“This is my favorite program of the festival,” says 67-year-old Thom Andersen, standing onstage alongside five of the other six contributors to this year’s first Wavelengths presentation. He adds, for sardonic good measure, “these are the real movies.” It’s vintage cantankerous wit from the director of “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” that outstanding, three-hour ode to the titular, misunderstood metropolis. It’s also, more than likely, a dead-on assessment. While scores of festival-goers flock to star-packed gala screenings and high-profile Hollywood premieres — many for movies that will be released commercially in the coming weeks or even days—TIFF’s avant-garde showcase, now in its tenth year, seems like the fest’s first and last stop for genuinely radical/challenging cinematic fare.
Last night was just the first of six such screenings, all taking place in the cozy contours of Jackman Hall, located within the Art Gallery of Ontario. (Fellow wayward Chicagoans take note: as with our very own Gene Siskel Film Center, the front row’s got the best seats in the house.) Aptly dubbed “Soul Of the City,” ‘Wavelengths #1’ is a mostly-stellar collection of urban mosaics, vastly disparate in tone and execution, but possessed of a shared interest in space and movement within architectural frame lines. Parallels between these seven movies range from the thematic (outrage regarding gentrification and the destruction of old buildings) to the formal (dividing the city of choice into squares and rectangles, into windows and pockets).
Andersen was, of course, the closest the program slate got to a household name, even among avant-garde enthusiasts. “Get Out of the Car,” his 30-minute dissertation in miniature, played third — pity the films, just a bit, that had to follow this funky scrapbook/mash note to a forgotten city. Andersen picks up where he left off in “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” chronicling a part of L.A. the movies rarely depict or acknowledge — desolate streets, abandoned buildings, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, body shops that looks like strip clubs, strip clubs that look like body shops, etc. He trains his lens chiefly on signs and billboards, some of them weathered and faded and torn, others left miraculously intact despite the fact that the business they’re advertising has long since gone under. The soundtrack is a jukebox shuffle of street sounds and 60 years of L.A.-based music, ranging from Dylan and Guthrie to obscure blues and mariachi records. (Knowing Andersen, all of these were probably used without permission; maybe the short will be included on the “Los Angeles Plays Itself” DVD, scheduled to be released sometime between now and never.)
Funny and bittersweet, “Get Out of the Car” eventually reveals itself to be a sly tirade against the white-washing of local color and culture. Andersen fights back through empowering fantasy: we see nary a glimpse of the “new L.A.” he’s implicitly raging against, just oddly anachronistic signposts of a Land That Time Forgot. (Though most of the footage was shot in 2009, this could very easily be L.A. circa 1989.) Andersen’s talent for digging up elaborate, hilarious, and oddly beautiful mural-style storefronts — most of them in predominantly Latin American neighborhoods — makes this a more sincere ode to street art than “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” It’s also a loose and self-deprecating corrective to Thom’s reputation as a cranky old cinephile. Caught filming a bare billboard, he offers up some vague missive about the power of absence, to which the bemused passerby quips “You make a movie about something, you give me a call.”
“Get Out of the Car” arrives like a jolt of joyous, jazz-infused adrenaline — especially right on the heels of Dominic Angerame’s silent, morose “Soul of Things.” We’re aware of at least one film critic who thinks this is the dirty dog of the program; it feels to me too modest in its melancholia to register as any kind of offense. The only silent and black and white picture of the bunch, Angerame’s short — a docu-sketch of a construction team at work, tearing down and building back up — is also the only selection that actually, historically embodies the “city symphony” mission statement of the program. It’s roughly, perhaps even clumsily, assembled but hypnotic in its solemnity. Its images of construction and destruction evoke the devastation of post-war landscapes. That aligns it neatly, thematically with both Andersen’s film and “Everywhere Was the Same,” a dread-infused lament for Palestine from Basma Al Sharif. She was the only filmmaker not in attendance — a pity, as this was maybe the film most in need of some serious elucidation. Its textual juxtapositions, setting vacation picture slides of abandoned buildings to the poems of an oppressed people, reminded me a great deal of latter-day Godard. Anyone miffed that “Film Socialisme” screened without subtitles might have gotten their baffling and/or dazzling fix of poeticized politicks right here.
Callum Cooper’s “Victoria, George, Edward & Thatcher,” a speed-demon portrait of a neighborhood shot entirely on an iPhone, passes in an intoxicating blink. The most formally adventurous of the bunch was probably “Landscape, semi-surround,” by Tokyo-based filmmaker Eriko Sonoda. I’m really not qualified to explain exactly how the hell Sonoda achieved the effect that she did here. A lingering look out the window of a moving train is multiplied by 16, neatly aligned into a block of squares, hung on a wall like paintings in an art gallery, painstakingly painted over frame by frame and toggled forward and backwards. So complicated is this formal experiment in frame manipulation that Sonoda herself, speaking during the Q&A session via a game translator, seemed rather unsure of how to explain her process. No matter: one could get lost in the stunning effect without understanding the cause. When the film suddenly and awesomely began to shift into a complicated musical number, you could hear minds blowing all across the packed, hushed auditorium. (As to how this is mostly rural travelogue qualifies as a “city symphony”: search me.)
I assume home town pride was the driving force behind making Oliver Husain’s “Leona Alone,” the closing chapter of this unusually strong program. After all, it’s the only one of the seven films to hone its peepers on the city of Toronto. Ironically, it’s more of a haughty, accusing glare than an adoring gaze; self-described “Euro snob” Husain inserts an ornate glasswork between himself and the gentrified neighborhood he scowls upon. It struck me as a fairly obvious piece of work, long before Husain plainly explained it to all of us on stage. Andersen’s would have made a more fitting climatic number.
Or Tomonari Nishikawa’s. “Tokyo – Ebisu,” which opened the program (and was thus the first movie I saw at Toronto) and may have been the most spellbinding of the entire group. Using 29 mattes — one for every station in Tokyo — Nishikawa turns the daily commute into a bustling collision of bodies and trains, ghostly superimpositions creating multiple planes of overlapping human traffic. (Ozu would approve. As would James Benning, whose “Ruhr” plays in this same theatre later in the festival.) I often feel as though I’ve spent half my adult life on commuter trains. The jaw-droppingly beautiful “Tokyo – Ebisu” speaks directly to that impression. Among these city symphonies, it’s the one that most evokes what it actually feels like to live in a big city. On my first night of ten in an alien metropolis, it danced its way into my dreams. Top that, TIFF. [A] — A.A. Dowd via In Review Online