Road hard

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.

I’ve never taken a proper road trip. I haven’t driven in almost 15 years, and the last time I did was before moving to Chicago from Ohio, where I drove for many years. One of my favorite things about the city is that I don’t need a car; if there was to be a downside, it might be that I can’t take road trips (or that I can’t more easily get to film screenings on the other side of the city), though it’s never really been something I’ve yearned to do.

The program of experimental films I saw last Tuesday, Eyes on the Road: Four American Road Movies, at Chicago Filmmakers (presented by Tone Glow, aka Reader contributor Joshua Minsoo Kim), reminded me of a benefit of this time-honored tradition: the road as a tool for acquiring and conveying a view of one’s surroundings, an extended runway from which ideas about our country can take off. This concept is most purely expressed in James Benning and Bette Gordon’s The United States of America (1975), shot from the perspective of the back dash of the filmmaker couple’s car as they travel across the country. It was filmed across two trips but appears as if it were one—part of its impact is that the film feels organically manifested, a seemingly serendipitous product of circumstance, despite actually having been carefully constructed. They recorded part of the soundtrack, for example, using then contemporary radio hits while pulled over. Gordon later said the pair “choreographed” how they appeared onscreen, what they were wearing, how they positioned their bodies, etc. Made around America’s bicentennial, the film is both an exclamation point (this is America!) and a question mark (but is it really?). Often with avant-garde film—The United States of America is considered a defining work of the structuralist movement within this mode—what appears simple is the result of concentrated deliberation, creating a tension between an elementary facade and its multifarious meaning.

an interior shot from the back of the car of a couple driving a car in a city — Still from *The United States of America* (1975) Credit: Cinéma Du Réel Archives

Also screening as part of the program were two rare Benning shorts, Chicago Loop (1976) and 9-1-75 (1975), on 16 millimeter. I enjoyed the former for its connection to our city, of course, but I especially liked the latter, which consists entirely of Benning filming the perimeter of a campground. The accompanying soundtrack seems to be diegetic but on closer reflection can’t be; campground conversations happening 20 to 30 feet from the camera couldn’t possibly be heard so clearly. I hadn’t even thought about this until after the screening, when someone wondered aloud how Benning had done the sound. In the other film that screened as part of the program, Thom Andersen’s Get Out of the Car (2010), also on 16 millimeter, staged conversations can be heard offscreen as Andersen films cultural deserts around Los Angeles, once home to groundbreaking sites—especially landmarks of Black music history, echoed in the soundtrack—now covered in crude murals and, more despairingly, advertisements.

Over the weekend, I went to the Music Box Theatre to see Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), as part of the Prison Break!: Films of Escape series. Sound is important here, too: In their book Film Art: An Introduction, scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson dedicate a whole chapter to the functions of film sound in this particular Bresson masterpiece. “Through Bresson’s control of what sounds we hear,” they summarize, “what qualities these sounds have, and what relationships exist among those sounds and between sound and image, he has made this technique a central factor in shaping our experience of the whole film.” Benning, Gordon, and Andersen’s films do this, too, but in the service of deconstructing narrative. That said, it’s always valuable to see a Bresson film. I wouldn’t say it’s a treat, per se, as even this relatively hopeful Bresson film is gravely bleak at times. A friend and I wondered if there’s ever a right time to see one of his films; a matinee sets the tone for the day, but I can’t imagine seeing one on a weekend night, either.

I also saw, quite randomly, John Cromwell’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) and then João César Monteiro’s Recollections of the Yellow House (1989) at Doc Films. The former was on a beat-up 16-millimeter print, rendering much of the dialogue unintelligible and the narrative oddly abstract. There’s no connection to be found with the latter, though, which annoyed me greatly; Monteiro plays a similarly named character, João de Deus, who’s like Chaplin’s Tramp by way of Woody Allen. I understand that this vexatious irreverence is likely the point, but I was aggrieved all the same.

Until next time, moviegoers.