Matt Lloyd Turner

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2022

Jeff Parker

A briefer recap this year, because 2022 has flown by, and because, even for me, an ardent enjoyer of lists and listmaking, it seems like there has been too many lists recently. In addition to the below, you can find my top ten games of 2022 here, the ten films I voted for in Sight & Sound’s “Greatest Films of All Time” poll here, plus the five best 2021 films I saw since I made my year in review recap last year.

The best shows I saw this year were all at Cafe OTO. I didn’t venture much farther because I like it there. It’s cozy, it’s small, it sounds good, they serve my favourite beer, and the people attending the shows there treat the music being performed with respect, reverence even. Both the artists and the audience always seem happy to be there. Of the shows I saw there, my favourite ones were Eiko Ishibashi, who made playing so many different instruments (often simultaneously) look so easy that it beggared belief, and Space Afrika, who made the best use of the atmosphere of the space I’ve seen in a while, filling it with strange, dense soundscapes that shifted the mood of the room moment by moment. Otherwise, for a greater sense of scale and spectacle, I liked seeing Grouper play to a large crowd at the Barbican, sending out brain-tingling signals to an appreciative room alongside visuals by Makino Takashi that were projected onto enormous shimmering split curtains.

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

  • Bill Orcutt - Music for Four Guitars

  • Billy Woods - Aethiopes

  • Cities Aviv - Man Plays The Horn

  • Cole Pulice - Scry / Cole Pulice & Nat Harvie - Strawberry Roan

  • CS + Kreme - Orange

  • Daniel Bachman - Almanac Behind / Lonesome Weary Blues

  • Dean Spunt & John Wiese - The Echoing Shell

  • Debit - The Long Count

  • Oren Ambarchi - Shebang / Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling & Andreas Werliin - Ghosted

  • Earl Sweatshirt - SICK!

  • Hi Tech - Hi Tech

  • Jack Chrysalis - Jack Chrysalis

  • Jeff Parker ETA IVtet - Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy / Jeff Parker - Forfolks

  • Kali Malone - Living Torch

  • Lucrecia Dalt - ¡Ay!

  • Moin - Paste

  • rRoxymore - Perpetual Now

  • Sam Prekop & John McEntire - Sons Of

  • Shinichi Atobe - Love of Plastic

  • Sofie Birch - Holotropica / Sofie Birch & Antonina Nowacka - Languoria

  • Soul Glo - Diaspora Problems

  • Smoke Point - Smoke Point

  • Spiro World - Time Warp

  • Tomáš Niesner - Bečvou

  • Voice Actor - Sent From My Telephone

Afterwater (Dane Komjen, 2022)

At the cinema, I most enjoyed going to the Kinuya Tanaka retrospective at the BFI. It was fun to watch all of the films made by a single director, and then to find out that my favourite of the lot wasn’t the one most commonly considered to the best (Forever a Woman, 1955) but instead another film entirely (Girls of the Night, 1962). I also liked going to the Robert Bresson season there, a director I had already seen a fair few films by, and finding new favourites, specifically Lancelot du Lac (1974) and The Devil, Probably (1977). I also had a great time at a BFI double bill of the really great Patlabor (Mamoru Oshii, 1989) and the even better Patlabor 2 (Mamoru Oshii, 1993), and was also very impressed by both Thampu (Govindan Aravindan, 1978) and Eight Deadly Shots (Mikko Niskanen, 1972), both of which came to the BFI via Il Cinema Ritrovato, a festival I’d like to go to next year. At the ICA, it was great to be put onto new stuff by The Machine That Kills Bad People. I wasn’t familiar with Blind Spot (Claudia von Alemann, 1981), Simone Barbés or Virtue (Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980), Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940), or The Movement of Things (Manuela Serra, 1985) before this group screened them, and all of them were really great. It was also at the ICA that I saw many of the films included in Open City Documentary Festival’s retrospective of Noriaki Tsuchimoto, whose work sort of towers above everything else I watched this year. The best films for me were On the Road: A Document (1964), Prehistory of the Partisans (1969), and Minamata Revolt (1973), but I had seen a number of the Minamata films already. At the Prince Charles Cinema, I had little to no expectations for either Event Horizon (Paul W. S. Anderson, 1997) or The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989), but both were amongst the best films I saw this year. Annoyingly, a lot of the best films I saw this year, I saw at home. After a few years letting cinema and festival programmers largely dictate my viewing, I decided they weren’t doing enough and started choosing my own priorities more often - which is the way that I got into film-viewing after all. Though it is much more expensive and the most interesting work isn’t always on, I still greatly prefer seeing films in the cinema and the moments that stick in my memory are the ones I watched in a big dark room with many others, like those listed above.

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

  • A Date In Minsk (Nikita Lavretski)

  • A Long Journey Home (Wenqian Zhang)

  • Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

  • Afterwater (Dane Komljen)

  • Blue Island (Chan Tze-Woon)

  • Cette Maison (Miryam Charles)

  • Concrete Valley (Antoine Bourges)

  • Dry Ground Burning (Adirley Quieros, Joana Pimenta)

  • F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now (Fox Maxy)

  • Hardly Working (Total Refusal)

  • I Didn’t See You There (Reid Davenport)

  • I Thought The World of You (Kurt Walker)

  • Is My Living In Vain (Ufuoma Essi)

  • Jackass Forever (Jeff Tremaine)

  • Jet Lag (Zheng Lu Xinyuan)

  • Pacifiction (Albert Serra)

  • Parkland of Fantasy and Decay (Chenliang Zhu)

  • Queens of the Qing Dynasty (Ashley McKenzie)

  • Robe of Gems (Natalia López)

  • Saint Omer (Alice Diop)

  • The African Desperate (Martine Syms)

  • The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sang-soo)

  • The Plains (David Easteal)

  • United States of America (James Benning)

  • We Had The Day Bonsoir (Narimane Mari)

Year in ReviewMatt Turner2022, music, Film