Ray Pride

The Opening Night Program of the 18th Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, shown at the Siskel Film Center, produced by Chicago Filmmakers, has two distinct highlights. Abbas Kiarostami's twenty-three-minute "Roads of Kiarostami" is an experimental black-and-white essay on why the Iranian director has been fixed on winding roads in both film and still photography for twenty-five years. "I wasn't originally interested in landscape or nature photography, I was more interested in being outside, contemplating my surroundings and spending time by myself," fills the film with imagery that parallels the travels in "Taste of Cherry" and "The Wind Will Carry Us," whether DV or panning across stills to follow the contours of the traceries of roads, tracks and paths. Scored to classical music, the narration's musings are studded with citations of Persian poetry. Kyoshi Kurosawa, director of "Cure" and "Pulse," contributes a U.S. premiere, the cryptic "Soul Dancing" (2004), a twenty-two-minute hallucination about a mysterious stranger (Tadanobu Asano), which with the most modest of means conveys cryptic rituals with figures massing before moving cameras in the style of Hungarian camera stylists Miklos Jansco and Bela Tarr. Being Japanese, of course, Kurosawa ends with a gummy pop tune and a fistful of forcefully dreamy images. The program includes new work by Lawrence Jordan and Peter Tscherkassky as well as the world premiere of Andy Warhol's 1966 "Bob Dylan (Screen tests 82 & 83)." Program 95m.

This selection plays at Siskel, Thursday June 15 at 8pm. Full program at chicagofilmmakers.org.

(2006-06-06)

Also by Ray Pride

Patriotic Gore
Two bits of testimony to the strength of "An Inconvenient Truth": in the first week of its release, on both Fox and in the Washington Post, the name of Vice President Al Gore has been linked to Adolf Hitler; and Variety's charts for the past weekend noted that a four-screen tally of $365,787 was the highest per-screen total ever for a documentary
(2006-05-30)

Tip of the Week
Aside from one of the greatest titles of all time, Frank Borzage's eclectic comedy-romance-melodrama, set in Paris and Manhattan, "History Is Made at Night" (1937) contains some of the most jaw-droppingly agile shifts of tone in classical Hollywood screenplay construction
(2006-05-30)

Summer Guide Movies: June
"Three Times"; "Wordplay"
(2006-05-24)

Summer Guide Movies: July
"Spirit of the Beehive"; "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
(2006-05-24)

Summer Guide Movies: August
(2006-05-24)

Rush Hour 3
(2006-05-23)

Tip of the Week
(2006-05-23)

Art Break
(2006-05-16)

Tip of the Week
(2006-05-16)

Murder ballad
(2006-05-16)

Artists and models
(2006-05-09)

Tip of the Week
(2006-05-09)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment