Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
A camel, it has been said, is a horse designed by committee. This seems wrong, though, since it assumes that a horse was the initial objective, and that the camel resulted from too many incompatible interests and desires. In fact, the camel is perfectly equipped for what it needs to do, and if that camel finds itself having to step into a horse’s position, that speaks more to poor planning and shortsighted decision-making than to the nature of the camel itself. Nevertheless, the point of this aphorism is to suggest that you get something weird and nonfunctional when you allow too many people to have their say. But are these outcomes really that strange? What you get is more likely to be the sort of compromise that pleases no one. The Affordable Care Act is national health care by committee. Oprah’s Book Club is literature by committee. Keir Starmer is a Labour PM by committee.
For many years, the Toronto International Film Festival was led by an artistic director and a handful of programmers, all of whom had very distinctive personal visions. One did not necessarily have to agree with those visions or the outcomes they produced. Many of us were perplexed by former TIFF executive director Piers Handling standing by Wim Wenders through his decade plus in the wilderness. But time has borne out Handling’s vision. Wenders might never have been able to make Perfect Days or Anselm (both 2023) had he not gotten such unwavering support. Point being, a personal vision is something one can argue with. Thom Powers, TIFF’s longtime documentary programmer, has a specific idea of what documentaries should do, and it’s one that I’ve never really shared. But to its credit, TIFF has permitted Powers to follow his own instincts with minimal interference.
TIFF Docs is one of the few remaining areas of the festival that is shaped by distinct curatorial sensibilities. The others are TIFF Classics, programmed by Robyn Citizen and Andréa Picard; Midnight Madness, selected by Peter Kuplowsky; and of course Wavelengths, which is mostly programmed by Picard and Jesse Cumming. But in recent years, Wavelengths has welcomed several other committee members whose taste and interests are somewhat at odds with the aesthetic properties we’d come to associate with the section. This is not an altogether negative development. Although I was not especially impressed with Muhammad Hamdy’s Perfumed with Mint (all films 2024), it strikes me as precisely the sort of feature film Wavelengths was created to showcase. It’s slow, aggressively symbolic, and progresses by concatenation and accumulation rather than following a causal narrative. Like I said, I’m not a fan of the film. I think it’s both overloaded and half-baked. But it’s certainly a film worth reckoning with.
While Wavelengths’ position in the festival resembles a war of attrition, it is also asked to serve many different roles—the classic “do more with less” injunction of the business world. While I staunchly admire Wang Bing’s grand project of documenting Chinese life during that nation’s cultural and economic upheaval, it does seem odd that Wang’s films are slotted into Wavelengths. You might expect them to show up in TIFF Docs, but I suppose they don’t quite fit Powers’s specific definition of documentary filmmaking. So in a year when Wang has completed two long documentary films, he is given two Wavelengths slots. One can assume that if the two Youth films weren’t placed there, they might not screen at the festival at all. One could similarly conjecture about the placement of Roberto Minervini’s The Damned, Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour, and Trương Minh Quý’s Viet and Nam, three very worthy films that the New York Film Festival programmed in their Main Slate and not in Currents, the section that’s roughly equivalent to Wavelengths. Point being, it seems a lot less likely that genuinely odd, uncommercial titles like Perfumed with Mint will have a place in Wavelengths and, by extension, in the festival.
Perfumed with Mint (Muhammad Hamdy, 2024).
So this section of the festival, which seems to be losing slots by the year, finds itself doing heavy lifting for the culture of auteurist cinema. Every film that Wavelengths includes means a slot in Centrepiece or Special Presentations is freed up for the likes of Emilia Pérez or the directorial debut of Anderson .Paak. Film festivals should of course aim to accommodate all sorts of different movies. But it is frustrating that Wavelengths, a section that has developed such a strong identity over the years (you could even call it a “brand,” I suppose) is the one left batting cleanup for work that, no matter its quality, is fairly recognizable as auteur-driven art cinema. Inevitably, this means that there’s no room for the sorts of films Wavelengths (and Visions before it) was meant to showcase. Ambivalent though I may be about the work of Vadim Kostrov, his Normandy is an exemplary Wavelengths film, as is Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell’s radical documentary Direct Action. Despite the programmers’ best efforts, TIFF now leaves such films by the wayside. They have no place in a film festival programmed by committee.
All that having been said—and let’s face it, bemoaning institutional politics is my brand—Cumming and Picard really are managing to showcase aesthetically challenging films, giving them the home at TIFF that only Wavelengths can provide. This is especially evident in the three programs of experimental short films. In the past, there were at least four, often five such programming slots, and this allowed for an unparalleled diversity of styles and approaches. But if there are fewer berths for such films, the sort that share some affinity with the Michael Snow classic that gives the section its name, the programmers have done their best to make them count. One of the very best films in the festival, Being John Smith by the titular maestro of the British avant-garde, would probably not fit anywhere else.
Being John Smith (John Smith, 2024).
Like a lot of people, I was a bit late in discovering Smith, a filmmaker who has always been something of an anomaly in the British experimental scene. While Smith’s work has always been rigorous and self-referential, his films have also been defiantly about things, which puts him at some distance from the mainstream 1970s U.K. structuralism of Malcolm Le Grice or Peter Gidal. Classics like The Black Tower (1987) and The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) consider not just the psychology of cinematic perception but our cognitive engagement with narrative meaning. Best I can sum up would be, John Smith is a lot like Owen Land, if the later American filmmaker hadn’t been a creepy evangelical pervert. (As a fan of Land, I mean that in the kindest way possible.)
I did not know that Smith had undergone cancer treatment, something that perhaps explains the brevity and directness of his work over the last five or so years. Being John Smith is his best film in quite some time, partly because Smith engages with autobiography while also refusing to make his own story the central axis of meaning. Using his comically nondescript name as a jumping-off point, Smith considers not only personal identity but the relative futility of worrying about the self in moments of global catastrophe. Smith's humor is black as onyx here, as he assesses the hubris of artists of his generation who are assembling their archives for a planet that is unlikely to survive. "Cockroaches can't read," he surmises.
He also describes the dual gut-punch of his illness and the war in Gaza, two situations that have made it very hard for him to concentrate on making artwork. Without stating it outright, Smith makes it evident that any conscious human being perceives personal struggle and the pain of others as part of the same continuum. This was the underlying idea behind Smith’s great Hotel Diaries series (2001–07), and Being John Smith extends that aesthetic of empathy. The film is also brutally honest about the desire for recognition, the conundrum faced by any dedicated artist. One does the work for its own sake, but it can be tough to continue when you're not sure it's reaching an audience. Smith acknowledges that self-deprecation can be a form of dissimulation, disguising an unattractive ambition or even bitterness. The name “John Smith” exemplifies this ethical quagmire, since the good working-class artist naturally wants to be like common people but can't help sometimes wanting to hear his name pealing through the crowd.
Someplace in Your Mouth (Beatrice Gibson and Nick Gordon, 2024).
Two of the strongest films in Wavelengths also happen to be two of the shortest. Beatrice Gibson and Nick Gordon represent the generation of British experimentalists whose conceptual approach was undoubtedly influenced by Smith. Something of a companion piece to Gibson's other 2024 film, Leisure, Utopic, which is based on the poetry of Bernadette Mayer, Someplace in Your Mouth is built around a poem by Magdalena Zarawski, a dense piece of writing that considers the entanglement of lesbian desire within a culture that insists on labeling everything in the cheapest, most reductive way possible. The visual information in the film seems casual and observationally unadorned at first: shots of the auto culture in Palermo, Italy, where wheelie-popping motorbikes and tricked-out muscle cars with booming bass become phallic implements, joyfully asserting their mechanized masculinity.
But over time, Gibson and Gordon reveal the Kenneth Anger undercurrent in this display, with a reminder that working-class subjects often take what they can get in order to assert their place in an atmosphere that demands that they just clock in, clock out, and disappear. Zarawski’s jagged collision of words plays as counterpoint to the car display scenes, and it becomes possible to understand what the poem and the motor fetishism have in common: a grasping at broken shards to cobble together an ad hoc island where contested identities can lay claim to a bit of jouissance.
In a very different vein, Rhayne Vermette’s A Black Screen Too projects its own unique personality, even as it recalls certain films by Stan Brakhage and Norman McLaren. Building on Vermette’s 2013 film Black Rectangle, A Black Screen Too is produced through direct animation, its mutating forms scratched right onto the filmstrip. The film is playfully geometrical, going through an impressive number of permutations in under two minutes. Vermette's line quality is highly unique, less classically avant-garde and more like scrimshaw or carving into pottery. On screen it seems like the shapes are willing themselves into being, but Vermette's tactile approach keeps referring us back to the woman behind the celluloid, giving it a strangely live, impromptu feeling. Following her quite good narrative feature Ste. Anne (2021), it’s wonderful that Vermette is still putting her energies and intelligence toward small-scale projects like this.
Adrift Potentials (Leonardo Pirondi, 2024).
Adrift Potentials by the Brazilian-born Leonardo Pirondi is a very porous film. I'm not speaking of its images and sounds, which are very concrete. Rather, from shot to shot, the film seems on the verge of disintegrating, its montage sequences wanting to fly apart. The footage comprising the work was allegedly shot by an anonymous Brazilian artist living in Los Angeles during the years of dictatorship in their home country. This could be true, or it could be a textual framing device, Pirondi both situating his film in the past and mitigating his responsibility for it. Whether the found-footage claim is fact or a Borgesian conceit, it allows Pirondi to suggestively situation Adrift Potentials under the ambiguous and exculpatory sign of "non-film." In other words, Adrift Potentials claims only to be an approximation of what the original artist may have wanted to do. But it also speaks directly to the themes of confinement and barricading the images convey.
At the start of the film, the camera is waving around in a gestural manner, resulting in an abstract field of lens flares and lateral swipes. This freedom does not last, since almost immediately Potentials turns to exterior shots bisected with fences and “do not enter” signs. Before long, the film has switched to interior shots where we see the outdoors enframed by windows, captured and turned into a view. We seldom see human beings in this film. One of the major characters is a large gray tabby wandering across the carpet. In fact, the shot that most directly connotes human presence is an extended take of an empty brown chair, the spot where someone might have been, or could still be.
I described Adrift Potentials in terms of porosity, and this pertains to Pirondi's seeming attempt to create an aural and visual vocabulary that eludes confinement. One can put up a fence, demarcating a legal boundary. But the grass and weeds don't heed this limit. They just keep growing. A cat may live indoors, but it is still a part of nature. So in a sense, Adrift Potentials addresses the crisis of human movement and its prevention, acts of control that are very literally against nature.
Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya (Malena Szlam, 2024).
The most exciting film in the Wavelengths series this year, however, is Malena Szlam’s Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya. A richly layered landscape film, Archipelago consists of twenty minutes’ worth of scenes from Chile and Australia, with particular attention paid to the latter’s Bunya Mountains. As in her earlier films Altiplano (2018) and Merapi (2021), Szlam focuses on volcanic activity and the atmosphere it generates. If we consider the phrase “earthen bones” that Szlam uses in her title, we get a clearer sense of her focus. A volcano is the birth canal of geological activity, the place where molten rock erupts and produces new forms in the landscape. Using dense in-camera superimpositions, Archipelago collapses distant and close-up views of the surrounding area—mountains silhouetted against the sky, bejeweled with the texture of rocks and plants.
Szlam also sandwiches in images of different locations, resulting in a “vertical” time-space structure, per Maya Deren’s theory. Instead of one location following another, we encounter them simultaneously. Like the volcanos themselves, Archipelago is generative of new, as-yet impossible spaces. With its saturated color palette, partly resulting from the refraction of sunlight through volcanic ash in the sky, Archipelago provides visual sensations midway between photographic materialism and painterly abstraction, the environment offering transitory Rothkos and Max Ernst dreamscapes. Archipelago reflects the very best of the type of filmmaking for which Wavelengths exists. In Szlam’s film, as in the works by Pirondi, Vermette, Gibson, Gordon, and Smith, rigor and precision are applied in the service of a deeper understanding of the world we share. In works such as these, celebrity photo-ops and premiere status are entirely beside the point. Great cinema is its own justification.
Read all of our fall 2024 festival coverage here.