Sunday, May 10, 2015

Chiho Aoshima's "Rebirth of the World" at Seattle Asian Art Museum: May 2 - Oct 4 | "Classic French Film Noir: Honor Among Thieves" at Seattle Art Musuem: Apr 2 - May 21


The Japanese urban art underground finally hit the larger US museum-going audience and critical regard with exhibits throughout the mid-2000's assembled by the KaiKai KiKi collective and it's cultural figurehead, Takashi Murakami. Who's "Little Boy: The Art of Japan's Exploding Subculture” exhibit and and more recently the Brooklyn Art Museum's “©Murakami” retrospective covered in the New York Times "Watch Out, Warhol, Here’s Japanese Shock Pop", brought Japan's Otaku-generation anime, design, sculpture, video art to a larger western audience. But it was the proceeding "SuperFlat" touring exhibit that introduced many people to the blissfully macabre transposition of dream and waking world seen in the vibrant surrealistic work of another KaiKai KiKi member, Chiho Aoshima. Her large scale murals and video pieces exhibited a enraptured contradiction in palette, style and subject matter the Los Angeles Times called, "Chiho Aoshima: At Once Childlike and Monstrous". For those who missed it the first time around, a decade later her jubilant psychedelia has returned to Seattle for the Asian Art Museum's, "Rebirth of the World". Of special note the exhibit includes the expansive "Takaamanohara", a second foray into video art again with New Zealand animator Bruce Ferguson as the follow-up to 2005's "City Glow".  

Seattle Art Museum's cinema programming also deserves a mention, as this past season's calendar has been filled with quality repertory and archival works, beginning with a series by one of the defining voices of Italian neo-Realism, "Blowing Up Cinema: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni". Including the masterful existential puzzlework of "L'Eclipse", the urban feminism of "Le Amiche", the part murder mystery, part postmodern gender commentary classic "Blow Up", another great classic in the form of the tragically hip, haunting observation on the modern disaffected and shattered romances, "L'Avventura" and the surrealistic experimental narrative of alienation and unease set against France's modernist industrial landscapes, "Red Sands". Concurrently SAM has also been running a "Classic French Film Noir: Honor Among Thieves" series, often starring the ineffable cool of Jean Gabin, in seminal genre establishing, and even later color neo-Noir by many of the great names who worked in the style, including Jacques Becker, Louis Malle, Jean Becker, François Truffaut and the master of them all, Jean-Pierre Melville. The nine titles in the series spanning almost four decades of cinema from the genre, "Golden Marie", "Honor Among Thieves", "Bob the Gambler", "Elevator to the Gallows", "The Finger Man", "Army of Shadows", "Le Cercle Rouge", "One Deadly Summer" and "Confidentially Yours".

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Seattle International Film Festival: May 14 - Jun 7


It's that time of the year again! SIFF once again arrives bringing a spectrum of cinema from across the world. This year, like the string of years since 2008, sees a qualitative diversity-dip in the percentage of foreign cinema, arthouse, auteur and all things challenging, cutting edge, progressive or adventurous. These were content agendas that once had prominence within the festival, making it of a caliber to challenge Toronto and New York. Those times, I fear, are officially over. That said, this year's fest isn't as painfully omissive as 2011 or 2010 for that matter. We saw a period of relief from the lackluster programming described above which waned a bit in 2012 and 2013 suggesting a further trend in that direction. For last year's festival, their 40th Anniversary was celebrated with what seemed to be a renewed vision as their strongest programming in almost a decade. Nonetheless this year we're again seeing that same glut of middle-ground contemporary romances, clever quirky dramas for the sub-Sundance sect and a lot of filler seemingly there to entice some imagined Northwest demographic out of their Bellevue hobbles and inner-city condos.

By way of example, two west coast festivals that have produced smaller, yet significantly more qualitative festivals have established a standard that can clearly be seen from year to year. The San Francisco International Film Festival concluding just this week features not only a diverse body of work, ranging from commercial entertainment to the experimental, embracing both award winning auteur works, genre film and potential indie breakouts. A cross section of the programming can be seen in their selection of Dietrich Brüggemann's award winning "Stations of the Cross", Tsui Hark's martial arts adventure, "The Taking of Tiger Mountain", another award winning and critically lauded festival highlight in Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's "The Tribe", the rising star of Alice Rohrwacher and her most recent, "The Wonders", visual and comic artist Dave McKean's second directorial effort, "Luna", Sergei Loznitsa's highly priased documentary, "Maidan" and extreme Asian cinema is represented with Tetsuya Nakashima's "The World of Kanako". Our neighboring city to the south, though smaller in scale and less urban in some sense, has a strong showing in their Portland International Film Festival again this year. It should be established that with each of them concluding some time before, the content of in each of these festivals was made available to the programming directors at SIFF. They simply made choices otherwise. Which begs the question, what kind of thinking is behind choosing to not program something like Pedro Costa's Film Comment and Sight & Sound year-end charting, "Horse Money"? Or thrilling documentary insights into modern China like J.P. Snaidecki's "The Iron Ministry"? Smaller, developing directors and fringe cinema is also represented in PIFF with works like Tudor Christian Jurgiu's "The Japanese Dog", Mipo O's "The Light Shines Only There" and Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo's "Nuoc 2030". Both producing festivals of a caliber that SIFF has seemingly un-learned as they continue to go astray of the kind of vanguard seen in the international festival circuit of our neighboring cities.

But there remains a handful of legitimate, original, challenging, crafted cinema to be found in here too. Seattle International Film Festival in the past has existed as a focal-point of visionary cinema curatorialship, with the resources, funds and legacy to be hugely influential. This year I found some 15 or so films of interest, curiosity or gravitas that I plan to attend, running the spectrum from directors of note, archival restorations and new developing artists. As a consequence the majority of the titles listed below are simply films of curiosity, rather than considered essential viewing. Not the least compelling year on record, but not one even approaching the par established with SIFF's own stellar run spanning the decade of 1997-2007. I continue to be enthused about their home at the SIFF Cinema Uptown and expanded screens between the newly acquired SIFF Cinema Egyptian and Film Center. Their curation for these year-round venues has exhibited the scope of SIFF, with this year's Recent Raves series suggesting a visionary path forward for the cinema. Unfortunately the 41st Seattle International Film Festival doesn't continue this high standard.

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Saturday, May 16
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10:00 AM - Hiromasa Yonebayashi "When Marnie Was There"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
WHEN0516

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26797


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Saturday, May 16
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12:30 PM - Emeric Pressburger & Michael Powell "The Red Shoes"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
REDS0516

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26798

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Saturday, May 16
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6:00 PM -  Setsuro Wakamatsu "Snow on the Blades"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
SNOW0516

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26800

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Saturday, May 16
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9:30 PM - François Ozon "The New Girlfriend"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
NEWG0516

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26801

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Saturday, May 16
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12:00 AM - Corin Hardy "The Hallow"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
HALL0516

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26802

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Sunday, May 17
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4:30 PM - James Benning "Natural History"
SIFF Film Center Festival
NATU0517

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27329

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Sunday, May 17
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7:00 PM - Bill Morrison "Beyond Zero: 1914-1918"
SIFF Film Center Festival
BEYO0517

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27335

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Monday, May 18
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7:00 PM - James Whale "The Old Dark House"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
OLDD0518

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26808

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Monday, May 18
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7:00 PM - Yukun Xin "The Coffin in the Mountain"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
COFF0518

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26974


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Tuesday, May 19
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9:30 PM - Esteban Roel & Juanfer Andrés "Shrew's Nest"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
SHRE0519

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27196

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Wednesday, May 20
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7:00 PM - Sergey Parajanov "The Color of the Pomegranates"
Harvard Exit
COLO0520

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26899

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Thursday, May 21
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4:30 PM - Kutluğ Ataman "The Lamb"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
LAMB0521

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26816

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Thursday, May 21
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9:30 PM - Joshua Oppenheimer "The Look of Silence"
Harvard Exit
LOOK0521

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26902

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Friday, May 22
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6:30 PM - György Pálfi "Free Fall"
Harvard Exit
FREE0522

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27056

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Friday, May 22
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7:00 PM - Oren Moverman "Time Out of Mind"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
TIME0522

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26986


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Friday, May 22
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12:00 AM - Rodney Ascher "The Nightmare"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
NIGH0522

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26822

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Saturday, May 23
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11:00 AM - David Gordon Green "Manglehorn"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
MANG0523

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26826

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Saturday, May 23
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1:15 PM - Christian Braad Thomsen "Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands"
Harvard Exit
FASS0523

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26906

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Saturday, May 23
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5:30 PM - Matthias Bittner "War of Lies"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
WARO0523

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27063

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Saturday, May 23
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8:00 PM - Szabolcs Hadju "Mirage"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
MIRA0523

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27132


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Saturday, May 23
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9:45 PM - Fabrice Du Welz  "Alleluia"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
ALLE0523

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26827

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Sunday, May 24
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11:00 AM - Satyajit Ray - The Apu Trilogy  "Song of the Little Road"
2:00 PM - Satyajit Ray - The Apu Trilogy  "The Unvanquished"
4:30 PM - Satyajit Ray - The Apu Trilogy  "The World of Apu"
AMC Pacific Place 11
SONG0524 / UNVA0524 / WORL0524

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27218
http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27219
http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27220

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Sunday, May 24
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9:15 PM - Alan Mak & Felix Chong "Overheard"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
OVER0524

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26832

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Sunday, May 24
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12:00 AM - Craig Denney "The Astrologer"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
ASTR0524

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26833

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Monday, May 25
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9:30 PM - Shim Sung-bo "Haemoo"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
HAEM0525

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27369

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Thursday, May 28
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4:00 PM - Daniel Garcia & Rania Attieh "H."
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
HHHH0528

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26996


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Thursday, May 28
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6:00 PM - Robert Siodmak "The Dark Mirror"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
DARK0528

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26991

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Thursday, May 28
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8:00 PM - Max Ophüls "Caught"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
CAUG0528

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26992


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Friday, May 29
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9:30 PM - Lee Kwang-kuk "A Matter of Interpretation"
Harvard Exit
MATT0529

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26929


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Saturday, May 30
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9:45 PM - Anucha Boonyawatana "The Blue Hour"
Harvard Exit
BLUE0530

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26934

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Sunday, May 31
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12:00 PM - Chad Gracia "The Russian Woodpecker"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
RUSS0531

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27083


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Sunday, May 31
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7:15 PM - Christian Petzold "Phoenix"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
PHOE0531

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26858

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Sunday, May 31
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8:30 PM - Batin Ghobadi "Mardan"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
MARD0531

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27157

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Monday, June 01
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7:00 PM - Ousmane Sembène "Black Girl"
Harvard Exit
BLACG0601

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26941


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Tuesday, June 02
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4:00 PM - Matthew Heineman "Cartel Land"
Harvard Exit
CART0602

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27133

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Tuesday, June 02
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9:15 PM - John Pirozzi "Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
DONT0602

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27015

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Wednesday, June 03
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6:30 PM Pan Si Dong "Cave of the Spider Women"
7:30 PM - Ho Meng Hua "Cave of the Silken Web"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
CAVE0603

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27094

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Wednesday, June 03
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9:30 PM - Fatih Akin "The Cut"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
CUTT0603

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26867

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Friday, June 05
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7:00 PM - Naoki Kato "2045 Carnival Folklore"
SIFF Film Center Festival
20450605

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27327

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Friday, June 05
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7:00 PM - Crystal Moselle "The Wolfpack"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
WOLF0605

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26871


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Saturday, June 06
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9:30 PM - Jonas Arnby "When Animals Dream"
Harvard Exit
WHEN0606

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=26978

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Sunday, June 07
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12:00 PM - Hao Zhou "The Chinese Mayor"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
CHIN0607

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27107


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Sunday, June 07
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2:30 PM - Sergei Eisenstein "Que Viva Mexico"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
QUEV0607

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27103

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Sunday, June 07
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5:00 PM - Peter Greenaway "Eisenstein in Guanajuato"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
EISE0607

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27031

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Sunday, June 07
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8:45 PM - Alberto Rodríguez "Marshland"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
MARS0607

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=345&id=27271


Sunday, May 3, 2015

Wire's new album "Wire" & US Tour: May 26 - June 10 | The Drill Chicago: Jun 11 - 13


Genre creating post-Punk innovators, Wire return to the US after 2013's The Drill: Seattle wherein they recreated their The Drill: London festival with collaborative performances with Earth, Chastity Belt the Pink Flag Guitar Orchestra realization of their 1991 album, "The Drill". This tour's destination of choice bringing them to the midwest for the second stateside iteration of the three day festival, The Drill: Chicago featuring an extended lineup and collaborations with Tim Hecker, Ken Vandermark and Disappears. In cryptic fashion, their 14th and newest album titled, "Wire" is both a stripped down representation of their core elements and an expansion on the sonic path they began down in what can be considered their 4th iteration, a phase of their music initiated in 2002 with the release of the "Read & Burn" series. Previous tours have have shown that they draw from the totality of their recorded enterprise, pulling from everything as far removed as 1977's "Pink Flag" and 1978's "Chairs Missing" of almost four decades past. This totality representing Wire's mission to innovate, warp, mutate and play with pop music's parameter's, creating through the 80's and 90's unclassifiable post-Punk and experimental fusions, like "154" and such striking amalgamations of electronic and rock as 1987's "The Ideal Copy" and the gorgeously lush orchestrations of "A Bell is a Cup" to their early IDM pop fusions as WIR and the "So and Slow It Grows"  EP with LFO and The Orb, all the way back around to the present day, as a loud rocking trio who's first album proper was 2003's, "Send". All the while producing a substantial body of quality solo works spanning decades, like that Graham Lewis' ambient neo-pop as He Said, Bruce Gilbert's brilliant "Music for Fruit" and collaborative side projects like the DaDa inspired experimental pop-Concrete of Dome. Theirs is a legacy that's beyond quantification. It's safe to say there'd be no opening of the floodgates of mathy post-Rock revolution like we saw in the 90's without them. Perhaps NPR's Barry Walters said it best; "If you hear the occasional imprint of subsequent musicians (My Bloody Valentine's layered buzz, Blur's quaint Britpop, Godspeed You! Black Emperor's monumental drones), that's because those are among the many bands this one birthed. The 99.9 percent might not yet know it, but it's a Wire world after all."

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Peter Brötzmann with Hamid Drake & William Parker at Seattle Art Museum: May 13


One of towering figures of the post-BeBop Jazz landscape, the 'saxophone colossus' Peter Brötzmann, who graced cover of the The Wire twice last year with a series of bold and impassioned interviews as well as a Primer for the magazine, is back at Seattle Art Museum with two other major players in modern Jazz. The legendary percussionist for many of the groundbreaking albums of the last four decades, Hamid Drake, and upright bassist and Jazz polymath, William Parker as part of Earshot Jazz' excellent Spring season programming. An ideal introduction to the man and his work can be had in Bernard Josse's, "Soldier of the Road" on Peter Brötzmann and his role as a pivotal figure in shaping the contemporary Euro Free Jazz scene. It does exactly what a music docu should do; iterate the cultural/political context that gave birth to he movement, explore it's various philosophies, depict the movement's cast of major players and show them in action. Namely Brötzmann with a rotating cast spanning half a century of players and collaborators. From his accounting his earliest childhood memories of German occupied Prussia and then Russian occupied Prussia and at a young teenage year, realizing his love of art stemming from a freedom that opposed the Nationalism and Fascism that inspired the war. Later to his taking up the Clarinet and painting and packing himself off to art school... only to land right in the middle of the BeBop and Hard Bop scene and then later at the vanguard of the Free Jazz movement.

And then the 60's hit and there's not only players on both sides of the Atlantic, but audiences and collaborators from England, to France to Belgium to Germany and a inquisitive young audience, who might not necessarily 'get it' but are looking for the unheard and the liberating. Ad to that the corresponding movements in the visual arts, notably Fluxus and Brötzmann is right there in the fray of things making a strong connection with the ethos of the movement. From the Punk Rock noise and fury of the Machine Gun albums to the equally powerful 80's lineup that was Last Exit to his later years, still as fiery, still as invested, still blasting away on his horn. But as the documentary depicts, with an equilibrium tempered by his lifelong love of walks in nature, photography, botany and his deep passion for isolated individual time in the studio working on graphic works and abstract landscape painting very much of the German Neo-Expressionist school. All of this balanced with time spent touring and collaborating with some of the fieriest, loudest, most dynamic and adventurous players in the world; Evan Parker, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Fred Van Hove, Paal Nilsen-Love, Joe McPhee, Michael Wertmüller, Michael Zerang, Johannes Bauer... most of whom now make up Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet. This is how one weathers decades, becomes all bearded and grey and remains a fiery passion with depths of deep contemplation and at the front of a vanguard most of the world can't even begin to approach. As a live, physical, auditory performance he transcends all the words said and written above. By far.