To commemorate the year that was, we invited an array of artists, writers, designers, and curators—from animator Miwa Matreyek and artist Alejandro Cesarco to designer Eric Hu and the Office of Culture and Design in the Philippines—to share a list of the most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects they encountered in 2014. Sam Green is a documentary filmmaker best known for his Academy Award–nominated 2003 film The Weather Underground, which was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His most recent works include The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (2012) , a live cinematic collaboration with the indie rock band Yo La Tengo (which came to the Walker in October 2013) and the new live musical documentary The Measure of All Things, a meditation on time, fate, and overall human experience, coming to the Walker stage on February 6, 2015.
(1)
Jackie Goss and Jenny Perlin, The Measures
My favorite film of the year. It’s an experimental documentary that retraces the 18th-century journey of two astronomers tasked with determining the true length of a meter. The story is wonderfully weird, but the form is what really makes the film so smart and sophisticated. Both Goss and Perlin filmed the same landscapes across Europe, each with their own Bolex, and the finished film includes the two images side by side. The two filmmakers perform a live version of this film where they read the voiceover in person. I loved it.
(2)
Yo La Tengo, “Nowhere Near”
I went and saw my pals and collaborators Yo La Tengo play a 30th-anniversary gig at Town Hall in NYC in December. They recently re-released one of their brilliant early records Painful and at the Town Hall show played many songs from that disc. This one just slayed me. I’ve listened to it over and over again since and think it’s pretty much a perfect pop song.
(3)
Miguel Gutierrez, Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note or &:-/ at the Whitney
Was knocked out by this dance piece and what a powerful performer Miguel Gutierrez can be. The piece, which was in one of the small galleries at the museum, was funny, disturbing, mesmerizing, poignant and both Miguel and Mickey Mahar danced fantastically. I left feeling wonderful and exhilarated.
(4)
Venice, Italy
I did a six-week residency in Venice through the Emily Harvey Foundation and fell deeply in love with the city. My girlfriend, the choreographer Catherine Galasso, grew up in Venice and knows the city well. We had a magic, productive, and very inspiring time there.
(5)
Heddy Honigman
Sometimes I go back and watch old films that especially resonated with me for one reason or another. The Dutch-Peruvian filmmaker Heddy Honigmann is probably my favorite documentarian. While I was in Venice, I re-watched her films Metal and Melancholy and Forever. I don’t have the space here to describe either of the films, but they are both gems. She has a way with people—is one of the most interesting interviewers working today—and both of these films are deeply, deeply human.
(6)
I got on Instagram to impress my 12-year-old niece. She’s a teen from central casting these days, and her phone, friends, and Instagram are pretty much the only things that matter to her. Initially, I thought that I would hold my nose and do a little bit of Instagramming just to show her that I’m cool, too (or at least I’m not totally lame). But to my great surprise, I ended up loving it. It’s playful, visual, kinda dorky, and because you cant post links, it’s free of much of the article-posting and event-promoting that often bores me with Facebook and Twitter. It’s coming up on my one-year anniversary on Instagram and I’m still high on it. (If you want to follow me, I’m sam_b_green).
(7)
Particle Fever
I saw this documentary about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland at the Film Forum in NYC where it had a smash-hit run over the summer. The Hadron Collider is a huge underground tunnel (17 miles in diameter) and is designed to allow physicists to make important discoveries by smashing particles at very high speeds. Sounds kinda snoozy, I’m sure, but the film is fantastic and inspiring and dramatic. Much of the credit for this goes to the fact that it was edited by the great Walter Murch.
(8)
Duncan Campbell
My friend, the film programmer Chi-hui Yang, shared some of the Scottish filmmaker Duncan Campbell’s documentaries with me: Make it New John, and Bernadette. I was very taken with his creative and sophisticated approach to history and odd historical footnotes. Both films lingered with me for some time after (which is my measure of a strong work). I saw recently that Duncan Campbell recently won the Turner Prize.
(9)
Valerie Solanas by Breanne Fahs
Bill Horrigan, the curator at the Wexner Art Center, recommended this, and it turned out to be my favorite book of the year. I’d always been fascinated by Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol—probably part of my general interest in that time—and I’d also always been struck by the fact that she was a fantastic writer (take a look at her SCUM Manifesto to see what I mean). This biography goes very deep into her history—lots of things I hadn’t known about her—and the effect is that for the first time one can see Valerie as a complex and very human person. The book was also fantastically written I couldn’t put it down.
(10)
Xylouris White at Union Pool
I saw this duo made up of the Greek lute player George Xylouris and the Australian drummer Jim White (Dirty Three) at a small bar in Brooklyn, where they did an ongoing residency over the summer. An enormous, hypnotic, and roiling sound! I could watch Jim White drum for hours.
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