Joe Cornish's ATTACK THE BLOCK (New British)

AMC River East — Check Venue website for showtimes
As we near the end of what has been a fairly disappointing season for popcorn movies, here comes a band of underprivileged British teenagers to save the day. The directorial debut of comedian Joe Cornish is an unexpectedly good action-thriller, set in a high-rise council estate (British for "projects") in the south of London. Already drawing comparisons to GOONIES due to it's ensemble teen cast and light-hearted joking, ATTACK THE BLOCK is a whole lot darker, a little farther from the beaten path, and even more class conscious in its approach. Looking past the basic plot about some hooligans who save the earth from an alien invasion, the best part of this movie is the morally challenged hero, Moses, played by the 19 year old John Boyega. He initially displays some of the more prevalent stereotypes of the angry black teen: the film opens with Moses leading a group of thrill seeking youths through the knife-point mugging of a female neighbor; he then follows that up by eagerly agreeing to sell drugs for the local kingpin. But, as the mysterious aliens grow in number and the body count inside the Block piles up, Moses begins to make the right choices, and protect both his gang and his neighbors. In this tale of redemption, the tough kid from a broken home, wise beyond his 15 years, comes through and saves the planet. Excusing the preachy, didactic, conspiracy theory-laced monologue that Moses delivers at the end of Act II, what makes this film special is the political stance the filmmakers take in favor of the poor and systematically oppressed. Cornish champions the boys in Moses' gang by showing them as fun-loving, feral kids, trying to act like grown-ups. Where Mikey and his friends were young adventurers out on a treasure hunt to save the family home in GOONIES, Moses and his crew begin as petty criminals in search of a power trip. Instead of giving us characters to instantly root for, we're shown realistic grit and violence inside public housing, along with brief glimpses of the broken home lives that spawn it. Like all good blockbusters there are plenty of funny moments, mostly courtesy of Nick Frost (SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ) as the pot dealer on the top floor, and the film eventually delivers a good guy to root for. But, the real guilty pleasure here is watching a teen thug find the tools to play the hero. (2011, 88 min, Digital Projection) - Cine-File.info

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

Huang Weikai's (DIS)ORDER (New Chinese Documentary)

White Light Cinema at the Nightingale — Friday, 8pm
Part cinema verité, part city symphony, part essay on humans living in an urban reality, and part celebration of digital egalitarianism, Huang's film is surprisingly cohesive and concise in it's focus. Casting the city of Guangzhou (the least famous city of 10 million people in the world) as the dominant manipulator of human behavior, the filmmaker allows the viewer to make connections between the chaotic behavior of a scam artist pretending to be hit by a car, a group of men swimming in protest of an oppressive government, a black market dealer of bear paws and frozen anteaters, and countless other actual occurrences that are at once absurd and commonplace. Compiled from what is purported to be over 1000 hours of footage shot by amateur videographers, DISORDER is a seesaw between anxiety and gleeful wonderment. The sequences are bridged by asynchronous sound, bleeding from one event to the next, and the most common through-line is a never-ending parade of apathetic authority figures. “It will lead to paperwork, we have bigger problems” would be an apt alternate title for this modern masterpiece, if that didn't sidestep the greater argument being made here. By shedding light on the magnificent number of situations people get into for which there is no logical resolution, Huang renders these occurrences mundane. The man seeking relief from a health inspector for the roach in his meal is just as crazy as the man threatening to jump of a bridge unless the police help him get relief (from what we never really know). Life as a system of orderly events is not just an illusion, but is the most illogical thought of all. (2010, 58 min, Video) JH - Cine-File.info

The Cinematic Formula: Hollis Frampton (Experimental Revival)

Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Monday, 7pm  
Watching any one of Hollis Frampton's structuralist masterpieces takes commitment and patience, but seeing six of them in a row? That's either going to lead to an inspired collective mental breakthrough or the first theater-wide brain-eye melt of the spring. Focusing on Frampton's output from the 1960's, the highlights of this program are ARTIFICIAL LIGHT (1966) and MANUAL OF ARMS (1969). Each film is silent and uses the hypnotic pattern of visual repetition and textural optic variation, a mode that would be perfected in the next decade. But if the creation of an internal cinematic language is the goal in some of his later work, then these two films celebrate the inclusiveness of the human gesture. In MANUAL, various performances for the camera by 14 "actors" walk the line between over-indulgence and rhythmic serendipity, always tripping towards joy eventually. Body movement from one edge of the frame to the other and an emphasis on the light/dark dichotomy of black-and-white film emphasize each beat, and the difference between the 14 sections is like the same note played on a different instrument. Sequential fades from one face to another create the content of ARTIFICIAL LIGHT, and 21 repetitions of the sequence make the form. After the first round (which is shown upside-down), a variety of interventions are performed: negative, hand-drawn clown makeup, still shots in sequence, a flicker of colors, and so on. At each variation, despite the film's formulaic premise, or perhaps because of it, an ascending tone is struck as faces emerge from the chaos, glances are exchanged, and the power of the close-up is realized. Also Screening: HETERODYNE (1967), PALINDROME (1969), STATES (1967), and SURFACE TENSION (1968). (1966-69, 98 min total, 16mm) JH - Cine-File.info

John Boorman's DELIVERANCE (American Revival)

Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday and Tuesday, 6pm
Since the plot of this film is so widely known, let's talk about the artists and the issues. Ned Beatty was never better, Jon Voight showed us that MIDNIGHT COWBOY was not a fluke, and Burt Reynolds played the hell out of the most perfect role he was ever given. But they all had to kick back and watch when Ronny Cox and Billy Redden gave us the most iconic bluegrass jam ever to grace the silver screen. These performances were buttressed by the impeccable authenticity that cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond delivered, making use of natural lighting almost throughout. Danger and moral ambiguity are still tangibly felt upon repeat viewings, owing mainly to the depth of James Dickey's script (and not hurt by his appearance as the Sheriff of Aintry, GA). It could be labeled a celebration of machismo, earned through a journey of conquest and killing—an appeasement of the male ego through self-reflexive masochism. Of course the film does this as a questioning of the position of men in white, suburban America in the early '70s. As Stepanie Farber said in her 1972 New York Times review: "In the film the journey has no purpose; nothing is achieved, nothing gained. The last images express a sense of total desolation. There is no sentimentality in the film; it is a serious and meaningful challenge to the belief in rites of manhood." SAIC professor Jim Trainor lectures at the Tuesday screening. (1972, 110 min, 35mm) JH - Cine-File.info

Ingmar Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING (Swedish Revival)

Gene Siskel Film Center — Friday, 6:15pm and Tuesday, 6pm
In his first full-scale collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman set the bar pretty high when he was awarded the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film. More importantly, the film marks a turning point in the focus of Bergman's films, sharing both the moral questioning of earlier works, as well as the psychological examinations so prevalent in the films that followed. Adapted from a 13th century Swedish ballad, this tale of murder and revenge is as grim as if it had been penned by Kierkegaard himself, and the subjective camera's presence has a powerful ability to make us disgusted by the acts on screen. Though not graphic by today's standards, the film was nevertheless controversial upon its release, mainly due to the on screen depiction of a girl's rape and murder. Outside of the plot, it is also a visual turning point for Bergman, who utilizes vast, natural landscapes more organically than in his previous films, while keeping the implied allegory. The medieval manor house where much of the film takes place, and the historical costuming of the characters, are treated without awe by the filmmaker, creating an understated backdrop for some heavy questioning of the human condition. SAIC professor Jim Trainor lectures at the Tuesday screening. (1960, 89 min, 35mm) JH - Cine-File.info

Kittens, Biscuits, and Blots: Films by Luther Price (Experimental)

White Light Cinema at The Nightingale - Sunday, 7pm
One way to measure the ability of a songwriter is by how well they turn an apparent personal narrative into a universal human experience. They take what they have lived through (or think they should have) and mold it into words that can explain the hopes and fears of everyone. In an almost perfectly opposite position is the found-object artist, and specifically, the subspecies of the found-footage filmmaker. Their task is to take the scraps of mass media and turn it into their own personal story. Much like there are trite pop songs, there are also many dull found-footage films, where the voice of the filmmaker never comes through the postmodern montage. In the hands of Luther Price, though, unknown industrial films, afterschool specials, and other relics of the recent past create the perfect canvas for him to paint his thoughts and feelings (sometimes literally). Still not as well known as he should be, even within the obscurity that is the Experimental Film community, Price has created a wealth of cinema gems throughout his now almost 30 years of activity. In part, the reason he can sometimes be missed is the difficulty in seeing most of his work – Price almost never makes prints of his films, preferring to show his fragile originals. One creative approach he takes is to paint directly onto found footage (such as in his INKBLOT series) or to bury it in the dirt. In both cases he achieves abstract shapes that roll in rhythms of an energy chaos, ultimately finding new territory. In the BISCUITS series, Price takes documentary footage of elder care and, again, is able to recombine it in ways that seem fresh. Utilizing multiple prints of the same film, he is able to repeat phrases and gestures, and seems to tap into both the happiness of a life long lived and the melancholy of being "put in a home." There is a genuine compassion for his "found" characters; Price avoids exploitation in his re-workings or social commentary on nursing homes in general. The strongest articulation of his editing skill is in KITTENS GROW UP, so simple in its approach, yet powerful in impact. Utilizing long takes, with only a hint of the jarring audio scratches that populate many of Price's films, we go back and forth from a film about kittens learning life-skills to one about young children and their alcoholic father. The metaphor of child and kitten, both alone and scared in the world, is easy enough. The delicate task that is done so well here is using the footage of kittens to darken the mood, not soften it. (2007-08, approx. 95 min total, 16mm) JH - Cine-File.info

Verna Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki's FOREIGN PARTS (New Documentary)

Chicago Filmmakers - Friday, 8pm 
American ethnographic filmmaking is experiencing a welcome crop of understated, discrete works that look at soon-to-be-gone industries. Along with 2009's SWEETGRASS, a film about a family-run sheep ranch in Montana having its final season before closing permanently, the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard supported FOREIGN PARTS, a film about another type of location that most Americans will never see, and another way of life that is in danger of extinction. The stark landscape of the Willett's Point neighborhood of Queens, NY (dominated by twisted metal and signifiers of poverty), is thrust upon us in the first moments of the film, and the hustlers, independent entrepreneurs, and dancing drunks that make their lives among this urban junkyard are revealed. In true verité tradition, the camera is a quiet observer of all situations, allowing the newly erected Citi Field (home of the NY Mets baseball team) to tower over the action like a modern-day lord's castle without feeling like a forced construction of design. The attitude of 39th Street, the neighborhood's main drag, is defined by the multi-colored signage for the many places to get dirt-cheap car parts and bodywork. Drive-by customers roll down their windows and bargain in an atmosphere reminiscent of a marketplace in an underdeveloped country. This is a populace focused on their struggles of the moment, and they seem relatively unfazed by the Bloomberg administration's plan to redevelop the neighborhood into condos, malls, and office buildings. In this way, FOREIGN PARTS is influenced by our current economic situation, but not obsessed with it. We are reminded of the divide between rich and poor in the visuals, but we get to know the people that inhabit this space, and not those that come to the stadium. The characters that concern us were poor before Wall Street had a downturn, and they'll continue to live off of scraps and recycling, even if they have to go unseen somewhere else. (2010, 80 min., video) JH - Cine-File.info