Offscreen Notes
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David J. Skal (RIP, 1952-2024)
Very sad to hear about the passing of film critic, historian and writer David J. Skal, who died on January 1, 2024, at the age of 71 (b. 1952). Skal was best remembered by those who knew him as a classic Monster Kid, someone who grew up watching broadcasts of the classic Universal horror films on television in the 1960s. Skal nurtured this love and passion of these films into a career as one of the most intelligent historians of this period. I still rate his second non-ficiton work The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (1993) as one of the best books on the horror genre. Across his written works and frequent appearances on documentaries and physical media commentaries Skal helped us to realize how important fear in its artistic manifestations is to our understanding of human psychology and culture in general.
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Amir Naderi’s The Runner
Nice to see Amir Naderi's important post-Revolution Iranian film The Runner (1984) get the Criterion Blu Ray treatment.
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Mario Monicelli Retrospective During December 2023 in Montreal
The great Mario Monicelli is the subject of this December 2023 retrospective at The Cinematheque Quebecoise.
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New Blu Ray of Three Films by Experimental filmmaker Richard Kerr
Stephen Broomer through his series Art & Trash, and blu ray label Black Zero has been one of Canada’s most vocal and articulate supporters of experimental cinema. His latest Blu Ray release is a package of three films by Canadian filmmaker/teacher Richard Kerr, entitled Field Trips. The disc includes Last Days of Contrition, Cruel Rhythm and Field Trip.
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Daruish Mehrjui (1939-2023)
I can not believe or understand this latest tragedy, and I am frankly shocked. The great Iranian filmmaker Daruish Mehrjui and his wife Vahideh brutally stabbed to death in their apartment on October 14. Mehrjui was a favorite at Offscreen and I encourage you to read some of the essays and articles we have published on Mehrjui over the years.
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Terence Davies: 1945-October 7, 2023
One of England’s most respected directors, Terence Davies, died on October 7, 2023 at age 77. Davies ‘only’ made about 15 feature films but managed to instill a quiet visual intensity and narrative complexity (often concerned with issues of temporality, memory and the relationship between the personal and the historical) to all his films. His final two films were bio-pics, one about 20th Century poet Siegfried Sassoon, Benediction, and the other about write Emily Dickenson, A Quiet Passion (2016) [read review here). Perhaps his greatest works were more autobiographical in nature, dealing with his working class, Catholic upbringing (in the city of Liverpool) as a gay man in a time when homosexuality was not socially accepted. Three shorts that formed The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992), The Neon Bible (1995) and Of Time and the City (2008), a documentary on his hometown of Liverpool.
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Yes! Film Festival
The Montreal Yes! Film Festival has a focus on local talent and is showcasing the 2023 crop of new talent this Saturday August 26 at the Leonardo Da Vinci Center. There are three programs of films:
Horror shorts 11:00 am-3:30 pm
Local Competition 3:30 pm-6:00 pm
International Films 6:30 pm-9:00 pmPlease note due to programming time restrictions, not all films listed are being screened. Filmmakers have already been notified of official selections.
NOMINATION FOR BEST ACTOR
Cedrick Mainville in PEANUT BUTTER
Alexis Deziel in LE MONSTER
Giuseppe Calvinisti in ELEVEN LINES
Mhohamad Ali Jawad in PINK TORERO KUSH
Shawn Baichoo in WRAITH
Nir Guzinski in BITTER SUN
NOMINATION FOR BEST ACTRESS
Tina Mancini in BITTER SUN
Lesly Velazquez in ISABELLE WALKS WITH ANGELS
Anne-Julie Proulx in HEALTH CHECK
Myriam Lopez in ELEVN LINES
Anne-Sophie Millette in LE MONSTER
Jen Viens in WRAITHNOMINATION FOR BEST DIRECTOR
Gabriel Despre for LE MONSTER
Maxime Divier for PEANUT BUTTER
Giuseppe Calvinisti for ELEVEN LINES
Naomi Silver-Vezina for ISABELLE WALKS WITH ANGELS
Samuel Edward Mac for WRAITH
Tommy Harvey for HEALTH CHECKNOMINATION FOR BEST SOUND
ISABELLE WALKS WITH ANGELS
WRAITH
ELEVEN LINES
PEANUT BUTTER
TEARS OF METAL
LE MONSTERNOMINATION FOR BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
ELEVEN LINES
PEANUT BUTTER
LE MONSTER
PINK TORERO KUSH
ISABELLE WALKS WITH ANGELS
WRAITH
HORROR NOMINATIONSNOMINATION FOR BEST ACTRESS
Moika Perreault in THE ILL FATED
Micheline Chartier in RED TILES
Charlotte Gagne in THE ILL FATED
Laurianne Dupuis in THE ILL-FATED
Charlotte Poitras in DIVA
Kochar Ababkir in AN ANGRY KNOCKNOMINATION FOR BEST ACTOR
Niwar Amin in AN ANGRY KNOCK
Gabriel Caron in GALATEA
Rizgar Hama in AN ANGRY KNOCK
Jonathan Asselin in SERIAL ENCOUNTERS
Dareen Smile in AN ANGRY KNOCK
Cedric Mainville in DIVANOMINATION FOR BEST DIRECTOR
Remi Frechette for DIVA
Philippe Bourret for RED TILES
Stephane Turgeon for THE SCREAM
Sarbast Raza Carmiany for AN ANGRY KNOCK
Daniel Rodriquez for THE ILL-FATED
Catherine Cote-Moisescu and Jeremy Glavac for SERIAL ENCOUNTERNOMINATION FOR BEST SOUND
THE ILL-FATED
RED TILES
THE SCREAM
GALATEA
DIVA
FUELNOMINATION FOR BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
GALATEA
AN ANGRY KNOCK
THE ILL-FATED
RED TILES
FUEL
THE SCREAM -
William Friedkin RIP 1935-August 7, 2023
William Friedkkn’s 1973 The Exorcist was a horror blockbuster as much from a cultural standpoint as box-office or genre film standpoint. No other film made as much of an emotional impact on me than seeing The Exorcist with a packed audience at the huge Loew’s theatre in Montreal. So packed that my friend and I (who were both under age I should add) had to sit in the only available seats right in the front row of the large Loew’s theatre screen. The anticipation my friend and I felt after the media frenzy around the film was palpable and the genius prologue in Iraq —a scene not in the novel so entirely Friedkin and Blatty’s design— was so unexpected its length felt interminable (“When is the scary stuff going to start, we thought to ourselves!”). But the way the sequence so eloquently set up many of the film’s themes without any obvious scares to set up the audience for the film’s slow burn horror was an aesthetic masterclass of narrative build-up. From 1968-1980 Friedkin had an enviable run of unique films each different in tone or subject yet remarkable personal reflections of how art can reflect social anxiety: The Birthday Party, 1968 (an engrossing Harold Pinter adaptation with a fantastic pre-1975 Jaws Robert Shaw performance, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, 1968 (show business musical comedy starring Jason Robards and Britt Ekland), The Boys in the Band, 1970 (bitchy, ahead of its time gay comedy drama), The French Connection, 1971 (multiple academy award winning police drug crime thriller with an all-star cast including Gene Hackman as unrelenting detective Popeye Doyle, Roy Scheider and Fernando Rey), The Exorcist, 1973 (arguably the greatest horror film ever made), Sorcerer, 1977 (on its day overlooked but now recognized as a masterful remake of Clouzet’s taut as a clothes line thriller The Wages of Fear, 1957), Cruising, 1980 (Friedkin’s second gay themed film, a detective-serial killer cat n’ mouse thriller set in the New York city underground gay S & M nightclub scene, which caused shock and controversy on its initial release. Post 1980 Friedkin would only sporadically scale these same artistic heights with To Live and Die in LA (1985), Bug (2006), and Killer Joe (2011), but his own legacy as a cantankerous old school director as dictator was cemented and endorsed by his own many on screen testaments and interviews (such as Alexandre O. Philippe’s elucidating documentary Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist, 2019).
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Michel Côté: 1950-May 29, 2023
One of Quebec’s most popular and loved film and television actors, Michel Côté, passed away at age 72 from bone marrow disease. Michel Côté had a golden touch when it came to box-office success, acting in some of Quebec’s most popular film and television shows, including the comedy of sexual (bad) manners, Cruising Bar (1989, and its sequel Cruising Bar 2, 2008), the Horror thriller Sur le seuil (2003), C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005), De père en flic (2009) and the television gangster series Omertà.
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Kenneth Anger: 1927-May 11, 2023
It is hard to imagine an avant-garde filmmaker as being famous, but that much and more can be said of Kenneth Anger, who died at the age of 96 on May 11, 2023. Anger was at the vanguard of a group of young American filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s (Curtis Harrington, James Broughton, Sidney Peterson, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Maire Menken, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Joseph Cornell) who ushered in a generation of transgressive and aesthetically rapturous avant-garde, underground films that have influenced subsequent iterations of experimental filmmaking. Although Anger made short, challenging films his cinema upbringing included a love of Hollywood glitch and glamour, which led to his seminal Hollywood expose blend of gossip, speculation and gonzo journalism, Hollywood Babylon. Although Anger’s influence is largely found in like-minded experimental cinema, his disdain for artistic meritocracy (drawing lines between high art and trash art) has seen his influence go far beyond the esoteric to narrative filmmakers as well (from David Lynch, to Martin Scorsese to Damien Chazelle, whose latest Babylon feels at times like an unofficial adaptation of Hollywood Babylon).
