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Events and Releases



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New York Asian Film Festivals
July 25, 2010 to July 08, 2010


In term of festivals that feature Asian cinema exclusively this is one of the best, and certainly so when it comes to North America.

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Blue Sunshine: Home of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies
June 26, 2010 to September 01, 2010


Festival programmer, writer, author Kier-La Janisse has moved to Montreal and is about to launch an intriguing new venture that will surely bring back a bit of the 1970s repertory madness that I lived through and loved. Kier-La has great ambitions for a loft space she envisions as a meeting ground for like-minded fans of esoteric cinema to watch movies (both 16mm prints and digital) and engage in talk and discourse. Along with screenings, Kier-La has plans for educational nights where practitioners, artists, and scholars can lead discussions on a variety of subjects related to horror culture in its broadest sense. Offscreen wishes Kier-La the best for her new ventures.

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Dennis Hopper: 1936-2010
June 01, 2010 to December 31, 1969


The great cult actor Dennis Hopper passed away on Saturday May 29, at the age of 74. Hopper’s career spanned over 50 years, and included roles with some of the greatest actors and directors. His career was filled with risks, taking on independent, controversial roles (Easy Rider, The Trip, Kid Blue, River’s Edge, Out of the Blue, and Blue Velvet. His performance as psychotic Frank Booth in the latter is still many people’s choice for the creepies ever, get-under-your-skin villain. Hopper battled through alcohol and drug addictions during the 1970s to revitalize his career in the 1980s, and continued to breakthrough into more conventional films right up until his death.

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Rue Morgue 100th Issue
May 30, 2010 to June 30, 2010


The May 2010 issue of the Canadian-made (all-entertainment) horror magazine Rue Morgue marked its 100th issue, a laudable achievement in today’s difficult era for print magazines of all type. Rue Morgue joins a select few horror magazines yo have achieved a similar longevity in publication, notably Famous Monsters (the granddaddy of all horror mags), Fangoria and The Dark Side. Congratulations.

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New Sergio Leone Book
February 20, 2010 to April 30, 2010


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
February 11, 2010 to February 17, 2010


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 OS3-845

Concordia University
1515 St. Catherine West, at Guy

Free 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
January 13, 2010 to March 14, 2010


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
January 11, 2010 to February 28, 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
December 20, 2009 to March 31, 2010


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
December 16, 2009 to February 28, 2010


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)
December 01, 2009 to January 15, 2010


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, 2009 to November 01, 2009


October 29 – November 1, 2009

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Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
October 29, 2009 to November 16, 2009


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
September 28, 2009 to November 30, 2009


“Even though she is a sweet-natured girl, she’s a total fucking freak!” (Ant Timpson on Kier-La Janisse)

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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.

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Breed Productions Website

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World Film Festival 2009 Preview
August 28, 2009 to September 11, 2009


Every year, Montreal filmgoers face the extremely difficult decision of choosing films to see at the World Film Festival/Festival des Films du Monde (WFF/FFM). No matter how cinephiliac one is, it is virtually impossible to predict what films by unknown directors, that have never shown anywhere, are going to be like. Although the “Class A” international film festival rules dictate that no film in the official competition can have been shown internationally or at another festival, previously—they must be “world” or “international premieres”—in the past, the WFF had shown few films in other sections in these “permiere” categories. According to my calculations, now fewer than 72 of the new 212 feature films showing (34%) at the WFF are billed as “world premieres” and a further 64 are “international premieres.” With only 2 films having been screened somewhere in Canada before, this leaves a mere 74 feature films (less than 35% of the total) that are receiving their Canadian or North American premieres and that are likely to have been reviewed in the media. We, at Offscreen have only viewed 10 of the WFF feature films (on screen), but, we have also done some research, and, we hereby boldly give our recommendation to 10 films. Readers can still buy a 10 film sheet of coupons for $60, and we believe you can do far worse than taking a chance on the following titles:

Tatarak (Sweet Rush) is surely Andrzeij Wajda’s finest film in over 25 years. Starring the great Krystyna Janda, Poland’s senior filmmaker has crafted a beautiful, but extremely sad homage to those who die, old and young alike. Don’t read the catalogue copy, because it gives away too much of the plot (and is also wrong on at least one point). It was in competition in Berlin (winning the Alfred Bauer prize), and is showing here in the “Hors Concours/out-of-competition” (HC) section.

Poltory Komnaty Ili Sentimentalnoe Puteshestvie Na Rodinu (A Room and a Half) by first time director Andrey Khrzhanovsky (Russia) showed in both the Rotterdam and Istanbul festivals and, like Tatarak, has been included in the very tight and sophisticated line up for this year’s New York Film Festival; which is why we are recommending it, sight unseen. It is also in the Out-of-competition section of the WFF.

Villa Amalia (France), may not be Benoît Jacquot’s best film, but is a very credible entry in the HC section. It features yet another brilliant performance by Isabelle Huppert, and, after a harrowing opening, it documents the picturesque flight of an aggrieved woman to a remote Italian island, in attempting to obliterate her past. The film was in competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary festival.

Lille Soldat (Little Soldier) directed by Annette K. Olesen (Denmark) is our 4th and final HC selection. I am picking this film based on my experience with Ms Olesen’s earlier work, including her first feature, Minor Mishaps (2002) which received a brief, unattended commercial run in Montreal, and, which struck me as being exactly the kind of realist “no-style” film that should be representative of the Danish, Dogme movement. Continuing the tradition set by her other films, Little Soldier won an award at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

Bist (Twenty), directed by Abdolreza Kahani (Iran) won the Special Jury Prize at Karlovy Vary. Although it begins very depressingly, this film gradually emerges as being a relatively optimistic view of class and gender relations in the contemporary Iranian workplace. Somewhat reminiscent of Bahman Famanara’s films, Bist is showing in the large, “Focus on World Cinema/Regards sur les cinemas du monde” section (REG).

Laskar Pelangi (The Rainbow Troops), Riri Riza (Indonesia) is my 2nd choice in REG. We don’t get to see very many films from Indonesia in Montreal, and this one showed in the Berlin Panorama and won the Signis Award at this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival.

The Bend, a first fiction feature by Jennifer Kierans, is my Canadian film pick this year (and 3rd and final selection in the World Cinema section). Ms Kierans has a great track record as a short filmmaker, and, we’re hoping that The Bend lives up to its promise. Interestingly, more than 40 of the feature films at this year’s WFF are directed by women, approximately 20%. We don’t think that festival president Serge Losique, or the “Directrice générale” Danièle Cauchard are exacyly “feminist” but, something unrecognized this year and last, is the inclusion of so many female directors. Well done!

Dia Dokutâ (Dear Doctor), Nishikawa Miwa (Japan) is the lone choice from the main, World Competition. Both of the Japanese entries this year seem interesting from their catalogue descriptions. And we can only assume that after winning last year, with Departures, the Japanese would not want to put on a lesser show this year. Nishikawa is yet another female director, and I’m counting on her to put on a good show.

Los Canallas (Riff Raff), Cristina Franco, Jorge Alejandro Fegan, Diego Coral López, Nataly Valencia (Ecuador), will be my risky choice of film in the First Films World Competition, if for no other reason than it is co-directed by four film students (at INCINE in Quito). The catalogue description of the plot makes it seem very convoluted—could it be that all four young directors worked independently?—but, it could turn out to be a very interesting experiment. Also, two directors are male, and two female (a good gender balance). And, I wanted to include at least one film from Latin America, a region which always produces one or two nice surprises. Our final choice should fit the bill.

Garapa, José Padilha (Brazil), my last choice, and the only film in the Documentary section, is unlikely to be the least of the choices. Indeed, I am predicting that some of the very best work this year might be found under the heading “Documentaries of the World.” Padilha made the great Bus 174 (2002), and the trustworthy critic, Amy Taubin has this to say about Garapa in the latest issue of Film Comment: “And then, in a class of its own [at the Tribeca film festival] there was José Padilha’s Garapa, a documentary that depicts the day-to-day struggle against starvation by three families living in northeastern Brazil who survive on a government allowance of $50 a month. Garapa is more than a great film—it makes almost all other films seem beside the point.” (Peter Rist)

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SP Terror 2009
June 25, 2009 to July 02, 2009


São Paulo will host its first International Fantasy Festival

SP Terror –International Fantastic Film Festival 25th June – 02 July

The programme includes over 40 titles most as Premiere in Brazil.

The Programme consists of two Competitive sections, Official International and Iberoamerican, a non competitive section of short films and Special Section showcasing films from the most sublime to the most ridiculous genre bending and cult classics.

Taking residence at the prestigious Reserva Cultural Cinema, at the Avenida Paulista, Sao Paulo’s student, financial and touristic epicenter, SP TERROR is set to become, according to Director Betina Goldman, a mark in the city’s calendar.

The International Official Section includes Brazilian premieres such the controversial French high art Eden Log (dir: Frank Vestilel), and Humains ( dir: Jacques Olivier-Molon and Pierre Olivier-Thevenin ) the British Lesbian Vampire Killers (dir: Phil Claydon) The Descendents (dir Jorge Olguin) regarded as the enfant terrible of Chilean cinema, the American independents Strange Girls (dir Rona Marks) and Dead Girl (Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel), the Japanese Yoroi Samurai Zombie , (dir.: Tak Sakaguchi).
Other highlights include the most awarded genre film of recent times the Swedish Let The Right One In (dir Tomas Alfredson) and an eclectic programme, amongst these Sex Galaxy and Pervert both by (dir Mike Davis) and Big Man of Japan (Dir (dir.: Hitoshi Matsumoto), the Argentian genre bending dark psychological horror The Owner and the hilarious splatter comedy 36 Steps (dir Adrian Garcia Bogliano). Brazilian titles competing in the Iberoamerican section include the already internationally awarded Mud Zombie (dir Rodrigo Aragao), Brazil’s first eco zombie film (Best New Director Chile Rojo Sangre, Best Film Audience award Rojo Sangre Buenos Aires), and Fim da Picada (dir Christian Saghaard).

The Jury will be presided by the Iconic Master of Horror Mojica Marins and Festival judges among the most representative local luminaries film critics and filmmakers, including Dennison Ramalho, Erico Borgo e Leopoldo Tauffenbach.

“Cinema is the most perfect medium for the Fantastic, and Fantastic Cinema appeals to a wide audience who enjoy its sub genres – supernatural, horror, sci fi, zombie, vampire, action hero, psycho thriller,” confirms Festival Director. SP Terror’s plan is to create an eclectic window from the sublime to trash and splatter. “The experience of the Fantastic in the Cinema, particularly horror, is a kind of a cathartic nervous experience,” explains Betina Goldman. “In the most important international film festivals such as Sitges, Brussels (BIFFF) , Imagine (Amsterdam), festivals which have inspired us, is frequent to see the audience reacting to the most horrific scenes laughing,’’ says Betina Goldman.

“We believe , she continues , that SP TERROR comes at the right time to Sao Paulo, the city has a high percentage of young people, an urban cosmopolitan population, who enjoy fantastic cinema, and horror as amusement and not as a vehicle for propagation of violence. Whereas in the 60’s young people were countercurrent through radical politics today the young and older enjoy horror cinema a cultural transgression.”

SP TERROR is being organized by Veras Imaginario a Brazilian arm of ONE EYED FILMS a UK based sales agency in partnership with ROCK COMUNICAÇÃO, a Sao Paulo based promotional marketing company.

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Fantasia International Film Festival, July 9-27, 2009 Preview
June 03, 2009 to July 30, 2009


The Fantasia International Film Festival will be upon us soon (July 9-27, extended to the 30th) with a full plate of succulent morsels for the new and faithful fans of this ever growing (in size and importance) international genre festival. One of the many invited guests this year is the New York based filmmaker Buddy Giovinazzo. Giovinazzo is best known to horror fans for his low budget cult favorite Combat Shock (aka American Nightmare), a searing, gritty urban study of an ex-Vietnam’s psychic meltdown. Accurately described by Giovinazzo as a “cross between Erasherhead [the domestic setting, the surreal baby] and Taxi Driver [the New York/Staten Island setting, the depiction of urban low-life, through poverty, drugs, prostitution, violence]” Combat Shock is a 1986 film that perfectly captures the social horror ambience of American horror films of the 1970s, lauded, referenced, and invoked by contemporary directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth and Alexandre Aja. As a treat, director Giovinazzo will be bringing his personal uncut 16mm print of Combat Shock to screen at Fantasia. This is a rare, not to be missed event. Giovinazzo has directed three other feature films to date, No Way Home (1996), The Unscarred (1999), and his latest film, Life is Hot in Crackdown (2009), based on his own same titled 1993 collection of short stories. The latter will also be screened (in its uncut version, which contains an important early scene cut from the US release print) during this mini-Giovinazzo retrospective.

Life is Hot in Crackdown revisits the urban squalor of Combat Shock and concentrates on the interconnected lives of four sets of characters touched in varying ways by the cycle of drugs, poverty and violence (an example of what scholar David Bordwell has christened ‘network narratives’). Crackdown eschews the bouts of surreal and graphic violence of Combat Shock in favor of a more realistic style, with a stronger script and an impressive ensemble cast. The interconnecting sets of characters include 1) Manny (Victor Rasuk), a hard working Latino who works two jobs, a late shift in a dangerous all night convenience store and a security guard in a rundown, drug-infested Welfare hotel, where he lives with his wife, Concetta (Shannyn Sassomon), and their sick infant; 2) Willy (Ridge Canipe), a ten years old boy, who also lives in the same Welfare hotel with his younger sister and their drug-addicted mother (Illeana Douglas) and her violent boyfriend (Edoardo Ballerini); 3) an oddball couple that brings touches of humor to the occasion, Marybeth (Kerry Washington), a pre-op transsexual working as a prostitute and her live-in lover/pimp, and somewhat dim-witted (Lenny from Of Mice and Men comes to mind) Benny (Desmond Harrington), and their ‘rich’ post-op transexual friend Ridge/Gabrielle; 4) and a young, angry African-American street gang member Romeo (Evan Ross), living with his older sister and ill mother. One of the strengths of Crackdown is the writing, which makes heroes out of the sort of characters portrayed as villains in mainstream cinema. Giovinazzo does not demonize his characters, or paint them as simplistic victims of their social environment. Their weaknesses humanize them and in the end we are touched by the ability of tarnished characters to rise above the squalor around them and produce genuine acts of compassion, sacrifice and love. In a sense there is more at stake in these mini-narratives than death, but the failure of humanity, and Giovinazzo loves his characters too much to let that happen.

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<center>Evan Ross as Romeo, holding gun</center>

There are two films with completely different tone and style receiving their world premieres at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival that should not be overlooked by fans looking to sink their teeth into something different: Must Love Death (2009, Andreas Schaap, Germany) and Neighbor (2009, Robert A. Masciantonio). Both feature one of the most recurring, identifiable and indeed iconic images in contemporary horror: a victim strapped to a chair (and tortured); both films also have moments of black humor, but in Neighbor the humor comes with much more of an edge.

Must Love Death is a film that gleefully embraces an identity crisis of grand proportions, successfully fusing two of the most incompatible genres imaginable, the venerable romantic comedy and the currently popular torture horror. While the mix seems improbable, it actually works because of a playful, infectious energy that muscles through some awkward opening moments to forge an original, quirky blend of reflexive banter and sincere characterisation. Although a German production, the film is filled with wall to wall American and Anglo-Saxon popular culture references (Star Trek, reality TV, rap music, country music, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead,The Shining, The Evil Dead), and an infectious (and surprisingly good) original music score in the tradition of American pop/country/rap idioms.

<div align=“center” class=“ic”>Love_Death.jpg border=0 width=300 height=169 </div>
<center>Killers Sean (Jeff Burrell) and Gary (Peter Farkas) and victim Norman</center>

While some horror fans may feel restless during the romantic comedy scenes (or, more likely, sheepish that they are enjoying them), they will feel in familiar territory during the very dark, blackly comic New Jersey/cabin scenes, where Norman spends most of the time tied to a chair being tortured or watching others being tortured by two of the silliest, most domestic (closeted gay?) psychos you will ever come across. The two killers interact like a married couple, with the slightly retarded Gary (Peter Farkas) feminized through his obsession with cleanliness, his apron and yellow latex gloves, and effeminate mannerisms. The sheer amount of physical pain and discomfort that poor Norman endures during the course of the film brings back memories of cinema’s greatest reluctant masochist, Ash Williams! A comparison that will no doubt put a small of the face of all horror fans. And don’t miss the hilarious end credit Star Trek parody.

Every year Fantasia has a film which seems to up the ante for visceral violence and contains one moment of violence which becomes hard to shake. Over ten years ago it was the wire brush to the lips scene in Doug Buck’s short Cutting Moments. Self-mutilation and paraphilia sent audiences scampering for their barf bags in 2006 with Neighborhood Watch. Last year the bar was raised by the self-mutilation in two shorts Snip (a man stands in front of a mirror and takes a straight razor to his whole body) and Electric Fence (a man possessed by the mind of a pedophile uses a pair of dull scissors to castrate himself). In the upcoming 2009 edition that film will probably be Neighbor, filled with enough squeamish violence to leave even the hardened Fantasia audience shaking their collective heads. Think Miike’s Audition meets Oshima’s Realm of the Senses.

In Neighbor a twenty-something, svelte, athletic dark-haired woman referred to as ‘the Girl’ (played with great gusto and energy by America Olivo) terrorizes a middle class suburban neighborhood, entering homes and torturing and killing its inhabitants. Her intensity and single-mindedness (to cause undue pain, ridicule, and death) recalls another recent female psycho, Béatrice Dalle’s the ‘woman’ in À l’intérieur. Neighbor revels in it’s character’s sadistic nihilism, without ever taking a moral stance (is that even necessary?) or rendering any pointed psychological or social explanation for the killer’s actions. However, I would not want to give you the wrong impression that the film is an unbearable watch. Director Masciantonio undercuts the film’s intensity by interjecting does of intertextuality, such as the recurring references the Girl makes to previous hostage/torture films, and references to many other horror films. And as dark and disturbing as the film is, there are also moments of near slapstick humor.

<div align=“center” class=“ic”>neighbor1.jpg border=0 width=300 height=169 </div>
<center>America Olivo as the ‘Girl’</center>

One of the more obvious elements that sets Neighbor apart from the slew of recent horror films featuring torture is that the perpetrator is female. It may seem that director Masciantonio has made his villain a woman for no other reason than the novelty and shock of having a female killer, but it also serves the story. As a woman, potential victims let their guard down or put themselves in a more vulnerable position because they don’t harbor (consciously or unconsciously) any fears toward an attractive woman and hence do not see her as a potential risk or threat. Along with his character’s, director Masciantonio plays his audience like a violin, performing a perfect narrative slippage from the killer’s relentless sadism, to the psychological effects of her kidnapping and torture on the traumatized victim, and then back to the killer’s gut wrenching violence. Masciantonio even gives us a scene of the Girl taking a shower to wash her victim’s blood off her body, which plays on the typical scene of the victimized (usually) woman who takes a shower to cleanse or purify herself (usually from a rape, an attack, or a violent encounter). But there is no such purification here. You’ll have to take your own shower at home after watching this one.

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Eisenstein on the Audiovisual
April 20, 2009 to June 30, 2009


Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema
by Robert Robertson
I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2009, p. 239

It has been a good week for Offscreen contributors. Only yesterday I posted notice of a new book by Roberto Curti, and a day later I receive a brand new book by another long-time Offscreen contributor, Robert Robertson, who has just published a new book of illuminating research and scholarship on the ideas in and around Sergei Eisenstein’s sound-music-image (audiovisual) montage theories. As a filmmaker and composer himself, Robertson brings to Eisenstein’s complex Chinese Box of ‘facets’ the right blend of theoretical and practical knowledge (as Robertson writes, when studying Eisenstein you soon notice that “this facet inter-reflects with other facets, which in turn relate organically to other aspects of his achievements”). Offscreen is especially proud of this book because of the tiny (and I stress tiny) role we have played in its development, having published several essays (six in fact) dating back to 2005 which bore the fruit of Robertson’s research in this area (and Robertson gives Offscreen a gracious notice in the Acknowledgements section). The bulk of Robertson’s ongoing research (since 1977) on Eisenstein is broken up into four major chapters in the book: 1. Audiovisual Counterpoint 2. Organic Unity 3. Nonindifferent Nature 4. Synaesthesia. If you do a ‘keyword’ search on Offscreen on Sergei Eisenstein you will come up with the six essays, and if you read them you will get a flavor of Robertson’s book (and its breadth and scope, covering Eisenstein’s affinities with architecture, music, philosophy, religion, the Occult, and literature). Offscreen will be publishing a review of Robertson’s book by Randolph Jordan in an upcoming issues. Please stay tuned for it.

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Demons and Gods: God, the Devil and Religion in the American Horror Film
April 18, 2009 to May 31, 2009


Demoni e dei. Dio, il diavolo, la religione nel cinema horror americano
(Demons and Gods: God, the Devil, and Religion in the American Horror Film)
by Roberto Curti
Lindau Publishers, 2009, 514 p.

This is becoming a bit of a habit (although a pleasurable one), the announcement of yet another new book by the prolific Offscreen contributor Roberto Curti. This time around Curti has tackled a subject which is potentially intimidating in scope: religion in the American horror film; but Curti is more than up to the challenge, covering American cinema from the 1920s to films as recent as The Village, 2004, I Am Legend, 2007, Diary of the Dead, 2007, and Cloverfield, 2008. Curti’s approach is thematic rather than strictly historical, grouping films together according to broadly based parameters that stem from both conventional religious thought (the Bible, the Apocalypse, the Church, the Devil, religious ritual, eschatology, etc.) and how social and political constructs are influenced by Christian thought, or reflect particular emerging or changing attitudes toward religion (race, gender, the family, cults, Reaganism, 9/11). Curti’s book (albeit written in Italian) makes a perfect companion piece to another recent book on the same subject (though Cowan’s book is international in scope), Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen by Douglas E. Cowan (2008). Like Cowan, Curti takes his subject seriously, rendering a constructive analysis to the role of horror cinema in helping us understand and give form to humanity’s horrors, fears, frailties, hopes, and weaknesses.

“Trasponendo in immagini l’esistenza del male nel mondo, fisico o metafisico, il cinema dell’orrore mette in scena le possibilita spettacolari e distruttive del dolore e della sofferenza: a finisce per interrogarsi sul rapporto tra finito e trascendente” (p. 23)

“Translating into images the existence of evil in the world, physical or metaphysical, the cinema of horror gives life to the spectacular and destructive possibilities of pain and suffering, and ultimately questioning the relationship between the finite and the transcendent.”

<div align=“left” class=“ic”>curti_demons.jpg border=0 width=250 height=373 </div>

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Acadiana Film Festival
April 16, 2009 to April 19, 2009


Acadiana Film Festival (Running from April 16 to April 19)

Many of us enjoy films about buddies, romance, space aliens, and even about various forms of social transgressions (relationships others disapprove of, people who break laws for money or sex), but we do not always think of films as art. However, it is true that films can express unique perspectives and change the way that we see and think about the world, some of the fundamental goals of art. It is an added pleasure to see the concerns of our own lives in films, and that is something offered to Louisiana residents by the Acadiana Film Festival. “Our line up is great this year. We have so many feature films, shorts, documentaries, panels, workshops, parties, networking opportunities,” answered festival director Jana Godshall, when asked by this writer about the festival, occurring in Lafayette from April 16th through April 19th. It is a festival with attractions for the novice as well as the expert, and can be expected to appeal to “anyone who enjoys independent cinema as we have tons of free screenings.”

The Acadiana Film Festival has events scheduled at different area locations and it will begin on Thursday, April 16, with an afternoon film editing seminar at Lite (537 Cajundome Blvd.) and an evening premier, at the Grand 14 theater, of Alex Holdridge’s film In Search of a Midnight Kiss, about a young man’s chaotic New Year’s Eve spent with a woman he met through the online advertising site Craigslist. Other film subjects include rural Mardi Gras, novelists Kate Chopin and James Lee Burke, the Creole heritage, Louisiana plate lunch houses, coastal land loss, and hurricane Katrina. There are full-length feature films and short films, films of fiction and of fact, and the festival includes instructive workshops on documentary filmmaking and on acting, as well as on sound recording/editing and marketing film projects. There will be—on April 18th—a screening of University of Louisiana students’ short films, too. One of the last festival events will be a zydeco brunch and awards ceremony recognizing a filmmaker of great impact, and named will be the best feature film and best documentary, among other award categories.

One of the goals of the festival is to support current efforts to develop a lasting film industry in Louisiana. In an e-mail exchange with this writer, festival director Jana Godshall stated, “Right now, many filmmakers are traveling to Louisiana to take advantage of our tax incentives…they’re staying in our hotels, but we want to help educate and offer the tools so we can have filmmakers staying in our homes.” It has been impressive just how many film productions already take place in Louisiana. The best known film shot in Louisiana these days is The Mysterious Case of Benjamin Button, but some of the other recent films that have been made here are Cadillac Records, Jumper, Soul Men, W, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, In the Electric Mist, The Great Debaters, Déjà Vu, Pride, and All the King’s Men. Although the film Ray was shot in Louisiana, the film’s storyline settings were places such as Chicago and Atlanta, proof of Louisiana’s versatility as a location. (The Acadiana Film Festival will include location tours for interested attendees.) It has been reported that more than eighty projects were filmed in Louisiana in 2008 alone. The website for the Louisiana Office of Film and Television declares, “Since 2002, when the first tax credits were introduced, the incentives have generated more than $2 billion in new revenue and spurred creation of thousands of high-wage jobs, state-of-the-art infrastructure development and new business opportunities.” Will it be possible, as Godshall suggests, for Louisiana to have an “indigenous” film industry?

If one considers the commitment of festival director Jana Godshall and festival coordinator Julie Bordelon, the answer is yes. Says Godshall, “This is a year-round job. Julie Bordelon and myself eat, sleep and drink the film festival. It’s more than a job for us. It’s a mission. It’s something that we want those in the state to take advantage of. This is why we bend over backwards so we can offer free workshops, panels, seminars.” If one considers the many student films in the Acadiana Film Festival, the answer is Yes, there will be an indigenous Louisiana film industry. If one considers Louisiana natives, such as Susan Labry, an actress, singer, and film community activist, who gain experience in film and share that experience with others the answer is yes. Susan Labry had speaking parts in films such as Hood Life and Hearts of Men and worked as an extra in Walk the Line and Monster’s Ball. Months ago, I asked Labry about “film in Louisiana” and she sent me much material, particularly information on groups (Louisiana Produces Meet-up, Baton Rouge Film and Music Meet-up) interested in the development of the Louisiana film industry. Susan Labry declared, “I would like to see more professionalism in the film industry. I want to see our culture preserved and maintained and respect for one another’s cultures as we are a diverse culture and that is what makes it interesting.”

For those who feel the same way, they can begin by viewing the schedule for Lafayette’s Acadiana Film Festival and attending films there they might see nowhere else, films that reflect some of the events and issues of their own lives and heritage. The 56-minute documentary on Mardi Gras, Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler, screens April 17th, Friday morning, at the Natural History Museum on Jefferson Street; and the James Lee Burke documentary, directed by Frederic Le Clair and Jacques Levy, screens Friday at Cite Des Arts on Vine Street, in the early evening; and there’s much more. (Search online: Acadiana Film Festival.) Film enthusiasts can further cultivate their knowledge by looking for the print publication Louisiana Film and Video, and film critic Alex Kent’s excellent blog Louisiana Movies. (Daniel Garrett)

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Poe's 200th Birthday
December 31, 2008 to January 20, 2009


As part of the world wide celebration of Edgar Allan Poe’s 200th birthday writer director Brent Fidler is planning an innovative event: he will have the world broadcasting premiere of his Poe feature film, Poe: The Last Days of the Raven online, Monday, January 19. Details are available on the film’s official website and in the media release. The film screened at the 2008 Montreal World Film Festival, where technical delays did not dampen the spirit of the director, and a sizeable amount of the audience remained during the long delay to watch Fidler’s unique dramatization of a part of Poe’s life. Fidler, who stars as Poe, blends autobiography and fiction into a reflexive (theatre-within-a-film) account of the final days of Poe.

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Secret Sunshine Screening
December 15, 2008 to January 18, 2009


“You are invited to a special (free) Christmas/holiday screening of the multiple award winning Korean film, MILYANG (Secret Sunshine, 2007) directed by Lee Chang-dong (Green Fish, Peppermint Candy, Oasis), which won the Best Actress prize at Cannes last year for Jeon Do-yeon, and which has never been released in Canada. (It only screened once, here, earlier this year at the Cinematheque.) This is a rare opportunity to watch the best-reviewed Korean film of the last three years. The 35mm print comes to us courtesy of the distributor CJ Entertainment and Mijeong Lee (of FanTasia and CineAsie).”

The Place: Webster Library building, LB-125, The Cinéma De Sève
The Time: 7:00pm, Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Jingle Bells, Peter Rist, The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema

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The 8th International School of Sound Symposium
December 08, 2008 to April 18, 2009


THE SCHOOL OF SOUND: Exploring the art of sound with the moving image
15 – 18 April 2009
Southbank Centre, London

“The School of Sound presents a stimulating and provocative series of master classes by practitioners, artists and academics on the creative use of sound with image. Directors, sound designers, composers, editors and theorists working at the highest levels of film, the arts and media show us the soundtrack from unexpected perspectives. They reveal the methods, theories and creative thinking that lie behind the most effective uses of sound and music. If you work in film, television, commercials, radio or multimedia – this event will convince you of the extraordinary potential of the soundtrack.

We have devised a programme that is as useful for the director, screenwriter or artist as it is for the sound designer and composer. Sound in storytelling, sonic environments, human sound perception – the topics range from the practical to the aesthetic to the abstract during these intense four-day meetings.

The April programme highlights the use of sound in documentary, animation and feature productions. It covers both narrative and experimental work, investigating the connections between sound, music and images. But, key to each presentation is an awareness of the subtle process of listening.

In its previous editions, the SOS has attracted delegates from over 25 countries. Join us for our eighth event in 2009. At the SOS you will not learn about hardware or software. But we can introduce you to the ideas of creators working at the cutting edge of sound production and inspire you to say, “I never thought of working that way.” “

Invited speakers
ROGER CRITTENDEN
Drama editor, former Head of the MA Programme at the NFTS and author of Fine Cuts: The Art of European Film Editing

DANIEL DESHAYS
Sound Designer and Music Producer for film, radio, dance and theatre, collaborating with Chantal Akerman, Agnes Jaoui and Philippe Garrel

MICHAEL GRIGSBY
British documentary filmmaker who began with the 1950s Free Cinema movement, continued at Granada TV and continues today (Before the Monsoon, The Time of Our Lives, Rehearsals)

PAT JACKSON
Features Sound Designer (Jarhead, The English Patient,The Talented Mr. Ripley) and Film Editor

GIDEON KOPPEL
Filmmaker, artist and lecturer whose work spans installation, commercials and documentary (Sleep Furiously)

KIM LONGINOTTO
Documentary filmmaker (Divorce Iranian Style, The Day I Will Never Forget, Sisters In Law)

STEVE MUNRO
Film Sound Designer known for his longtime collaboration with Atom Egoyan

DAVID McALPINE
Professor of Auditory Neuroscience and Director of the Ear Institute at University
College London

PIERS PLOWRIGHT
Radio features producer

NITIN SAWHNEY
A songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Sawhney composes and performs across music, DJ-ing, film, videogames, dance, theatre and the concert hall

PHIL SOLOMON
Avant-garde filmmaker, video and installation artist

AKIO SUZUKI
The unique Japanese sound artist whose performances and installations explore the process of listening

HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP
Composer, radio artist and sound ecologist

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Cinema Abattori: Rip in Pieces USA & Sexualities/Frontieres (December 11)
December 07, 2008 to December 13, 2008


Presents: Rip in Pieces USA & Sexualities/Frontieres. Thursday December 11, 2008, 9pm at (5$) at L’Envers – 185 Van Horne (Montréal, QC, Canada)

Rip in Pieces USA is a work in progress by Dominic Gagnon, Qc, 2008, 69 min:

“I was watching video on the Internet and I noticed that certain homemade clips were flagged for their content and quickly disappearing from free hosting sites. I started to save and edit them in a capsule format. Working in a gray zone about copyright, I nevertheless fulfill the authors’ will to contextualize their situation by grouping their videos together and then diffuse / preserve their messages.” –DG

when this thing goes down
and the crack-down happens
all this information that is on the internet
all these documentations… not going to be there anymore, man
they are going to cut off the main frame
delete all this information
that’s it
you’re not going to know anything

-Preceded by Sexualities/Frontieres, a program of short films:

Dead Man II: Return of the dead man (Aryan Kaganof, Netherlands, 1994, 25min)

J. (Solomon Nagler & Alexandre Larose, Canada, 2008, 7min)

Nymph (Ken Jacobs, USA, 2007, 3min)

Antékid (Serge de Cotret, Québec, 2008, 6min)

The sister and the priest (Istvan Kantor, Hungary, 1998, 11min)

Day’s Night (Catherine Corringer, France, 2005, 18min)

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Il Mio Nome È Nessuno
December 04, 2008 to January 07, 2009


Frequent Offscreen contributor Roberto Curti has added another intriguing book to his lengthening bibliography, with an excellent critical survey of the works of Tonino Valerii, entitled Il Mio Nome È Nessuno: Lo Spaghetti Western Secondo Tonino Valerii (My Name is Nobody: The Spaghetti Western According to Tonino Valerii. The book’s title would suggest that Curti deals only with Valerii’s five (out of his fourteen feature films) westerns: Per il gusto di uccidere/For the Taste of Killing, 1966, I Giorni dell’ira/Blood and Grit, 1967, Il Prezzo del potere/The Price of Power, 1969, Una Ragione per vicere e una per morire/A Reason to Live and a Reason to Die, 1972 and his most well known work, Il Mio Nome è Nessuno/My Name is Nobody. However, Curti spends an equal amount of time on Valerii’s other varied works, including his single giallo, Mio caro assassino/My Dear Killer, 1972, his dark romance La ragazza di nome Giulio/A Girl Called Jules, 1970,, and his crime films Vai Gorilla, 1976, The Sicilian Connection, 1987, and Sahara Cross, 1977, the latter, as Curti discusses on pages 74 to 78, being one of the first Italian films to extensively use the Steadicam. Curti feels that Valerii is underestimated as a director and argues convincingly for a re-evaluation of Valerii’s position within the landscape of popular Italian cinema. To this end, one of the goals of Curti’s book is to rescue Valerii from under the shadow of Sergio Leone, who produced his most popular film, My Name is Nobody. Curti writes:

“I temi preferiti da Valerii non sono pero l’epopea della Frontiera, il mito del progresso o la necessità di “stampare la leggenda”: al centro dell’attenzione c’è l’uomo, non l’icona leoniana dello “straniero senza nome”. Gli antieroi western del regista –con l’importante, significativa eccezione di Nessuno– sono outsiders tormentati e irrequieti, più vicini ai personaggii interpretrati da James Stewart nei western di Anthony Mann, segnati da conflitti interiori non meno laceranti di quelli a fuoco che punteggiano il loro cammino” (p. 15).

“Valerii’s preferred themes are not the Epic West, the myth of progress, or the classic ‘printing of the legend.’ At its center is man, but not Leone’s mythic ‘Man with no Name.’ His western antiheroes –with the significant exception of Nobody– are outsiders, tormented and restless, more in common with the characters played by James Stewart in the westerns of Anthony Mann, marked by interior conflicts which are no less lacerating than the fires that dot their path.”

<div align=“center” class=“ic”>Tonino_Valerii_Curti.jpg border=0 width=200 height=291 </div>

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Mapping Cinematographic Territories: A Cybercartographic Atlas of Canadian Cinema
November 25, 2008 to December 05, 2008


GPE Departmental Seminar Series Presents on Friday December 5th, 2008 at 11 am in H1252:

“The overall goal of this atlas is to better understand the influence of cinema in the construction and dissemination of geographic identities. To reach this goal, this atlas maps Canadian cinematographic territories, including the territories of film production (e.g. shooting location), of film audience (e.g. revenues of films and socio-demographic profiles), and of film action. Simultaneously, this atlas serves as a laboratory to explore new forms of cartographic techniques inspired by cinema, including jump cut framing, and audio-visual mapping.”

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Time and Place: The Films of Ernie Gehr
October 28, 2008 to October 01, 2008


In collaboration with the Cinémathèque québécoise, the Web Journal Hors champ will be presenting a cycle of films by New York experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr on the evenings of Octover 30, 31, and November 1, 2008: a rare occasion to discover the work of a true pioneer of the American Avant-Garde. Ernie Gehr will be in Montreal to present the three evenings of screenings (9 16mm gems) and a « Master Class » (in English) on the relationship between experimental cinema and early cinema.

Ernie Gehr and André Habib (organizer of the event and co-editor of Hors champ) will be also available for interviews.

“Ernie Gehr is, alongside Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow and Peter Kubelka, one of the pillars of experimental cinema. His films, and more recently his video and installation works, reveal a fascination for urban landscapes, sites of memory (Passage, Signal-Germany on the Air), perspective and the limits of perception (Serene Velocity), as well as optic toys (Cotton Candy), the origins of cinema (Eureka) or simply the tracing of light on film (Wait, Mirage). The conceptual rigor and the visual power of his films seem to operate a reduction of cinema to its fundamental elements, as if starting anew, each time, and rediscovering the destabilizing shock of the origins of cinema as well as its radical transformation of the visible. His films, that we could wrongly consider “minimalist”, are on the contrary the site of profound interior experiences. Made up of light, space, duration, movement, Ernie Gehr’s films also bare a documentary trace, always at the precise intersection of a specific time and place, whether it be a street in New York in 1971 (Shift), of San Francisco at the turn of the XXth Century (Eureka) or in the early 90’s (Side/Walk/Shuttle), or of Berlin in 1989, right before the fall of the Wall (This Side of Paradise). Although it is quoted in all the anthologies of avant-garde cinema, has been regularly written about by the most important scholars (Sitney, Gunning, Skoller, Michelsson, etc.) and praised by critics and film historians, the films of Ernie Gehr are proverbially hard to see. Hors champ has tried to modestly remedy this situation, by presenting, for the first time in Montreal, some essential “moments” of his vast filmography. Ernie Gehr will be in Montreal to present to programs and take part in a ‘Master Class.” (Double Negative Collective)

Hors champ receives the support of the Canada Arts Council and the Montreal Arts Council. This specific programme was made possible thanks to a contribution by the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema of Concordia University, as well as the Département d’Histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques of the Université de Montréal.

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Madison Horror Film Festival
October 20, 2008 to October 25, 2008


One day (October 25, 2008) horror film festival taking place at Madison, Wisconsin.

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FNC 2008 –Mid-Festival Round-Up
October 14, 2008 to October 31, 2008


It’s autumn in Montreal, and with it comes so many of my favourite things in life, not the least of which being the Festival de Nouveau Cinema (October 8-19, 2008). Locals know that this is the city’s premiere showcase for the best in international cinema across all genres and styles, and this year has not disappointed. Beginning with a bang, the first film I saw was Steve McQueen’s Hunger, plunging viewers into the plight of imprisoned IRA terrorists struggling against a violent administration to have their rights as political activists recognized within the penitentiary system. Rather than a moralizing tale seeking to justify any particular side of the conflict, the film unfolds as a brutal exercise in cause and effect. We live in the squalor of the feces infested cells of inmates refusing to clean themselves or their quarters, only to then witness their forced bathing at the hands of the prison guards. When the inmates destroy their few bits of furniture in a contained riot, the riot squad is called in to administer beatings to each and every IRA inmate as they get tossed down a corridor lined with shielded club-toting cops. Finally, Bobby Sands initiates a hunger strike, and in a remarkable shift in tone the final third of the film follows him to the hospital ward as he gently fades to nothingness. Difficult though it may sound, the film is brilliantly executed, and is well deserving of the Camera D’Or it won at Cannes this year.

Things lightened up a bit the following day with the Bruce Connor retrospective featuring 11 films by the acclaimed avant-garde filmmaker known best for his repurposing of appropriated material as epitomized by A Movie and Report. Indeed, seeing these films as they were meant to be seen was a rare treat, and kicked off what is turning out to be a rich festival for lovers of found footage, including Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, Luc Bourdon’s La Memoire des Anges, and various short films – including Belgian filmmaker Nicolas Provost’s Gravity exploring Hollywood kissing scenes through a new lens; and Fontage, a notable entry from Mike Hoolboom and Fred Pilon continuing in Hoolboom’s tradition of processing his identity through the processing of exposed film stock. But for me, the highlights of the Connor programme were his later films. Looking for Mushrooms and Easter Morning are both relatively recent re-workings of material Connor shot himself in the 60s, and both are structured as series of still images passing quickly enough to suggest movement without succumbing to the illusion of motion that begins somewhere around 16 frames per second. Both set to the music of Terry Riley, these films gesture in a psychedelic direction fostered by his interest in Peyote at the time the images were captured. Easter Monday, finished just before he died this year, is a probing journey through an unrecognizable San Francisco consisting of abstracted bits of garden flowers and other corners of experience ordinarily neglected by the average passers-by. With their careful attention to the relationships between the formal qualities of all the fragments brought together here, Mushrooms and Monday demonstrates how Connor’s understanding of montage – demonstrated so wonderfully in his found footage films – can be applied to more personal material seeking to craft an experience of interiority rather than restructuring the world as projected through the media.

Though Connor’s San Francisco likely won’t end up in any tourist videos for its lack of recognizable landmarks, this year’s festival is a pleasure ground for lovers of city films that pay as much tribute to the world’s great urban centers as to whatever action might be taking place within them. The aforementioned Of Time and the City and La Memoire des Anges are loving film poems dedicated to London and Montreal respectively, constructed from archival materials featuring these two wonderful cities. Though I haven’t had the chance to see it yet, James Marsh’s Man on the Wire promises to be a similarly beautiful portrait of New York City in the 70s as captured by the team documenting Philippe Petit’s tight-rope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Nicolas Provost’s short film Plot Point is a methodical study of street-level security on the island of Manhattan. First capturing shots of various police and security guards around the Times Square area, the film builds increasing tension through editing strategies that points to a major event brewing, with creative use of dubbing to suggest communication between disparate factions. The film culminates in an epic parade of police vehicles streaming out of the central station towards a catastrophe that remains unspoken but one that 21st Century New Yorkers can sadly imagine all to well. As such, the film develops a portrait of the intensity of police presence on the streets of New York City as part of the daily routine of life on the island. And Tokyo is also well represented this year. Though you might not expect it from an anime film featuring a mini-donkey bent on disrupting a young couple’s budding romance, Tokyo Marble Chocolate from Japan’s famed IG studios turns out to be a wonderful homage to the unrepresentable city. Known for it’s unfathomable density and general lack of holistic coherence, Tokyo is here rendered almost quaint with a focus on parks and cafes in which the bulk of the action takes place. What is most striking is that the city takes on an air of definitive manageability through the grounding effect of Tokyo Tower, the central point where the narrative begins and ends and around which the story of two social misfits trying to find love revolves. Frequently visible in the background, the film maintains a consistent orientation with respect to the tower throughout. Because of the tower’s importance to the development of the plot, its omnipresence serves as a spatial device that drives the narrative forward while creating a sense of core for a city so often described as being without center. And so Tokyo becomes a place where people might find love and companionship within the context of urban sprawl, rather than a bewildering environment that fosters a fragmentation of experience and attendant deterioration of social relationships.

One of this year’s most anticipated films also features the legendary Japanese metropolis: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata. Known for his masterful contributions to the J-Horror phenomenon and a favourite son of Montreal’s Fantasia genre-film festival, this year his absence from Fantasia was keenly felt. After seeing the new film, it is clear that it wouldn’t have been as appropriate in a fantastical setting as previous outings like Cure or Séance, for here Kurosawa takes a couple steps back from the supernatural in order to focus on a family disintegrating at the hands of Japan’s social and economic difficulties. But make no mistake: there is real magic here, enough to warrant its inclusion as part of the Temps Zero programming by Fantasia alumnus Julien Fonfrede. The film sets up a family being pulled apart at the seams by a father’s job-loss, a mother’s increasing frustration with home-life, and children whose needs aren’t being met by their parents. Then about three-quarters of the way through, a bit of mayhem is injected which forces the family apart, only to bring them back together under slightly suspicious circumstances. Whatever one makes of the film’s ending, it is clear that Kurosawa’s downplay of the overtly supernatural here serves only to emphasize the strangeness that the cold reality of urban life can engender. Fans will recognize approaches to mise-en-scène, montage, and sound that are characteristic of Kurosawa’s previous work, set here a bit more simply than usual so that the richness of the film’s understatement might be elevated to a new level. And amidst all this the film manages an acute critique of certain contradictions inherent to Japanese culture as made manifest by recent engagement with the US on matters of foreign policy. Though I love his genre work, I was not at all disappointed by the turn Kurosawa has taken here. Great stuff.

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Much as I love city films, my pick of the festival is set far from any hint of civilization. I cannot overstate the level of my anticipation for Philippe Grandrieux’s Un Lac. His first two films, Sombre and La Vie Nouvelle – both of which have played this festival in the past – are amoung the strongest cinematic works of the past decade. Grandrieux has developed an aesthetic that is more genuine and visceral than can be said of most filmmakers, and the experience of his films leaves me breathless every time. Like Kurosawa, however, in the new film Grandrieux takes a step back from certain of his characteristic strategies. Where Kurosawa has toned down the supernatural elements he has become known for, here Grandrieux moves away from the intensity of corporeal violence that has been such a dominating force in his previous works. Those who find the breast roping and forced coiffure of his previous works difficult can here breath a sigh of relief without worrying that the director has lost his edge. While devoid of the urban environments that allowed for his signature use of incredible outbursts of nightclub sound, environments which fostered the festering misogyny at work in his last two films, here the forests of Lapland provide a subtlety that renders the simple act of chopping wood into an experience equally moving in its intensity as anything he’s achieved in the past. The film unfolds like an onion revealing an ever-increasing cast of characters, each bringing their own potential for agitation and violence to the table. Yet amazingly, the film withholds the eruptions of its predecessors while developing a remarkable tenderness that would be stripped of its effectiveness if presented outside of this environment. In this film Grandrieux proves that the good, the bad and the ugly don’t always need to be represented in equal measure in order to create the tone he has mastered across his three feature films. Un Lac is a real achievement, and if I had to make one recommendation for the festival’s final weekend it would be to get your ticket for Saturday’s screening of the film before it’s too late. I’ll be there again without question. (Randolph Jordan)

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Festival of Nouveau Cinema: Choice Picks
October 07, 2008 to October 19, 2008


With so many excellent films and programs on offer at the FNC (which runs from October 8-19) some guidance is always helpful to make best use of one’s time. With this in mind, here are some recommendations based on advance notice, intuition, or previous track records. One of my most eagerly anticipated films is Gomorra by Matteo Garrone. Gomorra is confirmation that one of Italy’s most trusted and popular 1970s genres, the gangster film, is back with a vengeance. These films, made during what was called “Anni di Piombo” (“years of lead”), reflected one of the most troubling and violent periods in recent Italian history, with both far-left and far-right political groups terrorizing urban centers with bombings, kidnappings, and murders. There have been many recent Italian films dealing with this period, roughly from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, including La Scorta (Ricky Tognazzi, 1993), Michele Soavi’s masterpiece Arrividerce Amore, Ciao, 2006 (which played at the FNC two years ago) and his made-for-television epic, Uno Bianca, 2000, Romanzo Criminale (2007, Michele Placido), I Cento Passi, 2000, La Meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth), 2003, and Sanguepazzo, 2008, the final three all directed by Marco Tullio Giordana. Gomarra deals with the mafia in Naples, and comes with great advance notice from other film festivals. I was impressed by Garrone’s earlier film L’Imbalsamatore (2002), which played at the Montreal World Film Festival, and I described as follows in my brief discussion of the film in my festival report of that year: “The Embalmer presents a vision of Italy far removed from tourist pamphlets: dark, tenebrous, foggy, overcast, lonely, and dreary are the tones of the day. Director Garrone’s use of architecture and space, the lonely beaches, block-styled project tenements, and desolate border towns, coupled with a restless camera, recalls the great Michelangelo Antonioni.” Another hotly awaited film with an Italian link is the Korean The Good, the Bad, the Weird by the director of the excellent J-horror A Tale of Two Sisters and Quiet Family, Kim Ji-Woon. Kim’s film is the second recent high profile Asian film to cast an admiring wink at popular Italian cinema, along with Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Django Western (the latter referencing Sergio Corbucci’s masterpiece Django and the former referencing, obviously, Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly). Italy is also involved in longtime FNC festival fave Wim Wenders’ return to his existentialist road-movie roots with Palermo Shooting. Fans of the avant-garde should not miss the special homage screening (October 10, 7:20pm) of the short films of Bruce Conner, one of the most important US found footage film artists. For those who appreciate technical challenges, the Brazilian Still Orangutans (Gustavo Spolidoro) should be worth a (long, stared) look, as it is described as a sequence shot of 81 minutes, recalling other single, real time long take films as The Russian Ark (2002, Alexander Sokurov), Time Code (2000, Mike Figgis), Rope (1948, Hitchcock), and Running Time (1997, Josh Becker). Terence Davies casts his reflective, poetic eye on his hometown of Liverpool, England in the documentary Of Time and the City. J-horror master and Fantasia Festival regular Kiyoshi Kurosawa turns up with a change of pace drama entitled Tokyo Sonata, which sounds closer to Ozu than Nakata. These are but a few choice selections from the bountiful programming at this year’s FNC. Happy hunting.

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Ken Ogata (1937-2008)
October 06, 2008 to December 01, 2008


Japanese actor Ken Ogata passed away on October 5, 2008, after battling with liver cancer. Ogata was a mainstay in Japanese cinema since the 1960s, working in both modern and period dramas and action films. Ogata worked with some of the most idiosyncratic Japanese directors of his time (Shohei Imamura, Takashi Ishii, Kaneto Shindo, Kinji Fukasaku, Kenji Misumi) also had a successful though limited crossover career working with international directors Paul Schrader (Mishima) and Peter Greenaway (Pillow Book).

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The Time Machine
September 25, 2008 to October 15, 2008


Festival grouping together films that in different ways reflect the omnipotence of time as a central element of cinema.

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Humbero Solas: 1941-2008
September 01, 2008 to October 31, 2008


One of the greatest Cuban directors of the post-revolution era passed away on September 17, 2008. Solas’s best known film, and perhaps masterpiece, was Lucia (1968), a tour de force, nearly three hour film divided into three stories covering important points in Cuban history: 1895, 1933, and 196?. Solas employs a different visual style for each section, leading some film critics to read the visual style as a reflection/commentary on the famous Solanas/Getino essay “Towards a Third Cinema.”

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Manny Farber (1917-2008)
August 18, 2008 to September 18, 2008


One of the greatest American film critics, known for his originality and eclectic interests, passed away on August 18, 2008, at age 91.

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Fantasia International Film Festival
July 03, 2008 to July 21, 2008


The irrepressible Fantasia International Film Festival returns for nearly three weeks (July 3-21, 2008) of varied genre programming, from action, horror, science fiction to fantasy, from Asia to Europe to North American.

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Palestinian Perspectives
May 13, 2008 to May 16, 2008


An evening (May 15) of Palestinian films, including Pasolini pa* Palestine, A Palestinian Journey, Sons of Eilaboun, and many others.

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One-Eyed Films
May 12, 2008 to June 30, 2008


Offscreen is a huge fan of the Brazilain horror maestro Jose Mojica Marins (better known as Coffin Joe), as witnessed by this in-depth interview published in 2005. Hence we would like to help promote One-Eyed Films and their effort to produce the first English language film starring Coffin Joe. Read the press release from Betina Goldman below:

Uk based ONE EYED FILMS and VERAS o IMAGINARIO recently set up a Brazilian production company and have signed an option to produce the first English language feature based on the infamous cult character Zé do Caixão (known in the English speaking world as Coffin Joe) created by the Brazilian iconic Director Mojica Marins.

Household name Director of over forty films during the 60’s and 70’s, and with a come back after 30 years in a Brazilian production of Embodiment of Evil, to be released by Fox in Brazil in 2008, Mojica Marins’ character Coffin Joe is a Latin American Horror legend with a committed legion of fans worldwide and celebrated by critics as one of the few auteurs of horror.

“As his agent for over ten years we have been able to witness the continuing fascination that Mojica Marins/Coffin Joe exerts over the international horror community” says Betina Goldman, ONE EYED FILMS’s MD. “The Cult Horror Collection has been sold to over twenty broadcast territories including IFC, Film4, SBS, CanalPlus, Cine Cinema, TPS and Universal Spain among others. We are in advance negotiations for a package of 9 titles for the USA.”

“The concept (working titled) The Bitter Garden is a loosely based script on the character, to introduce him to new audiences unfamiliar with the phenomenal Coffin Joe in a new contemporary arthouse twist.”

The Bitter Garden is to be produced in Brazil by VERAS O IMAGINARIO, and is seeking engaged and hands on co-producers in Canada/Spain to co-develop the project.

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Inflexions
May 09, 2008 to May 31, 2008


Launch of a new interdisciplinary webjournal whose goal is to “promote experimental practices combining research and creation in such a way as to foster symbiotic links between philosophical inquiry, technological innovation, artistic production, and social and political engagement.”

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Screening of Shahin Parhami's Faces
March 30, 2008 to April 02, 2008


The Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University

Invites you to a screening of FACES (2007), by Shahin Parhami, followed by a conversation with the director

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
3-5 PM
Morrice Hall
Room 023

FACES (100 min. Canada, Quebec, 2007) is an experimental documentary exploring the life and work in exile of 10 Iranian-Canadian artists as they represent themselves through art, performance, and monologues. This multi-layered documentary reflects on politics, pop-culture, history and the power of popular media as it crafts a new face for contemporary Iranian art and culture. FACES was premiered at Montreal World Film Festival and won the best feature film award at the Cinewest Experimental Film Festival 2007 (Sydney,
Australia).

Iranian-Canadian filmmaker SHAHIN PARHAMI was born in Shiraz, Iran. After his arrival in Canada in 1988, along with contributions of his poetry and essays to local Persian and English cultural/art journals, he pursued film studies and production, first at Ottawa’s Carleton University and later at Concordia University in Montreal. He has directed several award-winning short and feature films which have been screened in festivals, art galleries, and universities. From 1997 he worked on a trilogy: Nasoot (1997); Lahoot (1998); and Jabaroot (2003). The last part of the trilogy is a 60-minute poetic documentary on Iranian traditional music. His films have been selected by many prestigious international film festivals such as Montreal World Film Festival, Thessaloniki, Hot Docs, and Montreal International Festival of New Cinema.

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Cinefest
March 13, 2008 to March 16, 2008


A one-of-a-kind film festival that features silent and early sound films (mainly American) screened on (mostly) 16mm from morning until night. A real cinephiles mecca which shows rare and as yet unavailable films on video films. Also includes large dealers rooms featuring videos, dvds, books, posters, super 8 and 16mm film, equipment, etc.

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On Screen! A Celebration of Canadian Cinema
February 10, 2008 to March 16, 2008


“On Screen! is a documentary series that explores and celebrates the Canadian film industry’s most important cultural milestones. Each one-hour program showcases a quintessentially Canadian feature film and the work of the people who made it; artists and auteurs who blazed new paths, opened doors and set new standards for a modern generation of story tellers yet to come. Along with clips from the films, each episode features interviews with members of the cast, crew, and nationally known critics, who reveal the behind-the-scenes trials of how each movie evolved from page to screen. Occasionally sad, sometimes hilarious, but always poignant, these are the stories that changed the face of Canadian film forever.”

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WJT Mitchell Lecture
January 10, 2008 to January 17, 2008


The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture is happy to invite you to its inaugural public lecture Thursday, 17 January 2008 at 19h00, in H-763 (1455 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec).

WJT Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and well know theorist of media and visual art, will present some of his recent work. His lecture is entitled “Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib.” A reception will follow.

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Télé-Utopie : Godard, Rohmer, Rossellini, Ruiz
January 09, 2008 to March 28, 2008


The following series has been programmed by Viva Paci (Université de Montréal) and Karine Boulanger (Cinémathèque Québécoise), with financial and grant assistance from The Italian Cultural Institute of Montréal, The René Malo Chair, the National Audiovisual Institute (INA), the online film journal Hors Champ and the Art History and Film Studies Department of University of Montreal. All proceedings (introductions, round table panels) are conducted in French.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008, 7PM: Mai en décembre (Godard en Abitibi), Julie Perron, Qué., 2000, + La Dernière Utopie : La télévision selon Rossellini, Jean-Louis Comolli, Fr., 2006. Introduced by Viva Paci (UdM) and Paul Tana UQAM)

Wednesday, January 16, 2008, 7PM: France Tour Détour Deux Enfants (episodes 1 to 4), Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville, Fr., 1979. Introduced by André Habib (UdM and online journal Hors Champ)

Wednesday, Janaury, 2008, 7PM: France Tour Détour Deux Enfants (episodes 5 to 8), Godard, Miéville, Fr., 1979

Friday, Janaury 25, 2008, 7PM: France Tour Détour Deux Enfants (episodes 9 to 12), Godard, Miéville, Fr., 1979

Wednesday, Janaury 30, 2008, 7PM: Petit Manuel d’histoire de France (part 1 and 2), Raúl Ruiz, Fr., 1979

Wednesday, February 6, 2008, 7PM: “Éric Rohmer et la télévision pédagogique, 1964-1965 », Les cabinets de physique: la vie de société au XVIIIe siècle; Les histoires extraordinaires d’Edgar Poe; Perceval ou le conte du Graal; Les “caractères” de La Bruyère

Friday, February 8, 2008, 7PM: Ville nouvelle (episodes 1 and 2), Rohmer, Fr., 1975

Wednesday, February 13, 2008, 7PM: Ville nouvelle (episodes 3 and 4), Rohmer, Fr., 1975

Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 7PM: Socrate, Roberto Rossellini, It.-Fr.-Esp., 1970. Introduced by Adriano Aprà (Fondation Rossellini et Università di Roma 2)

Thursday, February 28, 2008, 1PM: Round Table on Roberto Rossellini and television, with Adriano Aprà (Fondation Rossellini and Università di Roma 2), Elena Dagrada (Università di Milano), Stefano Roncoroni (director and independent researcher), Viva Paci (UdM) : Roberto Rossellini placed great hope in television as a medium to reflect and transform the world. This round table will be an occasion to discover these television works and discuss the elements which the project as a whole share: namely a didactic and encyclopedic approach to human history. Admission is free.

Thursday, February 28, 6:30pm: India Matri Bhumi, Rossellini, It.-Fr., 1959. Introduction by Elena Dagrada (Università di Milano)

Friday, February 29, 2008, 7PM: Blaise Pascal, Rossellini, Fr.-It., 1972. Introduction by Stefano Roncoroni (director and independent researcher, Roma)

Wednesday, March 5, 2008, 7PM: La Prise du pouvoir par Louis XIV, Rossellini, Fr., 1966

Wednesday, March 19, 2008, 7PM: Cartesio (Descartes), Rossellini, It., 1974

Friday, March 21, 2008, 8:30PM: The Age of the Medici: Cosimo de’ Medici, Rossellini, It., 1972

Saturday, March 22, 2008, 7PM: The Age of the Medici: The Power Of Cosimo, Rossellini, It., 1972

Friday, March 28, 2008, 8:30PM: The Age of Cosimo de’ Medici: Leon Battista Alberti, Humanist, Rossellini, It., 1972

Click here for an introductory essay on the program by Viva Paci and Karine Boulanger.

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Ferdinando Baldi (1917-2007)
November 12, 2007 to December 12, 2007


Italian director of many important popular genre films, Ferdinando Baldi, passed away on November 12 at the age of 90. Some of Baldi’s best works include the spaghetti western Texas, Addio (1966), starring Franco Nero, one of the many Django spin-offs, Viva Django (1968), and The Sicilian Connection (1972). One of his last ‘public’ appearances was as himself interviewed in the documentary Spaghetti West (2005).

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Music and the Moving Image III: May 30-June 1, 2008
November 12, 2007 to January 15, 2008


Conference at NYU, May 30 – June 1, 2008
Call for Papers

The third annual conference, Music and the Moving Image, encourages submissions from scholars and practitioners that explore the relationship between music and the entire universe of moving images (film, television, computer, video games, and interactive performance) through paper presentations, roundtables, and plenary sessions. This year live performance/screenings will be a featured part of the evening program. Streaming video versions of every presentation will be available only at NYU from May 30 – June 3, 2008.

Accepted papers will be considered for inclusion in the new peer-reviewed online journal Music and the Moving Image.

The Program Committee includes Macquarie Univ. faculty Rebecca Coyle (Reel Tracks: Australian Feature Film Music and Cultural Identities); NYU artist faculty Ira Newborn (The Naked Gun); NYU faculty Robert Rowe (Machine Musicianship); Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison faculty Jeff Smith (The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music); and coeditors of Music and the Moving Image, Gillian B. Anderson (Haexan; Pandora’s Box; Music for Silent Film 1892-1929: A Guide); and NYU faculty, Ron Sadoff (The Moon and the Son).

For more detailed information about last year’s conference, click on the link below.

The conference will run in conjunction with the NYU/ASCAP Film Scoring Workshop in Memory of Buddy Baker (May 16-23, 2008) and the NYU Song Writing Workshop [ May 27-30 ].

Abstracts or synopses of papers (250 words) should be submitted to Dr. Ron Sadoff, chair of the program committee, by no later than Jan. 14, 2008. For more information contact Dr. Ron Sadoff.

Ron Sadoff
New York University
35 West 4th St
Rm 777H
New York, NY, 10012

Conference fee (May 30 – June 1): $135.00, Students: $65.00, Housing Available.

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Maldoror Screening (2000)
September 28, 2007 to October 08, 2007


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.

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Hong Sang-soo Retrospective
September 05, 2007 to September 14, 2007


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.

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Sex and Violence 2nd Edition
July 31, 2007 to August 31, 2007


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.

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The Passing of Antonioni and Bergman: Cinema Loses Two Giants
July 30, 2007 to August 30, 2007


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.

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Tomoya Sato on DVD
July 27, 2007 to August 28, 2007


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).

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Rudolf Arnheim
June 14, 2007 to July 31, 2007


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.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Cannibal
June 13, 2007 to July 13, 2007


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.

<div align=“left” class=“ic”>cannibal1.jpg border=0 width=220 height=165 </div>

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.

<div align=“left” class=“ic”>cannibal2.jpg border=0 width=220 height=165 </div>

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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First Peoples' Festival
June 10, 2007 to June 21, 2007


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.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Eurofest Film Festival
May 25, 2007 to June 02, 2007


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.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Curtis Harrington: 1930-2007
May 08, 2007 to May 31, 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.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Befilm: The Underground Film festival
May 01, 2007 to May 05, 2007


“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.”

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Carte gris a Michael Snow: Carl Brown: Visual Alchemy / Ocular Alkahest
April 19, 2007 to June 02, 2007


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 min

To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror
Michael Snow, 1991, 53 min

Urban Fire
Carl Brown, 1982, 15 min

Wednesday 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 min

Wednesday May 9 at 7:30 pm

Brownsnow
Carl Brown, 1994, 134 min

The Living Room
Michael Snow, 2000, 21 min

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Bob Clark
April 05, 2007 to April 30, 2007


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 <cite>Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things</cite>, and then three successive minor masterpieces, <cite>Deranged</cite>, <cite>Deathdream</cite> and <cite>Black Christmas</cite>. 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, <cite>Murder by Decree</cite>, and one of the best holiday films, <cite>A Christmas Story</cite>.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Cinéma Abattoir
March 22, 2007 to March 24, 2007


March 23rd at Midnight
1571 Sanguinet St.

Program

<cite>Liar</cite> Anne Hanavan, US, 2006, 3 minutes

<cite>La Femme Phallique</cite> Frédérique Marleau et Serge de Cotret, Québec, 2007, 7 minutes

<cite>God’s Little Girl</cite> Mitch Davis, Québec, 2006, 16 minutes

<cite>Merzbow Beyond Snuff</cite> Aryan Kaganof, Japon / Afrique, 1997-2005, 22 minutes

<cite>Pandrogeny manifesto</cite> Dionysos Andronis et Aldo Lee, Grèce / France, 2005, 11 minute

<cite>Theocordis</cite> Serge de Cotret, Québec, 2007, 10 minutes

<cite>Western Sunburn</cite> 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)

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Nanni Moretti Retrospective
March 21, 2007 to March 31, 2007


A retrospective of Italian documentarist and fiction filmmaker Nanni Moretti, which includes his latest film <cite>The Caiman</cite>, a not-too-loosely based satire on the life of Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Re-politicization of Art From (the East of) Europe: Creativity and Resistance
March 09, 2007 to March 11, 2007


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.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Enthusiasm. Artists: Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska
February 08, 2007 to April 01, 2007


“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.”

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Carlo Ponti: 1912-2007
January 17, 2007 to February 20, 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 (<cite>Liv</cite>). Along the way Ponti produced a range of important art films and popular genre (filone in Italian) films. Highlights include <cite>Senza pietà</cite> (1948, Alberto Lattuada), <cite>Il Mulino del Po</cite> (1949, Lattuada), several films with Totò, <cite>La Strada</cite> (1954, Federico Fellini), <cite>Il Ferroviere</cite> (1956, Pietro Germi), <cite>Matrimonio all’italiana</cite> (1964, Vittorio De Sica), and such non-Italian films as <cite>Heller in Pink Tights</cite> (US, 1960, George Cukor, starring his wife Loren), <cite>Cléo de 5 à 7</cite> (France, 1961, Agnès Varda), <cite>Le Mépris</cite> (France, 1963, Jean-Luc Godard), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s American films, <cite>Blow-Up</cite> (1966), <cite>Zabriske Point</cite> (1970) and <cite>Professione: Reporter</cite> (1975).

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Hou Hsiao-hsien Retrospective
December 06, 2006 to December 21, 2006


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 <cite>Flowers of Shanghai</cite>/ 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 Québécoise

1980: <cite>Cute Girl</cite> (<cite>Jiushi liuliu de ta</cite>) [Dec 6; 20:45]
1981: <cite>Cheerful Wind</cite> (<cite>Feng er ti ta cai</cite>) [Dec 7; 20:30]
1982: <cite>The Green, Green Grass of Home</cite> (<cite>Zai na hepan qingcao qing</cite>) [Dec 8; 20:30]
1983: <cite>The Sandwich Man</cite> (“The Son’s Big Doll,” Erzi de Dawan’ou) [Dec 9; 19:00]
1983: <cite>The Boys of Fengkuei</cite> (<cite>Fengkuei-lai-te jen</cite>) [Fr. s.t.’s , Dec 9; 17:00, 14; 16:00]
1984: <cite>A Summer at Grandpa’s</cite> (<cite>Dongdong de jiaqi</cite>) [Dec 9; 21:00]
1985: <cite>A Time to Live and A Time To Die</cite> (<cite>Tong nien wang shi</cite>) [Fr. s.t.’s, 10; 19:00]
1986: <cite>Dust in the Wind</cite> (<cite>Lianlian fengchen</cite>) [Fr. s.t.’s, Dec 10; 17:00, Dec 21; 16:00]
1987: <cite>Daughter of the Nile</cite> (<cite>Niluohe nuer</cite>) [Dec 13; 18:30]
1989: <cite>City of Sadness</cite> (<cite>Beiqing chengshi</cite>) [Dec 14; 20:30]
1993: <cite>The Puppetmaster</cite> (<cite>Hsimeng jensheng</cite>) [Dec 15; 20:30]
1995: <cite>Good Men, Good Women</cite> (<cite>Haonan haonu</cite>) [French s.t.’s, Dec 13; 20:30]
1996: <cite>Goodbye South, Goodbye</cite> (<cite>Nanguo zaijan, nanguo</cite>) [Fr. s.t.’s, Dec 16; 17:00]
1998: <cite>Flowers of Shanghai</cite> (<cite>Hai shang hua</cite>) [Dec 16; 21:00]
2001: <cite>Millennium Mambo</cite> (<cite>ianxi manbo</cite>) [Fr. s.t.’s, Dec 6; 18:30, Dec 7; 16:00]
2003: <cite>Café Lumière</cite> (Japan, Kohi jiku) [Fr. s.t.’s, Dec 16; 19:15]
2005: <cite>Three Times</cite> (<cite>Zui hao de shi guang</cite>) [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

p>. Peter Rist

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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A View on the Exotic: Travel in Early Cinema
November 24, 2006 to November 26, 2006


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).

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Robert Altman [1925-2006]
November 21, 2006 to November 30, 2006


Iconoclast maverick American filmmaker Robert Altman passed away on November 20, 2006 at the age of 81. I guess it was in the cards, when the Academy honored Altman with their honorary award this past March (it seems like the touch of death). Altman’s heyday was no doubt the 1970’s, when he directed a string of remarkably innovative and entertaining revisionist genre films: War satire, <cite>M*A*S*H*</cite>, 1970, Western, <cite>McCabe & Mrs. Miller</cite>, 1971, psychological horror, <cite>Images</cite>, film noir, <cite>The Long Goodbye</cite>, 1973 (the latter two also wonderful for their expressive use of the telephoto lens), crime film, <cite>Thieves Like Us</cite>, 1974, and epic drama, <cite>Nashville</cite> 1975. Altman had a late career comeback (not that he was ever inactive) in 1992 with the clever, reflexive <cite>The Player</cite> (with its playful opening rendition of <cite>A Touch of Evil</cite>) and once again in 2001 with his loosely veiled remake of Renoir’s <cite>Rules of the Game</cite>, <cite>Gosford Park</cite>, where he reminded everyone of how instrumental he was in refining the use of overlapping dialogue. One of the genuine foot soldiers of cinema is gone.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Phone Sex
November 02, 2006 to December 10, 2006


The documentary genre continues to be one of the hottest around, and its definition and meaning continually stretched and manipulated. A recent example is <cite>Phone Sex</cite>, directed by Steve Balderson, whose previous three films were two quirky and compelling indie narratives, <cite>Pep Squad</cite> and <cite>Firecracker</cite> and the documentary on the making of the latter film, <cite>Wamengo: Making Movies Anywhere</cite>. <cite>Phone Sex</cite> is a unique pop art styled collage of image and sound, structured around the question, “What is Sexy?” Phone recorded messages of people responding to Balderson’s open ended question are accompanied by images which range from literal to figurative. Can we say this film is sexy? One thing is certain, the documentary is. <cite>Phone Sex</cite> is slated for release on Dec. 5, 2006.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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6th Annual Accented Cinema Film Festival
October 18, 2006 to October 22, 2006


A film festival focusing on diasporic films and filmmakers, with its festival title lifted from Hamid Naficy’s important critical study of diasporic and exilic cinema, <cite>An Accented Cinema</cite>.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Danièle Huillet [1936-2006]
October 12, 2006 to July 14, 2009


Sad to report the passing away of French born Danièle Huillet at age 70 on October 9, 2006. Known for her seamless collaboration on over 20 films with her partner Jean-Marie Straub, many of them classics of New German cinema (like The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 1968, History Lessons 1972). The film that struck me the most was their 1999 film <cite>Sicilia!</cite>, which I wrote about when it showed in Montreal at the 1999 Festival of New Film and Media. Some who know Straub well are speculating that Huillet’s death will signal the end of his filmmaking. If so, the world of cinema is a poorer place.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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On Screen! A Celebration of Canadian Cinema
October 09, 2006 to November 13, 2006


A Canadian (out of Vancouver) documentary series of one hour programs celebrating classic and important Canadian films. The series is in its second season. Some of the films that already aired in season were <cite>Tales From the Gimli Hospital</cite>, <cite>Black Christmas</cite>, <cite>Goin’ Down the Road</cite>, and <cite>The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz</cite>. Each episode features film clips and interviews with crew and cast members, critics, academics, and fans. Season two highlights include <cite>Nobody Waved Goodbye</cite>, <Cite>Mon Onlce Antoine</cite>, and <cite>Roadkill</cite>.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Film Pop
October 05, 2006 to October 09, 2006


Unique cultural jam festival which combines the worlds of music and film and re-imagines the conventional theatre film space. Highlights include Live Music by guitar wizard Gary Lucas accompanying the German expressionist classic <cite>The Golem</cite>, Deco Dawson’s live re-interpretation (“re-filming and re-imagining”) of his film <cite>Dumb Angel</cite>, and much more. As much a social event as a cultural event.

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Touching Politics Film Series and Workshop
October 02, 2006 to October 06, 2006


The Centre interuniversitaire des arts médiatiques (CIAM),
The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and the Goethe-Institute present:

Touching Politics Film Series and Workshop

October 2 – 6, 2006, 7:30 pm.
Goethe-Institut Montreal
418, rue Sherbrooke Est
$ 7, $ 6 for students, free for Amis de Goethe
(514) 499-0159 .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

A film series curated and presented by Florian Wüst thematically linked around groundbreaking, social and political documentary, experimental, and avant-garde short films. Series is broken up into five thematic programs:

Oct. 2 at 7:30 pm.: Program 1: Circumstances of Depiction
Oct. 3 at 7:30 pm.: Program 2: Radical Bodies
Oct. 4. at 7:30 pm.: Program 3: Education and Resistance
Oct. 5 at 7:30 pm.: Program 4: Beyond Words
Oct. 6 at 7:30 pm.: Program 5: Economy of the Modern

Rare opportunity to view such important films (projected on film) as <cite>Mass for the Dakota Sioux</cite> (Bruce Baillie), <cite>Report</cite> (Bruce Conner), <cite>Now!</cite> (Santiago Alvarez), <cite>Perfect Film</cite> (Ken Jacobs), <cite>T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G,</cite> (Paul Sharits), <cite>Lehrer Im Wandel<cite> (Alexander Kluge), and <cite>Critial Mass</cite> (Hollis Frampton).

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Sven Nykvist (1922-2006)
September 21, 2006 to October 01, 2006


Sad day for lovers of light, with the passing of one of the world’s greatest ever cinematographers, Sven Nykvist. Best known for his groundbreaking work in both black and white and color with Ingmar Bergman, Nykvist also worked with Woody Allen and Andrei Tarkovsky. Click below for an <cite>Offscreen</cite> review of his son’s documentary, <cite>Light Keeps Me Company</cite>.

+ Click here to see the website for more information.

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Quand le cinéma d’animation rencontre le vivant
September 14, 2006 to September 16, 2006


Launch of the book, Quand le cinéma d’animation rencontre le vivant [When Animation Cinema Meets the Living], edited by Marcel Jean, on September 14 at 5:00pm at the Cinematheque Quebecois in Montreal, followed by a screening of selected animated films at 6:30pm. The program will be introduced by Marcel Jean. Film schedule as follows:

<cite>Le Mobilier fidèle</cite> dir. Émile Cohl, Fr., 1910, 7 min à 18
<cite>Opening Speech</cite> McLaren dir. Norman McLaren, Qué., 1960, 7 min
<cite>À travers champs</cite> (<cite>Przez Pole</cite>) dir. Jerzy Kucia, Pol., 1992, 17 min
<cite>Une artiste</cite> dir. Michèle Cournoyer, Qué., 1994, 5 min
<cite>At One View</cite> dir. Menno et Paul de Nooijer, P.-B., 1989, 7 min
<cite>Les Colocs : La Rue principale</cite> dir. André Fortin, Qué., 1993, 3 min
<cite>Aphex Twin: Come to Daddy</cite> dir. Chris Cunningham, R.-U., 1997, 5 min
<cite>Jona Tomberry</cite>ir. Rosto, P.-B., 2005, 12 min
<cite>Home Road Movies</cite> dir. Robert Bradbrook, R.-U., 2001, 12 min

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Mike Hoolboom: The Invisible Man
August 25, 2006 to October 07, 2006


Exhibition of a four-part video installation and selected short films by Canadian experimental filmmaker and critic Mike Hoolboom. The exhibition takes place in the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery located in the Concordia University Library building (J.A. De Seve Building). Vernissage is on the evening of Wednesday, August 30th 5:30pm-7:30pm and then the exhibit runs from August 31 to October 7, 2006.

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New NFB Documentaries
August 24, 2006 to September 04, 2006


NFB Documentary Films Premiering at the 30th World Film Festival are: <cite>Waban-Aki</cite> by Alanis Obomsawin, which sees the reknowned First Nations (Abenaki) filmmaker return to the village where she was raised; <cite>Shameless: The Art of Disability</cite> from the director of <cite>Not a Love Story</cite>, Bonnie Sherr Klein, which attempts to dispell the myths of and prejudices against people with disabilities (Klein being one of her own subjects); <cite>Unspeakable</cite> by John Paskievich, which takes a humorous look at his own speech impediment: stuttering; <cite>Breaking Ranks</cite> by Michelle Mason, a film about US soldiers seeking refuge in Canada as part of their resistance to the war in Iraq; <cite>Mike Birch, le cow-boy des mers</cite>, by James Gray, which chronicles the life of 72-year-old Canadian Mike Birch, one of the world’s greatest sailboat racing skippers: and <cite>Wal-Town</cite> by Sergeo Kirby, which “follows a group of six students as they travel across Canada to raise public awareness about Wal-Mart’s business practices and the effects of the company’s policies on cities and towns in Canada.”

Schedule of the above films at the WFF:

<cite>Breaking Ranks</cite> August 30, 9:30 pm, Quartier Latin, theatre 13; September 1, 10:00 am, Quartier Latin, theatre 13

<cite>Mike Birch, le cow-boy des mers</cite> (original French version with subtitles – 50 min) August 26, 7:10 pm, NFB Cinema; August 29, 12:30 pm, NFB Cinema

<cite>Shameless: The Art of Disability</cite> (original English version – 72 min) September 1, 7:20 pm, Cinémathèque québécoise; September 2, 12:40 pm, Cinémathèque québécoise September 3, 3:20 pm, Cinémathèque québécoise; September 3, 9:40 pm, Cinémathèque québécoise

<cite>Unspeakable</cite> (original English version – 89 min) August 30, 7:20 pm, NFB Cinema; August 31, 1:00 pm, NFB Cinema

<cite>Waban-Aki: peuple du soleil levant</cite> (French version – 104 min)
August 31, 7:20 pm, Quartier Latin, theatre 12

<cite>Waban-Aki: People From Where the Sun Rises</cite> (English version – 104 min) August 31, 7:20 pm, Quartier Latin, theatre 11

<cite>Wal Town</cite> (original English version – 66 min 30) September 1, 3:20 pm, NFB Cinema; September 2, 7:30 pm, NFB Cinema

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Italia Odia: Il cinema poliziesco italiano
August 19, 2006 to October 01, 2006


Hot off the presses is long-time <cite>Offscreen</cite> contributor Roberto Curti’s latest book, <cite>Italia Odia</cite>, an-in depth (over 400 pages) critical analysis of the Italian <cite>policier</cite>, one of the most prolific genres during the heyday of Italian genre filmmaking, the 1970s. Although written in Italian, English-only readers can get a glimpse of Curti’s book in an upcoming essay written by Curti exclusively for <cite>Offscreen</cite>, “Naples by Calibre 9.” <div align=“center” class=“ic”>odia.jpg border=0 width=200 height=297 </div>

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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
August 19, 2006 to September 10, 2006


If you happen to be in Philadelphia on the 8th of September, don’t miss the special screening of Jaromil Jires’ enchanting coming-of-sexual age film, <cite>Valerie and Her Week of Wonders</cite> (Czech, 1970). The screening will be accompanied by a live musical performance by members of Espers, Fern Knight, Fursaxa and Grass (also featuring Mary Lattimore, Charles Cohen and Jesse Sparhawk). Presenting this event is Joseph A. Gervasi, co-owner of Diabolik DVD, who says of the event: “This will be a one-time performance in Philadelphia and will be a part of the Fringe Festival. Scrumptious vegan food will be provided by Zinnia Piotrowski and drinks and snacks by Bull and the Mariposa Food Co-op of West Philadelphia. A wide variety of DVDs will be sold in the lobby by Philly’s own Diabolik DVD. Right now a documentary is being shot about the production and there will be a multi-camera shoot of the live performance. All of this should appear on a DVD to be released by Drag City Records, home of Espers and many other bands. The hope is that the DVD release will feature the film from a 35mm source (unlike the current Facets DVD) with multiple sound options, the live performance, documentary, amazing cover art by Tracy Nakayama, etc.”

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Young Cuts
August 17, 2006 to August 20, 2006


A festival featuring the long-standing, yet underappreciated film format, the short. A very ambitous festival, with 50 films from over 40 countries, with many filmmakers present, awards, and gala events. The festival tours to Toronto for a one-day jaunt on August 26. The festival program can be downloaded from the website.

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Auckland Film Festival
July 11, 2006 to July 30, 2006


Founded in 1970 as a component of the Auckland Festival, the Auckland International Film Festival in time became a fund-raising event subsidising live arts. Rescued from this role by the intervention of the Federation of Film Societies in 1984, the 34th Festival in 2005 achieved an audience in excess of 100,000.
Ken Loach’s <cite>The Wind That Shakes the Barley</cite>, winner of cinema’s most prestigious award, the Cannes Palme d’Or, will open this year’s Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals and screen in the country’s four main centres. It is just one of many Cannes winners to play at the Festivals. “We are delighted to have scooped this controversial film for the opening of the 2006 Telecom New Zealand International Film Festival. This year’s programme is clamorous with films of activism and protest, so it’s the perfect year to be celebrating this richly deserved accolade to one of cinema’s most persistent agitators,” says Bill Gosden, Festival Director.
Other films include, <cite>Korea’s A Bittersweet Life</cite>, Canada’s <cite>C.R.A.Z.Y.</cite>, <cite>Hard Candy</cite> and many more major films of the past year.

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