Handsomely shot in blue and green forest nighttime tones and anchored around a Joan of Arc-gone-absurd or le petit soldat turn by the reliably excellent Sylvie Testud, the World War I-set La France is a prodigiously clever work. Fellow traveler and Guardian writer Max Goldberg wondered to me what Wes Anderson might think of Bozon’s movie. I’d guess that Anderson might even be a bit envious of its musical sequences, which involved live recordings of the bric-a-brac band of outsiders – a platoon of deserters led by the just-as-reliably excellent Pascal Greggory – assembled onscreen. Did I just make some Jean-Luc Godard references? In the Q&A session after the screening I attended, the antic and ever-retro Bozon cited certain directors (John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh) and films (They Were Expendable, in particular) in a manner that couldn’t help but bring Godard’s youthful Cahiers du cinema days to mind.

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The ‘60s, European art films, moptop glories of mod masculinity – Bozon and La France provide as apt a pathway as any to Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. Walker fans know he loves European cinema; he named a song after an Ingmar Bergman movie, after all, and created a score for Pola X by Leos Carax, another semi-reclusive artist in a world where reclusive now means that you don’t whore yourself to fame. (When I interviewed Walker around the time of Tilt’s US release in 1997, he also sang the praises of Victor Erice, which, considering my love of Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive, was a definite case of preaching to the converted.) Perhaps less-known is the fact that, for some strange reason, amongst a number of film critics (especially a pair I look up to: Edward E. Crouse and Chuck Stephens), Walker might be second only to Roxy Music as a fount of musical joy.

Why are the voices of Bryan Ferry and Walker so godlike to movie lovers? I can’t say, and Stephen Kijak’s documentary about Walker concerns itself with more tangible matters, such as Walker’s increasingly imaginative and unconventional recording methods. Working with cinematographer Grant Gee (whose documentary Joy Division was a hit at the Toronto fest last month), Kijak crafts a stylish and baroque portrait. His best idea – a great one – is to film various interview subjects as they listen to Walker’s music. This tactic yields some enjoyably instinctive responses from David Bowie, and in general is as exciting as you’d think listening to records with pop stars and cult musicians would be. As for Walker, he very carefully maintains his enigmatic rep, spilling next-to-nothing beyond ambiguous hints when expressing regret about his longest stretches away from music.

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man piles on the praise to such a degree that when someone finally registers a complaint, it’s almost shocking. That someone is Marc Almond, who, along with Julian Cope, helped keep the Walker love and mystique alive in the ‘80s and early ‘90s via compilations and interview remarks. Almond says he hates Tilt, which leads me to believe he probably despises last year's follow-up, The Drift. The movie is edited in a way that condemns Almond (a devotee of Charles Baudelaire, Truman Capote, and others) as a conservative in avant-garde clothing, which seemed a bit unfair, especially since he was reacting against what he perceived to be the stuffy classical music air or entrapments of Walker’s most recent works. As a former pop artist still creating songs for his own voice, Walker is charting his own territory, but the music he’s making now wouldn’t be totally out of place next to a recording of Alban Berg’s Lulu. (Which I love – I wonder if Almond likes Berg, or any opera?)

The question-and-answer session following Scott Walker: 30 Century Man was one of the best I encountered during VIFF, because the audience was filled with Walker fans who really wanted to know more and get answers. One happenstance discovery was that Kijak’s love of Scott Walker bloomed in early-‘90s San Francisco (a few years before I wrote about Walker and the reissue It’s Raining Today in this paper), where he and some friends briefly put on a Scott Walker night at the Casanova Lounge on Valencia. If I’d known about that club, I’d have been there in a heartbeat, or – to borrow a rhythmic reference from Kijak’s documentary – in the beat of a fist pounding a slab of meat. Walker’s music probably sounded great at the Casanova Lounge, but during Kijak’s documentary, it sounded like it was made to be heard in a movie theater.

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If only the director Q&A following Jose Luis Guerin’s Dans la ville de Sylvia had been as lively as the one for Kijak’s Scott Walker doc; luckily, I got out of the theater just before another dumb question could deflate the contact high of one of the best examples of pure cinema I’ve encountered since at least Akihiko Shiota’s undersung 2001 movie Harmful Insect. As gorgeous as the many -- and I mean many -- women it pays tribute to (which, believe me, is saying something), Guerin’s movie is the kind that’s meant to be seen and then not talked about, so its very specific view of a city can influence and inform the way you see, hear, move through, and flirt with the world outside of the movie theater. Stripping his story down to the basics of boy-spots-girl and boy-follows-girl allows Guerin to craft a poetic (as opposed to a typically assaultive and thuddingly literal) soundtrack and focus on painting with his camera.

I detected what seemed like traces of some movies I love in Dans la ville de Sylvia, such as Eric Rohmer’s Rendezvous in Paris (though this time the almost rendezvous is in Strasbourg), maybe even Bruce Baillie’s On Sundays, and especially Agnes Varda’s sublime Cleo from 5 to 7, which also winds its way to a meeting on a train. It would be fun to pair Guerin’s film as a double feature with Varda’s, or with Friday Night by Claire Denis. Set to act in the next movie by another gifted Spanish filmmaker, Honor of the Knights director Albert Serra, Mark Peranson is the first programmer to present Dans la ville de Sylvia with Unas fotos en la ciudad del Sylvia, a silent black-and-white slide-show of sorts that revisits the scene of the romance from a making-of and autobiographical angle. Its best intertitles are those in which Guerin shares some of the ideas behind his practice.

Midway through Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia, I reached my threshold in terms of cinema as girl watching; a shame, since apparently it wound up in the realm of Petrarch, whom my boyfriend has recently been reading. But it was revealing – and occasionally hilarious -- to find myself in the festival’s hospitality/breakfast room at the same time as Guerin the following morning. Revealing because Guerin has a strong and highly individual presence, one that suggests he scarcely notices men unless one comes up to address him. (At least one woman I've mentioned this trait to just about whooped and applauded in response.) Hilarious because even though it was around 9 a.m., the women in the room were flirting with him as if it was past 9 p.m. One even told him that the tea he was drinking would bring vitality. (Ever ardent, he had a camera with him to film her.) Casanova lounge, indeed.