Filmmakers from Bong Joon Ho to John Woo pay tribute to the critic, curator and translator Tony Rayns (1948-2026), whose support and friendship shaped their careers.

YouTube video by Mako?Rehaps?

Pulp Fiction director writes in Sight and Sound that ‘since the pandemic … it seems almost impossible for a new movie to come out that I don’t pick to death’

(@russell.j.turner) This year we are using fi@leannemodenpoets from the Sight and Sound 2022 list as prompts Seventh up from me is Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966 - #46), concentrating on the women and children involved in the conflict, particularly Little Omar and Hassiba Ben Bouali You slip into a status and a smile You map the maze that men may slowly learn You host the home, the monument and trial You cut and paste the masks of no return You blow the bars with gifts of wire and dial You live, you love, you kiss, you kill, you burn He grows up with the heroes of the past He learns to run the streets under disguise He brings the word, delivered low and fast He shouts a bold defiance to the skies He is a child soldier at the last He grips Hassiba’s hand, and then he dies We never know the loss until they’re gone ‒ le petit Omar, il n’a que treize ans... RJT

(@russell.j.turner) This year we are using fi@leannemodenpoets from the Sight and Sound 2022 list as prompts Sixth up from me is Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017 - #100), a curtal sonnet taking inspiration and its title from a Swahili refrain used in the soundtrack Listen to the elders as the stories begin, drinking brews of mesmerism ‒ a sunken place manifests affected care and narcissism. Monuments to second chances, trophies of skin ‒ blind are they that seek to use another’s face, deaf to the tranquil, the wild and quiet rhythm. Listen to the last songs of deer that lay dying, dance in disbelief the gods may grant you their grace, crack the artifice and glamours that imprison. Listen to the sorrows, to the children crying “listen, listen, listen…” RJT

(@russell.j.turner) This year we are using fi@leannemodenpoets from the Sight and Sound 2022 list as prompts Fifth up from me is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (1974 - #52), heavily informed by my own experience of love across an age divide For you are so much younger yet possessed with wisdom way beyond my scatterbrain ‒ we meet in bars, we shelter from the rain, cocooned from animosity and jest. We build a monument to stand the test of time and love, to sing an old refrain which slowly fades into a frosty pain ‒ we feather and then flee our little nest But this is not some different land or age or circumstance, we do not face the fear and ignorance that others must abide ‒ conclusion comes from what I cannot cage, the darkness that in time may disappear beneath the waters of some tranquil tide RJT

(@russell.j.turner) This year we are using fi@leannemodenpoets from the Sight and Sound 2022 list as prompts Fourth up from me is Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953 - #92), through its theme of the treatment of women in warfare, and the metaphor of pottery From clay they come, by hand or history, each fashioned for a purpose or by fate ‒ a jug, a bowl, three women annotate old monuments of joy and misery. By brothel, drunken spear and jealousy, two bend under the stratagems of hate. The third arises from a charred estate ‒ a phoenix of desire, of loyalty Yet those who walk in darkness walk in light, each in their own way casting off the past ‒ one reconciles the future with the fight, one sings beyond the grave, content at last. Through warfare, rape and death, through love and spells, all vessels break and then remake themselves RJT

(@russell.j.turner) This year we are using fi@leannemodenpoets from the Sight and Sound 2022 list as prompts Third up from me is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979 - #43), with a sort of stream-of-consciousness interpretation of its source material, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers Regrets the mythic monument consoled Oblivion with fortune in its fold Advance, retreat where legends come untold Do Not Pass Go as heat melts into cold Sing shattered flowers faded by the stone Intelligence has left you all alone Down deep by ways imagined and unknown Exulting onwards, backwards bone-by-bone Perhaps our reasoning concludes too quick Incomers from the cosmos, shoot and trick Chimeric ghosts through deathly candlestick Now cancer boils beyond the river bed In colour bleached, in colour left unsaid Come let your monkey save you from the dead RJT

(@russell.j.turner) This year we are using fi@leannemodenpoets from the Sight and Sound 2022 list as prompts Second up from me is Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973 - #66), primarily influenced by my own visit to Senegal and Dakar about thirty years ago, particularly Île de Gorée and Maison des Esclaves (plus a small anachronistic nod to the Paris-Dakar) The road to Paris ploughs through seas and schemes ‒ this motorbike won’t navigate those sands whose shifting currents hide the whispered lands. As ships sail out to all the world’s extremes not far from Gorée’s echoed age-old screams, where memory and monument still stands to mark the manacles and fiery brands that bled to manifest another’s dreams Within the embassies we wait and yearn for slips of paper worth their weight in gold, as dimly then distinctly we discern hyenas that bamboozle, thieve and burn foundations of the constructs we’ve been sold ‒ illusions of departure and return RJT

(@rascalapache) This year we are using films from the Sight and Sound 2022 list as prompts First up from me is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960 - #33), along with Gus Van Sant’s pointless remake Our Californian butchery begins not far from Fairvale, where the Bates Motel stands like a monument to filial sins ‒ a seedy small-town cinematic hell. Conversant with the carnage that ensued, some cineastes will bore us with the cast ‒ “But did you know the characters include the wonderfully named Milton Arbogast?” Then Gus Van Sant, in nineteen ninety-eight, decided to completely replicate this classic film ‒ a shot-for-shot redraft that’s more to do with marketing than craft. Though given Norman’s chosen tool of strife, perhaps not shot-for-shot but knife-for-knife... RJT