A scene from The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers.
Okay, so it seems like every TIFF there's a light deluge of pieces praising the festival's experimental program, Wavelengths, and the singular vision of its lone wolf programmer, Andréa Picard. See, for example, the Globe's own Kate Taylor on the contemplative pleasures of Wavelength's slate of non-narrative, or barely-narrative, features.
As I get older, and sink more fully into the tarpit of my own cynicism, these sorts of things tend to strike me as increasingly fawning and facile. While other people line up at TIFF to catch a glimpse of Johnny Depp or Ellen Page or whoever, the brave, the noble, the contemplative strap into Miguel Gomes's three-part, seven-plus hour Portuguese epic, Arabian Nights. It's easy to get the sense that it's all some conspiracy of intellectualism, with people hurrah-ing experimental movies at the risk of seeming stupid or exposing their own thinly veiled philistinism. (I'm reminded of the character Jeremy from the British sitcom Peep Show, drinking a too-expensive bottle of wine: "Oh yeah. Now that's good. I mean obviously it's not really delicious like hot chocolate or Coke. But for wine? Brilliant.")
Now, I should admit, I'm strawman-ing a bit here. I generally make a point of seeing a few Wavelengths titles every festival (sometimes just so I can grab a much-needed snooze while some torrent of layered images laps against the outsides of my eyelids). But I also appreciate the suspicion of such recondite, knowingly highbrow, la-di-da fare. Yesterday, however, I had two incredible encounters with experimental or experimental-ish films at TIFF that chipped away at that hard-won sediment of cynicism. And in both these cases, I felt like I truly "got it."
The first was artist and musician Laurie Anderson's Heart of a Dog, part of the TIFF Docs program. It's an essayistic meditation on the life of Anderson's dog, Lolabelle, and a powerfully affecting look at life, love, memory and death. As studies of animal consciousness goes, it's even better than Jean-Luc Godard's much-ballyhooed Goodbye to Language. I found myself getting lost in Anderson's rhythmic vortex of video footage, drawings and hypnotic narration. And at one point, I cried: tears literally escaping from my face.
The second encounter was British artist Ben Rivers's The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers, which sounds like it could be the title of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor song or a Montreal punk club. The film is adapted from Paul Bowles's terrific short story A Distant Episode, in which an arrogant French linguist is abducted by a group of Arabic men, mutilated and forced to dance on command in a suit made out of jangly tin can lids.
Rivers's movie turns the linguist into a film director (played by Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe) and blends documentary, fiction and surrealist nightmare, to comment on the ways in which observational, anthropological film making tends to flatten and fetishize different cultures. When it ended, I sort of laughed it off as silly and halfway-senseless. But I've been unable to think about much else since. And it may sound basic, or ponderous, but there's something to be said for movies that can actually stimulate thought, consideration and reflection.
This isn't one of those hectoring "Eat your cultural veggies!" type pleas or anything. It's just nice to take time at a film festival to stop and actually think about something beyond what sort of suit Tom Hardy is wearing or where you can find a free half-sandwich.
That said, it's also nice to watch movies about cybernetic Russian super-soldiers. Which I plan to do….right now.