Wavelengths 1: “Maps of Traces”
(Japan, Austria, India, Nepal, Mexico, Spain, Hong Kong, France)
Dir. Tomonari Nishikawa, Viktoria Schmid, Sohrab Hura, Camilo Restrepo and Jorge Caballero, Chan Hua Chun, Vadim Kostrov
There’s a conceptual gap at the centre of Wavelengths 1: Map of Traces. The shorts in these curated sections are typically unified –– expressly or intuitively –– by a guiding principle that relates the films through form, style, or theme. Wavelengths remains a reliable oasis for cinephiles seeking a formally adventurous alternative to the commercial bilge that often dominates TIFF proper, but “Map of Traces” feels uncharacteristically disjointed in presentation and lacklustre in content.
It’s fitting that it begins with a tribute to the late filmmaker Tomonari Mishikawa, whose 2016 film Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon is composed of conspicuous gaps in the frame. The film depicts various bridges on the Yahagi River at both sunrise and sunset, exposing one sixth of the frame at a time. The effect isn’t immediately noticeable –– faint lines divide otherwise ordinary-looking landscapes –– until subjects begin to move across the bridges, disappearing and reappearing from section to section. These prismatic vanishing acts presage the fractured rhythms that follow the inceptive high point of “Maps of Traces.”
Similarly defined by its in-camera effect, the polychromatic Rojo Zalia Blau by Viktoria Schmid was shot thrice over on 16mm colour negative film through red, green, then blue colour filters, all finally layered together during projection. The effect is indeed beautiful, rendering Austrian forests and Baltic seascapes as eye-popping splashes of varicoloured flora, but the filmmaker’s desire to perturb our perceptions of nature stops just beneath the surface of these vivid analogue pleasures.
In contrast to the sprawling ten minutes of celluloid manipulation that precede it, Sohrab Hura’s Disappeared is bite-sized and stripped-down. It observes a forest camp site in extreme close-up through a digital lens: a bright orange tent is nestled in a blur of grey and green, with slight distortions giving the initial impression of an object submerged in water. It’s not entirely clear what we’re looking at until dogs and campers wander into the frame. This newfound visual clarity is quickly upended by a sudden, cartoonishly extended zoom out, revealing the camera’s massive distance from its subject. The effect radically reframes our perspective of the campers, who disappear from site when they’re dwarfed by miles and miles of surrounding foliage.
This rug-pull is rhymed in 09/05/1982, which evokes a fabricated moment of political upheaval in an unspecified Latin American country with shots of smashed windshields and burning cars, serenaded by a cacophony of skips and scratches. Though more wary viewers seem to have been tipped off relatively early, I was unfortunately hoodwinked by the film’s imagery, which filmmakers Camilo Restrepo and Jorge Caballero generated with A.I. The film contrives vintage texture in an attempt to postpone this realization till its final title card, which spuriously claims that the film was investigating the boundaries between the synthetic and archival.
Sinister undercurrents linger similarly throughout Map of Traces and En Traversée, two films that exhaust the potential of their evocative sights and sounds. The former, directed by Chan Hau Chun, guides us through black-and-white Google Earth tableaux populated by pedestrians with censored faces. The latter comprises out-of-focus flickerings of various shapes and shades as the camera records from the window of a moving train. Both films are sound in theory yet anaesthetizing in practice. They’re also hampered significantly by the ups and downs of their predecessors. Past programs frequently contain misfires –– trial and error are essential to experimentation, and part of Wavelengths’ enduring appeal –– but “Map of Traces” is a testament to the power of a collective flop to print such failures in upper case.
