:: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 ::

🤘 CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

This year marks the 30th edition of the Chicago Underground Film Festival, which begins this Wednesday at the Gene Siskel Film Center and continues through Sunday, September 17, mostly at the Harper Theater (5238 S. Harper Ave.) in Hyde Park. Select filmmakers, cast and crew in attendance. This week’s list covers select programs through Thursday. Check back next week for additional coverage. For a complete schedule (including afterparties), ticketing and more info, visit the festival website here.

Soda Jerk’s HELLO DANKNESS (Australia/Experimental)
Gene Siskel Film Center – Wednesday, 7:30pm
In an era of mainstream pop culture steeped in fealty to intellectual property, when most major studio films are nostalgia-baked retreads of the things we know and love, perhaps the logical middle finger of a reaction to such a tired capitalistic experiment would be something in the vein of the underground, experimental madness of Soda Jerk’s HELLO DANKNESS. A sly regurgitation of American cinema remixed, remade, and reinterpreted in front of our very eyes, this formalist hodgepodge of pirated film clips centers around a slighter-than-slight constructed narrative recounting the recent past, running from the 2016 election of Donald Trump through the 2020 election of Joe Biden, and covering all the political mania that took place in between. The whole affair is dripping in a contemporary political doomerism that anyone who would consider themselves “Too Online” is all too familiar with, cleverly telegraphed through edits that push the Kuleshov Effect to its hilarious limit, convincing us of a world where Seth Rogen in THIS IS THE END, Tom Hanks in THE ‘BURBS, and Annette Benning in AMERICAN BEAUTY—among many others—all inhabit the same universe. There is also, of course, the faint attempt at categorizing this all as a “musical,” with such rip-roaring set pieces as the COVID-infected zombie masses singing “One Day More” and a series of escalating film clips featuring police officers attacking protestors maniacally underscored by “Springtime for Hitler.” It would be unfair to give the entire game away of how your favorite film characters find themselves repositioned here, but highlights certainly include Wayne and Garth from WAYNE’S WORLD as alt-right content creators jamming out to “My Dick is Out for Harambe,” the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles discussing the origins of PizzaGate, and a segment consisting of the entirety of YouTuber PilotRedSun’s “Garfielf” video with a transplanted Trump hairpiece on the orange cat’s head to mirror the torturous relationship between Trump and the Democratic Party. Even if the political messaging does get a little old too quickly, the ingenious nature of Soda Jerk’s particular brand of pop cultural meme-age is crafty enough to win an eager and curious audience over. Whatever the future of movies may hold for us, this may portend one direction it can go in: a new vision of cinema where, in the most anarchic sense, everything old is new again. (2022, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]
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Rick Charnoski’s WARM BLOOD (US/Experimental)
Harper Theater – Thursday, 5pm
Set in the late ‘80s in Modesto, California, WARM BLOOD follows Red (Hayley Isaacson), a runaway who’s returned home in search of her father. Her apocalyptic journey through the streets and underground spaces of her hometown is shaped by those she meets along the way and voiceover readings from her journal, recounting stories from her childhood—namely her mental health struggles. She’s joined at times by a mysterious and silent drifter, who appears at opportune moments throughout (Ryan Toothman). The film was shot in 16mm by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, who’s known for his work with director Kelly Reichardt on FIRST COW and SHOWING UP. He and first-time-feature director Rick Charnoski create a visual landscape that moves from kinetic to unhurried, from dreamy to nightmarish, blurry to crystal clear. These surreal images are framed by continuous anecdotes about harmful chemicals affecting the health of those in the town. The use of radio and especially television throughout is noteworthy, adding background context to Red’s journey. News clips featuring frustrated reporters are some of the most interesting sections of WARM BLOOD, creating a sense of nostalgia that is immediately shattered. Dark—and at times comedic—these news briefings and interviews, through image and sound, aggressively interrupt to widen the film’s scope to address politics and environment more directly as the film shifts from narrative to documentary and back. At one point, Red mentions driving around to “watch the nothingness go by,” but it is clear to her as well as the audience that this space, the people within it, and the struggles depicted here are far from nothing. (2022, 86 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]
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Shorts 2: Metamorphosis Now
Harper Theater – Thursday, 5:30pm
This program presents experimental shorts that deviate, transgress, mutate and shapeshift. GROWING UP ABSURD (2023, 15 min) delves into the memories surrounding College F (known colloquially as the Tolstoy College), a somewhat short-lived anarchist educational community that operated under the University of Buffalo. Overlaying 16mm footage of a deserted university campus with audio interviews from key members part of Tolstoy College, Ben Balcom prompts us to envision the radical presence of pedagogical revolutionaries who redefined college education. Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu opens the Pandora's box of most precious childhood memories in IN LITTLENESS (2022, 8 min), combining two 8mm film strips and presenting them on 16mm. Two consecutive frames are juxtaposed with another pair; the passing of time is measured by ephemeral images woven into a dazzling fabric of light and movements. Yanbin Zhao also nods to history by tributing a dreamy, elastic and mesmerizing black-and-white short, TRAIN SONG (2022, 3 min), to thousands of Chinese migrant workers who labored on the Southern Pacific Railroad during the second half of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Louise Bourque conjures eerie and ghostly sensations through abstracting images from her family archive. In BYE BYE NOW (2022, 10 min), the materiality of the scratched and stained surface of the film is paired with drony noises akin to a projector running or acoustic feedback. Specters from the past say “Hi!” A similar disturbance is built up in Richard Wiebe’s THE END (2022, 5 min). Tension is high when uncomfortable sounds—from a hissing radio to the howling wind—churn the soothing images of nature; a natural disaster is looming, and so is the end of the world. Leonardo Pirondi records a VR gamer’s uncanny intrusions into cozy virtual environments on 16mm in WELCOME HOME (SEJA BEM-VINDO AO LAR) (2023, 4 min). A pair of visualized hands, the perfect desiring machine, move around exaggeratingly spacious rooms with luxurious interiors and mind-blowing views, as though everything was at the fingertips. NE CORRIDOR (2022, 7 min) is on the verge of becoming total abstraction. It possesses latent violence and arousing energy that filmmaker Joshua Gen Solondz conjures through collaging spliced film strips with splashes of magenta, azure, and salmon pink. Also in the program: BONEFACE EXHIBITION D 1 (2022, 9 min) by Robert C. Banks and 2CENT/10COIL (2023, 10 min) by Monteith P. Mccollum. [Nicky Ni]
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Shorts 3: Hyperbolic Dreams
Harper Theater – Thursday, 6:30pm
It may seem from the first four shorts in this program that the overall theme is sex. In Chris Noon’s HUNGER (2022, 3 min), split screen is used to clever, sometimes kaleidoscopic effect, with a singular performer at times appearing to engage in intimacy with themselves on the other side of the screen. The cinematography is grainy and overexposed, tactile elements that evince an air of guilelessness, like a home movie or a student film. This makes its themes of longing and isolation all the more poignant, as if the film is something very private upon which we’ve stumbled. One might say the same about Adam Sekuler’s REALLY GOOD FRIENDS (2023, 10 min) in that it centers on something very private to those whom it’s about. At the beginning an older woman, Mary, enters a hotel—one might presume she’s on vacation or something of the sort, an internal bias emerging at the fore. It turns out she’s meeting her married lover, whose sexual proclivities are of the decidedly un-vanilla variety. As Mary lays out her accouterments, she tells in voiceover of the relationship she has with this man, describing a connection between two people who understand each other's uncommon needs. Sekuler, whose previous films TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS (2017) and 36 HOURS (2019) were CUFF standouts, always reveres his subjects with a deference toward their idiosyncrasies and an eye for what makes them and their situations worthy of cinema. His pacing in particular is considered, conveying the ineffability of his viewpoint. More unlikely sexual encounters take place in Enrique Pedráza Botero and Faye Tsakas’s ALPHA KINGS (2023, 15 min), about a group of young, professedly straight men who do sex work for both men and women as alpha-male versions of themselves (something akin to a dominatrix, it would seem). More about labor than sexuality, the film explores the nuances of the work at hand; more about economic gain than survival, it also delves into a candid realization that this type of 'unskilled' labor is often more lucrative than other, more traditional paths. T. Arthur Cottam (PORNOGRAPHIC APATHETIC, FILTHY FOOD) spoofs short-form video tutorials in JELQING FOR GAINS (2023, 6 min), wherein a woman advises on how to jelq, an exercise that supposedly facilitates penis enlargement. Its sole performer, Jessica Amal Rice, carries the absurd premise; sadly, she passed away from cancer just before the film was finished. With Frédéric Moffet’s GODDESS OF SPEED (2023, 8 min) the program deviates into films that aren’t necessarily about sex, veering more into the hyperbole referenced in the program’s title. Moffet doesn’t necessarily overstate the truth in his film, however, so much as he reimagines it vis-à-vis one of Andy Warhol’s lost movies, DANCE MOVIE, starring dancer (and, in the film, roller-skater) Fred Herko. The second film in the program to utilize split screen, in obvious reference to Warhol’s own fondness for the technique, it features a stand-in for Herko performing his own one-footed roller skating routine. Text overlays provide context for the homage, drawing heavily from Bruce Jenkins’ research on Warhol and this lost film. Again Moffet succeeds in appropriating and further abstracting existing (or, here, no-longer-existing) media, using ghostly detritus to give new life. Macon Reed’s THE DEATH SPA EXPERIENCE (2022, 8 min) is a spoof on mortality, an extreme bit of comic reprieve much like JELQING, while Michael U. Olowu’s GRILLZ & MIRRORS (2023, 4 min) takes to its logical extreme the titular oral accessory, evocative à la a Hype Williams music video. Similarly hypnotic are the next two films, Jacob Kessler’s 2940 N CAMPBELL (2022, 4 min, Digital Projection) and Senem Pirler and Monica Duncan’s CONFESSIONS OF A TRANSMISSION LINE (2022, 7 min). In the former an underground party continues (CUFF, anyone?) despite the powers that be trying to stop it. Images become abstracted with the acceleration of the partygoers’ uncaring. An unintentional theme of this program may be the split screen, as the latter film is the third to utilize it. The film “explore[s] the audiovisual process of feedback as a spiritual practice in relation to Camp and queer potentiality using real-time signal processing tools,” per the artists’ statement, a concept more suited to being appreciated visually and sonically than textually. The images certainly are alluring, like vaporwave by way of Nam June Paik; if that isn’t hyperbolic, then I don’t know what is. Also in the program: Yony Leyser’s CHOKEHOLE: DRAG WRESTLERS DO DEUTSCHLAND (2023, 23 min). [Kat Sachs]
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Katlin Schneider’s MELOMANIAC (US/Documentary)
Harper Theater – Thursday, 7pm
Aadam Jacobs, driven by a desire to document, recorded the concerts he went to. This isn’t completely unheard of, but it’s an uncommon dedication nevertheless, exacerbated by the fact that for almost two decades he went to concerts almost every night. Katlin Schneider’s MELOMANIC centers on Jacobs, his massive archive, and his indelible presence within the Chicago music scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when he’d attend shows with a heavy deck and discernible microphones situated awkwardly in the small clubs he frequented. The film is as much a love letter to those spaces as it is to Jacobs, as many of those interviewed either currently own music spaces (Joe Shanahan from the Metro, Tim Tuten from the Hideout), previously owned them (Julia Adams and Susan Tweedy from Lounge Ax), or booked acts for them (Mark Greenberg for Lounge Ax, Matt Rucins for Schubas/Lincoln Hall). They describe an extremely vibrant scene, made all the better by its being in Chicago, where, as opposed to New York and Los Angeles, it’s truly a community in every sense of the word. (Peep also Cine-File contributor Dmitry Samarov as one of those interviewed.) And any community worth its salt has people like Jacobs in it, the obsessives and oddballs who set a high bar for what it means to be part of something bigger than yourself and who, through such dedication, manage to become singular presences like those they idolize. Fittingly, the film also spotlights members of bands whom Jacobs not just recorded but became friends with. Rick Rizzo and Janet Beveridge Bean from Eleventh Day Dream are prominently featured, as are members of the band Trenchmouth, which included comedian Fred Armisen, who speaks highly of Jacobs and his endeavor, describing it as something like outside art. Jacobs briefly had his own record label, and put out some of the band’s singles on it. Jon Langford from the Mekons extols the quality of Jacobs’ recordings, another thing that set him apart from run-of-the-mill bootleggers; some of his recordings have been used by the bands themselves, such as Sonic Youth, whose 1987 live album Hold That Tiger was recorded by Jacobs. It’s not all positive, as the ramifications of illegal recording are touched upon—Jacobs was banned from the Metro for six years after recording a show without permission—and his occasional entitlement over being let into shows for free are mentioned. In terms of the documentary itself, it’s definitely rough and ready, and I would have liked to know more about Jacobs’ life outside of his recording activity. (One does learn that the chairs still in use at the Metro were originally purchased from Jacobs’ mother.) But for anyone who loves music, loves archivism, loves community, or just loves Chicago, this brisk valentine for a man who loves all of those things and seeks to preserve them is a love letter onto which you will gladly sign your name. (2023, 70 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]
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Shorts 5: (Re)Constructed Realities
Harper Theater – Thursday, 8:30pm
This program skews toward the experimental side of underground filmmaking, with some pieces, like Jim Fetterley’s BUTTERFLY IN THE SKY (2022, 14 min) and Chris Shields’ CHANNELS (2021, 10 min), that approach total abstraction. The former is an unbroken take of the artist playing with analog video synthesis and making pretty, shifting blocks of color. Fetterley draws the work into more familiar (and familial) territory by incorporating his 85-year-old mother’s response to the video art on the soundtrack. Her layperson’s interpretation provides an endearing, human counterpart to the digital imagery. In CHANNELS, Shields records himself channel surfing on a motel TV with a broken iPhone 6, thereby defamiliarizing a common experience through an unlikely technological intervention. I couldn’t make out anything that was on the TV, but I found it fascinating to look at all the same. RED HOUSE (2022, 3 min), a short work by Canadian animator Barry Doupé, employs outmoded computer animation software to depict a character that’s constantly changing form between a person and a house. Like everything by this singular animator, the eccentric sensibility is so endearing that it’s hard to watch without grinning. This program begins with a couple of explicitly humorous works: Padrick Ritch’s (de)VICE GRIP (2022, 3 min) and Alexei Dmitriev’s STOCK (2022, 5 min). The first of these features a woman reading the terms of service of an unidentified social media application over frenetically edited city footage. The narration reflects our dystopian moment, with the agreement entitling the corporation to basically invade users’ privacy in the act of tracking their data; the footage, however, is invigorating, showing a vibrant city in full swing. The second piece recycles stock footage to comic effect, stretching out a joke for five minutes to make the most of it. On the other hand, Charlotte Hong’s highly imaginative SMRT PIECE (2022, 4 min) is wonderfully complex, presenting a triptych of frames that present video footage and rapidly flashing drawings from the filmmaker’s sketchbook. The audio, of a conversation between two young women, is remarkable for its breadth and candor. The Taiwanese short FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO (2022, 13 min), directed by Wu Chia-Yun, illustrates ideas from Albert Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” via onscreen text and actors performing obscure actions. Wu achieves some effective compositions with postmodern architecture, making the film an interesting environment to explore. In the closing work, I THOUGHT THE WORLD OF YOU (2022, 17 min), Canadian filmmaker Kurt Walker spins an elusive story about a recording artist named Lewis who releases a record in the early 1980s and subsequently disappears. Walker crafts a jarring mix of short, silent scenes and random social media posts from the early 2010s; the movie hints at its story but never tells it straight out, conjuring up a sense of mystery and dry humor. Shot on grainy black-and-white film, I THOUGHT THE WORLD OF YOU looks distinctive too, making for a memorable pseudo-narrative in the surrealist tradition. Also in the program: Bryan Boyce’s IMAGE TO TEXT TO IMAGE (2022, 3 min) and Sarah Lasley’s WELCOME TO THE ENCLAVE (2022, 12 min). [Ben Sachs]
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Shorts 6: Oscillating Perspectives
Harper Theater – Thursday, 9:30pm
I was able to preview only half of this program, but the four pieces I did watch were all poignant works that successfully balanced personal and formal concerns; I can comfortably recommend this on their strengths alone. Reminiscent of Jodie Mack’s great featurette DUSTY STACKS OF MOM, Gina Kamentsky’s FOOT PRINT SHOP (2022, 4 min) employs stop-motion animation to make it appear that a print shop is operating on its own and churning out lots of pictures of feet. On the soundtrack, the filmmaker’s mother talks about a variety of subjects related to feet and sounds like she’s having a jolly old time helping her daughter make art. Less cheerful but no less fascinating is Silvestar Kolbas’ THE FILM FACTORY (2022, 15 min), which consists of photographs of a shuttered factory that used to belong to Croatia’s Fotokemika Company; the images were all taken on expired film that was produced (presumably some time ago) at the factory in question. Like much of Bill Morrison’s work, the film invites us to get lost in the textures of photochemical decay, and the images fit the subject matter like a glove. More wonderful textures abound in Rhea Storr’s THROUGH A SHIMMERING PRISM, WE MADE A WAY (2022, 18 min), as it was shot on black and white Super 8mm, though Storr has a lot on her mind besides swell cinematography. A poetic meditation on the African diaspora, the film interweaves impressionistic shots of London and Nassau and three voices reflecting on personal and social experience. It’s heady stuff but grounded in sharp observations, both visually and in terms of the narration. Greg Jenkins’ MOTOR MOTOR BLUE (2023, 15 min) is similarly complex in its mix of onscreen text and location shots, this time in the Appalachian Mountains. The work begins in an underground cave and ends in a natural history museum; between these bookends are reflections on the death of Jenkins’ uncle, a sequence about auto racing, and some particularly beautiful shots of clouds. Also in the program: Elizabeth M. Webb’s PROXIMITY STUDY (SIGHT LINES) (2022, 6 min), Nicci Haynes’ THE COST (2021, 3 min), Martin Mulcahy’s STRAPHANGER (2020, 7 min), and Mark Street’s CLEAR ICE FERN (2023, 12 min). [Ben Sachs]

📽️ CRUCIAL VIEWING

Jack Smith's FLAMING CREATURES (US/Experimental)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 8:30pm

Part of the New American Cinema group in New York City during the ‘60s, Jack Smith's flamboyant aesthetic can be characterized by a mix of baroque exoticism, gaudy costumes, and detritus salvaged from the city streets. FLAMING CREATURES is a non-narrative, Dionysian orgy, complete with wild dancing, gender bending, and a climactic earthquake. The carnivalesque madness of the film is reinforced by the chaotic density of its formal composition. Smith's deliberate spatial disorientation creates a pansexual landscape of tangled body parts; just as the viewer is unable to situate the visual coordinates of the image, the creatures are unaware of which extremity belongs to whom. FLAMING CREATURES attacks phallocentric rationality by dispensing with conventional elements like plot and spatial orientation, but also by repurposing pop iconography for a queer agenda. Not only does the film satirize Hollywood, it reveals an androgynous, homoerotic subtext lurking underneath its surface. Smith's use of dated film stock lends the image a washed-out quality, which gives the viewer the impression that they're watching long lost outtakes of an aborted low-budget experiment. Screening as part of the Contra/Banned series. (1963, 43 min, 16mm) [Harrison Sherrod]

Oscar Micheaux's BODY AND SOUL (US/Silent)

Chicago Film Society at the Music Box Theatre – Tuesday, 7pm

BODY AND SOUL is a silent "race" film—one of the movies made by and for segregated black audiences in the 1910s-50s. It is a tale of the dangers of blind faith set mainly in a rural Georgia community. In his landmark study Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, historian Donald Bogle, an admirer, writes, "In most cases the Micheaux feature was similar to the Hollywood product, only technically inferior. His films resembled the best B pictures of the time. Lighting and editing were usually poor, and the acting could be dreadful. Still, the standards of the Micheaux feature were far above those of the other black independents." I don't know about the poor editing bit. While the first thing you notice about BODY AND SOUL is the erratic or eccentric editing, to my mind it displays a pretty nimble, if somewhat incontinent, absorption and deployment of Edwin S. Porter's strategies of parallel and contrast editing. The rhythm is jazzy. (Some edits to Micheaux's films, it must be said, were made by the "artists" over at local censorship boards.) In his first screen performance, the mighty Paul Robeson clearly relishes playing the part of a hard-drinking thief passing himself off as a pastor—stealing in the name of the lord, as it were. Bogle seems to feel Robeson is a bit wasted on a silent film: "Robeson without his voice was merely beautiful and mysterious." Still, his famous smile radiates hypocrisy, and there is sly comedy in the play of glances with his hustler frenemies. Robeson also plays the con-man's humble twin brother. This is the man the girl (Julia Theresa Russell) truly loves, but instead she is wrecked "body and soul" by the cruel, corrupt "pastor." Mercedes Gilbert plays the girl's hardworking, devout mother, torn between believing in the "man of god" and crediting her daughter's protestations that he is abusing her. Though a fake, the pastor really does outdo himself with the showcase "Dry Bones in the Desert" sermon, bobbing with the spirit, even hauling off and pasting the deacon a couple times. Bogle notes that "to appreciate Micheaux's films one must understand that he was moving as far as possible away from Hollywood's jesters and servants. He wanted to give his audience something 'to further the race, not hinder it.' Often he sacrificed plausibility to do so." Accordingly, and as is sometimes the case with silent movies, modern viewers must adjust to the film's rhythms and accept some melodramatic plotting and acting. But if you can, you will find moments of great beauty, as well as an elemental, timeless story with near-operatic emotions. With a live score by the Alvin Cobb, Jr. Trio. (1925, 80 min, 35mm) [Scott Pfeiffer]

Hype Williams' BELLY (US)

Music Box Theatre – Monday, 7pm

There are multiple filmmakers who started as music video directors—David Fincher, Michel Gondry, and F. Gary Gray—but Harold “Hype” Williams is something special, not just for what his work meant to Black culture, but for what it did for mass culture. While the others went on to be more conventional filmmakers, Hype made only one feature, and it is so consistent with his pioneering music video style that there is no change in aesthetic from the earlier work. He didn’t choose one or the other; he pushed his language further, possibly to its limits. Generally, hip hop videos before Hype featured mostly dudes in junkyards next to barrel-fires (a la F. Gary Gray’s "Natural Born Killers"). Hype had tried his hand with that world with "Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F' Wit," but it seems around the time of Missy Elliot's “Supa Dupa Fly” in 1997 that he really nailed his style: the fish-eye lens; the saturated colors; light glistening off skin, clothing, and objects; the almost abstract use of the widescreen ratio; and split screens (both length- and width-wise). Hype’s cinema (and it is certainly that) was a significant part of most mornings sat watching MTV or BET. Not to downplay the producers and musicians whose work he helped visualize, but Hype presented a generation of songs in a way that made the videos almost indistinguishable from the songs themselves. They're some of the few examples where music videos actually compliment the music, rather than distract from it: the wild surrealism of Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson’s "What's It Gonna Be," the minimalist perfection of TLC’s “No Scrubs” (and TLC's own T-Boz stars in BELLY), the bombastic use of red and BELLY-adjacency in Mobb Deep’s remix for "Quiet Storm," which featured Lil’ Kim in her prime. BELLY, made the year after "Supa Dupa Fly," is a kind of a gangster film. Hype was no stranger to that genre—given his videos for Usher’s "Nice & Slow," Biggie’s "Warning," and R. Kelly’s "Down Low"—but BELLY is closer to Pop Art for the big screen. The film’s plot is nothing to get too excited for, as it leans heavily into familiarity with SCARFACE and every cliched plot mechanism the genre can muster, but that isn't the point of appreciating BELLY. The late DMX (in a fantastic performance) and Nas (in a so-so performance) are two friends trying to make it in the drug game; as priorities and morals change, they find themselves at a crossroads in their personal lives, not to mention squaring off against a smoked-out Jamaican drug lord (the movie also features maybe the most blunt-smoking of any movie to date, as nearly every scene has someone blazing up). From the hair-raising, much-discussed opening scene to Method Man’s first-person shooter moment to the hypnotic re-rendering of SCARFACE’s infamous finale (transposed to 3/4 of the way in the plot), the movie gives viewers enough to admire, even though the story may leave a lot to be desired. The released version is heavily compromised, with Hype and his team having battled the money people left and right throughout the production; as a result, the movie can feel off-kilter and disorienting on first viewing. None of this takes away from the singular experience of BELLY’s intoxicating rush of hallucinatory visuals and sounds, an experience truly fit for 35mm. (The Blu-ray transfer of the movie significantly lightens the film’s intentional hypnotic contrast; Hype apparently fought with executives over their insistence that he use a film stock that "lightened" black skin.) Yet Hype’s moviemaking, aside from BELLY, has been non-existent, which is astounding. He was attached at one point to the SPEED RACER remake, and most tantalizingly of all, was developing a 3-D reggaeton zombie film set in Jamaica. BELLY provides ample justification that Hype remains a premier artist of our time, and we should be thankful for whatever bits and pieces of his imagination we get. Introduced by MC Ang13, with an-all vinyl DJ set by Shazam Bangles in the lounge before the show. Screening as part of Fresh Films: A Celebration of 50 Years of Hip Hop series. (1998, 92 min, 35mm) [John Dickson]

Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky’s WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (Hungary)

Gene Siskel Film Center – See Venue website for showtimes

For a generation of American moviegoers, WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES was the gateway to the world of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, and what an introduction it was. Here was a work of awe-inspiring long-take cinema à la Andrei Tarkovsky and Miklos Jancsó that also had roots in the absurdist theater of Samuel Beckett; likewise, the film’s perspective straddled folklore and modernity in a way that made it seem eerily timeless. What most American moviegoers didn’t know when WERCKMEISTER played the festival circuit and then got passed around as bootleg cassettes in the early 2000s was that Tarr and Hranitzky had been honing the film’s aesthetic for more than a decade, as their two previous features, DAMNATION (1988) and SÁTÁNTANGÓ (1994), both reveled in exquisite black-and-white cinematography, grungy rural settings, slow pacing, and even slower camera movements. Yet those films, as masterful as they are, didn’t arrive with the same urgency as this one. Jonathan Rosenbaum described WERCKMEISTER as an “account of ethnic cleansing (in spirit if not in letter),” and the film indeed feels haunted by the atrocities that took place in the Balkans just a few years earlier. The parable-like story concerns a small town that’s visited by a mysterious circus that promises two major attractions: the stuffed carcass of the world’s largest whale and a rumored-about foreign prince who never materializes. The specter of the new and unknown spurs something ugly in this backwater hamlet, and a sense of dread festers until terrible things begin to happen. Most of this unfolds from the perspective of a childlike man who doesn’t fully comprehend everything around him, and this enhances the film’s sense of dumbstruck wonder. As usual in Tarr and Hranitzky’s work, the plot frequently takes a backseat to the spectacle of time passing and accumulating; it demands the sort of concentration that is almost impossible to attain outside a theater. (2000, 145 min, New 4K DCP Digital Restoration) [Ben Sachs]

F. Gary Gray’s SET IT OFF (US)

Music Box Theatre – Wednesday, 7pm

A profoundly affecting display of female friendship and the unique trials faced by Black women, F. Gary Gray’s SET IT OFF will—to be completely cliche for a moment—make you laugh, and it will make you cry. The powerhouses that are Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, and Kimberly Elise star as four best friends in Los Angeles. Stony (Pinkett), Cleo (Latifah) and T.T. (Elise) work together as cleaners; Frankie (Fox) is a bank teller. The film begins with her bank getting robbed by someone she knows from the projects. Because of this, she’s unfairly fired from the bank, and a cop on the scene (John C. McGinley) even presumes she was involved in the crime. This is just the first of several hardships faced by the women—Stony’s brother is shot by McGinley’s cop, T.T.’s son is taken away from her after he accidentally drinks cleaning detergent at his mother’s job, as she had been unable to afford childcare—hardships that eventually drive them to start robbing banks themselves. While casing a bank, Stony, who emerges as the de facto main character, meets Keith (Blair Underwood), a handsome, well-educated banker. Yet it’s the friendship between the four women where the real love of the film is found. Deeply bonded after decades of friendship, their love for one another transcends any traditional sort of romance. The group is successful at first, but setbacks continue to rear their ugly heads. Scripted by Takashi Bufford and Kate Lanier, the story is altogether too realistic where it has no business being so. It shouldn’t be realistic that people from disenfranchised communities must resort to illegal and often dangerous activities just to get by. It shouldn’t be realistic that a mother can’t afford childcare and thus can’t keep a job. And it certainly shouldn’t be realistic that a young Black man might be shot dead by police, because of a white cop’s prejudiced assumptions over his actions during an arrest. But also realistic is the love this community has for its own, protecting each other where society at large has failed to do so. Gray (whose first feature was the stoner buddy classic FRIDAY) tautly directs the riveting script, relying largely on medium close-ups and wide shots to emphasize environment and include all four women, or variations of them, in one shot. It’s finely edited, too, by John Carter, who edited Miloš Forman's TAKING OFF, Elaine May’s THE HEARTBREAK KID and MICKEY AND NICKY, and other films such as THE KILLING FLOOR, Gray’s FRIDAY, and SOUL FOOD. (He had a fascinating career, being the first Black editor employed by network television [CBS] and the first Black person to be admitted to the American Cinema Editors society.) Not for nothing, author and activist Ibram X. Kendi is a big fan of the film, writing in his book Stamped from the Beginning that it was the “most sophisticated, holistically antiracist thriller of the decade,” which did what “law-and-order and tough-on-crime racism refused to do: it humanized inner-city Black perpetrators of illegal acts, and in the process forced its viewers to reimagine who the real American criminals were.” The subject is hard, and the stakes are high, but the film is tinged with a joy shared by the four women that makes it as much a beautiful love story as anything else. Screening as part of Fresh Films: A Celebration of 50 Years of Hip Hop series. (1996, 123 min, 35mm) [Kat Sachs]

Harmony Korine's SPRING BREAKERS (US)

Music Box Theatre – Friday and Saturday, Midnight

In the light of day, GUMMO may be Harmony Korine’s more enduring, trailblazing achievement, and TRASH HUMPERS is surely his most gleefully, deviantly fascinating, but SPRING BREAKERS stands as his most shiny, indulgent, Day-Glo-drenched ticket to midnight movie infamy. Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez—self-consciously cast here as cast-outs from the corporate House of Mouse—are joined by Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine (wife of director Harmony) as part of an unholy foursome, vivid and bright, gunning for the ultimate spring break glory… until the path turns, almost imperceptibly, into something decidedly darker and looser. Leaning on an unmistakably specific, Floridian iconography of teen hedonism, and infiltrating the vibe of ‘90s cable television (American exceptionalism as filtered through MTV and Girls Gone Wild), SPRING BREAKERS was shrewdly recognized by critics, notably Steven Shaviro, for the radicalism behind its audiovisual experimentation and its formally innovative, recursive editing patterns. Korine’s maximalist aesthetic of flash-forwards, flashbacks, music montages, and mixed formats (from glorious anamorphic 35mm all the way down to VHS camcorder glitchiness) careens into a free association between themes of irony, sincerity, clichés about pop culture, clichés about spirituality, and clichés about co-ed sexuality, like a raunchy Rorschach blot for the midnight or multiplex spectator. The circular narrative structure of SPRING BREAKERS emphasizes the way that cinematic images and sounds not only acquire, but also importantly shed, their meanings when they are repeated ad nauseum. But by emphasizing the stimulation of feelings over meanings, does Korine successfully exploit the cult of spring break, or does he just do it to lull you into a stupor? In the music-video logic of formal rhymes, where endings turn back into beginnings, and you can see the end of the road as the same place you started from, innocence and objectification go hand-in-hand, no need to ask Is it feminist?. In the meantime, never has a Britney Spears song been so incisively, intelligently choreographed. Never has James Franco, starring as cosmic gangster/rapper Alien and a one-man minstrel show, looked so high off his own supply. Never has spring break looked so liberating and tedious at the same time, when the empty, endless drudgery of partying becomes its own punishment. This is where our story ends. Spring Break… for-ever. Screening as part of Fresh Films: A Celebration of 50 Years of Hip Hop series. (2012, 94 min, 35mm) [Tien-Tien Jong]

Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts: INTERIOR LIVES (US)

Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center – Thursday, 6pm

Spanning four decades and nine filmmakers, this shorts program is rich in varying perspectives on Black women’s experience, though there are clear themes that recur. For instance, Cheryl Dunye’s JANINE (1990, 9 min, Digital Projection), Yvonne Welbon’s MONIQUE (1991, 2 min, Digital Projection), and Paige Taul’s 10:28, 30 (2019, 5 min, Digital Projection) all tackle formative experiences in the filmmakers’ lives; these showcase the confessional side of experimental cinema. JANINE plays the most like an actual confession, as Dunye addresses the camera to relate moments in her relationship with a white girl she knew in high school. Always a candid and ingratiating presence on screen, Dunye here acknowledges how she looked up to her friend Janine even though Janine clearly looked down on her. The work achieves a sense of catharsis when Dunye describes how she finally cut ties with her. In MONIQUE, Welbon recounts her contentious relationship with the only other dark-skinned girl in her elementary school; this pithy work stings in how quickly it conveys the process by which children internalize the racism of their surroundings. Taul also narrates 10:28, 30, which concerns her feelings toward her mother and twin sister. As in JANINE, the filmmaker disarms the audience with her candor, making the spectators feel privy to Taul’s private self. Fronza Woods’ FANNIE’S FILM (1981, 15 min, 16mm) also explores its subject’s inner life, though it does so in juxtaposition with a consideration of her public self. The film is a documentary about a cleaning woman who works at a fitness studio in New York City; Woods ingeniously blends audio of her subject discussing her past, her job, and her aspirations with images of her at her job—the effect is akin to an X-ray that allows viewers to see the complicated humanity within the workers we typically take for granted. Intimacy is a chief theme of Aarin Burch’s DREAMS OF PASSION (1989, 4 min, 16mm) and Zeinabu irene Davis’ CYCLES (1989, 16 min, Digital Projection). The first of these presents two Black women dancers whose choreography speaks to sensual desire; the second is a free-associative work that centers on a woman taking time to care for herself while on her period. Davis’ exceptional feature COMPENSATION (1999) has been a subject of rediscovery in recent years, and CYCLES is no less sensitive or imaginative, juggling portraiture and metaphorical imagery along with live action, animation, and still photography. Cauleen Smith is another filmmaker now undergoing a much-needed reappraisal, thanks to the restoration of feature DRYLONGSO (1998); she’s represented on the program with CHRONICLES OF A LYING SPIRIT (BY KELLY GABRON) (1992, 6 min, 16mm). This short culminates with a monologue about Smith’s responsibilities as an artist, much like Burch’s SPIN CYCLE (1991, 6 min, 16mm), whose soundtrack features the filmmaker contemplating her position in the industry as a Black lesbian. Where these films find the filmmakers equivocating about how to depict Black female identity in cinema, Jada-Amina’s I’M NOT GOING TO DIE, I’M GOING HOME LIKE A SHOOTING STAR (2020, 15 min, Digital Projection) and S. Pearl Sharp’s BACK INSIDE HERSELF (1984, 4 min, Digital Projection) are unabashedly celebratory works on the subject. Vibrant and poetic, both works erupt with positive feeling, which greatly impacts the tone of this program on the whole. [Ben Sachs]

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Sebastián Silva’s ROTTING IN THE SUN (US/Mexico)

Music Box Theatre – See Venue website for showtimes

Sebastián Silva—as both director and “character”—seems utterly entranced by Emil Cioran’s The Trouble With Being Born, a philosophical collection of aphorisms musing on, well, the title kind of says it all. A series of literary meditations on the horrors of existence and all that comes with it, it’s the perfect recurring text to sit within Silva’s ROTTING IN THE SUN, a meta-mystery that, if nothing else, features more cocks on screen than your average episode of Columbo. The film neatly exists as a kind of trio of cinematic aphorisms, bouncing from the desperate, suicidal ideations of Silva (playing himself) to the stresses of work placed upon his cleaning lady, Vero (Catalina Saavedra), to the vapid antics of Instagram celebrity Jordan Firstman (playing himself) as he tries to locate an MIA Silva halfway through the film. The scroll-and-you’ll-miss-it nature of contemporary life is detailed through Silva excusing himself from social life to scroll through the latest dumb internet videos, alongside the frantic stream-of-consciousness of the images displayed on screen; recurring memories poking into conversations, dialogue nagging in the brains of characters throughout; and the ever-present, casual queer sexuality on display. It all coalesces into a sprawling portrait of the fleeting joy of internet fame, the desperate nature of those at life’s edge, and the terror of losing your grip on what’s real. The trio of performers at the center command their own pockets of ROTTING IN THE SUN tremendously, but Firstman (whose blasé Instagram “impressions” have blown up in their own isolated way in our world) emerges as the sad clown that pop culture needs, his carefree queer mania veering into agonizing self-reflection within minutes, the height of which finds himself literally interrupting an orgy to discover the latest clue in the mystery of Sebastián’s disappearance. The mind reels while watching this intentionally confusing mashup of fiction and reality. Is Silva as horrifically depressed and obsessed with death as he posits here? Is Firstman genuinely in constant re-evaluation of the online persona he’s crafted for himself? Or is this just a convenient vessel for these thoughts to run rampant in the heart of Mexico City? Perhaps the clue to unlocking all this is another of Cioran’s maxims from his aforementioned text, a musing on literature that could very well apply to Silva’s cinematic philosophies here: “Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.” (2023, 109 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

The Short Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/Experimental)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Tuesday, 6pm

As part of the Gene Siskel Film Center’s lecture series on filmmakers who have broken convention and adapted to the medium’s digital evolution at the beginning of the 21st century, this program focuses on how Apichatpong Weerasethakul augments reality with contemporary cinematic tools. Whether amplifying spiritual manifestation, memory, or dreams, Weerasethakul’s work grants as much weight to metaphysical space as the physical. An accomplished director of feature films (he won the 2010 Palme d’Or for UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES [2010]), Weerasethakul has also curated dozens of art installations around the world and made short films that have set the bar for poetic cinema in the 21st century. The program opens with THIRDWORLD (1999), an early work shot in black and white in the village of Panyi. Weerasethakul studied architecture before filmmaking, and his images showcase the landscape and design of buildings; at the same time, the high contrast of the colorless images feels from another dimension. From his earliest work, the director makes hypnotic dream images out of the personal physical world of home. EMERALD (2007) takes place entirely in a rundown hotel room, with the physical space as the subject along with computer-generated floating dust; for context, the hotel was constantly occupied by international travelers in the early 1980s. Weerasethakal pushes his audience to consider associative memory, spaces that hold onto memory after forgotten people are long gone. A crumbling empty space remains meaningless but holds value for those who inhabited it, driving home the impermanence of the physical world and the importance of personal connections. VAPOUR (2015) centers on a fundamental aspect of Weerasethakul’s work: the dream and its deconstruction. For a majority of the short, billows of smoke make it difficult to see subjects, especially shot in low contrast B&W. Layers of sound create a cinema of blurred lines with reality. When subjects do reveal themselves, there seems to be some sort of politically violent event: figures bound by entities in ski masks (these images with a wilderness background conjure up Godard’s WEEK-END [1967]). Towards the latter half, the dream seems to end. Not only does the “vapor” dissipate but Weerasethakul shows its artificial source: a hose of smoke. An outlier of the program, MOBILE MEN (2018) is a brief surrealist documentary. Shot in the back of a truck with young men showing off their tattoos, the director captures masculine youth brandishing their muscles. BLUE (2018) takes on a similar tone of verfremdungseffekt previously seen in VAPOUR, only taken a step farther. Focused on themes central to Weerasethakul throughout his career, the audience watches a flame projected (through a pepper’s ghost) onto a woman in bed. Near the bed and woman, theatrical scrims unravel one at a time. Many see this as a depiction of insomnia manifested in the image, yet it depicts the multiple layers of artifice and framing that create the metaphysical image, pulling the curtain on his images to make a point about cinema. (1998-2018, Total approx. 70 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

John Ford's STRAIGHT SHOOTING (US/Silent)

Northbrook Public Library (1201 Cedar Lane, Northbrook) – Wednesday, 2pm and 7pm

Over the last 100+ years, STRAIGHT SHOOTING has seen its fair share of reversals of fortune. When ordered up by Universal in 1917, studio brass simply wanted to run out Harry Carey's contract in an anonymous two-reeler. Ford had already made several successful such films for Universal, but like his mentor Griffith, he chafed against the cautious and arbitrary length of contemporary product. Gallantly, arrogantly, the twenty-three-year-old Ford submitted a five-reel cut of STRAIGHT SHOOTING to Universal—a covert feature debut. The not-so-accidental feature was rejected by the marketing executives until Universal chief Carl Laemmle intervened and posed a marvelous analogy: "If I order a suit of clothes and the fellow gives me an extra pair of pants free, what am I going to do—throw them back in his face?" Both sides got their way eventually: Ford's five-reel STRAIGHT SHOOTING was released to theaters in 1917 and the front office boys reissued it as STRAIGHT SHOOTIN' in 1925—shorn of a letter and three whole reels. By then, Ford was directing big pictures like THE IRON HORSE and THE BLUE EAGLE for Fox and there was no time for posterity. Sooner or later STRAIGHT SHOOTING became a "lost film." (When did we lose STRAIGHT SHOOTING exactly? At the necessarily indeterminate moment we forgot to not lose it.) Recovered from the Czechoslovakian national archive in 1966 following the American Film Institute's worldwide search and re-premiered at the 1967 edition of the Montreal International Film Festival, a cheap program Western became an unlikely tributary of national importance. Ford was suddenly the de facto Old Master of an indigenous American tradition, honored with TV specials and the endorsement of California Governor Ronald Reagan. Excerpts from STRAIGHT SHOOTING aired on NBC. (Meanwhile, Ford's sublime 7 WOMEN—his latest feature and, ultimately, his last—had already vanished from theaters, received indifferently in all but the most fervently auteurist circles.) Despite its long obscurity and modest ambitions, STRAIGHT SHOOTING was picked over endlessly and admiringly in the burgeoning body of Ford literature. Scholar Richard Koszarski even complained that too many film students had been content to let a single early Ford feature stand in for the totality of this complicated transitional period. Then STRAIGHT SHOOTING receded again, for whatever reason—stubbornly absent from the repertory as new Ford discoveries like BUCKING BROADWAY and UPSTREAM trickled out. STRAIGHT SHOOTING still awaits a full restoration, which would entail replacing the Czech titles with better approximations of the English originals. Screening as part of the Silent Film Series. (1917, approx. 60 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Roberto Rossellini's L'AMORE (Italy)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 1:30pm

A deceptively intimate movie that must have looked positively tinny in the wake of Roberto Rossellini’s socio-political frescoes ROME: OPEN CITY and PAISAN, L’AMORE is an anthology film spun around the flimsiest of themes—namely, the virtuosic versatility of La Magnani. The first segment, "The Human Voice," taken from Jean Cocteau’s one-act play, is an exercise in minimalism: a single set, a straightforward premise, and only one character with a speaking part. (It’s no slight to Anna Magnani to acknowledge that her canine companion nearly steals the show.) Magnani sulks around her flat waiting for her lover’s telephone call and becomes no less emotional when the telephone rings. At times the scenario suggests a dusty topical play revived as-is, with the novelty of telephonic communication treated with equal doses of fascination and weariness. No wonder contemporary Italian reviewers dismissed it as something that didn’t quite constitute a movie. We only hear Magnani’s half of the conversation, and Rossellini uses this intermittently intelligible exchange to poeticize silence. Identified by Jonathan Rosenbaum as the first Italian film to be shot with direct sound, "The Human Voice" gains gravity through its ambient soundscape—a mix of creaky floorboards, overheard conversations, and the slightest hint of a world outside. The second segment, "The Miracle," from an original scenario by Federico Fellini, is probably more readily recalled today by law students than by cinephiles. Like THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST some four decades later, "The Miracle" was met with charges of blasphemy because it challenged audiences to take the Bible seriously. After Magnani’s simpleton shepherdess finds herself pregnant after a night with a drifter she believed to be St. Joseph, she’s pilloried by the peasants and the priests alike for her allegedly immaculate conception. What makes these believers so inured to the possibility of a miracle in their own time? A condemnation of small-minded Christianity that moves with the overpowering fleetness of a fable, "The Miracle" truly wound up doing God’s work: Rossellini’s film nudged the US Supreme Court to vacate the Mutual precedent, declare movies a form of expression worthy of First Amendment protections, and rule that "sacrilege" was insufficient and unconstitutional grounds for banning a film. Even after the Supreme Court ruling, the City of Chicago managed to ban it anyway (on the grounds of "immorality," not "sacrilege"), leaving it to Doc Films and the ACLU to screen "The Miracle" for assorted civil libertarians, lapsed Catholics, pinkos, and film enthusiasts. One more thing: due to rights issues that prevented the distribution of "The Human Voice" in the U.S., "The Miracle" was released stateside as part of a different omnibus film, THE WAYS OF LOVE, which also featured Jean Renoir’s "A Day in the Country" and Marcel Pagnol’s "Jofroi." More than sixty years later, it’s still rare to see L’AMORE in its integral form, so make haste. Screening as part of the Contra/Banned series. (1948, 79 min, DCP Digital) [K.A. Westphal]

Martin Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 3:30pm

Those of us who are old enough can cast our minds back to 1988 and recall just how controversial was Martin Scorsese’s THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. When not banned outright, the film—an intense, often exhilarating fictionalized life of Jesus based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel—was met with violence, boycotts, and protests on multiple continents from right-wing fundamentalists, who objected to the very notion of investigating the human side of Christ. The idea that he might have had human feelings, including sexual urges and fear of death, was an anathema to the bible thumpers. Angered by this thoughtless reaction, Lou Reed wrote a powerful song about the film, "Dime Store Mystery." "The duality of nature, godly nature, human nature, splits the soul," Lou sang of Christ, concluding, "I find it easy to believe that he might question his beliefs." In 1989, Lou’s New York album, which contained that song, was on heavy rotation in my freshman college dorm room, as was Peter Gabriel’s Passion, his beautiful and exciting soundtrack for LAST TEMPTATION. Scorsese had always wanted to film a life of Christ, not least because of his formative experiences with Biblical epics. Crucially, he burned to make a character study that would help viewers identify with the duality of Christ, who was at once fully divine and fully human. Barbara Hershey gave him the Kazantzakis novel in the early ‘70s, and he spent the next 15 years trying to mount a movie version; after an aborted start in 1983, he finally shot the film in 1987 in Morocco. In an empathetic performance, Willem Dafoe plays Jesus as a tortured Scorsese hero (literally, in this case), torn between the spirit and the flesh, confused about his calling, and human enough not to be above sin. Is he tormented by the voice of God—or is he schizophrenic? In the film as in the book, Christ’s last temptation—which, dreamlike, takes up the last 35 minutes of the film—is to come down from the cross and live the life of an ordinary mortal man: to have a family with Mary Magdalene (Hershey), whom he loved, to grow old and die. As Scorsese was at pains to point out, the film is not a version of the Gospels. Still, it includes key scenes from them: Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist (Andre Gregory); the wilderness temptations; the Sermon on the Mount and the gathering of disciples; the raising of Lazarus, who is later murdered by a pre-conversion Saul (Harry Dean Stanton). The Passion Week events are here, including the casting of the money changers out of the temple and the judgment of Pontius Pilate (David Bowie). As deeply serious a work as this is, its tone can be comic (you can tell Scorsese had seen LIFE OF BRIAN), albeit sometimes unintentionally. Elsewhere, the tone is feverish, nervous. I find the film compulsively watchable and moving, hypnotic, intoxicating even, and strangely shaped. It never drags despite its two-hour-and-44-minute running time. That has to do with the energy of Scorsese’s moving camera, his innovative approach to point of view, and Thelma Schoonmaker's sublime editing, so key to the film’s propulsive rhythm and poetry. The vivid images of bravura cinematographer Michael Ballhaus are in dialogue with the history of religious art. LAST TEMPTATION made the struggle with inner conflict and growth, with faith and doubt, into something urgent for me, a doubter raised Methodist. Here is a Christ to understand our suffering, not a “flesh-colored Christ that glows in the dark,” if I may paraphrase the poet. Scorsese decided to jettison the period language and have his characters speak largely in naturalistic American English. Paul Schrader is the credited screenwriter; what appears onscreen represents substantial uncredited rewrites by Scorsese and Jay Cocks, who refashioned the dialogue in terms of what they felt they themselves would say. It works for me. In fact, Harvey Keitel’s Brooklyn-accented Judas is one of my favorite Harvey performances. The essence of the vision, as Scorsese says, was to do “Jesus on Eighth Avenue.” How do you make the message of Christianity work out on the street? The message is love, but how do you actually live it out, live with forgiveness and compassion? How does one go about loving one’s enemy? Seeing the film again made these questions feel personal and alive for me. After all, I struggle with feelings of hatred for the people I regard as my enemies every day. Scorsese hoped to make viewers feel the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice, the agonizing nature of his decision, the selflessness of his shouldering of responsibility. He made a living, pulsing, flawed work of art that attempts to do nothing less than wrestle with the mystery of life. LAST TEMPTATION is about the struggle to find God, but that can be a metaphor for any spiritual change or personal evolution through which a person must go. Perhaps the line that moves me the most is when Jesus confides to Judas how ashamed he is when he thinks of all the mistakes he’s made—“of all the wrong ways I looked for God.” Such a line speaks to the journey all of us are on. Screening as part of the Contra/Banned series. (1988, 164 min, 35mm) [Scott Pfeiffer]

John Waters' PINK FLAMINGOS (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Saturday, 7pm

Even by today’s more desensitized standards, PINK FLAMINGOS retains its shock value. Babs Johnson (Divine) wears her tabloid-branded moniker “Filthiest Person Alive” with great pride. Living in a trailer park with her toddler-like mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills), and roommate Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) somewhere in the sticks just outside Baltimore, Babs is hiding from society and authorities due to her countless crimes, which includes murder. Meanwhile, perverted couple Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary) are outraged by Babs’ title—deeming themselves to be the filthiest—and set out to usurp her dubious designation. In a series of ever-escalating scenes more revolting than the last, the Marbles and Babs and her cohorts engage in a battle of one-upmanship. Waters’ film subverts damn near all societal norms and employs an almost cinéma vérité style of filmmaking, particularly in shots of Babs/Divine walking around town with onlookers gawking. No topic is too taboo here. Besides the infamous dog-poo scene, scenes featuring cannibalism, fetishes of all varieties, and rape also feature. This is a film not for the faint of heart—like a pig rolling around in its own filth and loving every second of it, PINK FLAMINGOS knows that it is trash, but glorious, artful trash. It’s not surprising that this is the film that brought John Waters (and Divine) out of underground cinema obscurity and into a broader collective consciousness. Screening as part of the Contra/Banned series. (1972, 93 min, 35mm) [Kyle Cubr]

Peter Berlin’s THAT BOY (US/Adult)

Music Box Theater – Sunday, 9:30pm

“Peter Berlin and I began living in San Francisco at approximately the same time,” wrote Robert Julian for the Bay Area Reporter in 2006, on the release of  Jim Tushinski’s documentary THAT MAN: PETER BERLIN. “Seeing him walk down Castro Street in skin-tight white spandex pants, with his prominent genitalia stuffed down one leg, was always a memorable experience… It was, in fact, a train-wreck of an experience; I didn't want to look, and I couldn't look away.” Julian kicks off his review by noting that he saw neither of Berlin’s forays into gay porn, NIGHTS IN BLACK LEATHER (1973) and THAT BOY, which he produced, wrote, directed and starred in. Ironically, the critic’s experience with (or at least around) Berlin recalls the plot of THAT BOY. The German-born filmmaker, photographer, and clothing designer  apparently used as inspiration his experience of being an unfettered object of desire while cruising. THAT BOY posits the dynamic between Helmut (Berlin, credited as Peter Burian) and a young, sightless man he encounters on the street. The latter became sightless only recently; before that, he was one of many of the beautiful boys who yearned for Helmut on his Haight-Ashbury walkabouts. Helmut stops to help the young man as he’s crossing the street; the two continue to walk together, with the sightless boy telling Helmut of his sexual desires. These are projected onto and then visualized in fantasy sequences between Helmut and various random passersby checking him out. One sequence in particular emphasizes Berlin’s rampant, albeit benign, narcissism, as he engages with a photographer who not only takes numerous photos of him, but also pleasures him within a veritable shrine made of the images. Despite this acknowledgment of society’s appreciation of his extraordinary good looks, it’s suggested that his interest in the young blind man stems from his inability to see Helmut, who may desire substance over just sex. “I'm not interested in it,” Berlin later said of the film. “I was never happy with any of my films. We made them just to get it off my chest. I don't look at pornography; it's too boring for me. The exciting part about erotic feeling and sensation is in one's head. It's not that you have some physical contact. It’s all about the mental context that surrounds that physical contact. I found this impossible to capture on film.” It would seem Berlin’s career—maybe even his being—centered on this effort to embody via images that which is essentially ineffable. Maybe he didn’t succeed with THAT BOY, but it’s undeniable that he succeeded in capturing himself, in all his beautiful, heady, and supercilious glory. Preceded by Four Chambers’ 2019 short film ARCHETYPES (12 min, DCP Digital). Programmed and presented by the Front Row and Henry Hanson. (1974, 78 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Friday, 8:30pm

Perhaps the best sequel ever made, Russ Meyer's love letter to groovy '60s culture triumphs by having nothing to do with Jacqueline Susann's 1966 novel and just a slight resemblance to Mark Robson's 1967 film adaptation. Nominally still a cautionary tale about a group of beautiful young women coming to the big city and being corrupted by fame and fortune, it marries Meyer's lifelong fixation with oversized bosoms to a lurid color palette and a cartoonishly square, moralizing voiceover. The result is like a gleeful episode of The Partridge Family set in a bordello. Viewed with 2023 eyes, it might be tempting to give Meyer credit for open-mindedness in depicting alternate lifestyles and nonbinary presentation, but though his outlook is primarily optimistic, it is still that of a traditional '50s American male. Like touring a safari, this is a chance to get an eyeful of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll from the comfort of staid suburbia. Meyer's true innovation was in owning all his intellectual property. He was a truly independent filmmaker even when working for studios, like he did here. That insistence on controlling his own economic and creative destiny is the lesson he can teach young filmmakers whose careers are imperiled before they even begin by corporations and AI. Meyer's perspective on sexual and broader societal mores are firmly patriarchal. In that way, his work is in line with Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine, in whose pages many of this film's stars were featured. Unlike Hefner, Meyer was self-aware enough not to try to sell his preoccupations as a wholesome lifestyle brand. Like a leering uncle, you wouldn't go to him for advice on how to treat your girlfriend, but you might ask about how he got the house with the two-car garage. Along with FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965), this is Meyer's most successful attempt at quasi-mainstream entertainment. The fetishism is buoyed by a bouncy soundtrack and there's a triple wedding in the end. It's not really a happening and it won't freak you out, but you'll have a good time anyway. Screening as part of the Contra/Banned series. (1970, 107 min, DCP Digital) [Dmitry Samarov]

Jack Cardiff’s THE GIRL ON THE MOTORCYCLE (UK/France)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 1:30pm

If you’ve heard anything about Jack Cardiff’s whiplash journey of female sexual liberation, it might be this particular tidbit in film distribution history: the film holds the distinct title of being the first movie in the US given the dreaded “X” rating by the MPAA, though the sordid implications of the rating meant very little when next year’s MIDNIGHT COWBOY would win the Academy Award for Best Picture, X rating and all. But THE GIRL ON THE MOTORCYCLE—originally released in the United States under the cheekier title NAKED UNDER LEATHER—likely wouldn't garner that sort of explicit notice today, as its female nudity and eroticism are infrequent and tame by today's standards. Perhaps the very thought of a sexually adventurous female protagonist was enough to drive the MPAA up the wall, with the film's heroine leaving her husband to find sexual gratification representing a daring notion in a post-Hays Code world (even though the topic was common enough on the silver screen). Under the directorial and photographic watch of Cardiff—best known as a frequent collaborator of directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger—the visuals on display are what really shine through, with fast-paced motorcycle cinematography appearing decades before Sam Raimi’s EVIL DEAD series would practically trademark the device, alongside the solarization effect that presents many of the sex scenes in a psychedelic array of multi-colored gaiety that almost reads as a softcore take on the kaleidoscopic “Beyond the Infinite” sequence from that same year's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. No matter where you fall on the explicit nature of Cardiff’s feature, there’s no denying it’s a hell of a ride. Screening as part of the Contra/Banned series. (1968, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Ben Kaye]

Howard Hawks' SCARFACE (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Sunday, 3:45pm

Howard Hawks' early talkie SCARFACE finds him adapting Armitage Trail's nigh-unreadable novel of booze slinging and unbridled incestuous lust into a free-for-all of cinematic show-offery. The perversely mannered, highly symbolic cinematography and visual patterns Hawks brings to this dirty and unwholesome tale are justly famous: the fortuitous 'X' appearing within the mise-en-scene just as death approaches, the playful long-take of murder the opens the film that's been stolen out of Von Sternberg's UNDERWORLD, the tommy gun that blasts away the pages of a calendar to mark the days of Tony Camonte's mob rule. As Camonte, Paul Muni seems to move through the frame like a caged animal, infinitely furious and simultaneously perpetually calculating, a monster whose body exists only because his desires need physical form to be satisfied. Screening as part of the Contra/Banned series. (1932, 94 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Paul Verhoeven's ROBOCOP (US)

Gene Siskel Film Center – Monday, 6pm

One of the most uncomfortable films ever released by a major Hollywood studio, ROBOCOP features a dead man, partially resurrected by capitalist interests as a cyborg badge-wearing mass murderer, on a quest of meaningless revenge. In an urban hellhole tellingly derived from the economically undead metropolis of 1980s Detroit, a police officer named Murphy is brutally killed by a group of giggling and moronic thugs who, inexplicably, rule the local underworld. Brought back by the ominously named Omni Consumer Products, Murphy is set on a quest to eliminate all crime in the city, seemingly through the most violent of possible means. In Verhoeven's realization, the film is a litany of intricate and graceful violations, filled with bodies slamming through shattering glass, blood smearing on lenses, obscenities hurled one after another in machine-gun-like abandon. Murphy himself, in his undead form, is a walking obscenity and is called such by major characters: he is an affront to the tasteful and easy morality that ROBOCOP is dedicated to demolishing, refusing any compartmentalization, whether the literal (he breaks free of his OCP bonds) or the figurative (is he or is he not the police officer who was killed?). Verhoeven collapses these fields of discomfort and rupture—the metaphorical, the visual, the verbal—into a series of brilliant set pieces that demonstrate the inherent internal contradictions that lie at the heart of American society as Murphy, the gun-wielding zombie of capital, journeys from the pettiest of street crimes to the heights of corporate evil. Each cut a slap in the face, each shape out of place, ROBOCOP is one of the major achievements of Verhoeven's Sirk-like mastery of the politics of design, composition, and rhythm.  Screening as part of the Contra/Banned series. (1987, 103 min, DCP Digital) [Kian Bergstrom]

Satoshi Kon's PERFECT BLUE (Japan/Animation)

Music Box Theatre – Friday, 11:45pm (SUBTITLED VERSION), Saturday, 11:45pm (ENGLISH DUB VERSION), and Sunday, 11:45am (SUBTITLED VERSION)

Many consider PERFECT BLUE to be Satoshi Kon's magnum opus—and for good reason. The film’s impact on culture reaches far beyond that of most other anime films, arguably rivaling the work of contemporaries like Hayao Miyazaki and AKIRA creator Katsuhiro Otomo. Those filmmakers regularly utilize the format to explore new, colorful worlds of fantasy and science fiction, which was also true of Kon. However, his work in the late '90s and early 2000s was more grounded in reality, exploring a dreamy aesthetic instead through his characters’ psychoses and fractured senses of self; Kon's approach led him to adapt Yoshikazu Takuchi’s novel of the same name, its story acting as a vehicle through which he could explore these themes. The film introduces us to Mima Kirigoe, a pop singer who leaves her idol group to become an actress. Between disappointed fanboys, mysterious deaths in her agency’s circle, and an acting role that increasingly mirrors her struggle to self-identify, Mima begins to lose herself in the horrors around her. This film would not be the last time Kon used cinema to tackle a character’s identity; he further explored the concept in his next original screenplay, MILLENNIUM ACTRESS, which he penned with frequent collaborator and PERFECT BLUE screenwriter Sadyuki Murai. Where that film uses cinema as a positive additive, heightening a tale of lost love and legacy to dramatic peaks, PERFECT BLUE hones in on the anxiety of performance, depicting an actress who loses herself both on camera and in the public eye. To categorize this film as a great work in anime is to do it a disservice; it's a masterclass in psychological horror that holds its own in one of the latter genre’s most memorable decades. (1997, 81 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Bates]

Andrew Bujalski's COMPUTER CHESS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Tuesday, 9:30pm

COMPUTER CHESS is a triumph of erratic moves: call it a knight’s-tour-de-force. Made at a time when other notable “mumblecore” adherents like the Duplass brothers were starting to venture into more commercial, star-laden territory, Bujalski instead swerved hard in the opposite direction with a formally audacious, thematically arcane period experiment. Set in 1980, when both the homebrew computing movement and Cold War cybernetics were at their apogee, COMPUTER CHESS shrewdly evokes the era through its use of black-and-white vacuum-tube cameras and split-screen video editing effects. No mere gimmick, the choice of medium channels a McLuhan-fueled excitement for new electronic media possibilities, rather than an empty nostalgia for the aesthetics of the past. COMPUTER CHESS initially purports to be a documentary covering a tournament between chess-playing computers, hosted by an avuncular chess master (played by film critic Gerald Peary). Crowded into the windowless conference room of a nondescript Holiday Inn, the human participants—a formidable ensemble of dweebs, academics, and misanthropes—confront the stresses of both advanced technology and basic human interaction. But as soon as the competition gets underway, COMPUTER CHESS starts breaking its own rules, dropping the nonfiction pretense and following odd narrative tangents that cut across a spectrum of pre-Reagan cultural energies. A ghost-in-the-machine mystery plot, played with a lightly ironic touch, careens into new-age encounter groups, Pentagon paranoia and polyamory. What casually emerges, between the awkward hotel-bar conversations, regression therapy sessions and dreamlike interludes featuring elevator-riding cats, is nothing less than a shrewd prehistory of the “California Ideology” that dominates the tech industry today. (It’s easy to see comic figures like Michael Papageorge, a cash-strapped chess hustler indelibly played by Myles George, as a proto-techbro of the Elon Musk variety). For this largely improvisatory exercise, Bujalski cast non-professional actors, many of whom had a background in computers and mathematics; the presence of two Richard Linklater alumni (DAZED AND CONFUSED’s Wiley Wiggins and animator Bob Sabiston of WAKING LIFE) signals COMPUTER CHESS’ kinship with that Austin fixture’s discursive, digressive portraits of American subculture. Linklater’s made his share of period pieces, but as a creatively restless, medium-specific, psychically probing analysis of the recent past, I prefer to think of COMPUTER CHESS as a low-budget, cockeyed counterpart to Paul Thomas Anderson’s THE MASTER (2012) and INHERENT VICE (2014). (2013, 91 min, DCP Digital) [Michael Metzger]

Stanley Kubrick's SPARTACUS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Saturday, 11am

A communist screenwriter, an iconic film star, and one of the greatest American directors in film history make a movie together in 70mm. It almost sounds like the start of a joke, but it's the truth of Universal's Roman epic, SPARTACUS. This grandiose classic came into existence through many happy accidents. It started with Kirk Douglas not getting cast in another Roman blockbuster BEN-HUR (1959). As producer, Douglas bought the rights to Howard Fast's book and hired Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay. Hiring a writer on the Hollywood blacklist was a controversial choice that was expected to harm the film’s PR; sure enough, it was picketed by anti-communists on its initial release. Douglas fired the original director of this picture a week into shooting; it was at this point that a 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick entered the project. This came to the surprise of the studio, as the actor and director butted heads constantly on the set of their previous collaboration, PATHS OF GLORY (1957). (There’s an interview with the late Kirk Douglas at over 100 years old still calling Kubrick a talented bastard.) On top of all these risks and happenstances, SPARTACUS was one Hollywood’s most expensive projects at the time. Shooting in Technicolor was not cheap at the time, and the filmmakers blew up the budget even more by shooting it all in whopping 70mm. Even as a stand-in director, Kubrick shows some of his talented in-sequences and commands this colossal project with such legendary actors as Douglas and Olivier (very different in performance style) at the top of their game. In the history of cinema, there are many cases where massive production budgets bloat and ruin the story being told. SPARTACUS from its bones is a story that can only be contained and experienced at the largest scale known at the time. (1960, 181 min, DCP Digital) [Ray Ebarb]

Michael Lehmann's HEATHERS (US)

Alamo Drafthouse (3519 N. Clark St., Suite C301) – Friday, 9:30pm and Wednesday, 7:30pm

Scrunchies, particularly giant ones, have been making a comeback recently, and it’s impossible to detangle the iconography of the hair accessory from HEATHERS, whose opening moments fetishize the scrunchie in dreamy soft focus. In the world of the film, the scrunchie is imbued with meaning, representative of social status at Westerburg High School in Ohio. HEATHERS' iconic fashions of oversized blazers and layered skirts embolden the film's iconic status as the darkest of comedies, a cutting take on the Hughes-style teen movies of the '80s. Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) has managed to become part of the most popular clique in school, the Heathers, titled for the group’s three members who share the same first name (they're played by Kim Walker, Lisanne Falk, and Shannen Doherty). Veronica misses her simpler life as a social pariah, disillusioned by the complicated rules of maintaining popularity and particularly by leader Heather Chandler’s cruelty to those lower in the social hierarchy. When a misanthropic new student, J.D. (Christian Slater), befriends Veronica, they connect through their disdain for the Heathers. Much to Veronica’s surprise, J.D.’s hatred goes much further—he intends on murdering the popular students and staging their deaths as suicides. Daniel Waters’ script is incredibly sharp, filled with obliterating one-liners that are delivered brilliantly by the cast. Everyone is fantastic, though Ryder stands out; Veronica’s diary entries narrate the film, and Ryder’s voiceover convincingly guides the audience through the film’s twists and turns. Noteworthy, too, is Waters’ creation of a fictional teenage slang, which sounds so authentic that it’s since seeped into pop culture as genuine phrases: “What’s your damage, Heather?,” “How very.” Despite being a box office failure upon its original release, HEATHERS has left a gigantic cultural footprint, from blatant references in current teen films and television to the giant scrunchies being sold at places like Target. Yet it retains its cult status because, despite its biting humor, it manages the tricky balance of taking the issues it addresses seriously, and characters (including those on the sidelines of the film) are genuinely affected by the consequences. With its commentary on teenage suicide, eating disorders, and gun violence, HEATHERS remains shockingly relevant. (1989, 100 min, DCP Digital) [Megan Fariello]

🎞️ PHYSICAL SCREENINGS/EVENTS –
ALSO SCREENING

 ⚫ Asian Pop-Up Cinema
The extensive Asian Pop-Up Cinema series begins its seventeenth season this weekend. Their in-person and virtual offerings are too many to list; visit here for more information.

⚫ Chicago Film Archives
The Chicago Transit Authority, in partnership with the Chicago Film Archives (CFA), presents a new, one-of-a-kind temporary art installation now playing at the Cicero Green Line station (4800 W. Lake St.). The installation, called we love, is a filmic exhibition of home movies and amateur films selected from collections housed and preserved at CFA. The video, which has a runtime of approximately 48 minutes, will be projected onto a wall in the mezzanine area of the station. The video will run day and night through mid-March next year. More info here. 

⚫ Chicago Filmmakers
Chicago Filmmakers’ 50th anniversary celebration is Saturday from 2 - 6pm at Le Piano (6970 N. Glenwood Ave). The event is currently sold out, but you can join the waitlist here. You can also make donations here. 

⚫ Cinema/Chicago
Shamira Raphaëla’s 2021 Dutch film SHABU (75 min, Digital Projection) screens Wednesday, 6:30pm, at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 E. Washington St.). Free admission. Register and find more info here.

⚫ Comfort Film at Comfort Station (2579 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
Daniel Ferrer’s 2019 short film EX DISPOSER and other short films screen Wednesday at 8pm. Free admission. More info here.

⚫ FACETS Cinema
FACETS Anime Club presents a members-only night dedicated to a pair of iconic OVAs (original video animations), DEVILMAN: THE BIRTH (1987) and DEVILMAN: THE DEMON BIRD (1990), screening Thursday at 7pm. Must be a FACETS Film Club Member to attend. More info here. 

⚫ Gene Siskel Film Center
King Donovan’s 1963 film PROMISES… PROMISES! (75 min, DCP Digital) screens Friday, 6pm, as part of the Contra/Banned series. More info here.  

⚫ Music Box Theatre
It’s officially Music Box Garden Movies season! See Venue website for films and showtimes. 

Robert Luketic’s 2001 film LEGALLY BLONDE (96 min, 35mm) screens Thursday at 9:45pm. Presented by Rated Q and Ramona Slick - A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema, with preshow drinks and a DJ in Music Box Lounge at 9pm and a drag performance in the main theater at 9:45pm. More info on all screenings and events here.

⚫ Sideshow Gelato (4819 N. Western Ave.)
The Sideshow Gelato shop presents Sideshow Sinema!, during which they will screen films connected to the shop theme, every Thursday. More info here.

⚫ Sweet Void Cinema (3036 W. Chicago Ave.)
Find information on the Humboldt Park microcinema, including its screening and workshop schedule, here.

CINE-LIST: September 8 - September 14, 2023

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Michael Bates, Kian Bergstrom,  Kyle Cubr, John Dickson, Ray Ebarb, Megan Fariello, Tien-Tien Jong, Ben Kaye, Michael Metzger, Nicky Ni, Scott Pfeiffer, Dmitry Samarov, Harrison Sherrod, K.A. Westphal