The Cinematheque MAY+JUNE 2016 by The Cinematheque

EXPERIENCE ESSENTIAL CINEMA

RIVER OF GRASS

MAY+ JUNE 2016

1131 Howe Street | Vancouver | theCinematheque.ca

SHAKESPEARE 400 CHINA NOW KELLY REICHARDT AGNÈS VARDA

y MAY + JUNE 2016

ome of cinema’s best, boldest, most imaginative, and most spectacular Shakespeare adaptations will be on screen as The Cinematheque, joining many in the world of arts and letters, commemorates this year’s 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.

Estimates vary, but the number of feature films adapted from the works of William Shakespeare is certainly in the hundreds. The Internet Movie Database credits Shakespeare (who died a mere 280 years before cinema was invented) as a “writer” on more than 1100 productions – features, shorts, television programs, etc. Shakespeare, the greatest-ever writer in the English language, the foremost dramatist in history, is undoubtedly also the most-filmed author of all time. Our tribute to the Bard, limited to a baker’s dozen of 13 remarkable features, is bookended by two Shakespeare adaptations with a fair claim to being cinema’s greatest: Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (screening in a brandnew restoration) and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. As Shakespeare adaptations go, both those films veer, to varying degrees, away from strict fidelity and towards the unorthodox; unorthodoxy, however, is no sin here (nor to most aficionados of Shakespeare in cinema): our selections travel the many light-years from Olivier (represented by the superlative trio of Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III) to Altair IV (the setting of Forbidden Planet), and include appearances by Keanu Reeves (My Own Private Idaho), Leonardo DiCaprio (Romeo + Juliet), and Natalie Wood (West Side Story).

“Chimes at Midnight may be the greatest Shakespeare movie ever made, bar none.” – Vincent Canby, New York Times

New Restoration!

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (aka Falstaff)

France/Spain/Switzerland 1966. Dir: Orson Welles. 115 min. DCP

The restoration of Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, almost impossible to see for years because of legal issues, is “a cinematic event of the first order” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker). Welles’s lifelong fascination with one of Shakespeare’s great recurring second-tiered characters informs this astonishing five-play mélange, also known as Falstaff. The film charts the friendship of Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), heir to King Henry IV’s throne, and his paternal tavern-chum Sir John Falstaff (a pillow-stuffed Welles), a boisterous, tragicomic drunkard. Chimes contains some the director’s grandest imagery, while Welles’s performance, a sensitive blend of conflicted emotions, is among his most tender and impressive. The film received a special 20th Anniversary Prize at Cannes. “The one Welles film that deserves to be called lovely; there is a rising tide of opinion that proclaims it his masterpiece” (David Kehr, Chicago Reader). FRIDAY, JUNE 10 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 11 – 4:00 PM & 9:05 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 12 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, JUNE 13 – 9:05 PM

MACBETH

(aka The Tragedy of Macbeth) Great Britain 1971. Dir: Roman Polanski. 140 min. DCP

Roman Polanski’s controversial follow up to Rosemary’s Baby was a different kind of psychological horror movie: a violent, blood-soaked adaptation of Shakespeare’s already-violent Macbeth that put much of the play’s off-stage carnage squarely on screen. (The film was also Polanski’s first since the Manson family’s murder of his wife Sharon Tate, leading some to wonder if the graphic violence was a questionable form of catharsis; Polanski downplayed any such connection.) Jon Finch and Francesca Annis have the leads as the murderous Macbeths; Polanski’s well-acted film won praise, particularly in Britain, as thoughtful, adventurous, admirably naturalistic interpretation of the savagery and superstition inherent in Macbeth’s world. The film was produced for Playboy Productions, Hugh Hefner’s then-new movie division, which had been looking for a prestigious first project. Lady Macbeth’s Playboy-like nude scene raised eyebrows. FRIDAY, JUNE 10 – 8:45 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 11 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 12 – 8:45 PM MONDAY, JUNE 13 – 6:30 PM

THRONE OF BLOOD (Kumonosu-jo)

Japan 1957. Dir: Akira Kurosawa. 110 min. 35mm

Kurosawa’s rousing, ravishing take on Macbeth ranks as one of the Japanese master’s finest works and one of cinema’s great Shakespeare adaptations; it was also said to be T. S. Eliot’s favourite film. Transposing the action to medieval Japan, featuring Toshiro Mifune in the Macbeth role as samurai general Washizu, shrouded in spooky mist and exploding in kinetic violence, Throne of Blood combines the conventions of traditional Noh theatre with the most dynamic cinematic techniques, and makes stunning use of glorious costumes, décor, and pageantry. Isuzu Yamada, as Washizu’s wife Asaji, is a memorably chilling Lady Macbeth. “Kabuki Macbeth, and like nothing you’ve ever seen . . . This is filmmaking with risk and greatness in its blood” (James Monaco). “Kurosawa’s best period film, surpassing even Rashomon and Seven Samurai” (Georges Sadoul). FRIDAY, JUNE 17 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 18 – 8:45 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 19 – 4:30 PM

ROMEO + JULIET

(aka William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet) USA 1996. Dir: Baz Luhrmann. 120 min. DCP

Starring Claire Danes and Leonard DiCaprio, Baz Luhrmann’s dizzyingly stylish, radically postmodern take on the Bard’s greatest romance reinvented Romeo and Juliet for the MTV era – and reigns as the highest-grossing Shakespeare film adaptation of all time! Maintaining a surprising fidelity to the original text while also nodding to a famous cinematic predecessor – West Side Story, itself a (less faithful) adaptation and update of the play – Luhrmann’s film is set in fictional Verona Beach, where the Montagues and Capulets are rival criminal empires whose younger members are firing guns at one another. The Australian writer-director had been invited to Hollywood after the global success of Strictly Ballroom, his flamboyant 1992 debut. He would follow up Romeo + Juliet with 2001’s Moulin Rouge! and direct DiCaprio again in 2013’s The Great Gatsby. FRIDAY, JUNE 17 – 8:40 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 18 – 6:30 PM

HAMLET

Great Britain 1948. Dir: Laurence Olivier. 155 min. DCP

“This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” Laurence Olivier’s second outing as a film director (after 1944’s Henry V) was the first British movie to win the American Academy Award for Best Picture. Olivier, himself winning an Oscar for his performance, is a platinum-blond Prince of Denmark; Jean Simmons is Ophelia. The film remains one of cinema’s most honoured Shakespeare adaptations; it was also criticized by purists for drastically cutting the text, dropping certain characters (Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern) and over-emphasizing Hamlet’s Oedipal complex! “But it hardly matters in light of the ethereal black-and-white visuals – heavily influenced by Citizen Kane – and Olivier’s hypnotic lead performance” (Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York). “Very likely the most exciting and alive production of Hamlet you will ever see on screen” (Pauline Kael). SUNDAY, JUNE 19 – 7:00 PM MONDAY, JUNE 20 – 7:00 PM TUESDAY, JUNE 21 – 7:00 PM

FORBIDDEN PLANET

USA 1956. Dir: Fred McLeod Wilcox. 98 min. DCP

Shakespeare meets Astounding Stories and The Tempest becomes interstellar movie magic in Forbidden Planet, one of the finest science-fiction films of the 1950s – or, heck, ever. In the 23rd century, a spaceship (under the command of Canada’s Leslie Nielsen) travels to a remote world to search for survivors of a much earlier mission. There, the voyagers encounter the Prospero-like scientist Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), his Miranda-like daughter Alta (Anne Francis), and their robot Robby (the sprite Ariel). Soon, a mysterious, monstrous (Caliban-like) force begins stalking the ship’s crew. Augmenting its imaginative take on Shakespeare with a little Freudian and Jungian psychology, this lavish, big-budget, great-looking film, shot in colour and CinemaScope, features Oscar-nominated special effects and a pioneering electronic score. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was clearly a fan. SUNDAY, JUNE 19 – 1:00 PM (CINEMA SUNDAY – SEE PAGE 22) FRIDAY, JUNE 24 – 8:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 25 – 6:30 PM

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO

USA 1991. Dir: Gus Van Sant. 105 min. 35mm

River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves star in Gus Van Sant’s off-beat, street-smart update of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays – set (despite its title) in Portland, Oregon. Reeves is Scott, a modern-day Prince Hal who has turned his back on his father, the city’s mayor, and is now slumming. Phoenix is Mike, a narcoleptic young hustler given to blacking out at the most wildly inappropriate moments; his snoozing subjectivity gives the film its giddy dreamlike edge. Eking out a grim living as prostitutes, the two pals come under the twisted tutelage of Bob Pigeon (William Richert), a raucous chickenhawk Falstaff who hankers after Scott. Van Sant’s arresting indie film combines audacious style, improbable Shakespearean dialogue, and gritty authenticity into a weird, wonderful, funny/sad tale of unrequited love and skewed family relationships. FRIDAY, JUNE 24 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 25 – 8:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 26 – 4:30 PM

HENRY V

Great Britain 1944. Dir: Laurence Olivier. 141 min. DCP

Laurence Olivier’s dazzling debut as a film director was the first Shakespeare film in colour and the first to enjoy wide commercial and critical success. It begins as a stage performance at London’s Globe Theatre before expanding outward. The sumptuous visuals often evoke medieval painting; the breathtaking Battle of Agincourt scenes have an epic pageantry recalling Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. Olivier’s rousing portrayal of English courage and conquest on the battlefields of Europe was meant to lift spirits and inspire patriotism during the dark days of WWII. The film was nominated for four Oscars, while Oliver received an Honorary Academy Award “for his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen.” “A triumph of colour, music, spectacle, and soaring heroic poetry” (Pauline Kael). SUNDAY, JUNE 26 – 7:00 PM MONDAY, JUNE 27 – 7:00 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29 – 8:35 PM

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING USA 2012. Dir: Joss Whedon. 109 min. DCP

Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is the grand prototype of screwball comedy, those fast-paced, sharp-tongued, battle-of-the-sexes rom-coms of classic Hollywood. This modestly-made, modern-dress adaptation – called “the first great contemporary Shakespeare since Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet” (Catherine Shoard, The Guardian) – is the surprising third feature of American writer-director Joss Whedon, creator of the TV genre hits Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, who had only just graduated to blockbuster/franchise filmmaking with The Avengers. Whedon assembled a group of his favourite actors and shot the film (in shimmering black-and-white) over 12 days at his home in Santa Monica, California. Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof are the bickering Beatrice and Benedick; Firefly’s Nathan Fillion impresses as Dogberry. “Perhaps the liveliest and most purely delightful movie I have seen so far this year” (A. O. Scott, New York Times). WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29 – 6:30 PM FRIDAY, JULY 1 – 8:50 PM SATURDAY, JULY 2 – 4:30 PM

WEST SIDE STORY

USA 1961. Dir: Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins. 152 min. DCP

Ten Oscars, including Best Picture, were lavished on the much-loved screen version of the Broadway blockbuster written by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim. West Side Story turns Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a rousing musical tale of rival youth gangs and star-crossed lovers on the mean streets of 1950s Manhattan. Jerome Robbins, director and choreographer of the stage hit, was hired to direct the movie; when his perfectionism threatened to slow production, veteran Robert Wise stepped in to handle non-musical parts. (Robbins was ultimately fired altogether.) Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris, and Russ Tamblyn star. The musical numbers directed by Robbins are still the highlights, and earned him an honorary Academy Award “for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.” Robbins also shared the Best Director Oscar with Wise, the first time the honour had been given to co-directors. THURSDAY, JUNE 30 – 7:00 PM SATURDAY, JULY 2 – 7:00 PM SUNDAY, JULY 3 – 7:00 PM

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

USA-Italy 1967. Dir: Franco Zeffirelli. 122 min. DCP

Fresh from eviscerating each other in 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virigina Woolf?, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the World’s Most Famous Couple (at that time), do battle again in this lush, lusty version of Shakespeare’s war-of-the-sexes comedy from Italian director Franco Zeffirelli (who also made 1968’s massively popular Romeo and Juliet). Liz is “shrew” Katharina, difficult eldest daughter of a wealthy merchant in Renaissanceera Padua. Dick is Petruchio, a fortune-hunting young nobleman willing to take up the challenge of wooing her. Nino Rota composed the score. The costumes and sets earned Oscar nominations. Expect plenty of rowdy, rambunctious fun. As for the sexual politics . . . “And so let the taming begin in a non-PC – or is it? — adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most problematic works” (Film Forum New York). FRIDAY, JULY 1 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, JULY 3 – 4:30 PM MONDAY, JULY 4 – 7:00 PM

RAN

Japan 1985. Dir: Akira Kurosawa. 160 min. DCP

The magisterial Ran – the great masterpiece of Kurosawa’s late period – is both an enthralling piece of epic movie-making and an inspired reworking of King Lear. Ran transposes Shakespeare’s play to 16th-century Japan, and transforms its three daughters into sons. Kurosawa regular Tatsuya Nakadai is aging warlord Hidetora, the film’s Lear. When he abdicates in favour of his eldest son, it precipitates a fratricidal struggle of cataclysmic proportions. Ran is a visually overwhelming work of extraordinary colour, exquisite costume and sets, and dazzling, horrifying battle sequences (some filmed in haunting silence) unfolding over vast landscapes. The title translates from the Japanese as “war” or “conflict,” but Kurosawa emphasizes an older, Chinese meaning of the word: “chaos.” “Spectacular . . . Among the most thrilling movie experiences a viewer can have” (Terrence Rafferty, New York Times). THURSDAY, JULY 7 – 7:00 PM FRIDAY, JULY 8 – 7:00 PM SATURDAY, JULY 9 – 7:00 PM

RICHARD III

Great Britain 1955. Dir: Laurence Olivier. 158 min. DCP

An otherwise royal cast – Ralph Richardson, Claire Bloom, John Gielgud, Cedric Hardwicke, et al. – is but handmaiden to the commanding Laurence Olivier in the last of the fêted trio of Shakespeare films directed by Olivier (his Henry V and Hamlet also screen in this series). Olivier is murderously, magnetically good (and maybe more than a little campy) as Richard, diabolic Duke of Gloucester, scheming to steal the English crown from his brother Edward IV. The film, made in Technicolor and VistaVision, stalled at the box office but was later sold to American television for a princely sum and viewed by tens of millions. “Richard III is comfortably the most entertaining of the three great Olivier Shakespeare films, and may have done more to popularise Shakespeare than any other single work” (Michael Brooke, British Film Institute). SUNDAY, JULY 10 – 7:00 PM MONDAY, JULY 11 – 7:00 PM WEDNESDAY, JULY 13 – 7:00 PM

HENRY V

“One of the few masters now working in American independent film.” Larry Gross, Film Comment

o mark the brand-new restoration and re-release of American indie auteur Kelly Reichardt’s largely-unseen first feature River of Grass (1994), The Cinematheque presents a mid-career retrospective dedicated to the acclaimed director’s already-essential oeuvre – arguably one of the most important, distinctive bodies of work in American cinema today.

Over the past decade, Florida-born, New York-based filmmaker Kelly Reichardt has established herself as a vital voice in the independent American film scene with her intimate, austere, organically-unfurling works of “quiet cinema.” Despite her NYC address, Reichardt’s reputation rests on a quartet of films set and shot in the Pacific Northwest, written or co-written by Portlandbased penman Jon Raymond (who also collaborated with Reichardt’s longtime friend/producer Todd Haynes on the latter’s exquisite Mildred Pierce mini-series for HBO). Taken together, these films provide a roughhewn tapestry of life in transition, populated by world-weary drifters pushed to, or seeking refuge at, the margins of society. They include: Old Joy (2006), Reichardt’s meditative, modest, bromance-in-the-woods gem; the sober, affecting Wendy and Lucy (2008), a best-of-the-year (if not decade) fixture and standard bearer for a new naturalism in American cinema; Meek’s Cutoff (2010), her masterful, revisionist Western and W. Bush-era parable of power unchecked; and Night Moves (2013), a slow-churning, existential eco-thriller that offered some late-game surprises for those accustomed to Reichardt’s typically subdued sensibilities. Although River of Grass – Reichardt’s delightfully offbeat, lovers-on-the-lam debut – garnered much praise when it premiered in competition at Sundance in 1994, it would be a staggering twelve years until her follow-up, something the filmmaker chalks up to gender discrimination in the industry. We are proud to present a new digital restoration of this auspicious work for Vancouver audiences, alongside her indispensable Cascadia tetralogy.

Program Note: Reichardt’s sixth and latest feature, Certain Women (2016), which received a rapturous reception at Sundance earlier this year, will not be included in this retrospective, as a Canadian release date has yet to be confirmed.

Opening Night! Kelly Reichardt in person (TBC) Thursday, May 19 Refreshments & Special Guests 6:00 pm – Doors 7:00 pm – Old Joy with Introduction by Dorothy Woodend Q&A with Kelly Reichardt after screening (TBC) Dorothy Woodend is the Director of Programming for DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver. In addition to her work at DOXA, she has been the film critic for The Tyee since 2004. Her work has been published in magazines, newspapers, and books across Canada and the US, as well as a number of international publications. She is a member of the Vancouver Film Critics Circle, the Alliance for Women Film Journalists, and was recently nominated as a YWCA Woman of Distinction.

RIVER OF GRASS

“The poet laureate of the Pacific Northwest.” Sam Littman, Senses of Cinema

Old Joy

USA 2006. Dir: Kelly Reichardt. 76 min. 35mm

After the frustrating, twelve-year gap that followed her first feature, Reichardt re-emerged in 2006 with this lo-fi, minimalist masterpiece that laid the groundwork – and critical precedence – for the director’s reset career. The first of now four collaborations with writer Jon Raymond, Old Joy faithfully adapts for the screen Raymond’s enigmatic short story about two drifting-apart buddies who reunite for a weekend hiking trip in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Cult musician Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) is one half of the two-hander, a wandering, past-prime hippie longing to reconnect with his hometown pal (Daniel London), a father-to-be. Featuring a scenic soundtrack by indie rock royalty Yo La Tengo, Reichardt’s second first-feature is an eloquent, incisive meditation on adulthood, alienation, and platonic(ish) male friendship in flux. “A triumph . . . One of the finest American films of the year” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times). THURSDAY, MAY 19

Opening Night with Refreshments & Special Guests 6:00 pm Doors 7:00 pm Old Joy with introduction & post-screening Q&A (TBC) SATURDAY, MAY 21 – 5:00 PM

New Restoration!

River of Grass

USA 1994. Dir: Kelly Reichardt. 81 min. DCP

The debut feature from writer-director Kelly Reichardt is a grungy, darkly comic, ennui-imbued riff on the amour fou film for a languid ’90s America. Described as “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime story without the crime,” River of Grass follows the maladroit misadventure of a bored, thirtysomething mother and housewife (Lisa Bowman) who falls for a pistol-toting fuckup (Larry Fessenden) in the sun-bleached wasteland of southern Florida – Reichardt’s childhood haunt. When the gun inevitably goes off, the slacker-couple make a tragicomic go at the outlaw life. An out-of-the-gate darling at Sundance and year-end bester for Film Comment and Village Voice, it would nevertheless be Reichardt’s only feature film for over a decade – the director stifled by an industry reluctant to finance a woman-helmed picture. “One of the year’s smartest indies. Not for squares” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice). FRIDAY, MAY 20 – 8:05 PM SATURDAY, MAY 21 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, MAY 23 – 4:15 PM

Wendy and Lucy USA 2008. Dir: Kelly Reichardt. 80 min. 35mm

Kelly Reichardt’s humble, heartrending third feature, the talk of Cannes when it debuted in Un Certain Regard, was the writer-director-editor’s breakthrough film, an unassuming tour de force that New York Times critic A. O. Scott placed at the epicentre of a burgeoning (albeit short-lived) “Neo-Neo Realist” movement in American independent cinema. Michelle Williams, in what remains her finest performance to date, is Wendy, a young, broke vagabond stranded in a small Oregon town after her battered car breaks down and her beloved dog Lucy goes missing. The plot of this unadorned, unsentimental, unhurried drama – adapted from co-writer Jon Raymond’s short story “Train Choir”– is deceptively slight; in its understated way, it speaks volumes about loneliness, economic hardship, and compassion in a culture of individualism and inopportunity, the modern American zeitgeist. “Breathtaking . . . It should be required viewing” (Michael Atkinson, Sight & Sound). FRIDAY, MAY 20 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, MAY 22 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, MAY 23 – 8:10 PM

Meek’s Cutoff

USA 2010. Dir: Kelly Reichardt. 104 min. DCP

Kelly Reichardt’s first foray into period filmmaking witnessed the indie auteur in revisionist mode, deconstructing, de-mythologizing, and de-masculinizing the true-grit American Western with predictably riveting results. Based on the real-life account of a doomed 1845 trek along the Oregon Trail, Reichardt and screenwriter Jon Raymond’s stark, female-fronted masterwork depicts – in immersive, oft-arduous detail – the life-and-death journey of a small caravan of westward pioneers (Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, et al.) attempting to cross the Cascade Mountains. Lost by their unreliable, self-aggrandizing guide Stephen Meek (a gruff Bruce Greenwood), the destitute travelers wager their lives on a captive Native American drifter. Shot on 35mm but enclosed in a boxy, 4:3 aspect ratio – to allegedly align the image with the bonnet-wearing women’s point of view – Reichardt’s feminist Western doubles as a blistering political allegory, with Meek a dead ringer for then-POTUS George W. Bush. “Some kind of masterpiece … A fascinatingly idiosyncratic, aesthetically provocative, enthralling vision” (Kenji Fujishima, Slant Magazine). SATURDAY, MAY 21 – 8:10 PM SUNDAY, MAY 22 – 4:30 PM

Night Moves

USA 2013. Dir: Kelly Reichardt. 112 min. DCP

Resuming her exploration – and upending! – of film genres following her brilliant excursion into Western territory in Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt tinkers with the syntax of the suspense-thriller in this existential, slow-motion nail biter, more Dostoevsky than De Palma. Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard – all superb – play a trio of Oregon-based environmentalists set to blow up a hydro-electric dam that is, in their view, “killing all the salmon just so you can run your fucking iPod every second of your life.” The ’70s-evoking title (the Arthur Penn film, the Bob Seger song) refers not only to the act of eco-terrorism in question but to the “moves” taken when it goes awry. Co-scripted with regular collaborator Jon Raymond – and featuring a haunting score by composer Jeff Grace – Night Moves is a modern moral tale of best-laid plans and fallouts, with a denouement that demonstrates the elasticity of Reichardt’s formalism. “A film of deliberate, gnawing intensity and focus” (Scott Tobias, The Dissolve). SUNDAY, MAY 22 – 8:05 PM MONDAY, MAY 23 – 6:00 PM

OLD JOY

NEW CINEMA

“Intriguing and thoroughly original . . . Further proof of Tsangari’s status as one of the most innovative chroniclers of human behaviour working today.” – Eric Kohn, Indiewire “Expertly executed . . . Profoundly eccentric . . . A committedly deadpan comedy of manners, morals, and men behaving weirdly. – Guy Lodge, Variety

Chevalier

Greece 2015. Dir: Athina Rachel Tsangari. 99 min. DCP

The directors Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg) and Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster) are the leading edge of a weird and wonderful Greek Wave making a big international splash of late. Tag-lined “a buddy movie without the buddies,” Tsangari’s eagerly-anticipated latest is a deadpan, whip-smart satire of masculinity, male competitiveness, and male anxiety – and also a sly allegorical take on Greece’s contemporary woes! Six middle-aged acquaintances, on a luxury yacht cruising the Aegean, decide to hold an elaborate contest to determine which of them is “best in everything.” Tsangari’s screenplay was co-written with Efthymis Filippou, who also co-wrote Lanthimos’s last three features. “A study of male antagonism as seen through the eyes of a brilliant female filmmaker . . . Chevalier is yet another marvel of the new Greek cinema, remarkable for its originality and wit” (Dimitri Eipides, Toronto I.F.F.). FRIDAY, JUNE 3 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 4 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 5 – 8:20 PM MONDAY, JUNE 6 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8 – 8:20 PM

NEW RESTORATION

First-ever North American release! A rediscovered treasure of adult-oriented Japanese animation!

Belladonna of Sadness (Kanashimi no Beradonna) Japan 1973. Dir: Eiichi Yamamoto. 93 min. DCP

“One of the great lost masterpieces of Japanese animation, Belladonna of Sadness is a mad, swirling, psychedelic lightshow of tarot-card imagery, demons, and haunted forests, equal parts J. R. R. Tolkien and gorgeous, explicit Gustav Klimt-influenced eroticism. Produced by Osamu Tezuka, the godfather of Japanese anime and manga, and directed by his long-time collaborator Eiichi Yamamoto (Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion), Belladonna unfolds as a series of spectacular still watercolour paintings that bleed and twist together. An innocent young woman, raped by the local lord on her wedding night, makes a pact with the Devil in order to take revenge. Yamamoto’s transgressive film is not for the easily offended. Set to a mind-blowing psych rock soundtrack by jazz composer Masahiko Satoh, and on a par with René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet or Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards as an LSD-stoked 1970s head trip, Belladonna, now beautifully restored from its original film and sound elements, marks a major rediscovery for animation fans” (Cinelicious Pics). 18+ only FRIDAY, JUNE 3 – 8:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 4 – 8:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 5 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, JUNE 6 – 8:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8 – 6:30 PM

DE PROFUNDIS

SHADOW BOXING THE LEGACY OF JOSEPH CORNELL IN AMERICAN AVANT–GARDE CINEMA CURATED BY KIM KNOWLES AND ANGELA PICCINI PRESENTED IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY’S EXHIBITION MASHUP: THE BIRTH OF MODERN CULTURE

culpture, collage, shadow boxes, and film: American artist Joseph Cornell collected and assembled fragments of industrialized production as “moments crystallised in feelings from the past” (Lawrence Jordan, Cornell, 1965 [1978]). His work profoundly influenced the post-war avant-garde film scene and resonates through decades of experimental film and video practice. Cornell’s first film, Rose Hobart (1936), is one of the earliest examples of “found footage,” a tradition of image recycling and appropriation that persists across the diverse range of critical and material engagements in the work of contemporary artists. For Cornell and those inspired by him, found footage – whether as “readymade” to be sampled, transformed through collage, or time-shifted to create portraits of things and forms – invites the viewer to recognize the original sources and to feel the potential of reminiscence re-assembled. Through a combination of canonical and lesser-known or more recent works, this two-day program explores the legacy of Cornell in American avant-garde filmmaking. Responding to Cornell’s fascination with stardom and mass culture (such as Rose Hobart) are the works of Dara Birnbaum (Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79), Chuck Workman (Precious Images, 1986), and Jeanne Liotta (Maria Movie, 2001). Cornell’s experimental mixing of print media and documentary archive is reflected in Stephanie Barber’s Flower, the Boy, the Librarian (1996), Abigail Child’s Mercy (1989), Janie Geiser’s The Secret Story (1996), and Deborah Stratman’s These Blazeing Starrs! (2011). Meditations on place are central to Cornell’s Gnir rednoW (1955) (a conversation with Stan Brakhage’s The Wonder Ring [1955]) and also Ernie Gehr’s Eureka (1974). Repetition and a playful sensitivity to the everyday and the seemingly banal feature in William Burroughs, Antony Balch, and Brion Gysin’s The Cut-Ups (1966), Jason Livingston’s The End (1998), Jonas Mekas’s Notes on a Circus (1966), and Jen Proctor’s A Movie (a 2002 response to Bruce Conner’s 1958 film of the same name). The political power of found footage spans the two-day program, but perhaps nowhere more forcefully than in Mónica Savirón’s Broken Tongue (2013). This political edge to Cornell’s legacy is further explored in the two feature films by Lewis Klahr and Lawrence Bose. Since the 1970s, Klahr has experimented with animated collage, combining American pop culture imagery from magazines and comic books to create an idiosyncratic retro-noir aesthetic. His new feature-length Sixty Six (2015) weaves the iconography and everyday ephemera of the 1960s into an imaginative and mysterious narrative. A different form of appropriation characterizes Brose’s De Profundis (1997), in which footage from home movies and gay male erotica is chemically treated to create sensuous surfaces and make tangible and material the themes of masculinity, sexuality, and identity politics. – Kim Knowles and Angela Piccini

Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell/1936. 20 min.) Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives, New York

Maria Movie (Jeanne Liotta/2001. 7 min.) Flower, the Boy, the Librarian (Stephanie Barber/1996. 4 min.) Cornell, 65 (Lawrence Jordan/1978. 6 min.) The Secret Story (Janie Geiser/1996. 8 min.) These Blazeing Starrs! (Deborah Stratman/2011. 14 min.) Mercy (Abigail Child/1989. 10 min.) Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum/1978–79. 6 min.) Precious Images (Chuck Workman/1986. 8 min.) The End (Jason Livingston/1998. 3 min.) Total running time: approx 85 min. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25 – 6:30 PM

DAY 1 - PROGRAM 2

Sixty Six

USA 2015. Dir: Lewis Klahr. 90 min. DCP

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25 – 8:15 PM

DAY 2 - PROGRAM 1 Gnir rednoW (Joseph Cornell/1955. 5 min.) Eureka (Ernie Gehr/1974. 38 min.) Notes on the Circus (Jonas Mekas/1966. 13 min.) A Movie (Jen Procter/2002. 12 min.) The Cut Ups (William Burroughs, Antony Balch/1966. 20 min.) Total running time: approx 88 min. THURSDAY, MARCH 26 – 6:30 PM

DAY 2 - PROGRAM 2

De Profundis

USA 1997. Dir: Lawrence Brose. 65 min. 16mm

preceded by Broken Tongue (Mónica Savirón/2013. 3 min.)

Kim Knowles is an academic and curator specialising in experimental film history, theory, and aesthetics. She teaches Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, Wales, and has curated the “Black Box” experimental program at Edinburgh International Film Festival since 2009.

THURSDAY, MARCH 26 – 8:15 PM

Angela Piccini is a writer, educator, and artist who works in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Bristol. Her writing, teaching, and art practice focus on the moving image and its intersections with place, space, and materiality.

MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture February 20 to June 12, 2016 Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby Street Info 604-662-4719 www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

Regular ticket prices in effect. Membership in The Cinematheque or the Vancouver Art Gallery will be accepted for this event.

DAY 1 - PROGRAM 1

ROSE HOBART

FRE E EVEN T

TH E CINE M AT H EQ UE

A R C HJUIVNEE4 D AY T

he Cinematheque does more than just screen great works of cinema. As part of our mission to advance the understanding and appreciation of cinema as an important art form with a rich history, we offer a range of cultural and educational programs, services, and resources – including the maintenance of a movingimage archive housing more than 2000 film prints, in 16mm and 35mm formats, the vast majority of them works by B.C. and other Canadian filmmakers!

Join us on Saturday, June 4 for our free Archive Day, a celebration of all things film. Enjoy a complimentary bag of the city’s best popcorn as you experience unique 16mm films from our archive collections. Participate in a film activity with our Education Department. Learn more about film and the efforts to preserve these fragile artifacts. Get up close and personal with the medium of motion-picture film as we bring The Cinematheque Film Archive out from behind its closed stacks!

12:00 pm: Screening - West Coast Film Collection Shorts Introduced by Cinematheque Executive + Artistic Director Jim Sinclair Preserving the precious heritage of independent filmmaking on Canada’s west coast, our archive collection includes more than 200 significant B.C. films dating from 1968 to 1978 – the first major wave of independent and avant-garde filmmaking in the province. This shorts program will showcase films from our West Coast Film Collection, featuring works by local film notables Al Razutis, David Rimmer, Sturla Gunnarsson, Peter Lipskis, and others. We’ll also be sharing some obscure archival buried treasures! You’re sure to get your fix of original experimental celluloid, all on 16mm film.

1:00 pm: Intermission + Activities Get up close and personal with films from our archive. Try you hand at 16mm scratch animation with our Education Department. And learn to project film!

1:30 pm: Screening – NFB Collection Shorts The National Film Board of Canada is a true Canadian treasure. The Cinematheque Film Archive proudly houses more than 1000 films donated by the NFB. This shorts program will feature some of our favourites from that collection, including celebrated animations from Norman McLaren and Ryan Larkin and classic documentaries from Colin Low and Budge Crawley. Bring the whole family and relive these award-winning greats from Canadian film history.

2:45 pm: Illustrated Preservation Talk 1. VARIATIONS ON A CELLOPHANE WRAPPER; 2. CORRAL; 3. SCRATCH ANIMATION; 4. WALKING; 5. NEIGHBOURS

Ever wonder why some old films appear a shade of red on screen? Or what causes those constant vertical lines on old home movies? The Cinematheque’s Film Archive Preservation Coordinator Jarin Schexnider will discuss film preservation and degradation, using excerpts from films held in the Cinematheque Archive, Cinephiles and casual film lovers alike will learn something new about the process of creating, maintaining, and preserving motion-picture film!

SUN TICKETS

MON

Agnès Varda

Le Bonheur – 4:30 pm La Pointe Courte – 6:30 pm

TUES

For May 2 film descriptions, please consult our previous program guide

MAY

The Cinematheque is recognized as an exempt non–profit film society under the B.C. Motion Picture Act, and as such is able to screen films that have not been reviewed by the B.C. Film Classification Office. Under the act, all persons attending cinematheque screenings must be members of the Pacific Cinémathèque Pacifique Society and be 18 years of age or older, unless otherwise indicated.

Le Bonheur – 6:30 pm

GUEST

DIM Cinema

Althea Thauberger:

GUEST

Frames of Mind

I Smile Back – 7:30 pm

Opening Night with Special Guests

Doors – 6:00 pm

Kelly Reichardt

Wendy and Lucy – 6:30 pm

Kelly Reichardt

Old Joy – 5:00 pm River of Grass – 6:30 pm

River of Grass – 8:05 pm

Meek’s Cutoff – 8:10 pm

Old Joy with Intro & Postscreening Q&A (TBC) - 7:00 pm

GUEST

Cinema Sunday

The Blob – 1:00 pm Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt

River of Grass – 4:15 pm

Shadow Boxing: The Legacy of Joseph Cornell

Meek’s Cutoff – 4:30 pm

Night Moves – 6:00 pm

Day 1 - Program 1 – 6:30 pm

Day 2 - Program 1 – 6:30 pm

Wendy and Lucy – 6:30 pm

Wendy and Lucy – 8:10 pm

Day 1 - Program 2 – 8:15 pm

Day 2 - Program 2 – 8:15 pm

Agnès Varda

Jane B. par Agnès V. – 6:30 pm

Kung-Fu Master! – 6:30 pm

Kung-Fu Master! – 8:30 pm

Jane B. par Agnès V. – 8:10 pm

Night Moves – 8:05 pm

Agnès Varda

Vagabond – 4:00 pm

Agnès Varda

Jane B. par Agnès V. – 6:30 pm

Vagabond – 8:30 pm

Agnès Varda

Vagabond – 6:30 pm Kung-Fu Master! – 8:30 pm

IN THIS ISSUE

NEW CINEMA 9 NEW RESTORATION 9 SHADOW BOXING 10

CHINA NOW 14–17

GUEST

Kelly Reichardt

Jane B. par Agnès V. – 8:10 pm

ARCHIVE DAY 11

Le Bonheur – 8:15 pm

Preuzmimo Benčić – 7:30 pm

Kung-Fu Master! – 6:30 pm

KELLY REICHARDT 6–8

Cleo from 5 to 7 – 6:30 pm

MAY 6–15

$3 ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP REQUIRED FOR THOSE 18+

SHAKESPEARE 400 2–5

Agnès Varda

SAT

www.doxafestival.ca

ALL SCREENINGS ARE RESTRICTED TO 18+ UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED

theCinematheque.ca

Agnès Varda

FRI

DOXA DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

HOW TO BUY TICKETS Day–of tickets go on sale at the Box Office 30 minutes before the first show of the evening. Advance tickets are available for credit card purchase at theCinematheque.ca ($1 service charge applies). Events, times, and prices are subject to change without notice.

THURS

La Pointe Courte – 8:10 pm

or visit theCinematheque.ca

Cleo from 5 to 7 – 8:15 pm

WED

AGNES VARDA 18–20

China Now Animation on the Edge – 4:00 pm New Restoration Belladonna of Sadness – 6:30 pm New Cinema Chevalier – 8:20 pm

Shakespeare 400

Chimes at

New Cinema

Chevalier – 6:30 pm

New Restoration

Belladonna of Sadness – 6:30 pm

New Restoration

New Cinema

Belladonna of

Chevalier – 8:20 pm

Sadness – 8:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Macbeth – 6:30 pm

JUNE

GUEST

China Now Opening Night

New Cinema

Chevalier – 6:30 pm

Filmmaker and Curator in Person

New Restoration

Doors – 6:00 pm

Belladonna of

The River of Life – 7:00 pm

Sadness – 8:30 pm

China Now

Egg and Stone – 6:30 pm The Dossier – 8:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Chimes at

Archive Day - Free Event! Screenings / Activities / Talks - 12:00 pm New Cinema Chevalier – 6:30 pm New Restoration Belladonna of Sadness – 8:30 pm

Midnight – 6:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Chimes at Midnight – 4:00 pm

Macbeth – 8:45 pm

Macbeth – 6:30 pm Chimes at Midnight – 9:05 pm

GUEST

Frames of Mind

Alice Cares – 7:30 pm

China Now

The Last Moose of

Midnight – 6:30 pm

Chimes at

Aoluguya – 6:30 pm

Macbeth – 8:45 pm

Midnight – 9:05 pm

Four Ways to Die in My

Shakespeare 400

Throne of Blood – 6:30 pm

Romeo + Juliet – 8:40 pm

Shakespeare 400

Romeo + Juliet – 6:30 pm Throne of Blood – 8:45 pm

Hometown – 8:30 pm

FRAMES OF MIND 21 DIM CINEMA 21 SCI-FI CINEMA SUNDAY 22

GUEST

Cinema Sunday

Forbidden Planet – 1:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Hamlet – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Hamlet – 7:00 pm

DIM Cinema

Brûle la mer – 7:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Throne of Blood – 4:30 pm

China Now

Shakespeare 400

My Own Private

Cut Out the Eyes + Female

Idaho – 6:30 pm

Planet – 6:30 pm

Directors – 8:00 pm

Forbidden Planet – 8:30 pm

My Own Private

Hamlet – 7:00 pm

Rated G

Shakespeare 400

Emperor Visits the Hell – 6:30 pm

Forbidden

Idaho – 8:30 pm

My Own Private

Shakespeare 400

West Side Story – 7:00 pm

Much Ado About

Henry V – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

The Taming of the

Much Ado About

Rated PG

Idaho – 4:30 pm

Nothing – 6:30 pm

Shrew – 6:30 pm

Nothing – 4:30 pm

Rated 14A

Henry V – 7:00 pm

Henry V – 8:35 pm

Much Ado About

West Side

Nothing – 8:50 pm

Story – 7:00 pm

Rated 18A BACKGROUND IMAGE:

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

Shakespeare 400

The Taming of the

Shrew – 4:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Richard III – 7:00 pm

The Taming of the

Shakespeare 400

Ran – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Ran – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Ran – 7:00 pm

Shrew – 7:00 pm

West Side Story – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Richard III – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Richard III – 7:00 pm

JULY

SUN TICKETS

MON

Agnès Varda

Le Bonheur – 4:30 pm La Pointe Courte – 6:30 pm

TUES

For May 2 film descriptions, please consult our previous program guide

MAY

Le Bonheur – 6:30 pm

GUEST

DIM Cinema

Althea Thauberger:

GUEST

Frames of Mind

I Smile Back – 7:30 pm

Opening Night with Special Guests

Doors – 6:00 pm

Kelly Reichardt

Wendy and Lucy – 6:30 pm

Kelly Reichardt

Old Joy – 5:00 pm River of Grass – 6:30 pm

River of Grass – 8:05 pm

Meek’s Cutoff – 8:10 pm

Old Joy with Intro & Postscreening Q&A (TBC) - 7:00 pm

GUEST

Cinema Sunday

The Blob – 1:00 pm Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt

River of Grass – 4:15 pm

Shadow Boxing: The Legacy of Joseph Cornell

Meek’s Cutoff – 4:30 pm

Night Moves – 6:00 pm

Day 1 - Program 1 – 6:30 pm

Day 2 - Program 1 – 6:30 pm

Wendy and Lucy – 6:30 pm

Wendy and Lucy – 8:10 pm

Day 1 - Program 2 – 8:15 pm

Day 2 - Program 2 – 8:15 pm

Agnès Varda

Jane B. par Agnès V. – 6:30 pm

Kung-Fu Master! – 6:30 pm

Kung-Fu Master! – 8:30 pm

Jane B. par Agnès V. – 8:10 pm

Night Moves – 8:05 pm

Agnès Varda

Vagabond – 4:00 pm

Agnès Varda

Jane B. par Agnès V. – 6:30 pm

Vagabond – 8:30 pm

Agnès Varda

Vagabond – 6:30 pm Kung-Fu Master! – 8:30 pm

IN THIS ISSUE

NEW CINEMA 9 NEW RESTORATION 9 SHADOW BOXING 10

CHINA NOW 14–17

GUEST

Kelly Reichardt

Jane B. par Agnès V. – 8:10 pm

ARCHIVE DAY 11

Le Bonheur – 8:15 pm

Preuzmimo Benčić – 7:30 pm

Kung-Fu Master! – 6:30 pm

KELLY REICHARDT 6–8

Cleo from 5 to 7 – 6:30 pm

MAY 6–15

$3 ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP REQUIRED FOR THOSE 18+

SHAKESPEARE 400 2–5

Agnès Varda

SAT

www.doxafestival.ca

ALL SCREENINGS ARE RESTRICTED TO 18+ UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED

theCinematheque.ca

Agnès Varda

FRI

DOXA DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

THURS

La Pointe Courte – 8:10 pm

or visit theCinematheque.ca

Cleo from 5 to 7 – 8:15 pm

WED

AGNES VARDA 18–20

China Now Animation on the Edge – 4:00 pm New Restoration Belladonna of Sadness – 6:30 pm New Cinema Chevalier – 8:20 pm

Shakespeare 400

Chimes at

New Cinema

Chevalier – 6:30 pm

New Restoration

Belladonna of Sadness – 6:30 pm

New Restoration

New Cinema

Belladonna of

Chevalier – 8:20 pm

Sadness – 8:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Macbeth – 6:30 pm

JUNE

GUEST

China Now Opening Night

New Cinema

Chevalier – 6:30 pm

Filmmaker and Curator in Person

New Restoration

Doors – 6:00 pm

Belladonna of

The River of Life – 7:00 pm

Sadness – 8:30 pm

China Now

Egg and Stone – 6:30 pm The Dossier – 8:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Chimes at

Archive Day - Free Event! Screenings / Activities / Talks - 12:00 pm New Cinema Chevalier – 6:30 pm New Restoration Belladonna of Sadness – 8:30 pm

Midnight – 6:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Chimes at Midnight – 4:00 pm

Macbeth – 8:45 pm

Macbeth – 6:30 pm Chimes at Midnight – 9:05 pm

GUEST

Frames of Mind

Alice Cares – 7:30 pm

China Now

The Last Moose of

Midnight – 6:30 pm

Chimes at

Aoluguya – 6:30 pm

Macbeth – 8:45 pm

Midnight – 9:05 pm

Four Ways to Die in My

Shakespeare 400

Throne of Blood – 6:30 pm

Romeo + Juliet – 8:40 pm

Shakespeare 400

Romeo + Juliet – 6:30 pm Throne of Blood – 8:45 pm

Hometown – 8:30 pm

FRAMES OF MIND 21 DIM CINEMA 21 SCI-FI CINEMA SUNDAY 22

GUEST

Cinema Sunday

Forbidden Planet – 1:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Hamlet – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Hamlet – 7:00 pm

DIM Cinema

Brûle la mer – 7:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Throne of Blood – 4:30 pm

China Now

Shakespeare 400

My Own Private

Cut Out the Eyes + Female

Idaho – 6:30 pm

Planet – 6:30 pm

Directors – 8:00 pm

Forbidden Planet – 8:30 pm

My Own Private

Hamlet – 7:00 pm

Rated G

Shakespeare 400

Emperor Visits the Hell – 6:30 pm

Forbidden

Idaho – 8:30 pm

My Own Private

Shakespeare 400

West Side Story – 7:00 pm

Much Ado About

Henry V – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

The Taming of the

Much Ado About

Rated PG

Idaho – 4:30 pm

Nothing – 6:30 pm

Shrew – 6:30 pm

Nothing – 4:30 pm

Rated 14A

Henry V – 7:00 pm

Henry V – 8:35 pm

Much Ado About

West Side

Nothing – 8:50 pm

Story – 7:00 pm

Rated 18A BACKGROUND IMAGE:

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

Shakespeare 400

The Taming of the

Shrew – 4:30 pm

Shakespeare 400

Richard III – 7:00 pm

The Taming of the

Shakespeare 400

Ran – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Ran – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Ran – 7:00 pm

Shrew – 7:00 pm

West Side Story – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Richard III – 7:00 pm

Shakespeare 400

Richard III – 7:00 pm

JULY

China Now:

Independent Visions

Presented with Cinema on the Edge

nteresting places make for interesting cinema, and at present there is no more creative, vital, and provocative independent cinema in the world than that emerging from the People’s Republic of China. The country is experiencing exciting, unpredictable social, economic, and cultural change, and China’s young independent filmmakers have been pouring their creative energy into addressing those changes — whether assimilating, provoking, shaping, cataloguing, resisting, surfing, or advancing them.

The mainstream Chinese film market, setting new box-office records set every couple of months, is expected soon to overtake the United States as the largest film market in the world, but this cinema is tizhinei: within the system of state-regulated cultural production. To hear China’s authentic, uncensored voices, to see the country in its full complexity and richness, one must look to outside-the-system tizhiwai filmmaking.

China Now: Independent Visions seeks out talented young filmmakers who haven’t yet broken through to the international festival circuit and whose works are difficult to see within their own country. A new generation of Chinese documentarians has found numerous ways to stretch the documentary form in order to capture the new, seemingly unrepresentable realities of their country. Young and enterprising Chinese fiction filmmakers are breaking through barriers, offering intensely personal, absurdist, visionary stories that refuse to speak the glossy fantasy language of mainstream marketability. Video artists working in animation have created playful, vibrant, and implicitly engaged works that provoke as they delight. These filmmakers have invented a new vocabulary of images and sounds in order to chronicle a present that is changing before our eyes even as it shapes our future. Presenting some highlights from a vast, exciting, and ever-expanding body of work, this series offers audiences a chance to encounter a China — or rather, several “Chinas” — that they may never have previously imagined. – Shelly Kraicer

Acknowledgements: “China Now: Independent Visions” is a touring series organized by Cinema on the Edge, a collaboration of Los Angeles-based producer and distributor Karin Chien, Toronto-based critic and curator Shelly Kraicer, and Chicago-based filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki. The Cinematheque is grateful to Shelly Kraicer for assistance in making this Vancouver presentation possible. Film notes by Cinema on the Edge.

Opening Night! Thursday, June 2

Refreshments & Special Guests Filmmaker Yang Pingdao and Curator Shelly Kraicer in Person 6:00 pm – Doors 7:00 pm – The River of Life with Introduction by Shelly Kraicer and Yang Pingdao Q&A with filmmaker after screening Yang Pingdao is a writer and director based in Guangdong province. He was born in Yangchun, Guangdong, in 1980, and graduated in film directing from the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts. His films have attended festivals in Beijing, Kunming, Xian, Leipzig, and London. A long-time Beijing resident, Shelly Kraicer is a writer, critic, and film curator, who recently returned to his native Toronto. Educated at Yale University, he has written film criticism in Cinema Scope, Positions, Cineaste, Village Voice, and Screen International. Since 2007, he has been a programmer of East Asian films for the Vancouver International Film Festival, and has consulted for the Venice, Udine, Dubai, and Rotterdam International Film Festivals.

PERFECT CONJUGAL BLISS

Opening Night! Director Yang Pingdao and Curator Shelly Kraicer in Person!

The River of Life 生命的河流 (Shengming de heliu) China 2014. Dir: Yang Pingdao. 101 min.

Yang Pingdao is one of China’s most exciting emerging filmmakers. His astonishingly creative camera eye brings unexpected beauty to his new feature-length film. Using an innovative structure, based on the distinctive texture of family memory through space and time, Yang invents something poised delicately between fiction and documentary to capture crystallized moments in his family history, to recreate in cinematic form its emotional weight and variety, woven around the life and death of his grandmother, and the birth of his child. In order to combine extended family chronicle, implicit national history, and intimate soul-bearing autobiography, Yang employs gentle formal experimentation to invent new cinematic pathways. In Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles. Thursday, June 2 Opening Night with Refreshments & Special Guests 6:00 pm – Doors 7:00 pm – The River of Life with introduction & post-screening Q&A

Animation on the Edge: Independent Chinese Animation Total running time: approx. 109 min. (+ intermission)

Perfect Conjugal Bliss / 花好月圆 (Huahao yueyuan) ) ● A gorgeous 3D animation unscrolling through Chinese history. Zhong Su/2014. 5 min. How / 在哪儿 (Zhi nar) ● Traditional pen-and-ink drawing animates a fuzzy-haired, ruddy-cheeked girl’s imaginative world of terror and freedom. Zhang Yipin/2013. 5 min. The Hunter and the Skeleton / 猎人与骷髅怪 (Lieren yu kulouguai) ● A spectacular animation, flash plus thangka, of an Eastern Tibetan folk tale. Bai Bin/2012. 26 min. An Apple Tree / 苹果树 (Pingguoshu) ● A Tibetan fable, in vivid colours, of an indomitable tree, assailed yet triumphant. Bai Bin/2013. 11 min. Double Act / 双簧 (Shuanghuang) ● A black-andwhite vision of the industrial surreal. Ding Shiwei/2013. 5 min.

Intermission (10 min.) Mirror Room / 镜室 (Jingshi) ● Master clay animator Zhou fashions a bathroom of hallucinatory reflections, where Lacan meets fascism. Zhou Xiaohu/2012. 9 min . The New Book of Mountains and Seas Part 2 / 新山海经2 (Xin shan hai jing 2) ● Classic-styled ink-and-pen drawings filled with quasi-nightmarish animal-machines depict a future of ecological collapse, genetic tampering, and space colonization. Qiu Anxiong/2007-2012. 30 min. Family Reunion / 馬拉自在 (Mala zizai) ● Cut-out and linedrawn animation tells the dreamy story of A-mei, a Taiwanese aboriginal woman and factory worker who wants to go home for the Harvest Festival. Chen Li-hua/2012. 18 min. SUNDAY, JUNE 5 – 4:00 PM

Egg and Stone 鸡蛋和石头 (Jidan he shitou)

China 2012. Dir: Huang Ji. 98 min.

Winner of the Tiger Award at Rotterdam in 2012, Huang Ji’s brave personal film is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent Chinese cinema. Set in her home village in rural Hunan province, Egg and Stone is a powerful autobiographical portrait of a 14-yearold girl’s attempts to come to terms with her emerging sexual maturity. Living with an uncle and aunt since her parents moved to the city for work, and alone with her own inchoate fears and desires, she grapples with a terrifying world of sexual awakening and danger. Huang Ji’s visual sophistication, narrative fluency, and technical polish belie her youth. Cinematographer Ryuji Otsuka (also the film’s producer and editor) contributes beautifully-crafted cinematic images, fearfully intimate, softly pulsing with light, saturated with complex emotional power. In Hunan dialect with English subtitles. THURSDAY, JUNE 9 – 6:30 PM

The Dossier 档案 (Dang’an)

China 2014. Dir: Zhu Rikun. 129 min.

Tsering Woeser, the subject of Chinese filmmaker Zhu Rikun’s extraordinary documentary, is a Tibetan writer now based in Beijing. Through her writing and online voice, she has become one of the most eloquent voices on Tibet. Zhu Rikun’s sharply designed, formally innovative documentary is completely in Woeser’s own voice: Zhu alternates formally photographed scenes of Woeser reading excerpts from her secret government “dossier” (which she has somehow gained access to) with scenes of her speaking in her own soft but powerful, eloquent, passionate voice. Woeser’s moving account of her political awakening and current activism makes for a powerful document of a Tibetan woman finding her voice and insisting on her freedom to use it. In Mandarin and Tibetan with English subtitles. THURSDAY, JUNE 9 – 8:30 PM

The Last Moose of Aoluguya 犴达罕 (Han da han)

China 2013. Dir: Gu Tao. 99 min.

Award-winning filmmaker Gu Tao’s weirder-than fiction documentary is a portrait of Weijia, a hunter-poet with a tumultuous life. Weijia is a member of the Ewenki minority, whose homeland is near Siberia in far northeastern China. Forbidden to continue hunting, the Ewenki have been forced to move from their forests into dreary Chinese government-designed permanent villages. Deprived of his means of livelihood like many of his people, Weijia spends his time drinking and being a poet – when all of a sudden, as in a fairytale, a young teacher from Hainan, the tropical paradise island in China’s far south, comes to marry him and sweep him away. Weijia, clad in tropical print shirts, doesn’t quite fit into paradise, and his story turns dark, with intimations of madness and violence. In Mandarin and Ewenki with English subtitles. THURSDAY, JUNE 16 – 6:30 PM

Four Ways to Die in My Hometown 我故乡的四种死亡方式 (Wo guxiangde si zhong siwang fangshi) China 2012. Dir: Chai Chunya. 90 min.

A four-part fiction film that’s as much poetry as it is narrative, first-time filmmaker Chai Chunya’s gorgeous work evokes four characters – a poet, a searcher, a puppet master, and a shaman – each with intense, mystical, deeply-rooted spiritual links to the land (the film was shot in and around Gansu province) mediated by the four elemental symbols: earth, water, fire, and wind. The film’s logic is associative, dreamlike; Chai builds up a series of striking tableaux, hypnotically suggestive and pictorially spectacular. Two young women lose a camel, then a father. A retired shadow puppeteer meets a gun-toting tree thief. Storytellers and shamans evoke a lost spiritual world that Chai films back to life in spectacular visual motifs whose meanings are intuited, like deeply-felt communal memories. In Gansu dialect with English subtitles. THURSDAY, JUNE 16 – 8:30 PM

Emperor Visits the Hell 唐皇游地府 (Tang huang you difu) China 2012. Dir: Li Luo. 67 min.

Winner of the 2012 Dragons and Tigers Prize at VIFF, this is a quietly astonishing tour de force that hinges on a lovely conceit: relocating to the present-day the famous story of the Tang dynasty Emperor Taizong’s visit to the underworld. Shot in elegant, black-and-white long takes, the film spins a tale of a local river god, the Dragon King, who, feuding with a fortune teller, alters the weather without authorization and is condemned to death. When the Emperor fails to commute the god’s sentence, otherworldly retribution is swift: he is summoned to Hell. Li’s audacious use of multiple levels of storytelling and filmmaking craftily and joyously subverts every authority around. In Mandarin with English subtitles. THURSDAY, JUNE 23 – 6:30 PM

Cut Out the Eyes 挖眼睛 (Wa yanjing)

China 2014. Dir: Xu Tong. 80 min.

Er Housheng is a blind musician who travels Inner Mongolia with his lover and partner Liu Lanlan performing the saucy, sensationally bawdy form of musical duet comedy called er ren tai. Er’s female audiences are particularly enthralled with his combination of sensuality, Rabelaisian earthiness, and frankly socially-subversive lyrics. Director Xu’s specialty is to train his piercingly observant documentary camera — intimate and complicit, rather than coldly objective – on unique Chinese characters like Er, using them to probe deep beneath the surface of China’s clash of rural traditions with its urbanizing contemporaneity. The result is, on one hand, an enthralling ethnographic showpiece; but it is at its core a passionate and frenzied psycho-drama of lust, violence, and genius. In Mandarin with English subtitles. preceded by

Female Directors 女导演 (Nü daoyan)

China 2012. Dir: Yang Mingming. 43 min.

Two brilliant young women, art school graduates with deliciously profane vocabularies and supreme confidence, talk sex, cinema, and power, as they wield their shared video camera like a scalpel. Yang Mingming’s superb debut is hilarious, moving, and subversive: is it documentary or fiction, or something new that violates both modes with gleeful abandon? In Mandarin with English subtitles. There will be a 10-minute intermission between Female Directors and Cut Out the Eyes. THURSDAY, JUNE 23 – 8:00 PM

FEMALE DIRECTORS

Agnès Varda Six F ilms by the “Grandmother of the French New Wave”

gnès Varda (b. 1928), one of cinema’s paramount female artists, received an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2015 for her career’s work, the first woman and only the fourth filmmaker (after Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, and Bernardo Bertolucci) to be so honoured.

Varda’s 1954 feature La pointe courte is now regarded as the film that launched the French New Wave. Her status as a key figure of that celebrated movement hasn’t always been properly acknowledged, perhaps because of her gender – Varda is the only female director associated with the nouvelle vague (Marguerite Duras more properly belonged to the so-called Left Bank Group, in which Varda can also claim membership) – and also because, unlike Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, et al., Varda was neither a devoted cinephile nor a film critic. In fact, Varda claims to have seen very few films prior to becoming a director herself. Varda has a background as a photo-journalist, and she brings a photographer’s eye to her cinema. She has worked in both documentary and drama; her innovative films often straddle the boundaries between the two, placing fictional characters and stories in realist, documentary-like settings, employing nonprofessional actors, shooting on location. Her intensely personal and political films are very much rooted in the social context of their settings, and have been groundbreaking in cinema for their expression of female subjectivity, female desire, a feminine perspective. Varda’s 1962 feature Cleo from 5 to 7, Pauline Kael wrote years ago, “[is] one of the few films directed by a woman in the viewer can sense a difference.”

Varda’s love of the arts – literature, painting, photography – is also very much evident in her films. She has described her careful, considered, artisanal approach to all aspects of a film’s making as cinécriture or “cine-writing.” She maintains that a filmmaker should have the same freedom as novelist. On the occasion of the restoration and re-release of Jane B. par Agnès V. and Kung-Fu Master!, two underappreciated and little-seen films Varda made with actress and icon Jane Birkin in 1988, The Cinematheque presents a select retrospective of this influential and inventive director’s highly individualistic films. Varda herself remains an underappreciated film artist. Late last year, noting that the re-release of her two Birkin films was proving a specialized and rather modest affair, Varda was sardonic about her status: “I can get the Palme d’Or, but I can’t get exhibition.”

Le Bonheur (Happiness)

France 1965. Dir: Agnès Varda. 80 min. DCP

What is the colour of happiness? Agnès Varda’s most sumptuous and stylized film was also her one of her most controversial – “extremely shocking,” according to the press. Le Bonheur concerns blissfully-happy family man François (Jean-Claude Drouot), a loving husband and father to his wife and children, who decides to increase his happiness by taking a mistress. The film’s sunny, seemingly idyllic world is filled with the music of Mozart and has a beautiful colour palette evoking the French Impressionists. Many were flummoxed, however, by the apparent amorality and refusal to psychologize. Was Varda critiquing the selfish pursuit of happiness? The limitations of fidelity and family life? Offering an ironic female perspective on male fantasy and male filmmaking? Le Bonheur’s daring aesthetics and ambiguities still register as audacious and unsettling! The film won France’s prestigious Prix Louis Delluc.

SUNDAY, MAY 1 – 4:30 PM WEDNESDAY, MAY 4 – 6:30 PM THURSDAY, MAY 5 – 8:15 PM

“One of the most important woman directors in the history of cinema.” Lloyd Hughes, The Rough Guide to Film

“One of the bravest, most idiosyncratic of French filmmakers.” A. O. Scott, New York Times

La Pointe Courte France 1954. Dir: Agnès Varda. 89 min. DCP

Agnès Varda’s graceful debut feature is little seen but hugely important: “certainly the first film of the French nouvelle vague” (Georges Sadoul). Loosely adapted from Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, its parallel narratives juxtapose the Bergmanesque tale of a faltering marriage with a documentarylike account of the travails of everyday life in a Mediterranean fishing village. Shot on location with a small crew and largely non-professional cast – only leads Philippe Noiret and Sylvia Montfort were pro actors – the film marked a radical departure from the stodgy, studio-bound traditions of French cinema. Varda’s background as a photographer is evident in the arresting visuals. Alain Resnais was the film’s editor. “In retrospect, everything that would later make the New Wave such a success can be detected in this 1954 work” (Cannes Film Festival). “A miraculous film” (André Bazin). SUNDAY, MAY 1 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, MAY 4 – 8:10 PM

Cleo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7)

France/Italy 1962. Dir: Agnès Varda. 90 min. DCP

Agnès Varda’s enchanting second feature established her international reputation and remains a classic of French New Wave cinema. Unfolding in almost real time, Cleo from 5 to 7 chronicles two suspenseful hours in the life of a self-absorbed pop singer (Corinne Marchand) as she waits to find out whether or not she has cancer. Her anxiety heightens her every perception and gives her new appreciation for the beauty of simple things. The film, luminously shot on the streets of Paris, has cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. “Varda sustains an unsentimental yet subjective tone that is almost unique in the history of movies” (Pauline Kael). “Captures the fairy-tale essence of early ’60s Paris with a vivacity and richness that rivals Godard’s Breathless” (Eric Henderson, Slant). SUNDAY, MAY 1 – 8:15 PM THURSDAY, MAY 5 – 6:30 PM

New Restorations!

Agnès Varda and Jane Birkin x 2: “Two films that are as artistically audacious as they are original in their approach to sex and the female body.’

– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Varda’s 1988 features are two of her most evocative, and provocative, films, and their release to wide availability is cause for celebration.”

– Jake Cole, Slant

“Distinctive, delightful, and sometimes even surreal . . . The farthest thing from a straightforward documentary.” – Glenn Kenny, New York Times

“One of my all-time favourites . . . A radical masterpiece that dives headlong into the complexity of a woman’s heart – with a dreamy Jane Birkin.” – Miranda July

“A quasi-fiction, poetic-realist documentary . . . Really, it’s Varda’s Orlando.” – Ryan Lattanzio, Indiewire

“Underlined with sympathy and understanding for all of the characters, and full of both wit and tenderness.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Vancouver Premiere!

Jane B. par Agnès V.

Kung-Fu Master!

Never before released in North America, Agnès Varda’s “documentary” is a marvellously playful, decidedly unconventional portrait of singer, actress, fashion icon, and Serge Gainsbourg companion Jane Birkin. Its kaleidoscopic consideration of Birkin’s many faces and roles (woman, wife, mother, model, muse, artist) mixes Jane’s reflections on her life and career with a series of fantasy film sequences and tableaux vivants casting her as various characters, Joan of Arc among them. Ruminating on portraiture, performance, and the director-actor partnership, Varda’s freewheeling film includes appearances by Serge Gainsbourg, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and others. Midway through, Birkin comes up with an idea for a movie she’d one day like to make – an idea that quickly became the Varda-Birkin collaboration Kung-Fu Master!, also screening at The Cinematheque in a brand-new restoration.

France 1988. Dir: Agnès Varda. 80 min. DCP

France 1988. Dir: Agnès Varda. 97 min. DCP

FRIDAY, MAY 27 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, MAY 28 – 8:10 PM SUNDAY, MAY 29 – 8:10 PM MONDAY, MAY 30 – 6:30 PM

(aka Le petit amour)

A troubling subject gets sensitive treatment in Agnès Varda’s bittersweet 1988 drama, developed from an idea actress Jane Birkin shared with the director during the making of Jane B. par Agnès V. Definitely not a martial arts movie, Kung-Fu Master! (the title comes from an arcade video game played by a character) charts the romantic affair between a vulnerable, 40-year-old Parisian divorcée, played by Birkin, and a 14-year boy named Julien. The film was very much a family affair: Birkin’s real-life daughters Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon play her daughters in the film, while Julien is played by Mathieu Demy, Varda’s son. Kung-Fu Master!, now beautifully restored, impresses as an even-handed, empathetic drama about aging and loneliness, innocence and love, in the early days of AIDS – and as a rare film that privileges female subjectivity. FRIDAY, MAY 27 – 8:30 PM SATURDAY, MAY 28 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, MAY 29 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1 – 8:30 PM

Vagabond

(Sans toit ni loi)

France 1985. Dir: Agnès Varda. 105 min. DCP

Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, the extraordinary Vagabond may be Agnès Varda’s masterpiece. A powerful, poetic drama told with Bressonian rigour while also displaying Varda’s fondness for documentary, Vagabond reconstructs the final days of a defiant young drifter named Mona – played, magnificently, by Sandrine Bonnaire, here an 18-year-old relative newcomer. The film opens with Mona frozen to death in a ditch. It then proceeds, through flashbacks and “interviews,” to piece together her story from the recollections of those who encountered her. The memories of these witnesses reveal much more about their own prejudices, perceptions, and moral failings than they do about Mona. Much of the cast is non-professional. Bonnaire won the Best Actress César for her performance. “Vagabond burns in the memory, lucid and unsentimental, like the challenging gaze of Sandrine Bonnaire” (David Thomson).

SUNDAY, MAY 29 – 4:00 PM MONDAY, MAY 30 – 8:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1 – 6:30 PM

Preuzmimo Benčić

Moving-image art in dialogue with cinema Programmed by Michèle Smith, co-editor of the art journal Drawing Room Confessions.

www.dimcinema.ca

In Person: Althea Thauberger

Preuzmimo Benčić Canada 2014. Dir: Althea Thauberger. 57 min. DCP

Shot in Rijeka, Croatia, with a cast of local children, Preuzmimo Benčić, by Vancouver-based artist Althea Thauberger, draws upon collective labour and the perspective of youth to tell the story of a defunct worker-managed factory at a time when the future of the building, and the city itself, is in question. By weaving together improvisation with material collected during a six-week occupation of the factory by performers and crew, the film re-imagines the site’s politics, history, and future while simultaneously exploring the relationship between work, art, and play. Please join us also for a post-screening launch of the monograph of the film, published by Musagetes. MONDAY, MAY 16 – 7:30 PM

Brûle la mer (Burn the Sea)

Tunisia/France 2014. Dirs: Nathalie Nambot, Maki Berchache. 75 min. 35 mm

Brûle la mer uses co-director Maki Berchache’s own experience of leaving Tunisia after the 2011 Jasmine Revolution as an entry point for a collective narrative about the harragas, North African migrants seeking refuge and a new, “better” life in Europe. “The film is a poetic quest which combines materiality (in the strictest sense of that which is material life) and abstraction: the experience of rupture, of reversal. The images should render perceptible the connection between a country left behind and the country of dreams, and then, the reversal which slowly takes hold, of how the country of dreams becomes the country left behind” (Nathalie Nambot). WEDNESDAY JUNE 22 – 7:30 PM

Alice Cares

A Monthly Mental Health Film Series Presented by The Cinematheque and the Institute of Mental Health, UBC Department of Psychiatry

he Cinematheque is pleased to join with the Institute of Mental Health, UBC Department of Psychiatry in presenting “Frames of Mind,” a monthly event utilizing film and video to promote professional and community education on issues pertaining to mental health and illness. Screenings, accompanied by presentations and audience discussions, are held on the third Wednesday of each month.

Series directed by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Director of Public Education, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. Programmed by Caroline Coutts, film curator, filmmaker, and programmer of “Frames of Mind” since its inception in September 2002.

Vancouver Premiere!

I Smile Back

USA 2015. Dir: Adam Salky. 85 min. DCP

From the outside looking in, Laney Brooks (Sarah Silverman) has it all: a comfortable upper-middle-class life, a charming and successful husband, two beautiful children, and a big house in the suburbs. But behind the façade, Laney is in serious emotional pain, and struggling mightily with depression, anxiety, abandonment issues, and multiple addictions (booze, pills, and sex – both with strangers and a friend’s husband). Eschewing her prescribed lithium, Laney risks everything by indulging her impulses in increasingly destructive ways, to devastating effect. Director Adam Salky elicits an extraordinary performance from Silverman. The screenplay was adapted by Amy Koppelman from her novel of the same name. “Silverman, digging so deep into her character that we can feel her nerve endings, is like nothing we’ve seen before . . . This is acting of the highest calibre” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone). Post-screening discussion with Dr. Heather Fulton. Dr. Fulton is a Registered Psychologist at the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addictions. She is also an Instructor in the UBC Departments of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Continuing Studies. Her research and clinical practice focus on promoting the use of evidence-based practices in the treatment of substance use and concurrent mental health issues. Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia.

Alice Cares (Ik ben Alice)

Netherlands 2015. Dir: Sander Burger. 76 min. DCP

By 2050, there will be four times as many octogenarians in the world as there are today; the majority will require care. How can we continue to meet the health-care needs of our rapidlyaging population? Enter Alice, a prototype of a social robot, or “carebot,” developed by researchers in the Netherlands to provide companionship to the isolated elderly. Alice is just 60 centimetres tall, with a doll-like face, a robot body, and tiny cameras behind her blinking eyes. As part of a pilot study, Alice is taken on multiple visits to three elderly women living alone in Amsterdam. They are initially wary of Alice (“I don’t feel like having a robot in my home,” says one, “I prefer a living human being”) but as this fascinating documentary shows, the results are surprising, not least to the ladies themselves. Post-screening discussion with Dr. Mike Van der Loos. Dr. Van der Loos holds a PhD from Stanford University, and is Director of the Robotics for Rehabilitation, Exercise and Assessment in Collaborative Healthcare (RREACH) Lab, Associate Director of The Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CARIS) Laboratory, and Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at UBC. Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15 – 7:30 PM

WEDNESDAY, MAY 18 – 7:30 PM

The Cinematheque’s Education Department presents

THE BLOB

An Afternoon Film Program for Children and Their Families $6 Children & Youths (under 18) $9 Adults (Cinematheque membership not required)

Attention all ages! Beam aboard the Starship Cinematheque for a 12-month mission as we explore the outer reaches of cosmic cinema with our 2016 series, “Sci-Fi Cinema Sunday.” Each month, we present a science-fiction film that inspires wonderment beyond the infinite with tales of faraway galaxies, alien encounters, ripples in spacetime, and technological tomorrows. Films will be introduced by Vancouver film history teacher, critic, and intergalactic space pirate Michael van den Bos. In-theatre giveaways courtesy of Cinema Sunday community sponsors Videomatica Sales, Golden Age Collectables, and Kidsbooks.

Presented in conjunction with Nerd Nite Vancouver and the Vancouver Aquarium

The Blob

USA 1958. Dir: Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. 82 min. Blu-ray Disc

“It crawls… It creeps… It eats you alive!” A first-rate ‘50s drive-in flick and enduring cult classic, The Blob oozes with such schlocky, gross-out fun that it must be seen on a cinema screen! An outer-space invader of the Jell-O variety arrives in the sleepy town of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, and begins consuming the slack-jawed residents, expanding as it eats. Steve McQueen, in his first topbilled role, is 28-year-old teenager Steve Andrews, resident rebel and lovers’lane cruiser. When his early reports on the growing red glop get shrugged off, it’s up to him and girlfriend Jane (Aneta Corsaut) to battle the blob. Shot on a miniscule budget by an indie director best known for educational onereelers, this B-movie blast features smart, no-budget effects, ham-it-up acting, and an infectious Burt Bacharach jingle – a radio hit! – as its theme song. Before the film, Nerd Nite Vancouver will preview its upcoming event on that other Blob, a mysterious mass of warm water wreaking havoc on the Pacific Ocean. Nerd Nite v.20 will occur at the Vancouver Aquarium on May 24. vancouver.nerdnite.com

SUNDAY, MAY 22 – 1:00 PM

Presented with Bard Education

Forbidden Planet USA 1956. Dir: Fred McLeod Wilcox. 98 min. DCP

Shakespeare meets Astounding Stories and The Tempest becomes interstellar movie magic in Forbidden Planet, one of the finest science-fiction films of the 1950s – or, heck, ever! In the 23rd century, a spaceship (under the command of Canada’s Leslie Nielsen) travels to a remote world to search for survivors of a much earlier mission. There, the voyagers encounter the Prospero-like scientist Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), his Miranda-like daughter Alta (Anne Francis), and their robot Robby (the sprite Ariel). Soon, a mysterious, monstrous (Caliban-like) force begins stalking the ship’s crew. Augmenting its imaginative take on Shakespeare with a little Freudian and Jungian psychology, this lavish, big-budget, great-looking film, shot in colour and CinemaScope, features Oscar-nominated special effects and a pioneering electronic score. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was clearly a fan. After the film, join Mary Hartman, Bard’s Director of Education, as she leads the audience in a lively and engaging discussion of The Tempest. bardonthebeach.org/education SUNDAY, JUNE 19 – 1:00 PM ADDITIONAL SCREENINGS ● SHAKESPEARE 400

See page 4 for details.

FRIDAY, JUNE 24 – 8:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 25 – 6:30 PM

Note: Regular admission prices and membership requirement for those 18+ in effect for the evening screenings of Forbidden Planet on June 24 & 25.

FORBIDDEN PLANET

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ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE 200 – 1131 Howe Street Vancouver, BC V6Z 2L7 Phone: 604.688.8202 Fax: 604.688.8204 Email: info@theCinematheque.ca Web: theCinematheque.ca STAFF Executive and Artistic Director: Jim Sinclair Managing Director: Kate Ladyshewsky Operations & Marketing: Shaun Inouye Education Manager: Liz Schulze Education Coordinator: Hayley Gauvin Venue Operations Manager: Linton Murphy Assistant Theatre Managers: Gabi Dao, Jessica Johnson, Aryo Khakpour, Viktor Koren, Justin Mah Head Projectionist: Al Reid Relief Projectionists: Tim Fernandes, Ron Lacheur, Cassidy Penner, Helen Reed, Ryan Ermacora Film Archive Preservation Coordinator: Jarin Schexnider BOARD OF DIRECTORS President: Jim Bindon Vice-President: Eleni Kassaris Secretary: Lynda Jane Treasurer: Elizabeth Collyer Members: David Legault, Moshe Mastai, Wynford Owen, Eric Wyness

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THE CINEMATHEQUE PROGRAM GUIDE

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