2018 in Cinema

I seem to have gotten into the habit of writing an end of year round up (see 2016 and 2017), and I don't really know why I keep writing them. I’m a lot less engaged in film culture than I used to be. The effort I once went to to keep track of which directors had films on the way in the next year or so and which festivals they might premiere at and all that kind of thing is now channeled into more rewarding areas of my life. I still keep an ear to the ground, but long gone are the Google Sheets filled with films, premiere dates, self-imposed hierarchies of interest. I tweet less and less. I only use Letterboxd for tracking what I watch and leaving the odd review or list. I write occasionally on here. I still watch movies, and I still care about what's happening. I'm just checking out of the online aspect of it. I don't enjoy it. More and more, the art feels secondary to the idea of being publicly seen to have the correct opinion on it, and the idea of having the correct, and therefore only, perspective on any kind of cultural object cannot be healthy, particularly when that opinion is policed. If you don't like Twin Peaks you're an idiot. If you like Suspiria you're a potato. It's all a bit too dystopian for my tastes.

This is just one part of film culture, of course, and it shouldn't be enough on its own to dissuade me from caring about the rest of it. I don't get to travel to see films very often as I don't work in the industry, but when I do, I'm able to treat film festivals as holidays. I like to enjoy films as an interest rather than as a profession. I have no obligations to write coverage of festivals so it's easy to relax and enjoy myself. The drawback, though, is that I don't get to see as much as I'd like to. I've not, for example, been able to see films like Christian Petzold's Transit or Stéphane Brizé's At War or Carlos Reygadas's Our Time, all films that I'm very keen to see but none of which have screened at the festivals I've been to or been released in UK cinemas. However, I do think that I see enough to get an idea, at least, of the themes dominating the year's cinematic output. Either that, or I project myself onto the films that I do see and only start to notice when an overarching theme begins to emerge. However it happens, it amounts to the same thing, and what I've encountered most often in the films I've seen in 2018 is an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction with the world. Lost pasts, doomed futures, a fog-shrouded present. A feeling that the infrastructure will crumble while the political hierarchies endure. Films about lies, cover-ups, paranoia, injustices. Films about how technology smothers humanity, about how nostalgia poisons culture. Films about the glass that separates us from each other. Films about death. However I've got here, the following twelve films, twelve because I always do twelve, are the films that have stayed firmest in my thoughts. For better or for worse, this is what I've got.

In alphabetical order:

An Elephant Sitting Still | Hu Bo
Ash is Purest White | Jia Zhang-ke
Burning | Lee Chang-dong
First Man | Damien Chazelle
Happy as Lazzaro | Alice Rohrwacher
I Don’t Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians | Radu Jude
If Beale Street Could Talk | Barry Jenkins
La Flor | Mariano Llinas
Monrovia, Indiana | Frederick Wiseman
Ready Player One | Steven Spielberg
Support The Girls | Andrew Bujalski
Suspiria | Luca Guadagnino
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I started the year with the intention of writing more than I did last year. It certainly doesn't feel as if I have, but, nevertheless, I've written some things that I'm proud of.

Here are my five favourites, in chronological order.

1) On doors and paint in Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance Nue
2) On Brian De Palma's homage to John Everett Millais in Femme Fatale
3) On my solitary day at the Edinburgh Film Festival
4) On Lee Chang-dong's Burning
5) On the films of David Cronenberg
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10 albums.

Ye | Kanye West
Iridescence | Brockhampton
Be The Cowboy | Mitski
Ruiner | nothing, nowhere
Kids See Ghosts | Kids See Ghosts
Some Rap Songs | Earl Sweatshirt
Nearer My God | Foxing
Lost & Found | Jorja Smith
Charmer | Charmer
7 | Beach House
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going through catastrophe, while all these humans laugh at me // 
it seems as they were born a different breed.
we must lend a hand to those who feel they're at the end // 
an act of love can really go the distance.

Catastrophe | Brennan Savage

I've listened to this track a lot this year, an incredibly direct song simultaneously appalled by human behaviour and hopeful that human goodness will shine through in the end. Everything's so toxic, but we can still get through it.
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M. Butterfly | David Cronenberg, 1993
Twilight's Last Gleaming | Robert Aldrich, 1977
Always | Steven Spielberg, 1989
Streets of Fire | Walter Hill, 1984
Van Gogh | Maurice Pialat, 1991
Poetry | Lee Chang-dong, 2010
Home From The Hill | Vincente Minnelli, 1960
Djinn | Tobe Hooper, 2013
Pola X | Leos Carax, 1999
Loving You | Johnnie To, 1995

Ten discoveries. I should probably dig deeper next year.
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Four memories from the year. Please allow me this indulgence.

In early June, listening to Ye over and over again on a delayed flight from New York City to London, somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean at 3am, or 7am, lost in jetlagged delirium and near-darkness, the hazy light of seat-back screens illuminating the aisles as people sleep face down on tray-tables. Virtual planes track our course across 3D globes on a dozen screens in my eyeline. The Titanic sank somewhere out the window more than a hundred years ago.

In July, getting entirely too emotional watching Eric Dier bury a dreadful penalty as England finally win a World Cup shoot out. It’s hard to explain the emotion of watching the national football team, an entity that I’ve been raised to love wholeheartedly, surpass all bottomed out expectations and succeed, particularly in a year in which the leaders of this country seem intent on debasing themselves at any opportunity. For a few brief moments in the summer things felt good in England. That’s something to be happy about, I think.

In October, watching La Flor, 808 minutes joyous of cinema, with Matt and some similarly embattled film folk across three weekday mornings and afternoons at the London Film Festival. Daily rituals: walking as slowly as possible from Piccadilly Circus to the ICA to breathe as much relatively fresh, unseasonably warm air as possible; tucking into a delicious Boost bar, a staple of my durational cinema endeavours, during the first intermission of each day; the frequent glimpses at Matt’s increasingly diagrammatic notes and meal deal choices, both equally impressive; actress Elisa Carricajo's cryptic daily introductions, telling us roughly when to expect each intermission based on the topic of conversation in a specific scene. All in all, a lot of time that I'm glad I spent where I spent it.

In November, losing myself for an afternoon at the V&A’s impressively vast Videogames: Design / Play / Disrupt, an exhibition focused on artistry in gaming. I’m both fascinated by gaming as a medium and dismissively terrible at video games, so this was always going to be an interesting experience. I’d never really considered how a game’s form could be used to enrich the ideas and themes of a game before, but now, having seen striking examples of this from Bloodborne and The Last of Us, in particular, my eyes have been opened to how much of this fledgeling artform I’ve either taken for granted or missed entirely. I’ve got some catching up to do.
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I should be more active.
I should put more work in.
Let's see where my time goes.
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