Free Film Event: Feb. 24, Regina

That’s a wrap? Killing Saskatchewan's film tax credit is economic nonsense

By Craig Silliphant
Art Threat
April 10, 2012

The cast from InSecurity. The TV show will no longer be produced in Saskatchewan.

With the announcement of the axing of the Saskatchewan Film Employment Tax Credit, we are effectively telling the rest of the film-producing world that Saskatchewan is closed for business. It’s a commonly known fact that film productions will not so much as consider a location that doesn’t have a tax credit program in place. In fact, even the ubiquitous Hollywood movie The Hunger Games, which made $155 million in its opening weekend, utilized a tax credit from North Carolina.

Being a movie lover, and writer / broadcaster in the province who is often identified with film, this makes me want to vomit with rage. I’d probably be working at 7-11 if not for the Saskatchewan film industry, which gave me my start and taught me how both the art and the business of how films work. This, in turn, helped my writing appear in places like The National Post.

Grierson

National Film Board of  Canada
1973

This feature film is a portrait of John Grierson, the first Canadian Government Film Commissioner and founder the National Film Board in 1939. Interweaving archival footage, interviews with people who knew him and footage of Grierson himself, this film is a sensitive and informative portrait of a dynamic man of vision.

Grierson believed strongly that the filmmaker had a social responsibility, and that film could help a society realize democratic ideals. His absolute faith in the value of capturing the drama of everyday life was to influence generations of filmmakers all over the world. In fact, he coined the term "documentary film."

Alfred Hitchcock Presents "Class Struggle"

By Mervyn Nicholson
Monthly Review
December 2011

Class struggle is the last thing most people would associate with Alfred Hitchcock, probably the most famous director of them all. But there is a connection, nevertheless. No one would call Hitchcock a socialist; he emphasized that all he wanted was to entertain people—not instruct them. He was proud of his commercial success (and so were the studios that employed him). He made cynical-sounding remarks about manipulating audiences, and he never bothered with deep-level interpretation of his films.

It is true that his movies of the war period (1939–45) are conspicuously antifascist, Lifeboat most of all, but the common view is that Hitchcock is essentially apolitical. “You generally avoid any politics in your films,” the French director François Truffaut said to him, and Hitchcock’s reply sums up his attitude: “It’s just that the public doesn’t care for films on politics.” He has nothing against it, but it is not what the public wants. It is significant that even Lifeboat was accused by some critics of supporting the Nazis.

Academics typically discuss everything about Hitchcock, except class—class not in a quasi-cultural sense, but in the technical and Marxist sense of class, with related themes of surplus extraction, alienation, immiseration, and revolution, implied in the term. As John Grant puts it, “the notion of ‘class’ is a dirty word in today’s America.” Critics notice the “dark side” of American society, plainly depicted in Hitchcock’s Hollywood movies; they discuss the alienation and cynicism, the satire, even nihilism, in his films.

Read more HERE.

Cosmonaut (Cosmonauta)

Portobello Pictures
2009

"A crowd pleasing coming-of-ager”
Variety

“I’m a Communist!” declares Luciana at age 9.

It’s now 1963 and 15 year old Luciana has been obsessed with Russian space missions since she was a little girl, a passion passed on by her older, oddball brother Arturo. She is now a committed member of the local Italian Federation of Young Communists and is nursing a hopeless crush on the handsome leader of the group, also her friend’s boyfriend. Susanna Nicchiarelli’s first feature follows feisty Luciana trying to get the boys in her group to take her ideas seriously as she suffers through the initial blast off and return to Earth of first love.

A teenage girl growing up in the Sixties finds an unusual way to impress a boy and show up her older brother in this bittersweet coming-of-age debut feature from director Susanna Nicchiarelli, which was selected for the "New Trends in Italian Cinema" section at the 2009 Venice Film Festival.

Luciana (Miriana Raschilla) was just a baby when her father died, but stories of his devotion to the Italian Communist party have had a strong impact on her and her older brother Arturo (Pietro del Giudice). They follow the progress of the space program together, urging on the Soviet cosmonauts. When Arturo declares his ambition to someday become a cosmonaut, Luciana starts her own personal space race, announcing that she intends to beat her brother into outer space and become the first woman in orbit. But it's hard to say how much of this is a genuine ambition, and how much is intended to impress Vittorio (Michelangelo Ciminale), the handsome leader of the Young Communists.

Sergio Rubini is terrific as Luciana's stern stepfather and Nicchiarelli, who co-stars as a party woman who inspires Luciana, skilfully evokes the period, contrasting historical events with the trials of adolescence, interspersing fascinating footage of the early Soviet space missions with newly recorded contemporary versions of pop songs from the period.

The Brother From Another Planet (full movie)

An early classic from John Sayles...



REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT / January 1, 1984

When the movies started to talk, they began to lose the open-eyed simplicity with which they saw the world. THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET tells the story of a man who cannot talk, but who can read minds, listen carefully, look deep into eyes, and provide a sort of mirror for our society. That makes it sound serious, but like all the most serious movies, it's a comedy.

The film stars Joe Morton as a visitor from outer space, who looks like a black human being, unless you look carefully at the three funny toes on his feet. He arrives on Earth in a spaceship that looks borrowed from the cheapest B space operas from the 1950s, swims ashore, and finds himself on Manhattan Island. At first he is completely baffled. Before long, everyone he meets is just as baffled. It is strange to deal with people who confound all your expectations: It might even force you to reevaluate yourself.

The Voice of the Mapuche

Director: Pablo Fernandez and Andrea Henriquez

Synopsis

The Mapuche defeated the Spanish Crown invaders, and do not recognize the border that Chile and Argentina have tried to impose. Presently, the struggle is focused on maintaining their identity as a people, and stopping the encroachment of multinational corporations in Mapuche ancestral territory. In an effort to increase profits, logging, hydroelectric, oil, mining, and tourist companies - among others - cause destruction and pollution on both sides of the Andes Mountains.

The music, the paintings, the poetry, the language, the rituals, the traditions, and the strength of nature and the ancestors are present in "The Voice of the Mapuche". In this independent documentary, the Mapuche vision of the world is the basis to understand the struggle.

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

Progressive films shine at Toronto film fest

By Bill Meyer
People's World 

September 26 2011

This year's Toronto International Film Festival offered another amazing array of films. With over 350 titles to choose from, the chance of viewing a variety of great films was not difficult. Interestingly, and similar to the Traverse City Festival, the most challenging and rewarding film was the longest one. The lengthy four-and-a-half-hour Vapor Trail (Clark) in Traverse City was beat out in length by the 15-hour Story of Cinema (An Odyssey), a monumental study of film history that was shown in separate episodes throughout the TIFF.

Providing not only a clear demonstration of the development of filmmaking through the decades, the marathon doc also presents a highly personalized but intriguing sampling of famous and neglected films over the years.

Key interviews with filmmakers who changed the world of cinema, philosophical and political analyses, fast paced editing and a voiceover with a charming Irish brogue by the filmmaker and critic, Mark Cousins himself, makes this one of the most engrossing and developed studies of film for political activists to date.

Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives

Pluto Press 
May 2005

From the introduction

Film remains one of the most dominant cultural forms in the world today. Crossing classes and cultures, it permeates many aspects of our consciousness. In film, perhaps more than any other medium, we can read the politics of time and place, past and present. The history of Marxism has intersected with film in many ways and this book is a timely reminder of the fruits of that intersection, in film theory and film practice.

Marxist film theory returns to film studies some of the key concepts which make possible a truly radical, political understanding of the medium and its place both within capitalism and against it. This book shows how questions of ideology, technology and industry must be situated in relation to class  a category which academia is distinctly uncomfortable with. It explores the work of some of the key theorists who have influenced our understanding of film, such as Adorno, Althusser, Benjamin, Brecht, Gramsci, Jameson and others. It shows how films must be situated in their social and historical contexts, whether Hollywood, Russian, Cuban, Chinese or North Korean cinema.

The authors explore the political contradictions and tensions within dominant cinema and discuss how Marxist filmmakers have pushed the medium in new and exciting directions.

Open publication - Free publishing

Full Movie: Libertarias

Libertarias 

English subtitles (1996 – Vicente Aranda)

Libertarias is a Spanish historical drama made in 1996. It was written and directed by Vicente Aranda.

In 1936, Maria (Ariadna Gil), a young nun is recruited by Pilar (Ana Belén), a militant feminist, into an anarchist militia following the onset of the Spanish Civil War. Guided by the older woman, Maria is exposed to the realities of war and revolution, and comes to question her former, sheltered life.

In the midst of the Spanish Revolution and Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, militia women Pilar (Ana Belen) and Floren (Victoria Abril) are joined by former prostitute Charo (Loles Leon) and former nun Maria (Ariadna Gil). The film opens with scenes of working class militants demolishing and burning religious icons, as they shout "down with Capitalism!" and "long live the libertarian revolution!"

While fully immersed in the overall enthusiasm of revolutionary Spain, Pilar and friends find themselves fighting against deep gender inequality which complicates their efforts in the war against Francisco Franco's Nationalist/Fascist/Catholic forces. They encounter resistance even within their own "Free Women" (Mujeres Libres) organization as one woman (that resembles Federica Montseny) tries to persuade them to stay and work in defense factories, while men try to convince them to go work as cooks, not front-line soldiers.


Libertarias - English subtitles (1996 - Vicente Aranda) from Stuart Christie on Vimeo.

Labour Front

National Film Board of Canada

This newsreel on the mobilization of manpower during World War II shows how the workers on production lines produced a tremendous volume of materials for the Allied war effort. It points out that after the war these workers expect to find the opportunities of peace.