What’s old becomes new again

For cinephiles, what’s old always has the opportunity to become new again. We’re lucky here in Chicago that, in addition to new releases, several local theaters (as well as groups of independent programmers) make a point of programming older movies from bygone eras. As I look back on my moviegoing year, it’s often these viewing experiences that I remember most fondly.

Rather than make a list of my favorite new films of the year, I’ve made a list of my favorite repertory screenings of 2022. The rules are loose, as you’ll soon read, but for the most part I attended these screenings here in Chicago. Of course, there were also many excellent screenings that for myriad reasons I wasn’t able to attend, but that’s another list altogether.

10. Dominique Cabrera’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow Again (Diary 1995) (1997) at the Logan Center for the Arts, April 30

It’s fitting to begin this list with Cabrera’s film, which revolves around reflection as she employs a diaristic mode of filmmaking to examine a year in her life as a depressed single mother. She appropriates the quotidian for cinematic form as well as content, crafting poetry out of the prosaic. Cabrera made the film, she says, “to establish contact with the outside world, with something other than my own fear,” expressing the medium’s capability for transformation. Overall her work connects the personal with the social, depicting how someone’s intimate life is influenced by (and sometimes even influences) what’s happening outside it. The French filmmaker appeared via Zoom after the screening in conversation with University of Chicago professor Dominique Bluher, for whose retirement this event was a celebration. 

9. George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) at the Music Box Theatre, February 5

I rarely stay up past 11 PM anymore, so midnight movies pose a challenge they once didn’t. With drooping eyelids, I made my way to the Music Box for this zombie classic (presented as part of the monthly Music Box of Horrors screening series), and aren’t I glad I did. Romero’s follow-up to his seminal horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968) is notoriously difficult to see—in a theater, no less—because of some unwieldy rights issues. Tired as I was, an introduction from local film critic Deirdre Crimmins roused me, as she imparted upon us viewers the importance of the screening. It was her connection to the elusive rightsholder that allowed the Music Box to screen it. Dawn of the Dead is arguably Romero’s best zombie film, and its stark social satire (it takes place in a mall, where the excesses of capitalism help to sustain survivors of the zombie apocalypse) will wake you up figuratively if not literally.

8. (Tie) Marie-Claude Treilhou’s Simone Barbès or Virtue (1980) via Another Screen, January 10 / Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso (1998) at the New York Film Festival, October 2

Sure, I technically viewed Simone Barbès or Virtue in Chicago but at home on my computer rather than in a theater. I watched it via Another Screen, the virtual streaming platform of the UK-based feminist film journal Another Gaze. The film and platform (a resource for hard-to-see films made by women) are, thus, both worthy of inclusion. Simone Barbès follows a young French woman over the course of a night, from the porn theater where she works as a ticket-taker to a hypnagogic lesbian bar to, finally, a chance encounter with a lonely oddball as she’s heading home. Treilhou’s direction is as assured as the film’s unflappable protagonist, with whom we careen through an anything-but-ordinary Parisian eventide. 

Tied with that is Smith’s independent masterpiece Drylongso, which centers on college student Pica as she undertakes an ambitious project for her photography class: she takes Polaroids of young Black men around her Oakland neighborhood, making the case for them being almost an endangered species due to localized violence and police brutality. She also makes a new friend in a young woman shielding herself from male attention while a serial killer terrorizes their neighborhood. There’s a lot going on in the film, and just as much going for it. The screening had something of a local connection, as University of Chicago professor Jacqueline Stewart (now director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles) moderated the post-screening Q&A with Smith at the New York Film Festival. 

7. “Prefiguring Immediacy: Video Art by Mako Idemitsu” at the Logan Center for the Arts, April 3

This South Side Projections screening provided for one of the most exciting new-to-me filmmakers this year. Japanese media artist Idemitsu, who began making films while living in California, explores themes such as feminism and the ubiquity of television through her signature “Mako-style,” in which a monitor within the composition exhibits images subliminally connected to what’s happening in the work. The four short films and videos included in the program provided an interesting overview of Idemitsu’s practice. In Another Day of a Housewife (1977), for example, the titular figure goes about her daily routine all while an eye peers out from an omnipresent television set. In Hideo, It’s Me, Mama (1983), a mother monitors her son away at college via a TV, even setting a place for it as she and her husband eat dinner. The commentary on domestic relationships in Japan is obvious, but these surreal details make it especially potent.

6. Anthony Mann’s Dr. Broadway (1942) at the Music Box Theatre, August 27

This played as part of Noir City, an annual extravaganza that presents a week of noir film screenings, mostly on celluloid (this is the first film on the list that was projected on 35-millimeter). Anthony Mann was known as much for his noirs as his westerns (Winchester ’73, The Far Country, etc.), so it wasn’t that surprising to see him represented in the series. What was surprising is that the film was his directorial debut, based on the character created by Borden Chase. The titular Dr. Broadway is a genial always-do-well who’s forsaken a more lucrative practice to help the lovable lowlifes of Times Square. In what was intended to be the first of a series, Dr. Broadway saves a wayward dame and goes up against a rowdy gang looking to cash in on an ex-nemesis’s inheritance to his estranged daughter. (After the screening, many a fellow cinephile lamented that the series hadn’t moved forward.) Mann, with the help of German-born cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl, contributes meticulous compositions and dramatic lighting to the otherwise satisfyingly pot-boiler-esque proceedings.

5. J.C. Cricket’s Sex Demon at the Music Box Theatre, October 26

I’d been eager finally to see this movie after the discovery of a 16-millimeter theatrical print of it was announced a few years ago by archivist and queer film historian Elizabeth Purchell. What makes this all-male horror pastiche so special? My colleague Micco Caporale said it best in their piece about the screening: “As a sexually explicit camp masterpiece, Sex Demon has it all. The film only runs an hour but manages to deliver some incredibly tender dicksucking and artfully framed fucking.” Indeed, it exceeded my wildest expectations (because, as it turns out, I don’t have the capacity to amuse expectations this wild). Purchell’s recorded introduction added to the experience, as she provided context that made it all the more edifying and enjoyable. Considering its subject—a  young man who becomes possessed by an ancient demon, with no impact at all to his libido—the film was an exceptional choice for the Music Box’s 31-day Music Box of Horrors: Scared Stupid series. 

4. Nightingale Cinema’s Farewell (for now) Festival, April 23 – 25

One source defines a repertory cinema as one “whose programme [sic] is based on screenings of older films that have finished their commercial runs.” But what if a film never received a commercial run? It’s with that question in mind that I again abuse the already nebulous parameters of this list to include the Nightingale Cinema’s Farewell (for now) Festival upon the space’s closing in late April. The Noble Square microcinema (where, full disclosure, I’ve served as a programmer) closed, but not the organization itself, which will continue via pop-up screening series and other events. But the final farewell of the storied space was one for the books; its inclusion in this list is justified by the several programs that featured short, experimental films from years prior, some more recent, and others farther back. For example, Marianna Milhorat’s Uncle Joe, Landscape Rapper, in which the filmmaker’s uncle performs a rap he wrote in the 80s, is from 2012; Cecilia Condit’s Beneath the Skin, which considers domestic violence with chimerical self-possession, is from 1981. Overall, however, it was the community celebrating its space and history that made this one for the list.

3. (TIE) Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003) at the Music Box Theatre, March 14 / Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) at the Gene Siskel Film Center, January 24

Campion’s In the Cut is a criminally neglected masterpiece, so to see it in a theater (courtesy of the Chicago Film Society) projected on 35-millimeter was a highlight of my moviegoing year.  The film is an erotic psychological thriller par excellence: Meg Ryan stars as a New York City school teacher caught in the crosshairs of a violent serial killer. The film moves as languidly as its star, almost sexily sluggish. Meanwhile, Mark Ruffalo plays the detective assigned to the case, and the two enter into a torrid affair amidst gruesome discoveries of the killer’s victims. Campion’s distinct visual sensibility makes her films ideal to see on the big screen, and this, with its sepia-toned, sometimes foggy veneer, is no exception. 

Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (also shown on 35-millimeter) was recently voted number one on the Sight and Sound’s greatest films of all time poll, controversially ousting Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It has in common with Campion’s film a theme of repression, which Akerman conveys via the title character’s onerous domestic drudgery. Almost three and a half hours long, Dielman’s labor is depicted in real time as she tidies up the house and prepares meals for her and her son in their small Brussels apartment. It also demands to be seen on the big screen, where the walls and ceiling of the cinema become the confines of Dielman’s domiciliary rituals. It screened as part of the Film Center’s 50/50 series, which included a film from each of the 50 years the theater has been open; programmer and critic B. Ruby Rich, whom I interviewed earlier this year for a piece celebrating the art house’s 50th anniversary, brought Akerman to the Film Center in 1976.

2. Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) at the Music Box Theatre, March 5

This isn’t a tie but rather a double feature. The excellent Highs & Lows series, hosted at the Music Box, paired a supposedly high-brow movie with a low-brow one, letting viewers decide which is which. Both series (the first earlier this year, the other now happening every month or so) were great (other pairings include Robert Bresson’s Mouchette with Patrick Read Johnson’s Angus and Maurice Pialat’s Graduate First with Paul Weitz’s American Pie), but it’s this particular combination that left an impression on me. Each film considers what if? What if Jesus had thwarted crucifixion? What if Peggy Sue could go back in time and not marry her adulterous husband? The same predicament, really. In seriousness the pairing was shockingly potent, leaving me in tears. In what’s perhaps my favorite filmgoing-related moment all year, when the screening was over and the audience was exiting the theater, I overheard a young man exclaim to his companion, “God, I love movies so much.” Same, bro. Same. 

1. Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) at the Music Box Theatre, July 18

Very little in life destroys me like this movie. Fosse’s enduring masterpiece centers on his cinematic incarnation Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a womanizing choreographer who, over the course of the film, comes face to face with his own mortality. He’s at work on both a new Broadway show and editing his latest film (about a stand-up comedian, similar to Fosse’s real-life Lenny Bruce biopic); his ex-wife (Leland Palmer), with whom he shares a daughter, is involved in the former, while he juggles a somewhat steady girlfriend (Ann Reinking) amidst a series of lust-driven affairs. He soon begins suffering from heart trouble, exacerbated by his high-stress, vice-ridden lifestyle, during which things start coming into focus: his troubled relationships with the people who love him, the toll of his quest for artistic perfection, and the realities of his impending demise. No piece of art has forced me to contend with my mortality like this one—no piece of art makes time feel both interminable and finite. The musical numbers are extraordinary, lending a fantastical element to considerations of life and death; the denouement is, in my opinion, one of the best things ever to grace the screen. And it was all on 35-millimeter (courtesy, again, of the invaluable Chicago Film Society), something I’ve long waited for (in the past I’ve considered traveling just to see this on film). I cried so hard my face hurt the next day. Even thinking about it still brings tears to my eyes. That, that is what I’m seeking when I go to the movies. All that jazz.

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