Retro Saturday - Dramatic Masterpiece Edition: Beale's Adams, Taymor's Oedipus, plus Lola and Lulu and Hugo

This month, the Gene Siskel Film Center is running a series, The Future is 4K: High-Resolution Digital Movies, which showcases what is currently the highest quality means of projecting movies.  Only one of the movies being screened, 2011's Samsara, was actually shot in 4K Digital.  The others are 4K scans of films as diverse as 1939's Gone With the Wind, to both Godfather I and II, Visconti's The Leopard, and Scorsese's Taxi Driver.  One of the 4K showings is actually of a film in black-and-white, and one, Lawrence of Arabia, is in 70mm, the decade-long standard for superior image quality for which there may now never be new prints again.  See the full schedule here.


You may have noticed we often write about the intersection of movies and architecture in pieces such as Divergent's Abnegation Village (photo below), or the building of the temporary structure that was the title character of the Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves romance, The Lake House.

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Sometimes, though, we go completely off the ranch with some observations on film, opera and shadow puppets.  So today we feature a quartet of past writings that we hope will tempt you into checking out some often overlooked masterpieces of acting, theater and film that you may have missed - or not even have known were out there.

Founding Father Rescued from the Waxworks
When I first encountered Simon Russell Beale playing John Adams in dramatized vignettes as part of a 2006 PBS documentary version of David McCullough's best-selling biography, I admit I had no idea who he was, much less that he is perhaps the foremost British stage actor of his generation.  But, no disrespect to Paul Giamatti, Beale's portrayal so vividly captures Adams's complex mix of irascibility and grandeur, intellect and courage, that you feel you could reach out and touch one of the most original - and quintessentially human - characters in American history.

Julie Taymor's Brilliant Oedipus Rex
Long before the phenomenon of the  Broadway version of The Lion King or the backstage melodrama of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Litigation, I came across what remains the most remarkable production of an opera I've yet to encounter, a perfect match-up between three dead Europeans, - Sophocles, Cocteau, and Stravinsky - and Julie Taymor's highly original direction of their Oedipus Rex.  Part of the work's ground rules is that the narrator should speak in the language of the place where the opera is being performed, and so in this production with the Saito Kinen Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa, the narrator is not only Japanese, but a woman, which adds still another layer to this amalgam of antiquity with the avant garde, and stoic reserve with the intimation of most violent passion.

As I said in my article, if you don't buy into Taymor's concept, you might dissolve in giggles over the symbolic headdresses and Mickey Mouse-like hands she assigns to the lead characters., but if, like me, you find yourself hypnotically drawn in, you'll find this well-known tale assuming a power often buried in more academic encounters.  With Philip Langridge as Oedipus, a stunning Jesse Norman as Jocasta, and a young Bryn Terfel as the messenger, this is a production that is both pinpoint apt to the intentions of playwright and librettist, and a poetical expression of amazing eloquence.

Lola Lulu Chicago

While the restraints of Sophocles characters in Oedipus derive from them being archetypes, those of Max Orphuls' film Lola Montes and Alban Berg's opera Lulu derive from society's propriety.  In all three cases, however, those restraints prove no match for anarchic recklessness of human desire and its consequences.   Actually, if you take it a step further, Lola and Lulu are also archetypes, the femme fatale projections of both their suitors and the artists who imagined them. In the case of Lola, she was also an actual historical personage, and while her story can't match the emotional intensity of Orphuls' sumptuous masterpiece, the contrast is an arresting mapping of the place where reality and our dreams intersect.


The Invention of Dreams - the Themes of Martin Scorsese's Hugo - Part I

. . . the place where reality our dreams intersect.  That's just one of themes of Hugo, which was swept at the Oscars by the less durable but more ingratiating The Artist.  Never mind - it also happened to Citizen Kane.  You may wince at my comparison, that I dare place the all-the-world's critics' pick as the greatest movie ever, Citizen Kane, with Scorsese's big-budget kid pic.  I'm not saying Hugo=Kane, but I do suggest, without apology, that Hugo has layers few so far have cared to even contemplate, as well as an emotional depth Kane never chose to attempt.  I suggest that, in a career overflowing with astonishing work, Hugo may, after all, prove Martin Scorsese's greatest and most mature masterpiece.

You'll notice my first appreciation inferred a Part II, but I wrote and I wrote and still couldn't get my hands fully around everything I've found in this film.  Maybe this wrap-up will be my incentive to go back and try one more time.  You'll have a chance to judge Hugo for yourself when it plays on August 20th at A. Montgomery Park as part of the Park District's Movie in the Parks for 2013.  Or just get the DVD, Blue-Ray or download.  (3-D TV?  Better yet.)

More on the Movies (all profusely illustrated):

Jeanne Gang's Cinematic Space at Columbia College

• Time Regained:  West Side Story in 70mm
• How to Build a Great City for under $350 million, or: Cleopatra conquers the Roman Forum in 70mm spectacle, by way of Seattle  
• Hey, Deceps:  Who's gonna clean all this up?  Loveable Transformers trash Chicago.

World's Only Architectural Comedy?  A Look at Jacques Tati's Masterpiece, Playtime. 

• Holy Motors - drunk on the power of architecture.
• The Death of Variety and The Supply-Chaining of the Magic of Movies
• New Red Shoes - Must-Have Items, only available through Thursday.
• Two must-sees: Gatsby (if only for the architecture); and Chimes at Midnight - Welles' greatest masterpiece?
• Portrait of a City at Warp Speed: The Eight Greatest Film Ever?  Man With a Movie Camera
• Mickey One: smoke and flame at Marina City.
• The Unexplored Power of Architecture in Film

Movie Lovers Paradise or Cornucopia Hell? 70mm at the Music Box, Leos Carax at the Siskel

A long time ago, 70mm represented the highest possible tech for making films. Capturing four times the image of a 35mm print, and projected on massive screens with state-of-the-art surround sound, 70mm films, especially when shot by a master like Freddie Young, created images as beautiful as anything you'd find at the Art Institute, 24 times a second.  The visceral kick of a masterwork  in 70 cannot be replicated on a home theater system, no matter how large the screen.

With few exceptions, the era of 70mm died forty years ago, when exclusive downtown bookings were replaced with wide releases in thousands of theaters simultaneously.  In the current era of high-res digital scans, rumors persist that the studios will be longer be distributing their remaining 70mm prints, and, at a cost of $50,000 on up, won't be striking new ones.

So this week's 70MM Film Festival at the Music Box could one of your last chances to see these films in the format for which they were made to be shown.  There are a number of omissions: no Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, Ryan's Daughter, Sound of Music, or Mad, Mad, World, but there's still Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (Saturday, Sunday and Thursday),  Hitchcock's Vertigo (Sunday and Tuesday), West Side Story (Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday), and, for the masochists, Chitty, Chitty, Bang Bang (look it up - I'm not going to encourage you.)

There's the rare opportunity to see Richard Brooks' Lord Jim, reteaming Lawrence of Arabia's Peter O'Toole and Freddie Young, Jacques Tati's masterpiece Playtime , , ,

 Branagh's visually splendid Hamlet, and a real oddity, Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce.  The festival will also offer the first opportunity to see Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master in 70mm since its sold-out preview at the Music Box last fall.

The Trib's Michael Phillips has a great overview of the festival and films here. You can view the entire schedule here.  This is is something not to be missed.

The Star-Crossed Visions of Leos Carax

As, in some kind of act of astral punishment, this very same week the Music Box has a festival of 70mm,  the Gene Siskel Film Center is offering up  a rare retrospective of the work of Leos Carax,  one of the most unique filmmakers of our time.  As I wrote about his latest film last November . . .

Holy Motors is, in turns, pretentious, incoherent, disgusting, sensationalist, raw - and all the better for it. . . .

We must disenthrall ourselves," Abe Lincoln said.  "Étonne-moi!" added Diaghilev, upping the ante. The curse of CGI is to make the fantastic as mundane as the every-day.  Says Leos Carax, "The problem is to find again that primitive power of cinema, that first shot of the train in La Ciotat. It’s harder and harder to do today. You have to reinvent that power, which is almost a mystical power, a magical power. 

In addition to Holy Motors, the Siskel is screening hard-to-find titles as Bad Blood (Mauvais Sang) with Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant, Julie Delpy and Michel Piccoli . . .

. . . plus Boy Meets Girl, and the ineffably, darkly strange Pola X.   See the full schedule here.

Lohan on Mies, Burns on what's under Block 37, plus Architecture and Emotion fuse in extraordinary I Am Cuba

This week, on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events . . . 

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Tomorrow, Tuesday the 12th, begins with the Chicago ACE Mentor Program Lunch, and ends at the Block Museum in Evanston with Dirk Lohan talking about his grandfather's Mies van der Rohe's Legacy and the Chicago Skyline.  Wednesday, the 13th, lunchtime at CAF, Joe Burns of Thorton Tomasetti will provide A Look Under Chicago's Block 37, including structure, foundations, and the unfinished CTA superstation, while in the evening Arup's Chris Luebkeman lectures on Design for the New Normal in the Next Decade for AIA Chicago.  The Structural Illinois Engineers of Illinois has a day-long seminar on Design of Low-Rise Reinforced Concrete Buildings at the UBS Tower on Thursday.

There are still dozen of arresting items to come on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Capturing Architecture as it's Lived:  I Am Cuba

Meanwhile, over at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Tuesday the 12th at 6:00 p.m., is your last chance to see one of the most remarkable films ever made, Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba, which transcends its intentions as a propaganda film that made it a flop in both Cuba and the U.S.S.R during its initial 1964 release. 

First of all, I Am Cuba is a time capsule that captures Cuba at the cross point between the decadence of the mob-run luxury resorts under dictator Fulgencio Batista and the evolution into a vassal state of the Soviet Union, the period of hope that saw the creation of a native revolutionary architecture in the never-finished National Arts School, and the descent into the imposed degradation of now crumbling Soviet-style pre-fab housing towers.

It's all captured in stunning, hyper-expressive black-and-white cinematography by Sergey Urusevsky, including two continuous-shot sequences that put even Orson Welles' opening of Touch of Evil to shame.  The result is one of the most profound explorations of a built environment that you will ever encounter, culminating in this amazing sequence in which the camera - in one take - moves down, through, up, in and over the streets and buildings of Havana as it follows the funeral procession of a martyr through city streets.  It is the most amazing intersection of architecture, movement and human emotion as you're ever likely to see.

Next week, a true cornucopia awaits: National Engineers Week, Leos Carax at the Siskel, and films in 70mm at the Music Box.  Stay tuned.