Wavelengths, the Toronto International Film Festival program that ferries viewers deep into the world of contemporary experimental film, celebrated its tenth birthday in 2010 and received a sweet birthday gift: A completely sold out first show. Even enthusiasts who had lined up more than thirty minutes early were turned away from the 200-seat theatre at the Art Gallery of Ontario (along with your loyal scribe and similarly surprised colleagues from The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Pacific Film Archive and the Walker Art Center). It was an auspicious start to curator Andréa Picard’s extensive program of more than thirty individual […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 19, 2010“If my life coincides with the life of film, I’ll be very happy,” said Nathaniel Dorsky at the Q&A following the screening of his three short experimental films in the Wavelengths 4 program at the Toronto Film Festival. That Dorsky’s work is bound to the materiality of its medium, to the poetry of light processed by the photographic process, was something I needed reminding of the night I saw his work. It’s easy to forget about things like film at a film festival. Most of the films at Toronto were projected digitally, their origins increasingly inscrutable in this age of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 19, 2010George and Mike Kuchar are two of the great camp experimental filmmakers of all time. They represented a pastiche heavy, less self-serious strand of the New American Cinema’s downtown explosion in the early 1960s. Evangelized by Jonas Mekas in the pages of The Village Voice, their work spans over 700 short and feature films, almost all of the executed on the flimsiest of budgets, many of them made in an almost artisanal, fiercely individualistic mode. In a Critics’ Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, appearing originally in the January 4, 2000 edition of The Village Voice, […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 7, 2010Saw back to back screenings in the Sundance “experimental” Frontier section to kick off my festival moviewatching this year. Frequently ignored by most industry, the Frontier section always contains a few real discoveries by filmmakers the fest tags as “experimental” but who will go on to make the mark in the indie scene. A few years ago J.T. Petty debuted his chillingly simple near-silent ghost story Soft for Digging in the section and last year Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation screened there as well. This year the Frontier “filmmaker to watch” may be Kyle Henry, whose Room is an excellently directed and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2005