2024 in Cinema

If a cinematic year delivers new works by David Cronenberg, Jia Zhangke, Albert Serra, and Mike Leigh, four filmmakers I’ve spent a great deal of time with over the past fifteen years or so, is it possible to summarise it without having seen a single one of them? And not just these four, but several others, too. Dozens of films I’ve wanted to track down but for one reason or another haven’t yet been able to. The answer is, of course, yes. Yes it is possible, but I’m certain that this roundup, more than any of the others I’ve written over the past decade, will be one I look back on as being frustratingly incomplete. A fragment of a fragment. A skim of a year that most likely demanded a much closer read than I’ve been able to give it. 

It’s rare that I feel as if I’ve missed more than I’ve seen, certainly in terms of the major films, which perhaps isn’t fair to the films I did manage to see, but I’m leaving 2024 with the impression that there’s still so much more left to unearth. Thankfully a year’s worth of cinema doesn’t just disappear because the calendar ticks over, and I’ll be able to see the majority of these films eventually. It’s just a lot harder to keep up with them all retroactively. The bigger ones, like Here, or The Brutalist, will inevitably be released in cinemas in the coming months, and a few others will end up on streaming services sooner rather than later. But not all of them. Plenty will be lost in the shuffle. And a new year brings its own cinema, its own riches to mine, and so the pile continues to grow. For the sake of keeping track, I’ve felt the need to list everything that has piqued my interest from the past twelve months that I've seen yet. At the time of writing, it has fifty-two films on it.

A backlog like this is usually the sign of a strong year, and from what I’ve seen I’d say it’s been a pretty good one. I did my usual trek around Europe for a couple of festivals (Berlin, Ghent, London), caught a few interesting new releases and one-off screenings, and made some exciting discoveries at home. Another year of the same routine, and while familiarity and structure isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I am once again wishing I’d managed to mix things up a little more than I did. But, then again, life has moved on for me. When I started this blog in 2015, I was twenty-four and able to spend as much time as I wanted immersed in cinema. I’m thirty-three now, and I just do not have the same time or the same energy to roll the dice anymore. I spent a lot of my time in my early twenties as a prospector, diligently taking the time to sift through the silt and the mud to find an occasional nugget of gold. As I’ve entered my thirties I’ve become a card counter, trying to game the system as much as I can in order to spend what little free time I have as wisely as I can. Aside from the odd misstep, this has largely worked for me, and I’ve still ended up seeing a decent number of good movies. I can’t really complain too much about that.

With all that in mind, it feels as if this year has been one of dilemmas, of balancing the scales of one’s own conscience. A look of horror suddenly spreading over a new father’s face as he’s forced to confront the consequences of his actions in Juror #2. A smirk of uncontainable joy passing over the face of an online reseller as he watches his stock of fake designer handbags sell out in real time on a screen in an empty room in Cloud. A glimmer of resigned sadness etched on the face of a woman at the precise moment she realises just how much she risked for the sake of a dream that was never going to happen in Three Friends. And the desirous glances made by a priest across a dinner table towards a mysterious young stranger in Misericordia. A year of faces, and facades, and how, when it comes down to it, they’re the first thing to give the game away.

But of everything, I’ve returned most frequently to the closing moments of Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me, in which several veiled puppeteers work to recreate a scene from Mauvais Sang, set to David Bowie’s Modern Love, with the marionette from Annette, not out in the streets of Paris but in a studio, with a revolving backdrop and a treadmill, and the uncannily expressionless face of a puppet. In some ways, this is a work of archaeology on the part of Carax, but it’s also a step into the future. A new way to keep the old ghosts alive. The past is the past, but it can exist again as something new. Yes, some part of it is lost, but something else takes its place. I think this is where I’m at as 2024 draws to a close. A happy card counter, keeping an ear to the ground, seeing what I can, noting what I can’t, and being okay with the balance. So while I’ve not covered as much ground as I’ve perhaps wanted to this year, I think I’m in a pretty good place all the same.

In alphabetical order:

A Traveller’s Needs | Hong Sang-soo

The Cats of Gokogu Shrine | Kazuhiro Soda

Cloud | Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Favoriten | Ruth Beckermann

Grand Tour | Miguel Gomes

Juror #2 | Clint Eastwood

Megalopolis | Francis Ford Coppola

Misericordia | Alain Guiraudie

7 Walks With Mark Brown | Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré

Sleep With Your Eyes Open | Nele Wohlatz

Super Happy Forever | Kohei Igarashi

Three Friends | Emmanuel Mouret

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Ten discoveries, of which seven were watched at home; two in London; and one, Herzsprung, in Berlin, as part of the festival’s retrospective strand, screened to a full-house in the CUBIX in Alexanderplatz with the director and lead actors present for an all-German Q&A. It’s rare that I see something without any semblance of context, but that’s what I did with Herzpsrung, and that intangible curiosity was rewarded ten times over. A spectacular reminder that beneath the canon lies some truly extraordinary movies. A nice incentive to keep digging.

In chronological order:

My Darling Clementine | John Ford, 1946

Silver Lode | Allan Dwan, 1954

Rio Bravo | Howard Hawks, 1959

Stolen Kisses | Francois Truffaut, 1968

American Graffiti | George Lucas, 1973

The Village of Mist | Im Kwon-taek, 1983

Herzsprung | Helke Misselwitz, 1992

Kamikaze Taxi | Masato Harada, 1994

Mahjong | Edward Yang, 1996

The River | Tsai Ming-liang, 1997

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Against all odds, I’ve managed to keep my monthly newsletter, Strange Days, running for another year. It’s been nice to get back into the habit of writing on a consistent basis again, and I think I’m a lot better off because of it. If you’re inclined to keep up with what I’m reading and playing and watching and listening to, then please feel free to pore over the archive here, and subscribe if you'd like to.

Elsewhere, I think it’s fair to say that I, and many of you, I’m sure, have been gradually checking out of social media, but in the spirit of keeping an ear to the ground I’m not entirely done just yet. I have a Bluesky account that I use sporadically to post screenshots of movies like it’s 2014, and for now it’s serving its purpose. I have to say it’s difficult to muster much enthusiasm for it, but I’ll be there for a little while longer.

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Best Albums (5 old, 5 new)

Long Season | Fishmans, 1996

Fantasma | Cornelius, 1997

A Demonstration | Kolya, 1999

The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place | Explosions in the Sky, 2003

Origami | Ichiko Aoba, 2011

Tigers Blood | Waxahatchee, 2024

If I Don’t Make It, I Love You | Still House Plants, 2024

All Hell | Los Campesinos!, 2024

You Never End | Moin, 2024

GNX | Kendrick Lamar, 2024

I didn’t dig too deeply this year, or too widely. In terms of live music, I saw Explosions in the Sky in Brighton, Death Cab For Cutie and Phoenix (and several others) at All Points East, and Ichiko Aoba and Cornelius at the Barbican. I’m hoping to see more and hear more in 2025.

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I read twenty-five novels in 2024, which is up from zero last year. Rediscovering my love of reading has been a wonderful thing for me, and I can only imagine that this will continue. I’m currently half-way through Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996), which would almost certainly have made this list if I’d been able to finish it in time.

In chronological order:

Another Country | James Baldwin, 1962

Portnoy’s Complaint | Philip Roth, 1969

The New York Trilogy | Paul Auster, 1987

The Black Dahlia | James Ellroy, 1987

American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis, 1991

Kafka on the Shore | Haruki Murakami, 2002

The Road | Cormac McCarthy, 2006

The Vegetarian | Han Kang, 2007

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead | Olga Tokarczuk, 2009

Small Things Like These | Claire Keegan, 2021

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If you’ve made it to the end of this roundup, thank you. It really does mean a lot to know that someone reads these things. As the year comes to a close, all that’s left for me to say is that I hope you’re well, and happy, and that you can find the time to take a break over this festive season. All the best for 2025.

London Film Festival 2024

London Film Festival 2024 | #1

Visions of fear. In Neo Sora’s Happyend, the Japan of the future is under attack from the natural world. An impending earthquake has been forecast, and this society lives in its shadow, with its threat used as a means for right-wing politicians to impose invasive rules and laws in the name of public safety. Follow the rules and survive. Break the rules and put everyone in danger. A culture of fear, in which to not abide by the rules of the group is the same as acting against it. And so racism flourishes, and violence, and hate, and the cycle of fear perpetuates itself. The generations that lived through Fukushima keep voting in the fascists, and the young have to live with their choices. Sora centres the film around a group of students in a Tokyo high school in the early 2040s (a date gleaned only from a few posters on the wall) as they try to live normal teenage lives: hanging out, listening to music, smoking, falling in love, breaking rules. But all in a constant state of invisible anxiety, waiting for an inevitable disaster that never comes. Alarms sound regularly on phones and rooms shake again and again. But it’s never as bad as it could’ve been. Maybe the next one will be.

Following an elaborate but seemingly harmless prank, which their headteacher tellingly and po-facedly describes as an act of terrorism, an AI driven surveillance system is launched in the school, tracking the students’ every move and penalising any rule breaking within the scope of its many, many cameras. This school is a microcosm of Japan, and these teenagers, not content to be placed under scrutiny, are forced to confront reality. Sora frames the film directly from the student’s eyes, and portrays their political awakenings exactly as they would experience them: messily, fervently, urgently. A first step into the real world, taken wholeheartedly with the intent to change things for the better. And they do drive change, just not on their terms. And so Happyend becomes a film of firsts: loves, heartbreaks; and first encounters with the slipperiness of an authoritarian political hierarchy willing to do anything to stay in power.

A similar desire to break free from (very different) forces of control is the driving force behind Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour. Set in the 1910s, Edward, a British diplomat, waits on a pier in Rangoon for his fiancée, Molly, to arrive on a boat from England. He hasn’t seen her for seven years, and has doubts about the idea of marrying her. Impulsively, he runs away, jumping on the first boat out of town and embarking on a sprawling journey across Asia, stopping in Singapore and Bangkok, Manila and Saigon, Shanghai and Osaka. On and on. City after city after city, never staying in one place for long before moving quickly onto another. Gomes first shows Edward’s attempts to escape, and then jumps back to Molly as she, not to be deterred, chases after him, picking up his trail again and again as he fruitlessly tries to shake her off. 

He chooses to run. She chooses to follow. A film about the ability to practise one’s own autonomy in a continent colonised by outsiders. An irony not lost on Gomes, who frequently underlines this outsider’s perspective by cutting between narrative images shot on a soundstage, vivid and ghostly, and documentary footage of the same locations in the present day, some in black and white, some in colour. All combining to form a stereotypical depiction of the countries and cities that Edward and Molly once passed through a century before: mopeds, puppet shows, mahjong, fortune tellers, martial arts displays; touristic images to create an outsider’s view of Asia as one single, amorphous entity. For Gomes, this colonial gaze is how Edward and Molly, perhaps unwittingly, turn the continent into a playground. A film viewed through the eyes of two people who think they know these places but haven’t even begun to understand them. And as they find themselves moving through China, through Chengdu and beyond, deeper and deeper inland and further and further from the port cities that opened up the world for them, they separately begin to lose their bearings, their senses, and, ultimately, themselves. A romantic film that morphs and shifts into a perilous one. A century of misunderstanding, of false confidence built on hubris, held within one man’s fear of the world he left behind, and an embrace of a world he will never make sense of. A century of refusing to engage, coming home to roost.

Film Fest Gent 2024 | #1

Film Fest Gent 2024 | #1

There are an astonishing number of bikes in Ghent. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them at a time, all chained up in racks or on fences outside cafés and bars and train stations and cinemas, anywhere they fit, or clunking and whirring over cobbled streets day and night alongside a few trams and fewer buses and even fewer cars. The city is calmer because of it, even its bustling historical centre, where scores of tourists crowd and linger in front of cathedrals while locals zip silently between them on their bicycles. There's not much of a roar, of a drone. It’s all very peaceful, very simple, very slow. A nice place to walk around in, to have a beer in, to get lost in. And, as it turns out, to watch films in, which is how I ended up in Belgium in the first place. To watch films in a new city and to get lost in new streets. In the four days I was in town for Film Fest Gent, I ended up getting lost plenty of times, and managed to see eleven films. Some good, some less so. But all worthwhile in one way or another. The ones that hit the hardest were all about the same sense of aimless wandering that I was hoping to find for myself.

It would make sense to start with Tsai Ming-liang’s Abiding Nowhere, a film specifically about walking for the sake of walking. The tenth and supposedly final film in his Walker series, which began in 2012, Abiding Nowhere tracks in extended long takes the protracted movements of a monk, barefoot and dressed in vivid red robes, as he glacially walks through a series of spaces in and around Washington, D.C., starting in a forest before moving onto the city and its landmarks. Tsai cuts between the walker and another solitary man as he separately passes through many of the same spaces, but not at the same time, and the two men never cross paths. After more than a decade, the fundamentals of the Walker films are well established, and besides some subtle variations, like an occasional companion or a cut or a pan within the frame, very little has changed. Little except, of course, the locations. Washington D.C. isn’t as busy or as vibrant as Tsai’s previous cityscapes of Hong Kong or Marseille or Tokyo, with the monk more often than not framed against tastefully graffitied walls and sterile marble buildings. But Tsai fills these bland spaces with the cacophonous roar of planes and cars, all constantly screaming past off-screen. Modes of transport in stark contrast to the walker’s slow journey on foot, and an incessant reminder of the speed of modern life. As the monk moves, the world moves past him, again and again, leaving him behind. He’s still walking while the other man, having covered much of the same ground already, eats noodles on his own in his sparse, silent hotel room. The planes keep flying and the cars keep driving. Tsai isn’t particularly interested in assigning meanings to these images, and Abiding Nowhere is, as with the rest of the Walker series, a film about the simple act of observation. A film of watching how the world reacts to the walker, and of how he keeps walking in spite of all the noise, all the chaos, all the reasons to move faster. In an accelerated world, slowness will always be an act of defiance.

In Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, observation is the only thing possible. Filmed entirely from the perspective of a ghost haunting a suburban American home, the film plays out as a series of vignettes in which this ghost drifts aimlessly around the confines of the building and watches life unfold for the family who’ve just moved into it. As they settle into their new house, the tensions and traumas that brought them there are gradually revealed, or eavesdropped upon by the ghost, and it’s not long before they begin to sense an intangible presence: first as a feeling, of being watched, of not being alone, and later as witnesses to the inexplicable. Soderbergh’s camera functions as the ghost’s eyes, and these sensory encounters are presented as a direct response to the ghost’s proximity to members of the family. At one point, for example, a teenage girl suddenly stops in her tracks and spins around in startled surprise, expecting to see something, but of course there's nothing there. However, the close up of her face at this moment suggests that not only is the ghost in the room with her, just as she thought, right in front of her, looking straight at her, but that she was briefly able to perceive its presence, too. It’s a startling inversion of a classic jump-scare, in which the fear of being discovered is replaced by the fear of being watched by something impossible to comprehend. As the fragmentary narrative begins to fall into place, Soderbergh starts to explore the limitations of such an invisible perspective. Eventually, the ghost is rendered a passive observer to a terrible situation in which it cannot intervene but equally cannot turn away from, and so the scene plays out in a frustrating, excruciating long-take as things get worse and worse, while the ghost frantically tries to intervene. These moments reminded me of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, which, perhaps coincidentally, I saw for maybe the dozenth time as part of the festival’s retrospective strand the following day, a film in which a sound technician hears a murder in real time but cannot do anything to prevent it. In Presence, the dangers are seen as well as heard, and viewed in extreme close up. And yet being an observer is still not enough. A brutal study of powerlessness.

There’s a similar sense of dread and desolation lingering over Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever. A man wanders aimlessly around a luxurious but near-empty tropical beach resort in the days before its closure, dragging his feet, looking miserable. He throws his phone in the sea mid-call. He asks a bewildered hotel receptionist whether they’ve found a red baseball cap he lost five years ago. And he abruptly leaves a conversation to perform a karaoke version of Bobby Darin’s Beyond The Sea. His behaviour is erratic to say the least, and it’s only a matter-of-fact comment in passing that reveals the reason for his unhappiness: his wife died a few days ago. Igarashi builds the film backwards from there, starting with this man’s grief and jumping back to five years earlier, to show how he and his wife met for the first time at this hotel and fell in love. Details from the present (the baseball cap, the room number, Beyond The Sea) are given their significance by the past. But they aren’t shown as memories. Igarashi adds a dimension of objectivity by jumping back in time to show the beginnings of this romance in flashback from her perspective, not his, and it has the effect of corroborating everything we’ve learned from him about their relationship. In the present, he explains how he first saw her in the hotel lobby, and in the past, we see this situation play out through her eyes in exactly the way he described it. There are no inflections, inconsistencies. No embellishments. And so the image becomes more concrete, more believable. And more powerful because of it. A film in which the present is enriched by the past, again and again, and so this love builds and builds through every new detail, towards an inevitable tragedy. A sad, straightforward love story told from end to beginning and one that, in its final gestures, begins to move forwards, onwards into an uncertain but hopeful future somewhere beyond the sea. 

Twister | Jan de Bont, 1996

Twister | Jan de Bont, 1996

The calm before. The first four shots of Jan de Bont’s Twister (1996) set an ominous tone. Empty landscapes in rural America, dwarfed by the sky above, darkness closing in. A gentle evening punctuated by the chirps of crickets. The fading remnants of the day’s sunlight slowly smothered by clouds. There are no people in sight, just their creations: a small farm and a pumpjack, a truss bridge across a river, a barbed-wire fence; each designed to give man some kind of hold over nature: to farm it, to traverse it, to segment it. And then, finally, a shot of the cloud-filled sky above a distant row of trees. Uncontrollable, unpredictable, unknowable. A constant, looming presence, beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. And then a crash of lightning tips the scales. Man has conquered the land and the threat now comes from above. The wind starts howling and the calm is over.

Challengers | Luca Guadagnino, 2024

Challengers | Luca Guadagnino, 2024

Tennis is an inherently cinematic sport, not just in its ability to create narrative, but also in its tragedy. A sport in which it’s possible to win more points and more games than your opponent and still lose; or lose more and still win. A sport about winning the points that matter. It’s in this idea that Guadagnino roots the film. A sport, and a film, about fluid contexts and constant reinvention, grinding down your opponent and preying on their weakness. Tennis and life, indistinguishable from one another. Winning at both is playing the game to win, and deciphering the points that matter from the ones that don’t. Come onnnnnnnnnnn!

2023 in Cinema

A year of considering the variables. I watched The Long Good Friday for the first time in the spring and its final moments have stayed with me all year. A man lost in the present with absolutely no idea how he got there, coming to terms with the end of the road as street lights stream past in the background. A grimace of clenched teeth. A lot of the films I’ve loved this year are in one way or another about people who have misread the room, or no longer understand what’s in front of them, and I don’t know why these kinds of films keep resonating with me. Perhaps it’s part of some drawn-out crisis of my early thirties. A lot of things in my life have changed this year, in joyful ways for the most part, but not exclusively, though it doesn’t feel as if I’ve had much time to savour the highs or the lows as much as I should have. Things keep happening, again and again, and the weeks roll by a little faster. I’m not lost in the chaos, by any means. I’m not Harold Shand, cogs whirring, frantically trying to make sense of how I got here, powerless to change anything. And yet the image keeps coming back to me all the same.

In terms of things I have been able to control, I’ve had a necessarily quiet year of film-watching. I’ve wanted to disengage a little and just enjoy the things that I want to enjoy, without the noise, and broadly I’ve done that. I’m on pace to end the year with an average of about one film every two days, which, by any measure, is still far too much cinema, but it’s a start. It’s definitely been nice to ease off and do other things with my time. In saying that, though, I’ve still been to all the usual festivals: Berlin in February, Edinburgh in August, London and Vienna in October; each one equal parts fun and frustrating in its own way, but I’ve enjoyed them all to varying extents. I’m starting to wonder whether this part of my life is winding down a little. As much fun as it is to lose myself in a city for the sake of cinema, the festival experience isn’t as exciting to me now as it was a few years ago. Maybe I’m becoming too familiar with these places. I’m quite keen to go somewhere else in the new year.

In September, I spent a weekend in Christchurch watching a dozen or so horror movies on 35mm at Grindfest. I’m by no means a film purist, and I still don’t know why I decided to go to this in the first place, but seeing great movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, and deranged oddities like Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In and Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow’s The Kindred, on a big screen with a hyper-engaged audience was a lot of fun, to say the least. Elsewhere, the jarring double-feature of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma at the BFI on a Saturday evening in January was a real joy, as was seeing Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala for the first time in a decade at the same cinema a month later, on 70mm no less. I didn’t get up to London as much as I’d like to have done this year, so other highlights are thin on the ground, but in September I left work early and jumped on the train for a surprise screening at the Prince Charles that turned out to be John Sayles’ Lone Star. I wish I did spontaneous things like this more often. I knew absolutely nothing about the film, even after the surprise was revealed, and found it to be a wonderful, knotty piece of work about, of course, and among other things, an unexpected challenge to an already accepted reality. Everything can change and sometimes it does.

This is a sentiment that has echoed through the films that have moved me the most from the year. Unexpected challenges to reality. I’m thinking about the forest fires burning elsewhere and getting closer in Afire. The lost memories of a man’s past played back to him on a cinema screen in an incomprehensible present in Close Your Eyes. An actress’s sudden realisation that her attempts to understand the complexity of the woman she’s playing in a movie have been nothing more than shallow mimicry and tickbox research in May December. An anguished scream towards a stolen future in The Beast. And, most specifically of all, a young boy’s reckoning with the fact that taking control of the chaos of his life will not save him from it in The Boy and the Heron. It’s a matter of finding a way to live with your own reality, not as it ought to be, not as it used to be, but as it is now. And then life can go on.

And I think that’s where I find myself in December: looking back on a year of letting life in. Maybe that’s why The Long Good Friday has stayed with me. Not so much for its bleakness, but for the simple fact that I’m not a passenger in my own life like Harold Shand. As turbulent and chaotic and messy and sad as this year has been in places, I feel better than ever for pushing through it. Everything can change and sometimes it does. I’m finally somewhere close to where I want to be. Let’s see what 2024 holds.

In alphabetical order:

Afire | Christian Petzold

The Beast | Bertrand Bonello

The Boy And The Heron | Hayao Miyazaki

Close Your Eyes | Victor Erice

Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World | Radu Jude

Evil Does Not Exist | Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Following The Sound | Kyoshi Sugita

Here | Bas Devos

Last Summer | Catherine Breillat

May December | Todd Haynes

Music | Angela Schanelec

Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan

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Some discoveries from a scattershot year. Scattershot by design, I think, in the sense that I’ve started to just watch anything regardless of how much context I have for it. I feel like I’ve been accidentally limiting myself over the past couple of years by focusing on the filmmaker rather than the films, so I’m not doing that anymore. Watching movies really shouldn’t be that complicated. I don’t need to see the deep-cuts of directors I don’t really care about before moving on to other things. Who cares!

In alphabetical order:

Bend of the River | Anthony Mann, 1952

Daisy Kenyon | Otto Preminger, 1947

Four Nights of a Dreamer | Robert Bresson, 1971

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes | Howard Hawks, 1953

The Heiress | William Wyler, 1949

The Long Good Friday | John Mackenzie, 1980

La Recta Provincia | Raul Ruiz, 2007

The Shop Around The Corner | Ernst Lubitsch, 1940

Trust | Hal Hartley, 1990

Violent Saturday | Richard Fleischer, 1955

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A musical snapshot. Ten albums: five new, five old; all of which were new to me, and all of which have hit me pretty hard at some point in the past year. I think I’m too close to know what this list says about me, if it says anything at all, but I’m sure I’ll make more sense of it one way or another in a year or two. Or maybe it’s just a list of ten albums I like.

In alphabetical order:

After The Magic | Parannoul, 2023

A Promise | Xiu Xiu, 2003

The Disintegration Loops | William Basinski, 2002-2003

Halos of Perception | Lisa Lerkenfeldt, 2023

Javelin | Sufjan Stevens, 2023

The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We | Mitski, 2023

Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts | Everyone Asked About You, 1997-2000

Smoochy | Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1995

Transatlanticism | Death Cab For Cutie, 2003

trip9love…??? | Tirzah, 2023

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I relaunched my newsletter a couple of months ago. It’s called Strange Days, and so far I’ve been framing it as a round-up of what I’ve been doing over the past month. It’s mostly film, of course, but I’ve also written about a Yoshitomo Nara exhibition and Super Mario Bros. Wonder, too. I don’t know how it’s going to evolve in 2024 but for now I’m having a great time with it. You can sign up here if you’d like to.

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If you've made it this far, or if you just scrolled to the bottom, I hope you have a wonderful festive season. Speak soon.

The Lineup | Don Siegel, 1958

The Lineup | Don Siegel, 1958

Two circles on a calendar. Yesterday and tomorrow. Yesterday, a man died after stealing a bag and crashing a cab in San Francisco, but nobody knows why. Two detectives investigate and trade in fragments of information, one clue leading to another, and another, and slowly the pieces begin to fit together. Tomorrow comes, and two men in grey suits, one calm, collected, methodical, the other wild, dangerous, impulsive, arrive in the city and yesterday's version of events becomes prophetic. A carefully laid plan unfolds as these men go about their business in the shadows. But tomorrow was always going to come. The boats and planes of yesterday become today’s aquariums and museums. Information trickles back to the detectives. Time ticks by and the cage closes in. And then the road runs out.

The Perfect Kiss | Jonathan Demme, 1985

New Order: The Perfect Kiss | Jonathan Demme, 1985

It would be tempting, perhaps seductively so, to shoot a Talking Heads live show from multiple angles and train every camera on David Byrne. His sudden jerks and lurches and twitches never fail to catch the eye, as they should, but with Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme is solely interested in capturing the totality of this performance, and this band, and these songs, and these people. Byrne’s unstoppably jagged charisma is a huge part of this, running laps of the stage, dancing with a floor lamp, performing in an enormous grey business suit, but it’s just one layer of dozens, each happening at the same time in the same place in total harmony. The alchemy of live music. Even split into its constituent parts and pieced back together, it’s impossible to see how it all comes together.

A year later, Demme took a similar approach with his music video for New Order’s single The Perfect Kiss, shot in the band’s practice room in Manchester as they perform the song from start to finish. The video cuts between close-ups of each member individually, either playing their instruments or waiting to play them, with the camera mostly trained on their faces. Demme isolates each person in a frame of their own and emphasises their individual contribution to the song: Bernard Sumner singing and playing guitar and hitting a cowbell; Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris turning the dials and pressing the keys of various synthesisers; Peter Hook playing a bass riff and hitting some drum pads. Each close-up underlines a certain sound visually as a single layer among dozens of others, created by one of four people and their instruments, and by focusing on the means by which these layers are constructed, Demme finds the same thing he found in Stop Making Sense: that music is alchemical. It’s water into wine, lead into gold. It’s a thousand individual noises thrown together to create something dense and magic and unknowable. 

Frantic | Roman Polanski, 1988

Frantic | Roman Polanski, 1988

A missing piece. A photo kept in the wallet of a family man, taken in San Francisco and now cut into pieces in Paris. The face of a smiling woman removed, cut out with scissors and taken by police for an investigation into her disappearance, or her kidnapping, or maybe nothing at all. The remains of the photo are given back to the man who provided it, who treasured it enough to take it across the Atlantic in his wallet, and all he can do is take it and keep looking for the person who completes the picture, an ocean removed from where it was taken. A family’s happiness remains frozen in time, a world away from the present, but now the absence overwhelms the joy. A square hole in place of a face, a photo that will never mean what it once did. A treasured memory doomed by the present and lost to the future. A ghost.

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2023 | #1

Edinburgh Film Festival 2023 | #1

When I first went to the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2018, it was June and the city was calm and quiet, and I remember feeling as if the crowds that built up around the Royal Mile and the Grassmarket were easy to slip away from, and some peace was never too far away. It’s been five turbulent years since then, and the festival is now held two months later in the year, in August, competing for space against a seemingly endless array of other festivals that all seem to take place in the city during the same four-week period in the summer. The calm and quiet of my first visit was this time replaced by near-total chaos, with every hideaway, every park, every alleyway filled with dozens and dozens of people gathered around to see something happen. Anything. A didgeridoo beatboxer opposite the entrance to Edinburgh Castle. A sword-swallower laying on a bed of nails outside the Scottish National Gallery. A toilet-paper juggler standing atop a precarious stack of IKEA tables in Princes Street Gardens. A hyperactive dancer performing a J-pop medley near the Palace of Holyroodhouse. A city so stacked with music and dance and performance at this time of year that it overflows from the bars and pubs and clubs and out into the cobbled streets and beyond. In August, everyone in Edinburgh seems to be outside and standing still, stuck endlessly in one place, watching and listening.

I’m not sure how cinema is supposed to contend with such mayhem, such an overwhelming array of louder options, and yet here we are. In the face of such congestion, and following the sudden collapse into administration of the Centre for the Moving Image, the operator of the festival, in October last year, the Edinburgh International Film Festival is somehow still here, holding firm, bringing cinema to the city once again. This is my fourth visit to the festival, but the first in which I’ve had to contend with the full cacophony of Edinburgh in August. In the five days I was in town, I saw 12 films: eight new features, three from the retrospective, and one, Christian Petzold’s Afire, that I’d already seen in Berlin and was curious to revisit. Even just a few months ago, it seemed as if the festival would never happen again. I was very glad to be there for its rebirth.

Among the necessarily truncated programme of feature films on offer this year, I was most excited to see Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, the latest work to emerge from El Pampero Cine, the production company and artist collective behind, among many others, Mariano Llinás’s La Flor and the work of Alejo Moguillansky. Trenque Lauquen is a two-part, four-hour mosaic about Laura, a mystery-loving botanist and part-time radio host, whose sudden disappearance baffles the men in her life, Chicho, a colleague, and Rafa, her boyfriend, both of whom are in love with her, and sets them on a meandering cross-country search to find her, or, at least, to find their own version of her. These two men drive from town to town, asking questions, following leads, and eventually hitting a dead end, before moving on to the next town down the road, again and again, searching in vain for some trace of Laura. Citarella frames this story in a dozen or so chapters, presented out of order, beginning with Rafa and Chicho’s search and gradually recontextualising it with new information and new obsessions: a mystery involving letters hidden in the pages of library books; a search for an unclassified species of orchid; a conspiracy surrounding a mysterious creature washed up on the shores of a lake. Time passes, and the film continues to shift and deepen, taking on layers of new detail that serve to cast a shadow over everything that came before. For Citarella, understanding is a futile game. Instead, Trenque Lauquen is a film about the limits of comprehension. Both Rafa and Chicho have decided that the Laura they know and love is the real version of Laura, whatever that means, when really the person they know only a small part of who she is. If they really knew everything about her, they’d know where she was. As with all the letters Laura found in the library books, it’s both easy and satisfying to take a set of (potentially incomplete) clues and use them to piece together a likely version of events, but that can never capture the totality of a story, a history, a life. It’s impossible to have all the facts, all the contexts, motivations. It’s impossible to truly know someone. All you can get is the version you’re most willing to believe in while the mysteries remain unsolved in the margins.

I’d be surprised if I see many films this year that have the same density and commitment to mystery as Trenque Lauquen, and while that wasn’t something I was particularly hoping for from the rest of the programme, the tidiness of some of the festival’s biggest titles seemed at odds with much of what made Citarella’s film so interesting to me. Both Ira Sachs’s Passages and Celine Song’s Past Lives feel dulled by the restrictive care with which their triangular relationships are constructed, and the inevitability with which they evolve and develop, while the ferocity of Daniel Bandeira’s Property, a survival thriller in which a farm-owner’s wife is trapped inside an armoured car after the workers take violent revenge after years of exploitation, is cheapened by the suspension of logic in key dramatic moments. Christian Petzold’s wonderful film Afire, on the other hand, is anything but obvious, and takes a similar approach to Trenque Lauquen, with a careful accumulation of information serving to disprove a solipsistic author’s assumptions about the world around him and force him, for better or for worse, to engage with the realities of his life. But of everything else at the festival, perhaps most interesting of all was Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, a film actively fighting against restriction at every turn, and one that, somewhat belatedly, received its first UK screening here eighteen months after its premiere in Cannes.

Showing Up follows a week or so in the life of Lizzy, a sculptor and administrative assistant in Portland preparing for a solo exhibition of her work in a small gallery in the city. As the week progresses, Lizzy has to deal with the distractions of her day-to-day life as she tries to prioritise the completion of her own work: a hungry cat, her tense relationships with her separated parents and reclusive brother, the care required to nurse an injured pigeon back to health, the lack of hot water in her apartment, and her landlord, friend, and fellow artist’s refusal to help her as she prepares her own work for exhibition. These inconveniences serve as an incessant attack on Lizzy’s ability to create, but never malevolently so. It’s all just a symptom of the world in which she lives, a world that allows her to live the life she wants, but doesn’t necessarily value her work or respect her desire to create it. Reichardt contrasts Lizzy’s life with other people’s perceptions of success and talent around her, but never towards her: her friend and landlord is staging two celebrated shows at the same time; her increasingly detached brother is seen by her parents as a misunderstood genius while they seem to have no opinion of her work at all. Even her workplace, the Oregon College of Art and Craft, seems to be against her, with several cut-aways showing students given the space and time to develop their art in their own way without the burden of responsibility, while Lizzy, no longer a student, is only able to give the required time to her work at home, and is only able to use the kiln at the college, a required tool in the completion of her sculptures, with the assistance and permission of a colleague. And yet she keeps working because that’s what she wants to do. It’s worth it for Lizzy. Showing Up is about finding ways to do what you love, and to go and make it happen in spite of every possible reason not to. The art itself can be angry on your behalf, as it should be, but it has to be there to begin with. It has to exist. If ever there was an ethos for the new-look Edinburgh International Film Festival, it would have to be something like that.