Innehållsförteckning för Issue 75 - Summer 2018 från Cinema Scope

“For me the vast open field of the unknown and the prison existed simultaneously.”— Kim Hye-soon, “Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream” After a string of US-funded anti-communist documentaries and neorealist melodramas, Korean director Kim Ki-young entered a new phase of his filmmaking with the wildly successful “Housemaid Trilogy,” comprising The Housemaid (1960) and its remakes Woman of Fire (1971) and Insect Woman (1972). With this tale of a bourgeois family’s undoing at the hands of a seductive interloper, the director located his cinema in the crossfire of gender essentialism, class conflict, and psychosexual idiosyncrasies. In Kim’s universe, men are impotent weaklings with an insatiable need for mothering, women at once insidiously cunning and neurotically desperate for men’s devotion. Until his death in 1998—when he perished in a house fire during the development of…

“There is a real contrast between the violence of the act of representation and the internal calm of representation itself.”—Le livre d’image Last summer, the Institut Lumière in Lyon run by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux announced a full Godard retrospective for its annual restoration festival; rumours had it that JLG’s latest film, Le livre d’image, would premiere there in October. Excitement had naturally been building around the film, one said to tackle the Arab world (raising eyebrows for some, fearing a tone-deaf tone poem). Then the Lyonnais festival came and went and not a word about Godard was uttered, let alone one of his films screened. Not the new one, none of the older works, not even a restoration. No erratum was issued either. The rumours persisted: Godard had managed…

Far removed from any realistic pretence and yet intimately connected to the ineluctability of the present and the obstinacy of the past, Alice Rohrwacher’s latest film unfolds in a state of fantastical rarefaction. No longer bound to the earthly naturalism of her previous two features, Rohrwacher seems to have found in the possibilities of magical realism a more congruous accomplice for her idea of cinema. Happy as Lazzaro recounts the restoration of feudalism, disguised as its own end, through the weightless verses of a parable that sublimates reality without making it more palatable. The film begins in a temporal bubble that predates its own narrative inception—in a time and place that never existed and is therefore only visible to the spectators whose defense mechanisms are immediately ambushed. “Inviolate” is the…

By far the most surprising and satisfying selection of this year’s Cannes Competition, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Asako I & II sets up and throws out stylistic paradigms faster than you can grab hold of them. As if to maximize the frustration of viewers who prefer to distinguish the fantastic from the “real,” Hamaguchi’s amorphous aesthetic—blending naturalistic and affected performances, unobtrusive and flashy editing—renders inseparable inner and outer and public and private forms of experience. Where Asako’s five-hour-and-17-minute predecessor Happy Hour (2015) made the external world firm, static, and hard-edged, this comparatively brief and far more accessible romance based on a novel by Shibasaki Tomoka adopts a more mercurial approach. Instead of giving the impression of individuals going about their lives unchanged by what surrounds them, Hamaguchi conveys a crucial symbiosis, one…

Early in One Night Stand (a.k.a Alibis), the 1977 feature directing debut of Pierre Rissient, the following dedication appears onscreen: “To Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, Movie Business Casualty.” A name now all but erased from the cinematic fossil record, d’Arrast was the Argentine-born, French-Basque filmmaker who came to Hollywood at the end of the silent era, worked as an assistant to Chaplin, and eventually directed seven American features of his own (including 1930’s Oscar-nominated Laughter) before retreating to Europe and disappearing into obscurity. D’Arrast was said to be a Lubitsch-esque master of the sophisticated romantic comedy, but also a Stroheimian perfectionist who clashed repeatedly with studio brass—among other indignities, he was fired from directing 1933’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum because he wanted to replace star Al Jolson with a then-unknown vaudeville…

“And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience…”—Herman Melville Who doesn’t recall from childhood the myth of seashell resonance? Holding a conch to one’s ear, the ocean could seemingly be heard in all its pelagic plenitude. The beguiling nature of the myth (that is, if one heard more than mere noise) resided in its apportioning of phenomenon both near and far, visceral and natural—so much that contained in so little this. Helena Wittmann’s Drift performs a similar, albeit more visual, inversion. The paradox of occlusion is that it can give rise to a sense of expansiveness, and Drift exploits this to trancelike effect, blurring the notion of literal and figurative shores beyond recognition. Teresa (Teresa George), a young German woman…

I am wantonly isolating Whacker (2005) from the rest of the work of video artist Harry Dodge, who has one of the wiliest names in show business, because the sun is going down and time is short and there’s yet quite a thicket of weeds upon the hill and still more, and less, left to say. One of the most complex creators of moving images currently working in Los Angeles, Dodge is a figure whose extraordinarily fluid identity and filmmaking concerns demand more room to move than we have at present; the more you Google, the more you’ll glean and the less you’ll know. “Harry Dodge is an American sculptor, performer, video artist, and writer, whose interdisciplinary practice is characterized by its explorations of relation, materiality, and the unnamable with…

Sara Cwynar’s Soft Film (2016) begins without an image, only words: “A quick history in a single thing.” A phrase with the canned authority of the TED Talk, torqued by its curious preposition. It is spoken by a man, his tone and tempo even, presentational; a touch of expected authority. And then, the cropped torso of a woman in a loose cashmere sweater, soft grey, as she holds a jewelry box in her left hand: “The soft texture gets me here.” She runs her right hand across its front, down its side; it is persimmon velvet, its fixtures golden. Her nails are long, elegant but not polished. “It appears here.” Cut to her holding a velvet earring box, moss, which she turns in her hands: “And here.” Another velvet box,…

Like all Cannes film festivals, the 71st began brightly for this correspondent with the highest of hopes and expectations—and by that of course I am referring to Paulo Branco’s lawsuit against the Festival de Cannes to block the closing-night screening of Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Say what you will about Cannes, but in my almost 20 years of attendance I’ve never seen the festival’s brutalist concrete façade show the slightest of tendencies to crack. Yet in the midst of the Branco-Quixote kerfuffle, a volley of press releases was issued that saw something like critical editorializing penetrating the typically machine-like vernacular. I mean, they referred to Branco “and his lawyer son” having “used intimidation and defamatory statements, as derisory as they are ridiculous” and “slanderous and grotesque…

There was a distinct feeling in the air at this year’s Cannes that the Competition jury was under far more scrutiny than usual. The Cate Blanchett-led, female-majority group illustrated a gesture by the festival towards gender equity and a commitment to making structural changes in one of the industry’s most prestigious institutions. In a film culture still steeped in the fallout of #MeToo, the question loomed: how might a jury of mostly women shake up the outcome of the competition? In a program of particularly strong contenders, few predicted Kore-eda Hirokazu would take home the Palme d’Or for Shoplifters, his return to the Japanese family drama after a tepid foray into crime thrillers with last year’s The Third Murder. Despite Blanchett’s insistence that the multi-racial, -gendered, and -generational jury meant…

In the eight years since Poetry premiered at Cannes, narrative cinema of the sort that director Lee Chang-dong specializes in has hit a fallow period unseen in decades. Coincidence, perhaps, but one need not look much further than the festival’s interceding Competition line-ups, traditionally rounded out with at least nominally dramatic narrative films, to sense an unfortunate lapse in competent (which is to say competently cinematic) storytelling. Indeed, even the most fruitful of current trends, most predicated on some hybrid variant of fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, have managed to grow familiar, if not altogether tiresome, in the interim. As if on cue, Lee’s long-awaited sixth feature, Burning, arrived in Competition at Cannes to remind viewers just how complacent narrative cinema has grown in recent years, and to reconfirm the South…

Watching Wang Bing’s Dead Souls at Cannes a few days apart from a restored screening of Safi Faye’s Fad Jal (1979), the citation by Hampâté Bâ that opened the latter felt particularly resonant, with its declaration that “In Africa, when an old man dies, it’s a library burning.” Faye’s finely observed tribute to local traditions and oral cultures is more sombrely echoed in Wang’s latest opus, which is structured around a series of testimonials from survivors of the Chinese government’s horrific activities directed at so-called “rightists” in the late ’50s. It’s a national chapter that remains largely undocumented—and with frequently skewed facts when acknowledged officially—so Wang’s decision to produce and assemble a collection of first-person accounts acts as an essential intervention, a people’s history from the ground up. Save installation-based…

The passing of director Michael Anderson at age 98 this April in Vancouver closes another chapter of film history. Among the most notable members of a British generation who channelled their own WWII experiences into the classic war movies that defined the nation’s cinema and self-image during the next decades, Anderson also scored as a member of the select sub-group crossing over into major Hollywood blockbuster territory, bringing homegrown know-how, reserve, and classicist spirit to US productions, even as the classical studio era was coming to an end. The group’s elder, J. Lee Thompson, broke through with The Guns of Navarone (1961) and died in 2002; its junior John Guillermin, whose prolonged Hollywood stint included hits like The Towering Inferno (1974), followed in 2015, and honorary member Lewis Gilbert, who…

Because, until recently, cinema has been as expensive an endeavour as yachting, the history of its artists, stars, and patrons tends to be a tale of the rich. Growing up in suburban Los Angeles and living in a middle-class neighbourhood full of households whose (exclusively) male breadwinners worked in the so-called “Industry,” I was aware of the workers who made the Hollywood machinery whir: the third assistant directors, the second gaffers, the assistant hairdressers, the transport haul drivers, the location scouts, the lab techs, etc. Their children attended schools with me, some of them dreaming of getting into the business; those who saw the awful 15-hour workdays endured by their dads, the endless deadline stresses, would’ve rather dug ditches than work in Hollywood. I knew both kinds of kids, rich…

In a dispatch for Filmmaker from Cannes, critic and filmmaker Blake Williams asserts that Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, which won the festival’s Grand Prix, is too “angry” and “didactic” to be “nuanced.” The implication is that Lee’s film is artless agitprop. But there’s an argument to be made that BlacKkKlansman is not agitprop-like enough. In today’s antiseptic film culture, a popular transmutation of Brechtian lehrstücke would prove refreshingly anomalous. Instead, Lee’s film, which strives to be an entertaining crowd-pleaser, is an ultimately unsatisfying admixture of knockabout satire and intermittent social commentary. The satirical jabs, moreover, come off as superimposed on the narrative and are not consistently “earned.” BlacKkKlansman recounts the peculiar tale of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, Denzel’s son), the first black cop on the Colorado Springs police force during…

It speaks to the richness of Jia Zhangke’s oeuvre that Ash Is Purest White already feels like a career summation, even though the Chinese director has yet to turn 50. Transition has always been at the heart of Jia’s work, but this, his twelfth feature-length film, explores the theme across three carefully intertwined levels, gently tracing out the progress of a relationship, a country, and his own development as a filmmaker to arrive at what feels like a definitive statement on each of them: nothing changes, nothing stays the same. The film’s central relationship is between Qiao (Zhao Tao) and her small-time gangster boyfriend Bi (Liao Fan), its dynamic already largely apparent from how the couple dance in a gaudy Datong nightclub in 2001 near the film’s beginning. After romping…

Ahead of Climax’s Quinzaine premiere, Gaspar Noé unveiled the movie’s hilariously boneheaded, almost exclusively text-based one-sheet: a rundown of his filmography, with each entry accompanied by a variation of presumed (not without reason) audience vitriol, capped off with an invitation (complete with a rendering of Noé mischievously grinning): “Now try Climax.” If the Argentine-born French director’s fifth feature was, in fact, intended to provoke outrage—in addition to the poster, his comments to the press seem to indicate as much—then he failed spectacularly, having created his most broadly acclaimed work to date and winning the Directors’ Fortnight’s Art Cinema Award in the process. Which is not to say that Climax, which transpires across a one-night timeline that covers a dance rehearsal and after-party, doesn’t contain ample ammunition for those who find…

It’s inevitable that Warner Archive’s new releases of Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (both 1956) look Lilliputian when compared to Kino Lorber’s recent Blu-ray box set of the filmmaker’s complete extant silent works. But no less than the monumentalism of the latter, the deceptive modesty of the former attests to the breadth of Lang’s vision. Shot back to back for RKO on noticeably low budgets, the films have the cheapjack urgency that could have been ripped from the headlines of the newspapers that play central roles in each film (the introductory title card of While the City Sleeps sets the action in “New York City…Tonight!”). But when viewed together, the overall effect is one of retrospection, summation, even exhaustion—a ruthlessly clear-eyed testament to the…

Having worked with horses his whole life and without any other means to make a living, Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) is left without his passion and his livelihood after he incurs a head injury during a rodeo. His shaved head gleaming with bloody staples, Brady subsists on a cocktail of pills during his recovery, while dealing with localized seizures and frequent, involuntary tightening of his hands due to nerve damage. Though his health depends on him staying away from horses, Brady is unable to abandon his risky lifestyle. Beyond the fact that wrangling is his only means of supporting himself, breaking these untamed, aggressive horses is a part of his nature: to walk away out of fear or concern for self-preservation is to both betray himself, and the macho cowboy…

In the closing moments of the Sundance award-winning documentary Shirkers—a compelling but compromised chronicle of the campaign to reclaim the lost and then found film of the same name—the original film’s screenwriter and star Sandi Tan tries to put some kind of a bow on the end of a devastating process that has defined her career since 1992. A collage artist in her youth and, in later years, a horror novelist and self-described “terrible film critic” for a Singapore newspaper, Tan has been haunted for 20 years by the memory of the wild and undisciplined film she developed as a precocious 18-year-old—a film which was then unceremoniously stolen from her by her director Georges Cardona, and finally returned two decades later by Cardona’s widow. Part travelogue, part essay film about…