The Free Screen
Time lost and regained.
Still from Venice Pier.
One of the most consistently strong, if unsung, programs at TIFF every year is Wavelengths, the experimental sidebar curated by Andréa Picard. Throughout the summer, TIFF Cinematheque offers a companion of sorts with the Free Screen, programmer Chris Kennedy’s long-running free showcase of both established avant-garde pieces and emerging work from contemporary artists.
July’s instalment, Fractured Movement / Constituent Parts, is bookended by a pair of recently restored short films by Los Angeles–based avant-gardist Gary Beydler. Beydler, who passed away in 2010, is known for his 16-mm work from the 1970s. The program closes with his final film, Venice Pier, which divides the titular quarter-mile-long pier up into discrete segments shot at random intervals over the course of a year.
True to its dual-pronged mission, Free Screen also presents a selection of newer works that are similarly devoted to how the cinema engages with and complicates matters of temporality and chronology. (You might wish to brush up beforehand on Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image, which is surely available in the TIFF Shop.) Montreal’s Alexandre Larose will be present to introduce his film Artifices #1, which plays with time-delayed images. So will Toronto-based filmmaker Alexi Manis, here with The Observatory, which views the night sky’s constellations through sketches of the same by her friend Jerry Spevak.