The Cinematheque strikes gold with a summer series of oddball musicals
Chantal Akerman, Tsai Ming-Liang, and Lars Von Trier are among the giants rethinking genre in “Who Will Sing Folk Songs?”: The Film Musical in Nine Variations
An ensemble cast sings its way through Chantal Akerman’s 1986 musical, Golden Eighties
The Cinematheque presents “Who Will Sing Folk Songs?”: The Film Musical in Nine Variations from May 23 to July 3
WE’VE SEEN a staggering Chantal Akerman revival in the last decade. The Belgian filmmaker’s stock has risen so much that her 1975 feature Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles now sits at number one above Vertigo and Citizen Kane in Sight and Sound’s most recent list of the greatest films of all time.
The reasons for this renaissance in interest are up for speculation. What we can infer, broadly, is that engagement with cinema remains robust and dynamic into the 21st century and the canon is never settled. As such, it’s great to see Akerman’s 1986 feature Golden Eighties included in the Cinematheque’s oddball series, “Who Will Sing Folk Songs?”: The Film Musical in Nine Variations, starting May 23.
It’s a minor title in Akerman’s filmography, but an indulgence for director and viewer alike. A witty and effervescent musical comedy set inside a shopping mall, with multiple, convoluted affairs of the heart playing out between a hair salon and a clothing store, Golden Eighties is simultaneously frothy and disquietingly pragmatic in its view of loyalty and faith. In contrast to the austerity of her most famous film, Golden Eighties brings an overt stylization to its characters’ infidelities, struggles, and passions, exciting the viewer with tight and snappy choreography between Akerman’s restless camera and her busy ensemble actors, including the great Delphine Seyrig (Jeanne Dielman herself!) and a posse of chattering young women and posturing men, all of whom break into song at one point or another.
“Golden Eighties is just proof of her enormous range as a filmmaker,” says the Cinematheque’s Michael Scoular, who curated the series. “It’s Akerman in dialogue with musicals but also with her personal stamp, where there’s this sort of anxiety that’s humming underneath all the musical numbers.”
In his introduction to the program, available to read at the Cinematheque website, Scoular describes a recent academic dust-up over the very notion of genre itself. At its simplest, “Who Will Sing Folk Songs” offers nine films “in dialogue with” an increasingly elusive and vexing thing.
“I try to draw out distinctions,” he says. “How do we define the bounds of genre? A musical can be a million different things, especially once you start getting outside of North America. You end up with very little solid ground to stand on, where you can say this and only this is a musical.” Opening the series on May 23, Tsai Ming-liang’s surreal 1998 feature The Hole is a fraught millennial tale of disease and decay relieved by bursts of retro pop, with songs lip-synced, Dennis Potter-style, by the film’s leads. It’s followed at the same screening by Jacques Demy’s Une chambre en ville, an operetta set inside a vicious labour dispute, which arrived in 1982 as a pointed effort after the director’s more conventional 1964 hit The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
“It's a fascinating film because he’s trying to accommodate things beyond the surface pleasures that you find in a traditional musical,” says Scoular. “All these films, they come from the ’70s and after, and so these are films that are less traditional musicals as much as they are about framing the musical. These are films that were made at a point where artists could look back and say, ‘Well, this is the history of film up until now, how can I possibly enter into this ongoing cinematic art? How do I acknowledge the complicated history of film art and also do something that’s going to be original and personal?’”
It should be added: there’s a secondary impulse to Scoular’s programming, which also includes Miklós Jancsó’s Red Psalm from 1971, Med Hondo’s epic and groundbreaking hymn to resistance, West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty from 1979, and Lars Von Trier’s heroically depressing Dancer in the Dark, starring Catherine Deneuve and Bjork, from 2000. Some have never been seen at the Cinematheque, others haven’t screened in Vancouver for a very long time, while both The Hole and Dancer in the Dark are presented in 35mm. Confesses Scoular: “All these titles, thankfully, were with North American distributors, so it was partly that yes, I am interested in genre, and I really value writings on genre by critics like Stanley Cavell. But it was also just a chance to show some films that I think it’ll be really great to see on the big screen.” 
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