The Cinematheque celebrates 50 years in August, with the "nihilistic pleasures" of film noir
The cinema is welcoming audiences back in droves, with its mix of crisp restorations and the avant garde
I Wake Up Screaming
The Big Sleep
The Cinematheque presents Film Noir 2022 from August 3 to 22, with a $1 screening of The Big Sleep on August 13; 50 Years of Essential Cinema from August 4 to 25; a film noir filmmaking workshop August 13 and 14; a 50th anniversary film noir party on August 19; and a 50th anniversary screening of Panda! Go Panda! on August 21.
CELEBRATING ITS 50th anniversary all month, The Cinematheque has survived the arrival of multiplexes, streaming, and a prolonged pandemic. And the good news is, it’s still going strong.
“The landscape has undoubtedly changed,” reflects artistic director Shaun Inouye. “Moviegoers aren't quite as adventurous, in terms of seeking out new and critically untested releases. But we’ve also been incredibly heartened to see a thriving and wholehearted return to live cinema.” To his and his team’s delight, a July tribute to anime icon Kon Satoshi sold out houses. “On these gorgeous summer days, we’ve seen our attendance go up dramatically across the board.”
Restorations, and building thoughtful series around them, have become a cornerstone of the facility’s programming as it enters its next half century.
“That’s particularly to make sure that rep films don't feel old,” Inouye explains. “Cinema is timeless and it’s important that they look as crisp and jaw-dropping as something you’re going to see at the multiplex….We’re finding that with these new restorations of these arthouse classics, we’re seeing people return in droves—in numbers we weren’t seeing pre-pandemic.”
Launched in 1972 and modelled after the Cinémathèque Française, the arthouse film centre has always served as much as an archive—it has a collection of more than 2,000 B.C. and Canadian films—as it has as a screening centre for local, national, and international films. In an era when streaming giants serve up Hollywood movies at the click of a remote, the hub on Howe Street has become a sort of vibrant cinematic museum for not just historic masterworks, but contemporary and world features that film fans otherwise would never see—let alone on a big screen. Think of the past year’s dazzling Afro-futurist, Burundi-set Neptune Frost, or the deeply empathetic documentary look at teens and the pandemic in Italy’s Futura.
“We’re as dedicated to the preservation of film as we are to the exhibition of it, or the film culture that builds around it,” explains Inouye, who has worked at the organization for a decade. “What is kind of remarkable and is maybe a testament to our longevity is that our value and mission haven’t really changed since then [1972]. That’s always been our True North: the advancement and appreciation of cinema as a true art. And it hasn’t really strayed from that.”
Amid the rich archive of work that The Cinematheque has screened over the years, film noir has been a popular, gritty foil to the summertime. So it was clear the August anniversary should centre around hardboiled detectives, femmes fatales, and shadowy underworlds—and a genre that happens to be enjoying a wave of exciting new restorations right now.
“Noir has remained such a hugely popular summer staple for us,” Inouye reflects. “We didn't really want to deny our cinema-goers the nihilistic pleasures of noir. We doubled down on noir!”
The 50th anniversary film-noir series will feature six new restorations out of eight films—including two dark gems that even dedicated cinephiles may never have heard of before: I Wake Up Screaming (“What a title!” remarks Inouye) and The Flame, by newly celebrated, long-unsung auteur John H. Auer (a darkly stylized, poverty-row discovery rescued by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation).
Amid the lineup, the centre screens the genre-defining, Bogey and Bacall–starring The Big Sleep, for just $1 on August 13 at 1:30 pm—the exact price of a flick back in ’72—in glorious 35mm. That masterpiece with the famously labyrinthian plot serves as a perfect bookend to Robert Altman’s equally tangly The Long Goodbye, from 1973, a vastly underappreciated spin on Raymond Chandler, in which Elliott Gould plays a bumbling Philip Marlowe in sunny California.
The Cinematheque’s artistic director Shaun Inouye
“The wonderful thing about film noir and that period of American filmmaking, and those core noir years of the ‘40s and ‘50s, is it was so prolific,” enthuses Inouye. “There will always be these hidden gems or these rediscovered jewels, particularly in these poverty-row B pictures. The pool is always getting bigger.”
On the same theme, The Cinematheque will host a film-noir filmmaking workshop August 13 and 14, and a blowout 50th Anniversary Film Noir Party on August 19; pull out your fedoras and prepare your finger waves.
Not everything is a deeper shade of black during this month’s anniversary, though. Also running on Thursdays all August is 50 Years of Essential Cinema, in which former Cinematheque curators Jeff Wall, Tony Reif, and Jim Sinclair, along with Brian McIlroy in place of late curator, critic, and UBC prof Mark Harris, guest-program films.
“I really wanted to look back and celebrate those past Cinematheque curators that have essentially built us up to be this bastion of film culture in this city— and it’s thanks to their curatorial vision that we’re what we are today,” Inouye explains.
Programming ranges from photo-art-star Wall’s picks of early films by radical French filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet to François Truffaut’s beloved Jules et Jim (a Harris favourite).
The most compelling and surprising pick comes from Jim Sinclair, who in March retired from his position as executive and artistic director after 35 years. He’s chosen Michael Tolkin’s jaw-dropping, and nearly-impossible-to-track-down, 1991 film The Rapture. Starring David Duchovny and Mimi Rogers, it’s a bizarre yet riveting mix of the Biblical, the horror flick, and the early-90s, uniquely Duchovny-esque erotic thriller.
“When we did the Best of ‘90s programming, Jim was too chicken shit to program it,” Inouye contends, laughing. “Now that he's not artistic director he feels more empowered to show it.” (Sinclair has called it his “giddiest guilty pleasure of the decade.”)
There is more, much more, on offer as The Cinematheque pays tribute to film in all form, including a 50th anniversary screening of the pioneering animation feature Panda! Go Panda! by future Studio Ghibli icons Takahata Isao and Miyazaki Hayao—also marking a half-century old. And yes, it has a new restoration. In a reconfigured theatre, DIM Cinema presents a quartet of projector performances by Alex MacKenzie and Lindsay McIntyre, with live sound by Clare Kenny and Peter Bussigel.
And rest assured, as The Cinematheque enters its next 50 years, under Inouye and new executive director Kate Ladyshewsky, it will continue to mix it up—whether it’s classic noirs, new anime, avant-garde African finds, or the giddiest of guilty pleasures.
“As artistic director it was challenging to find my footing after the pandemic,” Inouye says. “There's no playbook anymore. We’ve been able to maintain the balance, and we’ve been able to see the filmgoing public warmly return to the theatre.”
Nineties jaw-dropper The Rapture features in the anniversary’s 50 Years of Essential Cinema series.
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