Archive for July, 2008

Last week's New Yorker carried an interesting personal essay by Charles Van Doren, the Columbia University instructor who became a star on the 1950s quiz show Twenty One and then an object of disgrace when the public learned that the show was fixed by the producers. Movie fans probably know that story from Robert Redford's Oscar-winning Quiz Show (1994), but Van Doren's essay also details his life after the scandal, including the genesis of the movie. Redford offered him $50,000, and then $100,000, to serve as a consultant, but Van Doren, acting on the advice of his attorney and the feelings of his family, turned the offer down. According to the piece, that didn't stop actor Ralph Fiennes (pictured) from driving up to Van Doren's house and sneakily asking for directions in order to get a look at him.

A footnote: Redford's movie was adapted from a superb book by Richard Goodwin called Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties. A House subcommittee investigator on the quiz-show case, Goodwin later wrote eloquent speeches for presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Senator Robert Kennedy. (He's also the husband of presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.) Goodwin is a tremendously gifted writer, and Remembering America is an essential memoir of the 1960s. I can't recommend it more highly.

Fans of the Classic Film Series at LaSalle Bank (now Bank of America) in Irving Park may remember Scott Marks, who programmed the series from 1995 to 2000. Marks was part of the Chicago film scene for years: back in the 80s he managed the old Parkway revival house at Clark and Diversey, and in the 90s he taught history of film and animation at Columbia College. He was also a crazed memorabilia collector, an expert on the films of Martin Scorsese and Jerry Lewis, and an actual FOJ (Friend of Jerry).

In 2000 he skipped town to take a job programming the film offerings at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. "The first week I was there, I stepped out for a smoke and was suddenly transfixed by the building across the way," Scott wrote me recently. "It was as familiar as my mother's laugh; I was in Xanadu! In 1940, Welles sent a second unit crew down and used it as a stand-in for San Simeon."

Unfortunately, Xanadu turned out to be a pretty good metaphor for Scott's gig at MoPA: he says the program was never able to build a strong audience and ended in 2005. "What do you do when your biggest enemy is the sun?" The museum was located in Balboa Park, which he describes as "one of the most beautiful places on earth."

Since then Scott has been busying himself with various film-related activities. He wrote movie reviews for the Gay & Lesbian Times and did on-air reviews for the local Fox affiliate; he taught film at University of California, San Diego and at San Diego State University; he programs a classic film series at San Diego's North Park Theatre; and his radio program Film Club of the Air can be heard on KPBS. But the big enchilada is his blog Emulsion Compulsion, which includes over 10,000 images from his gigantic memorabilia collection. Enter at your own risk; the next time you look at your watch, it'll be two hours later and you'll be late for something or other. This I know.

This weekend the Music Box opens the first Chicago engagement of Marina Zenovich's documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which looks at the notorious 1977 statutory rape case against the highly regarded film director. It's a fascinating movie in many ways, exploring the media's sick fascination with Polanski (whose parents died in the Holocaust and whose pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was slaughtered by the Manson Family in August 1969) and reconstructing the judicial skullduggery that prompted Polanski to flee the U.S. in February 1978, never to return. But both times I watched the movie, I came away with the queasy sense that Zenovich was trying to excuse Polanski for his crime, playing up his tragic history and artistic achievements. It's OK to drug and sodomize a 13-year-old girl. the movie implies, when you can make a movie as good as Chinatown.

The case is way too complicated for me to synopsize here, so you should check out the movie yourself before taking my word. But you might also want to read the transcription of the victim's testimony at TheSmokingGun.com. When you see it from her perspective, the idea of Roman Polanski—who served only 42 days in protective custody, for psychiatric observation—as a martyr of the American justice system begins to break down.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. —L.P. Hartley

I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple. —Jean-Luc Godard

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (now at Landmark's Century Centre) wants to tell the story of the last romantic couple too. Or is it the first romantic couple? Since in terms of literal historical period we're obviously nearer the beginning than the end—the age of capital R "Romanticism" and everything that implies, about prevailing cultural attitudes and standards of human behavior in the post-Napoleonic brave new world of 1830s France. But then why do these dandified lovers, impeccably decked out a la July Monarchy—in plush, exotic fabrics, colorful toques and mantillas, with oriental hookahs on the plein-air carpets, etc—seem so anachronistically like ourselves? Since however meticulous the period reconstructions—gilded rooms, railings and balustrades, statuary—the behavioral signals seem almost intimately familiar: could be us up there, since that's how we'd be responding right now. Which makes you wonder how foreign this country of the past can be ...

Same period,* different film. Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, which played in town a couple weeks back, seems as chilly and distant in its neoclassical reserve—Ingres contra Delacroix, the polarities of the era—as Mistress is romantically hung out. As in his earlier Joan the Maid (1993), where late medievals discuss theological dogmas like transubstantiation as if their lives depended on it (which in fact they did), Rivette's characters in Duchess seem driven by assumptions about life, behavior, ideology, etc, that we're not in a position to share. These people aren't us—if you want to "relate," be prepared to fight your way into the mind-set.

So what's to choose between them? Obviously a matter of inclination and taste, since both deliver their own brand of delectables. Whatever her merits as historian, Breillat's micromanaged attraction to the vagaries of human passion invites a complicity that Rivette, more austere and abstract, isn't inclined to give. On the other hand, Duchess fascinates out of sheer obliquity, its terse, alienating distance—everything less predictable since less familiar, a matter of epistemological cunning rather than identification strategies unleashed. Yet despite its raw immediacy, it's the Breillat that arguably wears you down and out. Too much us, not enough them. Where's negative capability when you really need it?

(*Actually it isn't, though every review I've read apparently thinks that Duchess is set in restoration France, in the early 1820s or thereabouts. But as the film's introductory title makes clear—not to mention Balzac's own source novel—the relevant "restoration" is of the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, not France's Louis XVIII. So Napoleon's empire would still be alive and kicking, if only for a short while more. No wonder everything's so neoclassical—it's exactly as it should be!)

You can have your WALL-E, as calculated and corporate a product as the object of its own anemic eco-satire (which pulls so many punches that even Bush and Cheney could probably support the message: yo, we're for less garbage and that kinda shit ... and let's get rid of those fat people too—yeee-haw!). Me, I'm more into Doug Sweetland's Presto, the five-minute Pixar short that comes on before the sentimental google-eyed robot gets down to its sanitized, softball business. Not that Presto doesn't have problems of its own, mainly in character animation that almost seems xeroxed from Ratatouille, which already looked so airbrushed and cuddly that even babies couldn't feel remotely threatened by it. (So whatever happened to all those jagged cartoon edges of the 40s? Best keep the Termite Terrace people away from pointed metal objects ... ) But the pace is dizzying, sometimes even disorienting, both physically and mentally, a perpetual-motion circus—up-down, in-out, all from a handful of obsessional riffs and themes—that puts you in mind of Road Runner and Coyote and at least a half a dozen anvils. A lot of imaginative stretching from all parties involved, extending well beyond the professional "tastefulness" that predictably turns WALL-E into such a dispassionate, stifling bore.

But don't take my word for it—you can watch the whole thing online here.

Facet Film School's new six-week session of evening classes begins tonight with "The 'Religious' Films of Luis Bunuel," taught by Zoran Samardzija of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Scheduled for screening and discussion on Monday nights through August 25 are Susana (1951), Nazarin (1959), Viridiana (1961), Simon of the Desert (1965), The Milky Way (1969), and Tristana (1970).

Beginning Tuesday, novelist Aimee Laberge will lecture on the regional cinema of Quebec, screening Claude Jutra's Mon Oncle Antoine (1971), Michel Brault's Les Ordres (1974), Ted Kotcheff's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Jean-Claude Lauzon's Leolo (1992), and Phillippe Falardeau's Congorama (2006).

Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima are the focus of Brandon Linden's Wednesday-night course, "The LA Rebellion," which will include Killer of Sheep (1977), Bush Mama (1972), Ashes and Embers (1982), My Brother's Wedding (1983), To Sleep With Anger (1990), and Sankofa (1993).

Adam Jones of DePaul University will teach a David Mamet survey on Thursdays, screening House of Games (1987), Things Change (1988), Homicide (1991), Oleanna (1994), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), The Winslow Boy (1999), and Catastrophe (2000), Mamet's little-seen short adapted from the Samuel Beckett play.

Classes are $125, $80 for Facets members. To enroll call 773-281-9075 or click here. 

The Silent Film Society of Chicago begins its summer festival tonight with the Harold Lloyd comedy Speedy (1928), which screens at 8 PM at the Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, with live organ accompaniment by Dennis Scott. Programs are every Friday night through the third week of August, and as usual the schedule is a combination of the usual suspects (Buster Keaton in Our Hospitality on August 1, Fritz Lang's Metropolis on August 8) and lesser known titles for the buffs (Children of Divorce with Clara Bow and Gary Cooper on July 25, Raoul Walsh's Sadie Thompson with Gloria Swanson on August 15). The festival wraps up on August 22 with a program of five shorts (Keaton in One Week, Lloyd in Somewhere in Turkey, Harry Langdon in Lucky Stars, W.C. Fields in Pool Sharks, and Douglas Fairbanks in The Mystery of the Leaping Fish). 

The only clip from Speedy I could find on YouTube is this homemade video for "1945," a tune from Neutral Milk Hotel's classic 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. It doesn't begin to do the Lloyd movie justice, but the song is great, so why not give it a spin?

Unfortunately missing from the Film Center's current Manoel de Oliveira retrospective (apparently because it's available on DVD, if that's any excuse) is The Convent (1995), which Jonathan Rosenbaum's recently described as "boring" and most other reviewers haven't been too crazy about either.

Frankly I don't get it. If I had to pick one Oliveira film as an accessible primer that at the same time embodies his richly connotative aesthetic in something like full dosage, The Convent would be it, the whole symbolist schmear in one elegantly distilled package. Because there's not a frame in this comparatively short feature (for Oliveira anyway) that doesn't direct you elsewhere, to allusions and cultural entities beyond the phenomenological surfaces of things, a Bachelardian parsing that subverts every impulse to narrative explication. If Hou Hsiao-hsien's the ultimate film literalist (everything exactly as you see it—but what exactly is that everything?), then Oliveira's his nonliteral opposite: just a host of flickering impressions on the walls of Plato's cave. So we have Catherine Deneuve emerging from the ocean like a Botticellian vision, or fishermen's skiffs bobbing on an opalescent sea (marinescapes by Courbet?), or arcane sculptural riffs in a monastery courtyard that, to me anyway, suggest Brancusi's studio in Paris, with its endlessly receding columns and enigmatic glyphs of stone. Not to mention Malkovich's sardonic channeling of Shakespeare (and, more playfully, Caliban), or the mystery mandala that prompts assorted characters to shield their eyes, a sinister luminosity (Milton's satanic light bearer?) that none dare face directly. Evocations, gnomic references, and whatnot, the thematic afterimages of a thousand years of Western literature and art, all packed and resonating, like a swarm of elementary particles in a cultural cloud chamber. Plato's cave never seemed more inviting--or more protective of its obscure insights. Which, of course, are never more remote than when just beyond our grasp.

Though finally it's about balance, an almost perfect equipoise—or art aspiring to the condition of music, as intrepid philosophers used to theorize a century or more ago. Eureka, I think I've got it! ... almost.

Maybe old news at this point, but film avant-gardist Bruce Conner died last Monday at the age of 74. Not that I've anything to add to the basic obit info (which you can click here for ... and here too), and in fact his films—which I'm pretty sure I've seen some of, at least one or a couple—are mainly a blur right now, just an avalanche of collagelike impressions, which is essentially what they were and are. (Like Brakhage in that, the effects visceral and immediate, even overwhelming if you're in the right receptive mood, though admittedly in retrospect it's hard to distinguish one from another, separate out what the films individually do.)

My only personal take on this, from a proofreader's vantage at the bottom of the editorial totem pole, is to note how often people who wrote about the guy spelled his name wrong. It's -ER, ladies and gents, not -or. Let's hope they get it right on the tombstone.

Andrea Gronvall, a longtime contributor to the Reader's film coverage, will begin teaching this fall at the University of Chicago's Graham School of General Studies. Her eight-week course, "Encountering the East," will cover films about women of the West seduced by Eastern cultures. Edward Said's Orientalism will be a key text, and among the films she'll screen and lecture on are John Cromwell's Anna and the King of Siam (1946), Jack Cardiff's My Geisha (1962), David Lean's A Passage to India (1984), and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky (1990). The course meets Tuesday nights beginning September 23.

The Gene Siskel Film Center's schedule for August includes a retrospective of films by Sergei Paradjanov,  the Georgian filmmaker whose 40-year career was marked by harsh persecution from the Soviet government. In addition to Paradjanov's better-known films—Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (8/2, 8/5), The Color of Pomegranates (pictured; 8/9, 8/14), The Legend of Suram Fortress (8/16, 8/18), and Ashik Kerib (8/23, 8/24)—Film Center will also be screening three earlier titles from the 50s and 60s that Paradjanov later disowned: Andreish (8/2, 8/3), The First Lad (8/9, 8/10), and Ukrainian Rhapsody (8/16, 8/17).

Former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell will appear at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Tuesday, August 5, to talk about Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's HBO documentary The Black List, Vol. 1. Scheduled for broadcast later this year, the film features Mitchell interviewing such African-American cultural figures as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Sean Combs, Bill T. Jones, Vernon Jordan, Toni Morrison, Chris Rock, and Keenen Ivory Wayans.

The event is part of the Film Center's month-long Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video, whose 14th edition begins on the first of August. Among this year's documentaries are Rachel Goslins's 'Bama Girl (8/8, 8/12), about the first black homecoming queen at the University of Alabama; Dawn Logsdon's Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans (8/23, 8/25), which looks at the eponymous neighborhood just outside the French Quarter; Robert Patton-Spruill's Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome (8/8, 8/13), a profile of Chuck D and company; and Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water (8/6), about a woman in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Fiction films screening this year include work by Josiah Kibira, Dennis Dortch, Andrew P. Jones, Ilya Chaiken, and James Spooner, whose documentary Afro-Punk screened at the festival in 2003. Black Harvest has typically showcased talents from Chicago and the midwest; among the area filmmakers in this year's festival are Michael Merrill, David Muhammad, Deri Tyton, David Wethersby, Christopher Nolen, and Sidney "Mama" Winters. From neighboring Gary, Mark Spencer will present two features, The Ballad of Sadie Hawkins (8/10, 8/12) and The Gilded Six-Bits (8/24, 8/27).

Earlier this week the Museum of Cinema in Buenos Aires held a press screening of long-lost scenes from Fritz Lang's silent sci-fi epic Metropolis that were located in the museum's archives in April. Twenty to twenty-five minutes of footage, cut from the film by the German studio Ufa after the film's unsuccessful release in 1927, have been recovered from a print, now heavily scratched, that was brought to Argentina by a private collector in 1928.

As Lang fans know, Metropolis has been available in a dizzying array of cuts over the past 80 years. Patrick McGilligan writes in his biography Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, "The film was dictatorially and carelessly slashed everywhere after its Berlin premiere. Foreign negatives were often different from domestic negatives—to save money, different 'takes' rejected for domestic release were often inserted into foreign negatives, so that subtly and dramatically different prints made their way around the world. Local and government censorship in other countries added to the confusing variety of versions."

Helmut Possman, head of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in Wiesbaden, Germany, has said that the new material will bring the film within five minutes of its original length.

Last week at the Cinematheque Top 5 Project, site proprietor Kevyn Knox posted the results of his best westerns poll. No surprises among the top five finishers (save number three—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly??), though when it comes to handicapping oaters I'm the last person you'd ever want to rely on.

Let's see ... it's probably Bud Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959) in my number one slot (for the minimalist desolation, a hardscrabble dry run for Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, all broken waste and laconic cowboy palaver), then Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) at two (for the austere classicism—horse, rider, sky, mountains, piney breaks—with sudden pointillist spurts of color, e.g., in the mountain mining camp, to counterpoint the Zen-like stripping down), and ... then what?

3. Not The Searchers. Not that I have anything against John Ford, but the stylization's too schizoid for comfort: e.g., all that naturalistic Monument Valley rhetoric (shades of Sergei Eisenstein, in the heroic up-angle shooting) versus the boxy studio artifice of Natalie Wood's Indian encampment. If The Sun Shines Bright (1953) were even remotely feasible as a western—and to me it does actually feel like one—I'd unreservedly put it third (click here for Jonathan Rosenbaum's warm appreciation). But the river that says yes to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Long Riders and even The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (!) unfortunately says no to Kentucky. So y'all go figure.

4. The Ruse, William S. Hart (1915). Because something by or with this silent-era icon has to be on the list, and since (shame, shame) I haven't seen Hell's Hinges ... Come to make fun, then go away astonished: as an early modernist study in the psychology of underplaying, the guy's at least 30 years ahead of the competition.

5. The Phantom Empire (1935). With, gulp, Gene Autry—which probably isn't anyone's idea of a "good" western, or even a good serial, a singing cowboy chapter play that takes place mostly underground. Like a Max Ernst bricolage, in the thematic mating of misaligned elements—but aside from Cameron Menzies's Things to Come and Powell/Berger/Whelan's The Thief of Bagdad, no movie sparked my childhood imagination more. And where would The Mole People be without it!

When LaSalle Bank got devoured by Bank of America earlier this year, I wondered if it would finally mean the end of the Classic Film Series, which has been presenting weekly screenings of Hollywood relics in Irving Park since 1972. But the series' new schedule, which begins Saturday with Nicholas Ray's haunting noir In a Lonely Place (1950) and runs through the end of the year, proves that B of A is making good on its promise to preserve the series.

Mike King, who began programming the CFS in 2003, departed in May to take a job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's cinematheque, but Michael Phillips (not the Chicago Tribune critic), who came on as a projectionist in 2004 and became coprogrammer two years later, is staying on. (His film-related writing can be found at Goatdog.)

The new schedule includes series on Joan Crawford (Dancing Lady, 9/6; Sudden Fear, 9/13; Humoresque, 9/20) and John Ford (Judge Priest, 8/2; Young Mr. Lincoln, 8/9; Steamboat Round the Bend, 8/16), as well as revivals of Chaplin's City Lights (8/30), George Sidney's Pal Joey (8/23), Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown (10/25), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Stairway to Heaven (also known as A Matter of Life and Death) (11/22), and the original version of 3:10 to Yuma (7/26).

I'm always glad for the chance to see titles like these screened in a theater, but the real value of the series has always been its esoterica. Among the rare titles being screened through the end of 2008 are John Frankenheimer's 1965 thriller The Train, with Burt Lancaster (7/12), Rouben Mamoulian's 1936 bandito adventure The Gay Desperado (9/27), Terence Young's 1948 costume drama Corridor of Mirrors (10/18), and Val Guest's 1959 satire of the British teen-idol racket, Expresso Bongo (11/8).

Last but not least, the programmers launch every show with a short, newsreel, or serial episode, which is sometimes more rare and worthwhile than the feature. Coming soon are the Laurel & Hardy short Scram! (8/2), Buster Keaton's multiple-exposure experiment The Playhouse (8/30), the rare early Three Stooges short Plane Nuts (9/6), and cartoons by Tex Avery, Rudy Isling, Chuck Jones, and Dave Fleischer.

The series doesn't have a web site, but you can pick up a print copy of its reliably handsome and well-written schedule at the weekly screening on Saturday night, or request one by leaving a message with your mailing address at 312-904-9442. The theater is located at 4901 W. Irving Park, and there's free parking in the bank's back lot, which is where the theater entrance is hidden. What you want to do is turn south on Lavergne and then hang a left into the lot.