News #009: "Making a film is like going into an intestine"
This week's rep report featuring events and podcasts from all over
Hello and welcome to Rep Cinema International. This week’s newsletter focuses on events, job opportunities and other miscellanea related to repertory cinema around the world. This newsletter is a self-initiated project that arose from my perception that there needs to be more attention and comment on the very special film screenings happening across many different cities and countries.
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Repertory cinema highlights
Yes Sir! Madame... at Cinémathèque québécoise (Montreal)
As part of the ongoing partnership between Cinémathèque québécoise and Éléphant, who restore and promote the history of Quebecois cinema, this special screening of Robert Morin’s cult film Yes Sir! Madame… (1994) caught my eye. The trailer sets up the film’s main conceit: Earl Tremblay, played by Morin himself, is a bilingual schizophrenic who narrates his life through diary film footage, speaking over it with dual French and English voiceover. This performance of reality interrogates the diary film form, narrativizing it while presenting the action naturalistically. Things seem to fly off course and I wonder if showing a protagonist’s obsession with filming reality from a third person perspective might be somewhat similar to Ivan Zulueta’s Arrebato (1979)? It’s also worth mentioning that another video work by Robert Morin will be screened in the concurrent series Vidéographe - 50 ans, celebrating 50 years of the organization’s research and dissemination of video and experimental moving image works, more info here.
A Cuban Fight Against the Demons at Block Cinema (Chicago)
Northwestern University’s Block Cinema just screened a recent restoration of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 17th-century period film A Cuban Fight Against the Demons (1972). “The film follows Juan Contreras, a landowner in a 17th-century Cuba whose unorthodox ideas and free-spirited lifestyle run afoul of the Church and the Spanish colonial bureaucracy. Using radical techniques of cinematography and montage, Alea figures Contreras as a man “born too early,” one whose disobedience represents the first stirrings in a 300-year struggle for independence.” The Academy Film Archive and the Cinemateca de Cuba partnered on the restoration of A Cuban Fight Against the Demons and Alea’s 1979 The Survivors and produced a short video on the collaboration that brought these two films back to life.
Our Corpses Are Still Alive at CINEMATEK (Brussels)
This exceedingly rare Rosa von Praunheim film from 1981 (“A staged documentary which gathers five women who came of age in the 1930s—ranging from a lesbian-feminist journalist to a pro-Hitler housewife—for a week in a small apartment to see what will happen”) screens at Brussels’ CINEMATEK as part of Ledoux 100: Films Flamboyants, a series that I can’t find much info on but is presumably in association with the centenary exhibition on the museum’s founder, Jacques Ledoux (1921–1988). The series, which started in September and wraps up mid-November, includes a number of eccentric classics from the likes of David Cronenberg, John Waters, Erich von Stroheim and Busby Berkeley, as well as some other notable outliers, like Bigas Luna’s Poodle (1989). FIAF also has an online exhibition which details Ledoux’s history and years as the organization’s Sectretary-General.
Women Pioneers of French Cinema at Cinémathèque de Tanger
Morocco’s very special cinematheque hosts this five-program series featuring the films of Nicole Vedres, Marie Louise-Iribe, Germaine Dulac, Alice Guy-Blaché and Musidora’s Pour Don Carlos (1921), which I was lucky to see as an in-progress version of the restoration of during the retrospective “Rendez-Nous Musidora” at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2019. The series is available to screen via the Institut Français and should be in regular repertory rotation everywhere.
Emir Kusturica at Jugoslovenska Kinoteka (Belgrade)
It’s hard to translate the screening schedule of the Jugoslovenska Kinoteka but what I could gather from their Emir Kusturica retrospective this month is that the Serbian filmmaker’s early film Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981) has been restored by the Filmski Centar Sarajevo who should presumably be able to make it available via DCP.
Listening
Here’s a few podcasts I’ve enjoyed over the last weeks.
I’ve liked listening to Nicolas Rapold’s The Last Thing I Saw podcast over the past months and in particular recommend this recent episode with Jon Dieringer of Screen Slate.
The Film Comment Podcast had a recent episode with Wendell B. Harris on his 1989 film Chameleon Street, currently making the rounds courtesy of Arbelos Films.
I really love the documentary films of Andrea Luka Zimmerman, who spoke about her practice and especially her relationship with the subjects of her films for the Below the Radar podcast.
This just in: from Steve Macfarlane’s Element X Cinema a conversation with musician, composer, cartoonist, video editor and audio mixologist Matt Macfarlane on the art of the movie preview. Listen here.
Job listings
Anthology Film Archives (New York), Head Projectionist, full time
Arrow Films/Engine House Media Services (London), QC and Disc Authoring Assistant, full time
BAVC Media (San Francisco), Development Director, full time
Cousin (United States), Assistant, part time
Images Festival (Toronto), Programming Director (full time)
New York Public Library, Media Preservation Services Intern (paid), part time
Sheffield DocFest (Sheffield, UK), Senior Programmer, full time
University of Cambridge (Cambridge, UK), Teaching Associate, Film and Screen Studies (fixed term)
University of St. Andrews (Scotland), Lecturer in Film Studies (full time)
VideoDataBank (Chicago), Director, full time
Yorkshire Film Archive (York, UK), Archive Collections Cataloguer
Endnotes
Featured images: Our Corpses Are Still Alive (Rosa von Praunheim, 1981) // Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris, 1989)
Several interviews are in the works as well as a new section titled Expanded, bringing deeper context to specific events, news stories and issues within the field of film exhibition and distribution. Stay tuned!
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