TIFF

[Aaron Gerow]

What disturbs me about the announcement is less the prospect that the 
TIFF will move away from film (though that is a matter of concern for 
me), but the fact that the proposed venue will be using the term 
"contents." As I note in a brief analysis of recent Japanese government 
film policy that will appear in Midnight Eye (tomorrow?), that policy 
evinces a disturbing emphasis on film as just one of many commercial 
audio visual "contents" to fill the containers of computers, DVD 
players and broadband internet. (I personally hate the word 
"contents"!) There is little thought to the processes of artistic or 
critical thinking that make films better (and presumably, more 
commercially attractive in some cases). That is understandable given 
that most government bureaucrats have historically only defined cinema 
as commercial product, but for those of us who care about cinema in 
other ways, there is something lacking. Calling the new TIFF the 
"International Content Carnival" just really stinks of some bureaucrats 
wanting to turn the film festival into a sales convention.

Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University

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