Results tagged “chicagocinemaforum”

Every Saturday night you'll find the second-floor auditorium of the Bank of America on West Irving Park Road in Portage Park packed with movie lovers. They come there to see a wide-ranging program of classics, rarities and good old-fashioned popcorn movies. The weekly screenings have now been going strong for over thirty years. A hardcore base of regulars keep coming back year after year despite the encroachment of cable TV, home video and the multiplex.

We'd all like a little sunshine right about now. On Sunday the Chicago Cinema Forum will be splashing buckets of it all over the screen, thanks to the glistening cinematography of lenser Gabriel Figueroa. He photographed the little-seen María Candelaria, a Mexican film that won "Best Cinematography" and tied for "Grand Prize" at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. Screen siren Dolores del Río plays a savvy flower girl whose attempts to succeed in the marketplace are thwarted by a conservative community that isn't about to let her escape her past. Throw in a fiancée, an appreciative painter and the Mexico City locale and you've got a Grade A feisty melodrama.

Filmmaker Taylor Greeson was twelve years old in 1993. That summer, three things occurred: he was ordained with the priesthood in the Mormon church, he lost his virginity to an older man and his older brother Charlie was murdered. Using montages of family photographs and pastoral footage of Montana, where he lived at the time, Greerson revisits that summer in Meadowlark. He uses a cool, seemingly-detached perspective that drains any traces of sensationalism from the events. His unflappability extends even to sequences where he interviews his brother's killer in prison. It's a horse of a different color compared to daytime TV.

Several decades before the eye-popping wizardry of Koyaanisqatsi, the "City Symphony" genre, whose golden age lasted until perhaps the early 40's, was equal parts travelogue and razzle dazzle. The movies of this genre aimed to capture not only the atmosphere of the city in question but also showcase the latest in filmmaking technology. Canted camera angles, flash-cut editing and film that was sped up, slowed down, frozen, superimposed or otherwise manipulated were tools skillfully (and playfully) used to create a sense of wonderment about the modern world.

Even before we moved to Chicago we were aware of Poi Dog Pondering, thanks to a splashy ad in Rolling Stone for their album Wishing Like a Mountain and Thinking Like the Sea. Their song "Thanksgiving," from the aforementioned album, always pops into our playlist this time of year; and it was really cool to see them open for David Byrne a few years back at Navy Pier. However, their newest foray comes as something...

Luis Buñuel once wrote, "A film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream; as in dreams, images appear and disappear through dissolves and shadows, time and space become flexible, shrinking and expanding at will." A film is like a dream ... or a nightmare. Why do we, as viewers, sitting in the dark, voluntarily subject ourselves to disturbing images and sounds? Do the horrors of the real world help to explain the popularity...

Recently we’ve told you a little bit about the Chicago Cinema Forum, a new group that’s trying to bring rare and underseen movies to Chicago. To honor Ingmar Bergman after his passing, they quickly put together a mini-retrospective that touched all the bases; and last weekend they presented Roberto Rossellini’s all-but-unseen masterpiece India, Motherland. What was to have been the final screening of the latter, in fact, was sold out (!) so a third show...

A: Damn well worth seeing!

Who was Ingmar Bergman? You probably heard the news that he died last week, at age 89, and somewhere you mostly likely read Woody Allen’s pronouncement that he was, “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion-picture camera.” But you shouldn’t feel ashamed if you don’t really know who he is. For example, he was not the father of Ingrid Bergman (although they did make one film together, Autumn...