Jonathan Rosenbaum

As far as I know this was something of a first, at least since the 20s or 30s: a movie predicated on film theory that opened commercially. Written, directed, and produced by American independents Scott McGehee and David Siegel, this odd black-and-white ‘Scope thriller (1993) about identity and social construction concerns a young man named Clay who becomes briefly acquainted with his half brother Vincent. Vincent, who wants to flee the country, stages an accident meant to look like his own death, but substitutes Clay in his place. With everyone believing he’s dead, Vincent can easily disappear. But Clay survives the explosion, though he has amnesia, and with the help of a plastic surgeon and a psychoanalyst is restored to an identity that was never hisVincent’s. A subversive spin is given to this material: Clay and Vincent are said by all the characters to be dead ringers, yet Clay is played by a black actor and Vincent by a white oneand no one ever comments on it. The film may be at times a little too smart (as well as a little too drab and mechanical) for its own good, but the witty, provocative implications of the central concept linger, and the story carries an interesting sting: this is a head scratcher that actually functions. Read more

It isn’t a patch on Im Kwon-taek’s previous Fly High Run Far, though unlike that masterpiece, this 1993 feature made a killing at the Korean box office. How you respond to it will probably have a lot to do with how you respond to pansori, a traditional dirgelike Korean song form; the story recounts the travails of an itinerant pansori singer and the sacrifices made by his family, including two adopted children, over many years to sustain that art. With Kim Kyu-chul and Kim Myung-gon. In Korean with subtitles. 112 min. (JR) Read more

A single mother (Suzy Amis) comes home one day to find her suburban house in disarray and her two young children missing; a police lieutenant (Fred Ward) turns up and, convinced she murdered the children, proceeds to question her at length. These are the only two characters in this playlike, rather ritualized chamber piece (1993) with sadomasochistic overtones, which never strays from the house and its immediate environs. Written and precisely directed by Beth B (Vortex, Belladonna) and shot in Germany, this independent effort is sustained by the talented actors, though how much one warms to the ambiguous goings-on will depend a great deal on one’s own psychosexual predilections. (JR) Read more

Chicago-based film and video artist Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa (Ruins Within) directed this 20-minute video documentary (1994) about Muslim, Farsi-speaking women in the U.S.many of them political exiles from Iran, Tajikistan, or Afghanistanand their problems reconciling their American identity with their religion and culture. A personal and thoughtful work, charged with feeling. (JR) Read more

Andy Warhol’s characteristically unscripted 1966 feature with Edie Sedgwick was shot twice: the first time a technical problem with the lens caused both 33-minute reels to be out of focus; the second time everything was fine. But in a classic Warholian gesture, the filmmaker decided the final version should be made of the first reel of the first version and the second reel of the second. Unavailable since it was withdrawn from distribution in 1972, it’s bound to be interesting. (JR) Read more

John Waters’s first sync-sound feature (1970), starring the traveling show Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions and described by J. Hoberman as the filmmaker’s most overtly Catholic film. Violence was this generation’s sacrilege, Waters once said, so I wanted to make a film that would glorify carnage and mayhem for laughs. Hippies and revolutionaries are ridiculed along with straights, and downtown Baltimore has probably never looked so depraved. With Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Edith Massey, Mink Stole, et alWaters’s original Whole Sick Crew. (JR) Read more

The late 300-pound transvestite Divine, John Waters’s most enduring muse, makes his/her first star entrance in this 1969 featurethe first Waters movie to play outside Baltimoredriving a 1959 Eldorado to the strains of The Girl Can’t Help It. She inadvertently runs over Mary Vivian Pearce and stuffs the body in the trunk, and they both eventually wind up in a lunatic asylum orgy where Mink Stole tap-dances topless; more adventures and outrages ensue. (JR) Read more

Broadly speaking, this cheerful documentary by Kermit Cole does for HIV-positive people what Frank Perry’s On the Bridge did for people with canceri.e., offer a constructive set of strategies for dealing with a difficult and socially unacceptable medical condition. The principal difference in method is that Cole deals with a wide variety of people and Perry dealt mainly with himselfwhich has positive as well as negative consequences. On the plus side we see a broad range of likable individualsmale and female, gay and straight, of diverse ages and from all walks of lifesharing their experiences and exhibiting a great deal of wisdom and resourcefulness. Less helpful is the formulaic editing stylecrosscutting and frequent sound-biteswhich tends to work against the range and variety of the individuals. On the whole, this is well worth seeing. (JR) Read more

This campy, low-budget American independent comedy by Richard Glatzer covers five workdays in a daytime-TV production office where various employees are competing for the same job. It’s neither Soapdish nor Executive Suite, but if you’re looking for some lighthearted sleaze you may have a good time. The gay hero (Craig Chester, who played Nathan Leopold in Swoon) is the story editor of a courtroom soap opera, and most of what keeps the plot going is the bisexual office intrigue. With Jackie Beat, Lucy Guttridge, Illeana Douglas, Alexis Arquette, Carlton Wilborn, and Robin Swid. (JR) Read more

In his first feature without Divine, John Waters finds himself without a moral center. This 1977 prepunk midnight shocker and scabrous fairy tale is full of deviant sexuality, violent excess, and plenty of other Waters regulars, including Liz Renay, Mary Vivian Pearce, Susan Lowe, Mink Stole as a murderous housewife, and Edith Massey as the Queen of the Underworld; there’s also the hefty Jean Hill, who murders one hapless victim by sitting on his face. 91 min. (JR) Read more

Stuart Goldman’s 1988 film documents the life of the blues singer (1895-1984) who gave up her musical career for 20 years to work as a nurse before making a triumphant comeback in 1977; a lot of enjoyable concert footage is included. (JR) Read more

I only know the 30s radio show by hearsay, so I can’t vouch for the faithfulness of this big-scale movie version, but if I had to choose between a sequel to this and another Batman or Indiana Jones romp, I’d opt for a second Shadow, if only because the visual design of this one–a comic-book fever dream of 30s Manhattan so well imagined and lived-in that one could almost crawl inside it–has more enchantments than the Wagnerian pretensions and Pavlovian cliff-hangers of the other two cycles. Admittedly, this visual design–which recalls more than once some of the classic Universal horror pictures of the 30s–tends to triumph over and thereby diminish everything else in the picture. The characters are fairly dim (Alec Baldwin in the title role, alias Lamont Cranston, is still a bit of a stick, and Penelope Ann Miller is just a slinky icon, though John Lone seems well cast as the occult villain); the plot–largely a matter of telepathy, hypnosis, and mind over matter–while true enough to its origins in Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang, is not especially memorable; and the action thrills tend to be obligatory rather than inspired. But the look of this movie is such a delight that even passing details–an apple twirled in Miller’s hands, a striped sofa beside which subvillain Tim Curry falls to his death–seem integral parts of the production design; and when an anachronistic, spherical atomic bomb barrels down a hotel hallway, even if it occasions much less suspense than the rolling boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it has all the sleek decorum of a Magritte painting. Read more

Essential viewing: an intimate hour-long self-portrait on film, JLG by JLG, plus the third and fourth episodes of Godard’s ongoing video series Histoire(s) du cinema, each half an hour long; all three works were completed this year. Ostensibly a work of winter landscapes and brooding self-scrutiny, somewhat suggestive of German romanticism, the beautifully composed JLG occasionally gives you the uncomfortable feeling that Godard may be starting to fancy himself someone like Goethe, though he does include at least a couple of his characteristic ingenue employees, one of them in hot pants, along with a blown-up photograph of himself as a boy and various empty notebooks labeled with the first names of directors he admires: Roberto (Rossellini), Boris (Barnet), Nicholas (Ray), and Jacques (Rivette? Tati? Demy?). I prefer the equally private and contemplative but somewhat more accessible new chapters of Histoire(s) du cinema, titled “Only Cinema” and “Deadly Beauty”–both somewhat less frenetic than the first two episodes, though equally pungent and suggestive. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, June 26, 6:00, 443-3737. Read more

A much more serious treatment of Buddhism than Little Buddha, this 1989 Korean feature by Bae Yong-kyun (who produced, directed, shot, and edited), winner of the top prize at the Locarno film festival, has already become something of a cult film, and it’s easy to understand why. The title is an unanswerable Zen koan, at one point echoing the narrator’s queries: “Who is Buddha? Who isn’t he?” The skeletal plot concerns an old master, a young disciple, and an orphaned boy in a remote Korean monastery in the mountains, but the film’s main offering is its contemplation of and inexhaustible fascination with the natural world; indeed, we periodically have the sensation that the narrative has been suspended almost entirely for the sake of this meditation. Full of ravishingly beautiful images rather than ravishingly beautiful shots, the film conveys not so much a filmic intelligence as a Buddhist intelligence that’s being translated, step by step, into movie terms; the film seems to reach us from a certain remove, with positive as well as negative consequences. Count on something slow, arresting, and lovely, and if you’re looking for drama, expect to find it internally. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, June 17 through 23. Read more

After personally thanking all the members of his cast and crew inside the film’s various sets, Sacha Guitry plunges into the most ferocious, and possibly the most subversive, masterpiece of his career (1951). The great Michel Simon plays a middle-aged village gardener who despises his alcoholic wife (who despises him in turn). After learning on the radio about an ace defense lawyer famous for getting murderers acquitted, he goes to see the lawyer, claiming to have already killed his wife, and learns from the lawyer’s questions and comments precisely how he should commit the crime to escape sentencing; meanwhile, his wife is hatching a murder plot of her own. Shot in just 11 days–in deference to Simon, who demanded that each of his scenes be filmed only once–this caustic social satire lasts 96 minutes, and not one of them is wasted; with Germaine Reuver and Jean Debucourt. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, June 18, 6:00, 443-3737. Read more