Wavelengths: Film Art, Refocused
Colleen Fitzgibbon FM/TRCS 1974 Film still
With the Toronto International Film Festival rolling into town this week, it’s hard not to get caught up in the melee of blockbuster premieres and Hollywood-celebrity sightings. But the festival spotlight also turns, if only briefly, on the better-known lesser-knowns of the film world with its alternative programming, which includes the avant-garde showcase Wavelengths.
Curated by TIFF programmer Andréa Picard, Wavelengths concentrates on filmmaking by artists who push the boundaries of cinema using film as a medium for experiments in storytelling. Take, for instance, American artist T. Marie’s shimmering, abstract “digital painting” 010101 or the poetic shifts of dissolving and resolving imagery in veteran film artist Colleen Fitzgibbon’s FM/TRCS. Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s A Letter to Uncle Boonmee reprises a 1965 clash in rural Thailand between communist farmers and government forces with “a floating camera and incantatory narration” that is both an ode to the past and the future. In Zum Vergleich (In Comparison), artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki uses the common builder’s brick as a transnational metaphor for the fundamental struggle—and perhaps, ironic beauty—of labour in the globalized industrial world.
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Harun Farocki Zum Vergleich (In Comparison) 2009 Film still |
Though generally more obscure than the mainstream festival fare, Wavelengths is not without its own bit of cinema-star power: Jean-Luc Godard shows up with Une Catastrophe, a one-minute film “complete with the grunting sounds of a tennis match, a dash of melodrama and his signature epigrammatic wordplay.” And avant-garde film legend Michael Snow—whose iconic 1967 film Wavelength gives the series its name—presents his latest video work, Puccini Conservato, “a witty visual and sonic commentary on Puccini’s La Bohème.” (317 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON)
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Jean-Luc Godard Une Catastrophe 2008 Film still |
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