Rubba Nada's Cairo Time with Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig |
The Cinémathèque kicks off its winter programme with Canada’s Top Ten, an annual series established to honour excellence in contemporary Canadian cinema. This year’s programming features –among others– Ruba Nadda’s Cairo Time, Denis Côté’s Carcasses, Bernard Émond’s The Legacy, and Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique.”
The numinous and spiritual certainly characterized a great deal of cinema this decade and a number of films in The Best of the Decade: An Alternative View end in gestures of forgiveness, acts of contrition, or outright miracles (e.g. Gerry, Le Fils, Silent Light, Beau Travail, The Wind Will Carry Us). But the decade according to the series’ curator James Quandt was also one of requiems for the cinema, Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn and Jean-Luc Godard’s Éloge de l’amour preeminent among them. The latter ends with an incantation of artistic failure—“maybe nothing was said”—but the ninety minutes of soul-stirring beauty preceding that repeated line belie any sense of aesthetic impasse.
 Jean-Luc Godard’s Éloge de l’Amour with Cécile Camp and Bruno Putzulu |
Finally, Human Rights Watch International Film Festival is also part of this challenging Winter programming. The collapse of systems, whether they be environmental, financial, or legal, have led to some of the most serious human rights abuses we have witnessed in this first decade of the twenty-first century. Lixin Fan's powerful documentary debut Last Train Home shows cracks in the seams of the social fabric as thousands of Chinese migrant workers move from traditional villages, where values are passed through generations, to factory cities, where they labour endlessly and anonymously in the hope of breaking through their poverty and providing a better life for their children. The risk in this, evident in the film, is that children are growing up without parents and must plan for their future alone.
Keep an eye on the Cinématheque site, and drop in to Le Sélect before or after to discuss the movie. Cinématheque screenings take place at Jackman Hall in the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) - enter on McCaul St south of Dundas.
If
you haven't yet seen Frank Gehry's extension of
the Art
Gallery of Ontario (AGO) don't wait to visit some of
the loveliest spaces in the city, such as the Italian Gallery, at left. The Globe and Mail gives it its top architectural award and comments that "Frank Gehry turned out a masterful reinvention that clarified the gallery's plan and suggested the warmth and shape of the body throughout". There you can admire Beautiful Fictions, an exhibition
of photography featuring works from the late 1960s to the present through
the lens of 60 Canadian and international photographers, including Candida
Höfer,
Thomas Struth, Michael Snow, Suzy Lake, and Cindy Sherman. Through January
17 2010.
News flash: the AGO has invested in a pyramid scheme! That's right, the glories of ancient Egypt have been brought to Toronto. King Tut: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs runs until April 18 2010. Plan to bring your mummy if she's not too wrapped up.
The
AGO now houses a bigger and better collection of art, with some tremendous
additions from the Thomson and Frum collections. They include a stunning
collection of European art and sculpture, from the middle ages onwards, a
flotilla of extraordinary model ships, an array of art and sculpture from
sub-Saharan Africa, and a recent anonymous donation of the most significant
collection of Australian Aboriginal art outside Australia. Plus there's the
old favourites: 11000 years of Canadian art, Dutch and Flemish masters, Henry
Moore, and a massive contemporary collection now overlooking Grange Park.
Also on: Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933 (to mid January) features work by the great sculptor, including wire pieces and his famous mobiles. And Edward Steichen: The Condé Nast Years, featuring his fashion and celebrity photos for Vogue and Vanity Fair, is a good companion piece to the ROM's Vanity Fair Portraits. Get updated on the AGO site.
At the Royal Ontario
Museum, the year starts with an award which it would have been happy to avoid, that of “Ugly Beast” according to the Globe and Mail architectural contest Beauty vs the Beasts. Oooch. “It’s a train wreck and we are not getting used to it” adds the Globe. No need to mention that it also leaks. But with its re-invention and construction mostly over, the ROM has most of its galleries now open and there's lots to enjoy, including the collection of crystals which inspired Daniel Liebeskind's glass and metal extension. Plus there's
the permanent collection - everything
from Chinese temple art to every kid's
favourite, the Bat Cave.
Qumran, where the scrolls were discovered |
The controversial exhibit of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls is now over. The exhibition had the ROM picketed by various Human Rights groups and progressive Jewish organizations dedicated to peace in Palestine as the artefacts were seized from a museum in the West Bank by Israel in its 1967 war, after having been excavated by teams of Jordanian and French archaeologists. Most museums in the world declined to present this exhibition given the dispute on how the collection came into the possession of a military occupier. Although the ROM had undertaken to present, along with about 20 of the scrolls, some background information on their turbulent recent history... it never did. This exhibition ends just as the world commemorates the carnage by Israeli artillery shellings which killed 1,400 Palestinians walled in the Gaza strip, one year ago. Read more about the controversy in the Globe and Mail and the UK's Independent.
Baker Lake House by Patrick Mahon |
At Leo Kamen Gallery, at 80 Spadina just north of King, Mask: Artists and Curators is an exhibition of photography by Arthur Renwick. In this series Renwick exhibits larger than life portraits of First Nations artists and curators who participated in a curatorial conference in Vancouver, British Columbia at the UBC First Nations House (not far from the UBC Anthropology Museum) in 2009.
After the holidays, from January 16 to February 19, there's a show by Denis Farley, inspired by architecture, perception, and memory, and prints by Patrick Mahon. Get updates on the Leo Kamen site.
Still in our neighbourhood (and even closer to Le Sélect)
is Nicholas
Metivier Gallery, 451 King St West, west of Spadina. Kingdom
Come by Joanne Tod runs from November 26 to December
22. Tod’s work brings to life the antiquities found in such institutions
as the British Museum, The Art Gallery of Ontario and the Brooklyn
Museum, while investigating notions of appropriation, display and ownership. Check
out the gallery
website.
Factory
Theatre is
also an easy walk from Le Sélect, and always features outstanding
new Canadian theatre. The
Madonna Painter (right) runs to
December 13, in which a Québec priest attempts
to protect his parish from the 1918 Spanish Flu
by commissioning a fresco devoted to the Madonna.
Written by the acclaimed Québec playwright Michel
Marc Bouchard, this is world premiere of the play's
English-language translation. See more on the Factory
Theatre website.
The Canadian Opera Company is now at the Four Seasons Centre at Queen and University. Bizet's Carmen is on stage from January 27 to February 27, and Verdi's Otello runs from February 3 to 28. Check the COC website for details.
