Described by critic Amy Taubin as “an unassuming masterpiece,” Faces Places is an ideal launch point for the series’ focus on late and last works. The film frames an unlikely creative collaboration, bringing together Agnes Varda, titan of French cinema, and the much younger street photographer, J.R.
Orson Welles’ final film, The Other Side of the Wind, has a certain notoriety: messy and ambitious, shot over a six-year period between 1970-1976 with his partner Oja Kodar, the sprawling production was never completed. Three decades after Welles’ death and an extended legal battle, 100 hours of footage was retrieved from a Paris vault and painstakingly reconstructed, led by Welles’ friend and collaborator, director Peter Bogdanovich.
24 Frames (2017) is a final, elegiac work from Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The project was originally conceived as a collaboration with the Louvre, animating a series of iconic paintings by Brueghel, Picasso, Millet, and others by adding layers of digital imagery and sound elements.
Perhaps the best-known monochrome film in the history of cinema, Derek Jarman’s Blue is a profound audiovisual experiment, foregoing conventional representation to offer a single, saturated frame of Yves Klein blue.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock | USA | 121 min
The closing title of the series is the last work of cinematic master Alfred Hitchcock, a loose adaptation of Victor Canning’s The Rainbird Pattern, (1972) originally titled Deceit. With a witty script by Ernest Lehman and a John Williams score, Family Plot is a dark comedy set in sunny California, focused on a pair of grifters, spiritualist Blanche Tyler (Barbara Harris) and her unemployed actor boyfriend, George Lumley (Bruce Dern) as they pursue a missing heir for a cash reward. Film music scholar Jack Sullivan has described Family Plot as a “frenetic ballet of crisscrossing con artists,” which captures the film’s signature energies. In contrast to the violent set-pieces featured in Psycho (1960), and the later film Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock’s parting shot is a lighter work designed to amuse, calling back to earlier comedies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) and The Trouble with Harry (1955).
In collaboration with the University of Calgary's Film Department
Part of our Final Frames Series.
Partner:
In the spirit of respect, reciprocity and truth, we honour and acknowledge that this screening takes place on Moh’kinsstis and the traditional Treaty 7 territory, as well as the oral practices of the Blackfoot confederacy: Siksika, Kainai, Piikani as well as the Îyâxe Nakoda and Tsuut’ina nations. We acknowledge that this territory is home to the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6. Finally, we acknowledge all Nations, Indigenous and non, who live, work and play, as well as help steward this land, honour and celebrate this territory.
