_J_'s Journal: TIFF09/01 Backstory/Cinema Museum

Backstory/Cinema Museum

Two art pieces/documentaries by Mark Lewis.

Backstory is a documentary about the family business of doing rear projection for movies. It is a series of interviews with the family patriarch, Bill Hansard, and his son Don all done with different scenes projected behind them. These two very human individuals go through life as part of a dying film technique. The father is crusty with some unpleasant bits. In the end the backgrounds are more interesting than the men who make them. Which is as it should be. 7/10

Cinema Museum is a tour of the title facility conducted by curator followed by the wordless camera. It is a story of two veterans of the cinema business who we never see but who hoard everything they can find related to movies houses and movies. The camera floats through room after room of barely organized piles of stuff; some of it valuable and some of it crap with no distinction made between them. At times pathetic and wondrous it is an example of an obsession taken too far that has crossed into the pathological. This might have special appeal to me since I worked in a movie house as a teen. 7/10