As someone who finds the feature film a more or less moribund form at the moment, the only real draw for returning to TIFF after five years away was the Wavelengths program. It’s ridiculous, of course, to think that three group shows of shorts could summarize the activity of any corner of the film world, but programmers Andréa Picard and Jesse Cumming have managed—year after year and despite all manner of institutional obstacles—to present clear enough visions of the state of post-avant garde small gauge and video work that I’ll always be curious to see what they think is going on. 

To get it out of the way: their report on the state of things seemed to me both accurate and dispiriting. I had a bad time. The structure of the program was the same as last year: two nights of work from young to mid-career artists (all, by my count, under 50 years old) and one night of legacy acts. Some part of that bad time was down to how much more compelling I found the latter than the former. The old men set an admittedly high bar: The deathless Jean-Luc Godard was back with two further “final films,” Scénarios and Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario,” as good in quite different ways as anything he made this century (the final shot of Scénarios, a self-portrait filmed the night before his suicide, may well be the most moving image he’s ever been responsible for), while the great British ironist John Smith delivered an archetypal late masterpiece, Being John Smith, a 27-minute video that departs from a comically obvious idea—Smith having the most boring name imaginable—to wind with grace and wit and bitter humor through enough ideas that just enumerating them would need the full length of the piece you’re reading. His ecstatic conclusion, the best needle drop in recent memory, was the perfect counterweight to Godard’s matter-of-fact pathos. But at 37, I shouldn’t care to beat the young with the old, and anyway, we’re in a moment of awful suffering: Auden’s given us a concise verdict on who excels there. 

So then: “accurate and dispiriting.” On some level, the latter is a question of the former, insofar as these formally varied films and videos almost all adhered to a somber, academic earnestness that’s come to feel like an unavoidable tone in the experimental realm over the last decade or so. That mood makes the tendency toward overt political content play less like individual commitment than an obligation, a sense that this is the only route to serious work today. Unpacking the dynamics of institutional taste that have led to such a situation¹ is beyond the scope of a festival report, and anyway, my issue isn’t with political content as such. Again, the times are awful; demanding that artists ignore them would be sheerly reactionary. But making art is a basic human activity that’s gone on unbroken across ages just as horrible as our own, and I follow T.J. Clark in seeing the problem of art under modernity² as nothing other than reckoning with a self-awareness of its terminal contingency, its inability to exist outside the mess of here and now. So, when Tiffany Sia concluded her introductory statement before the second night’s screening by saying that there are things the cinema can’t contain³, I could only agree: We have adequate evidence of what follows from the desire for a world reduced to aesthetic coherence. As a critic, I have to deal with what it can contain, with what it tries and fails to and with how it goes about that task in the first place.

Sia’s The Sojourn put the question of containment in a surprising way. Her video is a kind of landscape-based essay, traveling through the mountain locations of King Hu’s Dragon Inn to chart a half century of shifts in Taiwan. The surprise was that, in contrast to the now common practice of layering language atop images to nail down their meaning, Sia’s commentary was displaced to her introduction and post-screening comments, where she delivered long, precise descriptions of what she intends her images (and sounds) to do. For example, we were told that the rough rumble of cars passing in the offscreen space around wide, Romantic mountain views was enacting a negation of the classical experience of the sublime in nature, a “dialectical” move that was constellated with wide-ranging thoughts on modernization, the historical role of imagined landscapes (i.e., those from which native populations have been erased) in the formation of national consciousness, King Hu’s use of Taiwan on as a stand-in for Ming-era China and sundry other topics. These are all incisive, compelling ideas; the trouble, for me, is that they’re much more compelling than the video itself. While this landscape no doubt is gorgeous, these images of it—bland horizontal compositions of foreground, distance and sky, in flat digital often pushed by noon-day sun into overexposure—are not; the sublime has already been negated. Even as conceptual art, as filmmaking in which audiovisual satisfaction is beside the point, I found the distance here between idea and form (conceptual art does still have form) unproductively wide and obscure. Much of what Sia had to say about landscape has stuck with me over the last month—I imagine it will go on ringing in my ears whenever I see a piece of landscape art—even as the video itself seemed to disperse before my eyes while watching like the mists that fill many of its frames.

A more conventional approach to the essayistic was Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 45-minute video, The Diary of a Sky, which reports on Israel’s ongoing violations of Lebanese airspace with his usual journalistic transparency. Its images consist, with the exception of a brief coda that reverses the perspective, of low-grade digital shots of the sky, footage captured by Abu Hamdan himself along with 35 named collaborators and an additional number of anonymous others. Fighter jets can often be seen, either directly or via the vapor trails left in their wake. These images are, on the whole, bland to look at, and this banality becomes the video’s conceptual and rhetorical basis. Abu Hamdan layers on written text detailing monthly statistics regarding the violations (number of discrete violations, types of aircraft involved, total hours of flight time) gathered from a UN database. This data is also read in voiceover by Mazen El Sayed, brief dips into plain fact amidst his acerbic delivery of a text that otherwise ranges from the general argument that these aerial incursions exist mainly as a form of auditory terrorism—the introduction of a constant, loud of hum of imminent danger into the texture of life on the ground⁴—to the history of somatic responses to sounds of (potential) violence, the broader sonic landscape of Lebanon and the conspiratorial thinking such a situation can induce. 

This voiceover plays out amidst a shifting field of rumbles, gray noise that occasionally drowns out El Sayed’s speech (it tends to get loudest at the moments he’s reciting facts). My initial response was that this failed as a kind of realism: the use of “unpleasant” ambient sounds has a long history within the avant-garde and its aftermaths; if anything, it’s now something of a cliche route to avoiding silent work. But on reflection, it seems to fit productively within the matrix of facts that Abu Hamdan sets up here—legal facts, the fact of the naive recording of image and sound. Whether an artist as sophisticated as Abu Hamdan is capable of naive work is an open question, though it’s worth noting that I doubt anyone could sort his material from what he’s sourced from elsewhere. In trying to find a form appropriate to what can be rendered in facts about the brutality of a culture, the relevant point of comparison here might again be outside the cinema: Weegee’s photos of crime scenes.  

Elsewhere in the programs, the works’ political content was folded into forms that have tended either to avoid such content entirely, like the lyrical film. The best of these was Leonardo Pirondi’s languid, anxious Adrift Potentials. Though I have my doubts about the necessity of the reflexive fiction that frames it—the film is presented as an attempt to reconstruct an abandoned project by a Brazilian artist living in exile from the dictatorship⁵, but the clean, somewhat flat texture of modern 16mm stocks immediately gives the game away—Pirondi’s deft threading of repose and activity catches something true, and deeply felt, about the psychic and emotional experience of political engagement at a distance. 

¹ As far as accounting for institutional taste goes, it’s worth noting that the films given world premieres in this year’s program were uniformly more oblique in their politics than those that had premiered elsewhere, whether in cinemas or art spaces.↩

² A curator, responding to a piece critical of last year’s edition of Currents at the New York Film Festival, had it that I was “just a modernist,” which I am, so far as I think the same fundamental questions that David had to answer when painting the dead Marat still apply today.↩

³ Sia’s comment came at the end of an introduction in which she, along with Beatrice Gibson, Nick Gordon, and Leonardo Pirondi, echoed the demand from Daphne Xu that TIFF end its relationship with the Royal Bank of Canada (postcards were distributed detailing RBC’s ties to Israeli atrocities). In a grim irony, it seems this was something the cinema, as a physical space, wasn’t allowed to contain: festival staff quickly ushered the audience out of the theater following the screening, on the pretext that it needed to be turned around for the next show, which didn’t begin for nearly 75 minutes. While I can’t confirm that this was an active instance of artists being silenced over their politics, it was hard not to make assumptions. (Nearly the entire audience ultimately gathered in an office space down the hall to listen to the filmmakers speak.)↩

⁴ As I’m writing this, the terrorism has been brought to ground level via the perverse campaign to render everyday objects deadly, with exploding pagers and cell phones killing dozens and injuring thousands.↩

⁵ This fiction serves, so far as I can tell, mainly as a way to underline Pirondi’s own position as a Brazilian artist living and working in Los Angeles during the end of the Bolsonaro years.↩