Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 65 i Cinema Scope

Alan Zweig’s Hurt is steeped in failures, not all of them belonging to the film’s unholy trainwreck of a subject, Steve Fonyo. In 1984, four years after a similarly valiant effort by Terry Fox that won the hearts and minds of the nation, the 18-year-old cancer survivor from Vernon, B.C. began a cross-Canada run to raise funds for cancer research. Unlike Fox, whose run was halted when his cancer fatally spread to his lungs, Fonyo made it all the way from St. John’s to a beach on Vancouver Island. But 30 years later, Fonyo’s youthful glories couldn’t seem any more distant. Mired in substance abuse, bad romances, and penny-ante criminality—he apparently ekes out a living stealing and selling catalytic converters—Fonyo is largely the author of his own misfortune, but vigorously…

“The point of modernity is to live a life without illusions while not becoming disillusioned.” —Antonio Gramsci Both radically marginal and televisually popular, Želimir Žilnik’s work stands as a critical counterpoint to contemporary film culture and its sectarian impasse. His films blow up the contradictions that are depriving cinema of its public voice and role. The world beyond and before the screen is too often reduced to mere ornamental backdrop for elaborate selfies, while originality has become a fetishistic obsession rather than the natural outcome of an idiosyncratic practice. There is no denying art cinema’s increasingly isolationist tendencies—which is not to say that mainstream acceptance is the ultimate and only form of relevance, only that there is a difference between being marginalized and marginalizing yourself for the sake of coolness.…

“I see myself, in the years ahead, directing or producing or both. I see myself developing new talent, which would be furiously interesting for me. For I love talent. Love to watch it. Love to help it. Am more genuinely interested in the talent of others than I am in my own.” —Ida Lupino in a 1945 fan magazine interview In a heartfelt 1995 New York Times tribute to Ida Lupino (1918–95), Martin Scorsese called her “a woman of extraordinary talents, and one of those talents was directing. Her tough, glowingly emotional work as an actress is well remembered, but her considerable accomplishments as a filmmaker are largely forgotten and they shouldn’t be. The five films she directed between 1949 and 1953 are remarkable chamber pieces that deal with challenging…

Back in 2006, Marco Bellocchio sent the Rome Film Festival a project called Sorelle, a curious 68-minute whatsit he shot over a six-year period with a MiniDV camcorder. He made it in collaboration with several film-school students in Bobbio (Bellocchio’s hometown), but, with a cast that includes his son (Pier Giorgio), daughter (Elena), two sisters (Maria Luisa and Letizia), and brother (Alberto)—in addition to over a dozen other members of his kith and kin—it was predominantly a family affair. After its Roman bow, the project all but vanished until, four years later, it was resurrected in the Venice Film Festival’s Out of Competition section in an augmented form: it now ran 32 minutes longer, had a surname appended to its title (now Sorelle Mai), and saw its actors age a…

The protagonist of Kaili Blues, Chen Sheng, is a small-town medical practitioner and ex-con. He bought his practice in Kaili, in southwestern China’s Guizhou province, with a small inheritance after his mother died while he was in jail. He’s not exactly a doctor; he’s more of a dreamer, a poet, and a traveller. In Bi Gan’s remarkable debut, winner of Best New Director prizes at Locarno and the Golden Horse Awards, it seems that only dreamers like Chen can see what’s real. He often falls asleep, when we hear examples of his surrealist poetry read in his flatly expressive voice—which, like his face, seems stiff but barely conceals emotional tensions roiling under the surface. The poems are in fact Bi Gan’s, from a collection titled Roadside Picnic (Lubian yecan), which…

Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa, despite being, for lack of a better word, anomalous within the narrow contours of what is permissible in commercial cinema, is also strangely familiar. To anyone who has remained attuned to American literary or sociological motifs of the last 75 years or so, Kaufman and Johnson’s vision of urban loneliness and homogeneity, rendered strange by the film’s aesthetic coup de grace—the use of stop-motion animation featuring morose-looking puppets—is reminiscent of well-worn sentiments proffered by a grab bag of mid-20th-century authors. Henry Miller (The Air Conditioned Nightmare) and William H. Whyte (The Organization Man), writers known for decrying the alienation endemic to an antiseptic America supposedly in thrall to consumer culture, come immediately to mind. Like Miller, who could conjure up nothing more hellish in…

Another awards-season thoroughbred is foaled in Room, Lenny Abrahamson’s take on Ireland-born, Canada-based Booker Prize nominee Emma Donoghue’s best-seller. For all its touchy subject matter, Room is the sort of film for which People’s Choice awards were made: a lightly conceptual, sturdily acted piece of redemptive cinema that peers into the abyss only to blithely deny it. Still, despite the ease with which it checks off prestige-picture requirements—primarily a reassurance about the potential for new life to spring from the dirt—Room is a surprisingly uneasy affair, split between an ugly start that points to uplifting things to come, and a restorative coda that stubbornly forecloses as much as it promises comfort. Brie Larson, ever the most valuable player in the middlebrow projects she finds herself in, plays “Ma,” a young…

“I was overcome by an emotion I can’t quite define...but it was very, very strong, and had something to do with happiness. [And after seeing more of her work,] there really have been moments during which I felt I had to defend myself against what was being expressed, moments in the performance when I had to close my eyes. And at the same time, I can’t understand why.” Toward the end of Un jour Pina m’a demandé (1983), her made-for-television film about Pina Bausch, Chantal Akerman sits on the floor underneath a window and recounts her reactions upon first encountering Bausch’s choreography. That her description above could apply just as well to her own films indicates an affinity between these two women that goes beyond shared themes or sensibilities. Granted…

On a bare stage, behind a transparent scrim that gives the scene the hazy feel of a Vaseline-lensed flashback, a blonde woman lies on a gurney, either dead or unconscious. A female nurse and a male attendant stand over her, prepping her for something while debating whether or not she “did it”; from their clothes and the way they speak to each other (she’s white, he’s black), it’s presumably the 1940s or ’50s. They make some final preparations to the body and then the stage goes black and the scrim lights up like a movie screen with a black-and-white close-up of the blonde’s face convulsing as she receives violent shock therapy. Thus begins Helen Lawrence, a noir-inspired cinema-theatre hybrid piece conceived and directed by Vancouver artist Stan Douglas, with a…

To date the New York-based production company Borderline Films has specialized in what might be called “arthouse thrillers.” Whatever their respective merits or demerits, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene (2010) and Antonio Campos’ Afterschool (2008) and Simon Killer (2012) strategically mixed brutal, blatant violence with the more ephemeral language of “personal” filmmaking—and got attention for it. Taken together, these films, and also Durkin’s BAFTA-winning Netflix series Southcliffe (2013), feel representative of a contemporary moment (and movement) in which a lot of self-conscious, director-centric cinema uses genre tropes to hook audiences seeking out a slightly more sophisticated species of sensationalism. Josh Mond’s feature debut James White differs from its cousins in its lack of shock effects. Despite working on the other Borderline features as a producer, the 30-year-old director seems…

It’s an irony surely not lost on Athina Rachel Tsangari that her Chevalier won the “Best Film” prize at the London Film Festival, considering that its story is built upon an obsessive quest to attain an even greater superlative. But even though the film finds six mostly well-off, middle-aged-and-up males pursuing the all-encompassing title of “The Best in General” while vacationing aboard an opulent yacht, this tale of maritime machismo is far from being Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) on the high seas. What could have been an easy (or worse, trite) evisceration of male ego and vanity becomes something both subtler and stranger in Tsangari’s scenario, which finds the sextet engaged in a game in which each man’s gestures, habits, and inclinations will be evaluated by the rest of the…

Anyone old enough to watch a stateside TV during what was dubbed “Operation Iraqi Freedom” will remember what was sold as that one definitive image from the fall of Baghdad: the lynching and toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein, left arm outstretched, in the city’s Firdos Square. Shot entirely by the filmmaker in the uncertain months before and after the US invasion, Abbas Fahdel’s Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) demonstrates this incident was anything but isolated: during one of the film’s many long car rides, the filmmaker’s brother-in-law Madhat points out a couple of them, not just knocked down but blown to smithereens; all the camera can capture before the car must turn is a busted frame or a ramrod steel girder that was once, perhaps, a pair of legs…

Woe unto Johnnie To whenever he chooses to (or must) make a film that is not about masculine bloodletting. When this most cool and dexterous of directors turns to melodrama or wacky comedy, many critics seem to awkwardly ignore the existence of such films as if they are embarrassments that dampen the reputation of a classically virile auteur. The studio era and its specific constraints are long gone, but the lessons learned seem applied sporadically at best when faced with To, who films at a pace and with a versatility that conjures nostalgic echoes of the expressive, populist pleasures of cinema as an industrial art. A filmmaker closer to Hitchcock or Hawks than Walsh or Wellman in terms of choice of and power over productions—he typically acts as his own…

“The world groans and begins crumbling into bloodied rubble to the astonishment of humankind unaware of the sort of monster it had brought into being, brought proudly into being.” Thus begins Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato’s seminal book of essays, The Writer in the Catastrophe of our Time, with its opening salvo about the apocalypse heralded by the atomic bombs deployed in Japan. As each age brings with it its own catastrophe and tenebrous universe, the assertion of an affective and rallying humanism manifestly follows like a cautionary voice haunted by evil and expressive of a “demented faith.” Demented, surely, because of the scale and insidious scope of destruction and cruelty perpetrated across the globe, and yet resistance ensures our continuation rather than our capitulation. Our “tragic crossroads,” to quote from…

“The boss isn’t always right, but he’s always the boss.” It’s a line so nice that Joel and Ethan Coen used it twice: first in their metaphysical masterpiece A Serious Man (2009), where it summed up the supplication of suburban Jew Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) towards the God he suspected was testing him; now, in the Coens’ script for Bridge of Spies, it’s a gag about the comparatively all-powerful deity of the US Government, whose chosen representatives are downright rabbinical when it comes to brooking insubordination. In both films, the message to the characters is clear: keep your complaints to yourself, please. The Coens are of course comedians through and through, but Steven Spielberg is a Serious Man—increasingly so over the years, with uneven results. The coming together of three…

In his February 1963 essay “Towards a New Narrative Film Form,” Gregory J. Markopoulos proposed a radical conception of audio-visual harmony to be achieved via dissociative editing and “integrated frame adjacencies,” which together would accelerate the classic montage style while defusing its horizontal progression. This technique would first be realized in Markopoulos’ Twice a Man (1964) by way of fissures within or around discrete clusters of film phrases and precisely measured black frames producing rests between each “thought-image,” resulting in a highly complex structural stratagem that works to reorient the viewer’s perception from moment to moment. At optimal efficiency, this method would ideally generate a kind of metaphysical relationship between the image and the eye of the beholder, with the brief breaks in visual stimuli paradoxically fashioning a holistic viewing…

Four years after the broadcast of Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge, the series of nine hour-long coming-of-age films she commissioned through ARTE in 1994, the French producer Chantal Poupaud proudly claimed that each installment contained “the essence of adolescence: the complicated relationship with the body; the sense of the first time; death; passion; revolt.” By the time Poupaud conceived of Tous les garçons, films about restless adolescents were already popular exercises for post-nouvelle vague French filmmakers—from Jean Eustache (Mes petites amoureuses, 1975) and Maurice Pialat (Passe ton bac d’abord, 1978) to Catherine Breillat (36 fillette, 1988)—but the series confirmed that the energetically digressive youth film had become a kind of national specialty. A prickly introvert (Grégoire Colin) flailing around his bedroom to The Animals’ snarling cover…

For all their respective achievements and distinctions, Igor Drljaca’s The Waiting Room and Kazik Radwanksi’s How Heavy This Hammer are in many ways dead ringers of each other. Both are strong second features from Toronto directors whose 2012 debuts—Drljaca’s Krivina and Radwanski’s Tower—marked them as significant talents. Both exhibit influences that haven’t typically curried favour with Canadian granting bodies: Radwanski picks up the Dardennes’ lunging camera, while Drljaca adopts a sardonic realism halfway between Puiu and Porumboiu. Both utilize framing strategies that tend to restrict information, leaving crucial details offscreen and preventing easy entry to their protagonists’ headspace. And both feature as their main character a middle-aged, secretive, standoffish patriarch who is indecisive (if not indifferent) when it comes to his family commitments, an immigrant drifting through a grim, impersonal…

It’s a strange film that calls to mind both Out 1 (1971) and Sex and the City. But Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Happy Hour is defined by that odd tug between spacious, undirected improvisation on the one hand, and an incident-driven examination of the ups and downs of four women friends on the other. The resulting mix, worked out by Hamaguchi with mostly first-time actors through workshops in Kobe, oscillates between poles that reasonably seasoned viewers might be prompted to consider “cinematic” and “televisual,” even though the very nature of the Happy Hour project makes these descriptors rather inadequate. One of the key themes of Hamaguchi’s film—and a word that not only features prominently in the dialogue, but jumps out as the Japanese characters use its English-language cognate—is “communication,” and Happy Hour…

It is a question of pleasure after all… Reporting from Cannes, Daniel Kasman concluded his dispatch for Mubi’s Notebook on Carol with an apparently simple question, one to which he admitted he was unable to find a satisfactory answer: “So what is at stake here?” To be certain, the stakes of Todd Haynes’ sixth feature film—or his seventh, if one counts the HBO production of Mildred Pierce, which initiated a marked shift in Haynes’ style away from the lushly arch formal reflexivity of much of his earlier work— differ significantly from those of the Patricia Highsmith novel on which it is based, a hugely popular book which nonetheless remained unacknowledged by its author for decades due to its “transgressive” sapphic content. Writing from the literary closet under the pseudonym Claire…

Let’s get the spoilers out of the way: Bruce Willis is dead, Sam Jackson is the villain, water is the aliens’ weakness, Giamatti is the healer, the village exists in modern times, and, now, Becca and Tyler’s grandparents aren’t really their grandparents. The twist, of which M. Night Shyamalan is known to be cinema’s most indulgent purveyor, is the signature ploy of a director whose surface-level intention is to impress audiences with his ability to manipulate them like a bunko magician. Beginning with The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan’s penchant for third-act revelations has never subsided, but henceforth they emerged less as shocks and more as inevitabilities, not emphasized for how well hidden they were, but for what they meant emotionally. Casting himself in cameos a la Hitchcock, Shyamalan is partly responsible…

“By cutting across so many jungles, the archetype of adventure came out crazed and beating his chest. I barely understand him.” Legendary Los Angeles filmmaker Peter Mays is talking about his gorilla. His gorilla is dead, and has been a number of times now—dead on its various arrivals. Originally signed and “finished” in 1966, Death of the Gorilla—one of the greatest (and still least-known) of ’60s lysergic masterpieces—is a film that has, according to its maker, been several times born and undone and resurrected and deconstructed and, most recently, lustrously restored by master preservationist Mark Toscano, whose account of the travails involved is well worth Googling. A pulverizing plummet into the heaving heart of Hollywood’s Golden Age ur-magination, Death of the Gorilla consists entirely of footage from island fantasias and…