An architect's rendering of the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
The Toronto International Film Festival seems keen to carry the excitement of its annual movie showcase (35 years old in September!) into the rest of the year. That was the message of Monday's programming announcement for Bell Lightbox, TIFF's new purpose-built downtown headquarters.
TIFF still has to raise more than $20-million to meet all the fundraising goals for the five-storey $196-million Lightbox, set to debut Sept. 12. But it's not letting the shortfall hinder an ambitious agenda of new, old and restored films, lectures, concerts, exhibitions and special events set to unspool in the wake of the 2010 festival.
Much of the programming hinges on the Essential 100, TIFF's list of the most significant films of all time, announced last year and scheduled to begin screening in late September. At the same time, in scheduling presentations of new international and Canadian feature films, the Lightbox's array of five theatres, totalling more than 1,300 seats, clearly is determined to establish itself as a home for first-run cinema.
FILM AND MUSIC
The Lightbox has contracted several musicians from the classical and pop realms to provide live, on-the-spot scores to five silent films included in the Essential 100. Foremost among these is Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), ranked by TIFF as the greatest film of the last 100 years. On the evenings of Sept. 28 and 29, the Toronto Consort will accompany Dreyer's masterpiece with a score adapted by Richard Einhorn from his 1994 oratorio, Voices of Light. The next week, Toronto's experimental instrumental ensemble Do Make Say Think will construct a live score for the screening of 1923's Greed (No. 77), which its director, Erich von Stroheim, originally conceived as a 10-hour epic.
Britain's Michael Nyman, who's scored such films as The Piano and The Draughtsman's Contract, visits the Lightbox in the fall. The first event features an evening presentation by the Michael Nyman Band of Nyman's score to Dziga Vertov's seminal 1929 silent, the ninth-ranked Man with a Movie Camera. Then the band accompanies Nyman's own 64-minute reconstruction/adaptation of the Vertov masterpiece, NYman with a Movie Camera. Two chamber ensembles, one brass, one string, will perform alongside a restored version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (No. 50) Nov. 9 and 10, using an original score by Quebec's Gabriel Thibaudeau. Rebirth of a Nation, on Nov. 16 and 17, is DJ Spooky's re-edited version of D.W. Griffith's 1915 sprawler, Birth of a Nation (No. 81), accompanied by a soundtrack and voiceover from Spooky with an assist from the Baroque ensemble I Furiosi.
GUESTS THIS FALL
David Cronenberg, Isabella Rossellini, Peter Bogdanovich and John Waters are just some of the celebrities scheduled to appear in conjunction with the Lightbox's Essential 100 showcase. On Sept. 23 and 24, Cronenberg will introduce screenings of his 1983 classic, Videodrome, ranked No. 83 in TIFF's top 100, while Oct. 12 Rossellini introduces 1953's Voyage in Italy, directed by her father, Roberto Rossellini, and starring her mother, Ingrid Bergman. That same evening, Rossellini also will screen Guy Maddin's Roberto Rossellini tribute, My Dad is 100 Years Old, plus segments from her Green Porno series (short films about the mating habits of marine creatures) as well as 1986's Blue Velvet, starring herself and directed by her former co-vivant, David Lynch (No. 92 in the Essential 100).
Peter Bogdanovich, known for his direction of such films as The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, is also highly regarded as a scholar of Hollywood cinema, and it's in this capacity he's appearing at the Lightbox, first to introduce John Ford's 1956 cowboy/revenge classic, The Searchers (No. 41) on Oct. 29, then, on Oct. 30, to introduce a screening of Orson Welles's epic Citizen Kane (No. 2). John Waters ( Pink Flamingos, Hairspray) visits Oct. 23 to introduce Pier Paolo Pasolini's Sàlo, or The 120 Days of Sodom, No. 47 in the Essential 100 and often deemed the most shocking film in the history of cinema.
SELECTED SPECIAL EVENTS
* Walter Murch, the esteemed sound editor of such notable features as Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, The English Patient and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, speaks Oct. 10 on the state of cinema. What would have happened had the cinema been invented in 1789 and not in the late 19th century? What were the cultural and technological conditions necessary for cinema's birth? Will cinema in the 21st century undergo a radical reinvention?
* Oct. 4 sees the presentation of a newly struck print of Michael Snow's 1967 experimental masterpiece, Wavelength (No. 73 in the Essential 100), followed by a discussion involving the filmmaker and New York University cinema studies professor Annette Michelson and Princeton avant-garde film historian P. Adams Sitney.
* Just in time for Halloween: Toronto composer Andrew Downing appears live Oct. 29 with his ensemble to perform his original score for the 1919 German Expressionist classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
* To mark the fifth edition of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Oct. 2, TIFF will present 11 short films by France's Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968), generally regarded as cinema's first female director and producer.
Also scheduled: Singin' in the Dark, an all-night sing-along of movie theme songs and tunes, hosted by cabaret artist Shawn Hitchins.
THEATRICAL RUNS
Jesse Wente, head of film programming for the Lightbox, has pulled together a heady array of fresh films and new and restored prints for the facility's fall season. Among the Canadian films receiving commercial runs are Xavier Dolan's follow-up to his acclaimed I Killed My Mother, Les Amours imaginaires (release date: Sept. 23), and Incendies by Polytechnique director Denis Villeneuve (Oct. 21). Also starting that day: Olivier Assayas's Carlos, a 5 1/2-hour biopic on Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as the infamous international terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Other first-run features include Tamra Davis's acclaimed documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, about the enfant terrible of New York's eighties art scene (Oct. 7); Howl, starring James Franco as poet Allen Ginsberg (Oct. 7) and a documentary that's been 10 years in the making, Strange Powers: Stephen Merritt and the Magnetic Fields (Nov. 4).
Among the classics receiving runs of at least one week are new prints of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (No. 18 in the Essential 100; release date: Sept. 30 ), Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (No. 45; Oct. 14), François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (No. 74, Oct. 21) and Alfred Hitchcock's pioneering 1960 slasher thriller, Psycho (No. 68, Oct. 28).