Preparations are still underway for the SYNOPTIQUE BENEFIT: A night of short film screenings, music, indecorum, cinema community. We received this pithy e-mail from Brett Kashmere, the curator of the short film programme he calls Original Copy:

ORIGINAL COPY
Rework, re-edit, reroute. Transform, translate,
disrupt the surface. Speed up, slow down, zoom in,
superimpose. Multiply, magnify, erase. Repeat.
Start over.

Films by Christina Battle, Kara Blake, Stan Brakhage,
Kelly Egan, Rick Hancox, Annie MacDonell, Troy
Rhoades, Daïchi Saïto and more.

Advance tickets are cheap: 5 bucks at CD Esoterik and Cheap Thrills. $7 at the door.

On Monday, May 9th 2005, there will be a showcase of Experimental and Documentary work from Concordia’s production programme. A $5 donation is suggested.

So, this is Montreal’s new cinema events blog. SYNOPTIC CINEMA MONTREAL (or synopticinemontreal as we affectionately prefer to type it) is part-blog-part-events-calendar: it’s designed as a one-stop-shop for a comprehensive view of what’s happening week by week in Montreal’s cinema community. It is currently maintained by staffers of Synoptique, the film journal that hosts the site. But that’s just for starters. We’re looking for blogger-meisters from all over Montreal. We want different perspectives, fresh perspectives. The idea is to provide a synoptic sense of cinema happenings in Montreal.

If you have a cinema event you’d like posted (including casting calls), please e-mail us at events@blog.synoptique.ca

If you’d like to become a blogger on this site, please e-mail a short letter to info@blog.synoptique.ca telling us why cinema is worth sharing.

We publish in both French and English.

Two things happen on this site:

1. Events posting. Those appear in reddish/pinkish. Clicking on any day on the calendar to the right will list events for that day. Above the calendar is a list of all the upcoming events. Events are “posted” to appear on the day they occur.

2. Announcements/Commentary/Everything else. Our cinema related blogging appears in yellow. We’ll be posting extra information on events, commentary on past events, commentary on current films and DVDs, picks of the week, interesting sites to check out, and just about anything that crosses our minds.

And this will also be a forum for long and hard looks. Funding for the arts, government policy, institutional bottlenecks, stagnant scenes, what-were-they-thinking?. Cinema is art, entertainment, politics. This is a place to keep informed. To keep inspired.

Enjoy. And we look forward to reading your comments. (Click here to leave your comments).