Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Tomorrow night’s program of Georges Melies silent featurettes at Sonotheque, screening (presumably from DVD) as part of Gabe Klinger and Joe Bryl‘s “Magic in Cinema” showcase, seems as close to film nirvana as anything this curmudgeonly seeker could ever hope to find, format be damned. Melies invariably blows me away—maybe because the imagination’s so transparent, the ideas so ingenuous and raw, with all the technical seams showing. The man takes his chances, or follows his visual bliss, whatever you choose to call it. And every “primitive” experiment is its own eureka! event—multiple exposures, matte dissolves, even inadvertent jump cuts before the fact, all so adventurous and fanciful you can still feel the discoverer’s excitement more than a hundred years on. Morning of the world kind of stuff, bliss was it in that dawn…
