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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:

  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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