Seattle International Film Festival: May 18 - Jun 11

Seattle International Film Festival once again arrives bringing a spectrum of cinema from across the world. In working through the program, this year continues the decade long diversity dip seen in the per-capita of all things cutting edge foreign cinema, auteur, arthouse and experimental. These were content agendas that once had prominence within SIFF, on occasion approaching the programming on offer in Toronto and New York. Those times though, are now decades in the past. That said, it's worthy of note that 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. This year continues the trend away from the previously seen 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, which returned in 2015 and 2016 after it, has been taken to entice some imagined Northwest demographic out of their suburban hobbles and inner-city condos. With the inclusion of showcases in the outlying areas of Bellevue and Kirkland 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 financing ties with it all.

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. One can can adduce that even San Francisco and Portland continue to program festivals of a caliber that SIFF has seemingly un-learned. We can observe, year in and year out, that Seattle continues 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, Asian Crossroads, Archival Presentations, Midnight Adrenaline, Alternate Cinema, Documentary Films, FutureWave, and New Directors sections, this year I was able to generate an approximate 25 films of interest or gravitas. 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. 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 a visionary course forward for the institution once exemplified in the short-lived Recent Raves series. As the series has been discontinued in the past year, SIFF's venture down this path appears to have come to a conclusion.

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Friday, May 19
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7:00 PM - Emiliano Torres  "The Winter"
Majestic Bay Cinemas
WINT0519

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Saturday, May 20
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4:00 PM - Hirokazu Kore-eda  "After the Storm"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
AFTE0520

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Saturday, May 20
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9:00 PM - Bill Morrison  "Dawson City: Frozen Time"
SIFF Film Center Festival
DAWS0520

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Sunday, May 21
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11:00 AM - Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne  "The Unknown Girl"
AMC Pacific Place 11
UNKN0521

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Monday, May 22
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9:30 PM - Hong Sang-soo  "Yourself and Yours"
Majestic Bay Cinemas
YOUR0522

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Tuesday, May 23
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9:30 PM - Norihiro Niwatsukino  "Suffering of Ninko"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
SUFF0523

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Wednesday, May 24
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9:30 PM - Andrzej Wajda  "Afterimage"
AMC Pacific Place 11
AFTE0524

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Thursday, May 25
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9:30 PM - Xavier Dolan  "It’s Only the End of the World"
AMC Pacific Place 11
WEIR0525

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Friday, May 26
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7:30 PM - Julian Rosefeldt  "Manifesto"
SIFF Film Center
MANI0526

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Saturday, May 27
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11:00 AM - Alexander Korda  "The Marseille Trilogy: Marius"
AMC Pacific Place 11
MARS0527

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Saturday, May 27
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6:00 PM - Andrei Konchalovsky  "Paradise"
Lincoln Square Cinemas
PARA0527

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Saturday, May 27
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12:00 AM - Yoshihiro Nishimura  "Meatball Machine Kodoku"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
MEAT0527

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Sunday, May 28
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11:00 AM - Marc Allégret  "The Marseille Trilogy: Fanny"
AMC Pacific Place 11
MARS0528

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Monday, May 29
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11:00 AM - Marcel Pagnol  "The Marseille Trilogy: Cesar"
AMC Pacific Place 11
MARS0529

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Monday, May 29
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8:00 PM - Alejandro Jodorowsky  "Endless Poetry"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
ENDL0529

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Tuesday, May 30
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8:30 PM - Brett Whitcomb  "A Life in Waves"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
LIFE0530

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Wednesday, May 31
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6:30 PM - Kenji Kamiyama  "Napping Princess"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
NAPP0531

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Wednesday, May 31
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9:30 PM - João Pedro Rodrigues  "The Ornithologist"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
ORNI0531

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Thursday, June 01
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9:30 PM - Anocha Suwichakornpong  "By the Time It Gets Dark"
AMC Pacific Place 11
BYTH0601

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Friday, June 02
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7:00 PM - Ken Loach  "I, Daniel Blake"
AMC Pacific Place 11
IDAN0602

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Friday, June 02
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8:45 PM - Pacho Velez & Sierra Pettengill  "The Reagan Show"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
REAG0602

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Saturday, June 03
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9:00 PM - Selma Doborac  "Those Shocking Shaking Days"
SIFF Film Center Festival
THOS0603

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Sunday, June 04
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5:30 PM - Zhang Yang  "Soul on a String"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
SOUL0604

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Monday, June 05
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8:30 PM - Brillante Mendoza  "Ma' Rosa"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
MARO0605

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Tuesday, June 06
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6:00 PM - BU Wancang  "Love and Duty"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
17LOVE0606

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Thursday, June 08
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6:00 PM - Bertrand Bonello  "Nocturama"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
NOCT0608

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Friday, June 09
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7:00 PM - Bertrand Tavernier  "My Journey Through French Cinema"
SIFF Film Center Festival
MYJO0609

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Saturday, June 10
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4:00 PM - Abbas Kiarostami  "Taste of Cherry"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
TAST0610

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Saturday, June 10
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7:00 PM - Wang Xuebo  "Knife in the Clear Water"
AMC Pacific Place 11
KNIF0610

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Sunday, June 11
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3:00 PM - Kim Ki-duk  "The Net"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
NETT0611

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Pye Corner Audio's new album "Stasis" and US Tour: May 12 - 20 | Moogfest Durham North Carolina: May 18 - 21

The Head Technician himself, Martin Jenkins, will be appearing in a brief series of domestic settings before arriving at Durham North Carolina's annual tribute to Dr. Robert Moog. The east coast meeting of all things electronic, both historic and contemporary, sees Jenkins' techno-atavistic take on analog process appearing in the lineup alongside Colleen, Suzanne Ciani, SURVIVE, Pharmakon and The Haxan Cloak. Before arriving in Durham to celebrate the legacy of musical synthesis, Jenkins embarks on limited set of domestic dates including the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery Los Angeles, programed by Mount Analog. A San Francisco show follows, with The Head Technician appearing in the unlikeliest of unlikely settings for his Seattle date. Local all-female synth, industrial, and DJ collective, False Prophet have been enlisted as guest curators for another of Paul Allen's cultural endeavors, their contribution to Upstream Festival sees a Boy Harsher and Haunted Horses showcase. Which intersects thematically with Kremwerk's programmed night of music from the Diagonal label's foremost techno-brutalist, Not Waving, and Jenkins, under his Pye Corner Audio moniker. In their review for what many to consider to be masterpiece of Jenkins' prolific catalog, The Quietus review of The Black Mill Tapes touches on the nature of this explicit branch from the world of the Hauntological. The Wire offering the greatest tutorial of the form, hosted by Mark Fisher aka K-Punk, with their "Revenant Forms: The Meaning Of Hauntology". Describing the collective headspace of "Alternative Nostalgia" as Phil Harrison coined it, Pye Corner Audio are perhaps the most purist in their recreation and reclamation of our proto-electronic heritage. While their music fits in nicely with the techno-mystic cult built up by other early practitioners around the likes of J.G. Ballard, M.R. James, Nigel Kneale and the a reverie for all things BBC Radiophonic Workshop it's conceptually less abstruse and sonically more authentic, with the great majority of their output sounding like it could have been recorded pre-1984. What his work shares with Ballard, and some of his 1980s offspring like David Cronenberg and John Carpenter is the fascination for desolate spaces of leaded, weighty tension and a pre-computer era mix of future-fantasy and weary trepidation for our imminent 21st Century technoscape. The Dystopian Modernity that The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography attributes to Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies" most clearly describes the themes of his most recent endeavor, "Stasis" for Julian House's Ghost Box label. House himself being the preeminent Hauntological practitioner in the world of graphic design and aesthetics. Work that should be considered alongside his compatriot, Richard Littler's Scarfolk Council gesamtkunstwerk of paranoid, propagandistic, satiric plumbing of, "Why the 1970s was the Most Terrifying Decade".

Slowdive's new album & East Coast Tour Apr: 30 - May 11 | FYF Festival Los Angeles: Jul 21 - 23

It's been a memorable string of years for those who saw the heyday of spacerock and shoegaze as a pinnacle development following in the wake of the iconoclastic era of 1980's post-punk. We were not only witness to the third domestic tour since their reformation by My Bloody Valentine but the first new album in 22 years, "MBV" which finally manifested after years of legend and rumor. Equally unexpected, the return of LOOP after decades of it's founder Robert Hampson claiming if you weren't there to witness their staggering volume and endurance-testing live performances in the 1990's, then you'll never quite know what the band was about. 4AD label dreampop confection, Lush also joining their ranks in the course of the last year. Spring 2016 saw the band's first live shows in 20 years since the unexpected death of friend and drummer, Chris Acland, Miki Berenyi, Emma Anderson and Phil King spoke with The Quietus for their "Mad Love: An Interview With Lush". An era for the band that both initiated and concluded within the course of the single tour cycle. Marking a similar path, these ranks were also bolstered the immensely popular britpop influenced Ride, who themselves have a new set of recordings to be released this summer. All of which pursuing courses forged down precluding pathways by Scottish dream-pop progenitors Cocteau Twins, and the later British bands following in the druggy astronomical haze of Spacemen 3. This set of compatriots in shared sound fast became a who's who of the best of UK underground rock of the early 1990's. The most improbable of them all, was the announcement that Slowdive would be performing a one-off at the Primavera Sound Festival in 2014. Following in the wake of the massively received event, the band recognizing the ongoing dedication of their fanbase in interview with The Quietus, "There Seems To Be A Lot Of Love Out There: A Slowdive Interview". Finding an enthusiasm for performing and writing again, suggesting the very real possibility of a reformation as the "Slowdive Reunion Expands with More Shows, Possibility of New Music" and following in rapid succession, "Slowdive Announce North American Tour, Reunion".

For followers of the band, after the breakdown of the mid-90's, the last thing one would expect to hear is that it's their overlooked final album created in mid-rift, "Pygmalion" that stands out amidst the sonic bluster of this new incarnation. Made all that much more surprising for Neil Halstead's often-expressed sentiment that that era of his music was definitively closed and it was his 4AD released project Mojave 3 and solo work that would be his larger legacy. Halstead not the only band member with a vital and prolific post-breakup creative arch away from the path carved by Slowdive, the work of drummer and sound designer, Simon Scott is equal to the band's sonic summits. One only need hear the atmospheric, jazz-informed doomscapes of his excellent "Bunny" for the Miasmah label for it to be made clear that the adventurous pop Scott created with Halstead, Rachel Goswell, Nick Chaplin and Christian Savill decades before was a point of entry, rather than a destination. This month they reassemble for the first new recordings in 22 years on the self titled "Slowdive" for Bloomington Indiana independent label, Dead Oceans. Home to Ryley Walker's folk-concrete tapestries and the the spectral vocal transmissions of Juliana Barwick, the newfound poppier edge of the singles, “Star Roving” and “Sugar for the Pill”, share much with both the current neo-psychedelic scene as the band's own legacy. The development of this new work detailed for Stereogum by guitarist, Rachel Goswell with Halstead who was the primary architect of 1995's "Pygmalion", stating that his time out the group dynamic was all important, offering; "It's poppier than I thought it was going to be,". "When you're in a band and you do three records, there's a continuous flow and a development. For us, that flow re-started with us playing live again and that has continued into the record." The album's release ushering in a string of tour dates across the United States and continuing throughout the summer, onward from Slowdive's late July appearance in Los Angeles' FYF Festival.