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| Another Year, Another Superb Calendar Hyde Park this fall will again be the epicenter of the most diverse film programming in Chicago. Post-Nouvelle Vage Godard sits alongside the hardboiled noir of John Garfield and Robert Ryan; the mean streets of 70s American Cinema next to the meaner bedrooms/campgrounds of 70s American horror; early Hollywood films starring, directed or scripted by women flank a survey of jazz music in films and films about jazz music. Standard histories of Hollywood often overlook the great contribution made by powerful women in the positions of directors, screenwriters and actor-auteurs. "The Women of Early Hollywood: Writers, Directors, Stars" features rare pictures with stars like Lillian Gish (The Wind), Clara Bow (Mantrap), Greta Garbo (The Kiss), Mary Pickford (Sparrows), and showcases outstanding and unrecognized work from some of the best women screenwriters of the day: Marian Fremont (Griffith's True Heart Susie), Agnes Christie Johnson (King Vidor's The Patsy), Anita Loos (Wild and Woolly), as well as work by women-directors, like The Blot (Lois Weber), Speed Limit (Alice Guy Blache), The Red Kimono (Dorothy Davenport) and Her Defiance (Cleo Madison). This series presents a compelling argument for the place of women writers, directors and stars in the early Hollywood canon. The second part of Doc's Jean-Luc Godard retrospective offers a generous sampling of his work post-Weekend. His stints as dogmatic Maoist, aesthete (as part of the Dziga Vertov group) and video artist will be explored. This series will give Chicagoans a chance to appraise his aesthetic and political development, and to view rare and controversial works – from Sympathy for the Devil (certainly the only concert film of the Rolling Stones to include political murder and Marxist rants) to Godard's self-conscious masterpiece about filmmaking, 1982's Passion. The super-rare 1990 film, Nouvelle Vage will be screened in Chicago for the first time in at least a decade. As a special treat, each screening will be accompanied by rare DVD screenings of video shorts, many unavailable in any format in North America. The 1970s in America were a ripe time for horror. This genre doesn't get nearly the amount of respect it deserves, and hasn't gotten much respect from Doc lately. But "Revisiting the 'American Nightmare" will rectify all that. Films with taglines that just drag you to the theater (Deadbed… "the bed that eats") mix with frightening favorites, William Friedkin's The Exorcist and John Carpenter's Halloween. The modern gore that audiences flock to today (Saw, Hostel, etc.) wouldn't be the same without these lovably terrifying flicks. As a special treat, Halloween will screen twice on its eponymous night, with a costume contest at the midnight screening. American filmmaking from the 60s to the 80s saw the reinvention of genres and the entrance of "antiheroes" into mainstream Hollywood. The gritty realism of the period (Scorces's Raging Bull, Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, etc.) has influenced scores of today's filmmakers – from Michael Mann to Quentin Tarantino. This series is a chance for film buffs everywhere to watch movies they love on their intended medium, crisp 35mm. John Garfield and Robert Ryan have more in common than the films they made about boxing – "1-2 Punch: The Films of John Garfield & Robert Ryan" explores this affinity. The series offers a look at the overlooked American noir hero in various roles. In terrific films by some of the great auteurs (Max Ophul's Caught, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground and Anthony Mann's Men in War) each showcases the actors' particular skills. A pioneer of method acting, John Garfield made a mere 32 films before the Red Scare put him into early retirement. But this series offers a great taste of his superb talent – from a wounded WWII hero in Delmer Daves' Pride of the Marines to his most famous role as a mob-lawyer in Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil. Robert Ryan had a longer career and avoided HUAC (although they were an omnipresent threat). He turned out great performances in Robert Wise's The Set-Up (as a washed up boxer) and Ophul's Caught (opposite James Mason and Barbara Del Geddes). It's an intense series of some of the great B-pictures of the period, acted by two of the best genre actors of the period. Jazz, and its development as an "outsider art" alongside the movies, is the subject of the "Jazz Cinema" series. The series features films not only about jazz (Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber's astounding doc about tragic vocalist and trumpet-player Chet Baker) but also featuring great jazz soundtracks (Miles Davis's Elevator to the Gallows). Favorites, like Bertrand Travernier's 'Round Midnight straddle rare gems, like Minnie the Moocher (featuring Cab Calloway and his orchestra) and Dudley Murphy's St. Louis Blues, featuring the inimitable Bessie Smith. The weekend offerings are just as interesting. Richard Linklater's experimental animated film (adapted from a Phillip K. Dick novel) A Scanner Darkly and Al Gore's consciousness-raising agitprop An Inconvenient Truth are only two of the twenty weekend films. Others include the already cult-classic Snakes on a Plane, Robert Altman's elegiac A Prairie Home Companion and the latest from the Dardenne brothers, L'enfant. Popular favorites, Little Miss Sunshine, Nacho Libre, Superman Returns Cars, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Thank you For Smoking, fill out the diverse weekend calendar. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Jazz News :: home page |