For an event that I helped organize tonight, Friday, March 18th, 2016, at Sonic. - D.D.
***
On a fateful night some weeks ago, Toronto Film Review was humbly introduced to quite possibly the hottest and freshest video-editing collective in the city... Seven Day Rental digs into their sacred catacombs of forgotten VHS tapes to bring you a visual smorgasbord of the weirdest, the funniest, most titillating, and most horrifying footage imaginable.
These hard-working lads have pillaged the back rooms of local video stores for months, gathering rare and unwanted tapes to deliver spicy one-of-a-kind experiences that you will not soon forget.
Riding on the success of their recent feature in Video-Rama's live showcase at Dundas Video, 7DR is hungry for more.
Check them out tonight at SONIC CAFE, 60 Cecil Street, Toronto, off Spadina, just south of College. And if you can't make it, at least do yourself a favour by searching 'Seven Day Rental' on YouTube, and let your brain absorb some of their troubled past. - Daniel Barone
7DAY RENTAL live @ SONIC: PRE-SHOW / WARM-UP @ 8PM MAIN EVENT @ 9PM (intermission @ 10PM) DJ SET / COOL-DOWN @ 11PM - 12AM
In honor of tonight’s,
Tuesday, March 15th, Innis College screening of Hyena Road with Paul Gross in attendance for a question period, here
are some good Paul Gross quotes, which are particularly interesting for young independent Toronto directors. – D.D.
***
“My advice is shoot, shoot. Make movies.
You know, you have the luxury of having equipment that you have access to that can
allow you to make things, in the way that we didn’t when I was coming in because
we actually had to have film still. But I think the most important thing is
just keep doing it. When you’re leaving school, you get yourself involved in
productions. If you really want to get involved get into film, movies and
television, you just go and get onto shows. Shows that are shooting out of
Toronto, Montreal, Newfoundland. Get in and around those kind of things, to
start to really understand what the operations of what a set is like, and at
the same time you write your own shows, you direct your own shows. Make them
shorts. Once you start to feel comfortable making a complete narrative inside a
short, then you start expanding that out. Make movies!”
"What
does start to happen is that you go to other people for money, like you go to
Telefilm, the federal funding agency. And they always have a lot of opinions
about your script, many of which are completely idiotic, but you have to sort
of bear with them somehow. Once in a while you pick through there and there's a
couple of notions - and you say, oh that's pretty smart - but most of it is
nonsense."
“The
really important thing for directors is that you got to know how to delegate.
You can’t know all of this stuff. Know what you’re strong at. I’m not… I mean I
kinda vaguely know what cameras do, and I roughly know what lenses do. And I
more or less know what stock is. But I would never pretend to say that I want
it on… such and such a lens at eight feet… I can describe what I want the
effect to be. And those guys can achieve it. And the same goes for costume,
with design. And what I understand better are performers. But other people come
in and who don’t really know or understand performers, since they come from
editing. Or they’re Ridley Scott and they come from… wherever here does… The
factory of invention.”
“And
I think that you have to be in love with the performers. The director needs to…
Some advice to a director would be to do not dislike your cast. You must love
them. You must decide that you love them. Because they’re everything for you…”
MDFF presents Nathan Silver's new film Stinking HeavenMonday, March 14th at The Royal at 8PM. The film continues some of Silver's major preoccupations, such as ones from his earlier Soft in the Head, as it explores the idea of an alternative community, relationship dilemmas and the interruption of one's life by a volatile guest. Deragh Campbell and Hannah Gross, from I Used to be Darker, reunite and are extremely compelling, which is partly due to Silver's Cassavetes-like, improvisational directing. A compelling drama.
For tonight's seventh year anniversary of Early Monthly Segments its programmers are
organizing a special series of projection of the short-films by the local
director-photographer-experimental film enthusiast John Porter, in
conjunction with the release of his new book, John Porter’s CineScenes: Documentary Portraits of Alternative Film Scenes, Toronto and Beyond, 1978-2015. The screening is tonight Monday, March 7th at 8PM at the Gladstone Hotel.
But probably the most anticipated film in the program is the 1992 The Secret of the Lost Tunnel (or Woody Allen: A Space Odyssey), which is described on Porter's website as,
"A
Camera Dance, using time-lapse/pixilation. John performs for the
camera in a rare "narrative" film, edited in-camera. Playing a naked
Hardy Boy carrying a lantern in the dark, he discovers a mysterious,
long, pink tunnel. Struggling to squeeze all the way through, faster and
faster, he passes advertisements on the walls along the way, and at the
end he emerges into a scene from Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968). John constructed the tunnel "set" in his apartment,
changed shooting speeds to change his apparent crawling speeds, and
recorded his grunts onto the sound film afterward. Inspired by a scene
in Woody Allen's movie Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,
but Were Afraid to Ask (1972). The title, and title page in the film, is
borrowed from a Hardy Boys book."
A regular dilemma for Canadian directors: How to make a cinema in the shadow of Kubrick or The Force Awakens? Film a projection of 2001: A Space Odyssey
(The Secret of the Lost Tunnel), put Kubrick in your film (Operation
Avalanche), document the public event which is the opening night screening of the The Force Awakens (Nirvana:
The Band Part. II), or have children playing as if they had the force (Jean-Marc Vallée's Big Little Lies).
An attempt for an auteurist cinema has its limits in Toronto so a good goal is to reach for the sky and produce something great in the model of some of the most popular and imaginative films of the last century. In the shadow of Hollywood, there's a need to do everything to bring attention to your film, first people need to want to see your film, before they can evaluate and appreciate it.
“After the Apollo astronauts had revolved
around the moon’s surface in December of 1968, they assembled a television
camera and focused it on the art. All of us who were watching had an enormous
reflexive response. We “outured” and “innered” at the same time. We were on
earth and the moon simultaneously. And it was our individual recognition of
that event which gave it meaning.
A
resonating interval had been set up. The true action in the event was not on
earth or on the moon, but rather in the airless void between, in the play of
the axle and the wheel as it were. We had become newly aware of the separate
physical foundations of these two different world and we willing, after some
initial shock, to accept both as an environment for man.
“The
tetrad, like the metaphor, performance the same function that the camera di in
the Apollo 8 mission: it reveals figure (moon) and ground (earth)
simultaneously. The left brain with its sequential, linear bias, hides the
ground of most situations, making it subliminal. Left-hemisphere thinking, as a
dominant mode, is linear and tends to place emphasis only on the connected; it
is steeped in a priori notions of order, masking the complementarity of both
right and left brain modes. - Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers (The Global Village: Transformations in
World Life and Media in the 21st Century)
To celebrate the publication of Robert Schwartzwald's study of Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. (Queer Film Classic) the Alliance Française will be hosting a conference with its author Friday, March 4th at 7:30PM. Hope to see some of you there!
