TIFF 2011: Wavelengths 1: Analogue Arcadia

In its eleventh year, TIFF’s Wavelengths programme – which is curated by Andréa Picard and spotlights much of the world’s best avant-garde shorts and features – was reduced from six screenings to five. It’s anyone’s guess as to what prompted the slim, but the end result, in theory, suggested there would be a concentration of the sidebar to only the most superb work, whittling out some of the stragglers and fillers. And – if I may say so myself in as unbiased a voice as possible (my film Coorow-Latham Road screened in the Space is the Place programme) – that is exactly what happened.

For this first programme, Picard aggregated a set of films that address – or at the very least were shot on – celluloid itself. It’s no radical prediction at this point to suggest that we are living in the ‘end times’ of analogue image-making formats. Like a sparkler positioned in the centre of a nitrocellulose archive, the demise seems to be uncomfortably imminent. With the smaller stocks getting the axe first (a few 16mm stocks are already long gone) – effectively rendering celluloid to be completely unaffordable – there is perhaps no community more apprehensive about all of this than the avant-garde.

It is most apropos, then, that the centrepiece of this program should come from Tacita Dean, whose 2006 film Kodak spent 45 minutes looking around the film giant’s celluloid production factory as if she were touring a necropolis. Her film in this programme, Edwin Parker (see pic above), likewise takes a rare and intimate tour of a fading giant: the late Cy Twombly. The title is Twombly’s birth name, and foreshadows the 30-minute film’s demystification of his reclusive persona. Showing the master working in his studio – sometimes as an indirect, out-of-focus background, or ordering food and eating at a diner – offers an insight that does little to enhance the man’s body of work, but does wonders for our ability to see humanity in the most minimal and fragile of forms.

Other highlights include Nick Collins’ Loutra/Baths (see above), a jigsaw puzzle of sorts in which the pieces are large chunks of light or shadow that accumulate, in our visual memory, to create distinct forms and compositions; Sophie Michael’s 99 Clerkenwell Road, an Oskar Fischinger-esque pinball machine of orbs, lamps, and street lights that feel – in the best sense – like a child’s dream of the solar system; and Ben Rivers’ Sack Barrow, which is uncannily reminiscent of Dean’s aforementioned Kodak in Rivers’ stoic gaze on an archaic-looking London plating factory, with hints of extraterrestrial intelligence and chemical abstraction mixed in for good measure.

The final film in the programme, Joshua Bonnetta’s American Colour, was appropriately shot on film, but projected from a digital file. This didn’t seem to be an intentional statement on his part, though Picard clearly knew what she was doing. In a film all about the unique colour palette of celluloid, and how it’s been Romanticized with nostalgia even as it still exists (like the shots of the American Midwest that show up from time to time), it’s a brutal gesture to have shown it this way, especially when the reason, as Bonnetta said in the Q&A, was that finishing on film was just too expensive for him. While this ultimately clouds the work’s own raison d’être, it reads like a potent nail in the coffin for the beloved format, and a stark curatorial statement.