Noir City Festival: Face the Music! at SIFF Cinema: Feb 13 - 19

This year's edition of the annual festival thematically curated as Noir City: Face the Music! finds Eddie Muller and the Film Noir Foundation returning to Seattle, at the gloriously high definition venue of the Seattle Cinerama. The theme of this year's weeklong Noir City program of crime and mystery films is set to showcase music as the locus of the scenarios. Both in the sense of dedicated soundtracks by prominent composers and outfits, settings in and around music culture, cocktail, jazz clubs, and venues, and protagonists who are themselves musicians, either portrayed or as themselves. From late color noir from Bertrand Tavernier and Robert Altman, to all-time 1940s classics from Charles Vidor, and Howard Hawks, to moodier 1950s fares from Otto Preminger and Michael Curtiz, the movies in this year's edition feature real-life musical legends like Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Louis Armstrong, Keely Smith, Dexter Gordon, Ella Fitzgerald, Hoagy Carmichael, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peggy Lee, Oscar Levant, Dave Brubeck, and Charles Mingus. Performing alongside film noir favorites including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Garfield, Ida Lupino, Kirk Douglas, Ann Sheridan, and Robert Mitchum.

This marks the fourth installment since the notable Noir City: Dark City edition in 2022, inspired by Muller's bestselling book "Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir". At the time of the newly expanded publishing of the book, Muller spoke with NPR's Terry Gross, plumbing the genre's "Celebration of Cinema's Double Crosses and Doomed Characters" that populate "The Lost World of Film Noir". Outside of the annual festival, Muller took up permanent residence on TCM with the launch of his Saturday night Noir Alley showcase. Now in its tenth year, his show has become a central component of how "Turner Classic Movies Is Changing. And Trying to Stay the Same", yet the venerable platform has been under fire from its larger corporate umbrella. In 2023, Warner Brothers Discovery gutted the leadership team of Turner Classic Movies, following which, a group of famed directors then came together to "Fight to Save Turner Classic Movies". This resulted in a surprising reversal, in which, "TCM to Include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson Taking Active Role". Muller's weekly selections and introductions on Noir Alley act as more than just a showcase for the Film Noir Foundation and their partners at The UCLA Film & Television Archive, but instead a global overview of the social concerns, look, sound, aesthetic, and feel that define the Dark Passages of film noir.

"Propaganda in Cinemas, Newsrooms Slashed: This is the US Media Under Trump and his Tech Barons" | The Guardian

What Chris Lehmann's article, "Jeff Bezos’s Destruction of The Washington Post Is a Disgraceful Plutocratic Crime" in The Nation clarifies, is that democracy isn't being allowed to just quietly 'Die in Darkness', but is instead succumbing to what he describes as a series of muggings at the hands of the moneyed power elite. Or, as Eduardo Porter's analysis piece for The Guardian puts it, "From Gates to Musk and Altman: Today’s Ultra-rich Raise Questions about Who Decides the Future". With the evidence of this past week in mind, Lehmann elaborates on this most recent development in Bezos' purchasing of the paper and the history of suppression of news which the Amazon business magnate disfavors. "News of this impending bloodletting has been swirling around industry circles for weeks - so much so that foreign correspondents for the Post were reduced last week to publicly begging Bezos to save their jobs, and preserve the Post’s reputation as a serious news organization. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Bezos didn’t bother to reply and kept an arrogant oligarchic silence during the buildup to this gruesome journalistic dismemberment. Bezos also offered no comment when Post reporter Hannah Natanson had her devices seized by the FBI in the investigation of a series of leaks from a government contractor - an act of intimidation from a Trump White House waging sustained ideological war on the fourth estate."

Lehmann continues by then revealing the Amazon founder's actual values in this pivotal political moment, "Bezos’s silence on these fundamental assaults on news-gathering underscores his complacent indifference to the civic value of journalism; his true priorities became clear amid the Post’s death watch when he stirred out of his state of public hibernation long enough to host Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth - who has overseen the complete ideological purging of the Pentagon press corps - at his space start-up Blue Origin, which holds billions of dollars in defense contracts." Succinctly expressed in the headline by Perry Bacon in his piece for The New Republic, "The Washington Post Is in Free Fall - and There’s One Person to Blame" in which he states, "Today’s layoffs at this once great newspaper were nowhere near inevitable, but Jeff Bezos was never committed to the paper’s best traditions." This is stated even more explicitly in The Atlantic's headline, "The Murder of The Washington Post" and in the pages of the New Yorker, Ruth Marcus illuminates the falsity of the Amazon founder's claim that he bought the paper to save it, but instead, "Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post".

Which gives further supporting evidence to, by way of one example of the many, to Nesrine Malik's opinion piece for The Guardian, "Propaganda in Cinemas, Newsrooms Slashed: This is the US Media Under Trump and his Tech Barons". In which Malik draws parallels to Walter Benjamin's critique tying aestheticised politics to fascism and capitalism, and the historic moment in which we find ourselves, where we are seeing the development of the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic aesthetic politics. She states, "Trump regime talking points in favor of 'domestic terrorists' being deservedly killed on US streets are treated as matters of opinion that simply must be aired. Reality itself has become twisted and contestable. What people have witnessed with their eyes and ears is questioned by rolling commentary of lies and conjecture, given the imprimatur of truth through being shown or printed on credible platforms. But this move from news to opinion is part of something wider. Politics has become a performance of narrative about who is friend and who is foe. It taps into the public’s emotions by agitating and provoking fear. Channelling and emphasising these feelings then becomes the business of the media. All the while, actual power structures remain unchallenged. This is what Walter Benjamin called the 'aestheticisation of politics' under fascism." Photo credit: Kent Nishimura

She Past Away's "X" and West Coast Tour: Feb 3 - 7

An overview of the concurrent, interrelated, and offshoot genres of the original synthwave and post-punk sounds from decades past and their 21st century contemporary revival have been mapped by Vice in their, "A Brief History of Musical Waves from New to Next". Assembled in compilations like the now-classic, “The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume One” which focused on the coldwave and minimal wave strains, and the the recent genre overview presented in “No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock, and Coldwave 1981-1990”, offer an all-inclusive cornucopia of variables within the subgenre. Taken together, these compilations represent an overarching map of a sound that was born of the settling dust of the tumult of post-punk's upending of the topography of rock and noise music. Expressed through a more uneasy, existential, often edgier and sexually charged sound than their more commercial compatriots, darkwave retained its post-punk values while utilizing the same technology, and dancier, more upbeat tempos of new wave. The balancing act of its particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak is presented by The Guardian in, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”.

A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, Xeno & Oaklander, Kite, The Soft Moon, Twin Tribes, Drab Majesty, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables pivot and deviate around. The Turkish duo She Past Away, comprising Volkan Caner and Doruk Öztürkcan, have developed their own particular strain within this sound. One that leans more heavily into the earliest post-punk baritone ruminatuions of bands like Bauhaus, and the dissonant asceticism of Joy Division and Suicide, with musical lines that express a harder, more angular post-punk affinity. Announcing as much in interview, "We are a Gloomy Punk Band in Essence", She Past Away's sound is ironically best represented in the sprawling double disc assembly of remixes by their contemporaries heard on "X". They return domestically with a second leg of their most recent tour on the album, with a date at Seattle's The Crocodile.