Cowan’s grand ambition is nothing less than to heal the 20th-century schism between film and art. “The film world saw the museum world as a little fusty; the art world saw film as too populist. Now everyone’s re-evaluating that. The dislocation seems absurd.” Citing everything from cinema’s influence on cubism to the penetration of the Psycho scream into our psyche, he says, “The greatest films are with us every day, not just in vocabulary and references—they exist in our id.”
If Cowan sounds like he’s on a mission, it’s one he’s been devoted to from the age of 14, when he landed his first job at TIFF. The dream of the Lightbox, in fact, goes back to the early roots of the festival, and the vision of TIFF CEO Piers Handling. He traces it back to the 1970s, when he worked at the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa with Wayne Clarkson (later a director of the festival and of Telefilm Canada).
“We would look at brochures for the British Film Institute and were desperate to have something like that here,” says Handling, who joined the Toronto festival in 1987.
During the 1990s, TIFF expanded into year-round curatorial ventures, from the Cinematheque film series to Sprockets, a series for children. “But we were frustrated by the lack of traction for those programs,” explains Handling. “We needed a home.”
It was Canadian filmmaker Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters)—a Hollywood mogul worlds removed from the art house—who was the catalyst. His family, along with the Daniels Corp., donated a $22-million piece of prime real estate. The project took shape conjoined to a 42-storey condo tower, but raising the rest of the $196-million Lightbox campaign target has been “a long slog,” admits Handling.
That the building exists seems a miracle. TIFF is the world’s pre-eminent film festival after Cannes, and a corporation that’s branded to the hilt. But the torch of cinephile passion has been passed down through a family-like succession of executives with monk-like reverence. Handling is the film nerd who morphed into the suave CEO, while still keeping the flame. Now it’s as if the festival—a pluralist intersection of popular taste, Hollywood glamour, and high-art ambition—has been crystallized in glass and concrete.
Lead architect Bruce Kuwabara’s rectilinear design is radiantly cinematic; every wall and window looks like a potential movie screen. The Lightbox may be “this ocean liner that takes up a city block,” says Kuwabara, “but TIFF wanted a building that represented the complexity of film itself, and wasn’t monolithic.” Creating open, light-filled vistas within the building became a priority. “When you come out of the cinemas,” he adds, “you should be aware of the city and the light. The building celebrates not just film, but the act of watching film.”
Angled with reflective and translucent surfaces, the ramps and staircases invite people-watching; like the festival, it’s a social network. Kuwabara says TIFF left him free to follow his vision—the architect as auteur. It was his idea to crown the roof with a cinematic conceit—an amphitheatre modelled on Capri’s Villa Malaparte in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt.
Amid so much talk about the death of cinema in the face of digital technology, the Lightbox lands as an epic resurrection, animating its ghosts in a carnival of new media. Two weeks ago, while test-screening his carny sideshow of projected phantoms, Guy Maddin said, “It’s just a little come-hither haunting to make people aware there’s something going on in there.” Inside the Lightbox, he has created a Hauntings exhibit made up of 11 wispy fragments of lost masterpieces—faux-vintage scenes that he filmed from scripts that were never shot, or movies that vanished.
“It’s like ghostbusting in reverse,” he said. “We’re trying to inject a few ghosts into the building.” With those rear-window sirens floating on the fifth floor, and the Psycho shower scene unfolding out front, this high-tech haunted house may well be cinema’s dream home.
Pages: 1 2
