:::: FILMS OF 2022 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2022 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

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Gaspar Noé  "Vortex"  (France)
Charlotte Wells  "Aftersun"  (United Kingdom)
Brett Morgen  "Moonage Daydream"  (United States)
Luca Guadagnino  "Bones and All"  (Italy)
David Cronenberg  "Crimes of the Future"  (Canada)
Andrew Dominik  "Blonde"  (United States)
Claire Denis  "Stars at Noon"  (France)
Joanna Hogg  "The Eternal Daughter"  (United Kingdom)
Albert Serra  "Pacifiction"  (France/Spain)
Michelangelo Frammartino  "Il Buco"  (Italy)
Alejandro Iñárritu  "BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths"  (Mexico)
Edward Berger  "All Quiet on the Western Front"  (Germany)
Mia Hansen-Løve  "One Fine Morning"  (France)
Bruno Dumont  "France"  (France)
Sebastien Meise "Great Freedom"  (Austria)
Marie Kreutzer  "Corsage"  (Germany)
Jerzy Skolimowski  "EO"  (Poland)
Park Chan-wook  "Decision To Leave"  (South Korea)
Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis  "The Tale of King Crab"  (Italy)
Mia Zetterling  "Four Films by Mia Zetterling"  Restored Rereleased (Sweden)
Mark Jenkin  "Enys Men"  (United Kingdom)
Todd Field  "TÁR"  (United States)
Lucile Hadžihalilović  "Earwig"  (France)
Olivier Assayas  "Irma Vep 2022"   (France)
Panos Cosmatos  "The Viewing"  Short  (Canada)

 

For decades this annual entry has acted as an overview of music, dance, theatre and performance art attended, films seen in the cinema, visual art exhibitions and fairs, festivals covered, and international and domestic destinations traveled. Due to the ongoing effect of the global coronavirus pandemic, this year's overview will again be somewhat limited in scope. While now in its waning phases, its effect on cultural and social life is still a dominant factor. Businesses and cultural venues have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and continue to program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw in the years preceding the pandemic. Even the most rudimentary of social meeting spaces such as cafes, bars and restaurants continue to have reduced hours. The once essential component of urban social life in the Northwest, the cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours. Regionally, arts venues and cultural institutions returned to in-person programming in fall of 2021, cautiously opening the doors to music stages, galleries and movie houses. After a year and a half of navigating the complexities of the pandemic restrictions and closures, programming returned in August and September to the majority of these Northwest culture spaces. In many cases their future remained uncertain until relief funding became available just earlier that year with the benefits of the Save Our Stages Act, alongside the newly implemented Shuttered Venues Grant. The benefits of the various pandemic relief bills, alongside regional infrastructure like the 4Culture Relief Fund, awareness efforts like the Washington Nightlife Music Association, crowdfunding and philanthropy like the ArtistRelief, ArtsFund grant, and GiveBig Washington, all came in the 11th hour for many of our regional cultural institutions and art venues.

Overseas, the European continent has rebounded in a more decisive and assertive way, with the major festivals and exhibitions returning to both bold, and pandemic conscious, in-person programming. One can clearly see the nature of commerce, and social and cultural life at all the hours that one can imagine them transpiring, have made a more lively and vital recovery from the pandemic. This was evident in traveling overseas for the first time in almost three years to attend the once-a-decade confluence of Germany's Documenta, and the Venice Biennale. This year's particular convergence of the two offered a complex set of groundbreaking firsts, as well as an unexpected set of socio-cultural setbacks. With the initial launch not going to plan, Documenta 15 found itself in a set of novel complexities, being curated by a leaderless collective, there was a "The Bumpy Road to a Group-led Documenta”. In many ways the exhibition was a success, “Welcome to the Fun House! Sharks, Skaters, and Smelters liven up Documenta 15”, yet it found itself at the center of a wider discussion and controversy, "Documenta Was a Whole Vibe. Then a Scandal Killed the Buzz". At the close of September, there was much discussion about the resulting impact, and wider considerations to the exhibition, some even speculating, "The World’s Most Prestigious Art Exhibition Is Over. Maybe Forever.". The 59th Venice Biennale was afflicted by no such troubles. This year’s big group show, "The Milk of Dreams", curated by Cecilia Alemani, took its title from an early 20th century fairytale by the British-born Leonora Carrington. The era was also at the heart of the concurrent surrealism blockbuster at the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice's Dorsoduro. Including the 56 national pavilions and over 30 collateral events, the resulting citywide exhibition produced a smorgasbord of late-flowering surrealism. In what was being called the women's Biennale, this year's exhibition was an exuberant set of, “Cyborgs, Sirens, and a Singing Murderer: The Thrilling, Oligarch-free Venice Biennale”. In an almost singular historic moment, with the world recovering from the pandemic, and the Ukraine being pummeled by Russian missiles, there was no shortage of, “Looking Inward, and Back, at a Biennale for the History Books”.

Returning home domestically, life was reduced again to grappling with the larger part of one's existence being spent in our homes these past two years. While there are now opportunities again to engage with film, music and visual art, as a culture we are still relying on online resources more than was necessary pre-pandemic. Yet these deliver only a modicum of the sensations, social engagement, and sensory thrills and satisfactions of cultural happenings. The pragmatic response would be to accept the inherent losses and embrace what vestiges of a cultural life that could be salvaged online. Yet these are poor surrogates, even temporarily. So, while its role may be reduced in the age of streaming, the magazine, both print and digital, can still be a defining tastemaker amid the multitude of channels in which to discover new music. For those not finding compelling sounds via their internet trawls, digital retailers like Boomkat, and online institutions like The Quietus, represent the kind of expertise you’ll not find coherently brought together online outside the framework of such vision and curatorial legacy. Evolving right along with the times from a free improv, modern classical and jazz magazine in the 1970s and 1980s, in the following decades The Wire expanded its scope to include every imaginable genre (and some yet invented), becoming all-inclusive by the conclusion of the 20th century. A particular advantage at year's end, is that the magazine offers the opportunity to Listen to The Wire Top 50 Releases of 2022. Similarly, film institutions like those below offer a worldly scope, compiling the life’s work of people who have made watching their enterprise. Year in and year out again, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cinema-Scope, Criterion Collection's The Current, and The Guardian's excellent film coverage have brought focus to the year of moving pictures from around the globe.

Brett Morgen's "Moonage Daydream" at SIFF Cinema Sept 23 - Oct 20 | "The Final Mysteries of David Bowie’s Blackstar: Elvis, Crowley, and The Villa of Ormen" | The Guardian

Smashing onto screens at this year's Cannes, Brett Morgen's "Glorious, Shapeshifting Eulogy to David Bowie", comes to domestic theaters this month and regionally at SIFF Cinema Egyptian. Consciously averting the documentary format, Morgen's intimate montage of the uniquely influential artist celebrates his career, creativity, and decades of restless self discovery. Given unprecedented access to Bowie's personal archives, "Moonage Daydream" takes a cue from Bowie's own childhood wonder at the "Sound and Vision" experiences of early rock and roll washing over the artist as a young man. Through an assembly of audio-visual collage, this archive of five million items, including paintings, drawings, recordings, photographs, films, and journals, were structured into an experiential cinematic odyssey. The result is a sensory "Tripping David Bowie's Sound and Light Fantastic", as the musical and spiritual journey of the artist's life, featuring Bowie's own narration. Tony Visconti, who spent much of Bowie's career as recording producer, recently completed the massive retrospective box sets for Parlophone, which include "Five Years (1969–1973)", "Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976)", "A New Career in a New Town (1977–1982)", "Loving the Alien (1983–1988)", and "Brilliant Adventure (1992–2001)", serves as the film's musical director, with a team including Paul Massey, and meticulous musical edits and collage throughout by Morgen. The ensuing audio-visual experience, as described by Robert Daniels, for RogerEbert.com is, "a bombastic, overstimulating, poignant, life-affirming, and risk-taking summation of the artist's ethos and maturation as a person. In short, 'Moonage Daydream' is a film David Bowie would've proudly made." The amassed effect of this "David Bowie Documentary as Dynamic as the Man Himself" is a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work, and interviews that run the spectrum from the philosophical and revealingly personal, to humorously self-deprecating.

Morgen suggests that David Bowie’s first great period came to an end with the 1970s, but that his intellectual curiosity and creativity continued to have something more than a little heroic and magnificent to it as the years went by. And perhaps his following adventures in other art forms, like playing the "Elephant Man" on stage was slightly misjudged in that Bowie had already absorbed all these things, and was drawing on their energy in his rock persona. His film performances in the late 1970s and early 80s, in Nicolas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth", Tony Scott's "The Hunger", and Nagisa Oshima's "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" led into his era of super stardom, following the 1983 international pop hit "Let's Dance". The ensuing decade, while delivering massive success and arena-filling performances, where as Bowie describes it in "Moonage Daydream", a vast expanse of uncultivated and barren rewards for the artist. What Morgen shows next, through personal video documentary, home recordings and travel footage is the superstar become "bohemian vagabond" as Bowie entered into a period of restless international travel and personal rediscovery. In one of his most startling and unexpected transformations, (of many), David Bowie reemerged into the 1990s with a set of creative collaborations that directly engaged with the zeitgeist. Enlisting artists and producers, including the return of Brian Eno on the 1995 multimedia concept album, "Outside (The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper-cycle)", Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails on "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" and the video singles and remixes for 1997's "Earthling", and regular Tin Machine collaborator and The Cure guitarist, Reeves Gabrels on the 1999 album, "Hours". More recently on this side of the millennial cusp, both "Heathen" and his penultimate album "The Next Day", acted as a preview of things to come on David Bowie's last and final turn at an artistic metamorphosis. This "rich, deep, and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead; the position from which he's always made his greatest music." was released as his ultimate swansong, "Blackstar" just two days before his death in 2016. So rich in fact, that it has been half a decade now in the minds of its listeners, that much of the meaning and its inspirations have yielded up, "The Final Mysteries of David Bowie’s Blackstar: Elvis, Crowley, and 'The Villa of Ormen'".