For all you scribblers out there...

If you're hungry for indie animation (but like it served up in Youtube-sized portions), then you're advised to check out the Toronto Animated Image Society Animation Showcase 2007. Describing itself as 'a not-for-profit, artist-run organization whose mandate is to explore and promote the art of animation', the Showcase 2007 will feature films of all genres, styles, mediums, and themes, all under 15 minutes in length. The screening is to be held tomorrow (Wednesday, June 27) at 6:30 at the National Film Board Cinema on 150 John St, with a reception to follow. Admission is free for TAIS members and 'selected animators', or $5 for the rest of us schlubs.

For more info on TAIS, mozy on over to their website. And when you're finished there, saunter over to their blog.

Sorry for the late notice on this event - I only just found out about it today as I was on my way home from work.

I was a teenage 'Fibber McGee and Molly' fan

If you find yourself with a half hour to spare around, oh, let's say, 2:30 on a Friday afternoon, be sure to tune in to CKLN, Ryerson campus' radio station, to catch 'Cinephobia', a weekly program dedicated to all things film run by a chap from Liverpool, Stuart Andrews. Stacey Case will be on the program this week plugging Trash Palace, so be sure to check it out.

Head on over to CKLN's homepage. And after you've done that, check out Cinephobia's Myspace page.

Kino-Eye and Senator Ted Stevens Proudly Present 'The Internet: A Series of Tubes'

Need to check the movie listings but all the copies of NOW Magazine have been pilfered from the box by the bus stop? Try TorontoPlex.com. It covers everything from Cinematheque to Cinecycle. So now you have no excuse for missing C.H.U.D. at the Brunswick.

You'll never guess where Pai Mei's weak spot is...

A quick plug for two blogs run by Colin Geddes, the man behind the Kung Fu Fridays screenings at the Royal and the Revue, and the programmer for the Midnight Madness portion of the Toronto International Film Festival. Colin has been of great assistance in alerting Kino-Eye to film-related happenings around the city and we can only hope that, like the Shaolin Temple after its decimation in 1732 at the hands of the hated Qing, the Temple of Fu will rise again.

To check out Colin's 'Kung Fu Fridays' blog, which discusses all things k-fu related, click here. (Much respect, Colin, for choosing Lo Lieh as your profile pic. Not the most handsome of the Shaw Brothers' stable of actors, but one hell of a Pai Mei.)

For 'Popcorn & Sticky Floors', a more general blog dealing with the films and theatres of yester-year, click here.

Got a blog, a magazine, a zine, or a radio program that you want us to plug? Send us the info and it will be done!

Mono-no-aware

The pendulum swings in the opposite direction...

From Stacey Case's Trash Palace, we now move to Cinematheque Ontario, which for the duration of the summer will be running a retrospective of films from the Janus Films collection (Janus Films being an independent North American distributor which can be credited with introducing to North American audiences over the last five decades some of the greatest films and directors of world cinema). Call it a Best-of-the-Best, or All-Killer-No-Filler - Renoir, Kurosawa, De Sica, Bergman, Bresson: all the directors your cinema studies profs have been drilling into your heads for the last few years (and if you can still stomach them after all that, then you are to be commended).

If you have the time (often we don't) and the money (as students. we rarely do), I'd encourage you to see as many films as possible. But if I was going to recommend to you one film to see at Cinematheque this summer (and I say this with great hesitation, as many of my favourite films will be playing there), it would have to be Yasujiro Ozu's 'Tokyo Story'. Now, I'm sure there are many a cinephile out there that is groaning at this choice, given that the film just topped a critics list of 'greatest films of all time'. But if we can get past our cultural elitism (a disease that is positively rampant in this city), I think we can all admit what a beautiful, utterly human movie 'Tokyo Story' is, and how necessary it is to see such a film on the big screen (I've seen it at Cinematheque at least twice).

For a more qualified opinion, I quote Donald Richie, a Japanese film scholar whose writings on Ozu I don't fully endorse (I find his views on the essential nature of the 'Japanese tradition' problematic) but who nonetheless has the most sensitive appreciation for Ozu out of all the critics I've read on the subject:

'The end effect of an Ozu film - and one of the reasons that he is thought of as a spokesman for the Japanese tradition - is a kind of resigned sadness, a calm and knowing serenity which persists despite the uncertainty of life and the things of this world. It implies that the world will go on and that mutability, change, the evanescence of things, also yield their elegiac satisfactions.' - from 'Japanese Cinema' by Donald Richie

Not that Cinematheque needs our money (they have corporate sponsorship) and not that we can't go to Queen Video and rent most of these films ourselves. Nonetheless, I encourage all of you to choose one or two films from this summer's program to see. And being a Kurosawa fan (Kino-Eye's official mascot is, of course, Toshiro Mifune), I would be remiss not to encourage you to see 'Rashomon' or 'The Seven Samurai'. Classics, all.

Check out the full list of films offered this season at Cinematheque, as well as info on how to become a member, by clicking on this little link.

'Before I speak, I have something important to say.'

I assume a few of you are curious as to the origins of this blog's title, 'Kino-Eye'. Perhaps a few of the more clever students out there have already deciphered this cryptic phrase. If so, well done - your prize is the satisfaction of knowing that you truly are a film geek (and possibly a communist as well). For the rest of you, the answer is maybe more mundane than you might have hoped. 'Kino-Eye' is simply the name of a movie I happen to enjoy, by a director whose name I feel more sophisticated just by pronouncing, Dziga Vertov.

A friend of mine - himself a director - originally alerted me to the Soviet Dziga Vertov, specifically Vertov's film 'Man With A Movie Camera'. An amazing work, but a little too cumbersome to be the title of a blog. I opted instead for the title of one of Vertov's earlier works, 'Kino Glaz' ('Kino Eye'). It has a nice ring to it. More to the point, it allows us to imagine that we are that eye, redirecting the gaze of cinema (narcissistically, perhaps) back upon itself - in this case, the Toronto film scene.

But I think Vertov himself said it best:

"I am the eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see... My road is towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you."

(Many thanks to my friend Kohei for supplying me with the quote.)

I don't pretend to possess the qualifications to write at length about early avant-garde Soviet cinema, but I will say that I find it immensely fascinating that some of the most innovative films ever committed to celluloid were produced under the watch of the 'Man of Steel', Joseph Stalin. But then again, it might not be so bizarre. 'Casablanca' is nothing if not a paean to America's Free-French allies during the Second World War. And of course, there is Akira Kurosawa's first feature, 'Sanshiro Sugata', itself intended by his producers to instill in a war-time Japanese audience the correct sense of 'Yamato damashii'. Perhaps the relationship between the (totalitarian) state and art is more symbiotic than we would like to believe.

If you're curious about this Vertov fellow, or maybe are in need of some time to kill while you should be working on an essay (and if so, shame on you), then head on over to Google Video where you can watch the entirety of 'Kino Glaz' for free (along with, as I've just discovered, a slew of classic Chinese films from the Nationalist period). Too lazy to search the site yourself? All right. Here's the link. Happy?

(With many thanks to Groucho M. for supplying the title to this post.)

Trash Palace: 'Toronto's Classiest Cinema'

If you're like me, then you love Suspect Video. Not so much for the movies that they rent but for the bins of discounted VHS cassettes they're getting rid of for three bucks a piece. If you get past the copies of straight-to-video Van Damme features and mediocre romantic comedies from the mid-'90s, you can find quite a few finds. I've managed to find copies of Ozu's 'Floating Weeds' and the Marx Brothers' 'Animal Crackers' and a lot more. It's actually getting to be a bit of a problem. I now have a stack of VHS cassettes in my living room that easily dwarf me and yet I don't have the time to watch them all.

So it was on one of my frequent trips to Suspect Video that I stumbled upon a beautiful flyer for something called Trash Palace. Advertising itself as 'Toronto's Classiest Cinema', it promised screenings of such lost gems as 'TNT Jackson', 'Force on Thunder Mountain', and 'Schizo' (which has the best tag line ever: 'Schizophrenia: When the left hand doesn't know who the right hand is killing!'), all said to be presented on 16mm film. But even more intriguing than the movies themselves was the warning printed on the bottom of the flyer: 'No walk-ins. Secret location. Address on ticket. Advance tix at Suspect Video. $5.' Clever marketing? Or indie elitism? I had to find out.

That night, I visited Trash Palace's website - trashpalace.ca - to see if I could dig up anything else about these screenings. But the website was as enigmatic as the flyer. Precious little information was provided about the screenings and the movies themselves. My curiosity piqued, I contacted by email the projectionist Stacey Case, requesting an interview, either by phone or in person. Less than an hour later I got a reply and we arranged to meet Tuesday morning at Wagamama cafe on King and Techumseh. Putting on a newly purchased copy of the Hong Kong soft-core flick 'Erotic Ghost Story 2', I set about writing a list of questions for Mr. Case.

I arrived late for our meeting, having forgotten my digital voice recorder in my apartment, and was worried that the interview would have to be cut short. Well, it wasn't. For an hour and a half, Stacey talked about the motivation behind Trash Palace, his love for grindhouse and drive-in cinema, the place of the collector in today's film community, Mexican wrestling, and hammocks. It was a joy talking to someone who has such obvious passion for what he does and hopefully this transcription of the interview communicates some of that same passion. (I apologize in advance for the length of the piece. Maybe it's just symptomatic of me being knew to this whole blogging thing, but I would feel quite bad if I cut out too much of the interview. I am, however, chopping the interview into manageable chunks so it looks less daunting and so people can tackle it in piecemeal fashion.)

So here it is, my interview with Stacey Case, founder of and projectionist for Trash Palace. Enjoy!