Today is day three of the Images Festival, Toronto's "festival of moving image culture." 2010 marks the 23rd installment of Images, and also Wavelength's fifth annual collaboration as part of the festival. There's still unfortunately not a lot of awareness within the music scene of the excellent work being presented annually at Images, and especially the huge music component, which is expanding every year. Maybe it is the "e" word that scares people off, since Images is best known for experimental film and video, but the truth is a lot of this very formally challenging work is delivered with a great sense of humour and these screenings and shows are tons of fun.

Tonight (Saturday), of course, is Wavelength 501 — our 2010 co-presentation with Images, notably also our first show since the Wavelength 500 festival and the transition of our series from its traditional weekly Sunday night format to a more open-ended monthly series. We loved Le Cyc, the "graphic novel bike opera" created in 2008 by a Guelph collective affiliated with the Kazoo! music series and the band Elbow Beach Surf Club, and thus we commissioned them to create a new piece — incorporating live music and projections — which will make its world premiere tonight. It's this collective's debut under their new name, Polydactyl Hearts, and also one of the first indie music shows to take place at Workman Arts, a beautiful new space located in the Parish Hall of St. Anne's Anglican Church at Dufferin and Dundas. With high curved ceilings and an arched stage, it's worth coming out to see the space alone.

I was lucky enough to be able to catch the first two days of the festival, as well. Thursday's opening night at the Bloor featured two films: Toronto filmmaker John Greyson's Covered told the heartbreaking story of the first-ever queer film festival in Sarajevo, which was forced to shut down and "run for cover" due to physical attacks and even more serious threats of homophobic violence against the organizers. And the main feature, Kamal Aljafari's Port of Memory, is honestly the first Palestinian art film I've ever seen, and it's interesting that it took an art film to make the Holy Land seem, well, normal and mundane. The family in the film suffers under the lingering threat of eviction, but otherwise go about their daily lives in the port city of
Jaffa quietly and without making much of a fuss about anything. The abrupt and hilarious incorporation of footage from the 1986 Chuck Norris Arab-killing vehicle The Delta Force underscores the message that life in Palestine isn't like living in an action film.

Last night, the spirit of '77 Punk Toronto took over the Workman Arts Centre, with a retrospective on Toronto filmmaker Ross McLaren. Though he's been out of the city for well over a decade, McLaren was nonetheless there at Ground Zero for Toronto punk, and that was located at Crash 'n' Burn, the legendary D.I.Y. venue that existed for one short summer in a basement on Duncan Street. McLaren's footage of Toronto's The Diodes, Hamilton's Teenage Head and Cleveland's Dead Boys (as well as a fourth band, The Boyfriends, he now chooses to disavow) was assembled to create one of the seminal punk films, eponymously titled Crash 'n' Burn. This was not played as part of the Canadian Artist Spotlight per se, which instead focussed on McLaren's punk era (1977-83) formalist experiments such as Weather Building featuring playful angling, lighting and camera mods around the Canada Life Building, familiar to Torontonians as the colour-coded skyward weather report located at Queen and University. The retrospective culminated in Summer Camp, a film for which the sardonic McLaren apologized in advance; describing it as a "Duchampian" gesture, the film consisted of an entire hour of found footage of CBC audition tapes with aspiring teenage actors in Toronto the mid-'60s. Equally painful and hilarious, each of the ten interviews follows the same format: an interview, a memorized script about summer camp, and a bizarre, often morbid scene in which the actor has to console his/her brother who they discover is dying of cancer. Though definitely an endurance test, Summer Camp holds your attention with its tension between the teens' jarringly earnest eagerness to please and their occasional prankster attempts to sabotage the proceedings. "Crash 'n' Burn Karaoke" followed after a break for beers and grilled cheese, and this was almost like being at a punk show, with a mix of old punks and new(er) standing up and cheering between songs. The "karaoke" version of CnB was simply an updated version of the concert film classic, with subtitled lyrics to two Diodes songs added by McLaren, as well as digital hop-and-skip through the hapless Boyfriends.

With the recent publication of Liz Worth's Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, it looks like a long-overdue rediscovery of T.O. punk rock is underway, and last night's event was a great peek into what it looked like to be there during this groundbreaking era. So embrace that spirit of risk-taking and doing things (by) yourself, and go check out some of the Images Festival this week.

— Jonny