MAY + JU MA UNE E 201 013 3
F
THE FILMS O
KETT C A R B S E L R CHA DER + BILLY WIL
with
PARK CHAN-WOOK’S VENGEANCE TRILOGY KIBATSU CINEMA SAFETY LAST! AQUÍ Y ALLÁ OPEN HOUSE MICHEL GONDRY’S THE WE AND THE I with live piano BEN HUR accompaniment by SARA DAVIS BUECHNER 1131 Howe Street • Vancouver • theCinematheque.ca
VANCOUVER WRITERS FEST & SIMON & SCHUSTER CANADA PRESENT
JEANNETTE
WALLS The author of The Glass Castle talks about her new book, The Silver Star.
WED, JUNE 26 - 7:30PM FREDERIC WOOD THEATRE
6354 Crescent Road, University of British Columbia TICKETS
$ 21 GENERAL(+/service 19charges) STUDENTS & SENIORS VancouverTix.com 604-629-8849 WRITERSFEST.BC.CA $
303 East 8th Avenue Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 1S1 Canada
Tuesday to Saturday Noon to 5:00 pm PST
EVENT
The Western Front is 40!
1 604 876 9343 front.bc.ca
PERFORMANCE
Shana Moulton Friday June 7, 7PM New York based artist Shana Moulton will produce a new performance in her ongoing Whispering Pines series, specifically for the Luxe Hall. Building on a decade of video and performance work, Whispering Pines features Cynthia, Moulton’s alter-ego, traversing new age mysticism, consumerism and domesticity through rituals that are at once banal and uncanny. Moulton will present a selection of video works followed by a new performance.
EXHIBITION
Open House on June 16th @ 12 – 6 pm Our anniversary celebration will take place in and around the building with food, games, activities for kids and lots of programming. Scrivener’s Monthly, our “periodical that talks” will be presented inside Jacob Gleeson’s Tent Shop and Sonic Playground will be on site with new projects by Publik Secrets and Leslie Ross with Square One. Fancy Dress Party, a celebratory screening, evokes the history of costume at the Front with works by Kate Craig, Spartacus Chetwynd, General Idea and many others. Come celebrate with us.
Properties: Lyndl Hall, Devon Knowles, Erica S t Stocking, Erdem Taşdelen May 3rd → June 16th, 2013 Opening: May 2nd @ 7pm The artists in the group show Properties tarry with the thoughts and histories that live and breathe in the walls and objects that surround us. The exhibition will be accompanied by a public presentation by LA based artist and writer Margaret Haines on May 28th @ 8pm at The Western Front in the Luxe Hall.
ADMI N ISTRATIVE O F F I C E 200 – 1131 Howe Street Vancouver, BC V6Z 2L7 tel 604.688.8202 • fax 604.688.8204 Email: info@theCinematheque.ca Web: theCinematheque.ca STAF F Executive and Artistic Director: Jim Sinclair Managing Director: Amber Orchard Communications Manager: steve chow Education Manager: Liz Schulze Operations & Marketing: Kate Wilkins Venue Operations Manager: Heather Johnston Assistant Theatre Managers: Shaun Inouye, Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Jackie Hoffart, Amanda Thomson Head Projectionist: Al Reid Relief Projectionists: Peter Boyle, Stuart Carl, Ron Lacheur, Cassidy Penner, Amanda Thomson
EXPERIENCE ESSENTIAL CINEMA
BOARD OF DIRECTO RS President: Mark Ostry Vice-President: Eleni Kassaris Secretary: Mark Tomek Treasurer: Wynford Owen Members: Jim Bindon, Elizabeth Collyer, Kim Guise, Moshe Mastai V O LUNTEERS Theatre Volunteers: Pouya Alagheband, Mark Beley, Eileen Brosnan, Jeremy Buhler, Nadia Chiu, Andrew Clark, Dylan Clark, Adam Cook, Rob Danielson, Anh Dao, Ben Daswani, Steve Devereux, Bill Dovhey, Ryan Ermacora, Kevin Frew, Shokei Green, Joe Haigh, Jessica Johnson, Beng Khoo, Michael Kling, Ray Lai, Cam Langford, Shannon Lentz, Claudette Lovencin, Tomas Mesen, Vit Mlcoch, Kelley Montgomery, Taylor Gray Moore, Cat Moore, Linton Murphy, Danuta Musial, Julia Patey, Kailash Ragupathy, Chahram Riazi, RJ Rudd, Hisayo Saito, Paloma Salas, Anthony Santiago, Bobby Tabarraee, Derek Thomas, Stephen Tweedale, Diane Wood. Distribution: Harry Wong, Scott Babakaiff, Michael Demers, Martin Lohmann, Hazel Ackner, John William, Lynn Martin, Sheila Adams, Anna Xijing, Devin Wells, Allan Kollins, Horacio Bach, Jeff Halladay, Roman Goldman Office: Jo Bergstrand, Betty-Lou Phillips, Zac Cocciolo, Ratna Dhaliwal
CONTENTS
MAY+JUNE 2013 THE CINEMATHEQUE PROGRAM GUIDE, V36.5
Education: Zac Cocciolo, Michael van den Bos And a special thanks to all our spares! T HE C IN E MATH E QU E PR O G RAM G U I D E Art Direction + Graphic Design: steve chow Program Notes: Jim Sinclair Advertising + Additional Ad Design: Kate Wilkins Proofreading: Amber Orchard, Kate Wilkins
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FRAMES OF MIND Bob and the Monster Bully
5
SPECIAL EVENT
with live musical accompaniment by Sarah Davis Buechner
Published six times a year with a bi-monthly circulation of 15,000. Printed by Van Press Printers. ADVE RTISIN G To advertise in this Program Guide or in our theatre before screenings, please call 604.688.8202.
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The Cinematheqe is a not-for-profit arts society. We rely on financial support from public and private sources. Donations are gratefully accepted — a tax receipt will be issued for all donations of $30 or more. To make a donation or for more information, please call our administration office at 604.688.8202. The Cinematheque gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the following agencies:
BEN HUR: A TALE OF THE CHRIST
DIM CINEMA Luke Fowler - All Divided Selves Erth, and Other Landscapes CINEMA SUNDAY The Dark Crystal Labyrinth FOUR FILMS / “Nancy Holt — Selected Photo and Film Works” Presented with CAG
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SAFETY LAST!
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SPECIAL EVENT
OPEN HOUSE with free screenings of Easy Street and Safety Last!
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BOOK LAUNCH
WORLD FILM LOCATIONS: VANCOUVER FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, DIE LIKE CHILDREN
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AQUÍ Y ALLÁ THE WE AND THE I
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NOW PLAYING CALENDAR
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PARK CHAN-WOOK The Vengeance Trilogy
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KIBATSU CINEMA eccentricity, popular culture and contemporary Japanese film
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STRANGE MAGIC The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder
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THE BEST OF THE NORTHWEST The Best of the 38th & 39th Northwest Filmmakers’ Festivals
presented by THE CINEMATHEQUE and the INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH, UBC DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHIATRY
The 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.
FRAMESOFMIND.CA
FRAMES OF MIND IS TAKING A SUMMER VACATION! After 11 years without a break, Frames of Mind will be taking a vacation this summer. We won’t be around in July and August, but we’ll be back in September 2013 to begin our 12th year. Thank you for your ongoing support of our programs, and we’ll see you in the fall!
VANCOUVER PREMIERE!
Bob and the Monster USA 2012. Director: Keirda Bahruth
In the late ’80s, Bob Forrest was the lead singer and songwriter for L.A. post-punk band Thelonious Monster, a contemporary of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction. Infamous more for Forrest’s drug-fuelled rants and onstage antics than for its music, Thelonious Monster signed a major-label deal at a time when Bob was feeding a $500-per-day heroin habit. Not surprisingly, the band imploded after just one album. Forrest then squandered a fortune in advance money for a solo project that flopped miserably, eventually winding up homeless as well as a repeat rehab failure. And here the story might have ended, except that in 1996, after 28 days in a county jail, Forrest finally quit the drugs and found his calling as an addictions counsellor, working first with the Musicians Assistance Program, then co-founding his own counselling organization, Hollywood Recovery Services. (And yes, that is Forrest on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew — a sideline into reality television that is not touched upon here.) A terrific documentary with both heart and soul, the film includes a wealth of archival footage from the ’80s and ’90s L.A. music scene, quirky claymation interludes, and candid interviews with members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone, Hole, and Guns N’ Roses. Colour, Blu-ray Disc. 86 mins. Post-screening discussion with Dr. Vijay Seethapathy, a psychiatrist with special interest in addiction, particularly in management of concurrent disorders. He is the medical manager of Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction and physician lead for Assertive Community Treatment Teams in Vancouver (VCH). Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. WEDNESDAY, MAY 15 – 7:30 PM
Bully USA 2011. Director: Lee Hirsch
“Kids will be kids, boys will be boys. They’re just cruel at that age.” So says a Georgia state school administrator, speaking at a community forum organized by the parents of Tyler, a relentlessly bullied 17-year-old who took his own life. Platitudes such as these invoke the palpable anger that infuses Bully, a powerful and timely documentary by Sundance- and Emmy-Award-winning filmmaker Lee Hirsch. The film follows three bullied kids over the course of a school year: Alex, a smart, gawky 12-year-old whose classmates call him Fishface (Hirsch’s camera horrifyingly captures the unremitting physical and verbal abuse Alex endures on a daily basis); Kelby, 16 years old and a popular star athlete, until she came out as a lesbian; and Ja’Meya, 14, an honour student charged with 45 felony counts after bringing a loaded handgun to school to face down her tormentors. We also hear from two sets of parents who faced the anguish of a child’s death by suicide. Touched by unaccountable loss, these parents are demanding accountability and trying to effect change. Bully is not only a film about the victims of schoolyard persecution, it is also a hopeful film about the emergence of a grassroots anti-bullying movement and the possibility of change. Colour, 35mm, 94 mins. Post-screening discussion with Dr. Tyler Black, Medical Director of the CAPE Unit, an emergency psychiatric unit at B.C. Children’s Hospital. Dr. Black received his medical training at the University of Alberta and completed his psychiatric specialization at the University of British Columbia in 2008. His areas of interest include cross-cultural psychiatry, video games and violence, and suicide. Moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky, Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19 – 7:30 PM
NORTH SHORE studios
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VAN COUVER MUSIC FESTIVAL
JULY 19–21 • JERICHO BEACH PARK
FABULOUS, FIRST-CLASS FOLK IN DOLBY 3-D HI-DEF SURROUND-SOUND GLORY
On Saturday, June 15 and Sunday, June 16, The Cinematheque is very pleased to present the renowned pianist Sara Davis Buechner, who will provide live musical accompaniment to director Fred Niblo’s 1925 blockbuster Ben-Hur, one of the silent era’s most spectacular and celebrated epics.
[OH YES - AND IT’S LIVE!]
Kobo Town
T! SP EC IA L EV EN
J U N E 15+16
L LIVE M USICA BY T EN M NI ACCO M PA WITH
SARA DAVIS
BU ECHN ER
Tickets: 604.602.9798 www.thefestival.bc.ca
early bird to discounts June 11
E CHRIST A TALE OF TH
USA 1925. Director: Fred Niblo Cast: Ramon Novarro, Francis X. Bushman, May McAvoy, Betty Bronson, Claire McDowell
MGM’s 1925 version of Ben-Hur (remade by William Wyler in 1959 with Charlton Heston) was the most expensive film of the silent era, and still astonishes with its amazing set pieces and action sequences and truly colossal scale. Matinee idols Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman have the leads. Novarro is Judah BenHur, the Jewish prince-turned-slave who crosses paths with Christ while on a quest for revenge. Bushman is Messala, the old childhood friend, now a Roman official, who betrays BenHur and his family. The film’s thrilling sea-battle and chariot-race sequences are justifiably legendary; the lavishness on display throughout is breathtaking. “It was a remake even then [there was a 1907 film version], but MGM put $5 million into it, and so much Amazing, Gargantuan, Stupendous, and Mighty Biblical Pageantry that vast numbers of viewers were swept off their feet. There’s a galley manned by a thousand slaves, the sea battle between Romans and ancient pirates, the Valley of the Lepers, and the chariot race staged in a mammoth stadium” (Pauline Kael). B&W with Colour sequences, DVD, silent. 142 mins. Please note there will be a 20 minute intermission.
Dr. Sara Buechner, an Associate Professor of Piano at the University of British Columbia, is an accomplished classical concert musician whose performances and recordings have won acclaim and awards around the world. She has appeared as a soloist with many internationally prominent orchestras, won prizes at some of the world’s most prestigious piano competitions, and has an active repertoire of more than 100 piano concertos. Dr. Buechner has been the subject of profiles in the New York Times, Maclean’s, Paris Match, and other major media. She has a great passion for film music and is one of the very few concert pianists today performing originals scores to silent movies. Dr. Buechner will also provide an introduction to the performance/screening and conduct a short Q&A afterwards.
SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 7:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 16 – 4:00 PM
SPECIAL TICKET PRICE
15
$
ALL AGES WELCOME. Not suitable for younger children. Cinematheque membership not required. No passes accepted for this special event.
SPONSORED BY
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A MONTHLY EVENING OF MOVING-IMAGE ART AND CINEMATIC COLLABORATIONS DIM presents Canadian and international artists and their moving-image practices in dialogue with cinema. DIM is curated by Amy Lynn Kazymerchyk, a Vancouver filmmaker, writer, and curator. WWW.DIMCINEMA.CA
Erth, and
LukeFowler
OTHER LANDSCAPES
ALL DIVIDED SELVES
DOUBLE BILL!
CURATED BY MICHÈLE SMITH
“His work is unashamedly polemical, but the polemic is in favour of the proposition that the same discontinuities, paradoxes and breakdowns in communication that are at issue in cinema are also at work in our mediated lives.”
Luke Fowler was introduced to Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall experiment (1965-1970) while he was working on his own series of social and psychological experiments called “The Social Engineer” (1999). Fowler’s interest in Laing’s practice, and the documentation of Kingsley Hall, evolved into the film What You See Is Where You’re At (2001). WILL BRADLEY Laing’s hypotheses on the “double bind,” the family nexus, and ontological security, in books such as The Divided Self (1960) and The Politics of Experience (1967), shaped Fowler’s own concerns with family, community, and collaborative formation; self and social representation and perception; and truth and authority. Fowler takes formal influence on these matters from structuralist film, the Situationists, the Free Cinema Movement, and free improvisation. All of these elements fold into Fowler’s poly-rhythmic compositions of sound and images —formal experiments, in tune with divided selves. The Way Out profiles Xentos “Fray Bentos” Jones, one of the founding members of the post-punk band The Homosexuals. Pilgrimage from Scattered Points reflects on the English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) and The Scratch Orchestra (1968-73). Bogman Palmjaguar is a portrait of man who takes refuge in Scotland’s remote bog lands, as his only asylum against medical incarceration. All Divided Selves is an expanded collage of R.D. Laing’s life and practice. Luke Fowler (b. 1978) is an artist, filmmaker, and musician based in Glasgow. He has performed with experimental groups Lied Music and Rude Pravo, and runs the independent label SHADAZZ. Fowler was awarded the inaugural Derek Jarman Award in 2008. In 2012, he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for his solo exhibition at Inverleith House in Edinburgh, which showcased All Divided Selves (2011).
PROGRAM I
PROGRAM II
The Way Out Great Britain 2003. Co-director: Kosten Koper. Colour, video. 33 mins.
All Divided Selves Great Britain 2011. Colour, video. 90 mins.
Pilgrimage from Scattered Points Great Britain 2006. Colour, video. 45 mins.
MONDAY, MAY 27 – 8:30 PM
Bogman Palmjaguar Great Britain 2007. Colour, video. 30 mins. MONDAY, MAY 27 – 6:30 PM
All videos courtesy of LUX Artists’ Moving Image in London lux.org.uk
“Erth, and Other Landscapes” presents a series of musings on nature, technology, perception, and time by two generations of renowned artists and filmmakers. The program commences with a journey from the origin of the cosmos to the appearance of a “brilliant streptococcus organism for which no antidote exists”; and concludes with a year-long study of a forest, enacted by following the continually shifting movement of colour, light, and shadow across natural forms, articulating then obliterating them into pure abstraction. Between these parentheses, Peter Hutton discovers the sublime landscapes of the Hudson River School in a mound of burning tires; Patrick Keiller recapitulates the natural history of the universe in the capricious ontogeny of his narrator; and, like postmodern Brueghels, Rachel Reupke’s tiny human dramas get lost in the flow of traffic through a panoramic landscape. These closely observed encounters pose questions about our relationship with non-human matter and forces, and draw out some of the complex links between the objective visible world and our inner hidden worlds. Erth | John Latham/Great Britain 1971. Colour, 16mm, sound. 25 mins. In Titan’s Goblet | Peter Hutton/USA 1991. B&W, 16mm, silent. 10 mins. The Clouds | Patrick Keiller/Great Britain 1989. B&W, 16mm, sound. 19 mins. Infrastructure | Rachel Reupke/ Great Britain 2002. B&W, video, sound. 14 mins. Compline | Nathaniel Dorsky/USA 2009. Colour, 16mm, silent. 18 mins. Aspect | Emily Richardson/Great Britain 2004. Colour, 16mm sound. 9 mins. Michèle Smith is a co-editor, with Vincent Honoré and Manuela Ribadeneiro, of Drawing Room Confessions, a London-based contemporary art journal. She previously worked in the curatorial department of Tate Modern and in the botany department of the Natural History Museum (London), where she co-authored a biographical dictionary of plant collectors in Africa and Latin America. MONDAY, JUNE 17 – 7:30 PM
“Movie images are dim reflections of the beauty and ferocity in mankind.” JAMES BROUGHTON
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CINEMATHEQUE MEMBERSHIP NOT REQUIRED
CHILDREN
&(under YOUTHS 18)
USA 1982. Directors: Jim Henson, Frank Oz Cast: Jim Henson, Kathryn Mullen, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, Brian Muehl
May’s Family Frights presentation is one of the best fantasy masterpieces to emerge from the imagination of Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets. Working with long-time collaborator Franz Oz, renowned fantasy illustrator Brian Froud, and producer Gary Kurtz (Return to Oz), Henson employed groundbreaking animatronics technology to create a film markedly darker than his other projects. The story is filled with myth and mystery. One thousand years ago in the world of Thra, the powerful Crystal of Truth was fractured, resulting in the creation of two new races: the wise and gentle Mystics and the tyrannical Skeksis. When the Skeksis take control of the cracked stone — now known as the Dark Crystal — it falls upon Jen, the last of the elf-like Gelflings, to heal the crystal and save Thra. With The Dark Crystal, Henson wanted to evoke the darkness of the original Grimm Fairy Tales, and viewers young and old have been frightened and entertained by its violent Trial by Stone, scuttling Garthim creatures, essence-of-life device, and more. “A dazzling technological and artistic achievement” (Variety), The Dark Crystal is fondly remembered by those who grew up with it, and offers new wonder to those discovering it for the first time. Colour, 35mm. 93 mins. SUNDAY, MAY 19 — 1:00 PM
ADULTS
Many of us share childhood movie memories of a moment when the safe world of a family film transformed and started to seem dangerous! An image or a soundscape created an impressionistic, hazy sense of a character or a scene viscerally reminded us that life has its perils. These moments and memories have inspired Cinema Sunday 2013: Family Frights. We’ve assembled a year of family films sure to resurrect those childhood movie moments that haunt you still — films that walk the line between the happy universe of the kids’ movie and the nervewracking memories of childhood nightmares past. In the manner of Old World fairy tales, these stories prepare children for the hazardous transition into adolescence and the grown-up world. They’re not for the faintest of heart, but these creative, masterful stories give new meaning to the idea of the family film and family fun. We invite you and your kids to enjoy the artistry and magic of the some of the edgiest children’s films of the past. Films will be introduced by Vancouver film history teacher, critic, and children’s movie enthusiast Michael van den Bos.
USA 1986. Director: Jim Henson Cast: Jennifer Connelly, David Bowie, Toby Froud, Shelly Thompson, Brian Henson
Who has the Power of Voodoo? You do! June’s Family Frights features another of Jim Henson’s most memorable and iconic creations: Labyrinth, a whimsical fable full of fantastical creatures — and a wonderfully weird David Bowie! Starring a young Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, a bratty teenager whose fairy-tale fancies become nightmares when, forced to baby-sit her annoying stepbrother Toby, she wishes him away to the underworld of Jareth the Goblin King (Bowie). To save the boy, Sarah must find her way through a dangerous, shifting, Escherinspired Labyrinth in just thirteen hours, or Toby will be transformed into a goblin forever! The creepy goblin underworld and its eerie puppet inhabitants were developed by Henson with illustrator Brian Froud (The Dark Crystal); Monty Python’s Terry Jones contributed to the story; and the sets, costumes, and narrative feature artistic nods to classic children’s authors Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, and L. Frank Baum. This tremendously talented team, backed by a killer soundtrack from Trevor Jones and David Bowie, has cemented the fantasy film’s cult status. A fearsome, phantasmagorical shindig for all ages, Labyrinth “expands the possibilities of imaginative fantasy that can be transferred to the screen” (Nina Darnton, New York Times). Colour, 35mm. 101 mins. SUNDAY, JUNE 16 – 1:00 PM
FOUR FILMS / “NANCY HOLT — SELECTED PHOTO AND FILM WORKS” Presented by The Contemporary Art Gallery in association with The Cinematheque / FREE ADMISSION Nancy Holt is a leading artist of her generation, a pioneer in conceptual, site-specific art and film work, one of a group of important international figures who initiated the Land Art movement in the late 1960s. From April 19 to June 16, 2013, the Contemporary Art Gallery brings together an exhibition comprising a selection of Holt’s photographs from 1967 onwards, many seen for the first time, alongside pivotal text and film works. At The Cinematheque, we present four key films, some made with Holt’s late husband, the artist Robert Smithson, including Sun Tunnels (1978). It depicts Holt’s best-known environmental work, four large concrete
tunnels, aligned in pairs along an axis of the rising and setting sun on a summer or winter solstice, the pipes acting as viewing devices for the sky, the surrounding landscape, and each other. Holt deals with themes centring on memory, perception, time and space. Using the natural environment as both medium and subject, with a focus on the cyclical time of the universe, the daily axial rotation of our planet Earth, and its annual orbit around the sun, Holt’s films reflect her determination to connect people with the planet Earth, to bring “the sky down to earth.” Total running time: approx. 83 mins. MONDAY, JUNE 10 – 7:00 PM
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“A MARVEL ... Could be the most brilliantly sustained comic climax in film history ... The great silent comics defined their own other grea worlds; Ll Lloyd lives dangerously in ours.”
ME O C L E W E ALL AG
DAVE KEHR, C CHICAGO READER
“Demonstrates Lloyd’s ability to do more than milk a gag, but to top it ... Each new floor is like a new stanza in a poem; and the higher and more horrifying it gets, the funnier it gets.” JAMES AGEE, COMEDY’S GREATEST ERA
“To see it today with an audience alternately roaring with laughter and gasping is one of the greatest experiences of cinema.” DAVID SHIPMAN
USA 1923. Directors: Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Tayl Taylor Cast: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother, Noah Young, Westcott B. Clarke
Harold Lloyd ranks with Chaplin, Keaton, and Harry Langdon as one of the giants of American silent comedy, and is central to one cinema’s most indelible and iconic sights: a man, in straw-boater hat and round spectacles, dangling dangerously from the hands of a giant clock over a busy city street. That still-thrilling side-of-a-skyscraper sequence is found in 1923’s Safety Last!, one of Lloyd’s best and best-known movies, screening here in a new 35mm print struck for the film’s 90th anniversary, featuring a sparkling score by composer Carl Davis. “The comic genius of silent star Harold Lloyd is eternal. Chaplin was the sweet innocent, Keaton the stoic outsider, but Lloyd — the modern guy striving for success — is us. And with its torrent of perfectly executed gags and astonishing stunts, Safety Last! is the perfect introduction to his world. Lloyd plays a small-town bumpkin trying to make it in the big city, who finds employment as a lowly department store clerk. He comes up with a wild publicity stunt to draw attention to the store, resulting in an incredible feat of derring-do that gives him a head start on the climb to success. Laugh-out-loud funny and jawdropping in equal measure, Safety Last! is an unforgettable movie experience from a genuine legend” (Janus Films). B&W, 35mm, silent. 67 mins. FRIDAY, JUNE 7 – 8:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 8 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 9 – 6:30 PM TUESDAY, JUNE 11 – 8:30 PM
FREE SCREENING SATURDAY, JUNE 15 – 2:00 PM
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Membership requirement in effect for those 18+ (except for Open House free screening on June 15)
T! FREE EVEN
OPEN HOU E !
SATURDAY, JUNE 15
June is Film Lovers Month at The Cinematheque and to celebrate our doors will be open for a glimpse beyond the screen. Join us on Saturday, June 15 from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm for our 5th Annual Open House. Tour the projection booth, library, and archive. Participate in a special silent-film activity with our Education Department. Join our donor program. Bid on film posters. Then, at 2:00 pm, grab a complimentary bag of the city’s best popcorn and settle into your seat for an Essential Cinema experience with free screenings of Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 two-reeler Easy Street, with live piano accompaniment by world-class keyboard artist Sara Davis Buechner, followed by Harold Lloyd’s 1923 comic classic Safety Last!
OPEN HOUSE: 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM FREE SCREENINGS: 2:00 PM
Charlie Chaplins’s Easy Street with Live Piano Accompaniment by Sara Davis Buechner
+ Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! Tickets to the free 2:00 pm screenings will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis starting at 12:00 pm on Saturday, June 15th. For more information, call 604688-8202.
LE PONT DU NORD
New 35mm Print
France 1981. Director: Jacques Rivette Cast: Bulle Ogier, Pascale Ogier, Pierre Clémenti, Jean-François Stévenin, Mathieu Schiffman
x3 S I PAR
, RESSORNAX B , E T T E A RIV AND C
Paris on celluloid has rarely been more strange and enthralling, puzzling and mad, than in the three marvellous French masterworks we’re presenting over the Canada Day holidays. Anchored by a brand-new 35mm print of New Wave master Jacques Rivette’s long-unavailable Le Pont du Nord, a film never-before released in North America (it was also unavailable for The Cinematheque’s Rivette retrospective in 2007), the program also includes Leos Carax’s latest, Holy Motors — which, in many critics’ estimation, rivalled Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master as the film of 2012 — and Robert Bresson’s late-period stunner Le Diable Probablement (screening in the recent 35mm print struck for 2012’s Bresson retrospective).
Paris in an intriguing puzzle — or a gigantic board game — in Pont du Nord , the long-unavailable quasi- (or meta-) thriller from nouvelle vague founder Jacques Rivette, whose magical, mind-bending opus Céline and Julie Go Boating this film resembles. Real-life mother and daughter Bulle Ogier and Pascale Ogier play, respectively, a claustrophobic excon just out of prison and a punkish, paranoid, would-be kung fu fighter. Armed with a mysterious map, and pursued by various men named Max, they set out on an odd treasure hunt through a labyrinthine Paris full of strange rules, obscure clues, complex conspiracies, and looming dangers. Loaded as well with references to other films and filmmakers, Rivette’s hallucinatory odyssey is also a cinephile’s delight. “Underworld and wonderland merge in the open air; joyous whimsy blurs with justified worry; and Rivette risks exploring the scarifying powers of fantasy and paranoia with a panning, punning documentary eye ... A movie that pushes the conspiratorial playfulness of Céline and Julie in directions both maddening and magical” (Paul Taylor, Time Out). “One of the year’s Ten Best. Of all the survivors of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette remains the most thoroughly unpredictable (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles.129 mins. FRIDAY, JUNE 28 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 29 – 8:40 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 30 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, JULY 1 – 8:20 PM
LE DIABLE PROBABLEMENT (The Devil Probably) France 1977. Director: Robert Bresson Cast: Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Henri de Maublanc, Laetitia Carcano, Nicholas Deguy
“SHATTERING ... In the future, this film will be more important than all the rubbish which is now considered important but which never really goes deep enough. The questions Bresson asks will never be unimportant.” RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER
Bresson’s penultimate film was his most controversial: Le Diable Probablement was prohibited in France to viewers under 18, on the grounds it might incite suicide! It also ignited a jury revolt at the Berlin Film Festival, where German director R. W. Fassbinder and British critic Derek Malcolm went public with their anger that it had not won top prize (it won a Special Jury Prize instead). A work of bleak but stirring beauty, the film traces the last six months in the life of a suicidal Parisian youth who, horrified by a world of spiritual and physical pollution, rejects the conventional solutions (politics, religion, psychoanalysis) offered by society. “My sickness,” he says, “is that I see clearly.” “From the faces of his young protagonists and images of Paris, particularly the Seine at night, Bresson builds up an image of a world without grace but still imbued with mystery and the power to enthral” (Roy Armes) . “Bresson’s best film since Pickpocket ... Even though Bresson has painted a dark picture of wasted youth and beauty, one comes out of the film with a sense of exaltation. When a civilization can produce a work of art as perfectly achieved as this, it is hard to believe that there is no hope for it” (Richard Roud). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 95 mins. FRIDAY, JUNE 28 – 9:00 PM MONDAY, JULY 1 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JULY 3 – 8:40 PM
HOLY MOTORS France/Germany 2012. Director: Leos Carax Cast: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue, Elise Lhomeau
Voted the best film of 2012 in polls conducted by Film Comment and indiewire — and ranking third in the Village Voice and fourth in Sight and Sound — Holy Motors marked the ecstatic return of flashy Cinéma du look luminary and former French enfant terrible Leos Carax, who hadn’t made a feature since 1999’s Pola X. “With Holy Motors, Carax has roared back to form, and maybe even surpassed himself. This full-throttle cinematic fever dream stars Carax’s longtime muse Denis Lavant as 11 different characters — or maybe one character with 11 different identities — who crisscross Paris in a white stretch limousine over the course of one long, Borgesian, Lynchian day. There’s no mistaking the true location of the movie, however, for anywhere but Carax’s own feverish, movie-mad imagination ... In fact, one could argue that the ‘story’ of Holy Motors is that of cinema itself, as the form of the film hopscotches wildly from fairy tale to thriller to musical to melodrama, with the astonishing Lavant morphing from [character to character] ... All the while, Carax’s camera lyrically cranes and pirouettes around the streets of a nighttime Paris that has scarcely seemed more alive with narrative possibilities” (Scott Foundas, Film Comment). Colour, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 115 mins. SATURDAY, JUNE 29 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 30 – 9:00 PM WEDNESDAY, JULY 3 – 6:30 PM
9
FREE ADMISSION
BOOK LAUNCH
NEW DOCUMENTARY
FIGHT LIKE
SOLDIERS, DIE LIKE
CHILDREN
Join us as U.K.-based publisher Intellect Books launches the new book World Film Locations: Vancouver (Bristol, U.K.: Intellect, 2013) and we celebrate Vancouver films and filmmakers by discussing the past, present, and future of the local industry. Attendees will hear a few words from Professor Colin Browne (School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University), watch a show reel (edited by Vancouver filmmaker Flick Harrison) of film scenes analysed in the new book, and join a discussion about Vancouver film led by a panel of film professionals hosted by Diane Burgess (Instructor in Film Studies, UBC) and including Loretta Sarah Todd (director, writer, producer at Nehiyawetan Productions) and Sharon McGowan (filmmaker and Associate Professor of Film Production, UBC). The evening will end with drinks and conversation and another chance to see Vancouver writer and critic Michael Turner’s On Location 2: Four Double Bills, in which eight well-known Vancouver-made films are edited to remove everything from them but their Vancouver locales. Edited by Rachel Walls, World Film Locations: Vancouver features the work of Vancouver writers, artists, film-makers, and curators including Colin Browne, Diane Burgess, Elvy Del Bianco, Flick Harrison, David Hauka, Peter Lester, Amy Kazymerchyk, Kamala Todd, and Michael Turner. Through this writing, and images from the films and of the locations used, the book traces the history and diversity of Vancouver location filming. The book consists of 38 “scene reviews” of Canadian and Hollywood movies from 1927 to present, and seven “spotlight essays” on key filmmakers and film moments. World Film Locations: Vancouver is part of Intellect Books’ “World Film Locations” series. For more information about the book and booksellers, see http:// press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/W/bo15568220.html This event is co-presented by UBC’s Film Studies program and the Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society. THURSDAY, MAY 16 – 7:30 PM
10
Canada 2012. Director: Patrick Reed With: Roméo Dallaire
Fresh from this year’s Hot Docs festival in Toronto and DOXA in Vancouver comes an absorbing new documentary from the team behind Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire. Canadian General Dallaire went OFFICIAL SELECTION to hell and back as commander of UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda. This new film finds him back in Africa with a VANCOUVER new purpose. “In 1994 General Dallaire received orders to stand by as a genocidal civil war unfolded in Rwanda. He returned to Canada a disillusioned and shattered man. Still OFFICIAL haunted by these memories, he has become a celebrated SELECTION author and humanitarian, with a new mission: to bring his passion and dedication to ending the recruitment and use of children as soldiers around the world. Researcher and producer on Shake Hands With the Devil, the award-winning film that chronicled Dallaire’s experience in Rwanda, director Patrick Reed now follows him through DR Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan, and North America as he talks with child soldiers, self-defence groups, militia leaders, and those trying to demobilize these children. As Dallaire visits different countries searching for solutions to this horrific practice, graphic-novel-style animation interspersed throughout his tour adds the first-person voice of a child soldier, and Ishmael Beah recounts a chilling story that makes clear the critical importance of Dallaire’s work” (Lynne Fernie, Hot Docs). Colour, HDCAM. 83 mins.
TORONTO
HOT DOCS DOXA
FRIDAY, MAY 31 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 1 – 4:30 PM & 8:35 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 2 – 6:30 PM
VANCOUVER PREMIERE
NEW CINEMA
EXCLUSIVE FIRST RUN
GRAND PRIZE CRITICS’ WEEK
FESTIVAL OF NEW CINEMA
AQUÍ
Y
FILM FESTIVAL
ALLÁ
(Here and There)
Spain/USA/Mexico 2012. Director: Antonio Méndez Esparza Cast: Pedro De los Santos, Teresa Ramírez Aguirre, Lorena Guadalupe Pantaleón Vázquez, Heidi Laura Solano Espinoza, Néstor Tepetate Medina
USA 2012. Director: Michel Gondry Cast: Michael Brodie, Teresa Lynn, Laidychen Carrasco, Raymond Delgado, Jonathan Ortiz
“DELICATE ... BEAUTIFULLY OBSERVANT ... A quietly devastating exploration of the cruel paradox that, in order to feed their loved ones, emigrants have to leave them behind.”
“DETAILED, INTIMATE ... The film is as simple, straightforward, and elegant as its title, which translates as ‘Here and There.’”
JONATHAN HOLLAND, VARIETY
MELISSA ANDERSON, VILLAGE VOICE
The affecting, quietly intense first feature by Spanish director Antonio Méndez Esparza, who studied film at Columbia in New York, won top prize at the Critics’ Week at Cannes and a host of awards elsewhere on the festival circuit. A gorgeous, low-key gem, made with a non-pro cast, it tells, in subtle, sensitive, and strikingly poetic fashion, the tale of Pedro, a man returning to his village in Guerrero, Mexico, after years working in the U.S. Pedro’s reunion with his wife and two daughters has some awkwardness, while his dreams of staying in Mexico with his family and starting a band on the side may be unrealistic. “In the vein of Ozu or even Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the film is composed of sublime little fragments of life passing by ... This is the best film yet to screen at Cannes’ Critics’ Week, confidently made without a single wasted scene ... In a time when cinematic images are often frantic and hysterical, Aquí y Allá stands out — much like Cannes competition entries from Abbas Kiarostami (Like Someone in Love) and Michael Haneke (Amour) — for being so calm and pensive. Peaceful, almost biblical and completely absorbing, this film is a masterpiece” (Ryan Lattanzio, indiewire). “A most remarkable debut; rarely, if ever, has a film about U.S./Mexican border experience felt so fresh or authentic” (Film Society of Lincoln Center). Colour, HDCAM, in Spanish and Nahuatl with English subtitles. 110 mins. FRIDAY, MAY 31 – 8:10 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 1 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 2 – 4:15 PM & 8:10 PM
A NEW FILM FROM MICHEL GONDRY, DIRECTOR OF ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND AND THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP “A MAGNIFICENT ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPERIMENT ... A film full of inclusive magic ... A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.”
“An idiosyncratic, funny, unexpectedly poignant snapshot of American youth ... The film has a scrappy charm that springs organically from the characters and their stories.” DAVID ROONEY, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
“To call this thrillingly original, deeply felt movie a coming-ofage story would be to insult it with cliché.” A. O. SCOTT, NEW YORK TIMES
JESSE CATALDO, SLANT
This ride on a South Bronx bus is a decided (and surprising) change of pace for French whiz Michel Gondry. Gondry’s last feature was 2011’s big-budget The Green Hornet, with Seth Rogan, but he is best known for his 2004 Oscar-winner Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here, Gondry teams up with teens from a Bronx-based arts-andactivism community program to craft a piquant, poignant portrait of adolescence as it begins to shade into adulthood. It’s the last day of school. As a diverse group of Bronx teens makes its way home by public bus, trash is talked, behaviour is rowdy, relationships change and realign, and various overlapping dramas unfold. The film, workshopped with the teens, unfolds more-or-less in the real time of a long bus ride. Playful, whimsical Gondry-isms embroider what is otherwise a loose, low-budget, improvisational, unadorned, and admirably non-commercial tale. By the end of its ride, Gondry’s unexpected movie has gained real emotional heft and power. “Teaming with rollicking charm and poignant drama ... Marvellously organic, occasionally goofy, deceptively complex” (Noah Cowan, Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, HDCAM. 103 mins. FRIDAY, JUNE 7 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 8 – 8:00 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 9 – 8:00 PM TUESDAY, JUNE 11 – 6:30 PM
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19
6:30pm
FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, DIE LIKE CHILDREN (p 10)
4:15pm
AQUÍ Y ALLÁ (p 11)
Ball of Fire (p 20)
8:35pm
Ninotchka (p 19)
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (p 14)
8:45pm
Oldboy (p 15)
6:30pm
Lady Vengeance (p 15)
4:00pm
PARK CHAN-WOOK
The Dark Crystal (p 7)
1:00pm
12
5
8
1
8:15pm
LEVIATHAN + MAGNETIC RECONNECTION
6:30pm
TWO YEARS AT SEA
THURSDAY
29
The Major and the Minor
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
Five Graves to Cairo (p 20)
6:30pm
Casting Blossoms
6:30pm
KIBATSU CINEMA
Ball of Fire (p 20)
The Lost Weekend (p 20)
Luke Fowler Program II (p 6)
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
8:30pm
8:35pm
5
The Lost Weekend (p 20)
Ball of Fire (p 20)
Luke Fowler Program I (p 6)
8:30pm
6:30pm
6:30pm
DIM CINEMA
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
3
Sunset Boulevard (p 19)
Lady Vengeance (p 15)
Oldboy (p 15)
Ninotchka (p 19)
8:45pm
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
8:45pm
6:30pm
PARK CHAN-WOOK
8:45pm
6:30pm
24
6
30
6:30pm
THE WE AND THE I (p 11)
8:10pm
AQUÍ Y ALLÁ (p 11)
Sunset Boulevard (p 19)
8:30pm
The Lost Weekend (p 20)
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
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11
4
6:30pm
SAFETY LAST! (p 8)
8:35pm
8
FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, DIE LIKE CHILDREN (p 10)
6:30pm
AQUÍ Y ALLÁ (p 11)
4:30pm
FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, DIE LIKE CHILDREN (p 10)
31 JUNE FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, DIE LIKE CHILDREN (p 10)
6:30pm
Ninotchka (p 19)
8:40pm
Sunset Boulevard (p 19)
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
Lady Vengeance (p 15) Oldboy (p 15)
Bob and the Monster (p 4)
23
8:45pm 8:45pm World Film Locations: Vancouver (p 10)
22
Oldboy (p 15)
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (p 14)
6:30pm
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (p 14)
4:00pm
PARK CHAN-WOOK
7:30pm
6:30pm
PARK CHAN-WOOK
17
10
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
7:45pm
Mekong Hotel
6:30pm
APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL
3
SATURDAY
BOOK LAUNCH
7:30pm
16
9
2
FRIDAY
FRAMES OF MIND
15
www.doxafestival.ca
DOXA DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
7
Mekong Hotel
8:40pm
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
6:30pm
APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL
MAY
WEDNESDAY
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (p 14)
27
20
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For film descriptions, please consult the previous Program Guide magazine or visit our website: theCinematheque.ca
MAY 1-3 SCREENINGS
TUESDAY
Lady Vengeance (p 15)
6:30pm
PARK CHAN-WOOK
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LE PONT DU NORD (p 9)
9:00pm
8:20pm
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HOLY MOTORS (p 9)
6:30pm
LE DIABLE PROBABLEMENT (p 9)
30 JULY
Double Indemnity (p 21)(p 8) The Mirage of History
LE PONT DU NORD (p 9)
Double Indemnity (p 21)
+ BILLY WILDER Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (p 21) DIM CINEMA
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
1
8:40pm
LE DIABLE PROBABLEMENT (p 9)
6:30pm
HOLY MOTORS (p 9)
6:30pm
9:00pm
LE DIABLE PROBABLEMENT (p 9)
LE PONT DU NORD (p 9)
28
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (p 21)
8:45pm
Double Indemnity (p 21)
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
21
14
8:40pm
29
LE PONT DU NORD (p 9)
6:30pm
HOLY MOTORS (p 9)
More info: theCinematheque.ca/venue 604.688.8202 • theatre@theCinematheque.ca
The Cinematheque’s theatre can be rented on Tuesday nights and during the day seven days a week.
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15
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (p 21)
8:30pm
Double Indemnity (p 21)
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
7:30pm
w/ Sara Davis Buechner
BEN HUR: A TALE OF THE CHRIST (p 5)
2:00pm
EASY STREET + SAFETY LAST! (p 8)
12:00pm
OPEN HOUSE (p 8)
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Outsider Art in Japan (p 17)
8:15pm
Ringing in Their Ears (p 17)
27
Best of the 39th Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival (p 22)
6:30pm
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The Primitchibu World + Encounters (p 17)
8:15pm
(p 17)
Milocrorze: A Love Story
6:30pm
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Midnight (p 21)
The Echo of Astro Boy’s Footsteps (p 17)
8:40pm
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER A Foreign Affair (p 21)
20
13
8:30pm
SAFETY LAST! (p 8)
8:30pm
(p 17)
Time of Eve: The Movie
6:30pm
KIBATSU CINEMA
The Dark Harbour (p 16)
9:25pm
to the Sky (p 16)
8:15pm
3
26
19
12
Best of the 38th Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival (p 22)
6:30pm
BEST OF THE NORTHWEST
Bully (p 4)
4:00pm
Erth, and Other Landscapes (p 6)
w/ Sara Davis Buechner
7:30pm
A Foreign Affair (p 21)
8:20pm
Midnight (p 21)
6:30pm
CHARLES BRACKETT + BILLY WILDER
FRAMES OF MIND
8:30pm
SAFETY LAST! (p 8)
THE WE AND THE I (p 11)
11
7:30pm
24
17
CAG PRESENTS FOUR FILMS / “NANCY HOLT — SELECTED PHOTO AND FILM WORKS” (p 7)
10
(p 20)
DIM CINEMA
23
16
9
Five Graves to Cairo (p 20)
The Major and the Minor
8:20pm
Five Graves to Cairo (p 20)
BEN HUR: A TALE OF THE CHRIST (p 5)
Labyrinth (p 7)
1:00pm
CINEMA SUNDAY
June 12 – Sept 14 • bardonthebeach.org
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U P D AT E S & A D VA N C E T I C K E T S
8:00pm
THE WE AND THE I (p 11)
6:30pm
SAFETY LAST! (p 8)
8:10pm
AQUÍ Y ALLÁ (p 11)
8:30pm
(p 20)
PA RK CHA N WOOK 박리다매
복수 삼부작 “Park’s best work remains his Vengeance Trilogy ... If you’ve ever wondered where Quentin Tarantino gets his inspiration, Park is on that list.” BETSY SHARKEY, LOS ANGELES TIMES
For the past decade, South Korean shock waver Park Chan-wook has been a poster child for cinema’s so-called “Asian Extreme” movement. He is a director of hyperstylized, hyper-violent films that sit uneasily, at least as far as some uncomfortable critics are concerned, between exploitation movie and high cinematic art. Park’s works are frequently compared to those of fellow traveller Quentin Tarantino, who is an admirer. Park has recently made something of a crossover to Hollywood: Stoker, his first English-language feature, staring Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman, and Matthew Goode, was released earlier this year, while Spike Lee’s remake of Park’s 2003 cult hit Oldboy is set for a fall release, with Samuel L. Jackson, Josh Brolin, and Elizabeth Olsen heading the cast. Park’s signature achievement is his Vengeance Trilogy, made up of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), the aforementioned Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance (2005). The films are self-contained and not narratively connected, but have been dubbed a trilogy because of their common thematic concerns (revenge, as one might expect, looms large) and Park’s overarching — and hyper, and hair-raising — aesthetic.
“Park has cited Hitchcock, along with Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg, as a primary inspiration for a boy of work that has established him as South Korea’s most celebrated director.” MIKE HALE, NEW YORK TIMES
복수는 나의 것
SYMPATHY FOR
MR.VENGEANCE (Boksuneun naui geot)
South Korea 2002. Director: Park Chan-wook Cast: Song Kang-ho, Shin Ha-gyun, Bae Du-na, Im Ji-eun, Han Bo-Bae
The frenetic first instalment in Park Chan- FRIDAY, MAY 17 – 6:30 PM wook’s informal “Revenge Trilogy” is “a SATURDAY, MAY 18 – 4:00 PM gripping psychodrama, marbled with blackly SUNDAY, MAY 19 – 8:45 PM ironic humour, that establishes the director WEDNESDAY, MAY 22 – 6:30 PM among the top rank of Asian filmmakers” (Derek Elley, Variety). When green-haired art school dropout and factory worker Ryu, who is deaf and mute, sets out on an ill-advised child kidnapping scheme in order to acquire a kidney for his dying sister, it sets in motion a brutal, bloodsoaked chain of events in which — true to Park form – things go from bad to horrendous to numbingly, unspeakably nihilistic. Park is, arguably, something of a moralist and bleak humorist as well as a hugely talented filmmaker; Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance impresses with its breathtaking widescreen compositions, frenzied action sequences, and foreboding claustrophobic atmosphere. But sensitive viewers must be furiously forewarned: Park’s giddy-grim, frequently cruel gore fests are definitely not everybody’s cup of green tea! “A reminder of the invigorating potential of Cinema with a capital ‘C’ ... Quentin Tarantino doesn’t make enough movies. Thank heavens for Park Chan-wook” (Brad Westcott, indiewire). “A morally probing modern epic that begins with the question of organ trafficking and escalates into a mortal hellfire worthy of Ballard and Kundera” (Michael Atkinson, Village Voice). Colour, 35mm, in Korean with English subtitles. 121 mins.
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“A purveyor of slick, violent yarns with stylishly choreographed set-pieces and a leavening strain of hip, ironic humour ... Park Chan-wook is the epitome of Asian cool.” GEOFFREY MACNAB, THE GUARDIAN
South Korea 2003. Director: Park Chan-wook Cast: Choi Min-sik, Yoo Ji-tae, Gang Hye-jung, Ji Dae-han,Oh Dal-su
올드보이 (Oldeuboi)
A sadomasochistic bombshell, Oldboy, Park Chan-wook’s most notorious film, won the Grand Jury Prize — the festival’s second highest honour — at Cannes in 2004; jury chair Quentin Tarantino, a Park admirer, had wanted to give it the Palme d’Or, but was outvoted! Choi Min-sik is riveting as a man held prisoner in a shabby hotel room for 15 years without knowing why or by whom. Suddenly freed one day, he sets out on a quest for understanding and vengeance. A Spike Lee remake of Oldboy is scheduled for release this fall. No word yet if it includes the eating of a live squid! “Cherished by many cinephiles for its blend of visual elegance, melodrama, and extreme violence” (A. O. Scott, New York Times). “A movie of such jaw-dropping violence, wild improbability, and dazzling style it overpowers all resistance” (Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune). “Not really the sicko outrage of media legend, Oldboy is still a very queasy, yet thrilling, ride ... The film’s cult status feels wellearned” (Richard Craig, The Rough Guide to Film). “Once the picture gets into Hollywood’s bloodstream, it could well prove to be as influential as John Woo’s 1989 crime thriller The Killer” (Glenn Kenny, Premiere). Colour, 35mm, in Korean with English subtitles. 120 mins. FRIDAY, MAY 17 – 8:45 PM SATURDAY, MAY 18 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, MAY 19 – 6:30 PM MONDAY, MAY 20 – 8:45 PM
“I think right now, the most exciting cinema in the world is coming out of Korea. Park Chan-wook is amazing.” QUENTIN TARANTINO
LADY
친절한 금자씨
VENGEANCE (aka Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) (Chinjeolhan geumjassi) South Korea 2005. Director: Park Chan-wook Cast: Lee Yeong-ae, Choi Min-sik, Kim Shi-hoo, Gwon Ye-young, Oh Dal-su
The blackly-comic culmination of Park Chan-wook’s loose “Trilogy of Violence” features Lee Yeong-ae as a woman released from prison after serving 13 years for a notorious child murder. Apparently rehabilitated and now religious, she is in fact plotting terrible retribution: against the real killer, who blackmailed her into confessing to the crime. Oldboy star Choi Min-sik co-stars. An American remake with Charlize Theron was recently announced. “Powerful and lovingly crafted ... Lady Vengeance certainly has a body count, but it’s restrained by Park’s standards, and more of a character study than his previous films. Visually, it’s every bit as stunning, but in Lee the director has found a profoundly sympathetic central character who is haunted both by her vision of revenge and by her own ineradicable guilt ... Dense with pathos, poetry, and humour, this is Park’s finest work to date ... He’s a master manipulator in the Hitchcock vein” (Andrew O’Hehir, Salon). “Breathless pop filmmaking, narratively mercurial, viscerally traumatic, and thematically infernal” (Michael Atkinson, Village Voice). Colour, 35mm, in Korean with English subtitles. 112 mins. SATURDAY, MAY 18 – 8:45 PM SUNDAY, MAY 19 – 4:00 PM MONDAY, MAY 20 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, MAY 22 – 8:45 PM
15
JUNE
6
HUMOROUS, HEART-WARMING DOUBLE BILL
SCHEMA MAGAZINE
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ECCENTRICITY, POPULAR CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE FILM
Casting Blossoms to the Sky この空の花 長岡花火物語
(Kono sora no hana: Nagaoka hanabi monogatari) Japan 2012. Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi Cast: Akira Emoto, Yasuko Matsuyuki, Sumiko Fuji, Saki Terashima, Masahiro Takashima, Takashi Sasano
CINEMA THURSDAYS IN JUNE The Powell Street Festival Society and The Cinematheque are pleased to present the fifth edition of “Kibatsu Cinema,” a celebration of the odd and the eccentric in Japanese pop culture and contemporary Japanese film. Kibatsu is a Japanese word denoting a person or thing that is, by ordinary standards, unusual or unconventional. This year, Chris MaGee curates a series of quirky, smart, and stylish films that delve into and explore the world of anime, indie rock groupies, outsider art, iconoclast sound artists, and unconventional love stories.
A new film from Nobuhiko Obayashi, director of the 1977 cult hit House, and one of Japan’s most important filmmakers. The annual fireworks festival in Nagaoka, Japan, sets the backdrop as Reiko, a reporter, visits the city to write a piece on people displaced by the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011. While visiting, she reconnects with Kenichi, an old love who now teaches high school and is staging a play about the bombing of Nagaoka during World War II. Colour, Blu-ray Disc, in Japanese with English subtitles. 160 mins. THURSDAY, JUNE 6 – 6:30 PM
“Kibatsu Cinema: eccentricity, popular culture and contemporary Japanese film” is a lead-up event to Vancouver’s 37th annual Powell Street Festival, a celebration of Japanese Canadian arts, culture, and heritage. Festival weekend is August 3-4, with other events beginning in May.
www.powellstreetfestival.com CURATED BY CHRIS MAGEE Toronto-based writer and independent film curator Chris MaGee is the founder of J-Film Pow-Wow blog, and the co-founder and co-curator of Shinsedai Cinema Festival.
The Dark Harbour 不灯港
(Futoko) Special Thanks: Jim Sinclair and The Cinematheque staff; Haruhiko Daishima, Marty Gross, Matthew Hardstaff, Kasumi Hiraoka, Takashi Iitsuka, Keiko Kusakabe, Hidemasa Nagata, Kayoko Nakanishi, Chigumi Obayashi, Nobuhiko Obayashi, Miki Ohi, Chiaki Omori, Kiwamu Sato, Ann Tomoko Yamamoto; Canada Council for the Arts; Department of Canadian Heritage; the Province of British Columbia through Direct Access to Charitable Gaming; City of Vancouver through the Office of Cultural Affairs, and The Japan Foundation.
FUNDERS
Japan 2009. Director: Naito Takatsugu Cast: Shinya Kote, Yuko Miyamoto, Kazuki Hirooka, Akaji Maro, Diamond Yukai
Manzo’s life as a fisherman in a seaside town is a lonely one, but this perpetual bachelor not only has a chance at romance but also at fatherhood when he discovers single mother Mitsuko and her young son literally hiding in his closet. This downbeat and utterly charming comedy takes us off the beaten track and into a most unusual love story. Director Naito Takatsugu’s film was chosen as the 2009 Pia Film Festival Scholarship Film; the Tokyo-based festival is devoted to nurturing new Japanese talent, and each year chooses a single “scholarship” film to fund and promote. The Dark Harbour has since screened at festivals worldwide. Colour, DVCAM, in Japanese with English subtitles. 101 mins.
M E D I A S P O NSO R S THURSDAY, JUNE 6 – 9:25 PM
16
JUNE
13
JUNE
JUNE ANIME LOVERS DOUBLE BILL
20
ZANY, COLOURFUL, AND WILD DOUBLE BILL
Time of Eve: The Movie
Milocrorze: A Love Story
(Eve no jikan gekijouban)
(Mirokurôze)
イヴの時間 劇場版
ミロクローゼ
Japan 2010. Director: Yasuhiro Yoshiura Voices: Jun Fukuyama, Miki Itou, Kenji Nojima, Rie Tanaka, Rina Satou
Japan 2011. Director: Yoshimasa Ishibashi Cast: Takayuki Yamada, Anna Ishibashi, Maiko, Seijun Suzuki, Eiji Okuda
In a near-future Japan, humans coexist with sophisticated androids, who are indiscernible from humans except for the glowing data halo readouts hovering over their heads. In this beautifully-animated science fiction tale we enter the back alleys of Tokyo, where a secret café exists. It is a place where androids can turn their halos off and where the lives of humans and their robotic counterparts take surprising new directions. Time of Eve, written and directed by Yasuhiro Yoshiura, originally streamed in six segments on Yahoo! Japan between 2008 and 2009. Colour, HDCAM, in Japanese with English subtitles. 106 mins.
In this hilarious and visually stunning comedy, Takayuki Yamada plays three characters: a young man who has a pot lid where his heart used to be; a brash relationship counsellor; and a questing samurai. Writer-director Yoshimasa Ishibashi, the man behind the cult TV series Vermilion Pleasure Night, takes us on a zany tour of love in all its forms. Multi-talented director Ishibashi is also a visual and film artist with the Kyupi Kyupi avant-pop arts collective. Colour, HDCAM, in Japanese with English subtitles. 90 mins. THURSDAY, JUNE 20 – 6:30 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 13 – 6:30 PM
27
“TRIUMPH OF THE UNDERDOGS” DOUBLE BILL
Ringing in Their Ears 劇場版 神聖かまってちゃん ロックンロールは鳴り止まないっ (Gekijouban Shinsei kamatte-chan: Rokkun rôru wa nari tomaranai) Japan 2011. Director: Yu Irie Cast: Fumi Nikaido, Kurumi Morishita, Tatsuya Sakamoto, Uji Kiyotaka, Yui Miura, Mikihito Tsurugi
Real-life rock band Shinsei Kamattechan forms the nucleus of Yu Irie’s irreverent comedy/drama charting the rise of an indie band to major label success and the fictional lives of some of their most unusual fans. This web of fact mixed with fiction culminates in an electric live performance by Shinsei Kamattechan and its charismatic and quirky lead singer Noko. Director Yu Irie gained worldwide fame after his 2009 film 8000 Miles (Saitama Rapper) won the top prize at Japan’s Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival. Since then, Irie has delivered two sequels to that breakout hit about urban rappers in suburban Japan and has become one of Japan’s hottest young filmmakers. Colour, HDCAM, in Japanese with English subtitles. 89 mins. THURSDAY, JUNE 27 – 6:30 PM
Asian Canadian Arts and Culture
The Primitchibu World プリミ恥部な世界
(Purimichibu na Sekai) Japan 2009. Directors: Kasumi Hiraoka, Takeshi Shirai Cast: Evaryu, Hanaka Kiki, Kanji Masuyama
The Echo of Astro Boy’s Footsteps アトムの足音が聞こえる
(Atomu no ashioto ga kikoeru) Japan 2011. Director: Masanori Tominaga With: Matuso Ohno, Maki Nomiya, Rei Harakami, Shinji Hinoki, Yoshiyuki Kanamori
Matsuo Ohno may not be a household name, but the sounds and music he has created have become an integral part of Japanese pop culture. Ohno is the “designer” of the sounds featured in Osamu Tezuka’s seminal anime series Astro Boy. He has also released a number of groundbreaking electronic music albums. Narrated by the Pizzicato Five’s Maki Nomiya, this documentary takes us on a search for what happened to this unsung hero behind one of Japan’s most iconic characters. The film is directed by Masanori Tominaga, who gained national and international recognition for his quirky, offbeat 2006 comedy The Pavilion Salamandre. Colour, DVCAM, in Japanese with English subtitles. THURSDAY, JUNE 13 – 8:30 PM
“Primitchibu” translates roughly as “primitive underbelly.” In this bold, colourful, and celebratory experimental film, director Kasumi Hiraoka and partner Takeshi Shirai take us on a journey into the bohemian underground of present-day Japan. A young woman who sells flowers in a shopping arcade meets a young man who is obsessed with the idea that a war is imminent. Hiraoka was born in Osaka in 1981 and studied literature at Doshisha University; along with her filmmaking she is a live performer and pole dancer. Shirai, her husband, is a musician and the architect behind The Primitchibu Project, in which multi-media screenings of the film are accompanied by live performances. Colour, Blu-ray Disc, in Japanese with English subtitles. 70 mins. PRECEDED BY
Encounters エンカウンターズ
Japan 2011 Director: Takashi Iitsuka Voice: Takashi Iitsuka
Two friends’ weekend vacation turns into a battle for their lives when they face a mad scientist and his army of genetically-engineered monsters. Young director Takashi Iitsuka ingeniously creates “Super Organic Battle Action” by photographing action figures, toys, and miniatures in this short film. Hilarious from start to finish, Encounters is like nothing you have ever seen before. Iitsuka has developed a unique filmmaking method, eschewing computer and stop-motion animation for live filming of toys and miniatures. Colour, DVD, in Japanese with English subtitles. 30 mins.
gallery gachet
Outsider Art in Japan 日本のアウトサイダーアート
Japan 2008. Director: Haruhiko Daishima With: Yoshito Matsuo, Norikazu Usui, Takanori Hirai, Yoshimitsu Tomizuka
Drawn from a 2008 series of documentaries, Outsider Art in Japan focuses on four inspiring individuals. Each artist has overcome mental illness and developmental challenges and has produced remarkable works of art — ranging from detailed imaginary travelogues to portraits of rock superstars. Based in Tokyo, filmmaker Haruhiko Daishima is the director of the complete series of Outsider Art in Japan films. He is also the producer of the 1992 feature Pineapple Tours and the 2012 documentary feature Olo: The Boy from Tibet. Colour, DVD, in Japanese with English subtitles. 74 mins. THURSDAY, JUNE 27 – 8:15 PM
CANADIAN PREMIERE VANCOUVER PREMIERE
THURSDAY, JUNE 20 – 8:15 PM 17
THE FILMS OF
CHARLES
BRACKETT AND
BILLY
WILDER
CURATED B
Y DONALD
BRACKETT
IT WAS CALLED THE GOLDEN AGE OF HOLLYWOOD FOR GOOD REASON. The first double feature in this series, Ninotchka (1939) — the second The early evolutionary phase of the film industry, which we can designate film Brackett and Wilder wrote together for the great Ernst Lubitsch — and as being roughly from 1929 to 1959, immediately established the stylistic the Oscar-winning Sunset Boulevard (1950) — their last feature written devices, narrative techniques, creative content, and future direction that together, produced by Brackett and directed by Wilder — amply highlights cinema would take as both a visual art form and a commercial business the paradoxical nature of their mutual genius. How they accomplished this enterprise. Most importantly perhaps, the paradoxical fact that cinema monumental achievement, and the nature of their often painful collaboration, could be both entertaining and profitable, as well as both philosophically forms the basis of a book I am writing with the same title as this film series: challenging and emotionally comforting, was already etched in celluloid Strange Magic: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. For now, almost from its beginnings at the turn of the century. Fine cinema is quite we can all savour the strange magic of their partnership by viewing the simply the best of both worlds. remarkable output that lit up the screens “Looked at in its entirety, the There were, of course, truly great of the world. Their explosive partnership films before ’29 and after ’59, but they touched more hearts and minds than collaborative career of Charles often demonstrate the overlooked perhaps any other such collaboration Brackett and Billy Wilder can easily before or since. fact that film, like every other cultural communication device, is recursive, One of the most famous comments be compared to the 13 records reiterative, and clearly illustrates about the two apparently competing created by The Beatles.” the spiral growth pattern where theatrical genres of comedy and tragedy each historical element builds upon the former and expands towards is that “Comedy is simply tragedy plus time.” This remark is often attributed the next innovation exponentially. Once it gets underway, this pattern to the great Carol Burnett. It was in fact uttered by Charles Brackett to Billy almost inevitably leads directly from D. W. Griffith to Terrence Malick, in Wilder in the studio office of a Hollywood executive who was desperately a breathtaking lineage that continues to astonish us with its apparently trying to understand their original intention of making Sunset Boulevard as limitless potential for human storytelling and the making of shared meaning a comedy! in our cultural lives. Like McCartney and Lennon, another of the most influential partnerships Among the many screenwriters, producers, and directors who blazed in history (and one most accurately designated in that order), Brackett and that ever-expanding trail, few would have an impact on both comedy and Wilder each needed the balancing opposite aspect of the other in order tragedy quite as important and long-lasting as the iconic collaborative to most fruitfully produce and manage their mutual gifts. One without the partnership of writer-producer Charles Brackett and writer-director Billy other could be great, compelling, even delightful, but together they formed Wilder. Ironically referred to as the “happiest couple in Hollywood,” despite an almost incomprehensibly brilliant structural unit: the heads and tails of a the fact that they disliked each other intensely, and often identified literally superbly minted coin. by critics as “brackettandwilder,” as if they were one person, the artistic In keeping with that observation, it seemed far more useful, in creating franchise or brand they forged permanently places them in the Golden double features for his series, not to present comedies with comedies or Age pantheon as masters of two kinds of cinematic magic: the screwball tragedies with tragedies. Instead, most (but not all) of our Brackett/Wilder comedy and the film noir classic. Precisely how they pulled this off so evenings will pair one comedy with one drama, in order to illustrate most powerfully still remains a mystery. effectively their strange magic together. CONT >
18
Brackett and Wilder’s amazing 13-film partnership had begun rather arbitrarily in 1938, when producers at Paramount tossed together the barely-English-speaking Wilder with the worldly and senior literary figure Brackett and told them to write Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (screening at the end of this series) for Ernst Lubitsch. They quickly bristled at having other producers and directors wielding power over their hard-fought words, even when the results were as marvellous as their fine films with the great director Michael Leisen, including Midnight (1939), Arise My Love (1940), and Hold Back the Dawn (1941). (Midnight screens in this series.) After concocting the wacky wordplay of Ball of Fire for Howard Hawks in 1941, Brackett and Wilder swore that they themselves would write and produce and direct all their own future work. After the gentle silliness of the superb The Major and the Minor launched their independence in 1942, Brackett and Wilder never looked back, creating a string of popular and critical hits which explored the full spectrum of human emotions, from the dark claustrophobia of Five Graves to Cairo in 1943 and Oscar-winning paranoia of The Lost Weekend in 1945 to the subtly incisive political satire of A Foreign Affair in 1948. But it was clearly the bone-chilling, dark noir nightmare of 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, a disturbing meditation on our attachment to celebrity and the manic self-absorption of Hollywood itself, for which Brackett and Wilder are rightfully remembered as cinematic artists par excellence. It alone is visionary in its insights into the fame-addicted world we now inhabit. It also changed my life forever when I saw it on television one lonely, rainy day off from school when I was an innocent ten-year-old. It still has the power to change your life today. Looked at in its entirety, the collaborative career of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder can easily be compared to the 13 records created by The Beatles, both in their sheer impact on popular culture and in the intimacy and almost alchemical insights of their difficult but magical partnership. So, get out your handkerchiefs — you’ll need them for the flood of tender tears produced by both laughing and crying, often at the same time, at the splendid gifts Brackett and Wilder, working together, left behind for us to admire and enjoy.
Donald Brackett is an art/film critic and the author of two books on the dynamics of creative collaboration: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos (Praeger, 2007) and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter (Praeger, 2008). He is currently writing Strange Magic: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, a book focusing on the partnership and conflicted relationship of Hollywood writer-producer Brackett and writerdirector Wilder and their ability to create both comedies and tragedies at an equally high level. He is related to Charles Brackett as a second cousin on his father’s side, and grew up being equally haunted by the Brackett/Wilder talent for both laughter and tears.
Introductory Talks by
DONALD BRACKETT THURSDAY, MAY 23 Opening Night Intro FRIDAY, JUNE 21 Concluding Remarks Donald Brackett, curator of this film series and author of the forthcoming Strange Magic: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, will introduce the opening night program of Ninotchka and Sunset Boulevard on Thursday, May 23 and will also be in attendance on Friday, June 21 to introduce the final double feature of Double Indemnity and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.
DONALD BRACKETT
NINOTCHKA
SUNSET BOULEVARD
“Garbo Laughs!” proclaimed the adverts for Greta Garbo’s celebrated first comedy. “Stalin won’t like it!” observed a contemporary New York Times review. An effervescent exemplar of sophisticate director Ernst Lubitsch’s famed “Lubitsch Touch,” this political satire and romantic comedy, penned by the crack screenwriting team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, has Garbo as a stern Soviet commissar newly arrived in decadent, capitalist Paris. She’s there to rein in a troika of bumbling Bolshevik comrades — including Bela Lugosi! — who are in Paris to sell some state-confiscated jewels but have instead become seduced by capitalist luxuries. Icy Ninotchka soon finds herself melting under capitalism’s charms — and those of the debonair French count, played by Melvyn Douglas, who sets out to woo her. The scene where Douglas finally gets Garbo to crack up remains a highlight of Hollywood romantic comedy. This suave and appealing comedy, made in 1939, with Europe on the brink, is also not without its darker, cynical side, taking knowing swipes at Soviet tyranny, Tsarist-era corruption, and the emerging Nazi menace. “Glorious ... Ninotchka is delicate flirtation and political satire made into a perfect whole, and a reminder of skills that studio writers have largely lost” (Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York). B&W, 35mm. 110 mins.
A mordant, macabre film noir that really ups the ante on the genre’s doomladen determinism and fatalism — the movie is narrated by a corpse! — Sunset Boulevard was the final collaboration between Billy Wilder and long-time writing partner and producer Charles Brackett, and their second film together to win a screenwriting Oscar (The Lost Weekend was the first). The famed opening of this acid account of Hollywood decadence has a dead man floating face down in a swimming pool. William Holden’s off-screen voice identifies itself as that of the deceased, and proceeds to relate the sordid events that led to his demise. Holden is Joe Gillis, a down-at-heels Hollywood screenwriter. Fleeing the repo men after his car, he takes a wrong turn into the run-down estate of Hollywood has-been Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), an aging, embittered former silent star living entombed in a mausoleum-like mansion. With nothing better on the go, spineless Joe allows himself to become a kept man in Norma’s smothering clutches, and is soon in way, way over his head. Erich von Stroheim co-stars as Norma’s devoted butler Max; Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper, and Cecil B. DeMille have cameos. Wilder’s classic is noir at its most brittle, bizarre, and baroque — and “certainly the blackest of all Hollywood’s scab-scratching accounts of itself” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). B&W, 35mm, 111 mins.
THURSDAY, MAY 23 – 6:30 PM (with Introduction by Donald Brackett) FRIDAY, MAY 24 – 8:40 PM SUNDAY, MAY 26 – 6:30 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 23 – 8:45 PM FRIDAY, MAY 24 – 6:30 PM SATURDAY, MAY 25 – 8:30 PM
USA 1939. Director: Ernst Lubitsch Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ina Claire, Bela Lugosi, Sig Ruman
USA 1950. Director: Billy Wilder Cast: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Jack Webb
19
THE LOST WEEKEND
THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR
USA 1945. Director: Billy Wilder Cast: Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Howard da Silva, Doris Dowling
USA 1942. Director: Billy Wilder Cast: Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Rita Johnson, Robert Benchley, Diana Lynn
Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s adaptation of Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Screenplay, and remains one of cinema’s most memorable depictions of alcoholism. Ray Milland plays well-bred boozer and New York writer Don Birnam, whose fiveday binge becomes a hallucinatory descent into hell. (Check out his “mouse and bat” nightmare!). Cinematographer John F. Seitz, whose fine work here was Oscar-nominated, also shot Five Graves to Cairo, Double Indemnity, and Sunset Boulevard. “An unusually daring popular melodrama by the writing team of Brackett (who produced) and Wilder (who directed). As the star, Milland, reprieved from his usual lightweight leading-man roles, surprised the public with his tautness and irony ... It has the Brackett-and-Wilder speciality — a distinctive cruel (and sometimes cruelly funny) edge. And there are some famous sequences: the hero’s lust for a drink during ‘Libiamo,’ the opening aria of La Traviata; his long, plodding walk along Third Avenue in an attempt to hawk his typewriter when the pawnshops are closed for Yom Kippur” (Pauline Kael). “Puts all recent ‘horror’ films to shame ... Truly a chef d’oeuvre of motion-picture art” (Bosley Crowther, New York Times, 1945). B&W, 35mm, 101 mins.
Billy Wilder’s auspicious debut as a Hollywood director, co-written with regular screenwriting partner Charles Brackett, is a wonderfully funny sex farce featuring an irresistible performance by Ginger Rogers and a surprisingly subversive take on male-female relations. Cash-strapped career woman Susan, fed up with New York and the unwanted attentions of lecherous men, hops a train home to Iowa, masquerading as a 12-year-old girl in order to qualify for a reduced fare. Ray Milland (later to star in Brackett and Wilder’s The Lost Weekend) is chivalrous Major Kirby, travelling aboard the same train. Feeling protective of the young child travelling alone, the unsuspecting military man takes little Su-Su under his wing — and into his sleeping compartment! “The Lolita of the 1940s, and just as sexy ... The scintillating dialogue is very risqué and punches out the laughs in rapid-fire succession ... The film belongs to Rogers, giving one of her greatest performances in a role you can’t imagine any other actress pulling off ... Wilder was a great director from the start” (James Monaco, The Movie Guide). B&W, 35mm, 100 mins. MONDAY, JUNE 3 – 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5 – 8:20 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 25 — 6:30 PM WEDNESDAY, MAY 29 – 8:35 PM THURSDAY, MAY 30 – 6:30 PM
20
BALL OF FIRE
FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO
USA 1941. Director: Howard Hawks Cast: Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers, S.Z. Sakall
USA 1943. Director: Billy Wilder Cast: Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, Akim Tamiroff, Erich von Stroheim, Peter van Eyck
Barbara Stanwyck was Oscar-nominated for her fast-talking turn in this stellar screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks and scripted by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. Stanwyck plays Sugarpuss O’Shea, a saucy stripper on the lam from her gangster boyfriend. She takes refuge with eight eggheads compiling an encyclopaedia. The professors have become stuck on the entry for “Slang”; Sugarpuss is just the person to teach them a thing or two on the subject. The great cast includes Gary Cooper (an Oscar winner the same year for Sergeant York) as a fusty linguist. Cinematographer Gregg Toland shot Citizen Kane the very same year. The 1948 musical A Song is Born, also directed by Hawks, was a Ball of Fire remake. Billy Wilder would hereafter become a Hollywood director himself, debuting with The Major and the Minor the next year. “A marvellous performance from Stanwyck, all snap, crackle, and pop ... Hawks’s handling of the sparkling Brackett-Wilder script and its subversions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is pure joy” (Tom Milne, Time Out). B&W, 35mm, 111 mins.
“Ingeniously plotted” (Pauline Kael), Billy Wilder’s second Hollywood directorial effort, co-written with Charles Brackett, is a wartime espionage thriller set in North Africa. Franchot Tone plays a British soldier left stranded when the Germans take over a desert town. To save himself, he assumes the identity of a waiter at the hotel — a ruse that proves to be even more dangerous than he imagined! Erich von Stroheim struts his legendary stuff as famed German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. The fate of Egypt hangs in the balance. “Impressive ... The script by Wilder and Brackett is taut and intelligent, but the film’s real strengths are John Seitz’s superb photography of the desert and hotel, and von Stroheim’s resumption of his ‘man you love to hate’ persona as Rommel” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). “Devilishly clever ... Five Graves to Cairo scores on every level. The dialogue is by turns crisp, witty, and stinging ... But a large share of the praise must go to that master scene-stealer von Stroheim” (James Monaco, The Movie Guide). B&W, 35mm, 96 mins.
SUNDAY, MAY 26 – 8:35 PM WEDNESDAY, MAY 29 – 6:30 PM THURSDAY, MAY 30 – 8:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 3 – 8:30 PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5 – 6:30 PM
MIDNIGHT
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
Sensitive and sweet, smart and salacious, Midnight is a tour-de-force screwball comedy from the underrated Paramount director Mitchell Leisen — “an expert at witty romantic comedies” (David Thomson) — and the celebrated screenwriting team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. Midnight stars Claudette Colbert as Eve Peabody, a crafty, charming American chorus girl stranded in Paris without a centime to her name. Evading the rain and a flirtatious cab driver, Eve insinuates herself into a party of haut monde socialites — and love games are immediately afoot. Smart and infinitely wealthy Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore) catches on to Eve’s deceptions, and uses the knowledge to his advantage; as Eve gets further entrenched into the lives of the socialites, her adroit lies and evasions become increasingly elaborate — and, for us, more entertaining. “Rapturous fun ... One of the authentic delights of the 1930s” (Pauline Kael). “An enchanting comedy ... It has a superbly malicious script by Brackett and Wilder, gorgeous sets and camerawork, and a matchless cast. All in all, probably Leisen’s best film” (Tom Milne, Time Out). B&W, 35mm, 94 mins.
We couldn’t resist including Billy Wilder’s superb film noir in our Brackett-Wilder retrospective, even if Charles Brackett didn’t actually co-write it: After penning an initial treatment with Wilder, Brackett, who was also slated to produce, pulled out — because the material was too unsavoury. You bet it is! Raymond Chandler ultimately co-scripted this adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel. It begins, memorably, with Fred MacMurray, as Walter Neff, staggering into an office, a fresh bullet wound in his side, and to make a remarkable confession into his Dictaphone: “I killed Dietrichson. Me, Walter Neff, insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars. Until a while ago, that is ...” Barbara Stanwyck is Phyllis Dietrichson, the double-crossing dame who has drawn Neff into this dire predicament, seducing him into a plot to murder her husband. Edward G. Robinson is kindly Keyes, the insurance investigator who is Neff’s best friend and colleague. “This shrewd, tawdry thriller is one of the high points of 1940s films ... Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson is perhaps the best acted and most fixating of all the slutty, coldblooded femmes fatales of the film noir genre” (Pauline Kael). “Perhaps the best example of Hollywood film noir of the Forties — a pitiless study of human greed, sex, and sadism” (Sadoul, Dictionary of Films). B&W, 35mm, 106 mins.
USA 1939. Director: Mitchell Leisen Cast: Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, John Barrymore, Francis Lederer, Mary Astor
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12 – 6:30 PM FRIDAY, JUNE 14 – 8:40 PM
USA 1944. Director: Billy Wilder Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Jean Heather
FRIDAY, JUNE 21 – 6:30 PM (with Introduction by Donald Brackett) SATURDAY, JUNE 22 – 6:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 23 – 8:10 PM MONDAY, JUNE 24 – 7:00 PM
A FOREIGN AFFAIR
BLUEBEARD’S EIGHTH WIFE
Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich are romantic rivals in Billy Wilder’s cynical, satirical comedy, set in the ruins of postwar Berlin. Charles Brackett, Wilder’s long-time screenwriting partner, co-wrote the script. Ms. Arthur plays primand-proper U.S. congresswoman Phoebe Frost, investigating reports that an unidentified American officer may be protecting the former mistress of a leading Nazi — said to be either Hermann Goering or Joseph Goebbels! Miss Frost enlists the assistance of Captain John Pringle (Paramount contract player John Lund, here in his most notable role), unaware that he is the officer she is investigating. Marlene Dietrich plays beautiful cabaret singer Erika von Schluetow, the former Nazi consort who is Pringle’s girlfriend. The film was Oscar-nominated for its cinematography and script. Brackett and Wilder’s next (and last) film together was Sunset Boulevard. “One of Wilder’s great forgotten films, worthy of rapid rediscovery ... The Defence Department was none too pleased with this description of their brave boys. They might have just enjoyed Wilder’s priceless dialogue, and Dietrich smouldering marvellously” (Film4). B&W, 35mm, 116 mins.
Suave director Ernst Lubitsch’s famed “touch” is light and bright in 1938’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, the first film penned by the celebrated screenwriting team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. A battle-of-the-sexes farce set on the French Riviera, the film has Gary Cooper (perhaps miscast) as an American millionaire whose seven marriages have ended in divorce — and in hefty divorce settlements. He’s determined to make Claudette Colbert, daughter of a penniless French marquis (Edward Everett Horton), wife number eight. She’s just as determined to avoid the fate of his previous seven spouses — resorting to drastic measures, even after she agrees to marry him, to maintain the upper hand. James Harvey, author of Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, calls Bluebeard’s Eight Wife “a comedy of ‘the delayed fuck’” — one in a long Hollywood line! David Niven has a supporting role. Colbert and Cooper were Paramount’s two biggest stars of the time. Sunset Boulevard’s Gloria Swanson starred in a 1923 silent version of Alfred Savoir’s original play. Lubitsch would direct Ninotchka next, working again with Brackett and Wilder. B&W, 35mm, 85 mins.
USA 1948. Director: Billy Wilder Cast: Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, John Lund, Millard Mitchell, Peter von Zerneck
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12 – 8:20 PM FRIDAY, JUNE 14 – 6:30 PM
USA 1938. Director: Ernst Lubitsch Cast: Claudette Colbert, Gary Cooper, Edward Everett Horton, David Niven, Elizabeth Patterson
FRIDAY, JUNE 21 – 8:45 PM SATURDAY, JUNE 22 – 8:30 PM SUNDAY, JUNE 23 – 6:30 PM 21
THE BEST OF THE NORTHWEST SPECIAL GUEST:
THOMAS PHILLIPSON
NORTHWEST FILM CENTER PORTLAND Since 1973, Portland’s annual Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival (formerly the Northwest Film and Video Festival) has been a premier showcase for outstanding and innovative independent films from this region of the continent, screening works by both emerging and established talents, and featuring a carefully chosen cross-section of selections from the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska and the province of British Columbia. The festival is a juried event; each year, a prominent filmmaker or critic serves as festival judge. These two programs of shorts — including animation, experimental, drama/comedy and documentary — are comprised of award winners and favourites from the 38th and 39th Northwest festivals, held, respectively, in November 2011 and November 2012. Included are several works by Vancouver and B.C. artists. The programs will be accompanied by Thomas Phillipson, Regional Services Manager of Portland’s Northwest Film Center, which presents the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival.
I.
THE BEST OF THE
38TH
NORTHWEST FILMMAKERS’ FESTIVAL Festival Judge: Andrea Grover, a curator, artist, and writer, and founder of the Aurora Picture Show film and media arts centre in Texas. Festival Trailer: Let the Baby Judging Begin • You wouldn’t let someone talk that way about your baby, would you? Mutt Industries Inc./Portland. 1 min. Mossgrove • Experimental: A “sluggish” but exhilarating look at the flora and fauna of the Northwest. Kurtis Hough/Portland. 8 mins. Cameron’s Books • Documentary: Jeffery Frase is the third-generation owner of Cameron’s second-hand bookstore in Portland. Jim Ryu, Yi-Fan Lu/Portland. 6 mins. Strands, A Music Video • Experimental: “A visual celebration of the ghosts of mix tapes past” (AG). Rob Tyler/Portland. 4 mins.
László Lassú • Animation: “This masterful cut-paper animation has an Eastern European folk art flare to its lines and narrative” (AG). Ben Popp/Portland. 4 mins. Treeverse • Documentary: Two men take an unprecedented one-kilometre canopy trek — i.e. they never touch the ground — through an old-growth Oregon white oak forest. John Waller/Portland. 15 mins. The Big Sayonara • Narrative: “Some of the funniest understated dialogue I’ve heard in a short independent film about a former Wall Street employee who hits rock bottom in rural Rosalia, Washington” (AG). Don Hamilton/Spokane. 15 mins. Total running time: approx. 80 mins. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26 – 6:30 PM
II.
THE BEST OF THE
39
TH
NORTHWEST FILMMAKERS’ FESTIVAL Festival Judge: Maureen Selwood, a visual artist working with hand-drawn animation for film, installation, and performance and currently on the faculty of the Experimental Animation Program at CalArts.
Basin • Documentary: “Images of the once-pristine landscape of northern Alberta scarred by industrial development compel us to take environmental action” (AG). David Geiss/Victoria. 8 mins. Old-Time Film • Animation: “A fiddle and some antique engravings make for good times in this short toe-tapper” (AG). Barbara Tetenbaum, Marilyn Zornado / Portland. 3 mins.
Festival Trailer: For Your Consideration • The Festival reveals the not-so-secret ingredient in Northwest filmmakers’ art. Mike Houston, Austin Hilde, Rob Tyler/ Portland. 1 min.
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Woman Waiting • Narrative: “This powerful drama uses minimal dialogue and long takes to depict a middle-aged woman on the edge of homelessness and invisibility” (AG). Antoine Bourges/Vancouver. 15 mins.
Bird of Flames • Experimental: With music by David Lynch and Chrysta Bell, a spiderlike Vietnamese sorcerer coaxes a beautiful chanteuse to perform like a living doll. Chel White/Portland. 5 mins. A Tax on Bunny Rabbits • Animation: ASCII text animates the story of bunny rabbits and a pesky robot. Nathaniel Akin/Powell River, BC. 2 mins. Lingo • Narrative: Protective of her son and hindered by a language barrier, an Afghan immigrant is interrogated by police about a fire started by the boy. Bahar Noorizadeh/ Vancouver. 9 mins.
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In All Forms • Experimental: Stop-motion and experimental animation techniques explore evolution, creation, and primal forms of life. James Hebers/Vancouver. 4 mins. Later Than Usual • Narrative: An elderly couple marks time toward a not-soinevitable end. David Hovan/Vancouver. 6 mins. Dear Peter, Woodchips I • Experimental: Orland’s open letter to Peter concerns a steaming pile of woodchips, Mt. Fuji, and context. Orland Nutt/Portland. 3 mins.
Sterling Hallard Bright Drake • Documentary: A tombstone appears in a cemetery in Walla Walla, sparking speculation about what happened to this promising but enigmatic lad who predicted he would die of loneliness. Robert Sickels/ Walla Walla, WA. 15 mins.
SEE ONE OR BOTH “BEST OF THE NORTHWEST” PROGRAMS FOR OUR REGULAR SINGLE-BILL RATE
CINEMATHEQUE MEMBERSHIP REQUIRED.
The Whale Story • Animation: The story of a fisherman and a whale is retold, with the help of the passing public, in paint on a 16foot high wall. Tess Martin/Seattle. 4 mins.
Someone • Narrative: On his way home from school, a boy discovers the body of a homeless man. Josh Lunden/Portland. 6 mins.
2-FOR-1 PRICING! 11 Adults $ 9 Students/Seniors
Arctic Christmas • Experimental: Ernie Heaton, one of the last two survivors from the transport ship USAT Dorchester, relates the chilling experience of being torpedoed during WWII. Sal Strom/Tigard, OR. 3 mins.
Dear Peter, Woodchips II • Experimental: The correspondence continues. Here Orland’s relationship to the woodchips evolves. Orland Nutt/Portland. 3 mins. Total running time: approx. 75 mins. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26 – 8:15 PM
Surrey Art Gallery presents
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Tribute to the Legendary & Daring 05.14
06.18
3:10 TO YUMA
THINGS TO COME
The Thrilling original, directed by the masterful Delmer Daves.
H. G. Well’s Classic Science Fiction Spectacular! Now on Blu-ray!
05.07
Band Of Outsiders
05.14
Jubal
Medium Cool
06.11
Wild Strawberries
05.21
Life Is Sweet
06.18
Marketa Lazarova
05.28
06.18
Safety Last
Available at
© 2013 Entertainment One Films Canada Inc. All Rights Reserved. Distributed Exclusively in Canada by Entertainment One.
Tribute to the Mega-Directors 03.13
04.13
BADLANDS
NAKED LUNCH
Terrence Malick’s brilliant debut, one of Criterion’s most requested titles of all time.
Cronenberg’s mindblowing Burroughs adaptation. Now on Blu-ray!
03.12
MINISTRY OF FEAR
04.09
GATE OF HELL
03.12
03.19
THE BLOB
COLONEL BLIMP
04.16
04.16
ECLIPSE SERIES 38: MASAKI KOBAYASHI
REPO MAN
03.26
A MAN ESCAPED
04.23
PIERRE ETAIX
04.23
RICHARD III
Available online at
© 2013 Entertainment One Films Canada Inc. All Rights Reserved. Distributed Exclusively in Canada by Entertainment One.