The Time to Live and the Time to Die – Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1985 coming of age picture set in a remote rural Taiwanese town. Released the same year that Hou stared in, and co-wrote, Taipei Story, it feels part of the same conversation that Edward Yang is directing in that film, and later in A Brighter Summer Day. This is not an accident. Chu Tien Wen, a co-writer of Taipei Story and all of Hou’s subsequent films, is a co-writer here and these close friends aspired to forge a new Taiwanese cinema, one that dealt with the problem of Taiwanese national identity whilst exploring new aesthetic ground through film. The Time to Live and the Time to Die was a personal film for Hou, and it’s possible the events are entirely memoir; its Hou’s voice who narrates the film. Hou’s signature long takes and rural seated vantage point make this early film distinct for the time and the environment, but it never achieves the meditative focus or the thematic vastness of his later work.

Art Gallery of Ontario – A first time visit, this is a beautiful, though unintentionally funny building. If you have seen The Square and its X-Royal Art Museum you’ll know why. There were two highlights of this visit, the first being the Henry Moore gallery. It features around two-dozen original plaster sculptures, gifted by Moore to the AGO, populating a single large gallery and placed in scattered positions. The room itself is sanitized by filtered, natural light, giving the grey tones of the marble floor, off-white walls and concrete ceiling an antiseptic feeling. The aging, discolored plaster of the forms Moore created thrive like alien mutations in this atmosphere. Like the later two artists mentioned below, this was my first time encountering a compendium of Moore’s work and I was impressed at his ability to generate tension in the spatial voids of his work, often sculpting the air as much as the material. The second highlight was an exhibit called Mitchell/Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation which focused on the unique relationship between abstract expressionist painters Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle. The exhibit traces their work before, during and after their long romance, plotting how their work mirrored their relationship. Starting at two distinct points, their compositions slowly begin to resemble each other up until they don’t, at which point the couple were splitting apart, living on two different continents. Riopelle’s mosaic-like painting style, achieved by taking gobs of paint and then smearing them with a spatula or knife in mass geometric patterns, was a revelation for me.

Zama – This is Lucretia Martel’s 2017 adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel. I’m unfamiliar with Martel’s work, but this is a fantastic start, even though I much prefer the book (see next week’s Partial Review). The film follows the titular Don Diego de Zama, an administrator in the Spanish Empire stationed in Asunción, as he vies for a promotion to another region, ideally to his family still in Buenos Aires, or best of all to Spain. Zama is repeatedly promised these opportunities, but as the years pass unmarked, the realization of his desolation sinks in. We are never allowed to see inside Zama’s head but Martel externalizes his longing and metaphysical pain through vague illnesses, dilapidated means of living and a mesmerizing non-diegetic sound design. The tactility of the period is possibly this film’s highest achievement. Lastly, I got to see this at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which is quite nice!

Gardiner Museum – The ceramics-only museum in Toronto was hard to pass up. The temporary exhibit was a participatory Yoko Ono “room” that involved meditating with a rock, creating string connections across walls, and mending your own broken ceramics in the spirit of community. It had the strange two-pronged effect of inducing multiple eye rolls yet endearing me to Ono. The main collection, a short history of East-Asian ceramic production followed by a much more in-depth collection detailing how porcelain production technologies and styles permeated through Europe, was most notable for its British collections. The Brits brought an entrepreneurial spirit to porcelain, standardizing popular prints and styles for mass production. This in turn enabled them to serve both a larger middle class market, while stimulating highly inventive ceramics for the elite which necessarily needed to be more impressive. Though I felt like I was looking at the beginnings of Pottery Barn, the British seemed to understand how economics and art could be synthesized in a way that the other European powers did not. The standardized pieces, labeled by the pattern number (of which there were over 500), were the most elegant as well as the most egalitarian.

Avengers: Infinity War – I liked it. . . It was fun in the way that a comic book crossover event can be, but also as meaningless. Though, even if the events of this film are likely to be undone soon, it feels like Marvel is hinting that the events of the next film will result in some permanent consequences. I’m all on board the MCU train at this point. I recommend this review for a more substantive take: Avengers: Infinity War