Seattle Cinerama's Second Annual Science Fiction Film Festival: May 1 - 12 | Katsuhiro Otomo's "Short Peace" Anthology at Grand Illusion Cinema: Apr 24 - 27

Seattle Cinerama's Sci-Fi Festival returns! It's first incarnation in 2012 featured both blockbuster wonders, cult oddities and even some of the of the more adventurous auteur works within this genre cinema. It's second iteration was bumped from the schedule last year due to the extended screening of "Iron Man 3", but thankfully returns this May for a twelve day run. Like the inaugural fest, many of these are single screenings, with multiple films being shown throughout the day. With sci-fi being a common foundation of the pop culture lexicon, I don't feel a need for exposition here, nonetheless 35mm and even 70mm prints of the selections are rare treats. Requiring no small amount of effort to procure a 70mm of Kubrick's "2001: A Spacy Odyssey", (with effects maestro Douglas Trumbull in attendance!) or even of "Tron" for that matter. This year again features a number rare opportunities to witness these spectacles of design, concept and execution of a screen and soundsystem of the immensity as the Cinemrama. David Lynch's proto-Steampunk vision of "Dune" makes a return, as does Terry Gilliam's stylistic Dystopian "Brazil", and the bodily horror of David Cronenberg's "The Fly". There are also double-hitters from both Stanley Kubrick with "A Clockwork Orange" and John Carpenter, with the return of his arctic biological terror, "The Thing" and the 1980's dark urban camp of "Escape from New York". A lot has been said recently about Ridley Scott's collaboration with Dan O'Bannon and the dream design team of Mœbius, H. R. Giger and Martin Bower on "Alien", and groundbreaking in quite a different light, the animated adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo's epic paranormal Cyberpunk manga, "Akira". Speaking of Otomo, his first animated short film anthology in two decades "Short Peace", featuring works by his contemporaries Hajime Katoki, Hiroaki Ando and Shuhei Morita's award winning "Possessions", will be playing at the Grand Illusion Cinema for three nights only later this month. Rounding out the bill at the Cinerama, one of the anomalous transmissions from the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451", and another space oddity, in the form of Nicolas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth". Lastly, a smattering of original 1950's classics, including Fred Wilcox's "Forbidden Planet" (with it's groundbreaking score by Louis and Bebe Barron), and a rare theatrical showing of Henry Levin's "Journey to the Center of the Earth". To get a sense of the series' scope, here's the full line-list of titles: 2001: A Space Odyssey (70mm) • Akira • Barbarella • Brazil • A Clockwork Orange • Close Encounters of the Third Kind • Dune • E.T. • Flash Gordon • Forbidden Planet • Star Trek 2  • Star Trek: First Contact • Terminator 2 • Tron (70mm) • War of the Worlds • The Road Warrior • Planet of the Apes • The Thing • Escape from New York • The City of Lost Children • Fahrenheit 451 • 12 Monkeys • Logan's Run • Alien • Aliens • Tron (70mm) • The Man Who Fell to Earth • The Matrix • Journey to the Center of the Earth • Gattaca • The Fifth Element • The Fly • Predator • Brainstorm (70mm) • UFOTOG • Dark City •

Godflesh with Cut Hands, Pharmakon & House of Low Culture US Tour: April 10 - 25

Thursday at Neumos! After the cancelled tour of this past Fall, the west coast finally gets the out-of-nowhere revival of one of the all time defining Metal acts of the 1980's-90's, Justin Broadrick and G.C. Green's Godflesh. Reports from their New York show of last week is that they've reformed to play some of the most punishing, loud, assaulting music ever created by man and machine. If this sounds like hyperbole, then it's safe to say you weren't at the shows on their final US tour for the "Songs of Love and Hate" album of 1996. An album that at the time made 'Albums of the Year' lists for magazines as disparate as Terrorizer and The Wire. "Songs of Love and Hate" and it's companion "...in Dub" were a convergence of the purity of Metal assault of earlier Godflesh with a growing fascination with the weighty rhythms and hooks of Reggae and Hip Hop. The latter coming to inform Justin Broadrick's splinter project with The Bug's Kevin Martin through the late 1990's as Techno Animal. The rumored new Godflesh material promises to be a return to the era of just straight-up punishing Metal/Industrial assault, ala "Pure" and "Streetcleaner", with a forthcoming album in the works tentatively titled "A World Lit Only by Fire". Broadrick gave a recent in-depth interview with Pelican's Trevor de Brauw discussing his new solo work under the Jesu moniker, "Everyday I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came" and the past, present and future of Godflesh for Self-Titled; "When Pelican Met Jesu", that's pretty much essential reading for any fans of contemporary Metal. For their west coast leg of the tour, Broadrick and G.C. Green are joined by William Bennett's Cut Hands project involving a brutalist contemporary approach to traditional African rhythms. Yes, this is William Bennett of seminal 80's noise act Whitehouse we're talking about. Bennett who happens to have one of the largest private collections of traditional African instruments in the UK and since it's a 55(?) year old British gent who's been unrelenting about his aesthetics/approach to sound/physicality since the early 1980's, don't expect him to stop now. What we were witness to in Decibel's 2012 Modern Love showcase was a deluge of brutal African percussion, distortion and extreme frequency f*ckery; a evolutionary/mutagenic leap of the Whitehouse sound/agenda for sure. Joining Godflesh and Cut Hands as the initiating act on the bill, Aaron Turner's House of Low Culture project, which has included contributions from SUNN O)))'s Stephen O'Malley and Luke Scarola of Old Man Gloom, should go some way to establish the necessary ambiance. Photo credit: Greg Cristman

Jonathan Glazer's new film "Under the Skin" at Landmark Theatres: April 4 - May 1

Opens the first week of April at Landmark's Harvard Exit and at Sundance Cinema later in the month! A world away from anything Jonathan Glazer has ever realized on the screen, "Under the Skin" an adaptation of Michel Faber's novel of the same name is many things; a reflection on consciousness, a tension-filled tonal piece, a psychedelic road trip movie, a study on what it is to be human, an observation of the beauty of the natural world, and a exercise in terror and genuine 'otherness'. And that's not touching on it's central premise. Which you should do whatever you can to NOT read more on the film. Going in not knowing the crux of the protagonist's origin is one of the factors that will make it's viewing a significantly more effective, discomfiting and charged experience. This being a difficult thing to do in the internet age. Made that much more difficult by it's North American premier being almost seven months ago now at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. My own 'blind' first viewing made for a disturbing, putting-together-of-the-pieces in the tradition of the best of thrillers of decades past. Thankfully, the trailer doesn't reveal these central themes, yet (tactfully) and effectively conveys a sense of it's ominous, psychedelic, predatory tone. Only be read after viewing, Jonathan Romney's double-hitter of both a Short Takes: Under the Skin and Film of the Week for Film Comment give you a sense of it's distinction and significance. Romney stating; "Glazer’s third feature fuses a cryptic stranger-in-a-strange-land narrative, guerrilla shooting approach, and a tightly contained audiovisual scheme that makes for a claustrophobically seamless and unnerving drama of self-awakening. This frightening, unearthly film is the most striking achievement yet by a director whose first two features "Sexy Beast" and "Birth" were not quite fully realized, but suggested a will to unearth the strangeness within familiar genre forms. "Under the Skin" is not only genuinely experimental but feels authentically alien—almost something that a documentarist from another world might have shot here on a field mission." Which also earned it (again) Film of the Week status in Sight & Sound along with a feature on the powerful synergy of the film's image and sound, the latter supplied by British composer Mica Levi. Doing my best to not dissipate the experience of the film's disorientation and charged surprise, another to read after viewing would be Nicolas Rapold's invocation of some of the cinematic traditions inaugurated by Stanley Kubrick, Nicolas Roeg and Andrei Tarkovsky as they relate to Glazer's "Lovely, Lethal and Out of This World" vision, which Stephen Holden calls, "A Much Darker Hitchhiker’s Guide" for the New York Times.

Alejandro "Jodorowsky's Dune" and new film "The Dance of Reality" at Sundance Cinema: April 25 - May 1 & SIFF Cinema: May 2 - 14 | The Grand Illusion Cinema: Jun 20 - 26

After decades of absence from cinema, the Chilean alchemist of the wondrous and absurd returns! This of course is Alejandro Jodorowsky, creator, author and actor in such underground classics of Magickal, allegorical, psychedelic cinema in the 70's and 80's as "El Topo", "The Holy Mountain" and "Santa Sangre". As well as author of the groundbreaking, cosmic, comedic, operatic grandiosity that are his comic book collaborations with Jean Giraud aka Mœbius, most notably that of "The Incal". Just last week the New York Times Sunday magazine heralded Jodorowsky's return with a lengthy feature and interview, "The Psychomagical Realism of Alejandro Jodorowsky". After having seemingly disappeared from the world of filmmaking -- his "King Shot" of some years ago was abandoned due to difficulty securing funding -- this past year Cannes hosted the double-hitter of both a narrative and documentary from his particular Psychomagical Universe Jodorowsky's newest, “The Dance of Reality” premiered to enthused reviews in both the Guardian, "La Danza de la Realidad is a Triumphant Return: Mixing Autobiography, Politics, Torture and Fantasy to Exuberant, Moving Effect" and The Los Angeles Times', "Chile's Onetime Cult King Still the Wizard of Weird: At 84 He Still has More Movies to Make". From A.O. Scott's New York Times review, in which me calls the film "something very close to a masterpiece", it appears the director has lost none of his touch for transgressive lyricism, his return to cinema watching like a deeply personal and surreal "Family Memoir in a Dreamscape: ‘The Dance of Reality,’ Jodorowsky’s Comeback Film".

Almost a year later, it finally had it's North American premier at SXSW this month and is to be screened in the Summer calendar at Seattle's Grand Illusion Cinema the week of June 20 - 26th. Closer on the horizon, opening April 25th at Seattle's Sundance Cinema with a run at SIFF Cinema the week after, the documentary on one of the great unmade films of the sci-fi golden age of the late-70's/80's; "Jodorowsky's Dune". This being another preposterously audacious project involving everyone from effects by Dan O'Bannon and Douglas Trumbull, to Mœbius and H.R. Giger in it's production designs, to a cast consisting of Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí and Gloria Swanson, to a soundtrack supplied by Pink Floyd, Magma and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Even in pre-production the film ran significantly over budget, Frank Herbert recalling that Jodorowsky's script would result in a 14-hour movie, stating that "It was the size of a phonebook". It's producer and financier, Arthur P. Jacobs died before the film could be completed, the rights were then sold to Dino DeLaurentiis for what would become David Lynch's own taking of liberties with the source material (significantly less than we would have seen from Alejandro!) in his peculiar, divisive, proto-Steampunk adaptation of the book. The reviews for this documentary assemblage of accounts and materials from the production have called it "A Wildly Entertaining Look At The Most Ambitious Film Never Made" in the pages of Salon, “Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The Sci-Fi Classic that Never Was" and Twitch Film's established enthusiasm for all things Alejandro is given abundant space in the two-part, "Jodorowsky's Dune Delightfully Journeys Into The Brilliance That Might Have Been".

Skinny Puppy “Live Shapes for Arms” US Tour with Baal: Jan 24 - Mar 5

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the American continent saw its own variation on the burgeoning industrial and post-punk sounds that were then emerging from Europe, and the United Kingdom. The role that Chicago's Wax Trax! Records played in the development of the genre is now both historic and incontestable. Their legacy, beyond just releasing a body of music that bred or came to influence more commercially successful acts of the 1990s, like Nine Inch Nails and Prodigy, Wax Trax! were defined by a then-radical business model. Acting as more than just the setting of a retail record store, and label produced a cultural environment in which its founders generated a cultural locus of related aesthetics, sounds, values and lifestyles. This setting gave birth to the mid-to-late 1980s electro-industrial and EBM sounds of Ministry, Meat Beat Manifesto, KMFDM, Front 242, and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. Further north, there was an affinity to be had with the concurrent Canadian scene largely released by Nettwerk Records, which issued albums from the influential Vancouver trio, Skinny Puppy, Australia's SPK, Severed Heads, and Toronto's Front Line Assembly. The duo of cEvin Key and Nivek Ogre as Skinny Puppy stood out from this set of artists for its use of an array of live instruments, treated samples, concrete sounds and media collage, as well as incorporating the use of "B-grade horror movie visuals", including fake blood and gore props, into their live performance spectacles. In advance of their very first release they were signed to a label deal with Nettwerk, and were invited to Vancouver's Mushroom Studios to work on the material which would become "Back & Forth". It was here that the group recruited Front Line Assembly's Bill Leeb to co-produce the EP and perform bass synth and backing vocal tracks.

The darkly electro and synth-horror albums, "Bites" and "Remission" would follow, with Leeb leaving in 1986 to pursue his Front Line Assembly project, and his replacement Dwayne Goettel stepping into the fray with, "Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse". This album and its 1987 follow-up "Cleanse Fold and Manipulate" would be the works that would both elevate and cement the Skinny Puppy sound and aesthetic. With graphics created by Nettwerk's in-house photographer and designer, Steven R. Gilmore, the cover art and accompanying music videos featured distorted images from horror films and pornography, news media and television snippets and abstract swathes of degraded printing artifacts and muted, dark color fields. The music would mirror these treatments, with horror movie samples and news media and social commentary dialog, often addressing the band's own fixation on the dehumanizing effects of the military industrial complex, cruelty, and animal rights activism. It was around this time that they enlisted producers to do remixes such as On-U Sound's Adrian Sherwoood for the developing industrial, goth, fetish alternative and countercultural club music scene, many of which were featured on the "Twelve Inch Anthology". A set of more dissonant, socially aggressive, and literal  politically-minded albums followed in 1988 and 1989, with the release of "VIVIsectVI", and "Rabies". With "Too Dark Park" and their final album of what is considered their classic electro-industrial era, 1992's "Last Rights", Skinny Puppy delivered two albums and a set of singles for "Tormentor", "Spasmolytic", and "Inquisition". Exhibiting such a refined and hard-hitting concentration of their sound set on the fringes of the genre, that there was seemingly no new territory left to explore.

After a thirteen year stretch, the band disbanded in 1996 with the release of "The Process" following Ogre's leaving on the eve of its release, and within a few months, Dwayne Goettel's death due to heroin use. Through their numerous side projects and collaborations of the 1990s, the remaining members continued to be active. Most notable among them was cEvin Key, Anthony Valcic, Phil Western, and Mark Spybey's Download project, which expanded their sound into the then thriving electronic music scene informed by labels like Rephlex and Warp Records. After nearly a decade, Skinny Puppy reformed in 2003 with producer Mark Walk and released their ninth album, "The Greater Wrong of the Right". This was followed by three albums in this new mode and configuration and numerous festival appearances, including Download Festival in France, Spain's Primavera Sound, and Leipzig's Wave-Gotik-Treffen. The first of which at the Doomsday festival in Germany, was detailed in, "Ain’t Dead Yet: An Interview with Skinny Puppy" on which Orge recalls; "Afterwards, we felt very energized and healed, putting water under the bridge, like it was a magical journey to get there. After we had done the show, we were sitting on a train to Prague and we said, “That was so much fun, we’ve gotta do some more. Maybe it would be more fun to not just do old, looking-backward shows, but make a new album and see where we would be now”. From this series of one-off festival shows, the current iteration of the band was born, with the albums “Mythmaker”, “hanDover”, and last year’s “Weapon”, to follow. They appear at Seattle's Showbox, on an extensive tour this winter, with early dates generating reviews like “Skinny Puppy Unleashes a Torture Session on Miami”, and ReGen Magazine's interview series followed by enthusiatic praise for the realization of numerous nights in the Live Shapes for Arms.

Hayao Miyazaki's final film "The Wind Rises" screening subtitled at Seattle Cinerama: Feb 25 & Mar 4 | Landmark Theatres: Feb 21 - Apr 10

The six month wait for the most recent from Studio Ghibli's founding director concludes with two Tuesdays-only subtitled screenings at Seattle Cinerama and a more extensive run of the subtitled print in cities across the nation at Landmark Theatres. "The Wind Rises" is notable for both being Hayao Miyazaki's final film, and it's inclusion of realistic depictions of disaster and societal tragedy, warfare, sex, and other scenes from everyday life. More so than any other previous work, the film marks a surprising break from his previous fantasy and science fiction oriented allegorical approaches to discussing social, political and eco-industrial issues. A lot has been said already on the subject of the film's fantasized telling of the life of aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi in the setting of 1930's expansionist Japan, as it recovered from the devastating Kanto Earthquake and the rise of Nationalism proceeding Japan's march toward war. The film has received some exceptional reviews from it's western premier at the Venice Film Festival, but of higher profile has been the critical response from both the right and the left, summarized in The Guardian's "Japanese Animator Under Fire for Film Tribute to Warplane Designer" and the New York Times "Hayao Miyazaki’s Swan Song Too Hawkish for Some", with the Boston Film Critic's vote spurring heated debate by a divided jury before awarding the film Best Animated Feature. Lets not forget though, that this is the author of one of the greatest anti-war mangas ever written, "Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind" and director of numerous ecological, socially conscious, complex and nuanced tales that depict morality in all of it's spectrum of grayness, particularly during times of social upheaval. Miyazaki himself recently speaking out against the Japanese right-wing, "Anime Legend Miyazaki Denounces Push to Change Japan's ‘Peace Constitution’", opposing the movement backed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to change Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution and more recent developments such as the strong Nationalistic stance taken by Japan's leading LDP party. A considered response to the film and it's relevance offered by Chris Packham in his "The Wind Rises Review: Legendary Animator Hayao Miyazaki Takes a Bow" for LA Weekly: "The war rumbles over a distant horizon the myopic engineer can't see; his schematics and formulas are closer at hand, and within his field of vision. Like most of Miyazaki's films, The Wind Rises has no primary villain or Manichaean struggle between good and evil; though Jiro is bound for loss and sadness, asking a director known for his embrace of ambiguity to make a blunt, declarative political coda seems a little artless."

Leos Carax's "Mauvais Sang" & Claire Denis' "Trouble Every Day" at Northwest Film Forum: Feb 14 - 20

This month Northwest Film Forum hosts French Films for Valentines Weekend featuring earlier works by two greats of contemporary Francophile cinema! The first, a look into the stylistically formative years of Leos Carax, director of 2012's most phantasmagoric, absurd, postmodernly playful, wondrous thing seen on a screen, an homage of sorts to Jacques Rivette, Cocteau and Bunuel, "Holy Motors" and over a decade previous, his inventive, divisive, controversial, adaptation of Herman Melville in "Pola X". At the young age of 25 he broke onto the French cinema scene with a film that already would hint at the audacity of his play with the narrative tropes and storytelling conventions of French cinema that would be fully realized on the screen in later works like 1991's "Lovers on the Bridge". The not-distant-future tale of "Mauvais Sang" is a more plaintive affair, describing a paranoid, Alphaville-esque future society where a AIDS-like virus is ravaging Parisian youth, seemingly engineered by a shadowy medical industry Megacorp within a maximum security highrise. Our young protagonist unable to free himself from the orbit of his father's criminal past, and the heist his compatriots have planned with him as the surrogate. But that makes explicit a film which is much more oblique than all that, the quirky mystique of it's persevering charm detailed in Dan Sullivan's review for Film Comment. My lasting memory of "Trouble Every Day" from Claire Denis, (director of last year's pitch-perfect neo-Noir, "Bastards") is that it was billed in Seattle International Film Festival 2001, as a erotic 'vampire movie', much to the horror, confusion and significant dismay of those that I saw the screening with. I had done enough reading in advance from it's coverage in the festival circuit to glean that it mapped a kind of psycho-geography to rival something out of a Thomas Pynchon novel, (and coincidentally was devouring "Gravity's Rainbow" at the time). So I was properly primed for the deepest depths of mind, bodies, perception, self, gone awry. The psychological, psychedelic, psychosexual adventures of one Tyrone Slothrop across the European post-War Zone acted as complimentary preparation for this one by Denis. But again, I'm going to leave it to Max Nelson's review of in tha pages of Film Comment to better depict the film's nimbus of bodily horrors and graphic indulgences.

'Recent Raves' by Claire Denis, Jia Zhang-Ke, Abdellatif Kechiche, Asghar Farhadi, Jem Cohen & Clio Barnard | Paolo Sorrentino's "The Great Beauty", Ben Wheatley's "A Field in England" & Alain Guiraudie's "Stranger by the Lake" at SIFF Cinema: Feb 3 - Mar 31

New Monday night encore screenings of notable films which received brief showings upon their release. So far, the first couple months look to be the best thing SIFF has going for it in 2014! This series of Recent Raves beginning with Abdellatif Kechiche's divisive, corporeal, adaptation of "Blue is the Warmest Color", Jia Zhang-ke's blending of his usual documentary aptitude with a newfound flare for bloodletting in "A Touch of Sin" and Jem Cohen's study on art history, the social landscape of the city and the act of observation itself, "Museum Hours". The series also features a personal highlight of last year; the mining of the European economic crisis to perfect effect as the setting for Claire Denis' darker-than-dark Noir thriller, "Bastards". There's also Ralph Fiennes' debunking of Victorian values in "The Invisible Woman", and Asghar Farhadi's return after 2012's much lauded "A Separation" with another dose of familial melodrama set within nuanced social, gender and class commentary, "The Past". Speaking of drama utilizing mechanics derived from neorealist cinema, Clio Barnard’s "The Selfish Giant" is a great new entry from the UK, as much about social class concerns as it is the life of it's wayward young protagonist. Also on the calendar for the coming month, Ben Wheatley returns after the great Occult crime thriller of "Kill List", with a unique and sinister vision of Olde Albion set during the 17th Century Civil War in "A Field in England" and Richard Linklater's 'Jesse and Celine' trilogy of films, "Before Sunrise", "Before Sunset" and "Before Midnight" are being screened as a triple-feature. Romance of a darker, inverted nature can be found in Alain Guiraudie's exploration of desire without limits, his "Stranger by the Lake" is an eerie, troubling, almost Hitchcockian thriller charged with seduction and threat. And just in time for the Oscars, a weeklong run for the highlight of SIFF's Cinema Italian Style series, a film ranked by Sight & Sound as among the best the year had to offer and given Film of the Week treatment by Jonathan Romney in the pages of Film Comment, Paolo Sorrentino's "The Great Beauty" returns thanks to it's current Academy Award Nomination.

Noir City Festival: International Edition at SIFF Cinema: Feb 13 -17

Next week Eddie Muller's annual Film Noir Foundation event goes global at SIFF Cinema with Noir City: International Edition. Opening night begins with the WWII double-hitter of Orson Welles' (ostensibly directed?) "Journey into Fear", and a new restoration of Carol Reed's brilliant realization of Graham Greene's novel set in Allied occupied Vienna. As Europe struggled to get back on it's feet, much of the post-War Zone was a intersection of black market dealings, smuggling, espionage and marshal law, making for a shadowy setting of bombed out buildings and desolate empty city blocks that is the Vienna of "The Third Man". The series also features a ultra-rare screening of the only Hollywood era Noir directed by a woman, Ida Lupino's masterclass on the style, "The Hitchhiker". Another neglected masterpiece of Noir awaiting rediscovery, Byron Haskin's adaptation of Roy Huggins' serial, to which he also wrote the screenplay, "Too Late For Tears". Thought lost for decades this new restoration by The UCLA Film & Television Archive looks to return this film to it's rightful place in the genre-canon. We also get a double-hitter of Henri-Georges Clouzot. Clouzot probably best known for his gripping thriller, considered one of the most suspenseful films ever made, "Wages of Fear" and a earlier crime drama featuring the perfect concoction of a murder, a conniving chanteuse, her jealous husband and the sly police inspector that suspects our culprits in "Quai des Orfèvres". Akira Kurosawa's film that made Toshiro Mifune a star, as much as Kurosawa attempted a cautionary tale for Mifune's anti-hero, his tough but honest cool guy and charismatic swagger made him a sensation with Japanese youth. The alcoholic clinic doctor and tubercular gangster make the unlikeliest couple in one of Kurosawa's great contemporary films, "Drunken Angel". Near the program's conclusion, Jules Dassin pulls off what's considered one of the greatest heist films ever made, containing what might be the most suspenseful robbery sequence of all time (how's that for double-hyperbole?) in his 1950's classic, "Riffifi". Made that much more notable for the film being shot by Dassin while in France after his Hollywood blacklist at the hands of The House Committee on Un-American Activities and The MPAA's Waldorf Statement. From the SIFF press release: "The Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller, returns to Seattle and explodes the long-held belief that noir is an exclusively American phenomenon. Join us as Noir City goes international by presenting unearthed gems from Argentina, Britain, Germany, Norway, Spain, Japan, and (of course) France -- plus two newly restored Hollywood classics. This year's Noir City festival features 16 classic films, most in newly restored or archival 35mm prints! Opening night walk the red carpet for a double shot of WWII intrigue, then spend the next four days on a journey around the globe showcasing how the cinematic movement known as 'Noir' had a style, sexiness, and cynicism that crossed all international borders."

:::: FILMS OF 2013 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2013 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
-----------------------------------------------------------

Paolo Sorrentino  "The Great Beauty"  (Italy)
Joshua Oppenheimer  "The Act Of Killing" (Denmark)
Claire Denis  "Bastards"  (France)
Sion Sono  "The Land of Hope"  (Japan)
Shane Carruth  "Upstream Color"  (United States)
Wong Kar-Wai  "The Grandmaster"  Chinese Cut  (China)
Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor  "Leviathan"  (United States)
Tsai Ming-Liang  "Stray Dogs"  (Taiwan)
Ulrich Seidl "Paradise: Trilogy" (Austria)
Jia Zhang-ke  "A Touch of Sin"  (China)
Asghar Farhadi "The Past" (Iran)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa  "Penance"  (Japan)
Bruno Dumont  "Hors Satan"  (France)
Olivier Assayas  "Something In The Air"  (France)
Jacques Rivette  "OUT 1: Noli me Tangere"  Rereleased  (France)  
Lav Diaz  "Norte, the End of History"  (Phillipines)
Ashim Ahluwalia  "Miss Lovely"  (India)
Kristina Buožytė  "Vanishing Waves"  (Lithuania)
Hideaki Anno  "Evangelion 3: You Can (Not) Redo" (Japan)
Kuei Chih-Hung  "Boxer's Omen" Rerelease (China)
Michael Cimino  "Heaven's Gate" Uncut Rerelease (United States)
Alex Gibney  "We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks"  (United States)
Rick Rowley  "Dirty Wars"  (United States)
Pat Collins  "Silence"  (Ireland)

The past 12 months yielded great discoveries outside the expected sources and return artists creating works from beyond their established territory. A year of finding new record labels, imprints, publishers and film distributors. Authors of choice producing some of their finest writing to-date, in fields as far-flung as cultural criticism, literature, theory and even science fiction. Some of the most innovative visual art movements of decades past were given their first exhibits in the west and home-grown visionaries had retrospectives spanning the nation. 2013 was a memorable one. The growing pains of the digital age are still graphically evident in the world of film distribution, award winning films from festivals in Vienna, Toronto and Cannes have yet to screen in the United States, or even show up released digitally online. A paramount example of circumnavigation of this whole process was Shane Carruth's groundbreaking science fiction high water mark, "Upstream Color". Where rather than partnering with a distributor and licensing entity, Carruth took every imaginable aspect of the films production onto himself; direction, soundtrack, acting, writing, script and in the end, personally distributing the film both to independent theaters, and later, self-releasing it for home video. A striking inversion of this was Wong Kar-Wai's much anticipated (and even longer awaited) exploration of the changing landscape of China in the early 20th Century through the life of martial arts master, Ip Man. From it's initial 2 hour cut, screened at the Berlin Film Festival, it then was recomposed by Wong to a 130 minute release in China, to finally appear 'stateside (7 months later) in a significantly different cut thanks to the Weinstein Corporation. Recomposed, edited, reconfigured and delayed, one can't imagine in the age of digital piracy that this process has aided the film finding it's actual paying audience. The final nail being the delay in "The Grandmaster"'s home video release, now rescheduled for some as-yet specified date over a year from it's theatrical premier. The setting of the European economic crisis made for fertile ground in Claire Denis' perfectly measured neo-Noir thriller, "Bastards" and added spice to the concoction of romantic lyricism, existential melancholy and satirical play in "The Great Beauty". The spirit(s) of Cocteau, Fellini and Celine are alive and well in what might be Paolo Sorrentino's first true masterpiece.

Other contenders were Tsai Ming-Liang's wonderful (and underseen) most recent, "Stray Dogs" which watched like a condensation of everything he's created to-date, here's hoping it appears in theaters stateside in the coming year. Of all the films I viewed at home it was his, and Lav Diaz's "Norte, the End of History" that were the two I most regretted viewing on the reduced dimensions of a computer monitor. The latter especially epic in it's scope and duration. In the way of archival rereleases, the mythic, ultra-obscure, 'unviewable' status ended for one of the most significant works in the whole of the French New Wave; that of Jacques Rivette's "OUT 1: Noli me Taneger" which saw a box set release this year on Absolut Medien. Criterion invested in a stunning refurbishing of Michael Cimino's infamous "Heaven's Gate", restoring the film to it's full duration and scope, breathing new life into it's standing as a lost masterwork of that decade. The documentary took massive evolutionary leaps in just the past half-century, most striking of it's new forms have been the visual essayist films issuing from the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab and their Visual and Environmental Studies department. This year's "Leviathan" and "People's Park" for sheer sensorial immersion eclipsed the massive budget and big spectacle of Alfonso Cuarón's technically brilliant, but content-slight, "Gravity". Whether it be the depths of night off the New England coast, or a summer afternoon in Chengdu China; Cohn, Sniadecki, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor presented these locales as though seen through the eyes of an off-worlder - places of wonder, danger and mystery. Documentaries somehow got even more political, exploring the grey areas of privacy, information and war, the interrelated double-hitter of Alex Gibney's "We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks" and Rick Rowley's assemblage of half-obfuscated facts related to America's ongoing "Dirty Wars" the world over, made for provocative viewing. And this year's documentary of documentaries; Joshua Oppenheimer's exercise in memory, xenophobia and terror as Indonesia's Cold War Communist purge under the Suharto regime is reenacted (to surreal, sickening, absurd and bizarre effect) by it's perpetrators in "The Act Of Killing". It's no wonder this unclassifiable, moving, terrifying, lurid incursion into Indonesia's past was rated the number one film in the British Film Institute's annual polling of hundreds of critics, directors, curators and academics.

As it has for the past decade, Scarecrow Video played an invaluable role as a vector for moving pictures from around the globe, an especially considerable resource for those of us enabled by all-zone/region Blu-Ray players. This year's Seattle International Film Festival hosted a better turnout than the past couple year's selections, though still not on par with previous decades where SIFF often dominated the field by screening a majority of the year's highlights over the course of the festival. Thankfully, the SIFF Cinema and Film Center substantially filled in the blanks, bringing advance screenings, rare prints and numerous exclusive screenings. With indie cinemas closing around the nation, it was that much more important to support the local theater opportunities such as the Landmark Theatre chain, the Grand Illusion Cinema and what's proven itself to be the paramount indie screen in Seattle, Northwest Film Forum. Many of the best films seen this year, when they did come to the theater, had runs that lasted no more than a week. Others were never to to appear again outside of an initial festival screening. Again proving the wisdom of getting out there, seeing the city and prioritizing the art/music/film that we're fortunate to have in our urban cultural crossroads. This year, rather than the unseen, often international festival award-winning films that never made it over here stateside in theaters, as home video releases, or even a less-desirable appearance online streaming, ("Snowpiercer", "The Wind Rises", "Under the Skin", "Goodbye to Language", "The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears", "The Dance of Reality", "Manuscripts Don't Burn", or "The Congress" anyone?), I've assembled a list of runners-up. These for all their merits (many of them I felt were equivocal to the content of the list above) either fell a bit shy, were redundant within their respective director's oeuvre, or simply weren't as strikingly 'different' as the works above. All of them worth the time, and some even revelatory by degrees, these were good films that simply fell short of the distinction of those that made the top rated list:

Sergey Loznitsa  "In The Fog"  (Russia)
Cristian Mungiu  "Beyond the Hills"  (Romania)
Steve McQueen  "12 Years A Slave"  (United Kingdom)
Chris Marker "Le Joli May" Rereleased (France)
Naomi Kawasi  "Hanezu"  (Japan)
Abdellatif Kechiche  "Blue is the Warmest Color"  (France)
Clio Barnard  "The Selfish Giant"  (United Kingdom)
Don Hertzfeldt  "It's Such A Beautiful Day"  (United States)
Joel & Ethan Coen  "Inside Llewyn Davis"  (United States)
Libbie D. Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki  "People's Park"  (United States)
Thomas Vinterberg  "The Hunt"  (Denmark)
Ben Wheatley  "A Field in England"  (United Kingdom)
Shinya Tsukamoto  "Kotoko"  (Japan)