Toronto 2006
..Festival News

railers

..,.Gary Dretzka
..,.Leonard Klady
...David Poland
...Doug Pratt
...Ray Pride
...S.T. VanAirsdale

 

Toronto … Film Butcher to the World

There's something I cannot shake about the Toronto Film Festival. As the days shrink and my imminent departure looms, my levels of anxiety and apprehension rise.

It is, I believe, a mostly unreasoned response. Though it's perhaps not unique, I recognize that it's specific to my own personal history and my relationship to the festival, my work and my life. I'm also uncertain just how much I want to delve into what spurs this flood of mixed emotions rather than simply find ways to block them with pleasant diversions.

What occurred to me recently was that by design or providence film festivals have a tendency to be bundled. In an ideal situation, a behemoth such as Toronto or Cannes, Berlin or Sundance is abutted or overlaps with what might be perceived as a boutique event. One might segue from the hurly-burly of Sundance to the equally intense but more intimate and decidedly more eclectic treats of Rotterdam.

The most obvious Toronto partner is Telluride. It unspools during the Labor Day weekend in a somewhat difficult to access former Rocky Mountain mining enclave. The event has a convivial nature with screening venues clustered within a few blocks and much needed social interruptions such as barbeques to break up the pressure cooker schedule. It also provides a nice balance between a slate of upcoming high profile prestige releases and restoration and homage programs. And, part of its mystique is that the program isn't announced in advance though a round of calls to distributors will eliminate insiders from being totally blind sided.

It's literally been decades since I attended Telluride. The frantic rush to and from the festival and the rapid turnaround to get to Toronto did not enhance this fragile psyche.

My Toronto antidote has been the considerably lower profile Cinecon that runs on the same dates as Telluride in the decidedly more convenient locale of Los Angeles' Egyptian Theater. The program is arcane by conventional festival standards with a lineup of films that are generally at least 40 years old. The individual titles include few that are embraced as the classics of the medium though many deserve that status; some have undeniable historic importance; and still others are frankly guilty pleasures.

On one particular recent afternoon I dined on Red Lights from 1922 and segued to a rare kinescope screening of a 1956 live television broadcast of The Ernie Kovacs Show. It had been years since I'd seen the former film and had never encountered the latter. Red Lights stars the virtually forgotten (but obviously not to the Cinecon crowd) Raymond Griffith who reached his pinnacle with the classic (just ask a French cinephile) Hands Up! Unlike the other silent clowns he was dapper, urbane and unflappable and shared with them charisma, grace and an impeccable sense of timing.

I've always found that four days in the dark with a generally older film geek crowd to be refreshing. It is a legacy event with bygone stars including Betty Bronson and William S. Hart receiving some overdue attention, the recently restored 1920 silent version of Chicago imbuing a quality patina and British comic Will Hay and numerous serials and programmers an apt reflection of an age where routine fare offered fungible delights. It reinforces a basic belief that you cannot understand the present without a firm grasp of the myriad types of films that inform today's cinema.

Cinecon is exactly the sort of showcase I need as a runner up to Toronto. While the Canadian fest doesn't have a significant amount of historic content or homage programming, I'm generally unapologetic about giving it a pass in this context.

Toronto is a bear of a festival with more than 250 feature presentation crammed into 10 days. There are about 50 high profile screenings of movies positioned to compete for the ceaseless stream of kudos that run from December through March. That leaves one to confront 80% of the program that includes unknown or quasi-unknown talent and films that range from stunning discovery to ignominy.

This year's opener continues the event's virtually uninterrupted tradition of presenting a home grown film. In the past the selection has ranged from terrible to inappropriate but many have come with the creds of Cronenberg, Egoyan, Arcand or producer Robert Lantos and sometime Cannes recognition. One has to be a little nervous about this year's choice of the previously unseen The Journals of Knud Rasmussen from Zacharias Kunuk. His first film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) was a revelation but he unquestionably does not make the sort of warm bath film that opening night patrons tend to embrace.

The size of Toronto is daunting and as with Cannes some of the aforementioned anxiety derives from a sense that one is missing out on something important or significant. That feeling is especially underlined when sitting through a screening of a banal or worse movie. But that comes with the territory.

And while this is by no means personally exclusive, another aspect of my discomfort derives from the unavoidable verity that I have relatives in the Ontario metropolis. To wit, there's a sister, nieces, nephews and cousins. My sister is a long-standing festival attendee but apart from a handful of screenings we've attended together, there's been exactly one instance where our paths have crossed by chance over the past three decades. It should be understood that the latter is the result of the size and breadth of Toronto's programming rather than wildly divergent film tastes.

The fly in this particular ointment is that my sister can't quite come to terms with the fact that from the Thursday following Labor Day and for the subsequent 10 days, I come to work rather than socialize. As with a handful of other oversized movie marathons, there's not a lot of wiggle room in the schedule.

Last year was a particularly challenging edition. In addition to the usual rigors, I was also a juror for the event's Canadian entries and there were a record number of 28 submissions. Fortunately I had seen nine prior to arrival and to my embarrassment missed one film due to a miscommunication and a last minute venue change. It luckily did not figure in final deliberations.

My regimen last year was on average five films a day and at least two hours of writing very late at night. All very nice, but if I saw friends and acquaintances it was in passing and resulted in no more than a hasty coffee break. Somehow I also managed a dinner with my sister and one of her sons to which (owing to a temporary personal memory lapse of the length of an hour) I was 30 or 40 minutes late. I also saw another nephew at a screening. Festivals, in my experience, do not enhance family ties.

I must also admit that other than a vague notion of wanting to see a couple of particular films, I do not have a history of charting out my schedule in advance. My Cannes ritual has been to gather up as many schedules and bumper issues of trade publications prior to opening night and to spend the first evening going through them and creating a plan of attack that would disintegrate in the subsequent days based on unforeseen reviewing assignments.

Somehow that circumstance has evolved organically for me in Cannes, Sundance, Berlin and other festivals while it manifests itself as a burr under the skin in Toronto. It doesn't help the situation that Toronto has a notorious habit of announcing late and tossing in additions after the program has been set.

I feel very much like someone grasping for straws in explaining my irrational love/hate relationship with Toronto. There's too much to explain in my decision to head south to Los Angeles rather than East to the Ontario capitol.

The evolution of the festival itself also engenders a personal uneasiness. I remember its initial manifestations as an event with few world premieres and a great deal more socializing. It was originally the brain child of entrepreneurs and was scruffier with a dash of flim flam. However, it was an instant success with the locals and international participants were fans of the organizer's hospitality and the city's graciousness.

Despite the proximity of Venice, Toronto became the seasonal preference to premier and promote "important" movies and evolved into one of the few mandatory annual industry calendar stops. Its present size has certainly seen the loss of a past intimacy as well as some of its former attentiveness.

Perhaps some of my disquiet also derives from the ways the festival is an anomaly from its brother and sister events. All comparably sized and weighted showcases have film markets as part of their agenda. Toronto has one too simply because so much business and selling is conducted there. However, it simply isn't an official or duly constituted part of the organization.

Additionally unlike Cannes or Sundance and others there's a genuine public component. That's its roots and as its industry status grew the event had to create a separate non-public path that's comparable in size. The two organisms don't have to coalesce and in most instances its best they don't.

It's best not to even wade into the festival's ticketing system that creates long lines and missed screenings. Both the festival organizers and attendees appear to have thrown in the towel in that particular area, shrugging it off as inevitable but knowing full well that it simply isn't a deal breaker.

I'm not convinced either venting or chronicling Toronto's unique nature is cathartic. Perhaps only pushing through the tsoris is appropriate … and responsible.