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Film and Video Program

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Film Lecture

Thursday 7 February at 8 PM | Free Admission

By Ron Foley Macdonald

The French New Wave: The Generation of Change
An overview of the major figures, context and films of the French New Wave and its impact on the cinema and popular culture overall, with examples from the works of Godard, Varda, Marker and Truffaut.

Nouvelle Vague Landmarks: The French New Wave and the reach for new cinematic expression

Curated by Ron Foley Macdonald

The French New Wave changed the cinema completely, from how we make movies to how we watch them. Initiated by film critics from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, the Nouvelle Vague led to films shot on the cheap about contemporary subjects on one hand, while playfully re-imagining genres such as Science Fiction and musicals on the other. Without a single unifying theme beyond reaching for a greater sense of personal expressiveness in film, directors such as Malle, Resnais, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, Marker, Varda, Demy, and Vadim marked a trail that would transform cinemas from Hollywood to Japan to Czechoslovakia, injecting a blast of youth, energy and vision that still resonates today.

SCREENINGS WEDNESDAYS AT 8 PM. FREE ADMISSION

23 January - Elevator to the Gallows
Louis Malle, 1957, 88 minutes. With an uber-cool soundtrack improvised by Miles Davis, Malle’s dramatic debut follows two murder stories that intersect ironically while the director charts the new postwar attitude of emotional and existential detachment.

30 January - Les Cousins
Claude Chabrol, 1958, 112 minutes. The first big hit of the Nouvelle Vague sees director Chabrol following the ambivalence of pre-’60s young people as they struggle and celebrate through the new moral relativism infecting the Paris college scene.

6 February - Hiroshima mon amour
Alain Resnais, 1959, 90 minutes. Written with the author Marguerite Duras, this landmark New Wave film obliquely examines the collision between a female WWII collaborator and an A-bomb survivor.

13 February – Breathless
Jean-Luc Godard, 1960, 90 minutes. The breezy and definitive ode to American B-movies, Breathless tells the tale of a small-time hood on the run involved with a young American woman selling the Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris.

20 February - Last Year at Marienbad
Alain Resnais, 1961, 91 minutes. Working with the Nouveau Roman author Alain Robbe-Grillet, director Resnais fashions a quizzical but ultimately elemental essay on memory, place and the passage of time in this opaque, often perplexing classic.

27 February - Jules and Jim
François Truffaut, 1962, 105 minutes. This brisk three-way love story covers nearly twenty years of European history while capturing the enduring yet ephemeral nature of desire. Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner and Henri Serre star.

20 March - Le joli mai
Chris Marker, 1963, 165 minutes. A documentary meditation on the state of Paris–and France itself–just after the end of the bitter Algerian War of Independence, Le joli mai extols the art of personal non-fiction filmmaking.

27 March - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Jacques Demy, 1964, 91 minutes. The startlingly colourful landmark musical sees the luminous Catherine Deneuve singing her way through a two-part love affair in the famous port city of the title.

3 April - Paris vu par
Chabrol, Douchet, Godard, Pollet, Rohmer and Rouch, 1965, 95 minutes. Produced by Barbet Schroeder, Six in Paris lets a half-dozen directors profile different neighbourhoods through six diminutive dramas and comedies.

10 April - La Collectionneuse
Eric Rohmer, 1967, 89 minutes. One of the Six Moral Tales that made director Rohmer’s reputation, La Collectionneuse looks at a brief, self-conscious coupling between a jaded art reseller and a free-willed young woman at a seaside getaway in the South of France.

17 April – Barbarella
Roger Vadim, 1968, 98 minutes. Jane Fonda is unveiled–literally–in this campy romp written by Terry Southern that sees sexuality and Science Fiction blend in a wild futuristic vision.

24 April - Celine and Julie go Boating
Jacques Rivette, 1974, 193 minutes. Rivette’s most famous film follows two twentysomething young women as they explore magic and a possibly enchanted house in Paris in the early 1970s.

1 May – Daguerréotypes
Agnès Varda, 1975, 80 minutes. A documentary portrait of a lesser-known Paris neighbourhood, Daguerréotypes plays particular and loving attention to the sharply etched characters that populate the street corners.

8 May - The Story of Adele H.
François Truffaut, 1975, 96 minutes. Set partially in Halifax, Truffaut’s late feature recalls the tragic life of legendary author Victor Hugo’s daughter and her doomed love affair with a callous officer.


African History Month Films: Black Power!

Curated by Ron Foley Macdonald

SCREENINGS TUESDAYS AT 8 PM. FREE ADMISSION

5 February - The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
Göran Olsson, Sweden, 2011, 100 minutes. Frank interviews and footage of major post-Martin Luther King African-American figures such as Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael and Bobby Seale, conducted by sympathetic Swedes for European broadcast, make for an astonishing time capsule and blast of hidden history. 

12 February - Story of a 3-Day Pass
Melvin Van Peebles, France, 1967, 87 minutes. The first feature directed by an African-American man in 40 years, Van Peebles’ debut feature is a New Wave dazzler about an American serviceman on a weekend pass in France battling racism and finding love.

19 February - Putney Swope
Robert Downey Sr., USA, 1969, 84 minutes. When the only Black employee of a Madison Avenue ad firm is left in charge, he hires Black activists to remake the advertising world. Think Mad Men taken over by the Black Panthers and you might get the idea behind this truly subversive satire. 

26 February - I Will Follow
Ava DuVernay, USA, 2011, 80 minutes. A rare indie feature breakout written and directed by an African-American woman, I Will Follow gently tells the tale of a grieving woman who is helped to move on by 12 friends.


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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:

  1. 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.
     
  2. 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.
     
  3. 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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