Pedro Costa's new film "Horse Money" at Grand Illusion Cinema: Sept 18 - 24

There's reason why in their selection of his Fontainhas Trilogy for deluxe box set treatment, the Criterion Collection referred to Pedro Costa as, "One of the most important artists on the international film scene today". But as Akiva Gottlieb's "A Cinema of Refusal: On Pedro Costa" for The Nation makes clear, the Portuguese director has no lack of champions. At the time of the trilogy's completion he was honored with retrospectives at both the Tate Modern and Anthology Film Archives, and most recently, New York’s Lincoln Center. This came on the heels of the Cannes premier in 2006 of "Colossal Youth" which elevated him to the most widely heralded new filmmaker of the past decade in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, Cinema-Scope, Senses of Cinema and Film Comment. The Criterion release, and touring arthouse retrospective "Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa" which brought the Fontainhas project to a wider audience, describes the very heart of the paradox that anchors his work: the idea that a cinema of such austere, formalist pacing and technique, can be the most democratic use of the medium imaginable. It is in this balance of form and content that Costa has established his art's moral imperative. In his discovery of the sequestered barrios and slums of Lisbon, and their dark alleys and crowded homes that appealed to him aesthetically, the predominantly Cape Verdean immigrants that populated their unlit labyrinths disarmed him with their directness and fortitude. In his interview for Film Comment he describes how it was that his exposure to this dilapidated sector of Lisbon also prompted him to re-examine his relationship with cinema as a vehicle to affirm the existence of the dispossessed, and began refining his form to match the starkness of a human struggle that went on there day in, day out, removed from view.

Costa turned to moviemaking at a period in his personal life when Portugal itself was coming to grim terms with its colonial legacy. It was in part from this context and his unorthodox ways of watching the work of the 20th Century masters, among them Yasujiro Ozu, Straub-Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Tourneur, that Costa found a vocabulary with which to confront his country’s past. Classifications don't easily adhere to his films: they are formalist, yet they pulse with poetry, humility life and warmth; they are ascetic but also deeply expressive; they are glacially patient and yet possessed of a natural, flowing sense of rhythm. All of these figure in his return to the winding streets, ruinous interiors, alleys, dark hillsides and literal underworld depicted in "The Turning of the Earth: Pedro Costa's Mesmerizing Trance Film" as well as the Fontainhas everyman, Ventura José Tavares Borges. Who was last seen in the short film "Sweet Exorcism" as part of the Centro Histórico anthology, from which "Horse Money" takes a particularly oneiric passage. The reviews from it's premier at the Locarno Film Festival where it won best director, described this "Surreal Voyage Into the Past" as Ben Kenigsberg's review for the New York Times calls it, as a haunting disembodied "Existential Ghost Story that Will Get Under Your Skin". Jonathan Romney's Film of the Week review for Film Comment and Cinema-Scope's interview with the director, "L’avventura: Pedro Costa on 'Horse Money'", are our guides to Lisbon's "Elliptical and Mysterious" rhythms of the afterlife as Ventura wends through the city representing disparate periods of his life. From the youthful Cape Verdean immigrant picked up by the Portuguese revolutionary army in the hillsides. To the now shaking hand, grey-haired man in his later years, ascending from below the earth to wander the corridors of a hollow institutional facility. Drifting through a lifespan of adversaries, lovers, dreams and remembrances.

Aleksei German's final film "Hard to Be A God" at Northwest Film Forum: Feb 20 - 23 | Aleksei German Retrospective at Anthology Film Archives New York: Jan 31 - Feb 10

One of the great films of the year, if not the decade, finally sees distribution and a miss-it-and-lose four day run at Northwest Film Forum later this month. After stunning audiences at it's premier in film festivals around the globe last year, the posthumously completed "Hard to Be a God" by Aleksei German returns heralded by a retrospective at New York's Anthology Film Archives. These rare screenings of his handful of films making for, "A Small Batch from Life’s Work". Based on the Strugatsky Brothers novel of the same name, German (who died during the film's post-production in 2013) retains so little of the original's science fiction frame that his film becomes the closest thing to a Medieval Cinema Verité documentary; mud, incessant rain, fog, tides of sewage and disease, innards, decaying structures, the ruined facades of buildings and people. A world dominated by the downward tug of gravity and matter, pulling everything into the grave. Like finding oneself inside the nightmare torrent of a Pieter Bruegel painting made real. We're witness, often in first person, to human development the protagonist's civilization has already long, long overcome, "Hard to Be a God: A Man from the Future Who Walks Through a Cultural Past".

Set during civil and religious conflict enabling petty power grabs on the part of Barons and regional lords, the film follows the armor-clad Don Rumata, who the planet's populace believes to be the baronial offspring of a Pagan God, as he makes his way through the sweaty, embittered, superstitious, farting, primitive, hysterical, stupefied, madding crowd. The extreme tumult of the setting and the viewer's vantage in the midst of the grotesque, absurd, carnivalesque misery drown out any clear grasp of Rumata’s obscurely defined mission, or what's left of it. We're witness to a Conrad-like scenario in which the 'civilized' foreigner has been eroded away by the conditions of his acclimation to the alien place and time. What remains of his identity and lost ideals roll off his tongue as philosophical musings on power, exploitation and the downward nature of influence. The ingrained awareness that nothing can save these people from themselves... but time. IndieWire's coverage of the film's premier goes some way to describe it's monumental achievement, "Why A Visionary Work Over a Decade In the Making has Dominated the Rotterdam Film Festival".

Rumata as Earth's representative of a different path taken, must endure this world divorced from it's own Renaissance, yet seemingly on the cusp of civilization winning out over barbarism. Perhaps his own presence, and the influence of his perceived Godhood is one of the factors in the perpetuation of the savagery of the Middle Ages. The film becomes a thought experiment asking us to consider what society might be today had the Renaissance never taken hold, and if as emissaries of a cultured world, we have a place, much less a responsibility in it. Or, if as it seems through Rumata's pulling up of roots and disembarking from his civil war-torn kingdom at the film's end, the degeneracy, sludge and filth of Arkanarian Medieval existence might just continue uninterrupted for all eternity. These final scenes, the first breath of space amidst it's claustrophobic deluge offer perspective, insight and in the end, resignation. A singular cognizant rumination on this understanding, a breath of comprehension within it's flailing melee and strife. It's with this statement on the Universe delivering what will come, unnoticing and irrespective of the human experience, that "The Dark Master of Russian Film", leaves the world.

Otomo Yoshihide, Akio Suzuki & Gozo Yoshimasu 'Voices & Echoes' tour and Issue Project Room series: Sept 16 - 28

It's been quite the year for Japanese sound artist, curator, historian and activist Otomo Yoshihide. He published "Chronicle Fukushima" a collection of lectures and first person accounts on the nuclear disaster, appeared in last year's documentary on the Tokyo Onkyo, or 'pure sound' scene "We Don't Care About Music Anyway" and completed a yearlong residency at Art Tower Mito amidst all the activity of touring and playing throughout Japan and New York. This month we find Otomo the closest he's been to Seattle in nearly a decade! We get two Northwest performances, in Vancouver as part of New Music (just a week after New Forms Festival) as well as the Time Based Art festival in Portland as extended tour branching off the Voices & Echoes series curated by field recording artist and improv-collagist Aki Onda during his residency at Issue Project Room, New York. Anyone who caught Otomo in either 2003's New Forms festival in Vancouver or the following week at Polestar Gallery as part of Earshot Jazz that year no doubt has lasting impressions of his physical, sonic, virtuosity. 'Voices & Echoes' brings together Yoshihide with Sound Art pioneer Akio Suzuki experimental poet/filmmaker Gozo Yoshimasu (which those lucky dogs in New York also get a retrospective of at Anthology Film Archives) along with contributions from from a spectrum of other artists including Fushitsusha's Tamio Shiraishi. From Issue Project Room: "Voices and Echoes brings together pioneering Japanese artists Akio Suzuki, Gozo Yoshimasu, and Otomo Yoshihide. Sound artist Akio Suzuki will perform on a range of unique instruments including an Iwabue, the ancient stone flute passed down through his family for many generations and the Analapos, an instrument he invented in the 1970s that creates echoes through the acoustic transmissions of a spiral cord stretched between two metal cylinders. Experimental poet Gozo Yoshimasu will perform works utilizing his unique vocalization style of recitation, which relies upon a highly rhythmic delivery and intense vocal modulations. Yoshimasu will perform in collaboration with Otomo Yoshihide, an experimental guitarist/turntablist and leading international figure in the fields of contemporary noise and improv."

Patrick Keiller's new film "Robinson in Ruins" at Anthology Film Archives: Jan 12 - Jan 18

Other than Grant Gee's "Patience (After Sebald)" I can think of no other documentary (or film essay as these are increasingly called) that captures the sense of an individual, a community, history itself, disappearing into the landscape it occupied. Haunting in the deepest, most literal sense. I came to "Robinson in Ruins" through the circuitous path of edition 17 of the Tate Papers the essay specifically on this work and The Military Pastoral Complex which then led to Patrick Keiller and his third documentary in the Robinson series and the corresponding three year research project "The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image". Judging from the heady mix just implied by the titles of those essays alone, I knew the film was going to be a work not easily quantified, much less summarized. After seeing it, that's a task I still find beyond me. Somehow others have done it (and pretty brilliantly) in the pages of Sight & Sound and the Guardian UK. Both of which noted the correlation I saw with the shared territory of saturating nostalgia, melancholy and surrealist blurring of personal fiction and history found in the 'haunted landscapes' of W.G. Sebald. Chances to see it have been nearly as elusive as it's subject. The film played in last year's New York Film Festival and again this month in that city of cities as part of the Patrick Keiller Retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, but I fear that most others like myself, will have to make due with the UK release by BFI Films since Robinson's final exploration has yet to find distribution stateside.