DeWitt Beall's LORD THING & Robert Ford's THE CORNER (Documentary Revival)

Southside Projections at the South Side Community Art Center
(3831 S. Michigan Ave.) — Thursday, 7:30pm
For most of its history, Chicago has been a hotbed of gang culture in America. Although the street gangs of Los Angeles get more attention from the national media and Hollywood screenwriters, the Chicago gangs that formed in the late 1950s and expanded throughout the Civil Rights era really created the model for what we know today. The beginnings of the Vice Lords, one of the oldest and largest street gangs to emerge from this era, is the subject of the two documentaries presented in this rare screening of almost-forgotten films. Made just a few years after some young men from the North Lawndale neighborhood met at a juvenile correctional facility and founded the gang in 1958, Ford's THE CORNER (1962) is perhaps the earliest glimpse of the "club." Highlighting their increasing impact on Chicago's African-American communities, it feels like an industrial or educational film, but is more concerned with the feelings and viewpoints of it subjects than either would be. Utilizing non-synch narration by members of the gang, we get a sense of how these young men see themselves. They talk about why they joined a gang, why they drink, how they feel when they fight, their respect for hardworking single mothers, and their indifference towards absent fathers. These matter-of-fact statements are powerful in their self-awareness, even if they were obviously staged in a studio. We hear an articulation of the despair and hopelessness that these young men have about their prospects for a job and financial security, and their knowledge of being trapped in a cycle of poverty. This mood changes significantly in Beall's LORD THING (1970), which chronicles the VL's growth into a large coalition of gangs with over 20,000 members, and its emergence as both a community and business force. During the late 60s and early 70s, the leaders of the gang, now sometimes know as the Conservative Vice Lords (or even CVL, Inc.), began thinking well beyond their immediate surroundings and utilized their collective confidence in completely new ways. Beall gives us a fair amount of back-story, presented through re-enactments of historical fights with rival gangs, played by a cast of actual CVL members. He also documents numerous meetings of gang leaders that look and feel like town-hall meetings, and show both their increasing size and expanding concerns. Political actions such as protests carried out at construction sites, and a march on city hall—conducted as a joint action with other large Chicago gangs—illustrate how the CVL chose to use their power to influence the economic and social conditions in their turf and beyond. At times, Beall's film feels rather propagandistic—pro VL— but this may only be due to the desire that leaders like Bobby Gore have for using the VL's power to effect social and economic change. Perhaps this sympathetic depiction is the reason the film was never shown in the US, despite screening at Cannes and winning an award at the Venice Film Festival. After funding the film, the Xerox Corporation decided not to release it. Allegedly, they bowed to pressure from Richard J. Daley and the Chicago Democratic Machine, both of whom are roundly criticized in the film's final moments. Followed by a discussion with former CVL members (including poet and musician Orron Marshall), local historians, and activists. (1970 & 1962, 58 min & 26 min, DVD Projection)

Jean-Luc Godard's FILM SOCIALISME (New Swiss/French)

Gene Siskel Film Center — Check Venue website for showtimes
The five best words in the English language: new Jean-Luc Godard movie. OK, so three of those words are technically French, but no one is being particular, least of all Godard. The film at-hand, FILM SOCIALISME, is at best a fragmented, three-part narrative, and unlikely to win any new fans for the legendary new-waver. Once again Godard displays a mastery of the cinematic form. Here he makes fascinating contrapuntal use of several differing video formats (including cell phone, standard definition digital video, and crisp, beautiful HD video), focusing on and weaving together the visual textures unique to each of the various technologies. As a result, the shots at times bang against one another, jarring the viewer with each seemingly random cut, while at others the contrast works to give us an intimate view of an elderly couple eating a meal (cell phone) or a bourgeois family basking in the sun (HD). Godard's deep understanding of film as an audio-visual medium is also on display. A sound bridge carries us from the mostly white passengers on a cruise ship—the location of the first sequence of the film—dancing the night away, to the Asian and African workers who keep the playland going; an older male voice speaks like a narrator from off-screen while a young woman lectures back at him about Lenin and ideals while watching a movie on a laptop, perched on the bed in one of the ship's cabins. Various soundtrack elements clog our ears as they compete with one another, forcing the audience to pick one out of the crowd, and drop the others. The social commentary about the clueless, apathetic rich and the poor workers whom they ignore is overt in each of these scenes (I can imagine Marcuse laughing from farther off-screen than the old narrator), and equally excusable. The film's dialogue, which is primarily in French and English with a sprinkling of other languages, is only given in fragmented pidgin English, utilizing what Godard has termed "Navajo" subtitles. We get perhaps one or two words of text for every twenty that are spoken, a stunted poetic comment, misspellings and all ("AIDS tool forkilling blacks," e.g.). This provocative withholding of information can make the already subtextually and thematically dense narrative frustrating to follow, but it's results are brilliant when one is able to synthesize the different details being communicated in the pictures, sounds, and text into a larger meaning. Like an epic poem using 3 tangentially related stories to explore a unified theme, the film eventually shifts to a second stanza where the family crisis of a French politician goes down at a gas station (while her daughter reads Balzac next to a llama), and then shifts again to show what appears to be a montage of the various cultures which border the Mediterranean Sea. This distinct separation makes story tertiarily important. Secondarily, the film is an essay on the current state of humanity, akin to Chris Marker's SANS SOLEIL in its multiculturalism and simultaneous hope and disdain (when the travelogue gets to Palestine, an intertitle flashes "Access: Denied"). But, primarily, the film is a stretching of the width and breadth of possibility within the medium. Godard was recently described by Owen Gleiberman as "Stan Brakhage crossed with Noam Chomsky," and he shows us, for perhaps the last time, that he understands both the powers of cinema to make us engage in the act of seeing with ones own eyes, and the power structures inherent in its gestures and punctuation. (2010, 101 min, 35mm) Cine-File.info

John Hughes' THE BREAKFAST CLUB (American Revival)

Music Box — Friday and Saturday, Midnight
For people of a certain age, Anthony Michael Hall's voiceover that bookends this film will forever define the only roles everyone at their high school had to play: a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. And for the brat packers who formed our ensemble cast, these labels would stick with them for the rest of their careers. Watching this film makes you recall a time when Molly Ringwald (the princess) was the Emma Stone of her day, and Emilio Estevez (the athlete) was the Zach Ephron. Both were young and cute, with girl/boy-next-door good looks, and it seemed that their careers could last forever. Hall was so good as the pressure-cooked nerd who couldn't get an A in shop class that he would spend then next decade-plus trying to show his range. Ally Sheedy (the basket case) is the exception that proves the rule, as she was able to lose that label as soon as the credits rolled. Our criminal, played by the now shaggy Judd Nelson, defined cool rebellion for the better part of a decade and is surely the highlight of the film. As John Bender, he insulted the school principal right to his face (Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?), hid dope in his locker (and in AMH's underwear), saw through everyone's bullshit and called them out on it, and got to make out with the prom queen. John Bender was also full of some real malice, and had the cigarette burns on his arm to show us why. Ultimately, he forced a bonding ritual on his fellow high school students, and seemed to be the life of the party. He was the hero of the film, but what is left out of the diegesis may be Hughes' most important comment of all. We know that Bender's triumphant fist pump to close the movie (“Don't you...forget about me!”) is the high point of his life. At best he is destined for a crappy job in a bleak suburb, stuck in a loveless marriage with kids he can't stand. At worst he's drunk and alone, recounting how he blew his last best chance with that pretty little rich girl. Easily John Hughes' most mature effort up to that point, the film encapsulated the social structure of the white, middle-class, suburban high school experience of the 1980s. It celebrated the characters and the institutional halls they roamed, but also paid respect to their anxieties and problems, and never implied that these weren't the best years of their lives. (1985, 97 min, 35mm) Cine-File.info