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Film and Video Program
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FILM
SERIES
Jane Austen: Wit and Realism
To accompany the exhibition Lord Dalhousie: Patron and Collector,
the Gallery is featuring one of the most popular film sources of
the 1990s, Jane Austen, who was a contemporary of Lord Dalhousie’s.
Film versions of Austen’s six major novels – chosen
to fit into feature length slots – reveal a stratified English
Society seen uniquely from a woman’s point of view, with humour,
wit and compassion, where manners count as much as character.
SCREENINGS TUESDAYS AT 8 PM
MacAloney
Room, 4th floor, Dalhousie Arts Centre
FREE ADMISSION
January 19 - Sense and Sensibility
Dir: Ang Lee, USA/UK, 1995, 135 minutes. With an Oscar-winning script
by and starring Emma Thompson, this mid-90s costume drama by Brokeback
Mountain director Ang Lee set off a vogue for Jane Austen that
has yet to abate. The story concerns a worthy but impoverished family
who must marry off their daughters into financial stability, possibly
at the cost of true love.
January 26 - Mansfield Park
Dir: Patricia Rozema, UK/USA, 1999, 110 minutes. One of the few
Jane Austen adaptations to be directed by a woman – Toronto’s
Patricia (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing) Rozema
– Mansfield Park concerns itself with the life of
a girl named Fanny, her family and her potential suitors from an
upscale household headed by Sir Thomas, played by Nobel Prize winning
playwright Harold Pinter.
February 2 - Pride and Prejudice
Dir: Robert Z. Leonard, USA, 1940, 114 minutes. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s
opulence marks this sly take on Austen’s story of a family
that must marry off five daughters. Greer Garson and a dashingly
young Laurence Olivier head up an all-star Hollywood cast.
February 9 - Emma
Dir: Douglas McGrath, UK/USA, 1996, 111 minutes. Gwyneth Paltrow
stars as a self-appointed matchmaking expert unaware of the state
of her own heart in this brisk tale of early 19th century romance.
Toni Collette, Alan Cumming also star, with Jeremy Northam as Mr.
Knightly.
February 16 - Persuasion
Dir: Roger Michell, UK, 1995, 102 minutes. The return of a paramour
from the Napoleonic Wars renews the possibility of love for Anne
(Amanda Root) who at 27 is in danger of reaching an age out of the
range for marriage. Considered Austen’s most subtle and nuanced
story, Persuasion restrains its two lead characters, preferring
to let their surroundings and families speak for them.
February 23 - Northanger Abbey
Dir: Jon Jones, UK, 2007, 86 minutes. Hopeless romantic Catherine
(Felicity Jones) gets to indulge her fascination with gothic mysteries
when she is invited by an admirer to the lavish medieval estate
of the title in this gently satiric romantic drama made recently
for British television.
African History Month
Films: Blaxploitation Classics
In the early 1970s African
American filmmakers finally made their mark in the North American
Cinema, with a series of stylish, violent and unapologetically entertaining
movies that are still influential to today’s popular culture.
Referred to then as ‘Blaxploitation’ films – and
nowadays as ‘Grindhouse’ classics – these low-budget,
high-energy flicks sported soundtracks (Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield)
as memorable as the films themselves. This short series will revisit
some of those landmark features.
Warning: adult content throughout.
SCREENINGS MONDAYS AT 8 PM
MacAloney
Room, 4th floor, Dalhousie Arts Centre
FREE ADMISSION
February 1 - Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss
Song
Dir: Melvin Van Peebles, USA, 1971, 97 minutes. The Citizen
Kane of Blaxploitation films – written, directed, produced,
scored and starring the legendary Melvin Van Peebles in the lead
role – Sweet Sweetback follows the title character
on a nightmarish journey through South Central Los Angeles after
he witnesses two policemen assaulting an African American Nationalist.
February 8 - Shaft
Dir: Gordon Parks, Sr., USA, 1971, 90 minutes. Blaxploitation’s
big-studio breakthrough was MGM’s Shaft, brought
to the screen by veteran Life Magazine photographer Gordon Parks.
Richard Roundtree plays the African American private investigator
of the title, battling drug lords, the Mafia and political activists
all to Isaac Hayes’ pulsating score.
February 15 - Superfly
Dir: Gordon Parks, Jr., USA, 1972, 90 minutes. Curtis Mayfield’s
immortal soundtrack powers this tale of an impeccably tailored dealer
(Ron O’Neal) on the run after making his one last score amidst
a declining urban milieu that hadn’t quite reached its mid-70s
nadir.
February 22 - Cooley High
Dir: Michael Schultz, USA, 1975, 107 minutes. Known as the ‘African
American American Graffiti’, Michael (Car Wash) Schultz
looks back at Chicago’s North Side in 1964 to examine a group
of high school seniors preparing for adult life, all to a classic
early 60s Motown soundtrack.
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Some notes about the Dalhousie
Art Gallery’s
Film and Video Programs
The Dalhousie Art Gallery offers the longest-running fine art
and repertory Film and Video Program east of Montreal. Ronald Foley
Macdonald has been our Film and Video Curator for the past 15 years.
He selects films to complement exhibition programs, and organizes
special series on film history and culture. Ron teaches film theory
at NSCAD and is an organizer of the Atlantic Film and Video Festival.
Through him, we also collaborate with the Atlantic Filmmakers’ Co-operative,
providing a periodic space for local experimental films and rarely
seen videos, and with the Annual Atlantic Film and Video Festival,
for which we are now an official venue. Our popular Wednesday film/video
screening and post-film discussion group extends participation in
the critical discourse to new populations of students, faculty and
the general public.
Our film program has three purposes:
- To animate specific exhibitions. For example, Film and
Video by Robert Frank accompanied an exhibition of Frank’s photographs
(1996); films on the Holocaust accompanied Herzl Kashetsky’s exhibiton
A Prayer for the Dead (1998); the series Masters of Modern Sculpture
accompanied the exhibition The Very Thing (2000); the series Space
Aliens accompanied Bill Eakin’s exhibition of photographs of UFO
sightings and alien culture, Have a Nice Day (2001); and, more
recently, the series “The sneaky everyday humour of the surreal”
was programmed to accompany Lynne Cohen’s exhibition No Man’s
Land (2001). Where an artist is a film or videomaker him- or herself,
(as in the case of Robert Frank, or, more recently, Herménégilde
Chiasson) we often present their cinematic and visual works together.
Films are usually screened in the Main Gallery space, so correlations
and references are easy to make, especially during the post-film
discussion. For many people unused to looking at art, but comfortable
with film, this program is an excellent way to prompt thinking
about, and provide access to, contemporary art.
- To examine the history and nature of the film medium itself.
Examples: Eisenstein and Soviet Cinema (organized in collaboration
with the Russian Department in 1995), 100 years of the Cinema
(a collaboration with King’s College Contemporary Studies Program,
1996), Female Filmmakers at Five (a collaboration with the Atlantic
Film Festval 1997), and Six by Kurosawa (a survey of this prominent
Japanese filmmaker’s art, 2001). This program often links up with
and supports film studies in various postsecondary institutions
across Halifax.
- To make a space for public screenings of Canadian films,
and local experiemental film- and video-makers’ works. For
example, we have screened works by Canadian film/videomakers Bill
MacGillivray, Cameron Bailey, Lisa Steele & Kim Tomczak, Herménégilde
Chiasson, Cathy Martin, Sylvia Hamilton, Phil Comeau, Claude Jutra,
Denis Arcand, and women filmmakers from the now defunct NFB Studio
D. More recently, we presented First Nations Films at Five: The
complete films of Alanis Obomsawin (in collaboration with the
Atlantic Film Festival 2001).
We have also aligned our film program more closely with critical
discussion in contemporary media arts, by asking our film curator
to preface certain Gallery film series with illustrated lectures,
and inviting film- and video-makers and critics to present and analyse
their works (such as the visits by curator/critics Cameron Bailey
and Peggy Gale, videomakers Doug Porter and Lisa Steele & Kim Tomczak
and filmmakers Sylvia Hamilton, Cathy Martin and Alanis Obomsawin).
In addition, where appropriate,we arrange viewer access video programs
to accompany exhibitions. These are set up in special viewing stations
in the Gallery, where visitors may select videos from the program
for themselves.
The Gallery’s Film and Video Program is generously supported by
a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.
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