Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
The cinema is a house. Part of the beauty and potential of this house is that it is at once material and metaphorical. The projection of a film onto a screen always denotes a living space around it, whether physical walls and roof or a more nebulous zone, as outdoors under a night sky. This space is inclusive of some things and exclusive of others; its center looks different than its perimeter.
The movie itself can also create a house, building within and between shots an architecture of imagination abiding by unspoken rules and formed by plans known only to its makers, whose contours, coherence, and meaning are discovered through exploration by guests. What kind of house a film forms, on what ground it was built, what keeps it together, and what it’s like to move through it are questions whose pursuit animates some of cinema’s great pleasures. Rainer Werner Fassbinder imagined his whole filmography as a house, with each film forming a component of its edifice. One could even consider a film festival to be a kind of house, organizing a hospitable space for visitors to discover its many worldly selections; or, indeed, following Fassbinder’s idea, each film of the festival is a part—basement, kitchen, window—from which its house of cinema is formed.
Over too many recent editions, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has built a cookie-cutter house whose middle-of-the-road architectural quality and reliance on trends determined by neighboring homes, aiming to be habitable to anyone and thereby delight very few. Going house to house, taking each film as its own attempt to build something compelling, you are more likely to find the qualities of each, and discover that not only are many worth visiting, but also revisiting. Over a week in September, I visited several kinds of houses at TIFF before heading back to my own home to make it again into a cinema.
The cinema is a house.
A house haunted, the camera at once subjective and disembodied, an uninvited visitor; we become a ghost wandering, watching, listening and curious. (Presence, Steven Soderbergh)
A house of style, a gallery for immaculate art and bric-a-brac, Mediterranean pastels and decadent costumery, where glossy magazines come to life, tantalizing and aloof. (Bonjour Tristesse, Durga Chew-Bose)
A house of commerce, where “business” and “personal” cannot be separated, and connective technologies allow you to buy and sell at home, making it easier and more satisfying for irate customers to doxx you than complain to the Better Business Bureau. (Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
A house unfinished, where failure, whether of projects of wild ambitions or projects about wild ambitions, becomes its own fascination, for ambition is rare enough that even the unsupported and incomplete edifice can be more compelling than safe bets on sturdy foundations. (The Brutalist, Brady Corbet)
A house of many levels, for depth and its negation are among its most striking and unique components, and some even dare to go ever deeper, finding space without end. (Revolving Rounds, Johann Lurf and Christina Jauernik)
A house of exhibitionism, intended to show rather than reveal, in which dramatic and conceptual risk is skirted in favor of risqué plotting, which fails to query its subject but only lauds its star for daring to be involved. (Babygirl, Halina Reijn)
A house filled with sound, required since the late 1920s for movies that want to resemble the real world, but also used in radical and even violent ways to terrorize, dominate, and redefine reality. (The Diary of a Sky, Lawrence Abu Hamdan)
A house of portraits, gloriously vivid and arresting, their regal subjects proudly transparent in their emotion and powerful in their domination of the image. (The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar)
A house of compression, the four walls forming at once a prison and sanctuary, isolating and concentrating feelings about the outside world, with the potential to harden outrage and grievance into a diamond of spite. (Hard Truths, Mike Leigh)
A house of solidarity, with capacity for fellowship, for the paltry rewards of life’s toil can at least sustain hope if you have someone by your side, in love or simple intimacy, with whom work and respite is shared and on whose shoulder you can lean. (Youth [Homecoming], Wang Bing)
A house from whose confines excursions can be made in pursuit of freedom and strange beauty, of blossoms and rainfall, prowling through the nebulous possibilities of a puce dusk before returning again to stultifying interiors. (April, Dea Kulumbegashvili)
A house that has been occupied and bulldozed, tanks and gunmen blithely trampling over what was for generations a family’s home. (No Other Land, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor)
A house of laughter, mixing the banal with the unbecoming to create a discomfiting frisson uniting those in the dark by the recognition of humanity’s sublime capacity to say or do the wrong thing. (Friendship, Andrew DeYoung)
A house of artifice, of marvelous sets and backdrops, mattes and green screens, self-apparent models and all manner of charmed tricks intended to convince us not of reality but of its zealous recreation. (Queer, Luca Guadagnino)
A house that is a life, starting at birth, and charting on its walls a person’s journey until our visit. (Being John Smith, John Smith)
Read all of our fall 2024 festival coverage here.