Frames of Mind

Wednesday, December 20, 2006 - 7:30pm
Great Britain 2000. Director: Julien Temple
Post-screening discussion with Ramon Kubicek.

Pandaemonium is the delirious story of passion, betrayal, madness and addiction that binds two of history's most acclaimed poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. The film opens in 1816, where Wordsworth (John Hannah), about to be named poet laureate, is throwing a lavish party. An unsteady Coleridge (Linus Roache), ravaged by an opium addiction, crashes to the floor

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Wednesday, November 15, 2006 - 7:30pm
USA/UK 1990. Director: Jane Campion
Post-screening discussion with Ramon Kubicek.
Jane Campion's brilliant adaptation of Janet Frame's Autobiography

Originally conceived of as a television miniseries, Jane Campion's brilliant, heart-breaking three-part film adapts celebrated New Zealand author Janet Frame's three-volume autobiography. The first section, "To the Is-Land," tells of Frame's poverty-stricken childhood on a New Zealand farm, where she grows up chronically shy and awkward, acutely aware of being different, and finds refuge in books and writing. In the second section, "An Angel at My Table," she dutifully enrols in teachers' college, even though she desperately wants to be a writer.

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Wednesday, October 18th - 7:30pm
Canada 1976 . Directors: Donald Brittain, John Kramer
Post-screening discussion with Ramon Kubicek.
Special thanks to the National Film Board of Canada

English writer Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) exorcised his demons through writing and gin, all the while fearing he would be engulfed by his fiction. Opening in sobering fashion with the inquest into Lowry’s “death by misadventure” (a coroner’s jury cited his death as “the result of combined effects of gin, barbiturates and inhalation of stomach contents”), the film moves back in time to trace one writer’s agonized voyage into oblivion.

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Wednesday, September 20, 2006 - 7:30pm
USA/UK 1992. Director: Nick Broomfield

“Spalding Gray may be the ultimate WASP neurotic, analyzing his actions with an intensity that would be unpleasantly egomaniacal if it weren’t so self-deprecatingly funny. He questions everything and ends up more exhausted than satisfied” (Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press).

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Wednesday, December 21, 2005 - 7:30 pm
USA, 2004. Director: Jessica Yu
Post-screening discussion with Ramon Kubicek
Co-sponsored by Gallery Gachet and the Art Studios and The Ubyssey

In 1973, at a Catholic poorhouse in Chicago, an 81-year-old retired and isolated janitor named Henry Darger quietly died. After Darger’s death, when his landlords went to clean out his one-room apartment, they found an astonishing and monumental artistic legacy. Piled all over the cramped apartment were hundreds of brilliant watercolours, featuring disturbing and mysteriously beautiful images of little girls in the throes of apocalyptic battles with evil forces.

Preceded by:

BREATHING LESSONS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF MARK O’BRIEN

USA, 1996. Director: Jessica Yu
Jessica Yu won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for this honest and intimate portrait of an artist who lived for four decades paralyzed by polio and confined to an iron lung.

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Wednesday, November 16, 2005 - 7:30 pm
USA 1996. Director: Julian Schnabel
Cosponsored by Gallery Gachet and the Art Studios and The Ubyssey

In 1979, 18-year-old graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was sleeping in a cardboard box in a New York City park. Within three years, this Haitian-American child of middle-class parents was an ascendant star of the frenetic contemporary art scene ofManhattan in the 1980s. Marketed by his agent as “the true voice of the gutter”, Basquiat first gained attention as a graffiti artist whose neatly printed legends, signed SAMO, were found all over the city.

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Wednesday, October 21, 2005 - 7:30 pm
Great Britain/France/Japan 1998. Director: John Maybury
Post-screening discussion with Ramon Kubicek
Cosponsored by Gallery Gachet and the Art Studios and The Ubyssey

“One of the nastiest and most truthful portraits of the artist-as-monster ever filmed” (Stephen Holden, New York Times), Love Is the Devil offers a riveting and disquieting depiction of a riveting and disquieting painter. Recognized during his lifetime as “England’s greatest living painter,” Francis Bacon (played here in a fearless, astonishing performance by Derek Jacobi) created violent and disturbing paintings portraying the human body in all its ugliness and anguish — his works a constant probing of the horrors of existence.

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Wednesday, September 28, 2005 - 7:30 pm
France/United Kingdom/Netherlands 1990. Director: Robert Altman
Post-screening discussion with: Ramon Kubicek
Cosponsored by Gallery Gachet and the Art Studios

An unflinching and powerful portrait of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, acknowledged today as
one of the world’s greatest artists, but in his lifetime completely unrecognized.

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