of an experience from a
controlled space. While we may be coddled
in FENESTRA, NIGHT WALKS
throws us into a tangled, hallucinatory
city of jittery movements.
Long exposures of rapidly shifting
light sources recall REM-stage
sleep, evoking either our own dreams
or a facsimile of someone else's.
INSPIRATION | ASPIRATION | EXPIRATION
explodes in succession. A face
flashes, exhaling plosives and fragments
of letters, letting us ponder
the meaning of any one utterance. Using
occasional punctuations of
vivid color, striking auditory hums
and tones, and peculiar camera
movements, Monteleone's films aren't
exactly playful, but they evoke
an inventor's diversionary curiosity.
Drawing from his background in
cognitive psychology, the body of eleven
films is a thoughtful detour
into consciousness and observation,
isolating and testing the senses
before blurring them. (Various Years,
approx. 60 min total, Various
Formats) BW
Jonas Mekas' WALDEN (Experimental
Revival)
Doc
Films
(University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm
WALDEN is the first collection of film
diaries by the legendary Jonas
Mekas, shot and edited between Spring
1965 and Summer 1968. According
to the Lithuanian filmmaker, poet,
and founder of the Anthology Film
Archives, the Film-Makers' Cooperative
and Film Culture journal, most
of this footage was not originally
intended to be presented publicly,
but was rather exercises he undertook
to master the handheld 16mm
Bolex camera, in order to capture images
around him instantly so no
moment would slip away unfilmed due
of technical hesitation. Though
the spontaneity of the filming often
makes WALDEN feel like a home
movie—which it essentially is—there
is a palpable feeling of
continual invention and discovery throughout.
The only consistency in
the style of shooting and editing is
the joy of abandoning forethought
for a passionate connection with the
film and the people and events depicted, resulting in a gorgeous and
occasionally intense piece of
filmmaking. Featured in the film are:
Gregory Markopoulos (preparing
his film portraits), Carl Dreyer (as
a subject for Mekas' portrait),
the Brakhage family (in a excellent,
long section), P. Adams Sitney,
Tony Conrad, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg,
John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, Peter Orlovsky,
Tuli Kupferberg, and many many
others. (1969, 180 min, 16mm) JM
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Alfred Hitchcock's FAMILY PLOT
(American Revival)
Doc
Films (University
of Chicago) — Wednesday, 7 & 9:15pm
Alfred Hitchcock's final film
is also one of his lightest: Hitchcock himself said he wanted it to
feel like Ernst Lubitch directing a mystery thriller. But like most
of the master's lightest films (RICH AND STRANGE, THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY),
the surface tone masks a rather serious investigation of the artist's
favorite subjects. The parallel narrative construction moves between
two different married couples and, by extension, opposing ways of living
life. The wealthy criminals (William Devane and Karen Black) are cunning
and immoral; the working-class couple (Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris)
that discovers their kidnapping scheme is a sweeter, slightly naive
pair, classic Hitchcockian figures of blind chance. The director clearly
loves them all; both couples illustrate the quotidian joys and tribulations
of marriage (unflappable companionship, constant bickering) that were
a constant source of comic relief in his work. It isn't noted often
enough what an inspired chronicler of marriage Hitchcock was: Indeed,
few directors have portrayed the unspoken understanding between spouses
as adroitly as he did. And the intricate structure of FAMILY PLOT, based
on a system of pairs and opposites, only confirms this. The film is
an ideal final testament for Hitchcock, not only in its crystallization
of the marriage theme but in the off-handed joy with which it plays
with the mechanics of suspense. (1976, 121 min, 35mm) BS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
Leanne Pooley's THE TOPP TWINS:
UNTOUCHABLE GIRLS (New Doc)
Facets Cinematheque — Check Venue website for showtimes
For
the hardest working sisters in show-business, this documentary serves
as a welcome victory lap. After thirty years of busking, hosting 4H
rodeos, touring in 15mph tractors and traveling to nightclubs across
the globe, Jools and Lynda Topp have earned their claim to a warm-hearted
documentary. In their native New Zealand, the Topps are famous for a
unique brew of bold, stereo-voiced country and western, bawdy role-playing
comedy, and adamantly progressive politics. A magical childhood of livestock
rough-housing and the solidarity of twins in the lush countryside allowed
them to cultivate awe-inspiring self-assurance together. Never in the
so-called closet, the twins perform along a broad spectrum of gender-ambiguity,
both onstage and off; their characters range from the Absolutely Fabulous
Raylene and Brenda to the Leisure-Suit-and-chin-in-throat Ken and Ken.
In fact, on their own website, the character photos are arranged in
a gendered spectrum with the un-costumed twins at the center. The movie
gives no evidence that the twins were ever harassed or censured; the
question of sexual identity is mostly addressed through their political
actions for Gay Rights, and the twins bring an equal fervor to Indigenous
Rights, the anti-apartheid movement, and a nuclear-free New Zealand.
All this supports the impression one might have from watching Kiwi movies
that New Zealand is a particular hotspot for independent-minded women:
Jane Campion and the subject of her classic bio-pic AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE,
poet Janet Frame, come to mind, as does the recently deceased Merata
Mita. And lest anyone bring up the hoary anti-feminist charge of humorlessness,
The Sydney Morning Herald has called THE TOPP TWINS "More fun than
a possum up your trousers." (2009, 84 min, Video) JF
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More info at www.facets.org.
Barry Sonnenfeld's MEN IN BLACK
(Contemporary American Revival)
Doc
Films
(University of Chicago) — Thursday, 7pm
Manhattan is an intergalactic neutral
zone for wayward aliens in Barry
Sonnenfeld's pitch-perfect satire of
cultural integration and
identity. Efficiently paced and masterfully
written, the film
introduces us to a sub-world of anonymity
for both the aliens
disguised as humans and the eponymous
Men in Black who monitor them.
In Sonnenfeld's coolly stylized New
York, both groups willfully
disregard their identities for some
degree of autonomy: aliens raise
families and eke out a working-class
existence while the agents take
on a shadow world of information and
elite policing, keeping their
fellow humans in ignorance. The aliens'
necessary disguises are lumpy
and ugly, while the MiB affect standard-issue
suits and a humorless
persona—no one is totally comfortable
in their skin. Following the
recruitment and integration of a NYPD
officer (Will Smith) into MiB by
Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), the audience
is privy to these revelations,
but like the officer, we enter in the
middle of an intractable
situation. MEN IN BLACK never lingers
on conspiracy or cover-ups; the
alien presence is tangible, if one
can tweak their perspective. In one
scene, evocative of the entire film,
tabloids are considered the
hallmark of truth and are scanned for
leads in an investigation for a
missing galaxy. When civilians happen
to become aware of the alien
presence, the agents "Neuralyze"
their memory and construct a new
narrative to keep them in oblivion.
Sonnenfeld contrasts gleaming
chrome and a Eero Saarinen-style modernism
for the agency headquarters
hidden within the grimy and textured
environments of Manhattan at
large. These varying locations feel
both otherworldly and entirely
lived in. MEN IN BLACK never remains
in one place for too long,
however, balancing buddy-cop and sci-fi
disaster with deadpan humor
and remarkable special effects. Filled
with alien slime and whirring,
buzzing gadgets, MEN IN BLACK is at
its core a blockbuster, but
sublimated into a social commentary.
(1997, 98 min, 35mm) BW
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.
MORE SCREENINGS AND EVENTS
The Chicago
Underground Film Festival opens
on Thursday at the Gene
Siskel Film Center with local
filmmaker Jerzy Rose's first feature, SOME
GIRLS NEVER LEARN.
At the Film
Studies Center this week: on
Friday and Saturday, two screenings and a symposium on contemporary
Korean cinema: Border Crossings
in East Asian Cinema: Koreans on the Move - Two Evenings with Directors
Zhang Lu and Yang Yong-hi with
the films DOOMAN RIVER and
SONA, THE OTHER MYSELF (GOODBYE PYONGYANG).
And on Thursday at 7pm is 700
Million Miles an Hour: An Evening with Rebecca Cummins.
Also at the Gene
Siskel Film Center this week:
The Charlie Chaplin series continues with CITY
LIGHTS on Friday and Sunday
and MODERN TIMES on Sunday and Wednesday; the series on Czech
filmmaker Frantisek Vlacil continues with SIRIUS on Saturday and Tuesday and THE
SHADOW OF THE FERN on Saturday
and Thursday; Michelle Esrick's 2009 documentarySAINT MISBEHAVIN': THE WAVY GRAVY MOVIES screens on Friday, Monday, Tuesday; Alexandre
O. Philippe's 2010 documentary THE
PEOPLE VS. GEORGE LUCAS has
four screenings; and Kenneth Bowser's 2010 documentary PHIL
OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE
returns for a week run.
Also at Doc
Films (University of Chicago)
this week: Tim Burton's misanthropic trading-card epic MARS
ATTACKS, Friday night and Sunday
1pm; Darren Aronofsky's BLACK
SWAN, Saturday night and Sun
3pm; Spencer Williams' 1944 GO
DOWN, DEATH! on Tuesday; and
Bahram Beyzai's 1993 Iranian wedding tragedy TRAVELLERS 7pm Thursday.
At the Music
Box, Takeshi Miike's well-received
19th-century samurai film 13
ASSASSINS; and on Saturday
and Sunday, David Gordon Green's highly Malickian UNDERTOW; and John Carpenter's occult, orientalist
cult classic BIG TROUBLE
IN LITTLE CHINA.
Block Cinema hosts the 7th annual NU
Student Film Festival on Friday;
Uli Gaulke's continent-spanning film-culture
documentary COMRADES IN
DREAMS screens Thursday.
At the Chicago
Cultural Center, the encore
screening of German graffiti doc WHOLETRAIN
is held on Saturday; and Polish-American genealogy doc THE OFFICER'S WIFE shows Wednesday, with director Piotr Uzarowicz
in person. Also on display at the Chicago
Cultural Center through September
18 is the exhibit Movie
Mojo: Hand-Painted Posters from Ghana.
The Logan
Square International Film Series
(Comfort Station @ 2579 N Milwaukee, Friday 8pm) screens the 2002 Dutch
musical comedy YES NURSE!
NO NURSE!
Italian Language and Cultural Center Sentieri Italiani
(5430 N. Broadway) screen De Sica's classic BICYCLE
THIEVES Friday night.
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