Fantasia 2019, Day 6, Part 1: Ad Astra Book Launch, and Nao Yoshigai x 4: Of Blooming Flowers and Dead Skin
On July 16 I started my day at Fantasia with a book launch. Michael Gingold’s book Ad Astra is coming out this fall, but attendees of his multimedia presentation had the chance to buy it earlier. It’s a follow-up to 2018’s Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares From the 1980s and its sequel to come in September, Ad Nauseam II: Newsprint Nightmares From the 1990s and 2000s. Those books were collections of classic newspaper ads for horror movies, while Ad Astra is subtitled 20 Years of Newspaper Ads for Sci-Fi & Fantasy Films.
Gingold, a former editor-in-chief of Fangoria, said he’d collected ads since he was 12 years old, and the book thus covered films from the original Star Wars through to A Phantom Menace. He showed some of the images included in the book while discussing trends in newspaper ads — and in movies, noting that science fiction began to perform reliably at the box office in these years with Moonraker the most popular James Bond film up to the time of its release in 1979, while in the summer of 1980 The Empire Strikes Back and Friday the 13th were the only real financial successes. Gingold went on to say he had a sympathy for smaller films, such as Mighty Peking Man, a Shaw Brothers movie first released in North America as Goliathon.
He observed that while we debate ‘special editions’ of films today, the idea perhaps began with the 1980 version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Among the ads he showed was the one for Dune packed with expository text; and variant ads for films like Excalibur and Flash Gordon. Some films had seasonal ads, as Superman II did for July 4 or ET for Christmas. On the other hand, other films (like Howard the Duck) had to change their ads in an attempt to rebrand the film. Review ads began to emerge (prompting an ad for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure that mocked the format), as did ads featuring tag lines or actor’s name — a whole sub-genre of ads for Arnold Schwarzenegger movies placed the name “Schwarzenegger” in all-caps at the top of the ad. Gingold also noted that he included in the book some of his favourite quotes from his favourite dyspeptic movie critic Rex Reed; such as, for example, Reed’s line that The NeverEnding Story was “worse than girl scout cookies.”
From the book launch in Concordia’s York Amphitheatre I crossed the street to the De Sève Theatre. There, I watched a program of short films by experimental director Nao Yoshigai. Yoshigai’s a dancer and choreographer as well as filmmaker, and her work has already met with considerable acclaim; her piece “Grand Bouquet” was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. Fantasia’s program, Nao Yoshigai x 4: Of Blooming Flowers and Dead Skin gathered four of her shorts together, culminating with “Grand Bouquet.”