TIFF Programming
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...
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...
There are two obvious ways to react to contemporary tragedy: either ignore, or take a deep breath and sombrely learn. But what about a less intuitive third option: entertainment? No, I don’t mean the 2008 version of Rambo, which ‘engaged with’ the Myanmar crackdown of 2007 by having Sylvester Stallone shoot big guns at socio-economically disadvantaged Asian people. I mean something that can engage a spectator on an educational level while still being fun. John Greyson’s Zero Patience (1993), a hilarious musical about AIDS, is that third option. Today’s popular discourse rarely mentions AIDS without saying ‘Africa’ in the same...
Having recently won the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts, Jan peacock has cemented a spot as one of Canada’s leading video artists. In celebration of this milestone, TIFF Bell Lightbox's Free Screen series will be presenting Using Clouds for Words, a survey of her thirty-year practice. When you're approaching Jan Peacock’s work, especially in a cinema setting, it’s best to keep in mind that throughout her career, Peacock has chiefly used installation as her presentation method. This means that what we'll see at TIFF Bell Lightbox on a single screen may have originally been presented on...
The Sugarhill Gang may not have invented hip hop, but they’ll always shine in the annals of music history as the first rap group to hit mainstream airwaves. This Thursday, February 16, a new documentary on the Sugarhill Gang, I Want My Name Back, will premiere at the TIFF Bell Lightbox as part of their “Music, Magic, Clash: New Voices in the African Diaspora” series. Alert to hip hop fans: the Gang themselves will be there for a Q&A and a performance to accompany the screening—this event is not to be missed....
Feeling like your life has been lacking in austerity lately? This Thursday check out A Man Escaped (1956), the first screening from TIFF Bell Lightbox’s upcoming Robert Bresson retrospective, The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson, and get ready to begin an odyssey of Bach-scored morality tales – classic French cinema. The first thing you need to know about late French director Robert Bresson (1901-1999) is that he was never into thespians; there’s little acting to be found in a Bresson film. If you haven’t already had the Bresson experience, this is hard to fathom; like most directors,...
Possibly the most wonderful thing about TIFF is their dedication to providing access to films that aren’t widely available or, worse yet, may simply have been forgotten. Canadian Open Vault is a programme that is dedicated to doing just that. Its mandate is to “make our country’s rich cinematic heritage more accessible to our audiences.” Occurring once every season, Canadian Open Vault turns its eye this winter to the 1986 film Dancing in the Dark, an adaptation of the Joan Barfoot novel of the same name, about the collapse of a woman’s inner and outer world, as she attempts to...
This week, TIFF Cinematheque is going meta with a screening series that celebrates the golden anniversary of another film festival, which is itself a sidebar to another pretty well known film festival (hint: it starts with a “C”). In the series Fifty Years of Discovery: Cannes Critics Week, TIFF has invited eight local film critics, or “opinion-makers” if you please, to choose favourites from the films discovered, showcased, and generally boosted by Critics Week, the now fifty-year-old sidebar to the Cannes International Film Festival. Founded by the French Union of Film Critics in 1962, Critics Week was designed to showcase...
The TIFF Bell Lightbox continues its series on mid-century American auteur Nicholas Ray, and so I continue my musings about the enduring appeal and importance of Ray’s films. I’ve already profiled Rebel Without A Cause (1955) and Bitter Victory (1957), and this week the TIFF Bell Lightbox will show Ray’s 1952 noir love story On Dangerous Ground. The terms “noir” and “love story” may, at first, seem to be contradictory qualifications. After all, isn’t the typical noir‘s femme fatale supposed to somehow devour or undercut our brooding protagonist? Although the conventions are interestingly modified in On Dangerous Ground, there is...
