‘A sensorial delight’: Cinema professor premieres new film at the Toronto International Film Festival

Tomonari Nishikawa is not your average cinematographer. For starters, his work is — by his own admission — imperfect.

“If I made a mistake, a mistake should be part of that film. The way I work on a project is very different from commercial filmmakers; they will need to plan out everything that they are going to reveal,” said Nishikawa, an associate professor of cinema at Binghamton University. “When they make a mistake, they are going to reshoot the same scene again and again. But I don’t work in that way in most of my projects.”

Despite this difference, his works have found success with a dedicated audience.

Nishikawa’s films have been shown at film festivals across the world, including such locales as Hong Kong, London, New York and Singapore. His most recent film, Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke, will have its world premiere later this week, debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). He’s shown series at reputed forums, like the Museum of Modern Art P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, and has been an artist-in-residence at a number of esteemed programs, such as the MacDowell Colony.

He’s also received a number of accolades for his works. One of his films received the grand prize at the Curtocircuíto International Film Festival in 2015 and another won the 2017 Jury Award at Hong Kong International Film Festival.

In addition to his own personal works, Nishikawa has also been a curator since 2006. He has stewarded programs in Canada and Japan, and he’s served as a juror for several events, including the 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival and the 2018 Milwaukee Underground Film Festival. He’s even co-founded two festivals of his own: the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video and Music Festival (KLEX), and Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image, the latter of which was first held at the Spool Contemporary Art Space in Johnson City in 2011.

Nishikawa received his master’s in cinema from the San Francisco Art Institute, but his early years of study in the United States began in Utica at Mohawk Valley Community College. Although he had heard that “every college in the U.S. has a cinema major,” Mohawk Valley did not.

He decided, instead, to focus on photography, which would go on to impact his film work.

“At the time I was there, from 1999 to 2001, they didn’t offer a course about digital photography, only analog,” Nishikawa said. “I learned not only how to take pictures, but also darkroom techniques. I could understand more about the medium and the format, and that may be the broad base of my artistic practice using a celluloid medium.”

These days, Nishikawa’s films are mostly in 8 mm or 16 mm film, and revolve around documenting not just content or subject, but the process it requires to use a specific medium or technique.

“I’m more interested in the connection,” Nishikawa said. “Here’s a subject, and there are millions of different methods to show it. I want to choose the one that would work for this subject, but also the process and the concept.”

His films are often described as avant-garde because of their ambiguous messaging. Avant-garde, which Nishikawa describes as “an attitude,” is usually defined as new, experimental ideas. One way Nishikawa achieves this, for example, is by scratching his film physically to produce both visuals and sound and then projecting it using a 16 mm projector.

Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke, Nishikawa’s newest film, uses a similar method to tell its story.

Filmed in Japan, this six-minute film is deceptively simple. Described on the TIFF website as “rhythmic and hypnotic,” Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke begins as a fireworks show captured during a summer festival on Super 16 mm film. Nishikawa’s twist focuses on the process of filming; through a splicing and editing process, the viewer hears “the sonic imprints left by the same images on the optical soundtrack” at a distinct, but delayed, rhythmic beat.

All the footage comes from two 100-foot “rolls” of film, which Nishikawa alternated every 26 frames. This number, which translates to roughly a second, is normally the length that marks the distance between the projector’s gate and the position of the photocell that reads the visual information for sound on the physical film itself; this editorial process serves to remove the gap.

Jesse Cumming, who this year took on the position of associate curator of the Wavelengths program, which Nishikawa’s film is part of, said they were “thrilled” to add it, and remarked on Nishikawa’s method.

“It’s very simple in concept, but executed with the highest degree of skill,” Cumming said. “Some of it is layered in superposition, but most interesting is the complex play with sound that he uses, where the images bleed onto the optical track with the 16 mm. There’s this rhythmic interplay between these bursts of light but then also these bursts of sound at the same time. It’s purely a sensorial delight.”

Although the Wavelengths program contains a number of distinctive styles, not everyone is able to engage with the material. Cumming is adamant, however, that the works themselves are a boon to the festival and to the individuals who experience them.

“The best responses are [from] people who approach the work with curiosity and generosity and don’t have expectations, but are willing to be patient and to try something that they’re not expecting, appreciate artists who are trying to see the world differently and to give themselves the space to experience that as a spectator.”

Due to their complicated nature, too, analog movies are rarely projected on big screens. In fact, even at TIFF, the Wavelengths section is only presented once during the festival run, although both Nishikawa and Cumming expressed hope that the film is noticed by other curators and picked up to run in other venues.

Meanwhile, however, Cumming finds that the program is well-received for its unique style, describing it as a “special moment” in the digital landscape that TIFF is slowly evolving toward.

“They’re always very popular screenings, which is very heartening. People are always clamoring to get into the door,” Cumming said. “Sometimes you’ll be in a cinema with 300 people and you could hear a pin drop — and you can tell that it’s because there’s just a tremendous amount of reverence for the work on screen.”

Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke is part of Wavelengths 2: Sundown, a special program of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which premieres Sept. 9, 2023. This year, the program is described as probing “the hallucinatory underpinnings of the world around us and its layered, incongruous temporalities.”