Rather than producing just another indistinguishable ranked list of the “best” films of the year, we decided instead to ask a handful of our contributors to select their own handful of favourites of 2022 for the below display.
In the spirit of pushing boundaries and resisting categorisation, our 2022 review doesn’t restrict recommendations to experimental/avant garde/artist’s moving image films but could include any other - even tangentially related - product or production. They could select books, records, performances, DVD or Blu-ray releases, articles, interviews, film screenings, podcast episodes.
Contributors include: Patrick Gamble, Ruairí McCann, Ben Nicholson, Savina Petkova, and Sophia Satchell-Baeza.
Blight soundtrack by purge.xxx
There are few film soundtracks quite so memorable as Jocelyn Pook’s inventive, melodic, and mournful audio assemblage for John Smith’s Blight (1994-96). This fantastic vinyl release of the soundtrack also includes a more overtly musical variation using the same elements, Tango with Corrugated Iron. BN
Dry Ground Burning (Joana Pimenta & Adirley Queirós)
A brilliant synthesis of two forms that rarely cross-streams fruitfully: full-throated genre cinema and close-up, ethnographic filmmaking. However, this binary doesn’t say it all. Since it’s a film that constantly revises itself, seeking new ways to express the direct experiences, wounds, aspirations and rage of the disenfranchised. RM
Penny Slinger’s artist’s book 50% The Visible Woman (1971)
Long out of print, the publication of Penny Slinger’s future-looking artist’s book 50% The Visible Woman was a major cause for celebration. Influenced by Max Ernst’s collage books, but also drawing on Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960), it’s a messy, ritualistic, blood-and-guts descent into female consciousness. I reviewed it here. SSB
Les Mains négatives + Simone Barbès ou la vertu: The Machine That Kills Bad People at the ICA, London
Parisian streets collapse inward, seediness spills out like a broken sewage pipe, but it is deeply, profoundly human: love reigns, even when you don’t touch. SP
MISS-COMMUNICATION by Joanna Walsh.
Combining an AI generated text with a choose-your-own-critical-theory adventure, Walsh’s book sits alongside Jeppe Lange’s Abyss and the 25,000 films created by Eye Filmmuseum’s Jan Bot as a fascinating - if somewhat bewildering - work that asks interesting questions about authorship in art created by AI. PG
Derek Jarman’s Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping
Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction, written in 1971, was published just a few weeks ago by Prototype. A fabulous, surreal road trip through a fairytale America, it’s veering narrative makes the experience of reading it like being relayed someone’s dream. At the same time, the accompanying texts in the book place it brilliantly amongst Jarman’s other work. BN
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Instant Life (OJOBOCA)
I first saw Ojoboca’s Instant Life at the Berlinale Forum in February, and since then there's barely been a day when I haven't thought about it. A mischievous celebration of the creative and destructive power of reproduction, Instant Life is a riddle that refuses to come to rest. PG
Daniel & Clara’s Red Letters
A year-long project that’s about to end, Red Letters, by M.I.A. founders Daniel & Clara, has been a 2022 delight. A monthly missive, on vivid cardinal paper, delivered by snail mail, depicting an encounter with place – often conjuring a similar sense of the uncanny as do the duo’s moving images. BN
Heron 1954-2002 (Alex McCrimmon)
Can you piece a human being back together from the objects and memories they leave behind? How do you memorialise? An evocation of a cruelly, one-sided aspect of loss; the plummeting feeling that living have been left with the dead, in shards but never the whole, while the dead forget the living very quickly. RM
Garrett Bradley’s Safe (2022) at Lisson Gallery
Exhibited on three channels across all of Lisson Street’s gallery spaces, artist Garrett Bradley’s Safe (2022) explores interior emotions through abstraction, working with light, repetitive bodily movements, and the reflections and ripples on Mylar to create an enfolding psychic space. But it was all about the score for me: an enveloping, sometimes deafening cacophony of sirens, speech, and street sounds that felt like entering the belly of the underground. SSB
Wiliam Basinski performing the Disintegration Loops live at the Barbican, London
This one, I shared with Patrick, unknowingly. SP
Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol, Pavilion of Chile, Venice
From essential oils and an evocative soundtrack of Selk’nam voices, to video work by director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, this Ecofeminist installation by a team of Chilean artists combines various techniques to submerges you into a Patagonia bog to highlight the ecological potential of peat lands. PG
Striking Land (Raul Domingues)
A relationship to the land captured in deromanticised, intimate detail. The MiniDV format has a remarkable heightening effect, for its textures made me feel like I was burrowing into the earth. RM
Archangel Michael, Stone Nest, London
Redcar (Christine and the Queens) welcomed me in a holy space: a church and a confessional, a rusty old metal letterbox, red pencils, red ribbon to tie your paper slip. “It’s all yours in love and respect, [...] fill the box with deep secrets and feverish prayers.” SP
Jason Sharp at Cafe Oto
I discovered experimental saxophonist Jason Sharp last year when I saw Daïchi Saïto’s earthearthearth. For this unforgettable performance Sharp used a heart monitor to fuse his auscultated heartbeat with the corporeal sound of his sax; creating a haunting and at times deeply unsettling score to accompany Guillaume Vallée’s psychedelic visuals. PG
Luke Fowler and Ernst Karel on the Lucid Dreaming podcast (Anthology #5, Conversation #2)
The Lucid Dreaming podcast is a consistent source of inspiring conversations, but I had to pick out this particular episode from February this year which brought together two absolute favourites in filmmaker Luke Fowler and sound artist Ernst Karel. BN
Flora (Nicolás Pereda)
The violence that underpins a society, its fascination with that violence and its masquerade, played out as a comedy of manners, flipped onto its back to reveal a tightening thriller. RM
Betzy Bromberg retrospective at Open City Documentary Festival
A retrospective of the American avant-garde filmmaker Betzy Bromberg has been a long time coming and this did not disappoint. I particularly enjoyed the rare opportunity to slip into her long-form, later abstract work like A Darkness Swallowed (2005) and Voluptuous Sleep (2011) and having the darkened space of the cinema to contemplate the strange sounds and forms before me. SSB
A Woman Escapes (Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, Blake Williams)
I dreamt about this film before even seeing it. In my tiny room at a Norwegian fjord, my mind
made up its own 3D sequences and I woke up crying. (captured this in an essay for Square Eyes) SP
Ungentle (Hew Lemmey & Onyeka Igwe)
So entranced was I by Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s installation at Studio Voltaire, Ungentle, that I sat and watched it twice. An exploration of the intersections between espionage and male homosexuality, it’s wonderfully narrated by Ben Whishaw and the clear influences of the likes of Kieller, Jarman and Alan Clarke only cemented its position as one of my favourite works of the year. BN
Stilled Shadows: A Magic Lantern Show with Chloe Ardijis at Swedenborg House
I was completely knocked out by a spectral magic lantern presentation from novelist Chloe Ardijis and lanternists Jeremy and Carolyn Brooker. Amid the dark atmospherics of Swedenborg House, we watched, enchanted, as enigmatic strands of stories were woven together before us: lost lovers, haunted furniture, escapades to outer space: all brought to life with modern and archival slides on a mammoth, three-tiered Victorian lantern. SSB
Defiant Muses.Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives of 1970s and 1980s France at Kunsthalle Vienna
Portrait of Seyrig by Varda, Carole Roussopoulos’s conviction that “video allows them [the people she’s filming] control over their image and statement”, the patriarchy telling you to give birth laying down. SP
Lacerate (Janis Rafa)
Although it premiered at FIDMarseille in 2020, Janis Rafa’s film was the standout video work at this year’s Biennale. A 16 minute canine chiaroscuro about domestic abuse, influenced by baroque art and biblical iconography, the film got under my skin and unsettled me more than any horror this year. PG
Jonas Mekas: Diaries, Notes & Sketches Vol. 1-8 Blu-Ray Boxset
Despite a preponderance for physical media, there is not a purchase in 2022 I snapped up more quickly than this wonderful boxset of Jonas Mekas films on Blu-ray from Re:Voir. As if 27 of his films across 8 discs and an accompanying booklet weren’t enough, a clipping of 16mm filmstrip sealed the deal. BN
Hole in the Head (Dean Kavanagh)
It brilliantly expresses the lusty, tactile appeal of film while also the tendency to distance the half-willing supplicant from the very world to which it's supposedly tethered. Cinema is an indexical record but a cracked one, and horror and confusion can pour from its fissure. RM
Sonic Cinema’s Austrian Synaesthetic Cinema at Cafe Oto
Sonic Cinema’s Oliver Dickens curated an exciting ride through contemporary Austrian synaesthetic cinema at Cafe Oto. Strobes, flickers, and glitches played at the limits of perception as we cycled through digital projections by Tina Frank, Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Rainer Kohlberger, NO1, Peter Kutin & Florian Kindlinger, as well as a live A/V performance by Billy Roisz and Dieb13 titled TWIXT.
It was also a sheer delight to celebrate and return to the work of John Smith across several extensive retrospectives; discover Derek Jarman’s only novella, published by Protype; enjoy the programmes of Another Gaze’s Another Screen and explore the Experimenta strand at London Film Festival in letters with Patrick Gamble. And ALT/KINO’s Ojoboca screening at the ICA was also fab: Instant Life (2022) is living rent-free in my head. It’s been a good year. SSB