Cut-and-paste cinéaste

>> DJ XL5 re-launches Cinéma du Parc’s Midnight Madness with his latest party montage

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“I became a film fanatic by attending the repertory theatre,” says DJ XL5, aka Marc Lamothe. “One night when I was 12 years old, I attended a double bill—it was Phantom of the Paradise and Tommy, so on the same night I discovered movies, girls and rock ’n’ roll.”

The site of Lamothe’s epiphany was a theatre owned by Roland Smith, “the godfather of repertory cinema in Montreal,” says Lamothe, and part of the team that resurrected Cinéma du Parc after its closing last year. So it’s fitting that the man who first brought repertory and midnight programming to local screens, pioneering the phenomenon in Canada, is bringing Midnight Madness back to the Parc, continuing a tradition that seemed to be teetering on the edge of extinction.

Many obits have been written for rep cinema, but based on the raucous crowds at the Fantasia festival, where Lamothe works as director of marketing and communications, and the all-nighters he’s hosted at Nuit Blanche, he knew that there was still a market for a fun movie-going experience. “My fondest memory,” he recalls, “would be The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is a very hard film, but when you have people clapping their hands and chanting ‘chainsaw, chainsaw, chainsaw,’ it sort of adds something to the experience. People still respect the film, but the event has a life of its own.”

In that spirit, Parc will kick off Midnight Madness with DJ XL5’s Zappin’ Party Cavalcade Redux, a fast-paced program of short films and animation including a few of “the twisted films of Pes” (“one of the greatest stop-motion artists ever,” according to Lamothe) and the neurotic adventures of cartoon critter Foamy the Squirrel. (For those who saw the Cavalcade at Fantasia last year, note that this is a longer, different cut, hence “Redux.”)

The DJ XL5 screenings have been part of Fantasia since 2004, a way to accommodate the great shorts that didn’t fit the more horror-oriented Small Gauge Trauma program, among them Happy Tree Friends and 30-Second Bunnies Theatre, which later gained notoriety online. Not all of Lamothe’s selections are funny and freaky—he typically places some more serious fare in the middle to give the audience’s guts a break—but he keeps the pace up with the “zapping” editing technique and the insertion of hilarious, horrific moments from vintage TV. “I see myself as an entertainer, so what I want is to really create a momentum and sustain the energy from beginning to end,” he says.

Lamothe has had a lifelong love of collage, and some of his pop-art mixtape covers will be exhibited at Parc this month, not so much to stand alone as art, but to pay tribute to the dying analog medium, and to link collage with the arts of the mixtape and the montage. “I can’t draw for shit but I can glue and paste,” he says. “I’m not a great moviemaker but I have a sense of rhythm, and I couldn’t play music if my life depended on it, but I’m good at mixing. And, as opposed to an artist, I will never have the blank page—as long as there will be films, I’ll be able to make these programs.”

DJ XL5’s Zappin’ Party Cavalcade Redux will
screen on Friday, May 4 and Saturday, May 5,
at Cinéma du Parc, 11:45 p.m., $10

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