Articles
The Viscera Film Festival comes to the Projection Booth tonight and some of the shorts being screened include Nursery Crimes, a twisted take on the nursery rhymes we all know directed by Laura Whyte, and Together, a mind-bending tale of a man annoyed by his upstairs neighbour directed by Gigi Romero. Ranging from hilarious to stomach churning, every avenue of the horror genre is covered. From abduction to zombies, these female filmmakers show that women can be just as frightening and bloody as men. It’s hard to pick just a few short films to focus on when each one is...
Last week we clued you in to the Canadian Film Centre’s Short Dramatic Film Program and the fact that every year, they churn out a whole new crop of promising filmmakers and more importantly, great short films that very often make the film festival rounds, introducing some of the country’s best filmmakers to the worldwide landscape. With over 150 CFC shorts to choose from, it’s hard to know exactly where to start delving in. Here are some of the best of the bunch: 1. Evelyn The Cutest Evil Dead Girl (2002) One of the more famous of the CFC shorts, this...
Short film is the almost ideal vehicle for comedy. Comedy is about the bit, the joke, the punchline. Comedy is about surreality and visual incongruity. It does not require elaborate narrative and it does not invite deeper consideration. Comedy careens in, makes you laugh, and trips on its way out the door. Even now, in a culture where short film is devalued as a medium, comedy still comes to us in this format. What is a sketch in a comedy program or funny video clip uploaded to YouTube but a short film, however unpolished? But there was a time when...
James McNally is a real man-about-town. I first met him years ago when he invited me to his film blogger meet-up during TIFF, something that he organizes annually just for the fun of meeting other cinephiles over a pint. He writes about film at Toronto Screen Shots, and while I do see him online – on his site, on Twitter, and elsewhere – I also see James out in the real world quite a bit. He seems to always be at events, screenings, festival parties and receptions. He’s just one of those guys who, in addition to being a film lover, also enjoys...
I’ve been a fan of Fifth Column‘s music since a friend introduced me to their song “All Women Are Bitches” many years ago, while I was a student. What self-respecting young feminist wouldn’t be curious about an all-girl punk band with a song title like that? When I found out that they were from Toronto, I was even more intrigued. But there’s more to Fifth Column than just being a ‘girl band’, as Kevin Hegge told me while we chatted about his documentary She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column, which is premiered at Hot Docs April 27. When I...
While there has always been an urge to experiment with the medium of film, including such early-to-mid-20th century examples like the works of Maya Deren and Man Ray, a notable increase in the production (and institutional recognition) of so-called experimental film came about in the 1970s. Whether it was the medium-specific concerns of the burgeoning semiotic/psyhoanalytic/Marxist strains of theory emerging at that time, or perhaps the generally daring and unconstrained atmosphere of the post-Vietnam era, the 1970s were a time to break utterly free of the conventions of filmmaking that had been established in the 20th century, and Canadian filmmaker...
If you happened to stick your head out of your window on the morning of April 4, 2012 in Toronto, you might have heard a faint groaning sound rolling across the city. That would be the sound of Toronto’s significant filmmaking and passionate film-going communities reacting to the National Film Board’s budget cut announcement. It’s one thing to know theoretically that the NFB was mandated to cut 10% of its operating budget, a real number of $6.68 million over 3 years. It’s another thing entirely to learn that Toronto loses 33 full and part-time jobs and the NFB Mediatheque as...
If you love awkward outsiders in the movies, from Montgomery Clift and James Dean to Robert Crumb and Hedwig, then you probably have a place in your heart reserved for Crispin Glover. With a fascinating and eclectic onscreen acting resume going back more than 30 years, Glover has left an indelible impression in roles as diverse as George McFly in Back to the Future and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. He is a gifted performer, equally adept at light comedy and hard drama. What really sets him apart from other actors, though, is his remarkable capacity for being uncompromisingly weird....
It can be hard to commit to an experimental film. Without the gentle push of a coherent narrative, the moving image assumes a totally different identity. Words like ‘avant-garde’ and ‘non-linear’ tend to push the majority toward the multiplex. But we should all reconsider that thought, because Lewis Klahr’s epic collage film, The Pettifogger, is amazing. Collage has been enjoying somewhat of a renaissance these days. From collage parties like the one at last year’s Art Toronto event to a recently-launched Montreal magazine named Kolaj, all about – you guessed it – collage art, I’ve noticed a real surge in the...
The enigmatic figure of Kate MacKay first caught my eye while I was attending Cinematheque Ontario screenings at the AGO’s Jackman Hall, something I did quite regularly from the age of 16 until Cinematheque‘s move to TIFF Bell Lightbox. (Yes, I know it was mostly an over-18 venue, but my dad snuck me in, and I’m eternally grateful.) At the back of the small auditorium, in the projection booth, I would often see a mysterious woman, clad in black, with dark eyes and a shock of dark curls to match, silently observing as the room filled up. Running the show from...
In 2002, Playback magazine did a poll to determine the best Canadian films of all time. It’s an eclectic, but genuinely Canadian list. With Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter at #1, the remainder of the list is a who’s who of classic Canadian film with entries from Don McKellar, Claude Jutra, Donald Shebib and Denys Arcand (Arcand and Egoyan received two spots each). It is not a mystery then, that Bruce McDonald is also on this list, but what might surprise is the film. It wasn’t Highway 61 or Roadkill. It wasn’t even Dance Me Outside. It was Hard Core...
Experimental film exists in the middle ground between cinema and art. Often non-narrative, abstract and incorporating elements of other media, installations and so on, watching an experimental film programme is a challenge that’s different from sitting through, say, a Nicolas Cage film. Or even the artiest Alain Resnais film, for that matter. It demands a different kind of attention from the audience, and is not as open to easy, straightforward interpretation. Even the term “experimental film” is, itself, one of those that makes many an ardent film buff’s eyes glaze over. At worst, people avoid having to comment on it...
