Tag: Senses of Cinema

This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

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In 2018, the Toronto International Film Festival joined Sundance, Berlin, Locarno and Vienna in announcing major changes in leadership. After 36 years at TIFF, the final 24 of them as chief executive officer, Piers Handling will step down at the end of the year. Cameron Bailey, who has served as Artistic Director since 2012, retains that title and has also been named co-head of the fest, alongside new Executive Director Joana Vicente, who comes to Toronto after leading Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) for the past decade. During his tenure, Handling steered TIFF’s course from its original, local brand, the Festival of Festivals, to its current position as North America’s preeminent showcase of new cinema and the launch pad for awards season. Handling also led the effort to conceive, fund and build the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which opened in 2010 as a permanent home for the festival, its staff and TIFF’s film reference library. In addition to providing screening venues and entertainment spaces during the festival, the Lightbox has enabled the organisation to expand its year-round programming beyond the Cinematheque repertory screenings that had, for years, been held a few blocks north at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The very presence of the Lightbox, occupying five stories of an entire city block in Toronto’s entertainment district, is significant if for no other reason than because it represents a substantial and increasingly rare capital investment in cinema as a shared cultural and civic value. Located within short walking distance of premier museums, theatres, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts (home of The National Ballet of Canada and The Canadian Opera Company), and Roy Thompson Hall (home of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra), the Lightbox makes real, in a physical way, Ricciotto Canudo’s century-old and still aspirational description of cinema as “the seventh art”. The nearest analogy in North America might be the founding in 1969 of The Film Society, which bestowed a particular, Lincoln Center-certified, institutional credibility not only to film exhibition and appreciation but also to the social act of film spectatorship and to cinema as an art form worthy of philanthropic support. This is becoming a recurring theme in my festival reporting: better positioning non-commercial cinema in the public and non-profit marketplaces will prove key to its long-term sustainability. That TIFF and the city of Toronto managed to pull it off amidst the transition to digital exhibition and a downtown real estate boom rather than, say, during the heydays of campus film societies is quite a feat. It’s easy to imagine someone banging his or her fist on a TIFF boardroom table in 2005 and demanding, “I know it’s a risk, but if not now, when?” Film advocates in other cities, and working at other scales of funding and ambition, should be asking the same.

TIFF’s video tribute to Handling includes footage from the 9th Festival of Festivals (1984), where he presented a landmark program, “Northern Lights: A Retrospective of Canadian Cinema”, that featured work by Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, Denys Arcand, Gilles Carle, Michael Snow, Evelyn Lambert and Norman McLaren, among many others. “Northern Lights” remains an interesting historical document because it proposed a new canon – quite literally, as it was preceded by the first-ever broad polling of critics, academics, filmmakers and other industry professionals to determine the top 25 Canadian films of all time. In his program notes for “Northern Lights”, Handling sketches a brief history of Canadian cinema back to 1896, when Edison’s and Lumiere’s shorts first screened in Montreal and Ottawa, establishing from the very beginning a relationship in which, in his words, “our self-image was overshadowed by our more powerful neighbors” in America and France. Throughout the early decades of the 20^th century, as the major Hollywood studios consolidated control of production, distribution and exhibition, the imbalance of power became even more pronounced: Canadians “remained foreigners within our own cinematic marketplace.” Handling’s notes for “Northern Lights” amount to a polemic and a mission statement, while also demonstrating his rhetorical and marketing talents, essential skills not to be overlooked in a festival director:

Film in Canada is undergoing significant changes in its development. . . . At this critical juncture, it is time to look back at our cinematic heritage, to see what is best, what is indigenous, what marks it as distinctive and truly ours. . . . Although we need to understand the context in which they were made, the films need no apology. In fact they constitute one of the most stimulating national cinemas in the world and are a constant source of stimulation and interest to me. Innovative, often challenging, they tell us who we are and where we life. Together they constitute a family album of extraordinary richness.¹

Along with showing more than 200 Canadian films, the 1984 festival also introduced the Perspective Canada program, which in the following years would go on to promote the work and international reputations of any number of directors, including Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin, David Cronenberg, Bruce McDonald, Deepa Mehta and Peter Mettler. In 2004, TIFF did away with Perspective Canada and began screening Canadian filmmakers alongside their international peers, but the Perspective brand lives on as the name of TeleFilm Canada’s touring film market. As an aside, during my 15 years of attending TIFF, three of my favourite experiences were repertory screenings of Michael Snow’s Wavelengths (1967), Allan King’s A Married Couple (1969) and Francis Mankiewicz’s Les bons débarras (1980), all of which screened in “Northern Lights”.

All of which is to say it is impossible to separate Handling’s legacy from the essential Canadian-ness of the enterprise he helped to build. I’m curious to see how that aspect of the organisation evolves under new leadership. Certainly Joana Vicente’s arrival seems to suggest further expansion of TIFF’s mission of showcasing and supporting Canadian filmmakers. IFP, which also operates as a non-profit, has for nearly 40 years shepherded American independent filmmakers through every stage of production, from screenwriting and financing to marketing and distribution. And like TIFF, IFP deals daily with the very practical concern of how to make profitable use (in the general sense) of brick-and-mortar facilities in a digital age. IFP’s broad portfolio of events and services – IFP Week, classes, industry talks, Filmmaker magazine, the Screen Forward Conference, the Gotham Awards, the Made in NY Media Center – offers any number of tested models for Vicente’s new board of directors to consider as they evaluate their own industry offerings, including Rising Stars, Talent Lab, Writers’ Studio and TeleFilm Canada’s Pitch This! TIFF has already begun making some efforts to augment its brand and marketing reach through all of the standard channels (YouTube, podcasts, a blog, social media), and its five-year commitment to support women filmmakers, “Share Her Journey”, is a focused and timely message around which to build a non-profit fundraising campaign.

One outcome of “Share Her Journey” was the announcement in June, made by Brie Larsen at the Women in Film Los Angeles Crystal + Lucy Awards, that TIFF would join Sundance in allocating 20 percent of press credentials to underrepresented writers. The event was held only a few days after the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California released “Critic’s Choice?”, a study designed to “assess the gender and race/ethnicity of reviewers across the 100 top domestic films of 2017,” using Rotten Tomatoes as its data set. The results should come as little surprise to anyone who has attended a press screening or paid attention to review bylines:

Two-thirds of reviews by Top critics were written by White males (67.3%), with less than one-quarter (21.5%) composed by White women, 8.7% by underrepresented males, and a mere 2.5% by underrepresented females. White male critics were writing top film reviews at a rate of nearly 27 times their underrepresented female counterparts.

Andréa Grau, TIFF’s Vice President of Public Relations and Corporate Affairs, commented after the announcement: “It’s become more evident of what our role is. Festivals showcase the best cinema of the world, but we also have to showcase the range of voices talking about these films.” It’s worth mentioning that Sundance and TIFF are among a small and highly select group of international marketplace festivals whose business models are built on press coverage and, as a result, host thousands of press and industry professionals each year. I commend them for driving this conversation. They’re two of the only festivals with the clout and resources to do so.

In my report from the 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam for Filmmaker magazine, I argued that large festivals must constantly evaluate and improve their efforts to help make independent filmmaking a sustainable career: “Until a model exists that allows those same filmmakers to mature their craft and be paid a reasonable wage while doing so – to make not just a second feature but a fifth and sixth – then a premiere screening at an oversized fest risks becoming a kind of participation trophy.” I also noted that film criticism is facing a similar sustainability crisis: “At 45, I’m often the old man in the press room, surrounded by hard-hustling freelancers. Not coincidentally, I earn my living through other means, as do many of the filmmakers I cover.” TIFF acknowledges this situation in its inclusion initiative, vowing to use money raised through the “Share Her Journey” campaign to cover travel costs for underrepresented writers. The problem is real. A few weeks after TIFF, I created a Twitter poll, asking accredited press whether they would make enough money from their writing to cover the costs of their trip to Toronto. This is hardly scientific research, but of the 130 respondents, only 21 people (16%) answered “yes”. In the interest of full disclosure, I broke even. TIFF paid for my flight and I slept on a friend’s couch, but I’m not being paid for my work, a problematic bargain I’ve made in exchange for editorial freedom and longer deadlines. I can only afford to make this bargain at my age, with children and a mortgage, because I am able to use paid vacation leave from my day job and because my partner is willing to take on all parenting responsibilities while I’m gone. Also, I’m willing to write about experimental films and festival news during my lunch hour and late at night after my kids have gone to bed.

Transparency is essential in this discussion, I think, because otherwise it’s too easy to overlook the other factors, in addition to the urgent question of inclusion, that are determining the range of voices in our critical conversation, chief among them day-to-day economics. I’m writing a few days after a group of advertisers filed suit against Facebook, alleging the company knew for years that it was overstating the amount of time users spent watching videos on the platform. Those fraudulent reports contributed directly to the industry-wide “pivot to video” that precipitated one more gutting of staff writers and editors. The consequences of this de-professionalisation of journalism, generally, and of film criticism, more specifically, are never more obvious than during TIFF. Inspired by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, I concocted a less rigorous study of my own. Over the past month I’ve read one hundred reviews of four high-profile films that I saw at TIFF: If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins), High Life (Claire Denis), The Old Man & the Gun (David Lowery) and Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas). Like the authors of “Critic’s Choice?” I used Rotten Tomatoes as my data set, limiting my selections to reviews posted within two weeks of each film’s first TIFF screening. The results were equally stark: 64 of the reviews contain spelling, grammar and/or factual errors that would never have made it past a competent editor; only 35 of the reviews include what I would consider genuine critical insights into the film. This last metric is subjective, obviously, but I did approach the project with generosity. I was looking for anything beyond plot summaries, celebrity gossip, production histories, first-person rambles, and simple evaluation. Even a single inspired metaphor was enough to check the “critical insight” box.

I wouldn’t recommend repeating my experiment. It wasn’t much fun. On the whole, critical writing produced by accredited press during and immediately after TIFF is of poor quality more often than it’s good. To be clear, I’m in no way drawing a correlation between my criticisms and TIFF’s inclusion efforts. This has been a subject of conversation among critics, programmers, and filmmakers at every festival I’ve attended for several years now. The reasons for the mediocre writing are obvious and yet difficult to surmount. That the films are being written about is more important to TIFF’s position in the market than what is being written. In the battle for buzzworthy fall premieres, pageviews and retweets are the coin of the realm. The festival, then, is incentivised to maximise press capacity, but in order to do so it’s having to draw from a deepening pool of writers who have no reasonable expectation for a sustained career in the business. For their part, the writers are incentivised to post quickly rather than thoughtfully and accurately (pageviews!) and to trade a bit more credit card debt for the opportunity to wear a badge, see the new movies first, and be “part of the conversation”. Few will ever have the benefit of collaborating with good editors, who not only catch mistakes but challenge ideas and help to hone the craft of writing. Like the independent filmmakers they cover, too few critics will ever gain the benefits of experience. There are no simple solutions to these economic conditions, but I do hope TIFF, Sundance and other well-resourced festivals constantly evaluate their role in shaping those conditions. Press accreditation is also beginning to feel like a participation trophy.

Wavelengths Shorts

After a screening two years ago, Kevin Jerome Everson was asked a question about the seeming haphazardness of his technique. His response was along the lines of, “I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s my job. I work 40 hours a week making movies.” The man who asked the question didn’t seem to realise it was a bit patronising, and Everson’s answer didn’t take him to task for it. The guy probably came away thinking, “I was right. He shoots without much planning and then tries to find meaning in the editing.” Whereas Everson was implying, “I trust my instincts because I’ve done the work. I know where to put the camera. I know there will be wisdom in these images.” Everson’s background is in photography, which shows in his compositions, but his strength as a filmmaker has always been the integrity of his conceptual approach to each subject. When shooting Polly One, which opened the four programs of Wavelengths shorts, Everson did what millions of other Americans did on 21^st August, 2017: he turned his gaze to the sky to observe a rare solar eclipse. The six-minute silent film is composed of two shots of the crescent sun, each of equal length and filmed in 16mm. In the first, the cloud cover moves quickly from right to left, presumably in a time lapse, which causes constant variations in the levels of light diffusion and in the length and shape of the lens flares that extend outward in all directions from the sun. The sky is clear in the second shot, and the lens flares are prismatic. The image is softer and more abstract, in shades of deep lavender and orange, like a Whistler nocturne. The effect of the images is coloured by the title, an ode to Everson’s grandmother, who had died a few days earlier. To assign a specific symbolic meaning to Polly One would oversimplify the viewing experience, but the film does call for ancient and out-of-fashion words to describe it, like sacramental, reverent and consecrated.

James Benning returned to TIFF for the first time in several years with L. COHEN, which was also shot during the 2017 solar eclipse. Benning has said that, although he’d read a great deal about eclipses and spent much time preparing for the shoot, he was still overwhelmed by the immediate strangeness of the experience. “I was very confused,” he told an audience at UCLA last summer. “I had a whole different sense of time. For some reason, maybe because I’m getting old, it became a metaphor for how quickly life passes. . . . It seemed very spiritual.” A few days before the eclipse, Benning drove to Madras, Oregon, the location nearest his home that would be in the centre of the shadow’s path, meaning that he would get to witness the longest possible duration of the totality, when the moon blocks out all light except for the sun’s corona. He then scouted an isolated location at the exact midpoint of the path and pointed his camera due west. L. COHEN consists of a single take, and like Polly One the film is divided in half, with the few seconds of maximum eclipse as the fulcrum. The image is of a flat, empty pasture with Mt. Jefferson in the far distance. A few objects scattered in between and a line of telephone poles at the right edge of the frame give some sense to the depth of field. (At TIFF, Benning somewhat reluctantly admitted that he’d placed a gas can in the foreground: “I thought a little yellow would look good there.”) For much of the film’s first 20 minutes, our perception is tricked both by the long duration of the gradual changes in light levels and by the digital camera’s auto-exposure, which measures and compensates for those changes, just as the eyes of the eclipse-watchers cheering somewhere off in the distance had involuntarily measured and compensated. I observed the totality of the eclipse at home with my family and, like Everson and Benning, was bewildered by the almost fearsome foreignness of the experience. When Benning plays Leonard Cohen’s “Love Itself” on the soundtrack a few minutes after the totality, it seems redundant, a faint echo of actual catharsis.

Throughout his highly productive digital period, Benning has moved constantly between galleries and the cinema. Although L. COHEN has been presented as an installation, including as part of an exhibition at the 2018 Berlinale, it strikes me as being essentially cinematic. Kudos to Wavelengths programmer Andréa Picard and everyone else at TIFF who made it possible for a fortunate group of us to watch the film in the Lightbox’s massive Theater 1. To sample just a few minutes of L. COHEN, or to see it in a room with ambient light and other distractions, or to watch it all the way through beginning at some point other than the opening moment, would undermine the film’s fundamental justifications for being. Near the end of TIFF, a friend asked, “Why are we still having to look to filmmakers in their 70s, like James Benning and Claire Denis, for big ideas and new forms?” It was a rhetorical and slightly hyperbolic question, but I understood his point. I don’t know if this is a sign of my changing tastes, or if it speaks to trends, but at the risk of having to defend a sweeping generalisation, the main difference between the best and worst films I saw in Wavelengths this year was the sophistication of the concept and assuredness of its execution. A number of short films were constructed from footage gathered by the artists without much apparent pre-determined intent. While they all included startling images – and to be fair, beauty and defamiliarisation, of course, remain worthy pursuits in experimental art – they too often lacked an essential shape or motivating force. Seeing several versions of this type of film over four nights of programming (I began to think of them as travelogues) caused them to bleed into one another in my imagination. Even Nathaniel Dorsky’s latest, Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle), was a slight disappointment in this regard. That nearly all of them were shot on film makes me wonder if celluloid has indeed become a fetish object; shooting, processing and editing film is not, in itself, enough to justify a work. The remainder of my report will spotlight a few of the shorts that I think succeed in fully realising a compelling concept.

L. COHEN screened in the largest room at the Lightbox because it was preceded by Björn Kämmerer’s silent, five-minute short, Arena, which was shot in 65mm and required 70mm projection. Kämmerer has become a regular presence at Wavelengths. Navigator (2015) is a pulsing assemblage of close-ups of a rotating Fresnel lens that playfully discovers endless variations of movement and light/dark contrast. Untitled (2016) was made with even simpler means, standard-issue Venetian blinds set against a black background, which he likewise transforms into graphical elements. For Arena, Kämmerer found an unusual outdoor auditorium in the Czech Republic, where, rather than shooting the stage, he positioned his camera in the proscenium and turned it toward the seats. The film begins with a relatively tight frame (only four rows are fully visible along the y-axis) and then slowly dollies back as the entire grandstand rotates clockwise, mimicking a camera pan. Shot at 100 fps, Arena offers one more impossible perspective from Kämmerer on a familiar object. The chief pleasure of his work is the constant shifting of emphasis in our perception of the material. The seats are just seats until we begin to notice that some are slightly different colours, at which point “seats” becomes a group of individual units: one seat beside another seat, beside another, and so on. Like novice meditators, our attention can only hold that thought for a few moments, however, and soon the seats lose their specificity, become unrecognisable, and mutate, like Untitled’s Venetian blinds, into content-less shapes. Because the camera is dollying back, the frame widens gradually (by the end of the film eight rows of seats are visible) and the effects of motion parallax become more pronounced, creating visual illusions. The wide 70mm image also affords viewers uncommon freedom to explore the frame, and each time we shift the focus of our attention, new effects materialise. Whether turning the site of the subject into the spectacle is a meaningful intervention, I don’t know, but it’s a usable metaphor and a standout piece of old-school structuralism.

In the three years since his last feature, Cemetery of Splendor (2015), Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made several shorts, produced a documentary, and installed work at festivals and galleries in Asia, Australia and Europe. Blue, the latest of his short films to screen in Wavelengths, was developed with 3e Scène, an ambitious project of the Paris Opera that invited artists to create new work inspired, in some tangential way, by the 450-year-old institution. That context is useful, I think, when approaching a new piece by Apichatpong because the industrial bias toward feature films has limited our ability to see most of his work properly presented. Of the recent non-cinematic pieces, I’ve only experienced SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL, which allowed guests in Rotterdam to check in for the night to a large room with multiple beds and a projection, all designed by the artist. His recent flurry of activity recalls Primitive Project, the collection of multimedia works he made in the late-2000s that set about unearthing the lost history and past lives of Northeast Thailand. Blue certainly evokes Phantoms of Nabua (2009), a short film from that project in which teenage boys kick a flaming ball at a park late at night, eventually igniting a makeshift screen upon which Apichatpong is projecting filmed images of manufactured lightning strikes. In Blue, Jenjira Pongpas Widner (star of many of his films) sleeps restlessly in the jungle. Her bed is arranged opposite a hanging theatrical backdrop that cycles through three illustrations. Apichatpong, like Kämmerer, puts his camera between the spectator and the spectacle, cutting between the two without fixing a clear meaning to the relationship. A fire is ignited and appears to burn from Widner’s chest. In fact, the superimposition is a centuries-old mechanical illusion: a glass positioned between her and the camera is reflecting an image of the fire. In the final shot of the film, the fire has grown large and loud. We see it in the foreground and also reflected in the glass, as if the entire jungle is burning to the ground. Widner, in the deep background, seems finally to have drifted off to sleep. Apichatpong’s particular genius is his ability to conjure the sublime from the most basic of elements – and I mean that in both senses of the word. He summons elemental sensations from commonplace sounds and practical effects: a flickering spotlight, humming insects, theatrical props, and a nighttime breeze. It’s a kind of primal magic.

Karissa Hahn exposes the basic technique of Please Step Out of the Frame in the opening shot. The first image is black-and-white Super 8 footage of a MacBook sitting on a small desk. The camera zooms in briefly toward the computer before zooming back out again, beyond the original focal distance, which reveals that the image we have been watching is itself being displayed on the screen of that same MacBook and was filmed by that same Super 8 camera from the same position at some earlier moment in time. Hahn’s film is, in short, a kind of mise en abyme as intimate, digital nightmare, and it’s tremendous fun to watch. She introduces her next trick by showing found footage of people playing with the roller coaster backdrop on Apple’s Photo Booth app. After doing so, Hahn, who we’ve glimpsed briefly interacting with the laptop, becomes the central character in the film. She herself rides Apple’s roller coaster in one clip and then adds a new custom backdrop to Photo Booth, Eadward Muybridge’s Semi-Nude Woman Hopping on Left Foot (1887). Seeing Hahn emerge, glitchy and ghost-like, from Muybridge’s photo series is deeply uncanny, and it suggests other century-old precedents for the film, particularly Lumière’s playful inventions. In one of the more unnerving moments, Hahn sits at the computer, opens a video app, and plays a screen capture of some previous version of herself interacting with the desktop. She then stands, walks behind the camera, and takes hold of the lens, zooming in so that the video on the laptop fills the entire screen, essentially erasing the diegetic world originally established in the shot and replacing it with an alternate reality. The soundtrack, like the image, is a distorted amalgam of analogue noise and digital processing – or vice-versa, I’m not sure which. Describing art as “Lynchian” is so common as to make the term useless, but Please Step Out of the Frame is a precise expression of that familiar and disquieting dread particular to David Lynch. Hahn’s film is one of the best shorts I’ve seen in recent years.

By referencing Lynch, I’ve happened upon a useful transition to Words, Planets by Laida Lertxundi, who has likewise spent much of her career thinking about how to film Los Angeles. When asked by R. Emmet Sweeney about her training at Cal Arts, she mentioned the significance of Benning’s “Listening and Seeing” course, where she learned to patiently observe a location, as opposed to claiming it like a tourist. “We weren’t allowed to shoot or record anything, just take the place in. . . . I didn’t think about shooting, but about time and landscape.” Collectively, the ten short films she’s made since then are a kind of world-building exercise, in the sense that her representation of L.A. – the geography of the city, its people, and the surrounding deserts and mountains – is so consistent and particular that it not only sidesteps the familiar cliches of Hollywood movies but imagines a wholly alternative landscape, more private but no less fantastic or dreamlike. I think of Lertxundi as a member of the Ozu camp, filmmakers whose formal preoccupations are so fixed over time that one pleasure of watching each new film is discovering small variations that suggest a maturing or complicating perspective. Her previous film, 025 Sunset Red (2016), with its allusions to her father’s political career and its incorporation of her menstrual blood as visual material, marked a shift to direct autobiography. Words, Planets pulls from her standard storehouse of images and sounds, including desert cacti, diegetic music, and the faces and bodies of friends and collaborators, while also exploring for the first time the effects of motherhood on her work: the film ends with white-on-black text that reads, “… and my life from now on is two lives.” (The infant, who appears several times in the film, is the ideal performer for Lertxundi – pure Bressonian affect!) Lertxundi has said that Words, Planets grew out of a course she teaches that begins with a reading of “For a Shamanic Cinema”, in which Raúl Ruiz proposes six strategies that interrupt the narrative machinations of industrial cinema. The suggestions, borrowed and adapted from Chinese painter Shi-T’ao, include “draw attention to a scene emerging from a static background” and “reversal of function. What ought to be dynamic becomes static and vice-versa.” I suspect it would be possible to reverse-engineer Words, Planets by assigning each shot and cut to a Ruizian strategy, but I doubt doing so would provide much insight. Rather, the point is that Lertxundi has evolved her own particular shamanic cinema. She has, in Ruiz’s words, put her “fabricated memories in touch with genuine memories [that] we never thought to see again.”

In his director’s statement for Walled Unwalled, Lawrence Abu Hamdan writes: “In the year 2000 there was a total of fifteen fortified border walls and fences between sovereign nations. Today, physical barriers at sixty-three borders divide nations across four continents.” A few minutes into the film, Abu Hamdan recites the names of every affected nation, reading them from his phone at a breathless pace while pacing from side to side a few feet away from a studio microphone. To be more precise, he’s at Funkhaus, a facility purpose-built in the 1950s to broadcast GDR state radio into West Berlin. As he races through the names, Abu Hamdan is in the second of three interconnected soundproof spaces that we see through windows from our fixed position in the darkened control room. The camera, then, is always peering through one, two, or three walls of glass: the widest shot is planimetric, which gives our view of the soundproof rooms the shape of a triptych. Abu Hamden is an artist, academic, and “audio investigator” whose various interests in the ways “we can act in the world as listening subjects” has brought him to the attention of Amnesty International and Defence for Children International as well as MoMA, the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim. In Walled Unwalled, he delves into a central paradox of our political moment: that at the same time we’re constructing physical barriers between nations and peoples, technology has eroded the divide between personal and private space. He spins three ripping yarns – about a Supreme Court case, the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius, and a style of East German prison architecture whose acoustic design punished prisoners – but each might also have been presented as lectures (Abu Hamdan is a compelling multimedia performer) or as, say, a podcast series. Walled Unwalled, however, also succeeds as a work of cinema. The setting is essential, both thematically and as a formal device. For example, before illustrating how the Cold War-era prison design turned walls into “weapons, creating prisoners who see nothing but hear everything,” Abu Hamdan shows a clip of then-actor Ronald Reagan advocating for Radio Free Europe: “The Iron Curtain isn’t soundproof!” The clip is projected onto a wall through one of the studio’s windows, which, because of the angle of our perspective, reveals that the camera is separated from the other spaces by four thick panes of glass, each of which reflects the projection, creating multiple staggered superimpositions. Likewise, the drummer who pounds out a repeating figure through the first five-and-a-half minutes of the film in studio space three is silenced suddenly when Abu Hamdan shuts the door between the drum and the microphone in space two, walling what had been unwalled.

Beatrice Gibson’s I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead opens with a jagged-edge video montage of crowded subway stations, speeding trains, crumbling glaciers, violent protests, and, from time to time, in almost subliminal bursts, black-and-white home movies of her young daughter, Laizer. Over the images, Gibson describes a panic attack: “I can still feel my body except it’s like the skin is gone. It’s all nerve, edgeless, pulsating. There’s intense breathlessness. Blood is thumping. It’s like being in the club. I feel weightless. Unstitched.” Conceived soon after the election of Donald Trump, in collaboration with poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles, the 20-minute film argues forcibly, in both content and form, for the necessity of art in a time of anxiety and despair. Gibson borrows her title from CAConrad, who delivers a combative and vibrant performance of their poem of the same name. Myles reads too, and Gibson recites passages by Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde and Alice Notley. The film is scored, in part, by Pauline Oliveros. “I wanted to put all of these voices in one frame for you,” Gibson tells Laizer in voiceover, “so that one day, if needed, you could use them to unwrite whoever it is you’re told you’re supposed to be.” It’s a poignant moment because it’s so intimate, as if we’re secret witnesses to the passing down of an inheritance. The scene also captures the helpless terror of unconditional love, an aspect of parenting seldom addressed in films. Over exquisite 16mm images of Gibson alone and Laizer at play, Gibson recalls and modifies her earlier description of panic, now redeemed by love, like an act of grace: “Because of you, I am tone of voice. All nerve, edgeless, pulsating. I can breathe.” For the final act of I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, Gibson and Laizer reenact Denis Lavant’s dance at the end of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999). When I interviewed Denis a decade ago, she described the scene as the “dance between life and death.” Restaging it – complete with mirrored backdrop, disco lights, Gibson in all black, and Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night” – is an audacious and self-conscious move, obviously, but seeing it in the fall of 2018, several years into the migrant crisis and rising nationalism and after the GrenFell Fire and Charlottesville and all the rest, felt purifying somehow. That feeling of “being in the club” is cleansed of anxiety and transformed, even if briefly, into an act of joy and play. And in the process, the voices of three more artists, Claire Denis, along with Beau Travail’s cinematographer Agnès Godard and editor Nelly Quettier, are added by proxy to Laizer’s birthright.

This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

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My conversations during the first two days of the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival were dominated by two subjects: Twin Peaks: The Return, which had aired its final episodes earlier in the week (and ultimately overshadowed every film at the fest), and “the Globe story”, a months-in-the-works investigation into the various intrigues surrounding Canada’s highest-profile cultural organization. TIFF had contracted with a crisis management firm, people whispered. The article was going to be published during the opening weekend to maximise exposure while the A-listers were still in town, they predicted. The article, everyone speculated, would tie together all that was already publicly known – the announced retirement of long-serving CEO Piers Handling, TIFF’s decision a year earlier to trim the festival program by 20%, the departure of beloved Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes – and expose to the light the longstanding rumours of inflated payscales for TIFF executives, low employee morale, and debate over the strategic vision of the the Lightbox, TIFF’s expensive, publicly-supported downtown complex.

When the article was finally published, the night before the festival wrapped, the Globe and Mail buried all 6,000 words of it behind the website paywall. I suspect they did so because the final piece is something of a dog bites man story. Tracing the history of the festival all the way back to a “liquid lunch” at the “famed Carlton Hotel” in Cannes, where Toronto lawyer Dusty Cohl first pitched the idea, reporters Barry Hertz and Molly Hayes describe TIFF today as an organisation that has outgrown its original charge and, as a result, is feeling the pains of mission creep. This rocky transition period, Hertz and Hayes argue, has been exacerbated by changing market forces, particularly the growing pressures put on brick-and-mortar exhibitors by streaming services, and by the very real financial responsibilities TIFF took on when it staked its future on the Lightbox, including payments on a $46 million provincial loan. One notable insight from the article is that TIFF’s decision to devote valuable ground-floor space to museum-style installations has proven costly. They have since laid off most of that staff and plan to use the area, instead, for events and press conferences.

Geddes is not mentioned by name in the piece. Nor is Jesse Wente, who announced soon after the festival that he was stepping down as head of programming for TIFF Cinematheque after eleven years with the organisation. Rather, Hertz and Hayes refer only to an “exodus of senior staff”, noting that “three of TIFF’s four vice-presidents and two departmental directors have left since 2016.” Despite on- and off-the-record conversations with more than 40 TIFF employees, both current and former, along with “two dozen other individuals close to the organization”, the authors only hint at the precise causes of the exodus. Michele Maheux, the long-tenured Executive Director and COO, and presumably the person best equipped to address the question, suggests that the overall turnover rate of 18% is typical for an operation that employs so many people under the age of 30. The article doesn’t include any comments from her about the leadership changes. The only insight I can add comes from having spent the last 20 years working for another large, publicly- and privately-supported organisation (a university in the States). That Handling will have directed TIFF for just shy of 25 years strikes me as both remarkable and quaint, as large cultural and educational institutions have in recent years joined their counterparts in the private sector by rotating through CEOs, and by increasing executive compensation, at an accelerating pace. Judging by the article, many of the skills that earned Handling his reputation, in particular his taste and cinephilia, are viewed as less valuable, in a very literal sense, by today’s board. “They now need to keep business top of mind,” one source said. As an aside, I’ll add that over the years I’ve considered program notes by Handling a real recommendation when deciding what new films to see at TIFF. I hope the same is true of his successor.

The 2017 festival was the 14th in a row I’ve attended, so I can say with some confidence that much of the rest of article is a rehash of the same complaints and controversies that boil up every September in Toronto. I’ve catalogued many of them myself over the years in my reports for Senses of Cinema. Early on TIFF embraced its brand as “the people’s festival”, setting itself up in the process for annual charges of encroaching elitism and ticket-gouging. A decade ago, when I attended TIFF as an uncredentialled film buff, I paid $715 for an out-of-town package and attended 36 non-gala screenings. This year, the same experience would have cost a little over $900, for a reasonable annual inflation rate of about 2.5%. Like nearly every other TIFF attendee, I’ve never been invited to join TIFF Noir, which for $35,000 buys members privileged access at the festival, and judging by the one on-the-record comment Hertz and Hayes got from a Noir member – “Money does make the world go round.” – I’m not sure I would want to. Yes, the lines are occasionally long now; the lines were occasionally long in 2004, too. I remember because while waiting in them I often chatted up strangers who told me about the good old days when TIFF was “the people’s festival” and there weren’t so many long lines.

Likewise, debating the size and quality of TIFF’s program is a long-relished parlour game in Toronto, as it is at every film festival. My personal grievance this year, and every year, is with individual curatorial decisions – for example, Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable finding a spot in the fest at the exclusion of better French films like Claire Denis’s Un beau soleil intérieur (Let the Sun Shine In), Serge Bozon’s Madame Hyde (Mrs. Hyde), Philippe Garrel’s L’amant d’un jour (Lover for a Day), and Arnaud Desplechin’s Les fantômes d’Ismaël (Ismael’s Ghosts). Granted, the debate reached a head last year when Variety critic Peter Debruge described the 2016 edition’s 296 features and 101 short films as a “dumping ground … with hardly any discernible sense of curation.” TIFF seems to have taken note, reducing the total program by about 14% (less than the reported target) and eliminating entirely the Vanguard and City to City programs – both wise choices, in my opinion. Variety responded with a post-fest headline that must have raised some eyebrows in Lightbox offices: “Why the Toronto Film Festival Felt Smaller Than Ever.” The click-bait headline is a bit of a misdirection, however. While authors Ramin Setoodeh and Brent Lang join the trade paper chorus in bemoaning the fest’s “staggering 255 features”, most of which screened without much notice, their real target was the paucity of good films, echoing complaints made earlier this year in Sundance, Berlin and Cannes. It’s worth noting that when describing the competition for buzzy fall titles, Hertz and Hayes take an easy and justifiable shot at TIFF for its opening night film selection, Borg/McEnroe (Janus Metz), but the two openers to which they compare it unfavourably, Venice’s Downsizing (Alexander Payne) and NYFF’s Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater) also premiered to poor reviews.

The most interesting part of the Globe article, and the section most relevant to this report on the Wavelengths program, is its relatively detailed accounting of TIFF’s weeks-long Olivier Assayas retrospective. Hertz and Hayes dug up some raw numbers – $1,200 in ticket sales for the kick-off screening of Cold Water, another $1,000 for Clean, $630 for Irma Vep – and report that “subsequent screenings averaged about 65 people.” They then pivot to the Lightbox’s new-release programming, which also “failed to catch fire.” That reporters who wax romantic about the days of “liquid lunches” would also frame the success or failure of the Assayas retro in standard box office terms shouldn’t come as a surprise, I guess, but still it’s disappointing. Whether there exists a sustainable business model that will allow TIFF to remain “the people’s fest” and a robust international film marketplace and a year-round exhibitor in a pricy real estate market and a champion for “transformative” cultural experiences (to quote Handling) is a question baked into the history and culture of the organisation. The challenges facing TIFF are only exacerbated, though, by a public discourse that defaults to the anaemic language of entertainment journalism whenever it broaches the subject of cinema. Perhaps not by coincidence, the best new feature I saw at this year’s festival was Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, in which Frederick Wiseman documents a similar debate writ large. (Where is Wiseman’s Festival?)

We’re 130 years into the life of motion pictures. Cinema needs to be advocated for and publicly and privately supported at an institutional level, just as painting, sculpture, theatre, opera, dance and music have long been supported. Contrary to a theme running through the Globe article, I would argue that a “die-hard film geek” – one with tremendous interpersonal skills and leadership acumen, a rare combo, I’ll admit – is exactly who TIFF needs to lead this charge, because cinema must be advocated for in an aspirational voice that elevates the medium. (And by the same token, excluding Denis, Bozon, Garrel, and Desplechin from a program of 255 features is not only a lapse of taste; it denies audiences and critics the opportunity to engage with the medium’s greatest artists and to place their new films – even when they’re disappointing! – in the context of their larger body of work.) In my 2014 report I commended TIFF for integrating into the festival some messaging about its role as a year-round arts institution worthy of philanthropic support. That kind of direct appeal has been less conspicuous since, which makes me hope that the recent hiring of a new major gifts officer is step one in a larger effort to significantly ramp up their annual support and major gift fundraising efforts. Those of us on the outside of the gate might be tempted to scoff at members of TIFF Noir, but their access fees subsidiae, in a roundabout way, decidedly non-commercial programming like TIFF’s recent Kidlat Tahimik retrospective. We in the philanthropy business call this the 90/10 rule: 90% of gift dollars come from 10% of donors. It might seem crass to state this all so openly, but this is part of the model necessary to establish and sustain institutionalised support of cinema and, hopefully, expand that support beyond large metropolitan areas.

When TIFF announced it would be trimming the festival program in 2017, my first concern was for Wavelengths. If the board and leadership were considering a “pivot away from transformative cinematic experiences toward brand-friendly marketing opportunities”, as the Globe article puts it, then the fest’s strand of experimental programming would seem a likely focus of attention for hawkish budget-cutters. Indeed, The New York Film Festival decided this year to not bring back Explorations, a similar program of formally daring features, after a trial run in 2016. Now in its 17th year, and its 12th under the direction of programmer Andréa Picard, Wavelengths exemplifies the notion of cinema as art, full stop, and as such is absolutely essential to TIFF’s broad mission.

When the 2017 Wavelengths program was announced there was, surprisingly, one bit of good news: the four programs of short films had been moved from cinema 4 to cinema 3 at the Lightbox, adding nearly 50% more seats. Always tough tickets to get, each of the four screenings still approached a sell-out, and the projection team skillfully managed the complicated, multiple-format programs. Wavelengths did absorb significant cuts, however. The feature count dropped to 12 this year, down from 14 in 2016 and 16 in 2017, and video installations were eliminated entirely. In my 2016 report I argued that Picard’s championing of gallery work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Shambhavi Kaul, Ana Mendieta, Sharon Lockhart, Albert Serra, and others was a kind of declaration – that this work “is significant and that Wavelengths is now a global platform for avant-garde work of significance.” Seeing Mendieta’s short films in both a cinema and a gallery was revelatory last year. I wish the same treatment had been afforded to Erkki Kurenniemi, whose short film Florence (1970) preceded Blake Williams’ Prototype, or to Anne Charlotte Robinson, whose Pixillation (1976) played in the second shorts program and whose work is being restored by the Harvard Film Archive. TIFF was for years the only major festival in North America that programmed installations alongside celebrity-packed premieres. The elimination of Future Projections, as it was called from 2007-2014, seems both unwise and unnecessary, as what little amount, relatively speaking, it cut into to the fest’s bottom line would pay for itself in branding and communication value.

Note: The Wavelengths shorts programs were especially strong this year, so the remainder of this report will spotlight a few films of particular interest. From the features lineup I’ll add a quick recommendation for five standouts: Narimane Mari’s Le fort des fous, Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang, Pedro Pinho’s A Fábrica de Nada (The Nothing Factory), Williams’ Prototype, and Bruno Dumont’s Jeannette, l’enfance de Jeanne d’Arc (Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc).

Onward Lossless Follows is the latest in a series of films by Michael Robinson that meld his on-going preoccupations with kitsch and pop culture ephemera with what we, during my long-ago Southern Baptist days, called “givin’ testimony”. Line Describing Your Mom (2011), Mad Ladders (2015) and the new film are each narrated by found audio recordings of visionaries – a dreamer, a prophet and a preacher, respectively – whose slow drawls share a cadence and an unshakable conviction. In Onward Lossless Follows, Robinson pieces together footage he’d collected over the past decade, some of it found (stock images of women cheering in front of laptops, a “stranger danger” video, black and white science education films), some of it original (16mm footage of the beach and woods at Headlands State Park where he later shot Circle in the Sand [2012], lo-def video of a neighbour mowing his lawn). On the surface, Onward Lossless Follows is a dark, disturbing piece in the “amusing ourselves to death” vein, presenting a world decimated by climate change while each of us discovers our own bliss in the sensual, pseudo-religious pleasure of computers, phones and other assorted digital beeps that occupy so much of our attention. But as the preacher rails against the modern world for putting its faith in science, the particular register of his voice touches a euphoria that manages to counterbalance the film’s melancholy and cynicism. “Young man, you look miserable!” he chides. “There’s no help in starrrrrs.” And he’s not wrong. Robinson resolves the film’s tension by turning the “stranger danger” video into an impossible love story and by transforming TV news footage of a horse being airlifted out of a ravine into a moment of ecstatic splendour that, lord willin’, might just redeem us all.

Onward Lossless Follows opened Appetite for Destruction, the first of the four Wavelengths shorts programs. In her program notes, Picard describes its six films as “rebellious, even mischievous forms of resistance” to the “pessimistic prognoses” of the day. Fern Silva’s The Watchmen made for an especially good pairing with Onward Lossless Follows. On 14 October, 2016, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner ordered the closure of F-House at the Stateville Correctional Center, an hour outside of Chicago. The last Panopticon-style facility in operation in the United States, F-House was built in 1922 and was described by a prison watchdog group as a “sensory nightmare” and “unsanitary, inhumane, and degrading for prisoners and staff alike.” Silva uses the prison as a jumping off point for a sci-fi-inflected reexamination of Foucault’s metaphor some four decades after Discipline and Punish. The visual material of The Watchmen includes footage from Stateville, along with images of Old Joliet Prison a few miles away (most notably a shot of John Belushi’s character being released at the beginning of The Blues Brothers [John Landis, 1980]) and a massive, decaying array of Panopticons at Presidio Modelo in Cuba. More mysterious are three found audio recordings that together narrate a kind of “Invaders from Mars” story. In the first, a man recalls seeing visions of blue light pulsing in the night sky. In the second, a paranoiac is comforted by a woman who tells him, “Look! Look at the picture on the television set. You are calm. You are watching a rerun.” And in the third, a police officer reports to his dispatcher that he’s experiencing a form of mental paralysis during a stop. “They” get out of their car, approach his cruiser, and blind him with a bright flash. As the officer loses consciousness, he asks, “Are you the watchmen over this place? Are you the watchmen over this place?” The Watchmen is bookended by images of a nude man standing alone in nature. Is this the watchman? And, if so, is he a liberating or destructive force? Silva’s film is so fascinating because it’s populated by glaring metaphors that resist simple explanations. Like the women in Robinson’s stock footage, who are doomed to spend eternity masquerading the appearance of rapture, humanity in The Watchmen is pretty well fucked and in need of salvation. The final image is from the centre of one of the ruined Cuban Panopticons. As the camera spins, faster and faster, the window slats of the distant prison walls become like the photos in a zoetrope. That the cells are abandoned and the walls are crumbling suggests progress of a sort, but the experience is too frenzied and dizzying to offer much assurance.

Walter Benjamin’s story, “Fantasy Sentences” (1927), imagines a game between a man and an 11 year-old girl. He gives her five words: “pretzel, feather, pause, lament, doohickey”; she intuits connections and conjures meaning from them: “Time curves like a pretzel through nature.” Dane Komljen’s Phantasiesätze (Fantasy Sentences) borrows not only Benjamin’s title but also a palette of images from the story, along with its formal interest in ellipses or parataxis, a rhetorical strategy that avoids connectives between words – “I left. She cried.” as opposed to hypotaxis, “When I left, she cried.” The film opens with a garbled audio recording of a Russian storyteller who describes, in apocalyptic terms, the grotesque transformation of a man into an animal – “his skin tears open, blood flows. The skin slides to the ground.” Komljen then cuts to a montage of 8mm home movies, in black-and-white and colour. In the first few, children and their parents sled happily outside Soviet-era, brutalist housing complexes. We then see them in more idyllic settings – picking berries, canoeing, learning to swim, petting horses. Komljen’s next transition, away from the traditional pastoral, is signalled by a shift to lo-def digital. He softens the transition by bridging the audio, which is simple, natural sounds of wind and birdsongs. Finally, Komljen moves to hi-def video, returning us, presumably, to the site of the first home-movie images. Long since abandoned, the buildings have been reclaimed by nature. Phantasiesätze is in dialogue not only with Benjamin’s notion of history as human catastrophe and progress but also with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). There are formal similarities – the electronic score, a hand-held shot through a wooded path that mirrors the railcar journey into Tarkovsky’s “Zone” – but the loudest echo is Phantasiesätze‘s final image, a three-minute static shot inside a decaying room in the ruins of Chernobyl. The audio recording returns, now even more distorted, as if the tape had been found all these years later, warped by the elements and portending calamity. Like Tarkovsky’s stalker, author and scientist, we the viewers are left alone there in the room, on the threshold of revelation.

The first few images in Rawane Nassif’s Turtles Are Always Home could be mistaken for footage from a camera test video on YouTube. Wide-lensed and hyper-saturated, the opening shots are from the perspective of a slow moving boat, floating down a concrete canal. The camera looks up at passing pastel buildings and at a blue, cloudless, graduated-filtered sky. It’s stunning. Perfect. Like Venice, but immaculate and deserted. There are no signs of life until the second cut, when the camera moves onto land and the sounds of lapping water are replaced by a rumbling jet engine. A plane passes low overhead, and then another. The Pearl, a man-made island in Dohar, Qatar, boasts nearly 300 shops and restaurants on its website, and a recent article in Gulf Times reports that more than 25,000 people now call the island home, but in Turtles Are Always Home, Nassif documents its Venetian-themed Qanat Quartier district in an early, unspoiled stage of development. Pitched in sales materials as “an intriguingly complex area in which a true Riviera lifestyle can be enjoyed,” Qanat Quartier is as rich and “intriguingly complex” an example of the simulacrum as you’re likely to find. Nassif, however, is after something else. (Which is not to say she’s not also fascinated by the simulacral nature of The Pearl; this film should find a place on many a philosophy and critical theory syllabi.) Rather, she wants to observe and understand – and by doing so leave a trace of herself on – this place, her latest temporary home. “My dear country is a suitcase and I am always a traveller,” Nassif sings over the final shot, reinforcing the metaphor of the film’s title. She trains her camera on the art-directed photos of light-skinned models and luxury goods that shroud the windows of empty storefronts, and then, by pulling focus or tracking backward, brings her own reflection into relief. It’s an uncanny and bracing viewing experience that manifests the simultaneous pleasure, melancholy, and anxiety of dislocation.

Turtles Are Always Home screened in the second Wavelengths shorts program, Fluid Frontiers, which borrowed its name from Asili’s closing film. Asili in turn borrowed the title from Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker’s 2016 book, A Fluid Frontier, a collection of essays that explore the legacy of slavery and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River region. It’s a ripe subject for Asili, who has said Fluid Frontiers will be the final installment in his five-film series about the African diaspora that began with Forged Ways (2010). Drawn to the area by an invitation from Media City Film Festival’s Mobile Frames residency program in Windsor, Ontario, and nursing an interest in Detroit’s Broadside Press, a publisher of radical black poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, Asili travelled back and forth across the Ambassador Bridge and invited strangers on both sides of the border to read poems in front of his camera. Asili often shoots from a low angle, which allows the reader a privileged perspective relative to the viewer and at the same time situates the reader in a particular, emblematic context. The strategy also makes for some stunning graphic compositions. In the first reading, a black man is silhouetted against an indigo sky and the straight lines of a street lamp, like a figure from an Aaron Douglas painting. In another, the reader stands in front of a brick wall that advertises “Chene Liquor. Beer. Fine Wine. Money Orders.” The readings in Fluid Frontiers are similar to the long-duration shots of smokers in James Benning’s Twenty Cigarettes (2011) in that they capture each subject’s gradual transition from “performer” to “real” person and activate, by way of sync-sound recordings of passing traffic or chirping insects, the unseen space just outside of the frame. Another interesting precedent is Nicolás Prividera’s Tierra de los Padres (Fatherland, 2011), in which visitors to the La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires read poems and letters that tell the often violent and tragic history of the region. As in Fatherland, the most affecting moments in Fluid Frontiers come when the reader stumbles – these are all cold, first takes – into some personal connection with the written voice he or she is speaking into existence. The inscrutable expression on the face of a bookstore clerk after she reads from Sonia Sanchez’s We a BaddDDD People (1970) is magical, like a phantasmagoric conjuring of Harriet Tubman and Sanchez and a thousand other black women too.

Kevin Jerome Everson’s Brown and Clear was shot at his uncle William Wanky Everson’s place. I don’t know how people in Northeast Ohio refer to rooms like this. It’s not a bar, exactly. In the South we’d probably call it a joint. Everson buys bourbon and vodka, rebottles it, and then sells it by the glass outside the scrutiny of local liquor boards and accountants. Brown and Clear consists of only two shots (pun intended?). The first is a static, underexposed closeup of seven empty, backlit bottles neatly arranged so that the one furthest in the background is visible in sharp, shallow focus, while the bottles nearest to the camera are made abstract by bokeh blur. (Everson has an enviable knack for making warm, grainish images with a digital camera.) The bottles are different shapes and have different labels, some of which are visible through the glass. Uncle Everson then fills each bottle with bourbon, beginning in the foreground and working his way back. When he finishes, much of the backlight has been blocked out by the “brown” and the screen is mostly dark. The shot is a variation on the simple genius of Everson’s Ninety Three (2008), in which an elderly man blows out his birthday candles in slow motion, eventually leaving the theatre or gallery in total darkness. The second shot is again a shallow-focus closeup of bottles, but this time the camera is handheld and active. We see William Everson’s hands as he fills bottles with vodka and screws on the caps. We also hear him for the first time. When one cap doesn’t fit he says, “I’m gonna have to go behind me and get two more tops, okay?” Everson grunts “mhmm” in reply, and with that brief exchange the film suddenly unfolds in ways that exemplify the thorny pleasures of Everson’s best work. Brown and Clear is typical for Everson in its documentation of African-American labour and an alternative economy that are hidden from (a white, gallery-going audience’s) view. Everson’s immense body of work is also always a documentation of his own labour and of his evolving, complex relationship with “home”. With that “mhmm”, what begins as a formal experiment transforms into a portrait of kinship. I can imagine Everson fighting the urge to respond, “Man, you’re fucking up my shot,” just as when his uncle wipes down the bar and says, “Okay?” I can imagine him thinking, “Are we done yet?” There’s an impatience in both voices but also experience and pride.

Two minutes into Wojciech Bąkowski’s Yeti, the filmmaker appears in a medium closeup, staring directly into the camera – presumably the camera on his Nokia cellphone. Like every other shot in the film, he’s framed in portrait mode. His clean-shaven head – which along with a black mock turtleneck, black jeans, and black shoes comprise his signature look – rotates mechanically from side to side as cutout images of his passport and that Nokia phone dissolve into view, superimposed to his right and left. It plays like an homage to 40 year-old visions of a 21st-century future, a mashup of THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971), Sleeper (Woody Allen, 1973) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). Video-making is only one part of Bąkowski’s practice, which also includes performance, audio installations, animation and music. Yeti fits somewhere in the middle, as the most compelling moments are essentially documentation of his performed interactions with spaces in and around his apartment. He triggers the motion detectors that control the building’s lights and doorlocks. He taps the back of his head against a wall and shuffles forward and backward, up and down a single step. Over each shot he superimposes more cutouts of more products. I’ll admit to not being completely in tune with Bąkowski’s project, but the image of him as one more glitching automoton in a world of branded consumer goods is uncanny and playfully unnerving.

“The Internet Has Lost Its Damn Mind About The New Pink iPhone,” declared Buzzfeed on 10 September, 2015. Four days later The New Yorker put its own spin on the story with Rebecca Mead’s “The Semiotics of ‘Rose Gold’,” in which we learn that rose gold is an alloy of gold and copper that has fallen in and out of fashion over the past few centuries. Mead ticks off the names of high-end designers who currently sell rose gold products – Piaget, Van Cleef & Arpels, Diane von Furstenberg, and Alexander Wang – before concluding that we live in a “rose-gilded” age “in which a technology company can make fifty billion dollars in a fiscal quarter, largely on the strength of persuading people who already have a phone … that they need to buy a slightly different version.” Mead is among the company of philosophers, sociologists, academics and novelists who are referenced explicitly in Sara Cwyner’s Rose Gold, which had its international premiere in Wavelengths after screening as part of Cwyner’s solo show at Foxy Production in the spring. All of that context is necessary, I think, for describing the film, which is densely crowded with images and aphorisms. Rose Gold begins with the sound of a woman inhaling as if she’s about to speak; instead, a man speaks “for” her: “They invented this colour, rose gold, and I’m mesmerised. A new object of desire.” Throughout the seven-minute film, the soundtrack splices together readings of texts that have been grouped by subjects or themes: clocks, advertising, the Hoover Dam and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Melamine kitchenware, the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape, the children’s book Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, and on and on. “His” voice dominates, but “hers” chimes in as well from time to time. After transcribing it all, I can’t spot any obvious motivations for why particular lines are spoken by a woman. Cwyner, whose show included a number of collages, seems to layer audio with a collagist’s sensibility, modulating the harmony and dissonance of voices as sound. The images, likewise, come at a rapid-fire clip. Most were shot in her studio space and feature assorted totems of pre-digital life: along with her collection of Melamine cups we see rotary phones, Avon perfume bottles, analogue clocks, costume jewelry and other thrift store finds. Rose Gold is a beguiling piece of false nostalgia. Cwyner is both disgusted and fascinated by the aesthetic/ideology that would produce something as magnificently gauche as Trump Tower, as we all are. For such an analogue film, the pleasure of watching Rose Gold is actually akin to the adrenalin rush of opening your smartphone and hearing that deafening chorus of social media and advertising voices. “And always the feeling that there is too much to handle,” he and she say, their voices overlapping, just out of sync.

The third program, Figures in a Landscape, ended with Flores, Jorge Jácome’s 25-minute, alternate-reality fantasia on flowers, iconography, beautiful male bodies and the colour purple. In a first-person voiceover, “the filmmaker” informs us that he has travelled to the Azores islands in order to document the hydrangeas that have so completely overrun the landscape, all inhabitants have been forced to evacuate for Portugal, leaving behind only a small military force and some entrepreneurial honey makers and flower merchants. Jácome and co-writer David Cabecinha work a few faux-documentary devices into the film – a man is seen and heard putting on his lavalier mic, a worker in the honey factory turns away when she sees the camera pointing in her direction – but the conceit is primarily an excuse to create strange and sensuous purple-stained images of men and honeybees in an otherworldly landscape. With its references to the church, colonial history and the military, Flores invites ideological readings, but that seems a relatively unproductive critical path to take. Jácome is deeply indebted to Claire Denis, and the film’s politics, along with many of its images, are second-generation copies of Beau Travail (1999) and L’Intrus (2004). I offer that as a back-handed by sincere compliment. “I had a dream you could use in your film,” a soldier tells the filmmaker, “a dream in which our camouflage was purple and blue instead of brown and green.” Flores is a mesmerising viewing experience that, like Denis’s more abstract work, brings into being the logic and splendour of reverie. This film is a hell of a calling card. (That’s another back-handed but sincere compliment.)

Dan Browne’s Palmerston Blvd. was filmed over the course of a year in a single room of his downtown Toronto home. It opens with a wide, eight-second, time-lapse shot of a bay window with a table, three chairs and a few potted plants beneath it. Light levels are set to reveal the contours of the room, so the sunny world outside is overexposed and barely defined. With the first cut, the camera is repositioned nearer to the table and turned 45 degrees to the left, giving us a better view of two chairs and a large tree just outside the window. Over the next 15 minutes, Browne varies shot durations and camera setups but sticks to this basic strategy: documenting the changing light (and life) of the room and the neighbourhood around it in accelerated time. Palmerston Blvd. is so neatly conceived, I wondered if the viewing experience might seem redundant, or if the concept might not be able to sustain the relatively long run time. In fact, it was the highlight of the fourth and final shorts program, As Above, So Below. Working within tight formal restraints, including silence, Browne was forced to focus his creative attention on the limited set of tools at his disposal and constantly reinvent familiar images. I especially like a shot four minutes in, when he finds a new composition from a slightly lower, slightly skewed angle that turns the window frames into a kind of cubist collage. Gradually, other signs of life appear – first the family cat, and then split-second glimpses of Browne and his partner, and then finally, near the midpoint of the film, an infant swing and high chair. Seven years ago at Wavelengths, I found myself crying unexpectedly during a screening of John Price’s Home Movie, a 35mm, hand-processed study of his growing children. I explained afterward to a friend that Home Movie expressed a particular sensation I’d experienced daily during the five months since my first child was born. I called it a “nostalgia for the present” – a constant, conscious realisation that this moment is already gone and that someday, maybe soon, maybe in the distant future, I would desire deeply to return and reexperience it. I already felt the ache. Palmerston Blvd. has the same effect. When winter snows arrive and the halcyon light falls lower in the sky, the room becomes every warm room, with the sounds of a hissing radiator or the smell of a furnace. And when, at the end, the signs of Browne’s life are removed one by one – the toys and then the plants and then the table and chairs – it provokes a deep-in-the-bones feeling of loss, not only for a particular home (that universal, melancholy experience of locking a door for the last time) but also for a particular domesticity, for a particular light.

This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

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The 2016 Wavelengths shorts program opened auspiciously with Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Sangrienta (Bloody Silhouette). Made in 1975 in Iowa City, the two-minute, Super-8 film begins with a high-angle shot of Mendieta stretched out on her back, nude and still, on a charcoal-colored creek bed. She lies at the centre of the frame, tilted a few degrees counterclockwise. A small portion of the rippling creek is visible in the top right corner of the image. Brown oak leaves and grey stones lie scattered about her. With the first of three jump cuts, Mendieta then vanishes, leaving a sculpted trace of her body in the soil. With the second cut, her carved-out silhouette becomes filled with sanguine liquid, like aspic in a mold. And then Mendieta reappears, this time face down, her right arm submerged in red, the bottoms of her feet stained with dirt and crimson.

Because Silueta Sangrienta was shot at a low frame rate, light darts unnaturally through the trees and the film reads as something akin to stop-motion animation. Time is trackable only by the shifting shadows, and the three cuts are syncopated and surprising. Each of the four images functions primarily, then, as a graphic composition – a portrait, an absence, a gouge of colour, a body – and Mendieta’s montage provokes (in the best sense of the word) not just the ideas at play in the piece but a visceral reaction. Made in the wake of the brutal rape and murder of a University of Iowa nursing student, Silueta Sangrienta is transgressive and sorrowful. The third shot constitutes more than half of the film’s runtime, so when Mendieta finally cuts to the image of her motionless body, the splash of red lingers in the viewer’s eye, like a superimposition. It’s striking and violent and strange.

Silueta Sangrienta screened alongside another of Mendieta’s short films, Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece, 1976), in which the artist’s silhouette is rendered again, this time as a sparkling sculpture in the night. Dozens of small, red fireworks trace the line of Mendieta’s form, with a cluster near the heart. The film begins at the moment of ignition, explodes with light and colour, and then ends, seconds later, in darkness. The Estate of Ana Mendieta recently completed a comprehensive digital preservation of her 104 films, a number of which have been included in recent exhibitions, but seeing them screened at full 2K resolution in a proper theatre was a rare treat. In Anima, Silueta de Cohetes, for example, a car could be seen passing in the background (it’s not visible on the screener) and the mountain horizon was more prominent (this is another of Mendieta’s body and landscape works).

A few blocks away, at CONTACT Gallery, five more of Mendieta’s shorts (in addition to Silueta Sangrienta) and two photo collections, Untitled: Silueta Series (1976) and Volcan (1979), were on display in a tightly curated installation, Siluetas. The contrast between the two venues was instructive. At CONTACT, the films were projected at lower resolution and in relatively small dimensions, looped side by side on the walls of a naturally-lit gallery (I visited during the day). Mendieta didn’t consider herself a filmmaker; rather, the films were for her primarily a means of instantiating her process. And indeed Siluetas confirmed that in a gallery setting her work loses much of its innate filmness. The pieces spoke, instead, in the formal language of video documentation – not terribly different in a categorical, experiential way from watching clips of the same films in an adjoining room, where Ana Mendieta, Nature Inside, a short documentary by her niece, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, looped on a flat screen monitor.

Raquel was in Toronto to oversee the installation, and she mentioned after the first Wavelengths shorts program that, even for her, seeing the films in a theatre on a large screen was something of a revelation. That the films of an artist of Mendieta’s stature have so seldom been considered in this context testifies to the potential consequences of preservation efforts such as this (there are obvious pros and cons to the films being more widely accessible in digital format). It also speaks to the value of good programming. Over the past decade, Andréa Picard has fashioned Wavelengths into a grand critical project. When she took over in 2006 (co-programming that first year with Chris Gehman), Wavelengths was eight pages in the Toronto International Film Festival’s two-inch-thick program; now the Wavelengths brand, for lack of a better word, extends beyond short-film programming to features (fourteen this year) and installations (four, by Mendieta, Cyprien Gaillard, Albert Serra and Sharon Lockhart). While the fingerprints of other TIFF programmers can be spotted from time to time, Wavelengths now very much reflects Picard’s particular interests in the art world beyond the film festival ghetto. I make that assumption based on first-hand observation – I’ve attended every TIFF during her time there – and on Picard’s work as a critic, particularly the dozens of essays, interviews, and artist profiles she’s contributed over the years to Cinema Scope magazine.

The spotlight on Mendieta is typical of Picard’s programming in that it advocates for important recent work – in this case the preservations – by bringing it to a larger stage. Wavelengths has always had the feel of a secret outpost, hidden away amidst the celebrity chaos, but this is TIFF after all – among the largest and most rabidly reported festivals in the world. This year, in order to ensure best projection quality of the 16mm films, the Wavelengths shorts programs were moved to a smaller theatre at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which made the always scarce tickets even more difficult to come by. Still, among the nightly crowds were a not-insignificant number of critics and programmers, many of whom also saw the CONTACT exhibition and will, no doubt, share Mendieta’s work with an even larger audience. I don’t feel qualified to write at length about Serra’s Singularity, having spent less than an hour there, but Picard’s installation of the five-screen, twelve-hour piece, originally commissioned for the 2015 Venice Biennale, was similarly strategic (I say “strategic” without any cynicism or irony). TIFF has programmed three of Serra’s feature films, including The Death of Louis XIV (La mort de Louis XIV) this year, but the Singularity installation was a kind of declaration: that Serra’s work is significant and that Wavelengths is now a global platform for avant-garde work of significance. Picard’s curation in 2015 of Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s Fireworks (Archives) at the Art Gallery of Ontario made a similar statement. That Wavelengths continues to expand its mission with such ambition, and that it manages to do so within the institutional machinery of the Toronto International Film Festival, is impressive. I have to wonder how much of an inspiration it’s been to the New York Film Festival’s selection committee, whose new features program, Explorations, kicked off this fall with six films, five of which had their North American premiere in Wavelengths.

Short Films

Good programming is especially critical with the curation and sequencing of shorts, and Mendieta’s films certainly benefited from the context in which they were presented. The first Wavelengths program, “The Fire Within,” included six other pieces, all of which were directed or co-directed by women. Silueta Sangrienta was followed immediately by Ana Vaz’s Há Terra!, in which her camera hunts for a young woman who hides in the tall grass of the Sertão, a highlands region of northeast Brazil. In voiceover, the woman recounts two stories about this landscape. In the first, she’s bitten by a snake while picking fruit with her sister, which causes her foot to swell with each cycle of the moon. In the second, she describes a former mayor, Big Felipe, who ran others off the land by threatening them and burning their camps. The title refers to a line of dialogue borrowed from Manoel de Oliveira’s Francisca (1981) that Vaz injects into the soundtrack from time to time, creating a conversation of sorts between the coloniser/hunter and colonised/prey. Vaz has been interested recently in “cannibal metaphysics” – the idea that consuming an enemy can lead to a new perspective. “The Other is a threat,” she has said, “but also a possibility of seeing through different eyes.” If Há Terra! has a sound-as-brickwork logic (to borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer) that veers toward didacticism, it’s also leavened by Vaz’s rich, saturated 16mm images, which turn the woman’s shirt an impossible red and draw an association between her and the feathers of a bird we see later in the film. At this particular screening, it also recalled Mendieta’s red liquid. These are not just symbolic associations. Rather, this is the sublime, psyche-triggering, primary red of giallo films and Hans Hofmann paintings, a burst of sensation that short-circuits reasoning.

Camilo Restrepo’s Cilaos is shot in the grainy, warm brown style of a 1970s blacksploitation film. A musical in miniature, it concerns a woman’s journey to find her father and fulfill her mother’s deathbed wish for vengeance. Soon, however, she discovers he’s already dead, at which point the film becomes a kind of ceremonial incantation, a calling forth of ghosts. When we first hear the woman (Christine Salem) sing, she’s framed in a close-up against a black background. Her tall afro is lit from behind, and the only other light catches her eyes and left cheek. “It’ll drive him crazy to see a woman stand up to him,” she whispers, recalling with sadness and anger her mother’s final words. Cilaos is, among other things, a portrait film: Restrepo loves faces, especially Salem’s, which he often shoots from a low angle and in high contrast. The effect recalls Pedro Costa’s Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014) and countless earlier aesthetic precedents, from Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974) to the cover of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. Salem, who hails from Réunion off the eastern coast of Madagascar, is a transfixing screen presence, and the final scene, in which she and two musicians wake the spirits with a Reunionese maloya, is great fun in the most basic sense – it’s one hell of a performance – but it’s also charged with an uncanny sense that the material world really might crack open before us.

“From where I was standing, I could actually hear this man trying to talk to [the cop]. And the sound he was making is a sound I will never forget.” In Kevin Jerome Everson’s Shadeena (2016), Shadeena Brooks recounts the 2010 murder of DeCarrio Antwan Couley, which she witnessed from her front porch. The bulk of the film is a four-minute shot of Brooks, who reenacts the scene of the crime as she talks, mimicking the murderer by leaning over and pretending to fire off bullet after bullet, “Bap! Bap! Bap! Bap!” When she recalls the “sound [Couley] was making,” she points unconsciously toward her left ear, then Everson cuts to the closing titles, punctuating her testimony. Everson intervenes in Shadeena by editing the sound so that her voice falls briefly out of synch until the first shot is fired in her story, which foregrounds the performance of it all. Brooks has told this story many times over the years, and she tells it well.

Shadeena is an intriguing piece in its own right, but it’s also a useful intertext for Ears, Nose and Throat, which was one of the highlights of Wavelengths and is among Everson’s very best films. Here, Brooks again narrates her account of Couley’s murder, but Everson shifts his focus from Brooks the storyteller to Brooks the witness/survivor. Ears, Nose and Throat opens with a series of night-time images of a street, presumably the location where the shooting occurred. The sequence eventually resolves to a low-angle shot of a street lamp, which reads on subsequent viewings as Couley’s dying vision. Everson then cuts to Brooks, who is in an examination room, listening as a doctor explains that her hoarseness is caused by a weak vocal cord. Again, it takes Brooks four minutes to tell her story, but this time Everson lays it over an image of her in an isolated sound booth as she takes a hearing exam. A beep in the left channel of the soundtrack is greeted by her raising her left hand. With a beep in the right channel, she raises her right hand.

Everson mentioned during the Q&A in Toronto that Ears, Nose and Throat was inspired in part by that gesture, by the raising of her hand, which reminded him of seeing Brooks swear to tell the truth in court (Couley was a close family member of Everson’s). In the context of the film, however, it transcends simple symbolism. As in Shadeena, Brooks seems haunted most by those dying sounds. “From my porch to where they were standing, I can hear him, like, trying to breathe and trying to talk,” she says. Her voice trails off as she finishes the story. “And then the ambulance came.” Her shift to the present tense is terrifying – “I can hear him.” Rather than cutting away to titles, this time Everson returns to the examination room, now in a tighter shot. It’s silent. The doctor busies himself in the foreground, slightly out of focus. All attention is on Brooks’s face. Ears, Nose and Throat is a self-consciously beautiful film, almost romantically so, and it culminates in this epilogue, which is sympathetic and haunting and full of grace. The film ends just as Brooks glances at the camera, which would be a cliché if it weren’t such a gut-punch.

After the screening of AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN, Manuela De Laborde said that making the film was for her like “returning to Montessori.” I almost applauded because one of the chief pleasures of the film – it was for me not only the highlight of Wavelengths but of all new cinema in 2016 – is its pedagogical form. By that I mean it reveals, reworks and illuminates the essential components of the modes in which she’s working: abstraction, sculpture and the materiality of celluloid. Like a musical theme and variation, AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN introduces ideas then spins them in new contexts by recalibrating the rhythm of the film and by modulating the degree of complexity in the individual compositions and the montage. It’s quite a feat.

AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN begins with abstracted shots of an unidentifiable surface that recalls a lunar landscape. The camera and filmed objects are still, but the screen seems to dance because of the magnified, blown out film grain. The only sound is hissing white noise, and each cut is separated by varying lengths of darkness. This opening section, then, presents two foundations of cinema in relatively pure form: image and duration. De Laborde simplifies (if that’s the right term) the abstraction by using an all-blue colour palette, presenting each image as if it were a stand-alone work, like paintings hung a few steps apart in a gallery. Then, at the two-minute mark, a flash of light reveals that the oddly shaped patch of blue we’re staring at is the blunt end of a sculpted object. Along with introducing new content to the film (it’s no longer just visual abstraction; it’s now about the object), De Laborde also uses that reveal as a jumping off point for a playful exploration of the sculpture. The pace of the editing quickens and then slows. She juxtaposes different perspectives of the object, cutting between shots of varying magnification and frame rates. In essence, she has introduced montage to the mix.

For the remainder of AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN‘s 24-minute runtime, De Laborde continues along this line of enquiry. The blue palette is joined by red. The soundtrack is activated by electronic tones. One image is recomposed in real time as other shapes and colours are superimposed upon it. Gradually the sculptures become objects of contemplation in and of themselves. In that sense AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN is very much a sculpture film in its attention to the surfaces of things, and that includes the emulsion on its celluloid. The film ultimately resolves to total abstraction, ending on screens of red, blue, and black, again animated by dancing grain. As a critic, I remain at a loss for objectively evaluating a work like this, but AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN is one of those rare instances when an experimental film’s rhythms felt intuitively true and right to me. It ended precisely when I wanted it to and not a moment sooner.

Feature Films

The publication of correspondences between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Ceylan created a small sensation in 2008. Two of the most important German-language poets of the post-war years, Bachmann and Ceylan met in the spring of 1948 in Vienna, lived together in Paris for two months in 1950, and reunited briefly in 1953 and 1957. The nearly 200 letters, postcards and poems they exchanged over two decades, however, reveal for the first time the true depth of their feelings for one another and the complexity of their relationship, which lasted until Ceylan’s suicide in 1970. Their story has all the stuff of an Oscar-baiting biopic. Ceylan was a German-speaking Jew in Romania when Fascism swept through Europe. He survived his years in a labour camp, but his parents did not. Bachmann was the daughter of an Austrian Nazi and made her way to occupied Vienna after the war in hopes of joining the literati. In 1952, he married artist Gisèle Lestrange and soon after had a child; she had a years-long relationship with author Max Frisch. Each eventually met a tragic end: Ceylan drowned himself in the Seine and three years later Bachmann died from complications of barbiturate addiction and injuries suffered in a fire. Through it all, they carried on their correspondence, confessing their frustrations and jealousies, both personal and professional, and expressing with disarming clarity their longing for one another.

With The Dreamed Ones (Die Geträumten), Ruth Beckermann has found a brilliant cinematic analogy for Bachmann and Ceylan’s story. Staged almost entirely within Funkhaus, a Nazi-era recording studio in Vienna, the film features singer-songwriter Anja Plaschg and actor Laurence Rupp, who read snippets of the correspondences directly into microphones. We only discover this after six or seven minutes, however, when an engineer interrupts to adjust their mic stands and then announces, “Take eight, rolling.” Until then, Beckermann cuts between Plaschg and Rupp, shot reverse shot, in low-angle close-ups. Rather than the scripts they hold in their hands, they appear to be staring into one another’s eyes. In those opening moments, the performances seem mannered and intentionally anti-dramatic but they still translate as acting, in the biopic sense. Beckermann skillfully complicates this dynamic by accompanying Plaschg and Rupp on their smoke breaks and on walks through studio soundstages and the commissary, where we witness, in documentary style, a “real” encounter between two artists in their 20s. “In the beginning, [Rupp] didn’t take [Plaschg] seriously as an actress, and she didn’t take him seriously as a person, but that changed,” Beckermann has said, and much of the pleasure of the film is in the tension of that transformation. Rupp is a natural leading man, with Tom Hiddleston charisma – never moreso than when the earnest and reticent Plaschg mocks his flirtations.

In the opening titles of The Dreamed Ones, we learn that Bachmann and Ceylan never wrote to each other of their war-time experiences, but Shoah haunted their lives and reverberates through the film. In an early letter, Ceylan confesses his loneliness, complaining that anti-Semitic Paris “has forced me into silence.” Bachmann, for her part, refers casually and with some bitterness to the sight of her home being bombed. “I risked everything and lost everything,” she writes of their relationship. After reciting that line, Plaschg jolts back from the microphone and hides her tears behind the script. I’m not sure how to classify Plaschg’s performance, exactly, but it’s a remarkable thing. She is unnervingly present onscreen, especially in close-ups. (I experience a small shock each time Beckermann cuts to a wide shot and we see how small Plaschg is – like watching a fierce performance by Isabelle Huppert.) In one of the documentary asides, Beckermann frees Plaschg to interpret Bachmann. “The role of the lamenter… got to be too much for her,” she tells Rupp. “Nothing ever slipped out” between them. The film rests in this –Plaschg’s uncanny empathy, in the pain she experiences for Ceylan and Bachmann, who were too scarred to express themselves.

In Austerlitz, Sergei Loznitsa goes to actual sites of the Holocaust. The film is built from 30 or so long-duration, static shots that were filmed in and around the camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, now transformed by time into tourist destinations, complete with snack bars and audio tours. Loznitsa intervenes little, instead standing his camera on a tripod and observing quietly the movement of bodies through these sacred spaces. Simple in concept, Austerlitz encourages some measure of quiet contemplation, provoking in those of us with even a basic familiarity with post-war philosophy questions about memory and the problems of creating art under the shadow of Shoah. However, by seating us at a distance, by forcing us to observe the throngs of tourists rather than the sites, Loznitsa makes a stinging and unambiguous argument. Posing under the Arbeit Macht Frei gate with a selfie stick is not problematic; it’s grotesque, a mockery, a kind of fascism in its own right. Righteous anger is, I think, Loznitsa’s defining characteristic as a filmmaker, and I say that as a compliment. Austerlitz, however, is simple to a fault and would be essentially the same film at half the runtime.

In the first act of Angela Schanelec’s Der traumhafte Weg (The Dreamed Path), one of the film’s four main characters, Kenneth (Thorbjörn Björnsson), leaves his girlfriend in Greece to tend to his dying mother. The sudden health crisis reunites Kenneth with his father, now elderly and nearly blind, who asks him during their first significant conversation, “Do you still take drugs?” It’s a typically equivocal moment for Schanelec. There’s no reaction shot of Kenneth, only a close-up of his hands, which hold a chocolate bar. “Yes,” he replies, without affect. Moments later, in a dialogue-free sequence of shots, we learn the father’s motives for asking. Kenneth stands alone inside a derelict building, watching through a window as a small parade passes by. Schanelec then cuts to a close-up of neatly folded bills on the corner of a table. Someone then enters (we never see his face), takes the money, and replaces it with a vial of morphine, which Kenneth places in his pocket. Cut to a young woman sitting alone in a dank stairwell, the space briefly illuminated by sunlight as Kenneth (presumably) opens and closes a door off-screen. We then see Kenneth alone at a restaurant, finishing a meal and trying, unsuccessfully, to suppress his sobs. Finally, Schanelec cuts back to the hospital, first to a shot of patients walking past the small chapel and then to a wider shot of Kenneth carrying his mother’s limp body, his father following close behind.

Writing about The Dreamed Path demands this degree of attention to the specific details of shots and sequences because the essence and emotional life of the film are in those juxtapositions and in the odd geometry of its ellipses. Comparisons with Robert Bresson are ubiquitous, but Schanelec’s mise-en-scène is even more graphic and still, and her montage more associative. Her images cut against each other like panels in a comic book or like Chris Marker’s photos in La Jetée (1962), each one a singular, crafted object. The most mysterious shot in the sequence described above is the girl on the stairs. The rest can be explained in symbolic or narrative terms (this represents or this happens), but the brief glimpse of the girl suggests other, equally vital possibilities for the film to explore – other dreamed paths, so to speak. (Also, Schanelec’s use of light to mimic a door and expand off-screen space is both lovely and clever, generating a sudden, unexpected Hitchcockian thrill.)

Gastón Solnicki’s Kékszakállú drops us immediately and without much guidance into the privileged world of Punta del Este on the southern coast of Uruguay, where children spend their days swimming and surfing while their older siblings and friends make out on the lawn and organise barbecues. Gradually, the film settles its focus on three young women: Lara (Lara Tarlowski), a teenager in that most awkward stage of adolescence; Laila (Laila Maltz), who is adrift, with little clue what to study or how to live; and Katia (Katia Szechtman), who returns from vacation to an amiable social life in Buenos Aires. Solnicki, making his narrative debut after two documentary features, works in a festival-friendly mode, with non-professional actors speaking seldom and functioning primarily as figures in his designs. His compositions are often balanced and planimetric and his colour palate is a few degrees on the cool side. Solnicki’s style and world-building recalls Yorgos Lanthimos minus the jolt of transgression that charges so many of the recent Greek films. Solnicki seems most interested in simply watching the women as they explore the architecture of their different worlds – the beach-front estates of Punta del Este and the Styrofoam and sausage factories where Laila and her friends settle for work. In a typical shot, Laila stands in front of a large exhaust fan on a factory rooftop, a moment that is unmotivated except as an excuse to see her hair blow and to listen to the rumbling noise of the machine.

Kékszakállú borrows its title from the murderous villain in Béla Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára), which is notable, given that no specific danger threatens the women. Rather, the title hovers over the film symbolically, imbuing with masculine menace a more general anxiety – the prospect of stepping, ill-prepared and with uncertainty, into adulthood. In his director’s note, Solnicki refers to the “supposed white paradise” of Punta del Este as a “kind of involuntary hell”, and the film’s final image, of Laila escaping at night by ferry, is a stunner that certainly invokes Stygian dread. If its surface-level economic critique never quite lands, Kékszakállú does, however, suffuse the women’s lives with disarming pathos by laying Bartók cues over several scenes. Solnicki’s use of Bartók activates otherwise unexceptional images from the film – Lara eating from a cereal bowl, an usher standing alone in an opera house, Laila shielding her eyes from the sun – in the same way Claire Denis’s use of Benjamin Britten mythologises the legionnaires in Beau Travail (1999). It’s difficult to overestimate the effect those brief snippets of music, scattered throughout the film’s 72-minute runtime, have on the overall shape and experience of Kékszakállú. Without them, it’s one more slow-cinema study of ennui, indistinguishable from the pack. With them, it’s a lively curiosity and a compelling calling card for its director.

Fellow Argentinian Matías Piñeiro returned to Wavelengths for the third time in four years with Hermia & Helena, the latest in his series of films that sample playfully from Shakespeare. Agustina Muñoz stars as Camila, a theatre director who relocates from Buenos Aires to New York City for a fellowship. There she passes her days translating A Midsummer Night’s Dream and wandering between brief encounters with past loves and potential new ones. Inspired in part by his own relocation to the States, Piñeiro cuts across time throughout the film, juxtaposing Camila’s new life – its loneliness, transience, and winter snow – with the family and friends she left behind.

Piñeiro is a reckless practitioner of kitchen-sink cinema. Like Viola (2012) and The Princess of France (2014), Hermia & Helena is bulging with ideas and diversions, as if the script were pasted together with scissors and glue from a year’s worth of jotted notes. The results are more than a bit uneven, but one section is worth special notice. Camila decides to contact her birth father, which precipitates a weekend trip out of the city to his small-town home, and the resulting scenes are unlike any I’ve seen from Piñeiro. The father’s house is a century old, with white walls, creaking wood floors, and a ticking grandfather clock. Piñeiro slows his pace to match the Bergman-like setting, even inventing an excuse for Camila to explore each silent room and indulge her curiosity before her father arrives. Silence is in short supply in Piñeiro’s films. Typically, his actors deliver their lines at a practiced pace, not so much reacting to others in a scene as reciting in their presence. (Performers lacking in star-power charisma often don’t come off especially well in these films.) When the father (Dan Sallitt) comes home, the sense of space and quiet remains, even during their conversations. In one especially nice image, Piñeiro frames Muñoz in a medium shot from a fixed camera position (both relatively rare for him), catching Sallitt in a reflection, ghost-like. They then play a question and answer game, each taking turns, and it’s an uncommonly free (improvised?) exchange. Piñeiro holds on Muñoz for more than two minutes as they begin to talk, withholding the first reverse shot as long as possible so we can enjoy the subtle transformations of her expression. When she asks if he’s told anyone about her after all these years, her wordless response to his answer touches a pathos that I hope we see more of from Piñeiro.

This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

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The 2011 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program included Mark Lewis’s short film, Black Mirror at the National Gallery, in which two bulky, fully articulated machines – one manipulating a round mirror, the other a camera – roam unattended and with immaculate precision through galleries dedicated to 18^th-century Dutch landscapes. It’s an unnerving viewing experience. For most of the film, we see two distinct depths of field simultaneously: the walls and paintings beyond the frame of the mirror, and the reflected image within the mirror itself. The former is objective and familiar; the latter is strangely subjective, as if the Martin Szekely-designed mirror apparatus were a sentient spectator, choosing with taste and curiosity the paintings most deserving of its full attention. Lewis has said that one of his goals with the project was to experiment with the very notion of composition:

I want the machine—and in Black Mirror at the National Gallery this means the camera, the mirror, the apparatus that carries the mirror and moves it through the space, and even the space itself—to come up with a composition through a collaborative exercise. The idea that the machine already has these possibilities programmed inside of it is something that feels right to me.

Lewis returned to Wavelengths this year with Invention, a feature-length compendium of short films that were shot on location in Toronto, São Paolo and the Musée du Louvre. Again, Lewis’s camera moves with servo-controlled elegance, this time floating, panning and rotating through gallery spaces, city skylines, late-night streets and office lobbies. On a few occasions, Lewis adds a touch of narrative to the edges of the frame by way of human figures – characters, really – who perform for the camera, or who are, at the very least, conscious of being filmed: a man shovels snow so that he can trick-ride his bike; a couple has a long, seated conversation on a pedestrian-packed elevated freeway; a crowd forms around an injured cyclist. These small human touches are welcome additions to a film that is always in danger of being little more than a cinematic sideshow or, worse yet, derivative (like other critics of Invention, I can’t ignore the most obvious precedents in Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale, 1971, and Ernie Gehr’s Side/Walk/Shuttle, 1992).

The patchwork structure of Invention is a problem for the larger piece – some sections are considerably more interesting than others – but Lewis’s project is a usable contribution to our ongoing and oft-vital discussions of power, privilege and spectatorship, not only in the cinema but in our image-mediated lives, generally. Lewis’s mechanical eye draws a stranged new attention to the omnipresence of closed-circuit surveillance, smartphones, dashboard cams, drones and the myriad other digital cameras that seem always to be hovering nearby. Should Lewis go to work for Big Brother, we can at least take consolation from knowing that our lives will be documented exquisitely before they’re uploaded into the cloud. One especially disorienting shot tracks down a spiral staircase at magic hour and plays like an extended variation on the “upside-down shadow” theme (to borrow a musical analogy) from Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011). It’s all quite lovely.

Viewed within the context of Wavelengths 2015, there was something downright quaint and comforting about the aesthetic and intellectual remove we get from Invention – as if Lewis had stepped aside, relinquished some measure of authorial control (and responsibility) and simply loosed the machines to generate the modernist images “programmed inside of” them. The pleasure I experience while watching Invention is relatively uncomplicated and almost purely formal. As the camera rotates, for example, I can feel the image steadily approaching a balanced, more ideal composition. Lewis often pauses the camera’s motion at these moments, allowing the viewer to enjoy a measure of harmonic resolution (to borrow another musical analogy). It’s an interesting idea – that resolving visual tension in a balanced composition can function as a caesura, mimicking a cut within a long take.

This kind of purely formal pleasure was in relatively short supply in Wavelengths this year, with a few notable exceptions. Daïchi Saïto’s Engram of Returning, which closed out the four evenings of short-film programs, is a mighty explosion of a movie – 19 minutes of 35mm CinemaScope images blown into super-saturated, deep-black abstraction. Engrams, I’ve learned since returning from Toronto, are neurological remnants of lived experience: researchers have hypothesised that traces of memory are scattered throughout our brains, etched onto neural tissue. Saïto, in essence, conjures new trace memories for his audience by offering hazy glimpses of landscapes that are never fully graspable, like half-remembered dreams. (An engram is a nice analogy for all of cinema, I think!) The visceral thrill of Engram of Returning owes much to Jason Sharp’s circular-breathed saxophone score, which is ruthless and mesmerising. The overriding effect of the film is primal and ancient, like recovering memories of some past-life visit to Sun Ra’s promised land.

Björn Kämmerer’s seven-minute film, Navigator, is different from Engram of Returning in nearly every respect – it’s silent, concrete, immaculate – yet the viewing pleasure is much the same. Beyond evoking the most basic question, “What am I looking at exactly?” both bypass comprehension completely and burrow straight into sensation. (After years of eagerly anticipating every opportunity to see a new film by Charlotte Pryce, I’m still at a loss for describing them. Needless to say, her latest piece of golden, hand-processed “natural magic,” Prima Materia, fits into this category as well.) Navigator is meticulously assembled from close-ups of rotating, beveled glass, presumably a Fresnel lens in a lighthouse. Kämmerer’s intervention is in the editing, which establishes a rhythm through crosscutting lighter compositions against dark, and then explores endless variations of movement along the x- and y-axes. As in Black Mirror at the National Gallery, movement and light are difficult to track precisely because the rounded, reflective surfaces constantly invert perception – we see light and its opposite, movement and its opposite. Notably, Kämmerer doesn’t vary the duration between cuts until the final shot of the film, which gives the piece a constant pulse. In her program notes, Wavelengths curator Andréa Picard compares Navigator to Cubism, which is true enough. It’s also a cinematic analogue to a Steve Reich chamber piece.

In his overview of the Wavelengths short programs for The Notebook, Michael Sicinski noted a telling demographic shift in this year’s lineup. While Picard has consistently programmed young and emerging filmmakers, and rarely with even a hint of tokenism, Wavelengths has, over the past decade, been an important showcase for the elder statesmen of avant-garde cinema, including Robert Beavers, James Benning, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ernie Gehr, Peter Hutton, Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, and Jean-Marie Straub. This year, Peter Tscherkassky’s The Exquisite Corpus played alongside a restoration of Paul Sharits’s 3D Movie, and Invention and new films by Chantal Akerman, Guy Maddin, and Tsai Ming-liang screened among the selection of mid- and feature-lengths films. The Wavelengths program as a whole, however, skewed significantly younger in 2015: the “median age,” Sicinski writes, “is somewhere around 33.”

I’m not qualified to speculate on the causes of this shift, but I’m intrigued by an apparent correlation between that programming decision and another shift in the lineup – that is, away from traditionally formalist art (structuralist films, optical experiments) and toward areas of the avant-garde that are more explicitly didactic, ideological and symbolic. To describe Invention as “quaint” and “comforting,” and to say that Navigation “bypasses comprehension” is, potentially, to damn with faint praise, which is not at all my intent. Rather, if curation is an act of criticism itself, in that it lays so many of the ground rules for the resulting conversations, then – and I say this as an observation rather than a critique – Picard seems to have biased the discussion somewhat this year.

Destabilising Images

Case in point: the psychological and aesthetic dissonance of experiencing the disembodied camera-machines of Invention so soon after watching Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.

With his first two features, Two Years at Sea (2011) and A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013, co-directed with Ben Russell), Rivers proved himself a compatriot of Lisandro Alonso, carrying his Bolex into remote regions of the world to document the hard-scrabble lives of solitary men. Like Alonso’s, his films exist somewhere in the murky middle of the non-fiction/narrative spectrum – that place where anything resembling anthropological documentary tends to be described as “problematic”. Or problematising, in the active, political sense: Alonso and Rivers are well aware of their cinematic and critical lineage, as are Russell (also in Wavelengths with his short film, YOLO), Denis Côté (also in Wavelengths with his short film, May We Sleep Soundly), and, to name just one prominent off-shoot of this movement (if “movement” is even the right word), Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel, Stephanie Spray, Pacho Velez, J.P. Sniadecki, and the other members of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. This is a smart and self-conscious bunch, these children of Jean Rouch, Chris Marker and Harun Farocki, and judging by the Wavelengths lineup, their numbers are expanding by the day.

With The Sky Trembles, Rivers’ effort to problematise the experimental docu-fiction form folds in on itself in delirious fashion. It opens in Morocco, where the filmmaker Oliver Laxe and a small crew are shooting his follow-up to You All Are Captains (2010). Rivers is a sympathetic and astute behind-the-scenes observer, cutting between extreme long shots of landscapes and more intimate portraits of the filmmaker and his cast and crew. The new film, Las Mimosas, is about a young man who leads a troubled expedition through the Atlas mountains, and there’s a suggestion of analogy between the character and Laxe himself. In a recent interview with Filmmaker Laxe says of one particularly challenging day on set: “It was a very critical moment, when you see that you are working on a project for four years and because you were maybe too ambitious you are making a disaster. I was asking myself, ‘How did I bring all of these people to this place?’” Of course, Rivers is aware also of the third layer of this analogy – that the protagonist of Las Mimosas is analogous to Laxe and Rivers and, by extension, to other filmmakers like Alonso and Russell who package these images for festival audiences around the world. To drive the point home, Rivers cuts near the end of The Sky Trembles to a handheld walking shot that melds his camera’s point of view with Laxe’s. It’s one of the only subjective shots in the film but one that seems inevitable and necessary.

Thirty minutes into The Sky Trembles Laxe climbs into his Land Rover and drives off alone. Rivers watches from a distance at first, panning from a fixed position to follow the truck’s movement, until Laxe turns a corner and disappears from sight. With a jarring cut, the point of view then jumps to the back seat and the soundtrack erupts with metal guitars blasting from the truck’s speakers. The drive, which lasts several minutes, functions symbolically as a journey through a liminal space, during which Laxe transitions from “Oliver Laxe, the director, performing some version of his own life” to “Oliver Laxe, the actor, performing in a fiction.” More specifically, he steps into the role of the Professor in Paul Bowles’ “A Distant Episode” (1947). As in the original short story, he is a personification of colonial alienation, overconfident and naïve. He wanders unaware into danger and soon finds himself beaten, bound and gagged. His captors later cut out his tongue, fit him in a hooded suit covered with tin cans, and force him to dance for their amusement.

The remainder of The Sky Trembles tracks closely with Bowles’ story. The film is so interesting and important, however, because of the new complications that are activated by Rivers’ translation of the scenario from one form (literature) to another (cinema). In “A Distant Episode” Bowles offers scant description of the Professor’s costume or his dancing:

That night, at a stop behind some low hills, the men took him out, still in a state which permitted no thought, and over the dust rags that remained of his clothing they fastened a series of curious belts made of the bottoms of tin cans strung together. One after another of these bright girdles was wired about his torso, his arms and legs, even across his face, until he was entirely within a suit of armor that covered him with its circular metal scales… He was now brought forth only after especially abundant meals, when there was music and festivity. He easily fell in with their sense of ritual, and evolved an elementary sort of “program” to present when he was called for: dancing, rolling on the ground, imitating certain animals, and finally rushing toward the group in feigned anger, to see the resultant confusion and hilarity.

I quote at length in order to illustrate Bowles’ voice, which is ironic (“their sense of ritual” is a loaded phrase, certainly) and plain-spoken. The same could be said of Rivers’ style, and yet Laxe’s embodiment of the “King of the Tin Cans”, as his captors call him, is uncanny and knotted in ways that are erased by Bowles’ prose. Each time he appears on screen, the tin can man exists simultaneously in three states. He’s a character – a tortured, desperate man who is gradually losing his humanity. He’s a symbol – of colonialism, generally, and of one specific contemporary symptom of it (the arthouse, docu-fiction filmmaker). And he’s a rendered art object – a brown and silver mass of cloth and metal that jangles noisily when Laxe moves, that reflects light unpredictably, that is framed in particular compositions and edited at a particular rhythm, and that is itself both a symbol (the refuse of industrialism) and a real thing (rusted tin cans that threaten to cut and infect the wearer). To a certain extent, the process of experiencing and interpreting filmed images is always a negotiation between these three states. Watching the King of Tin Cans dance, however, is an exceptional case because the negotiation is so disconcertingly self-conscious, immediate and unrelenting. I suspect I’ll be using the tin can man as an example for years to come when I find myself in a conversation about the messiness of interpretation.

The Sky Trembles, as a whole, traps viewers in this interpretive flux, which is a radical move only because its line of criticism is so focused on the particular problems of representation at this moment (whatever we want to call this stage of the West’s war on terror) and in this context (the festival-friendly art film). In the first act, Rivers shows Laxe working with a non-professional actor, telling him precisely where to walk and how to deliver the line, “The sheikh is gone!” There is a rehearsal, some discussion, and then a live take, which Laxe observes through a monitor. Later, members of the crew fold dozens of cardboard boxes that are eventually used to break the fall of a stuntman, who plummets, again and again, from a cliff, while Laxe films from below. The boxes are then dissembled and neatly stacked. These are standard, making-of scenes that reveal the labor and intentionality of filmmaking. So when Rivers intercuts portraits of aging Moroccan men, the images read, likewise, as objective, documentary moments. Viewers might be aware that a British man is behind the camera and choosing which footage to include and in what sequence, but everyone involved here (Rivers, his crew and his subjects) is participating in a common cause, the making of a film. They’re not equals, certainly, but they’re all willing collaborators, joined in fraternity. Indeed, Laxe has described the first section of The Sky Trembles as, “a beautiful homage to our profession.”

When The Sky Trembles transitions, midway through, from documentary to narrative, the shift is not signaled by a corresponding transition in form. Rivers’ cinematographic style remains consistent throughout, extending even to small details such as a droning, non-diegetic music cue that plays over two contemplative shots of the Moroccan skyline. The first instance is one more behind-the-scenes observation, the second is an establishing shot in a fiction. That the two shots could be swapped with little to no discernable effect on the larger film is what makes The Sky Trembles so deeply interesting. Rivers has taken the Kuleshov Effect to its logical extreme: instead of limiting the object of re-interpretation to one blank expression, as Hitchcock does so famously with Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window (1954), Rivers destabilises every image, whether a face or a gesture or a landscape.

That destabilisation is the truly radical act. In adapting “A Distant Episode”, Rivers has cast three non-professional “locals” as Laxe’s kidnappers and tormentors, which is a textbook example of problematic contemporary cinema, in that it transforms the men – even if always self-consciously and ironically – into one-dimensional representations of the terrifying, unknowable Other. They slice out Laxe’s tongue and feed it to a dog, fire warning shots at his feet to make him dance, and sell him off for profit, all without a trace of mercy or regret. We in the audience are made to stare at their laughing faces, which have been turned ugly by the context of the scenario and by the dictates of their director. And there’s the rub. Like Laxe on the set of Las Mimosas, Rivers has scripted every line of The Sky Trembles, staged every scene, rehearsed every stunt. The three men who torture the King of the Tin Cans are also collaborators in the process, brothers in arms. They likewise exist simultaneously – and at all times – as characters, symbols and objects. Their portraits could be swapped with those in the first part of the film with little to no discernable effect. They exist somewhere in the interpretive flux between fact and fiction.

The Sky Trembles ends with a long shot of the King of the Tin Cans running across the desert toward the setting sun. He waves his arms as he flees, and his howls can be heard over the clattering cans. Because Laxe is between the camera and the only light source, he’s little more than a dark silhouette at the centre of the frame, more graphic element than actor. (The effect reminds me, fittingly, of the ghost monkeys in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives, 2010). In “A Distant Episode” the Professor’s final escape is witnessed by a French soldier, who calls him a “holy maniac” then lifts his rifle and takes “a potshot at him for good luck.” Rivers omits those last two details but the final image is from the perspective of two soldiers, who turn and watch as Laxe passes. The sudden shift in point of view is critical because it takes The Sky Trembles beyond even the ironies of Bowles’ story. When, after nearly three minutes, Rivers finally cuts to black, the King of the Tin Cans is utterly destabilised and foreign. He’s barely a character, barely a symbol. Instead, he’s now essentially a black spot on an orange horizon. It’s as unsettling a representation of existential terror as I’ve ever experienced.

Distant Episodes

After the screening of The Sky Trembles, I joked with another critic that the film might put Rivers and other filmmakers like him out of work. Its inside-out critique of docu-fiction representation is so thorough and final, I wondered what was left to say. (It’s worth noting that Alonso’s most recent feature, Jauja, 2014, seems to signal a shift away from this style of filmmaking.) Rivers offered an answer of sorts – and a not especially satisfying one – at Wavelengths with A Distant Episode (yes, really), a 17-minute companion to The Sky Trembles. Another behind-the-scenes project, it’s quite similar to the feature in terms of content. Again, Rivers intercuts long landscape shots with observational footage of the cast and crew at work, including familiar sequences in which the director, Shezad Dawood, rehearses an actor and another performer prepares for and then executes a small stunt. In A Distant Episode, however, Rivers abandons the docu-realistic style and instead conjures from the material a kind of fake artifact. The black-and-white, hand-processed footage is scratched and pulsing with imperfections, and the soundtrack has been replaced by silence and by occasional music cues from Pere Portabella’s Cuadecuc, vampir (1970), which is itself a self-conscious deconstruction of genre filmmaking. Dawood’s project, Towards the Possible Film, appears to involve astronauts who wash ashore on another planet, which lends a playfulness to A Distant Episode that certainly distinguishes it from The Sky Trembles. Inspired by Morocco’s long history as a film location, Rivers gets a bit lost in the funhouse-mirror artifice of it all – the false facades of an abandoned movie set, the nostalgic kitsch of 1960s sci-fi, and the formal signifiers of the avant-garde.

Certain shots in A Distant Episode could be mistaken for footage from the silent era, and in that sense it’s reminiscent of Guy Maddin, who also had a new feature and short film in Toronto this year. The Forbidden Room (co-directed by Evan Johnson) has received more critical attention, but the short, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton (co-directed by Evan and Galen Johnson), is the more interesting of the two, I think, and the parallels between it and A Distant Episode are notable. As Maddin explains in voice-over, the film was born of financial necessity. Crippled by the ballooning costs of The Forbidden Room, he signed on to make a behind-the-scenes featurette that would eventually accompany the release of Paul Gross’s big-budget Afghan war film, Hyena Road (which also premiered at TIFF!). Maddin soon found himself in the Jordanian desert, disgusted by the situation –”Everything about my visit is gross, hideous” – and daydreaming of ways to salvage both the project and his dignity: “All I can do is dream of taking Paul’s actors and sets for myself, gratis, and shoot my very own ultimate war-movie cine-essay, a formally radical, ill-tempered retort to Paul’s digestible adventurism.”

And that’s what he does, in a roundabout way. Maddin and the Johnsons convert much of the footage to high-contrast black-and-white and then mimic digitally the imperfections of well-worn celluloid, the end result being a film within the film that looks remarkably like Rivers’ short. In one scene, a platoon of soldier-actors makes its way across a rocky landscape accompanied by vintage-sounding electronic music that would be at home on that same Cuadecuc, vampire soundtrack. (Could it be? I honestly don’t know. Wheels within wheels.) But Maddin, never more serious than when making a joke, seems to tire of the idea after six minutes and renders the first battle scene in the style of a 1980s video game, with super-saturated color and laser beams, and then gradually works his way back to more familiar thematic territory: hockey and movies. War movies, in particular, appealed to Maddin as a child, he tells us, “with their thrills and romance, camaraderie and cool uniforms, all the pomp and ceremony of real war but without real death.” And with that, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton blossoms into the cine-essay he’d imagined, a very moving and very funny analysis of the costs (in the most biting and ironic sense) of war.

Rivers’ frequent collaborator, Ben Russell, filed his Wavelengths dispatch from Soweto, South Africa, where he teamed with the Eat My Dust youth collective on YOLO, a playful short that employs mirrors and pre-roll sound to capture, in a structuralist turn, the collaborative work of filmmaking. As a mirror passes in front of the camera, we catch glimpses of rooflines, a face, and an azure sky. The world beyond the mirror changes with each pass – sometimes it’s a white brick wall, sometimes brown, sometimes the image is upside down, sometimes not, sometimes we see people at work or play, sometimes no one is present at all. How Russell achieves these effects – more mirrors? hidden cuts? flipping the image itself? – remains a mystery, like an illusionist’s secrets. YOLO was shot in the ruins of the Sans Souci cinema, which in 1948 became one of the few public spaces where black South Africans could gather, and was later a site for organising collective political resistance. In the final seconds of YOLO, we see some of the kids playing soccer and dancing to pop music, while Russell can be heard (asynchronously) saying, “You’re just going to press it down, and I’ll tell you when to put the mirror in.” It’s one more behind-the-scenes, self-reflexive moment in a festival chock full of them, but here it’s also a passing-on of the tricks of the trade, which given the context is both an act of memoriam and empowerment.

A Foreigner. And Not.

When asked if he felt like a tourist when shooting Las Mimosas in Morocco, his home for the past decade, Oliver Laxe replied:

No. We have to attack this subject from a different point of view. First, I think any artist is a foreigner—and this is a good thing. When I was born in Paris, I was Spanish, and when we came back to Spain, I was French. Of course, you suffer through adaptation, but with time you realize it’s a good position, a good distance from which to watch things. You have to be a foreigner. I’m a foreigner in Morocco too—and not.

Laxe’s defense of cosmopolitanism as an artistic (and political) first principle summarises nicely a strain of thought that animated much of the best work in Wavelengths this year – hence my earlier suggestion that Picard’s programming had biased the critical conversation somewhat in favour of work with an explicitly economic or historical bent. To watch all of the films in Wavelengths meant spending six hours with Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes’s three-part, carnivalesque satire of Portugal’s descent into austerity. Closely related was Night Without Distance, in which Lois Patiño blows out his digital images and then negative-reverses them (Command-I in Photoshop) in order to defamiliarise his story of smugglers preparing for a late-night journey through the Gerês Mountains between Portugal and Galicia. Paris-based, French Guyana-born artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc takes a more scholastic approach with his first feature, Sector IX B, in which a young anthropologist whose research confines her to the antiseptic halls of a museum takes an ancient drug and becomes lost, a la Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974), in colonial memory and sensation.

Another standout among the Wavelengths features was The Other Side, Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini’s latest distant episode in the American South. His absurdly problematic portrait of God-and-guns “white trash” in Louisiana is a vital testament to the limits of empathy at a moment when American politicians are calling for the rounding-up of Muslim immigrants and refugees. Also impressive were two features shot just below the U.S. border. Nicolás Pereda’s Minotaur is set almost entirely within a Mexico City apartment, where three young adults are stricken with a pathological and decidedly bourgeois ennui. Pereda choreographs them – and their put-upon housekeeper – like alienated wanderers in an early Tsai Ming-liang film. In Santa Teresa and Other Stories, one of the real discoveries of the fest, Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias transforms Roberto Bolaño’s epic novel 2666 into a difficult-to-classify mash-up of fiction, non-fiction and essay about corruption and violence in Ciudad Juárez. In only 65 minutes Santos Arias manages to weave together a variety of image formats, blends documentary footage with staged scenes, and intercuts a performance by the activist Judith Gomez and a series of crime-scene postcards by the artist Ambra Polidori. The result is tangled, sorrowful, and bracing.

Santos Arias exemplifies the cosmopolitan spirit of Wavelengths in that he was born in the Dominican Republic, was educated in Scotland and the United States, and made his film in Mexico. The same could be said of Yto Barrada, whose latest short, Faux Départ, screened with Sector IX B. Born in Paris and educated at the Sorbonne, Barrada has lived most of her life in Tangier. It should come as little surprise then that, having had a similar foreigner-and-not experience to Laxe’s, she would also echo his sentiments. “My French passport is my most important document,” She has said:

I’m in a position of incredible power because of my ability to leave. That possibility changes everything. My ability, because of my work, to articulate things, that’s another privilege: to name the disease and to point at the symptoms. I just lift the rock and the termites and the holes are everywhere. My role is to transfigure them through what I can do, which happens to be art. I have the perception, but the perception is nothing unless you do something with it.

When I described Rivers’ A Distant Episode as a fake artifact, I had Barrada’s film in mind. Faux Départ recalls Farocki’s In Comparison (2009) in that it celebrates the labour and craft that undergirds third-world economies. Instead of brick-makers in Burkina Faso, Barrada observes the Moroccan artisans who fabricate fossilised relics for the tourist market. It’s a ready-made metaphor, heavy with irony, but Barrada, like Farocki, focuses on the work rather than the workers and avoids editorialising. When, near the end of the film, she shows a craftsman laying out the tools of his trade, the gesture is uncommonly dignified and arresting.

And then there’s Behrouz Rae, whose work directly addressed the experience of crossing borders. During a Q&A, Rae mentioned that both of his films in Wavelengths, Untitled and The Reminder, were conceived with a traditional three-act structure. At one minute each, the results are like haiku. In Untitled, we see Rae’s hands place small pieces of paper face down on a white surface: on the right, a single rectangle; on the left, two items, each with a torn edge. Next we’re shown an atlas opened to a map labeled, “Retreat of Colonialism in the Postwar Period,” which Rae uses to illustrate, using a pen and ruler, his migration to California from his native Iran. Finally, Rae re-places the pieces of paper, this time face up, revealing old, black and white photos of an elderly white woman and a black man. A simple voiceover builds to this moment: “I got my green card. I came to the United States of America. And discovered two major colors, white and black.” The sentiment and irony are both fairly simple, but Untitled packs a bruising punch because of its tactile, intimate presence. Like Jean-Paul Kelly’s The Innocents, which screened in Wavelengths last year and employs the same technique of arranging photos by hand, Untitled makes literal the very private process of choosing and ordering images from which autobiographical, independent cinema is made. We hear not only Rae’s voice but also the sounds of his hands and objects as they brush across the filmed surface, as if we were sitting there alongside him. In the silence immediately following the final cut to black, Untitled‘s sounds and images collide and generate a new, unexpected sensation – not irony or cynicism but bitter disappointment.

The Reminder also opens with a voiceover, this time in Farsi, but the original voice is soon drowned out by its English translation. An adult man addresses his mother in a letter, recalling the day fifteen years earlier when, while moving out of their home, he stared at her portrait and imagined himself walking, breathing, smelling and hearing just like she did. “I thought you were not looking at anything but me in this world,” he says. Rae illustrates the letter with a classical shot breakdown: a wide shot of a young boy looking up at an old photo; a medium close-up of the boy, who stares intently; and an eyeline match to a close-up of the photo. Rae then zooms in and the photo dissolves to a portrait of a man, revealing striking similarities in the two people’s facial features. The zoom and two more cuts – to the boy’s face and back to the photo again – are accompanied by a music cue that recalls a Hollywood film noir, as does the final, cryptic line: “Please destroy this letter like other things that have been destroyed.” The Reminder is a classic, Rebecca-like mystery reduced to its essence, and its core elements – nostalgia, regret, saudade – are invigorated by political anger and by the suggestion of violence (who has ever wished to “destroy” a letter?).

Coda

Finally, a too-brief word for Chantal Akerman, the matron saint (though she surely would’ve scoffed at the term) of border crossings, homesickness and cosmopolitan filmmaking. There’s a haunting scene in Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) in which Akerman’s heroine, a young Belgian filmmaker who is struggling to make a home in France, steps from one train car to another and is surrounded, suddenly, by passengers who haunt the space like ghosts of the Holocaust. It’s a paradigmatic moment in Akerman’s cinema, at once autobiographical and universal – a profoundly moving expression of dislocation and trauma, both personal and historical. Akerman, as we see first-hand in what is presumably her final film, No Home Movie, was forever on the move, shooting films, promoting films, installing films, writing, teaching, and lecturing throughout Europe, North America, Asia and seemingly all points in between. In No Home Movie she reports back to her mother in Belgium via Skype. “There’s no distance in the world,” Akerman tells her, as if hoping it might be true.

The Skype calls are one of the many formal touches that allude to News from Home (1977), in which Akerman reads letters from her mother, Natalia, over images of New York City. In the earlier film, Natalia’s expressions of concerns for her daughter are sweet if occasionally overbearing. In No Home Movie, her concerns remain but are revealed through extraordinary tenderness. After the film’s premiere in Locarno, Akerman said, “I knew she loved me, but when I see that Skype moment, it’s really like a love affair between us.” Much of the film consists of conversations between the two, usually at a small kitchen table where Akerman sits with one foot tucked up her, like a child. They discuss the family and their lack of religious faith (echoed in occasional shots of a desert in Israel) but navigate around the details of Natalia’s experiences in the concentration camps. Instead, Natalia prefers to remember Chantal as a mischievous, brilliant, beautiful child. Near the end of No Home Movie, we watch from the distant perspective of a tripod-mounted camera as Natalia sleeps in her recliner. Akerman takes a seat on the floor beside her, camera in hand, and looks up at her mother through the small LCD display (yes, this is another making-of scene). Akerman’s sister Sylviane is also there, busying herself in the next room, but she calls out, “Mama, tell us a story. Mama, wake up and talk to us.” Natalia stirs in her sleep and mumbles, as if in a dream, but the words never come. This is, as far as I know, a unique scene in all of the cinema. In real time, we observe as a life’s stories become lost to the world. It’s devastating, and with Akerman’s passing, doubly so.

This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

* * *

“WTF is this movie?!”

I scribbled this note midway through I Am Here, Fan Lixin’s trainwreck of a documentary about Super Boy, an American Idol-style talent show that is a ratings sensation in China. I walked out of three feature films at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, each of which was more competently made than I Am Here, but none was as fascinating. Assembled from one-on-one interviews with the contestants, backstage observations, broadcast footage, and fabricated adventures (the film begins and ends with three of the boys walking through the desert, for some reason), I Am Here was surely edited by a committee whose sole concern was protecting and selling the brand. Each sequence feels focus group tested, as if the entire film were compiled algorithmically based on Youku analytics data. Say what you will about shows like Super Boy, but after two decades, its approach to storytelling and montage has become so refined it’s nothing for the editors at Big Brother and Survivor to introduce and individuate ten characters before the first commercial break. After 88 minutes of I Am Here I knew only Ou Hao (the guy with the circle earrings) and Hua Chenyu (the one with the lenseless black frames). In other words, I Am Here isn’t even good reality TV.

Two days later I saw Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, which proved to be my favourite film of the festival, and by a wide margin. The juxtaposition was instructive. Costa works independently with a miniscule budget and shot Horse Money with a camera that can be had on eBay for $400. (1) After the screening he told the audience, “The problem with digital is you have to do so much more to get something interesting… To get some truth or emotion with light, it’s hard today. It takes more work.” In her festival blurb, TIFF programmer Giovanna Fulvi calls I Am Here a “sharp commentary on the changes occurring in contemporary Chinese culture.” Putting aside for a moment the question of how a film like I Am Here even gets programmed at a festival as prestigious as Toronto, I suppose I would agree with Fulvi that the film is a “sharp commentary” but only in an ironic or extra-textual sense. At the risk of hyperbole, I felt at times during the screening of I Am Here that I was witnessing the death throes of cinema. The pretty vacuousness of its images and its radical incoherence are symptoms of this age, I think. Never has it been easier for us to generate compelling images; never has it been harder to imbue them with meaning. During his Q&A, Costa mocked the Dolby trailer that preceded every film at TIFF, calling it “fascism”. I wish he’d seen I Am Here.

Dana Burman Duff’s Catalogue, which screened in the Wavelengths experimental shorts program, addresses this image problem head-on. Shot in black and white and on 16mm, the film at first appears to be a study of domestic space along the lines of Jim Jennings’s Close Quarters (2004), with long static shots of silk curtains, jute rugs, and high-dollar linens. After a few minutes, however, Duff reveals her game: there at the top of an image are the words “Velvet Drapery Collection”; later, two pillows are tagged with product descriptions. Catalogue is old-fashioned in the sense that its central questions are nearly a century old. Where are the lines separating commercial work (home décor magazines) from “high” art (avant-garde film programs)? What cultural and economic forces determine those lines? And to what extent must an artist intervene in the manipulation of found material in order to claim ownership of the new work? (Duff crops and reframes the catalogue pages, her decoupage pops, and the vibrating gears of her 16mm camera bring a semblance of life and motion to the sterile photos.) But Catalogue is timely as well, as it reminds us not only that we’re inundated constantly by sponsored images, but that so many of them are so damn beautiful. Just look at the light in those photos the next time you’re solicited by Pottery Barn.

“My friends who don’t know a thing about cameras or photography regularly post interesting pics on Instagram,” another filmmaker from the Wavelengths shorts program told me. The breakneck evolution of smartphones, consumer-grade digital SLRs, and photo editing apps, combined with Pinterest and other curating-for-the-masses platforms, have enabled users – and I use that word deliberately – to make a pastime of cultivating their visual taste. The average Instagram user might not know terms like shallow focus, tilt-shift, or Kodachrome but he or she knows which filter will produce the most likes. It’s a learned aesthetic calculation. By the same token, I Am Here includes a few moments of striking imagery, especially in the on-the-road sequences, and I suspect that fans of Super Boy have already begun grabbing sequences from the film and posting (or Weibo’ing or Weixin’ing or QQ’ing) edited stills, GIFs and video snippets, finding new contexts for the images and creating new juxtapositions of their own. That I Am Here is a jumbled disaster of a narrative feature is, in many respects, beside the point. A feature film of this sort is just one more content delivery system, and one that can now be marketed with the TIFF “Official Selection” laurel icon.

Which makes a film like Horse Money all the more remarkable. Costa’s latest collaboration with a community of Cape Verdean immigrants in Lisbon opens with a silent montage of still photos by Jacob Riis, a muckraking journalist and social reformer who documented the lives of the working poor in turn-of-the-century New York City. I learned Riis’s name and the subject of the photos only after the screening; they’re presented in the film without context or explanation. I had assumed the images were dusty remnants of Portugal’s past, as if Costa were only making the (familiar) point that historical progress is slow and tragic, that our institutions and economic systems continue to fail the same people in the same ways. However, the montage also recalls, formally, the opening of Costa’s second feature, Casa de Lava (1994), which introduces the topography and people of Cape Verde by cutting together footage of volcanoes with portraits of Cape Verdean women. Costa scores Casa de Lava‘s opening montage with a Paul Hindemith viola sonata, self-consciously announcing his position as an outsider (this is the music of cultured Europe rather than post-colonial Africa) and aligning himself artistically with the modernists. The Riis photos are, likewise, a kind of declaration of principles. Costa is himself something of a muckraker, and the images in Horse Money are similarly sublime, haunted and material.

Costa cuts from the last Riis photo – an image of a cramped alleyway with eight people staring back toward the camera – to a full-colour shot of a painting of a young black man, which creates the effect of an eyeline match. Horse Money is very much a film out of time. To say that the painting acts as a transition from past to present wouldn’t be quite right, as the first person we see, Ventura, is himself caught in a liminal space. Now in his early 60s, he seems to exist simultaneously in the present moment, in 1974 when he was nineteen years old and caught up in Portugal’s revolution, and in all points in between. Since we last saw Ventura in Colossal Youth (2006) he’s developed a tremor in his hands: “I know a bunch of hospitals,” he tells a doctor before rattling off the names of several. The stark white walls of the new housing development in Colossal Youth have been replaced here by a different bureaucratic dystopia, the indistinguishable lobbies, cafeterias, elevators and hallways of our modern healthcare facilities. On those rare occasions when Ventura does step out into the world, it’s an equally strange and symbolic space, littered with monuments, faceless military forces, and rubble. “You’re on the road to perdition,” a woman tells him.

Aside from a brief appearance by Lento, the friend tasked with memorising Ventura’s letter in Colossal Youth, none of the other major characters from Costa’s previous Fontainhas films feature in Horse Money. Instead, he introduces Vitalina, a woman in her early 50s who has recently flown from Cape Verde to Lisbon to bury her husband. She speaks in a raspy whisper and her face is, for now, incapable of expressing much beyond grief and exhaustion. Costa’s style has evolved steadily through the years, and the move toward Cubist-like compositions in Colossal Youth (the signature shot of Ventura dwarfed by the angular towers, for example) now predominates, culminating in a remarkable close up of Ventura’s and Vitalina’s faces in profile. (2) They talk about their loves and losses in intimate detail. “Did you get Zulmira a full wedding dress?” she asks him, tears in her eyes. “Did you buy her undergarments? Headpiece and shoes?” When the voice of Zulmira, Ventura’s long-lost wife, comforts him later in the film, Horse Money fully reveals itself as a Gothic melodrama – and a deeply stirring one at that.

Just Shy of Greatness

That TIFF might be confronting some image problems of its own was apparent from their new tagline, “This is your festival”, which reads as a direct response to the annual stream of editorials that decry TIFF’s betrayal of its original position as “the people’s fest” thanks to rising ticket prices and policy changes that put a heavier premium on gala screenings. As a goodwill gesture, TIFF and the city of Toronto shut down five blocks of King Street during the opening weekend, creating a pedestrian-friendly refuge in what has become, since the unveiling of the TIFF BellLightbox four years ago, the most congested area of the festival. What I found even more interesting, though – and I say this as a communications professional in the non-profit world – is how TIFF’s marketing efforts this year shifted emphasis to the organisation’s status as a year-round arts charity. It’s a difficult message to deliver amidst the marketing noise of the festival itself, and when I heard people discussing it at all their comments were predictably cynical. I admire the effort, though, and thought it was well executed. I suspect it will change the conversation about TIFF ever so slightly; more importantly (for TIFF’s board of directors, at least), it will affect perception among the donor class who attend a few festival screenings each year and can afford to make transformational gifts. If those donations help sustain the TIFF Cinematheque eleven months out of the year, then it’s a small win for cinema culture, cynicism be damned.

Festival politics aside, “witnessing the death throes of cinema” is hardly the experience I was anticipating when I booked my eleventh consecutive trip to Toronto. While I Am Here was certainly the only film that turned my thoughts apocalyptic, and while the best films I saw were indeed exceptional, the lineup as a whole was among the least satisfying of the past decade. Given the size of TIFF’s program (284 features, 104 shorts), generalisations like mine should be taken with whole handfuls of salt, but more often this year than in any I can remember, the go-to conversation starter at TIFF – “Seen anything good?” – was greeted with, “Good, yeah, but not great.” And that sentiment seemed to be shared across the broad spectrum of programs, from the avant-garde to the mainstream. While I tend to avoid higher-profile films, knowing they will eventually receive wide distribution, I usually return home from Toronto with a good sense of which films will soon be getting an Oscars push. The buzz for 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012), and The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010), for example, was unavoidable, just as TIFF always hopes. This year, when The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum) won the People’s Choice Award, I had only a vague sense that it was one of those Benedict Cumberbatch movies.

Like many North American critics, I visit Toronto, in part, to catch up on titles that premiered at Cannes, a tactic that TIFF is now actively discouraging by front-loading the press schedule. (During the morning slot of the first day, seven films I wanted to see screened simultaneously.) My general disappointment with this year’s lineup owes something, I’m sure, to the unusually high number of well-reviewed films that played in Toronto but that I wasn’t able to see, including David Cronenberg’s Map to the Stars, Xavier Dolan’s Mommy, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan, Pascale Ferran’s Bird People, and Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan. In some instances, the Cannes holdovers I did manage to schedule only added to my disappointment – not because they were bad, necessarily, but because they fell so far short of my expectations. Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep is a major step back from Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), I think. A too-long film buoyed by a few very good scenes, Winter Sleep is essentially a Woody Allen movie (a portrait of the artist as conflicted, self-absorbed, aging intellectual) with too few jokes. Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is also too long, but it’s bigger fault is that it borrows the central premise of Julia Loktev’s far superior The Loneliest Planet (2011) and then turns that film’s greatest strength – subtext expressed through ambiguous gestures – into pages and pages of festival-friendly, on-the-nose text. At least it’s funny.

Most of the fall premieres I saw at TIFF also landed in the good-but-not-great camp. The latest in his on-going Shakespeare project, Matías Piñeiro’s The Princess of France is a loose translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost that focuses all of the play’s romantic intrigues on Victor (Julian Larquier Tellarini), a young stage director who returns to Buenos Aires after a trip abroad and immediately becomes entangled (or re-entangled, or potentially entangled) with each of the five actresses in his troupe. The film opens with a stunning, high-angle shot of an amateur football match that, had it been screened as a stand-alone short film, would have been a highlight of the fest. The rest of The Princess of France, however, fails to maintain the same formal and aesthetic heights. Piñeiro’s own troupe of actresses are never less than a pleasure to watch – after seeing her here, in Piñeiro’s Viola (2012), and in Santiago Mitre’s The Student (2011), I now look forward especially to every new appearance by Romina Paula – but Piñeiro is at his best when he’s observing groups of people, their faces falling into and out of frame at various depths of field. He finds a rare and distinct magic in those moments. His voice is less clear in more traditional dramatic stagings, of which The Princess of France contains many, and Tellarini lacks the screen presence necessary to carry so much narrative weight. The various competing relationships lose their tension as a result, and the film turns a bit flat.

Viola includes a wonderful scene in which two actresses are rehearsing an exchange from Twelfth Night, and as they repeat their lines again and again, the performed seduction gradually becomes real. At least among the two Piñeiro films I’ve seen, it’s the most effective use of repetition as a formal device, which seems to be an ongoing concern for him. The Princess of France restages on several occasions a scene in which Victor picks up his backpack from under a tree, and with each recurrence he’s pitted against another of the women in his life. In that sense, The Princess of France could very well be a Hong Sang-soo film. Hong’s latest, Hill of Freedom, concerns a Japanese man named Mori (Ryô Kase), who returns to South Korea in hopes of reconciling with a former love, Kwon (Seo Young-hwa). In the film’s opening moments, Kwon drops a bundle of letters sent by Mori, which is Hong’s narrative justification for jumbling the chronology of events and exploring, once again, the fickleness of memory, perception and affection. Hill of Freedom is charming and laugh-out-loud funny, but at just barely an hour it’s something of a trifle.

Like his previous film, Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy, which world-premiered at TIFF to mostly rave reviews, is an impressive display of style in service of a clever short-film idea stretched to feature length. Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) are a couple who enjoy a little S&M, one of them more enthusiastically than the other, and it’s that imbalance that makes the scenario so interesting. Cynthia, the would-be dominatrix, punishes Evelyn for her mistakes by locking her in a trunk or pissing in her mouth, but her every action is scripted, quite literally, by Evelyn. As we watch them perform their duties repeatedly throughout the film (to say The Duke of Burgundy has a cyclical structure would be an understatement), it all begins to seem routine – boring, even.

That’s the point, of course. Strickland is interested in how long-term relationships become defined by everyday habits, and The Duke of Burgundy is at its best when it foregrounds those expressions of generosity, intimacy and tenderness that make love a worthy effort. More often, however, the film is a catalogue of sensations. Strickland indulges his every aesthetic fetish – ‘70s Euro softcore, Bunuelian absurdism, Stan Brakhage! – and has great fun doing so, but watching The Duke of Burgundy is a bit like link-hopping on YouTube. As with I Am Here, the film’s best moments are, in fact, the simplest to reproduce. For example, a striking, golden image of a hand clutching bed sheets, accompanied by a loud, pulsing soundtrack is arresting but ephemeral, like a run of the mill music video. (I had similar reservations about Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin last year. That both films indulge male fantasies adds to my concerns about the directors’ reliance on sensation, but that’s a subject for a longer essay.) The last 30 minutes of The Duke of Burgundy are a patchwork of such scenes with sparse connective tissue. Strickland manufactures transitions out of musical montages, padding out the film with recycled images and ideas. Eventually, his brand of pastiche also begins to seem routine – boring, even.

Something in the Atmosphere

As usual, one of the highlights of TIFF was the annual four-night gathering at Jackman Hall for the Wavelengths shorts programs. Interestingly, it’s there, a few blocks north of the main hub of activity, amongst the relatively close-knit community of avant-garde enthusiasts, that TIFF still feels most like “the people’s fest”. If the films on average weren’t as strong as in recent years, there were several notable high points, especially in program two, “Something in the Atmosphere”. Borrowing its name from Mike Stoltz’s nostalgic 16mm portrait of Florida’s mythic-turned-kitschy “Space Coast”, the program was cohesive despite a lack of any easily identifiable unifying principles, either formally or thematically. Short film programming is such a tricky business. (3) Often, as in this case, I think the best sequences of films can be justified simply as an instantiation of the programmer’s taste. In her notes, Andréa Picard describes the tone of these seven films as “slightly amiss, uncomfortable, and, in some cases, surprisingly alluring,” which seems about right to me. Along with Something in the Atmosphere and Catalogue, the program also included Antoinette Zwirchmayr’s The pimp and his trophies, a 35mm memoir about her grandfather’s brothel, which brought to mind a slightly more sympathetic version of Heinz Emigholz’s grotesque D’Annunzios Höhle (2005); Relief, Calum Walter’s latest mash up of analogue printing, digital imaging and frame-by-frame animation (Walter’s use here of images from a car accident grounds thematically the technique in ways that are lacking in his earlier film, Experiments in Buoyancy [2013]); and Beep, Kim Kyung-man’s Brechtian interruption of North Korean propaganda films. The remaining two, Blake Williams’s Red Capriccio and Jean-Paul Kelly’s The Innocents, are especially deserving of attention.

At a festival starved for new images, it was a pleasure to encounter three filmmakers of different generations, including Williams, who wrestled playfully with the mechanics and possibilities of 3D. (4) Earlier this year, the Edinburgh International Film Festival premiered digital restorations of Canadian animator Norman McLaren’s stereoscopic films, two of which also screened in TIFF’s Short Cuts Canada program: O Canada (1951, directed by Evelyn Lambart using a technique invented by McLaren in 1937) and Around is Around (1951). In the latter, which was the first-ever stereoscopic animation, McLaren used a cathode-ray oscilloscope to generate wave forms and graphic, geometric patterns. I won’t pretend to know exactly how Around is Around was made, but it was, quite simply, the most delightful ten minutes of the festival. Also delightful – and confounding and funny and unexpectedly moving – was Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, about which I can only say, after a single viewing, that it is filled with nothing but new images. (The recurring shot of fingers wrapped around the rails of a gate is uncanny in exactly the way I’ve always wanted 3D to be uncanny but never is.) Even relative to Godard’s post-Histoire(s) work, Goodbye to Language is uncommonly dense. I hope to write about it some day, but only after doing the hard work of excavating its stacked layers of images, sounds, dialogue, quotations, music and stereoscopic effects.

In his artist’s statement, Williams explains that his latest video borrows its structure from Stravinsky’s and Tchaikovsky’s capriccios, which are “playfully shaped from clashing staccatos and glissandos, and prone to sudden, dramatic tonal shifts.” It’s a clever move because it frees Williams to experiment within loose but essential formal constraints. Red Capriccio races through three movements in barely six-and-a-half minutes, and it’s the juxtapositions between them that make the larger piece so compelling. The first and longest section is constructed from handheld shots of an unmarked police cruiser (a Chevy Caprice, natch) that is parked on an empty street at night with its lights flashing. Playing variations on this theme, Williams cycles several times through a sequence of images of the car, modifying shot lengths and anaglyph effects with each return. Around the three-minute mark, he cuts to a montage of footage shot by travelers as they speed down the mostly vacant Turcot Interchange, a labyrinthine network of highway overpasses that first opened to traffic in anticipation of the 1967 Montreal Expo. The final and most mysterious section is a series of three shots: an image of a small suburban house that is illuminated first by a spotlight on the right and then on the left; a demonstration of a lighting rig inside a small and empty disco; and, finally, a sports car spinning recklessly in tight circles.

Red Capriccio, like most of Williams’s recent work, is assembled from material that he has scavenged from the Internet and then converted to anaglyph 3D. Many a Swan, which screened at Wavelengths in 2012, treats the found, two-dimensional images as pieces of paper, folding and bending them like origami. In Baby Blue (2013), he experiments – in the true sense of the word – with parallax, exploring the 3D effects that result when objects move horizontally through the frame at various speeds and at various depths of field. Red Capriccio continues this inquiry into the fundamental components of anaglyph 3D by focusing on blue-red separation. The flashing lights of the police car, for example, are a keen and quintessential demonstration of the mechanics of anaglyph. Williams’s interest in form, however, serves only as a starting point for these videos. He is a structuralist, but only in the sense that the structure prescribes certain boundaries within which his other ideas are confined. (The Internet is an inexhaustible source of material after all.) In other words, while the 3D effects in his recent videos are essential and compelling, they don’t alone determine the ultimate success or value of each individual work.

To be frank, Williams’s experiments with anaglyph don’t interest me nearly as much as his montage and his taste. Before rewatching it recently, I had only vague memories of Many a Swan, with the exception of a moment near the end when Williams cuts from a noisy, syncopated, and rapid-fire sequence of images to a silent, slow-motion shot of origami master Akira Yoshizawa folding a swan. It’s the video’s big reveal, as it explains the title and contextualises many of the work’s larger ideas, but that cut – the way it made me catch my breath and shift my perspective – is where Williams’s true talents lie. Red Capriccio is the best of his 3D videos because it contains the highest concentration of those moments. By the same token, Baby Blue is the weakest, I think, because the formal ideas are more interesting than the montage. Red Capriccio‘sfootage of the Turcot Interchange is alien and beautiful, recalling the 18^th– and 19^th-century paintings of “fantastical and sublime” architecture that inspired Williams. More impressive, the two-minute sequence builds imperceptibly (on a first viewing) toward an astonishing cut to black. Having now watched Red Capriccio a half-dozen times, I find myself anxiously anticipating that cut because the leap from that sequence to the final section is both logic-defying and ineffable. It makes me smile like an idiot. That the last shot of Red Capriccio favourably recalls Denis Lavant’s dance at the end of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999) is, perhaps, the best compliment I can give Williams.

The first section of Jean-Paul Kelly’s three-part film, The Innocents, is a nearly seven-minute shot of two hands methodically placing and then removing dozens of printed photos, each of which has been pierced in one or more spots. The cutout holes vary in size and location, and each has a small, conspicuous ring of colour around it. The photos also vary greatly – in style, source and content – but gradually a few themes emerge: sites of violence and decay (an abandoned home, soldiers, bombed out buildings, a bullet-riddled body), homosexuality (gay porn, intimate selfies, protests for marriage equality) and media representations that conflate the two (Anderson Cooper, political hearings, Chelsea Manning, In Cold Blood, Glenn Greenwald). The middle section, shot on 16mm, is a silent restaging of snippets from With Love from Truman (1966), Albert and David Maysles’ documentary interview with Truman Capote. In Kelly’s version, a tattooed, muscular man in a white tank top and with a plastic bag fitted loosely over his head imitates Capote’s gestures, a marker in one hand, a highball in the other, while Capote’s bon-mots on form and style display below as subtitles. The final two minutes of The Innocents recall the opening section with a series of grainy, scratched 16mm images of coloured circles against a white background.

Kelly offers a clue to his strategy with the first image in the opening series, David Boudinet’s “Polaroid” (1979). Boudinet’s photo of blue, sheer curtains in near-darkness also appears on the title page of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, in which Barthes attempts to better understand and explain his own subjective, sentimental experience of photography. In it he proposes a useful distinction between studium – the culturally-learned, political and intended content of an image – and punctum, which is a “sting, spack, cut, little hole… that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Kelly’s printout of “Polaroid” has been pierced midway down the image, just to the right of centre, which excises a small section of the photo where the curtains are slightly torn. In this opening series, then, Kelly has literalized punctum, systematically removing from each photograph that mysterious thing that “fantastically ‘brings out’” the true nature of the image.

Truman Capote is a complicated figure, and Kelly’s film is in part a critique of the man, both as an artist and gay icon. The Innocents foregrounds the ease with which Capote justifies his treatment of violence in In Cold Blood (“I chose [the brutal murder of a family] because it happened to accommodate an aesthetic theory of mine”) and distances himself from his own moral responsibility, as if the words on his page materialised magically (“style… comes naturally, like the colour of your eyes”). But Kelly’s larger concern is the systematic and sensational representation of the gay male body as something dangerous and pathological – a form of political exploitation that can be traced back well beyond Capote’s “poetic” depiction of murderers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. Like Camera Lucida, The Innocents speaks in a subjective voice – presumably, these are photos that bruise and sting Kelly personally – which makes the final section all the more affecting. Barthes wrote, somewhat controversially, “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes” (p. 53). This characteristic distinguishes photography from cinema, he argues. The closing images of The Innocents are a counter argument to Barthes, I think, as they force viewers to experience retroactively the disorienting, “ill-bred,” and “lightning-like” chill of punctum.

Discoveries

One pleasure of attending a festival as large as TIFF is stumbling upon filmmakers like Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán, the husband and wife who co-wrote and co-directed Sand Dollars (Dólares de Arena). Set in a beachside town in Guzmán’s native Dominican Republic, the film concerns a love triangle between twenty-something Noelí (Yanet Mojica), her unemployed boyfriend (Ricardo Ariel Toribio) and Anne (Geraldine Chaplin), an aged European ex-pat with whom Noelí has had a years-long romantic and financial relationship. I say “pleasure” because from the film’s opening shot, a beguiling close up of an old man singing in a nightclub, I trusted Cárdenas and Guzmán, trusted their taste and perspective. The first cut, to men playing Bocci on the beach, establishes with remarkable efficiency both the style of the film and the rules of the world in which these characters operate. Sand Dollars is leisurely paced, and Cárdenas and Guzmán’s camera is attentive to bodies and gestures, to the routines and transactions of daily life in this economically- and racially-divided paradise.

Cárdenas and Guzmán introduce Anna by first leading viewers through the resort where she and other wealthy ex-pats bide their time. Noelí wanders in with an easy familiarity, changes into a bikini, and then finds Anna on the beach, where they enjoy a swim together. When they return to the room, the arc of the story is already written on Anna’s face. Chaplin’s wistful eyes and fragile expression, hallmarks throughout her long career, leave little doubt that every moment of joy she experiences will be fleeting. Such is the bargain she’s made, exchanging money for time, affection and a fool’s hope in love. Sand Dollars sidesteps the major traps of films like this: owing to Cárdenas and Guzmán’s observational style, the characters come to embody certain tendencies of their post-colonial condition without ever becoming cogs in an allegorical machine. If the film occasionally feels too familiar – Sand Dollars fits comfortably into the “post-Dardennes international film festival film” genre – that’s a small complaint. I’m eager to see what Cárdenas and Guzmán do next.

In many respects, Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu dors Nicole is a film we’ve all seen dozens of times before. Nicole (Julianne Côté) is one more descendent of The Graduate‘s Ben Braddock, a suburban 20-something drifting aimlessly and reluctantly toward adulthood. When we first meet her, Nicole is getting dressed and attempting to sneak out after a hookup. “Will I see you again?” the guy asks. “What for?” she answers. It’s a typical response for Nicole, who is reticent, passive-aggressive and profoundly melancholy.The film follows her for a few days one summer when her parents are away on vacation. She’s living at home and working at a thrift store, where she sorts clothes with the same bored detachment that characterises so much of her life. During the day, Nicole hangs out with her best friend, Véronique (Catherine St-Laurent), or listens to her older brother rehearse with his band. A chronic insomniac, she spends her nights wandering through the neighbourhood, peering curiously into the lonely lives of the strangers on her street. If Tu dors Nicole were prose, it would be in the spare, wistful style of Raymond Carver, which is what makes the film such a pleasant surprise.

Tu dors Nicole takes its title from a line in the penultimate scene, when Nicole is woken up by the mother of a young boy she’s babysitting. “You’re asleep, Nicole,” she whispers – the most literal wake-up call in the history of coming-of-age movies. It’s a hard-earned line, though. Lafleur’s style recalls a number of filmmakers – Wes Anderson’s perpendicular camera angles and balanced compositions, Hal Ashby’s long-distance cutaways, Jim Jarmusch’s sound designs – but it avoids being derivative by virtue of the film’s subjectivity, which is aligned intimately with the main character. Tu dors Nicole is about the gradual build-up and explosive release of pressure in the life of a young woman, and much to his credit Lafleur builds that same tension into individual scenes and into the larger narrative. All of Nicole’s repressed pain and desire are manifest in the world around her – in the jammed bicycle lock she shakes violently while talking to Véronique, in the music and conversation that seeps through the walls when she tries to seduce the band’s drummer, in the loud lawnmowers and electric fans that seem to pollute every moment of potential quiet. The film’s turn to magical realism in the final image, then, is less surprising than inevitable and necessary.

Soon-Mi Yoo’s Songs from the North, which premiered at Locarno and screened in TIFF’s Wavelengths features program, opens with a striking piece of found footage of highwire acrobats. The camera is positioned at a great distance, as if from the far side of a stadium, which turns the performers into small and illuminated figures against a deep black backdrop. An acrobat falls, there’s a gasp from the audience, and then a jarring cut to radically different found footage, this time from, presumably, a 1980s-era propaganda film about North Korea’s rocketry program. That cut, and the logical and aesthetic juxtapositions it generates, is a worthy introduction to Songs from the North, which swings constantly throughout its relatively brief running time (72 minutes) between numerous modes of discourse: a talking head interview, text inserts, original documentary material, and a broad range of found footage, including North Korean fiction films and television broadcasts.

In her interview with Adam Cook, Yoo classifies Songs from the North as a “poetic essay” and describes the challenge of taking on a subject as complex as North Korea: “It is always tricky, when dealing with such loaded historical and political issues, to know exactly how much information you should provide without turning your film into a lecture.” Her solution is to speak very little in the first person: the text inserts are seldom more than a sentence and we hear her voice only occasionally in the documentary sequences. She presents her argument, instead, through the curating of images and sounds and, most importantly, through her montage. Ideally, in a poetic essay such as this each cut functions as a koan, creating a dissonance that transcends logic while still leading the attentive viewer toward a (relatively) specific end. That Yoo scarcely achieves that ideal is, perhaps, too easy a criticism. Indeed, I found myself falling into the film’s rhythms and experiencing the collective weight of its images just as Songs from the North ended. But the film is both too much and too little; there are too many voices (I understand why Yoo includes the interview with her father but it breaks the film’s form) and too few images (I can’t not compare the experience of watching this film to Andrei Ujica’s three-hour The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu [2010]).

This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

* * *

By coincidence, the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival began and ended for me with strikingly similar images. The first film I saw, Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain, opens with a minutes-long shot through a wall of ceiling-to-floor windows. The camera is positioned within Panahi’s seaside home and is focused on a point in the middle distance, where we see a man climb out of an SUV, lift a heavy bag, and then, with some amount of effort, make his way toward the villa. The man (Kambuzia Partovi) eventually enters the room and proceeds to cover the wide panes of glass with dark curtains. After doing the same to every other window in the three-story home, he opens his bag to reveal a dog he’s smuggled away from the city. In the film’s signature image, dog and master then sit together on a long, low table in silent contemplation of the black curtains.

Eight days and 40 films later, I wrapped the festival with a late-night screening of Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, a beautiful and harrowing chimera of a film. It ends with a twenty-minute sequence built from only two shots and featuring two characters (Lee Kang-sheng and Chen Shiang-chyi), who stand motionless amidst the rubble of an abandoned concrete building. The first image is a low-angle, medium shot of their faces; the second is a reverse shot from a high-angle perspective several meters behind them. In the first, we see them staring without expression at some point beyond the camera; in the second, we see the focus of their attention: a painted mural of a barren field with mountains in the distance.

That Panahi’s curtains and Tsai’s mural mimic the two dimensions and wide aspect ratio of a cinema screen is, presumably, no coincidence at all. As was the case with This is Not a Film (2011), Panahi was forced to make Closed Curtain within the tight constraints of his house arrest in Iran. After premiering Stray Dogs at the Venice Film Festival, Tsai announced the film would likely be his last. Both men are in their mid-50s and have been making films for more than two decades, both have been forced to work under increasing restrictions (political, financial, or otherwise), and both have made the transition from film to digital video. They should, perhaps, be forgiven if their latest work is preoccupied by the idea of cinema.

And at a festival where only one of the 288 programmed features was projected on film, Panahi and Tsai were hardly alone. The analogue holdout, Mark Peranson and Raya Martin’s La última película, was screened for press and industry on the first morning of the fest, where it was greeted positively, for the most part, and with a mixture of nostalgia and resignation. The print, which as far as I know had never been shown to an audience, looked beautiful, and if I was disappointed at all by the technical experience of the screening, it’s owing to the projection booths at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox, which are sealed so effectively I wasn’t able to hear even a hint of the turning reels (my own particular cinephile fetish).

The digital tide has turned quickly in recent years, and with tremendous force, but its final triumph – at this festival, at least – came with a proverbial whimper. In a telling anecdote, Daniel Kasman, in his interview with Frederick Wiseman for The Notebook, asked the 83 year-old director if he felt there was a profound difference between shooting on film, as he’d done for more than four decades, versus video. When Wiseman dismissed the idea (“there’s an enormous amount of garbage about that”), Kasman responded, “I’m sure there is but the reason I ask, I just feel as a film goer coming into this age that people are taking digital for granted for the most part, that the question should be asked before people forget to ask” (my italics). A related anecdote: the night before the public premiere of La última película, Peranson told me he was concocting a scheme to burn up part of one reel within the projector so that the audience would see celluloid melt. It didn’t happen, but as a farewell gesture to the century-old medium at the heart of TIFF, a funeral pyre would have been a spectacular way to go.

Inspired by Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) and by L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller’s The American Dreamer (1971), La última película is a difficult film to summarise fairly. Real-life writer-director Alex Ross Perry stars as a sardonic and absurdly over-confident filmmaker who travels to Mexico with a small crew, intent on using the world’s last remaining reels of film stock to shoot an apocalyptic spectacle. They arrive in late 2012, just in time to join the throngs of tourists, true believers, and hawkers of trinkets who gathered at Mayan ruins to welcome the end of the world. There’s much drinking and improvised rambling in the style of Hopper at his most egomaniacal and paranoid, and all of it is captured on an assortment of cameras: 16mm, Super 8, hi- and standard-def DV, iPhones.

The resulting film feels handmade, like a patchwork quilt, and most of its finest moments are born of small formal gestures that call attention to the character of a particular stock or video format. I especially like a sequence in which a young woman walks through a cemetery at dusk and begins to sing “La Llarona,” a traditional folksong about a mother who is trapped between the living and the dead, doomed to wander the earth until she finds the children she murdered. As the woman turns and disappears into the darkness of a crypt, the image momentarily pops with a flash of light. Whether by happy accident or through post-production meddling, a few frames of the stock have been overexposed – a phantom image in a film overrun by ghosts. It’s a remarkable and genuinely moving sequence. Her song accompanies a montage of crucifixes, landscapes and footage of an elderly man dancing in the street. The images stutter from dropped frames, and the soundtrack has the hiss of aged analogue. Typical of the film, Peranson and Martin further complicate the moment by cutting later to a more distant perspective, shot on hi-def DV, that reveals members of the crew huddled on the floor around her, laughing about having just run out of film.

La última película reminds me of those carnivalesque postmodern novels of the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s chaotic, idea-packed, and frequently funny, but it’s also always on the verge of collapsing into a too-simple, juvenile pastiche. As with those pomo novels, evaluating a film like La última película is a challenge because the criteria are ever-shifting. The film is self-aware to a fault, anticipating and absorbing every critique with a wink and a nudge. “People are going to look at this and think that I was out of control,” Perry’s character says in the first of his many direct addresses to the camera. “That I didn’t know what I was doing, I was lost in my own visions, that I wasn’t conveying anything.” He could be a character in a Christopher Guest mockumentary, the object of our loving derision, but when the seams of Peranson’s and Martin’s low-budget production show, as they do on occasion, he also serves as an ironic narrator, a sly reminder that the filmmakers are in on the joke. To its credit, La última película is often hilarious, particularly a scene in which Perry strolls among the ruins, spewing insults under his breath at the crowds of “white people with dreadlocks.” “I hate America,” he says, suddenly more Bill Hicks than Dennis Hopper. “The end is overdue.”

But La última película only occasionally functions as pure parody. Its finest moment might be the opening shot, a hand-held close-up of “Mayans” with painted faces. They’re standing along a busy street at night, presumably posing for pictures in exchange for tips. In a single, long take, the camera drifts across their faces, eventually landing on one young man, who turns his gaze directly into the lens and strikes a grave and practiced pose. Eventually his mouth cracks into a smile and he laughs, “I’m tired.” The image is human and defamiliarising, and it introduces ironies that become tangential concerns of the larger film, including the nature of performance, the reification of history, and the fraught relationship between spectators and filmed subjects. Peranson’s other professional roles as a festival programmer and editor of Cinema Scope magazine, and Martin’s experiences as an independent filmmaker in the Philippines, give them an insider’s perspective on these issues, particularly the now-ubiquitous practice of trotting out developing-world poverty for the edification of Western art-film audiences.

It’s in these constant shifts in tone that La última película is both most alive and most frustrating. Midway through the film, Perry asks his Mexican guide if he’s ever watched a woman take a bath without her knowledge. That experience of seeing “someone at their most vulnerable and their most exposed” is the character’s guiding ambition as a filmmaker, and it’s also, I think, both a genuine goal of La última película – their conversation is intercut with a disarming shot of a young woman posing self-consciously for the camera – and a good-natured dig at a certain tendency of world cinema on the festival circuit. Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana, which played alongside La última película in TIFF’s Wavelengths program, is a feature-length riff on just that idea. Spray and Velez put a camera in a Nepalese cable car and filmed a series of static portraits of whomever happened to make the ten-minute journey up or down the mountain. Like Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1965, 1966), the “Americans” chapter of Jon Jost’s Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) (1987) and James Benning’s Twenty Cigarettes (2011), Manakamana operates under the notion that eventually (duration is important here) all subjects will drop their camera-ready poses and reveal their “real” faces. It’s the same principle that makes the opening shot of La última película so ambiguous and charming – the transformation of the Mayan warrior’s expression as he tries, and fails, to hold back his smile. Perry punctuates his drunken, late-night discussion of film aesthetics with a straight-faced declaration of what he thinks about when he sees people: “Tub, bubbles, soap, sponge.” And there’s the rub: the character’s dull-witted smugness – all by design and intended for comedic effect – bleeds too often into the voice of the film itself, further muddying its already messy discourse on the values of cinema.

A Consistent Voice

2013 marked my tenth annual trip to Toronto, and I think it’s fair to say that the city has changed more during that time than the festival has. The airport shuttle approaches downtown from the west, and each year I’ve watched with interest as more and more of the real estate along the northern edge of Lake Ontario has been redeveloped into condominiums, all of them indistinguishably tall and glass-covered. An October 2012 report named Toronto “North America’s new high-rise metropolis”: its tally of 147 on-going construction projects was more than twice that of the second-place city, New York, and seven times that of Vancouver, which came in third. The massive influx of new residents, most of them young (the median age in downtown Toronto is now 35), can be felt on the streets and subways, which are noticeably more crowded, and in the shops and restaurants, which are more abundant and diverse. This year, I interviewed Jia Zhangke at the offices of his Canadian distributor, Films We Like, and given his career-long preoccupation with the radical transformation of China’s landscape, the location proved especially apropos. We sat together in a quaint, three-story brick building, surrounded on all sides by high-rise construction projects. The recording of our conversation is punctuated by jackhammers.

TIFF got in on the real estate boom itself a few years ago, when filmmaker Ivan Reitman and his sisters donated some property on the corner of King and John, right in the heart of the entertainment district. The site, which for decades was home to their father’s car wash, has been rechristened Reitman Square, where you’ll now find the TIFF Bell Lightbox and its adjoining 42-story luxury condominium development, Festival Tower. A second, even taller building, Cinema Tower, is under construction immediately behind the Lightbox. (The Cinema Tower’s developers are currently taking reservations for units with names like The Spielberg, The Tarantino, and The Nolan.) As I’ve noted in past TIFF reports, the opening of the Lightbox in 2010 shifted the festival several blocks to the south, and, indeed, many of the theatres that were in use during my first trip to Toronto – the Varsity, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Cumberland – are no longer part of the festival circuit at all. The drift southward continued this year, when the bulk of non-gala public screenings were moved from the AMC up on the corner of Yonge and Dundas to the Scotiabank multiplex located two blocks from the Lightbox. I suspect that decision will be revisited by festival organisers in the coming months, as crowds at the Scotiabank frequently overwhelmed volunteers and caused unprecedented (in my experience, at least) logistical problems.

Certainly, the past decade has seen TIFF solidify its reputation as a marketplace and as a launching point for awards season. Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said are among the handful of films that came out of this year’s festival with that unmistakable momentum, aided in no small part by the marketing power of Warner Brothers and Fox Searchlight and by the star power of Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock and James Gandolfini, in one of his final roles. In fact, TIFF’s greatest accomplishment in recent years might be its brand management. The “tiff.” wordmark is now inescapable in Toronto, and not just during a few weeks in September. Thanks to its real estate ventures and its year-round programming at the Lightbox, including museum-quality exhibitions (Tim Burton and Grace Kelly have been featured in the past, David Cronenberg: Evolution is currently running, and Stanley Kubrick has been announced for fall 2014), TIFF is much more than just one of the world’s largest and most important film festivals; it’s become a cultural institution.

Despite the evolution of its parent brand and the transformation of its home city, however, the festival itself has changed quite little in the years I’ve attended. Flipping through the 2004 catalogue, I’m struck most of all by the consistency of the programming. Indeed, several of my favourite films at this year’s festival were made by directors who were also programmed nine years ago: Claire Denis with Bastards and L’Intrus, Jia with A Touch of Sin and The World, Gotz Spielmann with October November and Antares, Catherine Breillat with Abuse of Weakness and Anatomy of Hell, Lav Diaz with Norte: The End of History and Evolution of a Filipino Family, and Peter Hutton with Three Landscapes and Skagafjördur. A few of the programs have changed over the years – Real to Reel is now TIFF Docs, Visions was folded into Wavelengths, Canadian Retrospective has been replaced by TIFF Cinematheque (and expanded to include international retrospective titles) – but the voice of the festival is still driven by a small team of programmers, nearly all of whom have been with TIFF for more than a decade. In his festival wrap-up for IndieWIRE, Robert Koehler notes that, in that sense, TIFF has remained loyal to its original mission as a “festival of festivals.” With its massive program, TIFF is able to spotlight the world’s leading auteurs, roll out the red carpet for movie stars, curate programs of avant-garde shorts, trend-hop with issues-oriented documentaries, delight the late-night crowd at Midnight Madness, and screen restored classics. “You’re going to one festival, but you’re really going to many festivals at the same time,” Koehler writes. “You pick how many you want to attend.”

Discoveries

One of my favourite festivals within TIFF might be called “Up and Comers”. Among the many ways TIFF distinguishes itself from the other major fall festivals in Telluride and New York is by the sheer volume of its world premieres. The pressure to show films first – Toronto proudly unveiled 146 features in 2013 – gives programmers license to take more chances on first-time filmmakers. It’s a point of pride for the festival, I think. On a number of occasions, I’ve heard programmers bring established directors on stage with an introductory comment along the lines of, “We’ve shown all of his (or her) films here at the fest, going all the way back to their debut.” An entire section of the festival, the Discovery program, is dedicated to first features, and over the past decade it has brought attention to a number of directors who have since gone on to become “names” in contemporary world cinema, including Maren Ade (The Forest for the Trees, 2004), Giorgos Lanthimos (Kinneta, 2005), Joachim Trier (Reprise, 2006), Pablo Larraín (Tony Manero, 2008), Steve McQueen (Hunger, 2008), Radu Jude (The Happiest Girl in the World, 2009), and Athina Rachel Tsangiri (ATTENBERG, 2010). Because of the large number of world premieres, the final TIFF schedule is always a thick catalogue of intriguing unknowns. The Discovery section alone typically includes 25 to 30 features, and more debuts are scattered throughout other sections. In an effort to improve my odds of choosing wisely, I’ve gone so far as to devise a complex scoring system that gives added weight to first-time filmmakers. This year I saw five films by new directors and was especially impressed by the talent on display.

Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat is not only the best first film I’ve seen this year, it’s among my favourite features of 2013. Cat premiered at Berlin in February, and it’s a credit to the quality of the filmmaking that nearly a year later it continues to be programmed at prestigious festivals (Vienna in October; AFI Fest, Lisbon, and Taipei in November). It’s a small marvel, really – a perfectly conceived and executed study of an extended family who gather in a small apartment to prepare and enjoy a meal together. Particularly on a first viewing, “study” seems just the right word to describe Zürcher’s style. The film’s action is confined mostly to a cramped kitchen, which he cuts at right angles, often shooting from a waist-high position a la Yasujiro Ozu. His static camera tends to focus on a single face from a medium distance, while other bodies move in and out of the frame, busily chopping onions, washing dishes, and mending loose buttons. (I mean “bodies” literally. We frequently see only a torso as someone passes momentarily in front of the camera.) At first glance, Zürcher’s style feels removed and clinical. It’s not until several minutes in, when the mother who is hosting the dinner begins to tell a story about going to the movies, that the deep strangeness of the film takes root. It’s the first of several such reveries. The mother (Jenny Schily), her two older children, and a niece each share stories that are of vague but profound significance to them personally but that fall mostly on deaf, uninterested ears. Within the context of this quiet, elliptical film, however, each of the stories generates the dramatic power of a car chase or explosion.

Rather than Discovery, The Strange Little Cat was screened in Wavelengths, TIFF’s section devoted to “daring, visionary and autonomous voices.” Having now seen Zürcher’s earlier short films, I think it’s a perfect description of the 31 year-old. Much has been made of the fact that Zürcher conceived of Cat in a seminar with Béla Tarr, but the qualities that make his film so distinctive are all there in the earliest work: the confined spaces, the dialogue that is rich in concrete images but that seldom functions as exposition or conversation, a playful affection for things (orange peels, sparrows, spinning bottles, moths, toy helicopters), a fetish for ponytailed women, and most of all a style of portraiture that creates a distinctive kind of communal subjectivity.

Early in the film, for example, when the husband and younger daughter leave to run errands, the camera watches from the kitchen as they make their way down a long hallway and exit through a side door. Zürcher lingers there for a few seconds, relishing the first moments of silence in the film, before cutting to a stunning shot of the mother, who is standing completely still, framed by the light of the kitchen window. She’s lost in thought, with an obscure and curious expression on her face. However, rather than moving to her perspective (what is she staring at?) or into a close-up, as traditional continuity editing would lead us to expect, Zürcher instead cuts to the older son, who is looking at his mother, unnoticed, from across the room. It’s a Zürcher trademark: an eyeline match in reverse. The portrait of the mother is a small point of entry into her subjectivity and also the subjective perspective of her son. The cut forces viewers to revisit the previous shot, to recontextualise it, to actively create a relationship between the two images and the characters framed within them. Zürcher’s montage constantly demands this kind of re-association, as the film’s perspective drifts from character to character. As a result, the film packs a much stronger emotional punch than its 72-minute runtime would suggest.

If Zürcher shares anything with Tarr, it’s the Hungarian’s dark humour and his unsettling ability to expose the tangled mess of affection, bitterness and alienation that characterises so much of human relations. The Strange Little Cat has drawn comparisons with Chantal Akerman’s early work, and while Zürcher’s movie doesn’t take a violent turn quite like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), it certainly stands alongside that film in its meticulous attention to domestic routines and the barely-suppressed animosity they can mask. In one of the film’s opening shots, the youngest member of the family, Clara (Mia Kasolo), sits at the kitchen table, jotting down notes on a grocery list. When her mother turns on a blender, Clara lifts her head and yells – a wide-mouthed, piercing scream. As soon as the appliance is shut off, Clara stops with a giggle and turns her attention back to the list. It’s a cute moment, a quirky character detail typical of the film, but it’s also just slightly grotesque. In a film this quiet and low-key ­ – the only non-diegetic music is a recurring snippet of the song “Pulchritude” by Thee More Shallows – Clara’s scream is a shocking burst of expressionism that becomes all the more disturbing a few minutes later, when she is slapped suddenly by her mother. There’s a palpable and anxious hostility in The Strange Little Cat that threatens constantly to throw the tone of the film out of balance. Miraculously, it never does. The family laughs through dinner and then parts with hugs and kisses, stubbornly oblivious to the dangers that surround them.

The Strange Little Cat is a rare exception to the rule for debut films at TIFF, in that it doesn’t fit neatly into one of a few immediately recognisable categories. I laughed out loud last year when I saw that TIFF had programmed a film in Discovery called Eat Sleep Die (Gabriela Pichler, 2012) because that title so perfectly encapsulates, with tongue in cheek, a genre of modest-budget art cinema that has gained traction – at least among festival programmers – in the wake of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s success. Shot mostly in natural light, with handheld cameras and non-professional actors, these films are typically small character studies that follow one person (usually under the age of 30) through a series of trials and tribulations before ending on an ambiguous grace note. (Pichler’s film, by the way, is better than most). I have a weakness for these films, mostly because they’re often born of a humanistic sensibility combined with a socio-political urgency, but also because there’s a pleasure in finding new variations on the theme.

Juraj Lehotský’s Miracle, for example, is well worth seeing despite the fact that it hits every genre beat. The film opens at a moment of crisis for the lead character, a troubled teen named Ela (Michaela Bendulová), who has been drugged by her mother and forcibly removed to a correctional facility. Over the next 70 minutes, she suffers every manner of betrayal, degradation, and violence, and Lehotský shoots it at all in what A. O. Scott calls the “neo-neo realist” style. Even the critical language for describing these films is becoming clichéd: Miracle is cool and unflinching, and Lehotský, whose early work was in documentary filmmaking, remains driven by an admirable impulse to expose the hardscrabble lives of Slovakia’s disenfranchised. As is often the case with better films of this sort, Miracle is redeemed by its lead performance. Bendulová, who was discovered in a re-education centre like the one we see on screen, has a remarkable stone face, and when we discover, first, that her lack of expression is partly due to her constant effort to hide her rotting teeth, and, second, that Ela is pregnant, the experience of watching her on screen becomes heightened in complicated and exciting ways. The film swings suddenly to the centre of the fiction/non-fiction spectrum, with Bendulová – her body, her presence – overshadowing the character she’s been asked to play. Aran Hughes and Christina Koutsospyrou’s To the Wolf, which screened in TIFF’s City to City program, is another 2013 debut in this general mode. More observational and still than Miracle, it follows two poor shepherding families as they struggle to survive in a remote Greek village. Aping the style of Pedro Costa’s and Denis Côté’s recent work, To the Wolf ends on a dark note that feels blatantly allegorical rather than inevitable, which robs the film of some of its emotional potency.

Faced with overwhelming programming choices, another tactic for improving the odds of finding a diamond in the rough is to prioritise films that involve known talent in key creative roles. This year, for example, I watched three films at TIFF that were shot by Agnès Godard. (Notably, all of them were shot on video.) Bastards is the eleventh collaboration between Godard and Claire Denis, and it’s the director’s best work since L’Intrus (2004), I think. Godard’s other two collaborators, surprisingly, were first-time filmmakers, Moroccan writer-director Abdellah Taïa and Mexican writer-director Claudia Sainte-Luce. Both Salvation Army and The Amazing Catfish fall into another genre popular among Discovery programmers: the loosely fictionalised autobiography. Like many films of this type, Salvation Army and The Amazing Catfish are self-contained and sentimental, but both Taïa and Sainte-Luce succeed in boring straight to the emotional core of their stories.

Taïa’s film revisits two periods from his life, beginning with his adolescence in Morocco, where he pines for the attention of his cultured older brother and discovers his own homosexuality, before jumping forward a decade to his post-college years in Geneva, where he struggles to find a home, both literally and metaphorically. Taïa does all of the little things right – the things that too often hamstring debut films. In the second act of Salvation Army, the young adult Abdellah (Karim Ait M’hand) interacts with only three or four other characters, but each role is rounded and perfectly cast. A scene in which Abdellah shares a cigarette with a kind, genial stranger on a park bench would have been cut from most films, as it serves no specific narrative function, but here it’s an unexpected reprieve and a simple opportunity to watch Abdellah smile. The Amazing Catfish likewise recreates a moment in its director’s life, when Saint-Luce was in her early-20s and found herself absorbed into the family of a single mother of four who was dying of cancer. The film is always right on the verge of slipping into treacle. Each kid has a readymade defining characteristic (the practical one, the suicidal one, the glamour-obsessed pre-teen, the quiet child with sorrowful eyes), and it ends with them all piling into an old Volkswagon for one last trip to the beach. It’s the kind of film that, with the right marketing and distribution, could find a large popular audience. (Judging by the official poster, it appears their goal is to make it the next Little Miss Sunshine.) But Saint-Luce and Godard understand that the key to this melodrama is the mother and, by extension, the massive hole that will be left in the lives of her children after she’s gone. The film succeeds in that regard because of Lisa Owen, who brings to the role an almost supernatural vitality and warmth. I ran from an early-morning screening of Salvation Army, which ends with a brilliantly staged and deeply moving shot, into a neighbouring theatre for The Amazing Catfish, and I don’t mind admitting I was an emotional wreck for the rest of the day.

Utopian Visions

In my heart of hearts, I don’t know if I go to festivals for private or shared experiences. I think it might be a wild goose chase for the latter. Rather, could it be that we want to be in proximity of other people’s private experiences for a change?

In his final post from Toronto, written during the long flight home to Vancouver, Adam Cook manages to capture that evanescent something that brings me back to TIFF each year. What I most appreciate about his piece is Adam’s shameless (in the very best sense of the word) openness and sentimentality. Ideally, I would write this report each year during the shuttle ride back to the airport, when images from the films are still fresh in my mind and I’m still physically and emotionally exhausted by it all, when the people and landscape of Toronto are still passing by my window, and when I want nothing more than to go home and see my wife and daughters and nothing more than to stay just one more day to watch one more film with friends. Adam’s observation that a great film festival is simultaneously communal and solitary taps into something essential about cinema itself, I think. Nathaniel Dorsky, whose latest films, Song and Spring, played in Wavelengths, once told me, “In my aloneness I feel the ultimate kind of poignancy and the deepest sense of mystery. . . . And so, like anything that you feel with great tenderness and with great heart, you want to share it.” For all of its marketing and glamour, TIFF remains the best opportunity I’m aware of to see a sizable cross-section of the very best of contemporary cinema, and to see it in excellent theatres with excellent projection, surrounded by large, appreciative audiences, and in close proximity to the artists responsible for the work. In that sense, TIFF is a trip to a museum with friends and fellow travellers, a chance to sit alone with piece of art that is beautiful or upsetting or of great mystery and poignancy and then share that experience in myriad ways.

If I’m veering toward the maudlin here it’s because the films were especially good this year, and because many of them were exceedingly heartfelt and utopian in their concerns. Tsai Ming-liang and his alter-ego, Lee Kang-sheng, have been a welcome presence in my life as a cinephile for more than a decade, and as a last goodbye Stray Dogs is pure catharsis, the most direct and visceral of Tsai’s melodramas. Closed Curtain transcends the literary staginess of its conceit mostly because of Jafar Panahi’s compelling on-screen presence. As in This is Not a Film, we get to watch him in close-up as he surveys a room and imagines its cinematic potential, knowing all the while – experiencing it through his Chaplinesque eyes – that his own artistic potential has been limited by stupid political oppression. Lav Diaz’s Norte: The End of History is both an allegory of fascism and a tremendous piece of theodicy. Its images of Angeli Bayani pushing a vegetable cart are among the finest cinematic instantiations of common grace since Robert Bresson’s Balthazar. Even very different films like Ben Russell and Ben River’s A Spell to Ward off the Darkness and Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves grapple with our pervasive soul-sickness. Russell and Rivers propose utopian communities and spiritual/aesthetic ecstasy as alternatives; Reichardt’s approach is more cynical and existential: she reinvigorates well-worn conventions from film noir and heist pictures to analyse the problems of radical political action in the era of late capitalism.

That the film festival experience is ultimately a string of private moments, only some of which can be shared, has never been more apparent to me than with Götz Spielmann’s October November, a film that was greeted with indifference and mild disappointment by many in the critical community. It’s a fairly simple story of two adult sisters, both successful and miserable in their own ways, who confront the growing tension in their relationship when their widowed father takes ill. The script holds few surprises, and even after a profound family secret is revealed, the film actively resists ramping up narrative tension. As a result, critics have faulted October November for being dramatically inert, especially when compared with Spielmann’s previous feature, Revanche (2008). I’d argue, however, that the two films are essentially the same, with identical preoccupations, both cinematic and metaphysical. I’m a great fan of Revanche, and October November was the best feature I saw that had its premiere at TIFF.

A few minutes into October November, the younger sister, Sonja (Nora von Waldstätten), an up-and-coming film actress, returns home after having dinner with a co-star. Her apartment is all straight lines, right angles, cool colours, and buttoned-up perfection. She’s a woman of immaculate taste, in pulled black hair and a form-fitted blue dress. Spielmann and cinematographer Martin Gschlacht shoot interiors with a Modernist touch, recalling the paintings of Edward Hopper, with their posed, isolated bodies and mixed colour palettes (warm and cold light somehow coexist in many shots). After her dinner date, Sonja steps into an elevator and the doors close behind her, but instead of cutting immediately, Spielmann leaves the camera fixed in the empty, stark lobby for a few extra seconds. It was precisely that moment – that formal gesture, that specific image composition – when the film began to open up for me.

As in Revanche, Spielmann works here in archetypes, establishing a distinct but not uncomplicated dichotomy between the urban and natural worlds. Sonja is soon called back to the family’s mountainside inn, where her sister Verena (Ursula Strauss) tends to their father, her own family, and occasional guests, many of whom are making a pilgrimage to the site of a Christian cross. “So many pilgrims these days,” the father says. “People are looking for something, so they wander about.” If the religious content is even more overt in this film – both Revanche and October November mourn the loss of a family patriarch who has a more traditional faith – it’s integrated into an even more complicated network of allusions. The ghost of Ingmar Bergman looms especially large here, with Cries & Whispers (1972) being the most obvious influence. The father’s prolonged death throes echo Harriet Andersson’s screams of agony, and the final shot of October November, which features both sisters on a wooden swing set, is, I assume, a direct reference. It’s hard not to think also of Bergman’s The Silence (1963), with its estranged sisters and dilapidated country inn, and of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). October November is, indeed, a Gothic story in the 18^th century mode, a film about long-suppressed desire, psychological chaos, and in the words of David Morris, “a sublime utterly without transcendence. . . . a vertiginous and plunging – not a soaring – sublime, which takes us deep within rather than far beyond the human sphere.” Cries & Whispers ends with a kind of cheat. Harriet Andersson’s character is, in a sense, reincarnated by the reading of a letter she left behind. Bergman shows her and her sisters in an idealised moment and redeems the film’s bleak tone with a typical (for him) ode to human affection. The final image of October November offers no such comforts. Sonja and Verena’s final embrace is accompanied only by the sounds of wind blowing through trees and a piece of dissonant piano music. I’m still devastated by it.

This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

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“Where OMG Meets WTF.”

This was the first tagline I spotted at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Others included “Where Fantasy Meets Reality”, “Where Indie Meets Epic”, “Where Wow Meets Huh?” and “Where Seeing Meets Believing”. In other words, TIFF’s continuing mission to be the “all things for all people” film festival has now been written into its public relations. And the raw numbers bare it out: 337 films from 72 countries, including 146 world premieres; hundreds of visiting actors and directors, including red carpet-friendly stars like Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Ryan Gosling and Marion Cotillard; and 4,280 industry delegates representing 2,563 companies from 81 countries. All of these figures represent statistical increases over the previous year, which if the TIFF media office is to be believed, is necessarily a good thing. At the end of the festival, even before the prize winners had been announced, TIFF issued a press release touting the festival’s strong U.S. and international film sales. For 2013 they should perhaps add “Where More Meets MORE” and “Where Bang Meets Buck”.

Unlike other major film festivals, TIFF has never put a high premium on jury awards. The Prizes of the International Critics (FIPRESCI) went to François Ozon’s In the House and Mikael Marcimain’s debut feature, Call Girl, and the various Canadian prizes went to Deco Dawson’s Keep a Modest Head(Best Canadian Short), Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways (Best Canadian Feature) and Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral and Jason Buxton’s Blackbird (Best Canadian First Feature). The most coveted prize, the BlackBerry People’s Choice Award, went to David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook with a runner-up mention to Ben Affleck’s Argo. Other recent Peoples Choice winners The King’s Speech (2010), Precious (2009), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Hotel Rwanda (2004), and American Beauty (1999) have used the award to kick start successful year-end Oscar campaigns, and the Weinstein company appears to be charting the same path with Playbook.

Along with its many premieres, Toronto also hosted the first North American stops for a number of high profile films that had already played in Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes and Venice. Because of the late publication date of this piece, and for the sake of brevity, I’ll be focusing primarily on fall premieres and on smaller films and retrospectives that are less likely to have received widespread critical coverage.

The End of Visions

The most significant programming change at TIFF this year was the folding of the Visions section into Wavelengths. Wavelengths has traditionally been limited to only six screenings, all held during the first four nights of the festival, with a dedicated focus on avant-garde cinema. Each year, Andrea Picard programs twenty to thirty shorts, along with at least one feature-length film such as Ruhr (James Benning, 2010), Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell, 2009) and Schindler’s Houses (Heinz Emigholz, 2007). Because each Wavelengths program screened only once, and because the screenings were typically held at Jackman Hall, a few blocks removed from the primary venues, Wavelengths has always felt like a separate festival within TIFF, with its own particular, enthusiastic audience. Last year there was some question as to the future of Wavelengths, so it was a great relief to see Picard back again and to be greeted by a typically strong selection of films.

The Visions program, which was intended for features that “push the boundaries” of mainstream cinema, has been another consistently strong section at TIFF and has included such films as The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, 2011), Promises Written in Water (Vincent Gallo, 2010), To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009), and Birdsong (Albert Serra, 2008). I suspect Wavelengths and Visions were combined this year primarily for practical, branding purposes, but as a result of the move the new Wavelengths now has more room for oddly shaped films that fall somewhere between avant-garde shorts and “daring, visionary” features. In all, Wavelengths included 53 films this year, ranging from one minute to two-and-a-half hours. An especially welcomed development in the realignment was a new opportunity for programmers to pair featurette-length films as double bills. It was a natural extension of Picard’s excellent work as a creative and thoughtful curator and had the added benefit of bringing filmmakers like Mati Diop, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, and Matías Piñeiro out of the “experimental” ghetto and introducing them to a wider audience through multiple public screenings at more highly-trafficked TIFF venues.

Wavelengths: Features

Of the feature films in Wavelengths that had already played at other festivals, my favourite by a wide margin was Nicolas Rey’s Anders, Molussien, a hand-processed, 16mm study of technology and totalitarianism that is assembled randomly before each screening: its nine reels can be built into 362,880 different films. My interview with Rey and a longer discussion of Molussia can be found elsewhere in this issue. I also very much enjoyed Bestaire, Denis Côté’s quiet, suggestive portrait of wild animals and their human caretakers, and Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux, which reminded me, strangely enough, of Eraserhead in its treatment of crippling, new-parent anxiety. If I was slightly disappointed by two of the most talked-about films on this year’s festival circuit, it’s perhaps owing to too-high expectations. Miguel Gomes’ Tabu is beautifully photographed and features a brilliant sound design, but I wanted the film to be more formally daring or more politically complex or more opaque than the relatively simple film Gomes made. Memory, history, guilt, privilege, religion, symbols of captivity, dreams of hairy monkeys, a black woman improving her literacy by reading Robinson Crusoe (of all things!) — Tabu plays like a primer on post-colonial issues, all rendered in glamorous shades of grey. Tabu is something of a step back, I think, for Gomes after the hypnotic, joyous, rambling Our Beloved Month of August (2008). Leviathan, by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, is a singular cinematic experience, to be sure. Filmed at sea with a dozen consumer-grade DV cameras, it tackles one of the most documented of all human endeavours, fishing, by exploding it into abstraction. Especially when viewed on a large screen and in a loud theatre, Leviathan is by turns stomach-churning, curious, gruelling and wondrous.

Two hours into Wang Bing’s Three Sisters, the best of the feature-length fall premieres in Wavelengths, there’s a shot that recalls his previous film, The Ditch (2010). Yingying, who at 10 is the oldest of the three subjects of the documentary, has been left behind to live with her grandfather in their small village after her father returns to the city in search of work, this time taking Zhenzhen (6) and Fenfen (4) with him. Their mother is gone for good, having left for another man and other opportunities. Yingying sits alone in her windowless, one-room house, lit only by the faint grey sunlight from an open doorway. She’s curled up at the small table where she eats her meals and occasionally attempts to complete her homework. (In another scene we see her pretend-mouthing the words of her lessons while her classmates recite in unison.) She stares straight ahead and, as she does throughout the two-and-a-half-hour film, sniffs and coughs like clockwork. This is Yingying’s home but it could just as well be the underground dugout where the prisoners sleep in The Ditch, Wang’s fictional recreation of China’s labour camps of the 1950s. There’s the same loneliness and hunger, the same daily struggle to fend off decay and despair.

Wang introduced Three Sisters as “a simple film” that “might be too long”. I appreciate his humility (a hallmark of his filmmaking, too), but I think he’s wrong on both counts. There’s nothing simple about this precise assemblage of footage collected during several visits to the girls’ remote farming village, and the length of the film is, in fact, essential to its success. The sisters live a life of miserable poverty, but Wang rescues their story from the now-standard tropes of miserablist cinema and poverty tourism by respecting the temporal rhythms of that life and by acknowledging his own problematic role as a visiting observer. Yingying is never pitied by the camera (although her situation is nearly always pitiable); instead, she’s made dignified by it. We watch from a distance in long, unbroken shots as she struggles to carry a basket, throws a load of pinecones on her back, and slowly, patiently chops firewood. There’s a lived-in-ness to her movements that can only be represented on screen because Wang understands that cutting any of those behaviors into a sequence of shots would rob her work of its honour. The difference between a three-minute, unbroken shot of a feather-light girl hacking at a tree branch and a 20-second shot of the same followed by an elliptical cut to a woodpile is the difference between documentary and fiction.

As a work of drama, Three Sisters rises and falls with the returns and departures of the girls’ father, a world-weary young man with a kind smile and a deep affection for his daughters. It’s a bit of a shock when he first appears, one hour into the film, because Wang withholds explanation of his absence until a later conversation. When, in an early scene, one of the younger girls threatens her sister with, “I’m gonna tell daddy”, it’s unclear whether her threat is valid or if she doesn’t yet understand the permanence of death. Soon after he arrives, though, we see him sitting at that same small table with one of the girls on his lap and the others seated close beside him, each smiling and grateful, and that one moment of tenderness puts the entire first act of the film in relief and makes his inevitable departure all the more cruel. He buys new coats and shoes for Zhenzhen and Fenfen and washes their legs and feet in hopes that they can remain clean just long enough to make the long walk to the bus stop. Wang follows them onto the bus, rides along for a few miles, and then leaves them to their journey.

The bus scene is worth noting because it’s the one moment in Three Sisters when Wang’s presence is commented on by another person in the film. The father, visibly nervous for the trip and for the commotion he is causing, explains that he already bought tickets for himself and his two daughters, but the bus driver is more concerned about “the guy with the camera”. It’s an important moment because it acknowledges explicitly what is obvious throughout Three Sisters – that there’s no such thing as “fly on the wall” observational cinema, that Wang and his occasional crew are affecting the conditions of their little social experiment simply by being there and looking. A few minutes after the shot of Yingying alone at the table, we see her again outside, high on a hillside, walking a few yards in front of the camera. Eventually she stops, sits, and looks out across the valley. The camera also pans to take in the view. It’s a remarkable scene because without being sentimental or naïve, it manages to share her experience of something beautiful as she shares it with Wang. It’s a generous act on both of their parts.

Equal parts city symphony, essay, film noir and home movie, The Last Time I Saw Macao by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata is fascinating conceptually but a bit of a mess. Compiled from hours and hours of video shot over many months and on multiple trips to Macao, the film began as a documentary; it was only during editing that Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata stumbled upon the ultimate form of the project. Inspired by Joseph von Sternberg’s Macao (1952) and other Western, exoticised representations of the Orient, the co-directors scripted a B-movie intrigue involving an on-the-run beauty named Candy, a violent crime syndicate, and a much-sought-after, Kiss Me Deadly-like bird cage and then superimposed the drama onto the documentary footage by means of a fiction-creating voiceover and soundtrack. It’s a wonderful idea. Suddenly a random stranger pacing the street and talking on his cell phone is transformed into a mysterious contact awaiting a clandestine meeting. With a few well-timed gunshot sound effects, a couple shutting down their storefront for the night become the latest victims in a gang war.

Guerra da Mata described The Last Time I Saw Macao as a “fiction contaminated by memory”, and, indeed, “fiction” and “memory” are almost interchangeable here. Guerra da Mata spent much of his childhood in Macao. We hear his voice. The unseen hero of the film has his name. We see him as a child in old family photos. And I wonder if that might account for the uneven tone and pacing of the film. It’s not by coincidence that Candy lives on Saudade Road. (Saudade might be imperfectly translated from Portuguese as a kind of a deep and pleasantly painful longing for something lost and never to return.) The ideas at play in this film are almost too numerous to count: the political and economic consequences of China’s takeover of Macao in 1999, the complex legacies of Portuguese colonialism, the queering of glamour and a critique of Western notions of Asian sexuality (I haven’t even mentioned the opening sequence, which turns the classic femme fatale song and dance number, like Jane Russell’s from the original Macao, into a beautiful, camp drag show). But The Last Time I Saw Macao fails, finally, to shape them into anything satisfyingly coherent. It was telling, I think, that Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata invited their editor on stage for the Q&A. The noir idea could sustain an hour. The documentary images of Macao could as well. But Guerra de Mata’s saudade — what should be at the heart of the piece — is described in this too-long film but too seldom felt.

Wavelengths also featured the premiere of Far from Afghanistan, a new omnibus film by John Gianvito, Travis Wilkerson, Jon Jost, Minda Martin and Soon-Mi Yoo that offers multiple perspectives on the war that has now raged for more than a decade. The film was directly inspired by Far from Vietnam (1967), which screened in a beautiful 35mm print in the TIFF Cinémathèque program. A collaborative effort between Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, William Klein, Joris Ivens, Agnès Varda and Claude Lelouch, Far from Vietnam lays out its position in the opening minutes: America’s military involvement in Vietnam is another “war of the rich waged against revolutionary struggles intended to establish governments that do not benefit the rich.” The bulk of the film then supports that argument via montage, juxtaposing footage of American jets taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier with images of Vietnamese women building make-shift air raid shelters out of concrete. Crowds of World War II vets chant “Bomb Hanoi!” while a young man holds his child and chants “Naaaaa-palm! Naa! Naa! Naaaaa-palm!” before adding with a sigh, “Kids like this are being burned alive. Kids like this.” A television broadcast of General Westmoreland discussing the “accidents and mechanical failures” that had resulted in a few unfortunate civilian casualties is cut against footage of a mangled Vietnamese child receiving CPR.

Far from Vietnam is agit-prop. It was made as agit-prop and still reads as agit-prop (still-relevant agit-prop, unfortunately). It’s also a masterpiece. If tens of thousands of YouTube activists have co-opted the techniques of films like this, none have matched Marker’s violent cutting. The final sequence is as frenzied, exhausting, and incisive as anything I’ve ever seen. The film is also smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge and address the most obvious counter-arguments. “It gets complicated,” Claude Ridder says during the long, scripted monologue that is Resnais’ contribution to the film. The Ridder character plays the role of the conflicted intellectual, echoing and complicating a later, more biting charge from the film — that American society enjoys “the luxury of having students who protest” while slaves and farmers fight. Godard plays the role of Godard, critiquing the problems of representation and the very form of Far from Vietnam. His segment opens with a close up of a camera lens, which in the context of the film becomes one more violent machine in a mechanised war. It’s echoed nicely by Klein’s section, a moving profile of the widow of Norman Morrison, the American Quaker whose self-immolation outside the Pentagon became a media sensation.

That Far from Afghanistan pales in comparison with the film that inspired it is hardly a damning critique. I can’t think of another piece of agit-prop made in the past 45 years that wouldn’t suffer the same fate. But I wish it were a better film in its own right. Gianvito opens the piece with “My Heart Swims in Blood,” in which he juxtaposes shots of bourgeois comforts (shopping malls, tanning beds, pedicures, dogshow groomers) and a middle-class American man (Andre Gregory) trying to sleep against dry, voiceover recitations of first-hand accounts of civilian deaths and news reports concerning the war. Jost‘s segment, “Empire’s Cross”, is a straight-forward collage that combines split-screen images of 9/11 and bomb-sighting footage with a soundtrack that mashes up military radio transmissions, Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron” speech, and ominous music. Inspired by the testimony of a U.S. Army war veteran, Martin’s “The Long Distance Operator” is a narrative short about the men who “pilot” drone attacks from a base in the American southwest. Using footage attained via WikiLeaks and employing actors who are veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Martin explores the emotional trauma suffered by the pilots while also foregrounding the horrifying absurdity of drone warfare.

My two favourite segments of Far from Afghanistan are also the most simple conceptually. In “Afghanistan: The Next Generation,” Yoo cuts together archival footage from a variety of film stocks and video, and the running voiceover has the official tone of a National Geographic documentary. Only at the end of the segment does Yoo identify the source of her found footage, a U.S. Information Agency film about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It’s a simple but devastating irony, and Yoo’s montage exposes the cruelties that are otherwise elided by the formal conventions of State-sanctioned propaganda. Like Gianvito and Martin, Wilkerson uses his segment to bring the war home but does so more directly and with unapologetic pathos. “Fragments of Dissolution” is built from interviews with women who have lost family members under tragic circumstances. We see two of the interviewees, a young widow and a middle-aged mother, whose husband and son, respectively, committed suicide after serving overseas deployments. The other interviews are heard only in voiceover. As we listen to women describe, with deep sorrow and anger, the children, brothers, and friends who died while warming themselves beside portable space heaters, Wilkinson shows long, static, black-and-white images shot within their burned out homes. Each death was the result of an “illegal hookup”, according to Detroit Edison, who had shut off the victims’ power for lack of payment. Wilkinson’s segment subtly but powerfully recalculates the costs of the West’s latest forgotten war.

Wavelengths: Featurettes

The great discovery of TIFF 2012 was Matías Piñeiro’s Viola, a fantasia on love that dances between dreams, theatrical performances and a kind of hyper-sensual reality. “When he was singing, I thought I truly loved him,” the title character says in the film’s closing line. It’s typical of Piñeiro’s fluid perspective — a wistful, past-tense comment on a joyful present. Had I not known Piñeiro is barely 30 years old, I might have guessed this was an “old man” movie. His acute attention to potential love (or infatuation) is almost nostalgic, as if that surplus of feeling is so profound because it was always so fleeting. There are three kisses in the entire film, each significant in its own way, but like the particular scenes from Shakespeare that Piñeiro cuts and pastes into his dialogue, all of Viola is charged with barely-suppressed desire. I don’t know how else to put it: this is a really horny movie.

Except for a brief interlude in which we see Viola riding her bicycle through town, delivering packages for her and her boyfriend’s music- and film-bootlegging business, Piñeiro and cinematographer Fernando Lockett adhere to a unique visual strategy throughout the film. Each scene is built from only a handful of shots. Characters are typically framed in close-up, usually from slightly above and with a very shallow, always-shifting depth of field. The camera moves often but in small and smooth gestures. And, most importantly, nearly all character movement happens along the z-axis.

That’s all worth mentioning, I think, because the form of the film — or, more precisely, the video; Viola sets a new standard by which I’ll judge other indie DV projects — is so integrated with its content. Piñeiro often builds scenes around three characters. In some cases all three participate in the conversation (my two favourites take place in a theatre dressing room and in the back of a mini-van); at other times, two characters talk while a third remains just outside of the frame, either literally or metaphorically. Viola is a talky movie, and its eroticism (for lack of a better word) is in its language and in its shifting compositions of faces. Piñeiro seems to have found a new form to express the classic love triangle. The closest formal analogy I can think of is the café and tram sequences in Jose Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia (2007), in which faces fold into and out of one another at different depths of field. Viola was paired nicely with Gabriel Abrantes’s Birds, a lo-fi, 16mm mash-up of ideas, most of which flew by me (no pun intended) on a first viewing. Told in Greek and Creole, it adapts Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, turning it into an ironic commentary on the legacies of colonialism in Haiti.

Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel is a small film. It feels homemade, even by Apitchatpong’s small-scale standards, which was reflected in the mixed reviews that greeted its premiere at Cannes. Shot at a hotel in northern Thailand near the border with Laos, the film is built from casual conversations, most of them held on a patio overlooking the swollen Mekong River. Placid in tone and self-consciously informal in style, Mekong Hotel is also deeply moving, especially in the final minutes, when the ghosts that have haunted so much of Apitchatpong’s recent work become embodied by a mother and daughter, who mourn for all of the mothers and daughters who have been lost in the region’s tragic past. “Daughter, I miss you,” the mother says. “I hate that my life has become this.” Apitchatpong has a kind of super-human sensitivity and attentiveness to beauty and sorrow. I’m beginning to think of him as the other side of the David Lynch coin.

Mekong Hotel was paired with Mati Diop’s Big in Vietnam, which in some respects is the messy, opaque film I wanted Tabu to be. When an actor disappears into the woods while filming a low-budget adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, the Vietnamese director walks off the shoot and goes wandering through Marseille until she finds a karaoke bar and meets a man, also Vietnamese, of her generation. Diop then crosscuts between the film shoot, now being directed by the woman’s son, and images of the woman and man as they talk and walk among French sunbathers. When writing about Big in Vietnam, I feel obligated to preface every statement with “presumably”. The 25-minute film is elliptical to the extreme, and the thematic connections are never made explicit. Big in Vietnam certainly confirms the promise Diop showed in Atlantiques (2009), one of my favourite films of that year. She’s a digital native with a remarkable talent for finding new and exciting images with low-grade video. Two shots in particular, one taken from aboard a seaside Ferris wheel, the other a long, overexposed tracking shot, are among the finest I saw at the festival.

Wavelengths: Shorts

The title of the first Wavelengths shorts program, Under a Pacific Sun, alludes to Thomas Demand’s two-minute trompe l’oeil work, Pacific Sun, which uses paper models to restage the eerie movement of furniture aboard a cruise ship rocked by stormy seas. Each of the film’s 2,400 frames was shot individually and at great effort. The result is a breezy curiosity, a viral video inspired by a viral video. The rest of the program was quite strong, however. I especially enjoyed the pairing of Shambhavi Kaul’s 21 Chitrakoot and Fern Silva’s Concrete Parlay, two smart and playful found footage pieces. Kaul’s source material is video from a popular Indian TV show of the 1980s, a fantasy series that used rudimentary chroma-key effects to create otherworldly vistas. I appreciate the catholicity of Kaul’s approach. The footage can’t escape its cheesy, of-its-moment-ness, but the pleasures of 21 Chitrakoot have little to do with kitsch. The film is nostalgic for lost visionary imaginations in a way that recalls steampunk. That Concrete Parlay is likewise concerned with images of “the Orient” is obvious from its central, organising symbol, the magic carpet. Silva includes the carpet in two forms: found footage from an anonymous, low-budget children’s film and a green-screen tourist attraction in Egypt. Images of the magic carpet serve as bridges between the 18-minute film’s sections, transporting viewers across space and time, culminating with a stop at Tehrir Square during the revolution. Concrete Parlay ends with a sequence of high-angle landscapes that were shot, I assume, from the vantage of a hot air balloon we see being inflated earlier in the film. Into this footage Silva cuts a close-up of a man staring off at an animal in the distance, making the images momentarily subjective and reminding us that as tourists we’re always only looking at.

The third shorts program, I Am Micro, was among the very best I’ve seen in my eight years attending Wavelengths. A collection of portraits (loosely defined), the screening featured Nicky Hamlyn’s time-lapse diptych, The Transit of Venus 1 and 2 (2005, 2012), which offers an instructive study in contrasts. The first is stark white movement across a black background; the second captures the movement of clouds across a stunning sunset. Vincent Grenier’s latest video, Waiting Room, was shot entirely at his son’s pediatrician’s office. It’s fitting, I suppose, that it was programmed alongside a film by Nathaniel Dorsky, as both filmmakers teach viewers how to observe the world immediately in front of them with greater curiosity and reverence. The highlight of Waiting Room is a sequence near the end when Grenier discovers that the pulsing bursts of light from an overhead fluorescent bulb are falling in and out of rhythm with the frame rate of his small, consumer-grade camera, revealing that what appears to the naked eye as constant white light is, in fact, waves of yellow. (Ernie Gehr’s Departure, which screened in the Under a Pacific Sun program, plays with DV frame rates and naturally-occurring visual rhythms in similar ways.) Class Picture, by the Filipino artist collective Tito & Tito, is, as the title implies, a portrait of twenty or so school children posed on a beach. The one-sentence program note claims that the process for making it involved converting “a single 16mm colour strip into washed-out 35mm.” Beyond that, I don’t have a clue what I was looking at, but Class Picture is sublime. The image seems constantly on the verge of vanishing into the ether, a fitting expression of childhood.

The film that gave the program its name, Shumona Goel and Shai Heredia’s I Am Micro, opens with a slow tracking shot in a darkened room. As the camera glides from left to right, the tall, narrow windows directly in front of it take on the appearance of frames on a strip of film. It’s a remarkable and fitting image for I Am Micro, which is an ode to cinema and a lament for the Indian independent film industry. Shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm, the very material of the film registers consciously as an act of defiance. Its lush, grainy, black-and-white images of an abandoned film lab look like they were rescued from the 1950s, fragments of a lost treasure, and Goel and Heredia’s interview with Kamal Swaroop gives voice to the economic realities and requisite personal sacrifices that greet independent artists in India. (Swaroop has himself managed to complete only two films, Ghashiram Kotwai in 1976 and Om Darbadar in 1988.)

The program also included two films that can be more easily classified as portraits. Ich auch, auch, ich auch (Me too, too, me too) is the latest of Friedl vom Gröller’s studies of her aged mother, now bed-ridden and lost in dementia. Piss-tinted and shaking as if the film had jumped a sprocket, the image is reminiscent of an Expressionist horror picture. Gröller’s mother at one point rolls over and looks directly into the camera, and that stare combined with the terrifying, nonsensical ramblings of her roommate generate a gut-punch of anxiety — anxiety tied to death and human decay, generally, but also to that shameful ambivalence felt by an adult child for his or her dying parent. Ich auch, auch, ich auch is as concise and masterful an expression of dread as one is likely to encounter. As a kind of antidote to Gröller’s film, Picard also programmed selected video works by Francesca Woodman, all of them shot in her studio while still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Despite the spectre of Woodman’s suicide only a few years later, these self-portraits are delightfully engaging. The videos are black-and-white and warped by time, but they capture the joy of artistic experimentation and discovery. “Oh, I’m really pleased!” she says to her camera operator after standing up and admiring the pattern her naked, paint-covered body left on the studio floor. The sound of her voice, playful and proud, is revealing in ways her famous photographs can’t quite match.

I Am Micro concluded with Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, my favourite film at TIFF. The word I keep using to describe it is “breathe”. It breathes, and in ways that seem to mark a significant evolution in Dorsky’s recent work. His camera is moving more, and it’s moving into open spaces, even capturing portraits (of filmmaker George Kuchar and actress Carla Liss soon before each passed away) and ending on a long shot of a ship out at sea. For the second year in a row Dorsky’s film literally blew a fuse in the Jackman Hall projection booth, and I couldn’t have been more happy about it because it gave me a second chance to look at what might be the most beautiful filmed image I’ve ever seen. It’s a shot of a flag billowing against a dark sky, which Dorsky filmed as a reflection in a window. That image alone is staggering, but it becomes downright transcendent when, miraculously, a mannequin emerges from shadows on the other side of the glass. Only after the mannequin vanished again did I notice, at the top of the reflected image, clouds passing in front of the sun. It’s the essence of Dorsky’s cinema reduced to a single shot: shadows and light transforming before our eyes into something else, something revelatory, edifying, and ineffable.

Fall Premieres

Inspired by the case of Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who spent seventeen years in a vegetative state and ignited a national cause célèbre, Marco Bellocchio’s Dormant Beauty tackles the subject of euthanasia by weaving together four stories. In the first, a Senator (Tony Servillo) with first-hand experience of the issue prepares to cast a vote that pits his conscience against his party. His daughter (Alba Rohrwacher), while participating in pro-life demonstrations, falls for a man whose emotionally-troubled brother is arrested while protesting for the right to die. In the third story, a beautiful drug addict (Maya Sansa) with suicidal tendencies is nursed back to life — perhaps in more ways than one — by a handsome doctor (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio). And, finally, a famous actress (Isabelle Huppert) abandons her career, becomes a recluse, and dedicates her life to caring for her comatose daughter, praying to God for a miracle.

As that summary should suggest, Dormant Beauty is in many respects standard, made-for-TV fare. The script hits every predictable beat. When two characters argue, each actor waits patiently for the other to finish his or her line before responding. Huppert’s devout Catholic whispers on-the-nose lines like, “I can’t hope Rosa wakes up unless I have innocence, unless I have faith.” And yet Bellocchio makes it so much damn fun to watch, especially the story line involving the Senator, which he turns into a Juvenalian satire of politics in a media age. Nearly every shot catches a glimpse of a TV screen in the background that is tuned to coverage of the vote, including several scenes set in the bizarre underworld of the legislative baths, where naked Senators consult with a mephistophelean character known only as Lo psichiatra (The Psychiatrist), who offers political advice and anti-depressants by the handful. I especially like one shot near the end, when Senators come rushing through a door after a vote and by some trick of the camera (a really long lens that flattens depth?), the Senate chamber appears to have been replaced completely by a pixelated video monitor. Dormant Beauty is a bit of a disappointment after Bellocchio’s previous film, the excellent Vincere (2009) — it loses momentum each time Belocchio cuts away from the Senator and his daughter — but its best moments were some of the most exciting of the festival.

Set three years after May ’68 and loosely inspired by Olivier Assayas’ own political and artistic coming-of-age, Something in the Air follows 17 year-old Gilles (Clement Metayer) from his first direct action in the student movement to a sojourn through Italy to his eventual return to Paris, where he studies art and apprentices under his father in the commercial movie business while attending programs of experimental films at night. Something in the Air offers an interesting point of comparison with Dormant Beauty. In both cases, the writer-directors produced fairly banal scripts, but whereas Bellocchio frequently generates new and exciting images from the material, Assayas’s direction is strangely anonymous and unremarkable. For a film about beautiful young people discovering sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and revolution, Something in the Air is inert and humourless. Boring, even.

I did enjoy, however, some of the ironies built into Assayas’s backward glance. Something in the Air tackles a relatively un-sexy moment in the history of the Left and its heroes are refreshingly unheroic. More radicalism tourist than party soldier, Gilles is chastised in one scene by older revolutionaries for believing the reports of bodies washing up in Maoist China. And poor Christine (Lola Créton) abandons Gilles for a group of revolutionary filmmakers only to end up answering telephones and washing their dishes. Assayas’s version of the post-’68 Left is more than a bit sexist, and the concurrent rise of second-wave feminism is felt in the film — intentionally and ironically, I think — by its absence.

I won’t pretend to know anything about Raul Brandão beyond what I’ve just learned from his Wikipedia page — that he became a journalist while working in Portugal’s Ministry of War, that the most productive period in his writing life came after retiring from that career, and that he’s an important figure in Portuguese Modernism. Gebo and the Shadow, the latest film from 104 year-old Manoel de Oliveira, is as far as I can tell an adaptation of one section of Brandão’s 1923 novel, Os Pescaderos, a sympathetic study of the beautiful and tragic lives of the hard-working residents of various fishing villages. Although Brandão is a generation older than Eugene O’Neill, Oliveira’s film plays out like A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Stagy even relative to Oliveira’s other recent work, Gebo and the Shadow is built from several long, late-night conversations that lead inevitably toward ruination. “It was you and her that bound me to life,” Gebo (Michael Lonsdale) tells his wife Doroteia (Claudia Cardinale), and in that one line is contained all of the film’s tragedy. The daily labours of life, the lies and deceptions, the sacrifices — Gebo’s every action is made in despairing love and generosity for Doroteia and their daughter-in-law Sofia (Leonor Silveira).

Cinematically, Gebo and the Shadow is a fairly simple film. (I heard a fellow critic at TIFF refer to it as a script table-read.) The opening moments are fantastic, though. The first shot is an unnaturally lit, not-quite-realistic image of Gebo’s son João (Ricardo Trepa), who we see in profile, his face and body casting black shadows. (I must admit this allusion to the film’s title was obvious to me only in hindsight.) After a quick, impressionistic recreation of one of João’s crimes, Oliveira cuts to the small room in which nearly all of the remainder of the film occurs. Sofia stands in front of a window, illuminated by candlelight, and as the camera dollies, we catch a glimpse of Doroteia in reflection. It’s a lovely shot that reveals the full physical space in which the characters exist, while also setting up the female leads as mirror images of one another. An especially nice touch is that the first image of Doroteia is blurred. At first it’s possible to mistake her for a literal reflection of Sofia, one of the film’s many reminders of the passage of time — although no reminder is more shocking than watching the aged faces of Cardinale and Jeanne Moreau.

Every other contemporary director of traditional narrative films would do well to study Christian Petzold. From shot to shot, cut to cut, Barbara is smart, precise, classical filmmaking at its best. There are no radical or self-conscious gestures in his style. Most sequences boil down to some variation on establishing shot / medium shot / close up / point of view. Here, Petzold drops us into the secretive perspective of the title character, a doctor (Nina Hoss) who has been relocated by East German authorities to a provincial seaside town. Barbara conforms to all the plot conventions of the “beautiful stranger” genre, which makes the final act, and the final shot, in particular, a bit too neat for my tastes, but the pleasures are all in the filmmaking. There are no clues given about the location of the town, but in the recurring, fairy-tale-like images of Hoss bicycling through the woods, the trees are always being blown by strong gusts, and seagulls can be heard around her; there’s no actual mention of the sea until the film is almost over. Likewise, a colleague who visits Barbara’s apartment asks if she plays the piano, but, again, we don’t actually see the instrument in her room until a scene much later in the film. Petzold’s precision allows him to create a world with suggestions.

The easy response to Joss Whedon’s low-budget take on Much Ado About Nothing is that there’s nothing in the film that wasn’t already on the page. And that’s probably true, I suppose, but the film is so much fun, and it was so obviously made for fun, that I can’t really fault it for just being charming and droll. Whedon’s signature here is that he approaches the material as he would any other romantic comedy, and as usual he proves especially good at inventing excuses for his actors to behave like real people in a hyper-real scenario. The cast seldom just deliver lines; they deliver lines while cleaning up bottles after a party or strumming a guitar or dripping with pool water or walking back and forth to the pantry while fixing a pot of coffee. Every high school English teacher who has ever tried to convince his or her students that Shakespeare was the sitcom writer of his day now has proof, all the way down to a spit take and pratfall.

Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers is an interesting and well-made film that I might have liked even more had I not seen it with an audience that laughed loudly at every brutal killing. I don’t blame them for laughing. The film is designed for laughs. But if I’d watched it alone, it would have been a straight-up horror film. Sightseers concerns a 30-something couple, Tina (Alice Lowe) and Chris (Steve Oram), who set off on a long-planned, idyllic RV tour of Northern England. After Chris gets away with accidentally killing a man who had earlier insulted him, the two instigate an increasingly ridiculous murder spree. Wheatley has a sharp eye, and he and cinematographer Laurie Rose make exceptional use of the 2.35:1 widescreen frame, giving epic scope to this relatively small story. If I can convince myself that Sightseer’s jocular sadism is all in the service of a coherent allegory — the misguided self-sacrifice of relationships and working-class anger are the best bets — then I might also convince myself it’s a very good film.

Other Discoveries

First, a quick game of Six Degrees of Brazilian Cinema. Hermila Guedes, who plays the title character in Marcelo Gomes’ Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica, also starred in Gomes’ first feature, Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures (2005), which was co-written by Karim Ainouz. Guedes also starred in Ainouz’s breakthrough film, Love for Sale (2006). Ainouz was at TIFF last year with The Silver Cliff, a character study of an attractive, 30-something dentist who suffers an identity crisis after her husband, without warning, leaves her. Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica is a character study of an attractive, 30-something doctor who suffers an identity crisis after her father is diagnosed with a vague critical condition. I mention all of that because Veronica is familiar in the worst ways. The Silver Cliff was one of my favourite undistributed films of 2011; Veronica, inevitably, suffers by comparison.

Veronica is book-ended by what we eventually learn is the main character’s vision of ecstasy (or something like that), a strangely prudish orgy on a sun-drenched beach. The opening image is interesting simply because it lacks any context: what’s not to like about beautiful, co-mingled naked bodies rolling in the sand and floating in shallow waters? When the vision returns at the end of the film, immediately after an unnecessarily long, faux-dramatic shot of Veronica being baptised by sea spray and a standard-issue “making a new start” montage, it’s reduced to a banality. Perhaps this is Gomes’ stab at transcendence? There’s just no magic in his mise-en-scene, and certainly nothing approaching the rapturous image of Alessandra Negrini dancing her ass off in The Silver Cliff. Even Gomes’ documentary-like footage of carnival is boring. Seeing this film 24 hours after Far from Vietnam made me wonder what Chris Marker could have made of those crowd scenes. Talk about paling in comparison.

One pleasure of a 67-minute film like Sébastien Betbeder’sNights with Theodore is that it necessarily breaks convention in the most fundamental way. As seasoned film watchers, we’re familiar, deep in our muscle memory, with 85- to 120-minute run times and predictable act breaks. I feel time differently, more consciously, when I watch a film like this because the shape of the narrative is rare and peculiar. In the case of Theodore, this unmoored-from-convention quality is essential to its success. A fragile nocturne of a film, it imagines the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris as a fairytale wonderland pulsing with occult power. Betbeder cuts throughout the film between the main storyline — Theodore (Pio Marmaï) and Anna (Agathe Bonitzer) are young lovers who leap the park fence night after night, irresistibly — and documentary material about the park itself. The film opens with archival maps, photographs and film clips and with a brief history of the park’s founding. We see video footage of the park during the daytime when it’s teeming with joggers, tourists and picnickers. And Betbeder also includes a brief interview with an environmental psychiatrist who recounts the story (truth or fiction?) of a man whose bouts with depression corresponded directly with his proximity to the park. I’d like to see Theodore again before declaring whether all of the pieces fit together to offer anything more than an impressionistic portrait of a place transformed by history, imagination and obsessive love.

KazikRadwanski establishes the formal rules of Tower in the opening minutes of the film and then, to his credit, follows them to the letter until the closing shot. The first image is of Derek (Derek Bogart) digging a hole in the woods. The camera is inches away from his face, where it will remain throughout the film, only occasionally panning or cutting away to the people around him. Tower takes the trademark cinematographic style of the Dardennes’ The Son to its logical extreme, executing a disarmingly intimate study of a 34 year-old man who lives in the basement of his parents’ Toronto home. The key word there is “intimate”. Derek is an awkward, unmotivated, self-defeating guy, but he’s socially competent. He dates someone throughout most of the film. He’s invited to parties. He has friendly, if superficial, relationships with his co-workers. The camera, in effect, gets closer to Derek than any of the people in his life do, and as a result the cinematographic style of Tower emphasises real physical proximity. Films often make physical isolation a metaphor for emotional detachment; Tower is about the thing itself. Intimacy is felt profoundly in the film because it is so profoundly lacking. Tower is in many respects a classic “first film”. It has the whiff of autobiography — Derek toils away in his bedroom on a short animated film that he’s reluctant to share with the world — and I quickly realised the film would stop rather than end. Also, because it’s a kind of gimmick film (the form of it, I mean), I’m not sure what to think of Radwanski or how to predict his next move, but I’m eager to see what he does next.