BFI introduction: Set in 1880, this adaptation of Marvin Albert’s best-selling 1957 novel
Apache Rising arrived at a moment when the Western genre was undergoing
significant revision. The film employs the Anglo-Native American
conflict as a metaphor for Black-white relations in contemporary US
society. In his first Western, Sidney Poitier delivers a commanding
performance alongside James Garner, fresh from the hit TV series
Maverick. Together, they confront prejudice on the frontier, in a
groundbreaking precursor to the interracial buddy films that became a
hallmark of US cinema.
BFI introduction: In the pre-Civil War West, Gossett and Garner’s buddies and professional
conmen Jason O’Rourke and Quincy Drew beat racist slave owners at their
own game. Traveling through small towns, they swindle auction buyers
out of their ill-gotten gains and abscond with their money. But what
will these gamblers do when their luck runs out? Paul Bogart and Gordon Douglas’
comedy balances action and quick-fire dialogue, and features its two
stars at their very best.
This groundbreaking film is part of the African American Western season and also screens on February 21st. Details here. BFI introduction: Renowned photographer Gordon Parks wrote, directed, produced and scored
this adaptation of his 1963 novel. A deeply personal and
semi-autobiographical drama, it follows Newt Winger, a Black teenager
navigating adolescence and manhood in 1920s Cherokee Flats, Kansas. This
poignant coming-of-age story vividly captures the challenges of racial
injustice, community and self-discovery during a turbulent era. Among
the first films to be inducted into the American National Film Registry
in 1989, it remains a touchstone of American cinema.
This is a Funeral Parade Queer Film Society screening. There are others here.
Chicago Reader review: A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer
Werner Fassbinder's most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant
film (1972). The action is confined to a single set—the apartment of
fashion designer Margit Carstensen, decorated with desiccated mannequins
and a mammoth painting of fleshy, galloping nudes—where the three
characters (one is a mute) scheme, complain, and attempt to seduce. With
Irm Hermann and Hanna Schygulla. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman
(Jeanne Dielman) made this independent work from a work-in-progress
known as The Eighties (the English title of the finished film is Window
Shopping).
Forty minutes of videotaped auditions and rehearsals for Akerman's
shopping center musical are followed by three production numbers—in
radiant 35-millimeter—from the film. The subject is first and foremost
Akerman's love of actors and the filmmaking process, and second the
process itself—the intermediary steps between conception and perfection,
from physical materials to cinematic illusions. If you don't know
Akerman's work, this is an excellent place to start: it's a very funny,
very idiosyncratic piece from one of the most sympathetic of modernist
filmmakers. Dave Kehr Here (and above) is the opening to the film.
This 16mm presentationis part of a two days of screenings at ICA Cinema devoted to a titan of
experimental cinema, Michael Snow (1929-2023), who produced a body of
work that established entirely new ways of seeing.
Chicago Reader review: Michael Snow’s 1971 film La region centrale is surely one of the most
unusual in the history of the medium. For three hours we see a single
northern Quebec landscape from a single position, with no signs of human
presence save a rare glimpse of the camera shadow. The camera is
mounted on a complex custom-designed machine that takes it through a
series of increasingly elaborate, carefully choreographed movements,
many of which combine several different kinds of rotation. The sound
track consists entirely of a series of beeps that come from the tape
used to control the machine. Clearly, this is not a film for everyone,
but what emerges for the patient viewer is a sense that this rocky,
mostly treeless landscape possesses a vast, timeless, almost visionary
continuity that ultimately transcends the human-designed camera
movements. I have hiked similar Canadian terrain and can testify that
this land has a feeling of being very old, as if barely evolved through
the aeons, a sense well captured by Snow’s film. Few works of art have
so eloquently articulated the difference between the world we were given
and the consciousness we have evolved. Fred Camper
This film (showing along with 'So This Is' (1982), is part of a two days of screenings at ICA Cinema devoted to a titan of experimental cinema, Michael Snow (1929-2023), who produced a body of work that established entirely new ways of seeing. ICA introduction: A painter, sculptor, photographer and musician as well as a filmmaker,
Snow used techniques from across the disciplines to challenge
conventional cinematic notions of perception and representation. As part
of the structural film movement in which form was prioritised over
content, he saw framing, sound and duration as tools for reinventing the
language of the medium, saying that “to shape time seems to me to be
the quintessence of cinema”. Objecting to commercial cinema’s explicit
attempts to prompt emotional responses, Snow didn’t try to predict the
effect his work would have on audiences. Instead he stressed the bodily
effect of viewership, emphasising that his films, while carefully
structured, were “real experiences”. Noting that his 1971 work La Région Centrale
had caused some viewers to faint, he said “I must be doing something
right”. His work's ability to prompt both instinctive and analytical
reactions has helped it endure across the decades. With thanks to Dream of Light, a London-based film project that champions experimental and underseen cinema.
Chicago Reader review: Michael Snow’s notorious experimental classic (1967), consisting of a single, extended zoom (if anything moving at such a snaillike pace can properly be called a zoom) from one side of a loft space to the other. The aesthetic unfolding is engaging, also quite demanding, though I’m not convinced that letting your technical apparatus make the major decisions of your art is such a good formal idea. If nothing else, the film provides an inadvertent comment on the old classroom riddle of whether it’s possible to have a one-word poem; no, the classical answer goes, because it wouldn’t rhyme . . . and I’m not so sure that’s as stupid as it sounds. Pat Graham
