Innehållsförteckning för Issue 77 - Winter 2018 från Cinema Scope

In September, when he knew his time was not long, Jonathan Schwartz wrote to explain that he would try to retrieve previews of his films for me but that he was dealing with many logistical concerns in order “to be in emotional spaces with utmost presence.” I keep coming back to this phrase in the weeks since Schwartz’s death for what it says about him and his lyrical work in 16mm. The unusual poignancy of his films flows directly from their radical attentiveness, which in turn flows every which way. This makes me think of an essay by Mary Ruefle, a poet much admired by Schwartz, in which she contends, a little mischievously, that the problem with much so-called sentimental poetry is that it is not sentimental enough: “Don’t be…

“Nevertheless, what are truly characteristic of dreams are only those elements of their content which behave like images, which are more like perceptions, that is, than they are like mnemic presentations.” Written, as it was, in historical parallel with the moment of cinema’s birth, it is tempting to invert Dr. Freud’s argument and understand it as the earliest theory of one major strain of cinematic production, that one whose roots took hold in the last years of the ’20s and whose first full blossoms were brought forth by Maya Deren. Since Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), much of the most sophisticated filmmaking has given its energies to the creation of images which are, before anything else, opportunities for fresh and startling perception, as opposed to inducements to recognition and remembrance…

“I should have been born a hundred years earlier when not having a style was a style.”—Burt Reynolds in Gator (1976) The passing of Burt Reynolds this September at age 82 from cardiac arrest drew a lot of attention, but once again relegated to a footnote what I consider his most remarkable achievement: his small but fascinating body of work as a director, which is still overshadowed by his star image. It’s somewhat understandable, of course. After all, gone was a legend: one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the ’70s and ’80s and a major sex symbol to boot, his famous nude spread for Cosmopolitan in 1972 confirming his world-conquering celebrity and helping launch him to the top of the box office. For five years (1978-1982), Reynolds topped Quigley’s…

The virtues of economy, empathy, and negotiation find ample cinematic expression in Gustavo Vinagre’s I Remember the Crows, a deceptively straightforward portrait of a lady that extracts multitudes from little more than a camera, an apartment, and a single, sleepless night. This outwardly simple exercise in one friend getting another to talk about herself soon blossoms into a rich, wonderfully organic exploration of transsexuality, cinema, and, life as well as the myriad different roles played in all three, including those of the (standard) documentary. It’s nighttime in São Paulo and Julia Katharine can’t sleep, so she takes to the sofa with a cigarette and glass of rosé and starts to talk while Vinagre films her, listening and coaxing out more details as required. The account she gives is effectively her…

Why is it that, when destined for adult audiences, narrative films about children so rarely accord their diminutive protagonists the privilege of inhabiting a world of their own? Place a child at the centre of a film, and type will frequently take hold, dictated by the law of genre: either he is a wide-eyed innocent, a seer faced with the horrors of the world that reside beyond his comprehension, or she is a deviously evil soul, ready to wreak havoc. Either way, the child is an interloper in an adult universe, a screen onto which to project all the grown-up desires and anxieties that organize the film. Too often, any attempt at picturing the complicated strangeness of children, let alone the strangeness of the world as it appears to them,…

Yorgos Lanthimos begins and ends his scurrilous The Favourite with the susurrus of rabbits. Tricky to place, almost subliminal over the opening parade of myriad multinational financiers, the strange sounds scratch at the ear. Soon we understand: the rabbits are the odd, probably apocryphal, attendants of Queen Anne, who presided over Great Britain in the early 18th century. From the first scene, Anne (Olivia Colman) cajoles her confidante Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), Duchess of Marlborough, to coddle them in their bedside hutch. Flinty, Sarah replies, “Love has limits.” It’s a funny line, slyly referencing a retainer’s love for her sovereign. But when we discover the two are lovers, and that each rabbit signifies a child Anne has miscarried or lost—a crushing 17—the mulish rebuff takes on a crueller cast. “Love”—as…

There is a shot of an infant being carried by its father in Claire Denis’ L’intrus (2004) that may be the most rapt and tender image of its kind I’ve ever seen in a film. The first ten minutes of the director’s new High Life offer an extension and an elaboration of that shot, observing Monte (Robert Pattinson), apparently the sole adult survivor of a deep-space mission, as he feeds, changes, cuddles, and consoles the baby daughter, Willow, who is seemingly his only (living) companion on a spaceship divided into dormitory-style cells and littered with anachronistic-looking flat-screens. When the lithe, close-cropped Monte is not doting on his kid, he’s tending an artificially Edenic garden located somewhere in the ship’s bowels, a fertile space just waiting for sin to bloom there…

“I’m a tough old broad from Brooklyn. Don’t try to make me into something I’m not. If you want someone to tiptoe down the Barkley staircase in crinoline and politely ask where the cattle went, get another girl.”—Barbara Stanwyck on her role in The Big Valley (1965-69) It shouldn’t be contentious to state that the lasting image of Barbara Stanwyck is an urban one: a street-smart city girl with pin-straight back-seamed stockings, slit skirt, and perfectly coiffed bangs, whether sleeping her way up the corporate ladder in Baby Face (1933), teaching slang to a clan of cloistered academics in Ball of Fire (1941), or cold-bloodedly plotting murder in that quintessential noir Double Indemnity (1944). It’s an image that aligns well with the trajectory of her own hardscrabble, prefame life. Born…

“What else dost thou want, Belmonte?” When the question at the heart of Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj’s fourth feature, Belmonte, is finally spoken aloud, it comes in a whisper. Javier Belmonte (Gonzalo Delgado) has just woken with a start from a Buñuelian dream in which he sat at a piano with the beautiful young Monica (Giselle Motta), caressing her back and shoulders as she played a dirge-like theme and two of his former lovers looked on in judgment. When Belmonte settles back into bed, the camera follows his movement, revealing Monica sleeping beside him. He stares at her with a pained expression, as if unsure whether this is also a dream. We can’t be sure either. The walls in the bedroom, as in the fantasy, are painted in rich primary…

About 20 minutes into A Land Imagined, the nominal protagonist, Detective Lok (Peter Yu), tells his partner of how, on his travels to various locales, he realized that he’d been to all of them before—in his dreams. “The strange thing is, I never saw those places as a child. How is this?” he asks. Something of that same feeling—of having been to a place that one couldn’t possibly have gone to—is what Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua slyly, surely traffics in with his Golden Leopard-winning third feature. The title refers primarily to Singapore’s extensive, unceasing land-reclamation industry, which since 1965 has expanded the nation’s total area by over 20 percent. But it also raises a natural question: a land imagined, but by (and for) whom? In a firm rejoinder to…

For whatever thematic heavy-handedness or structural deficiencies Carlos Reygadas’ films may consistently and inevitably fall victim to, the man sure knows how to open a movie. Information, images, forms arrive from somewhere as something undefined—stars shining from who knows how far away; a small child lost in a field as day loses light—and we enter into them consumed by unawareness. In the beginning, there’s only vision and the senses: perception itself. Reygadas respects realism in his representations, but he also understands that our relationship to the world is always more unstable than we can ever realize. And so he elongates his preludes, edging us in a layer at time, protecting us from the onrush of imagination-annihilating impulses to identify, shape, and “read” images as information for as long as he…

Among the 800 or so Canadian shorts submitted to the Vancouver International Film Festival, Nathan Douglas’ 33-minute La Cartographe (which premiered at Locarno in August) is both emblematic and anomalous. Emblematic because its production model—no institutional support, limited budget, cast and crew sourced from friends and acquaintances—is characteristic of the conditions faced by filmmakers yet to make their debut feature in Canada, where public endowments frequently depend on a transition to more substantial runtimes; and anomalous because its awkward (mid-)length and obscure sentiment set it apart from the vast majority of accepted submissions, which are often reverse-engineered to cater to the dubious inclinations of overworked programmers and unimaginative funding agencies. The limited critical support for short and mid-length narratives, the widespread perception of such films as proofs of concept for…

The strangest aspect of the resurgence of Mexican cinema over the past decade-plus is that three of the country’s four filmmakers with the most international impact left Mexico behind. While Carlos Reygadas stayed home to create a body of work on facets of Mexican reality and unreality, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñarritu gave the impression that they couldn’t wait to get out of Mexico soon enough. In Hollywood’s embrace, all of them, in an unprecedented run for directors originating from a non-English-speaking country, have won the Best Director Oscar. This isn’t the place to ponder why these three—Cuarón the closest to an artist, Iñarritu a blatant self-marketer (suitable for someone who came up through advertising), del Toro a readily employable fan-boy director for Hollywood—abandoned the endlessly…

Ken Jacobs moves secretively in the halfdark that surrounds his apparatus. (“I’m terrible at keeping secrets,” he later admits to the assembled crowd.) Every ten minutes or so, Flo Jacobs exchanges one of what might be a dozen or so miniature flying saucers with her husband, who feeds the elaborately adorned platters into a large, mysterious box. As overflowing with uncontainable luminosity as Kiss Me Deadly’s whatsit, this contraption is Jacobs’ Nervous Magic Lantern, a legendary device known to sculpt painted light into tangible space. The place was the REDCAT theatre in Los Angeles this past October, the performance entitled Metropolis Looms And The Bad Maria Is Tuned Up, but it could have been one of the many darkened rooms in which the Jacobs and their Lantern have endeavoured to…

On first viewing, Alexei German’s Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) gives an impression of almost overwhelming density. This is due in part, of course, to its exquisitely cluttered arrangements of objects and people, from the babushki sniping at each other in cramped communal apartments to the Soviet security men who proliferate along the streets outside, accumulating into a genuinely Boschian vision of ’50s Moscow. But it’s also the result of the competing layers of reality that are set up from the film’s outset and ultimately even extend beyond its congested, claustrophobic frames. An expository opening scroll (written in French, not Russian, so that foreign interlopers know their place from the outset) lays out the most basic outline of the story: that of one General Klensky (Yuri Tsurilo), a decorated physician who…

1. This is the story of a repetition. General Juan Perón was elected President of Argentina for the first time in 1946, and served two terms of office, from June 4 of that year through September 21, 1955. From 1946 through 1952, his first term, he ruled with his wife Eva at his side, and this period was characterized by sweeping reforms that benefited the poorest sectors of society, such that “Perónism” became identified as a particular brand of Latin American “strongman” leftism. Perón was deposed by a military coup d’état in 1955. Following a period of exile, he returned from Spain in 1973. In the intervening 18 years, Perónism had become a free-floating signifier of populism to be appropriated as needed by various factions. Upon Perón’s return, there was…

“I think that to write the music for that scene was also his way to tell it…You almost have the impression that his script for the scene is the colour and the sound, that’s it.” Bertrand Bonello is here referring to a scene from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), in which the doomed Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) sways to a sinister, druggy rhythm on a roadhouse dance floor bathed in red light. The bar band is playing Lynch’s own composition “The Pink Room” (one of the few Twin Peaks tracks not written primarily by Angelo Badalamenti), and the imposingly bassy and tremolo-soaked performance overwhelms every other element of the soundtrack. It’s like a glimpse into Laura’s haunted soul: there seems only to be that throbbing song,…

Edge of the Knife (Sgaaway K’uuna) begins and ends with a hand-carved mask—a representation of Gaagiixiid, a monstrous, forest-dwelling wild man enshrined in the mythology of the Haida people of British Columbia—placed over an open fire. Smoke streams from the eye and nose holes as its seemingly open mouth remains stubbornly sealed. While the mask relates directly to the film’s plot, this image of an open but obstructed mouth doubles as a resonant metaphor for the centrality of voice and language in the film’s conceptualization and realization. Co-directed by Haida filmmaker Gwaai Edenshaw and Tsilhqot’in filmmaker and video artist Helen Haig-Brown, with partial funding from the Council of the Haida Nation, Edge of the Knife is the first feature produced entirely in the Haida language. Harshly suppressed under settler Canada’s…

Manta Ray is a film about the Other and all that this philosophical, social, and ethical concept implies. The debut feature film from Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, Manta Ray strikes a graceful balance between the details of lived experience and a deeper symbolic scope, building its story quietly towards an encounter with the irreducible reality of Others and our responsibility for them. It does so perhaps most stunningly in a scene that embodies what philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls “the epiphany of the face”: two men face each other in an empty room filled with flashing disco lights, swaying to the music, viewed close-up in a shot-reverse-shot sequence that lovingly and playfully highlights the vulnerable, unknowable nature of a living presence. That it does so with two men whose relationship is…

From pitch black to pampas beige by way of blood red, Benjamín Naishtat’s trajectory of mining the corrosive political ills of his native Argentina is filtered through the optics of genre that, while playfully plastic, resonate with caustic effect. The stark brutality of El Movimiento’s (2015) noir-Western revancha tale cedes to a more nascent touch of evil in Rojo, whose morally fetid parable is disguised by a ’70s telenovela aesthetic, just as a post-Perón generation might have been inured to the insidious advent of la guerra sucia amid certain middle-class complacency. The nondescript home in an unnamed Argentine province, circa 1975, that appears at the film’s inception is slowly revealed to be not only vacated but actively ransacked, its contents randomly looted by neighbours while its residents’ whereabouts are left…

I really hated Mad Men. I concede that the show looked terrific (its regular cinematographer Chris Manley, an old friend of mine from Philadelphia days, was deservedly nominated for an Emmy four times), but I found its politics totally oppressive. For a show that people loved so much for the way it “exposed the patriarchy” or some such thing, it sure seemed to spend a lot of time depicting women being humiliated, degraded, and generally abused in ever more novel ways. The series’ most vivid image for me is in the pilot: Elisabeth Moss, in the stirrups for an exam to get birth control pills, the doctor smoking as he berates her to not let herself turn into “the town pump.” The highly calculated ugliness of that tableau just seemed…

If nothing else, A Star Is Born has given us the best meme of the year. The four-image sequence depicting Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga (in character as Jackson Maine and Ally, respectively) exchanging meaningful glances and coy smiles, was ripped from the trailer months before its festival premiere. It has since become a ubiquitous presence in the pop-culture pockets of social media, remixed into variations and combined with other memeable images—Gaga transposed onto the nightmarish Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty is a favourite—creatively separating the images from their original context. This seems a fitting legacy for a film that is itself a remix of a story that has been told thrice before (four times if you count George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? [1932]). Cooper, in a dual role as star…