Special Commissions

As part of Essential Cinema, TIFF has specially commissioned installations and artworks that explore, deconstruct and recreate the films from the Essential 100 list, and challenge the process of list-making itself.

What’s Your Essential Cinema?

A CFC Media Lab and TIFF Production
Creative Team: Ana Serrano, Galen Scorer, Patrick Dinnen

As you enter TIFF Bell Lightbox, you will encounter an interactive projection above the box office: a dynamic visualization of kinetic images from each of the Essential 100 films.  Text in “your essential cinema”–one film from the Essential 100.  The system takes note of it and adds it to every other person’s choice.  The projected visualization then changes as the difference between what you think and what TIFF thinks is displayed on the screen.  “What’s Your Essential Cinema?” pits the general public against the experts and puts you at the centre of the conversation.

September 12-October 23

Guy Maddin Hauntings I and Hauntings II

TIFF Bell Lightbox will be haunted by a series of short film installations that are meant to invoke and appease the ghosts of cinema. Starting from the premise that every filmmaker has an unrealized project, a half-finished or abandoned film doomed to oblivion or left on the cutting-room floor, Maddin presents a series of shorts that explore the lost history of cinema.

Hauntings I

TIFF Bell Lightbox
Main gallery
From September 12

Hauntings II

Projection on north façade of TIFF Bell Lightbox
September 9 – 19, nightly dusk till dawn

Atom Egoyan 8 1/2 Screens

Atom Egoyan's discomfort and fascination with the relationship of viewer and viewed finds a perfect match in the famous projection room sequence in Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. Egoyan reverses the relationship between projector, audience and screen in this bravado deconstruction of TIFF Bell Lightbox's Cinema #4 space.

TIFF Bell Lightbox
Cinema 4
From September 12

James Andean and François Xavier Saint-Pierre E-100

E-100 re-contextualizes cinematic sounds from the Essential 100 - fragments of dialogue, instrumental samples and environmental sounds - according to their musical properties, creating an encyclopedic sonic collage. An aleatoric algorithm links the collaged phrases of cinema sounds creating an unending chain of musical scenes, and offering audiences a new, non-visual experience of cinema's most significant moments.

TIFF Bell Lightbox
Cinema 5
From September 12

Barr Gilmore Essential Titles

Essential Titles is a 5-minute looped motion graphic projection that isolates and recreates only the title and director's credit from the opening sequences of all of the films on the Essential 100 list — mimicking their transitions and time on screen and layering them in real time. Essential Titles acts as an environmental graphic at the entrance of the Essential Cinema exhibition.

TIFF Bell Lightbox
Main gallery
From September 12