TORONTO 2011: “WAVELENGTHS” PART II

By Livia Bloom

The adventurous Wavelengths experimental film programs at the Toronto International Film Festival, curated first by Susan Oxtoby and then, in recent years, by Andréa Picard, are a true festival highlight. 2011 was exemplary in this regard, its five experimental programs marked by a diverse range of aesthetics and artistic projects.

An eerie mood pervades the smart, surprising Sea Series #10 by John Price, one of the only films in the 2011 Wavelengths experimental program at the Toronto International Film Festival explicitly inspired by world events. An intertitle explains that the film was made “10,190 km from Fukushima” on May 21, 2011, two months after the deadly Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, and a week after a leak was reported at the nuclear power plant that lurks just outside Toronto. Located on the shores of Lake Ontario, Pickering is one of the largest nuclear plants in the world. For Price, the date held the added significance of having been designed by a religious group as the day of rapture.

To obtain lush, saturated color, Price develops his 35mm and 16mm footage himself; he also used water from Lake Ontario, the star of Sea Series #10, in that film’s chemical process. The first movement depicts distant sailboats doubling and shifting under a dancing, blue-tinted sun; later shots show tiny dead sardines lapping at the shore, and richly contrasting black-and-white footage of beachgoers at play in Pickering’s ominous shadow.

For James Benning, the formalist behind 2004′s 13 Lakes (thirteen static ten-minute shots of lakes) and 10 Skies (ten static ten-minute shots of the sky), the 99-minute Twenty Cigarettes (2011) is virtually an action movie. Each of the film’s shots (twenty, to mimic the number of smokes in a pack) lasts for the length of a single cigarette as consumed by one of the filmmaker’s friends. The director sees the film as, among other things, a record of the diversity of those who surround him these days and indeed, the ten men (including Thom Andersen, whose Get Out of the Car (2010) made a splash in Wavelengths 2010) and ten women (including Suzan Pitt… Read the rest

TORONTO 2011: “WAVELENGTHS” PART I

For fans of experimental film, 2011 has been a year of heavy losses. Yet even as we mourn the deaths of pioneer filmmakers including Jordan Belson, George Kuchar, George Landow (aka Owen Land), and Adolphas Mekas, the 2011 Wavelengths programs at the Toronto International Film Festival indicated that experimental film is alive and well… and living in Canada.

Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure is a site-specific live projection performance that was a highlight of this year’s festival. In the projection booth, Brooklyn-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder distilled a found 35mm commercial film print into rich, gorgeous beams of light that danced on the screen, the auditorium walls, and the faces of the rapt, dreamy spectators who filled the theatere at the Ontario Gallery of Art. (The movie that was the basis for the work was never identified to the audience, and the artists have never watched it in its entirety.) The introductory movement of the piece is a marvel: tiny lines of white light that were movie credits in a past life shimmer onscreen like sunlight filtering through deep water. Occasionally a half-glimpsed face from the original film surfaces deep within the piece like a mirage in the desert; other moments resemble flashlights dancing through fog.

The audio to the piece, created and mixed live in the theater by the Dallas-born contemporary composer Olivia Block, is at once organic and otherworldly. In addition to sounds produced digitally and musically, Block works with sounds she has collected from the world around her. Occasionally, these feel familiar: is that the sound of rushing water? Peeper frogs chirping on a summer night? The plaintive bleat of an alarm? The whir of an airplane about to take off? The pop of distant fireworks? Together, the visual and aural components of Aberration of Light are a symphony of lights and darks, quiets and louds, that are greater in concert then the sum of their parts.

Empire, as tiny and wondrous as Aberration of Light is long and wondrous, is the gem of a trailer for the 2010 Viennale made by Apitchatpong Weersethakul. Happily, it … Read the rest

TORONTO 2011 PREVIEW: CANUCK ATTACK

By Livia Bloom

Are you surprised that this year, some of the most anticipated films at the Toronto International Film Festival actually are by (gulp) Canadian filmmakers? Largely known to many for their solicitousness, their skills in the rink, and their charming way of saying the letter “o,” the Canadians often inspire jealousy in their film-loving neighbors to the south because of the wide-ranging institutional support that they provide for national filmmakers. The National Film Board of Canada, for instance, both produces films and distributes them to the far reaches of the country… and has been doing so for over 7o years, when it was founded as part of the National Film Act of 1939. Indeed, the first NFB commissioner was none other than John Grierson, the great Scottish producer and a father of modern documentary. (Today, it seems that the USPS could use a little love in the vein of the immortal Night Mail, the 1936 love letter to the British postal service narrated by Grierson that features an original poem by W. H. Auden). If this year’s pre-festival buzz has any truth to it, TIFF 2011  might well yield a bumper crop of local films. Maybe it’s something in the water?

Take This Waltz / Sarah Polley
An actor since childhood (one early role was in Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), Sarah Polley moved to the director’s chair in 2007 for her sensitive directorial debut, Away from Her. Polley even received an Oscar nod for her screenplay that brought an Alice Munro short story, about a woman (Julie Christie) succumbing to Alzheimer’s Disease, to the screen. Four years later, with a new marriage and a baby on the way, Polley brings home her second film, Take This Waltz. A drama about the challenges of a young marriage, the film stars Michelle Williams, Seth Rogan, Aaron Abrams, and Sarah Silverman and is named for a song by her countryman, Leonard Cohen.

Keyhole / Guy Maddin
“I often wondered what it would take for Canadian film to be considered part of the myth-making machinery of Hollywood, and I … Read the rest

AMERICAN IDOL: “TABLOID” DIRECTOR ERROL MORRIS

By Livia Bloom

As globalism renders the world ever smaller, national boundaries seem increasingly porous, if not outright irrelevant to the study of cinema. Yet Errol Morris still strikes me as a distinctly American filmmaker. From pet cemeteries in California (Gates of Heaven) to death row in Texas (The Thin Blue Line), from the Vietnam War (The Fog of War) to the Iraq War (Standard Operating Procedure), and in ads for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Barack Obama, Morris tends to bring his insatiable curiosity and searing intellect to stories and characters that, for all their strangeness and improbability, are inseparable from American history, American scandal, and American myth.

In Tabloid, his newest and perhaps sweetest cinematic confection, Morris turns his attention to the tale of former Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney, her captive “manacled Mormon” love interest, and the five pit-bull clones she commissioned from the DNA of a favorite pet. It’s a zany, utterly improbable story that nevertheless comes to epitomize the American dream and American derring-do. “The whole beauty queen story is an American story. The crazy pursuit of her boyfriend in Mormon Utah is American. Joyce’s retreat to North Carolina, that’s very American, too,” Morris explained to me at the time of his film’s premiere on the festival circuit.

Yet like the best, most essentialist of national cinema, even when Morris’s subjects are as American as apple pie (or freedom fries) the ideas threading through his narratives are universal. He is captivated by what G. K. Chesterton called “self-hypnosis”: the lengths to which people—or any being, for that matter—go to as a result of their convictions. As Morris recently wrote on the social media site Twitter (to which he admits an addiction): “QUERY: Roundworms have 302 neurons and 8,000 synapses, but how many are needed for roundworm delusions…e.g., the roundworm that believes that it’s segmented and can’t be disabused of that notion?”

With his first fiction film since The Dark Wind in the pipeline (it reportedly involves Paul Rudd, Ira Glass, and cryogenic freezing), several books on the verge … Read the rest

VIRTUE AND VICE AT THE 2011 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

By Livia Bloom

Moral questions about science, war, justice, and ethics were at the forefront of some of the strongest international work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

“He’s really not judgmental of his characters at all, is he?” said one party-goer of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Between bites of warm peaches and pistachio ice cream at a reception for the filmmaker’s sleek, stylish new thriller, The Skin I Live In, party-goers discussed the dark, unsettling tale of a mad scientist (played with panache by Antonio Banderas) who develops a miraculous new variety of human skin and a fraught relationship with his sad, beautiful Frankenstein (Elena Anaya). Although he has never won the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or, which this year went to Terrance Malick for The Tree of Life, Almódovar remains a perennial favorite here. As the director and his flamboyant entourage made their way into the Lumière Theater, accompanied by Banderas performing a toreador’s moves up the red carpet, the crowd gave them a standing ovation, followed by another one after the screening. The Skin I Live In boasts striking visual settings: an impossibly long staircase lined with fine art leads to a secret chambers; a science laboratory is a glass cube set in an ancient cellar of arching brickwork, and the woods outside a wedding looks like a tangled, primeval garden of earthly delights. It’s the kind of imagery that would ordinarily be associated with on-set cinematography, but Almodóvar shot the film on location in Spain, adding modern elegance to a gender-bending and morality-challenging story that calls into question what it means to take justice into all-too-human hands.

A tiny town is on the verge of being split down the middle between Muslims and Christians in director Nadine Labaki‘s warm-hearted second feature film, Where Do We Go Now? Yet the Lebanese filmmaker, who also plays one of the film’s leading roles, takes a open-minded approach to their conflict. Humorous and warm, with the occasional musical number thrown in, the film follows the story of the creative efforts by the townswomen to keep their men from violent conflict at all costs. Whether it means midnight sabotage against … Read the rest

“THIS IS NOT A FILM” AND MORE: IRANIAN CINEMA AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

By Livia Bloom

When is a film not a film? In one of the triumphs of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the remarkable documentary This is Not A Film, by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, asks this question and more as it portrays, diary-like, a day in Panahi’s life awaiting trial at his home in Tehran. Panahi talks on the phone with friends, illustrates with tape the boundaries of a future film set, chats with a garbage man who has just earned his Masters degree, and is kept company by his daughter’s free-roaming and giant pet lizard, Igi. If one is forbidden by law to make movies for 20 years, if one but sits in front of another’s camera, if one merely reads a vivid script aloud, does a word like “director” still have meaning?

Well-known to cinephiles for works including The White Balloon (winner of Cannes’ Golden Camera Award for Best First Film), The Circle (2000) (winner of Venice’s Golden Lion Award), and Offside (2006) (winner of Berlin’s Silver Bear Award), Panahi has been the subject of rumor, speculation and international concern over of the of the last year. In connection with a planned project about the controversial 2009 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Panahi was arrested in March 2010 on propaganda charges.

Contrary to many reports, including those published by The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter, Panahi was not under house arrest while making the film, nor is he currently in prison. According to co-director Mirtahmasb, who is in attendance at the Festival, Panahi currently is–and was during filmming–allowed to travel anywhere he wishes within Iran’s borders. On December 10, 2010, ten months after his arrest, Panahi was finally sentenced to six years in prison. He was also forbidden, for the next 20 years, to give interviews, make movies, write scripts, or travel outside the country. That sentance is being appealed, as Panahi discusses on the phone with his spirited lawyer during the film, and a prison term will not begin until after the appeal process is completed. The film was made after Panahi’s sentencing in December, and it includes footage from Nowruz, the Persian New Year’s celebration, which is held in March. While awaiting appeal, Panahi must remain within his country’s … Read the rest

SOUND AND FURY: BELA TARR’S “THE TURIN HORSE” PLUS MORE AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

By Livia Bloom

Sound design can be a filmmaker’s secret weapon. Psycho (1960) and Dirty Dancing (1987) aside, moviegoers are often hard pressed to remember the popular songs played in a film, let alone what a film itself sounded like. Yet in these layered, dense aural textures, every footstep and cigarette burn is meticulously tuned. Though it may never climb to the level of conscious analysis, this can have a deep psychological and emotional effect–particularly if the audience is treated to the top tier acoustics and audio systems of the theaters at the Cannes Film Festival.

The sound work and soundtrack in director Lynne Ramsay‘s Morvern Callar (2002) helped the film amass a cult following in the years following its release. They come together in one of that film’s most revelatory sequences: The Mamas and the Papas‘s “Dedicated To the One I Love” subtly shifts from sounding expansive and loud to take on the tinny quality of a character’s walkman headphones. It’s a tiny and brilliant decision. It literalizes Morvern’s insularity, brings the film’s story full circle, and also shows, long before the birth of Apple’s iPod, an uncanny prescience about the direction that music listening and culture consumption were to take.

It’s no surprise, then, that sound is similarly crucial to the Scottish director’s new film, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). This time, the score is by Radiohead‘s Jonny Greenwood, the British musician and composer known to cinephiles for his innovative work on films including Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood (2008). (Greenwood was an Oscar frontrunner for that score until it was disqualified for including too much pre-existing music.) In Kevin, listen again for sound design that shifts in and out of focus, even as the songs cherry-picked for the soundtrack–which ranges from “Tephra” by the British sound artist Helena Gough, to “Ham N Eggs” by skiffle musician Lonnie Donegan, to traditional Chinese pipa songs like “The Ambush” by Liu Fang–showcase a wide-ranging  musical and saavy sensibility.

Movie sound takes a front seat in The Artist by Michel Hazanavicius, a cheeky faux-silent love story set during the advent of the sound era in Hollywood. The Artist borrows liberally from other films, from … Read the rest

ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT: LOOKING AHEAD TO THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

By Livia Bloom

In a time zone six hours away, the espresso is stockpiled. The line-up is out. The hotels are booked. The contestants are in their corners. It’s time for the industry’s storied annual trade show/summer camp, the Cannes Film Festival. Actors, producers and executives will tend to prioritize networking events, while film programmers, distributors and journalists will gorge on films until the juice runs down their faces. I plan to gobble movies until my eyes glaze over, flickering like bionic screens.

A colleague recently complained about the tendency of festival goers to refer to films not by title but by the director’s name, which strikes him as pretentious. For instance, as avid fans and Filmmaker readers are discovering, trailers and teaser clips have already trickled online for hot-ticket items like The Terrance Malick (Tree of Life), The Lars von Trier (Melancholia) and The Pedro Almodovar (The Skin that I Live In). (Click the links to see the trailers for yourself, and let us know what your think in the comments section below. For me, these inspire an icy finger of fear–-surely the new films from these contemporary auteurs are not as bad as their trailers make them look appear?)

In defense of, ahem, anyone who would do such a thing, may I plead poor memory and poorer pronunciation? For example, loyalists affectionately know one of the most anticipated films in the festival as The Lynne Ramsay. The actual title is… There’s Something About Kevin? Let’s Talk About Kevin? What We Talk About When We Talk About Kevin? Make that, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Not only does the director-moniker nickname avoid confusion and inaccuracy, it also offers the pleasure of remembering, each time one mentions a new and unknown work, the cinematic pleasures that director created before. The previous Lynne Ramsays are Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002), both brilliant and beloved favorites.

Another film whose presence on the Official Competition slate made my pulse quicken was The Aki Kaurismaki (Le Havre). This is the second time … Read the rest

DOHA TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: LUCKY STARS

By Livia Bloom

So much depends upon… the position in which one reclines. Seated next to me in the elite section of a flight to Doha, Qatar, an Indian financial wizard with rings on each slim finger nodded and looked thoughtfully out the plane window. Across the aisle, Harvey Weinstein, an overstuffed teddy bear in Qatar Airways pajamas, turned another page of “My Week with Marilyn” and growled for the stewardess. Upon touchdown, a phalanx of young stewards ushered a group of remarkably well-rested travelers into private cars and whisked us away to the second annual Doha Tribeca Film Festival.

Could any film festival program match the perfection of that flight or the lavish hospitality that followed? (I attended as a guest of the festival.) Although screenings of the modest work in DTFF’s 10-film Arab Film Competition were often eclipsed by the star-studded panels, networking lunches and desert excursions, one program could and did: Franz Osten and Himansu Rai’s A Throw of Dice (1929). The film, which is silent, was accompanied by the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra performing a recently commissioned score by Indian-English composer, Nitin Sawhney, who flew in for the occasion. Thousands of extras, elephants and tigers, fire breathers and jugglers, veils and belly dancers all contributed to a film that mirrored the opulence of the festival itself. A Throw of Dice was beautifully restored by the British Film Institute (BFI) (whose budget, along with that of the UK’s National Film Fund, was slashed earlier this week). Alternately known as Prapancha Pash, the film’s English title echos the intricately designed lines written in French by Stephen Mallarmé: A throw of dice / Will never do / Away with chance.

When is a film more than a film? When it’s presented in a magical open-air theater erected temporarily for a festival, complete with a free-standing projection booth; a secret backstage as big as a train station; an open-air orchestra tuning area (necessary, of course, for audio fidelity); and plush seats for over 1800 spectators. Designed by the British-born New Yorker, Jeremy Thom, whose work has ranged from The Rolling Stones … Read the rest

TORONTO: TRAVELING WITHOUT MOVING AT ‘WAVELENGTHS’

Wavelengths, the Toronto International Film Festival program that ferries viewers deep into the world of contemporary experimental film, celebrated its tenth birthday in 2010 and received a sweet birthday gift: A completely sold out first show. Even enthusiasts who had lined up more than thirty minutes early were turned away from the 200-seat theatre at the Art Gallery of Ontario (along with your loyal scribe and similarly surprised colleagues from The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Pacific Film Archive and the Walker Art Center). It was an auspicious start to curator Andréa Picard’s extensive program of more than thirty individual pieces.

Experimental cinema is often neglected by mainstream/arthouse or narrative/documentary dialectics; it’s neither fish nor fowl. Yet it thrives in programs from Rotterdam to Berlin, from San Francisco’s Crossroads to New York’s Views from the Avant-Garde. This year, world-class work by female filmmakers Chris Langdon, Helen Hill, Elaine Summers, and Peggy Ahwesh at the Orphans Symposium were required experimental viewing. A sold-out show is a rare occurrence for any film at the well-organized Toronto International Film Festival, and for a program of avant-garde work, it’s remarkable.

The ghostly realm of cinematic specters conjured by Peter Tscherkassky was among this year’s Wavelengths destinations. Tscherkassky, an artist who works exclusively on film rather than digitally, is a favorite among film programmers. Perhaps his most well-known piece is Outer Space, in which he re-purposed footage of Barbara Hershey in Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity (1981) and added a brilliant and buzzing score, thereby deconstructing the suburban-set horror movie into sensual and suspenseful building blocks.

Coming Attractions (2010), Tscherkassky’s first piece since Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) screened in the program five years ago, arrived in Toronto straight after winning the Premio Orizzonti for Best Short Film at the Venice Film Festival. This ambitious 25-minute piece was inspired by film scholar Tom Gunning’s notion of a Cinema of Attractions which, according to Tscherkassky, “touches upon the exhibitionistic character of early film, the undaunted show and tell of its creative possibilities, and its direct addressing … Read the rest