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Woman with a Movie Camera (NSN playlist)

Lucrecia Martel, Maya Deren, Claire Denis, Louise Brooks, Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Alice Guy-Blaché, Lotte Reiniger, Jennifer Kent
Louise Brooks
Hollywood star Louise Brooks broke ranks and went to Berlin on her own to make the silent classic Pandora’s Box with G. W. Pabst in 1929. The film is getting a new theatrical release in the U.K.

WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
The British Film Institute is hosting Woman With A Movie Camera Summit on June 16 in London. BFI and Sight & Sound magazine have compiled a resource that tracks all films made by women filmmakers online (bfi.org.uk).

LUCRECIA MARTEL
The Cinematheque continues its mid-career retrospective of the works of Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel. Tonight The Headless Woman (2008) screens at 6:30 p.m. followed by her latest work, Zama, at 8:15 p.m.

MARGERIE BONNER
On June 7, 1939, actress Margerie Bonner met writer Malcolm Lowry on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Ave. in Los Angeles. Born in Washington, D.C., Bonner had moved out to the West Coast to be close to her sister, silent film star Priscilla Bonner. Margerie appeared in several films herself before getting work as a personal assistant to actress Penny Singleton. Lowry, kicked out of Mexico by this point, was staying at the Hotel Normandie, and working on an early draft of his novel, Under the Volcano. They eventually married and moved to a shack on the North Vancouver waterfront where Margerie helped Lowry finish Under the Volcano as well as other work including a never-filmed screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night. During their time on Burrard Inlet she also published three novels of her own: The Shapes That Creep (1944), The Last Twist of the Knife (1946)  and Horse in the Sky (1947).
As part of a Polygon Gallery digital art program launched this week, the Lowry’s home is featured in Polygon Outside, a site specific, 360° virtual recreation of the cabin in Cates Park, 4141 Dollarton Highway, North Vancouver.

MAYA DEREN
Columbia University professor Richard Peña presented The Invention of Independent Cinema: A Celebration of Maya Deren and Her Works from 1917-1961 in Istanbul in May. The talk explores the significance of Deren’s films and the emergence of the avant-garde in the context of post-war America.

LOUISE BROOKS
British Film Institute hosts theatrical release of G. W. Pabst’s silent masterwork Pandora’s Box, made in Germany in 1929 starring Hollywood actress Louise Brooks. Charlotte Siller’s new Documentary of a Lost Girl uses archival materials and interviews from various witnesses to uncover the life of Brooks away from the cameras.

LOTTE REINIGER
Trick Studios (Elizabeth Beecherl and Carla Patullo) have made a new short animated documentary about the pioneering work of German animator Lotte Reiniger, Lotte That Silhouette Girl. It will screen in Vancouver at the Summer Outdoor Series along with Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Date TBA.

CLAIRE DENIS
Claire Denis’ new film, Let the Sunshine In, starring Juliette Binoche “couldn’t be more French if it was smoking Gauloises and wearing a Breton top,” says The Guardian. The film is currently showing at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas.

JENNIFER KENT
In her follow-up to The Babadook Jennifer Kent has made The Nightingale, a period thriller set in 1825 in the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now the Australian state of Tasmania), A feminist John Ford epic from Down Under.

ALICE GUY-BLACHÈ
Tramp Strategy, from French pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché screens at The Cinematheque on June 18 as part of UCLA Festival of Preservation Tour.

AGNÈS VARDA
Belgian-born French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda celebrated her 90th birthday on May 30. Her latest film, Faces Places, made with street artist JR, screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival last fall. 

CHANTAL AKERMAN
Forty-five films screened at the Cinémathèque Française, Paris, Jan. 31 – March 2, 2018. Ten essential films from BFI.