Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film "Cemetery of Splendor" at Northwest Film Forum: Mar 18 - 24

Giving insights into the otherworldly from the experience of the everyday, the films of Apichtapong Weerasethakul collectively watch as somnambulistic cinematic wanderings through the urban centers, outlying rural expanses, and deep jungles that define the Thai landscape. Lingering specters of Thailand's military past haunt the peripheral of the urban and rural lives of it's protagonists, often as contrast to cultural vibrancy and spiritualism of the the natural splendor that surrounds them. Suggestively surreal, hinting at the metaphysical (or as in case "Tropical Malady", direct contact with the spirit world) they both describe the life of the Thai people as they are, as they once were (first chapter of "Syndromes and a Century" for example) and in the more abstract passages, suggesting how they could be, both in the world of the waking and dreaming. The heightened sensuality of his tonal palate defines the whole of the what Senses of Cinema calls, "Transnational Poet of the New Thai Cinema" as well as a personal connection with a shared history, both on screen and in life, as detailed in Cinema-Scope's "Ghost in the Machine: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Letter to Cinema" on the subject of his Cannes Palme d'Or winning "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives". A director who's whole filmography deals in mystic parables couched within modern life, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Cemetery of Splendor" may lack wandering animal spirits in the night of the Thai jungle, but it's mixing of the political, historic and the spiritual is told through a literally dreamy central metaphor, "A Shared Memory: Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Cemetery of Splendor".

One of two "Daydream Believers" witnessed at this year's Cannes, Apichatpong teasingly blends the spiritual and the mundane, deadpan humor, and a suggestion of something sublime, all cultivating in "Cemetery of Splendor: A Very Calm Sort of Hysteria". Sleep acting as a mysterious, uneasy bridge between the two worlds, the protagonists lead the viewer into a heightened sensory exercise of hypnotic motion and hushed sound as we observe their ambulations through neon-lit psychedelic jungle and Escher-like mazes of modern shopping complexes. All the while simultaneously turning increasingly Oneiric as it's political inflections sharpen at it's conclusion. In numerous interviews for Mubi, Film Comment and Senses of Cinema the director has spoken of the difficulties of continuing to make his cinema in the escalating atmosphere of political tension and censorship following the 2014 coup d'état. Shot in his home village of Khon Kaen and redolent with locations and memories from childhood, this most recent meditation on war, death and social bonds in rural life will likely be, "A Homeland Swansong: Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Cemetery of Splendor". Told through Jen, a nurse at a temporary military clinic located in the disused primary school of her youth. The dreamlike spell of the "Cemetery of Splendor" infuses her personal quest for healing and spirituality with the soldiers' enigmatic syndrome and the mythic ancient site that lies beneath the hospital. Punctuated by occasional percolating from within, aspects of these political and spiritual tensions rise to the surface of this gentle film, it's atmosphere withholding ominous forbearance. Thai critic Kong Rithdee describes the effect of this undertow in his insider perspective for Cinema-Scope, teasing out the “friction between tranquility and anxiety, between bliss and pain”, the political from the mythic, metaphoric from the metaphysical that characterizes Apichatpong Weerasethakul's most personal of films.

CoH's new album "Music Vol." & West Coast Tour: Mar 11 - 19 | Raster-Noton's 20th Anniversary installation "White Circle" at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe: Mar 11

It's been a inspired arc since the Raster-Noton label's inception 20 years ago, over the course of which they've defied the accelerated marginalized and fadishness of electronic music's short 'half life', all the while evolving in their transcendence of simple codification. On this side of the Atlantic they've made sporadic appearances live in cities across the continent over the two decades. From San Francisco and Los Angeles, to Mutek Montreal and beyond, each time the occasion marked by an evolutionary leap present in each artists performance, as well as the larger audio/visual expression of the label's continuance. The second decade of the 21st Century has yielded some of the finest work to be heard from it's roster. The collaborative Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto albums are a high point, as is Carsten Nicolai's ongoing serial solo work, the Xerrox series. It's two most recent installations characterized by the enveloping vocabulary of distortion on "Xerrox Vol.2" and melodic beauty of this year's rapturous "Xerrox Vol.3". A project which when completed, will likely stand as the opus of Nicolai's recorded career. This year was also distinguished by the dou's release of the collaborative soundtrack to Alejandro Iñárritu's award winning film, "The Revenant". The score's complex intermingling of Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto's larger structures detailed in NPR's "Alva Noto on Co-Scoring 'The Revenant'" are interwoven into a larger sonic tapestry constituting the work of Bryce Dessner and a cast of Raster-Noton label contemporaries including Vladislav Delay and Ryoji Ikeda.

Frank Bretschneider's "EXP" was another high water mark for the label, this boundary pushing multi-media set of abstract audiovisual sculptural objects has not seen another peer in his discography. The label's core trio is rounded out by Olaf Bender and his Byetone project, from which 2008's "Death of a Typographer" was an unexpected meeting of energized motoric Krautrock and 80's synth-pop inspired explorations. Outside of the core ensemble that initiated the imprint, Raster-Noton has enfolded a global body of work. Ranging from Japan's urban experimental dancefloor duo Kouhei Matsunaga and Toshio Munehiro, as NHK to the DeStijl inspired dynamic austerity of Emptyset to the pure datamatic audio-visual sensory environments of Ryoji Ikeda and Vladislav Delay's improvisation and jazz-informed rhythmic wanderings. The parameters of the label's scope have expanded with the inclusion of the humor and retro-futurism of Uwe Schmidt's live sets as Atom TM, most recently seen on the media package, "HD+" and the melodic dream-ambulations of the abstract pop of Dasha Rush and this year's excellent, "Sleepstep". Other recent additions to the label's cast include the pointilist digital rhythms and disintegrated melodic textures of David Letellier's Kangding Ray project and the complex theoretical investigations of Grischa Lichtenberger's "LA DEMEURE; il y a péril en la demeure", the first of his proposed five-part explorations on the subject of isolation and privacy.

As one of the label's trio of artistic directors, Olaf Bender spoke with The Quietus "On the label's 20th Anniversary and the Concept Behind the new White Circle Project", their forthcoming showcase at this year's Sonar Festival in Barcelona and the new large-scale touring installation work, "White Circle". Designed for the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie's Klangdom, via Zirkonium control software, an explicit spatial mix is created through precision assigning of compositional aspects over the 47 loudspeakers distributed through the space. The installation will feature new, self-contained compositions by Alva Noto, Byetone, Frank Bretschneider, and Kangding Ray exploring individual interpretations of ambient music unveiled with a launch party featuring performances by Frank Bretschneider, Kangding Ray and Kyoka on the mobile 4DSOUND immersion system. Russian-born sound artist and engineer Ivan Pavlov shares a long established association with the label through his earliest releases under the CoH moniker, beginning as far back as 1998's "Enter Tinnitus", a volume in the millennial cusp series 20 to 2000, and a decade later, with his extended tonal/textural experimentation heard on the double disc set, "Strings". Still a Raster-Noton associate, he has found a new home for his ongoing charged explorations of electronic frisson on Peter Rehberg's Editions Mego, who this month release his wryly-titled, "Music Vol.". The album's final track, "Return to Mechanics" suggested a "slouchy robotic groove, full of eruptions, synthetic pneumatic and rubberised squelches" that were too energetic to be contained on the Editions Mego album. San Francisco's Ge-Stell label become the home for the spillover of these rhythmic gestures, initiating a West Coast tour this month including a Los Angeles performance alongside the haunted nostalgia of Richard Chartier's Pinkcourtesyphone and a lineup of Ge-Stell label founder Cameron Shafii with Brandon Nickell at Seattle's Kremwerk.

Ciro Guerra's new film "Embrace of the Serpent" at SIFF Cinema: Mar 11 - 24

While not a historic biopicture, Ciro Guerra's "Embrace of the Serpent" 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. The film taking place at two points in the shaman’s life: circa 1907, when he encounters (fictional analogs for Grünberg and Schultes) explorer Theodor von Martius and some 40 years later, when he repeats parts of the earlier journey with Boston-born botanist Evans. Von Martius, the earlier explorer, is severely ill and seeks out Karamakate for his reputation as a healer. While Evans is in search of both the decimated remnants of the Cohiuano and the yakruna, a flowering plant that is central to their sacred rituals. Portrayed by two separate actors, the youthful and senior Karamakate retraces his steps over the distance of decades.

Along the way, the twin parties witness the ravages of Colonialism, specifically the genocide and enslavement of natives perpetuated by Colombian rubber barons in the late-19th and mid-20th Century. The two timelines alternate throughout the film, coinciding with the two great Rubber Booms of the Amazon. The first, from 1879 to 1912, was one of the worst holocausts in South American history with some 50,000 Amazon natives enslaved to harvest rubber, it's result decimating 90% of the Indian population in a wave of appalling brutality. The second, spanning the years of 1942 to 1945 saw the Brazilian government at the behest of the Rubber Development Corporation financed with capital from United States, recruit some 100,000 citizens, mostly non-natives, to harvest rubber for the efforts of the second World War. In this approximately 30,000 people died, though the chief cause of death was not murder, but malaria, yellow fever, and other tropical diseases. In Karamakate’s eyes, the rubber barons who enslaved and destroyed his tribe are marauding agents of an insane European and American culture devoted to genocidal conquest and rapacious destruction. These themes are depicted in two central scenes of madness and cultural devastation at the hands of intruders from the outside world. On von Martius' quest, they encounter a tyrannical Spanish priest presiding over an isolated Roman Catholic Mission, it's flock of boys orphaned by the conflicts between rubber barons and indigenous tribes. Decades later, Karamakate heals the dying wife of a community cult leader and self-proclaimed Son of God. In a delirium inspired by her recovery, he invites his followers to take from him a Eucharist, literally consuming his body and blood. From here, IndieWire's review from Cannes, describe the "Soulful, Strange and Stunning Discovery" the film diverges on as things take a Jodorowskian turn toward mystical higher ground. Enmity expands into awe as the quest for the yakruna leads to the very threshold of the cosmic. But rather than release through revelation, 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.

"Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road" at SIFF Cinema & Northwest Film Forum: Mar 2 - 31 | SIFF Cinema Encore: Apr 22 - 27

Much in the way of last spring's Hou Hsiao-Hsien retrospective, this year is proving to be a notable demarcation in the life's work of New German Cinema director, Wim Wenders. His lengthy career populated by eccentric wayfarers on the open road watches like series of variations on "The Searchers: Wim Wenders in One Word". 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 inversion of location, genre and style created a language out of the Americanization of Europe. The expressive possibilities of landscape, the glories of American Blues, pop and German underground rock music, and the primacy of the cinema, set in the expanse of "Landscapes that Show, Don't Tell". His Road Movie Cycle, inspired by such American counterculture renaissance pictures as "Easy Rider" and "Two-Lane Blacktop", produced three films in this genre in quick succession: "Alice in the Cities", "The Wrong Move" and "Kings of the Road". Followed by the highly-assured "The American Friend", a brilliant adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith thriller "Ripley’s Game". For his first English-language picture, Wenders cast three of his personal American movie idols: Dennis Hopper and directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller, cementing his credentials with the lineage of the cinema that inspired him. As J.Hoberman puts forward in his New York Times review, the film arrived in New York by way of Cannes, the year after “Taxi Driver” took the Palme d’Or and stunned the world. Like Scorsese and Schrader's film, "Wim Wenders' High Plains Grifter" was a new sort of consciously filmic movie; sleekly brooding, voluptuously existential and saturated with the gestures of cinephilia. Wenders’s work, in turn, helped establish the New German Cinema and 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 . With the 1980s Cannes award-winning art-house hits "Paris, Texas" and "Wings of Desire", Wenders’ international popularity reached a zenith. The latter particularly resonating with young collegiate cinephiles for it's cast of illustrious underdogs from the German and British post-Punk scenes. At once rarefied and accessible, with a singular visual style that's impossible to carbon date (thanks to legendary cinematographer Henri Alekan), "The Sky Over Berlin" has earned its place alongside the likes of "Rashomon" and "The 400 Blows" in the Arthouse for Beginners canon, exemplified by it's new restoration for the Criterion Collection.

This "Looking Back at the Road Ahead" at the life's work of one of Senses of Cinema's Great Directors will be taking place over the course of five weeks this coming March as the "Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road" touring retrospective arrives in Seattle with new restorations spanning the totality of Wenders' filmography. Wednesdays at SIFF Cinema featuring single screenings of "The American Friend, "Alice in the Cities", "Wrong Move", "Kings of the Road", "Buena Vista Social Club" and "Pina" in 3-D. With a short week of encores to follow in late April. Single screenings of the series' other selections will take place at Northwest Film Forum with "Paris, Texas", "The State of Things & The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick", "Wings of Desire", "Notebook on Cities and Clothes" and the exceedingly rare opportunity to catch "Until the End of the World" in the cinema in it's complete, expansive, director's cut edition. On a personal note, this year marks the 20th Anniversary since Wenders came to University of Washington's Meany Hall to present one of four existing 35mm prints of "Until the End of the World" in it's full director's cut in the mid-1990s. As of 2010, there exists two separate releases of the full, unedited, 4+ hour cut for those with All Zone / All Region Blu-Ray players, thankfully with a rumored Criterion edition forthcoming, for those who don't. The film's backstory is as circuitous as it's extended narrative path, Wenders spent much of the 80's conceiving the film, assembling thematic content and scouting locations. Shot on four continents (including video smuggled out of China), the expanse of it's global inclusiveness were detailed in a interview for Movieline at the time of the 20th anniversary of the theatrical release, "Wim Wenders on Until the End of the World at 20, Its Amazing Soundtrack, and Loving LuLu". He and longtime cinematographer Robby Müller conceived a global road movie which foresaw a future abetted by such diversions as mobile viewing devices, proto-GPS and highly sought-after tech (by the CIA of course), which records images for the blind via the consciousness of the user.

Starring William Hurt, Sam Neill, Solveig Dommartin, Jeanne Moreau and Max von Sydow among an international ensemble of actors, for all it's potential star cast and ur-Cyberpunk appeal, "Until the End of the World" was a massive loss for the studio investors. With it only grossing some $752,00 Stateside, the film never made back even a fraction of it's eventual $23 million budget. At twice the original duration its distributors Warner Bros in the United States then required cuts that truncated it to barely a quarter of Wenders’s original vision. Thereby reducing the film to a fairly inchoate, half-realized expression of it's themes when it was finally released to cinemas worldwide in late 1991. Having just recently viewed the uncut film, after some 20 years between the University of Washington screening and present day, I was struck by both the Terry Gilliam-like eccentricities of it's character and the particulars of Wenders' framing of the distractions of the technological everyday mundane. The latter notable for it's disconcerting mirroring of the world in which we now live. The English dub does contribute a stilted romaticized poetry to the script and it's pacing, and Sam Neill's exposition doesn't aid in that regard, but it still watches as a fluidly engaged sociopolitical Global Worldview on the road. The hyper-embedded technological future seen through the globetrotting Zeitgeist imagined as the end of the 20th Century in the film's opening chapter, are as convincing a alternate reality as our own big-five-dominated 21st Century. The most significant of the director's cut additions, it's third closing chapter becomes a wandering existential inquest to the edge of consciousness. After having traversed the globe, our protagonists find themselves literally in the dreaming of Australia's outback, delving deep into new frontiers of the inner universe. This third chapter's focus on mood and space, (physical and otherwise) and the potentially sacrosanct nature of the inward looking inquiry is reflected in a series of striking video manipulations and semi-linear narrative flexures. Favoring infrared and simple digital effects over the (even then) increasingly popular computer generated depictions of the imagined, we instead get a oddly timeless, convincingly surreal psycho-scape Wenders' quest to the end of the world delivers us.

Andrew Haigh's new film "45 Years", Alê Abreu's "Boy and the World", Robert Eggers' "The Witch" & Miguel Gomes' "The Arabian Nights Trilogy" at SIFF Cinema: Feb 12 - 25 | Corneliu Porumboiu's "The Treasure" at Grand Illusion Cinema: Feb 12 - 18

Mid-February sees an abundance of quality cinema this week and next at SIFF Cinema and The Grand Illusion. Highlighted in David Filipi's year-end overview for Film Comment, "From the Artisanal to the Industrial: The Year in Animation", Alê Abreu's award-winning, dialog free, ornately musical sensory experience, "Boy and the World" had it's beginnings in a documentary about the formation of South America and instead became one boy's adventure through Latin America's social strata. A journey described in IndieWire's "Meet the Director Behind the Year's Most Extraordinary Animated Indie" from peasant and agrarian cultures, to industrial labor exploitation and colonialism to fascistic nation-building to advanced consumerism and class struggle, culminating in grassroots uprising and reformation, "Immersed in Movies: Alê Abreu Talks 'Boy and the World'". Concurrently at SIFF, a cinematic celebration of dark forces in league with the devil, the Witches Brew series launches this week's release of Robert Eggers tale of a frightful unraveling as, "A Family’s Contract with God is Tested" in the New England wilderness. "The Witch" is his meticulously constructed addition to the Puritan-horror mantle, framed by America’s long history of frontier insanity and legacy of religious zealotry and hypocrisy, "Serving Up Supernatural Dread, 17th-Century Style". Other highlights from the series include, Ken Russell's transgressive cult classic spin on Cardinal Richelieu's purging of secessionist and 17th-century priest Urbain Grandier and his cult of "The Devils" during the events of the so-called Loudun Possessions. The series also features Michael Reeves eliciting one of Vincent Price’s most sinister performances in "Witchfinder General" and Roman Polanski's slow-build horror as it follows a young couple played to perfection by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, as they are inducted into a cult genesis of a deity from the underworld and "Rosemary's Baby".



The post-millennial explosion issuing from the Romanian New Wave that produced the award winning run of "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days", "12:08 East of Bucharest", "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" and "Police, Adjective" as documented in Dominique Nasta’s, "Contemporary Romanian Cinema: The History of an Unexpected Miracle". All that much more striking for it being born from the conditions of the most overtly and consistently propagandistic cinema in Europe. Late 20th Century Romanian film under Nicolae Ceaușescu was consistently glossy but stale, relaying blatantly communist sympathies through simplistic stories, straightforward narrative linearity, often heavy in metaphor. Freed from state censorship and the narrative restraints of the Soviet era, A.O. Scott hailed the arrival of the movement on the global scene with his New York Times Magazine feature, "New Wave on the Black Sea". The Guardian following with their own critic's roundup, "Romania's New Wave is Riding High" and as a retrospective of it's formative years, there's not better overview than Shane Danielson's "Eastern Promise" for Sight & Sound. A notable benchmark for the movement, 2015 marked the 10th anniversary since Catalin Mitulescu's "Trafic" took the Short Film Palme d'Or at Cannes and Cristi Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" was awarded the festival's Un Certain Regard. The anniversary commemorated by Film Society at Lincoln Center presenting their decade of Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema. This year also saw one of the movement's significant players, Corneliu Porumboiu stepping into sharp social satire with, "The Treasure". Lacking the more studied cultural critique of his excellent "Police, Adjective" and 2013's less successful, "When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism" he's assembled a darkly comic familial drama in, "‘The Treasure’: Digging for Something of Value in Romania". Yet his familial comedy is as surprising and grimly funny a denouement of the cultural and economic landscape of post-Ceaușescu Romania as anything this "Accidental Auteurist" has produced to date.



More than just a chamber drama observation on how "A Dead Flame Threatens a Marriage", Andrew Haigh has tackled the Hollywood taboo of later-years love with a sensitive and devastating portrait of a long, happy marriage in sudden crisis. "45 Years" explores the nuances of this suspended, curious limbo brought on by a sudden and unwelcome new understanding, upending the quiet later years in the lives of Charlotte Rampling's Kate and Tom Courtenay's Geoff, as retired schoolteacher and factory worker respectively. Their habitual and largely sedentary daily comforts of ritual walks through the countryside, occasional social visits to the local village, tea in the afternoon, books at bedtime - a world of simple but enriched middle-class comforts - is disrupted by an intrusion from the past. As survivors of Britain’s postwar transformation, beneficiaries of the expansion of post-War opportunity and the bounty of the 1960's social liberation movements, it isn’t difficult to conceive of an adventurous past for Geoff and Kate. The contrasting worldliness of their youth is strikingly tangible in this thoughtful, cultivated, left-wing couple, who are about to celebrate "45 Years" of quiet decades of stable marriage spent in the isolated eastern countryside of Norfolk, England. The power of this "Psychological Drama at its Most Delicate and Acute" based on David Constantine's "In Another Country" stems from the discrepancy between, on one hand, the strangeness of the event from Geoff's past and it's resurgence, and the comfortable mundanity of the world in which this drama unfolds. Hailed by The Guardian as the number one film that screened in the UK last year, Haigh's meticulous drama is ultimately not about the larger forces that tear relationships apart from without, but the the unresolved troubles that lurk in the minds of each individual while together. Suggesting that even after decades together, two people can remain perfect strangers.



By turns nostalgic, political, haunting, romantic, sensual and equal parts emotional as it is cerebral, Miguel Gomes' "Tabu" could be found on all of the most notable 2012 Films of the Year lists, from Sight & Sound to Film Comment, Cahiers du Cinema and online institutions like Fandor. He returns with an assembly of incidental, everyday news pulled from the headlines weave of life from post-austerity Portugal. Which Gomes then spins into a satirical, outwardly political refashioning of folk tales from the Islamic Golden Age. Few contemporary films, much less anything concerned with a central political premise addressing socioeconomic strife and the conditions of post-Austerity Europe, embrace sprawl and variety in style and substance to the extent of this three-part reimagining of "Arabian Nights". Both Jonathan Romney's Film of the Week and Dennis Lim's New York Times "Past is Present Yet Irretrievable" identify the signal attribute and only constant in his films as their unpredictability; from scene to scene often starting in one form and ending in another. Like much of his work it embodies his own wry spin on stylistic and thematic mutation, this “genre contamination" as Gomes calls it, explored in Cannes Interview for Film Comment. An attempt at summarizing the prominent plot points of "The Arabian Nights Trilogy" reads like an exquisite corpse; community advocates take it upon themselves to halt the invasive Asian wasp from displacing honeybee populations, an annual ritual of winter sea swimming is halted by the corpse of a dead whale, and dockworkers vent about labor losses documentary-style in "Volume 1, The Restless One". An alfresco court hosts an absurd Balzac-like chain of grievances and idiocies, all the while a charmed stray dog enhances the lives of everyone it touches in the downtrodden towerblock housing communities in, "Volume 2, The Desolate One". The remaining old shanty towns of Lisbon are the locus of a community of bird enthusiasts as they engage in rigorous song competitions in, "Volume 3, The Enchanted One" all intermittently punctuated in arabesque scenes on a mystical isle, in which Scheherazade herself appears offering interjections of the framing conceit. And like Scheherazade, Gomes has pulled out every storytelling trick in the book to span the film's epic 6 hour duration: prologues and epilogues, prolix voiceovers, obtuse framing devices, abundant on-screen titles and nested narratives within narratives. At once fabulous, quotidian and political, "Miguel Gomes Blends Fantasy and Real Life Fluidly in Arabian Nights".

László Nemes new film "Son of Saul" at Landmark Theatres: Jan 22 - Mar 3

Given high praise by The Guardian as the number one film screened in the United States last year, László Nemes has 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 quail 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 unseen revelation that is Alfred Hitchcock's recently reconstructed "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey". The latter recently detailed in HBO's "Night Will Fall", this is 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. 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, "Son of Saul" 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 filmic fictionalization of human dignity amid the torrent of the Holocaust.

In his "Atrocity Exhibitionism" for Film Comment, Stefan Grissemann details why "Son of Saul" is an opportunistic and highly problematic work. How in making a Holocaust drama a renewed exciting and vital storytelling experience, Nemes courts the dangers of fashioning a provocative vision of entertainment. Conversely in the same Cannes 2015 Roundtable, Jonathan Romney opens his review establishing the "Dead Man Walking" of Nemes’ troubling film conveys the Holocaust’s full horror by keeping it out of focus. More significant than their appraisal of the film, "Shoah" and "Last of the Unjust" 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 specifically commended the film’s focus. Rather than presuming to evoke the Holocaust in broad strokes, Nemes concentrates on the experience of one man, a Hungarian Jew named Saul interned in an unspecified concentration camp. As a Sonderkommando, his work is a form of complicity pressed into the service of murder, that did not ensure its members’ survival: the Sonderkommando were destined to be rapidly killed in their turn. It is our vantage into this most untenable of horrors that sets Nemes' film apart from contemporary Holocaust drama, to quote from Jonathan Romney's Film Comment review; "Son of Saul is neither melodramatic nor mundanely centered on redemption, par excellence a theme devalued by cinema. Nemes’s film is, most immediately, about what we do and don’t see, what can and can’t be shown."

Claude 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. In this documentary Lanzmann has gifted the world a "Fascinating, Subtle Study in Survivor Non-Guilt" and "A Remarkable Companion to the Document of 'Shoah'". But rather than simply shaping the existing footage, Lanzmann returned to Theresienstadt and to Vienna, where the camera follows him into courtyards that once housed gallows and still-empty synagogues. This where the new film diverges dramatically it's predecessor; Lanzmann is as much a presence as Rabbi Murmelstein. "Last of the Unjust" watches as complex and discomfiting reflection on one man's role in the supposedly comfortable arrangement that was part of the pantomime of ostensible good faith after the Anschluss. The Nazis coerced leading Jews to be their administrative elders, or Ältester, a queasy use of Judeophobe-propagandist terminology, of which Murmelstein is the last surviving member. In response to interpretations of the documentary's objectives, Stephen Smith of the Shoah Foundation disputes the idea that Lanzmann is an apologist for Rabbi Murmelstein; “This was Lanzmann giving him a chance to clear his name, but one must not understate the complexity,” he said. “He’s good at discerning and getting to the bottom of the complexity of the Holocaust. It may not be desirable to everyone’s view, but I think it’s one we need to see and to grapple with."

Alejandro Iñárritu's new film "The Revenant" at Sundance & SIFF Cinema: Jan 7 - Feb 18

The defining characteristic of Alejandro Iñárritu's most recent collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, is that the the two have produced a fully realized vision of the scale and splendor of frontier America, a land of endless riches and great danger. In doing so, "The Revenant Welcomes You to Paradise. Now Prepare to Fall". Choosing as their vehicle a grand experiment with genre, this time the Western fashioned as "The Revenant" into another advancement in the director's art of "Gut-Churningly Brutal, Beautiful Storytelling". It is this steadfast dedication to realism in his portrayal of human honor and duplicity "Set Against the Unsympathetic Magnitude of Nature" that makes Iñárritu's latest stand out from the pack. This almost spiritual concoction is comprised of the extraordinary visual vocabulary, refined through decades of, "Emmanuel Lubezki on Working with Iñárritu, Cuarón and Malick" and Iñárritu's commitment to being there in the inhuman expanse of the natural world. Expressed in the film’s hesitant regard for the grandeur of America's once great wilderness and it's skeptical consideration of the moral framing of the life of Frontiersman, Hugh Glass and his time as a pioneer explorer under the employ of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. Their commercial and explorational forays into the Midwest were the paving of the way for the Homestead Act of 1862 and the 19th Century's Western Expansion. The driving Manifest Destiny of America's move west and the ethical fallout of resource and legislature enabled land acquisition are the contextual groundwork of Iñárritu's unflinching, enveloping drama, set against the unsympathetic magnitude of the cosmos.

To compliment the scale of "The Revenant"'s physical and psychological landscape, in choosing central elements from the Raster-Noton aesthetic, Iñárritu has designed both a challenging and correspondent companion in it's sound design. The film's depiction of "A Return From Death's Door" was mirrored both onscreen and off, as during it's production Ryuichi Sakamoto had just emerged from a extended hiatus from touring and performance, while battling cancer. In an interview for Rolling Stone upon his return to health Sakamoto "Detailed 'Gigantic' Score to The Revenant" revealing the collective soundtrack stands as more than a work by it's three central composers of Bryce Dessner and Alva Noto. The recordings they produced as featured in the film are instead a complex intermingling of their larger structures, as is described in FACT Magazine's "The Returned: Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alva Noto on Recovery, Oscars and David Bowie", NPR's "Alva Noto on Co-Scoring 'The Revenant'" and Create Digital Music's, "Sakamoto and Alva Noto again Create Electronics, Scoring Masterpiece". The duo's compositions interwoven into a larger sonic tapestry constituting the work of Raster-Noton label contemporaries, Vladislav Delay and Ryoji Ikeda, as well as excerpts from Seattle Symphony's recording of John Luther Adams' Pulitzer Prize winning "Become Ocean", Eliane Radigue's "Jetsun Milan" and Olivier Messiaen's "Oraison". With an additional, curious Northwest connection as Sakamoto's orchestrations were recorded here by an expanded chamber symphony including Hildur Guðnadóttir alongside members of the The Northwest Sinfonia and Chorale as well as what Alex Ross describes as the "Water Music of John Luther Adams’ 'Become Ocean'", upon it's premier with the Seattle Symphony in 2013.

Kent Jones' new documentary "Hitchcock/Truffaut" at Grand Illusion Cinema: Jan 29 - Feb 11 | Claire Denis' "Chocolat" & Philippe Garrel's "In the Shadow of Women" at Northwest Film Forum: Feb 12 - 14

Northwest Film Forum's annual Coeur Sans Coeur: French Films for Valentines Weekend this year brings Philippe Garrel's "In the Shadow of Women" and Claire Denis "Chocolat". Philippe Garrel's previous feature, "Jealousy" stood as a highlight of SIFF 2014 and topped Film Comment's 20 Best Undistributed Films of that year. Detailed in the wide-ranging, Philippe Garrel in Conversation for Mubi during his first North American visit in decades, Garrel is revealed to be literally a child of French cinema. His father was the actor Maurice Garrel, his second home was said to be at the Cinémathèque Française, he shot the first movie of his own at the age of 16 and he's known for having ridden through the streets of Paris with Godard shooting newsreels of Paris, May 1968. His career has established his intimate, handcrafted cinema as fundamentally close to the mechanics of silent film -- the unadorned beauty of faces, figures, hands, rooms and light -- and revisited the same deeply personal themes of loss, mourning, and revitalization of purpose through love. Another feature of his pedigree can be seen in the wonderfully sharp and vigorously cinematic the black and white filming by Willy Kurant, (the cinematographer for Godard's, "Masculin Feminin") who lends Garrel's subjects the expressive vitality and immediacy of a daily life lived.

Thematically variegated, from strange science and libido monstrosities run amok, to male camaraderie in the French Foreign Legion, to post-Colonial aftermath in both Africa and at home in modern day Paris, Claire Denis' filmography navigates the spaces between traditional narrative and more structurally adventurous cinema. At times not quite hitting the balance between these two forms, evident in 2005's "The Intruder", she more consistently fashions an interplay of these two gravitational pulls. Recent successes can be seen in 2008's near-masterpiece on class, race, urban life, light and motion that was "35 Shots of Rum" and 2014's pitch perfect neo-Noir, "Bastards". The latter bringing it's audience deep into the nightmare of one family's decomposition from the inside with it's contact with power, corruption and an immoral elite. In a sense all of her work can be seen as, "Family Films of a Very Different Sort". Another constant of her work, one that she shares with the best of her peers, (think David Lynch, Steve McQueen, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang) is the elliptical nature of it's narrative and visual structure. Looping back on itself, projecting ahead, fusing impression, experience and dream, these structural and thematic signatures are abundantly detailed in Nick Pinkerton's Claire Denis interview for Film Comment and Senses of Cinema's "Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis".



This month Grand Illusion Cinema features Kent Jones archive-plumbing, "Hitchcock/Truffaut" which watches not unlike a enthused installment of, "At the Movies With François and Hitch". In his interview for Film Comment Kent Jones examines the legendary interview between the two directors and the varied influence of "The Master of Suspense". The design of Jones' documentary essay pivots around what came to be known as “one of the most revealing and engrossing books on film art, technique and history ever put together”, upon it's English translation in 1967, which was born of a week of interviews conducted in 1962 at Universal Studios by the two directors along with translator, Helen G. Scott. In the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, Truffaut had been one of the original proponents of the auteur theory, the notion that the director is the artist of a film. In "Solidarity of Cinema" for Roger Ebert, Kent Jones establishes that, “Truffaut wanted to correct the bias against Hitchcock in the United States, but then on the other hand, he was also trying to amend what he thought was the tendency toward abstraction in Cahiers criticism.” Truffaut was interested in larger issues like how artists managed to work within the studio system, and in specifics like film craft. In both the book and the documentary, the two directors amply discuss technique. Yet for a book so rich with shoptalk, “Hitchcock/Truffaut” has, for nearly half a century, also retained its reputation as a witty, breezy read, a canonical text for anyone interested in movies.

Elucidating the parallels of their cinema, The Grand Illusion will also be screening 35mm prints of two repertory works. Alfred Hitchcock's post-War espionage thriller starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, "Notorious" marked a watershed for Hitchcock artistically, and represents a heightened thematic maturity, featuring what Roger Ebert called in his Great Movies; "some of the most effective cinematography in his—or anyone's—work". With an abundance of mirroring scenario, technical and stylistic gestures, François Truffaut's "Mississippi Mermaid" watches as a curious homage and observation on the Hitchcock-ian themes of misplaced identity, obsession and mirroring realities. An adaptation of "Waltz into Darkness" by Cornell Woolrich, Truffaut spins a haunting island Noir starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo, framed by the post-Colonial setting of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. While not highly regarded upon it's release in 1969, it was still recognized as a compelling exploration of the director's "fascination with loneliness and love, which comprise, of course, a different kind of mystery". A new restoration screened as the opening film in 2012's touring The Film Lover: A François Truffaut Retrospective, inspiring Edward Guthmann's timely critical reassessment in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, "Truffaut's 'Mermaid' Merits Second Look".

Elevator presents Julia Holter at The Columbia City Theater: Feb 3 | Morton Feldman's "Rothko Chapel", Christian Wolff, John Cage & Earle Brown at Seattle Symphony: Feb 5

After the dry spell of the holiday season, live music finally returns to the Northwest! Seattle's progressive underground monthly, Elevator had a groundbreaking year in 2015 with acts like Lawrence English, Rene Hell and M.E.S.H. gracing their showcase at the Machine House Brewery and expanding into exhibition curation with last week's Corridor Festival. Hailed as a unanimous success for it's day-long meeting of audio-visual media, installation art, music and performance, "The Organizers of Corridor Festival Invite the City to Be Alone Together". The festival's programming featuring live electronic, electric and experimental sounds from, A Box in the Sea, Ahnnu, as_dfs, Beastnest, Black Hat, decimus, Djao, Limits, Raica, Ramzi, Rene Hell, Sarah Davachi, x/o and The Esoterics, a secondary room of installation work by national and regional names, Bristol Hayward-Hughes, Ceci Cor-Leo, Coldbrew Collective, Grey Ellis + Tara, Leena Joshi, Jinx’ 75, Annisa Amalia, and Robin Cullen intershot by dance performances from Northwest choreographers, Belle Wolf, Campbell Thibo, and Coleman Pester. The reach of Elevator's vision continues to expand in 2016, this week bringing in The Wire's 2013 album of the year artist Julia Holter. She'll be performing her lush interplay of jazz orchestrations, dissonant guitar and open-ended songform alongside the soaring vocalizations of Haley Fohr's Circuit Des Yeux at the Columbia City Theater.

The Seattle Symphony [untitled] Series continues in 2016, with two works inspired by the interrelationship between New Minimalism and the Abstract Expressionists and the late-1950s and early 1960s in which together they constituted a New York School that revolutionized each of their respective artforms. The hour-long program includes John Cage's "Living Room Music", Earle Brown's "Music for Cello and Piano", Christian Wolff’s "For Bob" which honors the famed painter Robert Rauschenberg and Morton Feldman’s piece inspired by and written to be performed in Rothko Chapel as a moving tribute to painter, friend and contemporary, Mark Rothko. A composition conceived to express the unity of, "Meditation and Modern Art that Meet in Rothko Chapel". Upon his arrival in 2011, Seattle Symphony's new conductor Ludovic Morlot initiated this late-night [untitled] Modern Composer chamber series which has brought contemporary back into symphony's lexicon, after almost a decade of being remiss in their performance of these modern works. To date Morlot has programmed a who's-who of 20th/21st Century Modernism including, "John Luther Adams Pulitzer Prize Winning 'Become Ocean'" which had it's premier and was recorded with the Seattle Symphony in 2013. Continuing his programming of modern works, this weekend sees the rendering of Luciano Berio's disorienting choral, "Symphonia", as well as the newest installment in the seasonal [untitled] program. Previous installments acting as showcases for the works of George Crumb, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Terry Riley, Giacinto Scelsi, last year's performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen's groundbreaking electro-acoustic, "Gesang der Jünglinge" and the series' initiation with the realization of Olivier Messiaen's rarely performed, massive symphonic work, "Turangalîla".

:::: FILMS OF 2015 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2015 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
-----------------------------------------------------------
Bruno Dumont  "Li'l Quinquin"  Theatrical Cut  (France)
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy  "The Tribe"  (Ukraine)
George Miller  "Mad Max: Fury Road"  (Australia)
Todd Haynes  "Carol"  (United Kingdom)
Alejandro Iñárritu  "The Revenant"  (United States)
Hou Hsiao-Hsien  "The Assassin"  (Taiwan / China)
Lav Diaz  "From What is Before"  (Philippines)
J.P. Sniadecki  "The Iron Ministry"  (United States / China)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul  "Cemetery of Splendour"  (Thailand)
Robert Gordon & Morgan Neville  "Best of Enemies"  (United States)
Alex Gibney  "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief"  (United States)
Kinji Fukasaku  "Battles Without Honor and Humanity"  Rereleased  (Japan)
Joshua Oppenheimer  "The Look of Silence"  (Indonesia)
Liliana Cavani  "The Night Porter"  Restored Rereleased  (Italy)
František Vláčil  “Marketa Lazarová”  Restored Rereleased  (Czech Republic)
Satyajit Ray  "The Apu Trilogy"  Restored Rereleased  (India)
Tsai Ming-Liang  "Journey to the West"  (Taiwan)
Denis Villeneuve  "Sicario"  (United States)
Fabrice Du Welz  "Alléluia"  (Belgium)
Asghar Farhadi  "About Elly"  Rereleased (Iran)
Alice Rohrwacher  "The Wonders"  (Italy)
Christian Petzold  "Phoenix"  (Germany)
Michael Almereyda  "Experimenter"  (United States)
Pedro Costa  "Horse Money"  (Portugal)
Lisandro Alonso  "Jauja"  (Argentina)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa  "Journey to the Shore"  (Japan)
Guy Maddin & Even Johnson  "The Forbidden Room"  (Canada)

Nothing this year compared with the incontestable greatness of time spent in Europe this summer attending the Okwui Enwezor curated “All the World’s Futures” and the Venice Biennale. Adrian Searle offering an encompassing overview in the pages of The Guardian, "Venice Biennale: The World is More than Enough", going on to include the city-wide exhibition in his Best Art Shows of 2015. With Artforum's selections touching on the critically hailed pavilion by Joan Jonas: "They Come to Us Without a Word". Returning from travel abroad it was a great relief to find engaging festivals and exhibitions domestically. The inaugural Paul Allen funded Seattle Art Fair, which taken with the collateral "Out of Sight" exhibition proved to be significantly more than a wealthy man's vanity project. Particularly for it's inclusion of the "Thinking Currents" wing with galleries and media work from the Pacific Rim. Reflecting the changing economic and cultural landscape of Seattle, two regional festivals with an international scope had closing and transitional years in 2015. Neoclassical, ambient and electronic music from around the globe gathered under the vaulted ceilings of the Chapel Performance Space for the final Northwest edition of Rafael Anton Irisarri's Substrata Festival. And in an open letter Decibel Festival's 13th year closed with programming director Sean Horton's farewell to the city. But not before Autechre could deliver their three dimensional, hallucinogenic sonic sculptures in a sold-out festival setting as part of Decibel's Resident Advisor Showcase. The epitome of what's come to be known as the New Music movement largely centered around late 20th and 21st Century American composers, Bang on a Can have "A Quarter-Century Of Banging, and are Still as Fresh as Ever" when they came to Seattle's Moore Theater for this year's iteration of their daylong marathon performance, including the quietly groundbreaking "Music for Airports" by Brian Eno and Steve Reich's landmark "Music for 18 Musicians". If you live on the west coast, this past year offered the possibly once-in-a-lifetime touring retrospective of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's entire oeuvre. Screened in weeks-long series at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater and without such prestigious academic support, The Grand Illusion Cinema and Scarecrow Video combined forces with Northwest Film Forum here in Seattle to present three weeks of, "Also Like Life: The Films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien". As appraisals of the significance of his contribution to late 20th Century cinema, polls conducted by Film Comment and The Village Voice named Hou director of the decade, and in the overlapping 1998 worldwide critics' poll he was cited as one of three directors "most crucial to the future of cinema". Yet it's the Museum of the Moving Image, "Hou Hsiao-Hsien: In Search of Lost Time" and their symposium introduction that still stands as the most succinct tacking of the paradox of this revered, yet rarely seen director.

For global cinema the digital age is still proving to be 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 and the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound annual overviews have yet to screen in the United States, or even show up released digitally 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 hosted a less than memorable selection, many calling it the the weakest seen in nearly a decade, which was particularly disheartening after the strong year that was the festival's 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 this year. Here's hoping for it's return in 2016. 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, Northwest Film Forum, and what's fast become the greatest programming seen on a screen in Seattle, The Grand Illusion Cinema stepping up to fill the void after strengthening their nonprofit partnership with Scarecrow Video. 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 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, this 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 the 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. Resources like Fandor and Mubi are fast becoming the almost singular streaming platforms through which (paying) online viewers have access to the true scope of the past twelve decades of moving pictures. Particularly with both being avidly involved in the festival dialog, with curation and criticism offered throughout the year in their respective digital magazines, Notebook and Keyframe.

As much as it was a strong year for contemporary cinema, some of the real 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. Two of the rarest works of the whole of the French New Wave saw brief theatrical runs and new restorations this year. With the passing of the New Wave's technician of time and space, Alain Resnais in 2014, Kino released a restored edition of his late-period masterpiece for the first time to wider audiences. Rarely screened upon it's release in 1968, "Je T'aime, Je T'aime" watches as an reflective science fiction, a descent into the hall of mirrors that is "Fragmented Frames of the Love That Was, Taunting Yet Poignant". Through the director's puzzlework abstraction of remembrance, perception and hope, it emerges as a paradoxical rush of simplicity and grandeur. Even more profound in it's scarcity, this past November saw the premier of a new restoration of "Jacques Rivette’s 1971 Film, ‘Out 1: Noli Me Tangere’" as part of BAMcinématek's two-week engagement. A major city theatrical run, including a week at SIFF Cinema followed and for the first time a release for home viewing will be made available by Kino later this month. The Guardian's review, "Out 1: Noli Me Tangere: 13-Hour Art Film is a 'Buff's Ultimate Challenge" not only noting the film's scarcity, but the challenges of it's duration and narrative experimentation. This nearly 13-hour work has stood for decades as a kind of filmic holy grail. A cinematic soak both sprawling and intimate, which has been almost impossible to view in the more than 40 years since its release in 1971. In testing the porousness of the border between narrative and experimental film, Rivette’s monstrous cinema experiment delivers an experience that is satisfying in-part for precisely the reason it is exhausting.

Criterion Collection's vision continues to be enriched by masterpieces of decades past, this year seeing long overdue restorations of the work of the oddball of Italian Neorealism, Vittorio De Sica and Edward Yang, the auteur without whom there would be no Taiwanese New Wave. Plumbing the depths of genre cinema and the transgressive, they released beautiful restorations of Masaki Kobayashi's "Kwaidan" technicolor adaptation of Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of Japanese folklore and Yokia tales, Nicolas Roeg's inexplicable, disturbed spin on a story by Daphne du Maurier, "Don't Look Now", and one of the most profound and unsettling loves ever dedicated to film, Liliana Cavani's "The Night Porter". Masters of Cinema made the complete oeuvre of Japan's great chronicler of society's underside widely available in stunning blu-ray box set restorations, 40 years of his challenge to society is contained in their Shohei Imamura Masterpiece Collection. Digging deeper into the underbelly of Japanese post-War pop culture, the UK's great new genre imprint, Arrow Films have released a equally decades-spanning career of the frenetic madman of Yakuza dramas, Kinji Fukasaku. His "Battles Without Honor and Humanity" makes for a edgy, rough and tumble contrast to Arrow's concurrently released, "Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism". The set clearly positioning Yoshida as a less consistent, yet more eccentric risk-taking contemporary of late Japanese New Wave luminaries like Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda. Incontrovertible masterpieces also made up some of this year's Criterion catalog, Yasujiro Ozu's late-period meditation on passing generations, "An Autumn Afternoon" finally saw a blu-ray release after being available on other formats for some time. And no discussion of international cinema dealing with familial relations and mortality would be complete without Satyajit Ray's "The Apu Trilogy". Restored to luminous glory after one of the most painstaking and elaborate reconstruction processes of this century, Ray's film of rural childhood transitioning to urban adulthood, in some ways mirrors the circuitous journey of the film's return to the screen, "Back on the Little Road: Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali Returns in All its Glory". Not only a tale of generations within a Bengali family, "Pather Panchali" is a film of countless cultural details, especially in Ray’s often exacting production design and profuse textual quotation, qualities often lost on most Western viewers. Particularly representative in it's second installment "Aparajito", the domestic dramas that dominate his filmography are rooted in the specific struggles of the middle class at various stages in post-Independence India’s development. In his depiction of India's then developing middle class, Ray is "Master of the House: A Giant of World Cinema’s Golden Age, Satyajit Ray Held a Mirror to Bengal’s Middle Class". His portrayal of life in this developing social structure often clashes with practical realities, and Ray is invested in observing the tensions caused by their ideals, the pleasures they afford and the consequences of an upwardly mobile youth on the traditional family. "Satyajit Ray: A Moral Attitude" is best described in the words of the director himself, compiled from a long series of conversations with his biographer Andrew Robinson in the years before Ray’s death in 1992, as well as an excerpt from a 1968 interview for Film Comment.

There were of course major dividends for those taking risks in contemporary cinema as well. For all the talk in recent years of "auteur television" in the United States, exemplary works such as Vince Gilligan's "Breaking Bad" and Nic Pizzolatto's "True Detective" characterize this competent, complex and atmospheric television spanning season-long developmental arcs. My vote goes not to American or British television, but to the French. After 2012's austere, quasi-religious drama "Hors Satan", Bruno Dumont has decided to vacate his creative heartland of harsh social realism in favor of a epic farce that (mostly) wears a poker face as it documents his continuing obsession with the collision of humankind’s bestial and spiritual impulses. This exquisitely photographed four-part film made for French television, set in a isolated farming community near Calais in northwestern France, is populated by a cast of predominantly nonprofessional actors portraying rural eccentrics and down-home locals. "Li'l Quinquin"'s central figures are a nonsequitur Clouseau-like police captain, Van der Weyden (known as "The Fog" within his department for his impenetrable, incongruous techniques) who, along with his assistant Carpentier, set about in this expansive landscape where the countryside meets the sea, riddling out a series of baffling, grotesque, rural murders. Mubi's "Cracking Up: A Conversation on Bruno Dumont's Li'l Quinquin" positions the viewer very much in the passenger seat with this this duo. Van der Weyden, who trundles around the countryside in his police vehicle, is a classic bumbling cop with bushy eyebrows and a bundle of facial tics pushed to the nth degree. He and Carpentier, with his string-bean body, gaptoothed stare and stunt-driving antics, are foils against the concurrent self-described investigation conducted by pubescent title character Quinquin Lebleu, who roams the area on his bicycle with a group of adolescent friends. Bored, curious, ignorant, racist, insensitive, Quinquin and his bunch are like teenagers anywhere, though this set embodying the current mores and superstitions of contemporary France. At the heart of this "Acid Black Comedy Set in Small-Town France" is the suggestion of the Lebleu family's ugly, conflicted history revolving around the distribution of an inheritance. But there is more to this "Dead Meat" than just a morbid detective comedy in a rural setting. Once Dumont has established these seemingly well-meaning antipodean posses as the anchorage points, he then shifts focus to the pervasive unthinking reflexiveness of their superstition, anti-Arab bigotry and xenophobia. All the while, pulling of a nuanced portrayal enriched by sympathy, fascination and love for it's characters, delivered with humor and sensitivity. In an interview with Film Comment upon it's Cannes screening, Dumont detailed the significance of the quiet comedy at the heart of this series; "The laughter reveals hidden zones of human nature. The capacity to have this explosion, this burst, happening is to me very important, and it reveals zones of falseness, zones of ambiguity."

A film that is represented on nearly every major overview of the past year, and finally seeing screenings at SIFF Cinema this month, is Todd Haynes period drama again framed by regular collaborator Edward Lachman. The two bringing life and poetry to their visualization of Patricia Highsmith's drama of forbidden love and gender values in mid-Century America, "The Price of Salt", adapted to the screen as "Carol". Lachman's cinematography as though set not within the period, but instead Douglas Sirk's status-quo challenging melodramas of the era, Haynes has fashioned a restrained, yet "Captivating, Woozily Obsessive Lesbian Romance", that sidesteps the pitfalls of willfully gay cinema. In an interview with Film Comment, the director's depiction of "The Object of Desire", centering around the piece’s most contemporary concerns; sexism and sexuality, situation opposing social norms and his desire to blend these into a more timeless vision of the stifling normalcy of 1950's malaise. In the way of more explicitly referencing cinema of decades past, there was Guy Maddin's kaleidoscopic tribute to the cinematic canon. His and Evan Johnson's delirious hyperfrenetic faux-silent melodrama fever-dream, "The Forbidden Room" watches as a veritable psychedelic trip through the very form of film. Boring wormholes through narratives-within-narratives, in seemingly infinite regress it subsumes form and content from the silent era to early 30s and 40s talkies, to 50s melodrama, to 60s and 70s exotica and beyond. Their approach to both form and technique in their paradoxically original pastiche detailed in Cinema-Scope's "Lost in the Funhouse: A Conversation with Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson". Further quantified in the pages of Film Comment as "too much is just right", Jonathan Romney delves deep into the movie-mad filmmaker’s latest feat of phantasmagorical cinema, "The Infernal, Ecstatic Desire Machine of Guy Maddin". Utilizing chemical and digital degradation processes along with a twinned auditory effect in Galen Johnson's deeply Hauntological soundtrack constructed from repurposed classical music and incidental film scores. Together the sound and image making for a headily over-brimming, absurd concoction of hallucinogenic digressions and narrative tips of the hat.

The most restrained formalism seen on the screen thus year has to be credited to Hou Hsiao-Hsien's at once old-school, free-form, classic and avant-garde adaptation of Pei Xing's Tang Dynasty short story "Nie Yinniang". Though a Wuxia film, it's technical rigor and opacity of storytelling mechanics are the defining characteristics of the "Killer Technique: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Return in Full Force" that set "The Assassin" apart from everything seen in the decades since the genre came into it's own in the 1960's. More than an assembly of "Long Takes, Fast Edits and a Warrior in the Shadows", Hou's film reads rather not as a short story of novella, but the abstraction and open-ness of poetry on the screen. A stark contrast to the restraint of Hsiao-Hsien's 8 years in-the-making period drama, Miguel Gomes sprawling, outwardly political satire refashioned the "Arabian Nights" folk tales from the Islamic Golden Age into his own take on post-austerity Portugal as, "Volume 1, The Restless One", "Volume 2, The Desolate One", "Volume 3, The Enchanted One". And like Scheherazade, Gomes has pulled out every storytelling trick in the book to span the film's epic 6 hour duration: prologues and epilogues, prolix voiceovers, obtuse framing devices, abundant on-screen titles and nested narratives within narratives. At once fabulous, quotidian and political, "Miguel Gomes Blends Fantasy and Real Life Fluidly in Arabian Nights". Much has already been said about 's Alejandro Iñárritu's dramatization of the life-story of fur trapper Hugh Glass, though few have seen the film. Another of Iñárritu's collaborations with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, together they have realized the scale and splendor of frontier America, a land of endless riches and great danger, "The Revenant Welcomes You to Paradise. Now Prepare to Fall". Described in no small way by it's score from Carsten Nicolai, Bryce Dessner and "Ryuichi Sakamoto Details 'Gigantic' Score to The Revenant". It's a grand experiment with genre by Iñárritu, this time the Western fashioned as "The Revenant" into another advancement in the director's art of "Gut-Churningly Brutal, Beautiful Storytelling". It is this steadfast dedication to realism in his portrayal of human honor and duplicity set against the unsympathetic magnitude of nature that makes Iñárritu's latest stand out from the pack. This almost spiritual concoction comprising Lubezki’s extraordinary cinematography and Iñárritu's commitment to being there in the inhuman expanse of the natural world, expressed in the film’s hesitant regard for the grandeur of true wilderness.

A director who's whole filmography deals in mystic parables couched within modern life, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Cemetery of Splendor" may lack wandering animal spirits in the night of the Thai jungle, but it's mixing of the political, historic and the spiritual is told through a literally dreamy central metaphor, "A Shared Memory: Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Cemetery of Splendour". Another of Apichatpong's drifting off into another world that teasingly blends the spiritual and the mundane, deadpan humor, and a suggestive little something sublime, cultivating in it's "Cemetery of Splendour: A Very Calm Sort of Hysteria". Sleep acting as a mysterious, uneasy bridge between the two worlds, the protagonists lead the viewer into a heightened sensory exercise of hypnotic motion and hushed sound as we observe their ambulations through neon-lit psychedelic jungle and Escher-like mazes of modern shopping complexes. All the while simultaneously turning increasingly Oneiric as it's political inflections sharpen at it's conclusion. This was one of two "Daydream Believers" at this year's Cannes, along with the Miguel Gomes' fabulist anthology, that many felt stole the festival’s thunder. As for the year's unforeseen curveballs, who could forget George Miller's bombastic out-of-nowhere late career coup, "Mad Max: Fury Road"? Sight & Sound's review heralding the return of the heavyweight champion of post-apocalyptic road carnage with "Fury Road: A Cast-Iron Manifesto on the Physics of Screen Action”. Even cinema academia got behind the kinetic carnage of his spectacular return to the water and fuel depleted expanses of post-Collapse Australia. Cinema-Scope's review opening with Miller's own ironic quote before the Cannes screening, “Who’d Have Thought 20 Years Ago that People Would One Day be Nostalgic for the Apocalypse?”. To the elation of many, what we were witness to rather than a postmodern serving of Retromania, was Miller's most elaborate demonstration of his astonishing stylistic talent and the instant legibility of his articulate hyper-complex montage symphonies, which stood tall in an era of visually incoherent digital mashups. Although Miller employs digital trickery in Fury Road, the return of Mad Max is a celebration of old-school resourcefulness; an audiovisual experience whose impact derives from meticulously pre-planned sequences and editing of bewilderingly complexity, delivering every single shot together forcefully to form an endlessly fluid, high-speed whole. Film Comment's "Deep Focus: Mad Max: Fury Road" sees all the technical wizardry put to the service of delivering a convincingly eccentric, original worldview populated by zealous cults, rogue protagonists and reluctant heroes, Miller coming full circle, returning to his Mad Max roots and emerging as what Michael Sragow hailed "The Compleat Action Artist".