If Guy Maddin’s Tales From the Gimli Hospital whetted your appetite for more comic/nostalgic/facetious strangeness–or if you haven’t seen the Maddin film but have such an appetite anyway–you’ll probably get a kick out of this entertaining assortment of shorts by Maddin’s neighbors and colleagues, all members of the Winnipeg Film Group of Manitoba, Canada; producer Greg Klymkiw will introduce and discuss their work. The ones I’ve been able to sample include Tracy Traeger and Shawna Dempsey’s We’re Talking Vulva, a funny rap-music video featuring performance artist Dempsey in a vulva suit; John Paizs’s hilariously deadpan evocations of 50s educational shorts in Springtime in Greenland and The Obsession of Billy Botski; and Lome Bailey’s memorable The Milkman Cometh, about a businessman who becomes so entranced by the Alpine landscape on a can of evaporated milk that his life gradually becomes overtaken by it. Also to be shown are films by John Kozak (Two Men in Search of a Plot) and the Winnipeg Film Group as a whole (Rabbit Pie). (Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Wednesday, October 10, 8:00, 281-8788) Read more
Much as history is written by survivors, film history is frequently written by distributors. So the greatness of the serials of both Louis Feuillade and Jacques Rivette must remain a postulate for Americans who can’t see them, and the towering importance of the fascinating ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch is usually something U.S. viewers can only read about. Rouch was a pioneer in working with sync sound and in mixing fiction and narrative with documentary, usually through the creative intervention of the subjects being filmed–aspects that were to fundamentally influence the French New Wave. Fortunately, one of Rouch’s finest (and earliest) features–about three young men who leave Niger to find work in Ghana prior to its independence–has been unearthed for a rare screening. This film was made before sync sound was available, and Rouch invited the major characters to improvise a narrative over the footage, which is an amazing and often funny document in its own right. If you care about cinema and haven’t yet encountered Rouch, this shouldn’t be missed (1953). Chicago documentary filmmaker Judy Hoffman, a member of the Kartemquin collective who has worked with Rouch, will introduce the film and lead a discussion. (Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Friday, October 5, 8:00, 281-8788) Read more
