Avant-Garde Film and Video Showcased In Toronto’s Wavelengths Program

The Toronto skyline. Photo by Peter Knegt.

The Toronto International Film Festival has announced the lineup for its Wavelengths program, a presentation of avant-garde film and video that runs September 11-14 at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario. Curated by TIFF Cinematheque programmer Andrea Picard, this year’s lineup is composed of six programs that feature 25 films and videos, including works by masters of experimental cinema such as Ernie Gehr, Michael Snow and Karl Kels; artists such as Harun Farocki, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Heinz Emigholz; world cinema giants such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Lisandro Alonso; and emerging artists such as Ben Russell, T. Marie and Tomonari Nishikawa.

“The works in this year’s Wavelengths display a confident, gutsy and personal engagement with the world” said Picard, in a statement. “This is a lineup of first rate filmmakers and artists, whose interrogations of history and our current socio-economic climate often include a daring form of self-portraiture - one that equally explores the mediums of film and video in the most provocative and profound ways.”

The announced programs are listed below with descriptions provided by the festival:

Wavelengths 1: Titans
George Melies’ playful and eccentric spirit hovers throughout Wavelengths’s opening programme. Klaus Lutz’s Titan (USA), is a charming, artisanal space odyssey during which the filmmaker doubles as an intrepid astronaut simultaneously creating and voyaging through space. Heinz Emigholz’s Two Projects by Frederick Kiesler (Austria/Germany) is the latest instalment of his internationally lauded Photography and Beyond series. The film renders homage to this visionary Viennese architect whose wild and wonderful genius was little understood during his lifetime. T. Marie’s 010101 (USA) is an incredibly meticulous digital painting, offering one minute, one second and one frame of shimmering and breathtaking beauty through its diaphanous and forever-changing palette. American avant-garde master Ernie Gehr’s stunning Waterfront Follies (USA) is a work of extended sublime that presents a view of the Brooklyn harbour as it is continuously interrupted by the flow of human interaction. The film’s structure and soundtrack work as a reminder of the constant intersections between life’s impulsiveness and beauty. Likewise, enigmatic human poetry in motion spills forth from Josef Dabernig’s Hotel Roccalba (Austria), a sonata of inactivity starring the filmmaker’s family whose gestures of leisure conspire to operatic heights. Puccini Conservato (Canada/Italy) by Michael Snow, to whom Wavelengths is dedicated, was commissioned by the Lucca Film Festival for the 150th anniversary of the famous Italian composer’s birth. In this delightful video, the Canadian master offers a witty visual and sonic commentary to Puccini’s La Boheme.

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Wavelengths 2: Pro Agri In a time of tampered food and farming, an appreciation for nature and its untold mysteries is as strong as ever. Tomonari Nishikawa’s Lumphini 2552 (Thailand) is an exhilarating chiaroscuro montage of still photographs taken in Bangkok’s inner-city oasis, Lumphini Park. Nicky Hamlyn’s Pro Agri (UK) is a time-lapse composition that bears a powerful and timely pro-land, pro-agriculture message. Cordao Verde (Portugal) by first-time filmmakers Hiroatsu Suzuki and Rossana Torres is part poem and part documentary that observes farmers in the greenbelt of Portugal as they work and rejoice off the land’s riches. Chris Kennedy’s serene and painterly Tamalpais (Canada) was filmed while perched high above San Francisco. The majesty of the landscape materializes in relation to an easel-mounted grid that not only recalls the tradition of plein air perspective painting but also reverses the spatio-temporal dynamics inherent to cinema. Bookending the programme in 35mm black and white is Karl Kels’s Kaefig (Germany), an incredible, archaic burlesque dance of rhinoceroses that uses high-contrast and positive-negative juxtapositions to blend notions of domesticity and wilderness. Wavelengths 3: Let Each One Go Where He May Let Each One Go Where He May (USA) is the stunning feature debut of celebrated Chicago-based filmmaker Ben Russell. Having its world premiere in Toronto, the film traces the extensive journey of two unidentified brothers who venture from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname, on land and through rapids, past a Maroon village on the Upper Suriname River, tracing the voyage undertaken by their ancestors, who escaped from slavery at the hands of the Dutch 300 years prior. Shot almost entirely with a 16mm Steadicam rig in thirteen extended tracking shots, this cartographic portrayal of contemporary Saramaccan culture is a rigorous and exquisite work that partakes in and dismantles traditional ethnography, inviting anachronism and myth-making to participate in the film’s daring conflation of history. -continued on page 2-   (1 of 2)  Next Page › posted on July 21, 2009 |Share