Early on in John Smith’s recent aptly-titled Being John Smith, the formal structure of the film, that of Smith’s disembodied voice kindly recounting difficulties he experienced having the most common name in Britain floating over top a collection of archival images from his youth, collapses. The film’s subtitles begin to disagree with the spoken word, telling of Smith’s inability to make work during a genocide, and that contrary to the old adage, in his elder years, he is only drifting further and further to the left.
I had viewed this sequence, a segment of one of the greatest films I watched last year, in the Lightbox Theater at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival. Being John Smith played as the final film in a triple bill, preceded by the final works of Jean Luc-Godard - Presentation of the Trailer of a Film “Scénario” and Scénarios, a film completed 24 hours before his medically assisted suicide. While I am wary to “spoil” too much about such a highly anticipated film that does not have a near set release date, Scénarios sees Godard in dialogue with Smith, mulling over his medical documents and x-ray scans and photographs of human decay, all distilled into iconic images from the history of cinema - a revolutionary shot dead in the middle of the street in Rome, Open City, Rita Hayworth’s reflection repeatedly shattering in the funhouse mirror shootout in The Lady From Shanghai.
Originally the Toronto Festival of Festivals, the Toronto International Film Festival was built with the intent to bring well-regarded films that premiered at other, larger festivals to Ontario. The festival touted itself on its accessibility, charging little for tickets and fostering an intellectual yet casual environment. In these early years, the festival came to be known as the “People’s Festival”. Today, TIFF touts itself as the largest film festival in the world by attendance, seeing over half a million visitors this past year. If the festival was “for the people” then, it certainly was not in 2024, with some single-film tickets for anticipated premieres priced at up to 95 CAD.
It is impossible not to notice the incredible scope of the money lining the festival’s main thoroughfare. Coinciding with Toronto’s film industry flooding with tax-evading Hollywood productions, the festival has become runover by corporate dollars, and as one walks down King Street, they are bombarded by advertisements, mostly from Netflix and the major Hollywood studios, hoping to make their films this festival’s must-see. This is another notable difference between TIFF 1976 and TIFF 2024: the People’s Choice Award, voted on by the public, has become a major awards precursor, often correlating with Academy Award nominations and wins (the 2024 winner, The Life of Chuck, has yet to receive a theatrical release, but the runners-up, Anora and Emilia Pérez, are very likely to take home Oscar gold this Sunday).
In the widening of the festival’s scope, the selection of films is divided into 12 sections (up from 3 in 1976), each selected by a different set of programmers. These sections are occasionally separated by a unifying theme (TIFF Docs for documentaries, Midnight Madness for genre-fare) but most are divided by their determined popularity - Gala and Special Presentations for commercial and auteur cinema, Centrepiece and Discovery for work from unestablished directors.
The Smith and Godard program I mentioned previously was hosted by the Wavelengths section (named after Michael Snow’s era-defining Wavelength) programmed by Andrea Picard and Jesse Cummings, founded in 2006 to exhibit experimental works - features, shorts, video art, and serial films - that would not typically play this now very commercial TIFF. The section is significantly more autonomous than the other TIFF programming teams, having their own social media presence that is not entirely beholden to advertising their events during the festival. Even during the festival, they advertised films in other programs (many co-programmed by lead Wavelengths programmer Andrea Picard, including By the Stream last year, and The Beast the year prior), which then became Wavelengths screenings by-proxy to those who buy into the section’s cult of personality, which a very devoted crowd do every year. At one point during the festival, Picard received a round of applause after announcing herself, a highly unusual situation that I did not see replicated at any other point in the festival with any other programmer.
More than anything else, Wavelengths acts as a sort of safe haven in the midst of what has essentially become Toronto’s Comic-Con; while the audiences of most screenings are full of Oscar pundits and amateur paparazzi, Wavelengths screenings garner an audience mostly consisting of critics and film artists, producing a notably more pleasant environment that consistently felt lively at every screening I attended. At the end of their Q&A for Grand Tour, a (very drunk) Miguel Gomes interrupted her outro with an outro of his own, emphatically insisting that Picard’s work is keeping this festival afloat.
While the value of Picard and Cummings’ work is undeniable, it is very interesting to see how Wavelengths compares to the New York Film Festival’s (NYFF) Currents selection (formerly Projections, which was recently folded into Currents), very much its American counterpart. While many films in the Wavelengths lineup appear in Currents, films like Grand Tour and Wang Bing’s Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming) were placed in NYFF’s Main Slate section, which is more akin to TIFF’s Special Presentations. This is an interesting distinction as these three works are more experimental than the average festival fare, but they are authored by much more well-known filmmakers than the rest of the Wavelengths selection, and particularly in the case of Grand Tour, have budgets comparable to, if not larger than, the average Sundance indie. While one cannot be certain as to the reason for these films’ placements in the Wavelengths section, my guess is that the larger sections must accommodate the major studios, meaning that these more uncompromising works must play Wavelengths, or else they will not be featured at the festival. These works are great, but yet it seems odd to me that a section named after a film produced on scraps does not embody a similar non-commercial ideology to that of its filmmaker.
We approach a sort of standstill here, where this gem in the midst of a wholly corporate festival must cater to the needs of its proprietors. Picard must announce that the film she is presenting is eligible for the “People’s Choice Award: Sponsored by Rogers”. It sounds like a joke when she says it, but the words leave her mouth nonetheless.
During the Q&A for the second of Wavelengths’ three shorts programs, director Daphne Xu (of Notes of a Crocodile) spent her allotted time by distributing postcards among the audience detailing the financial ties of the Royal Bank of Canada, one of TIFF’s major sponsors, to companies like Palantier, a software company providing AI predictive modeling tools and surveillance technology to the IDF, and is financing Coastal GasLink, a natural gas pipeline currently being built in British Columbia against strong opposition from multiple First Nations, which the other directors with films in the program stood in agreement over. While I was not present for this event, John Smith strongly supported Xu’s sentiment during the Being John Smith screening, which also saw tacit agreement of Jesse Cummings, who moderated the Q&A.
This moment struck me as particularly symbolic; Cummings, bankrolled by TIFF and unable to express his verbal support (or unlikely disapproval, given the lineup he programmed), must watch the events unfold around him with his hands tied as he is allotted little agency by the institution that employs him. I feel a slight unpleasantness writing this as Picard and Cummings are exceptionally talented programmers, and if their goal was to incite political discourse, they succeeded, regardless of their inability to literally “speak up”. Thus, it pained me to see them unable to fully interact with the artists and audience by bringing their feelings to words, out of a fear of jeopardizing both their job and the integrity of Wavelengths in the future.
Michael Snow’s late-career masterwork *Corpus Callosum (2002) centers an office in Toronto, an invented space (a film set), where the only spoken words are from the (fictional) director, heard from behind the camera, dictating what appears in the frame, with digital special effects flooding the screen to contrast the mundanity this space typically connotes. This work folds his 60s-70s structuralist work into a form greatly opposed to its structure, and where the perceived quotidian mundanity of Wavelength (1967) and La région centrale’s (1971) environs give way to feelings of great wonder, *Corpus Callosum is a wet fart of a film that expresses little interest in keeping its audience engaged in any meaningful way; it is an assortment of hat tricks and a shockingly prescient imagination of the current Toronto film industry. This film concludes with a number of these office workers being directed into a corporate screening room where they, and we, watch a student film of Snow’s, as the audience apathetically applauds. This space is sick and repulsive, and gives me great fear as to whether or not the contemporary festival space will truly be able to extend beyond it for much longer. As long as wealth dominates these spaces, it is impossible for a soul to exist, and “safe havens” such as Wavelengths are at constant risk of suffocation.