Hogtown. The T-dot. The Great Lakes’ second-prettiest city after East Lansing. Call it what you will but Toronto will most definitely take centre stage when TIFF Cinematheque (as Cinematheque Ontario has been officially rebranded) begins its fall season this weekend with two new programs.
A series of features, docs and shorts with a civic-minded bent, “Toronto on Film” celebrates the recent publication of a book of the same name. As the first critical study of Toronto’s history on screen, it’s long overdue, though the city’s decades-long reluctance to truly assert itself as a worthy subject — as opposed to a faceless stand-in for New York, Detroit, Chicago et al. — may have something to do with that.
The perceptive essay by Geoff Pevere at the heart of the book articulates that tension and illustrates how the changing face of the city can be scrutinized in the movies in which Toronto plays itself, a wildly diverse spate of works ranging from the footage of the Great Fire of 1904 to tax-shelter-era thrillers like The Kidnapping of the President through to the Parkdale extravaganza that is Monkey Warfare.
Not coincidentally, Reginald Harkema’s 2006 comedy screens Oct. 13. Other highlights from TIFF Cinematheque’s series include a screening of the late Allan King’s final feature-length work, EMPz 4 Life, on Oct. 12, a scrappy double feature of Curtis’s Charm and The Last Pogo on Oct. 20 and David Cronenberg’s nutso Videodrome on Oct. 22. Other essays in the book — such as Wyndham Wise’s survey of the pioneering efforts of local filmmakers in the ’60s and ’70s and Brenda Longfellow’s insightful look at the factors that bred and sustained the Toronto New Wave in the ’80s and pre-Harris ’90s — should inspire other expeditions into the city’s oft-neglected cinematic history.
Time Regained
This weekend also sees the launch of another program whose time has definitely come. Celebrating Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese master who turns 101 this year, “Time Regained” collects works made during an astonishing span of 78 years. That’s how long it’s been between De Oliveira’s debut 1931 short Douro, Faina Fluvial (which screens Oct. 9) and his latest feature, Eccentricities of a Blond-Hair Girl (Oct. 10). The latter is the typically eccentric and stately tale of a lovestruck young man who learns the hard way that “commerce shuns a sentimental accountant.”
The series features rare screenings of the four works that comprise de Oliveira’s “Tetralogy of Frustrated Love” — including the 1978 TV serial Doomed Love (Oct. 25) — and more recent masterpieces such as Valley of Abraham (Nov. 2), his mesmerizing 1993 adaptation of Madame Bovary and I’m Going Home (Oct. 16), a melancholy 2001 feature that makes outstanding use of two of the director’s favourite actors, Michel Piccoli and John Malkovich. Paris, Porto and Lisbon tend to be his preferred locations but perhaps if you squint hard enough at the backgrounds, you can pretend to see the Rua Açores in disguise.