Ron Falcioni
ART REVIEW

view of films offered in
cific Cinematheque’s French
documentary film series. Running
at Pacific Cinematheque, 1131
Howe St, Vancouver, to Sept, 27.

F OPERA with its

sophisticated amalgama-

tion of music, drama and
stagecraft epitomized the
culmination of art in the
19th century, it should be
obvious by now that the
single most encompassing
art form of our own century
has been that of the cinema.

This 5 not to depreciate paint-
ing, sculpture, photography or any
other of the venerable modes of
vicarous self-exorcism that have
hovered jealously over the floating
crap-shoot of art during the past
100 years.

It is merely to acknowledge that
no other art form has touched us
so profoundly of so universally as
that of film.

Unlike the masterpieces of
painting and sculpture, whose
most illustrious examples seldom
reach us in this part of the world,
the masterpieces of cinema are
always in circulation.

Needless to say, technological
advances notwithstanding, such
uniquely personal pursuits as
painting will no doubt survive the
20th century as surely as they sur-
vived the 19th, for they remain cur
most tangible evidence of the raw
‘immediacy of creative expression.

But with the advent of virtual
reality and the wrowing accessibili-
ty of hyperspace it is difficult to
make the sume hopeftdl pro-

- its
1958 film
Opera Mouffe is included in the
cinematheque retrospective.

nouncements with regard to the
fate of cinema.

Whatever its fate, there is at least
one organization in Vancouver
dedicated to the perpetuation and
dissemination of the film medium
as art.

As evidence of its ongoing
commitment to the evolution and
excellence of the art of the
movies, Pacific Cinematheque ts
mounting anexpansive film series
which will survey, from its humble
beginnings to the present, the de-
velopment of a specific branch of
the medium — that of the

Photos submitted

FRENCH FILMMAKERS Jacques Rivette (far left) and Jean-Luc Godard (with sunglasses) at a 1951 screening in the Studio Parnasse.

documentary as it developed in
France.

In conjunction with the Com-
munications Department of the
French Foreign Ministry, Paris, and
in anticipation of the centenary of
the birth of the cinema, Pacilic
Cinematheque has scheduled
through mast of September the
exemplary film series, Cumiere’s
Cuntury,

This comprehensive film
retrospective acknowledges the
contributions of all those who
have left an indelible imprint on
the development of cinema in
France.

Virtually all of the great French
filmmakers are represented in this
undertaking: Vigo, Carne,
Cocteau, Franju, Renoir, Renais,
Goddard, and Marker -— rot to
mention the countiess lesser-
known luminaries among
Lumiere’s progeny.

Although the first film sequence
on celluloid, Freed Olt's Sneeze,
was recorded in 1889 by William
Dickson — a technician working
for Edison — it would be another
six years before the first actual
projection of film was accomplish.
ed in Paris by the Lumiere
Brothers.

Workers leaving the Lumiere
Factory, the earliest example ot
cinema as we now recognize i,
was both recorded and projected
on the Lumieres’ revolutionary
cinematographie machine and
lasted all of 30 seconds.

That crisp openatir sequence, of
uciualite as the Lumierts called it,
was not unlike a familiar home

of today, and like the home
movie it was a clearly documen:
tary accomplishment.

Early this September, an ines-
plicably small audience had the
nieasure of viewing atthe

‘Cinemateque most of the remark:

able sequences witnessed at the
cinema’s first historic screening: in

att
a

eee

i
hs

a

MAN IN the moon: French film pioneer George Melies’ Le Voyage Dans La Lune.

the basement of the Grand C:
Paris on Dec. 28, 1895.

This generous sampling of
Lumiere films included Le Repas
de bebe (depicting the feeding of a
Lumiere infant, lurroseur arrosec
(a staged precursor of Slapstick in
which a wardener’s face is doused
by the prank of a mischievous
boy), and }’Arrive d'un tran en
gure Ovhich reportedly so terrified
its original audience that it shriek-
ed and ducked to avoid the on-
caming locomotive).

fe also featured countess other
actualities recorded by Lumiere
cameramen prige to the 20th cen-
tury -- events as mindane as the
demodition of a wall or as mamen-
tous as the Coronation of the czar

Sharing the spotight with the
Lumiere selection was Georges
rranju’s Le Grand Melies, a 1951

documentary celebrating the life
and tegacy of Georges Melies, the
magician-showman contemporary
of the Lumieres who is justly
regarded as the father of film fan-
Lasy.

Incorporated into this warmly
respectful tribute to the first master
of narrative film are excerpts tom
many of Meties’ fanciful fabrica-
tions, including -\ Trips to the
Moon (1902), that wonderful belle
epoque concoction that iniects
lanky-legyed chorus girls into the
seriously scientific domain of jules
Verne,

By the end of September, this
ambitious series will have brought
to Vancouver cinepbdes a hast of
rarely sven CineMalG Masterpieces
such as Georges Feanju’s grueling,
The Bload af the Beasts, whose
disturbingly tyrical portrayal oF

animal slaughter makes oblique
references to Nazi death camps.

Audiences will also have seen a
full spectrum of Chris Marker
“documentaries.” beginning
with La fetee, his 1962 sci-fi
photo-romain told almost entirely
in photo stills, and concluding
with Sans Sofeil, the 1982
cinematic essay speculating on the
future of civilization,

Aseminal influence in the de-
velopment of cinema generally,
these films achieve more than the
mere documentation cf reality.

At their best these documen-
taries reflect the avant-parde sen-
sibilities of thase who have sought
to overcome the strict prohibitions
of commercial narrative fitms, and
inso doing have expanded the -
harizons of cinematic art im-
measurably,