Entries associated with the tag "Gene Siskel Film Center":

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.

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).

The Gene Siskel Film Center has released the schedule for the 11th European Union Film Festival, which runs March 7 through April 13. Though many Chicago film festivals have been contracting, the EU Fest just keeps getting bigger: this year's edition offers a whopping 61 features, almost all of them screening in the Chicago area for the first time. Among the highlights:

• From Austria, Ulrich Seidl's Import Export (3/8, 3/11).

• From Denmark, Peter Schonau Fog's The Art of Crying (3/9, 3/13) and Pernille Rose Gronkjaer's The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun (3/7, 3/11).

• From Finland, Aku Louhimies's Frozen Land (3/23, 3/24).

• From France, Olivier Assayas's Boarding Gate (pictured, 3/8, 3/12), Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two (3/23, 3/25), Claude Lelouch's Roman de Gare (3/16), and Guillaume Canet's Tell No One (3/15, 3/18).

• From Germany, Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (3/21, 3/22) and Stefan Krohmer's Summer '04 (3/16, 3/17).

• From Hungary, Robert Koltai's Train Keeps a Rollin' (3/29, 3/31).

• From Ireland, Tom Collins's Kings (4/3) and John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail (3/22, 3/26).

•  From Italy, Gianni Amelio's The Missing Star (3/29, 3/31) and Giuseppe Tornatore's The Unknown (3/30, 4/1).

• From the Netherlands, Albert ter Heerdt's Kicks.

• From Portugal, Paul Auster's The Inner Life of Martin Frost (3/15, 3/18).

• From Romania, Nae Caranfil's The Rest Is Silence (3/15, 3/20) and Catalin Mitulescu's The Way I Spent the End of the World (3/8, 3/13).

• From Spain, Jose Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia (3/28, 3/29), Mercedes Alvarez's The Sky Turns (3/16, 3/18), and Nacho Vigalondo's Timecrimes (3/22, 3/26).

• From Sweden, Johan Kling's Darling (3/14, 3/19) and Klaus Haro's The New Man (3/30, 4/1).

•  From the United Kingdom, Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha (3/8, 3/10) and Ken Loach's It's a Free World . . . (3/15, 3/20).

About two weeks from now, on February 19, the Gene Siskel Film Center will present a rare screening of Bluebeard's Castle, one of the twilight works by the great British director Michael Powell. I haven't had a chance to see this adaptation of the Bela Bartok opera, though Jonathan Rosenbaum has reviewed it for the Reader.

As part of the film's run, Powell's widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, has made available a short piece about the movie by French director Bertrand Tavernier (Safe Conduct, Round Midnight, Captain Conan). The Film Center has kindly allowed us to reprint the piece, translated by Michael Henry Wilson:

"I remember seeing this film in a small British Film Institute theater. Michael Powell had set up the screening for me. I was impressed then by its extreme rigor, its strangely luxuriant sobriety, and its great visual beauty. Seeing it again 40 years later is an even stronger experience. The friendly familiarity that I have formed with Powell's films provides more keys, opens other doors through which the imagination can surge.

"Bluebeard's Castle appears suddenly as the missing link that connects The Tales of Hoffman and Peeping Tom. It combines the incredible visual inventiveness, the surrealistic set design of the first one, and the moral rigor, the peremptory, inescapable and yet deeply compassionate tone of the second. Bluebeard is Mark’s twin brother. Both live in a universe of death and desolation, haunted by terrifying memories of their crimes and broken dreams. Flowers and clouds are tinted with blood like the images filmed by Karl Boehm or the magnetic tapes upon which he recorded the screams of his victims as well as his own cries of fear. In this funereal world, victims seem to long for their destiny or to stage it.

"Let us acknowledge right away that Bartok’s opera is one of the masterpieces of the last century—along with Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw by Britten. Magnificent is Bela Balasz’s libretto, with its extraordinary score building up an almost unbearable dramatic tension without any artificial effect. And Powell recaptures this musical power in his direction, in his changes of camera axis, of lighting, of angles, blurring perspectives and vanishing points. Judith finds herself suddenly facing Bluebeard, when in the previous shot he stood at the other end of the dungeon... The characters appear to be walking towards each other but you quickly realize that they are following each other or moving away from each other.

"Helped by the brilliant Hein Heckroth whose experiments are on a par with the work of some of the greatest theater directors—Peter Brook, Strelher, Chéreau—Powell creates on a single set a tortuous, unpredictable maze—a mental labyrinth. You feel as though you are penetrating the characters' emotions just as you penetrated David Niven's mind in A Matter of Life and Death. This labyrinth is perfectly in tune with Bartok’s music. 'The eye listens' as Paul Claudel said magnificently. This was perfectly understood and mastered by Powell.

"What also strikes me in this film where the dark, brown colors of the background and props are pierced by flashes of gold—like in the shot where Judith is suddenly irradiated by a yellow light as if struck by an unexpected and, alas, fleeting ray of sunshine—or violet, or red like the flowers in the water, is its extraordinary melancholy. It is a melancholy that you find in many of Powell and Pressburger's films, from The Small Back Room to Hoffman to Red Shoes to Blimp to Peeping Tom. It emanates from the scenery or from the characters and their relation to the decor. The impressive Norman Foster expresses it marvelously in his acting as well as in his musical phrasing; in the way he holds back his voice. In the last minutes, when the camera moves away from Judith (played with intense inner fire by the beautiful Ana Raquel Satre, who recalls so many of Powell's heroines), one gets the impression that he merges physically into the set, becomes a part of it, and turns to stone.

"Florence Delay, in her magnificent books on the Knights of the Round Table, showed that what was called 'the disease of melancholy' in the Middle Ages was always related to the story of an immense, devouring, impossible, broken love. That tragic love is the one haunting the rooms of Bluebeard's Castle."

In the wake of Barack Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses, the Gene Siskel Film Center has canceled its two scheduled screenings of Bob Hercules and Keith Walker's 53-minute video Senator Obama Goes to Africa, part of this month's "Stranger Than Fiction" documentary series. Barbara Scharres, director of programming, says she thought the movie was a natural for the series when she chose it last year; back then Obama was still a long shot for the Democratic nomination and the movie was new work by a local filmmaker of note (Hercules codirected the highly regarded Forgiving Dr. Mengele). But now that Obama has the Big Mo, the Art Institute of Chicago, which runs the Film Center, has concluded that exhibiting the movie two weeks before the Illinois primary would be a partisan act that violated its nonprofit status. "Given the timing of the presentation of the film, it could be perceived as supportive of a particular candidate," reads a statement from Maria Simon, the Art Institute's legal counsel, "although I understand that was not GSFC's intention when this was scheduled."

The movie, which screened as a work-in-progress at the Chicago International Documentary Festival last April, is a rather dry but nonetheless illuminating look at the freshman senator, already an international star, as he tours the African continent in August 2006. The movie begins in his father's native Kenya, where Obama and his wife, Michelle, pay a visit to his grandmother in the village of Kisumu. His father and grandfather are buried near his grandmother's house, but any possibility of introspection is squashed by the mob of reporters trailing him. Obama's official duties limit his visit to a mere half hour, and he expresses disappointment that his children can't get a sense of the place where his father grew up "without the hoopla."

Excitement surrounds Obama even at that point, and to his credit he takes advantage of it to call attention to problems. In Kenya he and his wife get tested for HIV/AIDS, and in a speech he denounces the country's political corruption. From there the Obamas travel to Kibera, a gigantic slum on the outskirts of Nairobi that Obama first became acquainted with when he toured the continent by auto with his sister, Auma, in 1987. In Chad he visits a camp for Sudanese refugees and hears stories of Janjaweed atrocities, and in Cape Town, he criticizes the South African ministry of health for its inadequate response to the AIDS crisis.

The most dramatic sequence shows the senator taking a boat ride to Robben Island and inspecting its former maximum security prison with African National Congress leader Ahmed Kathrada, who was sentenced alongside Nelson Mandela in 1965 and spent 18 years there. The two men look at the tiny cell where Mandela once lived, and Obama recalls that his first political experience was participating in the antiapartheid movement in the U.S. during the late 70s and early 80s. 

According to Paul Marchant of First Run Features, which has acquired Senator Obama Goes to Africa, there are no further plans to exhibit the documentary, but it's been released on DVD and a five-minute clip can be accessed on YouTube.

Phil Grabsky's fine new documentary In Search of Mozart has broken the Gene Siskel Film Center's box office record for the most successful single-week run. Marty Rubin, the center's associate director of programming, reports that only  Bonhoeffer, Martin Doblmeier's documentary about the German theologian, and Edmond, Stuart Gordon's star-heavy adaptation of the David Mamet chestnut, have grossed more—in runs of five and two weeks respectively. 

Film Center management knew something was up on Friday, April 13, the first night of the engagement, when the movie had to be moved from the smaller 61-seat theater to the main 197-seat theater. Since then nearly every show has been a sellout; the movie's numbers are even more impressive given that the Film Center was closed on Wednesday, April 18, for a private rental.

Rubin attributes the movie's success to heavy promotion on classical-music station WFMT, including three on-air interviews with programming director Barbara Scharres, and says the Film Center has scheduled a return engagement for June 1 through 7.

Never mind the Gene Siskel Film Center's January calendar page, with its steamy shot from The Double Life of Veronique—check out the new "Girls of Croatia" page. When I needled Marty Rubin, the Film Center's good-natured director of programming, about this, he replied, "We at the Film Center are well aware of the Reader's proclivities in this direction, and we have a stock phrase, 'Reader still.'  When we're going over the stills for our monthly Gazette, and we come across a particularly juicy one featuring nudity or similar risque content, we say, 'Oh, that's a Reader still!'" 

What can I say? You know it's hard out there for a paper / When the cybercompetiton never tapers.

I can't really fault the Film Center for doing whatever works to find patrons. The big studios certainly  use sex to draw audiences, the difference being that their product rarely delivers the goods (or anything else for that matter). If you look at any typical month of Film Center programming, there's more healthy honesty about the subject—and probably more genuinely hot sex—than you're liable to find in the same month's general-release offerings. I think the Film Center should go all the way and do a 2007 swimsuit calendar.