TIFF: Wavelengths and Strange Cuts Reviews

Notes of a Crocodile, dir. Daphne Xu

A blurrily shaking closeup of a woman vibrates with colour as she’s being driven by tuk tuk through the streets of Phnom Penh. A neon blur of signs and streetlights goes by as the woman scans from side to side, the camera’s view mostly obscured by the back of her head, filling the screen with an abstract pattern of light and shadow. The woman counts out money to driver, as the handheld camera spins around as if it too islooking, trying to find something lost. “Do you know about the crocodiles?” she asks a man on the street. This enigmatic scene is the opening of Daphne Xu’s mysterious new short film Notes of a Crocodile, and before this question is answered the film leaves us with many more.

While not strictly an adaptation, Notes of a Crocodile borrows its title from a 1994 Taiwanese novel by writer Qiu Miaojin. The novel depicts the identity, emotional belonging, and self-exploration of lesbians, and uses the metaphor of a "crocodile" to represent a homosexual who is forced to live in disguise in a society that is dominated by heterosexuals. "Crocodile" has since become a self-referential term for lesbians in Taiwan; the crocodile symbolizing a lesbian who appears to be shy on the outside, but lonely on the inside, keeping immobile and quiet to fit into surroundings and not be noticed.

Lai Yuqing plays the searching woman, unnamed in the film. She’s in Cambodia looking for another Chinese woman—who she is and where she might have gone isn’t revealed, but Xu follows her closely on her search through the bustling city and its people, searching, asking “Do you know this woman? Have you heard of the crocodiles?” Xu captures the challenges of travelling in a foreign country, struggling to pronounce words with the help of Google translate. She experiences not just the feeling of being lost and alone in a new place, but also the excitement that this type of adventure can bring—one minute you are watching a local dance performance, and the next you’re being driven across the river to a cafe by a man who sleeps with his mouth open.

The novel Notes of a Crocodile is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire, and Notes of a Crocodile the film borrows this radical freewheeling spirit, juxtaposing natural documentary style with high drama and ambient shots of nature film with musical interludes. While the woman’s search for her missing friend can be taken at face value, the film takes on a richer meaning when imbued with the queer subtext of the novel. “Do you know about crocodiles?” is not simply inquiring after the local wildlife but it is a winking innuendo from a woman who has lost her special friend and is searching for more.

Xu is a Chinese Canadian artist and filmmaker exploring the politics and poetics of place through film, video, photography, and printed matter. She is a fellow at the Harvard University Film Study Center and an associate of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Xu uses her experience with the Sensory Ethnography Lab to plunge her character and her viewers into an overwhelmingly vivid world of sights and sounds. The Sensory Ethnography Lab promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography using analog and digital media to explore the aesthetics the natural and unnatural world, with perspectives drawn from the arts, the social and natural sciences, and the humanities.

In Xu’s camera, the streets of Phnom Penh become a swirl of ambient sound, the roar of motorcycles, and the hum of street noises; the camera whips around and around, as if looking from side to side; disorienting jump cuts giving an alienating feeling. Construction sites become vertiginous looming towers beneath forebodingly cloudy skies.  In more serene passages, Xu borrows from nature: animal sounds, rippling water, and extreme close-up shots of crocodile eyes and teeth. The careful sound design by Reithy Chhour heights the sensory ambience of all these scenes into a threateningly shivering mix.

Xu’s creative practice engages observations of the everyday, and lived experiences of contested landscapes, primarily in contemporary Chinese contexts. By moving a Taiwanese story to Cambodia, Xu alienates her Chinese character in a strange and unfamiliar land. But this also lends Notes of a Crocodile an aching universality for anyone who has ever searched for someone they have loved and lost.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

The Diary of a Sky, dir. Lawrence Abu Hamdan

The skies about Beirut, Lebanon rumble and shake as fighter jets pass by. Some of these Israeli aircraft are so low they break the sound barrier and shatter windows, but most are in the background, their noise hanging in the atmosphere. They are not so loud to be terrifying but frequent enough to cause constant dread to the residents of Beirut. Since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the repeated aerial hum of helicopters, drones and planes has escalated steadily toward terrorizing noise pollution. The Diary of a Sky takes the form of a meticulous video-essay which pieces together evidence of the normalization of this eroding sensorial boundary and exposes the Israeli Air Force for tactics which verge on auditory torture.

Continuing his career as a “Private Ear,” director Lawrence Abu Hamdan gathers years of information in The Diary of a Sky, as he investigates and analyzes audio and video recordings of Israeli fighter jets illegally infringing on the otherwise peaceful skies above Lebanon. Beginning in May 2020, Abu Hamdan recorded every instance of Israeli aircraft in Lebanese airspace in exacting forensic detail—“148 violations of Lebanese airspace by Israeli Air Force. 101 unmanned aerial vehicles, 46 fighter jets and 1 drone. Total flight time: 453 hours 40 minutes,” reads one typically thorough chyron. The UN Digital Library contains information like this on every Israeli incursion airspace for 15 years, and in The Diary of a Sky, Abu Hamdan connects these incursions to events in his life, like how many jets flew by on the day his daughter was born.

Abu Hamdan is a Turner Prize-winning artist and audio investigator, whose work explores the politics of listening and the role of sound in human rights. He creates audiovisual installations, lecture performances, audio archives, photography and text, translating in-depth research and investigative work into affective, spatial experiences. Abu Hamdan created The Diary of a Sky for the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media. Through extended and rigorous investigations, that gather and analyze testimony, recordings and archival documents, he has created a work that exposes and produces evidence of crimes and systems of injustice, perpetrated against individuals and communities that have no voice in official legal contexts.

As Abu Hamdan combines his perceptive monologue with archival records, smartphone recordings, eyewitness testimonies both historical and present, as well as his own shrewd observation, The Diary of a Sky documents contemporary life in Beirut, in which the people on the ground must navigate two domineering and opposing forces. Abu Hamdan supplements his seemingly never-ending footage of airspace incursions with informational quoted from scientific studies, noise specialists, historical precedents, government documents, crowdsourced information missing from the UN database, and a myriad of other sources. All the while, the ingenious sound design by Moe Choucair keeps the rumbling of the weaponized air at a constant rumble—several times he makes the ironically winking mixing decision of having Abu Hamdan’s narration drowned out by incursions of threateningly loud aircraft noises.

Though sound is the focus of the film, visuals created by Abu Hamdan and his small army of cinematographers (some of whom remain anonymous) convey the ever-present threats to the residents. Throughout The Diary of a Sky, Abu Hamdan’s camera remains pointed straight into the sky. The edge of a building takes up a corner of some frames, powerlines crisscross the screen, and an occasional flock of birds flies by, but always he is looking up. Sometimes we see these aircraft flying low in the sky and clear in the camera’s view, sometimes they are more like spectral shapes in the distance, and sometimes they are merely moving lights in the night sky, but always they are violently present over Beirut.

Abu Hamdan calls the increase in jet noise over Beirut an “aural epidemic” and quotes a study explaining how the sound of low flying aircraft can increase cortisol, blood pressure, and heart rate in the people that hear it. Israel is using the noise of its jets to exert territorial dominance over Lebanon; the noise of its fighter jets and unmanned drones are used to broadcast the possibility of violence against the populace, rather than to hit specific military targets. In June 2021 when the skies over Beirut became suddenly silent it was not a relief, but the direct result of the increase of bombing in Gaza; the same aircraft are maximizing their sonic and material destruction elsewhere, destruction that continues to this day.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

The Sunset Special 2, dir. Nicolas Gebbe

The newest section at tiff—an offshoot of Short Cuts named Strange Cuts—could not be a more aptly named home for The Sunset Special 2, director Nicolas Gebbe’s genuinely original mishmash of video game loading screens, 3d modeling, and acid trip psychedelia, spewed onto the screen and left for audiences to unravel once they pick their jaws up on the floor. This is violently inventive, and often inexplicably dense image-making, something truly new in cinema. The Sunset Special 2 examines the role of the individual in the digital world as a consumer and the relation to real world experiences and desires.

Those looking for a plot might be best to avoid The Sunset Special 2, but it plays (at least at first) something like a more adventurous—or more insane—Triangle of Sadness. The main characters, an animated family, board an exclusive luxury cruise presenting itself as the perfect holiday and family utopia. They wander through this tropical paradise in search of the perfect hotel, but before long, the illusions of wealth and comfort break and the crude reality beyond superficial luxury is unveiled. From here, the cruise turns into a psychedelic dream world like collage made in MS Paint during an acid trip, where the children on the cruise ship are nightmarish hobgoblins of raggedy cut-and-paste polygons and the galley is a swirling, gaping black hole.

Gebbe pilfers inspiration liberally from retro cruise commercials, vintage stock footage, found photos, and the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise—his character design is literally borrowed from The Sims. Like these video game avatars, the characters in The Sunset Special 2 seem to be moved by some external force, moving in a linear fashion and not leaving any space for a change in course or new perspective, every choice predetermined. Conversation and behaviour are superficial as if part of a template (an increasingly funny gag finds the characters reacting to everything they see “Amazing” in a stone-faced monotone, every character their own Siri). It all follows a glitchy video game logic, characters pass through walls and through each other, following some unknown controller.

The perfect facades of these virtual worlds are eventually broken open as the characters are analyzed through a glitch heavy, psychedelic aesthetic, that allows a glance into what lies beyond; smilingly bright colours and warm tropical locations are a facade for the darkness that’s underneath. What starts out as recognizable figures devolves into moiré fringes of static, and the characters become increasingly pixelated as if they have been mis-rendered, and eventually fully glitching out. Psychedelic swirls of colour paint the screen as pictures bleed into each other and play over top of one another in an orgy of datamoshed information.

The Sunset Special 2 is part of an experimental audiovisual, interdisciplinary multi-media concept including an interactive art exhibition, web content, YouTube videos, and a VR experience. The project deals with the effects of reality distorting imagery and narrative spread by social media and advertisement through new technologies. The experience also includes a Choose Your Own Adventure-type video game where players can click through and explore the spaces of the cruise ship and hotel themselves. Looking for connections between the digital and analog worlds, The Sunset Special 2 questions the nature of the realities presented to the individual.

Review by: Joshua Hunt