Cinematic Milestones at the Cinemateque Ontario this Fall

Screenshot: Cinematheque Ontario Calendar for October 2008
Credit: Cinematheque Ontario

Cinematheque Ontario's new Fall season has started on October 17, 2008. A very interesting program of films. Check the calendar.

Cinemateque Ontario: Fall Season:
October 17 - December 14, 2008

WAR AND PEACE
(VOYNA I MIR)
Director: Sergei Bondarchuk
Year: 1965-1967
Runtime: 415 minutes
Country: USSR
Cast: Sergei Bondarchuk, Lyudmila Savelyeva
Screening Times:
October 17, 2008 7:00 PM
October 18, 2008 7:00 PM
October 19, 2008 1:00 PM
October 20, 2008 7:00 PM
Screens at Jackman Hall
Images Courtesy of the Film Reference Library

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
Director: David Lean
Year: 1965
Runtime: 193 minutes
Country: USA/UK
Cast: Julie Christie, Omar Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin
Screening Times:
October 24, 2008 7:00 PM
Screens at Jackman Hall
Images Courtesy of the Film Reference Library

ALEKSANDRA
Director: Alexander Sokurov
Year: 2007
Runtime: 92 minutes
Country: Russia
Cast: Galina Vishnevskaya, Vasily Shevtsov
Screening Times:
October 25, 2008 7:00 PM
October 26, 2008 5:30 PM
Screens at Jackman Hall
Images Courtesy of the Film Reference Library

ELEGIA ZHIZNI: ROSTROPOVICH VISHNEVSKAYA
Director: Alexander Sokurov
Year: 2006
Runtime: 101 minutes
Country: Russia
Cast: Mstislav Rostropovich, Alexander Sokurov
Screening Times:
October 26, 2008 3:30 PM
Screens at Jackman Hall
Images Courtesy of the Film Reference Library

100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA
Director: Nagisa Oshima
Year: 1995
Runtime: 52 minutes
Country: UK
Screening Times:
December 9, 2008 7:00 PM
followed by KYOTO, MY MOTHER’S PLACE
Screens at Jackman Hall
Images Courtesy of the Film Reference Library
If Godard’s history of French cinema for the British Film Institute’s “Century of Cinema” series was predictably polemical, Oshima’s goes it one better by producing a history of Japanese film that is outright perverse in its seeming disdain for many of its giants. (Critics have speculated as to why Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Kurosawa are slighted, given one clip each while Oshima accords his own films four!) Oshima begins with the silent period, and shuttles through the family dramas of the Thirties, the rise of militarism and the effect of WWII on the film industry, the postwar golden age, the arrival of the Japanese New Wave, and the subsequent emergence of independent directors from Terayama and Kitano to Yoshimitsu Morita and Yoichi Sai. Oshima ends with the wish that Japanese cinema “free itself from the spell of Japan and blossom as pure cinema.” Fascinating in the context of this retrospective, Oshima’s history of his country’s cinema has a muted string quartet score by Toru Takemitsu.
Please note: Narration is in English.

Cinemateque Ontario: Fall Season: October 17 - December 14, 2008