Tom Palazzolo. Still from Ricky and Rocky,1972.

An upcoming event worthy of special note: this Thursday, the Art Institute unveils a new exhibition focused on the work  of Chicago experimental filmmaker Tom Palazzolo, who began making films about Chicago in 1965 while attended SAIC with painters Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and Karl Wirsum, all soon to be known as Chicago Imagists.  Palazzolo focused on the kinds of everyday goings-on that made the city and its inhabitants utterly unique. The show will include four important films made during 1967-1976, a key period of Palazzolo’s filmaking career, such as the nine minute long film Jerry’s (1976), which profiled deli owner Jerry Meyers, who was notorious for screaming at the customers of his South Loop eatery, and Ricky and Rocky (1972; 15 minutes), made with Jeff Kreines, which visits a backyard wedding shower in suburban Chicago for the Polish-American Roxanne (Rocky) and Italian-American Ricky.

The Art Institute’s website notes, “While Tom Palazzolo’s films feature distinctively Chicago imagery and subjects, they move beyond purely regional concerns to embrace archetypal ideas about American history, civil rights, and personal and political expression. They depict the spectrum of human experience and, as he noted, “are a celebration of reality even if there is no understanding it.”

Guest-curated by Kelly Shindler, the exhibition is on view through January 9th, 2011. All  four films will be screened consecutively in Gallery 186 during the Art Institute’s public hours. For more information on the exhibition, click here. If you want to read more about Tom Palazzolo, check out this 1999 article in the Reader here, and the entry on his work at Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey here.

Jerry’s (1976). Film still.

Art21′s feature film documentary William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible premieres on PBS this week. The national broadcast premiere is scheduled for October 21 at 10:00 p.m., though broadcast times will vary by region -  check your local listings to find out when the program will air. Also make sure to dig into all the extra content Art21 has organized in conjunction with the film: slide shows, video clips, and special essays commissioned from Art21′s regular writers. You can keep up with this material by subscribing to Art21′s special William Kentridge website’s RSS feed, by signing up for Art21′s email newsletter or hookin’ up with them on Facebook and Twitter.

William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible gives viewers an intimate look into the mind and creative process of William Kentridge, the South African artist whose acclaimed charcoal drawings, animations, video installations, shadow plays, mechanical puppets, tapestries, sculptures, live performance pieces, and operas have made him one of the most dynamic and exciting contemporary artists working today. With its rich historical references and undertones of political and social commentary, Kentridge’s work has earned him inclusion in Time magazine’s 2009 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

This documentary features exclusive interviews with Kentridge as he works in his studio and discusses his artistic philosophy and techniques. In the film, Kentridge talks about how his personal history as a white South African of Jewish heritage has informed recurring themes in his work—including violent oppression, class struggle, and social and political hierarchies. Additionally, Kentridge discusses his experiments with “machines that tell you what it is to look” and how the very mechanism of vision is a metaphor for “the agency we have, whether we like it or not, to make sense of the world.” We see Kentridge in his studio as he creates animations, music, video, and projection pieces for his various projects, including Breathe (2008); I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008); and the opera The Nose (2010), which premiered earlier this year at New York’s Metropolitan Opera to rave reviews.

With its playful bending of reality and observations on hierarchical systems, the world of The Nose provides an ideal vehicle for Kentridge. The absurdism, he explains in the documentary’s closing, “…is in fact an accurate and a productive way of understanding the world. Why should we be interested in a clearly impossible story? Because, as Gogol says, in fact the impossible is what happens all the time.”

Michael Winslow (from Police Academy fame) here performs in Ignacio Uriarte’s epic 21 minute film “The History of the Typewriter”. Coving the major machines from the past 115 years. I dare you to watch it all lol.

As soon as Logorama won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Short Film, Animated multiple attempts were made to publicize it online in it’s entirety. Each one was quickly brought down with DMCA requests in short order. Now it seems either enough time has passed and no one cares or composer Marc Altshuler has clearance where others didnt but for the time being Logorama is availiable online in it’s full 16 minute length on his Vimeo account, so enjoy.

If you haven’t heard of Logorama it is basically the film Quentin Tarantino & Roland Emmerich would co-direct in the nightmares of a Trademark Attorney. A crude, violent, self aware, disaster  film that relishes using any and every Corporate Brand possible to make farce. Enjoy while it lasts.

In Mini News: The 2010 Turner Prize short list has been announced almost all of the artists nominated who are suposed to be “promoting public discussion of new developments in contemporary British art” are oddly just a few years shy of the 49 year old age cutoff? Weird choices this year it seems. Time to start the Culture World’s Office Pools.

Map charting Robert Frank's route while shooting The Americans

During the month of January the Gene Siskel Film Center hosts a series that spotlights new works of documentary films in a series called, Stranger Than Fiction: Documentary Premiers. For this month we will check out a couple of films including Mine, Prodigal Sons, and this week’s pick, An American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps.

Directed by Philippe Seclier, An American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps documents the filmmaker’s attempt to capture scenes from Swiss photographer Robert Frank’s seminal work The Americans. Published in 1959, the book first came under criticism before it was heralded as a body of work that portrayed a complex portrait of American life on the cusp of the 60s. Beginning his journey after winning a Gugenheim Fellowship Frank traveled 15,000 miles documenting a side of America that typically was not portrayed in photography at the time.

While meeting with friends and collegues we get a better idea of how the artist worked. Primarily editing from contact sheets and often throwing away unwanted negatives Frank appeared to have an intuitive approach when it came to selecting his frames. A scene that really stands out in the film happens near the beginning when we get a chance to see the mauquette Frank put together for the first edition. It’s worn down and dirty but the object almost feels as if it reflects many of the subjects within the series, humble, dignified, and underrepresented.

I have to give Seclier some credit, he knows how long to make a doc. Clocking in at only 60 minutes, the film, although filmed with a handheld (which I hate), quickly moves through the American landscape. It is unclear if he visited every location from the book but after viewing a handful it would be hard to show all without feeling repetitive.  Although we walk away with small stories about Frank’s travel it is not a particularly powerful portrait of the artist. Instead, we are left with the notion of changing landscapes, urbanization, and mortality.

An American Journey: In Robert Frank’s Footsteps will be playing:
Thursday, January 14th at 6:00pm
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 North State Street
Chicago, IL 60601-3505
(312) 846-2600