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.

"L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise" at SIFF Cinema: Sept 10 - Nov 12

This fall, the longest-running film noir series in North America returns with a program set within the most filmmable of cities. Few genres in cinema have quite exploited the riches, spoils, bacchanalian abundance, calamitous ruin and down-and-out despondency of Los Angeles to the extent of film noir. It's as though the geography of the city itself has developed to map the elevated heights and plumbing depths of the human experience. Thom Anderson's positioning of the city as narrative central protagonist in his essential exegesis "Los Angeles Plays Itself", supplies substantiation of this fact. As further representation, the near-century of noir, neo-noir, and crime thrillers on exhibit in "L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise" offers ample evidence supporting this assessment. The films in the series span the gamut of "Kiss Me Deadly"'s hardman gone awry in a time of 1950s Cold War paranoia, "Point Blank"'s fragmented broken-mirror damnation of 1960s modernism and the emptiness of the coming era of materialism, laconic and existential 1970s adaptations of the classic Raymond Chandler text "The Long Goodbye", the hyper-stylized 1990s celluloid ambience of "Heat", the kinetic sound and motion of "Drive", "L.A. Confidential"'s channeling of the the tabloid sleaze of James Ellroy, and the "Inherent Vice" found in Thomas Pynchon's slippery fixation on paranoid parallel narratives. For these films and more in the series, we can thank programmer Greg Olson, who continues his essential work after "Fate of SAM Film Series Unclear as Museum’s Longtime Film Curator Laid Off", with the elimination of his position at Seattle Art Museum. It should be noted, that with the loss of their film program, including the longest running film noir series in America, the plan at Seattle Art Museum appears to be to bring cat videos, guest chefs, and miniature golf to fill the void left at the museum. Subsequently, in the years since Olson has rented theaters as a guest programmer, bringing his Ingmar Bergman, Powell and Pressburger, and Fellini series to the screens at SIFF Cinema.