Thanks for a great CCR Season III !

A big thanks to everyone who came out to our screenings this season. We are currently planning the Canadian Cult Revue Season IV. Check back mid summer for the new schedule.  Thanks again for all the support!



The Adventures of Prince Achmed, April 30th Bytowne Cinema

The Adventures Of Prince Achmed (1926), April 30th 9:05pm Bytowne Cinema

with Live Music. 35mm Tinted and Toned print.

The Adventures Of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving feature-length animated film. We present it tonight from a restored 35mm film print, brought up for one night only from a distributor in the United States. The evening will feature a live musical performance of a new score composed by Ottawa’s own Mike Dubué (Hilotrons), who will perform it along with various guest musicians.

The musicians performing the score are:

 

Mike Dubue: Bass, Piano, Vibraphone

Holger Schoorl: Classical Guitar, Electric Guitar

Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde: Cello

Paul Hogan: Electric Guitar

Alex Moxon: Electric Guitar

Adam Sakailey: Effects, Piano

Rolf Klausener: Bass

Philip shaw Bova: Percussion

To make this all happen we are selling advance tickets and fundrasing to pay for the musicans, rental and original musical composition. Check out the campaign here which includes lots of great perks: 
http://igg.me/at/michaeldubue

Achmed is a tale of adventure and magic based on the legends of the 1001 Arabian Nights. The film was created over a three-year period by German director Lotte Reiniger, who animated the film using an innovative silhouette technique, photographing cardboard cut-outs and lead forms with a multi-plane camera. Though filmed in black and white, Reiniger also employed various coloured tints and tones to lend the film a more evocative atmosphere. The end result is a film of surprising depth and delicacy. Upon its release it was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece.

Reiniger was a highly accomplished animator, and a determined female pioneer in the film world. In her professional life she crossed paths with luminaries such as Bertholt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir, as well as John Grierson, who later founded the National Film Board of Canada. He helped Reiniger and her husband flee to England to escape Nazi persecusion for her involvement in left-wing politics, where she lived and worked for many years, before coming to Canada in the early 1970s. Enticed out of a self-imposed retirement after the death of her husband, she completed two final short animated films at the NFB, and influenced a new generation of Canadian animators.

It may be a stretch to claim Reiniger as a Canadian filmmaker, but we’re willing to do it in the name of art.

Press info here

– Lost Dominion Screening Collective

Decasia, March 26th With Bill Morrison

Decasia, 2002, 35mm, March 26th, Bytowne Cinema,

with Director Bill Morrison in Attendance  

 

Decasia
Production year: 2002
Country: USA
Cert: PG
Runtime: 67 mins
Director: Bill Morrison
Format: 35mm






Decasia is a stirring, haunting feature film masterpiece composed
entirely of found footage- more precisely decaying early nitrate film
footage. Cellulose nitrate base was abandoned by filmmakers
around 1950, a technical improvement that really was justified. Nitrate
film is highly flammable and prone to rot. Yet it is the rot that
fascinates Morrison.

Morrison has found examples of old film, from archives such as
George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art, going back
to the beginning of the 20th century: some drama, some
documentary, screen tests, all kinds of peculiar images that have
decayed in intriguing ways.

Morrison not only researches and collects this footage, but he uses it
to create compelling montages with original soundtracks. He has
collaborated with some of the most interesting composers working
today–John Adams, Henryk Gorecki, Johann Johannsson, Steve
Reich, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon. In fact the music
begat the film. Decasia was commissioned for a multimedia
performance of Michael Gordon's symphony of the same name. The
end result of this artistic collaboration is mysterious, beautiful, and
highly unique.

Edited with an authentically poetic sensibility and delirious timing, the
images flow mysteriously into one another in what feels like a
necessary, meaningful structure, though inexplicable. Faces and
buildings dance in and out of random, abstract pools of black, grey
and silver; faces become chrome shadows; the sun turns black;
flames look like water. The effect of the nitrate film's decay is to
make everything seem fluid, while creating a strange landscape of
grotesque, pulsing shapes Decasia is on a death trip of its own.
In fine art and architecture, ruin has been regarded as picturesque
since the 18th century, but cinema's ruins are rarely visited. Rancid
and, in normal terms, unwatchable, these bits of film are gradually
fading into nothing in archives away from the light and away from the cinema.
They were never meant to flicker into life again.

This would not be such an original, engaging film, however, were it
simply an exercise in abstract cinema or avant-garde playfulness.
What makes Decasia so beguiling is that the film footage Morrison
has discovered is only partly destroyed. You can see images, and not
just any images. The dead and forgotten faces seen through the fog
are moving, striking, sometimes frightening.

Sometimes the effects are so expressive you can't believe chance did

this. But it did. Morrison's editing is so emotional that he makes you

see, always, something behind what is on screen, shadowy back

stories. Gradually the power of it mounts and from mild pleasure in

seeing something so unusual you become involved, tense, menaced.

It has a sculpted, sensual quality, a richness of texture missing from

most modern cinema: in place of all those clean, digital, precise

empty blockbusters here's something dense, deep, full of
unnameable spectral presences. It is film as landscape, as sublime
vista, and at the same time as history, as fact. It makes you feel that
the art, as opposed to the business, of cinema does have a future -
even if it has to be found deep in the past.

Over the past two decades, Morrison has built a filmography of more
than thirty projects that have been shown in museums, theaters,
concert halls, and galleries around the world, including Sundance and
the Tate Modern. His films are in the collection of the Museum of
Modern Art, The Nederland’s Film museum, and The Library of
Congress. He is a Guggenheim fellow and has received the Alpert
Award for the Arts, an NEA Creativity Grant, a Creative Capital grant,
and a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. His
work with Ridge Theater has been recognized with two Bessie
awards and an Obie Award.

A Q&A will follow the screening with Director Bill Morrison

Also Bill will be at IFCO for a Master Class before the screening at 5:30pm info here.

Bill will also be at Daimon in Gatineau on March 28th at 8pm

For more on Bill Morrison's films go here http://billmorrisonfilm.com/

 

Brought to you with the collaboration of the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa.

 

 

Big Meat Eater Feb. 26th Club SAW

Big Meat Eater (1982), Feb 26th

Club SAW(67 Nicholas St.) 7:30pm, 82mins, PG $5
 

 

The Big Meat Eater is an action packed roller-coster ride of a film involving:

- alien invaders!
- the reanimated corpse of the Mayor!
- a boy genius!
- construction on the site of the local butcher's septic tank!
- a special element called "balonium"!
- a new language invented by the town butcher!
- a psychopathic cleaver-wielding butcher's assistant!
- a rapidly decreasing canine population!
- musical numbers!


Skype Q&A with the producer/editor/writer/song writer! Laurence Keane
 

 

 We'll also be giving out prizes after the Q&A

Bob Sanderson is the mild mannered butcher of the small, sleepy town of Burquitlam. His motto is "Pleased to meet you, meat to please you." Bob's life is thrown into turmoil when he decides to hire Abdullah (The Big Meat Eater) - a massive human blockhouse of a man - as an apprentice in his butcher shop. Unbeknownst to Bob, Abdullah has just murdered the Mayor of Burquitlam in a fit of pique - and the corpse is hidden in Bob's freezer. 

 

 

An alien spacecraft arrives in search of a rare fuel - Bolonium - which is deposited in large quantities underneath Bob's butcher shop. Meanwhile, Jan, a boy genius, has stolen the Mayor's cadillac, installed a cyclotron and is set to launch it into outerspace...

Abdullah sings the blues while he charcoal grills gangsters and turns dalmation dogs into spotted spam... Alien robots desperate for bolonium possess the defrosted Mayor as their zombie agent... Bob and Jan are in turn the victims of repulsive temporary mutations... and Burquitlam itself becomes just another excuse for a bizarre musical comedy sci-fi/horror film. 

 From www.utopiapictures.com

Mystery of the Million Dollar Hockey Puck Jan. 29th

Mystery of the Million Dollar Hockey Puck
Jan. 29th CLUB SAW (67 Nicholas St.)
16mm, 7pm, $5.00 for adults, kids are free

A brother-sister pair of orphans get wrapped up in a diamond-smuggling caper in this delightful family film set in Quebec in the wintertime. Filmed in the mid-1970's, the Mystery of the Million Dollar Hockey Puck is basically a chase movie involving a pair of kid-detectives (Pierre and Catou) trying to thwart a couple of dastardly thieves. The chase runs from Chicoutimi, to Quebec City's Winter Carnival, to the big city of Montreal and the world of NHL hockey. The film plays like a series of colourful vignettes of the best parts of the province. The presence real NHL players also lends big dose of authenticity and nostalgia for anyone with fond memories of the NHL's glory days. In this, the year of the “lockout season”, it's a fine reminder that hockey means something more than greedy owners and spoiled players with multi-million-dollar salaries. In the “Million Dollar Hockey Puck”, as in life, the value is in the thrill of the chase, and the game, itself.

Back to God's Country with Live Music Dec. 11th

Silent Film Concert featuring Back to God's Country (1919) 

 Where: Club SAW (67 Nicholas St.), Tuesday December 11, 2012, at 7:30pm, $10, 16FPS, 85mins
 What: Live concert featuring score by Mike Dubue of the HILOTRONS with special musical guests.

Back to God's Country (1919) is Canada's oldest surviving feature film and it was Canada's biggest box-office hit of the silent film era. The film will play with a live musical accompaniment composed by HILOTRONS founder Mike Dubue. The evening will also feature a performance of Mike's new score for the silent short documentary Ice, which looks at the practice of ice harvesting from frozen lakes and rivers in the era before electric refrigeration. The film was produced by the Ontario Motion Picture Bureau (OMPB)and we are lucky it still survives. The vast majority of the OMPB's films were melted down to recover the silver nitrate contained in their film emulsion, an act ordered by the Ontario government, which was desperate for money during the Great Depression.

Our feature presentation, Back to God's Country, is based on a novel by American author James Oliver Curwood, one of the most popular authors of the early 20th Century. He specialized in wilderness adventure tales, somewhat in the mold of Jack London (his novel The Grizzly King was later adapted into The Bear in 1994 by Jean Jacques Annaud). Many of Curwood's novels were set in Canada and he was known for his sympathetic portrayals of both animals and women, so it's clear why its Canadian star Nell Shipman – writer/director/actress and animal trainer - would be attracted to the the story. The plot, concerning a young woman's race across the Canadian arctic to rescue her injured husband from a dastardly villain, gives her plenty of opportunity to showcase her skills. Shipman wrote the scenario for the adaptation and supervised the film's editing, smartly changing the focus of the plot from “loyal dog rescues man” to “loyal wife rescues husband, with the help of a loyal dog”.

Born Helen Foster-Barham in 1892 in Victoria, B.C., Nell Shipman moved to the United States when she was 13 and was writing and acting in Hollywood movies by the age of 20. She starred in twenty-six films in total. With a full complement of wild animals, rugged landscapes, rousing action and a pre-Hays Code nude scene (often credited as the first full-frontal nude scene by a leading actress in a feature-length film), Back to God's Country cemented Shipman's reputation as one of the most ambitious and daring entrepreneurs of the silent film age. Most of Nell Shipman's films were shot in the United States, but Back to God's Country was filmed both in the USA and in Canada in order to take advantage of the Canadian winter. The winter scenes were shot 160 miles north of Edmonton on Lesser Slave Lake, where the crew braved daytime temperatures of -40 degrees Fahrenheit (which, funnily enough, also happens to be -40 degrees Celsius!).

The film was produced by Nell Shipman's Ottawa-born husband Ernest Shipman, who partnered with James Oliver Curwood to form the company Canadian Photoplays Ltd. Ernest Shipman managed to drum up financing through some investors in Calgary and recruited American David Hartford to direct. Hartford capably showcased the natural charms of both his star and the wilderness, aided greatly by first-time feature cameraman Joseph Walker, who later went on to shoot 18 feature films for director Frank Capra, including the classics It's A Wonderful Life and Lost Horizon, becoming one of Hollywood's most famed cinematographers.

Back to God's Country ended up playing around the world to big audiences. In New York City, it opened at the Capitol Theatre on Broadway, then the world's newest and most luxurious movie palace, with 5300 seats. The film became the most financially successful Canadian-produced film of the silent era, grossing around a million-and-a-half dollars (which would be around 25 million dollars today), earning back roughly 300% of its production budget. This was a remarkable feat in a time when most movies only lasted one week in the theatre, and it's largely a testament to the skillful efforts of its savvy and pioneering Canadian star working with a top-notch production team.
  
The film is lots of fun, and even better with live music!

For more info on the restoration of the film read this PDF

Amanita Pestilens Nov. 27th Bytowne Cinema

Amanita Pestilens - 50th Anniversary Screening

November 27th, Bytowne Cinema, Ottawa, 9:20pm

35mm, 79mins, 1962

Amanita Pestilens (1962) is an unusually compelling film about one man's obsession with creating “the perfect lawn”. Jacques Labrecque stars as champion lawn-grower Henri Martin, a man who struggles to balance the needs of his family with his own ambitions for horticultural achievement as he wages war against the insurgent mushrooms that threaten his immaculately manicured domain. The film manages the unusual feat of being both funny and suspenseful at the same time, treading a fine line of ominous hilarity perfectly conveyed by Labrecque. It feels somewhat as though Spanish surrealist master Luis Bunuel had wandered into the Montreal of the early 1960's and managed to tap into the cultural zeitgeist of discontent and change bubbling just under the surface of polite society.

Shot on location in Montreal and close to Ottawa at Harrington Lake in 1962 by director René Bonnière, it was the first fictional feature film produced by legendary Ottawa filmmaker F.R. “Budge” Crawley. It was also the first Canadian feature film produced in colour, and stands as the cinematic debut of Canadian acting queen Genevieve Bujold, who, in her role as rebellious daughter Sophie Martin, displays enough raw cinematic charisma to suggest that she was born for the movie screen.

The production has the added bonus of having captured images of La Belle Province at a time of great physical and social transformation. It contains numerous visual delights, including early 1960's fashion, wonderful old Montreal streetscapes, and the sight of shockingly new-looking highway interchanges. Special mention should go to Ottawa-based composer Larry Crossley for writing an excellent score, incorporating jazz, folk, and orchestral music, helping the film take on the scope of a much larger production.

Unfortunately Amanita Pestilens never received a wide release. Festival screenings and the occasional TV appearance served to spread the legend, but the film has essentially been vault-bound for 50 years. We are proud to bring it back to the big screen, before it returns to dormancy like a mushroom spore waiting to re-emerge - hopefully sooner than the year 2062!

Part of the Canadian Cult Revue film series at the ByTowne, presented by the Lost Dominion Screening Collective. English-language version.