DOCUMENTING - TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

The Toronto International Film Festival 2024 edition had all the bells and whistles one would expect from North America’s largest and most important celebration of film. With world premieres (this year the festival opened with David Gordon Green’s family drama NUTCRACKERS) and North American premiers the festival is now an established venue for Oscar campaigns.

But it is away from all the glitz and glamor and obsession with awards and red carpets that one finds the real languages of cinema. This year in Toronto those tongues were found in the documentary sections, films that revive some hope for the future of cinema.

First, it has to be admitted that the future of cinema is a long game - in the literal sense of the term. The two exceptional documentaries this year were Wang Bing’s YOUTH (three parts including Spring, Hard Times, and Home Coming with a combined running time of about 10 hours) and EXERGUE - DOCUMENTA 14 (868 minutes structured into 14 chapters and shown in three parts of around four to five hours each in Toronto). The works were included in Berlinale 2024 but these screenings marked their North American premiere.

Wang Bing is an epic filmmaker of the intimate. From his debut nine hour opus WEST OF THE TRACKS some 20 years ago, he has developed into an astute and unassuming observer of human behavior in relation to surroundings. In YOUTH the surroundings are the textile industrial centers of Anhui province. It is very much of an armpit experience - sweaty, crowded, messy, discarded clothes and belongings all over the place. Crumbling edifices house both factories crowded with sewing machines, and workers’ dormitories where the young workers navigate an existence between instant noodles, total concentration on cell phones (and chargers), and trying to keep warm in what seem to be very well used comforters. If you want to know why circa 2016, Chinese goods were cheap, the deprivations of the workers and their environment provides at least a partial answer.

This is not to say that the workers are miserable. All aged around 16 to 24, they seem positively chirpy most of the time - maybe it’s the camaraderie, and being away from their equally crowded family abodes and situations that give them energy. It’s like leaving home for the first time and discovering a certain freedom despite the relentless drive for the machinists to make their quota of for example, sewing purple bow ties onto kids’ clothes. How long each worker’s long and hard work can last is anybody’s guess but it surely cannot be more than a few years.

But it’s not the living and working conditions that are central to YOUTH. One can always make observations from any point of view about the environment and still reach no real useful deduction. The core of YOUTH it seems to me is the future prospects for this generation, the first really industrialized youth of China. That there do not appear to be any prospects or discussions of ambition, goals and the future is as distressing as it is apparent. Even in HOMECOMING the third part of the trilogy, going home at Lunar New Year is to be looked forward to but it’s a short term goal whose main purpose is to eat and throw firecrackers around bleak fields. And while a wedding is conducted with the requisite ceremony, it seems almost like a dream in passing because soon after it’s back to work (but isn’t this the same around the world?) The fundamental question that Wang Bing seems to ask (and it has to be an assumption because nowhere does the filmmaker make any direct comment) is what does the future hold for this generation? 

Given that these films were made in the mid-2010s, enough time has passed now to see what has happened to all these people. Their youth may have passed and I hope Wang Bing will go back to find what has been lost. (Though he does not seem to have a habit of going back to the sites of his original films).

Thoughts about the future also underlie EXERGUE, a 14 and a half magnum opus which follows Adam Szymczyk the appointed artistic director for Documenta 14 (2017) and his team of curators as they seek out artists (though their minds seem to be quite well made up by the time we join them in early 2016), battle with the German bureaucracy which funds just over half of hit major art show (to the tune of around EUR 37 million), and grapple with holding the event (100 days exhibitions) in both Kassel (where the event was born in 1955) and Athens - a city chosen by Syzmczyk to pair with Kassel. 

Obviously (though not necessarily to everyone in the film), holding Documenta in a second city would require if not double the costs then a considerable increase in the current budget. Money looms as a factor throughout the documentary but one supposes due to confidentiality such budget meetings between the artistic director and his institutional and political bosses are noticeably absent.

Instead,  Dimitris Athridis, operating as a one man film crew and creative, focuses on the selection and preparation Szymczyk faces with his curatorial team that reflects some of the pressures on them from the bosses above. Athridis gets over the inability to film confidential closed door meetings by focusing much on Szymczyk who was the original inspiration for this film voyage. He is an interesting study, not only in the role of curator as protagonist - instead of artist as protagonist with curator as enabler - but also in his own self-regard and image. He looks - in partly gaunt, thin stature - like a mid-career David Bowie and has the body movements to reinforce it. When dancing in his staff parties, he flops his hair against its natural drape as he ripples fluidly on his own. When singing in band (where he also seems to play piano) he reminds not only of Bowie but also of the late Ian Curtis of Joy Division. Indeed both Bowie and Curtis point to a certain narcissism and self-image that Szymczyk sometimes evokes.

While much of the film follows quite compellingly the ins and outs of choosing works, handling artists, looking at venues, negotiating with the Athens museum, it is only in the last chapter that we see some of the pressures that Szymczyk has probably been dealing with throughout the curation tenure. He talks on the phone to someone (his wife? We only see her briefly) about how he has not been around, that their relationship is under stress, and how he is at a breaking point. This sequence is filmed mainly with the camera staring at the ground, Szymczyk's feet, or Szymczyk in the corner or edge of the frame as if the camera is too embarrassed to follow this intimate exchange or is following its subject surreptitiously afraid of getting caught. I think this sequence captures both the strengths and weaknesses of the film - we are looking a kind of notes of a curatorial process which is captured well because this is the work of the film and the exhibition, but less forceful when it comes to personal matters. Szymczyk dancing in the dark is an intimate moment but it hides as much as it reveals.

Which leads us to a philosophical point about the documentary as it is practised today. The documentary as exposition for the edification of man - the Grierson policy - is no longer applicable. Reality TV, portable cameras, digital technology, everyone cameras mixed with surveillance cameras, have all changed the nature of the form and seemingly expanded the content. EXERGUE is like a kite caught in the swirl of these forms. It is neither well laid out exposition like THE NEW RIJKSMUSEUM (2014) which is a biting example of internal conflict and external politics in the building of the iconic and venerable museum in Amsterdam, nor is it completely observational like Fred Wiseman's portrait of The National Gallery in London, or for that matter a silent companion to the young workers in Wang Bing's YOUTH. EXERGUE is somewhere in between, a navigation of both external reality and internal self regard. From this point of view it is one of the few dialectical works of the 21st century and is no less for it.