Projections, Wavelengths, and More

Ben Russell’s COLOR-BLIND (2019)

What, in 2019, are we calling the sort of work shown in the New York Film Festival’s Projections program or the Wavelengths section of the Toronto International Film Festival? The question was raised yesterday on Twitter by Darren Hughes, cofounder of the Public Cinema and a programmer for the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. “My sense is that ‘experimental filmmaker’ and ‘avant-garde’ filmmaker have fallen out of fashion,” he writes, “but I’m not sure what to use instead.” In the thread that follows, “moving image art” is the term that seems to have won the day.

Announcing this year’s Projections lineup, Film at Lincoln Center is calling it an “international selection of film and video work [that] expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be.” The word “experimental” pops up here and there in today’s announcement of the Wavelengths program from TIFF, but as the section’s head programmer Andréa Picard points out, on the eve of the program’s twentieth anniversary, “one can discern an important shift in formal language and experimentation, and an even wider range of artistic expression, which reflects—in some cases seriously, and others surprisingly playfully—a refusal to be contained, confined, or even labelled.”

From October 3 through 6, Projections will present a total of forty short, medium, and feature-length works. There will also be a special program dedicated to the memory of Jonathan Schwartz, the late artist known for his evocative 16 mm films. “Schwartz developed a beautiful rhythmic pattern with his in-camera edits and intuitive use of the variable shutter,” wrote Claudia Siefen last year at desistfilm. “There is a musical quality to the way brief clusters of shots, complete with flash frames, leading into gestural pans . . . In both his travel films and his more diaristic work, Schwartz draws influence from certain traditional approaches to observational filmmaking as well as from mentors Saul Levine and Mark LaPore.”

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