MOCA Toronto and TIFF Wavelengths are pleased to present Selections by Jeff Wall, a short-film programme curated by MOCA exhibiting artist, Jeff Wall. Featuring influential filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, and Pedro Costa, artist Jeff Wall’s selection of short films foregrounds the process of materialist image-making in lens-based practices. Jeff Wall will be joined by Pedro Costa for a recorded conversation following the screening.
available to TIFF members currently
Tickets are currently available to TIFF Members only. A limited public release will follow—check TIFF for updates.
We could talk for hours about the political content of both the Straub–Huillet films, but that is not what primarily interests me, although it is more than interesting. I watch films to appreciate their making process, essentially their cinematography. Machorka-Muff is exemplary for the condensation it achieves through the intense pruning of the original text by Heinrich Böll, and for the sharp, angular imagery that creates a cold odious atmosphere of revanchist cynicism. Lothringen! is unique in combining mild, almost vapid documentary images of the city of Metz with just two shots in which a performer appears. This suggests an entirely novel approach to what is usually called narrative cinema. Pedro Costa had a close relationship to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and made a noted film of the couple at work. He has adopted and reinterpreted aspects of the use of static shots extended in time within his longer films, but has also isolated that approach in short films like The End of a Love Affair, one 8-minute shot in what appears to be a forlorn hotel or apartment.
– Jeff Wall
Setting the tone for one of the most singular bodies of work in contemporary cinema, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first film is an idiosyncratic and austere adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s prescient, stinging satire Bonn’s Diary. Machorka-Muff follows a former Wehrmacht officer who eagerly navigates postwar West Germany’s bureaucracy and
bourgeoisie to secure his promotion to general. Through a rigorous montage of pristine black and white images, an unsuspecting dose of gallows humour, and intense organ music, the film reveals the seamless persistence of militarism beneath democratic rhetoric.
New digital restoration.
Based on a text by fin-de-siècle writer Maurice Barrès, Straub/Huillet’s Lothringen! conjures historical trespasses in “Lorraine”, the French border region that was seized by Germany in the late nineteenth century, only to be returned following WWI. Slow and stunning topographical pans, voice-over narration of excerpts from Barrès’s Metz-set novel Colette Baudoche, and a theme from Haydn’s Kaiser quartet combine in another ravishing materialist distillation of history, literature, images, and sound.
35mm print.
Constructed with Straubian economy, Pedro Costa and João Fiadeiro’s plaintive short, The End of a Love Affair exudes raw and fleeting emotion from a single extended take of a man with an air of dejection as he holds onto a chair, sways ever so slightly, and gazes towards an open window in a nondescript room as an orchestral arrangement of the eponymous Billie Holliday song begins to play.