WAVELENGTHS at the Toronto International Film Festival (Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas West). tiff.net.
In its ninth year, TIFF’s avant-garde section takes over the AGO’s Jackman Hall auditorium for six thematically curated programs of experimental cinema. Here are the highlights, gleaned from an admittedly incomplete selection of screeners.[rssbreak]
Programme 1 (September 11, 9 pm) offers, among others, Michael Snow’s Puccini Conservato, commissioned to accompany a selection from La Bohème, and T. Marie’s lovely digital cascade, 010101.
Programme 2 (September 12, 6:30 pm) features Rossana Torres and Hiroatsu Suzuki’s Green Belt, a lyrical study of Portuguese farmers, and Chris Kennedy’s Tamalpais, built out of images of San Francisco shot on film and converted to still photographs.
The whole of Programme 3 (September 12, 9 pm) is given over to Ben Russell’s Steadicam feature Let Each One Go Where He May, about a pair of brothers (Benjen and Monie Pansa) making their way through Suriname.
Programme 4 (September 13, 4 pm) is similarly dominated by a feature – In Comparison, Harun Farocki’s hour-long documentary about brickmaking – but it sneaks in Lisandro Alonso’s Untitled (S/T), a one-minute divertimento from the director of Liverpool.
Programme 5 (September 13, 6:30 pm), features Jean-Luc Godard’s hallucinatory, ephemeral Une Catastrophe, commissioned as a brief introduction to features at last year’s Viennale, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s A Letter To Uncle Boonmee, a 20-minute meditation on humanity’s inability to learn from history couched in a story about identity, memory and reincarnation.
And Programme 6 (September 14, 9 pm) presents Coleen Fitzgibbon’s recently rediscovered 1974 production FM/TRCS alongside Hen Night (Polterabend) and Passage Briare, two shorts by Austria’s Friedl vom Gröller Kubelka that dissect the notion of the posed portrait from the inside out.
