Ryan

Taiwan, 2024 1. Jiufen 2. Herbal jelly and sweet tofu dessert at "Little Shanghai" restaurant from HHH's City of Sadness 3. Beitou hot springs 4. Old Beitou matchboxes 5. Ellen Pau, Drained II at the Taipei Biennial 6. Snake alley, Huaxi St Market 7. Pingxi Lantern Festival 8. Yang Chi-Chuan, Your Tears Remind Me To Cry, Taipei Biennial 9. HHH's City of Sadness at Shenping Theater, Jiufen 10. Lingsen North Rd, Taipei 11. @wangtheresaa at Mingdu Karaoke 12. Cute alley 13. Fortune teller booths 14. Betel nuts 15. Li Yi-Fan, What is Your Favorite Primitive, Taipei Biennial 16. @baby_betelnut 17. Uncles watching 3 screens at once 18. Sylvia Chang, Tempting Heart

My favourite films of the year were: 1. Magellan (Lav Diaz, Philippines) 2. Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari, Canada) 3. Sirāt (Oliver Laxe, France/Spain) 4. Duse (Pietro Marcello, Italy) 5. Everything Seemed Possible (Ramón Rivera Moret, Puerto Rico) 6. The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadžihalilović, France) 7. Mirrors No. 3 (Christian Petzold, Germany) 8. Fiume o Morte! (Igor Bezinović, Croatia) 9. Bouchra (Orlan Barki, Meriem Bennani, USA) 10. Book of Eternalisms 39 (Ken Jacobs, USA) I added the full list of 2025 favourites, discoveries, and books at the 🔗 in bio. HNY! [Photo from the abandoned Radio Optical Observatory ROT54, Orgov, Armenia, a place I visited this year]

Posted about my Favourite Films of 2024 and some other stuff. 🔗 in Bio. This photo is from a trip to Taiwan that I took this year.

Here are some from a 🇲🇽 trip

🇻🇳, 🇹🇭

Before I go on another trip, I should probably get these off my phone. 🇻🇳 Hanoi, Ha Long Bay 🇹🇭 Phuket, Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Bangkok.

I posted about my favourite films of the year at the link in my bio. Happy new year everyone!

𝙏̷𝙝̷𝙚̷ ̷𝘼̷𝙨̷𝙨̷𝙚̷𝙢̷𝙗̷𝙡̷𝙚̷𝙙̷ ̷𝙖̷𝙣̷𝙙̷ ̷𝘼̷𝙥̷𝙥̷𝙧̷𝙤̷𝙥̷𝙧̷𝙞̷𝙖̷𝙩̷𝙚̷𝙙̷ ̷𝙄̷𝙢̷𝙖̷𝙜̷𝙚̷ I've been invited to guest-curate a @newcircleofcinema program for @cathodecinema , an online curatorial screening showcase run by the Coaxial Arts Foundation. I've put together an 11.5 hour program called "𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐈𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞," which will play twice as a continuous livestream on cathodetv.com (🔗 in bio), from 𝟏𝟎:𝟑𝟎𝐩𝐦 𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟑𝟎 𝐭𝐨 𝟖-𝟗𝐩𝐦 𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟑𝟏. I hope you can tune in! This broadcast is a love letter to the two loves of my life: synthesis and cinema — in other words, the dialectics of montage. Inspired by the time back in 2012 when I watched (not all, but a lot of) Christian Marclay's 24-hour THE CLOCK at The Power Plant with my friend @isiahm11 , I decided I'd try to re-create my own entire day of documentaries, film essays, experimental films, and other 'camera-less' curiosities that all primarily repurpose, remix, reuse, and recycle found footage from other films. Through various methods of compilation, collage, and appropriation, each of the films I've chosen was forged from material ripped from other contexts, frames juxtaposed in such a way as to "draw attention to the body of the film itself, to the film's own image-ness" (Wees, Recycled Images). To watch these films is to discover how citation operates as a type of negation, interrupting the source, challenging its ability to stand alone unperturbed. Yet, one also observes that the image cut is an image edited. Interruption is equally "one of the fundamental methods of all form-giving," (Benjamin, "What is Epic Theatre?"). By transposing the clip into a new setting, additional layers of complexity emerge, forcing these "films [to] beget films," as Jay Leyda put it. So, it was with this idea in mind that I wondered about extending this self-referentiality a step further, by re-contextualizing the already-amalgamated film itself within an extended super-cut, a visual mixtape of remixes so to speak.

So excited to be bringing the next @newcircleofcinema night to ROOMS at @915dupont tomorrow, Thursday, March 9, 2023 at 7pm: 𝗡𝗘𝗪 𝗖𝗜𝗥𝗖𝗟𝗘 𝗢𝗙 𝗖𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗠𝗔 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀… 𝗙𝗟𝗢𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗪𝗘𝗘𝗗𝗦 & 𝗧𝗔𝗜𝗪𝗔𝗡𝗘𝗦𝗘 𝗡𝗘𝗪 𝗪𝗔𝗩𝗘 𝗙𝗜𝗟𝗠𝗦, a night of rare and unreleased films selected from and about the Taiwanese New Wave, including FLOATING WEEDS, the debut film of master auteur Edward Yang, translated specifically for this event by @wangtheresaa . I'd tell you all to come, but it was sold out in an hour and there's like 200 people already on the waitlist! Maybe I'll do a second screening? Anyway, here's the lineup: - When Cinema Reflects the Times: Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang - Hirokazu Kore-eda (1993, 47m) - The Electric Princess Picture House - Hou Hsiou-Hsien (2007, 3m) -It's a Dream - Tsai Ming-Liang (2007, 3m) - Floating Weeds (aka Duckweed) Edward Yang (1981, 145m) Kicking things off, we'll start with Hirokazu Kore-eda's (SHOPLIFTERS, NOBODY KNOWS) unreleased 1993 documentary 𝗪𝗛𝗘𝗡 𝗖𝗜𝗡𝗘𝗠𝗔 𝗥𝗘𝗙𝗟𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗦 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗧𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗦, which introduces the early work of Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang. Then onto two rare 2007 shorts about community-building through cinema-going, Hou Hsiou-Hsien's 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗘𝗟𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗥𝗜𝗖 𝗣𝗥𝗜𝗡𝗖𝗘𝗦𝗦 𝗣𝗜𝗖𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗛𝗢𝗨𝗦𝗘 and Tsai Ming-Liang's 𝗜𝗧'𝗦 𝗔 𝗗𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗠. Like his hypnotic masterpiece of slow cinema, GOODBYE DRAGON INN, this later short from Tsai also explores the use of the cinema-house for non-cinematic purposes, a juxtaposition fitting for New Circle of Cinema's mandate of repurposing non-cinematic venues (like my yard!) for theatrical purposes. Finally, the prime ticket: 𝗙𝗟𝗢𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗪𝗘𝗘𝗗𝗦 (𝗮𝗸𝗮 𝗗𝗨𝗖𝗞𝗪𝗘𝗘𝗗), Edward Yang's very first film, created in 1981 for the Sylvia Chang-produced television series ELEVEN WOMEN. This coming-of-age story about a girl from Jiufen who is trying to break into Taipei's entertainment industry anticipates many of the modern, urban themes explored in Yang's beloved later works, like TAIPEI STORY and A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION. Publically screened with subtitles only one other time before now, in Chicago in 1997. 📽️

A few more…

I visited one of my favourite places on earth about this time last year

I wrote a bit about my top film of the year. 🔗 in bio.