TIFF Cinematheque is honored to welcome Jean-Pierre Gorin, celebrated filmmaker and professor at University of California, San Diego, to guide us through this essential series on the "essay film," one of the most exciting and elusive genres in contemporary cinema. In many ways a salient postscript to our successful nouvelle vague show this past summer, this series, which will run over two successive seasons, forms an inevitable, if shape-shifting portrait of cinematic auterism-which pre-dates Alexandre Astruc's infamous coining of the term "caméra-stylo." With examples by Chris Marker, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel, Orson Welles, Chantal Akerman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Gorin himself, as well as his Dziga Vertov group collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard, various incarnations of the essay film will emerge, from the analytic and the ruminative to the incendiary.

Featured Works:

Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929); À Propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930); Las Hurdes (Luis Buñuel, 1933); Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955); Le Chant du Styrène (Alain Resnais, 1958); Chronique d'un été (Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, 1961); The Secret Formula (Rubén Gámez, 1965); Letter to Jane (Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972); F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973, pictured); Je tu il elle (Chantal Akerman, 1974); Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975); Ici et ailleurs (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976); In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (Guy Debord, 1978); The Origins of a Meal (Luc Moullet, 1978);Sans soleil (Chris Marker, 1983); Routine Pleasures (Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1986); A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (Raya Martin, 2005); Helsinki, Forever (Peter von Bagh, 2008); La Rabbia di Pasolini (Giuseppe Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini, 2008) ; L'Itinéraire de Jean Bricard (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 2008)

Program information:

The Way of the Termite: The Essay Film

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Other Ways Around by Andrew Tracy posted Nov. 05, 2009