Diaspora In Conversation with…

International Diaspora Film Festival 2012
Through Female Eyes

 1 to 6 November 2012, Toronto
Innis Town Hall & Carlton Cinemas
 In Conversation with…
Filmmakers, actors, producers, and film scholars will be in attendance for intimate discussions with the audience.

 

Atom Egoyan and Arsinée Khanjian will share their CALENDAR with the audience. An on-stage interview and Q/A after the film screening.
Monday, 5 November 2012, 7:00 PM, Innis Town Hall, Free Event

 

Cyrus Sundar Singh will be present after the screening of his film MASHALA for discussion.
Sunday, 4 November 2012, 8:00 PM, Carlton Cinema, Free Event

 

Elie Wajeman, the winner of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight 2012 prize for ALIYAH will attend the screening for a dialogue with the audience.
Sunday, 4 November 2012, 6:00 PM, Innis Town Hall

 

Elisa Paloschi, the director of EMBRACING VOICES will present her film about the luminary jazz musician Jane Bunnett.
Sunday, 4 November 2012, 6:00 PM, Carlton Cinema

 

Sergei Kapterev, is a Senior Researcher at the Research Institute of Cinema Art in Moscow. He will discuss the Soviet-Armenian epic film KHAZ-PUSH (1928).
Tuesday, 6 November 2012, 7:00 PM, Innis Town Hall, Free Event

 

Vincent Ebrahim, the lead actor in MATERIAL, and well-known for his TV hit The Kumars at No. 42 will entertain the audience with his views of the film.
Sunday, 4 November 2012, 8:00 PM, Innis Town Hall

York University Student Showcase, young talented filmmakers from York U will present their works in a special screening of their shorts.
Sunday, 4 November 2012, 2:00 PM, Carlton Cinema, Free Event

Tickets
General: $10 online, $12 at door
Seniors and Students: $8 at door only (please provide ID)
Festival Pass: $80 online, $100 at door
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Chris Marker; filmmaker

 

 

It was a funny-shaped object. A small tin box with irregularly rounded ends, a rectangular aperture in the middle and on the opposite side a small lens, the size of a nickel. You had to gently insert a piece of film—real film, with sprockets and all—in the upper part, then a tiny rubber wheel blocked it, and by turning the corresponding knob the film unrolled, frame by frame. To tell the truth, each frame represented a different shot, so the whole thing looked more like a slide show than a home cinema, yet the shots were beautifully printed stills out of celebrated pictures: Chaplin's, Ben Hur, Abel Gance's Napoleon. ... If you were rich, you could lock that small unit in a sort of magic lantern and project it on your wall (or screen, if you were very rich). I had to satisfy myself with the minimal version: pressing my eye against the lens, and watching. That forgotten contraption was called Patheorama. You could read it in golden letters on black, with the legendary Pathe rooster singing against a rising sun.

The egotistic pleasure of watching by myself images pertaining to the unfathomable realm of Movieland very soon had a dialectical byproduct: when I couldn't even imagine having anything in common with the process of filmmaking (whose basic principles were naturally far beyond my comprehension), there something of the film itself was within my reach, pieces of celluloid that were not that different from the photographic negatives when they came back from the lab. Something I could touch and feel, something of the real world. And why (insinuated my own dialectical Jiminy Cricket) couldn't I in turn make something of the same kind? All I needed was translucent material and the right measurements. (The sprockets were there to look good, the rubber wheel just ignored them.) So, with scissors, tracing paper, and glue, I managed to get a proper copy of the Patheorama model tape. Then, screen by screen, I began to draw a few poses of my cat (who else?) with captions inbetween. And all of a sudden, my cat belonged to the same universe as the characters in Ben Hur or Napoleon. I had gone through the looking glass.

Of all my school buddies, Jonathan was the most prestigious; he was mechanically minded and quite inventive, he made up maquettes of theaters with rolling curtains and flashing lights, and a miniature big band emerging from the abyss while a cranked gramophone was playing "Hail the Conquering Hero." So it was natural that he was the first to whom I wished to show my masterwork. I was rather pleased with the result, and I unrolled the adventures of the cat Riri which I presented as "my movie." Jonathan managed to get me sobered up: "Movies are supposed to move, stupid," he said. "Nobody can do a movie with still images."

Thirty years passed. Then I made La Jetée.

Chris Marker

First published at Film Quaterly, 52:1, Autumn, 1998, p. 66.