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Portrait of Jason (Music Box Theatre, May) Along with Shohei Imamura’s Karayuki-san: The Making of a Prostitute, this restoration of Shirley Clarke’s cinema verité landmark (1967), about gay hustler and sometime servant Jason Holliday, was one of the year’s major documentary rediscoveries. “Nowadays Portrait of Jason is debated as an example of cinema verite because Clarke so tacitly indulges Holliday’s drama queen instincts, letting him turn a documentary into a one-man show,” J.R. Jones wrote in May. “After a while you begin to wonder how much you’re being hustled here.” Besides offering plenty of food for thought, the screening represented Chicago’s repertory programming community at its best. The presentation was a joint effort by Northwest Chicago Film Society, Black Cinema House, and the Reeling Film Festival—moreover, the Music Box stepped up to host it last-minute after the Portage Theater was shuttered unexpectedly.
- Rat Life and Diet in North America
Rat Life and Diet in North America (Chicago Filmmakers, July) Joyce Wieland’s 1968 experimental short (a hilarious send-up of the sort of agitprop cine-essays that were big at the time) was a highlight of the Cat Film Festival, a program of feline-related shorts curated by Chicago Filmmakers and Chicago Film ArchivesSouth Side Projections. The selections ranged from abstract works (including three by Stan Brakhage) to comic animations—and there were enough of the latter to keep the kids in the room engaged. Thanks to those children, this was one of the liveliest crowds I’ve encountered at an experimental-film screening.
- Polanski’s Tess
The Vikings (Patio, July) Richard Fleischer, who directed this breathtaking historical spectacle (1958) in wide-screen and Technicolor, is the sort of undervalued filmmaker that the Northwest Chicago Film Society is especially adept at defending. A craftsman of uncommon seriousness and compositional sense, Fleischer turned in solid, entertaining work across multiple genres. (I offered some further thought on his career here.) Not long after The Vikings screened at the Patio, Fleischer’s Violent Saturday turned up at the Music Box’s annual Noir City series. The two films provided a fine sample of the director’s range and ingenious use of the wide-screen format.
