Essential Cinema in the Gallery

Essential 100 Exhibition Catalogue
September 2010

The medium of film has traditionally been associated with a specific environment. People expect to gather in a dark black box with controlled sound and watch light projected through a translucent material (or, more recently, through a large format digital projector).

Museums increasingly show films and film fragments on monitors in their galleries. While these reproductions have illustrative appeal, they rarely acknowledge the crucial specificity of cinema presentation to a film’s aesthetic success. These digital reproductions of films meant for the cinema should be acknowledged as having the same relationship to the medium of film as photographs and postcards of paintings do to the original works of art.

And yet the gallery has a unique and important role to play when we want to think about film culture. Since the medium’s invention, filmmaking has spun off an immense outpouring of works—drawings, photographs, maquettes, etc.—that uncannily echo or parallel advances in the visual arts. Whether or not they can truly function as autonomous, fully achieved artworks in their own right, they stand as suggestive examples of near-art or “possible art,” implicitly blurring or questioning the boundaries between craftsmanship and art-making. Conversely, there has been a long history of visual artworks proper that draw upon, criticize or laud both film imagery and technique, arguably dating from the Cubists’ engagement with early silent cinema, recently chronicled in Pace Wildenstein’s Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism exhibition curated by Bernice Rose in 2007, and Arne Glimcher’s documentary Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies that followed a year later.

We believe that films made for the cinema, the secondary artifacts they produce and artworks that have drawn from or comment on the medium of film offer a triangular relationship that illuminates social and aesthetic trends of the century just past, and points us forward to possible trends in new media and media yet to come. For these reasons, the opening programme of TIFF Bell Lightbox takes place in both the gallery and the cinema.

We began with a list. Motivated by a desire to share the key moments of film history and to provide substantial contextualization around them, we sought a method to create an institutionally specific Top 100. We did so by merging a list of 100 films created by our internal experts and a 100-film list compiled from a large-scale stakeholder survey. This became the Essential 100, with “essential” defined as somewhere between “best” and “most influential.”

As we sought to transpose this list from the cinema to the gallery, we faced a difficult challenge: considering the abundance of material from the production and marketing of films, what would be our criteria for judging those items worthy of display? We decided to seek out those representative objects that spoke most clearly to the respective films’ “essential” status, that could most successfully encapsulate their iconic quality. To begin with, we delved into the production process, seeking out those subsidiary elements (notes, designs, correspondence, etc.) that revealed key germinating influences on the realized films. We asked if the films contributed to a larger cultural discourse, whether through their purely aesthetic properties or their particular socio-political resonance. We also looked to the development of celebrity culture (especially relevant for the American cinema) and to the dark arts of marketing, whose various engines of iconography—photos, posters, and other ephemera—also happen to lend themselves effectively to gallery-based display.

We chose to organize this material in a section we have dubbed the wünderkammer, adopting the name of the eclectic cabinet of curiosities popularized by scholars and collectors from the Renaissance forward. The wünderkammer functions as both a tool of scientific and cultural inquiry and a playful, highly subjective collection of assorted phenomena, a chamber where the museum meets the funhouse. We like the lack of pretension such a concept suggests, as well as its intimations of multiple personality—particularly apt as the film medium has variously (and often simultaneously) functioned as art, a technological showcase and escapist entertainment.

These multiple entry points into cinema appreciation are reflected by and celebrated in the immersive, non-hierarchical structure we elected to use for the design of the wünderkammer. By obscuring the ranking of our list, we allow visitors to find their own organic pathways through the history of cinema, inviting them to create their own personal groupings of filmic icons—in effect, to create their own canon. We imagine their process will reflect that of our expert panel in the making of our list, which saw a constant play between a studious weighing of influence and achievement and that passionate emotional investment that drew us to the medium in the first place.

Several visual art and film commissions presented within the Essential Cinema exhibition explore this fluidity, subjecting both the list itself and certain films on it to close and sometimes critical scrutiny.

In Hauntings I and Hauntings II—a series of projected film fragments—Guy Maddin imagines an alternate list all his own, a parallel universe where the lost or abandoned films of great filmmakers live on as spectres of their unmade selves. Atom Egoyan’s 8½ Screens, which fragments a key scene from Fellini’s 8½ into a prismatic collage of viewers and viewed, questions whether we have the critical distance to create a list of essential films at all. He sees the relationship between audience and film as an eternal present of shared complicity, a perpetual state of wonder that intrinsically resists dispassionate analysis.

Barr Gilmore and the team of James Andean and François Xavier Saint-Pierre isolate and manipulate a certain element of filmmaking—film sound for Andean and Saint-Pierre, film titles for Gilmore—to go deeper into this powerful, often subliminal relationship between films and their audiences. Exploring the often inexpressible sensations created by seemingly minor phenomena—the typeface on a title, the timbre of a voice, a brief snatch of music—they reveal how deeply our cinematic experiences have penetrated both our conscious and unconscious memory, and how the sparks of recognition they elicit can yield revelatory experiences when those elements are suddenly placed in new contexts and combinations.

This year the Toronto International Film Festival’s cross-media Future Projections programme has become part of the Essential Cinema exhibition, and we sought out works from well-known and emerging artists which addressed the films from the Essential 100. Like the works by Gilmore and Andean/Saint Pierre, the artists within Future Projections use similar techniques of isolation and deconstruction, stripping away a film’s many visual, aural and performative layers to locate a crucial gesture at the core. However, rather than addressing the list as a whole or the film medium in general, they focus on specific films within the Essential 100 and interrogate the mechanisms through which they connect so powerfully with audiences. In Jeanne, Martin Arnold reassembles the many close-ups of Renee Falconetti from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, reinforcing the otherworldly force of this most famous of screen performances. William Kentridge’s Journey to the Moon utilizes Georges Méliès’s pioneering science-fiction epic as an engine for his own escapes into the world of imagination. Through fantastical homage, both artists encourage us to find deeper personal meaning in the original films.

Other projects complicate our relationship to films from the Essential 100 even as they pay them homage. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy reinvent David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as a tabletop diorama that self-generates infinitely repeatable images of suburban horror, extending the original film’s reach beyond its specific characters and locale. Harun Farocki meanwhile connects the Lumières’ single-shot film of workers leaving a factory to other films that evoke that same famous shot, inscribing the brothers’ seemingly arbitrary actualité into a wider discourse of 20th-century labour sociology.

Other artists echo Maddin’s impulse to seek out the lost or forgotten in cinema’s history and remake the original films. Rather than phantasmagoric homage, however, they use the results as an analytical tool to explore specific cultural and sociopolitical contexts, whether in the urban reclamation of Chris Chong Chan Fui and Yasuhiro Morinaga’s HEAVENHELL or the Otolith Group’s Pirandellian empowerment of the protagonists from Satyajit Ray’s abandoned science-fiction screenplay. Composer Michael Nyman substitutes his own found images for Dziga Vertov’s and so privileges score over image in his remake of Man with a Movie Camera. Ming Wong’s replays of Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, meanwhile, explore whether the films are able to retain their affective power when shorn of their original signifiers of language, gender and race.

Issues of time and space, perhaps the greatest points of differentiation between the gallery and cinema, loom large for the remaining artists. Douglas Gordon’s excruciatingly slowed-down and doubled version of Psycho sabotages the film’s narrative thrust and intensity, while inviting speculation about the relationship between photography, sculpture and cinema. Perry Bard, who also remakes Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, disseminates the film’s kaleidoscopic vision into ever-multiplying dimensions of space and time, discovering new possibilities, new connections and new image-makers through the vehicle of Vertov’s original conceptual conceit. Most fascinating of all is Michael Snow’s Slidelength, which uses slide images to ruthlessly deconstruct the spartan simplicity of his own masterwork, Wavelength, while still reinforcing the innate magic of the projected image.

There is one connective idea that the Essential Cinema exhibition demonstrates above all others: film matters. It matters to artists and audiences, to experts and multiplexers. It matters if you care about the recent history of our world, and about the principles of narrative and design through which we frame our daily experiences. Most of all, it matters that film not only allows us to relive moments of great joy (or great sorrow) in our own lives, but that it again and again reinvents itself to better or differently evoke those ineffable emotions that might otherwise go unexpressed.
—Noah Cowan

Essential Cinema co-curator Noah Cowan is Artistic Director of TIFF Bell Lightbox. He was previously Co-Director of the Toronto International Film Festival, Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Global Film Initiative and Co-President of Cowboy Pictures. He has been a programmer of and writer about films for more than twenty years.

Guy Maddin’s Hauntings

The ghosts of cinema loom large in Guy Maddin’s body of work. Hauntings is a series of very short films commissioned for the opening of TIFF Bell Lightbox. Both a cheeky commentary on the idea of an essential films list and a harrowing exploration of the regret and weakness felt by cinema’s great masters, this is both Maddin’s most expansive work in terms of the sheer size of his palette and his most personal. For years, he has been collecting tales of unrealized, half-finished or abandoned films, potential masterworks doomed to oblivion as they slipped out of their creators’ control. This impulse rhymes remarkable well with Maddin’s thematic obsession with regret and the perils of wild abandon found in both his film and installation work.
—Noah Cowan

Atom Egoyan’s 8½ Screens

Atom Egoyan’s discomfort and fascination with the relationship of viewer and viewed finds a perfect match in the famous projection room sequence in Federico Fellini’s 8½. Egoyan reverses the relationship between projector, audience and screen in this bravado deconstruction of our Cinema 4 theatre space. A projector stands on stage, boldly spewing out light. On screens spread throughput the venue, Fellini’s various audiences—some angry, some in love, some bored, plus a freaked-our director—occupy their own spaces, their own screens. The audience is left to work out their own place in this upside-down world. Gradually, we feel their interconnectedness and reconstruct the act of viewing films through Fellini’s eyes. This composite non-linear experience also gently critiques the Essential 100 list itself by making clear the powerful subjectivity of the film-viewing experience and our consequent unreliability as judges of the work.
—Noah Cowan

Barr Gilmore’s Essential Titles

Essential Titles is a 6-minute looped motion graphic projection from former General Idea studio assistant and Bruce Mau Design senior designer Barr Gilmore. As part of his ongoing fascination with typographical representation, he isolates and recreates only the title and director’s credit from the opening sequences of all of the films on the Essential 100 list, mimicking their transitions and time on screen and layering all of them in real time to create an environmental graphic at the entrance of the Essential Cinema wünderkammer. The work has an immersive quality that reinforces how ingrained these title sequences are to our overall cinematic experience, and how slight alterations—a director’s name preceding the title possessively, to the cheeky substitution of “movie” for the more dignified “A film by…”—can subtly but powerfully affect our comprehension and reception of the film.
—Noah Cowan