Offscreen Notes
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Befilm: The Underground Film festival
“Now in its fourth year and on its way to becoming one of the largest short film festivals on the East Coast, BEFILM has quickly garnered the reputation of showcasing the world’s finest live action (narrative, documentary, experimental) and animated shorts. Focusing on the belief that “shorter is better”, BEFILM provides a cultural and entertaining forum that recognizes and honors independent, emerging, and established filmmakers. Selected from over 500 submissions from around the world, the competition films are distinguished by genre, not country, and a panel of judges from the entertainment industry reviews the films and selects the winners. First-time and well-established filmmakers screen side by side in an environment designed to support creativity.”
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Carte gris a Michael Snow: Carl Brown: Visual Alchemy / Ocular Alkahest
An exhibition of photographs and films selected by Michael Snow on the work of Carl Brown, an artist he has collaborated with on many occasions. Photographs and installation films are on exhibit at the Dazibao Gallery and a series of film screenings at the Goethe Institute:
Wednesday April 25 at 7:30 pm
Triage
Carl Brown and Michael Snow, 2004, 30 minTo Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror
Michael Snow, 1991, 53 minUrban Fire
Carl Brown, 1982, 15 minWednesday May 2 at 7:30 pm
Blue Monet
Carl Brown, 2006, 60 min [in the presence of Carl Brown]See You Later / Au revoir
Michael Snow, 1990, 18 minWednesday May 9 at 7:30 pm
Brownsnow
Carl Brown, 1994, 134 minThe Living Room
Michael Snow, 2000, 21 min -
Bob Clark
A sad day for the film industry with news of the tragic (because utterly avoidable) death of American-born director Bob Clark, best known (at least in Canada) for his valuable contributions to genre cinema at a time when such cinema was rare in Canada. Clark, along with his 22 year old son, were killed in a head-on car collision with a drunken driver. We’ve all done dumb things in our life, but driving a vehicle while inebriated is a needless crime which must be treated much more seriously than it is so tragedies such as this will become rare (they are not). Clark made a key contribution to the horror genre, with his loveable comic horror debut Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, and then three successive minor masterpieces, Deranged, Deathdream and Black Christmas. Click here to read my discussion of Clark’s pioneering contribution to the stalker film in the essay “Documenting the Horror Genre.” Clark also made one of the best films on the Jack the Ripper myth/conspiracy, Murder by Decree, and one of the best holiday films, A Christmas Story.
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Cinéma Abattoir
March 23rd at Midnight
1571 Sanguinet St.Program
Liar Anne Hanavan, US, 2006, 3 minutes
La Femme Phallique Frédérique Marleau et Serge de Cotret, Québec, 2007, 7 minutes
God’s Little Girl Mitch Davis, Québec, 2006, 16 minutes
Merzbow Beyond Snuff Aryan Kaganof, Japon / Afrique, 1997-2005, 22 minutes
Pandrogeny manifesto Dionysos Andronis et Aldo Lee, Grèce / France, 2005, 11 minute
Theocordis Serge de Cotret, Québec, 2007, 10 minutes
Western Sunburn Karl Lemieux, Québec, 2007, 10 minutes
“Nails in the eyes. And also an opposition to the film festivals circuit as an alternative space of diffusion: Cinéma Abattoir is a film society that deals with experimentation and documentation of iconoclastic film work. The subject here is the exploration and transgression of cinema by the subversion of its aesthetics and ethics” (Programmer, Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt)
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Nanni Moretti Retrospective
A retrospective of Italian documentarist and fiction filmmaker Nanni Moretti, which includes his latest film The Caiman, a not-too-loosely based satire on the life of Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
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Re-politicization of Art From (the East of) Europe: Creativity and Resistance
Thursday March 8th at 7:30pm
The Liane and Danny Taran Gallery, Saidye Bronfman Centre“Re-politicization of Art From (the East of) Europe: Creativity and Resistance”
“For the second event of the Crash Course lecture series, in which we present a major issue, theme or movement in contemporary art, Slovenian artist, philosopher and theoretician Marina Grzinic will outline key ideas and themes being taken up by some of the leading contemporary artists from Eastern Europe. Specifically, Grzinic will investigate the role of practitioners who maintain a form of critically engaged activist art.”
Sunday March 10th at 7:00pm
De Sève Cinema, Concordia University (McConnell Bldg ground floor, 1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd W)The Liane and Danny Taran Gallery in collaboration with Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University presents a selection of video works by Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid.
Dr. Marina Grzinic is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art) in Ljubljana. As well she teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Grzinic also works as freelance media theorist, art critic and curator, and has been involved with video art since 1982. In collaboration with Aina Smid, Grzinic has produced more than 40 videotapes, and has exhibited media art installations and screenings internationally – such as the Art Center in Seoul, The Kyoto Biennale, The Freud Museum in Vienna, The Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Enthusiasm. Artists: Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska
“For ten years, British artists Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska have been exploring forms of collaborative cultural production. The projects they have been engaged in research new ways of artistic practice, particularly in relation to cultural institutions that define, promote and distribute art. On this occasion, these collaborators have created an exhibition and archive of films produced by the Polish amateur film movement between the l950s and l980s. In Poland, in the Socialist era, leisure was organized through factory clubs sponsored by the state. In this project developed over three years, the artists explore the unexpectedly creative response of ordinary people to the oppressions of official culture. The exhibition comprises a reconstruction of a film club interior and three cinemas, screening found films divided into three subjects (Love, Labour, Longing), as well as an archive room of found films. This will be the first North American presentation following its appearance at Warsaw’s Centre for Contemporary Art, the Whitechapel Gallery in London and Tapies Foundation in Barcelona.”
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Carlo Ponti: 1912-2007
Venerable Italian producer of approximately 150 films died at the ripe age of 95 on January 10, 2007. Perhaps being married to Sophia Loren had something to do with his longevity, but Ponti started his career in 1941, producing Piccolo mondo antico and never looked back, producing his final film in 1998 (Liv). Along the way Ponti produced a range of important art films and popular genre (filone in Italian) films. Highlights include Senza pietà (1948, Alberto Lattuada), Il Mulino del Po (1949, Lattuada), several films with Totò, La Strada (1954, Federico Fellini), Il Ferroviere (1956, Pietro Germi), Matrimonio all’italiana (1964, Vittorio De Sica), and such non-Italian films as Heller in Pink Tights (US, 1960, George Cukor, starring his wife Loren), Cléo de 5 à 7 (France, 1961, Agnès Varda), Le Mépris (France, 1963, Jean-Luc Godard), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s American films, Blow-Up (1966), Zabriske Point (1970) and Professione: Reporter (1975).
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Hou Hsiao-hsien Retrospective
At the end of 1999, the Village Voice conducted its first poll of North American film critics, whom they asked to pick their “bests” of 1999, and also of the decade. Of the 50 plus respondents, 9 chose Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien as the “Best Director of the Decade.” (Abbas Kiarostami and Krzysztof Kieslowski finished second with 6 votes each.) Remarkably, at that time, none of his films had ever been released in the U.S. or Canada, and, even more remarkably, Hou finished as 2nd Best Director of 1999 for Flowers of Shanghai/ Hai shang hua (1998), the film which placed as the 3rd best film of the decade, even though it had never received a North American theatrical release! In a similar manner, the prestigious French film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma voted Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye??/ ??Nanguo zaijan, nanguo (1996) the best film of the 1990s, having previously named Flowers of Shanghai the best film of 1998. At least Hou’s films were being released in France, and, it wasn’t until 2003, that his next feature, Millenium Mambo??/ ??Quanxi manbo (2001) received a limited release in the U.S., after it was voted the #2 “Best Unreleased” film in the 3rd Voice poll at the end of 2001. The pattern continued. Hou’s next film, a tribute to Ozu on his centennial, Café Lumière (Japan, 2003) was voted the “Best Undistributed Film” in the 2004 Voice poll, receiving 26 mentions, and was released the following year. Then, Three Times??/ ??Zui hao de shi guang (2005) a great overview of three stages in his career was voted “Best Undistributed Film” of 2005 (by 34 respondents no less) and was then released in 2006. (Both films were released on time in France and were placed in the Cahiers top ten in 2004 and 2005, respectively).
Unbelievably, Three Times is the very first of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films to be theatrically released in Quebec, and so, it is with enormous pleasure that we are able to announce that the Cinémathèque Québécoise is mounting a complete retrospective of Hou’s work as a feature-film maker in December. His first two films, Cute Girl??/ ??Jiushi liuliu de ta (1980), and Cheerful Wind??/ ??Feng er ti cai (1981), both filmed in cinemascope and made within the “healthy realism” dictates of the repressive Guomindang government at the time, have never been screened publicly in Quebec, we are sure. Almost as rare is the groundbreaking portmanteau feature, The Sandwich Man (1983) co-directed by Hou, Ren Wang and Zeng Zhuang Xiang, which ushered in the Taiwanese New Wave, the strange Daughter of the Nile??/ ??Niluohe nuer (1987), and the first film in his Taiwan history trilogy, City of Sadness??/ ??Beiqing chengshi (1989). This is essential viewing, as is the 2nd film in the series, The Puppetmaster/Hsimeng jensheng (1993), which, with its puppet shows and on-screen appearances of the octogenarian narrator, brilliantly re-invents narrative film structure. Although many of Hou’s films are available on DVD, including his autobiographical, realist work of the 1980s, from The Boys of Fengkuei??/ ??Fengkuei-lai-te-jen (1983) to Dust in the Wind??/ ??Lianlian fengchen (1986), the “history trilogy” and most films that have followed need to be seen on the big screen to properly appreciate the detail of their intricate compositions. This is certainly the case for Flowers of Shanghai wherein the director tried to recreate the ironic beauty of unbalanced male/female relations of 100 years ago.
Filmography of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films as a director with screening times in the Salle Claude-Jutra at the:
Cinémathèque Québécoise1983: The Boys of Fengkuei (Fengkuei-lai-te jen) [Fr. s.t.’s , Dec 9; 17:00, 14; 16:00]
1984: A Summer at Grandpa’s (Dongdong de jiaqi) [Dec 9; 21:00]
1985: A Time to Live and A Time To Die (Tong nien wang shi) [Fr. s.t.’s, 10; 19:00]
1986: Dust in the Wind (Lianlian fengchen) [Fr. s.t.’s, Dec 10; 17:00, Dec 21; 16:00]
1987: Daughter of the Nile (Niluohe nuer) [Dec 13; 18:30]
1989: City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi) [Dec 14; 20:30]
1993: The Puppetmaster (Hsimeng jensheng) [Dec 15; 20:30]
1995: Good Men, Good Women (Haonan haonu) [French s.t.’s, Dec 13; 20:30]
1996: Goodbye South, Goodbye (Nanguo zaijan, nanguo) [Fr. s.t.’s, Dec 16; 17:00]
1998: Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) [Dec 16; 21:00]
2001: Millennium Mambo (ianxi manbo) [Fr. s.t.’s, Dec 6; 18:30, Dec 7; 16:00]
2003: Café Lumière (Japan, Kohi jiku) [Fr. s.t.’s, Dec 16; 19:15]
2005: Three Times (Zui hao de shi guang) [Dec 17; 17:00]There will also be a screening of Olivier Assaya’s documentary, HHH, portrait de Hou Hsiao-hsien (1996), on December 17 @ 19:30
Peter Rist
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A View on the Exotic: Travel in Early Cinema
Two sets of early film programmes organized around the theme of travel, tourism and colonialism. The event gets kick started with an academic panel on the subject featuring members of GRAFICS and the universities of Concordia and University of Montreal. The event is co-programmed by GRAFICS (a research group studying the history of early/silent cinema) and Hors Champ (online sister film journal to Offscreen).
