Canadian film director Atom Egoyan, shown Sept. 18, 2009, will create a film project based on Fellini's 8½. (Alvaro Barrientos/Associated Press)Canadian film director Atom Egoyan, shown Sept. 18, 2009, will create a film project based on Fellini's 8½. (Alvaro Barrientos/Associated Press)

The Toronto International Film Festival group has commissioned new works by Canadian filmmakers Atom Egoyan and Guy Maddin to celebrate the opening of its Bell Lightbox headquarters.

The Bell Lightbox opens Sept. 12 with an exhibit titled Essential Cinema, based on 100 films chosen by TIFF experts and audience votes.

On Tuesday, TIFF announced details of the free exhibit, including a raft of world premieres and a forum for films by experimental artists including Michael Snow, Douglas Gordon and the Otolith group.

It also released the list, topped by Carl Theodor Dryer's silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, with Orson Welles's Citizen Kane in second place, followed by Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura.

Toronto-based Egoyan, director of Chloe and Adoration, and Winnipeg's Maddin, known for his My Winnipeg and The Saddest Music in the World, are among four filmmakers commissioned to create works that riff on selections from this list.

The commissioned works:

  • Hauntings 1 and II, by Guy Maddin, a series of shorts that recreates fragments of lost or unrealized film masterpieces.
  • 8½ Screens, by Atom Egoyan, a work centred around a key scene in Federico Fellini's masterpiece 8½.
  • E-100, by James Andean and François Xavier Saint-Pierre, a sound installation that combines dialogue culled from the films in the Essential 100 list and other sound effects.
  • Essential Titles, by Barr Gilmore, a five-minute looped motion graphic projection based on opening credits from the Essential 100 titles.

The exhibit will also include a cabinet of curiosities room with objects and clips from films on the Essential 100 list, among them Robert De Niro's cab licence used to research his role in Taxi Driver and original Gone With The Wind storyboards.

Essential 100 (top 10)
1. The Passion of Joan of Arc
2. Citizen Kane
3. L'Avventura
4. The Godfather
5. Pickpocket
6. Seven Samurai
7. Pather Panchali
8. Casablanca
9. Man with a Movie Camera
10. Bicycle Thieves

Among the Toronto premieres of experimental films that make reference to the film list are Stan Douglas's Klatsassin, which refashions Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and Ming Wong's 2009 film In Love for the Mood which is inspired by Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love.

Snow's Slidelength (1969-71), Austrian director Martin Arnold's Jeanne (2003) and Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro (2008), will be featured in the TIFF Bell Lightbox windows facing King Street West.

The list itself, which merges a list created by TIFF experts with another from fans and stakeholders, leans heavily to European directors, including Fellini's 8½, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Guiseppi Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso.

Hollywood entries include Michael Curtiz's Casablanca, Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, and perennial film buff favourite The Godfather.

Canadian films that made the cut include David Cronenberg's Videodrome at No. 89 and Michael Snow's Wavelength at No. 83.