This is the final round-up titles in Wavelengths that have documentary roots. Follow these links to Part I and Part II.

Profit motive and the whispering wind by John Gianvito is an astonishingly elegant and elegiac chronicle of the history of the progressive movement in America told through its cemeteries, plaques and monuments, its symbolic and physical landscape (the one we so often overlook). Propelling us on this journey is a wind of change that summons and gathers the images that lend voice to those who have disappeared from cultural memory. Gianvito has crafted a beautiful landscape film that pays homage to those who fought for their beliefs, one whose underlying force and tensions are compelled by the perfidious acts committed by the current US administration. Recently screened to great acclaim at FID Marseille, Profit motive and the whispering wind is, without a doubt, one of the year?s strongest documentaries, experimental or otherwise.

Even more oblique about its politics, AT SEA by veteran 16mm filmmaker Peter Hutton is a high seas expedition which chronicles, in the words of the director, the ?birth, life and death? of a container ship. Silent and sublime in its photographic beauty, the film transforms reality by no other means than its patient observation and poetic eye as it documents ship-builders in Korea, a trans-oceanic trip and finally, ship-breakers in Bangladesh. The intensity of the sea and its bewitching aura casts a spell upon the viewers and juxtaposes, with compelling tension, the harsh work involved in keeping the naval industry afloat. Hutton is a former merchant marine and knows the sea intimately. The film attests to his awesome experiences.

Lastly, epc 2D: sun by John Price is likely the shortest documentary in the festival, if one will allow that. Price is a Toronto experimental filmmaker whose interest lies in the alchemical possibilities of celluloid. He?s also a home movie documentarian, who uses his two children as subjects for his filmic experiments. A day in the park with his family has yielded epc:2D, a 3 minute film shot with a hand-wound 35mm 1920s Russian camera processed by hand. It?s a page from his family album, but one which displays colour from another world. And that, in a sentence, summarizes the unique power of Wavelengths?s documentaries.

We began to note the crossover of docs into TIFF's Wavelengths section in a post two days ago; and we heard from one of these filmmakers Heinz Emigholz, the director of Schindler's Houses. Here's the second of three installments, highlighting other Wavelengths titles with a documentary impulse:

(Picture: The Butterfly in Winter)

ERZHÄLUNG, which translates as ?tale?, by the Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach, is a silent portrait of 80 year-old Italian sculptor Cesare Ferronato whose life we see, is devoted to artistic process. He seemingly lives sequestered from the world in order to create his works of art. The ordinary quickly becomes extraordinary as Schüpbach carves time, light and darkness with his 16mm camera; we sense the encounter between both artists as ephemeral but somehow everlasting. However understated, the power of art and art-making creates a ?tale? not so much told, but felt, and which lingers far beyond the screen.

THE BUTTERFLY IN WINTER is a poignant mother-daughter diptych made by friends Ute Aurand and Maria Lang.  The film is part of a trilogy entitled HERE IT IS VERY NICE AT THE MOMENT begun my Aurand and Lang in 1981. This final part is a diary of Maria?s daily tending of her gorgeous, 96 year-old mother, shot with impossible intimacy by Aurand. Everyday is the same, but everyday is vastly different as the rituals of waking, washing, eating and sleeping harbour the truths of our own humanity.

A resounding humanism also comes to the fore in Chris Chong Chan Fui?s KOLAM (POOL), which he shot in post-tsunami Aceh, Indonesia. Fashioning a touching portrait of a community attempting to rebuild and heal itself following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that shocked the world, Chong Chan Fui focuses on an unnamed hero who helps the rural children face their fear of water and learn to swim again (in an unused, unattended and abandoned USAid basin), despite having lost everything when the sea came blindingly crashing in. The filmmaker?s quiet observations tell us more than any newscast possibly could.

Similarly, Jean-Marie Straub and the late Danièle Huillet (who died last October) transformed an international news item into an atypical indictment of racial injustice. When they were commissioned to make a film for Roberto Rossellini?s centenary, they instead made a cinetract (protest film in the spirit of May ?68) reminding us of two senseless deaths that occurred on the outskirts of Paris, setting aflame the forsaken banlieus. Two teenage boys were burned alive after they jumped into an electrical converter box, fleeing the brutal hand of the French police. Straub-Huillet took their camera to the death site and recorded a ten minute remembrance of the tragedy thereby transforming Rossellini?s EUROPA 51 into EUROPA 2005, 27 OCTOBRE, the date of the senseless deaths.

Check back next week to read about more docs in Wavelengths.

TIFF?s Wavelengths section is a curated presentation of artist-made film and video from around the world. The term ?artist-made? is increasingly replacing the more slippery and elusive idiom ?avant-garde? and the somewhat aloof-sounding ?experimental?. They?re just labels, equally expendable, elastic and appropriated at will. Unlike some of my international colleagues, I actually like the terms, but recognize nonetheless that what counts is the ethos: the mode of expression, the personal means of production, the risk-taking.

This year?s Wavelengths demonstrates a remarkable surge in filmmaking, longform and on celluloid, with many works fitting the documentary label in our unflagging urge to categorize. Incidentally, a similar desire for taxonomy emerges variously from some of the works, as diary, catalogue, high-seas chronicle, photographic roadtrip, artistic encounter, protest, even home movie moments. The avant-garde (yes, I?m using the term) is plunging itself into our visual reality, returning to pictorialism and duration, no doubt as rejoinder to our frighteningly accelerated and digitally multiplied world. Some of these films are slow. In a good way. In a regenerative way that brings us back to reality, that offers up the beauty of the world as something to behold and hold onto, allowing us to withstand the unnecessary and unfortunate ills that plague us.

Heinz Emigholz?s SCHINDLER?S HOUSES, which is part 12 of his colossal PHOTOGRAHY AND BEYOND film series is a 35mm catalogue of forty of R. M. Schindler?s houses built in and around Los Angeles between 1921 and 1952. Through Emigholz?s discerning eyes, we view these Modernist architectural marvels, sometimes in surprising compositions created by the filmmaker, and other times,  in equally surprising or dismaying states of decay caused by neglect, weather and time. The film leads us on a pilgrimage, allowing us to discover this significant body of work, as though they were in situ frescos in Italy. Emigholz renders us the time to observe, contemplate, to become familiar with and to recognize Schindler?s unique architectural vocabulary. He may have studied under Frank Lloyd Wright but his signature style is all is own. Time is cinematic, and hence mechanical, artistic, prescribed, etc?but for the viewer, it?s felt as pure luxury. A cameo by Thom Andersen (seated in his Schindler house) whose award-winning documentary LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF screened in Reel to Reel a few years back, provides a cinematic wink. Here, Los Angeles really is playing itself.

Revisit Doc Blog later this week to learn about other Wavelengths docs. Click here for information about Wavelengths tickets.

The slippery fields that are documentary and experimental film have been flooded?dare I say littered? with theoretical posturings, both having been debated ad infinitum.

Bypassing those tired arguments altogether, I will simply list the remarkable (amount of) documentaries in this year?s Wavelengths programme. In the traditional sense, the avant-garde has always formed to rebel against mainstream structure, inertia (societal or stylistic), and conservative and extremist politics. And sometimes the politics of the image alone were (and are in face of preposterous ?film is dead? current Debord-derived lamentations) the source of rabid urgency. After all, art and poetry are well worth fighting for? All to say that it should come as no surprise that experimental and avant-garde film and video makers continue to question the authenticity of the image and to use their art-making to render stylistically beautiful realities not gamely observed, or to fashion insightful and often risky portraits of today?s fervent disorder and trespasses.

Their tenor needn?t be grave, however, as evidenced by Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari?s witty IN THIS HOUSE, a split-screen meditation on absurd situations arising out of conflict. Having learned of a soldier?s unorthodox (and utterly human) gesture, Zaatari set out to uncover a letter which lay hidden away in a family?s garden, unbeknownst to them. Buried in a mortar casing, the note of gratitude was written by a member of a resistance army who had occupied their house for 6 years while Israeli soldiers occupied the adjacent hills in a town not far from Beirut. Zaatari?s approach to the subject is light and playful; he creates a witty diagrammatic schema in response to many of the subjects? refusal to be on camera. Deeply intelligent, In This House is a rare combination of comical and grave, where humanism triumphs.

UN PONT SUR LE DRINA (above) by Xavier Lukomski is, in my opinion, one of the most important docs from the last year. Shot in sumptuous Cinema Scope on 35mm, the film offers exquisite compositions of an ancient bridge which crosses the Drina river at Visegrad. The stately, picture-perfect beauty is juxtaposed with the sound of a war trial testimony, casting horror upon the splendour of the scene?its impact beyond description. The jarring interplay between sound and image foregrounds the language of film and its unique ability to offer a spare but shocking portrait of the unfathomable ills of the world.

The alchemical possibilities of film are showcased in Nicolas Rey?s brazenly original, feature length essay documentary, SCHUSS!. Ostensibly about alpine skiing, the film unfolds mysteriously, making evident the complex relationships between the leisure industry, the manufacturing of aluminum and the history of the cinema, and culminates in a prescient, yet enigmatic take on global capitalism. As a sagacious chronicler of information, Rey, not unlike his French confrère Chris Marker, makes insightful observations whose connections are not always apparent from the outset. The look of the film is as compelling as the subject matter. With a successive use of filters the super 8mm and 16mm material has a distinctive cast to it which speaks to a meticulously hand-made work of art.

Iranian master, Abbas Kiarostami, with a commission from a young festival in Seoul, Korea called the Green festival, has made THE ROADS OF KIAROSTAMI (right), a low-budget documentary musing on his own art: his precisely composed, luscious black and white landscape photographs. He accepted the commission from this environmentally-themed festival, he said, because he is deeply interested in such issues, as evidenced by the recurring landscape in his films and photos. THE TASTE OF CHERRY, arguably, is one of the best landscape films in the history of the cinema. Kiarostami ruminates on why his landscapes depict winding roads, forged paths leading into the horizon, while a montage of those very photographs fills the screen. This deeply personal essay film references Persian poetry and history, ending on a prescient, shocking note, which leaves us pondering, as most of his works do.

While the four works mentioned above are indisputably (or perhaps more traditionally defined) documentaries, other films and videos in the Wavelengths programme approach a shadier area ?of lyricism drawn from reality. Jim Jennings?s SILK TIES renders a sumptuously black and white New York City, owing to the photographic tradition of William Klein and Robert Frank. Rose Lowder?s impressionistic and frenetic three minutes of film ?the final installments in her miniature BOUQUETS series, offers beautiful landscapes in mechanized fits and starts. 3 MINUTEN, an experiment in cinematic time compression by Austrian artist Christoph Brunner, documents the look and feel of a train platform in Passau, Germany, on three separate occasions for a duration of four hours each. During that time, reality has been compressed, its essence spectrally recorded by Brunner?s custom-made, time-lapse camera for which he has begun a series of short, experimental works examining the transformation of reality through time.

Acclaimed Italian photographer, Olivo Barbieri, has embarked on a new series of works, the first of which will be premiered at Wavelengths. SEASCAPE #1 NIGHT CHINA SHENZHEN 05 (right) is a high definition video portrait of a busy beach in Shenzhen, of its revelers, their movements and that of the waves. A multi-layered document of this real-life composition, this video is as much about the real as it is about the language of art.

A similar ethos is shared by SWIVEL, an impossible, obsessive and whimsical portrait of Shanghai created by Oliver Husain?s incessant panning camera. Digitally stitching together views of the city?s interior and exterior realities, SWIVEL is a far cry from cinéma-vérité, and yet, it shows us more of Shanghai in 15 minutes than do most feature-lengths portrayals.

And lastly, the wondrous THE ZONE OF TOTAL ECLIPSE by multi-talented, Helsinki-based Mika Taanila, who is known for both his experimental films and his documentaries, will be projected in dual 16mm to simulate a real-life solar eclipse. The images of sun and moon (and scientific instruments) were taken from cinematic footage documented by Finnish scientists in 1945. This raw matter, excavated from a Finnish archive, is resurrected by Taanila, who recognized its ability to conjure the sublime, as most celestial phenomena do.

Are these documentary impulses to be acknowledged or allowed? In some cases yes, in some no. I think it depends mostly on who you ask?