If the end of 2022 marked new hope 2023 was a year of growth, or the least closure. I achieved four things that were major to me although at least one certainly wouldn't be to many others. I travelled back to and across Japan, something that up until last year seemed like it might not ever be possible again. I got a promotion, raise and made a vague success of myself after a previous job spent five and a half years (and my brain and body far longer) destroying me. I had a threesome. If this is a better version of myself I'm not sure. There's still much I'm unhappy about; there are two big things in my life that I desperately want to change but I don't see a sensible or likely way they can; I'm still perpetually and crushingly alone, both romantically and socially.
Cinematically I've watched fewer films than I'd like to have (and fewer than last year) but more new releases. To a point that's the job (and the effect of COVID halting production the past couple of years) but more seems to have changed in my tastes. I've got into opera. Two of my list were films I really liked despite glaring flaws (Carmen, a tactile, ghostly, genuinely strange adaptation of the opera from ballet dancer, choreographer and not a director Benjamin Millepied with a ferocious and not central performance from Almodovar muse Rossy de Palma, and Babylon which was mightily self-indulgent, far too long and featured a montage at the end which was utter bullshit). A third, Brandon Cronenberg's immature body horror which filmed sex and psychotropic drug use really quite poorly, Infinity Pool, I liked but not as much as the other two. Carmen was also one of two dance-based films on my list, the other being Asif Kapadia's Creature. It also, along with Tár and Wim Wenders' deeply individual documentary Anselm, was a true cinematic experience with remarkable sound design which may not hit quite as powerfully when streamed at home. In my work as a projectionist I sat in the back row of our first screening of Tár with a notepad and had a very nerdy 2h38mins working out which speakers Todd Field (a former projectionist himself) was using or muting to try and settle on the appropriate volume level and if I had to put in automation cues for particular scenes and moments.
Where all this navel-gazing leads I don't know. I have goals in mind but no solid path to achieve them. It's now less 'anything can happen' so much as 'whatever'.
2023
Tár (Todd Field - USA)
Jigarthanda Double X (Karthik Subbaraj - India/Tamil)
L'immensita (Emanuele Crialese - Italy/France)
Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania - France/Tunisia/Saudi Arabia)
Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki - Finland/Germany)
Suzume no Tojimari (Makoto Shinkai - Japan)
Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet - France)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese - USA)
One Fine Morning (Mia Hansen-Løve - France)
My Imaginary Country (Patricio Guzmán - Chile)
Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam (Lijo Jose Pellissery - India/Malayalam/Tamil)
All The Beauty And The Bloodshed (Laura Poitras - USA)
Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi - Germany/Sweden/Denmark/France)
Creature (Asif Kapadia - UK)
Passages (Ira Sachs - France)
Babylon (Damien Chazelle - USA)
Carmen (Benjamin Millepied - Australia/France/USA)
Please Baby Please (Amanda Kramer - USA)
White Noise (Noah Baumbach - USA/UK)
The Annoyed (Mehdi Fard Ghaderi - Iran)
Not 2023
Lost Illusions (Xavier Giannoli - France)
Gabbeh (Mohsen Makhmalbaf - Iran)
An Actor's Revenge (Kon Ichikawa - Japan)
Bad Black (Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana - Uganda)
Horrors of Malformed Men (Teruo Ishii - Japan)
The Lion Has Seven Heads (Glauber Rocha - France/Brazil/Italy)
Big Time Gambling Boss (Kosaku Yamashita - Japan)
The German Chainsaw Massacre aka Blackest Heart (Christoph Schlingensief - Germany)
