2021

Parannoul - To See The Next Part of the Dream

I didn’t see a lot of shows this year, but the few I managed to catch were a lot of fun, a welcome reminder of the incomparable pleasures of communal experience. The first thing I saw when venues reopened was my friend Matthew performing an extended live deconstruction of the EA Sports jingle at Cafe Oto, cue large whoops and cheers from the crowd once they realised the source of the cacophony he was producing. That was about a perfect return to that venue as can be imagined: absurd, somewhat embarrassing when described, but also magical somehow. A few weeks later, I saw Claire Rousay and Organ Tapes there too. The emo ambient set Rousay performed was really nice and surreal. It was a mix of all sorts of things, involving a bit of guitar, some voice, ASMR scratchings, and something like bad stand up comedy, plus more confessional dialogic elements, and a variety of found-sounds from YouTube videos. Collectively, it explored ideas around friendship and loneliness: how we draw people in and push them away. It was tragic, but also kind of sublime. People laughed, listened, and felt things. At one point, someone accidentally smashed a glass. It was also very nice to see Organ Tapes stand in a full room in an ill-fitting jacket and baseball cap pulled all the way down, look forlorn, sing his sad songs, and strum on his big guitar. I also saw Loraine James, somewhere in Hackney, which was good and quite loud, and Space Afrika, in a strange, small room in that building that also contains The Guardian offices. They used the space well, mixing visuals with their emotive, expansive sounds. The whole performance felt like an act of cohesive and contained worldbuilding, a transmission of place, personality, and lived experience through the various sonic textures and the diaristic, sketch-like imagery that looped in accompaniment..

T W E N T Y F I V E N E W R E C O R D S

• 96 Back - Love Letters, Nine Through Six / Flex Time / 9696 Dream

• Akira Rabelais - À La Recherché Du Temps Perdu

• aya - i'm hole

• Chris Corsett & Bill Orcutt - Made Out of Sound

• Claire Rousay - A Softer Focus / 17 roles (all mapped out) / it was always worth it / ilysm

• Daniel Bachman - Axacan

• Dean Blunt - Black Metal 2

• Dites Safran - Une Tendance à Remplir

• DJ Manny - Signals in My Head

• Enji - Ursgal

• Erika de Casier - Sensational

• Fuubutsushi - Setsubun / Yamawarau / Natsukashii / Good Sky Day

• Grouper - Shade

• Jana Rush - Painful Enlightenment

• Kedr Livansky - Liminal Soul

• Kelman Duran - Night in Tijuana

• L'Rain - Fatigue

• Loraine James - Reflection

• Lucy Liyou - Practice

• Parannoul - To See The Next Part of the Dream

• Patrick Shiroishi - Hidemi / i shouldn't have to worry when my parents go outside / Resting in the Heart of Green Shade

• Sam Gendel - Fresh Bread

• Space Afrika - Honest Labour

• Tirzah - Colour Grade

• William Parker - Migration of Silence Into and Out of The Tone World

Ten Skies (James Benning, 2004)

It was really nice to go back to the cinema. I watch a fair amount of stuff at home, but I do still think that watching something in the cinema is very different to seeing it at home. In this interview with Ryûsuke Hamaguchi he explains well why this is, describing the sort of hyper-focused attention the dark space affords: the way that sitting in a cinema trains your brain to watch attentively, to properly see and hear in a way that, however hard you may try, never quite proves replicable at home. This experience, of sinking into a chair, of being subsumed by image and sound, of being totally absorbed in something, is what made seeing Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021) so special for me. It’s a film that I have been waiting years to see, and it delivered on the weight of that expectation. I found the second half of the film very intense, almost terrifyingly so. When you are in the club and the bass is so heavy that you can feel your skeleton shaking, it sometimes feels like your heart could explode. This is how that film’s final 45 mins felt to me, a sonic pressure cooker of intense emotion that travels outwards from the screen, penetrating all of the sensorial zones.

The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (C.W. Winter & Anders Edström, 2020) was also a cinema highlight. A 480 minute long film, it details the day to day life of a family of farmers living in rural Japan, forging a simple story out of moments of life spread across the seasons, covering work, toil, life, leisure, and everything in between. I saw this at the ICA one rainy day in September, and like Memoria, it was a film I had been looking forward to seeing for a very long time, having seen the filmmakers’ previous feature a decade ago at the same venue. The film is incredibly well constructed, a real marvel of small observances and careful considerations that favour the incidental and everyday over anything more dramatic or forced, still always finding pockets of intense beauty within the routine or mundane. Watching this film after having not watched anything like it in the cinema for a long while felt like being retrained in how to see. The viewing experience was transfixing and I think I will remember that day for a long time to come. Similarly, it was also exciting to see Ten Skies (James Benning, 2004) on 16mm that same week. I watched it at home earlier in the year having read Erika Balsom’s really good short book on the film, but seeing it in a room full of people made for a different experience entirely. I knew what was coming—which is to say, not all that much—so I was happy to sit there without putting any pressure on the sanctity of the experience. Instead, I could just watch some skies, hear some sounds, feel some sensations, and think about whatever it was that popped into my head.

At home, I did a bit of catchup. Of this viewing, my stands out were: Punishment Park (Peter Watkins, 1971), Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie (Jang Sun-woo, 1997), Feelings of Mountains and Water (Te Wei, 1988), The United States of America (Bette Gordon, James Benning, 1975), and Without Memory (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1996), all of which, coincidently, can be found as bootleg uploads on YouTube, albeit as fairly bad quality rips. Mainly though this year, i was back with the bagmen at the BFI. With them, I saw a few good things at the Robert Altman season in April (McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982), and Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974)) all of which were good, and different enough to show his range. It is easy to forget quite how compelling a filmmaker he is, so it was nice to have a reason to be reminded during a period when there really wasn’t much else on. In November and December, I spent an inordinate amount of time (and money) watching films in the BFI Japan season, postponed from last year and very much welcome this winter instead. So many of the films were playing from 35mm and many were also otherwise hard to see, so it really felt like it was worth trekking out to as many as I could manage. Out of what i saw, my highlights were Yearning (Mikio Naruse, 1964), My Love Has Been Burning (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1949), Children of the Beehive (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1948), The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (Yazujiro Ozu, 1952), Straits of Hunger (Tomu Uchida, 1966), Pale Flower (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964), Muddy River (Kôhei Oguri, 1981), and The Man Who Stole The Sun (Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1979), though everything was good really. It was all very exciting and pure.

I didn’t make much festival travel this year but I tore through links from Sundance, IFFR, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Cinema du Reel, and FID Marseille. To what end, who knows? At the moment, I don’t really know what I am doing. Home viewing this year felt sort of like a hoarding disorder, seeing so many things almost just so they had been seen. I had a good time visiting Sheffield DocFest in the summer, and San Sebastian in late autumn. Screenings at the former were sparsely attended, whilst at the latter everything was absolutely packed out, with ticket touts flouting stubs outside of sold-out venues. This speaks to various things perhaps, including: the strength of cinema cultures in the respective countries and regions, the state of the pandemic and attitudes towards it, questions of budgeting, and the festival’s relationships with their host city and the sort of programming they provide them with. I definitely saw better films in Sheffield, including: Twin Peaks (Al Wong, 1977), La Zone (Georges Lacombe, 1929), and earthearthearth (Daichi Saito, 2021), all of which were charmingly introduced by (former) programmer Herb Shellenberger. I definitely ate better food in San Sebastian. Both festivals had controversies that arguably overshadowed the films they were showing. DocFest’s board unceremoniously let go of all its programming staff shortly after their event, along with the artistic director; San Sebastian welcomed Johnny Depp as a guest of honour, making themselves accomplices to his multi-city rehabilitation tour. Having stepped away from working at a film festival early in the year, it was maybe fine to not attend as many of them as I usually would. Instead, I read Abby Sun—who, as everyone who matters knows by now, is probably the sharpest critic and the smartest thinker around—whenever she publishes, pouring over every well chosen, properly considered sentence like the knife that it is.

Below, a list of twenty five 2021 premieres I liked. For me, this was a year of real quality and abundance! Every year (assuming you skip enough dross and look properly), it is my experience that there are more great films made than can be listed or counted, but I found that this year the volume was especially noticeable. There is still lots I want to see.

T W E N T Y F I V E N E W F I L M S

• A Human Certainty / Surviving You, Always (Morgan Quaintance)

• A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces (Shengze Zhu)

• All About My Sisters (Wang Qiong)

• All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes (Haig Aivazian)

• All Light, Everywhere (Theo Anthony)

• Anachronistic Chronicles (Yu Araki, Pan Lu)

• Atlantide (Yuri Ancarani)

• Come Here (Anocha Suwichakornpong)

• Delphine's Prayers (Rosine Mbakam)

• Do Not Circulate (Tiffany Sia)

• Drive My Car / Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)

• earthearthearth (Daichi Saito)

• History of Ha (Lav Diaz)

• In Front of Your Face / Introduction (Hong Sang-soo)

• Just a Movement (Vincent Meessen)

• Looking for Venera (Norika Sefa)

• Maat Means Land (Fox Maxy)

• Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

• North by Current (Angelo Madsen Minax)

• Shared Resources (Jordan Lord)

• Summer (Vadim Kostrov)

• Teenage Emotions (Frédéric Da)

• We Need To Talk About Duras (Claire Simon)

• What Do We See When We Look At The Sky (Alexandre Koberidze)

• Worlds (Isaac Goes)