Event Details

Book Launch for TRUTH & SOUL: A ROBERT DOWNEY SR. READER
Introduced by Editors Kier-La Janisse and Clint Enns

A wildly funny still-image film about a man suffering through his “annual November breakdown.” Take a plunge into the 1960s New York underground scene populated by degenerate artists, desperate independent filmmakers, hustlers, eccentrics, and compulsive dirty-sock sniffers. Incest jokes, absurd psychotherapy, artistic pretension, sexual confusion, and no-budget filmmaking collide in a barrage of deadpan gags and surreal non sequiturs. Scrappy, offensive, and relentlessly inventive.

Spectacular Optical celebrates the Montreal launch of Truth & Soul: The Robert Downey Sr. Reader with three nights of films by the singular American filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. Each screening will be introduced by the book’s editors, Kier-La Janisse and Clint Enns.

The three-film series reflects the remarkable breadth of Downey’s career. It begins with the perfect summer movie, Hugo Pool, a surprisingly tender romantic comedy that confronts the realities of living with ALS (Weds July 22 at La Métropolitaine); continues with the early hit Chafed Elbows, his hilarious 1966 underground breakthrough (Fri July 24 at la lumière collective); and concludes with America, his under-seen and anarchic 1980s media satire (at Cinéma au Cinoche).