Book Launch & Film Retrospective: Frank Cole
* Introduced by Tom McSorley of the Canadian Film Institute
Canadian filmmaker, writer and critic Mike Hoolboom and Tom McSorley have edited a new book on the films and life of Frank Cole: A Life Without Death. Cinematheque presents a launch of the new book with screenings of Cole’s works. Legendary Canadian filmmaker Frank Cole entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the first man to cross the Sahara on foot. Meticulous, fearless, obsessive and the maker of at least two bonafide masterpieces, there has never been anything in the cinema like Frank Cole. His murder in Mali in 2000 left us with a legacy of two features, a pair of award-winning short films and a mystery that may never be solved - Mike Hoolboom
THE MAN WHO CROSSED THE SAHARA
Dir. Korbett Matthews | 2008 | Canada | 53 mins
Shot with the same stark beauty that impelled Cole’s death-defying movies, Matthews brings us home with Cole’s family and close-up with the cameraman he dragged across the Sahara. He swims alongside best friend Rick Taylor, and then brings us to filmmaker and wordsmith Peter Wintonick (Manufacturing Consent). Each provides a fascinating, haunting glimpse into the single-minded burn that drove Cole into the Guinness Book of World Records as the only person to cross the Sahara alone. The Man Who Crossed the Sahara is a movie generous with inner and outer geographies. Not only does it travel back to Cole’s terminal point in Mali, it brings us to the Cryonics Institute outside Detroit where his remains lie in a state of deep-freeze preservation. - Mike Hoolboom, Tom McSorley
ABOUT TOM MCSORLEY
Tom McSorley is the Executive Director of the Canadian Film Institute. He is also a sessional lecturer in Film Studies, at Carleton University; a freelance film and theatre critic for CBC; the editor of Rivers of Time: The Films of Philip Hoffman (2008), and co-editor of Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm (2006) and Life Without Death: The Cinema of Frank Cole).He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on Canadian and international cinema, and the author of a new critical study on Atom Egoyan’s 1991 feature The Adjuster. He compiled this new book of essays with award winning acclaimed Canadian experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom.