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Becoming Anita EkbergThe Film Society of Lincoln Center’s "Art of the Real" series, which recently unspooled its second season, has become New York’s annual showcase for the “hybrid” film, experimental works that, despite a more than tenuous relationship with the documentary tradition, oscillate between fiction and nonfiction. Now that documentary has become unmistakably fashionable (a banal subplot in Noah Baumbach’s dreary comedy, While We’re Young, is even spawned by cartoonish version of a debate over “documentary ethics”) the schism between films such as The Hunting Ground and Merchants of Doubt, which resemble feature-length 60 Minutes stories, and the sort of documentaries programmed at film festivals like Doclisboa and Cph: Dox has grown even wider. Art of the Real, laden with an amalgam of festival favorites and classic precursors of cinematic hybridity (this year’s Agnés Varda retrospective is a case in point) is certainly a cheerleader for...

Letters to Max

Dear Fern,

Ah, Tsukamoto's Fires of the Plain! I liked this film very much, the director-actor-editor-cinematographer's baby-faced soldier hysterically pushing through an unforgiving jungle, unforgiving war, unforgiving humanity, slushy digital shades of the surrealism in Herzog's under-appreciated Rescue Dawn and Buñuel's Death in the Garden.

I have still more to tell of the shorts in the experimental Wavelengths sections, so please excuse my continued digressions away from the features you are seeing (and I too, but am leaving to your choice words!). Two of the best features I've seen, Christian Petzold's tremendous post-war German theoretical thriller Phoenix and Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Hann's rich, generous Episode of the Sea, I'll save for another time.

Something a bit more documentary than avant-garde closed the third Wavelengths shorts program, Rebecca Baron's Detour de force. This found footage film pulled from the University of...

What follows is a highly selective, unavoidably partial guide to the Wavelengths section of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, which kicks off today. Perhaps it seems that “selective” and “partial” are synonymous enough to produce redundancy when placed within the same sentence, and in most instances I would agree with this objection. In the first case, "selective," I will note that, of the 28 shorts and features that I was able to preview from the Wavelengths section (impeccably curated, as always, by the perspicacious Andréa Picard), I have chosen to highlight the fifteen that I personally found most aesthetically and intellectually bold, invigo(u)rating, troubling, critical-verbiage-thwarting, or otherwise worthy of hearty recommendation. This in no way implies that the other works were somehow lacking, only that I could not see my way through to them at this particular time and place. A different set of viewing circumstances (the ones you’re about to embark upon,...