Douglas Gordon/ Courtesy of TIFF
It’s a balmy August night in the heart of downtown Toronto. Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is standing in an empty lot, gazing up at a ghostly blond in a white gown who has just appeared between a pair of curtains in an office window. “If you wait, you’ll see a billowy upskirt thing,” he says. In another window, an old man parades between the drapes in a pair of white briefs. These burlesque apparitions, and the curtains framing them, are black and white video loops, rear-projected onto the fifth-floor windows at the back of a brand-new building. Maddin’s silent-movie sideshow is more subtle than the red neon Hooters sign behind it, or the pinball-lit CN Tower to the south. But enough to make a passerby do a double take.
The building is the TIFF Bell Lightbox, an exquisite monument to cinema that serves as the new headquarters of the Toronto International Film Festival. Maddin’s test screening was just one of the hectic preparations leading up to its opening on Sept. 12. The Lightbox is the latest crown jewel in the city’s growing array of cultural landmarks, along with its new opera house and face-lifted museum and art gallery. Though inspired by cinephile meccas such as the British Film Institute, it’s unique in the world—an art-house rebuttal to the multiplex that recombines fine art, film and pop culture in a blockbuster hybrid of cinemas, galleries, learning studios and public spaces.
For a city that likes to think it’s the centre of the universe, the Lightbox is huge. Toronto has long imagined itself as our New York or Paris, a cultural capital that no longer needs to brag that it’s “world-class.” And each September those delusions of grandeur gain giddy credence as Hollywood stars descend on the city in droves for TIFF. This year’s festival (Sept. 9-19) marks its 35th anniversary with a celebrity roll call that includes Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro, Nicole Kidman, Robert Redford, Helen Mirren, Javier Bardem, Woody Allen, Bruce Springsteen, Bill Gates and Steve Nash. But a festival is ephemeral. Stars alight from limousines, films play, champagne flows. Then the red carpet is rolled up and the circus leaves town.
This year will be different. For once, the festival won’t be folding its tent when it’s over, because the tent is now a $196-million permanent home that should make TIFF the envy of rival festivals like Cannes, Sundance, Berlin and Venice. A year-round exhibition venue, the Lightbox includes five state-of-the-art theatres with a total of 1,300 seats. They run off a single projection room, equipped with a vast digital server, and projectors for 16-, 35- and 70mm film. Each cinema is a sound-proofed concrete volume, a box within a box buffered by earthquake-resistant rubber pucks.
There are also two galleries, three learning studios, two restaurants, a lounge, TIFF offices, the Cinematheque library and a gift shop.
The Lightbox will be launched with a myriad of exhibits geared to TIFF’s Essential 100, a list of all-time favourite films. Anyone strolling the sidewalk in the middle of the night will be able to look into a blood-red storefront gallery to see Hitchcock’s Psycho projected in ultra-slow motion on dual screens, one playing it forward, the other in reverse. This visiting installation, created by Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon, stretches Psycho into a 24-hour frame-by-frame marathon.
Throughout the fall, the Lightbox will stage special screenings of Essential 100 films.
The Passion of Joan of Arc, the 1928 silent classic that tops the list, will be projected with 37 musicians on stage playing a medieval score. Duelling chamber orchestras will enact the class struggle in Metropolis. The infamous The Birth of a Nation will get a radical remix as DJ Spooky joins a baroque ensemble to present his Rebirth of a Nation. And in the atrium, swirling graphics on an interactive screen will throw up images from the 100 films according to votes sent via mobile devices—complete with texted comments.
Allaying any fears that the Lightbox caters only to hard-core cinephiles, it will open its doors to the public on Sept. 12 with a block party featuring rock bands, The Wizard of Oz face-painting and free admission to the building. And it will reel in some crowd-pleasing galas, beginning with a Tim Burton exhibit in November. Because it hails from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “it has an arty frisson,” says Noah Cowan, artistic director of the Lightbox. “But it’s also in tune with those who enjoy the populist rush of Hollywood. The communications department hates it when I do this, but I like to say we see our role like a heroin dealer—we hope the galas can hook people on the medium of cinema and then they’ll get excited about the history and culture.” To hook the kids, the Lightbox will also host workshops in choreography, optical illusion, costume, hair, makeup, directing and music scoring.
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