From the category archives:

TIFF

Take Your Time: Museum Hours, The Quiet Room, and Mariner 9 in Review

by Paddy Johnson on September 10, 2012
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As I wrap up my visit at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, I’ve begun to notice an emerging theme: duration. I’ve already complained at length about the run time of Spring Breakers, but there’s plenty more to discuss in the Wavelength and Future Projection programs. Jem Cohen’s feature film Museum Hours and Liang Yue’s installation The Quiet Room, at The Gladstone, both offer notable examples of a work playing off slow pacing, while Kelly Richardson’s Mariner 9 at The ROM fits the bill a little less successfully.

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Wavelengths 2: Notes on The Archive

by Paddy Johnson on September 9, 2012
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Watching Lillian Schwartz’s UFOs in 3D last night made me very happy. It was the closing film at TIFF’s second night of Wavelengths screenings at The Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackson Hall, and the highlight so far. Schwartz was one of the first to use computer code to create videos as art, and the work—made in 1971 at Bell Labs—still looks amazing.

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Wavelengths: Doing Away With Formulas

by Paddy Johnson on September 8, 2012
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“That wasn’t the [Thomas Demand] film we intended to screen,” curator Andrea Picard informed the audience after the Wavelength screening last night at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Demand was one of five participating artists in the program, which included Fern Silva, Shambhavi Kaul, Blake Williams and Ernie Gehr, and arguably the weakest inclusion.

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The Surface Value of Spring Breaker

by Paddy Johnson on September 7, 2012
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At least twenty minutes of today’s press conference for director Harmony Korine’s Spring Breaker were dedicated to unearthing whether James Franco’s character Alien was based on the rapper Riff Raff. According to Korine, he had originally planned to have Riff Raff perform with Franco in a scene early on in the movie, but decided against it. That mystery had to be solved at least three separate times, though, because reporters weren’t hearing what they wanted.

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The Toronto International Film Festival: Day One

by Paddy Johnson on September 7, 2012
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This morning, I took a look at James Franco’s latest project, Spring Breakers. I went in with low expectations, due to Franco’s questionable art-making practice and the “plot”: four college students head out to Miami to get fucked up, or, as is repeated ad nauseam throughout the movie, find themselves. It’s way too long for what it is.

It’s part of the Toronto International Film Festival, better known as TIFF. To give readers a sense what this festival is like, let me begin by saying that TIFF has exceeded 260,000 attendees for the last few years, which is approximately 190,000 more visitors than Art Basel Switzerland. It is enormous, and it’s considered the world’s most important film festival next to Cannes.

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