Lau Nau new album "Hem. Någonstans" & West Coast Tour: May 26 - June 4

Documenting the emerging new Finnish underground as a focal point and locus of the scene, the vast majority of the Fonal Records releases have been recorded, mixed and mastered at the label's own in-house SS-Palace Studio. Independent institution in every sense, founder Sami Sänpäkkilä has run label from his home in Ulvila since it's inception in the mid-1990s with an extended family involved in every aspect of the label's process, from assembling books to packaging records. Releasing a roster of largely psychedelia influenced folk music and abstract fusions with ambient and tonal enterprises, the Fonal sound came to assemble around the vanguard of Jan Anderzén's "chemical friends" project, Kemialliset Ystävät. Ensconced in it's tapestry of Northern European folk and 1970s improvisational rock traditions can be heard influences ranging as wide as interstellar mythology of Karlheinz Stockhausen and large ensemble Afro-Futurist explorations of Sun Ra. Gathering momentum and a growing body of like-minded artists from the surrounding Nordic cultural landscape by the early 2000s, Matthew Wuethrich delivered the first extensive mapping of Finland's new folk underground for The Wire's December 2004 issue. In pieces for various publications over the course of the decade, Wuethrich and Jordan N. Mamone becoming cultural emissaries of sorts for Finland's new strange vein of folk, the "Fonal Records: A Logo, A Sound, A Goal – but No Ads" and overview of "Finland Calling" for Dusted offering some of the first interviews outside of Finland with the scene's founding players. Their work at the time almost the singular english language resource covering the extended collective enterprises under the label's banner outfits of Kemialliset Ystävät, Avarus, Paavoharju, Tomutonttu and Sänpäkkilä's own ES.

Foremost among the scene's solo voices, the obtuse wanderings of Islaja's solemn lyrical explorations are a strong counterpoint to the more distended psychedelia of her label compatriots. A intimately inward-looking music mapping the physical and psychic landscape of rural Finland; mountains, clouds sun and sea make up Merja Kokkonen's thematic and lyrical geography. Another of the label's idiosyncratic, finely honed soundworlds can be heard in the music of Laura Naukkarinen. Her breathy open songforms built of fragile, spectral states center around ambient improvisation and extended drone exercise. Arriving with significant fanfare, the finesse of the debut "Kuutarha" garnered inclusion in the 50 Albums of the Year in The Wire's 2005 Rewind. Employing strings, dulcimer and an array of acoustic instruments Lau Nau's ear for protracted tonal explorations was further realized in the following "Nukuu" of 2008. Embracing psychedelia and northern folk traditions as much as the avant-garde of mid-Century minimalism, the course of Naukkarinen's creative arc has most recent arrived at producing scores for Benjamin Christensen's "Haxan", Jean Epstein's "The Fall of the House of Usher", Robert Wien's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and the seminal horror of Victor Sjöström's haunting, "The Phantom Carriage". This affinity for the contained world's of early silent and Expressionist cinema has informed her most recent, ”Hem. Någonstans”. An instrumental album spinning variations around Naukkarinen's soundtrack to Lotta Petronella's similarly named documentary film, ”Home. Somewhere”, it's focus the quietude and small events that comprise the lives of those living in a remote Finnish archipelago. Later this month and next, Lau Nau will be bringing her musical mirroring of the subtly experimental documentary film on a west coast tour, with a series of dates in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and a span of events in the San Francisco Bay Area, fittingly hosted in smaller, intimate environments and community cultural centers.

Seattle International Film Festival: May 19 - Jun 12

Seattle International Film Festival once again arrives bringing a spectrum of cinema from across the world! This year like the string of years since 2008, the festival sees a qualitative diversity dip in the percentage of all things foreign cinema, auteur, arthouse, experimental and progressive. These were content agendas that once had prominence within SIFF, making it a festival that approached the per-capita in these areas of Toronto and New York. Those times are now decades in the past. That said, this year's festival isn't as painfully omissive as 2011 or 2010 for that matter. We saw string of years that suggested relief from the lackluster programming described above which waned a bit in 2012 and a further positive trend in that direction in 2013. For the 2014 festival, their 40th Anniversary was celebrated with SIFF's strongest programming in almost a decade, suggesting a renewed vision for the festival. Nonetheless this year, like 2015, we're again seeing that same glut of middle ground contemporary romances and knowingly clever dramas for the sub-Sundance sect. One can speculate that this middle-road approach to programming has been taken to entice some imagined Northwest demographic out of their suburban hobbles and inner-city condos. The inclusion of showcases in the outlying areas of Bellevue, Kirkland and Renton are indicative of such. One can't help but consider these factors alongside the changing economic and cultural landscape of Seattle and what may be SIFF's bid at strengthening financial ties with it all.

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 new historic documentary by Sergey Loznitsa "The Event" and the superior of last year's two haunting dramas by Kiyoshi Kurosawa "Journey to the Shore". Yorgos Lanthimos Jury Prize winning film "The Lobster", a decidedly "Kafka-esque Meditation on Romance and Estrangement" premiered at Cannes a year ago now and will have a brief run at Sundance Cinema along with Matteo Garrone's adaptation of Giambattista Basile's bawdy Neopolitan "Tale of Tales", adding some "Grown-Up Twists to the Fairy Tale". The festival also hosted what from the outset appears a traditional melodrama by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, "Happy Hour", belies a deeper core deserving of it's Film Comment mention in their Best Cinema from Asia feature. This year's SFIFF also saw Christopher Doyle's "Hong Kong Trilogy" and Lewis Klahr's cinematic archeology of the American unconscious, his "66" employing the unlikeliest of tools in it's telling of mass culture as myth. Happily there is some shared programming between the festivals. Zhang Yang's most recent "Paths of the Soul", Wener Herzog's much anticipated "Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World" and Vitaly Mansky's documentary on the fashioning of a North Korean family of "model citizens", all grace Seattle as well. Other highlights screening outside of the festival in the coming weeks include the Freudian psychedelia of Eiichi Yamamoto's "Belladonna of Sadness" and another of Naome Kawase's hushed familial melodramas, "Sweet Bean".

Screening in SFIFF and outside of the festival at SIFF Cinema, Ben Wheatley's adaptation of JG Ballard's "High-Rise" is ostensibly the most promising thing both festivals share in their programming this month. The Guardian's film of the week review going some way to how it is that the challenges of "High-Rise Takes Dystopian Science Fiction to a New Level". In a fashion, "The Nightmare of JG Ballard's Towering Vision" even proved daunting to the unmade Nicolas Roeg production of the late 1970s. 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 the pathos of an Otaku's transformation seen in Masaharu Take's "100 Yen Love"? Or Gabriel Ripstein's Best First Feature award-winner, "600 Miles" from this year's Berlin International Film Festival? Other global festival highlights featured in PIFF, include Jacques Audiard's Palme d'Or winning "Dheepan" and Nanni Moretti's "Mia Madre". With some unexpected surprises like Keiichi Hara's animated period feature, "Miss Hokusai" and another Cannes award winner in Ida Panahandeh's "Nahid". Portland also saw Patricio Guzmán's most recent meditation on the colonization of Chile, "The Pearl Button", festival favorite Hong Sang-Soo's "Right Now, Wrong Then" and Ben Rivers' epic, experimental merging of documentary and fable, "The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers". All of which are absent from this year's programming in Seattle.

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 a hugely influential institution. From the above one can can adduce San Francisco and Portland producing festivals of a caliber that SIFF has seemingly un-learned as they continue to go astray of the standard of the international festival circuit embodied by New York, Cannes, Toronto, Rotterdam, Vienna, Venice, Berlin and Locarno. But there remain a handful of legitimate, original, well crafted cinema to be found in here too. Largely culled from the Contemporary World Cinema, Archival Presentations, Alternate Cinema, Documentary Films, Midnight Adrenaline, Catalyst, and New Directors sections, this year I found some approximate 20 or so films of interest, curiosity or gravitas that I plan to attend. These run 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 in recent memory, but not approaching the par established with SIFF's own stellar run spanning the decades of 1987-2007. It must also be said, this year's SIFFX sidebar does little in the way of compensating for these programming oversights. Nonetheless, I continue to be enthused about their home at the SIFF Cinema Uptown and expanded screens between the recently 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 exemplifying a visionary path forward for the institution. Unfortunately the 42nd Seattle International Film Festival doesn't continue this high standard.

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Tuesday, May 17

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7:00 PM - Ben Wheatley "High-Rise"

SIFF Cinema Uptown
HIGH0517B

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=261&id=34443

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Friday, May 20
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4:00 PM - Terence Davies "Sunset Song"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
SUNS0520

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33757

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Friday, May 20
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6:00 PM - Hirokazu Kore-eda "Our Little Sister"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
OURL0520

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33612

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Saturday, May 21

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4:00 PM - Eiichi Yamamoto "Belladonna of Sadness"

Northwest Film Forum

http://nwfilmforum.org/live/page/calendar/3914

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Saturday, May 21
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6:30 PM - James Schamus "Indignation"
AMC Pacific Place 11
INDI0521

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33844

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Saturday, May 21
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9:00 PM - Mauro Herce "Dead Slow Ahead"
SIFF Film Center
DEAD0521

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=34075

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Sunday, May 22
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1:30 PM - Douglas Sirk "A Scandal in Paris"
AMC Pacific Place 11
SCAN0522

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33618

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Sunday, May 22
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9:00 PM - Bence Fliegauf "Lily Lane"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
LILY0522

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33769

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Monday, May 23
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3:30 PM - Yaelle Kayam "Mountain"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
MOU0523

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33697

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Monday, May 23

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7:50 PM - Matteo Garrone "Tale of Tales"
Sundance Cinema

https://www.sundancecinemas.com/coming_soon.html

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Tuesday, May 24
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7:00 PM - Orson Welles "Chimes at Midnight"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
CHIM0524

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33772

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Wednesday, May 25
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6:00 PM - Helen Walsh "The Violators"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
VIOL0525

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33919

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Thursday, May 26
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3:00 PM - Shunji Iwai "A Bride for Rip Van Winkle"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
BRID0526

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33776

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Thursday, May 26
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9:30 PM - Marcin Wrona "Demon"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
DEMO0526

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33558

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Friday, May 27
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4:00 PM - Zhang Yang "Paths of the Soul"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
PATH0527

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33559

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Friday, May 27
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9:00 PM - Marta Minorowicz "Zud"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
ZUDD0527

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33704

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Saturday, May 28
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11:00 AM - Ernst Lubitsch "Heaven Can Wait"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
HEAV0528

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33783

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Sunday, May 29
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3:30 PM - Ti West "In a Valley of Violence"
Lincoln Square Cinemas
INAV0529

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33793

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Sunday, May 29
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9:30 PM - Lucile Hadžihalilović "Evolution"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
EVOL0529

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33638

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Monday, May 30
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7:10 PM - Yorgos Lanthimos "The Lobster"
Sundance Cinema

https://www.sundancecinemas.com/coming_soon.html

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Tuesday, May 31
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6:00 PM - Naotaro Endo "Tsukiji Wonderland"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
TSUK0531

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33646

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Wednesday, June 01
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9:15 PM - Vitaly Mansky "Under the Sun"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
UNDER0601

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33722

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Thursday, June 2
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8:15 PM - Naome Kawase "Sweet Bean"
Northwest Film Forum

http://nwfilmforum.org/live/page/calendar/3972

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Friday, June 03
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9:30 PM - Jaco Van Dormael "The Brand New Testament"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
BRAN0603

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33808

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Saturday, June 04
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2:00 PM - Fernando Ayala "The Bitter Stems"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
BITT0604

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33812

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Saturday, June 04
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8:00 PM - Werner Herzog "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
LOAN0604

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33578

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Sunday, June 05
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2:30 PM - Ferdinando Cito Filomarino "Antonia"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
ANTO0605

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33734

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Sunday, June 05
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8:30 PM - Małgorzata Szumowska "Body"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
BODY0605

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33547

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Monday, June 06
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7:00 PM - Sylvia Chang "Murmur of the Hearts"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
MURM0606

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33588

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Monday, June 06
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9:30 PM - José Luis Guerin "The Academy of Muses"
AMC Pacific Place 11
ACAD0606

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33908

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Tuesday, June 07
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9:30 PM - Sion Sono "Tag"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
TAGG0607

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33592

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Wednesday, June 08
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7:00 PM - King Hu "Dragon Inn"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
DRAG0607

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33820

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Thursday, June 09
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3:00 PM - Jia Zhang-ke "Mountains May Depart"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
MOUNT0609

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33826

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Thursday, June 09
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7:00 PM - André Téchiné and Céline Sciamma "Being 17"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
BEIN0609

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33827

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Friday, June 10
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7:00 PM - Mark Cousins "I am Belfast"
SIFF Film Center
IAMB0610

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=34084

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Saturday, June 11
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8:45 PM - Kiyoshi Kurosawa "Creepy"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
CREE0611

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33833

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Sunday, June 12
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4:30 PM - Gilles Legrand "The Scent of Mandarin"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
SCEN0612

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33836

Ben Wheatley's new film "High-Rise" at SIFF Cinema: May 13 - 18 & Grand Illusion Cinema: May 20 - 26 | Jonathan Lethem's "JG Ballard: Poet of Desolate Landscapes"

Ben Wheatley returned at Cannes last year with "High-Rise", after the 2011 genre-bending crime thriller "Kill List" and his unique and sinister vision of Olde Albion of a few years later set during the 17th Century Civil War. The smaller budget, yet highly successful "A Field in England" watched as an "Oblique, Ominous and Wickedly Idiosyncratic Barney through Old Weird England". His significantly more audacious new adaptation was announced as far back as 2013, "Ben Wheatley to Direct Adaptation of Ballard's High-Rise'", with producer Jeremy Thomas, "The Man Behind England’s Greatest Independent Films". Thomas himself the production infrastructure for David Cronenberg's adaptation of "Crash" some decades back as well, so there's a familiarity with the depth and potential difficulty involved in the handling of the source material. The director talks the significance of the setting and the trickiness of Ballardian heroes in his interview with Empire, "Ben Wheatley Talks High-Rise". The Paris Review offering a deeper examination in conversation with Wheatley, "Lost in Translation: Notes on Adapting Ballard" on not only the complexity of translating great prose to the screen, but the nature of when a literary work is adapted as a film, the specificity of the art must be translated. It may be about the very same subject, or literally translated in word and action to the screen, but to paraphrase Roger Ebert; "how it’s about, what it’s about, needs to be reconceived".

For many of us who know JG Ballard's work, the details of his life depicted in the BBC's "JG Ballard and the Alchemy of Memory" comes as less of a surprise. As his central motif has in some way always been the metaphor of the orderly living room inverted, flooded, in upheaval, spun in a dry-cycle; where modern life is just stage sets made to appear hollow, surreal and turned to ruin in their dishevelment. There is possibly no other work in his whole canon that explicitly tackles this premise than his 1975 novel, "High-Rise". Detailed in The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright's analysis of class through architecture, urban and social planning, "A Long Way Down: The Nightmare of JG Ballard's Towering Vision". As well as Chris Hall on both Ballard and Wheatley's explorations into the psychology of enclosed, brutal environments, this inner space is where, "High-Rise Takes Dystopian Science Fiction to a New Level". Ballard very much being of the mind that mid-late 20th Century sci-fi was ideally suited to address social issues through the vehicle of what's now come to be called "speculative fiction". At the time his work regarded to be equally in the company of postmodernist writers like William S. Burroughs, as it was the science fiction of contemporaries like Harlan Ellison. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies", so it's elementary that his particular Dystopian modernity would be bedrock on which the Cyberpunk work of Bruce Sterling and William Gibson would be built decades later. Through these themes Ballard's exploration of modern western life and it's potential futures embraced the understanding that, "The Duty of the Satirist is to Go One Worse than Reality".

There is no better entry into that reality than the collected short works "The Complete Stories of JG Ballard" as Jonathan Lethem's review for the New York Times elucidates, it's a fully realized journey guided by a paradigmatic "Poet of Desolate Landscapes". "Each of Ballard’s 98 short stories is like a dream more perfectly realized than any of your own. His personal vocabulary of scenarios imprints itself from the very first, each image with the quality of a newly minted archetype. Ballard was the poet of desolate landscapes marked by signs of a withdrawn human presence: drained swimming pools, abandoned lots littered with consumer goods, empty space stations, sites of military or vehicular tragedies. Himself trained in medicine, Ballard frequently chose doctors or scientists as protagonists and narrators, yet expertise never spares them from the fates they see overtaking others. If Ballard’s view of the human presence in his landscapes is grimly diagnostic, his scalpel is wielded with tenderness, his bedside manner both dispassionate and abiding. Ultimately, Ballard is simply a master story writer — the maker of unforgettable artifacts in words, each as absolute and perplexing as sculptures unviewable from a single perspective. In this book of almost 100 stories, there are at least 30 you can spend a lifetime returning to, to wander and wonder around. I find myself recapitulating Ballardian patterns not for their beauty (though they are beautiful) but for their tremendous aptness in attempting to confront the dying world before me, and inside me. Consider this, then, a late-to-press elegy for perhaps the most cosmically elegiac writer in literature and like all who mourn, Ballard had first to love."