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.

Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal, Oct. 23rd 9:10pm

Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal is a Danish-Canadian co-production shot in the Ottawa area in the winter of 2011. This comedy-horror movie features appealing Danish actor Thure Lindhardt as Lars Olafssen, a world-famous artist with ‘painter’s block’ who takes a teaching job at an obscure art school in a small Canadian town. Struggling to fit into his new surroundings, he soon finds inspiration in Eddie, a mute gentle-giant of a man with an odd somnambulistic habit: stalking the woods at night and devouring small forest animals.

Canadian actor Dylan Smith (Immortals) plays Eddie with subtle menace, effectively portraying the character’s Jekyll and Hyde nature. Georgina Reilly (‘Murdoch Mysteries’) lends appropriate cuteness and intelligence as Lars’s nascent love-interest. Supporting standouts include Paul Braunstein (‘Train 48’) as a smart small-town cop, and Stephen McHattie (Pontypool) as Lars’ art dealer suddenly eager for more commissions.

First-time feature director and co-writer Boris Rodriguez pulls together an entertaining story skewering artistic pretension with low-brow horror. The film makes good use of its small-town setting to build suspense and takes particular advantage of the harsh beauty of the Canadian winter to enhance the film’s themes and visuals.

Eric Hynes of The Village Voice calls the film ‘inspired’ and says that it ‘strikes just the right balance between camp horror and clever satire.’

– Lost Dominion Screening Collective

Oct. 23rd 9:10pm @ The Bytowne Cinema

Part of the Canadian Cult Revue film series at the ByTowne,
 
Producer Michael Dobbin will attend a Q&A after the screening, along with some members of the cast and crew.

Dump Talk: Dogma Television North of 60

Lost Dominion Screening Collective presents:
Dump Talk Retrospective
Club SAW (67 Nicholas St.) – Tuesday September 18th, 2012, 7:30pm, 75mins
Part of the Canadian Cult Revue III series
Admission is a food or cash donation to the Ottawa Food Bank, cash bar

In the fall of 2001, Yellownkife community cable debuted a new home-grown TV-show filmed largely in the winter in the town's garbage dump. Dump Talk  featured interviews, improvised comedy and documentary vignettes exploring the lifestyle and culture of the largest town in the Northwest Territories. Loosely inspired by the “dogma” filmmaking trend out of Scandinavia, whereby films were produced with the barest of production values, Dump Talk took pride in making a virtue of its minimal-to-non-existent budget. Treasures scavenged in the dump and sold on eBay helped finance production expenses. The talk-show set was constructed and deconstructed each episode out of refuse and recycling found on location. Dump Talk became a "must view, cult hit" for local Yellowknifers, which was probably helped by the fact that it aired right after TV-Bingo.

The show also took some of its inspiration from the halcyon days of Ottawa's community-cable volunteer movement (pre-Rogers corporate slickification), when rough-and-ready genre-bending shows such as the early “Tom Green Show” and “In Your Face!” took comedy to the streets of the city and aired their shows with minimal censorship or corporate interference. Two of Dump Talk's creators, Paul Gordon, and Adam Bowick were Ottawa-raised transplants to the North, and they brought some of that NCR video-pride to the YK. As far as we know, Dump Talk is the only TV-show in Canadian history to be filmed primarily on location in a town dump.

VHS tapes have been passed around, but never has a DVD of Dump Talk been assembled until now. To celebrate the occasion we decided to make a party of it.  Bowick and Gordon will be on hand to introduce the video and answer questions. It should make for a fun evening at Club SAW.

Yellowknifer Article here from Dec 21st 2001

Canadian Cult Revue Season III Poster

More info to come!

Cinema Under the Stars III Aug 10-11th

Raven's Knoll and the Lost Dominion Screening Collective present:

Cinema Under the Stars III, August 10th and 11th 2012

Friday August 10th at dusk we bring you vintage 16mm animated films

The program runs approx. 70mins.

Titles include:

Trolls of Norway, a look at all the different trolls that inhabit the streams, forests and Caves of Norway

Legend of Paul Bunyan, an animated look at the legendary giant and his companion Babe the Blue Ox. 

+ some surprise vintage cartoons, trailers and snipes.

On Saturday, August 11th at dusk we present the fantasy classic, The Dark Crystal, on 35mm, 1982, Rated PG, 93mins

 The Dark Crystal (1982) is one of those films that sticks with you long after you've seen it. Why? Because it's super cool! It's an elaborately concocted fantasy adventure film made with puppets, co-directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, longtime creative collaborators on both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show (and later Labyrinth). It was also produced by Gary Kurtz, one of the producers of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. The film follows the journey of Jen, an elf-like “Gelfling”, as he quests to save his world from destruction. That's a pretty classic template for adventure, and the film doesn't disappoint.

It wasn't a huge blockbuster when it came out, but it was very successful, particularly in Europe and Japan. If you were lucky enough to see it as a kid you probably have more than a few indelible memories, mostly owing to its amazing puppetry, fantastical sets, and the fact that it's a genuinely scary movie. It also has great moments of humour and wonderment. The fact that the puppets are “real” give the film a sense of solidity and reality that is lacking in many of today's computer-generated fantasy films. That is perhaps part of the secret of its current status as a cult fantasy favourite that finds more ardent fans with each passing year. The film not only looks great, it sounds great too, as just as much effort was put into the sound design as into the puppets. It will be an awesome summer treat at Raven's Knoll!

The films are free, camping rates are $11 per adult, $5 for children

Special thank you to SAW Video for donating a 12ft fast fold cinema screen for the weekend.

Cinema Under the Stars III August 10th-11th at Dusk

Once again we will be screening film under the stars at Raven's Knoll Campground. Raven's Knoll is a just outside of Eganville, Ontario on the Bonnechere River close to Golden lake. Check back for more details on the lineup. The films will start at dusk near the Raven stage. All feature films we be shown on 35mm, with shorts on 16mm.  Projector Stats:  35mm Century CC with Simplex Sound Head, 6000ft kelmar reels arms, 750watt Xenon ORC lamphouse.

The films are free, camping is $11 a night per adult, $5.00 per child.