A couple of weeks ago, Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival, published what pretty much amounted to an open letter in the Globe and Mail newspaper entitled "Dear Canadian Filmmakers: It's not about you. It's about us" basically challenging homegrown cinema artists to do -- I don't know, maybe just something different.
I believe I speak for myself and many others either making or trying to make movies here when I say, "This gives us a laugh".
In his effete throwing down of some kind of gauntlet of self-interest, Bailey, like many in the business of supporting and promoting the Arts in Canada, reveals not only how little he knows about how the films he'd prefer to see get made; but of his own part in the annual regeneration of the kind of movies he doesn't much want to see anymore.
For it is Bailey's own TIFF that has devolved from an invigorating film festival that once championed up and coming Canadian talent to one striving to be seen as the first Studio stop for American Oscar contenders; while the majority of Canadian filmmakers are relegated to being second or third class citizens in their own country.
Indeed, it is film programmers such as Bailey who have gotten us where we are "creatively", eternally providing a pulpit for and thereby suggesting up-and-comers imitate either the dense vacuity of Atom Egoyan, the cheap patina of class inherent in the Robert Lantos imprimatur or the eternally ill conceived and unrefined first drafts or first edits that typify Paul Gross.
If Bailey really wanted better movies, he'd stop programming the annual failures of those who regularly account for the lion's share of government funding (the only real film financing in this part of the world) and get his movie scouts out to find people trying to do something better -- or at least more interesting.
Before I get all Greg Klimkiw on everybody's ass, the above rant was inspired by a short film on Martin Scorsese's work in this month's Filmmaker Magazine.
Included with the text is a Leigh Singer video essay offering a staggering insight into the Scorsese filmography, the city where half of his films are set and how both combined to give us not only endlessly original and re-watchable movie experiences but an undeniably clear and focused body of work.
It's also a reminder that the Scorsese Oeuvre was created not by Pauline Kael or the programmers of the New York Film Festival and Museum of Modern Art.
They were made by a single artist given the freedom to follow his inspirations, surround himself with other independent artists and do the work that artists do. Uninfluenced by those given to navel gazing or striving to one day collect an indexed pension.
Singer's video is a reminder of what's possible when a filmmaker is not required to define or divine the goals of bureaucrats, but work his own magic.
Enjoy Your Sunday.
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