This past weekend saw the release of Captain Marvel, but Brie Larson isn’t the only superwoman of American cinema you can see on Chicago screens this week. Tomorrow at 7:30 PM at Northeastern Illinois University the Chicago Film Society will screen the 1932 drama Christopher Strong, which was directed by Dorothy Arzner, one of the few women to direct Hollywood movies between the 1920s and the 1970s. And at Chicago Filmmakers at 7 PM on Saturday, local filmmaker and educator Shayna Connelly will present an introduction to pioneering women filmmakers, incorporating clips by such key U.S. (or U.S.-based) artists as Alice Guy Blaché, Lois Weber, Maya Deren, Mary Ellen Bute, Marie Menken, Shirley Clarke, and the recently departed Carolee Schneemann.
Outrage This 1950 film by Ida Lupino may not be stylistically original or completely successful, but it does treat the subject of rape with real sensitivity, especially for its era. Ann Walton (Mala Powers) is a young bookkeeper whose life falls apart after she is raped, and her reactions—refusing to talk about the rape, rejecting her fiance, and ultimately fleeing her hometown—seem believable, in part because of the various ways Lupino presents the woman’s body. The rape itself is omitted, but Walton’s helplessness and terror are palpable as she tries to escape her pursuer in a barren industrial landscape, dwarfed by parked trucks and lifeless buildings. Lupino saves the intense close-ups for men, as when Walton’s memory of the attack is triggered by another man coming on to her, but she avoids pigeonholing Walton as a victim. Before the rape, the woman seems as independent as her fiance, and afterward, when a minister shows her a favorite landscape, her face brightens; Lupino shows Walton’s appreciation of nature and hints at her recovery. —Fred Camper
In the Mirror of Maya Deren Maya Deren (1917-’61) did more than anyone else to create the American experimental film as we know it, and this 2002 German documentary (in English) by Martina Kudlacek is the best portrait of an experimental filmmaker that I know. Kudlacek steeps us in Deren’s artistic and bohemian milieu (basically Greenwich Village in the 40s and 50s, though she made her first film in Los Angeles and later spent much time in Haiti), and because Deren did such a good job of recording and documenting her own activities, the film is able to provide a detailed sense of what she was like as both a person and an artist. Among the eloquent friends and associates interviewed are Jonas Mekas, Katherine Dunham, Stan Brakhage, Amos and Marcia Vogel, Graeme Ferguson, Alexander Hammid (her second husband and sometime collaborator), Judith Malina, Miriam Arsham, Rita Christiani, Teiji Ito, and Chao-li Chi. 104 min. —Jonathan Rosenbaum 2003 v
