By Samuel La France “There is no post-production in my work,” claims Helga Fanderl in an expository video posted on her website. Fanderl’s statement reinforces the spontaneity and immediacy of her shooting methods, the results marked by an explicit sensitivity toward the objects, gestures and spaces that she films. And while it’s true that her…

By Samuel La France There was deception aplenty in the first of four Wavelengths shorts programmes at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Entitled Variations On…, the programme foregrounded the formal repetitions and deviations pervading each of its five works, the title’s ellipsis suggesting that the audience’s requisite curiosity be matched by an equally imperative…

By Max Goldberg One of several triptychs showing in this year’s Wavelengths program, Peter Hutton’s Three Landscapes zeroes in on the industrial terrain ringing Detroit (where he grew up), the bucolic pastures of the Hudson River Valley (where he now lives), and Ethiopian salt flats (where he travelled under Robert Gardner’s sponsorship). The most obvious link between…

By Tom Charity “Open up and let the devil in!” With four movies in four years, Ben Wheatley seems set on giving Michael Winterbottom a run for his money as the most prolific filmmaker in Britain, and the devil take the hindmost. Unlike the versatile and self-effacing Winterbottom, however, Wheatley immediately stamped a distinctive authorial signature…

By Adam Cook The King’s Body is at least the third film this year to play with a formula in which the filmmaker(s) provide an environment and scenario and introduce to it a variable (people, actors), the ensuing interaction between the controlled and uncontrolled becoming the source of the film’s meaning; the two others I…

From Cinema Scope #55, Summer 2013 By Michael Sicinski The first five shots of Ramon Zürcher’s debut film The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen) serve as a kind of miniature map for this relatively short (72-minute), highly unusual work, neatly outlining the spatial compression and sonic misdirection that characterizes its aesthetic approach throughout. (Though…

By Michael Sicinski With its very title, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness is a film that announces itself as being in league with forces not entirely of this world. Nevertheless, its makers are two of the leading lights of contemporary experimental cinema precisely because of their pellucid examination of the world around them.…

By Mark Peranson “It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”—Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (1964) Cinema Scope: Let me repeat what I wrote about your film, namely that for me Story…

From Cinema Scope #55, Summer 2013 Every Film Must Be an Exercise: Cristi Puiu on Three Interpretation Exercises Cristi Puiu’s new film Three Interpretation Exercises is exactly that: three discrete, roughly 50-minute sequences, improvised with three groups of four actors, which grew out of a workshop Puiu was invited to lead in Toulouse. Puiu spoke…

By Andrea Whyte Black TV (Aldo Tambellini, USA, 1968) Burning Star (Josh Solondz, USA) When Bodies Touch (Paolo Gioli, Italy/France) Ritournelle (Christopher Becks, Peter Miller, Germany) Watch the Closing Doors (Jim Jennings, USA) View from the Acropolis (Lonnie van Brummelen, Siebren de Haan, The Netherlands) De la mutabilité de toute chose et de la possibilité…

By Samuel La France I am micro (Shumona Goel, Shai Heredia, India) Class Picture (Tito & Tito, The Philippines) Francesca Woodman: Selected Video Works (Francesca Woodman, USA, 1975-78) Ich auch, auch, ich auch (Friedl vom Gröller, Austria) Waiting Room (Vincent Grenier, USA/Canada) The Transit of Venus I and II (Nicky Hamlyn, UK, 2004-5/2012) August and…

By Aliza Ma Pacific Sun (Thomas Demand, USA) 21 Chitrakoot (Shambhavi Kaul, USA/India) Many a Swan (Blake Williams, Canada) Concrete Parlay (Fern Silva, USA) Departure (Ernie Gehr, USA) Auto-Collider XV (Ernie Gehr, USA) Filing into the familiar (and familial) cinema space of Jackman Hall for the inaugural installment of Wavelengths 2012, devout patrons of the…

  By Michael Sicinski Untitled, 35 mm glass slides (Luther Price, USA) Phantoms of a Libertine (Ben Rivers, UK) A Minimal Difference (Jean-Paul Kelly, Canada) Shoot Don’t Shoot (William E. Jones, USA) Sorry Horns (Luther Price, USA) Orpheus (outtakes) (Mary Helena Clark, USA) Pipe Dreams (Ali Cherri, Lebanon/France) UFOs (Lillian Schwartz, USA) Although the first…

By Bart Testa The Toronto International Film Festival’s experimental film series Wavelengths was begun by Cinematheque Ontario programmer Susan Oxtoby a decade ago as an outgrowth of her popular year-round Cinematheque series The Free Screen—and not of anything happening at TIFF itself, which has consistently displayed little interest in avant-garde films. Wavelengths continued with Oxtoby’s…