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.
A scene from Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, which will be playing at the Lightbox this fall
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).
