Future Projections Symposium

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2007

Something exciting and perhaps a bit dangerous has been taking place in the blurry territory between film and the visual arts. Projected video and celluloid have become core tools for many of the world’s most celebrated artists. Even artists working primarily in traditional media like painting have been utilizing film and video to frame or elaborate on their work. Much of this work comments on the nature of cinema and cinema-going itself. At the same time, an increasing number of well-known film directors have embraced gallery-based installations as a play space to work out their ideas. The gallery business also represents a potential source of revenue for original and innovative film and art productions, removed from onerously expensive feature filmmaking.

This confluence is a positive development; it extends the creative possibilities of several art forms and engenders a frisson of friendly competition among otherwise unrelated art makers. It also provides audiences with new possibilities for exploring narrative and the experiential within moving-image-and-sound environments. Experiments in immersive spaces, interactivity and reimagined uses of obsolete or abandoned technology are all thriving in non-cinema settings. These works of art inspire both new flights of imagination and a serious questioning of the apparatus behind conventional cinema's narrative and visual forms.

As this interdisciplinary dance continues to grow in importance, it presents a challenge to curatorially specific organizations like our own. After three years of pilot projects, international research and critical negotiation, this year’s Festival marks our first broad programme of work that occupies the borderlands between film and the visual arts. The inaugural year of our Future Projections programme features several projected works appearing at venues throughout the city, each exploring various ways in which artists are interrogating and repurposing cinema’s toolbox. The Festival’s involvement runs from producing shows based on a staff curator’s vision, to acting in the role of supporter of congruent work developed by colleagues at other institutions.

At the same time, our longstanding Wavelengths programme continues to present some of the world’s best artist-made films, whether by filmmakers or visual artists working in film or video. As “experimental” and “avant-garde” increasingly become problematic as labels, Wavelengths puts forth film and video as works of art, worthy of contemplation, discourse and engagement; works that may or may not belong to the established tradition of “expanded’ cinema.

In addition to the presentation of art work, we have also asked a few interested parties to comment on the issues that both complicate and inspire the relationship of a film festival to work from the visual arts community. Debates have been raging for some time and these suggest honest differences among us. Whether concerns reflect frustration with presentation standards, differing critical language, different modes of economic production, the role of experimental cinema or even the idea or importance of duration itself, we ask that these concerns and opportunities come to light.
—Noah Cowan