I Hate the Acronym "TIFF"

Posted by Chris H.

The Toronto International Film Fest has been going on for several days now, and, depending who you ask, you may be entirely aware of this fact or completely oblivious. This is the weirdness of living in a city that occasionally has Big Events in the cultural sphere, but isn't really a Big Cultural City (although, as we are reminded ad nauseum, it is a diverse one.) Things happen here that at times warrant international coverage, but most of the resident’s, upon careful inquiry, will respond to questions about it in the vein of “Oh, yeah well, I sort of forgot and it was a busy week at work and my daughter kept me up until 3 in the morning on Wednesday so I had to miss basketball practice Thursday and make it up Saturday and I was really tired and maybe I’ll go next year.” It’s an interesting phenomenon because really, depending where you are situated, it can massively influence your day-to-day living or have absolutely no effect whatsoever.

For anyone who writes about this business, it is, of course, a Very Big Deal. Here at the offices of Formerly-Never-Later, we don’t really write about anything, which is, I guess, a counterintuitive approach to an organization that is purportedly a patron of writing. However, one might think that in the case of a local event of such magnitude some driblet of content might eke out on this site. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong thinking this, but to talk about the Film Fest itself would not really be in keeping with the office’s areas of interest, which are more inclined towards books and rats and poking each other in the ribs when the other person isn’t looking so as to provoke a reaction of surprise, alarm, and impotent rage.

But of course, there are lots of people interested in the Film Fest, and everyone seems to have their own agenda, which is really all the same agenda – how can I be more famous? The crazy people pressing up against restaurant glass to be closer to George Clooney want it, the filmmakers obviously want it - the smaller and more disaffected the better, and the people who write about the Film Fest want it. These are my favorite people, because they try really hard to perform the same function differently. You can probably divide them into two types, the ones who are aware of this and do it anyway, and the ones that are oblivious because they are so caught up in the details of differentiating themselves that they fail to recognize the overwhelming sameness they are caught in.

For some, there’s the films themselves, and you might be lead to believe this is the point, but that seems unlikely. Reviewing a film to me seems a lot like casting a vote. It’s deeply personal and you want to do your best and at the same time almost everyone else doesn’t give a shit and just wants a little consensus. When the Festival is all said and done, most people won’t know anything more about the movies than before it, except that really good and really bad movies draw enough common opinions that you can’t help but hear something. Lost amidst this vague impression of whether the Festival decided a film was “good,” “bad,” or “okay,” are the reams and reams of words in articles, blogs, essays, and what have you. Critics have their “picks” going into the festival, things they really want to see, don’t want to see. Entire books are essentially written about the Festival before there is a Festival, and for a very small crowd this is Useful Information. For everyone else, it’s so much lost noise. It’s unclear what recognition there is for any of the writers engaged in this somewhat crazy and arguably arcane pursuit, except for the likelihood of recognition amongst ones peers, or the even more unlikely prospect of making a “discovery” that no one has made yet. I can only imagine there is some Freemason-like hierarchy that one can rise through by successfully playing this system, but what the rewards are as yet remains unknown. As it is, of course, for someone like myself who remains minimally in tune with the bombardment of information, it’s just an avalanche of do’s and don’t’s and top ten lists and arbitrary critics awards that the critic will likely give some clever allusory name that isn’t so clever. I can’t help but suspect one can get more mileage writing about the people who write about the Toronto International Film Fest rather than the Film Fest itself.

There is a far simpler explanation for why writers bother – and really upon examination I could have written this post in under a hundred words. The possibility of going to parties and hanging around famous people seems awesome, and worth all the associated bullshit required to make it happen. How true that is probably depends largely on whether you spend four hours at the fringe of a conversation with Michael Cera’s brother’s agent, or find yourself alone with Kate Hudson half in the bag. Don’t give up the dream guys, don’t give it up.