Personal Apperances By Jean-Pierre Gorin, Lisa Ray, Mark Lewis And Many More This Fall

 Toronto – This fall, TIFF Cinematheque offers yet another opportunity for film lovers to delve into the deep riches of cinema. Opening on October 3, the Fall Season begins with A Trip to the Moon, an all-night celebration of the origins of cinema during Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. Other free events include the Free Screen and Home Movie Day. The season also presents retrospectives on Manoel de Oliveira, Elia Kazan (curated by Kent Jones), Lisandro Alonso and Lucrecia Martel. A highlight of the Martel retrospective is the Canadian theatrical release of The Headless Woman. The season features three thematic programmes, the Toronto on Film series; Mark Lewis Presents Rear Projection’s Greatest Hits; and the first part of The Way of the Termite: The Essay Film, curated by luminary Jean-Pierre Gorin. Special Screenings include a new print of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965) presented in celebration of the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, a 20th anniversary special presentation of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness (1989) and a screening of Jacques Demy’s timeless The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), free for TIFF Cinematheque’s members. Classic Sundays: Treasures from the Bologna Film Festival returns with a rich array of treasures that will renew cinephiles' faith in film culture.

In early 2009, the Toronto International Film Festival Group was re-branded and renamed TIFF in an effort to present a unified identity and vision for the organization and all of its year-round activities. In support of these efforts, a series of new sub-brands were created, and as a result, Cinematheque Ontario was renamed TIFF Cinematheque. Under this new name, film lovers will continue to experience the exceptional programming that has made TIFF Cinematheque a world-renowned screening programme.

Free Events
On October 3, TIFF Cinematheque joins Scotiabank Nuit Blanche for the fourth time with A Trip to the Moon, an all-night celebration of the origins of cinema. The programme features famous films such as Louis and Auguste Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) and Georges Méliès’s beloved and oft-quoted A Trip to the Moon (1902). The films will be projected repeatedly throughout the course of the night and will feature live improvised scores by pianists William O’Meara, Andrei Streliaev and Robert Hall.

Home Movie Day is an annual worldwide celebration of amateur films and filmmaking. World-renowned director Martin Scorsese, an advocate for film preservation, has urged all those with an interest in film or in preserving their own history to come out and support Home Movie Day screenings in their local community. Curated by TIFF's Film Reference Library, the seventh edition of Toronto’s Home Movie Day will take place on October 17. It will offer a programme compiled from local home movies as well as the opportunity to meet with professional archivists and learn about film preservation. Call 416-967-1517 for further details about the event and programme updates, or go to filmreferencelibrary.ca.

From October 16 to December 3, this season’s Free Screen takes an integrated approach to TIFF Cinematheque’s overall season, nurturing cross-disciplinary dialogue as it continues to offer the most innovative work by artists engaged in fields ranging from avantgarde film and animation to hybrid documentaries, essay films and video art. Some of the highlights include a tribute to legendary Canadian filmmaker Frank Cole and a book launch on October 28 for Life Without Death: The Cinema of Frank Cole, edited by Mike Hoolboom and Tom McSorley. A co-presentation with the Toronto Animated Image Society and the Christopher Cutts Gallery, Eleven in Motion: Abstract Expressions in Animation features the world premiere of 11 newly commissioned works inspired by the Painters Eleven. Screening on November 11, these films reflect a vast and astonishing array of animation techniques and styles by some of Canada’s finest and up-and-coming animators, including Rick Raxlen, Félix Dufour-Lapèrrière, Steven Woloshen, Richard Reeves and Elise Simard. On November 26, Raya Martin’s award-winning A Short Film about the Indio Nacional, Or the Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos (2005) receives its Toronto premiere. Cross-listed with the Essay series, the film explores the history of the Philippines through the unconventional storytelling techniques of one of the leading (and youngest) members of the “New Filipino cinema.” A newly subtitled 35mm print of Guy Debord’s cult classic In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (1978) has its Canadian premiere on December 3. A key work of Situationist International art, Debord’s last film is an enduring text filled with anarchistic spirit and tinged with the melancholy of lost youth (it is also cross-listed with the series The Way of the Termite: The Essay Film.

Directors’ Retrospectives
At 100 years old, Manoel de Oliveira remains the radical iconoclast of Portuguese cinema, who at last is getting recognition in North America. Manoel de Oliveira’s Time Regained, a retrospective that began touring last year, arrives in Toronto on October 9 and runs until November 2. This select tribute features the director’s majestic oeuvre, including some of his rare early films. Presented with live piano accompaniment by Andrei Streliaev, de Oliveira’s first film, Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931), has long been considered a masterpiece of Portuguese cinema. Made at the tail end of the silent era, this city symphony laid the roots for his interest in the hybrid of documentary and fiction. It will be presented with the Toronto premiere of Oporto of My Childhood (2001), de Oliveira’s touching tribute to his birthplace, Porto. His rarely seen feature debut, Aniki-Bóbó (1942), is a remarkable children’s film shot in a working-class Porto neighbourhood and is widely considered the precursor to Italian neorealism. Screening in Toronto for the first time in 20 years, de Oliveira’s acclaimed Tetralogy of Frustrated Love (a.k.a. “Tetralogy of Thwarted Love”) cemented his reputation in Europe and abroad. The first film, The Past and the Present (1971), is a mordant black comedy and excoriating exposé of the foibles of the bourgeoisie. An adaptation of José Régio’s 1947 play of the same name, Benilde or the Virgin Mother (1975) is an elegant and sombre chamber piece that tells the story of a young woman who believes she is carrying the child of God through an immaculate conception. Based on Camilo Castelo Branco’s eponymous novel from 1862, Doomed Love (1978) is a doleful tale of forbidden passion that features a radical and unprecedented fusion of theatre, literature and cinema. Francisca (1981), the magnificent conclusion of the Tetralogy, caused a major sensation at Cannes when it premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight. Based on a book by Agustina Bessa-Luís, the film chronicles the true story of a tragic 19th-century love affair. Also included are some of de Oliveira’s most recent triumphs, such as Je rentre à la maison (2001), starring Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich, and his latest gem, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (2009), an account of obsession and thwarted love told through the director’s characteristic detached irony, whimsical characters and amusing storytelling.

Arriving from engagements in Boston and New York, American Outsider: The Films of Elia Kazan, a comprehensive retrospective curated by Kent Jones, will offer Toronto audiences the opportunity to explore the body of work of one of the most controversial figures in the history of American cinema. Running from October 23 to November 23, the series includes classics such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), starring Vivien Leigh as a pseudo-Southern belle with a hidden past who arrives to stay with her pregnant sister and brutish brother-in-law, infamously played by a sweaty and muscular Marlon Brando; Splendor in the Grass (1961), a dark, furious critique of bourgeois morality and hypocrisy that chronicles the psychically damaging effects of sexual repression, starring Warren Beatty (in his screen debut) and the immortal Natalie Wood; and a restored print of On the Waterfront (1954), Kazan’s most explicit statement of his signature themes of loyalty and betrayal. Winner of eight Academy Awards®, including those for best picture, director, and actor (Marlon Brando in a career-making performance), it was shot on the New Jersey waterfront to achieve gritty, documentary-like authenticity. Kazan’s profound impact on the art of directing can also be traced in East of Eden (1955), a Freudian melodrama that made James Dean an icon, and in his swan song, The Last Tycoon (1976), which rallied an extraordinary cast including Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Ray Milland, Jack Nicholson, Dana Andrews, Teresa Russell, and Robert De Niro (The screening will be introduced by Albert Schultz, the founding artistic director of Soulpepper Theatre Company, and a discussion will follow after the film.) Kazan’s lovingly crafted autobiographical epic America America (1963) and a new print of the little-known Wild River (1960) are also part of the retrospective.

From November 27 to December 4, Holy Girls and Headless Women: The Films of Lucrecia Martel and Ride Lonesome: The Films of Lisandro Alonso look at two of the most critically acclaimed auteurs of the so-called Argentine New Wave. Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008) finally receives its Canadian theatrical release on November 27. Weightless and mesmerizing, Martel’s third feature opens with a bourgeois woman as she drives alone on a dirt road. From that point on, the film progressively becomes an enigmatic puzzle that makes masterful use of the director’s distinctive visual style as it enters a world of shuttered twilight and incipient madness. The other two films in her Salta Trilogy, La Ciénaga (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), portray the Argentine rural bourgeoisie with alarming insight and savage subtlety. Martel’s compatriot, Lisandro Alonso, sets his films in the hinterlands of Argentina and focuses on reticent men of obscure emotion and motive travelling through isolated landscapes. His highly praised debut feature, La Libertad (2001), follows the quotidian details of the life of a woodcutter in the pampas. His unnerving and ultimately shocking second feature, Los Muertos (2004), exerts powerful mystery in its tale of a 54- year-old man who has just been released from prison. Alonso’s masterpiece to date, Liverpool (2008), centres on a hard-drinking sailor on a merchant freighter as he journeys through a snowy landscape to visit his mother. These retrospectives are part of TIFF Cinematheque’s Film Now series.

Thematic Series
Celebrating Toronto’s 175th birthday, TIFF’s recently published anthology, Toronto on Film, charts the development of feature filmmaking in the city and seminal archival works. Taking place from October 9 to October 22 and inspired by the anthology of the same name, the series Toronto on Film provides a rare opportunity to examine and enjoy the development of Toronto’s cinematic history, beginning in the late 1950s with Julian Roffman’s The Bloody Brood (1959). This cult classic focuses on a gang of beatnik hipsters who decide to feed a young delivery boy a hamburger garnished with broken glass. Other key films include David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Robin Spry’s Flowers on a One-Way Street (1967), which recounts the Yorkville hippies’ illfated attempts to close their street to traffic. One of the most relevant and controversial works produced by the National Film Board in the 1960s, Spry’s film will be accompanied by Ron Mann’s introduction of his own Dream Tower (1994), a touching and effective elegy for the ideals and hopes of the 1960s, and his student short The Strip (1973), a record of Toronto’s steamiest and seediest neighbourhood in the 1970s (Yonge Street around Dundas), both to be introduced by Geoff Pevere. The series welcomes many other special guests including Lisa Ray, who will introduce Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), Clement Virgo presenting Save My Lost Nigga’ Soul (1993), Patricia Rozema with I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1988) and Reginald Harkema introducing Monkey Warfare (2006). Guest speakers and presenters, including members of the Toronto Film Critics Association, will also be in attendance. The series is supported by the City of Toronto.

Although now entirely replaced by green screens, CGI and other computer-based technologies, rear projection gets a well-deserved spotlight from October 15 to October 20. Art superstar Mark Lewis, Canada’s representative at this year’s prestigious Venice Biennale, presents some of his favourite examples of rear projection in Hollywood cinema. Presented in conjunction with the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mark Lewis Presents Rear Projection’s Greatest Hits includes in-person introductions by Lewis of his own acclaimed Backstory (2009), an exploration of the personalities and artistry behind rear-projection technology in Hollywood; his Cinema Museum (2008), a documentary that follows the eccentric owner of a private museum of cinema ephemera in South London; and Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime thriller, Saboteur (1942). Other films include Otto Preminger’s River of No Return (1954) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939).

The Way of the Termite: The Essay Film is a two-part series that will run over two successive seasons, Fall 2009 and Winter 2010. Curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin, celebrated filmmaker and professor at the University of California, San Diego, this essential series explores the “essay film,” one of the most exciting and elusive genres in contemporary cinema. Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) launches the first part of the series on November 6 with an introduction by Gorin. Recently added to the French curriculum, this quintessential essay film is a mesmerizing treatise on memory, time and temporality. Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Ici et ailleurs (1976), also to be introduced by Gorin, responds to an ever-present desire to re-evaluate images of war and their usage and will be followed by Gorin and Godard’s Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still (1972), a semiotics lesson that deconstructs a now famous photograph depicting an anguished Jane Fonda in Hanoi. Audiences will be treated to two more in-person presentations by Gorin: the Canadian premiere of La Rabbia di Pasolini (2008), a recent restoration and reconstruction of a political found-footage essay film by Pier Paolo Pasolini that was censored and cut before its release due to its polemics; and Gorin’s own Routine Pleasures (1986), an amusing and clever essay film that grew out of the director’s friendship with the late, great painter-critic, Manny Farber. In addition, the series includes Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) with live piano accompaniment by William O’Meara, the North American premiere of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s L’Itinéraire de Jean Bricard (2008) and Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle (1974).

Special screenings
Celebrating UNESCO’s designation of October 27 as World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, the Film Reference Library co-presents the stunning newly restored print of Jean-Luc Godard’s study of sexual obsession and betrayal, Pierrot le fou (1965). In singling out restored works, the goal of this annual event is to commemorate the importance of film preservation and demonstrate the need to treat our cinematic treasures like works of art. The restoration of Pierrot le fou was completed by the Cinémathèque Française, StudioCanal and the Fond Culturel Américain.

Long missing in North America, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness (1989) has become something of a holy grail. A new print made especially for the film’s twentieth anniversary comes to Toronto on November 19, 22 and 24. Winner of the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, this exquisite film was the first Taiwanese film to deal with the events of February 28, 1947, in which thousands of Taiwanese were massacred by Nationalist forces. Through its majestic succession of precisely framed images and carefully composed soundtrack, the film employs a classic family saga to mirror the history of Taiwan during one of its most tumultuous periods.

As a special treat for TIFF Cinematheque’s members, Jacques Demy’s timeless The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) will be presented as a free screening on December 5. Starring Catherine Deneuve as the yearning Geneviève who falls for a handsome auto mechanic, this utterly original, melancholy musical is a color-coded feast for the eyes and ears. This screening is on a firstcome, first-served basis. For more information or to R.S.V.P., call 416-968-FILM.

Ongoing Series
Classic Sundays: Treasures from the Bologna Film Festival returns after its annual summer hiatus with a rich array of treasures, both familiar and obscure. Among the eight films in the series, presented from October 18 to December 6, some highlights include a restored print of Julien Duvivier’s La Bandera (1935), which made Jean Gabin a star and is one of the early important works of French poetic realism; an eye-popping restoration of Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1949), a delirious tale of love until death set in the Technicolor environs of the ancient Spanish port of Esperanza; and a splendid Technicolor restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), recently presented as a gala at both the Cannes and Bologna film festivals. Some of the greatest American movies ever made are also included in the series: King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (cross-listed with American Outsider: The Films of Elia Kazan) both receive their first TIFF Cinematheque screenings. The Fall Season wraps up with a restored full-length print of Sergio Leone’s definitive spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967), one of the most superbly shot, scored, and choreographed epic westerns ever.

TIFF Cinematheque screenings are held at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto (McCaul Street entrance), unless otherwise noted. Regular tickets are $5.90 for members and $10.14 for non-members. Limited Runs and Special Presentations are $7.08 for members and $11.56 for non-members. Lecture Series tickets are $9.91 for members and $15.33 for non-members. Prices do not include GST, building-fund fee or service charges. Films playing at TIFF Cinematheque that have not been rated by the Ontario Film Review Board are restricted to individuals 18 years of age or older; check the TIFF Cinematheque website for updates on film ratings. Visit our Box Office at 2 Carlton Street (on the West Mezzanine, Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.) or call 416-968-FILM or toll-free 1-877-968-FILM for tickets and more information. Tickets for the Fall Season go on sale beginning September 22 for members and October 6 for non-members.