ADFF 2014 Articles (or, I really should write things here rather than just linking to the ADFF site, but....)

I was asked once again to contribute to the website for the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (taking place October 23 to November 1), and this year wrote four articles discussing five films.

Margaret Brown, one of my favourite filmmakers (and my buddy since her beautiful debut Be Here to Love Me screened at TIFF a million years ago) has her utterly brilliant documentary The Great Invisible at ADFF. The film also opens in NYC and LA this Friday -- you should see it if you can. My ADFF review here may give you some arguments why. (Like how I did that?!) Or, if I can't persuade you, here's the trailer.

I also contributed articles on:
- Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes, a film that joins Margaret's in being, in essence, about the American soul and which was my top pick at TIFF this year;
- Theeb, the first ever "Bedouin Western" and another film that also really dazzled me at TIFF;
- and the aesthetic choices fueling two disparate documentaries, The Wanted 18 and Iraqi Odyssey. The former uses stop-motion animation (of cows, no less) and the latter 3D.

It's always a pleasure to write for ADFF as their programming team tends to select many of my top picks that I've seen at Hot Docs or TIFF and they really let me write whatever I want in my reviews of the films; to whit, my review of The Great Invisible has pretty pointed things to say about the oil industry and did I mention that the festival is in Abu Dhabi...? Anyhow, if you are interested in my latest published musings on films, the links above will take you there.

Journal Article Published: Spectacular Paris

Hello loyal readers (reader?)! This is becoming (so sadly), the only thing I post on this blog, but I wanted to mention that a journal article loooong in fruition* has recently seen the publication light of day.

(*Especially so, if you consider that it grew out of a paper I wrote for a graduate architecture seminar in 2003.)

The article is ponderously titled "Spectacular Paris: Representations of Nostalgia and Desire," and it appears in the journal Paroles Gelées (vol. 26 no. 1), available online here. It's kind of a favourite piece of mine: a mobilization of theories including Guy Debord's work in Society of the Spectacle to interrogate the (near)coincident opening of the Paris Las Vegas resort and casino and the release of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, all in short succession around the turn of the millennium. Lots of meaty discussion of illusion, false vacations and, naturally, the spectacle. Both films discussed play a big role in chapter 5 of my diss, so it's nice to see some of my ongoing analysis in this vein see the light of day. Sort of a preview of things to come. Soon.

[Image from Moulin Rouge, dir Baz Luhrmann, 2001]

And Another Overdue Mention...

Last spring, I co-edited an anthology on the cinematic representation of my hometown (and current home) with the inimitable Steve Gravestock, TIFF's Associate Director of Canadian Programming.

Toronto on Film was published by TIFF and distributed by Wilfrid Laurier University Press (by Indiana University Press outside of Canada). Click here for a link to the WLUP site.

You can read a review of the anthology in the Spring 2010 volume of Cineaste.

It was my first scholarly editing stab, both trial by fire and incredibly rewarding. The collection features essays by critic Geoff Pevere and scholars including Brenda Longfellow, Wyndham Wise and Justin D. Edwards, as well as contributions by TIFF's in-house experts Steve Gravestock, Piers Handling and Matthew Hays, tracing the evolution of the industry here, the eventual obsession with/necessity for role-playing as other cities (license-plating, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith once referred to it) and, as of late, it's return to some semblance of... itself.

Overdue Mention...

Back in the summer, a chapter of mine - first ever to be published - finally saw the light of day after a many-year wait and valiant efforts by the editors to see the project to completion. The anthology is called Moving Pictures/Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film, and was published in July of last year by Lexington Books.


My chapter, written concurrently with the formative stages of my dissertation work, is ponderously titled "Just an Anonymous Room: Cinematic Hotels and Motels as Mnemonic Purgatories." (Honestly... what was I thinking?) The approach is reflective of my (then less-developed) fascination with the intersection of space/spatialization and narrative in filmmaking, analyzing such spaces as "paradigmatic zones of transit and homelessness." I look at Leaving Las Vegas, Memento, The Business of Strangers, Tape, Century Hotel, Chelsea Walls, The Tesseract, Dirty Pretty Things and 2046 and deconstruct the functions of the hotel/motel space in support of the narratives' creation of purgatorial spaces.

Mercifully, I think the chapter held up over the years and the anthology overall contains some great, vigorous analytical writing.

The book is available on Amazon and other online sellers, and hopefully at many local and campus libraries.

Published: Article on Continental, un film sans fusil

A speedy update to announce that a brief article of mine has been published in Cinema Scope's Winter 2008 Issue #33. Unfortunately the text isn't available online, but you can check out a copy of the magazine at your local bookstore or Film Reference Library.

Here's the article's intro:

"Cinema is as much about disappearance as it is about presence; after all, “persistence of vision”—the mind’s subconscious determination to bridge the image that has just vanished to the one that is arriving—is as much about that which has departed as that which remains. On a broader scale, Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil is inspired by that process, by how we bridge the gap that comes after loss. Its loosely knotted narrative is initiated by a single, specific and yet baffling disappearance: a businessman who dozes off on public transit wakes to find himself alone on the bus on a deserted roadside. He steps off, peers into the near-absolute darkness of the adjacent woods, then walks—purposefully? timidly?—into the trees and is gone.

"While the man’s vanishing is the ostensible glue between Continental’s four protagonists, it is merely the analogue of their deeper commonalities: loss, disappearance and emptiness. It is a film of myriad absences, proceeding from the second half of its title (“a film without guns”). Watching Continental is like spying on the Quebecois cousins of the grey-faced, typically despondent protagonists of Swedish iconoclast Roy Andersson’s films. Like Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (played TIFF 2007), Continental focuses upon modern dissociation and disconnect."

I go on to explore the film in relation to my theorization of networked narratives. It was a short article, but one that I really enjoyed writing, in part because the film itself is so lovely. (It was declared one of Canada's Top Ten by TIFFG for 2007.)

You should check it out.