The essay film holds a special place in cinema no other genre offers such a direct line into the creator’s consciousness. We always see only what a filmmaker wants us to see, but an essay film comes with a sense of mission: someone wants us to hear what they have to say.
Repurposing images and sound to its own means, the essay film interacts with audiences in ways few other types of cinema ever do. There are no accidents of editing or cinematography, unless the filmmaker has consciously chosen to include them everything we see is there for a reason.
This week, TIFF Cinematheque offers Toronto cinephiles the chance to dive deep into the essay film with a series called The Way Of The Termite, curated by filmmaker and film professor Jean-Pierre Gorin, whose creation of the Dziga Vertrov Group with Jean-Luc Godard in 1968 was essential to the evolution of the essay film.
Gorin originally assembled this program – named after Manny Farber’s famous coinage of the term “termite art” to describe works that burrow ever forward into the world around them – for the Austrian Filmmuseum in Vienna, and it’s as strong a sampling of this genre as we’re likely to see.
Gorin is in town to present the first local screenings in the series, starting tonight (Friday) with a 7 pm screening of Chris Marker’s essential 1982 Sans Soleil, and continuing through the weekend.
Saturday, he’ll introduce his own Routine Pleasures at 7 pm, and his Godard collaborations Lettre À Jane and Ici Et Ailleurs at 9 pm. And on Sunday, Gorin presents La Rabbia Di Pasolini at 6 pm, which reconstructs Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 essay film La Rabbia as the director wanted it to be seen by the Italian public.
Perhaps the best-known example of the form is Alain Resnais’s 1955 Night And Fog, a haunting half-hour meditation on the Nazi death camps – and, by implication, France’s complicity in the Final Solution – that hasn’t lost an ounce of its hypnotic power in the half-century since its release.
Night And Fog screens Tuesday (Nov. 10) at 7 pm, with Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s 2008 L’Itinéraire De Jean Bricard, which matches present-day footage of France to the audio memoirs of a Resistance fighter – a fine pairing.
There are more than a dozen additional titles to be screened, but if you can only spare one night, check out Thursday’s double-bill of Orson Welles’s F For Fake at 7 pm and Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle at 8:45 pm. And be prepared to talk about them for hours afterward. [rssbreak]
