Offscreen. 9.5.

For those of us reading the journal online, the May 31 issue of Offscreen's a new one. And, as the intro says, it's devoted "entirely to the recent and past of Québec cinema," beginning with Canuxploitation! editor Paul Corupe's history of Canadian pulps, from their heyday - "Written, illustrated and printed in Québec, these 32-page booklets encompassed the thrilling sub-literary genres of romance, science fiction, crime and espionage, all with indigenous settings and protagonists" - to their run-in with massive American competition to their eventual reemergence, in the form of at least one diehard character, Agent IXE-13, on screen.

Isabelle Morissette interviews Denys Arcand and the occasion is pretty remarkable: the National Film Board's release of L'oeuvre documentaire intégrale de Denys Arcand 1962-1981. "[T]here is 20 years of my life in this little box set," he told the press when it was launched.

Editor Donato Totaro does the heavy lifting, revisiting Robert Lepage's Le Confessionnal, "which, to my mind, remains one of the most impressive debut Canadian films ever," as well as Jean Yves Bigras's 1952 La Petite Aurore, L'enfant Martyre, based on a hideous incident that "has been in continuous adaptation in most mediums (theatre, novel, radio, television, film) from its first appearance as a stage play in 1921 (by Petitjean and Rollin) to this day." Totaro also queries filmmakers Karim Hussain and Julien Fonfrède with particular regard to their sci-fi short La Dernière Voix (The City without Windows).

Posted by dwhudson at June 27, 2005 12:19 AM