No easy answers

The Gene Siskel Film Center will host Chicago’s firstever complete retrospective of filmmakers Camille Billops and James Hatch.

By KAT SACHS

“The films of Camille Billops may not be a good place to look for answers,” writes Monique Guillory in her essay “The Functional Family of Camille Billops,” published in editor Jacqueline Bobo’s Black Women Film and Video Artists compendium. “Nor should one expect to have any one ideology or school of thought confirmed there.”

Indeed, if you’re influenced by traditional narrative structures that demand punishment, guilt, and/or redemption for any morally incogitable action, you may read the synopsis of a Camille Billops film and be tempted to assume it follows such a pattern, that a salve will be o ered for any such burn, in which case you might be confused, even (depending on your own virtuous predispositions) disappointed.

Billops subverts expectations here, too, using that very disappointment to salt the wounds of impropriety. As Guillory asserts, “The confrontational brashness of Billops’s work precisely yields the dynamics of interrogation and discourse that may lead us to a path of productive valuation.” If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Billops’s work suggests the road to salvation (be it personal, artistic, or societal) is paved with, if not exactly bad intentions, then at least some tricky animus. Thus, her films interrogate uncomfortable aspects of familial and societal structures that might be otherwise ignored or diluted by polite civil discourse.

“A String of Pearls: The Films of Camille Billops & James Hatch” (the latter her longtime partner and eventual husband, with whom she collaborated on all her films) is a complete retrospective of their film work, the first-ever in Chicago. I refer to Billops primarily because Hatch often took a supporting role to Billops’s lead, especially when the films were directly about Billops or her immediate family. In addition to making films, Billops (who died in 2019) worked in such media as sculpture and printmaking; Hatch, who was white—the dynamics of their interracial relationship, which at the time was still taboo, are sometimes explored in their work—was a professor and a historian of Black theater. Their SoHo loft in New York City was a storied meeting place among their contemporaries, and together, they amassed an extensive archive of Black art ephemera, now called “The Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives” and housed largely at Emory University.

The couple met in 1959 and married in 1987. To hear one of Billops’s relatives tell it, Hatch was the reason Billops gave up her daughter for adoption when she was four years old. These circumstances account for the basis of Finding Christa , a film that’s radical in both form and content. Simultaneously a documentary (though that term feels insufficient for the kind of colloquy Billops and Hatch work in), a memory play, and an averment of will and independence, the film is a decidedly unapologetic examination of Billops’s decision. It screens Saturday, July 29, at 3 PM and will be followed by a discussion with Natalie Bullock Brown, a teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University, documentary filmmaker, and founding member of the Documentary Accountability Working Group.

Billops’s films are often informally divided into sections; one needn’t reach too far to bridge a connection between that structural motif and the act of compartmentalization in her real life. What may be a coping mechanism in reality becomes a device in art, allowing for Billops to more objectively interrogate her subjective experiences. Christa, on the other hand, Billops’s daughter who appears about midway through the film, is more emotionally vulnerable than her mother; it was Christa (herself an artist, having split the di erence between her birth and adoptive mothers’ influences by specifically being a musician like the latter) who sought out Billops, while it’s Billops who stages reenactments of pivotal moments in their reunion. The film was made over the course of several years, so it was subsequently at a chronological remove, as well as an emotional remove, from the initial experience; di erences between the two women are palpable yet intriguing.

A STRING OF PEARLS: THE FILMS OF CAMILLE BILLOPS & JAMES HATCH

Fri 7/28 6 PM, Sat 7/29 3 PM and 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State $13 general admission, $ 8 students and youth, $ 6 Film Center members, $ 5 SAIC students and faculty, and staff of the Art Institute siskelfilmcenter.org/billopshatch

The reason Billops provides for having given up Christa is she simply didn’t want to be a mother. (As she told bell hooks in an interview for hooks’s Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies, “I didn’t admire motherhood.”) “It is clear that in her films, Billops does not view herself as an exemplar of feminism nor does she endorse her own life as a universal model for all to follow,” Guillory writes. “But ultimately, Billops is unequivocally a feminist and her life tacitly embodies those social factors and forces that encroach upon the life and freedom of all women.” To that end, Billops represents a particularly audacious version of feminism that defies even radical forms of convention (motherly love, for example, remains a constant expectation across political ideologies) as much as it does labels; by using her circumstances as the source material, going so far as to reenact key moments with no apparent feelings of shame or regret, Billops uses cinema not just to document but to illuminate in such a way that may seem almost gratuitous.

It’s di cult to talk about Billops’s films, this one in particular, without dancing around language that could be interpreted as judgmental or even contemptuous, regardless of the critic’s (an all-too appropriate word here) intentions. Billops may keep an emotional distance from her subject matter, but in confronting viewers with the nuances of her story, she and Hatch ask us to evaluate the distance at which we keep ourselves from what many would deem the “unthinkable,” a space often infused with deep-rooted prejudice and unreasonable scrutiny. As Denise Ferreira da Silva writes in an essay for e-flux journal, “the art of confrontation is an anticolonial intervention precisely because it turns the space between the performer and the audience into the trenches,” where the war of perception is fought.

Finding Christa won the Grand Jury Documentary prize at Sundance in 1992, making Billops the first Black woman (although cocredited with Hatch) to win the award.

Screening with the film is Billops’s and Hatch’s 1982 documentary short Suzanne, Suzanne, called as such after Billops’s niece. Suzanne, Suzanne is also Ingmar Bergman-esque, not just in its aesthetic—austere black-and-white cinematography, sometimes hazy, sometimes stark—but also in its considerations of love and violence. Suzanne’s father physically abused her and her mother, and in the film they recount their complex emotions toward him. Her mother, Camille’s sister, Billie, expresses guilt over being glad her husband is dead, while Suzanne, whose once-dire drug addiction is hinted at as being the result of this trauma, expresses that singular kind of admiration, frustration, and desperate yearning for a ection that a child might feel toward an abusive parent.

Suzanne, Suzanne and Finding Christa comprise the first two parts of a three-film Family Trilogy (not unlike Bergman’s famed trilogy); Billops’s and Hatch’s 2002 film A String of Pearls , which screens Saturday, July 29 at 6 PM, is the third part. Instead of focusing on the female members of her family as she had done previously, Billops here turns her camera toward the men, exploring questions of fatherhood and the issues they face being Black men in America. You’ll recognize familiar faces and names from the other films; some have merely gotten older, while some have grown up altogether, new fathers to young children.

This is perhaps the most traditional of the documentaries, as interviews with various doctors exposit the violence facing Black people in the U.S., especially Black men and specifically in Los Angeles, where Billops grew up. Somehow this film is still gentler than the previous two, with a good amount of levity from its subjects. There’s a certain “boys will be boys” quality to much of the banter, though ironically, it’s Billops who interjects with admonitions toward the younger male members of her family, imploring them to be more responsible. Society often goes too easy on men, but here, she’s harsh toward them; on the other hand, society is often too harsh toward women, so with regard to her own decisions, it would appear she’s gone “easy” on herself, another provocative contradiction that underscores the undeniable radicality of her thinking.

Screening with A String of Pearls is the 1987 short documentary Older Women and Love , inspired by a love affair between Billops’s octogenarian aunt and a younger man. It was Billops’s and Hatch’s second film after Suzanne, Suzanne ; its tone is genial, even celebratory, as documentary and narrative are blended to provide a simultaneously informative and entertaining probe of a thenvery-taboo subject (which it still is now, even, just to a lesser degree). Seemingly among the more lighthearted of the program’s six films, it’s nevertheless underscored by Billops’s proclivity for bringing into public consciousness that which is often left behind closed doors, unspoken about, and perhaps even reviled by so-called polite society. The screening of these two films will be followed by a discussion with Naeema Torres, the interim executive director of Mezcla Media Collective.

The 1998 short Take Your Bags , commissioned in part by the National Black Arts Festival, is a high-concept, semiparablistic essay on slavery and the legacy of cultural theft that emerged as a result. Billops, talking to a little boy, recounts an almost childlike tale of how the slaves’ bags were stolen on the slave ships, from which their heritages were then taken out and appropriated. Billops and the boy face generally toward the camera but with their gazes somewhat askew, as if looking at something to the side. Billops references whatever might be there (perhaps that which is shown to viewers as still images separate from the scenes with Billops and the boy) as if what she’s looking at is some kind of dry-erase board on which anything might come into view. Which through art, Billops seems to be implying, it can.

Several years prior, Billops and Hatch explored another high-concept idea, this one less child friendly. The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks: A Docu/Fantasy About Everybody’s Racism (1994) evokes a John Waters-esque tactility in how it realizes an understanding of racism vis-à-vis Dante’s Divine Comedy . It’s an ambitious and expansive descent into this hyperparticular version of the underworld, where hatred comes in all shapes and sizes, much of it frolicking about unchecked as a less common or lesser known type of prejudice. At various intervals, Billops and Hatch appear in a field of sunflowers, doing one another’s hair. These sequences, revealing more of the intimacy between the two filmmakers than we’ve seen prior, along with the conventional interview segments, differ starkly from the tour through hell (with activities and displays such as “May I Touch Her There?” and “The Room of Racial Slurs”), which is all color paper-mache and o ensive ephemera.

In their idiosyncratic body of film work— here presented in all newly digitized 2K with a special 4K restoration of Suzanne, Suzanne Billops and Hatch explore the tempestuous complexities of life, family, and society at large, asking all the questions and providing none of the answers. Here, one starts on the road to “heaven” by going through hell (in the case of the The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks, literally); salvation will always be hard-won.

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Greta Gerwig serves up a frothy confection of fashion and fun coupled with searing social critique of the iconic doll in the movie Barbie. A freewheeling kaleidoscope of saturated colors and snark, this film is a bonkers romp through Barbieland, the real world, and back again. The improbably stacked cast includes Helen Mirren as the narrator, Issa Rae as President Barbie, Will Ferrell as a villainous Mattel exec, and John Cena as Mermaid Ken.

Margot Robbie is fantastic in plastic, perkily skipping down a path of self-discovery as Stereotypical Barbie, trailed by lovesick puppy Beach Ken, a pitch-perfect casting of Ryan Gosling. Hardcore Barbie fans will squee underneath the cubic ton of nostalgic Barbie fashion and accessories, and haters will cackle at the nonstop irreverent jokes. An underwritten subplot about a mother and daughter reclaiming their inner child (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt, respectively) gives the film heart.

The plot flies completely off the rails in the second half, not unlike a group of children playing make-believe. But the movie transcends all missteps through the strength of its vision. Anyone expecting a harsh critique of capitalism or apolitical mindless fun will be sorely disappointed. Some of the funniest sequences in the film send up the patriarchy through mocking the himbo Kens, including the now iconic power ballad “I’m Just Ken.”

With Barbie, Gerwig proves once and for all that thinking pink pays at the box office.

—SHERI FLANDERS PG-13, 114 min. Wide release in theaters

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Oppenheimer the latest from Christopher Nolan, is a searing portrait of a man plagued by visions of a world that can’t be seen, a theoretical world composed of the literal particles of his ideas. Driven by an unyielding need to bring his visions to light, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) struggles with the notion of bringing theory into practice, reminiscent of the very process of filmmaking. It’s a film about the creation of something not before seen and the consequences this entails.

It’s set against the backdrop of Oppenheimer’s hearing to renew his security clearance and maintain his vocal political influence on the United States’s atomic policy, a semblance of control over the further development of the weapon he helped unleash. Oppenheimer maintains several states at once, shi ing backward to Oppenheimer’s early education and to his involvement in the Manhattan Project and forward to the contentious Cabinet hearing of former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and friend-turned-antagonist Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.).

Visually, it’s clear to see Nolan’s love of the physicality of film, of the process of transferring concepts to a physical medium, and using the physical medium to present those ideas to the world; Nolan uses the development of the Manhattan Project to symbolize his own efforts. We’re witness to jarring visions of the physical processes Oppenheimer sees in his head, images of chaotic motion of particles, unharnessed energy with the potential to create new worlds and destroy our current one.

For a film framed around political proceedings, there’s very little interest in political analysis here. Communism is used as a backdrop, but ideology isn’t the focus, and Nolan spends little time delving into the brunt of the political conditions his characters advocate for. Narratively, it’s one of Nolan’s more straightforward efforts in recent years, which despite its linear shi s maintains a clear through line and focus. The ensemble cast puts in stunning performances led by Murphy and Downey, and Emily Blunt is compelling as the equally troubled Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer.

From the onset, Oppenheimer, in all its jarring imagery and sound, sears its way into the viewer’s brain. It’s an effectively devastating portrayal of the formulation of events that unleashed unprecedented destruction onto the world, the results of which we’re still caught in the looming shadow of today. —ADAM

MULLINS-KHATIB

R, 180 min. Wide release in theaters v

ATTENTION CHA PUBLIC HOUSING RESIDENTS & HCV PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS

Attention

If you listed Lawndale Complex or the Lawndale Community Area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you would like to permanently live, please read the information listed below.

Proposed FY2024 MTW Annual Plan

The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) is releasing the Proposed FY2024 MTW Annual Plan for public comment.

The 30-day public comment period begins July 24 and ends August 23, 2023. While CHA encourages and welcomes all program participants, residents, and the community-at-large to review the proposed updates to the FY2024 MTW Annual Plan you are not required to attend or view the livestream public comment hearings to submit comments. Your presence or absence does not a ect your housing.

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The 30-day public comment period will be held for CHA to receive written comments starting April 7 through May 7, 2021. The Tenant Selection Plans (TSP) will be available on CHA’s website beginning April 7, 2021.

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