The Auditorium at Northeastern Illinois University
Building E, 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
General Admission: $7 • NEIU Students: $3
Wednesday, March 4 @ 7:30 PM
UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul • 2010
In Thai with English Subtitles
If anybody recognizes that cinema is an art form uniquely hospitable to both delicate ruminations on time passed and rubber-suited ghouls, it’s Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The winner of the 2010 Palme d’Or, Uncle Boonmee found Apichatpong broadening his appeal beyond avid readers of film festival dispatches, pairing an expectedly sensitive study in reincarnation with enough spirits, monsters, and other supernatural phenomena to make the cover of Psychotronic Video. As he faces down an imminent death from kidney failure, the soft-spoken Boonmee (roof welder Thanapat Saisaymar, magnificent in his only screen performance to date) begins preparations for the metaphysical journey that awaits him. In between placid trips out to Boonmee’s farmlands and visits from his family and friends (including the corporeal, deceased, and those transformed into monkey ghosts), Apichatpong takes stock of what could possibly be episodes from past lives lived by Boonmee in passages ranging from banal (such as a farmer looking for a lost ox) to fantastic (as when a princess takes a talking fish for a lover). Shot in beautifully textured Super 16mm to evoke the look of the television productions of Apichatpong’s youth, Uncle Boonmee ends up being a testament to the wide-ranging and thoroughly unpretentious cinephilia of its director, a philosophically rich, millennia-spanning cosmic inquiry with the heart and soul of a creature feature. Screening in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Super 16 format! (CW)
113 min • Kick the Machine Films • 35mm from Strand Releasing
Preceded by: “Blanket Statement #2: It’s All or Nothing” (Jodie Mack, 2013) – 4 min – 16mm
“Encountered in an appropriately exploratory frame of mind, it can produce something close to bliss.” – A.O. Scott
“A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble.” – J. Hoberman
Watch a trailer for UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES
Coming Soon
Music Box Theatre
3733 N. Southport Ave
Admission: $11
Saturday, March 21 @ 11:30 AM
TRAFFIC IN SOULS
Directed by George Loane Tucker • 1913
Live organ accompaniment by Dennis Scott
The earliest feature films to grace American screens were adaptations of stage productions or spectacles imported from Europe. It’s no wonder that Traffic in Souls, an all-American, effortlessly cinematic blend of thrills, melodrama, and social critique, would stand out like a flare in a tinder box. Promoted as a “full-blooded sermon” that allegedly dramatized the results of a highly-publicized 1910 grand jury investigation into sex trafficking chaired by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the film follows two sisters who work as shopgirls in a New York candy store: Mary (Jane Gail), who is dating police officer no. 4434 (Matt Moore), and Lorna (Ethel Grandin), who will soon be abducted and deposited at a brothel clandestinely operated by one of the city’s most vocal social reformers. The film’s political sensibility fits squarely within the social concerns of the Progressive Era, but the technology that moves the story forward and exposes the crime ring — dictagraphs, telegraphic pens, secret communication channels — pushes it into the realm of pulp espionage, a runty American cousin of the hyperbolic crime cinema of Louis Feillaude and Fritz Lang, cut to a frenetic tempo that rivals D. W. Griffith. An enormous hit that sold 30,000 tickets on Broadway in its first week of release, inspired a legion of imitators, and became the first feature film to be novelized, Traffic in Souls may be past its centenary, but it’s never stopped to catch its breath. (KW)
75 min • Independent Moving Pictures Company, Incorporated (IMP) • 35mm from Library of Congress
Preceded by: “Love, Speed and Thrills” (Walter Wright, 1915) – 13 min – 16mm
“a trashy, corny guilty pleasure” – Leonard Maltin
