TIFF Cinematheque Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary With A Summer Of Sex, Swords And Seduction
Toronto - Running from June 3 to August 26, this summer season celebrates TIFF Cinematheque’s twentieth anniversary by bringing back two momentous retrospectives from its inaugural season, a selective retrospective on Pier Paolo Pasolini, TIFF Cinematheque’s very first presentation during the summer of 1990 at Jackman Hall, and a complete retrospective on Akira Kurosawa, first presented during the Fall season of 1990 at the Backstage. In addition, it will feature first-ever tributes to James Mason and Catherine Breillat; a ten-film tribute to Robin Wood; Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales; an evening with Julian Schnabel; and a special screening of Joyce Wieland’s The Far Shore.
TIFF Cinematheque (formerly Cinematheque Ontario) opened its doors in June of 1990 when the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) assumed the operation of the revered Ontario Film Institute, which had been founded by film scholar and author Gerald Pratley in 1969. In its twenty-year history, TIFF Cinematheque has risen to become one of the pre-eminent programming institutions of its kind. Film professionals in the international arena recognize its programming as among the best in the world, highlighting its inspired approach, the quality of presentation and the serious consideration given to all genres and periods of cinema.
“The range and richness of this summer season capture what TIFF Cinematheque has stood for over the past two decades: a fierce adherence to the history of international cinema, and an equally passionate commitment to contemporary film; past and present, radical and classical, social and aesthetic, all in close tandem,” said James Quandt, Senior Programmer for TIFF Cinematheque.
The Man Between: James Mason – June 3 to July 5
Continuing in the tradition of star showcases at TIFF Cinematheque, this selective retrospective features some of the greatest performances by James Mason, one of cinema's most versatile and unpredictable actors. The Man Between: James Mason launches on June 3 with the recently struck Scope print of Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life (1956). A central work of fifties cinema, it features Mason as a schoolteacher whose gentle patience and liberal aspirations as father, husband and instructor suddenly turn into murderous psychosis. The actor’s brooding malevolence and regal demeanour will be on display in films by other great auteurs such as Max Ophüls’s The Reckless Moment (1949), featuring Mason as a suave blackmailer who thrusts an affluent American family into an underworld of murder; Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), with a silkily sinister Mason as one of the master of suspense’s most ominous villains; and Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), a chess game of conflicting fixations that focuses on Humbert’s (James Mason) desire for his adolescent stepdaughter. The series also includes Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1946), featuring Mason as the leader of a band of Irish revolutionaries driven to booze and desperation when their plan to rob a bank goes awry; the reconstructed version of George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (1954), one of the great Hollywood musicals featuring an ultra-vulnerable Judy Garland matched with Mason as a self-loathing, seductive drunk; and an eye-popping restoration of Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1949).
Akira Kurosawa: Centenary of a Sensei – June 11 to August 2
Before the recent Akira Kurosawa retrospective at Film Forum, New York, TIFF Cinematheque mounted the last complete exhibition in North America in the fall of 1990. In the two-decade interim, many of Kurosawa’s films became unavailable, so it is with a sense of momentousness that TIFF Cinematheque celebrates the director’s centenary and its own twentieth anniversary with Akira Kurosawa: Centenary of a Sensei. Starting on June 11, this retrospective offers Toronto audiences the chance to experience the complete body of work of one of the most influential directors of all time. The director’s nearly two-decade collaboration with Toshiro Mifune produced a seemingly ceaseless series of masterpieces, including Rashomon (1950), the film that introduced Japanese cinema to the west; Drunken Angel (1948), featuring Mifune as an inebriated seraph who rules the back streets of postwar Tokyo through extortion and intimidation; Stray Dog (1949), with the mercurial star as a hapless young detective who descends into the Tokyo underworld to retrieve his stolen gun; Yojimbo (1961), the samurai classic that won Mifune the Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival; and Seven Samurai (1954), consistently voted one of the greatest films of all time. Other highlights include the striking Sanshiro Sugata, Parts I and II (1943-45), based on a famous novel about the conflict between judo and jujitsu; Ikiru (1952), the story of a middle-aged government bureaucrat who, upon learning that he has terminal cancer, sets out to perform one small act that will give his life some meaning; The Idiot (1951), an eerie and intense version of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece unseen in Toronto since TIFF Cinematheque’s first Kurosawa retrospective two decades ago; and No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), based on the famous Takikawa Incident of 1933 in which an esteemed professor was purged from Kyoto University for his supposed communist leanings.
Personal Views: A Tribute to Robin Wood – June 18 to July 3
This ten-film series pays homage to the great film critic and educator Robin Wood, who passed away late last year. A passionate attendee of TIFF Cinematheque over the years, Wood wrote with flair and commitment about directors as diverse as Kenji Mizoguchi, Alfred Hitchcock, Max Ophüls, Michael Cimino, Satyajit Ray, Larry Cohen and George Romero. Featuring some of the critic’s favourite films, Personal Views: A Tribute to Robin Wood opens on June 18 with Howard Hawks’s seminal western, Rio Bravo (1959). The screening will be introduced by Richard Lippe and Piers Handling. TIFF and the Department of Film at York University will toast the memory of Robin Wood prior to the screening of Rio Bravo from 5:00 p.m. to 6:45 p.m. in the Ontario College of Art & Design's Lambert Lounge, 100 McCaul St. Other films in the series include George Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985), to be introduced by Romero; Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), to be introduced by Peter Lynch; Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966), to be introduced by Bruce LaBruce; Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (2000), to be introduced by Scott Forsyth; and William MacGillivray’s Life Classes (1989), to be introduced by William MacGillivray.
Special Screening: Joyce Wieland’s The Far Shore – June 30
On June 30, TIFF Cinematheque is pleased to present The Far Shore(1976), a rich and compelling rumination on gender, nationalism, nature, myth and art from one of Canada’a most prominent and influential artists, Joyce Wieland. Seldom screened, the film focuses on the ill-fated love affair between a married woman and an as-yet-unsuccessful landscape painter (patterned after Tom Thomson). Johanne Sloan, art historian and author of the newly published book, Joyce Wieland’s The Far Shore, and Dennis Reid, Chief Curator of Research at the Art Gallery of Ontario, will introduce the screening. Sloan will also be present for a discussion after the screening. Joyce Weiland’s The Far Shore is a co-publication by TIFF and The University of Toronto Press and will be in stores May 28. For more information, visit www.utppublishing.com
Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Poet of Contamination – July 8 to August 6
Filmmaker, novelist, linguist, critic, playwright, painter, journalist and poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most important and controversial intellectuals of postwar Italian culture. Employing raw, street-shot imagery of the poor, disenfranchised and unfortunate, Pasolini was a fierce critic of his country's complacency and bourgeois aspirations as it underwent the economic transformation into modernity. This arduously assembled retrospective invites audiences to experience the stylistic experiments in Pasolini’s legendary cinema and the eternal beauty and passion of his work. Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Poet of Contamination opens on July 8 with Mamma Roma (1962), featuring the volcanic Anna Magnani as a prostitute who attempts to extricate herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son. Pasolini’s incandescent debut, Accattone (1961), is an unforgettable portrait of a thief attempting to survive in the netherworlds of postwar Rome. The director’s eclectic oeuvre ranges from classic texts refashioned to stress their pagan qualities, such as his version of Euripides’ tragedy, Medea (1970), starring Maria Callas in her only major non-operatic role in cinema, to political fables such as Porcile (1969), an outrageous and touching portrait of the hypocrisy and greed of contemporary life starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Pierre Clémenti. Based on the three most famous works of omnibus fiction, Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life celebrates sex as the conduit to the sacred. Visually spectacular and juicily sacrilegious, The Decameron(1970-71) turns Boccaccio’s blasphemous tales about lusty nuns, reprobate priests and thieving sacristans into a glorious celebration of fleshly pleasure. Banned in Italy despite having won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, The Canterbury Tales (1971-72) is a wild refashioning of the famous medieval text, populated by copious codpieces, copulation and scatology. Intoxicating in its eroticism, The Arabian Nights (1974) is a daring and debauched festival of the bizarre shot in the mirrored palaces and labyrinthine streets of Yemen, Nepal, Iran and Ethiopia. Pasolini’s extreme vision ended with what was to be his last film, Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (1975), a legendary work of utter disgust and rage against a world distorted by the desire for power and privilege. Banned, censored and reviled the world over since its first release, the film is an unflinching tableau of degradation and humiliation based on The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, with the setting transposed to Mussolini's miniature Fascist Republic of Salò in 1944. Also included in the retrospective are rare works such as a restored print of Notes for an African Oresteia (1969-70), which follows Pasolini as he scouts locations and actors for a prospective version of Aeschylus’ tragedy to be set in then contemporary Uganda and Tanzania; and Pasolini & Giuseppe Bertolucci’s La Rabbia di Pasolini (2008), a recent restoration and reconstruction of a political found-footage essay film by Pasolini that was censored and cut before its release due to its polemics.
Catherine Breillat’s Anatomies of Desire – July 22 to August 15
French filmmaker and best-selling novelist Catherine Breillat has consistently walked a willfully precarious line between provocation and pornography, courting both censorship and praise. Catherine Breillat’s Anatomies of Desire, the first retrospective in Canada of Breillat’s uncompromising body of work, is an overdue examination of one of the most compelling female filmmakers working today. The series launches on July 22 with the Toronto premiere of her latest film, Barbe bleue (2009), a sly variation of Charles Perrault’s gruesome fairy tale about a young bride married to an aristocrat who has murdered his previous wives. Breillat’s frank inquiry into the complex psychology of female desire has given birth to plenty of audacious films, including her racy, sun-drenched opera prima, Une Vraie Jeune Fille (1975). Shelved for twenty-five years due to its transgressive views on sexuality, the film featured newcomer Charlotte Alexandra as a sullen, doll-faced teenager who lusts over the quiet hunk working on her father’s struggling sawmill. 36 fillette (1987) focuses on a brooding and feisty fourteen-year-old determined to lose her virginity. The subject of one of the most debated incidents of censorship in Ontario’s history, Fat Girl (2000) follows a younger sibling as she is forced to watch the seduction of her gorgeous sister by an older, smooth-talking Italian boy. Stunned North American critics were not quite sure what to make of Romance (1999), the incendiary and sexually explicit film that cemented Breillat’s reputation as a fearless provocatrice. Tapage Nocturne (1979), an exploration of the destructive desire and sexual submission of a lonely woman unable to conform to societal norms, was deemed so offensive that it nearly caused riots with its extreme depiction of female desire and compulsive adultery. Une Vieille maîtresse (2007), a tale of sexual intrigue, jealousy and obsession, liberally inspired by nineteenth-century dandy Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel of the same name, marked Breillat’s brave return to filmmaking following a stroke that left her partially paralyzed in 2004. In addition, Bernardo Bertolucci’s powerfully erotic Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Nagisa Oshima’s provocative In the Realm of the Senses (1976) are included in the series as essential references to Breillat’s cinema.
Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales – July 29 to August 10
To commemorate the French master Eric Rohmer, who recently died at the age of 89, TIFF Cinematheque presents his most celebrated and enduring work, his cycle of Six Moral Tales. Transforming erotic possibility into moral quandary, the six films are all struck from the same narrative template: a man, committed to one woman, finds himself attracted to a second woman, more sensual and dangerous than the first, a temptation which precipitates a moral crisis. The cycle starts on July 29 with a pairing of the first two tales, rarely shown in Toronto, La Carrière de Suzanne (1963) preceded by La Boulangère de Monceau (1962). Ma nuit chez Maud(1968) focuses on the moral dilemma of a deeply committed Catholic who is torn between a blonde woman he sees at church and the vivacious, intellectual Maud. One of cinema’s supreme works about sensual obsession, Le Genou de Claire (1970) centres on a soon-to-be married diplomat and his fixation with the knee of a schoolgirl who is summering in the same lakeside resort. Rohmer’s first colour film, La Collectionneuse (1966), pushes the Moral Tales into new, darker realms. An amoral gamine who collects one-night stands shares a summer villa in St. Tropez with two male friends, a humourless antiques dealer and a lazy, affable artist. The men decide to give her a lesson in morality, but inevitably become enmeshed in sexual stratagems. Celebrated for its stinging insights into bourgeois propriety, L’Amour l’après midi(1972) follows a happily married father as he meets a promiscuous, volatile and unconventional woman, an encounter that proves an almost irresistible temptation.
Julian Schnabel: Carte Blanche – August 26
TIFF Cinematheque, in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario, is delighted to present an evening with acclaimed artist and Academy Award® nominated director Julian Schnabel on August 26. At 7 pm, Schnabel introduces his Carte Blanche selection, Hector Babenco’s Pixote(1981), the neorealist masterpiece about child criminality and survival in the Brazilian slums. At 9 pm, Schnabel introduces Before Night Falls(2000), his celebrated biography of Reinaldo Arenas, the gifted, persecuted Cuban writer. Both films will be followed by a question and answer session.
TIFF Cinematheque’s move to TIFF Bell Lightbox
After twenty years of programming, most of which has been featured at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall, TIFF Cinematheque screenings will move to TIFF Bell Lightbox this fall. The building’s incredible range of facilities will ensure that the quality of the screening experience at TIFF Cinematheque will only grow, along with the stature of its programming, which will continue to be led by Senior Programmer James Quandt and Programmer Andréa Picard. In its new home, TIFF Cinematheque will have the capacity to offer more repeats and a more consistent programme offering throughout the year.
Limited Time Offer for TIFF Cinematheque members
In its new home, TIFF Cinematheque’s membership programme will transition to a TIFF membership programme that will offer new opportunities and additional benefits to ensure that members can experience all that TIFF Bell Lightbox has to offer. In recognition of the longstanding support that TIFF Cinematheque members have provided over the past two decades, TIFF is extending current TIFF Cinematheque members the opportunity to renew their memberships at TIFF Cinematheque prices as they come due. This offer will be available to all current members whose TIFF Cinematheque memberships expire between November 2009 and August 31, 2010. TIFF Cinematheque memberships can be renewed by visiting tiff.net/cinematheque or by calling 416-968- FILM.
About TIFF Cinematheque
TIFF Cinematheque presents an ambitious selection of more than 300 films annually, including acclaimed directors' retrospectives, national and regional cinema spotlights, thematic programmes, experimental and avant-garde cinema, exclusive limited runs and classic and contemporary Canadian and international cinema, including many new and rare archival prints. For more information, visit tiff.net/cinematheque.
All screenings for TIFF Cinematheque’s Summer season are held at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto (use 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 HST or 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. Tickets for TIFF Cinematheque’s Summer Season go on sale on May 4, 2010. Tickets can be purchased in person at the TIFF Box Office (2 Carlton Street, on the West Mezzanine, Monday to Friday, 10am to 7pm. Closed on May 24, Victoria day, July 1, Canada Day, and August 2, Civic Holiday or Simcoe Day), by calling 416-968-FILM or toll-free 1-877-968-FILM, or online by visiting tiff.net/cinematheque.
TIFF Cinematheque thanks its supporters Bell, RBC, the Ontario Media Development Corporation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Toronto and the Ontario Arts Council.
About TIFF:
TIFF is a not-for-profit cultural organization whose mission is to transform the way people see the world through film. Its vision is to lead the world in creative and cultural discovery through the moving image. TIFF generates an annual economic impact of $135 million CAD and currently employs more than 100 full-time staff and 500 part-time and seasonal staff, and counts upon the largesse of over 2,000 volunteers year-round.
About TIFF Bell Lightbox:
Currently under construction, TIFF Bell Lightbox, a breathtaking five-storey complex located in downtown Toronto, will provide a permanent home for film lovers to celebrate cinema from around the world and will propel TIFF forward as an international leader in film culture. Designed by innovative architecture firm KPMB, TIFF Bell Lightbox’s fluid structure encourages exploration, movement and play. The campaign to build TIFF Bell Lightbox is generously supported by founding sponsor Bell, the Province of Ontario, the Government of Canada, the City of Toronto, the King and John Festival Corporation - consisting of the Reitman family and the Daniels Corporation – RBC as major sponsor and official bank, Visa†, the Copyright Collective of Canada, the Slaight Family Foundation, NBC Universal Canada, the Brian Linehan Charitable Foundation, the Harbinger Foundation, CIBC and BMO. The Board of Directors, staff and many generous individuals and corporations have also contributed to the campaign. For more information on the TIFF Bell Lightbox campaign, visit belllightbox.ca.
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For information, contact the Communications Department at 416-934-3200 or email proffice@tiff.net.