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1517 W. Fullerton Ave.
Chicago IL 60614
800.331.6197
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Night School Archives:
FACETS NIGHT SCHOOL
Archive: Session 1
May 2 - June 27, 2009An off-shoot of Facets' long-running, popular film school program, Facets Night School digs into cinema's wild side with special Saturday night midnight lectures on cult favorites led by Facets' expert staff, followed by screenings of the films and post-screening discussions. It's a schooling in Midnight Movies that you won't find anywhere else!
Horror greats, sci-fi wonders, action and kung-fu whirlwinds, exploitation favorites, classic and contemporary oddities, black comedies, rock 'n' roll docs, crazy animation and much more all go under the microscope at the hands of Facets' movie obsessives!
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Mining The Holy Mountain:
The Influence of Jodorowsky on Conservative Action Movies
and Progressive Rock Music
Brian Elza presents
Holy Mountain
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973
Jodorowsky's follow-up to his midnight movie smash El Topo is a big budget carnivalesque succession of psychedelic vignettes, shocking iconography, alchemical set pieces, fascistic mass movements, and Brechtian distanciation devices. Brian Elza gets to the bottom of the "heady" visuals and looks at why the film resonated so deeply with macho action films (The Road Warrior, Conan the Barbarian) and later rock bands like Sleep, Marilyn Manson and The Mars Volta.
Brian Elza is Facets' Catalog Writer/Researcher. He received his Masters in Film Studies from Emory University in 2006. He has lectured on Bergman and German Expressionism, and presented at the 2007 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference on the relationship between Twin Peaks fandom and Ivan the Terrible scholarship. He also plays hot licks in a metal band.
YouTube trailer Senses of Cinema: Jodorowsky
Saturday, May 9, 2009
The Invisibles are Exploding:
Toxic Trickle-Down in the Reagan Era
Bruce Neal presents
Street Trash
Directed by Jim Munro, 1987
"There's something to offend everyone, though the perversity can be inspired... This may make you laugh, or it may make you sick (or both)"
-Chicago Reader
Set in and around junkyards and skid row slums, this dark horror-comedy is a toxic slice of straight-from-the-sewer cinema about Brooklyn winos who indulge in tainted wine so powerful it melts anyone who drinks it into a puddle of human slime. Bruce Neal explores the colorful day-glo graphic visuals, politically subversive themes and unsparing gore of a film that "makes Herschell Gordon Lewis look like Mary Poppins" (Wes Craven).
-Chicago Reader
Set in and around junkyards and skid row slums, this dark horror-comedy is a toxic slice of straight-from-the-sewer cinema about Brooklyn winos who indulge in tainted wine so powerful it melts anyone who drinks it into a puddle of human slime. Bruce Neal explores the colorful day-glo graphic visuals, politically subversive themes and unsparing gore of a film that "makes Herschell Gordon Lewis look like Mary Poppins" (Wes Craven).
Bruce Neal is a Facets Personal Video Consultant and has worked in underground theater, performance art and stand-up comedy. Bruce was a co-founder of the performance art group The Dol Furies and his work has been featured on NPR, PBS, HBO, Stage Left, Prop Theatre, Chopin Theatre, Cabaret Metro, Theatre IgLoo, Lounge Ax and many others. Bruce recently completed work on the film, Dream Havana, which went on to win best documentary at the Chicago and Orlando Latino Film Festivals.
YouTube trailer New York Times Chicago Reader
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Mods, Rockers and the Cult of Quadrophenia
Dan Mucha presents
Quadrophenia
Directed by Franc Roddam, 1979
Recommended! "Aligns sociological observation and romantic fantasy to create an extravagant, involving teenpic with a responsible intellectual grounding."
-Chicago Reader
The cinematic transformation of The Who's great "rock opera" album is a dramatic recreation of mid-60s British youth culture full of mods vs. rockers melee, vintage vespas, shagging in the streets, rioting at the beach and Sting. Dan Mucha gets to the bottom of Quadrophenia's cult appeal in the U.S., while also looking at the history of the mods/rockers clash in the UK and more.
-Chicago Reader
The cinematic transformation of The Who's great "rock opera" album is a dramatic recreation of mid-60s British youth culture full of mods vs. rockers melee, vintage vespas, shagging in the streets, rioting at the beach and Sting. Dan Mucha gets to the bottom of Quadrophenia's cult appeal in the U.S., while also looking at the history of the mods/rockers clash in the UK and more.
Dan Mucha is the Distribution Coordinator for the Facets Video label. Previous Facets Film School classes taught include True to Life: The Films of Louis Malle and The British New Wave: From Angry Young Men to Swinging London.
YouTube trailer Quadrophenia.net Chicago Reader
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Mean Spirited: Horror in the Naked City
Miguel Martinez presents
The Entity
Directed by Sidney J. Furie, 1982
In this under-rated, creepy horror sleeper, Barbara Hershey stars as a woman who is attacked frequently in the middle of the night by a terrifying, unseen entity. Her friends and family think she is going crazy - can a parapsychologist free her from the torment? Miguel Martinez peers into the mysteries of this meaner, more vulgar version of Poltergeist, and also presents Outer Space, an experimental short compiled from Entity footage found in a trashcan in Austria.
Miguel Martinez is a Facets Personal Video Consultant. A life-long Chicagoan, Miguel is also a filmmaker whose work can be seen on Youtube. He is currently working on a documentary with fellow Night School presenter Amy Boyd.
YouTube trailer TimeOut London
Saturday, May 30, 2009
A Fractured Fairy Tale
Susan Doll presents
Night of the Hunter
Directed by Charles Laughton, 1955
Robert Mitchum gives one of his best performances in this true classic as a psychotic, self-styled preacher--tattooed with "LOVE" and "HATE" across his fingers--who infiltrates and terrorizes a family to get his hands on stolen loot. Susan Doll looks at Mitchum's career defining role and the film's nightmare imagery which creates an eerie, surreal tone unlike typical Hollywood films of the time.
Susan Doll is writer/researcher for the Facets Video label. She holds a PhD in film studies from Northwestern University and is the author of Florida on Film, The Films of Elvis Presley, Best of Elvis, Elvis Album, Elvis: Forever in the Groove, and more. Susan also writes for Turner Classic Movie's blog, MovieMorlocks.com.
YouTube trailer Roger Ebert New York Times
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Regurgitating a Cult Classic:
The Hidden Feasts of Eat the Rich
Lew Ojeda presents
Eat the Rich
Directed by Peter Richardson, 1987
"Lampoons the lunacy of every social group it touches... it delivers the laughs"
-TimeOut Chicago
The jet-set are in big trouble when a motley group of the less-privileged gets hungry for revenge...literally. Lew Ojeda digs into this anarchistic, cannibalistic black comedy from the Comic Strip Troupe of Great Britain with cameos from Paul McCartney, Koo Stark Bill Wyman, Jools Holland and Sandie Shaw and music by Motorhead.
-TimeOut Chicago
The jet-set are in big trouble when a motley group of the less-privileged gets hungry for revenge...literally. Lew Ojeda digs into this anarchistic, cannibalistic black comedy from the Comic Strip Troupe of Great Britain with cameos from Paul McCartney, Koo Stark Bill Wyman, Jools Holland and Sandie Shaw and music by Motorhead.
Lew Ojeda is a Facets Personal Video Consultant and Catalog Writer. His film reviews have been published in Shock Cinema and The Empty Closet. Lew has also produced and directed local TV programs in Rochester, New York.
YouTube trailer New York Times TimeOut Chicago
Saturday, June 13, 2009
The Making of a "Feature-length We-don't-know-what"
or: How the American New Wave Birthed the Documentary Hybrid
Amy Boyd presents
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
Directed by William Greaves, 1968
William Greaves' experimental counter-culture classic is an energetic, electric weave of reality, fiction, satire and performance art that follows a documentary crew filming another crew that's filming another crew that's shooting a couple performing a break-up scene over and over on a summer day in Central Park. Amy Boyd unpeels the wild layers, possibilities and ambiguities of a recently-rediscovered great that "(blurs) the lines between art and artifice, truth and fiction, illusion and reality" (Boxoffice Magazine), while also examining the documentary hybrid genre and more.
Join us at 11pm for a pre-lecture reception. It'll be happenin'!
Amy Boyd is a Footage and Photo Researcher at Getty Images and for local documentary filmmakers. She moonlights as a Facets Personal Video Consultant.and has almost fifteen years experience working in the film and video industry.
YouTube trailer New York Times
Saturday, June 20, 2009
David Bowie's Codpiece,
or: How Girls of the 1980s Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Backlash
Cary Jones Elza presents
Labyrinth
Directed by Jim Henson, 1986
Directed by Jim Henson, written by Monty Python's Terry Jones, executive produced by George Lucas, and starring Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie, this live action/Muppet amalgam about a young girl's journey to rescue her baby brother from a goblin king is a fantasical powerhouse. Cary Jones maps Labyrinth's gender and sexual politics to uncover the way gender is represented in the context of the 1980s, the way memory and spaces are represented, where the film falls in the cycle of fantasy films of the 1980s and also why Labyrinth is so beloved by women who grew up in the 1980s.
Cary Jones Elza is a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University, and is currently writing her dissertation on female figures and boundary crossing between real and imagined worlds, from Alice in Wonderland to Coraline. She earned her MA in Film Studies at Emory, where she wrote a thesis on Superman, and has also taught film at Oakton Community College. She has published articles on Pokemon, Smallville, and The X-Files.
YouTube trailer New York Times
Saturday, June 27, 2009
There's No More Room in Hell, So Let's Go Shopping
Phil Morehart presents
Dawn of the Dead
Directed by George A. Romero, 1978
Romero's sequel to Night of the Living Dead ups the zombie action, violence, blood and nihilism to follow a quartet who find refuge from the flesh-eating undead in an abandoned shopping mall. Or do they? Phil Morehart dishes on this landmark horror masterpiece, from its bleak satire of American consumerism, comic book action and groundbreaking gore FX to its impact upon the horror genre and regional independent filmmaking.
Phil Morehart is Facets' Editor. Prior to joining Facets, Phil was a programmer for the Cincinnati Film Society. He also writes on film, theater, music and visual arts for Chicago Journal Newspaper and Cincinnati CityBeat Newspaper, and is a contributor to the upcoming book, The Armchair Reader Guide Goes Hollywood.
YouTube trailer Roger Ebert
For all inquiries about Facets Night School, contact Phil Morehart at 800.331.6197 or philm@facets.org.
