Approaching the Little Free Librarylike structure in front of a house in the Wychwood neighbourhood, you might expect to find outdated software manuals, a few James Patterson potboilers and a couple of copies of “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Instead, this wooden box resting on a post, facing the sidewalk, features a peephole through which light emits. Stooping slightly to a not-quite-comfortable position and pressing an eye against the hole, you can watch a film by one of Canada’s premiere experimental filmmakers playing on a tiny digital screen inside.
“It may not look like it, but this is a step toward building a bus,” said architect Noah Gotlib, a member of the BUS Collective, the group behind the Little Free Cinema.
BUS Collective — which also includes filmmaker Rennie Taylor and architects Wyatt Armstrong, Ian Pica-Limbaseanu and Abhishek Wagle — created this public art installation in January as an inaugural project dedicated to expanding the parameters of film exhibition in Toronto. A bus that screens films, or a “mobile gallery,” as Gottlib calls it, is the collective’s eventual goal. But for now, there’s this one Little Free Cinema, with 10 more planned across the city.
“We want to provide spaces for artistic display that are able to circumvent the hyper-commodification of real estate in this city,” Gotlib told the Star. “If institutional funding is being cut, we need to create alternative mechanisms for being able to show art.”
The prototype was put together economically, in keeping with the collective’s goals of increasing the accessibility of film in the city.
The design is simple: through a hole in the back of the wooden box, an electrical cable runs to an outdoor outlet. Inside, a tiny monitor connects to a media player that runs films on a USB key. So far, the design does not include sound, so the curation is limited to silent titles, a fitting callback to the days of the kinetoscope.
March’s 24/7 programming, chosen by Taylor, was a work by the Canadian experimental filmmaker Barbara Sternberg, adapted from her landmark 69-minute piece “Through and Through” (1992). Looking through the peephole, you could see the melting Toronto landscape captured in frenetic bursts.
Former experimental film officer at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Sternberg has seen the ability to exhibit challenging work in the city shift many times over the years.
“There’s been a real decline in numbers — what’s available, what’s shown,” Sternberg said. “Rents in Toronto go up and up, and opportunities for small-scale, inventive, interesting work go down and down.”
Sternberg cites the AGO’s Jackman Hall no longer presenting film programs, but the trend stretches across the long history of Toronto film exhibition, despite some resilient outliers. Funnel Film Collective, the basement venue that showed avant-garde work from all over the world, has been closed since 1989, and the community-run Projection Booth Cinema shut down in 2016.
“The city’s screening options really changed over COVID,” said filmmaker Mark Loeser, whose “Sugar Beach” (2011), a view of the titular beachfront exposed through several pinholes in a matte, screened in February. “It was already expensive (to screen films), and it’s so much more expensive now.”
Taylor and Gotlib alighted on the idea for the Little Free Cinema when they stumbled across the New York location of the Peephole Cinema, with outposts in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The basic premise — a box with a hole the size of your eye containing a tiny screen with a silent film running on a loop — has been preserved, but BUS collective wanted its version to fit Toronto’s urban landscape. The structures may resemble Little Free Libraries, but the painted eye on the front recalls nothing so much as a Neighbourhood Watch sign.
“The Toronto Neighbourhood Watch signs have some of the best graphic design for mass surveillance I’ve ever seen,” Pica-Limbaseanu said with a laugh.
BUS Collective wants to flip this association from “Neighbourhood Watch” to something along the lines of “Neighbourhood, watch!” In this respect, while the Little Free Cinema fits into a familiar Toronto cityscape, its moving images are unlike those you might otherwise encounter in the urban outdoors.
“Everything is trying to maximize your attention,” Gottlib said, referring to the digital billboards that tower over spaces like Sankofa Square.
“It’s kind of an assault,” Sternberg added.
Instead, the Little Free Cinema poses a kind of invitation to pedestrians to peek in for as long as they like, offering a moment for a private artistic experience. Peering through the hole, passersby can get a glimpse of their city caught at odd angles, rendered in the eclectic styles of the Canadian experimental film community.
Sternberg’s “Through and Through,” which played throughout March, makes use of rapid-fire images of the changing seasons — ice freezing and melting, flowers budding and blooming, the years turning over at breakneck speed before being interrupted with a quote from Gertrude Stein, as the cycle loops all over again. There’s something simultaneously exhilarating and mournful about the procession, as Sternberg cues us to appreciate the death and rebirth of each passing second, season and year.
“Peering through the eyehole felt like seeing a shaky vision of what would hopefully arrive in a few weeks,” Winnie Wang, film critic, Star contributor and pedestrian, told me. “What made it feel especially immersive was the nearby sounds of slow drips from the snow melting and footsteps of passersby and their dogs, as if my surroundings anticipated the film.”
Viewing “Through and Through,” you couldn’t help but feel a sense of hope, against all evidence, that the current austerity and decline in experimental film venues in the city could be a preview of tomorrow’s abundance. Either way — no matter how slim the margins for artistic activity in the city get, the Little Free Cinema is scaled to survive.
“It’s about leaving people with a piece of artistic infrastructure,” Gottlib said.
BUS Collective is already building more Little Free Cinemas, and is looking for spaces — front lawns, parks, cafes, restaurants — to accommodate them.
“We want them to have a life of their own afterward,” Pica-Limbaseanu said.
This month’s film, “diario de verano (summer diary),” by Cristal Buemi and Franci Duran, employs the phytogram method, a processing technique in which local plants are used in the chemical development of the film, for its exploration of the filmmakers’ ties to the land and neighbourhood.
Responding to a time of decreasing public funds for the arts and increasing rent for artists, BUS Collective aims for resiliency by making smallness, temporariness and mobility its mandate.
“We’re planning to expand this,” Gottlib said. “We want to turn this into a new form of urban furniture or a utility that you’ll begin to see around the city.”
For the location of the Little Free Cinema, contact BUS Collective on Instagram @buscollective.
