Wim Wenders’ "Perfect Days" and "Anselm" at SIFF Cinema: Feb 16 - Mar 21

As the director of "Tokyo Ga", few western directors are more qualified or capable to present an account of the daily pleasures and travails of modern Japanese life than Wim Wenders. For what The Guardian called, "Wim Wenders’s Zen Japanese Drama is His Best Feature Film in Years", he has teamed with the incomparable talent of Kōji Yakusho, this year's winner of Best Actor at Cannes, to "Explore a Quiet Life in Tokyo". Through the ambient urban charm of their film, "Perfect Days", Wenders and Yakusho follow the daily rituals and unexpected encounters of Hirayama, a middle-age staff member of The Tokyo Toilet project, in the Shibuya district of the city. As he motors from location to location, listening to predominantly American classic rock on cassette, each of his 17 destinations present new daily alterations and quiet moments of urban situations and social contact. The minimalism of the role, and the focus drawn away from revealing narrative background in relation to the character's personal history were some of the more attractive aspects to its lead, “Limited Lines and Background? Kōji Yakusho Saw the Potential of ‘Perfect Days”. For the spareness and ascetic minimalism of the role, “Japan's Versatile Veteran Kōji Yakusho Won Best Actor at Cannes”. In the place of a biographic tale of Hirayama, we instead observe the continuance of the character's daily rituals and repetition, and the unexpected variables that develop along the course of the days and weeks involved. It is in this way that the film is clearly another of the director's explorations of, "‘All My Films Deal with How to Live’: Wim Wenders on Herzog, Spirituality and Shooting a Movie in 16 Days". In addition to the role, and the fulfilling personal and spiritual components found in exploring it, the film's lead also reflects on the public works project and the world class architects and designers behind it, “‘If God is in Everything, that Includes Toilets’: Kōji Yakusho on Cleaning High-art Restrooms in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days”.

The city of Tokyo and Shibuya district enlisted such notable names as Fumihiko Maki, Junko Kobayashi, Kashiwa Sato, Kazoo Sato, Kengo Kuma, Marc Newson, Masamichi Katayama, Miles Pennington, Nao Tamura, NIGO®, Shigeru Ban, Sou Fujimoto, Tadao Ando, Takenosuke Sakakura, Tomohito Ushiro and Toyo Ito, to design and realize the accessibility, utility, and pleasure of this public space work. The conception of The Tokyo Toilet project expressed in a statement from The Nippon Foundation; "Japan is known as one of the cleanest countries in the world, and even public toilets have a higher standard of hygiene than in much of the rest of the world. However, the use of public toilets in Japan is limited because of stereotypes that they are dark, dirty, smelly, and uninviting. In cooperation with the Shibuya City government, The Tokyo Toilet project has renovated 17 public toilets in Shibuya to make them accessible for everyone regardless of gender, age, or disability. The toilets were designed by 16 globally recognized architects and designers, who are using their design and creative skills to address social issues". A very different large-scale work of a private, rather than public, work will be explored the following month at SIFF Cinema. The singular unearthly landscape of Anselm Kiefer's 200 acre La Ribaute located in Barjac southern France, home to, "Some of the Most Extraordinary Artworks of the Last Century" is the subject of  "Anselm", Wender's second film of last year. As we journey "Into the Black Forest with the Greatest Living Artist", in the highest technological rendering available 6K, 3D, and Atmos Sound, Wender's presents these works, and some of their construction, in his "Reverent 3D Portrait of Artist Anselm Kiefer". This is framed alongside philosophical musings and the artist's observation's on the century that birthed them, and the resulting, "Artwork that Took 30 Years and 200 Acres to Create".

:::: Films of 2023 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2023 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
-----------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Glazer  "The Zone of Interest"  (United Kingdom)
Mstyslav Chernov  "20 Days in Mariupol"  (Ukraine)
Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel  "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" (France)
Victor Erice  "Close Your Eyes"  (Spain)
Cyril Schäublin  "Unrest"  (Switzerland)
Ira Sachs  "Passages"  (France)
Jafar Panahi  "No Bears"  (Iran)
Alice Rohrwacher  "La Chimera"  (Italy)
Bertrand Bonello  "The Beast"  (France)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan  "About Dry Grasses"  (Turkey)
Lisandro Alonso  "Eureka"  (Argentina)
Lukas Moodysson  "Together 99"  (Sweden)
Hirokazu Kore-eda  "Monster"  (Japan)
Pedro Costa  "Daughters of the Fire"  Short (Portugal)
Laura Citarella  "Trenque Lauquen"  (Argentina)
György Fehér  "Twilight"  Restored Rereleased (Hungary)
Budd Boetticher  "The Ranown Westerns"  Restored Rereleased (United States)
Juliet Berto & Jean-Henri Roger  "Snow"  Restored Rereleased (France)
David Lynch  "Inland Empire"  Restored Rereleased (United States)
Jean Eustache  "The Mother and the Whore"  Restored Rereleased (France)
Wim Wenders  "Anselm" & "Perfect Days"  (Germany/Japan)
Ryusuke Hamaguchi  "Evil Does Not Exist"  (Japan)
Kôji Fukada  "Love Life"  (Japan)
Yorgos Lanthimos  "Poor Things"  (Greece)
Wang Bing  "Youth (Spring)"  (France)
Catherine Breillat  "Last Summer"  (France)
Ulrich Seidl  "Wicked Games: Rimini Sparta"  (Austria)
Pham Thien An  "Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell"  (Vietnam)
Pablo Larraín  “El Conde”  (Chile)
Takashi Yamazaki  "Godzilla Minus One"  (Japan)
Hayao Miyazaki  "How Do You Live?"  (Japan)
Makoto Shinkai  "Suzume"  (Japan)

For decades now, this annual overview has acted as a summation of the music, film, dance, theatre, visual art exhibitions and festivals attended and covered. Both domestic and international. As we enter into the post-phase after the global pandemic one would assume that the continuance of such opportunities would be returning in an assertive manner. Yet here in the urban northwest, the effects of the pandemic on cultural and social life are still manifesting themselves in a dynamic manner. Businesses and cultural venues continue to have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw in the years preceding the pandemic. Some of which regionally even reducing hours more than when they had initially after reopening two years ago. The once essential component of urban social life in the Northwest, the espresso cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours of any variety. Regionally, arts venues and cultural institutions returned to in-person programming in the 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. It is important to consider that the benefits of the Save Our Stages Act, alongside the Shuttered Venues Grant are a significant component as to the continuance of arts beyond the pandemic. The benefits of the various 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. Most of which would not have doors open to their cultural community now two years later, without these resources.

Unlike last year's convergence of the Venice Biennale and Document in Germany, the art seen and traveled to this year was all of a domestic nature. The Seattle Art Fair returned at the height of summer, offering works from over 80 galleries from around the globe, and the satellite event Forest for the Trees, concurrently presented a volume of regional work in Pioneer Square. In cinema, after the discontinuation of the Seattle Art Museum's film program, and the termination of its programmer, Greg Olson found a new home for his long-running film noir and italian cinema series at SIFF Cinema. The most significant filmgoing news of the year came with the unexpected convergence of cultural and civic rehabilitation funds, the legacy of Paul Allen, and the Seattle International Film Festival organization with their acquisition of the Seattle Cinerama Theater. Other notable annual events returned with the array of horror and genre film returned in the fall, significant jazz performances were seen, both within the Earshot Jazz Festival and outside its programming, and SIFF Cinema presneted a near-complete retrospective of the films of David Lynch. In music events, Seattle's recently launched Tremolo had a second successful festival of shoegaze, noise-rock and dream pop sounds at the Central Saloon, and the goliath of metal, noise and hardcore that is Northwest Terror Fest, returned to Neumos and Barboza with a sprawling and qualitative fifth iteration. Over the course of the summer, a set of legendary gothic rock and early electro-industrial bands had tours, presenting The Cure's "Songs of a Lost World", and after nearly 40 years of darkly theatrical music, the final tour from Skinny Puppy. The year also saw a series of closures and conclusions within the arts community. Two hard-hitting losses came at the end of the summer, the first of which was the newly launched visual art and community space, Museum of Museums, and the second not soon after its opening and inception for, XO Seattle in the space of the historic Coliseum Theater. Even Seattle's longstanding and prestigious literary arts mecca finds itself in uncharted water, due to a recent turn of events, "Seattle's Hugo House Faces an Uncertain Future". The year also saw the announcement of the, "Closing of both Linda Hodges and James Harris Galleries" and all the while, the gutted void-space of downtown has seen a few vacant storefronts become creative arts venues. In a lengthy discussion with NPR's Libby Denkmann and Mike Davis, Museum of Museums founder Greg Lundgren addresses the reality of, "Is Seattle's Arts Infrastructure Crumbling?"

While there are now opportunities again to engage with film, music and visual art, domestically 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 in-person 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. Two major events in the year revealed the fragility and impermanence of our quality online arts platforms. The first of them came with a series of corporate buyouts of the online direct-to-artist platform and community that was Bandcamp. First by Epic Games, who quickly dispensed with the platform, "Epic Games’ Sale of Bandcamp Has Left the Artist-Friendly Music Platform in Limbo", and then by Songtradr, as artists and professionals working in music had a unified response which was shared by The Guardian, "The Music site Bandcamp is Beloved and Unique. I Shudder at its Corporate Takeover". The second came with what Wired called, "HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, and the Day Streaming Died", after Warner Brothers Discovery gutted the leadership team of Turner Classic Movies, a group of famed directors then came together to "Fight to Save Turner Classic Movies". Which concluded in a positive outcome and a rare reversal for the network, "TCM to Include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson Taking Active Role". So, now at year's end, for those who have not found compelling new sounds, digital retailers like Boomkat, online institutions like The Quietus, and magazines like The Wire, represent the kind of expertise you’ll not find brought together online outside the framework of their curatorial legacy. A particular advantage, The Wire offers the opportunity to Listen to The Wire Top 50 Releases of 2023. 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.

Orcas Island Film Festival: Oct 11 - 15

North of Seattle, one of the region's most compelling cinephile events returns to the pastoral setting of the San Juan Islands. As an example of festival programming featuring diverse and qualitative content, the current body of the Seattle International Film Festival could take a page or two from the Orcas Island Film Festival. While running only five days, and featuring less than one tenth of the films on offer during the three weeks of SIFF, the regional micro-festival is an exemplar representation of contemporary programming. In the unlikely setting of the rural beauty of the San Juan islands, chief programmer Carl Spence, has produced a small 35 film program to rival that of its Seattle goliath. One might marvel "How this Remote Spot in Puget Sound Attracts Such High-caliber Fare", yet it is all the work of co-founders,Jared Lovejoy and Donna Laslo, producer Marc Turtletaub, and of course the curatorial work of Spence. This year, the lineup has garnered the attention of the mainstream media and rated one of the 10 Best Film Festivals in the US, and local press have dubbed it as, "Orcas Island Film Festival is Our Cannes". As the Seattle Times states, this "Orcas Island Film Festival: Small Fest, Big Movies" draws largely from this year's Cannes Film Festival, alongside a number of the notable films from this year's Venice, Sundance, and Toronto festivals, and re-presents them in a smaller, more intimate setting. In another standout installment with a remarkable lineup, this year three of the major films from Japan appear in the festival, which include the endearing and soulful goodbye from veteran animation director and head of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki. As reported in The Guardian, "Miyazaki’s Last Movie is a Fitting Swan Song", and thanks to Carl Spence, "How Do You Live?", receives a very early west coast screening within the festival.

After the brilliant set of films from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi in 2021, he returns this year with a "Enigmatic Eco-Parable that Eschews Easy Explanation", in "Evil Does Not Exist", and Japan's master of the quiet melodrama switches up tone and genre once again, Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Monster", is a "Hydra of Modern Morals and Manners". As the director of "Tokyo Ga", few western directors are more qualified or capable to present a tale of the daily pleasures and travails of Japanese life than Wim Wenders. Wenders here teams with the incomparable talent of Koji Yakusho, this year's winner of Best Actor at Cannes, to "Explore a Quiet Life in Tokyo" through the ambient urban charm of "Perfect Days". After a string of masterful, philosophical films, including a Palme d'Or winner, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's newest "About Dry Grasses", is "An Absorbing Drama of a Teacher-Pupil Crisis". On the subject of Cannes most notable award, this year's winner "Anatomy of a Fall", from Justine Triet, "Compels as an Author Accused of Her husband’s Murder". Pivoting away from his depiction of the life of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, François Ozon has apparently delivered one of the great comedies of the year with, "The Crime is Mine", and a different register can be found in "Fallen Leaves", and the gentle tide of Aki Kaurismäki's "Deadpan Comedy with Springtime in its Heart". In an unexpected turn of genre and setting, after his Haruki Murakami adaptation, Vietnamese-born French director Tran Anh Hung serves "The Taste of Things", in "A Belle Époque Tale of Meaningful Meals". One of the most anticipated films from Cannes, Alice Rohrwacher's "La Chimera", follows an Englishman's plundering of Italy’s historical artefacts alongside a bizarre gang of followers in an, "Uproarious Period Adventure that Teems with Life".

"Losers, Loners, Outcasts & Outlaws: An Original Series of the Early Works of Jim Jarmusch" at The Grand Illusion Cinema: Nov 2 - 21

What will likely prove to be the Northwest repertory cinema event of the year begins the first week of November with The Grand Illusion Cinema's original Losers, Loners, Outcasts & Outlaws: The Early Works of Jim Jarmusch series. Much in the way of the independent theater's 2016 Action, Anarchy & Audacity: A Seijun Suzuki Retrospective and Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien of 2015, this is a rare theatrical opportunity to see an assembly of work by what the New York Times called, "The Last of the American Indies". Not a stretch in terminology, as "After 40 Years in Cinema, Jim Jarmusch Remains the Quintessential Leftfield Auteur", who's cinema began as a student of NYU, engrossed with the counter cultural environment of New York City's late 1970's No Wave scene. This pressure cooker of influences, edgy self reinvention, and a vital DIY culture created the setting (and supplied much of the cast) for the director's first feature. Jarmusch utilized the resources of the university to transform his final project, a working short film, into he feature length "Permanent Vacation", an 80-minute preamble about drifting set in and around Tribeca and the East Village. This early work of No Wave Cinema now watches as much a historic document of the era and it's setting as the documentaries on the time, like that of Céline Danhier's "Blank City". As detailed in Senses of Cinema Great Directors profile, a personal cinema was already proposed in this first feature. Much in the way of his German contemporary Wim Wenders, Jarmusch has built a cinematic world on the edge of popular society. From the vantage of these corners of the world, he observes the pursuit of the curious through the travels and ruminations of outsiders, eccentric wayfarers, and poets. In his four decade-long global cinematic journeying, he would expand on "Permanent Vacation"'s template to embrace ensemble works, romantic comedies, and genre film, yet remain true to this consistent set of core concerns. In his working process, he also shared much with another senior contemporary, John Cassavetes. Like the quintessential New York director of a decade before, in his early films Jarmusch adopted an actor-oriented approach to scenario. The characters would develop first, often with a specific actor envisioned for the role, to which Jarmusch credits the genesis of the details of “the plot kind of suggest itself around the character”.

From the DIY success of his first feature, he developed his 30 minute short film into "Stranger Than Paradise", having received recognition and praise for this first work by Wim Wenders himself, who would donate 40 minutes of extraneous film stock for the film's completion. This second feature solidified Jarmusch’s trademark style; minimal sets and long, uninterrupted takes of it's outsider protagonists traversing depopulated and fringe landscapes, overflowing in dialog centered on wry and subtle observations on life, circumstance and love. Occasional intersections of characters and concerns punctuate the low-relief dramatic high points of his storytelling, often with a quietly humanist, comedic flair. At the time of its release, Jarmusch described his methodology and approach to structure as such; "Rather than finding a story that I want to tell and then adding the details, I collect the details and then try to construct a puzzle of story. I have a theme and a kind of mood and the characters, but not a plotline that runs straight through." He would expand this methodology with his next film, and in doing so find an underground hit in 1986's "Down By Law". Described by the filmmaker as a “neo-beat-noir-comedy”, it features musicians and fixtures of the downtown New York scene, John Lurie and Tom Waits, alongside the Italian comedic actor Roberto Benigni. As three men who escape from a prison, who rather than freedom, discover themselves lost in the surrounding dense Louisiana swamplands. The setting and tone of the film cemented by the substance of another of the benefits of Wim Wender's patronage, the work of the German director's longtime cinematographer, Robby Müller.

"Stranger Than Paradise" won the Camera d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival and was heralded by critics domestically and abroad as a watershed film in American independent cinema. Alongside the Coen Brothers' 1983 debut, "Blood Simple", Gus Van Sant's 1986 "Mala Noche", Susan Seidelman's Cannes-competing "Smithereens" of 1982, David Lynch's 1986 "Blue Velvet" (though produced by Dino De Laurentiis is still independent from studio funding), and Spike Lee's "She’s Gotta Have It" of the same year, Jarmusch's trio of early 1980's productions proved that the American indie could be a viable audience-drawing commodity. These niche films tonally and thematically nestled alongside a set of European contemporaries, yet expressed their own sense of a life on the margins of America's then-dominant concerns. The view gained on the society of their setting runs parallel, yet outside the prevailing social norms of the time. Jarmusch asserted a quietly countercultural posture by expressing the validity of the lives lived in his fascination with persons and communities on the margins of 1980s Reagan-era America. In 1989's "Mystery Train" he would continue this exploration of America through the eyes of outsiders, with his most structurally ambitious film to date. An anthology film comprising three vignettes that all intersect around a hotel on the industrial fringes of Memphis Tennessee, it features an eccentric cast on international characters who have descended on the city in their various travels from across the globe. This ensemble cast comprises Steve Buscemi from America, Nicoletta Braschi from Italy, musician Joe Strummer from England, and a young Japanese couple played by Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase, who all arrive at the central setting overseen by the hotel's night clerk, portrayed by Rock n' Roll legend, Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

Set to the R&B of Otis Redding, early Rock n' Roll of Roy Orbison, American blues of Junior Parker, and a moody contemporary jazz score by John Lurie, this was the first of the Jarmusch's films to place music in a more assertively forward role. Many notable meetings of sound and image in the course of the director's filmography were to follow. With scores composed for 1991's "Night on Earth" by regular collaborator Tom Waits, and Neil Young supplying a set of improvisations for guitar, piano and organ to accompany 1995's neo-western "Dead Man". It was in this film that Jarmusch's late career approach to editing, cinematography, and duration would also make itself felt. As Senses of Cinema have parsed in their review of "Filmmaker, Musician and Poet: Jim Jarmusch: Music, Words and Noise",  the form of this variation on the western was structured around the flowing improvisational work of Neil Young's sonic contribution into "a slow, hypnotic rhythm, which makes a viewing of the film into something akin to a spiritual meditation". It's setting also marked the first non-contemporary film for the director, as well as the first to explore abstracted metaphysical themes. The genesis of this American original is mapped in the three part The Guardian interviews at the BFI: Jim Jarmusch, traversing the path embarked on with his first realization that "not all films had giant crab monsters in them" at age 16, to studying literature at Columbia in New York, following a brief stint in Paris and his personal encounter with the Cinemathèque and international cinema. The earliest riches of this decades-spanning storytelling journey have been only recently disentangled from distribution licensing with Samuel Goldwyn, Island, and the defunct Orion, Fine Line, and Miramax Pictures. Now assembled together by Janus Films, through rereleases by The Criterion Collection, audiences of his late-period masterpieces can once again marvel at "How the Film World's Maverick Stayed True to His Roots".

:::: FILMS OF 2016 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2016 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
-----------------------------------------------------------
Lucile Hadžihalilović  "Evolution"  (France)
László Nemes  "Son of Saul"  (Hungary)
Ciro Guerra  "Embrace of the Serpent"  (Colombia)
Aleksander Sokurov  "Francophonia"  (Russia)
Barry Jenkins  "Moonlight"  (United States)
Bi Gan  "Kaili Blues"  (China)
Maren Ade  "Toni Erdmann"  (Germany)
Alain Robbe-Grillet  "L'Immortelle"  Restored Rerelease (France)
Wim Wenders  "The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick"  Restored Rerelease (Germany)
Sidney Bernstein  "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey"  (United Kingdom)
Krzysztof Kieślowski  "Dekalog"  Restored Rerelease (Poland)
Byron Haskin  "Too Late For Tears"  Restored Rerelease (United States)
Karel Zeman  "A Deadly Invention"  Restored Rerelease (Czech Republic)
Seijun Suzuki  "Gate of Flesh"  Restored Rerelease (Japan)
Paolo Sorrentino & Stefano Rulli  "The Young Pope"  (Italy)
King Hu  "Touch of Zen"  Restored Rerelease (China)
Makoto Shinkai  "Your Name"  (Japan)
Denis Villeneuve  "Arrival"  (United States)
Paul Verhoeven  "Elle"  (France)
Matteo Garrone  "Tale of Tales"  (Italy)
Pablo Larraín  "Neruda"  (Chile)
Shunji Iwai  "A Bride for Rip Van Winkle"  (Japan)
Albert Serra  "Story of My Death"  (Spain)
Avishai Sivan  "Tikkun"  (Israel)
Mauro Herce  "Dead Slow Ahead"  (Spain) 

This past year was marked by the inescapable reality of a election cycle in which both liberal and conservative media elevated a reality TV celebrity, media mogul and real estate magnate to one of the most influential positions of power in the world. All the while, the other aspect of the dominant two party system marginalized their more viable candidate. Less travel this year, both domestic and international translated as nothing in 2016 being comparable to attending the Okwui Enwezor curated “All the World’s Futures” and the Venice Biennale, of the year before. Grounded here in the United States, with the noise and confusion of the theatrical pantomime that was this year's election cycle, it was a great relief to find memorable festivals and exhibitions domestically. Gallery-going and the cinema played an even more prominent role, with the 300 mark hit it was a year in which a new personal record was set in theater attendance. The most notable arts event witnessed this year was the second-annual Paul Allen funded Seattle Art Fair, which again proved itself to be decidedly more than a rich man's vanity project. Particularly so for the inclusion of Pivot Art + Culture hosting the return of the KaiKai KiKi collective and it's cultural figurehead, Takashi Murakami in collaboration with Juxtapoz magazine for, "Juxtapoz x SuperFlat". Taken with the collateral "Out of Sight" exhibition, returning to the King Street Station exhibition space for its second-annual survey of contemporary art in the Pacific Northwest, the two produced an international caliber event. Reflecting the changing economic and cultural landscape of Seattle two regional festivals which had previously brought an international scope to the city had closing and transitional years in 2015. That year saw the final installments of the region's two dominant, global festivals of electronic, neoclassical and experimental music. The final Northwest edition of Rafael Anton Irisarri's Substrata Festival came and went, and in an open letter Decibel Festival's 13th year closed with programming director Sean Horton's farewell to the city. In lieu of the more expansive international forums offered by these festival settings, Seattle's monthly showcases of electronic and experimental sounds, Elevator, Secondnature, MOTOR and Wayward Music Series produced a string of memorable one-off events in 2016. Elevator's maturation this past year into exhibition curation with their first annual Corridor Festival was hailed as a unmitigated success in local press. It's day-long meeting of audio-visual media, installation art, music and performance may be the city's best new hope in filling the festival void. Corridor's second edition this month promising an equally engaged festival of light, sound, and movement from the media and performance underground.

For the larger part of global cinema, the digital age is still proving to be at a narrow impasse rather than the promised plateau of abundance, which many are learning to navigate. Particularly evident in the world of film distribution, though footing has been found on some of the growing independent streaming platforms. Award winning films from festivals in New York, Berlin, Vienna, Venice, Hong Kong, Seoul, Cannes, Paris, London, Toronto and Cannes topping both Film Comment, Cinema-Scope and the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound annual overviews have yet to screen in the United States, or even show up streaming online. So count yourself fortunate that you live in a international city if you do, as more and more of the world's greatest film aren't to be found for purchase, rent, streaming or even download (legal or otherwise). This year's Seattle International Film Festival somewhat stronger showing than the less than memorable selection of the year before, which was disheartening after the exceptional year had in 2014 for their 40th Anniversary. Their year-round programming at SIFF Cinema compensating for the oversights of the festival, bringing advance screenings, rare prints and numerous exclusive screenings to their three cinemas including the Film Center and recently restored Egyptian Theatre. Their second-run Recent Raves series being the best thing SIFF had going until it's suspension at the end of last year. Here's hoping for it's return in 2017. With indie cinemas closing around the nation, it was that much more important to support the local theater opportunities such as the fast-shrinking and now halved Landmark Theatres, and occasionally rewarding Sundance Cinema in Seattle.

Our own Northwest Film Forum had a strong calendar year as did what's fast become the greatest programming seen on a screen in this town, The Grand Illusion Cinema. In the past year this micro-sized, yet longest continuously running theater in Seattle, stepped up to fill the growing theatre void after strengthening their nonprofit partnership with Scarecrow Video. Many of the best films seen this year, when they did come to the cinema, had runs that lasted no more than a week. Others were never to appear again outside of an initial festival screening. Again proving the wisdom of getting out there, seeing the city and prioritizing the remaining opportunities that we're fortunate to have in our urban crossroads. Even so, no mall percentage of these films even avid theater-goers living in urban centers didn't get to see. Making a resource like Scarecrow Video, last year's Stranger Genius Award-winner, that much more irreplaceable. One can't imagine in the age of digital piracy that this process has aided films in finding their audience. More worrying, the lack of genuine cinema available on the dominant streaming resources, particularly with Netflix phasing out the diversity offered in their physical media. Amazon not being a real alternative either, despite their claims. Resources like Fandor, Mubi and FilmStruck, the newly launched endeavor of Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection, are fast becoming the almost singular streaming platforms through which online viewers have access to the true scope of the past twelve decades of moving pictures. Particularly with all three platforms being avidly involved in the festival dialog, with curation and criticism offered throughout the year in their respective digital magazines, Notebook, Streamline and Keyframe. In the end Mubi coming out on top, their "It's About Time: The Cinema of Lav Diaz" feature on the Filipino director's extended duration film was the cinephile streaming event of the year.

Rated by The Guardian as the number one film screened in the United States last year, László Nemes created in his award-winning, unlikely directorial debut, "'Son of Saul', an Expansion of the Language of Holocaust Films". Understandably even the century's most confident filmmakers have quailed before the terrifying responsibility of massacre, torture and sadism that is the Holocaust. Only documentaries have successfully addressed the immensity of the subject, namely Alain Resnais haunting "Night and Fog" the plumbing of the personal in Claude Lanzmann's monumental achievement "Shoah", and the recently reconstructed "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey". The latter detailed in HBO's "Night Will Fall", as a "Recalling of a Film From the Liberation of the Camps" that features some of the most unflinching footage dedicated to film in the whole of the 20th Century, and stands as a profoundly significant "lost" document on the subject. Few have ever gotten as close to the three works mentioned above to penetrating the mysteries of this most cataclysmic of human horrors. Neme's film approaches the untouchable by taking the viewer into the close-viewed final chapter of it's protagonist's life as a Sonderkommando in a unnamed concentration camp. This is a raw, pitiless cinema that pulls no punches, and does the "unrepresentable" in it's fictional representation of human dignity amid the torrent of the Holocaust. Documentarist Claude Lanzmann, famous for his disapproval of dramatic representations of the Holocaust on screen, and even well-meaning and educational entertainment's "threat to the Incarnation of the truth" surprised everyone by praising Neme's film, calling it the “anti–Schindler’s List”. Lanzmann himself resurfacing in 2013 with the release of his extended interviews with the last living Ältester of the Judenrat in his belated documentary, shot in the 1970s in Rome and not completed until present day about the divisive Holocaust survivor, Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein. With his documentary "Last of the Unjust", Lanzmann gifted the world a "Fascinating, Subtle Study in Survivor Non-Guilt" and "A Remarkable Companion to the Document of 'Shoah'".

Atrocities of quite a different kind were addressed through fictional characters in the historic setting of Ciro Guerra's "Embrace of the Serpent". His award-winning film stands as a capaciously researched work of Colonial fiction richly drawing from the accounts of ethnologist and explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg and the American botanist Richard Evans Schultes. The latter widely considered the father of modern ethnobotany for his global studies of indigenous peoples' ritualistic and medicinal uses of entheogenic plants and fungi. As described in Nicholas Casey's piece for the New York Times, Guerra arrived in the jungle with an anthropologist who aided the conveyance of his project to a local shaman, who in Guerra’s words, carefully “explained the project to the forest.” This project became, "Embrace of the Serpent: Ciro Guerra's Searching Tale about Invaded Cultures in the Amazon". Almost directly referencing the life's experiences and knowledge contained in the pages of Grünberg's "Two Years Among the Indians: Travels in Northwest Brazil", "The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Charles Evans Schultes", Schultes' own book co-authored with chemist Albert Hofmann, "The Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers", and for it's larger context, "One River", Wade Davis' account of the explorations of Charles Evans Schultes. Guerra's tale is viewed largely through the aggrieved eyes of a shaman by the name of Karamakate, a Cohiuano spiritual leader living isolated in the jungle, his tribe on the verge of extinction. “Embrace of the Serpent”'s fantastical mixture of myth and historical reality "Where Majesty Meets Monstrosity" adopts Karamakate's non-Western concepts of time and storytelling into it's very structure. Guerra gives us a damning condemnation of Colonial encroachment, a "Dreamlike Exploration of Imperialist Pollution" seen sidelong through Western man's journey for knowledge in the spiritual landscape of the Amazon. 

The strongest directorial debut in recent years appeared as an entry in what has become the European forum for the vanguard in contemporary narrative cinema. The Locarno Film Festival has emerged as one of the most important Western festivals to support Asian cinema, particularly works without commercial distribution prospects. For mainland Chinese filmmakers, the affirmation and support from the global independent film industry has become more crucial in recent years. Particularly as the government under President Xi Jinping continues to carry out the broadest crackdown on free expression in the "25 Years of Amnesia" since the events that culminated in the Tiannanmen Square protests of 1989. By way of example, China’s most prominent arthouse director, "A Guy From Fenyang" by the name of Jia Zhang-ke, would not have had the global reach of a "Filmmaker Giving Voice to Acts of Rage in Today’s China", without the support of the international festival circuit. Those filmmakers are also aware that as recently as 2010, Locarno awarded the Golden Leopard, it's top prize, to an unknown Chinese director for Li Hongqi's “Winter Vacation”. Further bolstering it's role in supporting independent film from mainland China and broader Asian subcontinent, Locarno established “Bridging the Dragon", a traveling workshop aiming to foment co-production partnerships for both European and Chinese films. So it is that "Chinese Independent Filmmakers Look to Locarno Festival" in growing numbers and diversity. Ranked among Film Comment's Best Undistributed Films of 2015, Bi Gan's "remarkable arthouse debut" swept up Locarno's Best New Director prize, it's screening in the festival hailed as one of the most assured directorial debuts of the decade by both Film Comment and Cinema-Scope. In "Kaili Blues" Gan offers up an increasingly dreamlike elegy for bygone Miao traditions and sweeping changes seen in the landscape of China itself. Delivered through extended shots and images that are achingly melancholy, and teasingly cluttered, "Kaili Blues: A Dream without Limits" describes the subtropical province of Guizhou, a mountainous, lush region of sporadic human habitations. Intriguing associations of the narrative's emotional landscape can be found in the depicted real-world recurrences of transition and disrepair.

On a personal level there were three films in the year that spoke to aesthetic, philosophical, emotional and conceptual interests like no others. Curiously, this trio shares as little in common as anything viewed in the year, yet they are all bound up in a dedication to form in their exploration of meaning. With “Evolution”, her first film in over a decade, Lucille Hadzihalilovic has again created a tantalizingly atmospheric cinematic "Miracle of Life" that’s utterly sui generis. Yet it is one which also resonates with recognizable echoes of genre forms found in French Fantastique and Giallo, all the while remaining enigmatic from its opening to dystopic close. This "Eerie Body Horror with a Tender Undercurrent" watches as a transporting coming of age tale, similarly in the case of her "Innocence" of 2004 and again it is equally mesmerizing and troubling, a entrancing confluence of the beautiful and sinister. The two films also share in an effect of, "Going to a Magical Place You Wouldn’t Want to Live In" yet as a viewer finding that its entrancement lingers beyond the closing credits, if only to further parse out it's mystery. It is a film who's function is in part about the construction of irreducible tension, and the satisfaction of finding that it remains unresolved at it's completion. Special mention goes to the sound design and score by Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown as Cyclobe, who like the work of Jóhannsson for Villeneuve's "Arrival", play a significant role in reinforcing the sensory bedrock of the film's the fantastical setting. A setup equally out-of-time serves a diametrically different purpose in relation to Aleksander Sokurov's "Francophonia". This time around the Russian experimenter has put nothing less than his whole self into the film, quite literally. Sometimes acting as an unseen interlocutor, host and guide, the director speaks with the ghosts who haunt the Louvre over it's centuries of existence, his inquiry echoing across time. Through the vehicle of the museum's own life under varying governments, empires and states, some benevolent, others hostile, like in that in case of it's central passage, "About World War Foes Turned Allies, for the Sake of Art". But Sokurov's larger theme this time is the cruelty of greatness itself. It is in this age-old alliance of art and power, and the crushing distance of both from the lives of those who serve them, that is the film's central concern.These are detailed through Sokurov's own nocturnal ruminations about the connections between war and peace, art collections and conquest, Western and Eastern Europe. Like its theme, his "Meditations on the Louve" is in itself a work of art that troubles the conscience; putting forward the consideration that no art is innocent, and that both its preservation and destruction, depends on the very influence of that power which has shaped history. 

Barry Jenkins' exploration of inchoate desire is as wise as it is generous, and as a portrait of masculinity it is both as unflinching, and deeply empathetic, as anything in all of contemporary cinema. That a film of such cultural specificity manages to be so overwhelmingly universal is another of it's many feats. Another is that Jenkins and screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney have crafted a film which originates from so deep in its own DNA that it often comes across as as impossible to separate any one aspect from the context which produced it. Through the tandem of urban sounds in concert with Nicholas Britell's expressive soundtrack, the poetry of James Laxton's cinematography, and a few beautifully executed acknowledgements to Jenkins' cinematic heroes, the moments that comprise "Moonlight" are deeply immersive. The result in concert is that there are extended passages of Jenkins "Song of Myself" that watch as though the viewer is experiencing them with all their senses. The product is a very real sense that the journey of Jenkins and McCraney "From Bittersweet Childhoods to ‘Moonlight’", is the story of the film itself. "This Magical, Majestic Portrait of Young, Black Gay Life" as Matt Sandler puts it in "Miami Melancholia" for the Los Angeles Review of Books; "Makes a swerve on the broad and compulsively historical cliches that usually frame American filmmaking about Black people, by being more historical, by looking so closely that a new kind of filmic history emerges. Moonlight’s sublimity depends on the specificity of its setting in the age of neoliberalism and particular as a site of transnational, African diasporic, utopian dreaming." Phil Coldiron's approach in Cinema-Scope is to consider how differently this film addresses America’s ongoing history of structural racism and the preponderance of occasions in which black communities in popular cinema face poverty and oppression so that a singularly-able hero might transcend it. If not escaping the conditions of systemic poverty, then suffer them nobly or more productively "as the means for analyzing some relationship of power marked off by the distance of history". No such devices are at play in Jenkins' film, and it is much more superior for it. 

While a strong year for contemporary cinema, some of the greater revelations came from decades past. The highest concentration of which was seen delivered by the work of institutions like Criterion Collection, Masters of Cinema and Kino Lorber, who continue to fund the restoration and rerelease of some of the past century's greatest film. Criterion Collection's vision continues to be enriched by masterpieces of decades past, this year seeing long overdue restoration of one of the most notable works of the whole of the Taiwanese New Wave in Edward Yang's "A Brighter Summer Day". This evocation of the "Heartache and Confusion of Adolescence from an Arthouse Master" is among the rarest and most significant films to emerge from world cinema in the 1990s. From quite another era of Asian cinema, King Hu's preeminence as a "Martial-arts Pioneer Who Brought Dynamic Grace to the Genre", was reestablished with Janus Films and Criterion producing new 4k restorations in a domestic theatrical run this past summer. This marked the first opportunity to see these films in the west for most filmgoers, particularly in the case of "A Touch of Zen". With "A Touch of Zen's Masterful Concoction of Cinematic Flavors" Hu emerged in 1971 as a "Martial-arts Filmmaking Master, Bending Light and Arrows to His Will". Befitting a body of work of this influence and stature, in a rare move for genre works Senses of Cinema have dedicated a Great Directors feature on Hu's warping and reformatting of the three tenets of 20th Century Wuxia cinema: the political world of the Jianghu, bewildering martial arts action, and thirdly, and most artfully in Hu's case, abstraction in representing Buddhist concepts. Polish cinema also featured prominently. SIFF again played host to the annual Seattle Polish Film Festival, with this year's programming coupe the exceedingly rare screening of "On the Silver Globe", a truly lost "Thwarted Sci-Fi Masterwork" by "Polish Cinema Rebel, Andrzej Zulawski Who Died this Year at Age 75". Coinciding with the Criterion Collection's release of the restored blu-ray box set of the apogee in all Krzysztof Kieslowski's filmography, "Dekalog" returned to cinemas for the first time in almost two decades. SPFF featuring not only Kieslowski's restored ten-part masterwork, but also his earliest collaborations with cinematographer Sławomir Idziak, "A Short Film About Killing" and the director's first film outside of Poland, "The Double Life of Veronique". 

The year's two most notable retrospectives were brought to town by Northwest Film Forum in collaboration with The Grand Illusion and SIFF Cinema. Again decades since many of the German director's work was seen in cinemas domestically, "Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road" brought a rare and overdue opportunity for "Looking Back at the Road Ahead" at the life's work of one of Senses of Cinema's Great Directors. A quest spanning the five decades from his earliest 16mm experimental shorts of the late 1960s to his recent award-winning documentaries, his global cinematic journeying was celebrated with a honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. This "Misfit, Outsider and the Man Who Helped America to See Itself" first came to wide attention in the 1970s for his string of existential road movies exploring modern-day alienation, spiritual confusion, loneliness and dislocation. This body of work featured in Criterion's new blu-ray restorations helped establish the New German Cinema alongside the work of his contemporaries, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta as arguably the most significant national cinema movement of the 1970s. The other side of the globe and a decade in advance, the course described by "Action, Anarchy and Audacity: A Seijun Suzuki Retrospective" was as much of the great outsider director, as the Japanese studio system itself. Particularly that of Nikkatsu and the decade of action films from the studio that flooded the Japanese market. These appeared in genres spanning yakuza movies, urban thrillers, jazz-inflected youth pictures, Nippon westerns and French New Wave-inspired emotional dramas and crime films. Amid this abundance of action potboilers, Mukokuseki Akushon (or “borderless action”) crime films emerged, the best of these originated from the then-new, and stylistically daring directorial talent of, Toshio Masuda, Takashi Nomura, Seijun Suzuki and Buichi Saito. Arrow Films' Nikkatsu Diamond Guys and Criterion's Nikkatsu Noir represents a standout cross section from the best of what the genre had to offer. Nikkatsu in the throes of cranking out successful lower budget gangster and Noir-ish crime movies, initially had a ideal director in Suzuki. As time progressed, Suzuki increasingly bridled against these formulaic restraints, and from within the budgetary constraints that bound him, he began down his own divergent path. Choosing instead a personal denial of service to rote, prosaic plotlines, his response was instead to approach his works as exercises in technically bold, visceral visual expression. It was the fallout over his singular 1967 stylized shocker "Branded to Kill", that Suzuki was banished from the Nikkatsu clearing house that had once brought him great success. And though, "Branded To Kill 'Made No Money and No Sense' it's Still a Classic", it is an act of creative defiance many consider to be Suzuki's right of admission into the Japanese New Wave.