Offscreen Notes
-
Maldoror Screening (2000)
Rare screening of the 16mm print of Maldoror (2000), a unique collaborative epic super 8 collage made by 15 individual directors working with one of either two underground film collectives, Filmgruppe Chaos (Germany) or Exploding Cinema (London). Another in a long line of important esoteric programming ventures by Montreal’s film co-op, Cinema Abattoir.
-
Hong Sang-soo Retrospective
A retrospective of one of Korea’s most high profile ar thouse directors, Hong Sang-soo. Director Sang-soo made his mark as a rigorous formalist with such films as The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well (1996) and The Power of Kangwon Province (1998). The program, which is curated by Mi-Jeong Lee at Cinematheque Quebecoise, will feature all seven of his feature films, including his most recent from 2006, Woman on the Beach.
-
Sex and Violence 2nd Edition
Regular Offscreen contributor Roberto Curti has released his fourth book, Stanley Kubrick: Rapina a mano armata, a close formal-textual analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing. Although the book is smallish at 155 pages and restricts itself to the one film, it is ambitious in breadth, contextualising the film within film noir (both classic film noir made before the film later neo-noir) and Kubrick’s other works (and critical history). In the same year, 2007, Curti has seen the release of the second edtion his co-authored (with Tommaso La Selva) book Sex and Violence, which was reviewed here in Offscreen. The second edition is not simply a touch-up but a major revision, with approximately 130 extra pages (620 up from 490). Chapter 7 on extreme Asian cinema and the concluding chapter 10 have been rewritten from scratch and considerably lengthened. The final chapter has been completely updated to incorporate the cycle of recent ‘survivalist’ and ‘hardcore’ (or ‘hardgore’) horror (Fred Vogel’s August Underground trilogy, Hostel, Wolf Creek, etc.). Sections have been added on Greek cinema, Brazilian sexploitation (the pornochanchadas), and Ken Russell. An indispensable book has become even more so.
-
The Passing of Antonioni and Bergman: Cinema Loses Two Giants
By some strange, cruel fate, two cinema giants were taken from us on the same day, July 30, 2007, at the respective ripe ages of 89 and 94, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. They were contemporaries whose careers followed each other closely, with their first and last films coming only a few years apart (1943/2004 for Antonioni and 1946/2003 for Bergman). The modern cinema associated with the influx of post-World War 2 New Wave cinema could not be thinkable without these two directors, whose respective visions of a humanity at odds with this modernity shaped the language of cinema forever. Antonioni’s rupture from classical narrative was so abrupt that his film L’Avventura was hissed at and jeered by a hostile Cannes audience when it showed in 1960. Such was the power of Antonioni’s daring use of formal language to express characters at odds with their physical (and emotional) surroundings. While Bergman concerned himself with the world of the sacred —religion, faith, the existence of God— Antonioni was preoccupied with the growth of the rational and scientific world and its relationship to the growth of the human moral world. As one Italian critic aptly put it, Antonioni was the only secular Italian director. And while Bergman may have begun at a profane place, he slowly worked his way through his Lutheran Protestant upbringing toward a position of bleakness and hopelessness not that far removed from Antonioni’s. As one person wrote in their eulogy for Bergman and Antonioni, in their own different ways they were both ‘searchers’ of the proverbial ‘mysteries of existence’. Looking back at their careers one can see parallels: both made their international marks with ‘trilogies’ at approximately the same time. Bergman with his ‘faith trilogy’ –Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963)– and Antonioni with his ‘alienation’ (or ‘sick eros’) trilogy –L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962). Both directors also had a preference for female protagonists, with some critics going as far as referring to these actresses as important ‘muses’ (Monica Vitti for Antonioni and several for Bergman, including Liv Ullman, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thullin). Because of this, their films were strongly championed by the first wave of feminists in the late sixties/early seventies (although they also had their enemies among feminists, especially Bergman). Offscreen is truly saddened by this tremendous loss of human, artistic expression. When the dust settles we will plan a proper tribute to these important filmmakers.
-
Tomoya Sato on DVD
This extremely independent DVD label has put out three interesting medium length films by Japanese director Tomoya Sato, L’Ilya (16mm, 2000, 39 min.), Shita??/??A Deadly Silence (HD, 2004, 38 min.), and Marehito (16mm, 2005, 30 min.). Each film comes attractively packaged in a slim jewel case with tasteful cover art and sold individually. Although the films are less than feature length each DVD is accompanied by a nice selection of special features including other short films, interviews, trailers, and poster art. L’Ilya was reviewed as part of the Fantasia Small Gauge Trauma DVD. Crippled Brothers also has a fourth film in its catalogue, the unique stop motion animation fantasy/science-fiction film Mecanix, which is a cross between silent cinema fantasy (Georges Méliès and Lang’s Metropolis come to mind) and modern Kafkaesque surrealism (the claustrophobic worlds of Eraserhead, the Quay Brothers, and Jan Svankmajer are invoked).
-
Rudolf Arnheim
Psychologist and art critic Rudolf Arnheim passed away on June 14 at the age of 102. Arnheim wrote eloquently about the aesthetics of visual arts from the standpoint of perception and cognition. His contribution to film theory and aesthetics included the seminal Film as Art, first written in German in 1932 and translated to English in 1933. Arnheim’s book was the first important contribution to film theory since Hugo Munsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study in 1912 and stands as a pillar of the formalist approach to film theory (along with the writings of Munsterberg, Béla Balázs, and the Russian theorists Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov). For an interesting account go to David Bordwell’s blog and read his tribute to Arnheim.
-
Cannibal
Cannibal is a 15 minute short film by the Nova Scotian filmmaker Rod Marquart which was made on April 25, 2007 and is presently being submitted to festivals. Marquart, who filled many of the other creative and technical roles in the film, does not hide the fact that it was shot in one day, with zero budget using a MiniDV camera. The film does not try to escape from these limitations, but attempts to explore other creative dimensions not necessarily affected, such as mood and style; and in this regard the film is an interesting little exercise in sustained visual dementia. There are only two story actions that occur in the 15 minute running time, both of them extremely violent: a derelict man living in the woods kills, dismembers, cooks, then eats an infant; later he repeatedly hacks away with a machete at the body of a man hog-tied to a tree. However, it is not these two acts –the first graphic, the second kept off-screen– that demands our attention, but the mood of the remaining 10 or so minutes of screen time. There is no dialogue and most of the action happens at a non-real speed, either too slow or too fast for normal human locomotion. The color scheme is either garishly saturated colors that give the natural scenery a strange painterly quality, or monochrome/black and white. There is even a few seconds of pure abstraction which gives the image the look of an abstract expressionist painting.
At times, the texture reminded me of Super 8mm films from the seventies with the color stock starting to go bad. There are moments when the digital color manipulation goes too far, especially with the solarization effects, but for the most part the abstract colors, unreal shooting speeds, and intensely brooding experimental music (by “Drums & Machines”) combine to form a hyper-stylized aesthetization that offsets the realist impact of the atrocities (especially the first killing). The film opens with selected freeze frame images which foreshadow the second killing (we see a brief black & white image of the second victim tied to a tree). The opening intertitle informs us that a man and his infant daughter have gone missing in the woods of Goodwill Nova Scotia, and that locals believe they were abducted by a rarely seen mountain man. A few shots later tension is created when we hear the off-screen sound of a crying baby, as the hand-held camera pans across the picturesque scenery and then cuts to ominous shots of a man’s boots. A cut to an infant wrapped up in a bundle confirms our worse fear. The baby is shot, dismembered with a hacksaw, cooked over an open fire, and eaten. For the next 5 or so minutes we are treated to a symphony of wailing sounds, shots of the man moving through the woods, a helicopter flying above (will he be found?), point of view shots peering through the woods, until the killer arrives at his second, tree bound victim. What makes this sequence of trivial action effective is that each shot has a different texture (shifting in light, color, focus, speed, sound, etc.). Unfortunately, this sequence is far more powerful than the murder of the man, which suffers from poor choreography (neither the killer’s machete thrusts nor the editing are convincing). However, it improves when it moves away into abstraction. At times the film recalls Night of the Living Dead (with the black & white freeze frames), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the cannibalism, backwoods horror, slow zoom-ins to flesh) and the short works of Jim Van Bebber (Roadkill and My Sweet Satan), which is not bad for a film made on such minimal means. It will be interesting to see what Rod Marquart can achieve with some time and money.
-
First Peoples’ Festival
An impressive collection of films and videos by people of first nations, including films from Canada, the United States, Brazil, the Philippines, Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
-
Eurofest Film Festival
The Eurofest Film Festival, in partnership with Cinema du Parc, presents from May 25th to June 2nd 2007 recently awarded films from Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Ukraine as well as Canadian documentaries and shorts by young directors of Eastern and Central European origin.
The program includes fiction films, short films, animation, documentaries and experimental films, with English or French subtitles, featuring, among others, four experimental documentaries by Peter Forgacs (Hungary), three by Jan Sikl (Czech Republic), and films by
Eldora Traykova, Yuli Stoyanov and Andrey Paounov (Bulgaria).Dr. Christina Stojanova, Department of Media Production and Studies, University of Regina, is the Guest Curator of the Bulgarian, Hungarian and the Czech Film Programs.
The screenings will take place at Cinema du Parc, 3575 av. du Parc, from Friday, May 25th to Saturday, June 2nd; ticket price: $7 . Tickets will be on sale starting May 11th 2007 at Cinema du Parc. Free parking for 3 hours. Please ask for your parking stub at the box-office.
-
Curtis Harrington: 1930-2007
Film critic, filmmaker, actor, and writer Curtis Harrington passed away in his Hollywood home on May 6, 2007 at the age of 80. Harrington had a varied career which saw him leave his mark in many areas of film history. Harrington began as a film critic, writing several essays on the horror film, most notably “Ghoulies and Ghosties” in Focus on the Horror Film. Harrington then befriended filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos to form the central impetus to the second wave of American experimental cinema in the 1940s (initiated by friends and colleagues Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid). Like Anger, Harrington loved Hollywood lore and they incorporated cinema history into their own personal, ‘mytho-poetic’ (term coined by P.A. Sitney) dreamscapes. Harrington worked on several Anger films (Puce Moment, 1949, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, 1954) and made several of his own experimental shorts, including Fragment of Seeking, 1946 and On the Edge, 1949. Harrington then left the underground for the mainstream, beginning with a debut film which carried over some of the surreal and poetic quality of his experimental work, Night Tide, 1962, starring a young Dennis Hopper as a sailor who falls in love with a woman who thinks she is a mermaid. Harrington is probably best remembered for his contribution to the minor sub-genre of gothic horror popular in the 1970s, which included How Awful About Allan, 1970, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, 1971, and What’s the Matter With Helen, 1971. Harrington then moved into television, directing episodes of Baretta, Wonder Woman, Dynasty, and Charlie’s Angels. He made a return to feature films in 2002 with his Edgar Allen Poe adaptation, Usher, which he wrote, directed and starred in as the titular character, Roderick Usher.
