CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO LECTURE SERIES

CINEMATIC ARCHAEOLOGY, OR YOU ARE WHAT YOU SEE AND HEAR:

PETER LYNCH & THE LOST WEEKEND

"It is not down on any a map. The True places never are." – Herman Melville

This talk will playfully map my personal cinematic journey to date. It will be an entertaining, freewheeling, apocryphal, anecdotal, stream of consciousness talk featuring artifacts, sound and vision. It will be a self-portrait of sorts, moving between life, movies, memory, and places. This will also be, in a sense, a cinematic archaeological portrait of Toronto. It will look at my cultural experiences growing up as the son of English immigrants in an exploding multicultural Toronto while watching as much American pop culture as any American kid. The stories I present will link to my past, e.g. where I found the arrowhead in my neighbourhood; where I set forest fires; buried stolen goods; ended up in reform school overnight; and committed acts of creative delinquency growing up in TO. How I got lost and ended up becoming a filmmaker.

Drinking or addiction as a means of avoiding mediocrity is a theme that runs through the history of writing and art in general; it is also present in Billy Wilder’s American realist masterpiece,The Lost Weekend. There isn’t a filmmaker or writer alive, no matter how successful, who can’t see a part of themselves in Wilder’s film. Wilder, as with all great filmmakers, wants to show us the secret heart, the story behind the story; he wants to hold a mirror up to our elemental human struggle. In my presentation I will be talking about my attraction to characters who often have a slightly skewed sense of reality, who struggle against their demons and a banal life, trying to set the world right through their quixotic adventures. – Peter Lynch

Followed by:

35MM