!Toronto A Non-linear and Generative Exploration of Toronto in Film

!Toronto is a multi-screen, video-wall installation, which acts as a collaborative extension of a documentary film project initiated by filmmaker Alexandra Anderson (Ryerson, School of Image Arts). During the research phase for her documentary, a database was constructed of films shot in Toronto from early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on this vast collection of fictional film clips, her documentary maps, in a linear fashion, key landmarks and more quotidian settings that are often used to depict Toronto as “somewhere else”. The documentary explores what this means within the discourse of Canadian national cinema and Canadian identity. The title of the documentary, Toronto Hides Itself references the 2003 film Los Angeles Plays Itself, directed by Thom Anderson, which served as a source of inspiration.

!Toronto makes use of custom software and Geographic Information System (GIS) map data to produce an emergent and generative journey through this same database of clips making use of various keywords which have been applied to the clips (such as “Yonge Street”, “Nathan Philips Square”, “Little Italy”, “CN Tower”, “TTC Streetcar”, etc.). Through combining over 1700 clips from narrative cinema, with locative map data, interviews with various filmmakers (Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, and Bruce McDonald to name but a few), and original footage showing the locations as they actually appear outside of fictional film, the project works present a new way of visualizing and understanding the depiction of Toronto on film. The title, !Toronto, stems from commonly used coding syntax where the “!” denotes a negation, or a logical “not”.