Marginalia on Latour

(modernity)



:



[objects]


__ ... __


[for(u)ms]


So in Theol., a sacrament is said to consist of matter (as the water in baptism, the bread and wine in the Eucharist) and form, which is furnished by certain essential formulary words (OED).

Films of Note: Screening in Chicago this Week

Canyon Passage (1946), dir. Jacques Tourneur
@ Music Box Theatre
Sunday, September 19 | 11:30 A.M.

The Girlfriends (1955), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Sunday, September 19 | 3:00 P.M.
Sunday, September 19 | 6:00 P.M.
Monday, September 20 | 8:15 P.M.

Naughty Girl (1956), dir. Michel Boisrand
@ Delilah's
Sunday, September 19 | 6:00 P.M.

Let Each One Go Where He May (2009), dir. Ben Russell
@ Cinema Borealis
Sunday, September 19 | 8:00 P.M.

Diabolique (1955), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Monday, September 20 | 6:00 P.M.

Gilda (1946), dir. Charles Vidor
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Tuesday, September 21 | 6:00 P.M.

Billy Childish Is Dead (2005), dir. Graham Bendel
@ Delilah's
Tuesday, September 21 | 7:00 P.M.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life (2008), dir. Steven Sebring
@ Transistor
Tuesday, September 21 | 7:30 P.M.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), dir. Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton
@ Northbrook Public Library
Wednesday, September 22 | 1:00 P.M.
Wednesday, September 22 | 7:30 P.M.

Hollow Triumph (1948), dir. Steve Sekely
@ Portage Park Theater
Wednesday, September 22 | 1:30 P.M.

The Last Metro (1980), dir. Francois Truffaut
@ Alliance Francaise
Wednesday, September 22 | 6:30 P.M.

Have to Believe We Are Magic (various), dir. Kent Lambert and Jesse McLean
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Thursday, September 23 | 6:00 P.M.

Do It Again: One Man's Quest to Reunite the Kinks (2010), dir. Robert Patton-Spruill
@ Metro
Thursday, September 23 | 7:30 P.M.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), dir. Oliver Stone
@ ShowPlace ICON Theatre
Friday, September 24 | 12:01 A.M.

Whirlpool (1949), dir. Otto Preminger
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Friday, September 24 | 6:00 P.M.

Henri Georges-Clouzot's Inferno (2009), dir. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Friday, September 24 | 6:00 P.M.
Friday, September 24 | 8:00 P.M.
Saturday, September 25 | 4:15 P.M.
Saturday, September 25 | 8:15 P.M.

Valley of the Dolls (1967), dir. Mark Robson
@ Music Box Theatre
Friday, September 24 | 7:00 P.M.

The Fearmakers (1958), dir. Jacques Tourneur
@ Music Box Theatre
Saturday, September 25 | 11:30 A.M.

The Mystery of Picasso (1956), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Saturday, September 25 | 2:15 P.M.
Saturday, September 25 | 6:15 P.M.

Meet Me at the Fair (1953), dir. Douglas Sirk
@ Bank of America Cinema
Saturday, September 25 | 8:00 P.M.

Canyon Passage: Saturday Matinee at the Music Box

If Jacques Tourneur is more your style than Tommy Wiseau, then the screening of Canyon Passage (1946) at the Music Box this Saturday, September 18, at 11:30 A.M., is well worth seeking out.

The celebrated director of the Freudian horror favorite Cat People (1942) and the more subtly Freudian noir classic Out of the Past (1947) saddles up and turns out this big-budget Technicolor western for Universal.

Hoagy Carmichael plays the shiftless backwoods minstrel Hi Linnet. Not only is he the heart and soul of the film, but he also sings some really charming folk songs.





I have a pretty good sense of how lush the deep greens, yellows, and reds of Tourneur's film are going to look and feel against the golden panels and trim of the Music Box. But what will be the somaesthetics of viewing this film, set in the 1850s and released in 1946, in a movie house built in 1929, at 11:30 A.M. on a late-summer Saturday morning? Will we all disintegrate into this elaborate temporal vortex? How is that going to feel? Why doesn't anyone write film reviews that address this type of vexing question?

Tommy Wiseau's The Room Friday Night at the Music Box

A tremendously important addendum to my weekly preview of film screenings in Chicago: At midnight this Friday, September 17, the Music Box Theatre will show Tommy Wiseau's cult masterpiece The Room (2003).

It has been called the worst film ever made. It has been called the greatest cult film of all time. One reviewer, after seeing the film three times, remarked, "I no longer know where The Room ends and I begin."

Is it a soap opera? Is it a melodrama? Is it a comedy? Is it a dark comedy? Is it the story of one teen's battle against addiction?

Unfortunately, Tommy Wiseau will not be present at the screening. But that doesn't mean you can't toss around the pigskin without him.

Visit the official site of The Room here.

View the full trailer below.

Others

Rutherford, N.J. 1916.

Front Row (L-R): Alanson Hartpence, Alfred Kreymborg, William Carlos Williams, Skip Cannell.
Back Row (L-R): Jean Crotti, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Arensberg, Man Ray, Robert Alden Sanborn, Maxwell Bodenheim.

Everyone made it out to see Old Bull in the Borough of Trees.

Films of Note: Screening in Chicago this Week

The Sicilian Girl (2008), dir. Marco Amenta
@ Music Box Theatre
Monday, September 13 - Thursday, September 16 | 4:30 P.M.
Monday, September 13 - Tuesday, September 16 | 7:20 P.M.
Thursday, September 16 | 7:20 P.M.
Monday, September 13 - Thursday, September 16 | 9:40 P.M.

Le Corbeau (1943), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Monday, September 13 | 6:00 P.M.

The Ninth Day (2004), dir. Volker Schlondorff
@ Loyola University (Klarchek Information Commons)
Monday, September 13 | 6:30 P.M.

Gabi on the Roof in July (2009), dir. Lawrence Michael Levine
@ Music Box Theatre
Monday, September 13 | 7:00 P.M.

Sleeping and Waking (2009), dir. Joe Banno
@ Facets Cinematheque
Monday, September 13 - Thursday, September 16 | 7:00 P.M.
Monday, September 13 - Thursday, September 16 | 9:00 P.M.

Breathless (1960), dir. Jean-Luc Godard
@ Tivoli Theater
Monday, September 13 | 7:30 P.M.

My Tale of Two Cities (2008), dir. Carl Kurlander
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Monday, September 13 | 8:00 P.M.

Riffraf (2009), dir. Justen Naughton
@ Music Box Theatre
Monday, September 13 | 9:30 P.M.
Thursday, September 16 | 7:00 P.M.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), dir. Bansky
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Monday, September 13 | 6:15 P.M.
Monday, September 13 | 8:00 P.M.
Tuesday, September 14 | 6:00 P.M.
Tuesday, September 14 | 8:00 P.M.
Wednesday, September 15 | 6:15 P.M.
Wednesday, September 15 | 8:00 P.M.
Thursday, September 16 | 8:15 P.M.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943), dir. Alfred Hitchcock
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Tuesday, September 14 | 6:00 P.M.

The Elephant in the Living Room (2010), dir. Michael Webber
@ Music Box Theatre
Tuesday, September 14 | 7:00 P.M.

Blow-Up (1966), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
@ Transistor
Tuesday, September 14 | 7:30 P.M.

Beneath the Blue (2010), dir. Michael D. Sellers
@ Music Box Theatre
Tuesday, September 14 | 9:30 P.M.

The Last Command (1928), dir. Josef von Sternberg
@ Northbrook Public Library
Wednesday, September 16 | 1:00 P.M.
Wednesday, September 16 | 7:30 P.M.

Flying Deuces, (1939), dir. A. Edward Sutherland
@ Portage Park Theater
Wednesday, September 15 | 1:30 P.M.

La Verite (1961), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Wednesday, September 16 | 6:00 P.M.

Eat the Sun (2009), dir. Peter Sorcher
@ Music Box Theatre
Wednesday, September 15 | 7:00 P.M.

Carmen Jones (1954), dir. Otto Preminger
@ Music Box Theatre
Wednesday, September 15 | 7:00 P.M.

Biker Fox (2010), dir. Jeremy Lamberton
@ Music Box Theatre
Wednesday, September 15 | 9:30 P.M.

Eleanore & the Timekeeper (2010), dir. Daniele Wilmouth
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Thursday, September 16 | 6:00 P.M.

Modern Times (1936), dir. Charlie Chaplin
@ St. Xavier University (Warde Academic Center)
Thursday, September 16 | 7:00 P.M.

Gilda (1946), dir. Charles Vidor
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Friday, September 17 | 6:00 P.M.

Quai des Orfevres (1947), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Friday, September 17 | 8:15 P.M.
Saturday, September 18 | 5:15 P.M.

Air Doll (2009), dir. Hirokazu Koreeda
@ Facets Cinematheque
Friday, September 17 | 6:30 P.M.
Friday, September 17 | 9:00 P.M.
Saturday, September 18 | 1:30 P.M.
Saturday, September 18 | 4:00 P.M.
Saturday, September 18 | 6:30 P.M.
Saturday, September 18 | 9:00 P.M.

The Phantom Planet (1961), dir. William Marshall
@ Portage Park Theater
Saturday, September 18 | 12:00 P.M.

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), dir. Ishiro Honda
@ Portage Park Theater
Saturday, September 18 | 2:00 P.M.

Diabolique (1955), dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Saturday, September 18 | 3:00 P.M.

House of Dracula/ (1945), dir. Erle C. Kenton
@ Portage Park Theater
Saturday, September 18 | 4:00 P.M.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), dir. Wallace Worsley
@ Portage Park Theater
Saturday, September 18 | 5:30 P.M.

The Wild Ride (1960), dir. Harvey Berman
@ Delilah's
Saturday, September 18 | 6:00 P.M.

Darkman (1990), dir. Sam Raimi
@ Portage Park Theater
Saturday, September 18 | 7:30 P.M.

The Southerner (1945), dir. Jean Renoir
@ Bank of America Cinema
Saturday, September 18 | 8:00 P.M.

The Girlfriends (1995), Michelangelo Antonioni
@ Gene Siskel Film Center
Saturday, September 18 | 8:00 P.M.

The Manster (1959), dir. George P. Breakston & Kenneth G. Krane
@ Portage Park Theater
Saturday, September 18 | 10:30 P.M.

They Stole It from My Subconscious!

From September 3 to December 14, the Gene Siskel Film Center (SAIC) is putting on a new film noir series. This is the second noir series that has come to us here in Chicago this summer (in addition to the Music Box's excellent August Noir City series), but the Film Center's program promises a new angle on the genre. The lineup of the series seems to have come about through a collaboration between Marty Rubin, one of the Film Center's programmers, and James Naremore, a professor emeritus at Indiana University. Applying the central thesis of his celebrated book More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (from which the Film Center series also takes its name), Naremore has this to say about the program and its lineup of films:

The film noir is usually associated with a cycle of dark crime movies from Hollywood in the 1940s and '50s--pictures about drifters attracted to femmes fatales, criminal gangs who pull off heists, private eyes who keep whiskey in their desks, and doomed lovers on the run. The form is usually downbeat in a smart, romantic way: “Is there any way to win?” Jane Greer asks Robert Mitchum in OUT OF THE PAST. “There’s a way to lose more slowly,” Mitchum replies.

This series will explore those films but will also show that the noir category is larger and more complicated than most viewers realize. We will discuss the phenomenon as an idea that originates in France in the 1930s, as a type of popular modernism, as an underground or low-budget cinema, as a style that undergoes changes over time, as an idea that has social and racial implications, and as a fashionable postmodern term that circulates throughout the contemporary mediascape.

Naremore's introduction sets us up to expect a lineup of films juxtaposing a few well-tested classics (e.g., Tourneur's Out of the Past) and a larger number of unusual, fugitive films that expand or challenge our basic assumptions about the film noir genre. What we get, however, is by and large a distillation of some kind of film noir canon -- a paean to some of the most watched, most discussed, and most written about films of the genre. The series kicked off last week with Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, will round out September with Charles Vidor's Gilda, and will crest in October with Nick Ray's In a Lonely Place.

Now for months I've been toying around with the idea of proposing a series to Doc Films that would explore pretty near precisely the terrain that Rubin and Naremore's program stakes out for itself. Except that my series actually would take a serious look at unusual, fugitive films that expand or challenge our basic assumptions about film noir. It would mine the archive for noir films that develop cinematographic styles and techniques uncharacteristic of the noir genre writ large, that cross-pollinate with other genres (such as historical drama, melodrama, and horror), and that surface from the depths of the Hollywood-era poverty row -- all goals that Naremore's rationale seems to set for the Film Center series. That's why I mime Salvador Dali's (heartless and ludicrous) response to Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart and exclaim that they (Naremore and Rubin) stole the idea for this kind of film noir program from my subconscious. The idea has been lurking there in my (admittedly conscious) mind for some time now, and the Film Center has publicized the concept but largely ruined the execution.

More than Night: Looking at Film Noir does include one genuinely offbeat film noir. It's called The Black Book, directed by the great Anthony Mann, and it's a darker than dark, deeply noirsh post-WWII take on the French Revolution. It had headliner status on the rough draft of my noir series, but its inclusion in the Film Center program (despite the humdrum nature of most of the rest of that program) ruins the freshness and originality of this particular feature. I banged my head against the wall when I saw Mann's film on the lineup.



Don't get me wrong: I laud any programmer's commitment to bringing even tried-and-true noir films to a wider audience (and the Film Center has that audience), and I welcome the chance to see each of these films on the big screen. But I do feel cheated. I'm counting on Naremore's introductions to make us see familiar films in novel, unfamiliar ways; I'm counting on him to explain, for instance, what makes a film like Gilda an unusual noir film.

Other series highlights include: Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract (Nov. 12/16), Joseph Lewis's So Dark the Night (Dec. 3/7), and -- a film that can never be screened too often -- Orson Welles's Lady from Shanghai (Oct. 15/19).

The tentative title of my series: Film Noir Offbeat and Off-Color. I'll refrain here from posting my proposed lineup for fear of further subconscious theft.