Tim
and Karrie were impressed with the different skills that I had doing
this festival, so they were like, “well, if you ever want t a job, you
should come work for us.” And I said no at first, because I didn’t have
any intention of moving. I wanted to open my own theatre, which I did;
but I ran it into the ground after about three months.
If you’re in film exhibition, everyone comes up to you and says,
“you should show my movie”, or “you should show my friend’s movie”,
with no concept of the bottom line. Everyone wants to pick the movies –
that’s the fun part. So I think me having the experience, and having
put my own money into things, even if they failed, was impressive to
them in some way.
You could get your PHD in Medieval Studies. I went there because of
that, and I took all the entry-level courses. But once you got into
your third year, there were no courses. So I just kept taking
electives. Random shit like “Scandinavian Studies” or whatever.
Eventually I just quit because I was racking up this $40,000 student
loan but not getting anywhere near my degree.
It eventually happened like this: Christmas week, it’s impossible to
pick movies, because no matter what you pick, it’s going to fail. So I
said, “give me the Monday night, two days before Christmas” It was the
worst night of the week on the worst week of the year, so it didn’t
really matter that much if it failed. So I put in a Serge Gainsbourg
show, which was a compilation I’d put together of clips and interviews
that we’d translated from French. They were interviews that were only
available in French, so we subtitled them with these lame, half-assed
subtitles, and we put it on a double-bill with Pretty Things,
which was a glam rock compilation that I’d made. And they both sold
out. It was incredible. Tim was just floored – especially because they
weren’t even real movies, they were just compilations that I’d made
myself.
So that’s how Music Mondays was born. But in the last month or so,
we’ve seen this decline in attendance, and I’m not sure where it comes
from. We used to be sold out pretty consistently.
I mean, we’re not able to have something every week that deals with
a universally appreciated musician or subject. But part of the idea
behind the series was that we wanted to be able to do these more
obscure things and have people come anyway because it would be seen as
sort of a musical education series, where you could go every week and
learn something new.
So I loved all those Hanna-Barbera cartoons that had people solving
mysteries and monsters and rock bands. Some of the people on the Butch
Cassidy show were actually in rock bands. Or they’d have guest stars.
But there seemed to be this real pop culture tie-in. And I think a lot
of the things I grew to like as an adult came form watching those
cartoons.
It’s rare that you get a music documentary where fans of the artist
think that it’s anything but superfluous. But people who are just
learning about the musician might think that it’s the most amazing
movie they’ve ever seen. So music movies are definitely built to
convert to people to the music. Most of these films are made because
the filmmaker loves the music, and they want to share it with other
people and draw attention to the artist.
And they played live concerts! And people would say that there was a
live band behind a curtain who was actually playing the songs, but that
wasn’t true. Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith were actually already in bands
when they got cast. Micky Dolenz did have to learn to play the drums to
play the songs, but Davy didn’t really do anything besides play the
tambourine.
What a year 2007 has been for lovers of exploitation films! Following the theatrical release of GRINDHOUSE,
multiple DVD labels started issuing sleazy double-features from the
60’s and 70’s, and while they don’t get the royal treatment companies
like Blue-Underground or Synapse would give them, they are still great
for those of us who don’t own a VHS player. In theaters we had the
Tarantino / Rodriguez affair, Craig Brewer’s superb, BLACK SNAKE MOAN
and Eli Roth’s HOSTEL: PART 2, that featured notable genre actors
Edwige Fenech and Luc Meranda, and a moving cameo by legendary
director, Ruggero Deodato (CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST). From a
Spaghetti Western retrospective at the Venice Film Festival to various
screenings hosted by Tarantino, Roth and Edgar Wright in LA, everybody
wants a piece of the Exploitation pie – longing for the days when
independent cinema was truly independent.
This surge of exploitation appreciation didn’t skip your bookshelf.
Tim Lucas released his massive biography of Mario Bava (reviewed by Roy
Frumkes in the Christmas Editorial), the Italian company, Cinedelic,
published beautifully-made reference guides for Italian genre cinema,
and the British FAB Press has been consistently putting out some of the
best genre writings out there.
And here comes a treat to the Italian Exploitation enthusiast from
FAB’s “Cinema Classics Collection”: Kier-La Janisse’s “A Violent
Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi”.
“While countless books and magazines have been devoted to the female
stars of the Italian exploitation films, commonly assessing their faces
and figures more than their acting,” writes Kier-La Janisse in her
introduction, “I have yet to encounter a book where a female fan of the
genre appraises an actor in a similar fashion.” It is true that most
studies of Italian Genre Cinema and the Exploitation industry are
conducted by male writers, an unfortunate fact that Kier-La
successfully counters. One could only wish her intro ran longer then
2-pages, as her personal point-of-view is one of the strong points of
this book.
Luciano Rossi is an interesting subject as he is an obscurity within
an obscurity. Although he is one of the most frequent faces in
Spaghetti Westerns and Italian Crime cinema, Rossi never managed to
reach stardom and usually portrayed a psychopath who meets a violent
death at the hands of heroes like Django (Franco Nero) or Commissioner
Betti (Maurizio Merli). It would be easy to dismiss Rossi at first, but
once the viewer becomes aware of him, he is undeniable, always
delivering an intense, powerful performance, even in the smallest of
parts. Without a doubt, he is one of the most prolific actors of the
Italian Exploitation cinema.
“A Violent Professional” is a survey of Rossi’s roles and films,
offering a summery of each and a description of his character. His
actual biography runs a short 4-pages and leaves a reader hungry for an
in-depth look at his life and career, but that is not the goal of the
publication. Not a “straight” read, “A Violent Professional” is a
viewing companion, a reference guide. Kier-La has two rating systems
for each film: A star-rating for how big Rossi’s role is and a
heart-rating for how cute he is in it. Those personal touches give the
book its edge.
Rossi’s career creates a collage, a remarkable landscape of Italian
Exploitation cinema. He worked alongside the best Italy had to offer
and also some of the worst. In the close-to-70 films covered in this
book, a reader would find Western classics such as Sergio Corbucci’s DJANGO and obscure gems like Mario Lanfranchi’s DEATH SENTENCE.
Seminal Crime-genre works by Sergio Martino, Umberto Lenzi and Stelvio
Massi. A few great Giallos and a handful of other genres. With the
exception of maybe Tomas Milian, very few Italian actors have a body of
work that follows these genres from birth to disappearance. While the
book may focus on Rossi, the nature of his career makes it a reflection
of the Italian Exploitation industry as a whole.
“A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi” is not a primer
or a beginner’s guide, and would be hard to recommend to those who are
new to Italian genre cinema. But if you are a fan who wishes to explore
these genres further, you’d want it mounted on your bookshelf.
Journey was the original emo band. Not emo in the "I hate myself/I
wanna die/Why don't you love me?" way, but actually emotional.
Journey's songs were about triumph over the broken heart, going your
"Separate Ways," spreading those "Open Arms," and, sometimes, about
"Sandcastles," but that's just on Japanese import. People tend to talk
about them with hushed admiration or bile-eaten hatred; there's really
no one who says, "Yeah, Journey's OK."
Haters would have had a field day during Faithfully: the
Journey Sing-Along at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown on a recent
Saturday night. "Travis County's premier Journey cover band," Odyssey,
provided the preshow score. Nevertheless, there were some personal
triumphs happening in the rowdy, to-capacity audience. There's triumph
in the scattered air-drum solos during "Open Arms"; there's triumph in
the fact that a fortysomething investment banker is wearing his 1981
Journey Escape tour T-shirt and no one harasses him; and when the time
comes during "Lights," we hold up our cell phones in place of a
lighter.
In short, we feel it, man. This is why Journey still gets
played at every prom in the country; they're part nostalgic longing and
part white-fringe leather irony, which equals some sort of guilty
triumph. On the night in question, folks pounded the tabletops, stood
up and cheered, and collectively laughed at Steve Perry's moustache in
the video for "Faithfully." We also cringed when close-ups of the
band's commendably tight pants lingered a little ... too long.
Journey was getting its night of crowd-assisted "Lovin',
Touchin', Squeezin'" on an appropriate headliner night, but the Alamo's
Music Mondays, roughly 21/2 years old now, have neatly coexisted with
events like weekend sing-alongs of R. Kelly and competitive events like
the Austin Air Guitar Championships. Music Mondays mold bits of
cultural detritus into 90-minute history lessons, exposing local music
fans to rare footage of underground or cult-status acts, while also
screening wide-release documentaries like Lian Lunson's poetic Leonard
Cohen doc I'm Your Man and indulging audiences in the
occasional guilty pleasure like the recent boy-band sing-along. In
other words, Music Mondays are a void-filler on otherwise dead evenings
Downtown.
Music Monday emcee and programmer Kier-La Janisse, an
energetic, petite brunette with an armful of tattoos, is largely
responsible for the material shown; she's been a film junkie since her
college days, when frequent arguments with film professors stoked her
passion even more.
"I'd always been 'the horror girl' since as far back as I
could remember," Janisse explains. "In kindergarten I scared other kids
with gruesome stories, collected Fangoria and Famous Monsters
[magazines], watched the Saturday Creature Feature religiously, and
brought hand grenades to show-and-tell. By the time I hit 30, my
interest in the genre was starting to wane a bit; I had kind of
overdone it my whole life."
Janisse met Alamo owners Tim and Karrie League in Vancouver,
where she was putting on her annual splatter horror fest Cinemuerte.
"We had a mutual friend who recommended that they come check out my
festival," she explains. "So they did, and we became friends and later
ran into each other at another festival in Spain. It was there Tim
offered me a job while under the influence of alcohol and then forgot
that he had offered me a job when I decided to take him up on it
several months later. But I was keen for a break from Vancouver and
decided I'd come down here for a year to try it out. I stayed."
In December 2003, during a particularly slow Christmas week, she screened Pretty Things: The Rise and Fall of Glam Rock together with I've Come to Tell You I'm Going,
a Serge Gainsbourg compilation she cobbled together. Both sold out, and
Music Mondays was born. Since she began, at a bargain-basement door
cover of $2 (it was $1 until a few months ago), music lovers have been
treated to a variety of films, from the enlightening to the downright
weird. Back in May, they presented a night devoted to enigmatic cult
crooner Scott Walker, and earlier this year was the hell-and-gone 1981
documentary Urgh! A Music War, featuring performances from Gang
of Four, the Cramps, and Gary Numan, and Klaus Nomi's alien arias,
which brought down the house. Folks have campaigned to bring this one
back.
There was Derailroaded, the heartbreaking bio of Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, a Sixties counterculture casualty and performer; the grainy but excellent TV Party,
a late Seventies/early Eighties cable-access show in New York in which
Basquiat and Deborah Harry were regular cast members; the Monkees'
trippy, Jack Nicholson-penned film Head; the well-attended retrospective on New Zealand's Flying Nun Records; the stark investigative doc Jandek on Corwood; a sold-out screening of Amazing Grace,
a Jeff Buckley retrospective; and a terrific BBC documentary on the
Fall that made Mark E. Smith seem kind of likable. Music Mondays have
also delved into the lives of reclusive or revered artists like Gary
Wilson and Nick Drake. Then there was the Wayne Newton birthday party.
Beyond just music films, however, the Alamo has been attempting synergy. Whether it's a director Q&A, like Gram Parsons, Fallen Angel
director Gandulf Hennig, Ian McLagan's Faces live set and birthday
party for one-time Austinite Ronnie Lane in conjunction with The Passing Show, The Life and Music of Ronnie Lane,
or this Saturday's Cut Chemist show in Waterloo Park, with visuals by
the Alamo's Rolling Roadshow and sponsorship from Emo's, music and film
have come together in a community where both thrive. This only means
good things for both camps, DIY endeavors much of the time.
One recent experiment was the Beats Per Minute film festival,
co-sponsored by Vulcan Video and the record store folks at End of an
Ear, where local teams were given 48 hours to create a music video.
Entries included someone in a Big Bird suit doing dirty deeds to Olivia
Newton-John's "Physical" and a guy in bike shorts thrusting to Def
Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me." There's the potential for absurdity
here, with Austin's reputation for weirdness and all, but there's also
potential for serious discourse, whether it's watching a bunch of
metalheads burn churches in Metalstorm or shimmying to the history of bubblegum music.
The most synergistic event so far may have been the recent screening of Fallen Angel,
another sold-out event and a film Janisse had stalked for years.
Immersed in an obtusely utopic Southern California backdrop, the
documentary, now on DVD, plays out as a stunning portrait of a genre's
birth, though the majority of the film is profoundly sad; Parsons could
never quite tear away from his reflection, but the music was almost
prescient, resigned to fate years before his untimely death. It also
prompts the question: Could anyone in country music today get away with
wearing sequined suits with pills and marijuana leaves sewn on them?
Steel-blown pop quintet Li'l Cap'n Travis played live after the
film, which is another aspect the Alamo has nurtured. Psych heroes ST
37 were one of the first local acts to score a classic silent film for
the Alamo, then accompany it live ("The Sound and the Fury," Music, September 10, 1999). The group's bassist, Scott Telles, remembers their scoring of Metropolis
as one of their "most successful gigs ever. I think most bands would do
it for free Alamo food and beer and the exposure," he says. He also
provided narration for several segments of a recent Krautrock doc.
The Flying Luttenbachers, meanwhile, played live for a screening of Contort Yourself: A New York No Wave Tutorial.
Cry Blood Apache held court in a parking lot before a recent Monday
Judas Priest doc, while Golden Arm Trio composer Graham Reynolds
presents a small orchestra for the musical portion of the A Scanner Darkly
showing at the Alamo this weekend (see Screens p.50). Janisse says she
wants to do this more frequently, but with the budget, she has some
reservations.
"I know there are probably some bands that would be happy to
play for free," she acknowledges, "but I usually feel bad asking them."
While the quality of the films isn't always top-notch, with the low
admission price, big films aren't always available. So Janisse searches
out 35mm prints or broadcast video format. If it was shot on film, they
play it on film. "We can't bring in a lot of classic music movies that
are owned by studios, except maybe every once in a while," Janisse
laments. "So that's why we haven't played Stop Making Sense or The Last Waltz or Tommy.
Also, the availability of the films in 35mm is often a problem. I don't
like to show films on video that were shot on film. So I won't show Get Crazy or Suburbia unless I can find a 35mm print.
"Also, this is just the snobby part of me," she adds, "but I
tend to avoid really popular contemporary bands. If I do things
focusing on a recent band, it's usually an indie band. But I do want to
expand the spectrum of music that I'm covering with the series, so
suggestions are always cool."
Of course, there are some misses. One particularly bizarre choice was the recent Stunt Rock,
a two-hour opus featuring a Rod Stewart-looking Aussie stuntman and a
bedazzled band called Sorcery. When Janisse doesn't have a full-fledged
doc on hand, she often edits footage and interviews together and adds
voiceovers for context, such as for the Gainsbourg doc, a process that
doesn't mesh with every viewer. "The only thing I've really noticed is
that sometimes people think the films are too long," Janisse says.
"This is common with indie filmmakers who fall in love with their
subject and forget that the audience can get disengaged quite easily.
But, usually, I find the strengths of the film outweigh the weaknesses
and that if I have to choose between showing a movie that might be 15
minutes too long and not showing that movie at all, I'll show it
anyway, because I think the subject matter is underexposed or the film
makes some valid arguments."
And discussion is what Janisse is striving for, as an ardent
music lover herself. There are usually regulars in the audience every
week, regardless of what's playing, and in a city so cross-pollinated
with filmmakers and musicians, Music Mondays offer a meeting point, a
forum for all the music and film nerds in town to revel in obscure
musicians and bands, or learn about a musician they've never heard of,
and possibly get drunk and eat curly fries.
"I hope to create a following for it like Weird Wednesdays,
where the audience is just really open-minded, and they'll go every
week even if they don't remember what movie is playing," Janisse says.
"I would love to have the theatre full every week and then everybody
just goes for a beer afterwards and raps about the movie."
Or about the creative legitimacy of "Oh Sherrie," as was overheard that Saturday night at the Journey sing-along.
"In high school, I took a lotta shit for liking this band," Janisse said to the crowd. "Who else got shit for liking Journey?"
A few claps.
"What?!"
"Fuckin' Journey!" someone screams.
These were the believers. They never stopped. 
See the original article HERE
------------------------
From the Georgia Straight (Vancouver):
Anything goes for Cinemuerte curator Janisse
Standing amidst the rows of horror rentals at Cambie's Black
Dog Video, Kier-La Janisse hunts for a title she'd consider
watching. It takes a little while-she's already seen a lot of
them-but then her eyes fall on the spine of a DVD called Barbed
Wire Dolls. "I'd probably watch this," she says, extracting the
1975 women-in-prison flick by European exploitation king Jess
Franco. A quick glance at its lurid cover reveals that the film
is squarely aimed at a crowd unopposed to scenes of female
degradation and suffering. This ain't Driving Miss Daisy. But
Janisse, as curator of the Cine?muerte Film Festival, loathes
restrictions. She's not put off by the celluloid exploitation of
anyone.
"Not at all," remarks the 33-year-old cineaste, programmer,
and Fan?goria contributor. "I mean, if you're making a fictional
film and the actors have agreed to be in the movie and they don't
care about the roles they're playing, then they're just having
fun. They're just acting out fantasy situations, and if it's
fantasy, anything goes. Whether it's torturing a woman or
castrating a man, I feel like it's all fair game."
Like-minded filmgoers will appreciate the taboo-blasting works
Janisse has lined up for the seventh and final installment of
Cinemuerte, which runs now through Halloween at Pacific
Cinémathèque. For starters, there's the 1974 Japanese flick
School of the Holy Beast. It's about a young woman who enters a
convent, searching for clues in her mother's strange death.
According to the festival's Web site (www.cinemuerte.com/), "she
soon discovers a smorgasbord of vice as she's abused by lecherous
archbishops, a lesbian mother superior and a line of fellow nuns
ready to whip her (in the film's most deliriously over-the-top
scene) with rose-thorns!" That same title is currently on the
shelf at Black Dog, where Janisse worked from 1998 to 2003 before
being offered a programming job at the prestigious Alamo
Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, where she now resides. The question
is: wouldn't most fans of kinky cinema just rent the DVD and view
it at their leisure rather than jostle for seats at a crowded
theatre?
"That's one of the reasons the festival is ending," she
relates. "Like, it used to be really hard to find films like
School of the Holy Beast. It used to be that you would have to
get them from sketchy mail-order companies, and a lot of people
just didn't feel comfortable sending cash in the mail to weird
people they'd never met. But now so many DVD companies are buying
rights to them and rereleasing them, remastered and everything,
that it definitely decreases the [theatrical] audience for those
movies."
Devotees of Japanese nun-whipping flicks should know that the
Cine?muerte screening of School (Thursday [October 27] at 7 p.m.)
will feature a brand new, "really beautiful" 35mm print. Also of
note is The Birthday (Sunday [October 30] at 7:30 p.m.), a 2004
horror-comedy by Spanish director Eugene Mira that includes a
"very strange" performance by lead actor Corey Feldman. It also
stars '70s Eurohorror icon Jack Taylor, a mainstay of the
aforementioned sleazemeister Franco's films, who will appear in
person to receive a lifetime achievement award from Janisse. She
got one of her contacts from the Alamo Drafthouse, famed American
director Quentin Tarantino, to film a congratulatory intro for
the presentation.
Festivalgoers drawn to more unsettling subject matter might
consider Zev Asher's controversial 2004 documentary Casuistry:
The Art of Killing a Cat (Saturday [October 29] at 7 p.m.). It
tells the story of three young Toronto men, including artist
Jesse Power, who, high on a hallucinogen, videotaped their
torturous slaying of a housecat in the guise of an "art project".
Although there is no actual footage of Power's cat-snuffing video
in Casuistry, Janisse says that it is still the most disturbing
selection at this year's festival. "I guess to a certain extent
it is exploiting the situation," she ponders, "but I feel that
the way the subject matter is handled in the movie is very
respectful and very pro-animal- cruelty laws. Allowing the people
who killed the cat to speak freely about what they did doesn't
make them look intelligent; I didn't come out of the movie seeing
their point. Instead, I came out thinking, 'Yeah, we should have
harsher animal laws.'?"
Janisse got hooked on genre films as a kid growing up in
Windsor, Ontario. Her very first memory is of watching the 1972
Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing terror-on-a-train epic, Horror
Express. But her lifelong interest in movies that shock hasn't
culminated in a desire to push people's buttons for the sake of
getting a response. "I play things that I'm interested in sharing
with people," she points out. "I mean, I've already gotten hate
mail because of playing Casuistry, but I'm not playing it because
I want to outrage people. Sometimes I know that there are movies
that are gonna upset people, but I don't get scared off from
programming them."
See the original article HERE
---------------------
Todd Babiak,
The Edmonton Journal
Published: Thursday, January 17 2008
We
go about our daily routines, treating our co-workers with respect,
avoiding eye contact with people on the bus. At home, we are kind to
our husbands and wives, we chuckle at those deluded children on
American Idol. Most of us avoid the dark thoughts, at work and on the
bus, in the kitchen, in the bath. If, for instance, we're given to
wonder if anyone in the neighbourhood is -- at that precise moment --
having sexual relations with a chrome hedgehog dipped in caramel sauce,
we push that thought away and resume chopping vegetables and listening
to As It Happens.
That is, most of us.
Others indulge these
wonderings and imbed them in cult films. German director Jörg
Buttgereit, for example, who released the ultra low-budget Nekromantik
1 and Nekromantik 2 in 1988 and 1990, which concerned the lust and,
yes, love between a man, a woman and a decayed corpse.
Nekromantik
1 and 2 were banned in a number of jurisdictions around the world,
including British Columbia. That is, until a video-store clerk and
horror aficionado named Kier-La Janisse wrote a series of passionate
letters to the film classification board in 1999. She was planning to
initiate a now-defunct film festival in Vancouver called Cinemuerte,
and wanted Nekromantik and Buttgereit to be part of it.
Janisse
won, on grounds of artistic merit and freedom of expression. The first
year of her festival, designed to peer deeply into the international
underground horror scene, was a success.
Her struggle, and clips
from some of Cinemuerte's most memorable onscreen moments, are
documented in a feature film by Ashley Fester called Celluloid Horror.
It's an intimate look at what it takes to be an arts administrator in
Canada, particularly when the art form or event doesn't neatly fit into
the mandate of any public funding body in the country. Janisse, like
all born administrators, is obsessive about her chosen subject:
extremely disturbing low-budget movies.
Celluloid Horror is a
cheap documentary about a cheap film festival. In my time working as a
Culture writer at The Journal, I've met a number of people like
Janisse: intelligent, organized, passionate and knowledgeable, and
living in apparent poverty by choice. They're the sorts of people who
would excel as bureaucrats or small business owners. Instead, they
choose to work three times as hard, producing small festivals and
running not-for-profit arts organizations.
Fester, who grew up in
Edmonton, now lives in Vancouver. Her mother runs Chickies, the
venerable antique store in Highlands, and her father is a real estate
agent here. Celluloid Horror started as a promotional video for
Cinemuerte but morphed into a
feature-length documentary when
Fester found Janisse --whose formative years included abuse,
evangelical Christianity, reform school, assault with a deadly weapon
and, of course, scary movies -- too fascinating for a short. Their
approaches are similar.
"A lot of people wait to get money from
the government," says Fester, who will be in Edmonton tonight for the
Metro Cinema screening of Celluloid Horror with the 1976 Spanish cult
film Who Can Kill a Child? "People like Kier-La and I, I guess, we just
do it. We'll apply for grants, but if we don't get any money, we'll
find a way to do the thing anyway."
Fester is renting Metro Cinema tonight. She has rented theatres in
her bus tour across Western Canada, and she's selling DVDs of the film
at every stop. Similarly, when Janisse couldn't get grant money or
large corporate sponsors for her festival, she threw fundraising
parties. One, featured in Celluloid Horror, was called Torture Garden.
Audiences were invited to watch a series of laughably bad films for
several hours, some with the accompaniment of an ear-shattering "noise
band." If you decided to leave early, the fee was $20. If you stayed to
the end, it was only $5. She made $600.
It hasn't been easy,
touring Celluloid Horror. Improbably, Fester lost money in Winnipeg,
where Janisse now lives and works at the Cinematheque. In the last 10
years, low-budget feature filmmaking has become accessible to anyone
with a camera and a computer. It's now on par with self-publishing a
novel and recording an album. Anyone can start a festival. The most
difficult and expensive challenge for all of these do-it-yourself
approaches to art is the same: marketing and distribution.
Marketing
and distribution for an event or art form that concerns itself with
graphic necrophilia offers its own special set of problems. If the
Internet has taught us anything, though, it's that our most fanciful
and vile thoughts are not unique. If you are determined and willing to
forgo middle-class rewards like a house and a car and new clothes once
in awhile, you will find an audience.
Be
assured, several people out there want to see, read or listen to their
neighbours having sexual relations with a chrome hedgehog dipped in
caramel sauce. Just don't bother applying for a grant to facilitate it.
See the original article HERE
--------------------
From "THIS MAGAZINE":
Notes from the underground
In defence of fantasy and horror cinema
BY Dorothy Woodend
Tell someone you like science fiction, fantasy or horror films
and you might get “the look.” A look that says, “Are you silly,
immature or, worse, pervy?” Fans of genre cinema—the term
applies to many different categories of film but is most commonly
applied to sci-fi, fantasy and horror—have long had a
bad rep as freaky weirdoes, social misfits,
gore hounds and so on. I know because
I am one of them. Despite being a
confirmed coward, I feel drawn to the dark
side simply because there is often some
odd form of truth there.
The success of the Fantasia festival in
Montreal (which runs for almost three
weeks in July), Toronto After Dark and
the Calgary Underground Film Festival
(now in its fifth year) indicates a growing
level of interest, acceptance and
even love for the form. But whether this
is a good or bad thing usually depends
on whether you were a fan before
mainstream acceptance. In this
post-Tarantino age, it’s getting damn hard
to find very much that is truly underground
any longer. Cult cinema ain’t
what it used to be.
Isaac Alexander, who contributes
to different science-fiction blogs and
worked with the Seattle-based anime
convention Sakura-Con, says, “When
I grew up, I was a part of school
clubs devoted toward science fiction/fantasy and anime. These clubs provided
the ‘distribution’ to discover video
programming from distant lands,” says Isaac. “Now, you just
need to load up the internet and head to YouTube.”
Kier-La Janisse, who founded Vancouver’s infamous (and
now defunct) horror film festival CineMuerte, pulls no punches
in her assessment of this phenomenon: “I think the mainstream
always comes knocking when anything underground proves to
be viable to some degree, regardless of genre. Then they rip off
the ideas of all the real pioneers, the people who took all the
chances to prove that these types of films could work.”
She adds that a true aficionado is someone who works to
locate low-quality versions of these titles. “When I want to watch
Messiah of Evil or something, I watch a crappy VHS of it. I need
the specialness—otherwise you’re just a consumer.”
A consequence of this contradiction is that films that do
very well at bigger festivals like Fantasia or Toronto After Dark
often err on the lighter side of the darkness. A case in point is
an Austrian film called On Evil Grounds, which has screened
in multiple festivals including the Calgary Underground Film
Festival and Fantasia. On Evil Grounds is very much like a Tex
Avery horror film (for those who don’t know the man, he was
the looniest of the Looney Tunes animators). Bodily fluids erupt
everywhere, and one doesn’t know whether to laugh or throw
up. Maybe both. Since it is made for people to hoot and holler
at, the film was a massive
success at festivals.
Of course, festivals cannot
live on love alone; you still need
funding, and bums in seats.
Certainly there is devotion from
committed fans, the occasional
bit of critical respect, even money.
Well, sometimes. Bill C-10 is only
the latest offensive that critics fear
will deny tax dollars to films that
are excessively violent without an
educational value. You can have
your bloody mayhem, but there
better be a lesson buried at its centre.
Despite the increased visibility
and popularity of genre cinema,
the festivals that program it don’t
get much help from the Canadian
government.
Try explaining to the Canada
Council the educational benefit of
films that depict maniacs hacking
up boobalicious teenagers, and you
get the picture. Or maybe you don’t,
since many films simply don’t get
shown. Brenda Lieberman, who runs the
Calgary Underground Film Festival, says, “People often stereotype
horror fans, which makes it less likely for sponsors to jump
in.” CUFF has been growing slowly over the past five years, but
the festival still struggles to break even, balancing more obscure
offerings with crowd-pleasers.
If you really want to see weird stuff or, worse, show weird
stuff to other people, you still have to do it yourself. I think it’s
time I started a film festival.
See the original article HERE
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