Cinema Revisted
Since the 1930s, classical Hollywood cinema had been highly censored, and predominantly escapist. The 1960s were about to change all of that, at least as far as documentaries were concerned. Enter Robert Drew, a Life magazine photojournalist, whose goal was to adapt methods of photojournalism to filmmaking. With technological advancements allowing for lighter sound and camera equipment, filmmakers were now able to get up close and personal with their subjects like never before. In his quest to “capture real life without intruding,” Drew founded Drew Associates, a group of filmmakers meant to pursue this quest for truth, which included Richard...
Lina Wertmüller is a conundrum. The Italian filmmaker (she gets her umlauts from aristocratic Swiss descent) was the first woman to be nominated for a Best Director Academy Award for her masterful 1975 movie Seven Beauties. She’s not exactly prolific, but she does have 23 feature films to her credit. Hell, even Madonna made hubby Guy Ritchie remake (at gun point I imagine) one of Wertmüller’s film, resulting in the abysmal Swept Away (2002). Yet when I mention Wertmüller’s name, even at roundtable of film snobs, I get nothing but blank stares. What’s up with that? Wertmüller gets many contradictory labels...
Ah the sixties: a time of existential angst, political turmoil, and cultural revolution. OK, so I was born in 1983…but it doesn’t mean I can’t dream. Of course, the ’60s were a seminal moment globally and cross-culturally: the sexual revolution took hold in the West while films and music began to experiment with form, and the strength of the student and labour movements engendered the protests of May ’68. But what was going on at home was much more specific and thought-provoking: the Quiet Revolution swept the province of Quebec (so called because it was not a revolution of...
First of all, doesn’t Denys Arcand kind of look a little bit like John Waters? Hm. Despite this jarring similarity, let’s take a look back at the work of one of Canada’s most internationally-renowned auteurs. But when we aim to “revisit” cinema, what is it exactly that we are doing? In my view, it is one of two things: recuperation or time-testing. In the act of recuperation, a formerly-maligned film might be re-read to excavate some previously unnoticed qualities, or perhaps to highlight the usefulness of those of its qualities which were used against it in contemporary criticism (think of...
What is it about a movie that makes a lasting impression? Characters? Effects? Plot? The emotions it evoked at the time? The people you were with? Perhaps simply the weather? I hold a special place in my heart for the moves I loved as a child. I think most people do, to a certain extent. When I see the majority of the kids’ films today I find myself sighing deeply in an “oh, they don’t make “˜em like they used to” kind of way. Technology aside I got to thinking; do they really not make children’s movies so great anymore,...
As we’re all getting geared up to dodge fireballs falling out of the sky or surf that mega-wave that’s set to engulf the earth on December 21, why not pick up a few handy tips from some of the many films that have explored the idea of what the end of the world might be like? Not only is TIFF Bell Lightbox offering up the chance for you to commiserate with a cinema full of other doomsday weirdos (I mean that lovingly) with their Countdown to Armageddon retrospective - running from December 14 until the end – but TFS...
The Emperor Kurosawa It’s the Asian cinema issue here at the TFS, and you don’t talk about Asian cinema without talking about Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Or rather, you don’t talk about cinema (and you certainly don’t revisit classic cinema) without talking about Akira Kurosawa. It turns out that the “Asian cinema” part is a little more complicated than I might have thought. Undeniably, over the course of his 57 year career, Kurosawa proved himself to be a master filmmaker. The list of his best films – Stray Dog, Yojimbo, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Ran, Throne of Blood - is longer...
I should probably clarify, before I begin, what I mean by “forgotten gems”. I don’t really mean amazing films that are well written and executed and should be remembered in the annals of history as finely crafted pieces of cinema. And I don’t mean films that are “so bad they’re good”, either, because I really don’t believe in that concept. The argument against it was articulately (and touchingly) stated by Alamo Drafthouse programmer Zack Carlson recently in an article for Wired. Carlson condemns what he calls the “point and laugh” habit of watching films in order to mock them, and...
The great thing about giant film festivals like TIFF or Hot Docs is that you usually get a good mix of way off the radar films mixed in with all of the mainstream and popular fare. While some of those small films get a good boost from making the fest rounds and go on to achieve critical acclaim or a little bit of box office success, there are still a great many that never get the wide theatrical release they deserve. Here are just a few excellent but underseen festival films that have played in Toronto: Black Dynamite Opening the...
Raymond Carver would be doing the proverbial grave-turning if he knew how overused variations of the title of his 1981 short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are these days. (See here and here and especially here; I could go on forever). But Carver’s title is so overused because it perfectly describes the trouble we have when defining what a thing is. Therefore, I’ll add my name to the guilty pile of writer-borrowers, and say that this piece should tentatively be called “What We Talk About When We Talk About Porn”, which is really...
David Cronenberg is arguably Canada’s most famous director. Okay, perhaps he’s not better known than James Cameron, but he’s certainly the auteur most widely known outside of our borders, while still continuing to live and work in Canada. Throughout his career, Cronenberg has featured Toronto as the location for many of his films, and not in a self-conscious, “hey look, Toronto is playing itself” way (as in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe) but casually, as though it was no big deal (dare we suggest even perfectly normal) for Toronto to be the setting for a film. After all, things happen here. In...
French cinema pioneer Georges Méliès is having a moment. Martin Scorsese’s recent 3D release Hugo pays homage Méliès. The electro-pop duo Air just announced the release of a new album, La Voyage Dans La Lune, inspired by Méliès. The title not only refers to Méliès’s most famous film, but a limited edition of the album will be co-packaged with the movie. And, of course, a production still from that same film, a very annoyed moon with a rocket ship embedded in its eye, remains the most iconic image of the silent era, gracing t-shirts, coffee mugs, and the covers of...
