Film programmers are cinema’s unsung heroes. Granted, block bookings of Avatar or Marmaduke (opening this Friday, marking the first sign of the Rapture) at your local multiplex are divined by some Invisible Hand, but at any worthwhile art house, quality programming requires a certain thoughtfulness that is no less methodical.
This summer marks the twentieth anniversary of the TIFF Cinematheque — née Cinematheque Ontario, recently rebranded along with all of the Toronto International Film Festival’s various adjunct organizations. And for two decades, James Quandt has worked diligently to line up hundreds of series, from retrospectives of major filmmakers to national surveys and thematic programs. He has not only brought the best in contemporary and classic cinema to local audiences, but toured the Cinematheque’s programs throughout North America and Europe.
To mark the Cinematheque’s vicennial, the senior programmer and his team have prepared a robust summer schedule. Celebrating what would have been the hundredth birthday of Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, the Cinematheque is presenting the suitably titled “Centenary of the Sensei,” which unspools over two dozen of Kurosawa’s films from June through August. There are also retrospectives dedicated to the work of British actor James Mason, Italian provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini (“The Poet of Contamination” according to Quandt’s programming notes), a tribute to the late Canadian film critic and scholar Robin Wood, and plenty more.
Like the bulk of TIFF’s operations, the Cinematheque is currently preparing for its move to the festival’s new headquarters at the Bell Lightbox, a space which promises to expand the purview and possibilities of art house programming in Toronto. Walrusmagazine.com chatted with Quandt about history’s role at the Cinematheque, the dizzy logistics of programming, and the impending relocation to the Lightbox.
Looking back on your twenty years with the Cinematheque, which programmes really stick out for you as exceptional?
There are a few I’m extremely proud of. A lot of them lie in the area of Japanese cinema. That’s a personal passion of mine: not doing just the familiar masters like Ozu and Mizoguchi… I would look more to a relatively unknown director like Mikio Naruse, who we organized a retrospective on and toured it to about twenty cities. That was a great success, and a surprise to me. He’s just not known and there’s been very little written about him in English.
Another one I feel very passionate about is the Roberto Rossellini retrospective. I attempted it many, many times and failed. But about three years ago, I was finally able to put that together.
What are the logistics of assembling these comprehensive director retrospectives like, say, the Pasolini programme you’re launching this summer?
There are two ways it can happen. One is the easy way, where a cultural ministry from a country, say Italy, offers you a package of a director’s films, say Antonioni or Visconti, both of whom we’ve done, I think, three times. The prints are all made and rights are easy to clear.
Then there are the difficult ones. And there are many of those. An analogy would be putting together a major exhibition of artwork at a museum: you have to find good prints of older material, many of which are unavailable; you have to find the rights holders, which can be a lot of detective work. For example, we discovered about three years ago that the rights for a lot of classic Italian films are held by a Latin-American television company in Miami, Florida. It was only by searching contracts and quizzing people that we were led to this. Then the actual process of clearing the rights can be extremely difficult.
Another banner event at the Cinematheque was this winter’s “Best of the Decade” programme. How did it differ from other “Best Ofs” that tend to emerge at the turn of every decade?
The first time we did this [ten years ago], I asked local and Canadian critics and programmers [for input]. This time, because I was aware that there were a number of “Best of the Decade” polls being done by various magazines — Cinema Scope, Film Comment, et cetera — I wanted to bring a different perspective to it. I thought it would be interesting to narrow the field to curators and programmers of similar institutions as the Cinematheque. Now it’s slightly specious as many people, including myself, act both as curators and as critics. But by and large, what I was looking for was a perspective coming from people dedicated more to the history of film then to contemporary cinema. That proved somewhat controversial. Some people saw this as a confederacy of mandarins, and that was not my intention.
The list was ultimately prescient, considering that… I can never pronounce his name…
Yes! Well, he just won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. And his films figured very prominently on the Cinematheque’s “Best of the Decade” list.
I was thrilled about that win. I actually published a book on him a little while ago, and I felt the Palme d’Or confirmed his importance.
How do you balance the desire to shed light on emerging filmmakers with your dedication to classic film?
I would say we’re focused largely on the history of cinema, as our purview is devoted from the very early days of cinema to the current period, [but] we’ve always been focused on contemporary cinema as well. After we moved into the AGO in 1993, I decided there were a number of important films that weren’t getting to Toronto — that were getting passed on by distributors because they were too difficult or too small or not commercial enough, or for whatever reason. There were also a number of re-releases of classic films being missed in Toronto. I thought we had a chance to do some limited runs, to open up to both these types of film.
We also have a series called “Film Now,” which looks at directors who are the new masters of cinema. And you’re going out on a limb predicting that, because careers can go into a tailspin for any number of reasons. We’ve done in that series Jia Zhangke, who figured pretty prominently into that “Best of the Decade” list; we did the Dardenne brothers. Most recently we did a double bill of two Argentinean directors, Lucrecia Martel and Lisandro Alonso.
Something else that’s interesting this summer is the Robin Wood program at the Cinematheque. Here’s a guy whose importance to film criticism and scholarship was immeasurable. Magazines like Scope and CineAction — which he co-founded — did some nice write-ups after he passed late last year, but what gave you the idea to dedicate an entire series to him?
Well, everything that you’ve just said. And we had worked with him on a number of series. He had done a Leo McCarey retrospective for us. We worked with him on a Hitchcock retrospective as well. He certainly had a very long list of directors he wanted us to profile. He went to the Cinematheque all the time, and made his opinions very strongly known.
How will the move into the Bell Lightbox in September impact what you’re able to do with the Cinematheque’s programming?
I’m very excited about the move. We have been limited, shall we say, by being on a single screen. There are countless series that we regrettably turned down because we could just not fit it into our programming. There’s a limited number of spots at [our current home in the AGO’s] Jackman Hall. Now with five cinemas of greatly varying capacities, from very large to quite intimate, it opens up whole new territory for what we can do. We can dedicate more difficult, or slightly more esoteric programming, to the smallest theatre. It also opens us up to doing far bigger events. We have 200 seats at the Cinematheque now, and we’ve often had to do bigger events off site. Soon we can do them in-house. There’s [going to be] a lot more latitude in the programming.
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