BUFS 2023-2024

Once again, the Brock University Film Society operated as a monthly series during the 2023-2024 season.

Our line-up consisted of the following nine films:

Perfect Days—Thursday, April 11, 2024, 7:00 pm @ the Film House

Wim Wenders began his career as a filmmaker in the late 1960s in West Germany, where he quickly became a leading figure in the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Margarethe von Trotta, and Volker Schlöndorff. Films like The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), and The American Friend established Wenders’s reputation as director with a particularly sensitive understanding of West German culture and its ambivalent relationship with American culture. These films also brought Wenders widespread acclaim on the international art house film circuit.

Wenders reached directorial superstardom in the 1980s with films like Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). The former, which starred Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski, captured Wenders’s fascination with America, with American stories, with American landscapes, and with American music (especially the country blues stylings of Ry Cooder) at its strongest yet. The latter, which starred Bruno Ganz (one of the stars of the New German Cinema) and the newcomer Solveig Dommartin, alongside a particularly memorable turn from Peter “Columbo" Falk, playing an unnamed American film and television star much like himself, was one of the definitive portraits of the divided city of Berlin in the period immediately preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It was during this era—the 1980s—that Wenders began to make documentaries with frequency. He would go on to make such celebrated documentaries as The Soul of a Man (2003), about the blues, Pina (2022), a highly ambitious 3D film about the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, and The Salt of the Earth (2014), a powerful film about the famed Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, but his most famous nonfiction film was Buena Vista Social Club, the behind-the-scenes story of how the beloved Cuban jazz all-stars album was orchestrated and recorded by Ry Cooder, and then taken on tour to perform before adoring audiences in Europe and America.

The documentary that is most relevant here, however, is Tokyo-Ga (1985), a film about Wenders’s love affair with Tokyo, but especially about his love affair with the Japanese auteur Yasujiro Ozu, whose subtle, measured treatment of contemporary life in the Japanese capital in films like Tokyo Story (1953) was such an inspiration for Wenders and others.

Now, with his latest film, Perfect Days, Wenders has returned to Tokyo to tell a tale of contemporary Tokyo that focuses on a particularly humble, diligent, kind-hearted, and enlightened Tokoyite, played by Koji Yakusho. The role won Yakusho the Best Actor Award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. It is exactly the kind of subtle, nuanced role that Ozu would have appreciated greatly.

The Zone of Interest—Thursday, March 7, 2024, 6:30 pm @ the Film House

Like so many directors of his generation—David Fincher, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, and others—the British director Jonathan Glazer specialized in music videos early in his career.  He’d actually gotten his start in theatre, but when he switched to motion pictures, it was through commercials and music videos for bands like Radiohead, Massive Attack, and Blur that he made a name for himself.

By the year 2000, Glazer had transitioned to feature filmmaking, and he did so in audacious fashion.  His first film was Sexy Beast, an outrageous heist film starring Ray Winstone and co-starring Ben “Gandhi” Kingsley as an unhinged sociopath.  The film was notable for its settings—Spain’s Costa del Sol and London—and for Winstone’s brilliant spin on the retired ex-con who gets pulled in for “one last job,” but it was Kingsley who stole the show, and who secured a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards for his performance.

Since then, Glazer has only directed films intermittently, but when he has, he’s tended to make waves.  Take Under the Skin (2013), for instance, an odd, fascinating sci-fi film starring Scarlett Johansson.  In essence, this was a film in that “sexy alien comes to Earth and wreaks havoc” vein, but it played like Roger Donaldson’s Species (1995)* meets Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968), with maybe a pinch of Ken Russell and a little Danny Boyle thrown in for good measure.

This time around, Glazer has made one of the most acclaimed and controversial films of the year.  Based loosely on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest is an ambitious and highly unusual film about the atrocities of the Nazi regime. It focuses almost entirely on the family life of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss—he, the commandant of Auschwitz; she, the hausfrau who cultivated her domestic ideal directly adjacent to the notorious concentration camp.  As Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post has argued, the experience of The Zone of Interest is one of watching two films simultaneously:  one dealing with the banality of evil that is the Höss household; the other, made up of images conjured in our minds, knowing full well the scale of the crimes taking place on the other side of that wall.

Glazer has picked up awards for The Zone of Interest at both the Cannes Film Festival (where it won two major prizes) and the BAFTAs.  It has been nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best International Feature, Best Director, and Best Film.

*Improbably, Ben “Gandhi” Kingsley appeared in Species, too (but not in Species 2).

Anatomy of a Fall—Thursday, February 8, 2024, 6:30 pm @ the Film House

Justine Triet’s star had been steadily rising for about fifteen years, but it reached new heights last May when her latest film, Anatomy of a Fall, took the top prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Anatomy of a Fall is part court procedural, part murder mystery, and part contemporary family melodrama—the latter featuring a depth and intensity reminiscent of the work of Ingmar Bergman, and a concern with technology and memory that we might find in an Atom Egoyan film.  But it is Sandra Hüller’s fascinating and mystifying performance as Sandra Voyter, a talented and successful novelist who is accused of the murder of her husband, that has electrified audiences.

Indeed, if it’s been a big year for Triet, it’s also been a momentous one for Hüller.  Anatomy of a Fall is nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, and Triet is also up for Best Director.  Hüller, in turn, is nominated in the Best Actress category for her performance in Anatomy of a Fall, but she also stars in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, another film that has received nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.

One of the themes explored in Anatomy of a Fall has to with the writing of fiction, and where the material that a writer turns into fiction is actually drawn from.  Are Voyter’s novels direct reflections of her personal life?  Can clues to the truth behind her marriage and her husband’s untimely death be found in her books?  What is the stuff of fiction, and how incriminating is it?  It’s a theme Triet has explored elsewhere in her work.  In fact, she even did so in a film that co-starred Hüller—Sibyl from 2019.  In that film, it was a psychotherapist-turned-novelist (played by Virginie Efira) who was basing her novels directly on the lives of her patients.  And Hüller played a director who was making a film about a troubled relationship that mirrored aspects of her own troubled relationship, and that starred her duplicitous partner.  What is the line that separates truth from fiction?

May December—January 18, 2024, 6:30 pm @ the Film House

Todd Haynes burst onto the film scene in 1987 with his underground classic Superstar:  The Karen Carpenter Story, whose odd but fascinating delivery was part camp (the drama was acted out with the use of Barbie dolls), part music film (The Carpenters and the soft rock revolution they helped pioneer, and part family melodrama (with a considerable amount of tragedy, given the story in question and Karen Carpenter’s terrible demise).

Since then Haynes has continued to return to music film with regularity, as evidenced by such films as The Velvet Goldmine (1998), on Glam Rock in the 1970s, I’m Not There (2007), his phantasmagoric study of the Bob Dylan phenomenon of the 1960s an 1970s, and The Velvet Underground (2021), his definitive documentary on the legendary underground art rock band of the same name.

But there’s little question that Haynes’s primary fixation has been with creating unorthodox variations on the family melodrama, and his mastery of this form has resulted in most of his most notable projects:  Poison (1991), his first feature-length cause célèbre; Safe (1995), his first collaboration with the great Julianne Moore; Far From Heaven (2002), his tribute to Douglas Sirk and especially All That Heaven Allows (1954), and his second collaboration with Moore; Mildred Pierce (2011), his inspired mini-series version of the noir classic, starring Kate Winslet; and Carol (2015), his mesmerizing, award-winning adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, “a modern novel of two women.”

Now Haynes is back with May December another utterly bewitching and highly unconventional family melodrama, this one set in contemporary coastal Georgia.  This time it’s based on a story ripped from the tabloids (the Mary Kay Letourneau sex scandal of the late 1990s and early 2000s), but Haynes has taken this material and transformed it into a captivating hall of mirrors.  Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman star, and, as the film’s poster suggests, and as one critic has put it, “it’s a little as if Ingmar Bergman’s Persona had been remade by the Real Housewives of Savannah.”

The Pigeon Tunnel—December 7, 2023, 7:00 pm @ the Film House

This week we’ll be screening the latest documentary by Errol Morris, easily one of the most accomplished nonfiction filmmakers of the 50 years. Morris began his career in film as an upstart and an outsider, one who brought a very unorthodox approach to documentary representation on early films like Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981). His sensibility was darkly ironic, and he displayed a knack for finding quirky characters, but his real gift was that he was unusually good at conducting interviews.* Since then, his best projects— films like The Thin Blue Line (1988), Mr. Death (1999), Standard Operating Procedure (2008),Tabloid (2010), and the series Wormwood (2017)—have all been showcases of his masterful skill with interviews. In fact, a number of these films have seen Morris go toe-to-toe with particularly tricky interview subjects—figures of historical importance known for their slipperiness and their dissembling, like Robert McNamara in The Fog of War (2003) and Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known (2013).

The Pigeon Tunnel is another such interview showcase. Here, Morris’s subject is David Cornwell, the ex-British spy turned master of the spy novel, who was better known by his nom de plume John le Carré. Le Carré is best known for the clarity and brilliance of his insight into the murky and labyrinthine world of Cold War espionage, as well as the impeccable British irony and reserve he brought to the genre in such works as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley’s People (1979). When the Cold War ended, Le Carré somehow found a way to adapt and even flourish, as evidenced by The Tailor of Panama (1996) and The Constant Gardener (2001). Many of these novels have been adapted into memorable films, with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965), starring Richard Burton, The Constant Gardener (2005), with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), featuring Gary Oldman, being particular standouts.

As the title suggests, Morris’s film is based on Le Carré’s utterly fascinating 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life. David Cornwell died in 2020 at the age of 89. Morris was lucky enough to have gotten the opportunity to interview Cornwell at length just before he died. And now we’re lucky enough to have Morris’s film on the great John le Carré.

*As a PhD student in his twenties, Morris prided himself on being able to get an interview subject to fill both sides of a 120-minute audiocassette (remember those?) with the rambling, revealing answer to just a single question or two.

Rush to Judgment—November 22, 2023, 7:00 pm @ the Film House

Wednesday, November 22, 2023 marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  To commemorate this solemn occasion, the Film House together with the Brock University Film Society will be showing a new 4K restoration of Emile de Antonio’s 1967 documentary Rush to Judgment, the first important film to address the President’s murder and to call the conclusions of the the Warren Commission Report (1964) into question.

As the title suggests, the film was based on Mark Lane’s book of the same name, which had been released a year earlier to great acclaim—and great controversy—and Lane is a major figure in the film, leading its inquiry.  Lane’s Rush to Judgment (1966) was the first mass-market book to raise serious doubts about the Warren Commission, and to investigate the murders of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Officer J.D. Tippit of the Dallas Police Department, who Oswald was also accused of having murdered during the same crime spree.  Though it had been preceded by a number of self-published books on the topic, Lane’s book had a certain weight to it.  Lane was a lawyer and former New York State legislator, one who had represented the Oswald family before the Warren Commission out of concerns that the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office had botched the investigation, and, therefore, he was particularly well-versed in the details of the case.  His book was published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and it came with an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper, a distinguished Professor of History at Oxford University.

De Antonio was a maverick documentary filmmaker whose first film, Point of Order! (1964) was a brilliant indictment of McCarthyism and 1950s anti-communist fear mongering constructed entirely out of archival materials.  He would go on to make such celebrated documentaries as In The Year of the Pig (1968), the first feature-length film to explore America’s involvement in Vietnam in depth and to construct a powerful argument against the war, and Millhouse:  A White Comedy (1971), a trenchant critique of Richard Milhous Nixon that was produced and released during Nixon’s first term, years before news of the Watergate scandal went public.

De Antonio’s Rush to Judgment is a crucial artifact from the period immediately after the assassination of the President, and just a year before the assassination of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for president at the time.  It features interviews with numerous first-hand witnesses of the attack on the Presidential motorcade, including Abraham Zapruder, the businessman and amateur filmmaker whose 8mm record of the assassination remains one of the most heavily scrutinized and widely discussed pieces of celluloid ever filmed. After years where Rush to Judgment languished in obscurity due to poor distribution, de Antonio’s bracing documentary has been digitally remastered so it can raise questions anew about this “murder most foul.”

Please join us for this special screening.  After the screening, there will be a discussion of the film led by myself and Dr. Barry Grant.

The Killer—November 9, 2023, 7:00 pm @ the Film House

David Fincher has always been a director of bold visual style.  He’s best known for films like Fight Club (1999), Panic Room (2002), The Social Network (2010), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and Gone Girl (2014), but he got his start directing music videos in the 1980s, including such icons of pop and postmodernism as Madonna’s “Express Yourself” (1989) and “Vogue” (1990), so he’s very much a product of the MTV Generation.

Of course, Fincher is also know for his stylish, yet macabre fascination with serial killers, as exemplified by films like Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007), and the television series Mindhunter (2017-9), all of which delve deep into efforts to investigate, study, and come to terms with the psychology of serial murderers.  Which is one of the reasons this latest project is so interesting.

Here, with The Killer, Fincher has turned his attention to the mind of another kind of serial killer:  a paid one, a professional assassin.  Michael Fassbender plays a high-calibre contract killer whose complicated psychology and brazen amorality are under scrutiny in a tale of double-crossing and retribution that is reminiscent of such classics of the genre as Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) and Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999).  Did I mention The Killer is “wickedly funny,” too? More than one critic has mentioned how incredibly entertaining the film is.

In the end, it all boils down to that distinctive Fincher aesthetic, though.  As Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian puts it: “This is a thriller of pure surface and style, managed with terrific flair.”

Stop Making Sense—October 22, 2023, 7:00 pm @ The Film House

By 1983, Jonathan Demme was a promising director who had been working in the industry for about a decade but had yet to hit full stride.  He was on the verge of becoming an indie darling with a knack for using hip New Wave-fuelled soundtracks to full effect, as he did with Something Wild (1986) and Married to the Mob (1988), but his blockbusters of the ‘90s (The Silence of the Lambs [1991] and Philadelphia [1993]) were still beyond reach.  The film that stands as the major pivot point in Demme’s career was his first documentary, and, more importantly, his first rockumentary:  Stop Making Sense (1984).

Here, a talented and aspiring director teamed up with the band Talking Heads at the peak of their powers and at the height of their artistic ambitions, and the result of this most fortuitous cinematic alchemy was (yes, you guessed it!) pure gold.  Together, Demme and David Byrne, the band’s singer, lyricist, and resident performance artist, deconstructed the concert film, stripping it of its clichés and excesses (e.g., The Song Remains the Same [1976]).  Then, with his bandmates Tina Weymouth (bass), Jerry Harrison (keyboards and guitar), and Chris Frantz (drums), plus an expanded lineup that included such luminaries as Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic), Byrne and Demme reconstructed the concert film as something both mysterious and mesmerizing, an utterly irrepressible, totally irresistible, hyper-kinetic experience.  As Roger Ebert once put it, “The overwhelming impression throughout Stop Making Sense is of enormous energy, of life being lived at a joyous high.”

From this point on, Demme became known for his taste in music, as well as his genius for capturing it on film.  He made a large number of rockumentaries in the years to follow, as well as many music videos, and he developed lasting relationships with such icons as Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.  But it’s safe to say that he never achieved the heights of Stop Making Sense ever again.  It’s not clear anyone has.

The concerts immortalized in Stop Making Sense occurred in Hollywood in December 1983.  This Sunday we’ll be holding a special Sunday Meeting edition of the Brock University Film Society featuring a brand-new 4K restoration of the film just in time for its 40th anniversary.  Take Me to the River!  (And don’t forget your dancing shoes!)

Searching for Sugar Man—September 14, 2023, 7:00 pm @ The Film House

Hello, everyone,

That's right—it's that time of year again!  We'll be kicking off our BUFS 2023-2024 season tomorrow, Thursday, September 14, with a special presentation of Malik Bendjelloul's 2012 film Searching for Sugar Man, his documentary on the mysterious life and the remarkable impact of Sixto Rodriguez.  This supremely talented musician and songwriter from Detroit died in early August at the age of 81, and the news came as something of a shock for those of us who are fans—rumors of his death had dogged the enigmatic performer for decades.  Searching for Sugar Man won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 2013, one of only a handful of music documentaries to have done so,* but this film is quite unlike most other rockumentaries--there are so many unexpected twists and turns to this story.  

If you've had the pleasure of having seen Searching for Sugar Man in the past, here is your opportunity to revisit the film and pay tribute to the man once again.  If you've never seen Searching for Sugar Man, you (and your students) are in for a treat!

*For those who are curious, the other films in this elite group are Brigitte Berman’s Artie Shaw: Time is All You’ve Got (1985), Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet from Stardom (2013), Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015), and Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's Summer of Soul (2021).

Hot Off the Presses!: "Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised): A Docalogue"

fig. a: don’t judge this book by its cover

Very happy to be a part of this fine collection about this truly amazing film.

As the title page for my essay suggests,

fig. b: secret histories

my thoughts on the film were prompted in large part by Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples’ absolutely breathtaking duet of “Precious Lord” during the extended tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.

fig. c: Mavis & Mahalia

I’ve seen Questlove’s film so many times now, and I still get goosebumps during that scene every single time. Anyway, that led to a consideration of the Staple Singers and their outsized role in the early history of the popular music documentary—Festival (1967), Soul to Soul (1971), Wattstax (1973), The Last Waltz (1978)—and how Summer of Soul, which documents the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, fits in with this body of work.

fig. d: Festival (1967)

fig. e: Soul to Soul (1971)

fig. f: Wattstax (1973)

fig. g: The Last Waltz ((1978)

fig. h: Summer of Soul (2021)

If you’d like to know more about this collection, you can find its webpage here.

If you’re a true devotee of Summer of Soul, you can order the book from the obvious multinational technology sources, but wouldn’t it be better to order it from a local, independent bookstore instead? Or just ask for it from your local library. If you happen to be in the vicinity of a university library, it should be pretty easy to track down.

aj

BUFS 2022-2023

The Brock University Film Society operated as a monthly series this last year, 2022-2023.

Our line-up consisted of the following films:

March 9, 2023—Geographies of Solitude (2022), dir. Jacquelyn Mills

In a recent interview on The Ezra Klein Show, in an episode titled “The Art of Noticing—And Appreciating—Our Dizzying World," the American poet Jane Hirshfield discussed her pronounced shift toward environmental issues and what we might call an overt eco-poetic sensibility.  This development was prompted by the ever-increasing urgency of the climate crisis, of course, but it was also tied to a growing awareness on her part of the staggering inter-connectedness of life on earth.  Hirshfield noted that none of this was entirely new—she’d been an active part of the very first Earth Day proceedings back in 1970 and had long had an attraction to nature, in spite of her New York upbringing—but it had become more prominent in her work in recent years as climate change had become a clear and present danger.

Zoe Lucas is a Canadian naturalist who experienced an epiphany in 1971 when she first visited Sable Island, Nova Scotia, a rather large, but extremely narrow spit of land—40 kilometres long and 2 kilometres across at its widest point—that sits 100 kilometres off the mainland.  Lucas had gone to the island to see its famous wild horses, but the experience turned out to be life-changing.  She visited the island repeatedly over the next several years, and in the early 1980s she relocated to Sable permanently.  Lucas arrived as an art student from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, but within a few years she’d become an amateur naturalist—a particularly passionate and committed one.  As she’s noted, the thrill of learning things directly, instead of reading about them in books was something she found unbelievably compelling.  Lucas has been the island’s sole year-round human inhabitant for over 40 years.  Over time, as oil, debris, and especially plastics have washed ashore in greater and greater quantities, wreaking havoc on Sable, its ecosystem, and the waters that surround it, she’s become the island’s steward, as well as a highly respected environmental researcher and sentinel.

Jacquelyn Mills is a talented Canadian filmmaker with a poetic sensibility.  Her film Geographies of Solitude is a remarkable account of Zoe Lucas and her profound relationship with Sable Island—an experimental documentary that is “part nature film, part biographical portrait,” as the critic Ben Kenigsberg has noted.  At one point in the film we hear audio of Lucas addressing an audience in 2015.  “So, I’m not going to give you a straightforward talk about the natural history of Sable Island.  This is more about experiencing Sable.”  The same could be said of Geographies of Solitude.  This is not a conventional film about the natural history of Sable Island.  This is a film about experiencing Sable, about experiencing the richness, diversity, and complexity of its ecosystem, about submitting to its majesty, its subtleties, its cruelty, and its peculiar genius, and about the art and science of noticing—and appreciating—its dizzying and awe-inspiring world.

February 9, 2023—Saint Omer (2022), dir. Alice Diop

The gifted French director Alice Diop is primarily known as a documentarian whose films often display an interest in the greater Paris region—from which she hails—and a sociological sense of its complexities, its tensions, and its challenges.  Diop is also of Senegalese descent, so, perhaps not surprisingly, she’s often been attracted to the lives and the narratives of recent immigrants.  This was certainly the case with her first major documentary, On Call (2016), which dealt with a doctor in suburban Paris whose practice specialized in attending to recently arrived refugees from around the world.  Diop spent a year at the clinic researching the story and taking notes while the doctor, together with a psychiatrist, took on the Sisyphean task of healing the bodies, minds, and souls of this constant flow of new patients.  Eventually she found a way to make a film about the clinic while doing everything she could to respect the dignity of her subjects.

We (2021), Diop’s breakthrough film, was a sweeping study of Paris, one that traced the path of a rail line that traverses the entire region, finding stories in its suburban districts at either end of the line, giving voice to characters and ways of life across classes that might otherwise be neglected.  At first, Diop maintains an observational distance to her subject matter, but gradually her voice begins to make its way into certain scenes, her family—and especially her relationship with her father—becomes an important chapter in the film, and eventually the director herself appears on camera, personalizing the film, introducing the “I” of the filmmaker into We.

Diop’s latest film, Saint Omer, is a fictional work in an established genre—the courtroom drama—but one that was pulled from the headlines.  The film deals with the story of Laurence, a highly educated immigrant woman from Senegal who is accused of having committed infanticide in a case that winds up dredging up issues of gender, race, and class, as well as France’s colonial past and its post-colonial present.  Saint Omer’s protagonist is a young woman named Rama, a novelist who also happens to be of Senegalese descent, and who attends the trial obsessively, hoping to use some of the material in an adaptation of Medea that she is writing.  Like Rama, in 2016 Diop found herself obsessed with a very similar trial that also involved a highly educated Senegalese immigrant accused of infanticide and that happened to take place in a town named Saint Omer.  The product of Diop’s obsession is Saint Omer, a film that, according to Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, has taken “a straightforward premise [and transformed it] into the stuff of unassuming, unexpected and authentic poetry.”

January 19, 2023—She Said (2022), dir. Maria Schrader

The investigation into Harvey Weinstein and the decades-long pattern of sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and rape that accompanied Weinstein’s rise from a Hollywood outsider to the ultimate Hollywood power broker remains one of the signal accomplishments of the #metoo movement.

Famously, after years where Weinstein managed to avoid scrutiny and remained one of the most powerful and feared figures in the entertainment industry, two major investigations were finally able to gain traction in the late-2010s, uncovering evidence and successfully collecting the testimony of victims in a way that previous investigators had been unable to.  In both cases, not only were Weinstein’s abuses revealed in great detail, but the widespread use of non-disclosure agreements by men in positions of power in order to dispel accusations of sexual harassment was laid bare.

One of these investigations was led by Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker.  The other was conducted by Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor at The New York Times.  Together, the two investigations helped bring Weinstein’s reign of terror to an end in the fall of 2017.  Both investigations won Pulitzer Prizes, and both resulted in bestselling, highly acclaimed books in 2019:  Farrow’s Catch and Kill:  Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators and Kantor and Twohey’s She Said:  Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement.

She Said, directed by Maria Schrader, is a biographical drama based closely on Kantor and Twohey’s groundbreaking work.  It’s also a great newsroom drama in the tradition of films like Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight (2015), which tackled the Boston Globe’s investigation into child sex abuse committed by numerous Roman Catholic priests in the Boston area, and Allan J. Pakula’s All The President’s Men (1976), which dealt with Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Washington Post investigation into the Watergate scandal.

In fact, She Said plays a lot like a feminist All The President’s Men.  Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan bring grit, determination, and empathy to the roles of Kantor and Twohey, and they’re complemented by a fantastic cast, including Patricia Clarkson as Rebecca Corbett, a rigorous but supportive editor, and André Braugher as Dean Baquet, the Times’s former executive editor.

December 8, 2022—The Eternal Daughter (2022), dir. Joanna Hogg

As some of you may know, the British director Joanna Hogg is a particular favourite here in the offices of the Brock University Film Society.  We’ve been following her work with interest and admiration for several years now.  Though Hogg’s career in film and television dates back to the 1980s, she was mostly involved in the latter, television, until about 15 years ago, when she began to make her presence known on the international cinema stage.

From the start of this most recent chapter, Hogg has specialized in unconventional family melodramas, ones where the tensions and conflicts are often much more subtle, much more nuanced than we typically associate with the genre, but no less poignant, no less affecting. Archipelago from 2010 was a standout in this regard.  It was so mysterious, so hard to pin down (Who are these people?  What are their backstories?  Where in god’s name is this film set?), and yet so resonant.

Archipelago featured Tom Hiddleston, and Hiddleston was something of a muse for Hogg, starring in her first three feature films in the years before he became a fixture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Since then, Hogg has returned to her original muse, Tilda Swinton, the phenomenally talented actor who appeared in Hogg’s graduate student film Caprice back in 1986, when both women were at the very beginning of their respective careers.

Hogg truly came into her own as a director with her last two films, a highly autobiographical diptych about a young woman trying to find her identity as a film student in the 1980s:  The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir: Part II (2021).  Both films starred the fantastic Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie, the character based on the young Joanna Hogg.  Nearly as important, however, was the actor who played Julie’s mother, Rosalind—none other than Tilda Swinton, Honor Swinton Byrne’s real-life mother.

Hogg’s latest film, The Eternal Daughter, is the third part in the series.  Julie is back, but is now a middle-aged director.  Rosalind, too, is back, but has aged accordingly.  And the two women find themselves in a film that is both an unconventional family melodrama and a ghost story of sorts.  While the film has been described as “eerie,” “haunting,” “lovely,” “moving,” and “sly,” a significant part of its magic once again has to do with casting.  As one critic put it, "Hogg’s greatest stroke in The Eternal Daughter is her casting of Swinton in both lead roles. Swinton is a wonderful chameleon and while she can go as big and showy as any Oscar contender, she is also a brilliant miniaturist.”

That’s right—Swinton plays both Julie and Rosalind, and the result is a truly breathtaking performance, one that stunned audiences when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, one that is yet another highlight in an acting career that has been chock full of them.

——

Speaking of unconventional family melodramas, just last week Sight & Sound released the latest edition of its famous list of the Greatest Films of All Time.  Every ten years Sight & Sound polls critics, scholars, programmers, curators, and archivists on their Top Ten films, the results are tallied, and a list of the Greatest Films of All Time is produced.  This year the number of experts surveyed grew substantially—from 846 in 2012, to 1,639 in 2022—and the results of the new poll were dramatic.

Among other things, the list now has a new #1 film:  Chantal Akerman’s 1975 hyper-realist art house classic Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles.  Akerman’s film first appeared on the list in 2012, when it was expanded to 100 titles—it showed up in the #36 spot.  How does one account for Jeanne Dielman’s truly remarkable ascent?  Among other factors, Laura Mulvey, the esteemed British film scholar, has noted an influential film series called “A Nos Amours” that was held in London between 2013 and 2015, where a complete retrospective of Akerman’s work was held—the first one ever mounted.  One of the co-curators of the retrospective was our friend Joanna Hogg.

November 17, 2022—Decision to Leave (2022), dir. Park Chan-Wook

His career got underway a decade earlier, but for many people in the West, Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), his gritty, utterly captivating neo-noir thriller was an introduction to a bold new directorial talent.  It also served notice that 21st-century South Korean cinema was a force to be reckoned with.  In fact, in some ways, with its craft, its vision, and its cruel ironies, Oldboy anticipated the blockbuster success of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, which took the world by storm in 2019-2020.

In 2009, Park followed up on the success of Oldboy up with an offbeat vampire film called Thirst, one whose inspiration came from Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, of all places, indicating his ambitions.  Speaking of ambitions, Park’s next film was his first venture into English-language filmmaking:  Stoker (2013), starring Mia Wasikowska and Nicole Kidman.  It was written by the actor Wentworth Miller (Prison Break), who described it as part horror film, part family melodrama, part psychological thriller, and it took its inspiration from both Bram Stoker and Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.

And in 2016, Park returned with The Handmaiden, a twisted and fascinating study of class, sex, gender politics, and colonialism in 1930s Korea, when it was under Japanese rule.  Here, too, Park displayed a penchant for audacious adaptations.  In this case, the source material was Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, set in Victorian Britain, and Park found a way of creating a connection between these vastly disparate locations and time periods through the aristocratic taste for British-inspired architecture and manners that was in vogue in Korea at the time.

Now, Park is back with one of his most acclaimed films yet, Decision to Leave, a Hitchcockian psychological thriller that has been widely hailed as a “masterpiece.”  The narrative involves a suspicious death, a police investigation, a mysterious and beautiful widow, and a detective who falls hopelessly, obsessively in love. As Manohla Dargis of the New York Times put it:  “Park’s most obvious touchstone is Vertigo, Hitchcock’s sublime 1958 l’amour fou about a detective who falls in love with a woman he thinks he’s lost only to find and lose her again.”

The more I read about this film, the more I find myself thinking of the line from the old Chet Baker song:  “let’s get lost.”  Personally, I can’t wait.

November 10, 2022—Triangle of Sadness (2022), dir. Ruben Östlund

The Swedish director Ruben Östlund burst on to the world cinema scene in 2014 with Force Majeure, a highly idiosyncratic family melodrama whose narrative depicted one tumultuous week at a luxury ski resort high up in the French Alps.  The film’s Swedish title, Turist (or “Tourist”) was simultaneously more to the point and rather vague.  The film’s English title, and the one that was used more commonly around the world, was more suggestive, alluding to the avalanches (both “controlled” and somewhat out of control) that unsettled what was supposed to be an idyllic Alpine getaway for an outwardly ideal Swedish family.

Since then, Östlund has further reinforced his reputation as one of top directors in contemporary cinema.  In fact, he’s won the Palme d’or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, with each of his last two films.  In doing so, he’s joined an extremely select group of filmmakers who’ve won the award twice, one that includes Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Haneke, the Dardenne Brothers, and Ken Loach.

The first of Östlund’s Palme d’or winners was The Square (2017), an absolutely savage skewering of the contemporary art scene, its ties to the world of Big Business, especially advertising, and the buzzy mediascape that is so crucial to its viability—and so capable of tearing it all apart.

Östlund’s most recent success is Triangle of Sadness, and this time the target of his lethal form of satire is the billionaire class, those sycophants and glitterati who congregate around them, and those who serve them, with a particular focus on today’s superyacht culture.  Prepare yourselves for an unforgettable cruise, and, remember, a flotation device can be found underneath your seat cushion should we encounter turbulence.

October 27, 2022—Moonage Daydream (2022), dir. Brett Morgen

Our BUFS 2022-2023 season got started on a “particularly flamboyant note” a few weeks ago, when we screened Valérie Lemercier’s truly outrageous Aline, the French filmmaker’s totally unauthorized biopic of Celine Dion.

Well, we might be dealing with a very different type of film, but, once again, popular music is of the essence and the flamboyance factor is not letting up a whit.  That’s because our next film is Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream, his magical, mysterious, at times hallucinatory, but ultimately moving rockumentary about the late, great David Bowie.

One of the peculiarities of the history of the rockumentary is that the artist who was arguably the artiest, most theatrical, and most cinematic rock star of his time never got the full-blown, artistically significant popular music documentary he so deserved.  Frankly, it’s surprising Bowie didn’t direct or collaborate on such a film himself, especially given his interest in film and its history, in acting, in music videos, and in the creation of experimental cinema and video.

Sure, there were exceptions, like D.A. Pennebaker’s 1979 film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, a record of Bowie’s outlandish 1973 tour from one of the pioneers of the genre,* and one that provided Morgen with some choice material, but such films lacked the scope that might have captured Bowie’s constant shape-shifting, his gender-bending, and his genre-blending.  There were also countless documentary profiles, mostly of the made-for-TV variety.  But an ambitious, sweeping, artful documentary eluded Bowie—until now, six years after his death.

Brett Morgen has been a leading documentary filmmaker for at least 20 years, since the time of The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002), his fascinating portrait of Robert Evans, the legendary film producer and “godfather of the New Hollywood.”  Since then, some of Morgen’s most notable films have been rockumentaries, like Crossfire Hurricane, his 2012 account of The Rolling Stones circa 1972, and Cobain:  Montage of Heck (2015), his devastating biography of Kurt Cobain.  And in the remarkable story of David Robert Jones, the artist and musician who transformed himself into Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, and, most importantly, David Bowie, Morgen appears to have found his ultimate subject.  At the very least, Bowie seems to have unleashed Morgen’s daring archival collage aesthetic to its fullest extent.

The result?  Well, as Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian has put it, “Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream is a 140-minute shapeshifting epiphany-slash-freakout leading to the revelation that, yes, we’re lovers of David Bowie** and that is that.”  Or, to word things a little more concisely, as The Globe and Mail’s Brad Wheeler did:  “Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah.”

*“Penny,” as he was known by his friends, was also responsible for Dont Look Back (1967), his seminal observational documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK Tour, and Monterey Pop (1968), his equally era-defining study of the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival and the Summer of Love.

**Ed.:  or we should be.

September 15, 2022—Aline (2021), dir. Valérie Lemercier

The Brock University Film Society is back for its 2022-2023 season, and things are starting off on a particularly flamboyant note.

Get this: "For Aline Dieu, nothing in the world matters more than music, family and love. Her powerful and emotional voice captivates everyone who hears it, including successful manager Guy-Claude Kamar, who resolves to do everything in his power to make her a star. As Aline climbs from local phenomenon to best selling recording artist to international superstar, she embarks on the two great romances of her life: one with the decades-older Guy-Claude and the other with her adoring audiences.”

Any of this sound vaguely familiar? Any of this sound like it could be "a fiction freely inspired by the life of Celine Dion"? Well…

Valérie Lemercier's Aline was one of the biggest sensations of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. It garnered 10 nominations at the 2022 César Awards (France's Oscars) for everything from Best Costume and Best Production Design, to Best Director and Best Film). And it took home one major prize: Best Actress (awarded to Lemercier herself). It was also one of the most controversial films of the year.

What was all the fuss about? Lemercier dared to make an unauthorized biopic based on the life of Celine Dion. She dared to play Celine herself. And, not only that, but she had the audacity to play Celine at virtually every stage in her life, from the age of 5 till the age of 50 (!). How? You'll have to see it to believe it. Why? You be the judge!

Critics were hotly divided on Aline. Many were appalled. Many others were astounded. Kyle Buchanan, reporting on the Cannes Film Festival for the New York Times, perhaps put it best: "You see a lot of nervy things at Cannes, but this surely takes the cake.”

At the very least, Aline seems destined to be a cult classic (if it isn't already). The kind of film that inspires fans to learn all the lines, encourages them to get in costume, and emboldens them to belt out their favourite Celine numbers (as if they don't do that already!).

Please join us for a singular experience.

Top Ten Lists for 2022

In anticipation of our first screening of 2023, we here at BUFS thought it might be fun to take a look back at 2022, especially with Awards Season upon us already.

Here are our BUFS executive committee Top Ten lists for 2022.

Everything is in alphabetical order: our names and the titles we selected.

The three posters were chosen because these were the three films that showed up on more than one of our lists.

Anthony Kinik

Aftersun (2022), dir. Charlotte Wells

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), dir. Laura Poitras

Decision to Leave (2022), dir. Park Chan-Wook

Fire of Love (2022), dir. Sara Dosa

Licorice Pizza (2021), dir. P.T. Anderson

Moonage Daydream (2022), dir. Brett Morgen

La Panthère des neiges/The Velvet Queen (2021), dir. Marie Amiguet & Vincent Munier

Parallel Mothers (2021), dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Petite Maman (2021), dir. Céline Sciamma

The Souvenir, Pt. 2 (2021), dir. Joanna Hogg

Peter Lester

Barbarian (2022), dir. Zach Cregger

Crimes of the Future (2022), dir. David Cronenberg

Decision to Leave (2022), dir. Park Chan-Wook

The Menu (2022), dir. Mark Mylod

Moonage Daydream (2022), dir. Brett Morgen

Nope (2022), dir. Jordan Peele

The Northman (2022), dir. Robert Eggers

Prey (2022), dir. Dan Trachtenberg

Slash/Back (2022), dir. Nyla Innuksuk

Turning Red (2022) dir. Domee Shi

Jon Petrychyn

Bros (2022), dir. Nicholas Stoller

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), dir. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

Framing Agnes (2022) dir. Chase Joynt

Fire Island (2022), dir. Andrew Ahn

Glass Onion (2022), dir. Rian Johnson

If From Every Tongue It Drips (2022), dir. Sharlene Bamboat

Nope (2022), dir. Jordan Peele

Parallel Mothers (2021), dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Skinamarink (2022) dir. Kyle Edward Ball

Soft (2022), dir. Joseph Amenta

Bon cinéma!

ak

p.s. For the record, my original list was a Top 13. It included Drive My Car (2021), dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, The Eternal Daughter (2022), dir. Joanna Hogg, and this week's BUFS screening: She Said (2022), dir. Maria Schrader.

Jeanne Dielman, Party-Crasher: Thoughts on the 2022 Edition of Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time

fig. a: ready for her selfie: Jeanne Dielman, as played by Delphine Seyrig, as she appears in the DVD edition of Jeanne Dielman, 23, qui du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Criterion Collection)

Shaken, Not Stirred

Powerful tremors have been felt in the realm of film for several days now, and the reverberations, and accompanying debates, are likely to last for quite some time.  At least ten years.  

Thankfully, this time around the cause isn’t another disturbing scandal.  It isn’t a mega-merger.  It’s not even something having to do with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  It all has to do with the release of the latest edition of the Sight & Sound survey of the Greatest Films of All Time.

The top film is a non-Hollywood film for only the second time in the history of the survey!  Not only that, but it was directed by a woman!  It’s also a minimalist and hyperrealist film—and therefore an outright rejection of the maximalist and fantastic cinema that has reigned supreme at the box office for decades.*  And it’s a film that’s almost 3 1/2 hours long!  

Just this alone—this bold, new, surprising #1 selection—would have been big news in film circles, but it was hardly the only shocker to be found in this year’s survey.  After decades of relative stability—the kind of conservatism we often associate with canon preservation—the foundation of the temple has been shaken.  If not an all out revolution, the new poll results certainly amount to a revolt.

Hitchcocko-Wellesians

Sight & Sound, of course, is the film journal of the British Film Institute.  In 1952, when Sight & Sound was celebrating its 20th anniversary, its editorial team came up with the ingenious idea of soliciting the opinions of a fairly large group of film critics in determining a list of the most significant films ever made, instead of just coming up with a list on their own from within their own ranks.  

Ten years later, Sight & Sound took the same approach to devise a new list, and the exercise has been a decennial tradition ever since.  Not only that, but they’ve greatly expanded the scope of their inquiry over the years.  By 2012 the list had grown into the 100 Greatest Films of All Time, and those polled began to include a wider array of programmers, scholars, archivists, and curators, in addition to film critics.

A decade ago, the biggest storyline was that Orson Welles’s 1941 epic American tragedy Citizen Kane, the film that had held the top spot since 1962 was dethroned—by Alfred Hitchcock’s mesmerizing 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo.  More than one critic referred to this as a “coup” at the time. Others were less dramatic: a “modest revolution,” one critic commented.

Hitchcock had never appeared on the list until 1972, when Vertigo first made the poll in the #12 position. 1982, when it reached the #8 position, was the year that Vertigo’s arrival caught people’s attention and there began to be talk of “the hard work of the Hitchcock critical industry.”  Such comments proved prescient.  

What ensued was a truly remarkable ascent:  Vertigo reached the #4 position in 1992 and the #2 position in 2002, before finally reaching the #1 position in 2012.  This year, though Vertigo is no longer in the #1 position, it has only been demoted to #2 (again)—meanwhile, three other Hitchcock thrillers are in the Top 100 for the second time in a row—Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), and North by Northwest (1959)—and they’ve all moved up in the rankings.

Enter Jeanne

So what is the film that has crashed the party in such dramatic fashion, making the great leap forward from the #36 position a mere ten years ago, to the #1 position in 2022?  Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles, of course—a film that is so singular, so entirely unconventional, that its title is an address.  A very specific one.  In Brussels.  

fig. b: Jeanne Dielman as she appears on the cover of the DVD edition of Jeanne Dielman, 23, qui du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Criterion Collection)

This is no Sunset Blvd. (1950), Billy Wilder’s beloved noir study of Hollywood past and present, which held firm on the list at #78.  Nor is it Mulholland Dr. (2001), David Lynch’s twisted neo-noir examination of Hollywood, which was another one of this year’s party crashers—moving from the #28 position in 2012, to the #8 position in 2022. Here, the geography is much more specific, and infinitely less glamorous.

In some ways, the fact that Vertigo was displaced by a film like Jeanne Dielman has a certain logic to it.  Akerman’s methodical, precisely executed, and utterly fascinating investigation of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, and in the immediate aftermath of a nervous breakdown, has everything to do with sex and murder and guilt—three obsessions that were central to Hitchcock’s work.  

The film might also be seen as a deconstruction of a police procedural, or perhaps, more accurately, a police procedural turned on its head—where instead of a crime prompting an investigation into what went wrong, here the study of what went wrong comes first, in great detail, covering minutiae that the police and the criminal justice system will likely never understand and that Jeanne Dielman herself might not be aware of.  

And, it must be noted, for every person who finds the film “utterly fascinating,” there are ten who find its radical experimentation with cinematic duration to be tedious and exhausting, and 100, maybe 1,000, who’ve never heard of the film, let alone seen it.  

There’s no question Chantal Akerman was a director of great significance.  There’s no question that the team that created Jeanne Dielman was inspired—especially Akerman, who brought an exacting vision to the project, but also her longtime cinematographer Babette Mangolte, her editor Patricia Canino, her art director Philippe Graff, and Delphine Seyrig, that icon of European art house cinema** whose turn as Jeanne Dielman is quite simply a tour-de-force performance. There’s also no question that placing Jeanne Dielman at the top of the list of 100 Greatest Films of All Time will be seen by many as provocative.  As will the inclusion of Akerman’s 1976 experimental documentary News From Home in the #56 position, one of a number of documentaries and experimental films (in this case, the film is both) that now appear as part of a group that had long been dominated by fictional narratives.

Sea Change/See Change?

How is one to account for this sea change?  Part of it has to do with the fact that although there are those who would deny it, the history of film just keeps growing and growing, even in the midst of a global pandemic.  Every ten years there are so many more films to contend with, many of them notable, some of them remarkable.

Then there’s the sheer number of critics, programmers, scholars, archivists, and curators who are now polled—between 2012 and 2022, this number nearly doubled, from 846 to 1,639.  There’s also the issue of demographic change within the ranks of these professions, and thus among those polled by Sight & Sound.

This is also the first Sight & Sound poll of the #metoo and #timesup era, as well as the #blacklivesmatter and the #________sowhite era.  There are considerably more women filmmakers on the new list than there were in 2012.  And with Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1997) now positioned at #7, there are suddenly two films directed by women in the Top Ten, when there had never even been one before.  Meanwhile, African-American directors appear on the list for the very first time, including recent titles such as Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016—tied for #60) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017—tied for #95), alongside Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989—#24), Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977—tied for #43), and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991—tied for #60).

Finally, with the last two polls in particular, there’s been a concerted effort to internationalize the realms of film studies and film appreciation well beyond the U.S., European, and Japanese triumvirate that had dominated earlier editions of the list.  In addition to films from India, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the Top 100 now includes titles from Iran, Senegal, South Korea, and Thailand.

All of these are important developments, and timely ones.  Sight & Sound has been discussing the need for greater diversity for decades—since at least 1992, when the list’s lead editorial addressed the fact that it seemed to be guided by a “‘West’ and the ‘rest’” philosophy.  But it was not until 2002 that the introduction—this time signed by Ian Christie, the esteemed British film scholar—addressed the workings, the implications, and the limitations of the poll, as well as the larger issue of the canon, in any real depth.  “Are [we] voting to reinforce a sense of cinema’s cultural legitimacy or trying to topple a false structure of accepted classics?,” Christie wrote.  Then he answered his own question:  “Mostly, of course, we’re doing both.”  Still, overall, the 2002 poll continued to be characterized by “relative conformity,” as Christie noted.  Significant change continued to be put off.

The Criterion Connection

But there’s another factor that should be taken into consideration when examining the canon re-formation that’s currently underway, one that I can break it down in two words:  Criterion Collection.  I’m being reductive, of course, but there’s little argument that DVD and Blu-ray releases and re-releases play a major role when it comes to deciding which films matter and why these days.  As early as 1975, at the advent of the home video era, François Truffaut predicted this outcome—democratizing the ability to own a home library of films would change our understanding of them.  Today, there are few organizations that exert as much influence over our taste for film as the Criterion Collection, with its thoughtfully packaged and carefully curated titles.

From the time of its inception in the early 1980s, Criterion was invested in upholding the canon as it had existed up until that time.  Among its initial laserdisc releases in 1984 was Citizen Kane, and the company had long associations with Janus Films, the distribution house that was most closely associated with the masterpieces of European and Japanese cinema that were so central to the canon.

Over the last twenty years, through the Criterion Collection, its collection of DVDs and Blu-ray discs, and the Criterion Channel, its online streaming division, the Criterion group has been in the business of both upholding the canon, and tearing it down in order to rebuild it.  With nearly 1,200 titles in its list of titles at this point, it’s easy to understand why.

This week, Criterion has been busy touting the fact that over 50 of the films found on Sight & Sound’s 2022 edition of the Greatest Films of All Time can be found in its collection and on its channel.  Mere coincidence?  Jeanne Dielman was added to the Collection in 2009 in a typically thoughtful two-disc set supervised by Akerman herself.  Laura Mulvey, the legendary British film theorist and scholar, has pointed toward “A Nos Amours” [sic], a complete retrospective of Akerman’s work staged in London by Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts between 2013 and 2015, as being one factor that might help to explain the critical ascent of Jeanne Dielman.  But how many critics, programmers, scholars and others were able to attend “A Nos Amours”?  And how many gained a new appreciation of Akerman’s work through the Criterion Collection and the Criterion Channel instead?

Teaching Home Economics

One of the most satisfying courses I ever taught was a full-year course on Authorship in the Cinema at Concordia University in Montreal.  The course I developed was designed to be an in-depth study of the discourse of auteurism and its impact from 1945 to the present, covering six directors:  Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Chantal Akerman in the first term, Douglas Sirk, Jim Jarmusch, and either Todd Haynes or Steven Soderbergh in the second term.  Six directors, four films by each.  There were many reasons that the course took this form, but one of the primary considerations had to do with DVDs and the quality of the prints they captured.  Akerman’s ‘70s films had recently been released by Criterion, while Fassbinder and Godard were already very well represented in the Criterion Collection, as were Sirk, Jarmusch, Soderbergh, and, to a lesser extent, Haynes.

fig. c: home economics as captured in the DVD edition of Jeanne Dielman, 23, qui du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Criterion Collection)

One of the biggest challenges and greatest pleasures of this course was the module on Akerman.  I’d never contemplated teaching Jeanne Dielman before because I’d never had a block of screening time long enough to contain it.*** At Concordia, however, I had a four-hour block to work with, so I was just able to squeeze it in.

My students were quite adventurous in their tastes, but most of them had never experienced anything like Jeanne Dielman.  Surprisingly, very few people seem to have researched the film beforehand the first time I screened the film.  Attendance was high, and there was no exodus when I started the film 30 minutes later, after an exceedingly brief lecture.  During the screening there was some grumbling, some minor signs of frustration, but most of the students stayed till the very end, and, overall, there was very little of the outright animosity that the film had been met with at its premiere as part of the Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975.

Not only that, but there were some students who were utterly blown away by the experience.  I even had students who sent me emails in the days that followed saying they’d been so transfixed by Jeanne Dielman that they couldn’t stop thinking about the film. Some said they’d watched again in the days since we screened. One student even wrote me hours later, saying she’d gone straight home and watched Jeanne Dielman again that same night (!).  Twice in one day. That doesn’t really happen very often. If it does, my students don’t write to me to tell me that’s what happened. But that’s exactly the kind of film Jeanne Dielman is.  Most people who see it will never get it, but those who do….

Akerman reported something similar when Jeanne Dielman played at Cannes. On the occasion of its premiere the atmosphere was “difficult” and Akerman and Delphine Seyrig sat at the back of the theatre watching one audience member after another walk out, their “seats banging” as they left. Within 24 hours Akerman’s life had changed irrevocably. “[Fifty] people invited the film to festivals,” she later recalled. “And I travelled with it all over the world. The next day, I was on the map as a filmmaker but not just any filmmaker. At the age of twenty-five, I was given to understand that I was a great filmmaker.”

O Canada, Where Art Thou?

Finally, you might ask, with all this change in the air, how is Canadian cinema faring?  Not particularly well, I’m afraid to say.  Not a single Canadian film appears on the Sight & Sound list.**** There’s reason to be hopeful, though.  Canadian directors are fairly well represented in the Criterion Collection.  Atom Egoyan, Claude Jutra, Guy Maddin, even Allan King—bit of a boys club, but they’re all there.  

And with six titles in the Collection, David Cronenberg is a veritable superstar.  He’s no Godard (14), but he’s got nearly the same number of films on Criterion’s list as Alfred Hitchcock (8) and Orson Welles (7), and exactly the same number as Chantal Akerman.

aj

*Somehow an exclamation mark seemed inappropriate with this sentence.

**Seyrig’s art cinema credentials are impeccable. They include Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963), François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (1968), Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975).*****

***When I think back to the days of my undergraduate studies, as well as my M.A., I have no idea how some of my professors pulled off the feats that they did—or convinced us to go along for the ride.  I had one course where we watched Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler: A Film From Germany (1977)—all 7 1/2 hours of it—from beginning to end.  I think we did so in two screenings, but still.  I had another course where we watched Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)—a 14-episode mini-series that lasts over 15 1/2 hours. Again, we watched it in its entirety, in two particularly epic screenings.

****If it makes you feel better, Jeanne Dielman has a sister in Canada, and her communication with Aunt Fernande, via letter, is a plot element in a film whose plot is otherwise sparse.

*****For the record, every single one of these titles is available from the Criterion Collection.

It's All Starting to Make Sense...

David Bowie as Tilda Swinton, and Tilda Swinton as David Bowie.

One of the highlights of our Fall program was Brett Morgen's Moonage Daydream, his phantasmagoric ode to the late, great David Bowie.

The closer for our Fall program, Joanna Hogg's The Eternal Daughter, finds the extraordinary Tilda Swinton in a ghost story of sorts--a phantasmic sequel to Hogg's The Souvenir diptych (The Souvenir [2019], The Souvenir, Part II [2021]). And if all that wasn't enough, Swintonplays dual roles.

Save the date: Thursday, December 8, 2022, 7:00 pm.

More information to follow...

Richard Kerr's "Homecoming" @ The Mighty Niagara Film Festival 2022

I posted this on Monday, but somehow it appears to have gone missing in the interim. Take 2:

https://nac.org/ground-zero-homecoming-of-richard-kerr/

Yes, the 2022 edition of the Mighty Niagara Film Festival (MNFF) is almost upon us, and this year one of the featured artists and honoured guests will be St. Catharines' own Richard Kerr, a filmmaker and installation artist who first studied filmmaking at Sheridan College in the 1970s, and whose filmography dates back to 1976. Kerr began as a documentary filmmaker working in the observational style, but over time his work became more narrative-based, and eventually highly experimental--quite literally so: many of Kerr's projects involve experiments with the materiality of film's technologies.

Kerr's The Demi-Monde is a media installation that will screen nightly during the duration of the MNFF, August 24-27, beginning at sunset at the old Towne Cinema in downtown St. Catharines (280 St. Paul Street).

This will be followed by two screenings of Kerr's work--one focusing on early works like Canal (1981)--which deals with Kerr's memories of his childhood along the Welland Canal--and one focusing on Kerr's most recent film, Field Trip (2022).

Part One of this retrospective will take place Friday the 26th of August at the RiverBrink Art Museum (116 Queenston St, Queenston, ON L0S 1L0), beginning at 7:00 pm.

Part Two of this retrospective will take place Saturday the 27th of August at the Film House (250 St Paul St, St. Catharines, ON L2R 3M2) at 4:00 pm, with a Q & A hosted by myself to follow at Mahtay Café, across the street, immediately following the screening.

Hope to see you at the Festival!

bon cinéma!

BUFS, Winter 2022

After a hiatus of almost two years, the Brock University Film Society returned to the Film House in the Winter of 2022.

April 7, 2022—The Souvenir, Part II (2021), dir. Joanna Hogg

We can't wait for next week's screening (Thursday, April 7, 7:00pm), the final showing of our highly abbreviated 2021-2022 season.* In case you forgot, the film we're so excited about is "The Souvenir: Part 2," Joanna Hogg's follow-up to her extraordinary "The Souvenir" (2019). Like the original, it stars Honor Swinton Byrne as "Julie," a young filmmaker based in part on Hogg, and co-stars Tilda Swinton, Byrne's real-life mother, as "Julie"'s mother "Rosalind." "How do you follow a film that seemed perfect in itself, a model of compression and self-containment about a ravaging love affair and the growing pains of a young artist at a pivot point in her life?," Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal asks. "The answer," according to Morgenstern, "turns out to be daringly intricate and beautifully simple. Ms. Hogg has outdone herself with an even stronger film about grief, self-discovery, the daunting uncertainties of the creative process and, before and after everything else, the mysterious power of the movie medium."

Let's hear it for "the mysterious power of the movie medium"!

Once again, our screening takes place at 7:00 pm on Thursday, April 7.

See you next week!

*Yes, sad but true. But we'll be back in September with what we hope will be a full slate of films for 2022-2023.

The Brock University Film Society is thrilled to announce that our next screening, on Thursday, April 7, will be "The Souvenir: Part 2," Joanna Hogg's follow-up to her extraordinary "The Souvenir" (2019). Like the original, it stars Honor Swinton Byrne as "Julie," a young filmmaker based in part on Hogg, and co-stars Tilda Swinton, Byrne's real-life mother, as "Julie"'s mother "Rosalind."

If you've never watched "The Souvenir," you have a month to try and catch it (looks like it's available to rent through a number of streaming services).

See you in April!

March 26, 2022—The Earth is Blue as an Orange (2020), dir. Iryna Tsilik

Friends of BUFS! Just a reminder that the Ukrainian director Iryna Tsalik's award-winning documentary "The Earth is Blue as an Orange" (2020) will be playing this Saturday, March 26 at 2:00 PM at The Film House. This is a Pay-What-You-Can event with 100% of proceeds going to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress - Niagara so they can assist with the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, as well as all those neighbouring countries who have taken in millions of refugees from Ukraine over the last few weeks. "How much power can art have in wartime?," the film's poster reads. This your chance to find out. STOP WAR!

———-

Benefit for Ukraine!

Iryna Tsilik's highly acclaimed documentary "The Earth is Blue as an Orange" (2020) won the top prize for World Cinema Documentary at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Tsilik is a Kyiv-based filmmaker and poet and her film deals with life on the front lines in Eastern Ukraine after 2014 in a way that attests to the power of art and the creative spirit in the face of tremendous adversity.

In his 2021 review of the film for The Guardian, Phil Hoad described the film this way: "A halo of kinship, love and the tenacious power of art is gathered around this film."

This is a Pay-What-You-Can screening with 100% of proceeds going to charity (details below).

March 3, 2022—Parallel Mothers (2021), dir. Pedro Almodóvar

I'm so happy to announce that after a hiatus of almost two years, the Brock University Film Society will be back in action on Thursday, March 3, 2022, hosting a screening of Pedro Almodóvar's "Parallel Mothers." To celebrate, we'll be holding a post-screening discussion so that all of us who love to talk about film can hang out for a bit, enjoy each other's company, and talk about THIS film. Hope to see you there!

Film at 7:00 pm. Discussion to follow.

"Reclaiming Popular Documentary"--Hot off the presses!

The UPS guy showed up with such urgency at 9:00 pm last night, the truck’s stereo blaring at top volume as he pulled up.  I wasn't expecting anything and I couldn't figure out what could possibly be so important. Turns out he had reason to be excited. He had my brand-new, hot-off-the-presses copy of Reclaiming Popular Documentary (Indiana University Press), edited by Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson. Lots of great material in here : public television and its relationship to the doc ecology; aerial cinematography and the fly-over documentary genre; food docs; popular music docs; eco-docs; melodrama in popular documentary; true crime docs; viral media; etc. The collection also happens to include my essay "Errol Morris, the New York Times, Docmedia, and Op-Docs as Pop Docs” (not sure if the UPS guy realized that, but...)..

What’s the gist of it? Well, you’ll have to read it, but it’s got some scope to it (MK-Ultra, Seymour Hersh, journalism, photography, Abu Ghraib, “docmedia,” online newspapers, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, smallpox, biological warfare, Steve Bannon, etc.), largely because the work of Errol Morris—in motion picture and print form—has so much scope to it, even if one focuses almost entirely on Morris’s involvement with the New York Times alone. Which of Morris’s films are discussed? Well, primarily a trio of his contributions to the New York Times’ Op-Docs series—The Umbrella Man (2011), November 22, 1963 (2013), and Demon in the Freezer (2016)—as well as The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Wormwood. (2017).

Once again, I find myself in excellent company--contributors include Zoé Druick, Mike Baker, Patricia Aufderheide, S. Topiary Landberg, Rick Prelinger,, Ezra Winton, the late Jonathan Kahana, and many others.

If you’re interested in learning more about the book, its contents, and its authors, you can find that information here.

It's been a long, strange, but fruitful trip, Christie and Steve--congratulations, and thank you for all the hard work!

aj

"Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury" (2021)--Now in Print!

fig. a: Metallica’s Deliverance by Rockumentary

My copy of Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) showed up on our front door last Sunday.

fig. b: Uli M. Schüppel’s The Road to God Knows Where (1990) as it appears in the opening montage of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), roughly 12,152 days into the life of Nick Cave

This book includes my essay "Minimum and Maximum Rock 'n' Roll: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Rockumentary Form," which deals primarily with two films and two radically different approaches to the popular music documentary: The Road to God Knows Where (1990) and 20,000 Days on Earth (2014). Whereas The Road to God Knows Where can be seen as a ultra-minimalist “anti-rockumentary,” 20,000 Days on Earth is a maximalist meta-documentary, and one of the greatest works of “nonfiction” (the film goes to great lengths to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction) in the last 20+ years, in my opinion.

There’s lots of great material in this collection, spanning folk, jazz, pop, psych, punk, post-punk, metal, country, indie, K-pop, prog, and, yes, rock, and encompassing a wide variety of perspectives and approaches. It’s a book that aims to vastly expand our understanding of the rockumentary genre, its history, and its potential. All told there are 25 chapters broken up into five categories—histories, gender, aesthetics & politics, counter-cultures, and futures—plus an introduction.

I’d like to thank the editors of this fine book, Gunnar Iversen and Scott MacKenzie, for their vision and diligence. It truly was a pleasure working on this project.

aj

The City Symphony Phenomenon--Now in Paperback!

fig. a: judging a book by its front cover

The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, the book I co-wrote and co-edited with my colleagues Steven Jacobs and Eva Hielscher, and which was originally released in 2019 in a pricey hardcover edition, is now out in a considerably less pricey paperback edition.

This project was set in motion by a symposium that took place in Ghent, Belgium over the course of two days in December 2014. The idea behind this original event was to broaden our knowledge of the city symphony cycle, experimental nonfiction films, made between 1920 and 1940 in particular, that sought to capture the energies, complexities, and dynamism of the modern metropolis. Instead of continuing to focus on the most famous versions of the genre (Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City [1927], Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera [1929], and Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice [1930], not to mention the first of the precursors, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhattta [1921]), we would screen and discuss a dozen lesser-known examples in order to see what could be learned by widening the field of vision. Introductions were presented by scholars from across Europe and North America, the films in question were screened, often with live musical accompaniment (most of them were silent), lively discussions ensued, and all of it took place in a well-appointed movie theatre and was open to the public. Many of these presentations, and the discussions and debates that helped refine them, became the core of the book project.

fig. b: judging a book by its back cover

By 2015, Eva, Steven, and I had managed to track down about 35-40 city symphonies, many of which had long been overlooked or forgotten entirely. We were quite proud of this achievement, and there’s no question that it provided us with a deeper understanding of the genre. However, we continued to scour archives and libraries, and work with curators and other interested parties to find other city symphonies, and our list of films grew considerably. By the time we completed our project, we’d managed to identify over 80 films that together contributed to the “city symphony phenomenon” between the years 1920-1940, and we’d helped organize two programs of city symphonies at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy (as part of the 2017 and 2018 editions).

Our book is made up of three parts:

1. A lengthy and in-depth introduction that covers the genre, its characteristics, its scope, and the reasons for the demise of its “classical” era.

2. A collection of 16 case studies written by ourselves along with about a dozen other international scholars, including Malte Hagener, Michael Cowan, Christa Blümlinger, Malcolm Turvey, Merrill Schleier, John David Rhodes, Ivo Blom, Floris Paalman, Tom Gunning, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Cristina Meneguello.

3. A survey of the city symphonies of the inter-war period, including short discussions of 80+ films, plus production notes,, technical features, archival sources, and other information.

One of the design features that we’re particularly pleased with has to do with the book’s visuals, its stills, photos, and other illustrations. We wanted the text to be image-rich. The topic—”cinema, art, and urban modernity”—demanded it. So we devised a grid, or “mosaic” system to place multiple images from a single film where otherwise only one would have gone, thereby providing a stronger sense of the film’s iconography, its aesthetics, and its montage. Here are just a few examples:

The book has received strong reviews, including the following:

"The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, a product of scholarly sleuthing and obsession, is a fascinating and valuable achievement."—Charles Musser (Yale University), book review, Film Quarterly, Summer 2019

"With the publication of The City Symphony Phenomenon:  Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, editors Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik have created an invaluable contribution to the understanding of this compelling form of international film modernism… In choosing the term phenomenon, and in viewing it as a filmmaking movement engaging both amateur and professionals alike, this book makes a compelling case for not only revising notions of how film scholars understand the concept of genre, but demanding a re-evaluation of the boundary conditions under which such scholarly claims are theorized and validated."—S. Topiary Landberg (UC Santa Cruz), book review, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Volume 30 Issue 1, Spring 2021

It directly inspired a comprehensive retrospective of the genre at Anthology Film Archives in New York City in January 2019, soon after its initial release, as well as a seminar (“Expanding and Reconsidering the City Symphony”) at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference in Seattle in March 2019.

And now it’s available in a paperback edition.

aj

Night & the City, 20 Years Later (!)

fig. a: Night & the City: the Reception

Twenty years ago to the day, in the late winter of 2001 (pre-9/11!), a conference that my friend and colleague Geoff Stahl and I had organized under the aegis of the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University got underway: “Night and the City.” The response to our Call for Papers was remarkable, and the result was a vibrant and captivating academic conference that spanned four days and attracted participants from around the world. It featured dozens of panels, multiple keynote addresses (Mike Davis! Wolfgang Schivelbusch!), a wonderful screening at the Cinémathèque québécoise (Burrows & Palardy’s Montreal By Night, Godbout’s Fabienne sans son Jules, McLaren’s New York Lightboard Record, and others), an opening reception at Noize Records (showcasing images from the Will Straw Collection), and a closing event at Casa del Popolo (which had just opened a few months earlier, in September of 2000) that paired Fritz Lang’s M with the musical talents of Tim Hecker and Mitchell Akiyama.

Something about this event really struck a chord, everything just clicked for four days straight, and, for me at least, “Night & the City” still stands as a model for what an interdisciplinary academic conference is capable of being: rigorous, intellectually stimulating, lively, convivial, and entertaining.

Not surprisingly, given the subject matter and the setting, the discussions, activities, and shenanigans lasted deep into the night, each and every night. That might be one of the reasons that some of the friendships forged during those heady days of winter proved to be so lasting.

If you want to see how the conference was described at the time, in the pages of the McGill Reporter, check out this link.

Lastly, it goes without saying that it’s odd to be reflecting on this piece of history at this juncture, in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. It’s even odder to be doing so in a city that continues to be on curfew (from 8:00 p.m. - 5:00 a.m.) because of this crisis.

aj

p.s. Thanks to Geoff for sharing this flyer (and thanks, too, for reminding me of this anniversary!). I have a number of items hidden away somewhere in my very own “Night & the City” archive, but this wasn’t one of them. A copy of the official poster for the conference adorns the wall of my office at work. It was particularly arresting, and most of the credit for its success goes to my friend Zoe Miller, who very graciously lent her graphic design talents and expertise to the project. Unfortunately, my office is off-limits at the moment, but this morning I found the original mock-up for the poster among a bunch of old files. This was quite by accident. Honestly. I had no recollection of this collage and I probably hadn’t seen it since 2001.

fig. b: Night & the City: the mock-up

fig. c: Night & the City: the mock-up (detail)

Thanks also to all our friends and colleagues who helped make this event possible: Marc Furstenau, Peter Urquhart, and Will Straw in particular.

Vistas of Vermont

“Vistas of Vermont,” a series of 20 postcards produced in the fall of 2020. Here’s a selection of some of our most popular ones:

fig. a: the grand canyons of Vermont

fig. b: Winooski River, Montpelier, VT

fig. c: Royal Vermont Mounted Police

fig. d: Piazza Maggiore, St. Johnsbury, VT

fig. e: the iconic Green Mountain State Building, Burlington, VT

fig. f: they don’t call Crescent Beach, Burlington, VT “the world’s most famous beach” for nothing

fig. g: Trekkers on the Long Trail, VT

fig. h: Beautiful 17-Mile Drive, Lake Champlain, VT

fig. I: the Radio Corporation of America Building, Burlington, VT

fig. j: Sunken Gardens, Brattleboro, VT

fig. k: granite architecture in the neo-classical style, Barre, VT

aj

This is Not an Interview: A Conversation with Yung Chang About "This is Not a Movie" (2019)

fig. a: This is Not a Poster

As of early March of 2020, plans were in place to host the talented Canadian documentary filmmaker Yung Chang at the Film House in St. Catharines, Ontario so that he might introduce his latest film, This is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth (2019), attend the screening, and participate in a Q & A session with the audience afterwards.

A little over a week later, aspects of the lockdown began to go into effect, including the termination of face-to-face classes at Brock University where I teach, and the cancellation of all events at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, including film screenings at the Film House, and, by extension, any and all Brock University Film Society events.

When our plan to bring Chang to town in person was scrapped for obvious reasons, I conducted a Zoom interview with him in late May 2020 instead and we figured out a way to make the film available to local audiences via the "Film House at Home" program (Thank you, Film House! Thank you, Blue Ice Docs!).

What was meant to be a 15-minute interview turned into something closer to a 60-minute one, but I managed to edit it down to a 15-minute version (plus intro) that focuses in large part on one of my favourite parts of the discussion: the intricate editing of "This is Not a Movie." If you're interested, you can find that edit here .

If, however, you’d prefer to get a sense of the full scope of the interview, what you’ll find below is a transcription, one that’s been edited for clarity and concision.

By the fall of 2020, Chang’s film was getting a wider release in the United States and receiving widespread (and well-deserved) critical acclaim. Consequently, Chang was involved in a whole new round of promotional appearances, some of them on his own, and some of them with Fisk himself. And then the unthinkable happened: Robert Fisk died, at the age of 74, the apparent victim of a severe stroke. In its obituary, The New York Times quoted from This is Not a Movie directly: “You cannot get near the truth without being there.” The choice was fitting. Not only was Chang’s film the final and most exhaustive attempt to come to terms with Fisk and his work on screen, but Chang himself appeared to have taken Fisk’s dictum to heart in the making of the film—he’d followed his subject to Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Syria, among other places, in order to get the story, in order to capture the man, his journalism, and his legacy.

Since that time the tributes to Fisk have continued to pour in from around the world, and This is Not a Movie has made many Best Films of 2020 lists.

R.I.P. Robert Fisk, 1946-2010.

—————

Hello, everyone!  Hello, Film House fans!  Hello, Brock University Film Society fans!  Welcome to an experiment in #stayhome viewing.  

Today we’ll be holding a conversation that brings together two different people—myself and my guest speaker—in two different cities—St. Catharines, Ontario and Toronto, Ontario—united on screen through the miracle of modern videoconferencing.

I’ll be talking to one of the most talented directors working in Canada today, a leading documentary filmmaker with an international profile:  Yung Chang.

Chang has been making waves with his work since his feature film debut in 2007, Up the Yangtze, a powerful and poignant travelogue of a voyage by boat—on a cruise ship—up the Yangtze river—one that studied the impact of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam on the region.  

Since then Chang has continued to receive widespread acclaim at home and abroad for such films as China Heavyweight, which dealt with the rise of boxing in contemporary China; The Fruit Hunters, a film about fruit, especially exotic fruit, and the characters who obsess over them; and Gatekeeper, a film about suicide and societal taboos in Japan.

His latest film is the film we’ll be discussing tonight and which you’ll have a chance to screen after this intro, if you haven’t had a chance to do so yet.  That film is This is Not a Movie:  Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth.  

It might very well be Chang’s most ambitious film to date.  It’s a film that has broad appeal for those with an interest in journalism, in political science, in the history and politics of the Middle East, in wars and conflict zones, and in documentary form.  And for all of these reasons, it’s a film that is sure to spark analysis and conversation for years to come.

fig. b: the miracle of modern videoconferencing

AK:  Yung, great to see you again!

So, we’re talking about This is Not a Movie, your latest feature film.  This is a film that is a number of things, but it’s essentially a profile of a single person, the journalist Robert Fisk.  For those who might not be familiar with his work and the many accolades he’s received over the decades, what’s your 30-second elevator synopsis of Fisk and his career?

YC:  Robert Fisk… Well, he’s one of the most well-known British journalists and one of the most lauded foreign correspondents anywhere…. He writes for the newspaper The Independent in the UK.  He’s the only international journalist to have interviewed Osama Bin Laden three times.  He’s had a storied career.  He’s 75 now—he’s working, lives in Beirut.  He’s written a few tomes on his experiences as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East that have become essential readings on the region.  He’s someone who often writes on behalf of those whose voices are left out of the mainstream media’s accounts of the the region, and someone who examines stories that other journalists might not.

AK:  I know this project was long in the making and a true labour of love.  How did this project first come together?  What was the impetus?  What attracted you to the project?  And what were your first conversations/interactions with Fisk like?

YC:  I went to Concordia University in the ‘90s.  I was part of the Fine Arts community there.  And I remember we would gather in this one café—Café X.  That was the place where all the activists would hang out.  And you could use their crappy computer and their dial up connection, and we would get on Z Net and access Z magazine and read these columns by journalists and thinkers from around the world.  And specifically I’m thinking of Noam Chomsky, and Naomi Klein—all the prominent leftist voices.  And Robert Fisk was there, too.  And around 9/11 and its immediate aftermath I really gravitated to his writings.  They revealed perspectives that I just wasn’t getting elsewhere at the time and that I was yearning for in my attempts to understand what was happening in response to the September 11th attacks.

Fast forward to 2016 and that fateful night of November 8 and the Presidential Election.  I think the mainstream media failed us greatly on that occasion. That had me thinking about my media literacy again.  That was a wake-up call.  We have to be our own custodians when it comes to being informed.

And right around that time I received a phone call from the National Film Board with the idea of making a film about Robert Fisk.  The two things collided and I said to myself: “serendipity.”  So I went to Beirut, where Robert Fisk lives, and I met with him, and I was very nervous.  I thought to myself, “It’s going to be scary to meet this giant of journalism.”  And, in fact, he wasn’t intimidating at all.  He’s charming, funny, witty—it was a bit disarming, actually.  And I realized he’s a guy I could get along with.  He’s a guy I could potentially spend a couple of years making a film about.  Because that’s important.  Can you foresee this connection with your subject?  And I thought there was something there.

What really settled it for me was that we were walking through the streets of Beirut.  And he’s like an encyclopedia.  He has a sharp memory—instant recall—and boundless energy.  So we’re walking through the streets and he’s able to point out specific historical references—from the days of the Roman Empire to recent assassinations.  And to me that discourse was something that provided the structure of the movie—a film that could leap back and forth between times, while examining the cyclical nature of history. 

So I knew I had something there, but, as for the rest, this was the first time in my career that I had no idea how to make this film.  I don’t know the subject of the Middle East.  So I had to learn, and being able to be there [Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere] was really important.  And as Robert says, I was something of a blank slate.  The fact that I wasn’t coming in with preconceived judgments was a good thing.

Sorry, that’s a long-winded answer.  

AK:  That’s okay. Continue.

YC: I got a lot of encouragement from my producers.  They told me, “You don’t have to know how to make this film.  Go in and go with your instincts.”  And what happened was that the film was very rigorously structured in the editing room.  I worked with a remarkable editor, Mike Munn—he cut Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell and Peter Mettler’s Picture of Light.  He’s very patient and detail-oriented.  He carved out these very layered, organic moments where subtext and theme would just roll into the next scene.  

For me, when I watch This is Not a Movie, it doesn’t really trip me up.  It’s layered, and it’s this long essay, in a sense.  It’s a profile of Robert Fisk, but it’s a film that’s also meant to spark discussions and debates amongst friends and family on the nature of truth and the truth about journalism.

AK:  This is a film that’s very much about the Middle East and its politics, and how this region and its tensions are covered in the media by journalists.  It’s also film about being a foreign correspondent whose beat is wars and conflict zones.  But more generally it’s a film about the art, the craft, and the ethics of journalism.  What was the most surprising thing that you learned about journalism from the making of this film? 

YC: For me, what was surprising was realizing that journalism is essentially storytelling.  It’s very subjective.  For Robert, he’s always looking for that arc.

Just to rewind a little bit.  The structure of the film is also built around the arc of a character—and that is Robert Fisk’s transformation from a young, idealistic journalist to a jaded, grizzled journalist at the end of the film.  And part of that arc was his connection to [Alfred] Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and cinema and storytelling.

AK:  That’s a great moment in the film, too.

YC:  Yeah, I love that moment.  It’s not in the movie, but initially [Fisk] was going to become a film critic.  So he knows everything about cinema.  He knows about the French New Wave—that’s his favourite film movement.  He really knows his stuff.  So he understands editing, and the construction of story.  And certainly in terms of the written word and language, he’s an expert.  And so he’s very attuned to storytelling, and for me that was quite illuminating.  “Oh, yeah, [when we’re dealing with journalism,] we are in a way telling stories…”  

But he’s created for himself a rigorous approach to journalism, which is defined by his reporting on the side of those who suffer and to question authority.  These ideas have become a mantra for him, they are what keep him grounded—to the point of controversy.  He’s willing to go to that edge because that’s what he believes—that’s his integrity.  That was something that I learned that was surprising to me, and that makes him so unique as a personality and as a journalist.

Someone like Fisk can push through all the muck and mire of truth online because his system of gathering knowledge goes well beyond the Internet.

AK:  There’s that one moment in the film that I really like where he’s talking about  the voice of his journalism, and how when he writes a piece he’s thinking about it in a conversational sense and he really wants to be as clear as possible and to really communicate with his reader and to not make things impenetrable.  I found that interesting—his concern with just being understood and reaching a vast number of readers.  He wants to be a public intellectual in addition to being a standup journalist.

YC:  Yeah, that’s true.  He’s close with Noah Chomsky.  Edward Said was a very close friend of his.  These are his inspirations—mentors, even.  If you’re not familiar with his work, I would recommend his books—Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilisation.  They’re emotional, raw, eloquently written.  And you can access all the work that he references in our film—all the columns he’s written—are available on the Independent website.  Just search “Robert Fisk Independent” and you’ll come up with all the articles—and I recommend reading through those.  In addition, on the Independent website we have included some deleted scenes from the film, one of which we had to cut because it didn’t fit the overall tone of the film.  But it’s a car chase scene and it takes place on the streets of Beirut as he’s pursuing an environmental story.  And in it you get to see Fisk in his element, wanting to get the story, being the detective. 

AK:  I want to come back to the issue of editing that you mentioned earlier.  The editing in the film is oftentimes breathtaking.  The first time my breath was taken away was in the opening minute-two minutes of the film.  There’s that transition between Iran in the early 1980s and Syria recently, in the last few years.  And it’s just such a subtle cut—the first time you see it—and such an incredible transition.  It sets a tone.  The editing right from the start is impressive.  One thing that struck me—it’s the only example I can think of in your work where you were working with archival material a lot.  I wonder if you could tell us about that.  At what point in time in the project was it obvious that it would have that archival element to it?  What was the archival material that you had access to?  And did that aspect of the project influence the original material that you were shooting?  Or did that archival angle come up later in the game?

YC:  That’s a great question.  Mike and I approached the story with the idea that we had two pieces of archival material—maybe three—that were essential.  One of them was this series that Fisk was involved with as its host in the early 1990s called From Beirut to Bosnia.  That was a crucial piece.  We had three different archival films that documented Fisk in different eras in his life.  We had the BBC documentary that he did in Northern Ireland—when he had long hair and kind of had a resemblance to a Woody Allen-type character.  And then we had the ‘90s with From Beirut to Bosnia.  And then we had our contemporary material.  And then in between we had another documentary about the Times of London—the one where Fisk talks about [Rupert] Murdoch.  So those we had as sources, but we had no idea how to fit them into the film.  But we knew we would want to be able to jump between times.  And the original impetus for that was that I wanted to be able to interview Fisk and get him to talk about things and reference something—and then we jump to some footage that related to that reference.  And it was impossible to figure out how to do that.  And quickly we realized that the form had to grow out of the editing process organically.  

The opening sequence was actually built around a bit of audio on cassette that Fisk had in his archives.  He had all of these field recordings that he did.  And I listened to them all and I found the bit that we used in the opening.  But all we had was just sound—analogue sound—with no image.  And we were struggling to find a way to visualize it.  I didn’t want to do recreation.  Anyway, one day in the editing room we received a hard drive.  We put it in and turned it on, and here were images related to the actual moments caught on that audiocassette, and you see Fisk in it.  This was archive material from the BBC.  Fisk realized that at the time that the audio was recorded he was with this cinematographer named Gavin Hewitt—a journalist—who was filming.  It’s not exactly in synch, but we managed to find the moments where it felt like it was aligned, and that’s what you have there.  It was a remarkable moment—to discover that.

We knew we wanted to punch in pretty quick—bring you right into the story of Robert Fisk’s career very quickly and succinctly.  And that magical edit to the present really defines the structure of the movie.  It signals the way the film is going to flow.  It gives the audience a sense of the way the movie is going to move back and forth across time.  So to me, that really is one of my favourite moments in the film.  And that’s the story behind it.

The editing process itself—it took one year to edit.  I did 16 hours of interviews with Fisk and that’s the foundation of the voice of the film.  That series of conversations determined where we could go with the film—that, combined with what we filmed with him in person and on location.

Thankfully, Mike Munn is so detail-oriented in his editing that he cut everything we shot into scenes, and logged it so meticulously, so that we could easily move things around so that we could figure out how to structure the film.  It was a puzzle that we had to figure out.  

I often say that it’s a relentless film because there’s so much information coming at the viewer.  But we had to figure out ways to build in breaths to allow the audience to let the material sink in and do so in such a way that they add to the next moments.  

I learned a lot through the editing of this film.

AK:  It’s an intricate film.  It’s clear that a lot of work and a lot of thought went into it.  The transitions are oftentimes fascinating.  Both in terms of where they take us, but also in terms of how they’re constructed.  When you’re looking at its form, it’s a really interesting film to study on that level.

I’m conscious of the time, so I’m going to move things along a bit and ask you a question that’s a little shorter.

For me, one of the most lasting impressions from the film has to do with Fisk’s office, with his filing system, and with his meticulous approach to researching and archiving.  Do you remember the impression this system of his left on you the first time you witnessed it? And I guess the follow-up question would be, have you become more organized since meeting Fisk? [laughs]

fig. c: Chang’s office and his ever-expressive hands

YC:  As you ask me this, I look around me [laughs at the sight of the clutter of his office]…. I just moved into this house in Toronto.  Actually, it’s been about a year.  So I’ve got boxes and boxes of my own personal archives, and they’re not organized as meticulously as Fisk’s.  And I also do not have a PhD, so I haven’t adopted the methods of research and organization that he did.  
He’s built this cataloguing system that’s perfect for his way of approaching his writing and his research.  He recalls and remembers where everything is.  He knows where to find something and he can pull that item out—immediately.  And like he says in the film, he has documents that do not exist online.  Not everything is on the Internet, believe it or not.  So I think his system is invaluable.  And that, to me, was illuminating.  

He has this analogue approach to work that is extremely valid, but it is overwhelming to walk into his office like that [because of its clutter and its enormous number of files].  Fisk struggles with technology and his computer as remarked upon in the movie.  His desktop on his computer—he actually doesn’t like to put things in folders because he worries that it disappears—and so everything is on his desktop—thousands of documents!  But that’s how he finds things…

This is an archive film.  And, ironically, in making this film we learned that the hard material—the actual analogue material—is often the best way to archive something, rather than to digitize it and put it online.  That’s a whole other conversation.

Another long-winded answer:  “Robert’s Archives.” [laughs]

AK:  I just love those scenes with his files and his filing system.  And the way you captured it with the camera was amazing.  It really gets you to think about what choices we make when we archive things.

YC:  Yeah, and that relates to the final note of the film.  The film follows the arc of this character who’s become a jaded journalist by the end.  And the least that a journalist can do is keep a record so that nobody can question whether something did or did not happen.  I think that’s crucial.  

AK:  Especially these days when truth is under fire.

Clearly we’re in the era of #stayhome cinema right now, otherwise we’d be conducting this interview on stage in St. Catharines.  There would be an audience in front of us.  The downside is that we’re in different cities—we’re not together and we can’t interact with each other directly.  And there isn’t an audience with us in the moment.  The upside is that we’re able to overcome geography and many more people have the opportunity to witness this discussion.  But people are actively looking for good material to watch these days, and many people who watch This is Not a Movie will surely be looking to watch more of your films.  Any tips on how they can do so? 

YC:  The easiest way is to just go to my website:  yungfilms.com.  You can find links to things there, and you can find all the work I’ve done.  What would we do if didn’t have the Internet during a pandemic?

I’ve got a question for you, Anthony.  You’re the music expert.  [ed:  Umm, not really…]

U2 wrote a song about Robert Fisk.

AK:  Oh, really?  I didn’t know that.

YC:  It’s at the end of our film, during the end credits.  It’s called “Cedars of Lebanon.”  Bono loves Robert Fisk, and he wrote this song for him.  

Some of the lyrics are a little bit off, but some of them are so perfect.  I have my thoughts about U2.  [laughs]  I know you do, too.  [ed:  Yes, indeed.]

Bono gave us the permission to use the song.  He wanted us to use it.  But actually we had to go to Harold Budd and Brian Eno because the song involves a sample from an album they had done back in the day—a beautiful album.  So the music is quite nice because it’s literally a Brian Eno and Harold Budd tune.  

You didn’t hear that song at the premiere at TIFF because we didn’t have it at that time.  We got it later for our international premiere at IDFA [International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam].

AK:  Okay, that makes sense, because when I watched the film again the other day, I didn’t remember that song.  That’s interesting.

Lastly, what’s in store for Yung Chang?  What are some new and/or upcoming projects that you can tell us about?

YC:  So I’m going back to China now.  China, having been through what we’re going through now, and having come out of it to a certain extent, is opening up to filming.  So I just got greenlit for a new China-Canada co-production and it’s about hockey in China.  This is going to be a pretty wild story.  It’s got great access.  It’s going to follow the rise of a major sport in China up to the 2022 Olympics where the Chinese national hockey team is in Group A with all the top hockey teams.  And the people involved in creating the Chinese team include Wayne Gretzky, and a general manager from Toronto who works with a Russian oligarch.  It involves billionaires.  It involves Chinese-Canadians who have to give up their Canadian passport in order to play on the national team.  There’s a lot at stake in the story.  I’m interested in modern relationships between countries, and I think this story will be a microcosm of that through what we’re calling “hockey diplomacy.”

AK:  Actually, I wanted to ask you.  I recently watched China Heavyweight again, and there’s one scene where one of the Chinese boxers was wearing a Habs [Montreal Canadiens] cap.  Was that a gift from you?

YC:  [laughter]  That was definitely a gift from me!  I’ve had my obsession with hockey, and certainly with the Habs.  I’ve had to let that go a little, because that obsession can become painful.  

I recall being in China not so long ago and following the Habs in the playoffs.  I’d be putting on my jersey at 3:00 a.m. in China and trying to find the Internet connection to watch these playoff games.  

Anyway, it’s called Red Stars.  That’s the working title.  And hopefully there will be something good that comes out of that.

And I’ve got another film I’m working on:  a pandemic film.  Actually, there’s two projects.  One that I worked on with my partner that you’ll see in the next few of months [that film is Pandemic19 , directed by Yung Chang and Annie Katsura Rollins] and another longer film that I’m not allowed to talk about yet that I’m hoping will be quite moving and revealing.

AK:  Excellent!  Thank you so much, Yung!

YC:  Thanks, Anthony!  Great to see you!  I shaved my moustache.  Dang it!  I wanted to go against the whole pandemic shaving thing.  I could have decided not to shave, but I couldn’t do it.  I thought if I do that I’m going to sink deep into a funk if I let myself go.

AK:  It would just be a “playoff beard.”  Don’t worry about it. [laughter]

————

THANK YOU!

BON CINEMA!

aj

True Story

fig. a: diptych

The following is a slightly revised and considerably updated version of a story I posted on Instagram back in November.

————

The toughest guy at our junior high school was a guy named Bart Simpson. No joke. Thing is, the context was rather different at the time: this was roughly 5 years before Matt Groening began creating Simpsons shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show.*

Anyway, among other personality quirks, Bart was convinced he was the reincarnation of Jim Morrison, which was particularly strange (people ARE strange) because he was born a couple of years BEFORE Jimbo died in 1971.

At the end of eighth grade, when our yearbooks were released to us, Bart grabbed my friend Kevin’s yearbook and scribbled something in it. Kevin was powerless to do anything because this was Bart Simpson, the toughest guy in school, after all, and he was terrified that his yearbook would be returned to him with all kinds of vulgarities that would be hard to explain to his mother.

When Bart finally handed back his yearbook it read “smoke dope / snort coke / drink wine / feel fine / —Jim Morrison.”

This inscription was still pretty hard for Kevin to explain to his mom, but it was considerably cooler than what he’d been expecting.

Five years later, when The Simpsons appeared on the scene, it became infinitely cooler.

Or, at least that’s the way I remembered things decades later.

Recently I asked Kevin to confirm this story. Turns out I was pretty close, but that Bart’s text was even more noteworthy than I remembered.

It read: “smoke dope / snort coce [sic] / drink wine / feel fine / p.s. Have a nice sumer [sic] / me / Jim Morrison / The Doors [captured in the form of their distinctive logo] / #1.”

fig. b: Jim Morrison in his own words

The truth is stranger than non-fiction.

The Truth / #1.

aj

*And, thus, about 7 1/2 years before it debuted as a stand-alone television show.

BUFS Highlights, 2019-2020

Here are some of the highlights from the Brock University Film Society’s 2019-2020 season.

March 26, 2020—Dark Waters (2020), dir. Todd Haynes [ONLINE]

Todd Haynes has been a significant figure in American cinema since he first made waves in 1988 with a poignant and subversive underground film called Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Within a few years, Haynes had become a superstar himself, winning acclaim and sparking controversy at the Sundance Film Festival with his feature-length debut Poison (1991), one of the opening shots of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s.

Some of Haynes’s most famous films have focused on popular music, and the complicated—and sometimes tragic—figures who become pop stars (Superstar; The Velvet Goldmine [1998], which dealt with Glam Rock in the early 1970s; I’m Not There [2007], which examined the Bob Dylan phenomenon of the ‘60s and ‘70s). But in many ways, Haynes’s preferred genre has been the family melodrama, as evidenced by films like Safe (1995); Far From Heaven (2002), his ode to two masters of the genre, Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Carol (2015), based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith; and Wonderstruck (2017).

Now Haynes is back with a powerful legal/environmental thriller called Dark Waters, one that stars Mark Ruffalo as a lawyer who had the audacity to take on DuPont. And if this seems uncharacteristic, one should remember that Safe—quite possible Haynes’s greatest film—was not only a powerful family melodrama, it was also a brilliant study of privilege, overdevelopment, and the environmental crisis in America.

Ruffalo is joined by an all-star cast that includes Tim Robbins, Anne Hathaway, and Bill Pullman.

March 19, 2020—A Hidden Life (2019), dir. Terrence Malick [ONLINE]

There was a time when Terrence Malick’s output was sporadic, to say the least.  Malick was one of the greatest talents to emerge out of the New Hollywood Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, but he only actually made two feature films during this period, and they were released five years apart.

The first of these, of course, was Badlands (1973), Malick’s bleak and haunting portrait of star-crossed lovers on a murder spree—a story that was inspired by the Charlie Starkweather/Caril Ann Fugate murders in 1958, and that starred Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek.  The second was Days of Heaven (1978), starring Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, a film that still stands as one of the most beautiful and poetic ever made, a true masterpiece of cinematography.

Then came a twenty-year hiatus (!), before the reclusive director returned with The Thin Red Line (1998), a masterful study of war, its follies, its absurdities, and its tests, one that was set during the United States’s campaign against the Japanese in the South Pacific, in a true Paradise Lost.  Fittingly, the film featured a huge, all-star, ensemble cast, including Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, Elias Koteas, and many others.

Since The Tree of Life (2011), his epic—even cosmological—account of family, personal history, and morality starring Brad Pitt, Malick has been on a relative tear, releasing three feature-length films and a handful of shorts, and now A Hidden Life.

Malick’s latest film, A Hidden Life (2019), is yet another epic, this time dealing with the plight of a conscientious objector in a time of tyranny and war—namely, the rule of the Third Reich and the outbreak of World War II.  It is his most highly acclaimed film—and his most majestic—in a decade, as well as the most pointedly political film he’s ever produced.

Pandemic Sign-Off:

Dear Friends of BUFS: it seems like a very different world than it was on Thursday night during our screening of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

By the time we returned home that night, we found out that all non-essential Brock-related activities (such as those hosted off-campus) we're going to be cancelled. By Friday afternoon Brock had cancelled classes through the end of term, and the Performing Arts Centre (and, thus, the Film House) had announced that they were also shuttering their operations for a period of time.

This wasn't the way things were planned, but it turns out that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was the final BUFS screening of our 2019-2020 season. In some ways, it was an eerily fitting end. It certainly was a moving one.

We would like to thank you for another fantastic season. Your support and your enthusiasm for our selection of "the best in independent and art house cinema" throughout the year was extraordinary.

We'd also like to thank our partners at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre and at the Niagara Arts Centre for making this season possible. And let's not forget our host program, the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film, and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Brock University, who've been supporting cinephilia in St. Catharines since 1975.

Take care, play it safe, and we look forward to seeing you again in the Fall of 2020!

March 12, 2020—A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2020), dir. Marielle Heller

In 2018 the filmmaker Morgan Neville took the story of Fred Rogers and the impact he had on television broadcasting, on childhood, and on American culture and made it the subject of his award-winning documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Along with Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001) stands as one of the boldest experiments in American educational television ever created—and also among the most beloved. More than anything, though, Neville's film was a profile in compassion and integrity for an era (our own) that so desperately needs it.

Now the story of Fred Rogers has been transformed into a biopic, and the man who dons the iconic cardigan-and-Sperry-topsiders is none other than Tom Hanks.  In other words, a famously decent man who won so many accolades over the course of his career, including a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 1997 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, is being played by another famously decent man who just won a Cecil B. DeMille Award for “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment” at the 2020 Golden Globes.

Even better, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is directed by Marielle Heller, the extremely talented actor/filmmaker who brought us The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018).  And here, too, the story of Fred Rogers takes on allegorical proportions.  The film’s tagline says it all:  “We could all use a little kindness.”

March 5, 2020—Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), dir. Céline Sciamma

Céline Sciamma has been one of the brightest lights of French cinema over the last 15 years, ever since Water Lilies (2007), her directorial debut, made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2007, before securing a coveted Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Feature later that same year.  Sciamma followed this success with two more highly acclaimed and award-winning films—Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014)—that together comprise a “trilogy of youth.” These three films established Sciamma as a modern master of the “banlieue drama”—contemporary narratives set in Paris’s sprawling and troubled suburbs. And all three have been praised for their subtlety and insight, as well as the depth and humanity that they’ve brought to issues of gender, youth, identity, sexuality, class, and, especially in the case of Girlhood, race.

With Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma has taken on what appears at first glance to be a very different project:  a costume drama set in pre-revolutionary 18th-century.  Here again, however, Sciamma addresses issues of gender, identity, sexuality, and class, but she’s done so in a breathtakingly beautiful film, and one that stands as one of the most powerful studies of art and the creative process in recent times.

The story is of a young artist named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) who is brought to a remote part of Brittany to paint the portrait of young woman, Héloise (Adèle Haenel), so it can be sent to an Italian nobleman and thus secure her arranged marriage to him.  The problem is that Héloise objects to having her portrait painted, so Marianne must do so surreptitiously, under the guise of being an innocent and understanding companion.  What ensues is a rather remarkable love story, one that A.O. Scott of The New York Times has described as being, “like a lost work of 18th-century literature:  at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.”

Scott is far from the only one who has been impressed by Portrait of a Lady on Fire.  Critics around the world have been effusive in their praise, and there’s not question the film has earned Sciamma her widest and greatest acclaim yet, including the Best Screenplay and Queer Palm awards at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and the prizes for Best Actress (Merlant) and Best Cinematography at the 2019 Lumières Awards, France’s equivalent to the Golden Globes.

February 20, 2020—Little Women (2019), dir. Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig first began making waves as an actor, writer, and director in the early 2000s, when she became a key figure in American independent cinema’s so-called “mumblecore” scene.  Within a few years she’d started to appear in bigger budget, more widely distributed “Indiewood” productions such as Frances Ha (2012), which she co-wrote with the director Noah Baumbach, and Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women (2016), where she was part of a terrific ensemble that included Annette Bening and Elle Fanning.  Even when she wasn’t cast in a leading role, Gerwig was the kind of actor who could steal the show, and critics singled her out as, “one of the most original actors of her time.”

And then came Lady Bird (2017)…

Suddenly Gerwig was being lauded as one of the most talented writers and directors of her time, and one who’d managed to transform her adolescence in Sacramento, CA into a breathtakingly original film.  Among other things, the film showcased Gerwig’s ability to gain the trust and harness the energies of a phenomenally gifted group of young actors, including Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Lucas Hedges, and Beanie Feldstein.

How does one follow up Lady Bird?  With Little Women, apparently.  Gerwig’s choice seems to have puzzled those who consider Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century classic of adolescent fiction to be nothing more than that—a classic of adolescent fiction.  (Not to mention one that’s already been adapted for the screen several times before.)  Gerwig, however, had something entirely more audacious in mind.  What’s she created is not a straight adaptation of Little Women, but an irreverent one, a mash-up that combines both volumes of Little Women (“Little Women” and “Good Wives”) with later works of Alcott’s (such as Rose in Bloom), elements of Alcott’s biography (including snatches from her journals), and a healthy dose of Gerwig’s own autobiography.  The result is both a work of daring ingenuity and a study of ingenuity itself, as well as those forces, gendered and otherwise, that would restrain and impede it.

Saoirse Ronan stars as the tempestuous Jo March, while Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, and Meryl Streep shine in supporting roles.

January 16, 2020—Parasite (2019), Bong Joon Ho

In a 2019-2020 schedule that has already offered us so many highlights (The Farewell, The Souvenir, Pain & Glory, The Lighthouse), Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite might be our most eagerly anticipated film yet.

Bong has been a dominant filmmaker on the international stage for roughly twenty years.  Over that span of time he’s shown himself to be a master of genre, moving with ease between everything from the crime thriller (Memories of Murder [2003], Mother [2009]), to the monster film (The Host [2006], Okja [2017]), to the post-apocalyptic sci-fi film (Snowpiercer [2013]), while wowing audiences and racking up numerous awards and widespread critical acclaim along the way.

With Parasite, however, Bong appears to have hit true pay dirt.  He’s created an international sensation that has taken his career straight into the stratosphere, winning the Palme d’or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and the prize for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2020 Golden Globes, while making countless Best Films of 2019 lists, as well as many Best Films of the Decade lists.  And he’s done so by making another brilliant genre film—this time a taut psychological thriller, one whose mastery of suspense and sly, morbid wit have drawn comparisons to the work of Alfred Hitchcock.

November 21, 2019—The Lighthouse (2019), dir. Robert Eggers

Pardon the pun, but Robert Eggers first made waves as a director at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, when The Witch (a.k.a., The VVitch) wowed audiences and took both the Directing Award and the award for Best Horror/Science-Fiction Film.  The Witch was set in Eggers’s native New England in the 1630s, in and around the Plymouth Colony in what would come to be known as Massachusetts, but it was actually shot in Mattawa, in Northern Ontario.  The Witch established Eggers as a director of rare talent and vision, one capable of creating a supernatural horror film that was all the more unsettling precisely because he hadn’t made much of it up—its disturbing account of superstition and witchcraft was based on actual histories, court documents, and folk tales from the 17th century.

If The Witch was a work that was surprisingly Hawthornean for an early 21st century horror film, The Lighthouse, Eggers’s follow-up, is a 19th-century psychological sea yarn that was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and is positively Melvillean in its treatment of good and evil, masculinity and madness in a remote coastal area of New England.  The film stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, it had its premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where it won a prestigious prize for direction, and acclaim for the film has been thunderous.

November 14, 2019—Pain & Glory (2019), dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar burst onto the art house film scene in the early 1980s.  His flamboyant, highly topical, and provocative (even outrageous) films announced a bold new talent, and one whose work signalled the emergence of a post-Franco Spanish cinema.  Within a few years he’d asserted himself as a master stylist, and his films found more and more acclaim around the world, at prestige film festivals such as those of Venice, Berlin, and New York and beyond.  His first major international breakthrough was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), a film that combined Almodóvar’s interest in melodrama with a knack for screwball comedy, and that earned him an Academy Award nomination.

Almodóvar reached the peak of his international influence around the turn of the century, winning back-to-back Oscars for his 1999 film All About My Mother (Best Foreign Language Film) and his 2002 film Talk to Her (Best Original Screenplay), and following up these triumphs with such hits as Volver (2006) and Broken Embraces (2009).

Like Fassbinder before him, Almodóvar is known for working with an ensemble of actors who reappear in his films over and over again.  He’s also known for having cultivated muses.  Antonio Banderas worked repeatedly with Almodóvar in the 1980s, from the time of Labyrinth of Passion (1982), his second film.  Penélope Cruz has been Banderas’s primary muse since she first appeared in Live Flesh in 1997, including standout performances in All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, and Broken Embraces.

In his latest, Pain & Glory--a film that has been compared to Fellini’s 8 1/2--Almodóvar tells the tale of a late-career film director who was once a brash, young renegade, but has since slipped into decline.  Pain & Glory features the talents of Banderas and Cruz together in an Almodóvar production for only the second time in his career (they were paired in a cameo in the 2013 comedy I’m So Excited), and, luckily, there’s no sign of decline in Almodóvar’s treatment of his semi-autobiographical material.  Banderas, in particular, has been singled out for delivering a career-defining performance, and many critics are claiming that Pain & Glory ranks among the Spanish Maestro’s greatest.

October 24, 2019—The Souvenir (2019), dir. Joanna Hogg

The British director Joanna Hogg has established herself in recent years as the film critic’s filmmaker.  She’s the kind of director who’s inspired The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis to exclaim, “Joanna Hogg — where have you been all my movie-loving life?,”upon seeing Hogg’s utterly captivating and highly unconventional family melodrama Archipelago in 2014.

Hogg is back, and The Souvenir, her most recent film, is another complicated, wrenching, and gripping take on the family melodrama.  Based in part on a chapter from Hogg’s own life, the film tells the story of Julie, a film student, and her mysterious and twisted relationship with Anthony, her boyfriend.  Adding further layers to the proceedings, Julie is played by Honor Swinton Byrne, and her mother—who isn’t sure what to make of Julie and Anthony’s relationship—is played by her real-life mother, Tilda Swinton.  And to make things even more convoluted, Julie’s thesis film has a protagonist named “Tony,” and her work on this project is a major source of tension between her and Anthony (in other words, “Tony” is getting between Julie and Anthony).

Once again, critics have been left spellbound by this latest film of Hogg’s.  In fact, A.O. Scott, Dargis’s colleague at The New York Times, was so moved by The Souvenir that he began his review as follows:  “‘The Souvenir’ is one of my favorite movies of the year so far, but I almost want to keep it a secret. Partly because it’s the kind of film — we all have a collection of these, and of similar books and records, too — that feels like a private discovery, an experience you want to protect rather than talk about. A direct message like this, beamed from another person’s sensibility into your own sensorium, isn’t meant to be shared.”

Well, sorry, A.O.  The cat’s out of the bag.  The Souvenir will be gracing the screen of The Film House, and the Brock University Film Society is happy to share it with you, dear viewer.

September 19, 2019—The Farewell (2019), dir. Lulu Wang

We’re so glad to be returning to the Film House at the First Ontario Performing Arts Centre for another season of the Brock University Film Society.  Our 2018-2019 season—our very first with the Film House—was truly a banner year, and we thank you for your support.  Our 2019-2020 season is shaping up to be another excellent one.  We’ve already got many outstanding films lined up for the fall term, and we’re confident that our programming for the remainder of the year will be just as strong.

Ironically, we’re starting off this year with a goodbye—a convoluted, highly elaborate, emotionally wrenching, but ultimately life-affirming goodbye.  Yes, we’re very excited to be launching this year’s program with Lulu Wang’s justly celebrated The Farewell.  As the film’s clever tagline (“Based on an actual lie.”) alludes, The Farewell is the fictionalization of a true story—one involving a whopper of a lie.

Though Wang is primarily a filmmaker, she first developed the story that forms the core of The Farewell back in 2016 as a truly wonderful work of nonfiction for the radio—for WBEZ Chicago’s highly acclaimed This American Life, to be precise.  The episode in question was called “In Defense of Ignorance” (#585:  https://www.thisamericanlife.org/585/in-defense-of-ignorance ), it was focused on the issue of denial and its occasional merits, and Wang’s segment was tantalizingly titled “What You Don’t Know.”  In it, Wang told a riveting and extremely personal story of her extended family, of the Chinese diaspora, of health and the human psychology, of white lies, of reunions, of mortality, and of the bonds that connect us across vast geographies, and across time.

Wang’s adaptation of her own work stars the talented rapper and actress Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians) as a version of the director herself, and though some liberties are taken (here, for instance, the protagonist of the tale is a writer, not a filmmaker), Wang mostly stays very close to her original material.  Reenacting her family’s melodrama and giving it visual form, however, generates fascinating alchemical reactions.  Wang’s film retains much of the nuance and detail that made her radio documentary so compelling, but turning this material into motion pictures and bringing it to the screen allows Wang to introduce many new subtle, yet powerful observations to the mix through her cinematography and editing.  As a result, The Farewell is much more about the Old World versus the New World, than “What You Don’t Know” was, and especially about how the former Old World of China has suddenly become the New New World.  In other words, in this version, the personal is the geopolitical.

The Farewell was a hit at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered in January, and it has impressed critics and charmed audiences everywhere it has played ever since.  In the process it has become something of a indie sensation.  We’re thrilled to be launching our BUFS 2019-2020 season with Wang’s film.

DJ Tom Mix! Live at Buch Spieler!!

fig. a: cue organ

Among the tracks played by DJ Tom Mix, on Saturday, July 6, 2019 as part of the Summer 2019 Community DJ Series at Buch Spieler Records, Montpelier, VT:

The Band, “Chest Fever” (organ intro), Music From Big Pink

The Faces, “Wicked Messenger,” First Step

Gamble Rogers, “Charlie’s Place,” V/A, Heartworn Highways

The Byrds, “Lover of the Bayou,” (Untitled)

Neil Young, “Last Dance,” Time Fades Away

Endless Boogie, “Style of Jamboree,” Endless Boogie, vol. 1 & 2

Rob Way, “Forgive Us All,” Rob Way

Azna de L’Ader, “Hey Joe,” V/A, Agrim Agadez

Mdou Moctar, “Kamane Tarhanin,” Ilana:  The Creator

Mohamed Karzo, “C’est la Vie,” V/A, Agrim Agadez

The Tiger, “Down the Road,” V/A, Mata la Pena

Kurt Vile, “The Outlaw,” B’lieve I’m goin down…

Townes Van Zandt, “Hunger Child Blues,” V/A, Country Funk II, 1967-1974

Bobbie Gentry, “Mississippi Delta,” Ode to Billie Joe

Link Wray, “Fire and Brimstone,” V/A, Country Funk, 1969-1975

The Rolling Stones, “Ventilator Blues,” Exile on Main Street

Terry Reid, “Bang, Bang,” Bang, Bang, You’re Terry Reid

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, “Inside the World of the Blues Explosion,” Extra Width

The Chocolate Watch Band, “Are You Gonna Be There (At the Love-in)?,” V/A, Nuggets Volume 2:  Punk

Lee Hazlewood & Ann-Margret, “It’s a Nice World to Visit (But Not to Live In),” The Cowboy & the Lady

Ike & Tina Turner, “Baby (What You Want Me to Do),” ‘Nuff Said

The Shocking Blue, “The Butterfly and I,” The Shocking Blue

Foxwarren, “Everything Apart,” Foxwarren

The Zombies, “Time of the Season,” Odessey & Oracle

Big Star, “You Get What You Deserve,” Radio City

The Shocking Blue, “Venus,” The Shocking Blue

Fleetwood Mac, “Sands of Time,” Future Games

Brian Eno, “Energy Fools the Magician,” Before and After Science

You Drive, “Home in My Love,” You Drive

aj

PCUL 3P96 Issues in Popular Culture: The Case of the Rockumentary

Dont Look Back (1967), dir. Pennebaker

PCUL 3P96

Issues in Popular Culture:  The Case of the Rockumentary

Spring 2019

Dr. Anthony Kinik

Course Description:  This course focuses on a single genre that has been a mainstay of documentary filmmaking for nearly 60 years now:  the “Rockumentary.”  The genre’s nickname is in many ways a misnomer, one based on the fact that “rock” rhymes better with “doc,” than, say, jazz, folk, soul, hip-hop, or any one of a number of other musical genres that have been the subject of the popular music documentary since its inception around 1960.  To paraphrase John Grierson, the great filmmaker, producer, and theorist who was the greatest champion of the documentary in the twenty-year period between the late 1920s and the late 1940s (i.e., well before the advent of the rockumentary): Rockumentary is a clumsy description, but let it stand.  

So “rockumentary” is the term that we’ll be using to refer to these films, but, in truth, we’ll be studying films that concern themselves with a wide variety of musical genres, from jazz, to folk, to soul, to rock, to punk, post-punk, heavy metal, hip-hop, and beyond.  And the rockumentary has not only addressed and represented a great variety of musical styles—at its best, it has also been a highly creative and dynamic documentary genre.  The rockumentary was closely associated with the ascendance of the observational approach in the 1950s and 1960s, and especially with the Direct Cinema movement in the United States, but it’s a genre which has also had strong associations with experimental filmmaking from time to time, and has frequently been on the cutting edge of documentary representation.  In other words, this is a film course that is primarily concerned with documentary form—if you’re not interested in documentaries and how they’ve developed since 1960, this is NOT the course for you.

FILM 3P96 is a course that is organized primarily chronologically.  It begins with the advent of the rockumentary genre in the period between 1958 and 1964, and it ends with two films made in the last decade.  For the most part it follows the development of musical styles between 1958 and present, and focuses on films that were made contemporaneously with these developments, but on occasion we’ll look at films that cast a retrospective glance at earlier moments in the history of popular music.  The bottom line, though, is that this is a film course that is also very much about music—if you’re not interested in popular music and how it has developed over time, this is NOT the course for you.

In addition to being a course about film and popular music, FILM 3P96 is also a cultural history, one that takes into account issues of socio-economics and politics, culture and counter-culture, race and subculture, celebrity and stardom, art and the creative impulse, gender and identity.  The rockumentary has become ubiquitous since its early days, and we can now find rockumentaries and rockumentary-like projects on cable television, on streaming services like Netflix, on YouTube, and on web projects like Tiny Desk and Black Cab Sessions.  Here in this class, however, we’re primarily concerned with films that have innovated and/or have made significant and lasting contributions to the rockumentary genre.

Screening Schedule:

1. Intro & Early History

2.  Classical 1:  Dont Look Back

screening:   Dont Look Back (1967), dir. Pennebaker

3.  Classical 2:  Monterey Pop & Woodstock

screening:  Woodstock (1970), dir. Wadleigh

4.  Classical 3:  The End of an Era

screening:  The Last Waltz (1978), dir. Scorsese

D.O.A.: A Right of Passage (1981), dir. Kowalski

5.  Punk

screening:  D.O.A.:  A Right of Passage (1981), dir. Kowalski

and/or The Filth and the Fury (2000), dir. Temple

6.  Post-Punk/New Wave

screening:  Stop Making Sense (1984), dir. Demme

7.  Metal

screening:  The Decline of the Western Civilization, Pt. 2:  The Metal Years (1988), dir. Spheeris

8.  Pop

screening:   Madonna:  Truth or Dare (1991), dir. Keshishian

9.  The “World Music” Phenomenon

screening:  Buena Vista Social Club (1999), dir. Wenders

20,000 Days on Earth (2014), dir. Forsyth & Pollard

10.  New Directions

screening:  20,000 Days on Earth (2014), dir. Forsyth & Pollard

suggested home viewing:  Homecoming (2019), dir. Beyoncé AND/OR Rolling Thunder Review:  A Bob Dylan Story (2019), dir. Scorsese

Expo 67 & Expanded Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, May 11, 2019

In May, Anthology Film Archives followed up their massive city symphonies series with another impressive program: “Films for the Fair: The World’s Fair and the Cinema.” Beginning on May 8 with a screening of Lance Bird and Tom Johnson’s The World of Tomorrow (1984), a fascinating study of the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair made up entirely of amateur and archival footage, “Films for the Fair” ran for two weeks and covered most of the 20th century.

I was part of a research group (cinemaexpo67.ca) devoted to cinematic and quasi-cinematic experiments at Expo 67 for a number of years. This research led to a book titled Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014), published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, a number of high-profile exhibitions, some film restorations, and several other events.

Because of this experience, on May 11, I was invited down to New York to introduce three programs of films along with Guillaume Lafleur of the Cinémathèque québécoise. With a few notable exceptions, these three programs were largely devoted to films about Expo 67 and films that had appeared at Expo 67, with a particular emphasis on “expanded cinema.”

Film Notes 1

As television emerged as an entertainment staple in middle-class households, cinema started looking a little long in the tooth. But at World’s Fairs in Seattle, New York, and Montreal, inventive filmmakers and technicians were exhibiting site-specific work that demanded a larger arena than the average living room could afford. Luminaries Charles and Ray Eames, already known the world over for their exemplary work in industrial design and the applied arts, debuted their revolutionary short film THINK at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, while documentary duo Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid reunited for the six-screen opus WE ARE YOUNG! at the 1967 Montreal Expo. Building on a rich aesthetic that began, arguably, with the tricolor finale of Abel Gance’s 1927 silent epic NAPOLEON, these multi-screen works from the heyday of midcentury modernism pushed filmmaking to the limit of two-dimensional exhibition and inspired subsequent artists for decades to come.

Program 1

Charles & Ray Eames HOUSE OF SCIENCE (1964, 14 min, 6-screen 35mm-to-digital)
Charles & Ray Eames THINK (1964, 15 min, 15-screen 35mm-to-digital. Preserved by the Library of Congress.)
Francis Thompson & Alexander Hammid TO BE ALIVE! (1964, 18 min, 35mm-to-digital. Film courtesy of SC Johnson.)
Francis Thompson & Alexander Hammid WE ARE YOUNG! (1967, 20 min, six-screen 35mm-to-DCP. Courtesy of Library & Archives Canada.)
Vincent Vaitiekunas MOTION / LE MOUVEMENT (1967, 14 min, 70mm-to-digital. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Québecois.)
Total running time: ca. 85 min.

Program 2

Roman Kroitor, Colin Low & Hugh O’Connor IN THE LABYRINTH (1967, 21 min, 5-screen 35mm-to-digital)
Christopher Chapman A PLACE TO STAND (1967, 17 min, 70mm-to-35mm. Courtesy of the Linwood Dunn Collection at the Academy Film Archive.)
George Dunning CANADA IS MY PIANO (1967, 4.5 min, 3-screen 35mm-to-digital. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.)
Michel Brault SETTLEMENT AND CONFLICT / CONFLIT (1967, 5 min, 2-screen 35mm-to-digital. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Québecois.)
Georges Dufaux & Claude Godbout MULTIPLE MAN (1969, 15 min, 70mm-to-digital)
Total running time: ca. 70 min.

Film Notes 2

Expo 67 was the most moving-image-saturated Exposition of them all. While the films and installations that attracted the most attention were those that experimented, often boldly, with the possibilities of multiple-screen cinema (and are therefore included in the two multi-screen programs elsewhere in this series), Expo 67’s moving-image works ran the gamut of styles and approaches. This program features some of the single-screen highlights, including William Brind’s city-symphony-like IMPRESSIONS OF EXPO 67, two films exploring the pavilions devoted to Canada’s indigenous culture (as well as the experiences of the Inuit artists and craftspeople who participated in the Fair), John & Faith Hubley’s experimental animation URBANISSIMO, and a section of Jud Yalkut’s film METAMEDIA that was shot at the Expo.

Program 3

William Brind IMPRESSIONS OF EXPO 67 (1967, 8 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Eva Kolcze & Phil Hoffman BY THE TIME WE GOT TO EXPO (2015, 9 min, digital)
Marc Beaudet THE CANADIAN PAVILION, EXPO 67 (1967, 19 min, 35mm-to-digital)
David Millar AKI’NAME (ON THE WALL) (1968, 22 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Michel Régnier INDIAN MEMENTO (1967, 18 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Hubs Hagen EXPOSITION (1967, 10 min, 16mm. Collection print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.)
John & Faith Hubley URBANISSIMO (1967, 6 min, 16mm)
Jud Yalkut EXPO ‘67 (1967, 2 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
Total running time: ca. 100 min.

aj

BUFS Highlights, 2018-2019

These are some of the highlights from the Brock University Film Society’s 2018-2019 season.

———

Our BUFS 2018-2019 season truly has been fantastic.  We got the opportunity to screen many, many outstanding films, and they played to impressive crowds, including quite a few sold-out shows, and a number of other near sell-outs (like last night's screening of "Vice").  We thank you for your incredible support during this transitional year.

We would also like to thank the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film and the Faculty of Social Sciences at Brock University for their continued backing, as well as their moral support.

Thank you to Stephen Remus, Barry Grant, Joan Nicks and the rest of the Film House's board for inviting us to join forces with them.  It really has been a pleasure!

Thank you, too, to the staff of the Film House and the Performing Arts Centre for being so friendly and accommodating.  And a special shout-out to Ernest Harris, Jr., who was a steady hand in the projection booth throughout the year.

But, once again, we'd especially like to thank YOU, our BUFS members and supporters. You've been amazing all year long.   I said it last night, and I'll say it again:  It's wonderful to see that quality cinema and cinephilia are alive and well right in the heart of St. Catharines.

We look forward to seeing you again in September, when our 2019-2020 season begins.

And keep in mind that the Film House's outstanding programming continues on unabated this spring and summer, as it always does.

Bon cinéma!

March 28, 2019—Vice (2018), dir. Adam McKay

Adam McKay first achieved fame as a particularly talented writer for Saturday Night Live in the 1990s, eventually becoming Head Writer between 1999-2001, at a time when the show starred the comic talents of people like Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, and Will Ferrell.

McKay transitioned to directing after leaving SNL, and his first five films were all Will Ferrell vehicles—Anchorman:  The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights:  The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers, The Other Guys, and Anchorman 2:  The Legend Continues—a number of which McKay had co-written together with his good friend Ferrell.  I think it’s safe to say that critics and filmgoers thought they had McKay pegged.

But then The Big Short came along in 2015, and everything we thought we knew about McKay got thrown out the window.  Based on Michael Lewis’s best-selling book on the 2008 financial crisis, McKay displayed an unprecedented degree of range and depth, tackling a complex topic with wit and aplomb, and harnessing the talents of a star-studded cast—Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo, and others—in order to do so.

Vice, McKay’s latest film, is another clever and penetrating black comedy, this time about Dick Cheney’s rise to power, and especially about his pivotal role as Vice President in the administration of George W. Bush.  Christian Bale is masterful and virtually unrecognizable as Cheney (which is to say his delivery, his mannerisms, and his appearance are completely uncanny) and McKay has once again assembled a star-studded cast—including Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney, Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfeld, and Sam Rockwell as W.—to tell “the untold true story that changed the course of history.”

March 21, 2019—If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), dir. Barry Jenkins

In 2016, Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro took the words from an unfinished memoir by James Baldwin, the great African-American writer and critic, and transformed them into a scathing treatise on race and social and economic injustice in America.

Late last year, the release of Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk marked the very first time a fictional work by Baldwin appeared on screen, as shocking as that might seem.  Somehow, the celebrated author of Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), Another Country (1962), and numerous other acclaimed novels and plays, had never seen his stories adapted into films.  At least, when if finally did happen, Baldwin had found himself an artistic soulmate of sorts, a director ideally suited to the task.

Jenkins, of course, first gained mainstream attention with his gorgeous, tender, and devastating film Moonlight, which beat out La La Land to win Best Motion Picture at the 2017 Academy Awards, and picked up two more Oscars that same night.  If Beale Street Could Talk is a fitting follow-up, and it earned Regina King a much-deserved Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.  Set in Harlem in the 1970s, Beale Street is a truly exquisite period piece, one that resonates powerfully in the era of Black Lives Matter.  I’m sure he would have wished otherwise, but once again, James Baldwin’s trenchant, yet lyrical prose has proven to be prophetic.

March 7, 2019—Cold War (2018), dir. Pawel Pawlikowski

Along with directors like Claire Denis, Luca Guadagnino, and Hirokazu Kore-eda—all of whom we’ve had the honour of featuring at BUFS this year—Pawel Pawlikowski is one of the leading lights of contemporary World Cinema, and Cold War is his first film in five years.  Ida (2013), Pawlikowski’s last film, stunned audiences around the globe with its highly economical (it clocked in at a mere 82 minutes in length), yet immensely powerful tale of politics, religion, and personal history, of long-buried secrets and difficult choices, in Communist Poland of the 1960s.  The film received widespread acclaim and Ida eventually won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the very first Polish film to do so.

Though it, too, features a compact narrative (running time:  85 minutes!),  Cold War is a much more sweeping affair than its predecessor.  It covers three decades in the lives of its star-crossed protagonists—from the 1940s to the 1960s—and presents its audiences with a poignant parable of Poland in the early Cold War-era that is at once epic, romantic, and tragic, as well as visually breathtaking.  Cold War won Pawlikowski the award for Best Director at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, and the film was nominated in three categories at the 2019 Academy Awards:  Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, and Best Director.

February 21, 2019—Shoplifters (2018), dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda

Hirokazu Kore-eda rose to prominence as a leading Japanese director in the mid-1990s, from the moment Maborosi (1995), his first feature film, won the award for Best Director at the 1995 Venice Film Festival.  However, Kore-eda has been on a tear for the last decade or so, becoming one of the world’s top directors in the process.  Still Walking (2008), a study of love, ritual, and remembrance among the Yokoyama family, was a critical sensation and reaffirmed Kore-eda’s status as an heir to Yasujiro Ozu, one of the legend’s of Japanese cinema and a master of the understated family melodrama.  His 2013 film Like Father, Like Son examined the very nature of family in the wake of “switched at birth” discovery, and it won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.  And Shoplifters (2018), Kore-eda’s most recent film, succeeded in winning the Palme d’Or, the top prize, at Cannes last year.

That was really just the beginning of the critical acclaim for Shoplifters.  This film, too, is an examination of the nature of family—here, in relation to issues of adoption—and it has met with virtually unanimous approval around the world, and is a strong contender for the Best Foreign Language Film award at this year’s Oscars.

Finally, Kore-eda is most often compared to his compatriot Ozu, but in a 2015 interview with The Guardian, he revealed a particular affection for the work of Ken Loach, the great British social realist.  That influence is very much on display in Shoplifters, which combines Kore-eda’s ongoing interest in family with a powerful study of class.

February 14, 2019—Widows (2018), dir. Steve McQueen

This year we have a rather unusual Valentine’s Day film on offer.  In fact, this might be the Valentine’s Day film for all those who are looking to escape Valentine’s Day, block it out, or, perhaps, reinterpret it.

Widows is the latest film from the gifted British director Steve McQueen (not to be confused with the other Steve McQueen, the talented, and long-deceased American actor).  McQueen began his career in the art world, as a film & video artist who specialized in striking installation projects, before making the transition to celebrated feature film director in the early 2000s on the back of the acclaimed films Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011).  His last outing, of course, was 12 Years A Slave (2013), a critical and box office sensation that also happened to win the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture—Drama and the Oscar for Best Picture.  This time around the principal setting is modern-day Chicago, not antebellum Louisiana, and the genre is the heist film, not the slave memoir.  And although the film features an all-star cast that includes a number of leading male actors (Colin Farrell, Daniel Kaluuya, Robert Duvall, and Liam Neeson among them), as its title suggests, its focus is on three determined women (played by Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, and Viola Davis) who decide to band together to pull off a big score in the wake of their sudden and unexpected widowhood.  In fact, what McQueen seems to have done is to have taken the heist film and turned it on its ear, transforming it into a fascinating study of gender, race, and big city politics in contemporary America.  Based on a screenplay by McQueen and Gillian Flynn, the best-selling author of Gone Girl.

January 31, 2019—Destroyer (2018), dir. Karyn Kusama

Though her career actually stretches all the way back to a number of memorable teen roles in Australian film in the early to mid-1980s (BMX Bandits, anyone?), Nicole Kidman has been in the international limelight for 30 years now, ever since her breakout performance in the Australian psychological thriller Dead Calm (1989).  From there, Kidman quickly became one of the most acclaimed actors of our time, tackling a wide variety of different film roles and displaying remarkable range.  Not only has Kidman been outstanding as the lead in films as distinct as To Die For, The Others, Moulin Rouge!, Dogville, and The Hours (which earned her an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role), but she’s also frequently been impressive in supporting roles (think Cold Mountain, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Boy Erased), and has successfully crossed over to both the stage and to the television screen (Big Little Lies).

Just when you thought you’d seen as much range as was conceivable from Kidman, now comes Karyn Kusama’s unflinching crime drama Destroyer.  This is probably Kidman’s toughest, least glamorous, and most visceral role yet.  As LAPD detective Erin Bell, Kidman has surprised and astounded critics yet again (Peter Debruge of Variety put it this way: “Nothing Nicole Kidman has done in her career can prepare you for Destroyer”), and the role has earned her yet another Golden Globe nomination—her twelfth!  Kusama has been a veteran of the American indie scene since the release of Girlfight in 2000, and now, together with Kidman, she’s made a powerful film about crime and punishment, violence and gender, and the perils of going undercover.

January 24, 2019—Suspiria (2018), dir. Luca Guadagnino

Italy’s Luca Guadagnino has been one of the most celebrated directors of the last decade, ever since the release of I Am Love (2009) introduced audiences to his talent for lush, intoxicating mise-en-scène, stirring romance, and contemporary melodrama, as well as to his special relationship with Tilda Swinton, the film’s star. (He’d already made a documentary about the great British actor.) The success of I Am Love ending up spawning two more similarly stylish and heart-wrenching films, completing a trio which Guadagnino eventually began to refer to as his “Desire trilogy.” The second instalment was A Bigger Splash, based loosely on Jacques Deray’s steamy ‘60s classic La Piscine (The Swimming Pool), and once again it starred Tilda Swinton, this time together with Dakota Johnson. 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, the final film in the trilogy, made the biggest splash of all, receiving widespread acclaim and accolades and vaulting Guadagnino into the top tier of international filmmakers.  A sequel to Call Me By Your Name is apparently in the works, so it looks as though the “Desire trilogy” is in the process of becoming a quartet, but until then, Guadagnino has many, many projects on the go, and his latest is a bold, new experiment with genre that caught many by surprise.

In 1977, Dario Argento, the legendary Italian director, and master of the horror film and of giallo thrillers, released a film that has since become one of the greatest cult classics of all time:  Suspiria.  Now Guadagnino has remade Suspiria as a period piece set in 1977, transforming this masterpiece of supernatural horror into an ode to Argento, to the 1970s and its cinema, and to Berlin in the late Cold War era.  Starring Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson, once again, and featuring set design, costumes,  special effects, and dance sequences that are by all accounts stunning.

January 17, 2019—BlacKKKlansman (2018), dir. Spike Lee

The Brock University Film Society launches its Winter 2019 program on Thursday, January 17 with Spike Lee’s brilliant, incendiary, and poignant BlacKKKlansman, one of 2018’s most celebrated films and a film that placed Lee (and his body of work) back in the limelight once again.

Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers—which was one of the hits of our Fall 2018 program—bills itself as, “The Most Amazing, Incredible, Remarkable True Story Ever Told,” and, as those of you who saw it can attest, that really wasn’t an overstatement.  Its story was quite literally insane.  BlacKKKlansman is not a documentary, but it is based on a true story—that of Ron Stallworth, the first African-American police officer to be hired by the Colorado Springs police department in the early 1970s—and this story, too, is truly “amazing, incredible, [and] remarkable.”  In fact, BlacKKKlansman’s marketing team has gone as far as to claim that their film is, “Based on a Crazy, Outrageous, Incredible, True Story!,” and that’s not overstating things, either.

You see, Stallworth wasn’t interested in being a typical cop, just putting in his time and putting up with the casual racism and indignities showered upon him by his colleagues and superiors.  Stallworth had ambition, and imagination, and he wanted to be a true detective.  And BlacKKKlansman tells the story of how Stallworth, of all people, figured out a way to go undercover and infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan (!), which had a significant presence in Colorado Springs at the time and very close ties with David Duke and the Klan’s leadership in Louisiana.

Lee directs with passion, flamboyance, insight, irony, and no shortage of humour, and somehow he transforms this quirky, bizarre ’70s period piece into a probing and powerful allegory on race relations and racism in Trump’s America.  Truly a must-see.

Starring:  John David Washington as Detective Ron Stallworth, Adam Driver as Detective "Flip" Zimmerman, and Topher Grace (!!) as David Duke.

November 29, 2018—Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018), dir. Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, and Nicholas de Pencier

When the world-renowned photographer (and St. Catharines native) Edward Burtynsky first collaborated with Jennifer Baichwal, the award-winning documentary filmmaker, on the highly acclaimed Manufactured Landscapes (2006), it was Burtynsky’s work that was the film’s principal subject.  Burtynsky had begun his career as a professional photographer specializing in images of pristine nature, removed from any obvious human contact.  But he experienced something of an epiphany when he began to focus on “human nature” instead—on the vast, ominous industrial landscapes created by man in places like Western Pennsylvania and Southern Ontario (Hamilton, for instance).  By the time Baichwal decided to make a film about his work, Burtynsky had become a celebrated large-format photographer and he was working on a series of photographs having to do with the rapid pace of industrialization in regions of the world like China, with its enormous factories and gigantic dam projects, and Bangladesh, with its vast ship salvaging operations.  In other words, large-scale photographs were being used by Burtynsky to document and scrutinize large-scale human endeavours, and Baichwal, in turn, used a widescreen film format—Super 16 mm—to study Burtynsky’s process.  This collaboration was so successful that Baichwal and Burtynsky went on to create a follow-up, Watermark, this time as co-directors, and this time dealing with humanity’s fraught relationship with water.  Now comes the final film in Baichwal and Burtynsky’s eco-cinema trilogy, Anthropocene:  The Human Epoch, a sweeping study of the topic that has been Burtynsky’s focus since he first experienced a revelation in the industrial steel and iron yards of Hamilton:  human activity so intense and on such a scale that it has ushered in an entirely new geological epoch.

This film is a companion piece to a multidisciplinary show by Baichwal and Burtynsky currently on exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, featuring photographs, video, holograms, and other media.

October 25, 2018—Three Identical Strangers (2018), dir. Tim Wardle

Three Identical Strangers might very well be the “separated-at-birth” tale to end all “separated-at-birth” tales.  It’s certainly one of most celebrated documentaries of 2018, and, in fact, it’s one of the most compelling and most inventive films of any kind released so far this year.  The basic story is of triplets, separated at birth, who had no idea they had siblings of any kind until they were already young men, and one of the brothers, Bobby, just happened to go to college at the same school as his long lost twin, Eddy.  This incredible coincidence made the local news, and led to Bobby and Eddy discovering that they had yet another brother, David.  Suddenly this even more remarkable story was national news, and Bobby, Eddy, and David soon became Eighties celebrities, appearing on countless talk shows, opening a successful SoHo restaurant together (Triplets Roumanian Restaurant!), and even getting a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan.  But all of that, amazing as it already is, is really just the beginning.  To say that this film is a jaw-dropper is a complete understatement.  The twists and turns just keep coming, and the end result is not only utterly captivating, it is downright devastating.  Tim Wardle’s direction is stunning, combining probing and poignant interviews, a vast amount of archival material from the triplets’ Eighties heyday, and some utterly delirious reenactments.  I’ll leave it at that, because as Anthony Lane of The New Yorker has written, “So bizarre is the tale that Tim Wardle tells… and so unnervingly mixed the emotions that it provokes, that the less you know about it beforehand the better.”

October 11, 2018—Madeline’s Madeline (2018), dir. Josephine Decker

Critical praise has been effusive since Madeline’s Madeline, which was written and directed by Josephine Decker, premiered at Sundance earlier this year.  While the film stars such indie stalwarts as Molly Parker and Miranda July, it is the breakout performance by Helena Howard that has stopped viewers in their tracks.  Thus, IndieWire’s David Ehrlich described the young actor as, “a major talent and utter force of nature,” while The New Yorker’s Richard Brody came right out and labelled Howard’s efforts “one of the great teen performances in film history.”  While Decker’s film is ostensibly a coming-of-age drama, it is set in the theatre and performance milieu and has a fragmented and highly reflexive structure to it, which makes it both a emotionally wrenching melodrama and a cinematic hall of mirrors.  As one critic put it, “[the] result is an experimental movie with the emotional tug of a mainstream hit.”  Madeline, played by the 16-year-old Howard, is an enormously talented but troubled young actor who participates in a theatre workshop in New York City, and who finds herself torn between the two most powerful forces in her life:  her mother (played by July) and her workshop’s theatrical director (played by Parker).  The results are, by all accounts, electric.

September 27, 2018—Let the Sunshine In (2017), dir. Claire Denis

A.O. Scott has referred to Claire Denis as “consistently the most interesting French filmmaker of the 21st century,” based on such films as Beau Travail (1999), 35 Shots of Rum (2008), and White Material (2009)—and there’s certainly an argument to be made for this—but, Denis has been a leading director on the international scene since the release of her debut film, Chocolat (1988), and her career in the film industry actually began in the early 1970s, soon after she graduated from film school in Paris.

Denis is perhaps best known for a series of films—including Chocolat and White Material—that have draw from her own autobiography, and from the fact that she grew up in West Africa during the dying days of French rule there, to analyze race, gender, and power relations under colonialism.  Her range has been impressive from the early days of her career, however, and her filmography has been defined by surprising experiments in genre, including a vampire thriller (Trouble Every Day, 2001), a film about cockfighting in Paris (No Fear, No Die, 1990), and a science fiction film about isolation and alienation in deep space (High Life, 2018).

Though it’s maybe not as obvious, Let the Sunshine In is a film that also shares this interest in genre.  It features a deceivingly simple narrative of astonishing complexity, one that is part romantic comedy and part psychological drama,“in which the questioning of those very categories is a part of the action,” as Richard Brody has pointed out.  And the film is propelled by a luminous and nuanced performance by Juliette Binoche, as “Isabelle,” a middle-aged Parisian artist whose pursuit of love, sex, friendship, companionship, and fulfillment is handled in a remarkably frank, insightful, and unsentimental manner.

September 20, 2018—First Reformed (2018), dir. Paul Schrader

Please join us for our inaugural screening of the Brock University Film Society's 2018-2019 season in our new location at the Film House (First Ontario Performing Arts Centre, 250 St. Paul Street, in downtown St. Catharines), 7:00 pm, Thursday, September 20, 2018.

We’ll be showing First Reformed by Paul Schrader, the director of such films as American Gigolo, Cat People, Mishima, and Light Sleeper, and the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and many others.  First Reformed is by far and away Schrader’s strongest film in years, and one of the best of 2018 thus far.  It features a career-defining performance by Ethan Hawke, and is a must for fans of what Schrader himself once referred to as the "transcendental style of filmmaking" when he was still a young graduate student and film critic, and an aspiring screenwriter.  Initially Schrader defined the transcendental style by analyzing the work of Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, but as he later made clear, this approach to filmmaking was much more wide-spread, encompassing the work of everybody from Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, to Chantal Akerman and Béla Tarr.  First Reformed is a true homage to the work of Bergman (Winter Light) and Bresson (Diary of a Country Priest, Pickpocket) in particular, but fans of Taxi Driver will also see strong resonances.  It is a powerful film, an artful film, a mysterious one, and very much a film for our times.