Matt Lloyd Turner

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2023

Agartha (Wata Igarashi, 2023)

2023: MUSIC

I tend to pick the album that I played through the most times as my favourite. This year that would be the Wata Igarashi album Agartha. Despite him having apparently developed his “vortex-like, psychedelic brand of techno” for more than a decade, I had not heard of him before this year. The art (above) piqued my attention though, and it is the sort of album that, for me, clicks from the first listen. Named after a mythical kingdom, it is a concept album of sorts, but not a showy one. Instead it is just a collection of rich, engaging, soundscapey songs. Other than this, the other favourite album of 2023 for me was Cr​é​puscule I & II by Tujiko Noriko. She did the soundtrack for Kuro (2017), but other than that I was unfamiliar with her work. Writing for Pitchfork, Philip Sherburne calls Cr​é​puscule I & II “an hour and 46 minutes of soft, luminous ambient music of alien beauty and human warmth,” which seems like a nice encapsulation. It is lovely but ambitious ambient music, as soothing and somnambulant as it is boundary pushing and strange.

Man in Black (Wang Bing, 2023)

2023: FILMS

This year, my favourite new films were the ones that stayed with me. Whether this was because the maker’s intention, or the film’s meaning, was elusive, resulting in me having to actually do a bit of work, or because they attempted something unexpected or new, this memory-permanence is what mattered to me most. The majority of new films are forgettable but fine and my short term memory is poor enough that I forget the opening scene of most films by the time the final credits arrive, so anything that makes a more lasting impression is immediately valuable to me. The below 25 films are the ones I remembered the strongest, mainly because they paid the fullest attention to film form, adopting a style that suited the idea they decided to explore or foregrounded the message they wanted to convey. The very best ones––Man in Black, The Trial, Music, Grenfell, and Still Film––which together make up my top five are the sort of films that are so forceful in their formal decisions and overall design that they become impossible to forget.

In terms of old films, I’m getting to an interesting point now in my advancing age where I’ve seen quite a few of the “big ones”––the sort of consensus serious arthouse films that you find making up Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of all Time list––and as a result, my viewing is now quite unstructured, dictated by random urges, by whatever needs to be watched for work, by what can be found from flitting about on Letterboxd, by what happens to be showing when I can be bothered to leave the house, by what has been restored and rereleased during the year, or by what is being put out by the home entertainment labels. As a result, my favourite new-to-me older films of 2023 were not things I would necessary have picked out myself back as a more active teenage pirate, but this is something I am happy about. It’s good to have choice taken away sometimes––to be guided by fate and circumstance. My ten favourites of 2023 were: The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, 1995) [home, streaming service]; Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) [BFI, DCP]; Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982) [Barbican, 35mm]; Not a Pretty Picture (Martha Coolidge, 1976) [home, vimeo link]; Threshold (Malcolm Le Grice, 1972) [BFI, 3x 16mm]; Mermaid Legend (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984) [home, torrent file]; Steamboat Willie (Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney, 1928) [BFI, 35mm]; The Gate of the Sun (Yousry Nasrallah, 2004) (Locarno, DCP]; The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1974) [BFI, DCP]; Ode to Mount Hayachine (Haneda Sumiko, 1982) [ICA, 16mm]. And, with an apology for cheating with my own arbitrary number of only 10, writing this list now I also can’t stop thinking about Intimacies (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2012) [ICA, DCP] and The Red Shoes (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1948) [BFI, 35mm], both of which are amazing films about the complicated creation of stage productions that I saw in an accidental bagman double bill last week. Next year, I will continue to watch more films.

  • Background (Khaled Abdulwahed)

  • Best Secret Place (Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel)

  • Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

  • Following the Sound (Kiyoshi Sugita)

  • Grenfell (Steve McQueen)

  • Keeping Time (Darol Olu Kae)

  • How I Became a Communist (Declan Clarke)

  • Man in Black / Youth [Spring] (Wang Bing)

  • Menus-Plaisirs Les Troigros (Frederick Wiseman)

  • Music (Angela Schanelec)

  • Nowhere Near (Miko Revereza)

  • Our Body (Claire Simon)

  • Remembering Every Night (Yui Kiyohara)

  • Rebranded Mickey Mouse / The Mask (Conner O’ Malley)

  • (sans)(image) (arc)

  • Self-Portrait: 47KM 2020 (Zhang Mengqi)

  • Sofia Foi (Pedro Geraldo)

  • Still Film (James N. Kienitz Wilkins)

  • The Adults (Dustin Guy Defa)

  • The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)

  • The Bride (Myriam Uwiragiye Birara)

  • The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lu)

  • The Trial (Ulises de la Orden)

  • Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars (Jean-Luc Godard)

  • What the Graphic Designers Wore (Gilbert)

Year in ReviewMatt Turner2023, Film, music