Long Live Suburbia

We’ve all had those moments where it seems like the whole world is conspiring against us and things couldn’t possibly get any worse. Strangely enough, most of these times, at least for me, occur in major cities. Though this may not seem like a coincidence since I have spent the majority of my life in one city or another, there’s still something undeniably infuriating about urban centers that can irritate me down to my very core. But is it really surprising that hectic city life drives people up the walls? Don’t get me wrong, rural and suburban communities certainly bare their fair share of wackos, but the modern American city breeds a special kind of crazy. While I love living in cities, especially Chicago, and have devoted much of my college career to studying them, I still can’t seem to find the Zen-like patience that some city-dwellers exhibit when confronted with even the most mind numbingly irksome situations. Maybe it’s simply that everyone has his or her own breaking point, but no one else’s seems to coincide with mine. Call me self-centered, but whether shuffling onto a crowded El car or circling around Lincoln Park for twenty minutes looking for a parking space, too often I seem to be the only one on the verge of going absolutely berserk. Admittedly, I have little patience for delay and that patience has been tested time and time again during my tenure in Chicago.

Now, I know what you’re thinking – an out-of-towner, right? True, but my native city of Dallas is hardly the sticks (despite popular opinion north of the Mason-Dixon line). In fact, Big D is the third-largest city in the state of Texas and the ninth-largest city in the United States. As of 2005, U.S. Census estimates put Dallas at a population of 1.2 million. The city is the main cultural and economic center of the 12-county Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area, which, at over 5.8 million people, is the fifth-largest metropolitan area in the United States and the largest metropolitan area in the state of Texas. By contrast, the city of Chicago is home to over 2.8 million inhabitants, with the greater Chicagoland area encompassing nearly 9.4 million souls, making Chicago the third-largest metropolitan region in the United States behind Los Angeles and, of course, the mother of all American cities – New York. The five boroughs of NYC contain over 8.2 million people and the New York metropolitan area 22.4 million, making it one of the largest urban centers in the world. Comparing Dallas to New York or Chicago just isn’t fair. The look and feel of these cities are different almost to the point that one might question whether the same civilization had built them. True, Dallas has a downtown, but it’s skyline pales in comparison with New York’s. The Dallas metroplex is spread out, with plenty of room to breath. In contrast, New York is so intensely dense that it almost suffocates those not yet accustomed to its immensity. For anyone not native to a major metropolis like the Big Apple, simply maintaining one’s sanity can be a tall order. But I find solace in knowing that I’m not the only one to ever be manhandled by the big bad city. At times like these, I remember the Sisyphean struggle of George and Gwen Kellerman in Arthur Hiller’s 1970 film adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Out-of-Towners and remember that things could always be worse.

The film, like many narratives, begins with a journey. Up for the vice-presidency of the New York office of a plastics manufacturing company, George (Jack Lemmon) with wife Gwen (Sandy Dennis) in tow, leaves the relative comfort of suburban Twin Oaks, Ohio for New York City and, presumably, a better and brighter future. The trip is anything but smooth, however, and the duo end up stranded, wet, mugged, and broke within mere hours of arriving in the Concrete Jungle. The film straddles a thin line between comedy and tragedy and the couple’s tribulations are both gut-wrenching and hilarious; gut-wrenching in their uncanny evocation of Murphy’s Law (anything that can go wrong will) and hilarious both in Jack Lemmon’s comic over-determination and stubbornness and also simply by nature of the fact that the viewer doesn’t have to physically endure all these hardships. Indeed, if I were put through a similar series of misfortunes, at least one homicide would most definitely be added to the list of maladies. Being a Neil Simon play, the film is low on violence, but rich in dramatic monologue. One scene in particular sums up all the feelings of exasperation I’ve ever had while stuck in traffic, lost, berated by irate drivers, or simply caught in bad weather. In all these situations, I’m often inclined to ask, “Why me God?” George Kellerman does one better – not only telling the entire city of New York to go fuck itself, but also proclaiming his unflappable desire to stay and get what he came for. As his wife Gwen prepares to give up and go home, she makes the mistake of saying, “We surrender, New York. You win” – which promptly sends George on his tirade. Standing in the middle of Central Park West, he furiously exclaims:

"No surrender. We don’t surrender. Ya hear that New York! We don’t quit! Now how do you like that! You can go ahead and rob me and starve me and break my teeth and my wife’s ankles, but I’m not leaving! You’re just a city. Well, I’m a person and persons are stronger than cities! This is George Kellerman talking. And you’re not getting away with anything. I got all your names and your addresses!"

I can’t count the number of times I’ve cursed out the city of Chicago, but I can tell you it does little good to get mad at a mass of buildings and people. I may be a person and persons may be stronger than cities, but cities also don’t care. They don’t get tired and they don’t stop. This is the realization that Gwen, always the voice of reason, comes to at the film’s end. After having gone through hell and high water to get to his interview on time, George returns to his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria to inform Gwen of the good news. After rattling off a laundry list of benefits that would be theirs were he to accept the job, George asks Gwen how she thought he responded to the offer. Looking despondent, as one is want to do after having spent the night sleeping under a tree in Central Park, Gwen remarks:

"I was hoping you would say no. I was hoping you’d say that you and your wife don’t really belong in New York. That you wanted to live the rest of your life in Ohio and that you never wanted to see a big city again as long as you lived. That you don’t want to live here or in Chicago, or San Francisco, or New Orleans, or Paris or any other place where people have to live on top of each other and they don’t have enough room to walk or to breath or to smile at each other. And you don’t want to step on garbage in the street or be attacked by dogs or have to give away watches in the middle of your sleep to men in black capes. That you were through traveling on trains that had no place to sit in and no food to eat and you didn’t want to fly in airplanes that had no place to land and no luggage for you when you land there. That you wish you’d never came here and the only thing you really wanted was to pick up your wife and carry her to the airport and fly home and live happily ever after. That’s what I was hoping you would say, George."

Staring lovingly into his wife’s eyes and curt for the first time in the film, George responds, “That’s funny. That’s what I told’em. Word for word.” I couldn’t have said it better, myself.
- Cortland Rankin

Seeing Sound at Sonic Celluloid

Ever notice how people tend to close their eyes at concerts? Obviously, some of these poor folks are sleeping, but the majority are taking mental trips that would make iTunes Visualizer pale in comparison. Sonic Celluloid, which screened on May 19th at Block Cinema in association with WNUR 89.3 FM, merged the cerebral voyages of experimental and silent filmmakers with the audial musings of bands Bird Show, KK Rampage, Weasel Walter, and The Lonesome Organist. Needless to say, no one at Block had their eyes closed that night.

Bird Show, headed up by Chicago-based musician Ben Vida, lent its melange of western and eastern acoustic music to the films of Ernie Gehr (Wait, Morning, and Untitled) and to John Whitney Jr.’s Terminal Self. The eerie, atmospheric strains of Bird Show’s minimalist tracks created a mood for each of Gehr’s films. Wait, a film featuring a man and woman at a kitchen table, took on a foreboding quality with the addition of Bird Show’s rhythms. Morning, a long shot of a window, took on a similarly tense mood, as did Untitled, which was merely a shot of falling snow. Whitney’s Terminal Self, an eight minute reel which depicts the weaving and unweaving of a shouting woman, was also heightened by Bird Show’s sonic creations. The image, haunting as it was, took on an even more sinister quality with Vida’s electronic elucidations.

“Who is KK Rampage? They’re the band that crashes your favorite bands’ show, throws powdered sugar everywhere, pukes on it and then rolls around in the disgusting puke paste. They’re the band that knows what high school girls were made for. They are the holocaust.” So says Tony Herrington of Wire about Sonic Celluloid’s second band, KK Rampage. Although Rampage abstained from spraying us with baking materials and other substances, they did lend their unique vocal skills to Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions, and to various clips from Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 film Point Break. Unlike Bird Show, who created moody tracks for Gehr’s films, KK Rampage paid an homage to the MTV generation. They turned Smith’s collage/montage of dark and fascinating images into a sort of music video, punctuating the succession of cinematic glyphs with sharp, earsplitting screams. KK Rampage took a similar approach to Point Break, providing a new soundtrack to the action-packed tale of cops and surfers. And might I add: Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze + Subtitles + Manic screaming = Sheer hilarity.

Synethesia: a neurological condition which causes one to hear, smell, or taste color. Judging from the way in which Weasel Walter jammed to the whirling tonal worlds of Stan Brakhage and Harry Smith, I would say that the Chicago composer and instrumentalist has a pretty good case of Synthesia. Weasel Walter added another dimension of color and perception to Brakhage’s Glaze of Cathexis and The Process, along with Smith’s Early Abstractions. With his jazz-inspired musical contortions, Walter gave life to Glaze of Cathexis’ whirling colors, The Process’ hazy and unfocused worldview, and Early Abstraction’s cut and paste progression of images and shapes.

Chicago musician Jeremy Jacobsen, AKA The Lonesome Organist, used music in the most traditional fashion of all the bands at Sonic Celluloid. “Traditional,” however, is not synonymous with “boring.” In fact, he was my favorite act of the night. Adding his macabre timbred pipings to Wladyslaw Starewicz’s The Cameraman’s Revenge, and George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, Jacobsen took us back to the realm of early twentieth century cinema. He added suspense and humor to Starewicz’s stop action animation tale of philandering beetles, and supplemented Méliès’ cinematic sublimity with his own brand of scored magic. To hear The Lonesome Organist’s silver-screen accompaniments is to take a trip into film history.

Whether you want to visit Ernie Gehr’s dark world with the aid of Bird Show, rip apart reality with KK Rampage and Harry Smith, trip the light fantastic with Weasel Walter and Brakhage, or take a trip to the moon with Méliès and The Lonesome Organist, Block Cinema’s has got you covered. The next time I go to the symphony and close my eyes with the rest of the non-drowsy crowd, I’ll have a whole new collection of images to run through my mind, courtesy of Sonic Celluloid.
-- Brenna Ehrlich

Inaugural Northwestern University Film Festival

Block held its inaugural Northwestern University Film Festival May 25. Director Harold Ramis (“Groundhog Day”) opened the festival and discussed his Hollywood beginnings. Before breaking into film, he worked at Playboy magazine and Second City. The classic Animal House, which he co-wrote, helped establish his name and his continual sharp comedies have made him legendary.

The first 25 minutes of Richard Linklater’s forthcoming "A Scanner Darkly" followed a screening of the student films.

Congrats to the all the winners!

Best Animated Short, “Life Unraveled” (3 min.), Sarah Cortese
Best Documentary Short, “Uptown: Portrait of a Palace” (26 min.), John Pappas and Michael Bisberg
Best Experimental Short, “Waves” (3 min.), Rachel Kichler
Best Narrative Short, “One More Coffee” (9 min.), Adam Price and Kunal Savkur

Honorable Mention, Animated Short, “The Lesson of the Moth” (3 min.), Sarah Cortese
Honorable Mention, Documentary Short, “Rushed” (12 min.), Marcus Cohlan
Honorable Mention, Experimental Short, “Don’t Worry—I’m a Rap Star” (4 min.), Jackie Doherty, Rachel Wolther and Kristin Bongiovanni
Honorable Mention, Experimental Short, “Arrow of Time” (3 min.), Arturo Menchaca
Honorable Mention, Narrative Short, “A Cup of Coffee” (6 min.), Jung Hyun Lee and Bongsoo J. Koo
Honorable Mention, Narrative Short, “Vom-o-Rama” (4 min.), Rachel Wolther, Amy Hirschtick, and Jackie Doherty
Honorable Mention, Narrative Short, “Pleasant Valley High” (10 min.), Anthony Williams and Michael Gaertner

Steve James reveals his "War Tapes"

“These are guys who think about what they’re doing, they think about it and they struggle with it. They’re not idiots. Like us, they think about it, but they have to fight the war at the same time.”

Clutching a mic with his legs crossed, Steve James ("Hoop Dreams") sits in the front of Block Cinema’s theatre, fielding questions from students about his latest project, “The War Tapes" (http://thewartapes.com). Winner of best international documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival, the film is being praised for its bold take on the war in Iraq. The film reverses the standards of documentary filmmaking by giving the soldiers cameras to shoot their lives in a “diary format” for most of the film.

“The War Tapes” began when the New Hampshire National Guard offered director Deborah Scranton a chance to become embedded with its unit. A single mother, Scranton declined the offer but decided to give soldiers cameras so they could film their experiences.

Of the twelve men who volunteered to take cameras, five became heavily dedicated to the project, according to James, and Scranton communicated with the soldiers using Instant Messaging. James, who produced the film, said they ended up with 1,000 hours of footage, and they had the challenge of cutting it down to 94 minutes of film.

“We did try to be true to this experience,” James said, explaining that the only discontinuity in time involves a period when the soldiers went on leave.

Throughout the 94 minutes, the camera follows the diary of Sgt. Stephen Pink, 24, who joined the National Guard during his second year at Plymouth State; specialist Mike Moriarty, a 35-year-old father of a 4-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter who joined after 9/11; Sgt. Zack Bazzi, a Lebanese American who joined to see the world and spent time in Bosnia and Kosovo; Sgt. Duncan Domey, 32, who joined the guard in 2003 after leaving active duty; and Specialist Brandon Wilkins, who joined the Army after high school. Some footage also follows their families around as the soldiers are away from home.

With Sony mini-disc DVD cameras, these soldiers captured intensely personal footage that can be rather funny (“If we end up in a survival situation, you have permission to eat me”) or poignant (“This is the most helpless feeling you’ve ever had”; “It’s unfortunate for Iraqi civilians, but it’s going to be our safety before theirs”; “If I play the odds, one of us will be dead before the tour is over. It’s something I don’t like to think about.”
“Can we build a wall around the country and just leave?”).

“What we’re trying to do is say this film speaks to a wide-range of people...we’ve been amazed at how broad the appeal is,” James said.


“The War Tapes” premieres in Chicago July 7 at the Music Box Theatre.

Still Doing It

“Are you going to take notes for later on in life?”

A woman sitting behind me in the cinema asked me this as I took out my notepad and a pen.

“Um, maybe,” I shyly replied.

She was one of many kind, older women and men who packed Block (people were in the aisle) on May 10 for a screening of Deirdre Fishel’s documentary, Still Doing It: The Intimate Lives of Women Over 65.

“Whether you still do it or you like to still do it, we’re glad you’re here,” Kathy Berger of Evanston’s Reeltime, which co-sponsored the event, said.

Barbara Schock’s short 1998 film My Mother Dreams the Satan’s Disciples in New York preceded the documentary, and it was a pretty amusing movie. It’s written by Rex Pickett, who wrote the novel Sideways. The plot follows a recent widow, Marian, who ventures from South Dakota to visit her grown daughter in big, bad New York City. Marian is delicately emotional at this time in her life, so she packs her late husband’s picture carefully in her suitcase before getting on the plane. When she lands, her experiences aren’t exactly ideal: the cab driver charges too much, and she finds out her daughter, Paula, lives on the same street as the headquarters for the Satan’s Disciples. Paula is sweet, but works a lot, so Marian is left to discover New York by herself. She loads up on maps, but gregarious men with tattoos riding motorcycles loom outside. The rest of the plot takes a few twists, and there’s some ambiguity about what really happens, but it’s an amusing story nonetheless.

“Life wasn’t over for her,” one woman commented after the movie. “It was a new beginning. I think this movie shows that people can advance at all ages – enjoy life and not be afraid.”

After a few more minutes of discussion, the documentary began, and well, it was certainly interesting. The most amusing character was Harriet, a 75-year-old hippie with long blonde hair, a husky smoke-tinged voice and a rather potent sex-drive.
“I need it like food,” she says blatantly to the camera.

“I’m not getting what I need,” she continues. “I mean, I wish I weren’t so sexual.”

There’s also Ruth, 67, who’s still working and searching for a man, Frances, 87, who met her love at 80, and Betty, 73, who met her lover, 40 years her junior, on the Internet.

All these women still like to do it.

“I love this movie,” one woman proclaims after the screening. “I think we all have these thoughts, and it’s courageous and strong for these women to come forward to talk about how women feel.”

Understanding A Cinema of Physics and Perception

By Arturo Menchaca

Experimental films can be rather intimidating. The term “experimental” conveys a sense of bizarreness to the average moviegoer. When placed in the context of filmmaking, the word suggests strangeness, complexity, inaccessibility, and more negatively, pretension and “weird for the sake of weird.” Even if these stereotypes are not necessarily true (though in some cases they are), most people do not approach experimental films, often because the films are not readily available, but even more significantly, because most people are not sure how to.

This is where A Cinema of Physics and Perception hopes to intervene. By making these films available to our patrons, we hope to give those who have never seen them a chance to, and those who already have a chance to see them again, for these are indeed films that reward multiple viewings.

The films in A Cinema of Physics and Perception are some of the most aesthetically compelling, intellectually challenging, and thoroughly enjoyable films ever made, because they use image and sound not simply as a way of entertaining (and certainly not as a way of selling a product), but as a way of articulating an aesthetic idea. All of the films in the series operate in this manner, and are directly concerned with expressing ideas about the art of filmmaking. A film like Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, while containing only frames of black and white and a drone-like soundtrack, is an aesthetic study in minimalism and the perceptual effects of long-term exposure to drastic changes in light and slowly shifting, protracted music. It is also a focused exploration into the nature of film and medium specificity.

This series favors a textual approach, one concerned with science and aesthetics. By observing and perceiving these films and the way they were physically constructed, one can extract a great deal of knowledge and meaning, no matter how conceptually dense the film may seem. This model suggests viewing films from the universal standpoint of 1) physics and 2) human perception.

The way a film uses and examines light, sound, matter, energy, and spacetime are at the forefront, as are issues of how a viewer perceives the film via the senses. The filmmakers whose works are included in the series made films because they had an aesthetic idea to express, and film was the only medium with which they could articulate it. Their statements rely as much on the regulated pulse of the projector as on the way the viewer perceives the world through vision and audition.

These films focus on the conditions of the medium, on the way each film is uniquely constructed and perceived. The inscriptions light has made in the emulsion through photochemical interaction, the way a strip of film comprises many discrete, individual frames, the fact that each of these frames can be edited and spliced together, the countless ways an image can be manipulated via an optical printer, the creation of images without using a camera, the illusion of motion or depth, the way a viewer perceives the colors in an image, the frequencies and amplitudes of sound being heard, the way language is biologically detected and comprehended: all of these are fundamental concerns of the films in this series.

So while some of the films in this series may seem unintelligible at first, one can gain a better understanding of them by regarding them as works of art akin to music, paintings, or sculptures rather than the straightforward forms of entertainment that most dramatic narrative films typify. Careful reflection on the ways these films operate in relation to physics and human perception offers a sound starting point from which to appreciate their aesthetic purpose. It is my hope that this model will give even the most unfamiliar viewer a way not only to approach the films analytically, but also to enjoy them on a more basic level, as pleasurable experiences for the senses and the mind.

A Cinema of Physics and Perception runs at Block through June 2.

Welcome, Day for Night Bloggers!

Welcome to the first Day for Night magazine blog closely related to Northwestern University's Block Cinema. We're new to the whole blogging scene so we're open to any suggestions regarding how we should organize postings.

Our main focus will be any discussion related to the movies shown at Block, as well as articles for Day for Night. If you go to a film event on campus or just have something to say about film in general, this is an ideal forum for you.

So, write.