Authors — Phil Coldiron
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TIFF 2024: Wavelengths
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 […]
by Phil Coldiron on Oct 7, 2024 -
“My Filmmaking is a Child of Mark Zuckerberg”: Wayne Koestenbaum on The Collective, Pandemic Exhaustion and Taking Up Filmmaking
“So abundant were the apples, we left them on the ground to rot. We regret the rot, but not the abundance.” These lines close “Tortoise,” one of the “fables” collected in Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Cheerful Scapegoat, the most recent of the 21 books he’s published across the last three decades. His written output—which ranges the terrains of prose and poetry, fiction and criticism, theory, memoir, and styles not yet named, typically collapsing as many of these terms as possible in a given sentence (his métier)—would alone qualify as an abundance. That he has, in more recent years, supplemented this body […]
by Phil Coldiron on Dec 9, 2021 -
Wavelengths 2019, Program 4: Full Circle
The fourth, and final, of this year’s Wavelengths shorts programs returned to the curatorial logic of the opening night, bringing together half a dozen disparate sensibilities based on formal, rather than thematic, common ground—in this case, their shared interest in performance. With one exception, the coherence here was more immediate than in the first slate’s buried interest in image production, though the styles of performance deployed across these works bear little resemblance to one another. The program began with Zachary Epcar’s Billy, a quick, cool sip of Michael Robinson-aid recounting the domestic unease experienced by its eponymous male lead (Peter […]
by Phil Coldiron on Oct 3, 2019 -
Wavelengths 2019, Program Three: Memory Traces
It is a lamentable fact that the historical avant-garde in North America was, against all odds, even more chauvinist and provincial than its counterparts across the commercial narrative cinema, whether in Hollywood or the arthouse. And while the situation for new work is undoubtedly improving, much remains to be done to recover the often buried histories of film beyond the accepted routes of circulation, to ensure that our institutional memories are not allowed to remain so riddled with gaps. Sunday evening’s screening began with one such intervention: the first presentation outside of South Korea of 2minutes40seconds, coming more than four […]
by Phil Coldiron on Sep 18, 2019 -
TIFF Wavelengths 2019, Program Two: Home Movies
Following on the eccentric construction of the first program, where the coherence of a quartet of formally disparate films was established by a shared interest in alternative means of image production (gender, as The Bite reminds us, being one of these as well), the second slate of Wavelengths shorts traced a much clearer arc, as all six works offered variations on the home movie. Though I found it lesser in quality than the night before, Picard’s curation here was brash and confrontational in a way it rarely is, a charmingly punk gesture to make in primetime on the festival’s first […]
by Phil Coldiron on Sep 10, 2019 -
TIFF Wavelengths 2019, Program One: Double Iambs
It grows more difficult with each passing edition to assent to the standard line that the Wavelengths program is a small clearing for artistic purity amidst a shrill, militaristically corporate environment. This has nothing to do with Andréa Picard’s curation—as deft and illuminating this year as any in the decade I’ve attended the Toronto International Film Festival—and everything to do with ongoing shifts in the social and institutional situations of artists interested in making work whose form is other than that of the commercial narrative feature. Shifts within the institutional priorities of the festival itself have required that Picard take […]
by Phil Coldiron on Sep 8, 2019
