Offscreen Notes
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New Sergio Leone Book
Offscreen contributor Roberto Donati has had a book on Sergio Leone recently published, alas only in Italian for non-Italian readers, by Falsopiano publishers. Donati’s book Sergio Leone: L’America, la nostalgia e il mito (Sergio Leone: America, nostalgia, and myth) is split between an intelligent close textual analysis of three films which he identifies as being part of a ‘trilogy of time,’ Once Upon a Time in the West, Duck You Sucker, and Once Upon a Time in America, and new interviews with fourteen people who worked with Leone, including key collaborators such as composers/musicians Ennio Morricone, Alessandro Alessandroni (the whistler!), Franco De Gemini (the harmonica man), writers Sergio Donati, Luciano Vincenzoni, Franco Ferrini, film critics Sir Christopher Frayling, author of several important books on Leone and the spaghetti western, including Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans, From Karl May to Sergio Leone, Luca Beatrice, author of the excellent Italian book Al Cuore, Ramon, al cuore, Western all’italiana, Antonio Monda, Carlos Aguilar, and actress Claudia Cardinale. The first 121 pages consist of Donati’s critical analysis of the works, followed by about 100 pages of interviews, ending with some wonderful pencil drawings on Leone and his works (which are worth the price of admission alone) by Luca Zampetti. I hope that out there somewhere is an enterprising publisher that would take on an English translation of this important book (Harvey from FAB Press, are you listening!). If you would like a sampling of what to expect in terms of the book’s critical approach, I suggest you read the following essay by Donati on Leone published on Offscreen, entitled “Once Upon a Time….Introduction to the Theme of Nostalgia in the Films of Sergio Leone”.
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The Wooden Lightbox / Alex MacKenzie
THE WOODEN LIGHTBOX: A SECRET ART OF SEEING / ALEX MACKENZIE
Monday, February 15, 2010. 7:30 pm
Engineering-Visual Arts Building
Black Box, sub-basement room OS3-845Concordia University
1515 St. Catherine West, at GuyFree admission.
Alex MacKenzie performs The Wooden Lightbox live in an intimate setting with a hand-cranked 16mm projector built from various relic parts and framed in an austere wooden box. The manual operation of the projector, placed in the middle of the audience, invokes a pre-electronic, pre-digital era of moving pictures, when aesthetic astonishment was achieved through stagecraft and mechanical mastery. In the role of travelling projectionist, MacKenzie renews a tradition of itinerant exhibition from a time when the endurance of cinema was not seen as a given, and the shape of the medium’s future was yet undetermined. Through this invocation of the early days of cinema, The Wooden Lightbox confronts our taste for novelty and challenges the amnesia of new media discourses, demonstrating how concepts of mobility, interactivity, and visual wonder have long been central to moving image innovation.
Following the performance, MacKenzie will talk about his practice and take questions from the audience.
Alex MacKenzie is a Vancouver-based media artist working in film, video, light projection, and performance. He was the founder and director of The Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images, The Blinding Light!! Cinema, and the Vancouver Underground Film Festival. He currently works as an independent curator, graphic designer, and writer. His works have been screened internationally. This event was made possible with the generous collaboration of the Studio Arts & MFA Visiting Artist Program, Mobile Media Lab, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Spectral Media Lab, and Hexagram.
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Mamori, by Karl Lemieux
World Premiere of Mamori by Karl Lemieux, presented by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada. Montréal, January 5, 2009 – As part of the Projections series, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal is proud to present, in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), the world premiere of Mamori (2010), an experimental animated film by artist Karl Lemieux. This original work will be screened continuously in Beverly Webster Rolph (BWR) Hall at the Musée d’art contemporain from January 13 to March 14, 2010. At the end of January, Karl Lemieux be showing this new work at the upcoming edition of the prestigious International Film Festival Rotterdam, devoted to innovative, independent and experimental films. Musée Director Paulette Gagnon is delighted to have Mamori on the Projections series program: “This series introduces the Montréal public to works by artists on the local and international scenes who are building and enriching the art of film. Lemieux’s work fits in perfectly with this tradition.” According to Monique Simard, Director General of French Program at the NFB, “Mamori is being presented in one of the most conducive places for discovering its artistic qualities, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. In keeping with its mission, the NFB supports innovation in all types of cinematic practices, including experimental films, and is proud to work all across the country with bold creative artists like Karl Lemieux.”
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Eric Rohmer RIP: April 4, 1920-January 11, 2010
One of the original film critics turned filmmakers who helped establish the French Nouvelle Vague, Eric Rohmer, has passed away at the age of 89. Rohmer was well established as the editor of Les Cahiers du Cinéma from 1956 to 1963 and, perhaps more than his colleagues, was influenced by the more spiritual/metaphysical leanings of its founding father, André Cinéma. Rohmer’s films were markedly different from the films of other New Waver directors, such as the more rigorously political/theoretical/polemical works of Jean-Luc Godard, or the more self-reflexive/intertextual/populist works of François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, or the more formalist/intellectual films of Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras. Although Rohmer was active until his death (his last film coming in 2007), he will be best remembered for his philosophical series of six ‘Moral Tales’ films, which began in 1969 with Ma Nuit Chez Maude and ended in 1998 with Conte d’automne.
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Robin Wood: 23 February 1931 - 18 December 2009
It’s has been a terrible last few weeks for cinema, especially horror cinema, with the recent deaths of Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy (November 30, 2009), American horror and science-fiction writer, director and special effects artist Dan O’Bannon (December 19, 2009) and the great British-born Canadian resident film educator, critic, theorist Robin Wood. Wood stands tall as one of the most important and influential film writers of his generation. I had the good fortune of taking a class with him during my Masters Degree at York University in the late 1980s. It was a course at Atkinson College on Images of Women in Cinema. I remember one class where he was discussing the doppelganger and mentioned how rare it was to come across a female doppelganger and that he was hard pressed to think of one. I put up my hand and mentioned the two Maria’s from Metropolis, to which he quickly replied with a retroactive “Ah yes, of course!” The class consisted of a mix of film students and students from Women Studies, which created somewhat of a divide within the class which reared its head in one particular class, on Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing. After his lecture, Wood warned the class that the film contained some harsh, misogynist imagery, at which point a sizable group of students stood up and left the class. Wood was hit so hard by their departure, saddened that they were not willing to see a film which he had programmed for the course. He was hurt by their lack of confidence in his ability to properly contextualize and analyze the film from a ‘feminist’ perspective. I remember the day so well because of the mixture of sorrow and pain on Wood’s face. And this was at the core of Wood’s strength: his ability to understand both a film’s social and cinematic significance. In this respect he remained forever influenced by his tutelage under the great humanist literary critic F. R. Leavis. Wood had an amazing range of tastes and critical skills, delving into great auteurs (Hitchcock, Antonioni, Bergman, Penn, Satyajit Ray), critical theory (specializing in Freudian, Psychoanalytical and Marxist theory), and genre (especially the Horror genre, but also the Western and, more recently, the teen film). Wood’s critical focus and commitment changed dramatically in the late 1970s, after the public acknowledgment of his homosexuality (he divorced his wife, with whom he had three children, in 1974 and then lived for the better part of his life with his partner Richard Lippe.) This shift was first stated in his essay “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic”, which was originally a speech at the National Film Theater and later printed in Film Comment in 1978. Perhaps his most groundbreaking work was on the horror film, which grew out of a catalogue of essays written to accompany a program of horror films at the Toronto Festival of Festival. The pamphlet, entitled The American Nightmare, was edited by Wood and Richard Lippe and published in 1979 by the Toronto Festival of Festivals. Although the essays were written and evaluated from the perspective of a (gay) Freudian-Marxist-Psychoanalytical bias, which not everyone would have agreed with, what was important (beyond the fact that this normally disparaged genre was being treated with such intellectual rigor) was the distinction made that horror films could have socially and politically progressive messages, themes, and subtexts. Out of this grew Wood’s ‘good’ (progressive) and ‘bad’ (reactionary) list of horror films. People argued with Wood’s position, but the gauntlet was thrown. Horror films would no longer be thought of as being only sensationalist, violent, juvenile, or misogynist. Wood’s essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” was to horror scholarship what Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was to feminism. What I’ll always retain from Wood was his commitment to formal and stylistic analysis; no matter how passionate and social his criticism, he never forgot about cinema. I recommend the wonderful “A Tribute to Robin Wood” that appears in the film journal he co-founded, Cineaction, Issue 71, 2007, p. 22-30 (reminiscences rom Kass Banning, Scott Forsyth, Peter Harcourt, Bart Testa, Bruce LaBruce, and Janine Marchessault).
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Paul Naschy: RIP
Paul Naschy, born Jacinto Molina on 6 September 1934, Madrid, Spain, died on November 30, 2009. Naschy was by far Spain’s most iconic horror figure, and his death means that only a scant few remain of his ilk in Spain (notably Jesus Franco). Naschy was a huge fan of Universal horror and fashioned his career around the classic monster figures of that studio (Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, Zombies, etc.). The figure most representative of Naschy’s mystique was the wolfman, which he portrayed (as Waldemar Daninsky) no less than thirteen times. As an actor and then director and screenwriter, Naschy was instrumental in producing works that would be so strongly identified with ‘eurohorror’. In many respects, Naschy is synonymous with all the idiosyncratic qualities that fans of cult cinema and the eurohorror have come to love: perverse mixture of sexuality and horror; brass, daring musical scores that are not afraid of veering from traditional score templates; emphasis on stylish visuals and elaborate set-pieces over plot; touches of surrealistic violence; and (especially for Naschy during the Franco era in Spain) subtle yet subversive social (gender) and political overtones. November 30, 2009 marks a sad day in the history of European horror, but thankfully Naschy has left behind a lasting legacy that will certainly grow in critical esteem over the years. Watch this moving tribute (uploaded in 2006) entitled The Molina Fantasy to get a sense of Naschy’s unique persona.
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Gilles Carles (1928-2009)
One of Quebec’s greatest filmmakers, Gilles Carles, passed away on November 28th at the age of 80. Carles was a principal player involved in all the great movements in contemporary Quebec cinema, starting at the NFB and its heralded French Unit and then directing some of the most important feature fiction films of the late 1960s and 1970s, including his first feature La Vie heureuse de Léopold Z (1965), made while at the NFB, and his greatest commercial success, La Vraie Nature de Bernadette (1972). Carles remains one of the most decorated and Internationally reknown Quebec filmmakers the world over.
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Inaugural Doha Tribeca Film Festival
October 29 – November 1, 2009
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Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
Festival Runs at the American Museum of Natural History from November 12-15, 2009
“The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival is the longest-running, premiere showcase for international documentaries in the United States, encompassing a broad spectrum of work, from indigenous community media to experimental nonfiction. The Festival is distinguished by its outstanding selection of titles, which tackle diverse and challenging subjects, representing a range of issues and perspectives, and by the forums for discussion with filmmakers and speakers.”
Highlights of this year, taken from the festival’s official website ‘news and press’ include: “a series of films presented in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition Traveling the Silk Road – including Cooking History (Péter Kerekes in person, NY Premiere), an exploration of the customs and conflicts of food on the frontlines, from serving up savory blinis to Soviet soldiers fighting off Nazi armies to feeding French forces during the Algerian War and Hair India (Raffaele Brunetti and Marco Leopardi, NY Premiere), a stirring tale about a destitute family’s religious sacrifice of hair that is processed and ultimately sold for profit.
Other Festival highlights include Babaji, an Indian Love Story (Jiska Rickels in person, US Premiere), a captivating tale about a centenarian man who has dug a grave next to his late wife’s and descends into it each morning to await death; Beyond the Game (Jos de Putter in person, US Premiere), a behind-the-scenes look at the tight-knit and competitive community of cybergamers that follows the top players of Warcraft III, the most popular game globally, on their way to the professional world championships; Blind Loves (Juraj Lehotsky, NY Premiere), an innovatively told story of four non-sighted subjects as they reveal their passions and anxieties while managing independent lives.”
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Celluloid Horror DVD Release
“Even though she is a sweet-natured girl, she’s a total fucking freak!” (Ant Timpson on Kier-La Janisse)
In my Fantasia festival report of 2003 I wrote about “an engaging” low budget documentary by Ashley Fester entitled Celluloid Horror. The subject of the film was a frequent attendee of Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival, festival programmer (and film writer/scribe) Kier-La Janisse, who returns to the 2009 edition of Fantasia as their official “Web News Editor,” which means festival goers will be able to read Kier-La’s critical reaction to select Fantasia films, as well as interviews. Celluloid Horror provides an insider’s look into the fertile mind of dynamo Kier-La Janisse, who single-handedly, and against all odds, started Canada’s first all-horror Film Festival, Vancouver-based CineMuerte, which ran for six editions between 1999 and 2005. Although the film is aimed at the tried and true horror fan, Kier-La’s infectious enthusiasm for all things horror, and her single-minded see-the-show-through-at-all-costs determination will win over anyone with a weakness for the underdog. Consciously or not, the notion of the underdog forms a sort of structuring device for the film, as we see Kier-La take on the Vancouver Censorship board, greedy distributors, an indifferent media, and unheeding government funding bodies; we also hear her talk about her troubled childhood and witness the quick deterioration of her marriage. But not all is doom and gloom, as Fester includes interviews of friends, festival guests, and festival goers who offer words of encouragement and heap praise on Kier-La’s festival and her dedication to the cause (including Udo Kier, Jeff Lieberman, Jorg Buttgereit, Mitch Davis, and Buddy Giovinazzo). The documentary also includes many film clips from CineMuerte screenings that validate Kier-La’s inclusive (of what defines horror) programming philosophy (Possession, The Isle, Nekromantik, The Moor’s Head, Cannibal Holocaust, etc.). This is anything but an ‘objective’ documentary because the director’s admiration for Kier-La shines through loud and clear, which is easy to understand if you’ve met Kier-La. Four years after its theatrical release, director Fester has independently released Celluloid Horror on DVD through Reel 33 Releasing company. One thing is certain: the same energy and enthusiasm that Kier-La brought to her projects is visible in the DVD release of Celluloid Horror. According to Fester, the cost of the DVD’s production was three times the average. The version on the DVD release is a slightly different cut of the film, eight minutes shorter than the version shown at Fantasia, but with different material and longer film extracts. Fester has also edited a 43 minute cut of the film, with the aim of a potential television sale. Along with the film, there are loads of special features, including a director’s commentary, an episode of a local Vancouver interview show, Urban Rush, featuring Udo Kier and Kier-La Janisse, over 30 minutes of extended scenes and a nice photo gallery of special guests at CineMuerte. The real treat for people who buy the DVD will come when they crack open the actual DVD box –a surprise which I won’t spoil. I’ll only say that, according to Fester, the feature is so unique that the Canadian and US Patent offices are considering the device as a new invention. Once inside the DVD cover you’ll find post card size reproductions of the six CineMuerte posters, which have select bios on the back, along with the nicely designed DVD. A small price to pay for such packaged obsession.
