Films by PHIL SOLOMON (Experimental)

Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Sunday, 7pm
The experimental cinema work of Phil Solomon is obsessed with the dark, the night, the past, and the lost. Reworking found images, he draws forth worlds that are epic and personal, historical and specific. Though he has branched out in recent years to produce machinima videos and multi-channel installation work, this selection of celluloid work represents the best of his output from the '80s and early '90s. NOCTURNE (1980, 10 min) remains a masterwork of post-structuralist film with its attention to rhythmic editing and mix of distanced original and personalized appropriated imagery. Often evoking the night bombings of London during WWII, nighttime cinematography of domestic scenes creates a landscape of America that is more Lynch than Brakhage. About THE SECRET GARDEN (1988, 23 min), U. of C's Tom Gunning wrote, "there is the shadow of a story here, one which deals with the passage from innocence and experience and invokes equally terror and ecstasy." A maturing cinematic voice is present in the abstraction here, blurring layers of movement into a single stream of subconsciousness. In the start of what would become a signature visual element of Solomon's films, THE EXQUISITE HOUR (1989/1994, 14 min) and REMAINS TO BE SEEN (1989/1994, 17 min) are living, crackling, bubbling, blistering memories, growing off the screen in a an almost tangible surface texture. Chemically treated and optically printed, home movies both inherited and acquired become a meditation on the passage of life, the pain of losing loved ones, the cruelty of loss.
(1980-94, 64 min total, 16mm) JH

Bill Morrison's THE GREAT FLOOD (Experimental/Special Event)

Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Symphony Center - Friday, 8pm
There are documents embedded in archives, and within those documents is embedded the magic of memory. Although the footage mined by Bill Morrison in this film radiates from the Mississippi river floods of 1927, the mythology of its cascading effect is what fascinates him. Moving across the entire landscape and influence of the great river—from cotton farm to tiny town, from delta mud to Chicago concrete—the score by Bill Frisell and his quartet never steal the scene while gently pulling us through. While the visuals, culled from a laundry list of archival resources, bring us back to the lives of people 90 years ago, it is the Americana Jazz that ties it all together. Largely avoiding the damaged footage featured in his most famous work, DECASIA, Morrison presents the river as the primary character throughout much of the first half of the film. But as people carry their belongings, and themselves, away from the raging water, they become the focus, and the massive effort of human labor is forefront. The film concludes with three sections about Chicago, emphasizing the role that this natural disaster played in the Great Migration. The first of these is a long take of parishioners exiting the Friendship Baptist Church in a steady stream, the most blatant of allegories. The second brings us along for the trip as countless people hitch a ride on the rails, destined for a new life up north. The final scene is a beautiful counterpoint to the hypnotic score, with lively and intimate shots of African-American musicians picking frenetically at guitars. First on an acoustic, then a shiny steel-bodied early electric, before finishing with scenes from patrons dancing at cramped juke joints of yesteryear. And all the while, the slowest and lushest rendition of "Old Man River" you'll ever hear fills the background. History and memory have merged. The Bill Frisell Quartet will accompany this screening. (2011, 80 min, HD File Projection) JH

Magnificat: Films by Pat O'Neill (Experimental)

Chicago Filmmakers (at the Second Unitarian Church of Chicago, 656 W. Barry Ave.) - Friday, 8:30pm
Any screening of Pat O'Neill's work is work checking out, but placing his beautiful, repetitive, and glowing images inside the walls of a church makes the experience extra special. Working with a combination of animation, optical printing, fragments of found footage, and his own precise cinematography, O'Neill delights in the absurd juxtapositions of life. His films have a wit that is often lacking in an artist of such technical mastery, and invite the viewer to be both absorbed into the psychedelic glow of matted outlines on the screen and delight in the skewering of consumerism and the construct of urban/suburban sprawl for which his hometown of Los Angeles is known. Covering much of his filmic output during the 1970s, this collection of shorts marries his imagery to the familiar sounds of movie soundtrack explosions, fragments of seemingly random speech ("they injected a bubble into my brain at that time...") and pop music from a banjo rendition of "Dixie" to the needle drop of T-Rex's IS IT LOVE. This audio-visual combination not only provides fluidity and contrast, it adds to the sardonic nature of his work. Films screening: DOWN WIND (1973), LAST OF THE PERSIMMONS (1972), SAUGUS SERIES (1974), SIDEWINDERS DELTA (1976), and RUNS GOOD (1971). (1971-76, 74 min total, 16mm)  JH

Elaine May's MIKEY AND NICKY (American Revival)

Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Friday, 7pm

Letting Peter Falk (Mikey) and John Cassavetes (Nicky) run wild on film can be a dangerous proposition. Sure, Cassavetes got away with it as a director, but he financed his own movies. After shooting 1.4 million feet of film while running 3 cameras at once, Elaine May was understandably over budget and the studio was understandably disappointed. Paramount buried the film after a short run, and it would be 12 more years until she would direct again (ISHTAR). Although panned by critics at the time, May's approach yielded a nuanced portrait of the male ego and of Downtown LA that has rarely been matched. The 2 close-ups and a master approach to cinematography was effective, albeit listless, in generating a claustrophobic world – a structure largely controlled during May's lengthy editing process. Although the two leads play low-level LA gangsters, they may as well be any of Cassavetes' standard protagonists: cornered by their jobs and social circumstances, and long past fighting to break out of them. We know the hero isn't going to win by the end of the first reel, and we know that he's not much of a hero by the end of the second. But watching May's collaboration with two great method actors in their prime is worth savoring until the credits roll. (1976, 119 min, 35mm) JH - cine-file.info

John Cassavetes' LOVE STREAMS (American Revival)

Block Cinema (Northwestern University) - Friday, 7pm
John Cassavetes' final film, LOVE STREAMS, is both his most fully realized in its portrayal of the fallacy of human connection and his most conventional in cinematic style. Working in front of the camera for the last time, he once again cast his wife Gena Rowlands in the female lead—a fitting public bow for their long collaboration. They play Robert and Sarah, a dysfunctional brother and sister—he's never learned to love and she loves too much—who lean on each other as their lives fall apart. LOVE STREAMS lacks anything that could be called an exposition despite the heaviest use of non-diegetic music and the only use of dream sequences in any of Cassavetes' work. We are dropped into the lives of an aging, drunk, womanizing, and wealthy writer and his clinically depressed, soon-to-be divorced sister, initially by following them separately on parallel paths and downward trajectories. Each sibling has a child that they make a genuine but clumsy attempt to bond with, but ultimately they prove unfit as parents. Sarah shows up on Robert's doorstep just as he's taking the 8 year-old son he's never met before on a weekend bender to Las Vegas. When he returns without his son, Cassavetes and Rowlands are left to act out the end of this tragedy. The story is somewhat secondary here, though, as the film functions as a recap of Cassavetes' previous directorial themes. Cassavetes' lonely artist is colored by a splash of personal regret (he had already been diagnosed with the liver cirrhosis that would kill him five years later). His sister, on the other hand, echoes the absurdist antics that Cassavetes was known for as a younger man, going further and further to keep everything cheery in the face of her own depression. Using one last script from her husband to show just what an amazing actress she is, Rowlands continually makes us forget her character's mental instability, only to unleash it again like a tantrum. For any fan of his films the use of Cassavetes and Rowlands' home as the primary set is both comforting and distressing. In color, we see all the rich, dark wood on the walls and the clutter of years filling up each room, scribbling the scent of John’s physical decline on every frame. As his life was coming to a close, Cassavetes seemed willing to yield a little of his standard formal difficulty in order to be understood more clearly. What he would not yield, though, was an insistence that Hollywood sold the public a false bill of goods regarding love and marriage. It is through understanding the pain of life that Cassavetes depicts on the screen that we gain greater appreciation for the joys of our own lives off it, not the other way around. (1984, 141 min, 35mm) JH - cine-file.info

Blake Edward's BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S (American Revival)

Music Box — Sunday, 2pm
With one of the most well known plots in movie history, it is the more insidious aspects of this romantic favorite that lend it an enduring appeal. In the popular imagination neither Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) nor Paul Varjak (George Peppard) are remembered for how they pay their rent. To face facts, each of them is a kept person, accepting money from dates or steady lovers. Therein lies much of the appeal of these two characters, who eventually fall in love. Neither is perfect but they have big dreams. They use hope to get through today and to forget the past. Emblematic of this existence is the character of Cat, Holly's rice-paper-thin-metaphor of an orange tabby. Content when given a saucer of milk and happy to stay for some fun, this pet demands no commitments and wouldn't notice them anyway. As much a film about the masks we use to face the world as it is about love (which never really comes), it's fitting that Cat ends up being tossed from a cab into the pouring rain. Untethered and free is fun to a point, but only in the movies do the girl and the boy come back for a kiss, and rescue the sloppy and matted Cat from the downpour. (1961, 115 min, unconfirmed format) JH - Cine-File.info

Lizzie Borden's BORN IN FLAMES (American Revival)

White Light Cinema and The Nightingale at Cinema Borealis (1550 N. Milwaukee Ave., 4th Floor) - Saturday, 7pm
With a concept, style, and politics that are still radical and relevant, Lizzie Borden's 1983 film gets a revival screening that is long overdue. Railing against the patriarchal and racist structures that remained in even the most progressive corners of American Society after the '60s and '70s, we are thrust into a feature length narrative of critique. Borden is able to place her ideology front and center, but also let the story sneak up around it. Embracing the gritty look of both 16mm film and the more battered parts of New York City in the early '80s, and combining them with an objective camera, she uses her low-budget as a storytelling asset. The world in which the anarchist movement dubbed the Women's Army carries out its counterrevolutionary campaign of pirate radio and direct action is rendered complete through a skillful combination of narrative and documentary modes. Artificial news clips about the progress of the current Socialist government and covert operations of the Women's Army's are mixed with observational shots of unemployed men and women on the streets, and we are constantly reminded of the veiled nature of the allegory. Other fictional scenes feel like we're watching the unedited negotiations between rival factions in a civil war as shot by an embedded cameraperson. When the pirate radio DJ—who acts as the film's voiceover—declares that the true nature of socialism is constant revolution, it seems a natural reinforcement of the film's message, rather than a didactic add-on. Managing to tow the line between preaching and pandering is not an easy task when taking on the very fiber of our society, and rarely has a film done it with such ease. The screening will be introduced by SAIC grad student Beth Capper. (1983, 90 min, 16mm) JH - Cine-File.info

Perry Henzell's THE HARDER THEY COME (Jamaican Revival)

Doc Films (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 9:45pm
Too often dismissed as "that Jimmy Cliff film," it might be overlooked that this 1972 slum-gangster click cum star-vehicle was the first feature to be made in Jamaica by Jamaicans, and is a heck of a smart story. Loosely based on the true story of Rhygin, a '50s era outlaw folk hero, alongside elements taken from Cliff's own life, the film mixes pop and politics to capture the emerging identity of the post-colonial Caribbean nation and the structural struggles that its people faced. Violent and self-reflexive, the scenes of destitute poverty in the Kingston slums stand in contrast to the pockets of wealth where Ivan (Jimmy Cliff) begs for work upon his arrival from the country. Finding no opportunities, the plight of many in the third world is captured as Cliff digs through the garbage at Kingston's landfill alongside real people who were scavenging for their daily subsistence. He turns to a preacher in the ghetto for help, and is offered employment, but not respect. This affords the subplot containing high-energy scenes of a poor Baptist congregation, its choir singing and dancing with palpable emotion so real it's hard to discern the actors from the extras. Wearing out his welcome with the preacher, Ivan leaves and gets the chance to cut a record, only to find out that he has to sign away the rights if he wants it released. His exploitation almost complete, he takes a job trafficking marijuana, and becomes an outlaw. Just as his song is starting to get radio play, he shoots a cop and as he goes on the lamb. He tries to flee the country, but the film hurtles towards a finale where the hero will be gunned down before he can escape the cycle of poverty for a shot in the US. The movie also features a soundtrack that's a who's who of the Reggae world (sans Bob Marley) and served as a primary vehicle for the worldwide popularization the music. A fitting film for an art that was itself a social and political movement. Though not particularly well received upon its release, THE HARDER THEY COME has aged well, and remains a benchmark in post-colonial cinema. (1972, 120 min, 35mm) JH - Cine-File.info