We can start carving an annual slot in our calendars for the YouTube-centric Buffer film festival. This is the third straight year Buffer Festival will be popping up for a weekend at venues throughout the Entertainment District. They claim to have sold 10 000 tickets last year with more growth expected this time.
This year you can choose from as many as 12 different video screenings, running about 90 minutes, each featuring YouTube content creators and filmmakers talking about the biz and their work. A select few ticket purchasers can arrange meetups with their favourite YouTube stars as well.
The big shindig is the red carpet gala premiere tonight at 9:00 p.m. at Roy Thomson Hall. The full slate of attendees is here but we know that Canadians JusReign and Matthew Santoro will be there.
Oct. 23 is also Creator Day, a new workshop designed for those looking to get in on the act of creating YouTube content worthy of those desperately sought after views and subscribers. It takes place at the Glenn Gould Studio.
More Pialat
For more on TIFF’s Maurice Pialat retrospective check out last week’s column.
The Pialat oeuvre is a body of work and most of it, with the possible exception of Police (Nov 13), reflects the director’s outlook and sensibilities such that plucking them out to discuss individually is difficult. It’s a rare instance where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. There’s no room to talk about them all though so, in addition to the terrific films already mentioned last week, the one that stands out to me is probably À nos amours.
The critic Molly Haskell, in her essay on the film for the Criterion Collection, notes a trope in French cinema where older, invariably male, filmmakers shoehorn their own lusts onto nubile, young female characters exploring their sexuality. Pialat comes close to stepping in it a bit with his depiction a young woman named Suzanne (played by a very young Sandrine Bonnaire) but ultimately skirts cliche.
Suzanne tries to stifle her own boredom with a series of sexual encounters that range from the frivolous to the sad. We quickly find that she’s trying to ward off the youthful frustrations wherein life seems stalled and already a bit played out. The film also digs into critiques of family structures, with Pialat himself playing an abusive, but also complicated father. The abuse in the film comes rather startlingly, and a telling presumption of normalcy.
It could be viewed as more of Pialat’s old world view being foisted onto today, but there’s also more complicated feelings to be had here. Certain scenes reveal that, in the end, no one knows where they stand. It starts out like many earlier Pialat films, with a slightly ordained, condescending take, but gradually starts to peel away at the hubris to find a reality wherein nothing is all that firm. It screens Oct. 29 at 6:30 p.m. and is probably the one to see.
But don’t stop there unless you have to. I have not had the chance to watch the four episodes of Pialat’s television series The House in the Woods — although I have it on good authority it’s quite good — but his terrific look at the final days of Vincent Van Gogh (Nov. 7) as well as a rending chamber drama about a dying woman called The Mouth Agape are well worth seeing. The retrospective closes Dec. 5 with a towering documentary on the man titled Maurice Pialat, Love Exists. The event runs concurrently at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and the Harvard Film Archive this fall.
Pre-Halloween
Last week’s screengrab was…
The Mask (Eyes of Hell)
Julian Roffman’s bit of gimmicky horror is by no means good. In fact, the plot lurches forward from one mind-numbing contrivance to another. It does, however, possess a few isolated hallucination sequences that take the viewer into a dream netherworld — done in traditional 3-D as seen through the eyes of said mask — resembling a sacrificial alter and The River Styx that could stand in line with Jean Cocteau’s great Orpheus or La Belle et la Bête.
It’s actually quite something to see something so good wrapped in something so bad. The plot involves an ancient mask that has the power to drive its wearer insane. A young brilliant archeologist steals it from the museum and ends up going batty before bestowing it on his therapist for more hijinks. If you’re ever going to see this film, please do so during TIFF’s new digital restoration of the film in 2K anaglyph 3D. You can all chuckle at the repeated prompting to “put the mask on,” but once you do, you may actually be rather impressed. It was shot in Toronto and released in 1961, so you do get some neat glimpses at the city more than 50-years on. Catch it starting Oct 23.
And of course, if you’re in need of a little more pre-Halloween classic creep, go check out the beginning of TIFF’s retrospective on British horror. Horror of Dracula (Oct. 24 9:15 p.m.) is the first time Christopher Lee sports the cape and fangs and features the wonderful Peter Cushing as Dr. Van Helsing. To this day, this Hammer Studios version is my favourite Dracula… at least with sound.
Toronto Screengrab of the Week
More scares this week. This time another in the long-stream of Hollywood remakes of J-horror from the mid-00s.
