Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

An assured polemic that plays as an eyes-wide thriller, Don Argott’s “The Art of the Steal” is also a rousing entertainment as layered and skeptical as a marathon of episodes of “The Wire.”

The Barnes Foundation operates a museum, five miles from Philadelphia, in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, created by the late Dr. Albert C. Barnes to hold his Post-Impressionist and early Modern art. The numbers bloom: 181 Renoir, sixty-nine Cézannes, fifty-nine Matisse, forty-six Picasso, seven Van Gogh, six Seurat. Barnes didn’t care for the elite of Philadelphia, 1922.

“People didn’t like him. He insulted people,” one of the many articulate interviewees tells us, and the art establishment of Philadelphia used similar language about the documentary. Horrors! Barnes was “extremely inflammatory toward his contemporaries.” At his death in 1951, Barnes left the collection to a small African-American college, but in recent years, there’s been a movement to break the strict conditions of his bequest and relocate the multi-billion-dollar-valued collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ray Pride

Monday night, Cobra Lounge is ground zero for a six-city experiment, launching the DVD and video-on-demand of the Sundance award-winning documentary, “We Live in Public.” Now situated in Chicago, the so-called “Warhol of Internet TV,” Josh Harris, accompanied by director Ondi Timoner, will take questions before and after a showing of the film.

On a large screen over the bar, a quadrant of feeds from Los Angeles, New York, Denver, Vancouver and Atlanta alternate with images from the Cobra’s own surveillance cameras inside and outside the building. The phone booth has its own flat-screens and cameras. Harris’ ideas were early: he got millions from investors for Internet TV years before broadband made it feasible. Bored, Harris built a bunker in downtown New York, dubbed “Quiet,” where a hundred or so people lived, ate, frolicked and fired off handguns and automatic weapons for free. The only condition? Cameras captured everything and Harris owned the images.

Read the rest of this entry »

At Northwestern’s University Hall there is a small room, perfectly square, with walls lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that are all but empty. A large flatscreen TV hangs on the front wall, next to two chairs facing the audience at different angles.

As part of a discussion titled “Where the Arts Meet,” writer Alex Kotlowitz and filmmaker Steve James are seated in these chairs, prepared to discuss a currently filming collaborative project titled “The Interrupters” and the intersection between film and nonfiction prose.

On storytelling in general, Kotlowitz mentions “a constant state of astonishment of being knocked off-balance.”

James, donning a navy blue fleece sweater, explains the premise of his 2002 film “Stevie,” a documentary about a man he met ten years ago in rural Southern Illinois who was once an “at-risk youth” in a Big Brothers Big Sisters program, now awaiting trial for a molestation charge. “Instead of this tidy little first-person portrait of a half-hour long,” James says, “it ended up being this two-and-a-half-hour documentary.” He then shows a clip featuring Stevie and his friend Tim, who is later dubbed “the existential fisherman.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Avant-Gondry,” the Siskel capsule for “Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow” begins, and it’s a good start for this heartening selection of seventeen animations by Al Jarnow, mostly from 16mm originals, whose work ranges from pieces for children’s television and personal, more “avant-garde” work. Jarnow’s 1984 time-lapse film “Celestial Navigation” is an enthralling experience: measuring the light that falls in an upstairs room, ideal and bright for an artist’s studio. But it’s also eye-widening to realize that Jarnow animated for “Sesame Street”: films like these, drawing on a wide range of animation and experimental traditions, were part of the currency of education not so long ago. They snuck, unannounced, into cultural consciousness (and unconsciousness, as several are uncannily familiar to anyone who would have seen them as but a child). “Cosmic Clock,” a hand-wash lovely, defines seconds and minutes then centuries and millennia as a young man with a stopwatch, lying at a lean on a hill overlooking a lake, considers eons as Jarnow’s gentle animation pencils away. A hypnogogic time capsule to savor. A half-hour documentary, “Asymmetric Cycles,” will be shown, too, following Jarnow’s creative process. 90m. DigiBeta. (Ray Pride)

“Celestial Navigations” shows Friday and Saturday at Siskel. The Numero Group releases a DVD in coming weeks that has a total of forty-five pieces, along with the documentary.

RECOMMENDED

(Hijos de Cuba) “Sons of Cuba,” Andrew Lang’s delicate, powerful, entertaining debut documentary, follows three handpicked young boxers at the Havana Boxing Academy in 2006, all under 12, all ready to train and devote their lives to being “good communist fighters.” With uncommon access, Lang forges a coming-of-age tale rife with all manner of implication, but without neglecting his characters or his empathic narrative style. Lang has an intuitive sense of how to fill the frame as well as the heart: this parallel tale to “Hoop Dreams” is intimate as well as lovingly shot. 88m. U. S. theatrical premiere. (Ray Pride)

“Sons of Cuba” opens Friday at Facets.

On Friday, Chicago Filmmakers will host the work of local filmmaker Adele Friedman, who will show nine films that span from her 1983 portrait of her grandmother and father (“Sarah and Norman”) to a couple working in a kitchen in Paris in 2008 (“Pauline and Patrick, Le Marais, Paris”). Friedman’s work revolves around the use of portraiture, focusing on friends. “My work is often about cultural people, and how their lives are informed by their cultural interiors and artistic tastes,” Friedman says. “They surround themselves with what moves them.” It is a decided break from the celebrity-centric media we are usually saturated with, and Friedman aims to show how her subjects (oftentimes, those in the art world) cannot just stop being who they are when they are away from it all. “People don’t leave their culture at the museum or the office; they bring it home and live with it,” the filmmaker says. “It’s part and parcel of the daily fabric of their lives.” (Peter Cavanaugh)

Chicago not-for-profit film production company Split Pillow has produced “Life as Lincoln,” a seventy-minute documentary darling, directed by local filmmaker Caitlin Grogan, about men who make their living—or at least part of their living—as Abraham Lincoln impersonators. “Presenters” is the term they prefer, and as the film focuses on three of these men it shows duties much more rewarding than ribbon-cutting at mall openings. Lincoln presenters are often called upon to appear and speak at schools; they are educators as much as they are entertainers. Grogan’s film, which bounces between Decatur, Indiana, Kentucky and Washington D.C., shines a light on three men who take their jobs as Lincoln very seriously—in many ways, we learn, their calling toward the great president saved their lives. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Damani Baker and Alex Vlack’s sweet and inevitably bittersweet “Still Bill” is an understated portrait of Bill Withers, the musician behind memorable pop like 1971’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us.” The avalanche of music documentaries are a long way from simple records of performances in front of an audience, and the best dig into the quirks of personality that provide inspiration for the mystery that is tune and song. Intimacy is key. Bill Withers walked away from a career that didn’t begin until he was grown, not owning a guitar until he was 32. Why the silence since his last music release in 1985? The filmmakers shot over 300 hours of footage across two years as Withers approaches his seventieth year. A trip back to his childhood home in the worn coal town of Slab Fork, West Virginia inspires Withers’ rich reminiscence. (There’s a present-day detour as Withers records a song with his daughter in his home studio.) Withers is also prone to aphorism: “I think I’m kind of like pennies. You have ‘em in your pocket but you don’t remember they’re there”; and “It’s okay to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful? You’re gonna have to pass through ‘all right.’ And when you get to ‘all right’, take a good look around and get used to it, ‘cos that may be as far as you’re gonna go.” “Still Bill” passes through all right. Talking heads include Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Jim James from My Morning Jacket, Angelique Kidjo and, erm, Sting. 78m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

One of the more intriguing developments in the “democratization” of filmmaking with inexpensive video equipment and modest budgets is the development of an unexpected new form of star system. Specialized videos on motorcycles, guns and fishing have been bubbling under for more than a decade, sold and traded among the aficionados of the most specialized objects imaginable. (I’d never heard of most of the fish in a raft of successful fishing videos made around the world by an uncle of mine in the nineties.) With “Helvetica” and “Objectified,” Gary Hustwit’s made a fine line in successful self-distribution to designers worldwide, capturing process, but also the faces behind the work that inspire this small yet substantial potential audience. (“Floored,” which premiered at Siskel this month, may find similar trade among present and former members of the financial industry around the planet.) Just like they say in the magazines, the stars? They’re just like you and me. “It becomes obsolete, which is what makes it valuable,” someone observes under the opening titles of “Typeface,” capturing the enterprise both of the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, as well as Justine Nagan’s documentary, a Kartemquin Films production.  Nagan’s “Typeface” has a tactile character that’s unexpected. It’s awe-inspiring enough to see racks and racks and racks of beautiful, aged, oiled, dated wood type, but Nagan observes; the museum’s director flicks on circuit breakers as the day begins: thwock-thwock-thwock. It’s a fine example of how the past isn’t past. Best, it doesn’t feel nostalgic, but appreciative of history, its weight and its wonder. “It’s wood. How can you not like wood, right?” 58m. DigiBeta. Shown with Kartemquin’s short about the Chicago Chicano mural movement of the 1970s, “Viva La Causa.” 16mm. (Ray Pride)

“Typeface” opens Friday at Siskel. Nagan appears at Friday’s screening.

RECOMMENDED

Merle Becker’s passionate collectible, “American Artifact: The Rise Of American Rock Poster Art,” runs the gamut of its title topic across forty years, from 1960s druggy San Francisco concert art to the Grateful Dead’s skeletal notices to the notably whimsical art wild-posted and limited-editioned in every large-to-medium-sized city in the country where musicians meet and play. In the best of contemporary rock art posters, melody meets the mind of another: what did this song make me see, what does this illustration make me hear, or better, want to hear? Becker’s documentary is a lovely convocation of piquant American oddity, a fine complement to all those nabbed bits of silk-screen gig art you’ve stashed under the couch or futon or behind the dresser.  With more than thirty artists, including Jim Pollock, Jay Ryan, Mat Daly, Frank Kozik [art pictured], Stanley Mouse, Leia Bell, Stainboy, COOP, Derek Hess, Art Chantry, Jim Sherraden and Hatch Show Print, Tara McPherson, Mark Arminski, Lani Barry, Stan Beinstein. 88m. DigiBeta.  (Ray Pride)

“American Artifact” opens Friday at Siskel. Becker and poster artists Jay Ryan, Mat Daly, Steve Ryan and Jim Pollock appear at the 8pm Saturday show.