Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) April 4th, 6:40pm, Bytowne Cinema
Directed by: Norman Jewison
Original Music by: Andrew Lloyd Webber
Cinematography by: Douglas Slocombe
Film Editing by: Antony Gibbs
Written by: Melvyn Bragg and Norman Jewison
Starring: Ted Neeley, Carl Anderson, Yvonne Elliman, Barry Dennen, Bob Bingham
Norman Jewison's big screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Jesus Christ Superstaris a fun film that pulses with a surplus of musical and visual energy. As far as musicals go, it has all the necessary ingredients of success: catchy tunes, fabulous costumes, and great performances by a talented cast. Standouts include Carl Anderson as Judas Iscariot, and Ted Neeley as Jesus Christ.
As with the stage production, the film embraces anachronism as a virtue. The all-out effort to mix the fashion and music of the early 1970's with Biblical times translates very well to the big screen. Jewison’s choice to film on location in the Holy Land pays off with spectacular scenery that reinforces a production that could easily have been too “far-out” and collapsed under the weight of its postmodern pretensions.
For all of its non-traditional elements, Jesus Christ Superstarmay be one of the best big-screen treatments of the Jesus story, effectively illustrating how an ancient religion is still relevant in the modern era. Coming two years after Jewison’s triumph with Fiddler on the Roof, a more traditional musical, it’s the work of an ambitious filmmaker always willing to set himself big technical challenges in the name of better storytelling. Jewison takes the opportunity to tell “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and tells it well.
Lost Films with Live Music by the HILOTRONS,March 28th, 7pm, Bytowne Cinema, Approx 70mins 35mm and DCP 2K
Collection of vintage & archival short films with brand new music performed and composed live by The Hilotrons.
The Canadian Cult Revue presents its second live music screening of the season with a selection of historically significant ‘lost films’ (well, nearly lost...) from the collection of Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Most of the films are silent shorts from the 1920’s, and will be projected from brand new 35mm prints created at LAC’s film conservation facilities in Gatineau.
To start off the evening, we’re showing a 1946 newsreel featuring many stories from the local area, including: a spectacular fire in Hull that destroyed the interprovincial bridge; the famous Dionne Quintuplets in Grade Five; Barbara Ann Scott at a skating championship; and, a spy ring uncovered by the RCMP. Then, local favourites the Hilotrons will play newly-composed soundtracks to our selection of silent short films with fascinating subjects such as: wireless telephony, preventing tooth decay, and graphite mining in Calabogie (seriously, they’re good!).
We will also be playing a reel from The Man From Glengarry (1922), also accompanied by The Hilotrons. The film, a spectacular silent feature shot in Ottawa in the early 1920s by director Henry Macrae, concerns a blood feud between the leaders of rival logging camps along the Ottawa River. This reel is one of only two that remain in existence.
March Matinee of The Peanut Butter Solution 1985, PG, 94mins, Mayfair Theatre, 3pm March 14th, 35mm
From the director of Tommy Trickerand theStamp Traveller comes this endearing tale about a kid, a couple of friendly ghosts and a magical cure for baldness that comes with one important caveat: take it easy on the peanut butter.
Mike Dubue is a musican, composer and a member of the Ottawa-based band HILOTRONS.
Paul Gordon of the Lost Dominion Screening Collective interviewed Mike about composing music for silent films. Mike and the HILOTRONS will be playing live March 28th at the Bytowne Cinema as part of the Canadian Cult Revue film series.
Mike Dubue (right) conducting Night of the Living Dead LIVE.
Interview recorded (February 27th 2012)
PG: So Mike, you have been involved in scoring for films for a while now, but how did you get involved with scoring silent films?
MD: Well, it started with Metropolis and the 2009 opening of the Mayfair Theatre. It was sort of a hefty idea as it’s a really long film, but we said "Hey, let’s try this" and well, I became really addicted to scoring silent films.
PG: What was involved with scoring Metropolis considering it's over 2 hours long. It’s a well-known film, what did it take to pull it off?
MD: Well, the original score for Metropolis is brilliant so we didn’t really stray far away from it. However, it is arranged for an eighty piece Orchestra and we were a five-piece band. So we sort of broke it down but we had a lot to work with already, so really the job ahead of time was learning the material and doing a lot of rearranging and a slight bit of writing. Metropolis gave us a good scope of what the work is like to score a silent film. Whether we want to start from scratch and score it note for note or if we want to work with existing material.
PG: What were the instruments used for Metropolis and who were the musicians?
MD: Drums and percussion - Mike Essoudry. Paul Hogan played electric guitar. Linsey Wellman played bass clarinet, alto flute, flute, and alto sax. I played left-hand bass, right-hand organ, some synths, and bass.
PG: Since Metropolis you have scored a number of silent films including running a silent film festival. Can you name some of those films for us?
MD: Sure. So Metropolis,Nosferatu, The Rail Rodder, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , Back to God’s Country, The Bear, Boy and Dog, Carry on Sergeant! (1928), Man from Glengarry, Tim’s Tiny Tooth, Wireless Telephony, Graphite Mining in Calabogie and Night of the Living Dead.
PG: Tell me a bit about Night of the Living Dead, that’s a bit of a different one because it’s not a silent film.
MD: The idea was to work with films in the public domain that weren’t silent but turn them into silent films in the sense of turning off the sound and then recreating the full sound design live. So I’d have voice actors on microphones in sync with actors on screen, then foley artists in sync doing all the sound effects with the film. Then I had a small chamber group orchestra of five strings, bass clarinet, guitar, prepared piano, vibes, and flute. It was all performed live to the film.
PG: Night of the Living Dead was one of your most successful shows including the shows at Bluesfest.
MD: That’s right, we did three shows at the Mayfair and two at Bluesfest.
PG: Are you ever going to do it again?
MD: Yep, when we can afford to do it. (Laughs)
PG: Ok what has been your favorite film to score so far?
MD: Well, Night of the Living Dead - it’s a tossup of three for three different reasons.
The Night of the Living Dead was really interesting because I directed a lot of how it actually worked live...I transcribed the whole script and created one of the first post-production scripts for the film because there was none in existence for whatever reason. Then I got to make a real Foley score, the way you would score Foley for something like an animated cartoon, like Looney Tunes. So that was kind of exciting...I got to work with the original music that George Romero had used but because it was all public domain I got to rearrange a bunch of ideas because the music editing in that film has always been kinda choppy. So I got to work with existing music but also rearrange, recompose. It was kind of fun to amalgamate it all together.
Then Cagliari is my favorite because I got to score it note for note. Then Back to God’s Country - it’s an original score but I kind of used lots of different music that would have been played or existed in Canada at the time, whether it be Canadian folk music, Acadian music, different Klezmer music.
PG: So right now you’re doing a mini tour with the HILOTRONS of Caligari plus four Canadian short films. How’s that going, and what’s involved with that?
MD: So far it’s going alright. We're trying to strategically book it for time and cost efficiency for the band on the road, because it’s a trying production to bring on the road. Trying might be the wrong word as we are enjoying it, there’s nothing trying about it - but it’s a lot of rehearsing to get it to the point where it is. It’s hard to treat the shows just like band shows so we are being selective of where we are playing. Then with the material itself it’s fun because with the four films as a band we are able to split the composing duties to everybody, we are all able to write for the films. So that’s a nice opportunity for the band.
PG: Speaking about the band, the HILOTRONS are pretty much a rock band, so what do they think about playing and composing for silent films?
MD: Well, the cool thing about this situation is that a lot of us come from and have somewhat of a background with scoring for cinema or live theatre, or dance. So we were able to utilize that experience in working with visual imagery. The band is good at wearing two hats, the hat of being a pop band playing on stage in rock concert format or we can work with a film, sort of like a chamber ensemble.
PG: Any major future plans?
MD: Well - as much work as I can do with the silent films. As much as I’m a musician, I’m also a real big film buff. A lot of what I’m trying to do with the silent films isn’t really necessarily about the music. The music is only there to kind of heighten the films and bring some attention to the actual picture. For me it’s all about the cinema and about people seeing the stuff because otherwise they might not see it without this opportunity. It’s exciting for the people to watch, especially the Canadian stuff that we are working with.
PG: Do you think silent films are having a bit of a renaissance? With The Artist winning Best Picture and Hugo.
MD: Yes, absolutely. Here is the interesting thing about the silent era: it is what it is and when talkies came out cinema became a different art form. Needless to say the silent era was pretty much completely squashed just because industry standards had changed, which is fine because we have had amazing cinema since then, but the art of the way silent films were made was kind of left unexplored. 30 years of the silent era is really not a long time for any art form so hopfully the renaissance that you mention maybe has a lot to do with people wanting to re-explore the idea an see what we can do with it now.
PG: Cool. Thanks for the talk and I’m looking forward to the at the Bytowne Cinema in Ottawa, March 28th, 2012.
World Premiere
71mins, DCP 2K, Feb. 29th, 6:50pm Bytowne Cinema
Directed by: Edward Folger
In a tribute to the work of his friend, the late Canadian/Bolivian/Dutch artist Juan Geuer, Canadian/American filmmaker/poet Edward Folger builds a jig-saw vision of his life in Ottawa, in the form of a graphic raga, evolving, like classical Indian music, from a leisurely beginning, into a frenzied ride on the force of nature. He draws from his history with media – still photography, feature films, early consumer video; moving on to standard digital and state of the art, high definition video; and finally, into online virtual worlds.
From New York, New England, Ottawa, rural Ontario, and the vast digital world of Second Life, in concert with artists from France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark, each stanza of this video poem twists in a new direction – drama, documentary, animation, still montage, experimental, music video. The worldview that Folger shared with Juan Geuer is the glue holding all the pieces together. Portions of the film have been screened previously at various galleries and international film festivals and some chapters were produced with the support of the City of Ottawa and SAW Video Media Arts Centre.
– Lost Dominion Screening Collective
Folger’s work leaps forward into the Twenty-First Century, visualizing String Theory and M-Theory, vibrating in the full eleven dimensions of reality.
– László Fontoskodó, Director of the Institute for Post-Quantum Critical Studies
Videodrome, 1983, rated R, 90mins, 35mm Archival print, 7pm Jan 25th at the Bytowne Cinema
Anyone familiar with pioneering Toronto television station City-TV, particularly its daring, fly-by-the-seat-of-its-pants incarnation in the 1970’s and 80’s, will recognize the inspiration for the fictional CIVIC-TV station in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. CIVIC is where Max Renn (James Woods) works as a producer seeking out the most provocative programming to drive up the ratings, always keeping an eye on finding the next big thing to scoop the competition. It’s this search that leads Renn to uncover an international conspiracy involving a mind- and flesh- altering signal hidden within violent images originating from the United States.
Videodrome still has the power to provoke philosophical reflection and disturb in equal measure nearly thirty years since its release. Like many of Cronenberg’s early films, it’s constructed around tropes of out-of-control technology, physical mutation, and sex and violence as social contagion. It’s the triumphant culmination of the first phase of his career, blending elements of science fiction, horror, and film noir in a deftly executed mix of genres. It’s noteworthy for being the first film where he started getting respect as a filmmaker of real intellectual substance, and not just a shockmeister intent on delivering cheap gory thrills.
For Canadian viewers, the fact that the film is set largely in an identifiable Toronto, and makes such great use of uber-Canuck references like Moses Znaimer and Marshall McLuhan, makes it all the more fun. Oscar-winner James Woods, always an interesting actor, makes for a compellingly flawed anti-hero, and he shares the screen with a cadre of fine supporting players, including rock star Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits (CBC’s ‘Street Legal’) and the perfectly-cast Jack Creley (Dr. Strangelove and TVO’s ‘Write On!’), who plays the McLuhanesque video-theorist Dr. Brian O’Blivion. To that we say: Long live the New Flesh!
The Dog Who Stopped the War, Dec. 28th 1pm, 35mm, Mayfair Theatre
English-language version of the Quebec film "La Guerre des tuques". From the height of the Cold War comes a tale of a real cold war: kids competing over a giant snow fort. A super-smart dog, toboggans, plenty of snowballs, and a subtle anti-war message make for wintertime fun that the whole family can adore.
Also from the same producer we have the Peanut Butter Solution in March!
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