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.