Friday 4/14 – Thursday 4/20
Tonight filmmakers Luis A. Recoder and Bruce McClure promise to “light up some 3,850 feet of film” during their performance, Beyond the Circle of Confusion. They won’t burn it exactly, but will manipulate it by interrupting the projector’s beam with things like cloth and mesh and by “bi-packing”–threading two copies of the same film into the projector to create ghost images. Chicago Filmmakers brings the pair, who live on opposite coasts, to Chicago to show several new films, including their recent collaboration Superimcumbant, McClure’s Indeterminate Focus and Heterogene, and work from Recoder’s Available Light series. It’s at 8 at Columbia College’s Ferguson Hall, 600 S. Michigan. Admission is $6, $4 with Columbia ID, $3 for members of Chicago Fimmakers (773-293-1447).
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15 SATURDAY Popular syndicated radio personality Laura Schlessinger has been quoted as saying that homosexuals are products of “a biological error that inhibits you from relating normally to the opposite sex.” She’s also said that feminists “nauseate and sicken me” and have “destroyed the sanctity of motherhood.” Comments like these have incensed groups like the Chicago Anti-Bashing Network, part of a local Coalition to Stop Dr. Laura, which wants to halt her plans for a TV talk show this fall on CBS. Today activists in several cities will hold simultaneous protests at CBS affiliates. The local edition starts at 3 at WBBM, 630 N. McClurg. Call the CABN at 773-878-4781 for more.
17 MONDAY In her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt called revisionist historian David Irving, who’s written more than 30 books on the Nazi era, “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial,” who “bends” his research to make it conform to his agenda. On April 11 Irving, whose work has argued that Auschwitz was just a brutal slave-labor camp with a high death rate and that Adolf Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust, lost his libel suit against Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books. Lipstadt gives a free lecture tonight at 7 at the Chicago Sinai Congregation, 15 W. Delaware. Call the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago at 312-444-2860 for more.
20 THURSDAY Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s The River is a bitterly pessimistic vision of life in contemporary Taipei involving gay saunas, a peddler of pornographic videos, and chronic neck pain. The film had its Chicago premiere April 14 and has been screening nightly at 7 and 9 at Facets Multimedia, 1517 W. Fullerton; tonight is your last chance to catch it. Call 773-281-4114.
