AD HOC #78: Slow Run

AD HOC presents Slow Run, winner of Best Canadian Feature at the Canadian Artists '68 competition. Filmmaker Laurence Kardish will be in attendance.

Slow Run is a raw, lyrical portrait of New York City as seen through the eyes of a young Canadian exile. The filmmaker, Larry Kardish, at 23 years old, had made his first and only film as a candid love letter to the city, a litany of fascinations and complaints. Kardish blends dreamlike street photography, intimate portraiture, and a rhapsodic monologue performed by the filmmaker's fictional surrogate, a young Canadian ex-pat (Saul Rubinek in his first film role). The narration accounts the lives and relationships of a group of young Bohemians, and unfolds in parallel to the imagery rather than in dialogue with it, creating a tension between voice and vision, presence and distance.

When Slow Run was released, Jonas Mekas asked, "is Larry Kardish a lyrical realist?" It is a film of such contraditions: romantic and disenchanted, spontaneous and composed. Slow Run captures a fleeting moment in time—New York in its grand beauty, as seen by an alien.

Slow Run was recently restored by Canadian film scholar Stephen Broomer, who has published the film on Blu-ray disc through Black Zero, a home video label that specializes in Canadian underground and experimental films. Copies of this film and others in the Black Zero catalogue will be available at the screening.

TRT: 90 minutes, with an introduction by filmmaker Laurence Kardish and film historian Stephen Broomer

AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.

AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Bart Testa.

AD HOC would like to thank Alberto Zambenedetti, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, and the staff of Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute.