VanRamblings started our Festival dark — Without, Tyrannosaur, and Michael — two weeks back, and we’re ending our Festival the same way: with Pure on Thursday night, and perhaps the darkest of the dark night of the soul film at this year’s VIFF, Sean Durkin’s Sundance psychological thriller, Martha Marcy May Marlene, which we saw Tuesday evening.
Stunning début performances in 2011, from Alicia Vikander, Eva Ionesco, & Elizabeth Olsen
At the 30th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, the word audacious might appropriately be employed in discussion of some aspect of a film screening at VIFF30 merely three times …
Alicia Vikander’s stunner of a performance, dark, disturbing and utterly humane, if ever so twisted in the realization of such, in Pure;
Eva Ionesco’s enthralling début film, My Little Princess, this film more than any other screening at the Festival employing every key element of the craft of filmmaking — sound, colour, words and feeling — in what has to be considered the cinematic and artistic triumph of the year; and
Elizabeth Olson who, as in the case of Vikander and Ionesco, finds herself at the centre of a film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, in which she surrenders deeply and hauntingly to the inexorable passage through the hours of her existence, and whatever horror may come from the move forward through her shuddering life.
VanRamblings is, this week, ramping down our coverage of the 30th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, as the Festival sets about to screen its final film this Friday evening, October 14th. And, of course, that will be it for VIFF30, resplendent with cinema from across the globe, 375 features and 100 more short films having screened at five venues across Vancouver.
Still, there are a few more films we’d like to write about, beginning with …
My Little Princess (Grade: A): The most audacious directorial début we can recall in recent memory, Eva Ionesco’s trenchant, autobiographical film offers a disturbing, accomplished and authentic tale of Ionesco’s unconventional relationship with her mother, Irina, in the most fully realized and beautifully sweeping cinematic fever dream of a film we’ve screened at the 30th annual Vancouver International Film Festival.In the 1970s, Ionesco’s mother rocked the Paris art world with photographs of her naked, pre-pubescent daughter. In interviews, Ionesco recalls that her mother began posing her provocatively when she was just four. In My Little Princess, Violetta (played with exquisite perfection by newcomer Anamaria Vartolomei, in the most auspicious and moving début performance we’ve seen at VIFF 30) is ten when her wildly unconventional mother, Hanna (Isabelle Huppert), takes the fun of dressing up in old clothes to a new and decidedly troubling level.As Irina increasingly sexualizes her daughter, Violetta turns into a Lolita figure, standing forlornly in the school playground in tight hot pants, swaggering into the classroom in full make-up and wearing clothes that could only be deemed inappropriate. Twelve-year-old Vartolomei is the saving grace of the film, as she gives a tough, moral, centered and very strong performance, always true to herself and to the character she is portraying, lending the film an integrity that otherwise may have not been present, in the process taking the film from what might have been considered demeaning and exploitative film fare to the realm of art.
Brie Koniczek & Maja Klempner, VIFF exhibitions staff, out front of the Empire Granville 7
Although VanRamblings continues to harbour much affection for volunteer co-ordinator Iulia Manolescu, who during this Festival has taken on the venue management responsibility for the Granville 7’s Theatre 5, we have this year made daily contact with, and come to depend on, Brie Koniczek and Maja Klempner — who, no matter what time of the day or night — may be found at their post near the entrance to the Empire Granville 7 facilitating the best possible Vancouver International Film Festival for you.
Brie and Maja have made VanRamblings’ Festival in 2011. No matter that we might feel the tribulations arising from a lack of sleep defined by a tendency towards a confused state of mind, or when at some point in the day we find ourselves in a curmudgeonly mood, out front of the Empire Granville 7, you will find Maja, her face aglow with that warm, wonderful, and welcoming smile, so beatific that any patron’s concerns would simply melt away. Brie, as is the case with Maja, simply exudes a hardy competence and, as you can see in the photo above, her smile is not only welcoming, but calming. Brie co-ordinates the passholders’ ticket table, which in these latter days has come to run with a sense of systemic élan. In 2011, Brie is the heart of the exhibitions staff, who possesses an administrative skill par excellence (she’s sees everything out front of the Granville 7 - lines moving in efficiently and well? you can thank Brie).
VanRamblings is grateful to Brie and Maja. Thank you so very, very much!
Imagine yourself on a Sunday morning at the 31st annual Vancouver International Film Festival. You’ve just walked into the Empire Granville 7, where you’ve been greeted by one of the volunteers, and are then ushered into a dark room with seats all facing forward. You feel reverent.
You are about to worship at the ‘church of cinema‘.
One hundred years on, global cinema has arrived as a form of transcendence, for many replacing the once venerated position held by the institutional church. Think about the similarities: churches and the cinema are both large buildings built in the public space. Both have signage out front indicating what is about to occur inside.
As physical structures, the church and the cinema create a sense of sacred space with their high ceilings, long aisles running the length of the darkened rooms inside, the use of dim lighting, the sweeping curvature of the walls, and the use of curtains to enhance the sacredness of the experience.
In the church of the cinema we take communion not with bread and wine, but with the ritualistic consumption of our favourite snack.
Consider if you will, the memorable moment when you enter the auditorium to find your perfect viewing angle, allowing you to sit back, relax and enjoy. Although you may not receive absolution at the cinema, there is the two-hour reprieve from the burden of your daily life.
As the lights are dimmed, the service begins: The seating, and the opening introduction constitute a liturgy for one and all, not dissimilar to the welcoming ritual that occurs in a church service prior to the sermon. If you are like most people, you obey an unwritten rule that requires you to be in place in time for either the singing (if you’re in church) or the introduction of a film by a Vancouver Film Festival theatre manager. And, you remain silent while in the theatre, focused on all that unfolds before you.
There is, too, the notion that as the film limns your unconscious mind you are being transported, elevated in some meaningful way, left in awe in the presence of a work of film art.
What we want from church is often, these days, more of what we receive from the cinema on offer at the Vancouver International Film Festival: the vague, unshakable notion that the eternal and invisible world is all around us, transporting us as we sit in rapt attention. We experience the progress and acceleration of time, as we see life begin, progress, and find redemption. All within two hours. The films at the Vancouver International Film Festival constitute much more than entertainment; each film is a thoughtful meditation on our place in society and our purpose in life.
As a film draws to a close, just as is the case following a sermon we might hear in church, our desire is to set about to discuss with friends that which we have just experienced. Phrases and moments, transcending current frustrations with a new resolve, all in response to a line of dialogue or an image on the screen that we have now incorporated into how we will lead our life going forward.
In the holy trinity of meaning, cinema reigns supreme, the personal altar of our home theatres placing a distant second place, the city providing the physical proof of the reality the other two point to, oriented towards the satisfaction of the devout cinemagoer’s theology.
Throughout the centuries we have sought to find meaning through manifest ritual and symbolism. If, as in the scene from American Beauty, a plastic bag sailing in the breeze is an intimation of immortality then there is, perhaps, something for us to consider respecting the difference between art as diversion and art in our lives as a symbolic representation of an awakened mindfulness, allowing us to transcend the troubles of our lives.
For those who attend the Vancouver International Film Festival, cinema has emerged as that place where we might experience life in the form of parable, within a safe and welcoming environment, that place where we are able to become vulnerable and open, hungry to make sense of our lives. Cinema delivers for many of us access to the new spiritualism, the place where we experience not merely film, but language, memory, art, love, death and, perhaps even, spiritual transcendence.
