The Festival, politics and space: Amigo and Route Irish.

Forsyth, Scott

It was a pleasure to see new films from John Sayles and Ken Loach at this year's Festival. It was a chance to consider the distinguished careers of these tenacious left-wing directors. Their new films were not greeted with much attention or celebration; there even seemed something incongruous about their appearance amidst the hyper-commercialism of the Festival. It made me reflect on the kind of space and spectatorship that the Festival presents each year.

Foremost, in its space, for a few days, the Festival hosts the full marketing machine of modern Global Hollywood, in Toronto. It becomes a setting for a sequence of "galas"--vacuous by definition--inflating mediocre movies into premiere events. Multiplexes are filled weeks later with the lame products. The local print and electronic media devolve into full tabloid inanity, an onslaught of gushing night and day. Celebrity culture supposedly obsesses the city. Crowds of star seekers cluster pathetically outside luxury hotels. One hopes for a Day of the Locusts eruption.

Last year, there was an eruption. The commercial space was unexpectedly politicized by the Festival itself. A Festival spotlight celebrated Tel Aviv, introducing a selection of Israeli films with the language of tourism brochures. In the year of the vicious war on Gaza, the aggressively rightist Israeli government and the ongoing brutality of the occupation, this was obviously provocative. Toronto filmmaker John Greyson initiated a protest that was joined by hundreds of local and international filmmakers, artists, academics and activists. Feelgood Festival coverage was constantly interrupted and even stars took sides; ferocious counter-attacks by Israeli lobbyists and supporters just drew more attention to the politics. What intensified the conflict was that the Spotlight on Tel Aviv fit with the Brand Israel public relations campaign that had been going on in Toronto over the previous year. Ads, billboards and shows in other elite cultural institutions had been part of an effort by the Israeli state to use propaganda and cultural diplomacy to burnish its more than tarnished international image. For example, the Royal Ontario Museum hosted the Dead Sea Scrolls, considered war plunder by the Palestinian Authority and international law; Israeli pottery was featured at the Ceramics Museum. The Israeli strategy rightly figured the slavish devotion to Israel-right-or-wrong by the Conservative federal government and solid support from the Canadian ruling class, who fill the boards of such institutions, would make Toronto a welcome test market. Festival programmers lamely defended their choice but Israeli officials gloated about the PR connection so public embarrassment continued throughout the Festival's 10 days and beyond. It was certainly the most politically exciting Festival ever. (For an excellent analysis of the Brand Israel campaign and the protests in Toronto, see Eric Walberg, "The Battle in Canada: Brand Israel Teflon vs. Palestinian Reality," www.counterpunch.org/walbergl 0192009.html).

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Nothing quite so politically interesting happened in 2010. While the Hollywood apparatus did its predictable job, this Festival was really devoted to self-promotion with the opening of an attractive new Festival centre. This year's Festival space was all about architecture and real estate. Of course, cultural capital has always been connected to real estate. Here, the relationship between an exemplary neo-liberal public institution increasingly dominated by private capital, the constant reinvention of cultural consumption, and the priorities of real estate development and speculation was especially clear. The attractive new centre, in grating corporate branding, the Bell Lightbox, features theatres, galleries, restaurants, bars, a library--always a great aid to CineAction--and, of course, a gift shop; it is a cinephilic funhouse of high-end shopping. And it is all supported by 48 floors of condominium sales

Indeed, that connection between real estate and elite cultural institutions has been particularly prominent in Toronto for the last 5 years. A multi-billion dollar extravaganza of building or re-building the museum, the opera, the art gallery, the conservatory, the Festival, all with celebrity architects and ruling class philanthropy/tax dodging, has re-configured local cultural consumption as a constant marketing spectacle. As often observed, the first world downtown becomes a cultural theme park This lavish re-organization of urban space and architecture for a class-demarcated audience takes place alongside the decades-long assault on the poor and the working class that starves wages, health care, education and social provisions in general. Class struggle in glass and concrete and art.

But the Festival has always had a bipolar organization of space. It functions perfectly as the proscenium for all the stars, fans, red carpets and buzz the publicity machine needs but it also provides the space for the crowds of film buffs, in gregarious line-ups, happily parading downtown streets, filling cinemas to see the latest challenging art film from Argentina or a gory slasher from Thailand. It is a genuinely popular event and those crowds thronged the new centre's opening. The Festival embraces both Adorno's nightmare of industrialized culture and Benjamin's imagining of a kernel of democratic potential. The new centre will expand the Festival's year-round Cinematheque for those film buff crowds as it melds it more firmly to a commercialized imperative.

That democratic space, while hardly 'contested terrain', includes the persistent availability of all those art films, political documentaries and fledgling national cinemas that are still featured amongst the several hundred films. Chomsky always says that the media industry should encompass liberal tolerance to function hegemonically. Nonetheless, it allows us to enjoy premieres by these venerable radical filmmakers. Two films exploring historical and contemporary imperialism in a Festival dedicated to the promotion machine of Imperial Hollywood may be ironic or contradictory but Loach's and Sayles' persistence against corporate domination and marketing marginalization is still something to celebrate.

Ken Loach was one of the prominent supporters of the protest at last year's Festival and he has been active in the international Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement that continues to grow around the world. He, along with screenwriter Paul Laverty, headlined several events with local Palestinian solidarity organizations to promote that movement and to discuss political filmmaking. His new film, Route Irish, is probably the most politically cogent and sweeping condemnation of the invasion and occupation of Iraq in any of the dramatic features made about that war. Those films, notoriously commercial failures, are mostly marked by weak liberal politics. (The Hurt Locker, a generically exciting war film, arguably anti-war in a de-politicised fashion, is the successful exception.) The film bears some comparison, among Loach's films, with Hidden Agenda in utilizing genre conventions - the mystery, the paranoid thriller, the war film - to express its political critique. It allows an avoidance of express didacticism though the politics Is certainly not secretive. The target is the corporate privatization that is the increasing characteristic of neo-liberal imperialist war. The motivation in the plot is an ex-soldier, now mercenary, unravelling the mysterious death of his best friend on the dangerous road to Baghdad, nicknamed Route Irish. The solidarity of brotherly mates is the emotional core that allows Loach to marry genre to the social realism of class that connects all of his work. That realist style--the work with both professional and non-professional actors, including ex-soldiers, the improvisational feel of dialogue honed to class rhythms and cadence, the keen sense of unspoken class structures--intensifies the painful excavation of the mystery. That marriage of styles is sometimes uneven as the machinations of plot become somewhat repetitive. However, the searing portrayal of atrocities and brutalization leads inexorably to a bloody climax of torture, murder, revenge and suicide, far beyond the genre conventions or the singular death that have drawn us into the plot. In the end, there is little mystery and there are no heroes to the rescue. War and imperial profiteering have thousands of victims and have made these soldiers and their corporate bosses "criminal sons of bitches on the make, that's what we have been." The sacrifice of men in war for profit is a difficult subject and Route Irish is a powerful and unsettling film.

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John Sayles' Amigo goes back to earlier days of American imperialism. It is set during the American conquest of the old Spanish empire in 1900 with the occupation of the Philippines. Here, the USA accelerated its supplanting of the old empires of Europe, in the war that inspired Kipling to hail America shouldering "the white man's burden." The frame is historical, novelistic in its ambition to panoramically explore the social totality of one village in personal, social and political detail. All sides of the struggle, the American officers and recruits, the Spanish colonists, the indigenous villagers, including a nuanced sense of class divisions amongst them, the priests, the rebels, the would-be collaborators--are carefully dramatized in an exceptionally literate script--and largely in Tagalog, if that can be imagined in an American film! The complex relationship between conquerors and subjects is delineated with all its confusion and contradiction, even humour. The eponymous 'amigo' tries to negotiate between all sides and fails terribly. The rebels stoically face defeat, confident their resistance will someday prevail. A brutal Colonel reminds his troops that they are winning "the hearts and minds" of these natives, while killing and imprisoning them, words that echo down the ensuing century of invasions and occupations to the present. Sayles thoughtfully presents his American warriors as much more than villainous, however. They believe in ideals of democracy and uplift, just like their British or French imperial cousins with their civilizing missions. America is certain it is the empire that is not an empire, as the Canadian economist Harold Innis put it. Perfectly plotted to a tragic and bitter ending, the film still has a radical optimism in its spirited portrayal of the complexities of imperialism's noble rhetoric and bloody results, and the corresponding inevitability of resistance.

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So there is enough space in the Festival for Sayles and Loach, powerful filmmakers succeeding on their own terms despite the deafening roar of the industry. As long as the condos keep selling, the Festival space will expand in its new centre and still, in its contradictory way, include the political in the world of cinema that it offers.